Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
Or about building tables… I don’t think hacking has to exclusively be about programming and computers.
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
>it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
Hm, no, it’s a proven fact that republicans kill jobs and are bad for the economy. And now that we are getting into semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps, or why it’s ok to deport a 4 year old baby with cancer, it makes sense to step back a little bit and look at ourselves and wonder where we went wrong.
>
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
you half joke, but having one administration (lying) about solving abusive interest on student loans, vs current one boasting (probably lying too) about sending millions to jail for failing to pay that abusive interest, do change peoples priorities in a way that lead more people to work flipping burgers instead of trying to code a wiki for a niche audience for example.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth. It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
I think what that is demonstrating is that models are commodity objects. The model factory may have a value. I think it would need a specialized context. It would need a market large enough to support it and small enough to keep the context out of the mainstream.
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my ‘side project’ full-time. My partner too: it’s our only income.
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
> It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
> Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world. Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
> They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world.
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
There are definitely a lot of FAANG engineers who are not unhappy and miserable with their lives, they are gainfully employed and live rich fulfilling lives providing abundance for their families.
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was commenting on is "people using their expertise to make money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have earned way more in traditional things but I do side project because I can select what I want to do.
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices. And guess what? The world is bigger.
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for customer support issues that are raised outside this channel
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Teams was almost free when you're already paying for microsoft 365. At least last time I had any involvement with it, the price difference between having teams in the bundle or not was negligible. It makes it cheaper than any competitor.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.
Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space. Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving and extending their monopoly.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team's marketplace. My wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
>Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user support
Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
They seem focused and dont have and debt or funding burdens. There risk of something catastrophic happening to an individual is lower than the average business going out of business.
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
But if I depend on a business making a critical tool, and am paying for the pleasure, then my prior for their going out of business decreases greatly. Their susceptibility to bus attacks remains unchanged however.
Exactly, it can also happen with larger companies and if the creator here decides to step back for
Example he might organize some sort of continuity by selling the product or hiring someone to maintain it
I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.
Very cool story! I love it. Here’s a direct archive link for those who want to support their fellow tech folks but don’t want to support habr, which directly funds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
Keep that surplush cash in the business with a window of a few years to absorb any downturn, don't get a Bugatti :) Not that I am qualified to provide advice on this topic. Great success story.
Congratulations! Great work so far.
I too have been looking to do something like this for a long time now. The biggest challenge for me is that I am locked into the golden handcuffs that FAANG companies put on you. Guess I will wait till I get laid off. I don't have the guts to resign and follow my dream (heavy sigh)
I love this story, so happy for your success. It reads great, and makes me feel great (oddly - maybe it gives me a sense of hope I can do the same thing one day).
Given the state of the typical Microsoft PM he will be safe. They'll always prefer more features over a fast UX.
Even if there will a fast enough teams wiki one day, the next PM will butcher it to death again.
Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and looked for ways to make other people's lives easier in a growing niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations
> My assumptions were confirmed — people were actively looking for an alternative to the built-in Wiki, and they searched for it directly in the Teams marketplace. They found my app using the keyword “wiki.” It was an awesome free acquisition channel.
Congrats on the success, but I feel like you hit gold because MS has little to no interest in providing actual good software for their users. Hopefully for you that stays that way and you can maybe expand to other areas where they come short (basically anything in Teams)
I admit I didn't read the entirety of the post, but I read the following:
> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.
So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.
I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
Slack is, I think, mainly focused on the messaging and relies on third parties to integrate other features. Microsoft is a behemoth that wants to sell their complete software suite and tries to integrate all of them together for a "seamless" experience. They do have an incentive for their own products to be good and used instead of third parties.
Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis, they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already done), so there is an incentive for them to have more users on their solution instead.
Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
"We're committed to compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and have implemented a wide range of technical and organizational measures."
Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.
kidnapping your family in Russia makes you vulnerable, what precautions do you take so i can be sure Russian government can not get to my data thru you ?
Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story/indie hacking.
No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).
Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.
Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
Moreover, habr is a great example why you should not let your site be 'out of politics' (which basically means making a silent deal with fsb to let their ambassadors roam free in the comment section for the luxury of not being blocked). At a certain point in time the site pivoted from being somewhat anti-censorship to a cesspot full of turbonormies, all because of the owners desire to stay highly monetized. There is nothing they would not force you to accept if you are only interested in views and money, but you will get neither in the end.
