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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Hi. I work on Google Registry. forum.dev is and always has been a premium domain name (and you paid that same premium price at initial registration). We price some domain names higher than others to help prevent cybersquatting, so that desirable domain names remain available for legitimate registrants rather than being sold for extravagant sums on the after-market. We have never increased the price of a single domain name after registration in our entire decade of existence.

For another example of a premium domain name that is still available for registration (in case people here want to verify the user experience), perform a domain name search for money.dev at your registrar of choice. It will be clearly marked with its yearly premium price. You would have seen this same information when you initially registered forum.dev.

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> We price some domain names higher than others to help prevent cybersquatting, so that desirable domain names remain available for legitimate registrants rather than being sold for extravagant sums on the after-market.

It's hard to take this seriously when $850/year is still way higher than other registrars charge for new domains. Are "legitimate registrants" supposed to be comforted that their extravagant sum is being paid on the primary market instead of the after market?

> It's hard to take this seriously when $850/year is still way higher than other registrars charge for new domains.

That's actually a great price for a good domain name. If the name is already registered by a squatter looking to profit off it, you're looking at five figures minimum. I think the mistake you're making here is you're thinking it would be $12 vs $850, but it's not; it would be 'already registered by a squatter within milliseconds of TLD launch years ago and listed on a resale site for 5 figures' vs $850.

And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.

Only a sucker would pay 850 a year to a company that can invent any tld.

How is this any different than any other digital asset? They are all, in one way or another, "created out of thin air."

Well it depends on how long you own the domain for. A one time 5 figure price, then $12 each year after that will be cheaper than $850/year if you keep the domain for decades.

Don't forget the time-value of money though. Not paying $XXXX now is worth a lot more than not paying $XXXX decades in the future.

It sounds like OP didn't spot that this was a premium domain and purchased it at a discount.

He says he has 100s of domains so presumably he's savvy to this and theres a dark pattern at play.

That or he's careless and someone has not realised many domains are cheap in the first 1-3 years then priced ludicrously.

It doesn't help that we have someone purportedly from Google trying to gaslight OP and us into thinking there's no way he paid $12 for the first year.

Okay he posted a receipt for the transaction and it was hundreds of dollars. I think they guy doesn't understand exchange rates.

The amount he paid for 1 year is worth about $120 today and then he's somehow dropped an order of magnitude AND forgot about the punishing inflation the Lira has seen.

I think I'd suggest OP is at fault.

> it would be 'already registered by a squatter within milliseconds of TLD launch years ago

That's an absurd false dichotomy. Gmail doesn't charge me $850/year for an email address, but somehow they managed to avoid people squatting thousands of addresses and selling them on the after-market at an exorbitant markup, and Google doesn't charge me $850/year to search things, and yet if I try to use `curl` to send a single search request it blocks it, but the Google domains team somehow doesn't think that it would have been possible to stop people from squatting thousands of domains "within milliseconds of TLD launch"?

Sorry, it's way more believable to me that this decision was made out of greed rather than a lack of imagination. Overcharging is may defensible position from a business perspective or even an ease of engineering perspective, but let's not pretend this decision was somehow made purely for the benefit of customers.

When .app was launched we saw a sustained 1,000 QPS of domain registrations through the first minute. We literally are not allowed by ICANN to prevent any valid registrations, as we must treat all registrars and registrants equally. Also, how would you do such a thing anyway? How do you possibly know what is a squatter and what is a 'valid' registration when you have basically no information to work off of? And do you really want a world where some domain name registrations are arbitrarily rejected like that? Better to have the situation where if it's available, and you can pay for it, it's yours.

Social Credit by Google.

Surely the next not-sure it's April fools not-sure it's real gApp

Squatters absolutely do. Why do you think Discord and Blizzard provide numbers at the end of your username? It's to provide uniqueness.

Basically every service that gets any traction on the internet whatsoever has a bunch of people running in and getting the tiny or interesting or unique usernames as fast as possible.

Many services like Gmail and Twitter to name just two prevent names to be shorter than X chars.

Releasing usernames is bad for impersonation, so we are stuck.

