Self-employed since 2005. It's been a slow road and I haven't wanted to lead a big team so it's been a mix of consulting and small projects. One of them is gaining a tiny bit of traction so I'm hopeful I can scale it up. I'd much rather build a software business than lead a consulting business.
In my mind, one of the most likely consumers of our data is insurance companies. It really exposes to me how messed up the idea of health insurance really is.
As an insurance company, you are incentivized to de-risk your pool as much as possible, and by spending a few dollars you're able to get to the earliest possible signals of who might be needing services very easily. Things like complaining about a sore throat on social media to friends, or even within private messages, are all things you might be interested in. Other signals, purchase history, location history, contact tracing, all of these provide potential ways to spot early risk and increase rates/push out the undesirable members of the pool.
Of all of the potential customers of our data, I keep coming back to insurance companies as having the most interest in these signals. When you can identify risks correctly, you can trim out or adjust rates to make things as safe as possible for your income stream.
This has a reactionary component to it that hurts us all. With most of our communication being digital now, I find myself thinking twice about putting out anything that could be taken as a signal to an insurance company. As an avid runner with most of our events organized online, this presents a social cost because I just won't engage in some conversations for fear of how companies will use whatever I might engage with against me.
Where does this type of behavior lead when practiced at scale?
Surely the intended end-game is to be bought by Shopify with companies like that (or the equivalent of Shopify in their case)?
I don't think this is quite the same personally, since it seems to me more like Gumroad is just what OP picked initially for MVP, and could 'easily' (and with probably exponential value-add?) support more platforms later.
That's a fair question, and that's why I didn't build out everything I had in mind (trends, AI based suggestions, etc), I just put together the best MVP I could in a week and put it out there.
If it is a react website that would imply it has an api you could just use directly. Might still need to login to get a token but that's a lot more robust
Agreed! I always am confused when people screen scrape instead of just monitoring and replaying network requests. Much cheaper and much more robust. Is there anything I'm missing?
I've got a 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee and I've been searching for where the sim card is for the built in cellular modem so I can rip it out.
It astounds me that there aren't more people interested in cutting off the constant telemetry and to be honest it wouldn't surprise me if the car refuses to operate correctly when I do figure out where it's at and pull it.
> it wouldn't surprise me if the car refuses to operate correctly
I know of a car (Renault in EU) whose SIM access is broken somehow that still works fine, just can't call home. No guarantee that every car will handle it gracefully, but at least some regions don't seem to mandate any enforcement if that module happens to "break".
I wonder if one could build a metal cap, shape and color matched to the sharkfin, that goes over the antenna and couples to the roof of the car. Would that be enough to make a small Faraday cage over the antenna? Would leakage though the mounting hole still be enough to let a signal through?
I don't think you really need to get that sophisticated. If you unplug the antenna and send too much current down that antenna line, whatever's on the other side is not going to like it.
In 2018? I doubt car manufacturers can move that fast. Apple didn't implement eSIM until 2018 for the iPhone XS. No way an auto maker has it before consumer electronics maker.
The European Commission selected the eUICC format for its in-vehicle emergency call service, known as eCall, in 2012.[23] All new car models in the EU must have one by 2018 to instantly connect the car to emergency services in case of an accident.[24]
For a very long time now you have never needed a SIM to call emergency services. Maybe it's different in the EU but US car models that include telematics (ie Onstar) have been able to call emergency services without a subscription.
I feel like if this were happening 20 years ago, common wisdom would develop to buy from a list of model of cars where people had already blazed the path, directions of what the cell modem looks like and how to unplug it, prominent links to a community working on a libre replacement, and majority opinion of this is just what you should do to cope in the modern world. Now with the web community being so diffuse the majority opinion basically seems to be "whatevs". Perhaps if you dug into the right threads on the right manufacturer-specific forum you could find a thread or two with some investigation, but that's about it. It's also essentially impossible to navigate/compare the amenability of different makes to this.
FWIW I've got no actual experience, but given the general slowness with which the car industry moves I would guess the cell modem is just a module hanging off one of the CAN buses, receiving telemetry broadcast by other modules and injecting/interrogating commands when requested (like modern OBD2 ports). I suppose it could also be part of something like the gauge cluster that links different buses as well (at least on Hondas) but with the modular way cars seem to work I'd guess it's not likely.
I'd try to track down a copy of the factory service manual for your model. Those have seem to have gotten pretty thin these days too in favor of computer-based documentation, but it should at least help you work out how things are generally connected. (No point to the readily-available Haynes manual though. Those are apparently garbage)
That’s quite a big assumption to think that it would be clearly labeled, and also that it would have a dedicated fuse. It’s not like that would be such a huge power draw that it needs its own fuse. Pulling the fuse would likely cause the whole infotainment system to go down.
Reading back at my reply, I didn't mean it to sound so authoritative. Just an idea.
I helped a friend do this a couple years ago in a fairly modern car. It most certainly was not clearly labeled, but there were clues that led us to try it out. It indeed disabled more than just the cellular modem but the goal was to disable all "smart" features altogether, along with anything that collects telemetry or phones home. After monitoring how it affected the car, the mild trade-offs were deemed worth it.
