Great, that means there is a potential market for it.
When Ford motors started cars already existed, when Facebook started social networks already existed, when Google started search engines already existed, etc.
In my opinion, getting demotivated for not being the first or being “the one” that came up with the idea prevents way too many people from starting their own thing.
In the end, execution and adoption are what really matters. In general is better to copy something and improve on it than trying to invent something completely new.
I know y'all are taking the piss. But real talk though: The consent-management space could do with some disruption. Like, for example, just a thought here, I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out: actually complying with GDPR. You'd think a tool whose entire job is to ensure compliance when gathering consent would actually gather consent in a compliant manner, but that's not the default behavior.
I’ve been working on compliance software for 2 years now and this problem is hard. A large part of it is in “ensuring compliance”. You have to sort of straddle the line otherwise you end up a data controller instead of a data processor. You also can’t really give legal advice. You can build as many tools as you want but it’s really hard to give a good toolset and also not become liable.
This is a hard problem still. AFAIK, it's still not really well understood what constitutes lack of compliance. I've worked at a few companies where we just work with a legal team to get an okay.
I take it to mean that this person is complaining (a point I often agree with) that these consent management platforms often resort to dark patterns to drive users' consent rather than attempting to truly inform a user before they consent.
To elaborate: While most of these tools can be configured to comply with GDPR, it is not their default configuration. The tools and products predate GDPR, and being enterprise software they value backwards-compatibility over other aspects of functionality. So out of the box, they engage in practices which are non-compliant.
But of course, most companies assume that the default configuration is compliant, since that's the entire point of the product, right? Companies think the product is a compliance solution itself and therefore compliance is purely an IT problem of deploying the software and legal doesn't need to be involved. But in fact the software is actually a platform for scaling and automating enforcement, and legal actually needs to be involved to figure out what compliance looks like.
There are several studies showing that a huge fraction of GDPR/ePD violations are actually a result of using consent-management software but leaving it in the default configuration.
Which is pretty ridiculous given that everyone needs a social security number, and then if you ever want to rent or buy a place you need a credit score. Then if you want to travel abroad you need a passport. And if you use google, social media or a cell phone, or pretty much just anything online, you are going to get tracked. All of these systems and organizations have already identified you, or they’ll easily do it when needed.
Not having a universal-nation-wide identification system only makes it worse for everyone.
It is pretty annoying -- to sign on to the IRS's system you pretty much need an existing debt to some private company (student loans [but not NELNET!], credit card, mortgage, etc). Apparently we can't have a government run identification service so we have to hack one out of random information from private companies.
SSN is insufficient to get full access to the IRS online account system. Which kinda makes sense given how many data breaches have happened, but it is still annoying.
Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co/) is a good Rails saas starter kit. Their licensing is pretty reasonable (you can choose an annual $500/year plan or pay $1.5k upfront to get unlimited access forever). They also have a great community with a very active and responsive Slack group.
Because the US government wants to maintain access to FBs data. Shutting down FB would be a big blow to surveillance, hence they will never do anything serious against it. They’ll just put on a show, scream publicly in outrage about what FB does or whatever, and then nothing substantial will come out of it, because they never intended to do anything in the first place.
I would love to be able to block all calls from Texas. Every day I get 5+ spam calls, starting at 7:30am, almost all from Texas. If I could block all of Texas, then 90%+ of the spam calls I get would go away.
Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet.
At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.
Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am.
My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up.
I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough.
My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls.
At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.
I fill up my voicemail ever week, 99% of them from the area code of my phone, which is 1500 mi from where I live now, and all are spam. I wish I could just block an area code.
I use Calls Blacklist [1] to block calls from unrecognized numbers -- just checked, it supports blocking numbers based on "Starts with" so that would probably work, if you're on Android.
If there's an actual blacklist where YC employees can just arbitrarily ban founders from working with certain companies that's quite surprising and maybe pretty bad for YC's reputation.
If you mean YC has a strong community of founders who share war stories of how people and companies were difficult to work with, and the other YC founders pay attention to those stories though, well, that's not a blacklist.
About the blacklist, I don’t know exactly how it works, who specifically has access to it or who can add entries to it, but I know it exists, I know people who have been affected by it, know people who have been told explicitly about it and know that at least some partners have access to it.
I have no idea what you're referring to, and if you're going to make such insinuations you should be specific and concrete. Otherwise it's impossible to answer, and that makes it a smear.
YC competitors go straight to shownew to minimize visibility and they have no hope of landing on the front-page. Whereas YC companies go straight to the front-page.
That's not even touching on the dirty tricks the YC network plays with the VC community. They will work hard to ensure that no YC competitors get funded, including spreading false dirt on founders of competitive companies.
/shownew and /show are clearly explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html ("Every Show HN appears on shownew. Once it clears a small points threshold, it will appear on the show page in the top bar.") and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ("All submissions appear on newest, and all Show HNs on shownew, but there is a small points threshold before a post appears on ask or show.")
