Some newer TLDs like .dev or .app have a tiered pricing structure. So it becomes less economically feasible to squat the best names. They also released them in stages when the TLD first went live.
Realistically this problem will never be solved while we only support fixed domain extensions and act like some are more legit than others. Like what gives DNS providers the right to say what's a valid extension or not? Just support any string ffs.
Not to mention the country restricted ones that you can only get if you're a resident, like bruh.
That said, part of the issue you flag is just perception. It's like going with a financial services firm that has a Wall Street or "Fifth Avenue" address in New York City versus a firm that has an address in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Both might be fine but we often attach significance to an address (even if its just a mailbox).
To your last point, I think its ultimately good that (many) Country restricted TLDs have geographic restrictions.
Nothing inherently, it doesn't have the “full of spammers” stigma of .xyz and so forth, though some seem to think it inherently means non-profit/non-commercial (sort of true, it was defined as for organisations not fitting in other tlds where .com was one of those and intended for commercial use) and think .com therefor looks more serious.
Also: if you take the .org and the .com is already in use, be ready to have the name taken off you if they get successful, or for some of your users to mistakenly go to the wrong place. To avoid one of those things happening later if the .com is available now you could buy both, but then the availability of the .com becomes the deciding factor again not the .org and you are paying for two domains.
One of my hobbies is the diametric opposite of this approach, I enjoy trawling domain auctions for short .coms that don't include any dictionary words but still sound fun. I love names like Quora that are meaningless but still somehow feel like they should be a real word! I believe the academic category for these is "lexical gap". During the pandemic I got a little too much into it and so now I'm actually busy working on a site to list them for sale - https://wuzmo.com - the plan is to make it essentially a cheap brandbucket.
Squatting has an intention behind it. You don't call ancient coin collectors deplorable squatters because they are taking limited stock off the market.
I think DALL-E would be a good way to come up with these. The nonsense text it adds to images is usually pronouncable and somehow always seems to match the theme you give it. GilaWhamm.com, anyone?
I have found amazing domain names by just checking auctions daily. I got both file.io and impervious.com on Flippa for around a few thousand each. I've started companies on both of these domains.
If you just check once a year, you likely won't find a good one. But if you check almost daily for years, you will eventually strike gold.
Interesting question! Well no one has complained so far, but I should definitely run them all through Google Translate to see. I could see this happening quite easily.
The one issue I did have was buying a domain on Namecheap auctions only to find it had been used very aggressively by spammers before going to auction. It made me think of the recent top HN post about how you could push a suspect domain to someone within a registrar and then implicate them without their knowledge. The Namecheap auction system happily let me buy the domain, but then as soon as it was in my account it got suspended and I got various emails from their security team about how many blocklists it was on and how I'd have to submit extensive documentation to get it unsuspended etc. Thankfully the support was helpful and now I check domains more thoroughly before I buy them...
Yeah. At my last job we made a pivot table tool feature into our project and we named it Pito after Pito Salas, thinking we were so clever and finally came up with a slick little branding for a feature. But that's slang for penis in Spanish... name lasted for a couple of years before it was replaced.
I can confirm the VAT handling works really well and I even have customers thank me for supporting VAT properly. Particularly EU customers that have higher expectations for this compliance. My original reason for starting to use Paddle for my SaaS was actually just because Stripe wasn't available in my country and I'd prefer anything to PayPal/2Checkout, but now after approx. 18 months I don't think I'd switch if Stripe launched here tomorrow.
They've also added an "Invoicing" system now so we can also be as easily VAT compliant for enterprise deals that will only pay by wire.
Impressive project, nice work! I'd use the `outdated` command but even just the basic listing of installed packages across all managers looks useful to me.
It's a move in the right direction but I can't help but feel that this is an example of a massive corporation getting ahead of regulation with a watered down version of right-to-repair than Apple suddenly having a genuine change of heart...
That said, my sincere hope is that this move doesn't dampen enthusiasm amongst people considering switching from Macbooks to Framework laptops. We desperately need a computer manufacturer that puts repairability at the core of their design process and Framework has made such a high quality start that it even with their first attempt it doesn't feel like a compromise!
