> It’s available right where employees already spend most of their day — in Microsoft Teams.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
duxup · 2h ago
Yup. Immediately a negative impression from me.
Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
MrJohz · 10m ago
Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
ValentinPearce · 1h ago
Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.
I think the cracks that ultimately led me to quit corporate IT and pursue being an artist were first formed when leadership insisted that the entire company switch to Teams under the guise of saving $9 a month per user.
GenshoTikamura · 11m ago
Gosh, I just recently talked our management out of taking the Teams turn after Skype sunset was scheduled, in favor of another solution. I thought maybe I'm too biased against M$ due to all those coworkers' accounts being blocked for no reason without any way to reinstate - but reading through this thread is a sure confirmation I was right
daheza · 3h ago
Our company is forcing us to drop slack and use teams. It’s going to be terrible. But hey it saves 600k per year. Never mind that our customer experience will become terrible as team communication fails.
dowager_dan99 · 2h ago
We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.
aaravchen · 11m ago
The stream of consciousness posts is my pet peeve.
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
ramon156 · 29m ago
Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane
hersko · 43s ago
$x/per-user/per-month. If you have many users it quickly adds up.
supportengineer · 15m ago
That's a huge financial incentive to build an alternative.
aaravchen · 7m ago
I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
seethishat · 2h ago
I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails?
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
dowager_dan99 · 2h ago
Teams is so tightly integrated into the MS ecosystem and 365 that it can essentially bring down email and even office apps. Example: PP decks always want to open in Teams by default; every meeting in outlook wants to be a Teams meeting, etc.
ctkhn · 2h ago
It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.
bambax · 10m ago
That's a great strength of the OP: instead of running away they decided to fix things, one feature at a time, and got rewarded for it!
jollyllama · 1h ago
Hey, think of the countless souls this author saved from Sharepoint.
DontchaKnowit · 32m ago
Im confused seeing all the hate for teams here. Whats so bad about it? Its a simple calendar and a messenger. Its not perfect but its not awful.
Jira on ghe other hand.....
unixhero · 2h ago
Well this is how I make tons of money, so no depression from me just acceptance... people said the same of Jira and Confluence earlier
mattlutze · 23m ago
Honestly I'm here for it, because it's an option for a market of groups that don't otherwise have the opportunity to deploy this kind of capability. Teams feelings aside :)
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
codegeek · 2h ago
Necessary evil especially at Enterprise Level. But I agree. I used to think JIRA gave me nightmares until I came across MS Teams. It is that bad.
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
youniverse · 2h ago
I haven't used teams but if it's so bad there has to be a good open source alternative? Let's build one???
duxup · 2h ago
People use Teams because they're already using Microsoft office products and it is "free" in that way. Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.
inversetelecine · 15m ago
We had to start using it because all of our clients demanded it. Managers/Owners don't say no to big money.
Suppafly · 1h ago
>Then it's entrenched and folks can't imagine doing things any other way.
It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.
sceadu · 2h ago
Seems like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT
cj · 1h ago
Your comment is unnecessarily dismissive.
Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.
But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
dghlsakjg · 29m ago
Slack and Zoom both predate Teams. Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.
There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
jf22 · 1h ago
I think it's dismissive to say that explaining something is harder isn't important.
And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
cj · 58m ago
Let’s try to turn this into a productive thread that adds some value here.
What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?
How can we get around those hurdles?
nemomarx · 28m ago
If you built that alternative, would companies choose to use it? they get teams built into their outlook and office 365 contracts and all the other integration. Slack didn't lose because it was worse, so just being better isn't enough.
The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
supportengineer · 12m ago
Cronyism and nepotism is how you get "Enterprise IT"
isaacremuant · 1h ago
Slack is not open source. Neither is Zoom.
Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
robocat · 24m ago
There are proprietary competitors.
