Hacker News Reader

philfrastyon Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists

Is this US only? Didn't find any mention on this in the FAQ or signup page.

philfrastyon SEO case study: 8k to 200k monthly organic traffic

Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.

philfrastyon Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial Report

What I find interesting is the breakdown of monthly vs yearly subscriptions.

223 $2 (paid monthly)

104 $5 (paid monthly)

26 $10 (paid monthly)

582 $2 (paid yearly)

174 $5 (paid yearly)

62 $10 (paid yearly)

I would have never guessed that more people pay yearly than monthly for a 20% discount. Has anyone else seen something similar for their own SAAS?

philfrastyon Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?

Can you give an example of an untested tool you have in mind?

philfrastyon I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS

Have you experimented with removing your free plan? Curious to know what your support-time is in relation free:paid plans. Just from my anecdotal experience free-plans attracted the wrong type of customer for me, switching to paid with a free trial worked much better. When you have a large team and can built fancy funnels to make freemium work it seems like a great idea from a marketing perspective but for small(ish) companies I really doubt the numbers (% of upgrades from free to paid after a certain period of time) make sense in a lot of cases.

philfrastyon Dark Patterns

The king of dark patterns: https://www.viagogo.com (try with any listed event)

(edit: they recently got banned from AdWords IIRC)

philfrastyon Show HN: Yack – Community Browser for Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube and More

Looks cool! Reminds me of (YCs) Station with a focus on online communities. Hint: Says "0 beta users signed up since August 1st 2019" in the bottom left corner. Maybe refresh the cache?

philfrastyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)

ZipKey develops modern visitor management solutions for high-security environments (e.g. data centers). Our current offering is centered around an iPad version with deep integrations into the customers IT and building infrastructure. We just launched our ZipKey Kiosk, which is a self-check-in terminal placed on premise at our customers with facial recognition and ID checks.

We’re looking for a great engineer to help us in pushing forward our kiosk project, the base version is already done and running (using React Native Windows with WPF & UWP) with all native bridges in place for a C# / WPF / UWP implementation.

Email us at phil@zipkey.de and I (Phil @ product) or Chris (CTO) will respond to you promptly. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your knowledge regarding Windows application development.

philfrastyon Commission to revoke British .eu domains after Brexit

Just one example: GoDaddy bought the HostEurope group for €1.6B [1]. They own one of the largest domain-registers (and cloud providers) in the DACH region called Domainfactory. They reside on df.eu

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Europe_Group

philfrastyon How Sketch Took on Adobe

Wasn't there OmniGraffle on the Mac even before Sketch? Seemed to me in the beginning that Sketch was an exact clone of OmniGraffle with a little nicer interface. Sketch evolved a lot from that point on.

Edit: OmniGraffle 1.0 launched 2001 [1], Sketch started 2008

[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1002530/omnigraffe.html

philfrastyon Robinhood launches 3% checking account

Anyone know of similar (short term) rates over here in Europe? Gotta be lucky to snatch up 1% for the first 6 months after signing up...

philfrastyon Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation

It does, but it still allows large businesses to be built on this rather fragile approach, see for example (european) SOFORT that got sold to Klarna. The only thing they did was allow you to pay directly with your bank account in online-stores that used them although banks (mostly) didn't cooperate with SOFORT (they also conveniently checked you account balance and any prior failed transactions).

philfrastyon Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake

TenX converted a large portion of their ICO proceedings into USD, see under "Finance" https://blog.tenx.tech/tenx-transparency-report-q2-2018-98bb...

philfrastyon Googlers Write to CEO Demanding Equal Treatment for Contractors

Would you mind sharing your opinion/learnings on your time contracting? My wife (molecular biologist) is currently interviewing for a similiar position through one of these middleman companies (Agap2).

Edit: (bit of background) from what I see (through her) really hard to get directly into Pharma here in Germany/EU even with a PhD and decent CV.

philfrastyon The YouTube Premium Concept Is All but Done

peanuts compared to revenue from product placements

philfrastyon Namecheap announces support for TOTP-based 2FA

Any idea why companies would choose a proprietary 2FA solution? I see this with European banks all the time.

philfrastyon Journal raises $1.5M to bring Google-like search to your personal life

Would love an early access code, too. phil@hubx.io

philfrastyon Show HN: Polar – an offline web browser with annotations and tagging

Would be very helpful if it does also save links x levels down, e.g. for reading documentation.

philfrastyon The Complicated Financial Lives of Freelancers

"it's unlikely you can convince them to pay" why not simply use some factoring service that charges you some minor % for never caring about missed payments again? There are multiple out there (I am EU based) that have APIs, a decent interface, etc.

philfrastyon Filming 100-Megapixel Aerials Over New York

for anyone interested...http://www.red.com/store/products/dsmc2-brain/710-0303

philfrastyon U.S. Websites Go Dark in Europe as GDPR Data Rules Kick In

11 cookies for me

philfrastyon In Germany, the use of cash has become a proxy for concerns about trust, privacy

"Cash has no payment fees" This is simply not true. Take a business for example:

1.) have a cashbox (or multiple)

2.) guard cashbox

3.) every evening count money in cashbox

4.) hope the cash you took in is still in the cashbox

5.) if not 4) --> accounting nightmare + fire employee

6.) bring cash to bank

philfrastyon Cool Backgrounds

same here, a lot more if you choose brighter colors: https://imgur.com/a/H5OIH4j

philfrastyon Coinbase acquires decentralized cryptocurrency trading platform Paradex

There is an intermediary in 0x called a relayer (receiving relayer fees) that brings together both buyer and seller through e.g. an exchange UI. Just the transaction itself does not require an intermediary and is therefore not prone to counter party risk (of course if buyer and seller knew each other before they could just skip the relayer).

philfrastyon My First Year of Freelancing

Hint: it's not easy to do

philfrastyon JavaScript is Good, Actually

calculatePaycheck("i am a world class programmer") > calculatePaycheck("i am a programmer")

philfrastyon $1M to build decentralized social networks

Try the Path app, exact use case

philfrastyon Drive-by Rowhammer attack uses GPU to compromise an Android phone

Buy a used iPhone? I am on a 6 and it works just fine. Goes for around 150$ to 200$ non negotiated.

philfrastyon Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

Guy they chose seems like a bad example.

- 30k on insta (since 2014): instagram.com/elijah_oezz

- 3k on YouTube youtube.com/channel/UCk4fZzhD8fStRHITL4sP_LA

- 0 comments on any of his pics

Forex trading is certainly big on SM but this guy does not convert a single visitor.

philfrastyon Health dangers of sleep deprivation

"...I will pay later..." this is so damn hard to grasp when you are young and pulling all nighters every day.