If you care about really owning your device and being able to repair it take a close look at the caveats Apple may include in the actual details of this programme versus with Framework.
Yeah, the M1 hardware sounds great -- Apple continuing Jobs' vision of locking down the platform is not so great. n+1 here for leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Is there a scenario where you feel this would have an effect on Framework?
I ask because it seems like those are two different customers.
The issue of hivemind thinking in forums is that it projects a uniform idea of what customers value while ignoring the obvious demographics. Apple gets a lot of scorn on here because their products suit an audience which differs quite a bit from the typical HN commenter.
If using this forum as an example, everyone wants a fully editable device, and wants every vendor to make such devices - but actually not buy from said vendors because they’re evil. I find this idea of people wanting to control the design of devices they’ll never buy to be such an interesting concept - that’s also why I don’t see the Framework buyer ever being allured to Apple’s laptops.
Following on from this I fully expect this move from Apple to be seen here as anything but a good thing: such as tokenism, part of a grand evil scheme, or similar conspiracy-level plan. This is in spite of a high-level view of Apple steadily expanding repair options over the last decade.
Not to get philosophical, but it does have a Friedrich Nietzsche feel to it all: that apple’s actions don’t matter, they’ll always be construed into being a scheme.
Basically I understand the idea of serverless in this context as abstracting away everything related to managing & maintaining the database - i.e. anything like VMs, containers, OS, DB processes etc.
So you can set up a PlanetScale MySQL DB and use it just like a normal instance of MySQL, but also keep adding data from one small set of records all the way up until you have gigantic petabyte volumes of data without having to do anything beyond sending the data through your MySQL connector.
In theory it should just keep working in a performant way from 100 user records for your new startup to the scale of running parts of Slack. No choosing bigger and bigger AWS RDS instances as you scale, no need for autoscale strategies in case of traffic surges or worrying about replicas for perf etc. etc.
As someone who is honestly quite resistant to parts of the serverless paradigm this offering actually appeals to me. I prefer running my own fleet of VMs and traditional PHP/Nginx type stack but have already moved to AWS RDS to abstract away some of the replication complexity required to achieve high availability DB with minimum hassle. This seems like the logical next step and despite being allergic to kind of hype you mention finding this is something I'd definitely try out before moving other parts of my infrastructure onto anything like Lambda.
Now we need seperate access controls, seperate networking tools, seperate monitoring and diagnostics. It's becoming apearent to me that this kind of stuff is the scam of the century.
I hate to be the stereotype of skeptical HN reader but I think this headline oversells the article.
Specifically for me it doesn't speak at all to the differences between starting a SaaS like this as a team of founders versus as a solo founder. As a committed solo founder all I can say is that choosing solo founding is not something to be undertaken lightly!
My startup CV is now roughly an equal length of being on a team of 4 founders and the current solo founder situation so I see the differences all the time. There are a lot of positives to both options but to write an article like this and not blend an awareness of the trade-offs between the two makes it much less interesting.
I've really struggled with being a solo founder despite it being a strong preference and learning to face every aspect of the running the business with a very conscious awareness that you're +1 in certain things and -1 in others is the only way I've found to make it work.
The idea you choose is a big part of this. I've seen thinking about your idea & solo founding preference described on twitter by @warikoo like this:
2x2 matrix
X-axis: Do you have the core skill reqd for the startup?
Y-axis: Are you a control freak?
Y,Y: DON'T have a cofounder
Y,N: Could get one, but with complementary skills
N,Y: Hire people, might make them cofounders later
As someone who runs a currency data API [1] I can confirm this is strongly the case - even to the point where relatively often I get messages to the effect of "we believe our company uses your service - how do we access it and can we use your logs to help us identify where in our infrastructure requests are being sent from...".
Users from clearly legitimate businesses sometimes sign up, start the billing and then just disappear. No response to emails, support tickets etc. I'm often tracking down billing teams 18 months later trying to convince them they really do use our API, and that if I can't get them to renew their billing details I'll have to eventually disable their access due to non-payment and then their infrastructure will no longer have up-to-date exchange rates! In these situations I sometimes disable access for 24 hours and then re-enable it to see if this drums up a dev I can speak to. It's quite a process but I've won some "customers for life" by saving them from downtime they would have had if I just cut them off.
