Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | tailspin2019's comments login

> Visionary accounts cost ~30 euro/month (assuming yearly subscription).

To be further pedantic, Visionary accounts are priced at ~30 euro/month. They likely cost Proton significantly less than that.

I would also suggest utilisation of those free accounts would be much lower than your estimates (though I appreciate I’m just countering your subjective opinion with one of my own).


Oh 100%. It's not a for sure thing but at the same time I know those plans also historically have been auctioned for a lot of money and as a result the people who end up with them tend to use them quite extensively.

And their cost is probably a decent bit lower than the sales price but given Visionary plans aren't sold directly any more to my knowledge, there's a chance the profit margin on those accounts dipped below a feasible amount and they've just kept the plan for existing users out of goodwill.

That all to say, those lifetime plans are definitely super expensive and probably make up a respectable amount of the raffle income but their exact cost to Proton themselves isn't exactly clear.


It's not pedantic at all. They cost so much less that it renders the entire calculation meaningless. Almost all of the cost of a consumer VPN account is user acquisition (a cost they don't bear in this case). Operations cost peanuts - maybe $1/mo, if that.


It's worth noting that the service isn't just a VPN but also a mail provider and cloud storage provider. And the visionary plan comes with several terabytes of storage.


Thanks for spreading the word. I hadn’t heard of Aider before and I’m now going to give it a try today.


Your experience doesn’t sound a great deal better and also puts me off this provider. 24-hours is almost synonymous with no warning in my book. How many contact attempts can reasonably be made in that time?

If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high.

If that email goes to junk, or you’re unwell and not checking emails as frequently (given - I assume - that many of Hetzner’s customers are individuals) or any other number of reasonable situations, you’ve effectively had no warning before service termination and deletion of data.

I don’t mind cloud providers acting on suspicious usage patterns or abuse reports but there has to be some kind of due process or it just ends up unnecessarily destroying goodwill in a brand/provider.


>If it’s a single email - then even if it doesn’t get caught in a Spam filter that’s still a short period of time to notice and respond when the stakes are so high.

What size company would you have to be where a 24 hour notice would not be problematic? I'm actually curious as to opinions here, and understand that obviously part of it is how well managed are your employee leave messaging etc.

I know one company with a very good manager and I think they would have managed it with 5 people being in the group of people who would handle this kind of thing (keeping track of all services etc. Obviously only 1-2 person does this but redundancy so it falls back when they are on vacation), slightly over 30 people in company size altogether.

If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.


it's equally stupid for a company of 10k. Even if you have poeple watching inboxes it still has to get routed up some kind of management chain before a response can be considered.


   If you're a startup of 3 people for example 24 hours might be game over.
Yeah, I was considering them for my part time projects and some small PaaS-ish stuff. Not now.

Realistically to have 24/365 email coverage you'd need like, full-time founders or at least a couple of paid employees.

For what I was considering, I will be a "founder" but I'll still be working my day job. So effectively that is > 16 hours per day (work + sleep) I need to dedicate to the day job. While I will generally be able to respond within 24 hours, I can't 100% guarantee it.


Given the dense amount of wisdom packed into this comment I checked out your profile. Both your current projects look extremely impressive and polished. And viable! Keep up the good work! It’s inspiring to see that in light of the obvious difficult lessons you’ve had to learn along the way.

Having learned many of the same lessons as you I can 100% backup everything you said in your “sum it up” paragraph!

The only caveat I would add is to the “make an MVP with AI”. I think MVPs generated directly out of ChatGPT/Claude are so easy now (or at least it can appear so on the face of it) that many people are just barely going beyond that - but to any experienced eye, that approach is quite transparent and can look very low-value (even if the idea is actually a good one).

Now if that person is a skilled salesperson then that might work.

But, for most people, I think it’s still very important to demonstrate good instincts, taste and strategic/commercial understanding when building such an MVP. And that means editing and shaping the output just enough to meet your vision for the product. So to agree with you - definitely, 100%, use AI as much as possible - but don’t assume that you can put zero work in on top and have that MVP be effective. Because the 10 year old down the street has the exact same tool as you - so if you are just relying verbatim on that tool’s output- it’s going to be hard to stand out.

I’d still definitely agree to spend as little time as physically possible on the MVP - with the above caveat.

Having said all that… a lot of historical wisdom on the topic of MVPs has been turned upside down since gen AI became mainstream, so on the flip side you could argue: create 1000 MVPs in an hour, publish them all, see what generates interest…*

Hmm.. I think I just argued against my own point.