> Gmail doesn't charge me $850/year for an email address, but somehow they managed to avoid people squatting thousands of addresses and selling them on the after-market at an exorbitant markup,

They don’t charge you for Gmail addresses, yes this is true, but there is definitely a thriving aftermarket for people squatting on desirable “OG” email addresses and user names, just as an example -> https://www.playerup.com/accounts/gmailogusername/

Clearly $850/yr is a price people are willing to pay, since there are plenty of great premium names unavailable at these TLDs. Greed or not, people are complaining here about the fact they own hundreds of other names and don’t see these kind of prices, but to me the economics seem pretty straight forward. They just happened to price these domains better than other registrars in my opinion…

That website is surely for spam purposes?

There's definitely an aftermarket for emails I don't disagree, and in some parts of the world of you have a nice phone number you will be called asking to buy it frequently.

In countries where sanctions prevent access you can buy apple, Google, PSN etc accounts on scratch cards. Might be handy for privacy actually but not sure how effective that is or if sign up via VPN just as easy.

Gmail has a state-of-the-art abuse prevention system to precisely avoid account reselling, that leads to hijacking and SPAM.

Domain parking has been and still is a business model for so many people.

> And to be clear, premium prices are set at the registry (i.e. wholesale) level, not at the registrar (i.e. retail) level. That means that these names are premium at all registrars. Premium pricing is not unique to Google (either the registry or registrar); it's used by nearly all new gTLDs.

Does that money go to the registrar?

The registrar earns the delta between their retail price that they charge the end user and our wholesale price that we charge registrars.

.sucks charges $2499 a year for premium domains.

Yes, well that TLD is basically an extortion scheme. "Buy this domains in this tld before someone else does and uses it to post disparaging content about your brand".

.art has the same model. Normal vs. Premium.

> and you paid that same premium price at initial registration

He shared the invoice: https://twitter.com/emirkarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...

According to that, he paid 4360TRY last year ($300), and now asked to pay 13040TRY ($850). You can’t even make up the difference with the exchange rate changes.

The Turkish lira is currently experiencing ~85% year-on-year inflation. Our domains' prices are denominated in US dollars, not Turkish lira. This problem looks to be caused by currency headwinds. At the time of initial registration, the amount of Turkish lira paid would have been worth a lot more than it is now.

Also, 13040 TRY is worth US$700 at the current exchange rate, not US$850. That's actually a slight discount on the correct exchange rate, as another available domain name in the same pricing tier (e.g. 6b.dev) is showing as costing US$720/yr. So by paying in Turkish lira it looks like they're currently getting a discount of around US$20/yr, presumably because the prices displayed in Turkish are lagging the real exchange rate.

No, the exchange rate on Dec 6, 2021 was 13.67. Not even close.

EDIT: You edited your comment which made mine lose context. You had claimed something like “he had paid equivalent of $850 last year”. That’s provably not the case here.

https://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+usd+try+rate+in+dec...

I'll have to defer to the registrar team then, as we're getting outside the purview of anything having to do with the registry. I feel that the volatile exchange rate with high sustained inflation might have something to do with it though; maybe he got a too-good exchange rate at time of initial registration and now they're updating exchange rates more frequently? Not for me to know.

The Turkish lira has lost value, but it is not a matter of fluctuation as you mentioned. I already shared the links to the exchange rates of the relevant day above. You can also verify the previous and next days yourself. We are talking about a number that is three times higher than on that day, and twice as high as today.

I also contacted another domain registration service to verify this price. They said that the domain transfer fee is $843 and that they have nothing to do with it, the pricing is determined by registrar(Google in this case).

Attached: https://twitter.com/EmirKarsiyakali/status/16014456975341649...

Even while writing this comment, they also responded from their own Twitter: https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1601447984775962625

The exchange rate is not exact-on day. It's not exact-on-month even. I switched just a couple domain names from USD to TRY and calculated the exchange rate and e.g. $180 domains go for TRY 3200 which implies USD/TRY 17.78 -- last seen in July.

If the price of forum.dev is indeed $850 then the attached TRY 13040 invoice implies USD/TRY 15.34 which was last seen in May. The $12 domains go for TRY 75 which implies USD/TRY is 6.25, last seen in 2020.

