That's quite exciting. Having worked extensively with OSM and trying to build something useful out of their data, it's historically been a huge pain to do. I'm more than happy to pay them to make my life easier.
I'm interested in seeing how they add new and interesting datasets. I expect there's going to be some difficulty with keeping things interesting and useful, while making sure it's still simple.
You're right that there's a ton of OSM data that most people can't use. We want to change that and give access to so much more. Follow us on Twitter at https://mobile.twitter.com/askiggyapp for lots more code samples this week and demos to come!
Anecdotally, Discord is down and unresponsive far more than Slack ever has been. I would never run Discord as the main method of communication at a large company. It might be fine for when I game, but it's unreliable for anything serious.
Here's some data to back it up:
Slack's uptime is 99.95% from August to October[1]
Discord's uptime is 99.85% from August to October[2]
Perhaps there is some regionality to the issues? I live in Brazil, and Slack is often somehow unavailable: images not loading, message delays, failure to load threads, and the built-in bot commands (not third parties) not responding. And mainly, voice calls having all sorts of connection issues imaginable.
In the last 3 months our team has had to (against company policy) fall back to Discord to be able to do our daily meetings about 6 or 7 times.
I wouldn't run Discord on a large company either, but not for stability's sake, but because their (free) screen sharing is possibly the worst if you want to share a desktop rather than a game (it is very much optimized for low delay, and the downscaling makes text unreadable).
It looks like he's launched two products that have gotten a little traction on Product Hunt[1].
I agree with you. I wouldn't give this the time of day. If he hasn't built out a successful product before, then he has no track record(as you say experience) to back up his ideas.
I can't speak towards his attitude toward security flaws, but I think his reaction to not wanting Calibre updated is reasonable.
Anytime a UI is updated, you're going to completely modify the behavior or of the people that are using it. So any change someone else is making that isn't as closely tied with the product as he is, is probably going to be suboptimal. Not only from a user experience perspective, but also from his ability to answer questions on the forum as people are asking him questions about how to achieve certain things.
This means that he'll HAVE to be closely tied with a redesign. Which is probably not where he wants to be spending a significant amount of his time.
There's also the added complexity of legacy users that are just book people, that are quite used to the design as it is, so any migration over the new one, no matter how gradual, is probably going to make the product harder for them to use.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with him, but his reasoning is valid. This isn't a project where you just hand off to someone completely new and let them do what they want. That's how you end up with a broken product.
Goyal doesn’t have to be closely involved in the forum helping users. I question the importance of his doing so while the UI is what it is. It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.
The UI isn't pretty and it can be clunky at times, but it's functional. UI is hard, and I guarantee a lot harder than you think it is just by how flippantly you've described the endeavor so far.
Also, be wary of judging someone by how they choose to spend their free time. Notice how you haven't actually lifted a finger yourself, just judged others for how they lift theirs with zero skin in the game.
He doesn't HAVE to be, but he is. Isn't that a good thing?
> It could be that while a small number of users are helped by his personal attention on the forum, a much larger number of users are left frustrated by the UI.
This is just speculation. Without data to back it up, I can say the reverse is true too.
Since there isn't a large number of users that are posting about how terrible the UI is(on the Calibre forum), it's probably functional enough and people can navigate it.
Buttons look like buttons, not text. It's better than modern UIs. I fear that if he gives in, this and similar small details would change so it looks nice instead of being easy to use.
I've never had any real issues with the UI. I run it locally, and sync it to a cloudserver where I run it headless.
Both the local and web ui are fine IMHO. They allow me to get things done and the work.
It's not about using a different OS. The monopoly is that if you want to distribute through Apple, you have to go through their app store. There's not another app store that you can go through.
At least with Android you can go through f-droid if you don't like the Play Store.
I'll defer to Epic's official court filings to make the argument for a monopoly for me. I'm not an expert on such topics, and it would be out of turn for me to speak more on it.
"Apple monopolizes the iOS App Distribution Market".
How do they reconcile that with the fact that it's possible to side load apps on iOS? Apple might monopolize the Apple App Store Distribution Market, but is that relevant to the legal argument?
We're on Hacker News, so the amount of people that are comfortable with sideloading apps on iOS is definitely going to be skewed.
I don't think that it's a good argument to make that anyone can do it, because it does require _some_ technical knowledge in order to do it. I'd make the argument that if it's not accessible to everyone, then I don't think it's a viable replacement for an app store.
To lean on F-droid as an example on the Android side, outside of the initial installation of F-droid(which can be done from your phone), you can easily browse F-droid and install apps.
I don't think it's as easy to sideload apps on iOS. I haven't done it in years(since my jailbreak days), but I remember that you needed to be on a Mac and needed xcode to do it. It's probably updated now to make it a bit easier, but from a quick Google it looks like you need to download a separate program in order to do it. It looks like other ways to sideload apps requires some abuse of developer certificates to make it work.
No company can sell or distribute an app without having to use the appstore. Sideloading is restricted by design to not work as a standard installation method
There are multiple stores that you can try and get your product on. If Walmart doesn't work, then you could try Target, or Aldi, or Amazon.
You have literally one option to go with on iOS. You can't even "drive to a new store", as switching to Android costs hundreds of dollars, and not everyone is in a financial situation to purchase a new phone on a whim.
I won't argue about the specifics of this, Epic paid lawyers millions of dollars to draft a court document about the monopolization of the iOS app distribution store. I'd urge you to read the document first before drawing pretty poor parallels.
I work on the talent side of AngelList. Over the past few months, we've witnessed the tough decisions many startups are facing with layoffs. As a result, thousands of highly motivated and talented individuals have suddenly found themselves in unfortunate situations.
My team launched this product today to hopefully make things easier. If you know anyone that may have been impacted by the layoffs or companies that are still hiring and looking for fantastic talent, please share this with them!
It looks like they're aggregating data from OSM: https://data.iggy.cloud/datasets
That's quite exciting. Having worked extensively with OSM and trying to build something useful out of their data, it's historically been a huge pain to do. I'm more than happy to pay them to make my life easier.
I'm interested in seeing how they add new and interesting datasets. I expect there's going to be some difficulty with keeping things interesting and useful, while making sure it's still simple.