_fb8a's comments

Unbelievable! how bloody rude can you be?

To the moderators (dang), do people get to keep their account here just because they're a "famous" poster despite writing the way they're doing all over this post? I'm assuming other posters have been banned for substantially less aggressive behaviour...

The cost isn't just bandwidth, but also:

- infrastructure (memory, CPU, disks...): all of which must deal with the huge amounts of data they manage (500+ hours of video uploaded every minute).

- personnel cost (developers, SREs...) (almost) all of whom have substantial salaries that support the gigantic scale (1 billion+ hours of content viewed every day)

When you take into consideration the median household income for both countries, the difference isn't as great as it sounds:

- US: ~$70,000 (source: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...)

- UK: ~32,000 (source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...)

what you've linked is the median household income, not individual income, i.e., calculated as the combined gross income of all members of a household, so it stands to reason that the individual median/average income is closer to the $31000 posted by the earlier comment than the $70000 you mentioned...

I'm not saying it's impossible to sell software with one-time payment model, I'm saying it's noticeably harder. There's always going to be companies that make do with such business models, but what's the ratio of successful companies with one-time payment out of all companies that have tried that? How does that compare with companies that go for subscription model (or ad-supported model)?

And are there any behemoths (i.e., hugely profitable companies) that do one-time payment software? Because as far as I know Microsoft would have been one of the few or only such cases (and obviously it only applies to a subset of their products, many others are using other business models) and they are also moving towards a subscription model, e.g., for Office, which considering they probably have a legion of financial analysts, accountants, etc. I assume they have done their due diligence to figure out it's worth it.

Yes, I know you said they do sell hardware and that's probably how they survive.

If you look at my comment I said "if they only produced software", because I wanted to use it as an example (just from your £200 figure) with back of the envelope estimates to show why many companies move to subscriptions, because if you have a niche product, having new customers in the thousands or tens of thousands every year is incredibly difficult compared to having a reliable set of recurring customers with subscriptions.

It has become worse for you; for me as a user it has become incredibly smooth for my use case, requiring literally no tweaking/toggling whatsoever to have a decent experience out of the box, which definitely wasn't the case for me 10 years ago.

So what I want to say is that it's subjective, don't say it's worse like some objective fact, when there are many people who don't share your opinion, just like there are many people that never liked Gnome (not now, not before), and they're all correct in that it's mostly about what works for each individual and that's it.

If that company, the one that develops DaVinci Resolve, only produced software, would that model of £200 fixed one-time payment be sufficient to be financially viable?

Let's say the company's headcount to develop/maintain such software, plus a bunch of other required roles such as marketing, sales, hr, etc., is around 25 people averaging £80,000/year each (not that far off considering employees cost more than just their salary) to make it an even £2 million/year.

That means in order to not go bankrupt, i.e. break even, they need to sell 10,000 copies to new buyers every single year. Is that realistic? I don't think so, a company that tries that model will soon go in the red because we aren't even considering other costs that a company has, which aren't negligible. Even if you cut the estimate above in half, e.g., let's say they cost £40,000 each instead, that's still 5,000 new buyers of the software each year.

In contrast, a subscription model of £100/year requires them to have 20,000 ongoing subscriptions, which is substantially easier to achieve. I believe there's a reason that a lot of companies have shifted/are shifting to a subscription model, an alternative being monetisation models such as advertisement-supported programs.

Is your first/native language SVO (subject-verb-object)? Mine isn't, it's VSO (verb-subject-object) or SOV (subject-object-verb), and for me the first example isn't more readable so I wonder if that also changes our perspective on what option we see as the most natural.

I can admit though that from an IDE point of view having auto-completion upon writing thing and typing the dot and seeing the results is very useful, whereas there is nothing (as far as I know) that comes even close in functional languages where the second example is more typical.

It's not about whether you like it, or they like it, or I like it; it's about being able to provide certain features that a subset (of which you may or may not be a member) desire or require.

For example, taking web push notifications, you and many others may not want it, but someone else and many others too may want it for whatever reason:

- maybe from a developer perspective because they're a hobbyist and don't want to create an app instead of a website just to get notifications, but would be happy if they had the option. And before you say you don't need them, you DON'T know their use case, e.g., if it's a chat web-app it's going to be pretty damn useless without notifications.

- maybe from a user's perspective because they're not happy granting additional permissions (or making it harder to use an ad-blocker) that could be required by an app from the store, they just need the push notification to get some alert, but don't want to give up access to their photos, files, or contacts too.

In any case, it's about having empathy towards allowing others to have wants/needs different from yours, and if you do that and put yourself in other people's shoes, you should be able to see that Safari is clearly lacking in implementing a bunch of features (or delivering them several years after every other browser).

Finally, all that doesn't take away the fact that Safari does some things better than others, and that other browsers do things worse or push features that are in line with their own agenda or monetisation strategy.

How does Google search make money? By having people see or click on ads.

First of all, if company X pays to have an ad published when a search query includes a particular set of terms then they definitely expect the ad to be present more or less prominently, not hidden away where no one can see it, to make a difference, otherwise why bother paying for it.

Now, stop for a second and put yourself in Google's shoes... is there a financially-wise alternative to what they are doing? Where would you put the ad?

You're most certainly not going to push all ads down to the 2nd page and restrict the 1st page to only real/organic/whatever you want to call them results because many users are never going to bother navigating to that 2nd page before clicking out on any of the earlier results.