It looks to me that the prices in TRY are simply set by hand and not refreshed that often. OP got a nice deal via such manually set price in 2021 and that's all that is going on here.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but I have absolutely nothing to do with domains or forex rates.

Yes but that's plausible only if they had set the rate in 2018 and had never refreshed it for more than two years. "Not exact-on day" is a bit stretch to explain an almost a three year difference, isn't it?

That kind of does seem to be what actually happened, though.

> They said that the domain transfer fee is $843 and that they have nothing to do with it, the pricing is determined by registrar(Google in this case).

The wholesale price is determined by the registry (Google), but the retail price will include markup from the registrar (Namecheap, Porkbun, Google). In the case of .dev Google runs the registry and acts as a registrar. As for registrars, that comparable (6b.dev) is $709 at Porkbun, $720 at Google, and $843 at Namecheap.

Namecheap is marking it up more than the other registrars.

I wonder if your registration last year included any kind of first year discount. This is the first time I've seen someone show an actual receipt for this type of complaint. I estimated the pricing at about $315USD vs $700USD. That's enough of an increase that I'm really curious to know what happened.

For the exchange rate fluctuation to explain this, USDTRY had to hit 5.1 or so which hadn’t happened since 2018. There was no way the rate hit 5.1 from 13.67 in a day.

https://www.google.com/search?q=usd+try&client=safari&hl=en-...

I never really thought about it before, but everything on Google Domains is shown in my local currency (CAD) and I'm fairly sure I get billed in local currency. It's nice having everything in my local currency, but they don't do a good job of making it clear the underlying pricing is USD.

I think this person's case is a good example of where that can be problematic. Even if they had paid the correct price originally, they'd be seeing a 35% price increase because of the exchange rate. It's not unreasonable for them to have assumed the original purchase and renewals were always going to be in their local currency without fluctuation due to foreign exchange rates.

I skimmed ICANN's registrar accreditation agreement for info about pricing and it basically says registrars can price domains however they want. The registry agreement has pricing related limitations, so I think the intent is to ensure registries don't engage in abusive pricing with the assumption that competition will keep the registrars honest because registrants can transfer their domain to a new registrar if they're being mistreated.

That leaves this person with no recourse. The registrar (in my opinion) undercharged them and didn't do a good job of communicating the true ongoing cost of the domain. Transferring to a competing registrar doesn't help because the registry pricing for the domain is going to be around $700 USD while the registrant's expectations were set at TRY4360 ($230 USD today).

There aren't any great options to make it right either. The registry can't start discounting domains to fix mistakes made by a registrar, the registrar can't take a loss of $470 / year (at current exchange rates, potentially forever), and the registrant shouldn't have to pay $700 USD / year for a domain they thought was TRY4360 ($230 USD today). To make it worse, the registrant's expectations didn't get reevaluated until the bill for renewal came due and if they've spent a year developing on the domain it feels like extortion (to them).

It's also not fair to expect the registrant to realize they're underpaying. Price differences between registrars are enough for people to assume a low price is the result of finding a registrar with better pricing.

Google Domains isn't the only registrar that gives the impression domains are priced in local currency either. Gandi bills me in CAD and doesn't mention USD when I'm buying domains. Namecheap shows me prices in CAD, but bills in USD and it's not clear USD is the real price rather than simply being the billing currency.

Forget you know the registry sets prices in USD and go pretend to register 6b.dev on Google Domains. Select a foreign currency and see if you can figure out the price will fluctuate based on the exchange rate for USD. I'm not sure where the OP got the idea renewal would only be $12 rather than the TRY4360 they paid originally. There's nothing that left me with that impression.

As usual the best, most informative comments come in long after the sound and fury of the initial discussion.

This is a tricky issue to solve. It's not like we can region-lock domains to a specific country, like how Steam is able to use price discrimination to sell the same game for different prices in different currencies. The real price is indeed denominated in USD and billed to registrars in USD, and these prices have always remained constant for all registered domains on all of our TLDs (so indeed the real price is steadily going down over time thanks to inflation, particularly over the past year). Any other price displayed in a different currency by a registrar is performing currency conversion and is presumably subject to change in the future along with the exchange rates.

I agree with you, it doesn't seem like registrars are communicating this well. Prices of other goods (e.g. luxury watches) do also change multiple times per year to reflect changes in underlying exchange rates, but crucially, what you're getting there is a one-time purchase, and you know up front the only price you'll ever be paying for it. Domains, by contrast, are essentially multi-year subscriptions, and the price of subsequent years is liable to change both as the registrar themselves adjust pricing and as underlying currency exchange rates shift as well. I think the registrars broadly have looked at this issue and decided it would be too complicated to display the underlying USD price to registrants, so better to hide it and just display the price in the local currency?

> I think the registrars broadly have looked at this issue and decided it would be too complicated to display the underlying USD price to registrants, so better to hide it and just display the price in the local currency?

That would make sense to me. I wouldn't even be surprised if some registrants are unable to pay in USD or if they get charged exorbitant fees for foreign exchange.

Even if the registrars added a warning during checkout with a link to an explanation of how it works, I bet very few people would read it. They'd probably have the same number of upset customers and the complaint would shift to registrars hiding a complex pricing scheme in the fine print.

My hunch is the OP is an extreme outlier and the issue happens so infrequently that the complexity of explaining it up front isn't worth it. In the past ~5 years this is the first time I've seen someone with a receipt and a legitimate complaint.

I think some of the responsibility can fall on the OP too. They say they've registered hundreds of domains, so it's not unreasonable to think they should be spending some time learning what rights they have as a registrant, how disputes are resolved, how long term pricing works, etc., especially if they're registering premium domains.

> That would make sense to me. I wouldn't even be surprised if some registrants are unable to pay in USD or if they get charged exorbitant fees for foreign exchange.

To clarify, I wasn't suggesting that the registrants in foreign countries pay in USD and potentially pay forex fees, merely that the underlying USD price be exposed to them so they are aware of what the future renewal price will look like as the exchange rate shifts. They'd still always be paying in local currency.

The amount of Turkish lira paid more than it is now but it's not $850. Here is the link you can get info about rates 6th of December: https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-TRY-06_12_2021-exchange....

4360 TRY is equal to $313 USD using the conversion rate from 1 year ago.

You're trying way too fucking hard. Give the guy a break.

you don't get to hide behind currency fluctation. as a customer he has all the right to be outraged. it's not like production costs had raised or whatever, google has chosen to put that price on that invoice when it could have chosen any other price or even to keep the old price

This is the same crap allocation policy you had during the presale.

Money is maybe a sufficient discriminator, but it is not a good one. Money is very unequally distributed around the world and this basically presumes that the only legitimate use of such a domain could be in an enterprise in a first world country. Or someone rich enough to not be price sensitive at all.

Fun fact, I reserved tty0.dev as a "vanity domain" during the presale, but someone decided to pay $300 more for the joke than me. And that domain still doesn't do anything "useful".

As a third world resident, I don’t see any solutions to this problem. You can’t give discounts, as that will enable arbitrage.

There's no such concept of "reserving" domain names in a pre-sale. Either you own it, someone else owns it, or it doesn't yet exist and anyone could own it. I think you got confused by a registrar's "preorder" language, by that was never a guarantee; it was just their attempt to secure it for you when it became available. There was no guarantee.

I'm aware it's on a registrar level.

I just thought that it was a misguided allocation policy. Someone ended up buying tty0.dev at the $300 price point and uses it for... a fake `ls` output. This registrant wasn't more or less legitimate than any other. They just had more disposable income to spend on vanity.

Hello. I am happy that I caught the attention of someone from the Google team. Let's do it this way. I shared the invoice in the link. You are asking me to pay three times that amount today. Is this normal? To be honest, I am not familiar with the annual payment you mentioned. I expected to pay the price I paid the first year, and then continue with the normal -$12- renewal price. Is there a way to solve this confusion? Could you talk to the team on my behalf? This pricing is different from what I am used to with other tlds, but at least I am willing to pay the price I paid the first year.

Last year's invoice and Google Domain dashboard screenshots: https://twitter.com/EmirKarsiyakali/status/16014366748564643...

Renewal prices are also much higher on premium domains. It's actually the contrary, they're often sold for cheaper through some discounts and the price for the second year is the actual price.

