HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sradu

379 karma · joined November 8, 2009

Cofounder at Two Tap / W14 (http://twotap.com) - Acquired by Honey. Former Debian Developer.

http://twitter.com/rspineanu e: radu.spineanu@gmail.com YC Badge: 0xBB8c1eAbeCd25E33f37bB16b193E44431df3BBE7

submissionscomments
sradu··on The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing
I've had Govee floor lamps for a while now, they seem to have feature parity with Philips Hue for 1/3rd of the price.

One of them broke, and there was a button in the app to report it. I kid you not, a replacement arrived the second day, free of charge.

sradu··on 100 years of whatever this will be
You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.

At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.

Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.

sradu··on Reversal of cognitive decline: A novel therapeutic program
I've done a bit of research here. It's not snake oil.

They did a trial, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.10.21256982v..., and it worked very well.

It's being commercialized here: https://www.apollohealthco.com/, and the guy has patents on everything.

sradu··on Lawmakers Ask Zuck to Drop 'Instagram for Kids' Since App Made Kids Suicidal
You are misinterpreting Isaiah Berlin.

"Such theoretical shifts set the stage, for Berlin, for the ideologies of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, both Communist and Fascist–Nazi, which claimed to liberate people by subjecting – and often sacrificing – them to larger groups or principles. To do this was the greatest of political evils; and to do it in the name of freedom, a political principle that Berlin, as a genuine liberal, especially cherished, struck him as a ‘strange […] reversal’ or ‘monstrous impersonation’ (2002b, 198, 180). Against this, Berlin championed, as ‘truer and more humane’, negative liberty and an empirical view of the self." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/

The idea of positive liberty is that you are free to become the best man you can be, but there is someone or a group who defines what 'best' is. And that inevitably ends in dictatorships or similar types of abuse.

sradu··on Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers
That was the initial approach, we're bringing in some people to highlight projects.
sradu··on Covid-19 projects looking for volunteers
We're working on this!
sradu··on Launch HN: Dashblock (YC S19) – Turn Any Website into an API
Have done a lot of scraping in my life, and I'm super excited about what Hugues and Max have built.

I tested a super early version and was surprised how well it worked.

sradu··on The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before
I don't know if you've seen this: http://carbon.ycombinator.com. Want to drop me an email with what you'd be interested in helping out with?
sradu··on Carbon Removal Technologies
Each proposed idea has a section related to energy requirements.
sradu··on Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year
Which projects would you consider as a potential replacement for Bitcoin?
sradu··on Increased acidity found in schizophrenia and bipolar patients’ brains
Can you share any studies around this? Especially about sleep apnea and bipolar 1.
sradu··on ContinuouSQL Triggers
Can you create a trigger on any continuous query
sradu··on How Paul Graham Gets It Wrong in “Economic Inequality”
Coming from a former communist country, I don't understand why smart, capable people want to give away their money to a corrupt, incompetent state to manage it for them.

The US is fundamentally different than Nordic countries, where socialism appears to be working: * The Nordic countries are tiny compared to the US. * They are highly educated. * Their society is homogenous.

It seems like everybody is assuming that there will be this rational actor collecting money from the rich and distributing them to the poor.

What actually is going to happen is that instead of entrepreneurs becoming rich, politicians will grow even richer than they are now. The politicians will have more power, power that they want to keep, and the only way to do that is to suppress the press and the people.

And that's how communism starts. It might sound like I'm taking it too far, but it's happened a number of times already.

sradu··on Welcome Jared
Huge fan of Jared. I met him a long time ago at a random party and he agreed to have coffee and share startup / YC advice.
sradu··on Stripe: Relay
You're right. Can't edit it anymore. Would have deleted the second paragraph.
sradu··on Stripe: Relay
No hard feelings here. We mean it when we say we're big fans of Patrick, John, Stripe. It's unfortunate that we have to compete, we would have loved to work with them.

Our approach is completely different than theirs: light integrations vs deep integrations. We believe their approach will do more harm than good for the industry causing retailers/platforms to invest millions of dollars in building infrastructure that's not going to be ROI positive. Retailers will end up paying to build/maintain that infrastructure part, they will pay the merchant fees, and they will have to pay Twitter/any partner promoting them.

sradu··on Stripe: Relay
Founder of Two Tap here. It takes an average of three minutes to send the order to the retailer via our platform. On the frontend we use a similar model to Amazon where tell the shopper we're confirming her purchase and handle the process in the background. It's working great for Amazon, and it works great for us for a thousand merchants.

