Love the product, love that you don’t need a cloud account. Congrats! I’m in the same situation where I seem to improvise better when I haven’t hit the record button.
Readit Newssnom380 commented on Show HN: I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianos jamcorder.com/... · Posted by u/chipweinberger
Google Brain spent oodles of money developing that tech only to watch other people capitalize on the research and potentially make Google Search (one of the stickiest products I've ever seen) obsolete. Freeform, self-directed, open-ended research labs are certainly a great approach from a technology breakthrough PoV, if you have 2010s Google margins.
But it's not obvious to me that approach was even a net win for Google as a business. Did Google Brain invent the technology that killed Google? TBD I think.
I wonder what would be the alternative, though? Other companies/universities would eventually have made the same breakthroughs, and I don’t think the answer to the innovators dilemma is to do less ambitious innovation?
In the case of Google there’s a lot of internal reasons why they didn’t leverage this opportunity, but if they had done that they might have ended up making their main product even more sticky.
One thing really worth addressing from the post that I don't think author accepted, and I see this a lot with engineers:
> "That did introduce tension for our team because we were supposed to be taking experimental bets for the platform’s future. These bets couldn’t be baked into product without hacks or shortcuts in the typical quarter as was the expectation."
If I can pump one learning into engineers' and PMs' heads it's this: intermediate deliverables are not optional no matter how cutting-edge your team is.
You will never succeed if your pitch to leadership is "give us a budget for the next N years and expect no shippable products until the end of N years". Even if you get approved somehow at the beginning, there's a 99.5% chance your team/project will be killed before you get to N years.
Again, once again for the audience in the back: there is no such thing as a multi-year project without convincing, meaningful intermediate deliverables.
To clarify, that doesn't mean "don't have multi-year roadmaps", it means "your multi-year roadmaps must deliver wins at a consistent cadence".
Understanding this will carry you a lot further in the industry.
As a fairly cutting-edge R&D team part of your job is to figure out what slice of this is shippable (and worth shipping). If you're coming up empty you are not ready to pitch this to execs.
I think what you say is true, yet some base research takes time. If you have a “ship it” attitude, you might push teams towards taking smaller bets that they know are within reach? I don’t know how the transformer breakthroughs at Google/DeepMind happened, and it’s likely they were “shipping” things internally, but it seems clear that the people on those teams were working in a very different environment than what the author is describing.
If you look at all the defining products of Apple, they also took years from the “germ of an idea” until they could be launched, and though they might have “shipped” internally, they gained a lot by not having pressure to ship things piecemeal to customers.
snom380 commented on Ask HN: How can we open-source a 7 year old SaaS codebase and build a community? · Posted by u/MarkinK
I'm usually hesitant to give advice since I'm never in someone elses shoes, but here's some thoughts:
A lot of community building comes down to trust, whether you are developing a commercial or open source platform. As a customer and integrator/consultant/developer, I want to know that the platform is going to be around and supported. The bigger my company the higher the risk is.
Open sourcing your software sends signals to your customers and partners. Some will see it as a last ditch effort to make it successful, with the flip side being that if it doesn't happen, you're won't be maintaining it anymore. Will that make them more or less likely to use your software/help build your community?
So in your messaging you should be very clear in what you want to achieve, and how you plan to build a successful business around an open source or open core model, and how the others companies fit into this. How will you respond if another company takes your code and does the exact same thing you're trying to monetize, only better? Etc.
You should also be careful about positive feedback. Most people like to be nice and supportive, and won't say negative things. The only way to know whether you'll have success there is to see actual commitment (in money or work spent) with your product.
Finally as others have said, you shouldn't expect automatic success/community by open sourcing the code. You might end up attracting the sort of customers / developers that have the least incentive to contribute or pay for additional services, unless you go find those yourself.
snom380 commented on PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS github.com/migueletto/Pum... · Posted by u/rickcarlino
They did have the Treo line!
Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.
Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
Completely agree that Apple does the exact same stuff with account management and iCloud notifications, but I don’t understand where these arguments keep coming from that Apple is more costly.
The 13.5 sLaptop 6 for Business is, i5/8gb/256gb is $1200
Compare that the 14” MBP (M3/8gb/512gb) for $1600. The diff in SSD storage offsets some of the cost, but not the whole $400
However, the 13” MacBook Air with the same specs (although a much better CPU) - M3/8gb/256gb is actually $100 cheaper.
Until someone builds an actual M3 competitor, Apple’s making better laptops for cheaper.
I have an M1 16” MBP that’s still running laps around any other laptop I’ve ever owned, including the 15” sBook 2 with a 1060. The Windows Arm laptop I have sucks compared to the M-series.
Anyway, totally agree that Apple does the same cross-sell garbage as Microsoft, just think it’s way off to argue that their hardware is more expensive, at least meaningfully so when you compare the performance, longevity, and battery life.
Does Apple require an Apple ID/iCloud account to set up a Mac? I thought that was a difference with windows 11?
That is because apple doesn't ask you, it just turns it on. If you don't accept changes to their terms of service (As I haven't) you'd get these notifications fairly regularly.
Granted, I have iCloud turned on (for syncing notes and calendar) but I have it turned off for everything else. I’ve never had it ask me to turn on any of the other iCloud features like iCloud backup or drive / desktop sync. (And I’d guess if it synced things without my knowledge it would show up in my iCloud storage usage?)
snom380 commented on Vision Pro Teardown – Why those fake eyes look so weird ifixit.com/News/90137/vis... · Posted by u/zdw
This is my main complaint with the design. Comfort is king for things you wear on your face, and a lot of the design decisions compromise comfort. If I was designing v2 I would delete the external facing display and glass cover, move all processing to the battery, and ship a rigid strap.
None of the arguments against putting the processor in the battery make any sense. It adds latency? No it doesn't, if designed correctly, and I guarantee you can fit the correct design in the budget for $3500. You can't cool it from inside a pocket? The wire is sticking out already, you could add a short air intake to it. It would be too big? I guarantee that size is easier to carry in the battery than on your literal face!
The only thing that makes sense to me is the battery was supposed to be internal and the external battery was a last minute compromise for comfort. Unfortunately I suspect that Apple will go the direction of moving the battery back in for v2 rather than moving processing out.
There’s 12 cameras and 3 screens to drive, how many lanes would you need for that through the cable? How chunky would the cable be after adding necessary shielding?
snom380 commented on Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration pkl-lang.org/blog/introdu... · Posted by u/bioballer
> We offer plugins and extensions for IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code and Neovim, with Language Server Protocol support coming soon.
Why? Why would they not have just done the language server first (or only)? All of those have built-in support for it, so separate implementations wouldn't have been necessary; that's the point.
I just don't understand why you'd make that decision on a greenfield project today, especially if LSP support is planned at all?
Why assume it's a greenfield project? I would think most open source software that comes out of companies have lived internally for a while before going public?
Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc