birudeghi

Good point. The prototype is hosted by us on the cloud and as a one-weekend project I'm so happy it's gotten the quick attention! Grateful for your quick feedback :)

Control is definitely in the works, and perhaps it can work as a self-hosted solution (meaning it's open-source) but i think the higher standard is to let more people who aren't technical access to this tech, so that means encryption and anonymization.

But please have a go at running it on your side, since it's currently open-sourced: github.com/birudeghi/penny-1

Hi HN! My team and I are building Penny, turning your caregiving WhatsApp group chats into helpful feeds that keeps everyone in the loop.

I see my friends and relatives being in numerous family group chats with the sole purpose of caregiving for someone. It's hard work trying to keep track of ground truth when coordinating care with different family members and other carers, and often scheduling mistakes can derail an entire treatment.

Penny would sit in your group chats and ambiently listen into the conversation, keeping notes and putting it in a feed that anyone in the group can see, without having to scroll through chat history. Penny is also a group member, so you can ask questions about anything, including something that happened too long ago.

In short, it turns chats into feeds. you can give it a try at https://app.pennyai.chat for free :) Let us know what you think!

A very timely news for something I've been working on lately.

It goes without saying that there's conflict of interest, but the interesting bit is such conflict arises because of crude thinking from the execs about what makes discount code works.

Discounts is a form of marketing, simple as that. If your company sells products at a discount, it means that you're spending extra marketing cost to sell higher volumes. Anyone in the middle distributing this discount information will charge extra for their service.

Anyone competing to charge companies for marketing can only meaningfully compete on cost and reach. In terms of cost, most discount code websites tend to only give small discounts to consumers as the 'sales' cost is internalised in other forms, e.g. commission, so only a fraction gets passed on to them.

At the end of the day, these kinds of businesses will fight to find any margins possible, however small, to keep the company afloat because competition will erode these margins away through price reductions to these companies.

This is why Honey is the way it is now, because the incentives forces them to do so. It is harmful to end consumers as they have no $$ on the table to influence this large incentives.

Honey doesn't have to do this, but they think they do probably because most companies around them are doing the same, so why not? But there's examples (like x.com) to show that you CAN charge consumers directly, and they'll pay handsomely if your product is good enough.

That's why I'm starting Pence (https://pence.so), where I charge consumers directly for giving them better deals. I don't charge merchants because of long-term incentive alignment for end consumers. The supply of deals comes from marketing emails that you and I receive, and these companies are sending them for almost nothing as email is a free protocol.

Feel free to challenge me, as there's obvious concerns I've anticipated for my product, but I think it's one valid way to think about this issue differently.

That’s a good question, in that there’s a valid incentive for companies (including Pence) to send you emails for promotional purposes. Marketing emails do correlate to brand image and therefore sales, and that is no exception for Pence. We will send you occasional emails (one email per week) to remind you of the offers you might miss, but nothing more than that.

However, Pence exists because we want you to never have to open your inbox ever again for non-communication emails, including going into it to manage them (automatic unsubscribe and deletion is part of the product roadmap).

If you care about the technical aspect of why we do what we do, email is a messaging protocol at the end of the day, and we are using email at a too low-level way (imagine reading your WhatsApp messages in a spreadsheet. Yes, that’s how absurd Gmail currently is). We deserve better and I think Pence is a good hypothesis to start with.

Hi everyone! As a relatively disorganised person I always miss promo codes in my email inbox whenever I order food delivery. It's either because I completely forgot its existence, or it expired by the time I try to use it. It's annoying and I miss out on real savings.

Pence is an attempt at solving this problem by making your inbox work for you. For $2/mo, Pence will curate deals that come into your inbox and send them via one email a day. It requires your consent to Pence reading emails in your inbox, but for existing subscribers it's paid back through actual savings that they otherwise would miss :)

Unlike other deal platforms we don't work with brands/merchants, so all revenue comes from your subscription. In simple terms, we benefit only when you save money through Pence.

Please give it a try, give your honest feedback and enjoy!

Yjs looks interesting! Have you personally used them?

Thanks for the feedback! Is the search bar for the libraries not sufficient? We assumed that whoever is writing the code will know what libraries to include so they can just type them in the search bar.

We see that people wanted to have a play with the product before fully creating one for themselves! We’ll consider doing a demo widget at the front page to serve that need, but out of curiosity, what do you find most difficult about creating the widget?

Yes, go ahead and start building! Surfboard would be perfect to showcase your first project so do pay us a visit down the road!

Very good point, thank you! I was betting on people trying it out for themselves but apparently the description isn’t clear :/