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
probably_wrong · 2h ago
(Disclaimer: Teams is in my "red flag" list when evaluating a company - I hate it that much)
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
There are plenty of better alternatives. Companies won't adopt them, and the bare concept of those applications is problematic already.
gadders · 8h ago
Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
freetonik · 7h ago
There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
gadders · 7h ago
I wouldn't mind if it was "Here is how I got to $250k ARR with my self-funded AI startup" :-)
-__---____-ZXyw · 56m ago
Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not interested in to be such a major affront to my sensibilities.
dmos62 · 6h ago
To be fair, more than 1/3 of my technical thoughts involve ai these days.
catlikesshrimp · 4h ago
I prefer AI both raw material and recycled garbage than the cryptocoin epidemy from recent years.
kryogen1c · 6h ago
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
vintagedave · 5h ago
You might be surprised what you could contribute.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
I would upvote interesting Show HNs about, say, raising pigs! I like learning from folks with firsthand knowledge.
mbreese · 4h ago
Or about building tables… I don’t think hacking has to exclusively be about programming and computers.
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
showerst · 5h ago
I’d take a 100 random IT folks with gardens over a single growth hacker, crypto bro, or “I created an ai bot to do (X)”
ChatGPT wrapper site shill.
catlikesshrimp · 4h ago
>
from pigs I raised.
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
sochix · 7h ago
My story on the first page, so I guess people still loves success-stories ;)
gadders · 6h ago
Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
devsda · 4h ago
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
cornholio · 6h ago
Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth. It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
pjc50 · 6h ago
> AI looks to many as a wall buster
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
detourdog · 5h ago
I think what that is demonstrating is that models are commodity objects. The model factory may have a value. I think it would need a specialized context. It would need a market large enough to support it and small enough to keep the context out of the mainstream.
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
We all have to start our sandcastle somewhere.
Perz1val · 1h ago
Using silicon chips manufactured in like 3 fabs
deadbabe · 5h ago
It used to be easier to use expertise to make money, now you need to use expertise just to get by.
YetAnotherNick · 7h ago
[flagged]
tomhow · 3h ago
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
A Wolf had nought but bones and skin
So exact the watch of dogs had been.
He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome
Fat, sleek, who had strayed by chance.
To attack him, quarter him
Lord Wolf would gladly do;
But he would have to join battle,
And the Mastiff was of such stature
As to defend himself with ease.
So the Wolf approaches him humbly,
Enters into conversation, compliments him
On his girth, which he admires.
"You fine sir could be as fat as me"
Replied the Dog.
"Leave the woods, you would do well:
Your like are miserable there,
Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils,
Their estate is to die of hunger.
Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For what?
Follow me: you would have a fate much better."
The Wolf replied, "What must I do?"
"Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars
And people carrying sticks;
To flatter those at home, to please one's Master:
In exchange your salary would be
A great many scraps of all kinds:
Bones of chickens, bones of pigeons,
Without mentioning many caresses."
The Wolf already imagines a happiness
Which makes him teary from fondness.
Walking along, he saw the bald neck of the Dog.
"What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? - Nothing much.
But still? - The collar by which I am tethered
Is perhaps the cause of what you see.
"Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run
Wherever you want? - Not always; but what matters it?
It matters so much that all your meals
I would not want in any wise or manner,
And would not desire even a treasure at such price."
This said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
— Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
Y_Y · 5h ago
The US constitution guarantees life and liberty, the great joke being that the two things are almost opposite.
jen729w · 7h ago
I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my ‘side project’ full-time. My partner too: it’s our only income.
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
motorest · 6h ago
> It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
close04 · 5h ago
> A telltale sign
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
motorest · 4h ago
> Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
cactusplant7374 · 5h ago
They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world. Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
motorest · 5h ago
> They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world.
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
cactusplant7374 · 2h ago
It's probably not a low-paying role in the country they are residing in. They can probably afford to eat out 3x a day.
deadbabe · 5h ago
There are definitely a lot of FAANG engineers who are not unhappy and miserable with their lives, they are gainfully employed and live rich fulfilling lives providing abundance for their families.
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
cactusplant7374 · 5h ago
They don't have the freedom to travel the world whenever they want. As I get older freedom is more important to me.
deadbabe · 3h ago
Except you’re not free, you’re bound by the constraints of how much money you have, which isn’t much.
And traveling the world is a bit overrated. It’s cool to change scenery, but at the end of the day, you’re just doing the same work you always do, just in a different country. You’re just running away from the fact you have nothing worth settling down a bit for, no where to truly call home and invest in a local community, just a drifter chasing their next hit of stimulus. Eventually, you run out of truly novel places to go. You’re not giving back to a community and making your mark, you’re just leeching off the lifestyles built by people who chose to settle in one place. If everyone was a traveler, there wouldn’t be anything worth traveling to.
bboygravity · 7h ago
It is if you live outside of the US or if you'd never make it into a FAANG, because of lack of credentials and/or connections.