We registered this domain in 2010 back when there was actually something called the "exact match bonus" in SEO. Basically if your domain exactly matched the searched keywords Google just automatically gave your site a massive boost in that SERP!
I can see why they did this since there were only a few TLD's back then compared to now and thus owning the .com for a specific keyword was a legitimate signal. I can't remember exactly when this got deprecated as a ranking factor but it was very useful for the first few years!
Over the years I've accumulated the domains of failed competitors that had more punchy names and toyed with the idea of rebranding but don't think it's worth it. The SEO risk of a rebrand is substantial concern.
Thanks - I really appreciate that! On one hand it is partly this, the uptime/reliability/LTS endpoints have been the focus of many years of work.
However, that said, I think in the majority of the actual cases I'm describing above the cause is more a combination of 1.) the surprising percentage of tech companies that appear to be in a state of continual organizational dysfunction and 2.) how API's are inherently a background type of thing like lloydatkinson wrote!
In about 1 in 10 cases I'd also say the cause is actually because of merger/acquisition - which is just always a complex and organizationally challenging process.
Considering how big Apple is already ($80 billion per QUARTER!) the idea that they could at some point still decide to add a search engine and the associated revenues is amazing to me. It obviously wouldn't be a 1-to-1 switch with Google traffic coming from Apple devices but if they seriously attempted it I don't see how it wouldn't be a very substantial business very quickly.
Presumably this payment is based on Google's evaluation of the search ad value attributed to Apple devices but only $3.75 billion per quarter still seems low for how much iPhone search traffic there must be? Especially considering the relatively lower level of iPhone ad blocking vs. desktop I see anecdotally in my non-tech friends. I imagine though that both companies send in fairly deadly teams of apex negotiators for a deal like this so it must be close to representing the true economic value of the tie-up...
> if they seriously attempted it I don't see how it wouldn't be a very substantial business very quickly.
I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph. Are you saying Apple could build its own search engine?
Possibly it could. But it's not just about throwing money at it. Do you remember when Google didn't brag about how big a DC footprint they had? It was all hush hush.
Microsoft struggled to bring up a search engine. They even licensed part of it. Some of the queries sent on live.com (as bing was called back then) were actually sent out to third party search providers.
Then Microsoft started bragging about how they're able to operate just like Google, too.
... then Google turned on search-as-you-type, or whatever it was called. The one where you see search results after every keystroke (since removed, because it was kinda pointless). That feature was basically a big FU to Microsoft, saying "we can 10x our search traffic overnight. Can you?".
Google reportedly stopped being secret about its capacity because the secrecy was there to prevent Microsoft truly understanding the scale needed to compete. Once they did understand, Google stopped being so secret.
Apple is years behind. They don't have shovels in the ground. They don't operate services at this scale.
Sure, they are not a small shop. But they outsource so many things in this space.
Microsoft started from a much better position, but they still took years to not be a joke in this space.
But yeah, with Apple building DCs, you should maybe expect them to have a reasonable replacement ready in 5-10 years, if they really put their mind to it.
And then there's the ad side. It's not just the tech (where Google has a 20 year head start), but also the business deals (where again 20 years head start), the inertia of existing advertisers, and integration of search ads and display ads.
But of course, with a closed ecosystem, and actually being the biggest private company in the world, they will absolutely get more monopoly accusations for integrating search, app store, and phone, than Google has.
So no, you can actually throw billions and billions at this problem and still fail. It's not obvious to me that such an investment will have positive ROI for 10 years.
I think the vast majority of people would not know the difference between a Google search and a DuckDuckGo search. They use search to shop the top few retailers or find the actual website of a company, but I doubt many are doing the deep dives that it might actually make a difference to use Google with.
Google’s moat right now is Maps, YouTube, and Drive apps, I think.
Or at least that is my family’s experience. Google search and gmail were easily replaced.
You're focusing on the quality of results, though. That I think is actually the easiest problem, to the point where I didn't even list it.
