I second the idea to use a zip. In fact it's what a lot of vendors do because it is so ubiquitous, even Microsoft for example - the "open Microsoft Office XML document format" is just a zip file containing a bunch of folders and XML files.
- you're on HN, so you have an opportunity to tell us the name of the thing - marketing
- perhaps consider your marketing budget to be the area you need to invest in now, and indirectly how that budget can actually generate a little revenue and exercise the engine
- e.g. do you have packages you can ship through your service to announce it to others? Use your marketing budget to do it and collect your marketplace fees - marketing again. Nothing says I believe in my product like using it for real (IMHO).
- a bold and risky move (?) - most would say fake it till you make it - but I for one tire of this tactic. How about approaching this with honesty and reward the first adopters? "We're brand new but you can be the first to help us prove out this model?".
- your marketplace is a network. Search for an opening that has viral properties. Try to tap into something that has a network effect, go to where your customer is and see how you can target/advertise strategically and respectfully - become a trusted partner to one or more communities (e.g. thinking out loud, eBay sellers maybe?). This could include finding the right partner(s) who have a problem and are willing to give you a shot in an existing network.
On the last point - as an example of the viral thing - I worked on a real estate tool a while back. We found a viral hook - there were for sure properties that needed to be processed and worked through the tool - we email invited the parties involved in the transaction to invite them to work on the property in the secure tool, and we gave them the ability to invite others working the same transaction to the tool, and we focused everything on polishing that workflow and experience.
This way, as soon as one person used the tool they could invite others to use it legitimately to work in the tool and that was the viral aspect.
This points to, replace real estate tool and house with "package" and invite... and can you achieve something viral that spreads itself... like, when someone ships with your tool, it emails the recipient with the link to your site for status tracking and a call to action to make them want to ship using your platform.
This to me is a lot of marketing and product strategy around incentivizing the network effect.
Disclaimer: I never made millions of dollars off a marketplace. But I did help stand up the real estate mechanism I mentioned and that business reliably brought in 5-10 grand a month with no marketing effort and just that one mechanism, and it also helped us find a few key network partners. That's what drives my feedback.
I have a bunch of TI-99 hardware in storage, have been thinking to donate it to a computer museum potentially. I had one in my hand when I was 5 thanks to my grandpa (it made me what I am today!).
I still don't understand what happened to using Apache Avro [1] for row-oriented fast write use cases.
I think by now a lot of people know you can write to Avro and compact to Parquet, and that is a key area of development. I'm not sure of a great solution yet.
Apache Iceberg tables can sit on top of Avro files as one of the storage engines/formats, in addition to Parquet or even the old ORC format.
Apache Hudi[2] was looking into HTAP capabilities - writing in row store, and compacting or merge on read into column store in the background so you can get the best of both worlds. I don't know where they've ended up.
Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.
This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.
Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.
It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.
As far as I can tell the single zip downloadable versions stopped being published after 2020. I grabbed a copy of the 2020 zip from the Internet Archive and turned it into a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
Just in case anyone else wants to poke around and discovers there appears to be archived versions after 2020[1]... don't bother. They all 404. At a guess: There were links to them in anticipation of creating updated zip files but they never got around to it. Lame.
Every country puts out an official gazette with abundant regulatory and statistical information. Of course you'd be foolish to rely on all these at face value, but it's an excellent starting point for assessing the economic activity of any given country. You can then synthesize it with things like market data and publicly available shipping information. Plus the CIA has (at least I hope it still has) a large staff of people whose only job is to study print, broadcast, and electronic media about other countries and compile that into regular reports of What Goes On There.
Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s
Half serious - but is that really so different than many apps written by humans?
I've worked on "legacy systems" written 30 to 45 years ago (or more) and still running today (things like green-screen apps written in Pick/Basic, Cobol, etc.). Some of them were written once and subsystems replaced, but some of it is original code.
In systems written in the last.. say, 10 to 20 years, I've seen them undergo drastic rates of change, sometimes full rewrites every few years. This seemed to go hand-in-hand with the rise of agile development (not condemning nor approving of it) - where rapid rates of change were expected.. and often the tech the system was written in was changing rapidly also.
In hardware engineering, I personally also saw a huge move to more frequent design and implementation refreshes to prevent obsolescence issues (some might say this is "planned obsolescence" but it also is done for valid reasons as well).
I think not reading the code anymore TODAY may be a bit premature, but I don't think it's impossible to consider that someday in the nearer than further future, we might be at a point where generative systems have more predictability and maybe even get certified for safety/etc. of the generated code.. leading to truly not reading the code.
I'm not sure it's a good future, or that it's tomorrow, but it might not be beyond the next 20 year timeframe either, it might be sooner.
I like Fastmail with my own domain for personal email, but the reality is nothing is a complete replacement for a Google account, given how tied in it is with auth and the whole Google ecosystem. I still have to use Google for work.
Proton is another one people often suggest. Hey.com sometimes too. No experience with those myself.
There are other options (such as the big guys, iCloud mail or Outlook.com), but aside from self-hosting (which I don't want to spend time maintaining just for my personal mail), I personally haven't seen much outside of those ones that are recommended often.
Not selling anything, but I am trying to figure out what to do to help support solo and micro entrepreneurs, very small businesses (2-3 people) and very small nonprofits.
I feel like there are a lot more people in this position now (me included), but I don't want to do things for the sake of doing them... I want to find out what solo folks really benefit from and help make sure you get more support.
Seems like developer tools/tooling are a hot commodity to the current big AI companies?