/home/claude/.cache/uv/archive-v0/nZCy52fMCgTsNaLySn0xf/chardet
  /home/claude/.cache/uv/wheels-v6/pypi/chardet
  /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_vendor/chardet
  /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/chardet 

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41940731

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en

Working link to the page that contains the picture: https://btwberkshires.com/arts/visual-arts/mad-magazine-draw...

That's why we decided to offer separate feature entitlements that are tightly coupled to the billing chain and metering as part of Wingback (disclaimer: I'm the CTO). In the end, depending on your plan complexity and how much you have already invested in feature flags, I think both approaches can work well. Having some kind of feature gating in place for your customers will also make your life a lot easier for provisioning customer accounts and being able to offer custom packages.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39515336

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I think a lot of the issues arise from the difference between payments and billing [0]. When just starting out and signing up your first customers, you primarily care about collecting a few (recurring) payments - and it's really easy to set that up with Stripe (or even just manually invoicing your first customers).

However, over time, more billing requirements gradually sneak in, such as more complex entitlements, multiple plans, grandfathering, and eventually enterprise/high touch sales customers (where the money is!) who need custom billing cycles, terms, and entitlement provisioning. Since billing is never a technical focus, numerous additions and small hacks accumulate over time, taking engineering resources away from the actual product. Eventually, this turns into an unmanageable mess that can significantly slow down the sales process or limit what you can sell.

The complexity of billing is riddled with hidden pitfalls and edge cases, and it has become even more complex now that most plans include many different limits and usage-based components and that most SaaS companies sell globally. Many later-stage companies have teams of 15+ engineers working solely on billing. I fully agree with the author that, unless it's at the core of your product, no organization should build a billing system themselves (Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of Wingback, a SaaS Billing Platform).

[0] https://www.wingback.com/blog/saas-payment-vs-saas-billing

Really easy to set up too, just make sure to also set up DKIM/SPF/DMARC to make sure the forwarded emails don't go to spam.

How so? Iirc, the entropy calculations assume that the attacked is aware passphrases are used. The eff-long word list often used for xkcd-style passphrases has 7776 words. So on average it would take 7776^4/2 attempts to guess one (randomly generated) 4-word passphrase, comparable to a truly random 8-9 character password with special chars. As the comic points out, people tend to be pretty bad at remembering random sequences of characters and therefore often often use combinations of common words and apply non-random substitutions and patterns, resulting in much lower entropy for those passwords.

Of course, everyone should use a password manager in the first place, but for cases where people don't or they need to reliably remember it (master passwords and critical ones), xkcd-style passphrases are a good and secure option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702

No other player has the ad revenue and market power to even attempt competing with Google:

* Microsoft's search ads + LinkedIn revenue was only $18.7b [3] in 2021 (9% of Googles) and they are the only big global (i.e. not Chinese) player with ad revenues over $10b and a competing search engine.

* Meta is the only company that comes closer in terms of ad revenue at $112b in 2021 (53% of Google) [4], but it's hard to imagine how they would fit search into their ecosystem.

* Apple has the resources and controls the valuable (=mostly iOS users) Safari market, but even for them, they would have to forego $18b/year (as per the article) in pure profits from their deal with Google and manage to actually create a competing product and advertise it heavily, which would costs them 10s of billions a year more. It makes sense that they'd rather keep taking the cash instead.

This also makes you realize just how valuable dominating the browser market with Google Chrome and having significant influence on the mobile market with Android must be for Google (and also why Apple doesn't allow third party browser engines on their platform).

[0] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-... [3] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-adverti...