
I Can’t Stop Winning - jashkenas
https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
======
daturkel
As far as I'm concerned, Pinboard is the most reasonably managed digital
product I pay for. No feature creep, no bloat, no overthinking it.

While Maciej notes accurately that death comes for us all, he's already
outlasted the theoretically more powerful competitor that was Delicious.

I would say "I'm excited to see what's next for Pinboard," but I suspect the
future is all it needs to be: The service will continue to function as
designed, and that's all I really need.

~~~
e40
If I use Chrome and the sync of bookmarks for that, across devices, why would
I use Pinboard?

All these comments have me wanting to try it, but I'm not sure what I get over
what I have. Thanks.

~~~
docbrown
First, you rid yourself of the Google Overlord that is tracking any and all
input from its user — You! On a more serious note, Pinboard can be
incorporated into so many different services, even his competitors. Do you use
Instapaper? Pinboard will sync everything you saved so you don’t have to worry
about losing it after reading it. Same with Pocket. Or it’ll automatically
grab embedded links from Twitter posts you “liked.” He makes it easy for you
in import all of your Google bookmarks if you export them to HTML.

His API is a modified version of Delicious.

You have a built in Notes path that can also store (x) amount of notes.

Your account is as public or private you want it to be. You can make all
bookmarks and user page private by default, or you can alter which tags you
want to be public, etc. Best of all, nobody is tracking you. You can be an
invisible user with a backlog of bookmarks spanning years and you will
_always_ have access to them.

Quick disclaimer: I’ve been using Pinboard since 2013-2014, before the new
subscription model, and am fortunate enough to have paid an onetime-fee.

~~~
kasey_junk
Don’t forget search...

------
simonebrunozzi
> What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes
> for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash
> of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.

I love this sentence, and the spirit of it.

~~~
Arete314159
Yes, it's that slavic pessimism combined with Gen-X fatalism that really gets
me.

------
zwaps
Some quotes from his website which is, by the way, deliciously non Javascript
garbagy

"The site is reliable. Outages are rare and brief. The site has servers in San
Jose and Sacramento, for better resiliency in case of a California
earthquake."

Front page review: “One dude in his underpants somewhere who has five windows
open to terminal servers.”

"The site has a sane business model that would be familiar to your
grandparents."

"As every year, I'd like to thank all Pinboard users, old and new, for their
support and their custom. I know there are lots of rival bookmarking services
out there.

I will consume them, one by one, like I consumed the pie."

Can't really overstate the coolness of this dude

~~~
notatoad
He's also a great follow on twitter

~~~
paulcole
The funniest thing I remember was him talking about how upset Germans got when
he said he didn’t do invoices. If they persisted, he’d send a blank invoice
with instructions to just fill it out however they wanted, which just made
them even madder.

~~~
ido
the tax offices here require invoices. i personally don't care at all but
unfortunately i do need to pay taxes.

~~~
klingonopera
This is how the rich and poor are segregated in Germany. The system is to take
too much from you, and let you reclaim that, theoretically once you've proven
that you had tax-deductible expenses.

But it's enough to just "talk" to the "Finanzamt" to already get a baseline
€1000 tax-deductible expense, without even needing to show them anything.
Which makes me wonder, why not just deduct this from all income taxes, if
you're willing to grant it to everyone, without any proof.

Sorry for sounding cynical now, but "dumb" and "busy" people are naturally
disadvantaged from this system. That's not exactly... helping anyone. Except
those who profit from the motto "A sucker born every minute!". But even they'd
have more advantages, if their "suckers" had more cash at their disposal...

~~~
marcus_holmes
Australia has the same system. They'll give you $1000 without proof. I worked
out that it's utterly pointless hoarding receipts and doing all the paperwork,
because the difference between what I could claim with paperwork and without
paperwork is maybe a couple hundred bucks. Not worth the effort.

