It's telling that the measure of quality of life you use in this comment is entirely materialistic in nature. I also challenge the idea that US provides 'access to better medical care', as it is pretty well documented that Americans spend more for lower quality care compared to similar developed countries.
I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.
> I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top
What top are you referring to?
We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow the $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.
My take: Discord will slowly enter the arena with the likes of Google, MS, Meta, Apple, Valve for their massive user network. The amount of resources needed to sustain free offerings for so long make it a nearly insurmountable moat for others to compete.
Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well.
You think discord is the same order of magnitude as a Microsoft or Google? Both of whom own major operating systems, browsers, ad platforms, office and workspace suites, app stores, cloud providers, search engines, maps products, developer tools suites, robotics, research laboratories, AI products, meeting and chat infrastructure, email products and any a million other things?
The moat there is staggeringly large comparatively.
I feel like you're nitpicking my comparison and misunderstanding what I said. I did not say these companies were technically equal. If you have more questions after rereading my statements, feel free to drop them in this thread.
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.
Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
I have said many times, Discord isn't just chat, it is 100% a social media app.
I think there's definitely more than 10 thousand servers... Unless they mean active? Even so... there's 3.2 million Discord servers with the Disboard bot installed, that's just Disboard, a way to advertise your Discord. There's likely millions more with no bots.
I'm just questioning the 'most users' aspect- just anecdotally among my 'normal' peers those big servers dont seem like the most common use case. For every big million-user server there could be a million private 10-user servers
Not necessarily, if Discord has more than 200 million Daily Active Users, and there are a few million-user servers. Those million-user servers could mostly be made up of the same million users (or only a small percentage still actively engage but they never left because there's no disincentive to leave servers instead of just muting them) meaning it's used by less than 1/200th of the total users of Discord.
Realistically, that's probably not the case, but it's impossible to know the true popularity without more statistics.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
Going back to something you said earlier:
> Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
So the primary thing is that there is no SSO for each server? No centralized auth system? Because everyone I know that uses discord 'found' the discord via some official means of those million person discord's like the official Marvel Rivals one. If the only purpose of the centralized system is not requiring a new login for every server, then a centralized auth system could be implemented by relying on people's other social media accounts. Login with Google/Facebook/Apple etc.
you could sign into A and your friend could sign into B using the single sign in, but you wouldn't be able to message each other is the problem, there is no platform bridging the logic gap, so you would both need to have A and B open. (afaik. didn't read about Rocket yet)
> Do they? Personally I've never willingly joined one of those massive servers
Large community servers are plentiful. I'm in a few that are definitely several hundred if not a few thousand users. It's pretty common to have a public server for cities too.
The question was not are there Discord servers with 1+ million people. The question was do most Discord users use Discord to join servers with 1+ million people.
> A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
That is totally true, but is that server really going to be one with NSFW content or channels? Those huge servers are great spaces, but every one I've been on is fully functional if you are on a "teen account" without doing ID/Age verification.
Why? I don't appreciate comments that cast doubt on decent technical contributors without any substance to back it up. It's a cheap shot from anonymity.
Sounds like you misunderstood. They didn't say they are merging PRs after a few seconds. Just that the difference between a good one and a bad is often obvious after a few seconds. Edit: typos
TSA pre-check, Global Entry, and Clear _infuriate_ me. It is privatization of public transportation and a net negative for society. In New York, JFK has closed off half of the security entrances for priority lanes, meaning a majority of passengers are forced into 50% of the entrances. The airport was built with state+federal funds, and now tax-paying residents are second-class to those who can afford $100/year. It's not even the amount, it's the principle.
And before people start to argue that planes aren't public transportation - over 10 million _passenger_ flights a year. It is critical to the functioning of all aspects of society.
Very, very different tools, though they cover similar areas.
Temporal - if you have strict workflow requirements, want _guarantees_ that things complete, and are willing to take on extra complexity to achieve that. If you're a bank or something, probably a great choice.
