Hypercritical

I'm always interested in new ways to handle billing/subscriptions/etc and this is a cool change.

I recently heard of a payment strategy that I liked a lot though I understand it's hard to explain to customers. John Siracusa's Hyperspace [0] app has the following options:

* Monthly, recurring

* Monthly, one-time

* Yearly, recurring

* Monthly, one-time

* Lifetime, one-time

More details in the developer's own words here [1]. The interesting options are the Monthly and Yearly one-time options. For anyone in the Apple ecosystem you can technically get this behavior by purchasing a subscription and immediately cancelling it (since you will get the full time period you paid for still). But I really like this payment style especially for an app like this where I don't want to pay-per-use (that feel punitive) but I don't really have ongoing data-deduplication needs (at least the features the product currently offers). It's a "once every year or so" and I might need to run it multiple times on different directories/different settings.

"Time-based unlocks" might be a better way to think about it. There are lots of products I would 1000000% pay for 1 month of, if it auto-cancelled, but I don't need it every month. Often I just skip using the product completely since I have no idea if I cancel if they will close my account right away and/or try to refund me. I just don't want to have to set a calendar item to remember to cancel a day before it renews.

I'm not opposed to…

Could be a defensive move of Elasticsearch to win the mindshare of the community. OpenSearch has been gaining some momentum, albeit far from being comparable to Elasticsearch. See OSS Insight: https://ossinsight.io/analyze/elastic/elasticsearch?vs=opensearch-project%2FOpenSearch#overview.

I'm not sure Amazon is willing to go all in to win the war of search services, for that means they need to to handsomely reward the best coders that contribute the most to the OpenSearch project to produce insane amount of high-quality code for better and new features. See the great article Code Hard Or Go Home: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home. Nonetheless, there's a chance that Amazon may be determined to make OpenSearch catch up with ES, just like Apple has made Apple Maps comparable, even not better than, Google Maps. Therefore, open sourcing ES with AGPL is not a bad choice to retain the talent in the ES community.

And AGPL is kinda restrictive to many large customers too, as the customers do not want to risk being forced to open source their business-critical code. In fact, many companies simply ban the use of licensed software. Therefore, AGPL reflects quite the spirit of OSS while in the meantime will not undermine Elastic's business model.

My understanding is that it is a copy-on-write clone, not a hard link. [1]

> Q: Are clone files the same thing as symbolic links or hard links?

> A: No. Symbolic links ("symlinks") and hard links are ways to make two entries in the file system that share the same data. This might sound like the same thing as the space-saving clones used by Hyperspace, but there’s one important difference. With symlinks and hard links, a change to one of the files affects all the files.

> The space-saving clones made by Hyperspace are different. Changes to one clone file do not affect other files. Cloned files should look and behave exactly the same as they did before they were converted into clones.

[1] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/

Jony Ive had been the CDO for years and the results weren't great. It's not that Jony Ive isn't a great designer. It's just that it's difficult to judge your own work, no matter how good you are.

What they need, more than a CDO, is someone who they have to run every design by, someone (EDIT: with an impeccable eye) who is not afraid to say no. In other words, someone who can fill the role Steve Jobs used to play.

I, for one, nominate the great John Siracusa, for this job.

See http://hypercritical.co/fatbits/2009/05/06/hypercritical

> I use it to follow people

This is something I have a real need for. Specifically, podcast hosts. I want to follow certain hosts and listen to every random show they're on.

Some hosts do keep lists of their appearances across many shows: http://hypercritical.co/about/appearances/

But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app.

I want something that aggregates appearances into a cross-podcast RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my app. Automatically subscribe to every one of their appearances.

What kind of changes could you make to one clone that would still qualify it as a clone? If there are changes, it's no longer the same file. Even after reading the How It Works[0] link, I'm not groking how it works. Is it making some sort of delta/diff that is applied to the original file? That's not possible for every file format like large media files. I could see that being interesting for text based files, but that gets complicated for complex files.

[0] https://hypercritical.co/hyperspace/#how-it-works