~~~
girvo
And yet my partner got $7k back this financial year. It’s certainly not as
simple as all that. I’ll be getting a decently large sum, though that’s
because of a mistake I made!

~~~
marcus_holmes
nice :) I'm not saying it's not possible, and sometimes beneficial. But for
me, it wasn't worth it.

------
smacktoward
_> A one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I
would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business.
You're not going to feel any worse._

+1

~~~
jamiepenney
Not to pitch in with low-value "me too thanks" style replies, but by god does
this sum up the last 18 months of my life. Every time I feel comfortable, bam!
Something new to keep me awake at night. It's one part exhausting and one part
exhilarating and I'm not sure if I could go back to salaried work at this
point.

~~~
ci5er
> I'm not sure if I could go back to salaried work at this point.

I hope it's a choice!

I applied for a salaried position at IBM (I think?) for a Product Management
position that I could have nailed, through a head-hunter that I knew was
covering the position.

He said: "No way, dude. I wouldn't do that to them or you".

I said: "Why not?"

He said: "Because you are a startup guy".

I said: "Hey - I used to work at Motorola. At the global level. Scotland,
Malaysia, I lived in Japan, Phoenix and Austin. I was a great corporate
droid."

He said: "Used to be. Now you would just get a couple of paychecks into
feeling less homeless-bound, and tell your boss or your boss's boss to fuck
off and die."

I said: "No I wouldn't".

He said: "Yes you would - and you can't change my mind".

Whatever.

In my town, I am apparently branded "a startup guy".

~~~
joejerryronnie
Dude, I think the headhunter may be right. Just imagine when (and this is a
when not an if) you are demanded to do an insanely stupid thing which you,
your team, and your customers hate. It makes no sense but must be done asap.
When you ask for justification, it’s because the VP, who never leaves his
office except for extra long work lunches with the other executive staff, said
it must be done. No logic, no reasoning, no arguing - just get it done. You
have two choices:

1) Eat shit and do the stupid thing while a small part of you dies.

2) March into the VP’s office, tell him to fuck off, and walk out like a
champ.

Which option do you choose?

~~~
ci5er
Ha! I remember a meeting at Intel, Scottsdale, I think, with their old
x386+DRM/crypto-coprocessor chip, where one of the directors (VPs?) got up and
stood on the conference table, and urinated on the stupid proposal.

It was very rude but pretty declarative!

In any case - I would never have the moral rectitude to make that kind of
statement.

~~~
mcv
I certainly wouldn't be making a statement in that particular way. But it's
impossible to misinterpret, that's certainly true.

------
snazz
The author is really good at writing. I read the article about December 2010
and found it equally funny and well-written as today’s article.
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/)

~~~
sanjayts
Yup; I get a strong very "P. G. Wodehouse" vibe from his writing.

EDIT: After looking at his resume, I'm fairly confident his writing style is
heavily inspired by Wodehouse (he mentions about Jeeves and Wooster!).

~~~
sk5t
Yes, and there are also hints of P.J. O'Rourke, I think, or perhaps a smidgen
of more lighthearted Hunter Thompson.

------
jccalhoun
I am glad to see him write that he is trying to win back customers. I use
pinboard a lot and was worried it was going down when a post appeared here
saying that parts of pinboard weren't working and the owner wasn't responding
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749330)

~~~
idlewords
Parts of Pinboard now are working!

~~~
jhayward
Back when archiving was getting pretty slow / iffy my plan, which I never put
in place, was to simply buy another archiving account every month until the
weight of either money or guilt simply overcame whatever obstacle was keeping
it from working.

Many thanks for all the hard work you put in to the "other" activities you
were involved in. Like, really. Thank you.

------
bigiain
The gentleman has all the "cool" cred covered:
[https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm](https://idlewords.com/2016/05/shuffleboard_at_mcmurdo.htm)

(I've been following his blog for ~12 years now, ever since I first read this
one:
[https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...](https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm)
)

~~~
codeisawesome
Just clarifying, by 'follow' do you mean a manual poll by refreshing the home
page? I don't even see an RSS feed... and he has no personal Twitter account,
I don't know if @Pinboard is the a/c to follow (I don't want the site news, I
just think his personal views are cool and his writing is extremely funny).

