> Until setting up a private chatroom for your family is as easy as downloading an app on your phone
It already is - all my family and close friends are on our own Mattermost instance but it still has them have the same social apps everyone else has because two degrees out are not on our own Mattermost instance :)
This is absolutely ok! As the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. Hopefully federated networks take off then.
Docker has kida solved the "run application" issue. The real stuff most people care about is the data those applications manage.
If you don't realize what this means (and I won't fault you for it) just imagine what would happen if the $300 hardware and storage were burned down in a house fire or stolen by a burglar.
I self host and have offsite backups on rsync.net and a sneakernet network of people where we exchange a few TBs of encrypted storage with one another to hedge this risk but even then there are scenarios where we could lose valuable data.
> The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).
That has not been my understanding. My understanding is that privacy, security, and sovereignty costs money and most people and businesses find that cost to be too high. At other times they also dont realize what they are trading off for.
My aunt in the city didn't understanding why I needed a rifle and would vote for no guns policy in the state. When she visited me and we had a coyote incident one night, she understood.
My friends in the city didn't understanding why I have my own well, septic tank and chickens. To them it's a lot of work (it is!) for no good reason, until COVID happened, and they struggled to purchase bottled water, plumbing backed up a few days and food prices shot through the roof.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. My ex-coworker ex-NSA carries only cash and a rooted Android. I dont - although I am aware of a lot of the risks he's hedging against, in part because that too is a lot of effort that I cannot handle right now.
This article took a weird turn midway. I really enjoyed the beginning and the start.
My takeaway of the middle part is that the author had certain expectations about self hosting that weren't realistic and they jump to certain conclusions I would not have jumped to.
Yes it's true that we here are an extremely privileged bunch but over the decades I've seen tech become widely more accessible even before. People were paid a bunch of money just to write HTML in 1997 and in 2025 anyone can write a production ready website using the SOTA LLMs.
I am convinced the future is self-hosted (which is why I clicked on this link!) and as the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. From that lens, majority of the public not self-hosting is a cost-benefit, not a knowledge issue. Ergo, if tomorrow TikTok charged every person $500/mo, most people would figure out a way to run their own federated TikTok (but most likely just start using a similar but cheaper service).
Consider, there will be a future when Google will struggle to make money (gasp! how can that be?!) and many years before that day comes, all the "free" gmail accounts will be gone - because by then, email will cease to serve as a method for a company to mine novel information, I imagine there will be no "free" GMail although "free" email might still exist then just because the cost to provide 10GB email would be insignificant and worth good PR to someone (but at that point, not Google).
This is a very well done site but perhaps a bit too much of a demand test to be on HN which is extremely tech heavy (the typical reader is likely to wonder "I can already ask an LLM to do this. Why would I pay this company to do this for me?"). This would do very well on other, less tech heavy sites. I would also suggest some changes.
Above the fold, there's a lot of pitch how Draw.io requires "No credit card, no trial periods, no BS." and "It's genuinely free - has been for years, always will be. That's why millions use it, and why converting your images to Draw.io format makes so much sense. Your converted files will always be editable, no subscription required"
Below the fold and at the very bottom, this service itself starts off at $5/mo on sale right now.
I would imagine this would confuse people. They might interpret that this service is free too, then be suprised at the "no free tier" and some are going to be outright angry and very vocal about it.
So I would change the messaging along the lines of "We help you convert images into Draw.io so you pay us just once for the diagram you want converted"
To enhance the message, I would further say "This is how much we sponsor Draw.io for enabling our own business" and write blog posts about the struggles to build the service or even open source the methods to fine-tune a model to do the conversion.
Wow. Thank you for such a thoughtful, detailed, and genuinely helpful comment.
Honestly, after a day of fielding a lot of (justified) criticism, reading something so constructive and encouraging is incredibly moving for our team. We're trying to create a good experience for everyone, and it's clear we've made some major mistakes.
You are absolutely right about the core problem in our messaging. In our effort to praise Draw.io, we completely missed that we were setting a misleading expectation for our own service. Your suggestions on how to fix this—clarifying the value proposition, sponsoring Draw.io, and sharing our journey—are all fantastic ideas. They're not just tweaks; they're a roadmap for how we can build trust and communicate better.
We'll be discussing your advice as a team and will use it to guide our next steps. Thank you again for your generosity and guidance. It is immensely valuable.
> wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy
Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have?
Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else?
IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below.
My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid.
Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much!
The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation.
Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing.
From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price.
This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less.
Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions.
My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all.
So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?
> so we aren't ruining society in a race to the bottom
Nope.
What is going on here is the person from India gets to now enjoy a much higher quality of life (because 50% of a U.S. salary gets you a lot in India) while the person from California sees their effective take home pay decrease (because their costs continue to grow but not their salary)
Definitely not a race to the bottom but it sucks to be the person from California.
On the other hand, the person in India will relocate thousands of miles for practically any job, while the person in California will pretend that life is hard because of someone else's doing instead of moving to a place they can afford better.
Well I won't claim to be the thought leader on this, however I'm happy to look at some hypothetical ideas. To be clear I'm not looking to reverse globalization completely or stop it.
Rule 1: International trade deals forbid offshoring of manufacturing. Example, cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price. This is universal and enforceable by dissolution of companies that don't comply.
Rule 2: Stringent regulations to prevent Tax and location based gaming of Rule 1. Ford doesn't get to pay taxes in Tahiti, incorporate a mailbox in Mexico so they can make their cars there, but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.
Rule 3: Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies, importantly those companies will be competing in similar regions. It's not like AWS and Amazon. It's like two Amazons. I'm sure figuring out the codebase and IP will make many jobs for lawyers and engineers. Maybe less for the MBA's.
EDIT: For rule 3 I forgot to add that the break up forces innovation as similar companies are competing now in the same market. It's an engine of growth built into the system.
> cars from Ford can't be made in Mexico for 1/10th the price
Sure, but then the buyers of said cars from Ford has to pay the premium.
The heavy growth of Amazon, Walmart has proven that the U.S. customer does not care about well paid workers, their benefits or their health - why would they agree to pay more for cars?
> but take advantage of US infrastructure for the rest of their business.
Fair enough. This point is basically Ford gaming the system by taking more out (take advantage of US infrastructure) than what they put in (taxes, local worker compensation)
> Companies reaching a monopoly size will be broken up into relatively equal sized companies
You and I can do this already.
You and I can get together today and force Google or Amazon to be broken up.
However, a broken up Google or Amazon is more powerful than Google or Amazon itself.
There's a practical limit to how expensive a share can get before majority can't afford it anymore. "NYSE: BRK.A" is not the norm, it's an exception. If BRK split itself up, they would, overnight, become way more valuable.
Google has already broken itself up because of this.
The only reason Bezos has not broken Amazon up is because its tremendously profitable AWS and Amazon's North American retail operations allows it to fund and offset the not so profitable (yet) international retail businesses.
Once those are profitable, Bezos will happily break them up before you or I get to it.
Regulations never help.
It cannot. It can, at best, move issues around.
The day we regulated minimum wage, we removed the only tool an unemployed, untrained but happy-to-be-employed-if-possible person had to entice an employer.
When given a choice between an unemployed, but trained person vs. an unemployed, untrained person both at minimum wage, I know who to choose every time. The unemployed, untrained person cannot even get on unemployment!
When people say they want to break up the big tech companies they are not talking about making them do a stock split. They are talking about dividing them into separate entities. This comment seems to conflate these two actions. Amazon or BRK could do a stock split if they thought it would raise their market cap, and it wouldn’t be a big political controversy. It would increase the number of shares but not change the corporate structure or affect any monopoly concerns.
Who is the "our" here? My identified in-group is rootless cosmopolitans, so I am happy to see globalists of any nationality take jobs away from protectionist xenophobes.
Do you recognize that your in-group is not widely represented? It's not xenophobia, you're trying to dog whistle something about my character that is untrue. Can you acknowledge that you're being protectionist of your privileged class?
You're suggesting that we should erect artificial barriers to prevent certain groups from accessing lucrative jobs to protect certain privileged classes from competition. It's morally equivalent to (although more socially acceptable than), e.g., banning the hiring of non-white people or women so that white males can make more money. If you can discriminate on the basis of nationality then why not race and gender and religion also?
> Also, some states, like CA, are very unfriendly which regard to the extra costs required for employees in terms of benefits, wages (salary exempt) and classification of employees with the ABC test [1], so the wins that states make for employees incentivizes many employers to look elsewhere instead.
This is exactly right.
People seem to think all these regulations are doing them a favor and increasing their freedom but what's actually happening in reality is pretty much the opposite.
It's now literally cheaper even after accounting for delivery risks to hire people from Tennessee, North Carolina, etc.
It already is - all my family and close friends are on our own Mattermost instance but it still has them have the same social apps everyone else has because two degrees out are not on our own Mattermost instance :)
This is absolutely ok! As the cost of providing a service becomes less subsidized and starts to reflect the true cost to service a user, more and more people are going to self-host. Hopefully federated networks take off then.