I've tried various reading trackers, but they felt ugly and slow, or they didn’t have my book, or they overwhelmed me.
This is a minimal reading tracker that makes room for what's important: actually reading. No social features, no reviews, no notifications. You can try it today with no account.
All data stored in localStorage, Lucene for search on OpenLibrary’s catalog, with a local cache of popular books in the client.
Maybe the paper is bad, but the critic needs to find a better way to present critisism.
Use paragraphs.
Don't lead with "The paper is awful and makes no sense whatsoever." At that point you have already lost the goodwill and attention of the author.
It reminds me of a time early in my career where I was tasked with analysing a financial model that a 3rd party company had created. At some point in the meeting, I said 'look, it's just terrible'. Crickets. I learned a valuable lesson about how not to talk other peoples' work - work that they have spent countless hours on and are probably proud of - even if it's not very good. The way I spoke about their model was not conducive to helping create a better model, it was just an excuse for me to fling shit.
Not discrediting the post, which I think is worthwhile and generally pointing at the right thing, however:
> I launched something last week. 14 people signed up — no ads, just a couple of posts. 14 real people who didn't have to. That number is tiny and it felt like something. Then I sat down to think about what it would take to grow it and I couldn't look at that math for very long.
They launched a paid social network, with no content available without joining a waitlist.
This would not have worked 20 years ago either. Bootstrapping the content for a _free_ social network is incredibly hard. But a paid social network where the only differentiating factor is that users are humans, and there is no activity in the network? Not going to work.
>as someone who's been building for the internet for 25+ years, this is the first time that i've ever felt like it's very difficult to make money building new things.
I understand it was already the trend 25 years ago, but way before that you really weren't expected to be able to make money building things for the internet.
The internet itself was simply not designed for that to begin with.
Building things where the internet was an element was already getting bad enough.
The force from within to return to "normal" baseline may yield, but probably never go away.
>The people winning mostly had a head start. Or they have money. Usually both.
As said every millennium since institutions and finance have existed.
>Show HN, the one place the internet was supposed to notice if you built something real.
No no no no no. This is for people who want to share with a much more limited audience than the entire internet.
HN readers did notice a lot of times especially when the project is amazing, OTOH sometimes the latest little side project from somebody well-known, or random interest could be shown.
Naturally the most popular things are free since that's inherently the most compatible with the internet anyway.
But real marketing and promotion is supposed to be far away from this site. If you're trying to sell to "the internet" you've got the whole rest of the internet for that.
HN is not supposed to be enough to be widely noticed at all, if you've got something that's worth marketing, YC is there the whole time and might be able to get you making the most of the internet and then some. Especially if you need a moat of money.
But why do so many people think the only business plan is to prepare to be sieged by a small enough horde which can be deterred by a moat anyway?
>if you're not already moving, you might never take off.
>The cost of acting like it isn't true when it is: permanent.
As I first mentioned, the internet being in place so people can make money off of it is the thing that just wasn't true to begin with, lots of people had some pretty good workarounds for a while though.
I've been watching businesses from startups to large corporations lock in high costs the exact same way for decades before the internet ever came around.
But not everybody has every single global development / news event IVed into their veins. Many of us just don’t keep updated on global news such that we may not be aware of an event that happened in the last 3 days.
Important news tends to get to me eventually. And there is usually nothing I can do about something personally anyway (at least within a short time horizon), so there is really very little value in trying to stay informed of the absolute latest developments. The signal to noise ratio is far too low, and it also induces a bunch of unnecessary anxiety and stress.
So yes, believe it or not very many people are unaware of this.
There are about 20-30 death penalties imposed each year [1]. In contrast, a homocide occurs roughly once every 30 minutes [2], approximately 17,000 per year.
So it is incredibly atypical for a homicide to result in the death penalty.
The death penalty is reserved for crimes involving aggravating factors - committing other felonies simultaneously, e.g. rape, or mass murder, torture, prior convictions, child victim, etc.
In other words, this news seems routine, probably designed to outrage people who are unaware exactly how _uncommon_ the death penalty usually is.
I've tried various reading trackers, but they felt ugly and slow, or they didn’t have my book, or they overwhelmed me.
This is a minimal reading tracker that makes room for what's important: actually reading. No social features, no reviews, no notifications. You can try it today with no account.
All data stored in localStorage, Lucene for search on OpenLibrary’s catalog, with a local cache of popular books in the client.
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