As a heavy Meetup user, I can say that Bending Spoons absolutely fixed some glaring, long-standing bugs. But their massive price increases have really driven people away, and some of their attempts to grab more money (Meetup+) really rankled a lot of people. Also, search still sucks.
This is why "running lean" for a B2C business is never something to take as a good sign from the consumer standpoint. Let alone the client. Those savings are not being passed to you, quite the contrary. they will in fact have their care and eat it by trying to throw more costs at you despite the supposed lower overhead.
Something interesting about your comment is that HN also has a post today (https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...) about TigerBeetle's support for Zig and their reason for using Zig specifically talked about wanting something for a long time horizon:
> Investing in creating a database like TigerBeetle is a long term effort. Databases tend to have a long half life (e.g. Postgres is 30 years old). And so, while Zig being early in 2020 did give me pause, nevertheless Zig’s quality, philosophy and simplicity made sense for a multi-decade horizon.
If Zig's core developers decided tomorrow they wanted to do something else, would that result in the rest of the devs slowly leaving, and Zig being unmaintained after a couple years? Might be possible; but it would be impossible with C, C++, Java, etc. If you give me a choice between two products, one in Zig and one in Java, and I need to run it for two decades, I'm picking the Java one (and I dislike Java)
> There are no plans to move the NATS server to Zig.
> Zig will become a Tier 1 NATS client, and Synadia will utilize Zig in resource constrained environments to bridge OT/IT for manufacturing, IIOT, connected cars, robotics and embodied AI.
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.
No, mainly focused on my cloud infra right now. Finding an alt to gmail+gsuite is something I'd like to do if there were reasonable options, but that involves non tech people also being open to that option
This is something I've wondered about. I started out in the green screen era and remember how amazingly quick those UIs were to navigate. I don't see any reason why we couldn't replicate much of that UX and development model, but deliver it to web browsers with graphical capabilities in the parts of the system that need it.
I feel like mouse+keyboard is a step down in speed of use for many tasks, but I do wonder about touch screens. For some things, touch screens can be plenty fast and the UI adapts to the task.
Yeah, I was just thinking of a very popular bar that I would go to about 15 years ago that was operated on very simple touch screens with large UI buttons. The bartenders could enter drinks & the tab it goes on very fast. It wasn't flashy, but very simple large buttons that always pop up in the same place very quickly, so they definitely had some muscle-memory going on for navigating it.
The SIMD story in Rust or another lower level systems language is much better, and the memory control is more fine grained without forfeiting inlining. For a hot loop that's amenable to SIMD, Rust can deliver twice the performance of Go if you don't hand roll platform specific code.
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas, could get 98% of its power from solar+storage at a price of $104/MWh, which is higher than gas but cheaper than new coal or nuclear. It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
But according to this[0], the US average cost of nuclear is ~$32/MWh (2023). I think the subtle keyword is "new", which could make for a very fuzzy argument.
Or maybe prices are different in LV but that's a big differential. It's also mentioning it's the best case scenario for solar. So even then, maybe that's the best option for Las Vegas, but is it elsewhere?
World Nuclear also gives us some global numbers to help us see the larger range of costs [1]
> LCOE figures assuming an 85% capacity factor ranged from $27/MWh in Russia to $61/MWh in Japan at a 3% discount rate, from $42/MWh (Russia) to $102/MWh (Slovakia) at a 7% discount rate, and from $57/MWh (Russia) to $146/MWh (Slovakia) at a 10% discount rate.
I don't think this means we shouldn't continue investing in solar and storage, but neither does it suggest taking nuclear off the table. This might be fine for LV or other areas in the Southwest, but unless those costs can be stable for the rest of the country I think we should keep nuclear as an option.
We shouldn't forget: it's not "nuclear vs solar" it's "zero carbon emitters vs carbon emitters". The former framing is something big oil and gas want you to argue, and that's why they've historically given funds to initiatives like the Sierra Nevada Club. If we care about the environment or zero emissions then the question isn't as simple as "nuclear vs solar" it is "what is the best zero carbon emitting producer given the constraints of the local region".
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