~~~
jeromegv
[https://idlewords.com/index.xml](https://idlewords.com/index.xml) is the RSS
feed

~~~
bigiain
Feedly managed to find that for me. Works fine.

------
NelsonMinar
I continue to love Pinboard. I run a linkblog through it; it's not so much
bookmarks for me as a small link-focussed blog. The HTML view (Pinboard's own)
is ugly, but it works great in an RSS reader or as a Twitter / Mastodon
account fed from the RSS.

It's so nice to have a simple, reliable service. I got a little cranky when
the various Pinboard APIs started suffering some scaling problems, I think
during the hiatus Maciej mentions as he was busy trying to save America.
That's OK, we survived, although jury is still out on whether America will.

~~~
etherdoc
I would be interested to learn more about how you run a linkblog using
Pinboard.

------
patryn20
Man it’s so great to see sites like this continue to thrive.

At the same time, I am once again amazed at how little revenue a publicly
touted successful project makes.

~~~
quickthrower2
$200k/y. One developer? Digital nomad friendly? Freedom from the pointy
haireds? No real need to do 40h/ week? I think that is damn fantastic revenue.

~~~
patryn20
Oh I’m not disputing it’s good for a single developer along with the freedom.

It’s just that these projects always get talked up as huge successful life
changing products (like Bingo Card Creator and appointment reminders etc) and
then have really small revenue numbers attached to them.

Don’t get me wrong, kudos to the developers for building something people love
and that give them the lifestyle they want.

I just think these projects are often overhyped to seem more than what they
actually are: lifestyle projects.

~~~
idlewords
I mean, they are life-changing projects. This is not my lifestyle, but my
life. What more do you want?

~~~
jholman
Frankly, if you don't have a bespoke Pagani Zonda with your initials in the
model name, we're collectively unsure that your lifestyle has enough style or
enough life. Thinking it over, I might not even invite you to my birthday
party.

------
personjerry
> What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes
> for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash
> of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.

Is he shutting saying he's shutting it down, or just saying that's the future
eventually?

~~~
austhrow743
Its a service ran by a single person. He croaks and its gone with no warning.

You should anticipate that as how your relationship with any non-big name
service you use will end because that's how it will. It just won't be working
one day, then the next. You'll hit the internet to find that the person
running it died a month ago and the business with them.

~~~
idlewords
I agree, with the caveat that the same holds for big-name services. It's only
the mode of death that's different (bus accident vs. "our incredible journey"
blog post).

~~~
austhrow743
In my experience the big names tend to give a warning but i agree that its
best to plan for instant death in that case as well.

~~~
gloflo
He just gave you that warning.

------
davidscolgan
> A one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I
> would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a
> business. You're not going to feel any worse. You've already got the main
> skill set of staying up and worrying, so you might as well make some money.

This hits very close to home, guess I might as well embrace it! I'd probably
be just as anxious at a normal job anyway and am determined to figure out
anxiety management.

~~~
gtirloni
If you do, please let me know :)

~~~
davidscolgan
One thing that helped me recently - I realized that my work is not a
reflection on my value as a human being.

I grew up in a semistrict religious context, and regardless of whether it was
intended, I internalized that everything I did was a reflection of my
righteousness and value as a human and even to a degree my worthiness to be
accepted into heaven.

I've since stopped practicing that kind of religion, but I realized I have
still been treating say my freelance work as a _moral_ question - if I do it
right, I am good, if I mess up, or take too long, or there are bugs, my
emotions still process that as if my eternal soul is at stake. Leading to,
procrastination, stress, and withdrawing from communication because I'm afraid
of punishment.

I had some really good conversations with clients lately, just being upfront
about my fears of blowing timelines and admitting to withdrawing, and they
were very understanding and to hear them acknowledge that this stuff is hard
and that I was doing a good job was massively motivating.

Hopefully most people don't have this issue, but if you do, it was very
relieving to even just realize this is what I was doing, and am working with a
really good therapist and a business coach to process and work through it, and
I'm already seeing a lot less stress as a result.