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
naughtyfinch · 7h ago
Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
sochix · 7h ago
agreed, however I never worked for FAANG
jll29 · 7h ago
...or the seeds of a company that may one day be a letter in the successor of the FAANG acronym.
gadders · 6h ago
Maybe? But not everyone gets into a FAANG, or lives in the places where FAANGs are hiring (as I believe not all offer fully remote jobs).
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
sochix · 6h ago
fingers crossed, I'll see something near $1m in a year or two
sochix · 7h ago
Maybe! But on the other side I can work when and how I want, it's a big bonus as for me.
sirfz · 7h ago
This bonus is priceless tbh congrats on your success and hope you'll never need to work for anyone
YetAnotherNick · 5h ago
I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was commenting on is "people using their expertise to make money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have earned way more in traditional things but I do side project because I can select what I want to do.
0_____0 · 7h ago
Not bad when the median salary is equivalent to 600$/mo
apercu · 6h ago
I quit a job a President of a software company 11 years ago. I’ve never been so happy or healthy.
cpach · 6h ago
Different strokes for different folks
RandomWorker · 7h ago
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
dustincoates · 6h ago
I misread that the first time, too. You should read it like this:
> All of this — without investors, [without] a 20-person team, or [without] a “Series A” round.
Later on, the author says:
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
whiplash451 · 7h ago
without a 20 person team
sochix · 6h ago
my bad!
pac0 · 7h ago
He said the opposite, I read it wrong the first time too
darkwater · 6h ago
You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices. And guess what? The world is bigger.
apercu · 6h ago
I’ve noticed a huge rise in political content and at first it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
Also, Republicans kill jobs.
monkeywork · 6h ago
>it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
apercu · 26m ago
Oh, facts are propaganda now? Well, I know who you voted for then. At first I thought you were talking about maintaining quality but now I’m pretty sure I touched a nerve. lol.
unethical_ban · 3h ago
Quite the hostile comment.
The parent comment was more about submissions than comments, and it is in a sub thread that is already a tangent from the main topic: a wiki app on the teams store that was successful.
I feel the same way as parent, that the idea of keeping politics off HN made more sense when the US wasn't going through a "bloodless coup" to destroy it from within.
Is this comment a primer on ranked choice voting or ascendant fascism? No. Do I welcome those posts more now than before? Yes.
No comments yet
cdelsolar · 5h ago
Hm, no, it’s a proven fact that republicans kill jobs and are bad for the economy. And now that we are getting into semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps, or why it’s ok to deport a 4 year old baby with cancer, it makes sense to step back a little bit and look at ourselves and wonder where we went wrong.
catlikesshrimp · 4h ago
>
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
1oooqooq · 5h ago
you half joke, but having one administration (lying) about solving abusive interest on student loans, vs current one boasting (probably lying too) about sending millions to jail for failing to pay that abusive interest, do change peoples priorities in a way that lead more people to work flipping burgers instead of trying to code a wiki for a niche audience for example.
specialist · 5h ago
Yes and:
TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
BLKNSLVR · 4h ago
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
zackmorris · 2h ago
Once wealth inequality reaches a certain threshold, revolution becomes inevitable.
I'd argue that we're seeing various indicators that suggest we've passed a tipping point. We can look at things like the high national debt vs unprecedented low tax rates on the wealthy, the wealth of the top 1% surpassing that of the bottom 90%, how government agencies and safety nets are being gutted when we have the highest GDP in history, how the wealthy build gated communities instead of relieving even the most basic suffering (like infant mortality), how tech profits get vacuumed up by a handful of people through financial instruments and crypto rather than going towards investment in new businesses, how private equity firms own a 5% stake in most companies and are buying up all housing and real estate along with foreign investment to turn owners into renters, how politicians are so involved with insider trading that we can no longer distinguish campaign contributions from Wall Street bribes and kickbacks.. the rabbit hole goes so deep that we fall forever if we get sucked into it.
