Almost all businesses need email, contacts, calendars, live chat, video calls, docs, sheets, and presentations. Ideally all linked. Where is the open source foundation for this package that everyone needs?
Nextcloud is not great, it's just the only available package that approximates an all-in-one GSuite experience. In practice, the UI is really janky and unpolished.
Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income.
Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
No? Advertising money is paid upfront. X number of impressions. You get paid a cut for hosting the ad. The ad might be a huge failure and lead to zero clickthrough or purchases. But the money has already been paid for the campaign.
Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at.
Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Yea, but most advertisers come only after something went viral, not when you are building something and you try to say to potential advertiser: "this will go viral trust me bro". And such small viral things are usually short lived, by the time the advertisers come it will probably starts to die down.
But yea, maybe he would have got a little more financial support than donations even if he puts up ads after it went viral.
Another way he could benefit from this is when people want his skills to build them similar things, so it's basically already an advertisement for his skills.
This is such a weird comment. Not all advertisement follows the influencer model. Banner ads have been funding small internet operations since before hacker news existed. Do we really don't have long term memories at all?
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.
If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter.
Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay.
You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all.
A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do.
Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers.
Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts.
A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual.
In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Like it seems like people are ideologically for or against UBI, but I’ve never seen anyone discuss how the mechanism would avoid this outcome. Like I’m not saying it’s 100% the outcome that would happen on whatever time frame, just that even e.g. a 10% chance of that happening would make it too risky to attempt at scale. And like I don’t accept “some people just love farming” or “a lot of stuff that isn’t needed gets made now”, I need an actual mechanism description.
> How do we ensure that we don’t enter the failure mode of “not enough necessities get made”?
Pay higher when someone does things. UBI + income. If you want to live better, try doing something that will bring you money, but if you fail, you can still live and try something other next time.
Current model: if you try something and fail, you are homeless and starving.
I could maybe support UBI if you completely shut down Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, school lunches, subsidized housing, and every other assistance program. It must replace all of that to achieve the so-called operational efficiency of just giving people cash. Give them enough to buy those things on the open market, and if they choose to spend it on something else, that's on them.
If you don't trust people enough to do that, then you don't trust them enough to do UBI.
I think most proponents of UBI want this and I think it's a good idea. UBI is meant as social security, just not dependent on what you do and doesn't disappear when you have cash. Just give minimum wage to everyone and remove minimum payment requirement from economy. If you use up your social security/UBI in wrong way, that's on you. But there should be probably some education. And if someone can't effectively use your allowance (mentally ill, non-functioning alcoholic), then maybe we should put such people in proper institutions, but they could be funded by UBI instead of specialised assistance program.
Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is precisely what is rewarded by the system. So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure).
On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live, and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically, even across plausible variable configurations such as “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming” etc.
We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
Most of the corruption I have in mind comes from the banking system and the system of government bribery we euphemistically call “lobbying”.
If we positively mandate full reserve free banking with no central bank and no state issued currency, that would eliminate I think all of the banking corruption I have in mind. I’m not sure about usury under the classical definition, if we run into problems still that might have to go too (though I do see downsides to innovation because loans are like crack cocaine for innovation, complete with the overdose deaths).
Lobbying is more difficult to make illegal because influence is much more nuanced than first-order* banking and influence will route around basically any protections given enough time. But today we don’t even try to make it illegal. Perhaps a meta-scheme where the lobbying rules periodically change according to some secret sequence could disrupt things enough to make it difficult to route around.
* First order in the sense that much of the complexity comes from playing with the primitives we have today and not from the primitives themselves, and the primitives I prefer are much clunkier to play with.
I don't think the "producers" argument is true, and even so it really does depend on the profession and on current trends.
What was vital yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow (see hospital secretaries vs ambient scribes for instance). I assume when you think of people taking a potentially "destitution-risky" decision, you think "entrepreneur without savings or backup income", not "hospital secretary". Yet here we are.
Also, in many professions, "production" is multi-level. Who is the producer in a hospital, the nurse, or the hospital manager? Yet I can assure you nurses, as vital as they are, get fixed term contracts or get fired all the time. Same with teachers and academics.
So, no, the system rewarding the hospital manager and the university deans for the "vital" work of their nurses and teachers isn't "cleverly recursive"; it's exactly the failure mode both you and OP speak of, except it's somehow both systemic and personal, depending in what angle you're looking at.
> financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods,
Say that to farmers struggling to make meets end. We managed to make production of vital goods so efficient, that we don't need as many producers, so they are becoming not-producers-of-vital-goods en masse. So, now that they don't produce vital goods, they can safely go into destitution?
> only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically
Individual level failure means individual is to blame. But UBI is meant to give them safety net, so that when they fail, they don't go into destitution.
> So at least what you mentioned cannot result in systemic failure from a mechanistic point of view, only an individual level failure (which isn’t to say that the individual is “to blame”, I am not talking moralistically, just that it affects individuals and not the entire structure
Nice, but when you get rid of 20% of people and move them into "not usable, you won't eat now" category, each single one for personal reasons, then another 20% for other personal reason, you have to train them somehow. You could of course say that they should retrain on their own, but that's currently done typically after several years of giving them too low prices, so they used up their safety reserve.
> On first paragraph, okay how does that scale though. Who does the actual work of producing things people need to live
The people who feel they have the skills for this. Just like right now.
> and how do we make sure that enough people keep doing that specifically,
We have enough people to make food. We have to make artifical limits on how much food they produce or they would flood the market with food. We pay them to keep their fields unused for some time, kept in reserve. UBI would just be a guarantee that they won't go into destitution when they can't sell the food at good price.
> “birth rate increases because people have more free time which means now you need more farming”
I think birth rate might decrease even more. As people become more and more comfortable and stopped having to work as much as previously, they don't need children to secure their future.
> We need to characterize these dynamics, wouldn’t you say? Have you thought about it, or are you satisfied by hand waving?
I agree we should. Who would do it? Who would pay for such characterisation? Maybe you should try to do it? A lot of people think about it already.
Or, ya know, save money or get a job. Failure rarely leads to homeless and starvation. Most people are far more resilient than that, the current US homeless rate is ~1/500
If we need/want UBI to be a thing, educating people on the difference is going to part of the effort and debate
Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
UBI discussion invariably is way off the mark. The only thing UBI solves is how to give out the money, which is a massive misdirection, the real problem is how to get the money. Do you gut the state and allow people who don't work to have enough money to barely survive as an underclass, or do you end billionaires and usher in a new renaissance where all needs are met and labour shall just be at our whim. These two vastly different visions are both UBI, but most discussion about UBI completely sidesteps that as it requires touching upon the more difficult issues.
Once you have control of the money to give out, literally every way of redistribution is as good as UBI. If you calculate how much money would be required for a reasonable UBI.. then imagine what could be done if that money was spent on communal, humane, services then it would be able to revolutionise the world every bit as much.
UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it.
In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule.
Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
> In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway.
The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
> Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize.
Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
> Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
Somehow I can imagine that a world where a the brightest minds of a generation didn't spend their prime optimizing ad clicking wouldn't necessarily be a complete disaster.
Optimizing ad clicking is profitable and the thing that would [partially] pay for UBI. That stops happening and money/value stop being created. The market is not 0 sum.
It's good to talk about UBI, but people taking it seriously have no idea how to fund it.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
It's alright. Those who would like to monetize can. There are others who wouldn't and UBI would utilize that surplus talent, which otherwise had to perform tasks they weren't skilled at to earn a living.
> most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver.
With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want. And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
I really view UBI as something that puts oil in the society: people have less friction to be at the spot they're better at. People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore. And jobs that nobody wants to do would finally be paid by how much they suck instead of how much money your parents had to educate you.
> Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question
I don't really see the issue. We're far from having shortage of ways to make people pay: ads, paywall, soft paywall, begging, rate limits. What's the issue with those? I certainly don't like them as a user and as a member of society but am fine with people doing that.
Especially with UBI in place: if the dev is putting a paywall, they have to compete with people that have plausibly much more freedom of time and mind to allocate to another free foss project. So in the end it becomes less profitable to be adversarial against end users.
> And others who couldn't do the CS curiculum even though they would have loved to because they had to find a job quickly would plausibly be at their place instead.
Unfortunately, also wishful thinking. A particular kind of wishful thinking endemic to naturally highly curious, academic achievers (not a dig, I am one). But -- and if you don't understand this, spending some time teaching at universities makes it abundantly clear -- most of the world is nothing like this. They aren't being held back from their natural passions and curiosities by the demands of living. They would not suddenly flourish under UBI.
