Hacker News: swipeharbor

New comment by swipeharbor in "Just put some HTML on the web"

swipeharbor — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:50:10 +0000

Yes, as long as you hand off the parts that need to be live. The catalog, product pages and even a search index can be generated at build time, and checkout goes to a hosted service (Stripe Checkout or Payment Links, Shopify's Buy Button, Snipcart and the like) that handles the cart, payment and tax. A webhook from wherever you edit products triggers a rebuild.

The catch is anything that changes faster than you rebuild, mainly stock counts and prices. The usual approach is to treat what's on the static page as a hint and make the checkout side the source of truth, so a sold-out item fails at checkout instead of being oversold.

For a small catalog that's a pretty comfortable tradeoff.

New comment by swipeharbor in "Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls"

swipeharbor — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:36:26 +0000

This filter isn't specific to polls. Anything that reaches people through reshares gets selected on how surprising or pleasing it is, so the visible sample skews toward the tails. Marketing has the same problem with screenshots of campaign results: the ones that travel are the outliers, and anyone calibrating on what they've seen shared ends up with expectations nobody can hit.

Curious whether the effect survives controlling for pollster. Some pollsters have consistent house effects and some have much bigger followings, so part of the slope could be "polls from well-known outfits get reposted more" rather than "favorable margins get reposted more".