sanjayparekh

Some thoughts have been swirling in my head given the discontinuation of the penny but the extreme precision of crypto stablecoins like USDC. What does this mean for privacy and are we in a slide towards someone knowing how you spend every dollar no matter how hard you try to have private transactions?

I will say in my case, the user was too lazy to mask the from address and agentmail.to was right there. Didn't even have to dig into the headers.

See my comment in this thread - I got an email from "someone" (an AI clearly) that signed up for my service (togetherletters.com) from the same domain (agentmail.to) after we had launched on ProductHunt. I looked up the address and that email was never used for a signup and it was just a way to then pitch their product (second email, not the first one it sent). I hate this so much and this is going to now make email just as bad as parts of the web.

I might need to move to Germany.

I've already received spam email from AI agents using a seeming competitor to this (agentmail.to) and then claiming they aren't AI agents and then trying to sell me garbage. I can't tell you how much I hate this.

We did a Show HN a few weeks ago (updated from 4 years ago) and have no AI, LLM, or anything and got... zero traction. We're on ProductHunt today but everything that is trending is all AI stuff. So that is where we're at.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850854

Years ago I had bought a Volvo XC90 T5 (gas powered only). It had this stop/start feature when the car was stopped to help improve fuel economy (lots of cars have this now). Except mine wouldn't work. I took it into the dealership and the sales guy was surprised to see me there on my third or so visit. He advised making a stink with Volvo North America and sure enough after a few months and about two years or so after I bought the car they bought it back from me for my full purchase price - no depreciation.

That made me a solid Volvo buyer (I replaced that car with a newer XC90 T8 - a plug-in hybrid that I still have and is a great vehicle). That said, new versions of any product have issues sometimes but the loss of propulsion on the highway is extremely concerning. Hopefully Volvo comes through and irons this all out like they did for me.

IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".

What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.

Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.

Interesting question. We never saw anything to this extent but did see when mergers happened how dial-in POPs would be merged and reallocated. Also interesting was how many IP addresses existed for North Korea (less than 32 IIRC) versus Antarctica (more than 2k IIRC). Reminder: I've been out of the business since 2005 (stayed on the board until we were acquired in 2007). So my data is quite dated at this point.

The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.

The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.

Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.

Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.

I "wrote" this DNS validator to help me migrate DNS from one service to another and make sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't write any code (or even the README or example BIND file) and just used AI (Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet) to write the initial version and iterate until I got all the features I think are needed. I have not reviewed the code (so there may be bugs) but it seems to work properly. For me this is a super eye-opener with what is going to happen next in the tech industry.

New goal: A "Sanjay popup". Hahaha.

Huh. Good question. Must be something Ghost added because I didn't do that manually. I'll have to take a look.

If you're getting targeted to your block with IPv6, your ISP is likely giving away your data. VPNs are your friend.

I took one for the team so that no one else had to ask that question. And I'll take Vint calling me a nincompoop any day. Especially when you know how nice of a guy he really is. :-)

I think a lot of people are confusing access to some kind of IP location data with access to high(er) accuracy data. Yes, you could scrape whois data to create a IP location database but even country level would be in the mid-80s and then dramatically drop off from there. In the early dot-com boom, that was good enough since there was nothing really better.

CAIDA had some awesome stuff back in those days. There was also an outfit that generated poster maps of the Internet backbones too. I wish I had bought one back then because I don't know of anyone making things like this anymore. Our data was used by a number of companies to create visualizations too. One even appeared on a 60 Minutes story (I think it was that show).

Agreed. But also the source of so many new possibilities. Like most things, the bad comes with the good.

All I can say is when I first met Vint Cerf, he was pretty enthusiastic about the invention. But maybe he didn't really understand the Internet either. You can see the fireside chat I had with him here (to be clear, we weren't sitting next to a fire either): https://vimeo.com/124048978

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I left my operating role at the company in 2005 and we exited the company (it was acquired) in 2007. I don't think I ever said anyone stole my idea - because they never did. Others were in the same space (Maxmind included) but came up way after us - and we never pursued anyone in court for patent infringement. Why? Because we always wanted to win in the marketplace and not in the courtroom.