> With UBI I wouldn't be surprised if those would be even more productive doing something else they want.
For the people that do naturally love creating and are good at it, they might "even more productive" in one sense -- creating more stuff that they, personally, value. And personally I'd love to do that, but it doesn't maximize value across society. That's one of the main things money is. It's a constraint forcing the production of consensus value. In a world of infinite resources that ceases to matter, but we're still very far from that.
> People who want to do nothing will not slow us down anymore.
Who do you think is supporting them? Until we have robots taking care of everyone for free, support is still a cost levied on other humans.
I am aware that most of the world isn't like this. But I am also aware that there are many people who more than anything want to share things they made, have a positive impact etc. In other words : there are 10x engineers and 10x altruists and some are even both. I am convinced that they collectively could make basically unlimited progress on things we all agree on: less sick people, more happy people, less waste, better environment, etc. I'm sure you've seen some random genius on youtube who built things in their backyards that are normally only buildable by conglomerate with advanced logistics. I just want them to not have to worry about an algorithm and sponsors and accomodate spaced for them to worl together on things.
> it doesn't maximize value across society
Well you'd have to define "value" here. I am sure GDP would plummet because bullshit jobs would plummet. The current society is doing maybe a decent job at producing but a terrible job at making it "across society". We still have millions of people dying every year of very preventable causes just because of the lack lf coordination. I think this would be better if we had less noise in our daily lives caused by the system so inefficient that we have bullshit jobs.
> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking
It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects.
I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
> It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't.
Seems inefficient to pay for everyone to have kitchens in their house and pay them cash to get ingredients to cook. Couldn't we just employ some of these people as cooks and have them make meals in a centralised kitchen in every neighbourhood? A bit like the British Restaurant idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Restaurant
- and historically in france where I'm from, when we started having freezer technology it first appeared in shared houses for the whole village. People would go there once a day to fetch what they needed and would eat it. Can't find english sources but it seems very efficient. A least much more than every one having a fridge. https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/pays-de-la-loire/mayen...
Don't you think that with UBI some people could flat out refuse to be squeezed by the supermarket owner and decide to make their own grocery association not motivated by greed and so less subject to inflation? I know of several projects like this where people give their own time for free to work in that low price supermarket. It's not even registered as a company but as a public benefit association. With UBI and inflation I have no doubt this kind of thing would pop up and limit inflation.
That's why it works, lol. Those already driven by the bet paying off still have their incentives, and those who would love to try something ... can! Because they don't have overdue bills to pay with extra interest.
People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.
The economic value is still created even if it's not captured as currency. Look at open source software - would you say that ffmpeg hasn't created any economic value just because the developers aren't charging for it?
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment.
I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be.
That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com).
It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others".
The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page.
This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee.
Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either.
In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads).
KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope.
If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1.
In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.
Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.
Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.
Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
Just kidding. I bet you will do very well marketing it to estate agents and AirBnb renters. It's just the "prettification" of the world which gets to me. I hate Instagram for the same reason. Just grumpy me.
Totally get the concern, and I actually agree on the “Instagram-ification” problem.
What ProntoPic does is basically what a professional real estate photographer already does in Lightroom: fix lighting, white balance, perspective, and sharpness.
No adding pools, no changing furniture, no fake sunsets, no staging things that aren’t there. My girlfriend is an interior designer, so I see firsthand how much effort goes into making spaces look 100% accurate but well presented.
The goal isn’t to misrepresent reality, just to make photos look like they were taken properly.
In practice this mostly helps small hosts and agents who don’t have the budget or time for professional shoots. Right now they’re uploading dark, crooked, yellowish photos that actively hurt bookings (like the ones in the hp, real examples).
I guess I need to make it clearer in the site. Thank you for the feedback!
Yeah that's fair enough. I've rented out my apartment on Airbnb and good photos are the key. I paid a real life photographer back in the day. As long as it doesn't change, clean or improve what's actually there in the apartment, and just makes you a better photographer I think that's fine. Good luck with it.
For an app like this, once I'm sold on the features of the app, I need to know and trust the credentials of the primary developer. I looked them up. Looks good.
Elon Musk attends the Donald Trump school of responsibility. Take no blame. Admit no fault. Blame everyone else. Unless it was a good thing, then take all credit and give none away.
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