Absolutely. Even if zero additional problems crop up while they are at the ISS, the Controllers will need to have fall-back-back-back-and-further-back plans on tap, in case of yet more failures in the Service Modules' propulsion systems.
Not surprisingly, they already have these backup plans. The potential for RCS jet failure was known ahead of time and was determined to not be a flight safety concern.
I wonder if these food/grocery delivery apps are shooting themselves in the foot with how they balance pricing/fees vs marketing/promotional costs.
You can almost always find gift cards for these services that are 10-20% off. And once you stop using these services for a short while, they bombard you with 20-40% discounts to pull you back.
So it's likely the fees are too high because they need to offset the marketing spend, but then the reason why people avoid or use these services not very frequently is because of the high fees.
Maybe there is a world in which spending less on marketing and lowering the fees could result in lower acquisition cost and higher retention.
I doubt getting rid of the discounts would ultimately help. Price discrimination and the psychological allure of a discount are powerful tools.
When I worked in Singapore, the whole office had an Uber Eats account and every day we could order lunch from anywhere with no consideration of any fees. There are plenty of price insensitive users like that who make it worth while to keep your base fees high.
And I also know plenty of people who compulsively order things whenever there's a promotion, but would rather starve than pay "full price".
Well there’s so much customer churn in part because many aren’t willing to pay for the actual cost of the service. Food delivery does work in some cases—Dominos or the Chinese place in a probably urban location.
But it seems tough in general. Personal services even by fairly low-paid workers are pretty much luxuries in much of the West.
Pizza and Chinese places that deliver normally either have it built into the price or charge a flat delivery fee. My local Chinese restaurant charges a flat $3 delivery fee on a minimum order -- it's $3 whether you order $15 worth of food or $50 worth. Dominos ran a promotion where they'd give you a discount if you came in and picked up the pizza; they weren't losing oney, they were just giving you the delivery cost.
Or it might just be price discrimination. The people who are just mindlessly ordering are probably not that price sensitive, so you can charge them higher, whereas the deal hunters that would actively seek out and stock up on 20% off gift cards likely weren't going to pay the inflated asking price to begin with.
Tangential, but this is a horrible choice for a header font at this size. I thought something was wrong in the rendering as I noticed white random smudges in the text.
I like they raised the broadband minimum upload speed from 3 to 25Mbps. Spectrum's 300 Mbps broadband is only 10 Mbps up. Let's see how fast they change their statement that "an upload speed of 3 Mbps is enough for most households" [1].
Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband. Raising the definition of broadband to meet this basic requirement is clearly a win.
I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing about this is that it will force ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure, but I'm worried the cost of that will be passed onto consumers at a time when inflation has already taken a toll on budgets.
I've been coping with 6 Mbps upload speeds from Xfinity for years now. This morning I got an email from them saying they were raising my speeds at no cost, and after a modem restart I'm now getting ~20 Mbps up.
This whole time I've been told that Xfinity couldn't provide decent upload speeds because of infrastructure reasons, but now that's been proven a lie.
CATV was designed as a one-way pipe. There are filters everywhere in the network that block inbound traffic because there wasn't much of a reason for cable boxes to need to communicate with the wider network which meant that the bandwidth on the cable that was actually usable for upload bandwidth was orders of magnitude smaller than downloads. As Comcast basically rebuilds their network (fiber to the edge), they're bypassing and removing all of those filters which means that there's plenty of frequency for uploads.
Designed, maybe, but it's not like the cabling is directional.
I thought one of the reasons why DOCSIS was straightforward to rollout was because they only really needed bi-directional amplifiers to do it. Though in the early days of cable internet, some setups used a telephone modem for your uplink.
And if you already had Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial infrastructure (which was rolled out for noise reasons in the pre-data analog days) you were already a step ahead of the game in terms of segmenting nodes/worrying about CPE noise.