Also, you probably don't know what data goes into Maxmind but that's okay. It doesn't matter to me since I exited a long time ago and have no dog in the fight anymore. But just because you don't know Digital Envoy doesn't mean you aren't using (and paying for) their data. ;-)

To clarify, yes whois registries have existed since the start of the Internet. However the location provided by those registries does not equate to the users' location. For example, back in the day, IBM (IIRC) ran a worldwide network of dial-ins and all of their IPs were registered back to their headquarters in Schenectady, NY. So yes, we figured out how to monetize it and maybe in the extreme "invented" is a stretch - maybe I should have said "invented a way for it to be accurate to a city level". In case you're wondering, 94% accurate to a city level, worldwide when I was there.

Whoa! That is awesome. I get chills whenever people tell me they've actually used something I've built. Hoping I get the chance to write more about the stories from my time building Digital Envoy. Congrats on your startup too - I hope it is/was wildly successful!

Oh, I agree with you. I don't really understand why sites don't use language headers which obviously specify the user's preference. I've never been on the implementation side for sites that were clients - I just explained the tech, showed how they could use it, and then they used it in those ways and many times more. Maybe it was just easy rather than having to use multiple variables? Maybe they don't know about this header (which would be shocking IMO)? But back in 1999/2000 time frame, no site was using the language header which may or may not have existed back then - I honestly don't know when that was introduced into browsers (I was a Netscape Navigator user back in those days).

I'll also say that even though I invented IP location technology, I am an avid user of privacy-shielding VPNs. Just because you invent something doesn't mean you don't regret some of the uses of said thing.

This is a great question. So when I came up with IP location back in 1999, there was nothing for location-based targeting. Any advertising that happened would be because a user shared a location (ZIP code, etc.) and then got cookie'd and that information was brokered between sites. This obviously doesn't work for more secure uses (content control, fraud detection, etc.), so some of these uses were made possible once we launched. The shift to streaming content would never have happened without a secure way to accurately know a user's location.

The other part of your question, I think, deserves its own blog post. One of my tenants was to NEVER be reliant on someone else's willingness to give us data or access. So, everything was designed with the idea that we would have to gather first-hand data and knowledge. If an ISP gave us data, that would be great and make things easier. But being beholden to ISPs would mean we would be hosed if the sands shifted. This is why I am still flabbergasted when people build their entire company based on someone else's platform, API, etc., and then are upset when those platforms change their models. If you build the foundation of your company on someone else's land, be prepared to lose the house.

It was very satisfying to live through and now reflect back on. :-)

See my comment about this on another response.

You're confusing the tech/innovation with the uses. I agree with you that not respecting, or rather assuming, a user's preferences is a bad UX mistake. That said the tech is also used for content control without which streaming of shows and films would be impossible to contractually happen. It is used to protect your bank account. It is used in a myriad of ways that are much less visible than just picking a language or showing targeted advertising.

My co-founder and I launched https://www.togetherletters.com a few years ago because we never felt like we saw updates from friends on social media. We now use TogetherLetters for our own groups and see updates from them, knowing the updates will never be on the web. In the last few months (with no marketing from us), usage has taken off. We're starting to spend more time on improving it and figuring out what all these new users want/need.

In the 80s I was in Lexington, Ky and got my first modem (1200 baud). That started me on the path to getting connected to others in the computer scene there. Just starting out it was hard to know where to call into but fortunately someone gave me a number to one BBS and that led to the other local ones (my parents wouldn't allow me to do long distance calls so I was limited to local BBSes).

Lexington had an interesting mix of BBS systems. Transylvania University had a system that was open to non-students and had 3-4 incoming lines so you could do real time chat (!) unless of course someone improperly disconnected (dang call waiting) which would cause that line to hang for 30-60 minutes IIRC until it timed out.

Also another great BBS in Lexington was one running Pyroto Mountain where you're a wizard and there are different chat levels depending on your wizard level. Going "up" the mountain required answering trivia questions. To this day a lot of trivia still in my head is from those early Pyroto Mountain days.

I eventually moved to a 9600 baud (Hayes brand!) and then a 28.8k and then 56k modem. Zipping at a 1gig connection at home (always on - no call waiting!) is really quite amazing to experience in just 40-ish years.

Thanks. And I feel ya. I have the same hate/love relationship with WhatsApp (another FB property - can't get away from them) with family there posting good stuff sometimes but some individuals blindly forwarding and reposting garbage where a good 50% or more is easily disproved with one web search. Frustrating.