Remember when Google+ launched, and Microsoft as a joke created a clone in a week or so? That was completely missing the point about what's hard.
Or how "make a twitter clone" is basically the "hello world" of web apps. If it's just you and your friends on it, actually yes you can make a twitter clone that you can basically not tell the difference, and you can do that in a weekend (another weekend to make the app).
To make a twitter clone for 10 people you can run it on your laptop. For 1000 people you buy a VM in some cloud. For a billion apple devices you need world wide pops, fibre deals, plots of land, construction companies, resource planning, legal teams, government contracts, etc...
Again, Apple could possibly do this. But this is not their core skill. And do you know what happens when a company throws billions on not their core skill? Google+ happens.
Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to handle Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for technical reasons?
I do not know enough about what goes into delivering people search results worldwide. I just know that my family’s experience switching to DuckDuckGo has been seamless, but I also do not know how representative our search behavior is.
> Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to handle Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for technical reasons?
Right, I think they would not. Not without A LOT of work, on all sides of the business.
If you have a 1qps service, you can scale 100x[1] fairly easily. If you have 1kqps[2] then scaling that to 100kqps is a different beast alltogether. Every single design in load balancing decision, TCP termination, request routing, peering aggreements, geolocation, backend load balancing, and failover, can be assumed to be wrong.
Or if not wrong, then at least untested and many parts will not survive first contact with the enemy.
And that's just to get the SEARCH working at all.
Remember, in order to replace Google's $15B you probably want some sort of revenue, too. And revenue of $15B+cost of service.
So… ads?
Google has buildings and buildings full of people doing nothing but ads. They have presence in pretty much every major city in the world. No, I'm not just talking about the engineering offices that are well known.
To ask Apple to create a search engine is actually to ask them to create "A Google" (except Cloud).
According to the latest earnings report Google spends about $160B and Search ads takes in about $120B. These numbers are not comparable, since they are different level line items. But it should be kept in mind that a very naive reading of this means that yes, Apple has $195B in the bank, but if they tried to "just create a Google" then they'd be broke in just over a year.
Especially since it would be MUCH more expensive and risky to build this in one big shot, than to organically grow it at great profit over many years.
Maybe better to get an earnings report from Google pre-cloud, when it was essentially an ads company by income and investment. Of course it won't be comparable unless Apple decides to also do an ad network. Which they probably would because if you have the tech and the customers, then it's free money.
But you said technical reason. So let's scratch ads, and never mind the money. Yeah, they could be able to do that. It's not clear to me how much of their search index they actually own, though. They say they have a crawler[3], but it sure also reads like "we're just a frontend for Bing". Truth is probably somewhere in between.
So what do you think MSFT would say if Apple started hammering Bing (albeit indirectly) for search results, sans ads? Or even with ads?
So duckduckgo is good because they don't actually have their own index. Bing took years to not be ridiculous (it's good now). We saw Cuil completely fail, even full of ex-googlers.
All this to say: Writing their own search engine is hard (see Bing, and how much MSFT plowed into that to make it work), and DDG can't just be used as a backend. And switching to DDG is just throwing $15B in the lake and giving it to someone else for free.
[1] that's the order of magnitude difference between google and ddg according to
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-alternativ..., of course that doesn't take into account that this would only move apple traffic, but I like the round number.
[2] 1.5B per month is about 578 per second, and with seasonality that it at least 1kqps at peak.
I assumed it would not be difficult to scale. I was asking knorker why they thought it might not scale, as that is what I thought their comment implied.
Admittedly they don't have to vertically integrate, and they wouldn't pay list prices if they use any other cloud.
But honestly, if the idea is to get off of Google search, what exactly is the gain by relying on a third party albeit at a lower level?
You have to ask yourself: Is running a search engine the best thing that Apple could be doing with its time? Is the fact that they don't run their own search engine a danger to their core business?
In the end it comes down to projected cost and income, and obviously I'm not in a position to calculate either one for Apple, not being in the room with their ruthless negotiators.
But yeah, the starting point of dropping google is losing out on these $15B. So already that's what you have to work with. And then the cost of public cloud egress traffic, which is famously ridiculously expensive.