Meanwhile how many of us are struggling to win the internet lottery with our 2nd, our 3rd, our 10th startup? When deep down we know the odds of succeeding are perhaps 10% or less, and the system feels rigged to deny us access to any capital at all, especially when we need it most to cover a mortgage payment or health emergency that should have already been covered by our exorbitantly high insurance rates and taxes going into a private healthcare system that's twice as expensive as the rest of the developed world.
In many ways, I consider us to be in a worst-case scenario. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. We could have had a technotopia like solarpunk with full automation and UBI, instead we're racing towards fascist dictatorship. Where we once had democrats and republicans at least symbolically opposing one another, now we effectively have a single center-right party funded by the same private donors, which uses wedge issues to keep the population divided and conquered.
I'd even say that we got here by banning political content on HN and elsewhere. So we have a generation of young people who never knew an America before everything was privatized. We can imagine what a center-left government would look like, a we society instead of a me society, where most profit flows into a pot shared by all, with equal pay regardless of gender or race, a national surplus as large as our current debt, free college and healthcare paid for by that endowment, nearly free renewable energy, climate change reversing back towards baseline, etc etc, an ivory tower so high it would reach the stars.
But sadly that's all just a dream now, so far away that it's hard to see a way to get there without going through societal pain that as recently as the late 1990s could have been completely avoided.
Ours was supposed to be the quick and easy path. Is it any wonder that we succumbed to the dark side?
angusb · 6h ago
Congrats, this is a great story! One small thing:
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
dabbz · 1h ago
I also see it as a contingency plan. How do customers get help from you if your service has interrupted downtime? Relying on separate systems helps you be available still. It's one of those things that is not a problem until it's a problem.
angusb · 6h ago
BTW - I see you have a LLM answering questions based on your docs on the help pages (which is great). So really I mean for customer support issues that are raised outside this channel
sochix · 6h ago
Not yet, but it is in our roadmap
1oooqooq · 5h ago
because internal ones are about knowledge, external ones are about driving sales and reducing support costs.
ThunderSizzle · 6h ago
Congratulations on your achievement.
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
doix · 6h ago
In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Teams was almost free when you're already paying for microsoft 365. At least last time I had any involvement with it, the price difference between having teams in the bundle or not was negligible. It makes it cheaper than any competitor.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
robertlagrant · 4h ago
The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.
wpietri · 4h ago
Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space. Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving and extending their monopoly.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
sochix · 6h ago
At least there is a lot of room for improvement for entrepreneurs likes me ;)
high_na_euv · 6h ago
For c#/cpp visual studio is really, really good
ThunderSizzle · 5h ago
Jetbrains rider blows Visual Studio out of the water, but it's not Microsoft, so our company doesn't use it.
brooke2k · 4h ago
as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful
RandomWorker · 7h ago
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
mattmaroon · 57m ago
Other ecosystems are smaller (probably nothing has more consumers than the two major app stores) but often much higher intent. The same person who you have to coax into paying $1 for an iOS app won’t bat an eye at a productivity tool that costs $20/mo.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
Suppafly · 1h ago
>What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
sochix · 7h ago
Yep, Teams store is a hidden gem.
xyst · 4h ago
You can make money through anything that has a decent market size.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
em-bee · 2h ago
what else is there then? google, microsoft, apple, some chinese companies. can't think of anything else with a large market for apps.
Suppafly · 1h ago
roblox :) Honestly though anything with a lot of users typically either has a way to make money selling addons, or by hosting your own content related to their product, like wikis and leaderboards and such.
MOARDONGZPLZ · 4h ago
Very cool story! I love it. Here’s a direct archive link for those who want to support their fellow tech folks but don’t want to support habr, which directly funds Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
Surely they meant indirectly. I suppose any Russian company that pays taxes could be said to do so.
keepamovin · 6h ago
This is cool, I never even heard of MS Team's marketplace. My wife uses Teams a lot for work and likes it. I should put BrowserBox on there. I need marketing ideas.
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
sochix · 6h ago
thank you!
keepamovin · 6h ago
You're welcome - it's inspiring :) Thanks for the write up!
nottorp · 6h ago
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed opportunity!
Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue and been a failure :)
parrit · 5h ago
It wouldn't exist at all. It isn't AI.
sciurus · 5h ago
By my count they mention AI seventeen times on their homepage.