------
wyclif
Who remembers hacky, plastic lawn chair, Mac mini-era, old-school del.icio.us?
Those were the days:

[https://live.staticflickr.com/8/10416310_7dabcdc326_b.jpg](https://live.staticflickr.com/8/10416310_7dabcdc326_b.jpg)

~~~
pvg
Aerons were deliberately shoved out of frame for that. The days change less
than one might suspect.

------
Tomte
"That is because I spent all of 2017 doing tech organizing, and then all of
2018 fundraising for the Congressional elections, and customers grew irate"

Oh yes. I was so close to giving up on Pinboard and hosting my bookmarks
myself. Badly, probably.

I hope he doesn't find another hobby that is taking exactly 100% of his time.

Since a few months everything is back to normal, and that is great. But this
episode showed the transience of things.

------
formatkaka
Great blog!

For anyone using Pinboard, Why would I use it instead of pocket?

I have been using pocket for a while and the overall feature set and
mobile/browser support is great.

~~~
tedmiston
Check out [https://pinboard.in/tour/](https://pinboard.in/tour/). Pinboard's
feature set is more geared towards bookmark management which happens to have a
read later integration. It's quite different than Pocket.

------
LeoPanthera
I have a lifetime account that I don’t have any ongoing payments for. And now
I feel a bit guilty.

~~~
wyclif
I do too, but as an early adopter (long before the Delicious "sunset" fiasco),
I did quite a bit of evangelizing for Pinboard. I'd like to think that some
people signed up for paid accounts because of me, but I have no way of
knowing.

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I
would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business.
You're not going to feel any worse. You've already got the main skill set of
staying up and worrying, so you might as well make some money

Love it :-)

------
hutzlibu
"you have to help your fate along"

Good old grandfatherknowledge. Reminded me of, "the gods help those, who help
themself".

Usually nice things do not get presented on a silver plate to you. You have to
act.

------
slowmovintarget
"Nine Fives Software"

I feel that.

------
jackfoxy
I have been a Pinboard user since 2010. In fact, I got in at some point where
the service offered free service forever. Thank you. I'm also a contributor to
the drop in active users. I stopped using it for several years. Don't know
why. Started using on a daily basis in the last year. Feel like I still don't
use it nearly to my full benefit. Simple. Does basically one thing. For a
service to be pretty close to perfect, it has to be simple.

------
SanchoPanda
I find it funny that the number of tags per bookmark has been falling. I've
also increasingly given up tagging things in favor of relying on global
search.

------
ernsheong
I'm Jonathan, founder of PageDash, a Pinboard alternative.

If you are looking for a Pinboard alternative, do try out
[https://www.PageDash.com](https://www.PageDash.com) (free tier of 30MB/month
storage). Essentially, PageDash archives full pages for $29/year. We have been
in business since 2017. Open to feedback. Thanks!

~~~
idlewords
My feedback is I will crush you.

------
wenbin
Pinboard is such an inspiration to my (one-person) entrepreneur journey!

------
_pmf_
Thank you for you work and please avoid those buses.

signed, an anxious customer

------
eridius
I didn't realize Pinboard is only 10 years old. It feels like it's been around
forever.

~~~
idlewords
Well, at its inception it was a retro reboot of 2003-era delicious, so at no
point did it feel new and fresh to anyone.

~~~
deejaybog
What with the Botoșani reference, what were you doing in Romania?

~~~
idlewords
My girlfriend was in the Peace Corps and I was freeloading.

~~~
deejaybog
Ah, thought for a moment you have relatives there or something. Was born
nearby (Iași) and have good friends/college mates from Botoșani.

Ever thought about leveraging your skills/instincts/fame for much bigger
impact other than through politics ;) ;) ? I'm in Seattle tired of big corp,
cooking up with other ex-pat Romanians a service to disrupt the traditional ad
model while preserving privacy and data ownership. Email is in my profile if
at all interested.

~~~
gloflo
LOL, that gave me a laugh. Thank you for the entertainment.

~~~
deejaybog
Care to share what you found so funny?

~~~
gloflo
Well, first I almost got a bingo for 'leverage', 'impact' and 'disrupt'. And
then I realised you asked _idlewords_ to join you in _ad_ business. That's
just funny.

~~~
deejaybog
Didn't intend it to be funny but good for you.

Hating ads is misguided. Ads aren't going anywhere and network effects keep
users and advertisers coming to Facebook and Google. The solution we see is
going after the ad money with a different business model and use cases that
give users control over their personal data while serving advertisers needs.
That is disruption and idlewords could leverage sorry use his success and
relative fame to more impact sorry effect on changing the status quo.

------
SanchoPanda
I subscribe to the blog via RSS, but it no longer updates with new posts it
seems.

------
shaunpud
This community is so toxic!

One minute something doesn't look "awesome" so it's shite, next minute
something looks "plain jane" and it's amazing.

Seriously guys, if this site was launched today it would be ripped to shreds,
but it isn't, obviously because it does it's job, and is well known on HN, but
if someone was to launch a bookmarking service with no react this and
javascript that, it would be shot down so hard.

Fuck this, so many ideas people have but don't want to progress because of
Silicocks.

P.S. I'm a paid member, and it's awesome!

------
slyall
I use it casually. I got one of the "lifetime" accounts so it doesn't cost me
anything and I put the odd bookmark into it. Best tool for the cost. I wasn't
really sure about recommending it to other people though since it felt like it
was being neglected (I have a pet bug on the site that is 2 years old -
probably a wontfix ). Feels better that he's giving it a bit more love.

I used to follow him on twitter but I get enough US politics already without
following somebody who tweets about it 24x7.

------
Wump
I would love to read a book or longer-form content written by this author. His
writing is just really funny, while also being sort of philosophical and semi-
informative. Love it.

~~~
neilk
You’re in luck: [https://idlewords.com](https://idlewords.com)

------
keyle
There are many wise quotes in that post, but this is my favourite.

> My grandpa sometimes said "you have to help your fate along".

------
adnans
I use pinboard daily, not so much to save bookmarks but to browse new content.
I wrote a small hacky script to filter out links on "recent" page with more
than X amount of other users that have it bookmarked too. It's not all new
content but if people are bookmarking it, it must be at least worth a look.

------
dstaley
I loved Pinboard when I was using it, but my biggest pain point was the lack
of a decent Android app. It was cumbersome to get websites from my phone's
browser into Pinboard. I'd easily pay $2/month for a polished, modern Android
Pinboard client.

~~~
kej
I've been happy with PinDroid. It adds Pinboard as a share target, so you can
bookmark things from any app with a share menu (including your browser,
obviously).

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pindroid](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pindroid)

~~~
dstaley
I was specifically thinking about Pindroid actually! It hasn't been updated in
over two years. I had some weird issues where the back button of the share
intent wouldn't correctly return me to the app I was sharing from, instead
bringing me to my bookmarks. There were a few other little small things, but
the fact that it's not being maintained anymore doesn't give me hope it'll
ever be fixed.

~~~
kej
Not sure how it would fit in your workflow, but you can avoid that back-button
bug by using the "read later" share intent (it's the pin with a white
background instead of blue). With that one you get a toast message saying the
bookmark has been added but you never leave the original app.

That does mean you don't get to add tags at that time, though.

------
fastbmk
Try [https://fastbmk.com/](https://fastbmk.com/)

It's a free alternative :)

------
hartator
> business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I would say if
> you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business. You're not
> going to feel any worse. You've already got the main skill set of staying up
> and worrying, so you might as well make some money.

Never thought about this that way!

------
ForrestN
Hey Maciej <3

Why did revenue go down? Think it'll go back to growing in 2020?

~~~
slim
it does not look like revenue is going down. he has made 222 in 2019 while
we're still 6 months from the end of the year.

~~~
idlewords
No, the revenue is for the completed preceding year.

