> I see. One similar food delivery business I consulted at had a healthy (for the startup) margins at 30% from each order, so I suppose it's beefy enough to absorb some fraud.
Alright, cool, a consultant. And then…
> Sri Lanka (where I currently live and run a bakery business),
And suddenly a bakery business.
I wish my life one day would be as interesting as yours. HNers are quite interesting.
On topic, FoodPanda is another popular one I’ve seen in Asia. And yeah, the markup for all of them seems to be close to your stated range. Though, it seems that Grab’s delivery fee changes depending on the number of available drivers (motorcyclists?) unlike their competitors like FoodPanda which is static from my experience.
The bakery is mostly for the excitement, although it is turning profit so I'm not complaining. I'm only investing and and involved in a small level, with a chef and a manager I hired. But it was a wonderful experience arranging stuff from ovens and mixers to signboards and corrugated boxes, with all minor details in between.
Things tend to be cheap in Sri Lanka, and rent isn't really that expensive, so it was not that difficult to start the business.
Having played with Zig I would say the tradeoff is complexity. Zig is harder to learn than C with more difficult concepts. Something like Go is much quicker. Yet I think Zig is finding an okay balance. You can still get productive much faster than in Rust.
Manual memory management gives obvious downsides which should be well known. Zig does this in the best way I have seen though.
> Zig is harder to learn than C with more difficult concepts.
I'm using Zig and C for a good amount of time now and i disagree. Zig has simpler concepts as C, but in C you can just ignore them.
Consider
char buf[4];
float * f = buf;
*f = 32;
Seems simple, compiles, and even executes. Everyone is happy. But that code will just explode randomly on non-x86 platforms as it violates alignment rules. In Zig, this code will give you a compile error, as []u8 does have alignment 1, while a []f32 will have alignment 4. This means you have to learn about alignment before accidently writing code that will randomly crash at runtime depending on the stack position of buf.
And Zig has a lot of these things that require implicit knowledge in C as explicit knowledge implemented in the language itself. Same goes for integer casting, shifting more than sizeof() bits, and so on.
It moves the footguns from the code to the user, and so the user has to learn about all of these concepts before writing Zig code. In C, the code will silently compile and misbehave at runtime. This might feel like additional complexity in a lot of places, but the complexity is there in both languages. One just makes it explicit.
But this is obviously not true for all things in Zig. comptime is a whole new feature that wasn't seen in a lot of languages before and afaik not as it is used in Zig, so it's something new to learn even if you already can do perfect C. The same goes for more precise data types (struct vs extern struct) and so on.
One hard footgun in Zig right now is implicit aliasing of parameter types, which sometimes get passed as a reference and sometimes as a value. This is a known footgun is already on the table to be adressed by better semantics and more safety guards
For me, writing Zig feels way less complex than C because a lot of brain load that went into writing correct C was offloaded to the compiler, which is good. But it also increases the friction when writing code as the compiler forces you to think about alignment and such.
Sometimes I wonder if we should try building a news site optimised for seeing the effect of appeals to authority.
To write an article for the site, we would need to:
1. Write a headline with no mentions of any experts.
2. Write another headline mentioning at least one expert in it.
3. Write the content without mentioning any experts.
4. Write the content and sprinkle names of experts as needed.
5. Publish.
Now, the reader would then:
1. Be exposed to the no-experts version of the article - both headline and content.
2. Once finished, the reader will be prompted to write their thoughts on the article.
3. Click “Reveal”.
4. The reader would then skim or read the whole article again, but this time it would mention the experts.
5. Prompt the reader to evaluate how their thoughts had changed after reading the expert version of the article.
I’m so gullible, seeing experts in anything especially when names of prestigious institutions or titles are tacked onto them, tend to shut down the reasoning part of my brain altogether.
Bear in mind, the site I proposed is not a place to police how articles should be written; rather, it’s all about increasing its readers’ awareness on how much mentions of an authority can impact their initial reasoning and judgement and sometimes make them stop reasoning at all. My view is that mentions of an authority are useful for calibrating our judgements after we tried to reason on our own but not before that.
And yeah, I have no opinion on the original post. Just like to go off on a tangent once in a while.
There is value in knowing what experts say. I and 99% of people in IT will never be in position to evaluate if quantum computing is feasible or not. The only thing we can do is try to evaluate expert's credibility and pick a side so to speak.
The same goes for health advice but this time it's 99.9%+ - if you're not in the field you can just listen and hope you are good at estimating who is more credible or likely to do better research or more truthful claims. Trying to evaluate them yourself is a recipe for being wrong and creating your own bubble.
If the article says: random guy X says quantum computing is a scam because Y there is nothing I can take away from it because it's very easy to make Y both incorrect and plausible sounding to me. If I know it's Oxford physics professor who makes the claim I can learn that Y is at least serious enough reason to not be easily dismissed.
Appeal to authority is bad as an argument when people knowledgeable in the field try to debate a certain point. In other cases it's very useful to know who makes the claims and very often it's the only thing that gives the claims credibility.
I've always wondered if the format of long form expert opinions could be replaced by a knowledge graph that is independent of the expert.
E.g. instead of article "Economist John rejects minimum wage"
Root node "Minimum wage is not the best solution to problem x" -> because -> <node to define problem>, <node to define alternative solutions> -> because -> <leaf nodes of studies or models>
In this way other experts could add to the graph and the differences between different branches of argument could be more easily compared or automatically updated. Articles could still be written, but could reference specific nodes or edges of the graph which adds clarity to the discussion.
Well, I don’t know, I do think that expert opinions can carry weight. Like: “according to Dr Malcolm Alan of the department of geology at Harvard university, this kind of rock usually indicates…”. I mean knowing that a professor of geology said that is evidence that a fact is true, isn’t it?
Having done that, you could then write a paper on your findings. You would then be an expert! You could then rerun the experiment using your paper as the story in order to validate your initial findings…
I am struggling to think of a more fitting analogy to describe this overvaluation of self-assembled items.
What’s similar to IKEA, as in the self-assembly bit, but also doesn’t have the “it’s exactly what I need” effect that confounds the “I love it because I assembled it myself” measurement?
Or maybe I’ll just call it the Effort Effect. Ugly, but I’m not much of a marketer so I’ll take it.
This post reminds me of this excerpt from the book How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard:
> What many organizations do to assess risk is not very enlightening. The methods I propose for assessing risk would be familiar to an actuary, statistician, or financial analyst. But some of the most popular methods for measuring risk look nothing like what an actuary might be familiar with. Many organizations simply say a risk is “high,” “medium,” or “low.” Or perhaps they rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. When I find situations like this, I sometimes ask how much “medium” risk really is. Is a 5% chance of losing more than $5 million a low, medium, or high risk? Nobody knows. Is a medium-risk investment with a 15% return on investment better or worse than a high-risk investment with a 50% return? Again, nobody knows because the statements themselves are ambiguous.
[…]
It is true that many of the users of these methods will report that they feel much more confident in their decisions as a result. But, as we will see in Chapter 12, this feeling should not be confused with evidence of effectiveness. We will learn that studies have shown that it is quite possible to experience an increase in confidence about decisions and forecasts without actually improving things—or even by making them worse.
For now, just know that there is apparently a strong placebo effect in many decision analysis and risk analysis methods. Managers need to start to be able to tell the difference between feeling better about decisions and actually having better track records over time. There must be measured evidence that decisions and forecasts actually improved. Unfortunately, risk analysis or risk management—or decision analysis in general—rarely has a performance metric of its own. 3The good news is that some methods have been measured, and they show a real improvement.
From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails.
> I still want to use a different provider to send email newsletters, why can’t I do that?
You can. There is no requirement to use Ghost’s built in newsletter delivery feature. Before we released this feature, thousands of people sent their newsletter using all sorts of other services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Convertkit, and many others. You can easily sync your members database to an external newsletter provider via Zapier, or by following our detailed integration guides.
I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost.
> From what I’ve read on this page[0], Ghost does allow other providers which I presume includes self-hosted emails.
Yup, "transactional" emails can be sent via a variety of methods, but "bulk" email can't.
I think the differentiation between transactional and bulk email is also bullshit (and a result of a broken underlying ecosystem) but that's a different story.
> I don’t know anything about self-hosting, but I’m curious to know if there’s no place for self-hosted email servers when it comes to integrating with Ghost.
Just to be clear, transactions emails are fine, but bulk email is not.
I personally think Ghost just didn't want to unleash a wave of under-prepared people into the difficult problem of email deliverability.
Letting people use SMTP servers would immediately lead to people using their own postfix setups, GMail, transactional providers that offer SMTP, etc -- probably instantly leading to many people being banned for unintended use (there's that bullshit again), and people either being angry at Ghost or filing issues against Ghost about email not working.
What's unfortunate is that they didn't really shim it out so it's easy to replace Mailgun... Which is why I'm embarking on this quixotic quest at all. It may end up being helpful down the road though, API aggregation has been a common theme for my ideas lately.
> And why is having a data center in Germany a selling point for some of these email providers?
The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens. Having a datacenter in the EU does not mean that your data can't be accessed by authorities at all, but it's harder than in other countries. At least in Germany, a judge-signed request with a specific reason is needed to get data from any email provider. Mailbox even publishes a transparency report[1] with details about said requests: in 2021 they just received 65 requests, 15% were incorrect. 61 of those requests were just about the contact data of the account owner, not even emails or any other data stored.
> The EU, and Germany especially, have strong privacy regulations and laws to protect their citizens.
This could quickly be changing with proposed mass-surveillance "Chat control" legislation which would force all providers to scan the contents of all messages, emails and other communications.
I use Tutanota and it's... fine for my needs. The web app is ok but it'd be nice if there was something like Proton Mail Bridge [1] for Tutanota so I could use my own email client.
I guess having data center inside EU could be a plus for EU citizens?
> We are all experiencing what happened when politicians regulated the web. I hope you are enjoying your cookie modals; browsing the web in 2022 is an absolute hell.
What would they do with email?
To be honest, I kinda like seeing a lot of cookie modals out there. Yeah, the experience can be hellish, but it highlights how many sites are actually collecting data from their users.
With that said, I wonder what alternative regulations are feasible if we don’t rely on politician-mandated regulations.
> To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
Not chaining the scientific process to objectivity might improve the evolution of scientific processes, but it won’t really bring the world any good as of now. Objectivity, as nebulous as it can be sometimes, is reliable enough at aligning what we think the world is and what it actually is. Plus, having competitive methodologies would just create silos of scientists all working on their own “science is X” methods, with nothing binding them all together. And how would you get someone who believes ‘science should be X’ to listen to someone who believes ‘science should be Y’?
Maybe if we’re on a new planet, an ‘epistemic anarchy’ is worth trying, but not on Earth, where the objectivity train is full speed ahead on an Ouroboros track.
Alright, cool, a consultant. And then…
> Sri Lanka (where I currently live and run a bakery business),
And suddenly a bakery business.
I wish my life one day would be as interesting as yours. HNers are quite interesting.
On topic, FoodPanda is another popular one I’ve seen in Asia. And yeah, the markup for all of them seems to be close to your stated range. Though, it seems that Grab’s delivery fee changes depending on the number of available drivers (motorcyclists?) unlike their competitors like FoodPanda which is static from my experience.