Retailers are incredibly happy by the fact that they don't have to do a complicated integration where they have to maintain a new piece of infrastructure for potentially getting less than 1% of their orders.

That being said, we're huge fans of Stripe. Always have been. John Collison was our mentor during YC. We're looking forward to seeing how they handle the challenges in the space.

sradu··on Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit
Tom, that most likely wasn't us.

We don't spider retailer websites. That means we don't follow links or go hardcore on building a database of products.

We hit your website:

* if someone has asked us information about a product url

* when we place an order

* weekly for regression tests

Ping us on contact@ and we're more than happy to jump on a call and describe exactly what we're doing. Most of the time we're completely un-noticeable except for the fact that you're getting more orders.

We know for sure nobody is spidering through us.

sradu··on Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit
Paraphrasing newrelic "it takes a village to count our proxy nodes".

We have our placing orders infrastructure on AWS, and whole in-house cloud dedicated to product crawling built on top of Digital Ocean.

sradu··on Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit
We simulate what a shopper would do. We first go through your affiliate link (which drops a cookie) and then go on the retailer website to place the order.

All the commissioning, connecting/talking to retailers, receiving the money, is directly between you and the affiliate network. We're plug and play :)

We do have a stats backend where you can see all the purchases that went through Two Tap. And you can also use CJs dashboard just like you are probably doing right now.

sradu··on Why scraping and ecommerce are a perfect fit
Oops, it's because it's the french version of the website. We currently support only US retailers.

If you try this (same product, US version) it would work perfectly: http://shop.lego.com/en-US/King-s-Castle-70404?_requestid=25...

sradu··on Two Tap (YC W14) Wants to Fix Mobile Checkouts
Two Tap is different than PayPal because:

* publishers/app devs can sell products from retailers inside their apps (users don't have to hit the merchant website). this is incredibly valuable, especially on mobile.

* merchants don't have to do anything to integrate us, and all the hard work is in on our end.

* TwoTap is a replacement for the whole checkout process, not only the billing part.

This means we can provide a unified buying experience on all platforms, at all points of sale, and provide a truly universal wallet.

sradu··on Amber.checkout, a Chrome extension to re-use your buying data on 100 merchants
amber.checkout is part of an ecosystem of products that help you never fill out checkout forms again.

* We have this Google Chrome Extension for desktop

* amberExpress which is an iOS browser extension

* amber.io as the API and checkout interface that merchants and publishers can use to help their users check out with two taps.

Also LastPass only fills out the form, we provide a 2-tap checkout process.

sradu··on Amber.checkout, a Chrome extension to re-use your buying data on 100 merchants
The only thing stored locally is an authentication token.

Everything else is stored in the PCI DSS scope.

sradu··on The eCommerce buying API powering amberExpress. Order products with code
Sorry for my late answer and for not understating the question initially.

We pass https traffic as is, we obviously can't look in it or manipulate it.

However most of the products (something like 98%) are on http connections.

sradu··on The eCommerce buying API powering amberExpress. Order products with code
With OnDemand VPN you can push a HTTP(s) proxy. Apple is awesome.
sradu··on The eCommerce buying API powering amberExpress. Order products with code
Very true. We have regression tests going in the background all the time checking and looking at different pieces.

If something fails one of us gets an email / sms / a strongly worded letter from our parents telling us we could better.

sradu··on Ask HN: Do you know anyone who left the tech world and found happiness?
Zach Klein, one of the founders of Vimeo, spends most of his time in nature. He builds cabins and seems incredibly happy.

From The Startup Kids (http://thestartupkids.com).

sradu··on Show HN: AmberExpress - order any product on your mobile device with just 2 taps
According to this: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=25843 iOS is the only platform that does VPN OnDemand.

I have to look into making it work on Android, I'm sure there are ways to get it working, but it will probably be a different approach than iOS.

sradu··on Show HN: AmberExpress - order any product on your mobile device with just 2 taps
Thanks for the nice words btw :)
Page 1 of 2Next →