> In May 2020, I lost my job and started thinking about new projects to launch or where to direct my efforts
I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.
kgeist · 7h ago
>Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people. I handle the development and product, and my colleague manages user support
Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
gmm1990 · 7h ago
They seem focused and dont have and debt or funding burdens. There risk of something catastrophic happening to an individual is lower than the average business going out of business.
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
Y_Y · 5h ago
But if I depend on a business making a critical tool, and am paying for the pleasure, then my prior for their going out of business decreases greatly. Their susceptibility to bus attacks remains unchanged however.
apples_oranges · 7h ago
Exactly, it can also happen with larger companies and if the creator here decides to step back for
Example he might organize some sort of continuity by selling the product or hiring someone to maintain it
edg5000 · 7h ago
Keep that surplush cash in the business with a window of a few years to absorb any downturn, don't get a Bugatti :) Not that I am qualified to provide advice on this topic. Great success story.
sochix · 7h ago
Thank you!
naughtyfinch · 7h ago
Congratulations! Great work so far.
I too have been looking to do something like this for a long time now. The biggest challenge for me is that I am locked into the golden handcuffs that FAANG companies put on you. Guess I will wait till I get laid off. I don't have the guts to resign and follow my dream (heavy sigh)
ethn · 7h ago
Good work, there are plenty of businesses like this for the pickings exactly because they are not VC investable.
pantulis · 5h ago
I think the overall consensus would be being cautious of creating a product on top of a third party platform and marketplace, worse it being MS itself. But! If this is a one person team, I think this is exactly the other way around and basing the product on top of Teams is unbelievably competitive to the point that if MS shuts you down in a couple of years you can still have made a profit.
parrit · 5h ago
Well done. No mean fear getting to 250k. I hope you can get to 1M as hiring people with just 250K is challenging (unless you are not paying yourself).
vlovich123 · 3h ago
He’s in Russia where it’s a lot more doable.
mparnisari · 1h ago
Congrats on building a successful product!
1a527dd5 · 7h ago
I love this story, so happy for your success. It reads great, and makes me feel great (oddly - maybe it gives me a sense of hope I can do the same thing one day).
Congrats!
sochix · 7h ago
Thank you! I think you could do it, just ship something today!
desireco42 · 32m ago
You guys are so negative and he literally made the boring and dreadful things easier for corporations... Congrats! Looks really good for me, very sensible approach.
From my perspective, this is excellent product.
misiek08 · 1h ago
Respect and positive jealousy!
unixhero · 2h ago
Great article, I got kind of motivated
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
daft_pink · 3h ago
Might be an unpopular opinion, but if you can accomplish your goal without investors, you should do it.
ph4evers · 6h ago
Congrats on the success! Are you not afraid that MS ships a wiki upgrade at a certain point?
rurban · 6h ago
Given the state of the typical Microsoft PM he will be safe. They'll always prefer more features over a fast UX.
Even if there will a fast enough teams wiki one day, the next PM will butcher it to death again.
jen729w · 7h ago
Honestly the most admirable part is shipping a Teams app.
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
iJohnDoe · 5h ago
Can you elaborate a bit? Been tossing around the idea of doing a Teams app. What were the challenges?
pugworthy · 3h ago
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on trying to open the page.
PeterStuer · 7h ago
Did you get any corporate or MS celebrity endorsement early on? In my limited experience this seemed key to bootstrap you on the store.
sochix · 7h ago
Nope! It was all done organically
zerr · 6h ago
Related: Had anyone had any success with (selling) Skype Add-ins/Plug-ins or whatever it was called? :)
exodust · 1h ago
Me: can dynamic content such as inventory feeds be included in wiki pages?
*AI Assistant is typing*
AI: Hmm, I couldn't find an answer to that. Can you rephrase your question or give me a bit more detail?
This is why I can't stand the idea of conversing with AI bots just to "browse" a company wiki. I mean how big are company wikis? Not big enough that simply browsing it yourself using regular content browsing or keyword searching can't surface what you need quickly and accurately.
And $790+ annually and still can't remove the "powered by Perfect wiki" logo! It takes $2390 before you're unsticking that sucker!
BiraIgnacio · 4h ago
Amazing, congratulations!
moralestapia · 5h ago
> My assumptions were confirmed — people were actively looking for an alternative to the built-in Wiki, and they searched for it directly in the Teams marketplace. They found my app using the keyword “wiki.” It was an awesome free acquisition channel.
