Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | alemanek's comments login

You can use GitHub issues for each blog post and then use it for comments. See here: https://www.richyhbm.co.uk/posts/using-github-issues-as-comm...

No it is clearly that as the main technical founder of Hashicorp his endorsement means something here. Where as other causes are outside of the area of his expertise.

China: https://www.barrons.com/news/china-sentences-former-asset-ma...

Vietnam: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636

Now both of those countries have their own issues but they know how to deal with corrupt bankers


It’s hard to know what is really true in those situations. Are those bankers actually corrupt? Or were they victims of political targeting? Or was their corruption authorized by a higher power until they were ready to be disposed of? I personally think rule of law is much greater in the US and most of Europe.

He said, somehow forgetting that the reason we're even discussing this is the heinous and well documented corruption of a US-based bank.

Not really. If a banker in China is taken down for political reasons, it’s not evidence that China is more adept at upholding banking corruption laws than the US.

They could just as easily have trumped up treason charges. Whether the charges are valid or not is irrelevant.

Both of these countries are clearly sending a message. Get too greedy, corrupt, ..etc and we will kill you. Whereas in the US there are 0 real consequences. It is the message that is important here.

The US needs to start putting executives involved in these crimes in federal prison with very long sentences. Fining them doesn’t work they need to lose their freedom.


No, that’s really not clear at all. You are still assuming corruption is the cause of these actions.

China consistently ranks far worse in terms of corruption on pretty much all organizations that do such evaluations.


And you're assuming political backroom antics. Neither assumption is borne out in any way beyond the fact you seem to think China is inherently scary because it's China.

What we do know for certain is that Well Fargo, based in the US, has a long and well documented history of financial tom-fuckery that has been proven, in US courts, to be tom-fuckery that they were given absolute, by any standard you'd care to apply, slap-on-the-wrist punishments for.

In contrast, China sentenced a man to die for his financial tom-fuckery that was proven in their justice system to be tom-fuckery. Whether or not you agree with that being his punishment, it was certainly, IMO, more appropriate to at least punish the person responsible rather than parking liability in an LLC, issueing middling fines, and calling it a fucking day. And considering how many times Wells Fargo (and others!) have had these kinds of cases come up, be proven, be slapped with fines that don't even remotely approach a real consequence, and have gone on to do additional tom-fuckery, I'd say it's well established at this point that the fines aren't doing shit.

Like, to be clear, I'm anti-death penalty and that would include bankers, I don't think Wells Fargo's CEO should be shot for what he did. That being said, if him being shot was a possible outcome, I have a strong feeling he'd be much more hesitant to do financial crimes via his business.


> And you're assuming political backroom antics. Neither assumption is borne out in any way beyond the fact you seem to think China is inherently scary because it's China.

I’m not assuming anything. You’re the one claiming that this factoid means something. The onus is entirely on you. A good way to demonstrate this would be something that shows China is systematically less corrupt.

Russia also has arrested individuals for corruption. is that supposed to be evidence that Russia is less corruption friendly than the US?


> I’m not assuming anything.

Of course you are. You're assuming the USA is less corrupt than China or Russia. Where's your prooof for that?

If you like, you can start with explaining how the Wells Fargo case documented in TFA demonstrates it...


By the same token: you are making these statements with the same level of certainty as "water is wet": the US is less corrupt because duh. However, the main reason for your argument is mostly marketing: the US has successfully marketed itself as "free" and "fair" over the years. Whether or not this is factual is very much debatable.

Oh, and don't bother looking up studies by US-based think tanks ranking the US as awesome at fighting corruption. Because duh.


There are many studies that are not run by the US. Even the US based one’s tend to put the US at maybe the bottom of the top quartile. There’s many countries that score significantly better. I think it’s kind of stupid to argue that corruption is more prevalent in the US than China, but mostly I’m just here to shit on the argument that a cherry picked conviction is worth anything as an argument that corruption is less tolerated.

Targeted convictions on charges of corruption are like the hallmark of corrupt governments. It’s not a useful data point at all.


Pretty much all of South America has some version of this as well. Colombia has “transferencia” which is awesome and even as a foreigner I could pay someone using cash at an ATM machine.


I am actually your target market. We are looking to buy a house early next year. But, one thing that put me off is that you don’t list what fees you charge, is it flat rate or a percentage, ..etc.

In the FAQ I see this but no mention of the standard terms of the buyers agreement:

> Do I need to sign a buyer agreement?