* (I’m not really seriously suggesting anyone do this, but I’m also not entirely discounting this as an approach either…)


    > Both your current projects look extremely impressive and polished. And viable!
Appreciate it and thanks for the positive feedback! But those are two of the multitudes of side projects I have collected that I haven't figured out how to monetize. My "day job" is at a VC-backed startup that is going through a protracted wind-down because it also failed to find a viable GTM. So yeah, I've learned some hard lessons in multiple facets of my career!

    > Now if that person is a skilled salesperson then that might work
My rule now is that if I'm building something for fun, I just open source it. If I want to make money, I'm going to first figure out who's paying and how do I get them to pay. AI MVPs are easy now to let you flesh out an idea one level up from a slide deck (in fact, maybe this is its own startup idea? Use AI to build an MVP from a deck??).

I had a non-technical friend recently spin up a full blown startup with customers using nothing but Claude + Replit (not plugging, but just sharing to show that it's real: https://bullship.co). He came up with the idea after talking to a friend and finding that indeed, the market had only two major competitors who both charged too much for many smaller customers.

The code is throwaway in my book, but it's enough to validate the idea by actually getting people to pay for something they can use. It won't scale, but that's fine; by the point that he needs it to scale, he'll be able to hire people with more skill to fix or rebuild it.


https://turas.app video is confusing, what I got is I have to do the planning myself using your app. Why would I do that instead I can get Chatgpt do the planning for me with some keywords on what I like/want.

You also have 20 different icons, that is so confusing for the user, get rid of most of them and just keep maybe 3 or 4.


Thanks for the feedback!

It's not an itinerary generator; it's a replacement for people who use spreadsheets to plan meticulously. Definitely not for everyone!


Speak for yourself. I’m not aware of any memes that I am unaware of.


You are not alone


Judgement is an animal instinct as you say, but I think it can also be a cognitive habit.

Our self awareness - in theory - allows us to change our habits, or at least temper them.

So my experience of this is that my default animal instinct is to automatically judge people in a negatively biased way (which I think may come from our evolutionary instinct to try to predict danger - or if not, perhaps something encoded in me specifically at an early age) but I have tried to adopt the conscious habit of overriding this initial instinct with “mediating thoughts” like “what do I really know about this person?” and “how would I behave if I were in their position”.

I also try to simply remember my discovered self-knowledge that my instinctive emotional response - pre-thought - is to be distrustful or overly negative. Just keeping that in mind helps automatically attack the judgemental thoughts as they come up. I guess it helps me recognise the pattern and not trust those thoughts.

I’m quite convinced that I’ve done this for long enough now that my “habit” of automatically judging people has lessened over time.

The instinct is still there, but better cognitive habits have been overlaid on top.

That said, I still feel I’m about 5-10% along in terms of progress compared to where I’d want to be! (And in reality there is no “end” to this work).

My outward behaviour towards others is generally “good” - I think - but I find myself often frustrated at the instinctive negativity in my head which I have to proactively counter - each and every time.

And because I’m human, I sometimes (ok… often) forget to.


All-In is one of the few podcasts I listen to where I don’t exactly like the hosts and disagree with a high percentage of what they say. But I find them interesting, and their recent shilling for Trump gave me a bit more of a nuanced insight into what they see as Trump’s strengths.

I take everything they say with a huge grain of salt. It is incredible how confidently they talk about certain topics where it’s clear even to an uneducated listener that they only have a surface level understanding.

Their flip-flopping on AI - from it being the best thing ever to being completely overhyped and underperforming - and then back again - has been amusing.

I enjoy their insights on slightly less hyperbolic topics like SaaS business models and other more mundane things. There can be some genuine nuggets of wisdom there.

Jason sometimes pushes back on the political stuff and attempts to be a voice of reason (relatively speaking - though I’m revealing my bias there) and that can sometimes prompt some actual interesting debate. I probably wouldn’t be able to bear listening at all without him on it.

Mainly though I think it can be good to listen to people you don’t agree with every so often.


> Their flip-flopping on AI - from it being the best thing ever to being completely overhyped and underperforming - and then back again - has been amusing.

One could tell they had no idea what they were discussing on many occasions, specifically on AI.

Jason and Chamath said AI prompted them to start "coding" again while entertaining the notion that AI will eventually replace all programmers in a matter of months. One day, AI will help the best to become "10 X" engineers. Another day, AI is a dud.

Friedberg said multiple times that everybody would create their Hollywood movie thanks to AI when there is little to no indication people would ever do this, leaving aside the production capability of LLMs to do so.