This is the money quote for me.
igtztorrero · 6h ago
Perfect Wiki = Perfect History for a coder: He lost his job and looked for ways to make other people's lives easier in a growing niche market. Perfect Receipt. Congratulations
sochix · 6h ago
thank you!
Orygin · 7h ago
Congrats on the success, but I feel like you hit gold because MS has little to no interest in providing actual good software for their users. Hopefully for you that stays that way and you can maybe expand to other areas where they come short (basically anything in Teams)
hampowder · 7h ago
You state it as if it were a coincidence. The important point is that the author identified the problem and filled the gap.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot.
Orygin · 7h ago
I admit I didn't read the entirety of the post, but I read the following:
> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.
So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.
I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
darkwater · 6h ago
They already expanded it to Slack and other platforms.
Orygin · 5h ago
Slack is, I think, mainly focused on the messaging and relies on third parties to integrate other features. Microsoft is a behemoth that wants to sell their complete software suite and tries to integrate all of them together for a "seamless" experience. They do have an incentive for their own products to be good and used instead of third parties.
Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis, they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already done), so there is an incentive for them to have more users on their solution instead.
Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
sochix · 7h ago
Agreed!
cess11 · 5h ago
"We're committed to compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and have implemented a wide range of technical and organizational measures."
Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.
lovegrenoble · 6h ago
Congrats!
DataDaemon · 7h ago
Where data are stored? How safe are they?
sochix · 7h ago
I am using Google Cloud Platform to store the data
Calwestjobs · 6h ago
kidnapping your family in Russia makes you vulnerable, what precautions do you take so i can be sure Russian government can not get to my data thru you ?
BRB. Installing russian knowledge management software on internal servers.
bestest · 6h ago
Author also mentions his thoughts on expanding to the russian market. So many red flags here. Pun intended.
xyst · 5h ago
Although I despise MS teams and never want to use that godawful piece of shit outside of work. I love this type of story/indie hacking.
No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).
Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.
Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
naghing · 7h ago
This seems like a commercial for the product. Why is this front page HN?
Calwestjobs · 6h ago
For ordinary US citizen without a broad worldview, this thing i wrote seem like writings of a mad man. As Kennedys presidential address says:
"...we shall pay any price,
bear any burden,
meet any hardship,
support any friend,
oppose any foe,
in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were warned.
answer to your question follows:
because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your data will be under influence of Russian government directly or indirectly - his family is in Russia.
so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor. im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course that would be silly.
Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia uncritically.
Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act as.
glowiefedposter · 2h ago
Oh no, russian spyware running inside american spyware!
Calwestjobs · 1h ago
american spyware to sell ads, russian spyware for looking for ways to kill american citizens. if you think this is hyperbole you are [vulgarism].
nlitened · 6h ago
Sir, this is a forum for people who make things
Calwestjobs · 6h ago
Every talent needs to be helped to grow, make all kinds of peoples life easier, so democracy invites everyone with good will to do that in west. Making Russia stronger means making west weaker. Because russian "government". After russian people get rid of their murderous gov...
https://youneedawiki.com/
As the files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor lock-in.
The documentation site is also made with their product: https://docs.youneedawiki.com/
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
Jira on ghe other hand.....
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.
Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.
But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?
How can we get around those hurdles?
The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
</rant>
[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union...
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not interested in to be such a major affront to my sensibilities.
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
[0]: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html and https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
[1]: https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
We all have to start our sandcastle somewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome Fat, sleek, who had strayed by chance.
To attack him, quarter him Lord Wolf would gladly do;
But he would have to join battle,
And the Mastiff was of such stature As to defend himself with ease.
So the Wolf approaches him humbly, Enters into conversation, compliments him On his girth, which he admires.
"You fine sir could be as fat as me" Replied the Dog.
"Leave the woods, you would do well: Your like are miserable there,
Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils, Their estate is to die of hunger.
Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For what?
Follow me: you would have a fate much better." The Wolf replied, "What must I do?"
"Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars And people carrying sticks;
To flatter those at home, to please one's Master: In exchange your salary would be
A great many scraps of all kinds: Bones of chickens, bones of pigeons,
Without mentioning many caresses." The Wolf already imagines a happiness
Which makes him teary from fondness. Walking along, he saw the bald neck of the Dog.