I got a premium domain for $20 and paying $260 every year to renew it (but I knew it'd happen).

No, I didn't have a discount. Google employee proved me right about that first-year fee. I paid the normal price for this domain. But, now, they want me to pay 2X for renewing.

Why do you claim that renewal price is $12? How did you come up with that number?

Can you comment on a reply below that claims there was promotional pricing in 2019 at launch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929132

I think they're referring to the Early Access Program, which was a one-time pre-launch Dutch auction in advance of general availability. Note that that is orthogonal to a domain being premium or not. During the last day of EAP, you might have seen the price of a non-premium domain be something like $130+12/yr. Whereas for a ~$70/yr premium domain, it'd have been something like $130+70/yr.

Regardless, forum.dev was registered in 2021 (you can confirm via WHOIS), which was long after the Early Access Program for .dev ended in 2019.

You stated here that they paid $850 to initially register the domain name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929354

Do you have proof of the initial price paid for registration or is this in some part speculation?

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929472 they checked in their system that the domain was billed as premium upon initial registration.

Around here Premium usually means "cheaply brewed with adjunct grains."

What's so premium about a domain? You're just pretending it has artificial scarcity and desirability. It's one step removed from NFTs in terms of fake value.

There's real scarcity. There are only so many five letter words with a strong relevance to the internet, and only so many tlds. Only one entity can control example.org at a time, so there you go.

Would I pay for a premium domain name? Probably not. They might make sense for some uses though. I'd rather them be available at a public price than through someone who bought as many five letter words as they could and then sells them privately.

Hi, offtopic question: I tried to register a .app domain on namecheap which suddenly became unavailable once I tried to add it to cart and is still unavailable. It was a strange coincidence that someone would buy that domain name at the exact same time as me, but Google Registry also says it's no longer unavailable, so I wanted to know who bought it. The weird thing is the Google Registry WHOIS page says "Domain not found" for the 3rd day in a row, which I find bizarre - the domain name is not available but also not registered. Any thoughts on what might be happening?

(I am omitting the actual name because HN is a public forum)

Pre-reserving domains that have been searched is a common business practice. Some domain brokers implement this at scale IIRC.

Unethical & Predatory? Sure, but it's not illegal.

They didn’t claim it was illegal? It makes it less economical for someone to hold a domain they aren’t planning to use for 20 years. The squatting just gets more expensive.

Yes it’s a common business practice. Doesn’t mean google has to encourage that industry.

I was highlighting that pre-reserving domains is predatory and unethical.

IIRC the domains that are reserved by registrars are usually moved into a temporary hold status with the TLD, so the registrar isn't paying to register the domain, they are just getting the exclusive option to buy said domain for a number of weeks or months. Much cheaper way to squat on domains than actually buying them!

This is not correct. Only registries can reserve domains. If a registrar "reserved" a domain, they'd have to have bought it from the registry.

At least in the past there were cases where some registrars automatically registered the domain if someone searched for it, it may have been in cases where their algorithm deemed the name somewhat premium. They would then essentially hold it hostage for some time, but would then cancel it during the refund period. AGP Limits policy (https://icannwiki.org/Add_Grace_Period) was created to combat that (and some other issues with refunds).

This is called "front-running" by the domain name registrar and it is a big no-no. Fortunately it's not what happened here though.

That's what I assumed simfree was talking about.

GoDaddy did this. Good domains registrars don't.

If you send me the domain name in question privately (use my HN username here @gmail.com), I can dig into it further. I suspect it's either an issue with the domain name registrar, in which case you should try out some others, or it's a case where the name is reserved and is not available for registration by anyone. If it is reserved I can find that out very easily. Note that it would not have been reserved as a result of a domain name search; it would have been reserved years ago, and perhaps the registrar you attempted to use didn't handle it well.

EDIT: The user reached out to me privately and the domain name in question is indeed reserved (because it is a Google trademark), and has never been available for registration. Looks like the registrar did not correctly display it as unavailable for registration.

Thank you! I emailed you from my @proton.me email (in case it went to spam).

I just love the concept of a “premium” database entry. Domain registries are such a goddamn rent seeking middleman scam.

