Personally, I think the pricing issue is related to the web app issue from the parent comment.
Even as a free iOS app, there is the $99/year Apple Developer fee, on top of any server costs.
Meanwhile, a web app can be used by anyone on any device, and if designed properly, can be hosted for free on a number of platforms.
If the goal is to make money from casual users, an indie iOS app is the move.
... But that would not fly for what I presume to be a very large fraction of the HN audience that lives and breathes code. What could have been an interesting and tweakable open source project built in a weekend, sold as a closed untweakable app at a $20/year subscription, only for iPhones? That would certainly be quite a bold sell.
Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0]
The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]
From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.
If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.
Strong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
It is free and opensource, but there are different parts to it if you selfhost. Synapse is the Matrix server backend, and Element is the UI (web/mobile app). [0]
ESS is a paid, fully managed service by the Element team for ease of use.
That sounds proportionate to me. They get to make profits, and I get to use their improvements if they also benefit me.
This can foster more community than if MIT code were to be taken and locked behind closed doors, for profit and to no benefit for the devs that made it possible.
A notable and interesting example I remember of "economics" being used to refer to practical skills is in "Home Economics"[0], which actually has nothing to do with home prices or underlying theories about spending in households. It's practical skills in social care, meal prep, and basic maintenance relevant to on-the-ground families.
Most of the article talks about characters, but in my experience, they are the easy part. Unlike Japanese and its 15 ways to pronounce 生, Chinese is "easy" by comparison, with most characters mapping only to one sound.
The death blow is the tones. For the Anglo-centric, not only are you unable to "read out" the characters like you can Latin-based scripts (let alone the "cursive script"), but if the tones are off, you'll accidentally call your mother (妈 mā) a horse (马 mǎ). Japanese is a lot more straightforward in this regard.
On its own, each challenge is surmountable. English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]).
But when the whole language is like that, it becomes a lot harder.
The popular reason is likely because 文 is used across East Asia in Chinese and Japanese (Korean and Vietnamese too, though written differently)[0], with the ideograph standing in as a sufficiently different contrast to the Latin alphabet, and as a reference to a major non-latin-alphabet based user market, while being simple enough to render (compared to something more "difficult"[1] like 语/語)
It's also been used in the Google Translate logo as well.
[1] Not only because of Simplified/Traditional/Japanese renderings (文 is mostly the same across all three), but more strokes for a small icon is a bad idea regardless
I took "Ultimately success is a matter of effort" to mean only that.
Even if you were handed opportunities on a silver platter (ie. rich parents), you still had to put in your own effort somewhere along the chain to get the ball rolling.
If you never start, no matter how lucky or good your circumstances are, you will still be at 0%. Therefore, there's no success without effort.
Not sure about within anime, but back in our fleshy human realm, Crunchyroll was founded by Berkeley graduates and is now the go-to anime platform. I suppose if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?
Even as a free iOS app, there is the $99/year Apple Developer fee, on top of any server costs.
Meanwhile, a web app can be used by anyone on any device, and if designed properly, can be hosted for free on a number of platforms.
If the goal is to make money from casual users, an indie iOS app is the move.
... But that would not fly for what I presume to be a very large fraction of the HN audience that lives and breathes code. What could have been an interesting and tweakable open source project built in a weekend, sold as a closed untweakable app at a $20/year subscription, only for iPhones? That would certainly be quite a bold sell.