I don't believe the regime in Russia (and potentially many other places) will allow your site to be "out of politics" in the classic western-democratic sense. If I understand correct, it either exists (and in unison with the regime) or it just ... doesn't exist. There might be an option if it's really small, then the FSB simply isn't interested. If it becomes big enough, you don't get the option.
>Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
You are saying this based on what? Do you have any relationship to Russia, have you visited it after the war started or you just read the newspapers?
Yes, there are some businesses receiving the direct calls from the government and I'm aware of several examples where they just tell "f. off" to a very senior official. Among the rest the level of cooperation or resistance varies from unstoppable patriotic propaganda and fundraising to CEO tipping employees about military recruiters during the mobilization campaign and relocating staff abroad. Russia is certainly not as centralized as you might think.
There is a tiny differenence between donating equipment to countries being invaded or under constant missile attacks (US) and actively invading a country with the stated official goal of exterminating local population (Russia)
> Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
Reads to me like the people have no problem with the idea of boycotting countries or products one doesn't align with as much as OP's apparent hypocrisy and selective application of his reasons.
But I say "apparent" because he doesn't flat out condemn invasions. He says he had no problem with the smaller scale invasion going back to 2014, or the many other invasions around the world, they were fine. Only the "full-fledged invasion of Ukraine" in 2022 crossed the boycott threshold for him.
This could leave a bad taste at best for some fellow HNers.
Coz colonialism never went away - Iraq, Afghanistan, the CIA overthrow of multiple elected governments, the French yoke over Africa, the Hague invasion act, etc.
As OP points out you can boycott Hacker News too if you want to take a principled stance on any group tangenially linked to colonialism.
To be fair, one can take a principled stance based on the nexus to the bad thing and the practical effects. It’s pretty undeniable that Russian invasion of Ukraine and the context around it makes it the worst active example of colonialism.
OK, and you would be right to boycott US economy and refuse to cooperate with the US companies if this is your conviction. But I guess you are not doing this, since you are commenting on Hacker News, run by Y Combinator, a US company?
You as a Western customer currently have no way to pay to a Russian legal entity, meaning that VAT and corporate income taxes from your payments are paid in EU and probably supporting Ukraine. I highly doubt that owners repatriate the profits to Russia or they cover operational costs in Russia from foreign income. It is also possible that part of that income goes into salaries of the staff which emigrated after 24.02.2022 and works for Habr remotely, as it happened with many Russian IT companies.
So question is, do you have any specific evidence that your money would fund the war or it is just application of collective responsibility?
I am certainly well aware of that. However this proves nothing and my question still stands. Not every company founded by Russians on Cyprus is a money-laundering or a war-funding enterprise. Tax optimization - yes, everyone does that. Friendly jurisdiction - yes, and now more than ever, if you are Russian, you want to do business but stay away from Russian government. A lot of people actually moved to Cyprus because they were opposing the war.
Is there any specific evidence that Habr supports the war? This is not a rhetoric question, I expect the answer and I'm fine if the answer is yes.
We are not talking about convicting them in a court of law. It's perfectly fine to refuse to deal with Russian companies because every ruble they pay in taxes goes to support the war. When the whole society (and yes, regular people too) are in favor of waging a war of their neighbor, refusing to deal with their companies should and must become the default way of action.
Just like with BDS in case of Israel, this principle is incompatible with Western values. If you apply collective punishment to Russia, how are you different from them?
> The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions.
Here, the point that's raised is: isn't there any collective responsibility for a group of people that support and re-elect a political leader with 87% of votes, who was, and promised to continue engaging in a war of genocide?
Notice that I'm being cynical here, referencing the 87% vote count. While it might be a theatrical display, the regime likes to preach about the legitimacy of Democracy (especially how Ukraine is conducting its democracy), and Russians accepted these results.
Also, let's not forget that a lot of the invading force is composed of individuals with entrepreneurial ambitions; they're contractors, conscripted.
So the question that I want to ask you is, at what point does collective responsibility apply?
For ordinary US citizen without a broad worldview, this thing i wrote seem like writings of a mad man. As Kennedys presidential address says:
"...we shall pay any price,
bear any burden,
meet any hardship,
support any friend,
oppose any foe,
in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were warned.
answer to your question follows:
because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your data will be under influence of Russian government directly or indirectly - his family is in Russia.
so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor. im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course that would be silly.
Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia uncritically.
Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act as.
Every talent needs to be helped to grow, make all kinds of peoples life easier, so democracy invites everyone with good will to do that in west. Making Russia stronger means making west weaker. Because russian "government". After russian people get rid of their murderous gov...
> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Microsoft Teams is DaaS (Dread as a Service). Here is a great video about how it sucks your soul: https://youtu.be/3O0VbCvWlxk?si=E61rlKLjtFMczl3D
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
I would upvote interesting Show HNs about, say, raising pigs! I like learning from folks with firsthand knowledge.
Or about building tables… I don’t think hacking has to exclusively be about programming and computers.
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
You might be surprised what you could contribute.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
[0]: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html and https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
[1]: https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
I’d take a 100 random IT folks with gardens over a single growth hacker, crypto bro, or “I created an ai bot to do (X)” ChatGPT wrapper site shill.
> from pigs I raised.
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
I’ve noticed a huge rise in political content and at first it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
Also, Republicans kill jobs.
>it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
Hm, no, it’s a proven fact that republicans kill jobs and are bad for the economy. And now that we are getting into semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps, or why it’s ok to deport a 4 year old baby with cancer, it makes sense to step back a little bit and look at ourselves and wonder where we went wrong.
> But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
you half joke, but having one administration (lying) about solving abusive interest on student loans, vs current one boasting (probably lying too) about sending millions to jail for failing to pay that abusive interest, do change peoples priorities in a way that lead more people to work flipping burgers instead of trying to code a wiki for a niche audience for example.
Yes and:
TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
I wouldn't mind if it was "Here is how I got to $250k ARR with my self-funded AI startup" :-)
I prefer AI both raw material and recycled garbage than the cryptocoin epidemy from recent years.
To be fair, more than 1/3 of my technical thoughts involve ai these days.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth. It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
> AI looks to many as a wall buster
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
I think what that is demonstrating is that models are commodity objects. The model factory may have a value. I think it would need a specialized context. It would need a market large enough to support it and small enough to keep the context out of the mainstream.
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
We all have to start our sandcastle somewhere.
My story on the first page, so I guess people still loves success-stories ;)
Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
It used to be easier to use expertise to make money, now you need to use expertise just to get by.
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A Wolf had nought but bones and skin So exact the watch of dogs had been.
He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome Fat, sleek, who had strayed by chance.
To attack him, quarter him Lord Wolf would gladly do;
But he would have to join battle,
And the Mastiff was of such stature As to defend himself with ease.
So the Wolf approaches him humbly, Enters into conversation, compliments him On his girth, which he admires.
"You fine sir could be as fat as me" Replied the Dog.
"Leave the woods, you would do well: Your like are miserable there,
Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils, Their estate is to die of hunger.
Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For what?
Follow me: you would have a fate much better." The Wolf replied, "What must I do?"
"Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars And people carrying sticks;
To flatter those at home, to please one's Master: In exchange your salary would be
A great many scraps of all kinds: Bones of chickens, bones of pigeons,
Without mentioning many caresses." The Wolf already imagines a happiness
Which makes him teary from fondness. Walking along, he saw the bald neck of the Dog.
"What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? - Nothing much.
But still? - The collar by which I am tethered Is perhaps the cause of what you see.
"Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run Wherever you want? - Not always; but what matters it?
It matters so much that all your meals I would not want in any wise or manner,
And would not desire even a treasure at such price." This said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
— Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
The US constitution guarantees life and liberty, the great joke being that the two things are almost opposite.
I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my ‘side project’ full-time. My partner too: it’s our only income.
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
> It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
> A telltale sign
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
> Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world. Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
> They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world.
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
There are definitely a lot of FAANG engineers who are not unhappy and miserable with their lives, they are gainfully employed and live rich fulfilling lives providing abundance for their families.
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
They don't have the freedom to travel the world whenever they want. As I get older freedom is more important to me.
It is if you live outside of the US or if you'd never make it into a FAANG, because of lack of credentials and/or connections.
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
agreed, however I never worked for FAANG
...or the seeds of a company that may one day be a letter in the successor of the FAANG acronym.