Your comment seems a bit like "why don't they just…", which seems a bit naive when dealing with business at this scale.
I think that Apple would only consider building their own search engine if they had the ability to generate (close to) these $15B per year in value.
Since Apple wants to keep its privacy-friendly brand, these $15B would have to come from something other than ads; and I can't think of another realistic source of revenue. But who knows, the whole "vertical integration" aspect could unlock new scenarios...
I can't find how much revenue Apple is generating from iAd, but all hints point to a fairly small number. I'm guessing that Apple keeps it around to "help" small app developers who build free apps.
And more importantly, iAd seems to focus on advertising apps themselves (like a game ad inside another game). This is a far less intrusive model than a general-purpose search engine (where you find all kinds of advertisers).
Substantial how? Apple doesn’t sell ads and I’m pretty sure that antithetical to their business model, if they did their advantage in other ways (privacy which sucks anyways) would dry up.
Apple build advertisement profiles on iOS users, and allow App Store and Apple News ads to be targeted using said profiles. They are estimated to sell billions of dollars of ads per year. Their tracking is, as far as I can tell, not opt in. Instead it's an opt-out hidden in an obscure settings menu, with the sign "beware of the Leopard" on the door.
So it absolutely isn't antithetical to their business model. The opposite: Apple's business model is to lock users to their platform, and extract rent out of as much of their economic activity as possible. If anything, third party advertisers making money from iOS users directly without giving Apple a cut is what's antithetical to Apple's business model.
It seems basically guaranteed that within a couple of years Apple will be doing another attempt at launching an ad network for third party apps and/or web sites (Safari-only) using the same tracking data.
Monetising mobile search would also require Apple to develop a very strong advertising platform. Doing that would put them in direct conflict with themselves over privacy, either they'd have to compromise privacy to benefit their ad business, or their ad business would be significantly less attractive to advertisers. In practice this would make it very hard for them to monetise search anywhere near as well as Google can, maybe 5 to 1. So if mobile search is worth say $30bn to Google, it might be worth $6bn to Apple.
Combined with the high costs of building both a search engine and an ad platform, and this would result in a massive revenue hit for Apple. I don't see how any vaguely realistic numbers lead to them benefiting from it, at least for quite a long time.
They don’t have to necessarily deeply monetize to be successful, apple could play dumb and offer ad results based on search terms only. DuckDuckGo does similar and I do wonder at scale what kind of revenue this could end up being. Google doesnt behave in an entirely pro-business way as well. Google ads are not market efficient at the moment, with competitors taking keywords that are company names for example, forcing businesses to spend to be the first option even if the user searches your business’ exact name. Eliminating just a few insulting Google search behaviors and limiting data tracking could be a nice revenue stream
I find it interesting that you consider the mob-like behavior of Google forcing everyone to bid on their own name "not efficient". It seems to me like they are really efficient (at their goal of extracting tons of revenue from everyone and their dog).
This is a great initiative. Interestingly, manual washing machines like this were briefly an incredibly hot commodity in even wealthy suburbs in my home city Cape Town, SA during the extreme drought and water shortages we had in 2017/2018 [1].
They used substantially less water than a traditional Samsung or LG washer and actually worked pretty well. Considering the draconian water rations that had to be put in place people were very keen to speed up washing while still very strictly controlling water use. The local brand that people used was called Sputnik [2]. Now that the drought has broken people often talk about how crazy in retrospect our water usage was before and I even know a few who actually still use these washers because of the efficiency. That said - most folks have gone back to machines now that the water situation is stabilised...
Those washing machines are also popular among cruising sailors for whom water efficiency is particularly important. While you can use seawater for washing clothes, it's not very nice and if you don't rinse the salt out, it will eventually damage the clothes.
I have read of some folks who just use a big bucket with a lid. They poke a toilet plunger through a hole in the lid and pump away like churning butter.
This guy (https://medium.com/@amd_2793/my-million-dollar-domain-hobby-...) actually used Google's rankings of domain value from .app to then squat domains on two other flat priced TLDs - io and ai!