He has no problem with large language models trained on copyright data but didn't even consider the ethical implications, conflating how humans and machines learn, which is rather simplistic for such an intelligent person to say. He then retro-pedaled in a later episode, not on that specific point exactly, but when he realized he would prefer his businesses and investments to keep their proprietary licenses and hard-earned know-how.


Agreed - I find it useful to get unfiltered insight into how ultra high net worth people think about the world and view/approach things and what sources they use to form opinions.

I also find it useful to compare/calibrate how much about finance that's not VC specific (i.e. macro economics, interest rates, commodities, etc.) I know relative to ultra high net worth people.

It does require active listening to spot the subtle/not subtle bias, errors in logic etc.


> I enjoy their insights on slightly less hyperbolic topics like SaaS business models and other more mundane things

I used to listen more but I agree with this point.

The most fundamental insight that I took from the show was in the episode 80 when Chammath talked about the “hard conversations” between founders of late stage companies and employees about liquidity.

At that time I was working in a late stage SaaS company and after some research I just discovered that our stock options were not only underwater but the founders screwed most of the early employees.

Honestly I started to lost interest mostly cause of the focus about US politics and Ukraine.


They make me feel like becoming super rich is achievable — even they could do it!


There's even government infrastructure for it in most states and countries! They're called lotteries.


It is! Just let yourself be evil and get your MBA


The part i find most fascinating is that when JCal does push back, the YouTube comments are so disproportionately telling him his opinion is wrong (in a venomous way), he is ruining the podcast, Sacks is running circles around him, etc.


That's the best description of the All-In Podcast I've read.

It's often infuriating to listen to someone being confidently wrong, but occasionally there are some good insights.


> I think it can be good to listen to people you don’t agree with every so often

I 100% agree. However I don't think it's valuable to get information from people who misrepresent data like All-In. In fact it can be counterproductive to listen to people who are misinforming you. If I can't trust my sources then it hurts more than it helps. This goes the other way too - you should fact check the people who are on your side. In my experience though, when I try sampling new content from people who are biased towards Trump, it's easy to find hypocrisies and misinformation.


I don’t have an opinion on your first sentence but happy to try and engage in the second one…

As a Brit looking in from the outside, it’s hard for me to understand how choices have been made in this election, but if I were to attempt a charitable take, did Trump win because he tunes in to some sort of low level anger/resentment/frustration felt by a chunk of the population?

Whereas the Democrats, more polished perhaps as they are, have failed to make that connection sufficiently?

And that connection - or whatever it is that the population picks up on from Trump, outweighs the “obvious flaws” that his detractors may point towards?

Ie they don’t vote for him because of his hyperbole and “questionable” behaviour, they vote for him in spite of that - for other reasons.

I can see the Democrats didn’t help matters by pushing Biden to run when he clearly shouldn’t have, though perhaps it was the lesser of two evils at the time (from their point of view) given his proven record of being able to actually beat Trump.

Happy to be corrected if this is a bad or naive analysis!!


You experienced Brexit. You know how this happens.

Maybe 10% of voters have opinions on policy, platforms, parties.

The remainder vote based on identity and some vibes. Their ability to link politicians with their actual policies is worse than a coin toss.

Democracy for Realists [2016] https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...

Us political hobbyists second guessing campaign strategies and decisions is mostly pointless.

Because final results more or less match the generic ballot. True, in close contests, there's some roshambo over individual states (cuz electoral college). Which is how Trump won 2016.

What happened with Harris v Trump? GOP party (self) identification is up (3% since 2020). Harris didn't pull Biden numbers. Pretty simple.

The real (campaign) questions, IMHO are:

Determine if Dem turnout (GOTV) in 2020 was the anomaly and 2024 is the actual norm.

Understand Latinos flipping from Dem to GOP.

Can a Democrat be the first (elected) female POTUS?

Now that Democrats are the minority party for the foreseeable future, what's the plan?


> relatively minor disability

“Research shows that adults with ADHD are 5 times more likely to attempt suicide. 1 in 4 women with ADHD have made attempts on their life, while men are more likely to end their life. Accidental death is also common.”

http://www.berkshirehealthcare.nhs.uk/media/109514702/suicid...


Now show me the suicide statistics on people suffering from permanent paralysis of their limbs.


Yeah, we tend to die earlier as well (65 on average, I recall reading). Turns out chronic stress from managing the disability is not great.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/child-development-ce...


Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

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

Search: