Sorry, it wasn't meant to come across as a complaint with copy and paste curl command, I agree with you it's convenient and I generally like it.
However, the sort of tools that generally provide it also generally have a GitHub link nearby to encourage reading/writing the source. That too is convenient and I generally like it. Seemed like a fair suggestion.
This is a really cool idea, and very appealing. Also very nice that it looks usable with just an SSH client. It would be useful if it was explained what the companion client is for?
Another small personal gripe: I think you should either remove the 1 line copy/paste sh install on the homepage, or add a link to a git repo on the homepage. I know it's possible to view the sh by visiting it, but a raw text file doesn't give any info about contributors or development process. Current form of no git repo and copy/paste bash pipe on homepage feels like a dark pattern.
It's possible to login and interact and use late.sh with just your SSH client - there's no need to download or run custom code. But you that did make me realise that they don't have a github link on that page anywhere.
Your tone in this comment is a bit out of place on HN. Why are you here if you think it's 1M dummies?
That's fair, I completely get that. I guess I was just surprised that there's an expectation that a website with content like Gwern's would be up front about their real identity. I'm trying to understand how widespread that expectation is now, because I'm concerned I'm becoming out of touch with modern web expectations!
I think you're inferring something that people aren't implying, and that inference leads to you eventually discussing how ATProto is better than mastodon. I think this doesn't look great, particularly at a time where there's quite a few posts of about unproductive conflict between open social network contributors. I don't think there's any bad intent or malice on your side: there is value in comparison between AT/AP to help understanding.
Your argument that there are no instances in ATProto isn't flawed if you redefine instances as this thing that ATProto doesn't have. But if I run it by the various computer science definitions I can find (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instance_(computer_science)) then your argument seems like it depends on a niche interpretation. So it can be technically correct, but just irrelevant or inconvenient when used in a comp sci discussion involving the word "instance".
But your blog post on the subject is interesting, and informative, and has some great diagrams, and the original parent poster agreed and learned stuff from it. Despite that, I think the implication in the parent post was, IMO, "so the main, largest implementer (instance) of the protocol is also a for-profit which owns the trademarks? I never realised that, I'd assume the protocol was governed and run by a not-for-profit independent governance org, charity or consortium" (like some other open protocols).
I think that's a fair and slightly critical implication that has nothing to do with network topology. I completely get how you would want to take issue with that implication alone, because without context like the trademark was acquired with good intent to protect protect openness, and that the Bluesky org is a specific type of for-profit (PBC) that expresses intent to favour public benefit and openness, it makes things sound more sinister than they are.
Ultimately, from an openness and independence position, I think it would be better looking from the outside if the ATProto and trademarks were governed and managed by a separate not-for-profit entity that wasn't tied to the biggest instance/implementation of the protocol. I think that was the point being made, and I don't think it's absurd. But I think refuting that argument by focusing on network topology and instance definitions seems like a misunderstanding somewhere.
Dan, you really should refine this line of reasoning a bit as it feels not very nice in some way: it feels like you're picking an unintuitive/uncommon definition for "instance" and then using that to tell everyone they're misunderstanding stuff then they're using different, arguably more widely accepted, definitions.
We've had a very similar discussion in response to this same argument recently elsewhere on HN. If you enjoy having this debate, then carry on, but I don't think it endears non ATProto users to the ATProto cause. I think it seems needlessly controversial/pedantic. Sorry for the blunt feedback, it's because I expect better from you:)
Gwern has been around for ages. I remember citing a few of their pages during my postgraduate work over 15 years ago. At the time, it wasn't easy (or even possible?) to find their name at all.
I've always assumed Gwern was anonymous because the norm on the internet generally was to try to be anonymous, especially those who've done research around crypto, darknet markets and other spicy areas.
Maybe I'm just getting old and losing touch, but is the expectation now that you can only write long articles and ask for donations or contributions if you publish your real name somewhere?
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator.
Sorry for taking that a bit too literally.
The other points still stand.
You have interesting experiences. There's a common theme in my feedback, and in the other comments that provide constructive feedback: you're missing accepted learnings by being a stubborn/arrogant/maybe just inexperienced entrepreneur. e.g.:
> Ultimately, for us, putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator, and it’s often counter-productive.
Your language here, and in the rest of the conclusion, frames the learning as "the problem was that my idea [that maybe customer support would be good if people just tried] just didn't work for specifically for us because x, y, z is different for us".
It didn't work for you because it's a fundamentally flawed assumption that CS was easy if you just try to be good at it and care about the customer. You wrote that as the idea you had when you bought the company. The idea didn't fail because of your special circumstances, the idea failed because it's a demonstrably bad idea, sorry.
Many other commenters have made the same critical point as me, but your first response to me was essentially: "what critical points? I can take it. And besides, I said 'what I got wrong' so you're wrong to say I got the wrong learnings". Which is - again - you dismissing people's experience (of you).
In the meantime, I noticed your site is down. I'll keep a look out for your writings in future. I mean it genuinely that you have interesting experiences. I think you need humbling a little though. Sorry again for the harsh feedback. I sincerely think your world and everyone else's world would be better and brighter if you really reread and absorb the constructive feedback from me and other HN commenters with an open mind, rather than looking for ways to dismiss it.
I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.
What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?
Another learning from your conclusion:
> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.
Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!
I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.
They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.
And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.
I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.
I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here.
The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.
There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).
I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.
Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.
In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?
I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)
I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.
I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
Your first sentence is the proof that CORS is a bad solution.
HN is supposed to be full of people who need to know, use and depend on CORS and CSP. We might all just be idiots, but we're the idiots who are supposed to use this tool, and we can't explain it or agree on it.
If a tool can't be used or understood by the primary users, IMO it's by definition a bad tool/solution. It's easy to see why - it's security that depends on a browser, something we're traditionally told never to depend on for security.
I feel the same. Unfortunately, I've had to deal with CORS in a few situations where the request is "we need to get this thing from this server, but we can't change the servers CORS or CSP", which, in technical security speak is "we have this security system in place, we need to circumvent it".
Ultimately, it almost always depends on the server only being accessed via an untampered browser request.
The Zoom exploit was able to happen because CORS and CSP are so easy to get around on the client side, so Zoom did it. Sure, Zoom were bad/lazy/silly for doing it, but I feel we're bad as a community for still having this model.
It's natural to be a bit racist an xenophobic internally. We're all animals at the end of the day who are motivated to protect our in groups and people like us.
The same way as it's natural to have strong feelings of wanting to inflict pain and suffering on someone who's done wrong to us or people we care about.
Choosing not to do these harmful but natural things is called "being civil". Nobody has to be civil, but a civil society is that way because it makes uncomfortable consequences on people who aren't civil.
It is not sensible to be xenophobic and racist in a civil society unless you consider harming others and inviting uncomfortable consequences on yourself as sensible.
But you don't have to pretend. You can choose to be outwardly racist and xenophobic if you want, it just doesn't seem very sensible.
The difference we're seeing in numbers here is because the centres of cities are historically have a higher number of immigrants.
Fortunately, ONS did a specific report on "Bradford", which is the source for the wikipedia page I cited. The source link was broken on wiki, here it is though:
"In the latest census, around 437,800 Bradford residents said they were born in England. This represented 80.1% of the local population."
I chose Bradford because it's locally referred to (pejoratively, not by me) as "Bradistan". But despite that, according to ONS, 30% cite Muslim as their religion, which is more than "no religion" at 28%, but still lower than Christianity, at 34%
I encourage you to go check the sources for your sources, like I should have done (and you forced me to). If you look at this debate with an open mind, I believe you will find the majority of us rightly don't feel represented by the statement "Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration" any more. My bias' are that I'll almost always be pro immigration, within reason, but I completely recognise there have been times over the past 10 years where I've felt that position has been legitimately hard to defend. Now is not one of those times
The real issue is that every single time someone or something suggests immigration is a problem in the UK, it can trivially be reframed as an inequality issue.
To get back to the original topic, I think beneficiaries of inequality - like certain big tech players - are strongly motivated to keep the general public blaming anyone other than them for the problems caused by inequality.
edit: I just understood the census page a bit more, it's a generic report by area. You can put Birmingham in there too. It says basically the same: the overwhelming majority of residents are UK born and Christian or of no religion. Yes this is changing, slowly, like the world and populations change, slowly - not at a new or concerning rate.
I don't think it's a made up idea that immigration is a problem, some people clearly, definitely consider it a problem, and it can cause problems. But it's a problem that's been heavily worked on recently and has had a lot of success in solving in the UK over the past 2 years.
This is why it's completely barmy to suggest the average brit is fed up of immigration now, and I'm not sure why many people pointing that out are being heavily downvoted.
However, the sort of tools that generally provide it also generally have a GitHub link nearby to encourage reading/writing the source. That too is convenient and I generally like it. Seemed like a fair suggestion.