The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".

Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.

This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

So get Google to buy Wiz for their nascent services play and plow the cash into this.

Smells like July of 2000.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39919226

Points: 59

# Comments: 19

Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.

It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.

But I digress. In the biz, if the contract has to be trafficked through a shell corp where the owner takes a 20% cut, everyone simply bids a 20% higher rate.

It's the taxpayer's prerogative if they would rather their government pay an inflated contracting rate -- as opposed to using that money for education, infrastructure, social services, etc.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...

This article is part of what I like to call the narrative media. You decide what the facts are and don't give a damn about reality -- because that's what keeps your readers coming back for more.

Well I'll see your demo, and raise you another demo

https://x.com/sean_moriarity/status/1760435005119934862

Except that demo was done by a single person, with a day job and no cap table.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38359655

Points: 26

# Comments: 29

Can only work when you have the advantage of being the dominant product in the marketplace -- but I gotta hand it to the board, I couldn't have done it better myself.

The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.

1. You have a $200 million piece of defense-critical equipment. 2. You know that there was a 5-minute period where a potential member of a foreign intelligence service was alone and unattended in the same room as this piece of equipment.

What do you do with the equipment? You can:

a) Put the equipment into service b) Disassemble the equipment on both a hardware and software level and try to detect if anything was altered c) Destroy the equipment

If you choose anything other than c) you have probably never been, nor should you ever be, in charge of securing critical assets that can be targeted by a nation-state. This incident seems to indicate that the leadership at Microsoft would choose a).

Also, bear in mind that these are the people that you just sent all your ChatGPT data to.

1. While JCH will usually be the most performant hashing method, naively, removing a node will affect all nodes of higher order. This makes the logic of node deletions somewhat more complex than (say) Discord's hash ring. This is why JCH is more common for long-term, distributed, redundant storage -- where the topology changes far less frequently.

2. For sharding, what makes distribution hard is not so much the hashing but consensus on the cluster state -- this is the hidden problem. Bryan Hunter's talk on Waterpark (https://youtu.be/9qUfX3XFi_4) is a excellent example of what you can do when you can set things up so that the topology is fixed. In fact, this approach makes things so straight forward that it is shared by Riak, where the number of vnodes is fixed.

However, if you have a rapidly changing topology (like several Kubernetes clusters that are frequently scaling up and down), you can often need some sort of consensus mechanism to make sure every node has a consistent view of the cluster. In my experience, this usually ends up being the most complex part of distribution problem to solve.

Whether they're paid by "you, the taxpayer" or "you, the bank customer", they will be paid.

Just remember that some losses matter more than others. Losses by community banks in Oklahoma matter (on a dollar for dollar basis) less than losses in Silicon Valley.

https://twitter.com/SeidlerCorp/status/1636518949872451584?s...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35211484

Points: 1

# Comments: 1