Upload is crap because they have to dedicate channels to it at the cost of download channels, and upload has more overhead because of the coordination required.
70s/80s cableTV companies basically won the lottery by being able to re-use their existing last-mile plant for high-value data. Telcos not so much.
It’s not a lie – they can’t provide upload speeds anywhere near their download speeds. 20 Mbps vs 6 Mbps is still quite small compared to 1000 Mbps. DOCSIS 3.1, the latest and not fully deployed standard goes up to 10Gbps down and 1Gpbs up.
It looks like DOCSIS 4.0 is actually a path forward to symmetric upload/download speeds over the same cables
I didn't say that asymmetric upload speeds being required was a lie, but until today Xfinity wouldn't allow me to pay for >6 Mbps upload without going up to some sort of business-tier package. Now, the day that the FCC sets 20 Mbps up as the minimum, I magically get that exact number for free.
25Mbps up may be adequate in a pinch, but it’s laughably outdated. Symmetric down/up enables a lot of great use cases including seamless backup. I briefly lived with AT&T fiber symmetric 1gbps (actually more like 940mbps at the router, but close enough). It was a game changer and losing it definitely undid a bunch of great use cases. If you WFH, it’s even more important.
I've seen urban condos in US offering 7gbps to home. The high end is there.
After I first experienced symmetrical gigabit fiber I have only lived in residences that offer it -- it is a prerequisite for me choosing a domicile similar to trash pickup and electricity. My argument isn't that we shouldn't offer faster internet. We should have more places that offer faster internet. My question is what is the minimum viable upload speed for residential service.
Yep. I've never had more than 35Mbps up from home, and it sucks. When talking about WFH, a lot of people focus on the uplink bandwidth needed for 1080p video calls (another commenter said Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps), but there's a lot more to it.
I might be building some software locally and uploading it to a cloud server to test it. The built artifact might be tens or hundreds of megabytes and take several minutes to upload.
This isn't even solely a software developer thing. Someone who does video production certainly needs to send around large quantities of data as well. I'm sure we could come up with examples from other industries.
It's pathetic how limited the coax infra is in the US these days. Supposedly this will be improving soon with DOCSIS 4.0, but c'mon, it's 2024...
It’s also a good opportunity to remind family that bandwidth is cumulative. That is nonobvious to quite a few people I’ve talked to that are not super internet savvy. What I mean by that is that if zoom uses 3.8Mbps that means they probably maximum two people can probably be on a zoom call simultaneously comfortably in a 15 Mbps household while other people are doing regular things. 3 if that’s the only thing happening in the household.
The technology to do asymmetric upload/download exists and many fiber-based companies offer it at the same rate as older infrastructure. It is not more expensive to offer symmetric service, but it may require infrastructure being brought more modern.
For example, in the same region of Massachusetts (around Worcester) I previously paid $40/mo for 300/300 Mbps to Verizon FIOS but now after moving I pay $40/mo to Spectrum for 500/15 Mbps.
> I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home.
Yet my experience when streaming high def video is much better in places with symmetric fiber with much higher upload bandwidth (> 100Mbps) than it ever is in places with coaxial cable bandwidth.
TCP ACKs back up are needed even for downloads and can get crowded if the bandwidth in that direction full or crowded. If those tiny ACKs don't get through downstream may stall. Linux QoS can help, but only if your router is Linux and you can run the appropriate commands on it.
>Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband
You can't even get 1080p on zoom unless you're using "Business, Education and Enterprise". Pro and free users are limited to 720p and 360p respectively. Moreover people don't even have 1080p webcams, much less webcams where you can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. That's not to say there are other reasons for wanting > 3.8 Mb/s up, but "video conferencing" is a poor one.
Depends what you're watching. A videoconference with a mostly fixed background and infrequently shapeshifting face or a screenshare won't chew up much.
