Hacker News: lubos

New comment by lubos in "SpaceX S-1"

lubos — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:00:23 +0000

That 1.25B per month is not profit

Stripe takes on Paddle with new Managed Payments feature

lubos — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:25:56 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.stripe.com/payments/managed-payments

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930939

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lubos in "Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco"

lubos — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:34:47 +0000

That's not entirely true. Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb. Nutritionally it can be exactly the same food but the net calorie intake will be higher for food that has been processed.

We should eat food that our pre-industrial ancestors would recognize.

New comment by lubos in "What I learned at Gitlab that I don't want to forget"

lubos — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 04:16:50 +0000

> I'm just saying, being a remote-first company should may you less likely to do this, not more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

New comment by lubos in "The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn"

lubos — Thu, 26 May 2022 23:52:57 +0000

Amazon stock price is currently back to where it was before the pandemic. Look at the charts.

New comment by lubos in "FormKit: Form building framework for Vue 3"

lubos — Fri, 13 May 2022 22:28:38 +0000

Very impressive. The schema covers everything I need. This library desperately needs "Repeater" component which I assume would handle array of inputs. This would allow FormKit to handle the most complex forms which is where this library would help the most.

New comment by lubos in "Ask HN: How did you find investors for your startup?"

lubos — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 22:25:57 +0000

Once you have paying customers and growth, the appetite for investor money goes down very quick.

New comment by lubos in "Closest known relatives of virus behind Covid-19 found in Laos"

lubos — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 22:12:44 +0000

They could have been infected by locals in regions they've been travelling to. Many possibilities. Why do we have to speculate? Let's just wait for more data.

The timeline of HIV pandemic has been established decades after pandemic started. This will take time.

I'd assume that virus originating anywhere in SEA region would be detected in China first. Just like many other viruses originating in America continent would be first detected in USA.

New comment by lubos in "AWS Region Coming to New Zealand"

lubos — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 02:45:54 +0000

This is great but I've noticed newer regions do not have feature parity with older ones.

For example, me-south-1 and af-south-1 still do not support AWS DataSync fully automated transfers. When this feature has been announced, it was put into 16 regions. Why not all regions where AWS DataSync is available?

There is more. This is just last example I've noticed.

As a result, when building cross-region service on AWS, it's not enough to just check whether AWS product is available in desired region, you need to check whether every single feature you need within the product is available in desired region too.

New comment by lubos in "ASML, a $300B Dutch firm, makes the machines that make semiconductors"

lubos — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:33 +0000

Hold your horses. TSMC is cutting edge. They got ahead only in the past 3-4 years.

Car/appliance manufacturers do not use their cutting edge chips. The biggest use-case for these chips are new iPhones and iPads. Nothing critical.

New comment by lubos in "Intel to spend $20B on two new chip factories in Arizona"

lubos — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:37:09 +0000

Random earthquakes is TSMC fork of chaosmonkey

New comment by lubos in "The Hazards of Asset Allocation in a Late-Stage Major Bubble"

lubos — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 01:37:21 +0000

Looking at historical S&P 500 to Gold ratio, stocks are definitely more expensive but nowhere near dotcom frenzy. Either we see market correction or gold is undervalued and will catch up. In that case there might be no stock market crash.

https://www.macrotrends.net/1437/sp500-to-gold-ratio-chart

New comment by lubos in "Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing"

lubos — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 20:28:29 +0000

0.5% is immaterial for subscription-based businesses where profit margins are typically the highest.

But... it adds up.

For example, just looking at the last $39 USD transaction in my Stripe dashboard which gets converted to $53.72 AUD (I charge in USD but receive AUD)

Stripe currency conversion fee: $0.88 Stripe processing fees: $1.69 Total: $2.57

That's 4.78% fee. Now add this new 0.5% and we are over 5% fee on transaction processing.

Is this expensive enough for me to consider alternatives? No.

New comment by lubos in "I sold Baremetrics"

lubos — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 21:09:50 +0000

> We’re also a company that has purposefully operated right around breakeven for years.

And here is the problem. Take VC money and now you are forced to run company at breakeven point.

This company would be perfectly fine operating with half the staff and generating for the CEO half a million in profits per year - every year.

He could have met his family financial goals long ago and still keep the company.

This is what folks at 37signals figured out years ago and good on them. Do not take VC money unless you are already a millionaire and aiming for the moon.

New comment by lubos in "When I raised my B2B SaaS’s prices"

lubos — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 22:40:57 +0000

For most bootstrapped SaaS businesses, the number of active free trial users is so low, it's not worth your mental capacity.

Also. You really don't want customers who will buy from you at $29/mo and won't buy at $39/mo. This is because if $10 makes difference in their purchasing decision, the value they are getting out of your subscription is roughly what you charge. This segment of customers will churn the fastest as they will be constantly on the edge revaluating whether your subscription is "worth it". You might as well not care about whether they become customers or not. So why bother with cheesy tricks to make them convert. It's not worth it.

New comment by lubos in "Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”"

lubos — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 02:33:24 +0000

You always represent value even if you don't pay. You might introduce the music to someone who will pay. It's freemium model applied to music industry.

New comment by lubos in "New Microsoft Edge"

lubos — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 10:19:21 +0000

I must admit, the landing page looks slick and very un-Microsoft.

New comment by lubos in "Virgin Australia administrators agree to sell airline to Bain Capital"

lubos — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 12:02:43 +0000

In Australia, independent administrator is appointed who is working on behalf of creditors. Government is usually another creditor so they are not exactly an independent party.

New comment by lubos in "US oil prices turn negative as demand dries up"

lubos — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 03:48:00 +0000

You can close your position by buying the month after futures. This will require you to store crude oil for just one month. I think the issue is that storage facilities are almost booked out and the remaining capacity is just so expensive.

New comment by lubos in "Ask HN: How to connect serverless lambda functions to custom domain?"

lubos — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 21:03:04 +0000

You will need to setup Amazon API Gateway which will give you http/https end point for your Lambda function.