> We will let you know if you need to sign a buyer agreement. You will for sure need to sign a buyer agreement when you submit an offer through us, but otherwise we can work out a timeline.

I know you just launched so not assuming any bad intent but it would be good to share pricing information for the services you offer. I have had to deal with lots of “Call us for pricing” in my day job. So, for stuff like this I just move on if I don’t see at least a price range listed somewhere upfront.


Other relators do not put their fee pricing on their websites so we decided to follow suit. We have the same pricing model - negotiable. But we provide better service.


This says to me, "we are just like other realtors" and makes me less inclined to use your services.

Transparency is a killer feature for realtors that would set them apart from the masses. AI is a nice to have feature.

> We have the same pricing model - negotiable

Nobody wants to start off with an adversarial discussion with the person they are trying to hire to help them.

Also, I'll point out that on your front page, you say:

> We are more responsive (24/7), provide better service, and offer better prices.

But here you are saying you offer the same prices.


True, I'll update the website to reflect our updated pricing model


FWIW services like Redfin list their fees right upfront.


Fwiw redfin is also tiny with 0.78% market share and slim or negative profits


How much market share do you have?


Why would we mimic Redfin, who's a fairly small & declining player in the real restate brokerage space, when we could mimic features of much more successful players like Keller Williams


Rarely read from someone so immune to constructive criticism, that is so full of himself, it is reason enough to avoid anything he touches.


Because your mission is to make home buying easier, faster, and far more enjoyable?

Sounds like you just said you don't care about that, and your real mission is to maximize your profits.


Some realtors do in fact list their commissions and fee structure:

Some examples from the market we are looking in.

1. Flat fixed fee and refunds extra: https://arrivva.com/

2. Minimum 1.25-1.5% but refunds 50% of any commission paid above: https://www.walawrealty.com/buy

Minimum for me to work with a company is transparent pricing. Even a range based on levels of service is cool. But, I am not going to waste time on a phone call with no clue as to fee structure.


The whole agent commission business is already fully shady and at least one class action brought that to light[1]. Both buyer and seller agents benefit from higher home prices and from percentage based commission despite the work being the same regardless of home price. The customers are always the victim.

https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/what-the-...

I've been very pleased to use an attorney on a simple hourly fee who did not have such gross conflicts of interest.


We are not participating in the race to the bottom. There are a lot of 0% fee realtors out there! Try https://www.turbohome.com/, I've seen them on social media


Frankly your responses on this page have convinced me to stay clear of this product.

Sorry, I guess.


Thanks for feedback. Our priority is on good service


I was so excited when I saw this and now I'm disappointed. This kind of statement "quit on trying to win clients that are trying to get the best price" creates a false dichotomy of those who are trying to pay nothing and those willing pay whatever. There are tons of customers in the middle who are happy to pay for important services but think 30K (3% in high COL areas) is too much for the services rendered.

That being said, I think as long as you are honest that "better pricing" isn't your goal then fair enough. It isn't the service for me, but I'm sure some folks will certainly be excited about it.


> We are charging for the service.

> Our service is rendered by an AI.

I really don't know what their eventual value-add is. I doubt anyone's going to be paying 2.5-5% to househunt with an AI.


They say in theOP "Our mission at Modern Realty is to make home buying easier, faster, and far more enjoyable."

But here in the comments, they say their mission is to get rich with AI. Tricky! I wonder which claim is right.


Your communication style in this thread is adversarial and curt, yet you aim to provide good service. You clearly have a very, very long personal journey ahead of you if you want to satisfy the good service objective.


...So being up-front with your pricing, even if that's a "our fees are negotiable but tend to be (flat rate or percentage) around the X range" is a "race to the bottom"?


So 3% and even lower touch service, oh yea “the seller pays for it” right? Buyer Agents are already grossly overpaid for the amount of actual work involved IMO, you so much as pointed that out in your stated value prop except found a way to keep the greedy commissions and not actually improve anything for the buyer.

There’s flat fee agents that will do exactly this without AI and at a cost of $500-1000 where I live. You should do that and go for volume. Edit: Oh and their offer doc includes a clause that effectively negates the 3% buyer commission and nets seller the same amount without letting their agent keep the full 6%

If you could normalize this, you will have truly disrupted the industry. As is, your an ai substitution for status quo


I don't know a single home buyer who likes that though. You have an opportunity to differentiate by moving away from the obnoxious dynamic that exists today.