Oban - DB-backed worker queue, which processes tasks off-thread. It does not give you the guarantees that Temporal can because it has not abstracted every push/pull into a first-class citizen. While it offers some similar features with workflows, to multiple 9's of reliability you will be hardening that yourself (based on my experience with Celery+Sidekiq)
Based on my heavy experience with both, I'd be happy to have both available to me in a system I'm working on. At my current job we are forced to use Temporal for all background processing, which for small tasks is just a lot of boilerplate.
I’ll say that, I think this varies by language/SDK - at least with the Temporal TypeScript SDK, a simple single idempotent step background task is however many lines of code to do the actual work in an activity, and then the only boilerplate is like 3 lines of code for a simple workflow function to call the activity.
Traditional DBs are a poor fit for high-throughput job systems in my experience. The transactions alone around fetching/updating jobs is non-trivial and can dwarf regular data activity in your system. Especially for monoliths which Python and Ruby apps by and large still are.
Personally I've migrated 3 apps _from_ DB-backed job queues _to_ Redis/other-backed systems with great success.
The way that Oban for Elixir and GoodJob for Ruby leverage PostgreSQL allows for very high throughput. It's not something that easily ports to other DBs.
A combination of LISTEN/NOTIFY for instantaneous reactivity, letting you get away with just periodic polling, and FOR UPDATE...SKIP LOCKED making it efficient and safe for parallel workers to grab tasks without co-ordination. It's actually covered in the article near the bottom there.
Transactions around fetching/updating aren't trivial, that's true. However, the work that you're doing _is_ regular activity because it's part of your application logic. That's data about the state of your overall system and it is extremely helpful for it to stay with the app (not to mention how nice it makes testing).
Regarding overall throughput, we've written about running one million jobs a minute [1] on a single queue, and there are numerous companies running hundreds of millions of jobs a day with oban/postgres.
Appreciate the response, I'm learning some new things about the modern listening mechanisms for DBs which unlock more than I believed was possible.
For your first point - I would counter that a lot of data about my systems lives outside of the primary database. There is however an argument for adding a dependency, and for testing complexities. These are by and large solved problems at the scale I work with (not huge, not tiny).
I think both approaches work and I honestly just appreciate you guys holding Celery to task ;)
How high of throughput were you working with? I've used Oban at a few places that had what pretty decent throughput and it was OK. Not disagreeing with your approach at all, just trying to get an idea of what kinds of workloads you were running to compare.
Knowing Mike and his work over the years, that is not the case. He is a man of integrity who owns a cornerstone product in the Ruby world. He is specifically the type of person I want to hear from when folks release new software having to do with background jobs, since he has 15 years of experience building this exact thing.
Just last week, I was accused on HN of "not knowing what I'm talking about" when sharing data showing, and my interpretation of, a declining US dollar globally.
It is so obvious in the context of globalization: countries seeking power will chip away at fiscal dominance of others with a thousand cuts. Why wouldn't they? Especially after years of getting bullied.
So many people are so dependent on this reality that I think it's going to happen long before any Americans accept it has happened.
Similarly I was downvoted for pointing out that the developed markets index returns (30%) doubled US market returns (15%) over the last year. Simultaneously the value of the dollar has dropped 10%. I simply stated that we’re seeing capital flight from the US. Ray Dalio said the same thing this morning.
And if you look at pricing as a proxy for capital flows, SMMD which is Russell 3000 minus S&P500 has had a heck of a run in 3 months. IMO People are retreating the mag7
I hadn’t noticed that , that is interesting. Makes sense to me. That’s not good for the S&P considering that ten stocks make up 40% of the index.
And since the wealth effect is really the only thing keeping the US out of a recession, if the MAG7 fail then we’re looking at serious economic problems.
Yes, people are in denial about these things. I'm still salty for the time I posted I believe the covid money printing will lead to inflation and I was down-voted for it.
I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.
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