Maybe? But not everyone gets into a FAANG, or lives in the places where FAANGs are hiring (as I believe not all offer fully remote jobs).
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
fingers crossed, I'll see something near $1m in a year or two
Maybe! But on the other side I can work when and how I want, it's a big bonus as for me.
This bonus is priceless tbh congrats on your success and hope you'll never need to work for anyone
I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was commenting on is "people using their expertise to make money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have earned way more in traditional things but I do side project because I can select what I want to do.
Not bad when the median salary is equivalent to 600$/mo
I quit a job a President of a software company 11 years ago. I’ve never been so happy or healthy.
Different strokes for different folks
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
I misread that the first time, too. You should read it like this:
> All of this — without investors, [without] a 20-person team, or [without] a “Series A” round.
Later on, the author says:
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
without a 20 person team
my bad!
He said the opposite, I read it wrong the first time too
You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices. And guess what? The world is bigger.
Congrats, this is a great story! One small thing:
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for customer support issues that are raised outside this channel
Not yet, but it is in our roadmap
because internal ones are about knowledge, external ones are about driving sales and reducing support costs.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on trying to open the page.
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
Yep, Teams store is a hidden gem.
You can make money through anything that has a decent market size.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
Congratulations on your achievement.
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Teams was almost free when you're already paying for microsoft 365. At least last time I had any involvement with it, the price difference between having teams in the bundle or not was negligible. It makes it cheaper than any competitor.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.
Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space. Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving and extending their monopoly.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
At least there is a lot of room for improvement for entrepreneurs likes me ;)
For c#/cpp visual studio is really, really good
Jetbrains rider blows Visual Studio out of the water, but it's not Microsoft, so our company doesn't use it.
as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful
This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team's marketplace. My wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
thank you!
You're welcome - it's inspiring :) Thanks for the write up!
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed opportunity!
Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue and been a failure :)
It wouldn't exist at all. It isn't AI.
By my count they mention AI seventeen times on their homepage.
https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
Plus, what will the other 18 people on the team do? Burn their cash using and inserting "AI".
Judging from their web site, so called AI is at the center of their offering.
https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
>Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user support
Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
They seem focused and dont have and debt or funding burdens. There risk of something catastrophic happening to an individual is lower than the average business going out of business.
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
But if I depend on a business making a critical tool, and am paying for the pleasure, then my prior for their going out of business decreases greatly. Their susceptibility to bus attacks remains unchanged however.
Exactly, it can also happen with larger companies and if the creator here decides to step back for Example he might organize some sort of continuity by selling the product or hiring someone to maintain it
I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.
Very cool story! I love it. Here’s a direct archive link for those who want to support their fellow tech folks but don’t want to support habr, which directly funds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
https://archive.is/wDHrB
Directly?
Well done. No mean fear getting to 250k. I hope you can get to 1M as hiring people with just 250K is challenging (unless you are not paying yourself).
He’s in Russia where it’s a lot more doable.
Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.
Keep that surplush cash in the business with a window of a few years to absorb any downturn, don't get a Bugatti :) Not that I am qualified to provide advice on this topic. Great success story.
Thank you!
Congratulations! Great work so far. I too have been looking to do something like this for a long time now. The biggest challenge for me is that I am locked into the golden handcuffs that FAANG companies put on you. Guess I will wait till I get laid off. I don't have the guts to resign and follow my dream (heavy sigh)
Honestly the most admirable part is shipping a Teams app.
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
Can you elaborate a bit? Been tossing around the idea of doing a Teams app. What were the challenges?
I love this story, so happy for your success. It reads great, and makes me feel great (oddly - maybe it gives me a sense of hope I can do the same thing one day).
Congrats!
Thank you! I think you could do it, just ship something today!
Amazing, congratulations!
Related: Had anyone had any success with (selling) Skype Add-ins/Plug-ins or whatever it was called? :)
Congrats on the success! Are you not afraid that MS ships a wiki upgrade at a certain point?
Given the state of the typical Microsoft PM he will be safe. They'll always prefer more features over a fast UX. Even if there will a fast enough teams wiki one day, the next PM will butcher it to death again.
Did you get any corporate or MS celebrity endorsement early on? In my limited experience this seemed key to bootstrap you on the store.
Nope! It was all done organically
Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and looked for ways to make other people's lives easier in a growing niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations
thank you!