I’m curious about the “market charges X so I’ll charge X too but with a better service.” I’ve seen this elsewhere, too.

Isn’t the point of replacing a human agent with software that your margins are better and can charge less to the end user?


> But we provide better service.

How would a prospective customer know that?


We let you drive your own process and interpret real estate data with AI. We target customers who are looking for these in their Realtor


> interpret real estate data with AI

What does this actually mean though?


The texting service we provide works similarly to texting a regular realtor. You can text it "Is a $1200 HOA fee per month high for san francisco?" and it will do the searches and compare the local properties to tell you an answer


So do you actually do real estate agent things: make contracts, review contracts, communicate with your client, negotiate on behalf of your client?

Or are you an information service specializing in real estate information?


I'm a licensed agent in CA and am particularly interested in the answer to this question.

There's very strict regulation around unlicensed individuals performing activities requiring a license (negotiating, showing property, etc). Thus I would be surprised if they have AI doing this for a client!


That doesn't in any way address the question the other commenter was asking?


Perhaps he meant better user experience.


Realtors do in fact list their fees. More and more of them are, especially after the August 2024 changes


Struggling realtors list their fees as a feature. Look through any of the top realtors in the bay area from last year: https://www.theleading100.com/honorees/theleading1002024/, you'll notice none of them list their fees. Here's the websites of the top 2 realtors in the bay area from last year, to save you some clicks: https://www.kerinicholas.com/, https://go2marin.com/


Aren’t you trying to be better than them though? People need to know that they are saving money with your new and unproven service that could go awry in so many ways.


People buying consumer products typically believe in price signaling. We've actually had clients believe in our services much more at full price than when we were discount a couple months ago.

The default question when we charged a discount price was - "but what am I missing out on if I choose you?" - and even when we said "Nothing!" clients bought into the discount pricing signal already and could not be swayed. This question is never asked at full price


“We can't tell you what our product costs beforehand because we try to extract as much as we can from you.”

It was actually worse than that. It was Tesla’s GPUs and the board refused to even address it. I was actually a bit surprised that something hasn’t come of that yet.


I wrote an ansible pipeline that pushes config backups, json and ndjson, to a GitHub repo. It just uses the “git” cli tool to clone the repo, commit any changes, and push those commits to “origin/main”.

Only piece that you have to be a bit careful with the guarding credentials or token you will be using for the “git” commands. In my case we use Hashicorp Vault for secrets management so I can just checkout the token to use from there.


Got it. CI/CD tools coming up often as a possible solve. Time to do some YT vids!

Appreciate the guidance on credentials, fully agree on using a vault.


Broadcom is just a Private Equity firm cosplaying as a tech company. This is just what they do. They don’t care if it dies as long as they are able to get every last drop of blood from their -victims- customers.

The company I work for started migration planning right when the acquisition gained approval. We all knew what would happen and have a “no Broadcom” policy when it comes to software.


Yikes, looks like CF is off my list of things to use. Super scummy


If you read the article, the OOP was running a gambling site so it is fairly reasonable for Cloudflare not to want their IP blocks to be associated with that.

It’s a communication failure on CF’s end, but it’s not an ordinary situation.


It is. To quote my comment from back then:

And all of that is fine when communicated properly. Even if OP is an unreliably narrator are we to believe they also left out some of CF's emails?

To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:

> As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow

Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.

The right email would start with something like this:

> Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")

> This plan would also include these features:


I did read it and understand that they are running a gambling site. CFs handling of it though where they instead took this as an opportunity for high pressure upsell is the scummy part.

Why wouldn’t they allow them to pay monthly for enterprise? This would allow them to use their own IPs, eliminating the risk to CF, and allow for an orderly migration off the platform if they wanted. Forcing an annual contract with a massive price tag is again just scummy sales tactics.

Also after reading that and searching a bit it looks like this isn’t the first time that CF has had these types of “communication failures”.

EDIT: a few words to clarify what I meant on the lack of a monthly option in this exchange.


They just asked for more money, they did not ask them to leave the service.


Thats what the casino tells a gambler, too.


They did, until they mentioned they were speaking to Fastly. Then, bye bye proxying and protection!

more of a goodbye than an ask :wink:


> It’s a communication failure

Ten thousand percent. When I read the article earlier they made the email something to the tune of "CF engineering says your account is seriously messing up our network. contact us to resolve this"

and it was a sales call. scummy as hell to get your kpis


Use old.reddit.com it is a lot cleaner


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: