The SpaceX plan puts the satellites in low earth orbit, much closer than the geosynchronous satellites you can connect to now. That lowers latency into the 25-30ms range. There will also be many more of them, and presumably they are being built with the understanding they will need to support the bandwidth requirements of the Netflix-era of internet usage.
The car sales environment makes it particularly hard to buy a manual car these days. Even for cars which are still made in manual like the BMW 340i and the Nissan Juke, it is impossible to find a manual version on a dealership lot. I don't know if it's because they acknowledge they're harder to sell, or because they don't like people test driving manuals, but either way you will be ordering your car if you want it as a stick. That generally corresponds to a 6-10 week wait for your car, which doesn't align well with an American public who want their car today.
The site is currently reporting an "Error establishing a database connection." If at all possible, please try to make simple content sites like this static using a tool like Netlify or http://stout.is. Static sites are faster, more reliable and cheaper to operate.
I got so annoyed with the complexity and poor performance of web frameworks that I sat down for a day last year and made my own little database-less CMS for this kind of usecase. It's not quite as fast as a purely static solution, but I think it would be fast enough for HN:
It'd depend on the shared hosting provider and your site.
Having hundreds of MB of content that people are going to want to load, even if it's all served statically, will probably still have you in a bad way with the cheapest of hosting providers.
But it'll have a much better chance of surviving than someone running wordpress or something that's got zero caching and needs to do a ton of calls to a shared MySQL host.
Then yes, it would probably be fine, within reason.
When running a static site at very high traffic loads it becomes about how many connections the webserver can handle and how much bandwidth you have to serve the site itself, rather than pure power of the server to process all the requests a dynamic site would generate.
You can start to chew through bandwidth allocations pretty quickly when you get a couple thousand concurrent visitors, so a shared hosting plan might run out pretty quickly if the cap is small, even with a fairly small site. And something like Apache would need tweaking a fair bit to handle that number of connections without eating all the RAM. Nginx is better in that regard and could pretty easily handle thousands of concurrents.
So a small DigitalOcean VPS can easily handle millions of 'hits' per day if set up with a little care, and more than that if setup well, but you just have to watch you don't saturate the connection.
I mirrored a few sites that had faced the reddit hug of death (just to see what the load was like) and I found you can easily hit 200mbps* sustained connection requirement with all the visitors it brings just from the comment thread, which people don't enter as much as the list posting.
*(depending on the size of the page obviously, the bigger the page the more mbps it'll need to serve, average was around 20-50mbps).
A VPS is quite a bit different than regular shared hosting though.
Like the absurdly low single-digit-per-month hosting plans with 'Unlimited' everything. They're run to push the most customers onto the fewest boxes possible, and offer incredibly large feature sets.
So, while you might be tuning your static content to be as small as possible, you're probably on a box that's serving a heck of a lot poorly optimised sites. Disk IO is probably going to be an issue if you can't keep your content in memory (remembering that memory pressure is probably pretty high)
Ah, you're right, disk IO is one I hadn't considered too. I"m so used to availability of cheap VPS and SSD I'm not sure the last time I used actual shared hosting myself.
Those sorts of shared hosting plans have a funny way of disabling your site if you get a big surge of traffic, despite the 'unlimited' claims.
I was told once, "Yes, your plan is unlimited, but not infinite.' when I had a post on a long forgotten site go mildly popular.
I suppose on those types of machines the sheer number of connections would get you in hot water too, especially if they're running vanilla apache and it starts burning through memory there.
If it's static, which is really recommended for content like this, I'd opt for Netlify (we love it for our projects) or a comparable service.
A traditional shared host will likely run into trouble once you reach a significant traffic spike, which is exactly the moment when you absolutely don't want to experience an outage.
Netlify, even on their cheapest 10 bucks/month plan, will let you use their CDN network and offer performance that is far ahead of shared hosts, let alone database backed websites.
That's what I do, with GitLab. I chose GitLab because it allows you to use true/full https with custom domains thanks to letting you upload your own certificates.
I know you can get what looks like https with Cloudflare, custom domain and GitHub but it's not full end-to-end.
GitLab also has built in CI (rather than something external like Travis with GitHub) so you can simply push a commit and have a free 'runner' (really a Digital Ocean instance) spin up, run a build script then deploy to GitLab Pages, all for free. It's pretty amazing what you can do there to be honest.
I'm using it with Hugo but there are 'runners' for just about any SSG. I think many people have switched to using it for the ability to use Jekyll plugins unlike over at GitHub.
From the connection times I'm guessing the the servers are somewhere on the East Coast of the US (maybe they're still on Azure?) so I can hit sub second loads in Europe, the US and just about get under 1.5 secs in Australia/Asia.
It's impressive for the grand old price of 'free'!
This is just not true. When a VC invests, they are betting this company will aggressively grow in value. All do some amount of due diligence. Clearly in some cases, not enough.
Not just that, but RideAustin is a non-profit and mimics virtually every feature of Uber. I seriously wonder if non-profit versions of the business will expand into other cities and challenge Uber and Lyfts margins.
> I seriously wonder if non-profit versions of the business will expand into other cities and challenge Uber and Lyfts margins.
Why would non-profits inherently be able to beat Lyft or Uber's margins?
Non-profits, despite the name, are not prohibited from making a profit. Conversely, the "profit" referred to in "for-profit companies" doesn't come out of their margins.
And even if you're talking about their bottom line rather than their margins, it's not like venture-backed companies are required to run at an operating profit anyway. To my knowledge, Uber has never actually issued GAAP accounting demonstrating that they're turning a profit[0]. Which makes sense - the whole point of raising outside capital is to spend money faster than you'd otherwise have access to it. Both non-profits and for-profit companies do this.
Non-profits are functionally equivalent to for-profit companies. The only distinction in this case is that a non-profit would have a harder time raising money, because they can't provide equity in exchange for the outside funding they obtain, whereas a for-profit company can.
[0] They've made plenty of non-GAAP claims, but that doesn't mean anything.
> Non-profits, despite the name, are not prohibited from making a profit.
Sure, but I would argue non-profit is still a useful term because while technically not accurate, it's not accurate in the same way people aren't being technically accurate in what they mean when they refer to an organization as non-profit. A non-profit cannot distribute its funds to owners or shareholders, it can only retain them to further its goal or ensure it's future survival. At the same time, I would argue more people mean "there isn't one or more people at the top profiting from ownership" when they say non-profit. This is an important distinction because it may lead to different incentives for the organization beyond survival (maximizing shareholder/owner profits vs maximizing customers served or some other metric).
> Why would non-profits inherently be able to beat Lyft or Uber's margins?
Presumably by doing everything Lyft or Uber do but without the need to ever pay out to investors. Whether that's likely is another story, but I don't think it's impossible, it just takes longer to self bootstrap and can be very hard (for example you might have to fight loss-leading tactics from a for-profit that's willing to defer profits until you are gone).
> At the same time, I would argue more people mean "there isn't one or more people at the top profiting from ownership" when they say non-profit.
Yes, and this is a bad usage of the term, because whether or not there are people "at the top" profiting from ownership has nothing to do with whether the company is structured as a non-profit or a for-profit company. People "at the top" can profit from a non-profit, and you can run a for-profit company without "people at the top profiting".
It's unfortunate that the term we use to refer to companies which cannot distribute dividends is "non-profit", but it's really bad to project conceptions of what those companies should act like onto them simply based on how the term sounds in common vernacular.
And again, whether you are using the term with its precise meaning or with its colloquial one, non-profit status has no impact on a company's margins:
> Presumably by doing everything Lyft or Uber do but without the need to ever pay out to investors.
"Paying out investors" does not impact their margins. They can pay out investors from their profit margins (if they have any), but the fact that non-profits don't have any investors to pay out doesn't mean that their margins magically go up.
And, yes, it's true that you never need to pay out investors if you never have any. Of course, if you never have any investors and your competitors all do, you're starting off at a huge disadvantage.
> And again, either way you use the term, non-profit status has no impact on a company's margins
I think your interpretation of the original comment and statement may be different than some of those you are in discussion with. I interpreted "challenge Uber and Lyfts margins" as "compete at a similar level" (with the margins of competitors being affected by the competition), and it appears you might be interpreting it as "getting better margins than the competitors". It's also possible to read the original statement as raising the question of whether it's even possible, and so fully in line with your position.
It is poor wording though. Margins have a complex relationship with, and are only one of the variables that goes into, profit.
> "Paying out investors" does not impact their margins.
Insofar as investors are willing (or forced) to defer payment it doesn't, but pressure can change strategy, and strategy can change margins. But as I outlined above, I'm not really making any argument for better/worse margins from a non-profit. Actually, I'm not making an argument that non-profits are any better at providing a service or surviving either. I was just adding a bit of information to the discussion.
Where does the profit come from if not the margins? The advantage of non-profits is that they don't have to make a profit in the long run and might have to pay less taxes.
Not having to make profits might be true in the beginning for startups, but at some points investors want to see returns.
If I remember correctly, Uber is already making profits in some markets and using it to subsidize expansion in other markets.
> Where does the profit come from if not the margins?
At a high level:
"Margins" typically refers to what is left over after you take all of the revenue from selling a product and subtract all of the per-unit costs (ie, ignoring fixed costs).
"Profit" is then whatever is left over after you take all of your revenue, subtract your per-unit costs, and then subtract all of your overhead (salaries, office space, etc.)
So, whether you are a non-profit or a for-profit, the accounting there is the same. The difference is that for-profit companies can choose to use that profit to issue dividends to people who hold shares. If they don't, that money stays within the company (ie, it's "reinvested"). Non-profits don't have a choice: they cannot distribute dividends.
Many notable for-profit companies don't distribute dividends. From an accounting perspective, if they also reinvest all of their money back into the company before year's end, they are essentially equivalent to a non-profit company.
There are some caveats to this, but that's the general idea.
> The advantage of non-profits is that they don't have to make a profit in the long run
No company "has" to make a profit in the long run, as long as they break even. But again, whether or not they are able to break even is determined the same way, whether they're a non-profit or a for-profit company.
> and might have to pay less taxes.
This is jurisdiction-dependent and is a relatively minor effect, because taxation on profits just encourages the for-profit company to reinvest its capital anyway. Most of the other taxes that a company pays are paid by both for-profit and non-profit companies.
In any case, the difficulty that non-profits would have in raising comparable amounts of money to venture-backed competitors is much larger, by several orders of magnitude.
> Many notable for-profit companies don't distribute dividends. From an accounting perspective, if they also reinvest all of their money back into the company before year's end, they are essentially equivalent to a non-profit company.
Only if you discount the pressure to raise stock prices for public companies. There are plenty of cases where the pressure to do this in the short term, or even just to mitigate an expected drop in prices, has produced a strategy that is not optimal for the business itself.
> There are plenty of cases where the pressure to do this in the short term, or even just to mitigate an expected drop in prices, has produced a strategy that is not optimal for the business itself.
Non-profits are by no means immune to this. They still have a board, and that board still operates in the exact same way as the board of a for-profit company does, subject to virtually all of the same incentives.
There are countless cases in which non-profits act in ways that are sub-optimal for both the operation of the company and for the long-term mission outlined in the company's charter, because either the board or the executive leadership (or both) were responding to short-term incentives.
Again: focusing on the "non-profit" vs. "for-profit" distinction is essentially meaningless when figuring out how a company is incentivized to run its business. They are both subject to the same underlying economic forces and the same incentives.
> focusing on the "non-profit" vs. "for-profit" distinction is essentially meaningless when figuring out how a company is incentivized to run its business. They are both subject to the same underlying economic forces and the same incentives.
I think many of the incentives are the same, but not all. Or, better put, all the same incentives exist, but importance is attributed to them differently. I've known desire for recognition and ego to cause problems in an obvious way in a non-profit that while not impossible in a for-pofit organization, would appear to be far less common. I think the converse could be said with regard to monetary incentives. That is, it's not that when I say the incentives are different I mean some exist in one instance and don't in others, but that the relative importance applied to each is apportioned differently, and I view those as "different".
I was in Austin two weeks ago and was worried about the lack of Uber/Lyft. I had great experiences using RideAustin. A driver even mentioned that they pay him 2x fares to drive out to areas like the F1 track because it's outside of the city.
To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. There is only one way to say 'Elon's vision is right and it will happen,' but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail. So after the first few excited comments come in, often the only novel thing to contribute is a counter point.
This doesn't mean that the majority of people aren't optimistic about the future, just that their opinion has already been expressed.
>To be fair, being enthusiastic and positive about the future isn't that useful of a comment. .... but there are countless, interesting, ways to point out how it might fail
Sure, but there is more than one way to say it:
"I live in the mountains of Virginia and this will never work here with the snow, therefore it's crap, therefore it will fail!!!!"
OR
"It's going to be really hard for them to solve the problem of heavy snow. I wonder if they'll use <something interesting we can all learn about> or <something else>. I wonder if they've teamed up with <who knows> to research <something interesting>. I think the best approach would be x,y,z and I read the Google are using a,b,c".
etc.
I mean, we're talking about a multi-billon dollar company trying to push forward - OF COURSE there are tons of hard parts. Pointing them out it not useful - thinking about (and working on) how to solve them is what HN should be about.
"I wonder if Elon will go down path A...." "Interesting that the battery is now x, this is probably a result of Y technology they developed last year." Etc. I don't find it hard to discuss a topic in a positive light at all.
It's interesting to think about the ways your opponent might capture your pieces, but it's just as interesting and just as important to think about the ways you might capture theirs.
Time we spend bickering about whether electric cars are ready is time not spent talking about the new grid, the new architecture, the new social organization that will form around these (to me obviously) imminent technologies.
I don't think "how it could succeed" is less interesting than "how it could fail". And if I expect something to succeed, frankly the failure speculation starts to get a bit boring.
It's a bit personal for me because I am pursuing a high-setback business model in my startup and so people always want to talk about the looming dangers they see. It starts to get boring, because I expect a certain number of failures, and I intend to work through them. What's interesting to mr is whether the first principles analysis is right, and how the plan looks from a Zen perspective... Not is everything right, but am I applying pressure in the right place today given the conditions.
He's implying we should retaliate against people because of their voting decisions, which is a hugely shitty thing to do. There is no black-and-white in politics, and someone who supports Trump doesn't mean they support literally everything Trump has ever said. But thanks to the divisive bullshit of this campaign, everyone hates each other.
Not simply a voting decision. As DHH explained, "this is a man who's a Trump delegate! Keynote endorser at his convention! Political action and operative."
I think most people who vote for Trump would be happy to be nominated as his delegate. All things aside, it is seen as a social honor to be a delegate.
By invoking the Resistance, pg compared Trump to Hitler. DHH was merely probing where the line falls between Hitler and the other Nazis in that metaphor. DHH didn't bring up black and white, pg did.