> My assumptions were confirmed — people were actively looking for an alternative to the built-in Wiki, and they searched for it directly in the Teams marketplace. They found my app using the keyword “wiki.” It was an awesome free acquisition channel.
This is the money quote for me.
Congrats on the success, but I feel like you hit gold because MS has little to no interest in providing actual good software for their users. Hopefully for you that stays that way and you can maybe expand to other areas where they come short (basically anything in Teams)
You state it as if it were a coincidence. The important point is that the author identified the problem and filled the gap.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot.
I admit I didn't read the entirety of the post, but I read the following:
> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.
So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.
I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
They already expanded it to Slack and other platforms.
Slack is, I think, mainly focused on the messaging and relies on third parties to integrate other features. Microsoft is a behemoth that wants to sell their complete software suite and tries to integrate all of them together for a "seamless" experience. They do have an incentive for their own products to be good and used instead of third parties.
Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis, they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already done), so there is an incentive for them to have more users on their solution instead.
Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
Agreed!
"We're committed to compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and have implemented a wide range of technical and organizational measures."
Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.
Congrats!
BRB. Installing russian knowledge management software on internal servers.
Author also mentions his thoughts on expanding to the russian market. So many red flags here. Pun intended.
Where data are stored? How safe are they?
I am using Google Cloud Platform to store the data
kidnapping your family in Russia makes you vulnerable, what precautions do you take so i can be sure Russian government can not get to my data thru you ?
Reason why i am asking this :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/30/inside-taganro...
Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story/indie hacking.
No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).
Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.
Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
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Moreover, habr is a great example why you should not let your site be 'out of politics' (which basically means making a silent deal with fsb to let their ambassadors roam free in the comment section for the luxury of not being blocked). At a certain point in time the site pivoted from being somewhat anti-censorship to a cesspot full of turbonormies, all because of the owners desire to stay highly monetized. There is nothing they would not force you to accept if you are only interested in views and money, but you will get neither in the end.
I don't believe the regime in Russia (and potentially many other places) will allow your site to be "out of politics" in the classic western-democratic sense. If I understand correct, it either exists (and in unison with the regime) or it just ... doesn't exist. There might be an option if it's really small, then the FSB simply isn't interested. If it becomes big enough, you don't get the option.
Habr is a great example why you should force your site to be 'out of politics' if you want senseful discussions
Otherwise half of threads will be about Nazis by Godwin's law [0]
Like this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[0] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
I guess I should delete my hn account. They pay taxes in the US which is used to fund countless wars all over the world.
Maybe one day, but so far I see one important difference.
Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
There is still a fair amount of dissent and chaos in US business circles.
But business leaders are shamefully silent in US indeed. I'd hope bg and pg and zuck and besos to take clear positions on tariffs, for instance.
>Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
You are saying this based on what? Do you have any relationship to Russia, have you visited it after the war started or you just read the newspapers?
Yes, there are some businesses receiving the direct calls from the government and I'm aware of several examples where they just tell "f. off" to a very senior official. Among the rest the level of cooperation or resistance varies from unstoppable patriotic propaganda and fundraising to CEO tipping employees about military recruiters during the mobilization campaign and relocating staff abroad. Russia is certainly not as centralized as you might think.
There is a tiny differenence between donating equipment to countries being invaded or under constant missile attacks (US) and actively invading a country with the stated official goal of exterminating local population (Russia)
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USA gives tons of money and ammunition to Israel.
I didn’t know this and thanks for sharing. Glad I run ad blockers (no ad revenue for them).
Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
> Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
Reads to me like the people have no problem with the idea of boycotting countries or products one doesn't align with as much as OP's apparent hypocrisy and selective application of his reasons.
But I say "apparent" because he doesn't flat out condemn invasions. He says he had no problem with the smaller scale invasion going back to 2014, or the many other invasions around the world, they were fine. Only the "full-fledged invasion of Ukraine" in 2022 crossed the boycott threshold for him.
This could leave a bad taste at best for some fellow HNers.
You misunderstood the OP. He boycotted Habr once it started enforcing censorship. Before it did it there was no reason.
Maybe I did, maybe he made absolutely no mention of "enforcing censorship". Without reading his comment we'll never know. Let's do it together.
> This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
> I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started
Habr contributes money to Russia and their war effort. OP was fine with this until 2022 when the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.
Coz colonialism never went away - Iraq, Afghanistan, the CIA overthrow of multiple elected governments, the French yoke over Africa, the Hague invasion act, etc.
As OP points out you can boycott Hacker News too if you want to take a principled stance on any group tangenially linked to colonialism.
To be fair, one can take a principled stance based on the nexus to the bad thing and the practical effects. It’s pretty undeniable that Russian invasion of Ukraine and the context around it makes it the worst active example of colonialism.
> This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
US economy contributes to endless wars in Middle East, crippling economies in South American countries. Commenting in HackerNews is bad taste at best.
OK, and you would be right to boycott US economy and refuse to cooperate with the US companies if this is your conviction. But I guess you are not doing this, since you are commenting on Hacker News, run by Y Combinator, a US company?
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Ah yes, classic. Here's a helpful guide:
- This never happened
- They deserved it
- They did it themselves
- What about Iraq?
I don't. Neither does my current client.
Actually, I wonder if I should start a consulting business to help others clear the skies from US clouds.
Anyone?
/s
Let's focus on the content rather than the form.
Similar things could be said about the US, excluding 90% of websites.
Cancel culture at its finest. Look at the company registration address:
Habr Blockchain Publishing Ltd. Diagorou 4 Kermia Building, 6th floor flat/office 601 1097 Nicosia Cyprus
You as a Western customer currently have no way to pay to a Russian legal entity, meaning that VAT and corporate income taxes from your payments are paid in EU and probably supporting Ukraine. I highly doubt that owners repatriate the profits to Russia or they cover operational costs in Russia from foreign income. It is also possible that part of that income goes into salaries of the staff which emigrated after 24.02.2022 and works for Habr remotely, as it happened with many Russian IT companies.
So question is, do you have any specific evidence that your money would fund the war or it is just application of collective responsibility?
Russian companies are commonly registered in Cyprus, and the money flow back to Russia.
Source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/11/14/d...
I am certainly well aware of that. However this proves nothing and my question still stands. Not every company founded by Russians on Cyprus is a money-laundering or a war-funding enterprise. Tax optimization - yes, everyone does that. Friendly jurisdiction - yes, and now more than ever, if you are Russian, you want to do business but stay away from Russian government. A lot of people actually moved to Cyprus because they were opposing the war.
Is there any specific evidence that Habr supports the war? This is not a rhetoric question, I expect the answer and I'm fine if the answer is yes.
We are not talking about convicting them in a court of law. It's perfectly fine to refuse to deal with Russian companies because every ruble they pay in taxes goes to support the war. When the whole society (and yes, regular people too) are in favor of waging a war of their neighbor, refusing to deal with their companies should and must become the default way of action.
Maybe you should read this then:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment
Just like with BDS in case of Israel, this principle is incompatible with Western values. If you apply collective punishment to Russia, how are you different from them?
> The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions.
Here, the point that's raised is: isn't there any collective responsibility for a group of people that support and re-elect a political leader with 87% of votes, who was, and promised to continue engaging in a war of genocide?
Notice that I'm being cynical here, referencing the 87% vote count. While it might be a theatrical display, the regime likes to preach about the legitimacy of Democracy (especially how Ukraine is conducting its democracy), and Russians accepted these results.
Also, let's not forget that a lot of the invading force is composed of individuals with entrepreneurial ambitions; they're contractors, conscripted.
So the question that I want to ask you is, at what point does collective responsibility apply?
They perpetrate Russian censorship.
Upvoted your comment. Don’t agree with you, but it seems like good faith discussion and a legitimate question to air out.
Thank you. Yes, this is a genuine and legitimate question to ask.
This seems like a commercial for the product. Why is this front page HN?
For ordinary US citizen without a broad worldview, this thing i wrote seem like writings of a mad man. As Kennedys presidential address says:
"...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were warned.
answer to your question follows:
because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your data will be under influence of Russian government directly or indirectly - his family is in Russia.
so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor. im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course that would be silly.
Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia uncritically.
Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act as.
Sir, this is a forum for people who make things
Every talent needs to be helped to grow, make all kinds of peoples life easier, so democracy invites everyone with good will to do that in west. Making Russia stronger means making west weaker. Because russian "government". After russian people get rid of their murderous gov...
Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you can accomplish your goal without investors, you should do it.