_imba_'s comments

Interesting, I'm in the industry and secured lines of credit, and insurance is definitely viable alternative revenue generators for a userbase like this and actually dovetail nicely. Wishing you all the best.

Interesting. I haven't gone to recruiters but I would assume going as a group makes their jobs easier. We've done some moderately successful startups (small non-US market, though) in the past, but I don't think anyone has the appetite (or ideas) to realistically bootstrap again right now.

I was in Tokyo on a short business trip once. I had a interpreter and back to back meetings with Japanese businesses for a few days. At one stage I realised that people are reacting slightly to what I am saying before the content was translated. I asked the interpreter about it and she said that they all had English as a school subject and that most Japanese people under 50 can understand English, and are too self-aware about their accent to even try to converse. I've never been able to verify this and would love a more informed opinion.

Not the same person, but this sounds very similar to an experience I had. Payments fail all the time for various reasons, that isn't really the issue. It's what happens after that.

In our case our bank blocked transactions to AWS and Google one night. I contacted the bank and Google, made arrangements and successfully paid the account within a day. I just retried the AWS payment and had no further issues with them.

I had issues with Google for months. Google kept sending me threatening messages about how our accounts suspension is imminent. We'd then follow up with a human, have it resolved, only for the same thing to happen weeks later. Note that there were no outstanding payments, and no failed payments again.

After ranting to friends in startups it became apparent that this was not an isolated incident, and it's always Google.

Most newest gen premium headphones can do that, Sony MX4 included.

I'm not sure if I've ever found a worst piece on HN. There may be valid criticisms of Hyperloop tech, but they are not in this article. It's just low effort sarcasm and strange arguments based on a very silly strawman.

No nothing dodgy at all. Whatever we did wrong it isn't obvious.

Yes, we're doing all obvious advertising channels, and have some cash to put behind it. Dominating SERPS with very little effort since we're doing long tail. Our particular long tail means people are searching for very particular terms and buying the single item they are looking for, with this behaviour the business seems very viable(and exciting) by the growth google shopping gives. All other channels combined are very slow in comparison. We're continuing trying to optimise those in the meantime. But we've learnt the newish(around here, at least) advantage Google shopping (and amazon search, probably) gives in insane compared to the typical alternatives.

I don't think this is quite fair. I'm from South Africa, hardly a backwater. It's a problem anywhere where people mostly search to buy on Google. In the western world it is anywhere Amazon has local 3rd party sellers and relevant adopted user behaviour. Many places don't have that to the point where it's a real alternative to Google for search-to-buy(I don't know the real term to describe this behaviour) ads.

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently:

I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresenting ourselves or a product with no details on what we did wrong. We went through the T&C's in some detail and we think we did everything they asked, and we have no idea what we didn't do well enough. We also checked in with every single client and we had near perfect scores on trust pilot, I can't recall a single incident with a client.

We've been contacting Google almost daily but almost never been able to find a human to talk to. Through unofficial channels we've found a few people in Goolge but whenever they gave us any advice on what to do it's always "off the record" or "you didn't hear it from me". Something is very rotten.

There are always replies on here about not betting your entire business on Google. Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried. For search-to-buy there really just aren't any alternatives and if Google decides to lock you out your business is basically dead. Lucky for us it was a side hustle. Here in Africa e-bay and Amazon aren't options.

More scary, since then we've found TONS of businesses in our country who have suffered the same fate in the last month, and many are well-established, popular businesses now facing existential threat.

It's incredibly scary that Google's moderation bots can be a single point of failure for a business employing 20+ people.

I am confused by the criticisms "a superimposed set of abstractions. Nothing more." and "nothing to do with its processes". Surely that is exactly what this kind of framework attempts to achieve? ie ways of abstracting to make better decisions when the problem is too complex or soft for process-level understanding.

> Progress in physics was much faster in the early 20th century when it wasn't so fascinated with deep space.

I don't think measuring progress is tivial enough to make that assumption. It's also unfair to blame a fascination with deep space for any slower progress, things are more complicated than that.

Getting humans onto anther planet asap is one of the most important things one can pursuit for humanity. The earth is a giant single point of failure

He gets predictions more than most. You should go read that book. There are many chapters on the incorrect weight people add to the outcome of correct predictions (or incorrect predictions, if that is what suits their agenda).