The stuff you're saying about how YC works is not only made-up, it's the opposite of the truth. YC often funds competitors to existing YC startups—first because if you're funding 1000 startups a year, that's inevitable; and second because startups don't usually die because of competition, as PG and YC have been explaining to founders for many years. A startup that's building something people want will almost always find a way to differentiate itself.
We don't moderate Show HNs to favor YC startups or disfavor other startups. We do give YC startups the chance to post Launch HNs that get placed on HN's front page (as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). But these don't go on the /show tab (they used to, but I disabled that so YC startups wouldn't get too much of an extra advantage). Plenty of Show HNs make the front page, and the overwhelming majority have no connection to YC—in fact, I can't fathom how you'd have thought otherwise, since this seems quite obvious.
When a non-YC startup is having a successful Show HN, I often help them and also encourage them to apply to YC. When a non-YC startup posts a Show HN that isn't successful, I often email them with suggestions about how to rework it so the community will like it better, and if they do that, I often put their Show HN in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so it gets a random placement on HN's front page.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28810941 I gather that you're upset about something that happened to a specific Show HN. Rather than jumping to false conclusions about what happened, you should post the link so that (a) we can look into it and respond, and (b) readers can make up their minds for themselves. Since the comments you're posting contain no specific information, the more you post dramatic claims, the less likely readers are to believe you.
There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN). I'd need a link to say for sure which of those, if any, it was. Or maybe it just didn't get enough upvotes to clear the hurdle from /shownew to /show. That often happens. It happens to YC startups too.
If your friend(s) didn't do anything bad, you or they should email us so we can look at the post and possibly help. That's what people do when they assume good faith, and that approach has a much higher expected value than the approach you've been taking with these comments. You/they should do that out of simple self-interest if nothing else. Even when people did do something bad, we usually forgive and unban them if they take responsibility for it and promise not to do it again.
Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community. To do otherwise would be not only wrong but stupid, since it would risk losing the good faith of HN users. Why would we do that? That's the only value HN has. It's precisely by not doing it that we can keep HN in the high esteem of this audience, and therefore keep YC in a kind of special relationship with users here. That's what makes HN valuable to YC (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
> There could be a ton of reasons why your friend's Show HN got demoted, ranging from setting off the flamewar detector, the voting ring detector, getting flagged by users for some reason, getting downweighted because it broke the Show HN guidelines, getting downweighted because it broke the HN guidelines, various kinds of spam or abuse behavior (the worst of which is buying upvotes from spammers, which people unfortunately do but which typically causes their post to get buried immediately, and their account and site banned on HN).
"We have half a dozen opaque excuses" isn't the argument you think it is. The fact is this site shouldn't even exist due to the crystal clear conflict of interest between running a vc firm and a startup "news" site. That's not just journalism 101, it's common sense 101. It's not defensible.
> Not only do we not lie to the community, we try never to do anything that isn't clearly defensible to the community.
If you take one step outside the HN/YC echo chamber, you'll find that most people know that this site is a scam and heavily weighted toward promoting YC companies as that's the only reason it exists. Only a very, very foolish person would believe otherwise.
Also LOL that you hid this reply! It's because there is no defense for a vc firm pretending to run a "news" service and you know it.
I didn't hide any of your posts - I've been unhiding them*. They are getting filtered by software. I've also been turning off the user flags that you've been attracting.
This has become repetitive, though, so I'm going to stop doing that now unless you have some specific information to offer.
* because we moderate HN less, not more, on YC-related topics [1]. Less doesn't mean zero, though.
You're lying. Next time you nuke one of my friends Show HNs off the front page, I'll send them a link to this comment so they can call you out publicly. YC partners don't hold grudges and work their network against people who have damaged their ego??? Bull fucking shit. I know YC companies call in hits all the time on people as they brag about it relentlessly. You have all kinds of levers to pull here and you pull them without hesitation. The YC network spreads false information about competitors all the time. They kill deals, focus companies against those they don't like and generally are one of the least ethical group of people operating in the tech space (and that's saying a lot). That you'll get on here and make an outright brazen lie saying that this doesn't happen is very par for the course.
None of this is true. I mean, I suppose there could be an invisible YC cabal acting completely out of character in ways the rest of us never observe, but that's so unlikely, it would be a Russell's teapot. I have never observed anything along those lines, and I've observed countless things going the other way.
I've also helped many (dozens if not hundreds by now) non-YC startups with their Show HNs, so the truth is actually the opposite of what you say. The goal is to have HN be the most interesting community it can be, because that's how HN serves YC's interests in the long run (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The global optimization is worth more than the sum of any local ones. We try never to do things that aren't defensible to the community, because the good faith of the community is the only asset HN has. Risking that would be dumb.
You should really supply specific links if you're going to post accusations, so that readers can make up their minds for themselves. Otherwise the community here is going to compare the extremeness of your claims to their lack of any specific information, and discount them.
When Ford motors started cars already existed, when Facebook started social networks already existed, when Google started search engines already existed, etc.
In my opinion, getting demotivated for not being the first or being “the one” that came up with the idea prevents way too many people from starting their own thing.
In the end, execution and adoption are what really matters. In general is better to copy something and improve on it than trying to invent something completely new.