"What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? - Nothing much.
But still? - The collar by which I am tethered Is perhaps the cause of what you see.
"Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run Wherever you want? - Not always; but what matters it?
It matters so much that all your meals I would not want in any wise or manner,
And would not desire even a treasure at such price." This said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
— Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
And traveling the world is a bit overrated. It’s cool to change scenery, but at the end of the day, you’re just doing the same work you always do, just in a different country. You’re just running away from the fact you have nothing worth settling down a bit for, no where to truly call home and invest in a local community, just a drifter chasing their next hit of stimulus. Eventually, you run out of truly novel places to go. You’re not giving back to a community and making your mark, you’re just leeching off the lifestyles built by people who chose to settle in one place. If everyone was a traveler, there wouldn’t be anything worth traveling to.
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
> All of this — without investors, [without] a 20-person team, or [without] a “Series A” round.
Later on, the author says:
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
Also, Republicans kill jobs.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
The parent comment was more about submissions than comments, and it is in a sub thread that is already a tangent from the main topic: a wiki app on the teams store that was successful.
I feel the same way as parent, that the idea of keeping politics off HN made more sense when the US wasn't going through a "bloodless coup" to destroy it from within.
Is this comment a primer on ranked choice voting or ascendant fascism? No. Do I welcome those posts more now than before? Yes.
No comments yet
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
TLDR: Technology is intrinsically political.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
I'd argue that we're seeing various indicators that suggest we've passed a tipping point. We can look at things like the high national debt vs unprecedented low tax rates on the wealthy, the wealth of the top 1% surpassing that of the bottom 90%, how government agencies and safety nets are being gutted when we have the highest GDP in history, how the wealthy build gated communities instead of relieving even the most basic suffering (like infant mortality), how tech profits get vacuumed up by a handful of people through financial instruments and crypto rather than going towards investment in new businesses, how private equity firms own a 5% stake in most companies and are buying up all housing and real estate along with foreign investment to turn owners into renters, how politicians are so involved with insider trading that we can no longer distinguish campaign contributions from Wall Street bribes and kickbacks.. the rabbit hole goes so deep that we fall forever if we get sucked into it.
Meanwhile how many of us are struggling to win the internet lottery with our 2nd, our 3rd, our 10th startup? When deep down we know the odds of succeeding are perhaps 10% or less, and the system feels rigged to deny us access to any capital at all, especially when we need it most to cover a mortgage payment or health emergency that should have already been covered by our exorbitantly high insurance rates and taxes going into a private healthcare system that's twice as expensive as the rest of the developed world.
In many ways, I consider us to be in a worst-case scenario. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. We could have had a technotopia like solarpunk with full automation and UBI, instead we're racing towards fascist dictatorship. Where we once had democrats and republicans at least symbolically opposing one another, now we effectively have a single center-right party funded by the same private donors, which uses wedge issues to keep the population divided and conquered.
I'd even say that we got here by banning political content on HN and elsewhere. So we have a generation of young people who never knew an America before everything was privatized. We can imagine what a center-left government would look like, a we society instead of a me society, where most profit flows into a pot shared by all, with equal pay regardless of gender or race, a national surplus as large as our current debt, free college and healthcare paid for by that endowment, nearly free renewable energy, climate change reversing back towards baseline, etc etc, an ivory tower so high it would reach the stars.
But sadly that's all just a dream now, so far away that it's hard to see a way to get there without going through societal pain that as recently as the late 1990s could have been completely avoided.
Ours was supposed to be the quick and easy path. Is it any wonder that we succumbed to the dark side?
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
https://archive.is/wDHrB
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed opportunity!
Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue and been a failure :)
https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
https://perfectwikiforteams.com/
I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.
Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
Congrats!
From my perspective, this is excellent product.
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
And $790+ annually and still can't remove the "powered by Perfect wiki" logo! It takes $2390 before you're unsticking that sucker!
This is the money quote for me.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot.
> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.
So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.
I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis, they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already done), so there is an incentive for them to have more users on their solution instead.
Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.
Reason why i am asking this :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/30/inside-taganro...
No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).
Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.
Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
"...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were warned.
answer to your question follows:
because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your data will be under influence of Russian government directly or indirectly - his family is in Russia.
so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor. im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course that would be silly.
Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia uncritically.
Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act as.