I get, realistically, like 30Mbps up with Spectrum with their 1Gb plan. At my last place they had a smaller competitor that did 1Gb up and down, so they changed existing 1Gb plans to the same. Now I live 8 minutes away from there and it's not an option! But competition is coming to my building soon so I can only hope.
For coaxial cable, I assume they will still allocate the same 50Mbps upload between 200 houses, and then let you get a 25Mbps burst for a few seconds by taking it from others.
Sometimes the issue is legacy CPEs that couldn't access channels that newer ones could (or couldn't bond as many). That's why sometimes a modem upgrade could "unlock" higher speeds.
My Comcast gigabit internet is only 25Mbps up. I'm pretty unhappy about it, as somebody who regularly has to push large docker images and wait forever each time.
On coax/cable lines like Charter/Spectrum, the upload speed limit is due to protocol/DOCSIS limitations. Supposedly the new version of DOCSIS fixes this/allows for symmetrical service, and Spectrum has been rolling it out for a while now. Still waiting for it where I'm at...
You may want to scroll down to the “throughput” section, instead of looking at the theoretical max.
The theoretical max up and download aren’t additive. It’s like saying that an egg carton can hold a max of 12 white eggs or 12 brown eggs. Good luck putting 24 eggs in it.
The DOCSIS standards carve up the available throughput, using some of that for upload and some for download.
Notably, these web apps will "continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture", so a progressive app added to the Home Screen can't for example run on a Chrome engine.
Yeah, that is interesting to me. I would imagine one of the main reasons people have been asking for alternative browser engine support in the first place is the potential to have more features added to PWAs by competing platforms, since they were clearly not a priority in WebKit for a very long time.
For those of you who decided not to have kids in your 20s-30s, and are now in your 40s+, when changing that decision now becomes increasingly more difficult: did you regret it? Did your position of “I want to live my life, I don’t want the hassle or the cost, or there are too many humans already, or something else”, did that position change or weaken?
In my 40s, never wanted kids, and my position hasn't changed at all.
I've never really had the urge, and it's only ever been friends/relatives pushing the "you should have kids, they're amazing!" narrative.
I'm sure they are, but I equate it with e.g. painting. I'm sure painting is very enjoyable, frustrating at times, and can bring a ton of joy and wonder to the world. But I just don't enjoy painting, or have any desire to learn, and don't feel the world is so desperately short of artists that I have a duty to do it.
Seeing many friends of mine seriously struggle with money and time also convinces me I made the right choice. I also don't envy a lot of issues they have to go through, e.g. bullying, teen pregancy, phone addiction, tuition fees, serious/lifelong medical issues, etc.
I've just turned 40, and I'm currently childless, but not because that was my goal. Twice wanted to settle down with a woman, but I wasn't her Mr Right. I'm still friends with the second, but she's (metaphorically) married to her activism; she and I split just as I moved to Germany which was itself just before the pandemic.
Then I ended up with a boyfriend, but medical tech isn't quite there yet for Mpreg :P
It's funny because I am trending in the same direction.
You can't say it because of political correctness but I believe many of our fertility problem lies in the behavior of today's women.
But women can't do no wrong so...
If you can't/won't have kids, men make better partners anyway. Everything else can be solved one way or another...
No regrets — there's also at least four[0] ways around that off the top of my head, but I think explaining them and how they relate to my life right now would derail the rest of the conversation.
[1] Would be five, but I'm too old for sperm donation.
Personally I find a deep satisfaction that my marriage produced a child so far. It gives it a lot of meaning. If I was in a relationship that wasn't headed anywhere except our demise it would eventually feel pointless to me, like a lot of effort for nothing. I'm sure this is a minority opinion though so take it with a grain of salt.
No I'm nearly 50 and I don't regret it at all, never have in the slightest.
I see all the strings my friends have, having to book meetings months in advance. Where I can go out dancing till 6am whenever I feel like it (which I do a lot) or wake up at 3pm on a Saturday. I don't think my life would have been so full if I'd been so tied down with a family.