It's to stop squatters from buying 10000 common word domain names and trying to sell them for crazy amounts.

Clearly it’s become much more than just that.

i HaVE nO cHoIcE bUt To ReNt SeEk MySeLf.

An extremely low quality, low effort meme comment more appropriate for reddit, but I'll respond earnestly in any case.

It's not rent seeking, which should be clear because the premium domains have a fixed price schedule that is far lower than what domain scalpers would charge, instead of a variable charge based on what they think they could get away with. Even at $850/yr, you can probably renew premium domains for multiple human lifespans before you end up paying as much as the scalpers might ask for certain domains. Instead of rent seeking, it is priced such that scalpers can't afford to squat on thousands of common word/phrase domains.

The comment deserved half the effort I put into it, and this one deserves a quarter of the effort I’m putting into it.

No one forces anyone to pay a domain squatter. This is literally a “problem” that only exists in people’s heads.

And no one forces anyone to buy a .dev domain. So what's the issue?

Now you get it.

The same premium domains are still squatted and sold for thousands. Absolutely nothing changed for the end users, but now Google takes a piece of the cake. Admit it.

... by letting the registry sell them for crazy amounts instead, and letting them continue to overcharge the owner on an ongoing basis.

Yes? Generally owners of those huge popular simple word domain names will be making far more than $850/year from them, if they actually put a modicum of effort into making the site useful. That's better than someone snatching up thousands of domain names and then holding them hostage with contentless park pages until someone coughs up $X00,000 or more.

> Generally owners of those huge popular simple word domain names will be making far more than $850/year from them

This might have been true in the past, but it isn't true anymore, especially not under new gTLDs. Nobody goes around typing in <word>.<tld> domains out of curiosity anymore, and advertisers don't pay anywhere near as much as they used to for impressions on domain parking pages. The vast majority of premium domain pricing is driven by pure greed.

Try something like Newsy

https://newsy.co

Which is a modern take on domain parking.

So, following the logic, the NYC should charge crazy extra tax on properties to 10x the prices to make the market, hm, more affordable?

I live in NYC and the city does indeed charge higher property tax on more valuable properties, so I'm not exactly sure what point you think you're making here? Charging property tax proportional to the value of the property is common across basically the entire world (as far as I'm aware).

I know. I'm just wondering if they increase the tax by 80x for those properties (like $12 -> $850), do you think it will make the overall market better somehow?

If people were buying properties, and leaving them desolate and unused for long periods of time in the hopes of cashing out one day later, then yes absolutely.

That's why I mentioned NYC. Because people say it's a problem there, i.e, a lot of properties are just bought and not occupied.

What happens in NYC is actually the opposite of laws that discourage squatting - the tax laws, depreciation schedules, and other financial products like property value estimation actually encourage building owners to pursue unoccupied-ness in many cases.

Yep it’s nonsense and a complete racket. It should just be first come first serve, for the initial registration and for lapsed renewals. Like it used to be (forever ago, but still).

Worked at a registrar before. This is the standard for how a lot of registries work.

The only thing that doesn’t seem great is that in the invoice shared by OP, the domain isn’t designated clearly as a premium.

This is straight up rent seeking behavior, and despicable.

Aaaaand the truth comes out.

The story is actually more nuanced than your knee-jerk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33928717

The "more" is surely whether they're premium or not, which is what Op was responding to.

That post links to a query for a non-premium domain name. Of course forum.dev is more valuable than asdfggg.dev. If you query a premium domain name that is available for registration (e.g. money.dev), you'll see that the listed price is higher than $12/yr.

I was bitten by this too. Why doesn't your team include the renewal price for domains in the 30-day autorenew notices? This whole class of problem would disappear if you did.

The renewal fee is on the domain management panel.

Not the question. Why is the information behind several clicks in a settings panel and not in the renewal notice?

Because they are embarrassed about the renewal price, of course. ;-)

To be clear, I work on Google Registry, not Google Domains. I don't particularly know anything about Google Domains other than basic generic information that applies to all domain name registrars. I can't even say that I know what most parts of the Google Domains UI even look like, let alone the 'why' behind them.

No you price some domains higher because you can and you want to make more money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com