It also doesn't make sense to order identical results:

link to company X website (organic)

link to company X website (ad)

instead of the other way around because again, the probability that a user will click on the first link is going to be (considerably?) higher than the second one, so it's going to be a less efficient way to make money.

In the end, the search engine survives because of advertisements. If they didn't optimise ad placement in this way (and other less obvious ways) and the ad revenue decreases or completely dries up then the company goes bust, so in my opinion it makes 100% business sense to make said decisions.

So it's not a matter of whether search engines are smart enough to detect that identical scenario, it's whether it conflicts with their monetisation strategies... It would be a really stupid idea (and make for a short-lived company) to make decisions that shrink your ad revenue if that's your main (or only) source of income.

From my personal experience, at work we use C and not Rust because for really low-level code (e.g., kernel bypass, niche datastructures, real-time, etc.) I believe Rust would have to use "unsafe" due to work with raw pointers and other code that can't be easily, or at all, expressed otherwise. In such a scenario a lot of the advantages Rust supposedly brings are diminished or gone.

When that happens, considering that our company's knowledge/experience with C (or C++, although not my case) is vastly deeper than with Rust it makes no sense to choose it for any of that type of code we write, old or new.

Zig looks promising but it's still too soon to take any risk in adopting it; in 5 years time it may be worth revisiting it and see how it has matured...

Finally, software we may write but that gives us no competitive advantage over other businesses, sure that can be in Rust, Go, Java, Python, whatever.

I guess you can say C17 is a change if you want to be pedantic except it didn't actually introduce any new features; it just corrected some defects found in C11.

So we have C89, C99, C11, and C2X (C23?) as the only revisions introducing new stuff...

What? That's not my experience at all; from my desktop, tablet, and/or mobile phone browser I can access all subreddits I'm interested in without having to be logged in, including the one you mentioned, /r/programming but also all of these:

android, askhistorians, biochemistry, c_programming, chemistry, compsci, design, embedded, freebsd, golang, haskell, java, javascript, linguistics, linux, math, mechanical_gifs, openbsd, physics, python, raspberry_pi, rust, statistics, sysadmin, vim, web_design ... and many more.

so not sure what you're doing to not be able to access said subreddit while being logged out.

I don't know which way the OP intended the "play the game" sentence, but I didn't take it to mean go work for Facebook or whatever; instead I took it as don't be naive in thinking you can fight against injustices in the system like so, because it will land you in prison (or worse); instead maybe find alternative ways that let you accomplish the same end goal, even if you have to accept progress cannot be achieved as quickly as the direct unsafe approach.

No I don't have any suggestions myself but as you point out there are already other alternatives, and I believe none are as blatantly obvious as when Aaron downloaded hundreds of documents per minute:

SciHub itself may be similar but there are some important differences, e.g., the creator is not a citizen or resident of the US where this would be prosecuted (I think she lives in Russia, which only "recently" ruled to block the site, but I'm unsure she'd face any criminal charges) and the way they source the paywalled articles/journals is less easy for the authorities to circumvent.

In addition, (some) universities and other institutions are slowly moving towards open access journals and other measures; not at an ideal pace, I agree, but certainly done on a better foundation to ensure publishers don't just bury people with lawsuits and so on.

I don't like how people downvoted this comment without even saying why.

The wording may be harsh (not what I think, just attempting to guess) but I believe there is truth in it; although the idea of allowing free access to academic journals is laudable, the way he went about it was naive/wrong in my opinion and impulsive as you say.

I think the initiative will serve both to reduce inequality and bolster Xi; to what degree each is yet to be seen, I can only speculate.

I do understand (and agree) with the fact that chances are Xi is not doing this out of the goodness of his heart but mostly due to self-interest to strengthen his position. However, if we separate the person from the action I still believe this measure will potentially benefit more people than it hurts and is in my opinion a positive one. Companies should always come second to people, and not just when it comes to monetary policies, but also environmental, etc.

Oh I definitely agree that is the case for certain sites, which will ask you for an outrageous fee and they may not even fully disable ads and/or tracking.

But even in the fair payment scenario you're suggesting, how many people do you reckon would be able to afford paying per whatever metric ,e.g., video watched, article read, MB downloaded, search queried, etc. for all/most sites they currently use like facebook, google, youtube, reddit, tiktok...? And how many would be willing?

On top of that, how would the Internet change as a result of that? Imagine in this hypothetical new setting someone who wants to make a decision about what film/series to watch: currently they may check all of imdb, letterbox, metacritic, rottentomatoes, justwatch, etc. Would they still do that if all those sites required some sort of payment (let's assume they may be different, some may require subscription, another charges per query... the point is they would all cost money to use)? I'm not so sure, and I don't think I'd like that Internet any more than the one we currently have.

There may be some policies/actions from the Chinese government I don't like but certainly not that one, I think it's laudable to take measures to shrink the gap between rich and poor and raise the standard of living for everyone before having some tiny percentage of the population living like kings.

In many western countries this divide is increasing and it doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon unless measures are taken.

As an example, in the UK, where I live, the median yearly salary is roughly £31k, which means you take home about £2k each month. Start subtracting rent/mortgage, car/public transportation, bills, groceries, toiletries, and just stuff necessary for living and you won't be left with much for pleasure and entertainment, i.e., for living beyond surviving.

Which is btw why I find some HN users are sometimes in such a bubble when they make comments about how they despise ad-supported websites and would love for them to be paid instead; that's lacking empathy, not realising that soooo many people wouldn't be able to afford a system like that, or if they did they would have to give up a bunch of other things instead.