No, but there is a very brief, almost imperceptible flicker of envy when you realize most of your friends have children.
Our decision was really my wife’s decision, I was always indifferent, which may explain the feelings described above. Wife remains staunchly committed to a child free lifestyle and couldn’t be happier.
I had my first child in my mid 30's, and one of my friends started when both him and his partner were in their 40's. No regrets, but the biological challenges can be very real -- my friends had to use IVF for both their pregnancies.
I don't know anyone who had kids a bit later in life who regretted it purely due to their age. Though being now in my mid 40's I think I would struggle with the sleep deprivation and noise of a new baby....
As I travel more, my opinion that there are enough humans already has only strengthened.
If I feel the need to scoop up the purported "joy of children", I can visit my sister and wind up my nephew for a few hours, then leave the sugar crash and ensuing tantrums to be her problem as I whizz off back to reality.
I'm so very grateful that my home doesn't have some little narcissist in it running around wearing my face and destroying my property, sanity, and finances. Or at least, not another one. :)
I've never used VyOS but I was wondering what the problem would be. This is what I did to build a .iso (I have no idea if it works or not, I don't have the hardware to test it on), courtesy of their manual https://docs.vyos.io/en/latest/contributing/build-vyos.html:
$ git clone -b sagitta --single-branch https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build
$ cd vyos-build
$ docker run --rm -it --privileged -v $(pwd):/vyos -w /vyos vyos/vyos-build:sagitta bash
[docker] $ sudo make clean
[docker] $ sudo ./build-vyos-image iso --architecture amd64 --build-by "j.randomhacker@vyos.io"
This caused an error message, which I solved using the first result on Google:
[docker] $ sudo mount -i -o remount,exec,dev /vyos
[docker] $ sudo ./build-vyos-image iso --architecture amd64 --build-by "j.randomhacker@vyos.io"
[docker] $ exit
$ ls -l build/*.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 502267904 jan 22 23:55 build/live-image-amd64.hybrid.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 502267904 jan 23 00:04 build/vyos-1.4-rolling-202401222255-amd64.iso
I picked 1.4 because that seems to be the latest LTS branch. Now, I'm not sure why it apt updated twenty times during the process, but after waiting a few minutes, I was left with what seems like a perfectly fine .ISO.
Is this harder than downloading an .ISO from a website? Yes, of course. Do I expect everyone to be able to follow the manual? Probably not. But that's why there are ways to pay VyOS, this is a company doing open source after all.
If you can spare some server capacity and are willing to put in effort, you could set up a script to run the build process automatically and host the ISO files for everyone to download, as long as you remove all the trademarked branding of course.
A quick search shows me a number of alternatives to Carta, but none that I have ever heard of or come across. Is there any competitor that is considered the second best? Carta just seems to me what everyone had been using without a second thought.
As an early employee at a startup from seed through a healthy Series B last year, I would have serious concerns about the company’s bookkeeping and how-up-to-date the shareholder information is if it were kept in an excel spread sheet on Google drive.
Carta and Pulley, etc. do a solve a valuable concern here for non-executives who are compensated with stock options and want to keep track of stock vesting, exercises, and shares in a transparent way, I’d say.
Once you get past a handful of grants, every Excel cap table I've seen has been an absolute disaster. Use a software product. Both Carta and Pulley offer free versions, until you exceed certain limits (e.g. for Carta Launch, until you exceed $1M raised or 25 stakeholders). If you are over those limits, even more reason to use a software product and not Excel.
I have a competitive product and excel is a very valid option but if you want automation for anything like this, you really need something like us hit me up on DM if you want a demo
HN doesn't have DMs, and you don't have any contact info in your profile. I agree about just posting a link though - self-promotion is okay if it's clearly relevant and up-front.
This is largely a result of how long each product has been available, i.e. the older products are more mature. Hopefully Pulley and AngelList continue to catch up so there is a diversity of good options available.
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