Alarms started ringing for me when they went for backwards support and focused heavily on that, when Bun was already on that route.

Sad but true.

I've personally neglected national (Portuguese) authors for about a decade now, so I've started focusing on that; I'm currently reading "Livro do Desassossego" by Fernando Pessoa.

For the few months before that, I'd focused on some classics:

- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

- 1984 by George Orwell

- The Village by Ivan Bunin

- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse

I read quite a bit and love it; if only I could be paid to do it at my own pace and rhythm!

My wife and I wanted one, so we founded one and launched it earlier this year; we're currently at 350 monthly active accounts, nearing 400.

It's paid and privacy-focused so you get assigned a random account number when you signup (there's no username or email), and you can get 2h for free by solving a proof-of-work captcha.

It's https://uruky.com if you want to give it a shot. If you want some more time to try it out, send us an email and we'll offer you a voucher for a few days.

EDIT: Seems people are downvoting this a lot and potentially interpreting it as spam? Sorry, was just trying to help people who said they wanted something like this, here.

We have been thinking about that, especially because my wife and I do not use most of those settings; they have been built over time with many customer requesting them, and it's gone through a couple of "redesigns" to accommodate all the knobs, though the "default experience" should be more than enough for most people.

I do wonder if we need some guided "wizard" of sorts for making sure it works as people want it, or perhaps a "features" page to explain those things.

I wouldn't want to do videos, as I'm not convinced those would be effective (and they take a significant effort to make).

To signup you don't provide any information (a randomly-generated account number is assigned to you), and you can run a proof-of-work captcha to get 2h for free. You can choose among many different search providers (for defaults and per query), including Uruky Site Search, powering our own index.

Last month we reached 300 monthly active accounts and released an image search gallery mode, plus a simple calculator and conversion widget!

The main differences between Uruky and Kagi, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, etc. are visible in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get copy of the source code (licensed as BUSL, into AGPLv3 in 2 years — a suggestion made here on HN)!

Our main challenge continues to be discoverability and outreach because we want to do it ethically (no Big Tech and no GenAI/LLMs). Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring open source projects, open source maintainers, and indie, small-web, and privacy-related websites and applications/groups/orgs. This month we're sponsoring NOYB [2]!

Feature-wise, for September the most visible things that shipped already were Tags and Scopes (top feature requests for a while). We’re also still (slowly and sustainably) increasing our own index, focused on indie/small web.

Thank you for reading this!

[NO-AI]: There is no generative AI product or service being offered, here.

[1]: https://uruky.com

[2]: https://noyb.eu

I did also make it more organized per cable type (USBs, Network, Audio, etc.). It's OK. It's for me. It's OK.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647557

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

You can also now customize the prefix character for bangs and tags (and scopes can have a tag set as well, so you can do "@s barcelona" for a "barcelona" search with a "Sports" scope, for example).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49640182

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497774

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

I looked into this a lot as my wife and I wanted to make Uruky [1] open source, but also a sustainable business.

What we decided on was that after you've been a paying customer for a year, we provide the source code licensed with BUSL into AGPLv3 after 2 years; it's a weighed risk that we can still "be killed" from, but I personally value open source too much, especially in relation to privacy-related software.

[1]: https://uruky.com (ad-free, private, and paid search engine)

Send them a virtual hug or nice supportive message, people, it'll brighten their stressful day.

Remember they are humans, like I _hope_ you are.