Hacker News: dazc

New comment by dazc in "One item purchased, ten emails"

dazc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:37:27 +0000

Wait until you see the tracking data that led to your purchase.

New comment by dazc in "Have a fucking website"

dazc — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:40:57 +0000

I used to work in construction in a previous life and always said I could judge how good a tradesman is simply by their appearance. The same goes for their website. If they have pride in their work it will show; if they do just about enough to get paid it will also show.

New comment by dazc in "Have a fucking website"

dazc — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:00:51 +0000

Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be difficult to outrank them.

New comment by dazc in "Have a fucking website"

dazc — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:57:34 +0000

Most people are indeed. Many of these people will also be able to complete very difficult tasks that you can't.

New comment by dazc in "Have a fucking website"

dazc — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:54:45 +0000

I think you underestimate how what you just wrote will fly over the head of most non technical people?

New comment by dazc in "Have a fucking website"

dazc — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:51:05 +0000

Recently explained to a local service business owner that all she needed to do was get listed on Google maps and start asking customers for reviews. Literally showed her how competing businesses were top of the search results by doing just this.

Did she do it? No.

People like this are never going to get around to having a website, let alone actually maintain and promote it.

New comment by dazc in "Starlink Mini as a failover"

dazc — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:49:53 +0000

Very much location dependent though. I lived less than a mile from Southampton city centre for a while and could never get anything close to dial-up standard download/upload speeds. I've heard similar from London residents.

New comment by dazc in "Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026"

dazc — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:57:03 +0000

I wondered what happened to him?

New comment by dazc in "Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026"

dazc — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:55:41 +0000

Launching a new service every 5 minutes is obviously stretching their resources.

New comment by dazc in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

dazc — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:30:18 +0000

no-index is a thing.

New comment by dazc in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

dazc — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:28:54 +0000

Good luck with that one.

New comment by dazc in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

dazc — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:28:23 +0000

You can use x-robots noindex on any page and it will not be indexed. This has been the case for at least the past decade.

New comment by dazc in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

dazc — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:25:53 +0000

Because you can see pages not affected doesn't guarantee they will stay that way.

New comment by dazc in "Fix your robots.txt or your site disappears from Google"

dazc — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:23:23 +0000

I've witnessed a few catastrophes that have resulted in mistakes made via robots.txt, especially when using 'disallow' as an attempt to prevent pages being indexed.

I don't know if the claims made here are true but there really isn't any reason not to have a valid robots.txt available. One could argue that if you want Google to respect robots.txt then not having one should result in Googlebot not crawling any further.

New comment by dazc in "Nike's Crisis and the Economics of Brand Decay"

dazc — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 15:08:19 +0000

If I'm buying shoes that were made in the third world for minimal cost then branding is not a guarantee of quality that it once was. This has been the case for at least the past ten years but it goes to show that if you have a well-known brand you can keep milking it for a long time before the market turns against you.

New comment by dazc in "The $20 Domain Trap: Why Buying a Domain Feels Like Progress but Isn't"

dazc — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:53:07 +0000

I stopped drinking a year ago and noticed I have registered far fewer domains as a consequence. Those late night ideas can rack-up a sizeable renewal bill with no real progress being made.

New comment by dazc in "Seven diabetes patients die due to undisclosed bug in Abbott's glucose monitors"

dazc — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:36:01 +0000

At the time of my diagnosis for Type 1 my glucose levels were very high (HbA1c of 134 (UK) / 14% (US)). I lost an extreme amount of weight over a short time period and became very ill.

I'm struggling to understand how occasional false low monitor readings would cause any significant problems?

New comment by dazc in "Seven diabetes patients die due to undisclosed bug in Abbott's glucose monitors"

dazc — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:32:16 +0000

I found having the monitor on my left arm results in a more reliable connection and consistent readings. This isn't just during the day either, so can't be explained by lifestyle patterns?

New comment by dazc in "Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals"

dazc — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:37:07 +0000

Housing used to be relatively cheap in Spain which has resulted in huge swathes of the main cities and tourist resorts becoming almost entirely airbnbs. The social/economic implications could have been predicted long ago.

New comment by dazc in "Spain fines Airbnb €65M: Why the government is cracking down on illegal rentals"

dazc — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:30:23 +0000

They don't want to upset the high number of middle-class Spaniards who have all of their money invested in airbnbs.