My 2021 Wrangler has a very obvious antenna on top of the roll bar, very easy to unplug. (There's actually two - one for SIM stuff, and one for the XM Sat radio)
Google. I’ve searched and searched. I have a 2018 Truck from a different manufacturer and I completely went down the rabbit hole of attempting to remove it. It’s not possible. It’s an assumption that most manufacturers are following the same logic due to economy of scale.
overwhelm the brain with input. to hold onto threads like this one, you have to be fairly healthy or fairly mad.
not strapping on tin foil hat, this likely isn’t some massive coordinated effort. it could be done “better.”
this is just making the most of the situation. at scale.
if you simplify the question, “Who wants to let their car manufacturer surveil them?” - the answer is also simple. very few hands are going to be raised.
most people don’t get the tl;dr - they drown in the firehose.
what isn’t out there is a friendly, accessible version of what you’re looking for - multi-manufacturer information on snipping the sensors, why and how, and what you lose in the exchange. if it is out there, it isn’t friendly enough to be readily found.
people are tired, stretched thin, even in the most powerful nations. information access has become so ubiquitous that it has become more challenging to filter than to find.
for many people, there are far more pressing concerns to address than if nissan knows how the back seat was used last night. they would need the time and space to slow down and consider the information, and likely have means to do something, for it to elicit a response. some people would love to have the issue, that would imply having means to get a new car. no, they wouldn’t love the issue, but it is out of reach, so it isn’t deemed worth the effort spent.
right now it’s like saying your cell phone spies on you. most people won’t be getting rid of their phones. some might get foil bags.
faraday cage around your car, on the other hand, isn’t happening.
None of that matters when the info is either routinely sold to others with more time and motivation on their hands, or simply leaked to the public whether on purpose or not.
The manufacturer may have to legally include the functionality in cars they sell but in pretty sure the owner isn’t obligated to use or keep the functionality untouched.
By comparison if your seat belts are all frayed and you don’t wear them anyway that’s on you, manufacturer sold you a car with seat belts in good condition and that as far as the “compliance” requirement goes.
Might depend on the wording of the law and how that system is tied into the rest of the car. For example in the states, it is illegal to tamper with any part of the emissions control system on your car. This is mostly about making sure emissions testing via OBD II can’t be gamed, but it also would target modifications like “rolling coal” or turbos and superchargers that allow user controlled fuel mapping. But in the crossfire it catches completely reasonable reasons to modify your emissions system like a flex fuel upgrade, or replacing the computer of your old car with an aftermarket one because the engine immobilizer unit died and they’re paired together and OEM computers and immobilizer kits are either too expensive or not obtainable anymore.
Laws against tampering with vehicle safety devices would easily have a similar effect on your built in phone home systems.
it is illegal to tamper with any part of the emissions control system on your car.
Can you cite the law? I know the EPA has civilly pursues companies that make products that bypass emission controls. But haven’t seen or heard anything that goes as fat as you suggest.
Title 2 of the Clean Air Act "authorizes the EPA to set standards applicable to emissions... the CAA prohibits tampering with emissions controls, as well as manufacturing, selling, and installing aftermarket devices intended to defeat those controls."
They just got a $10M civil judgement against a couple "diesel tuners" here in Michigan:
The site you linked mentions the carve out that the EPA has, but note that it requires both retaining or beating original behavior and requires extensive prod of that fact. A similar law affecting phone home circuits would almost certainly not find disabling the ability to phone home as in compliance.
The part of your post that made me curious was whether fuel mapping, or ECU swapping was illegal. It looks like it is in a grey area under Clean Air Act, but generally interpreted as legal as long as you aren't doing things to make your emissions worse.
At least as far as ECUs go, almost every after market ECU I’ve seen doesn’t control OBD II or the CEL (or does so very minimally) and is therefore immediately in violation of not conforming to the requirements to retain OEM level behavior. Fuel mapping is more grey, largely due to the ability of some OEM ECUs to be reflashed and thus retain OBD behavior.
"It is a crime to knowingly falsify, tamper with, render inaccurate, or fail to install any "monitoring device or method" required under the Clean Air Act, including a vehicle’s on-board diagnostic system. Clean Air Act section 113(c)(2)(C)." https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/documents/ta...
Tampering. You may not remove or render inoperative any device or element of design installed on or in engines/equipment in compliance with the regulations prior to its sale and delivery to the ultimate purchaser.
It seems primarily about bypassing or disabling emission controls, not user controlled fuel mapping, or mods like putting in a performance air filter or exhaust. But EPA does consider a flex fuel conversion tampering.
Yup. Here's a fun hack - you can drive car in EU on US plates, due to international agreements. In that case, you don't have to follow local car inspection standards, but inspection standards of your home country.
Get a plate from US state that has no inspections? You need no inspections at all!
There's usually a time limit on that. Last I checked in my country it's six months before you have to register the car, get local plates, and pay VRT (vehicle registration tax) + VAT. Including the cost of VRT in the VAT calculation, resulting in double taxation.
You can't put foreign plates on an irish registered car without first bringing it out of the country and registering it abroad either. I don't think there's any tax due on re-importing a car that's already been registered however. (you even get the same plate numbers since they're consistently mapped 1-to-1 VIN-to-plate forever)
There is a legal limit, yes, but nobody checks it, so you can do it indefinitely. Around here, there's even a lot of people driving on fake "foreign" plates.
It is EURO5 or EURO6 emmision norm. It also handles firmware updates, reaction to Volkswagen cheating. Car needs to be online, check for latest firmware and all sort of nasty DRM.
There is also a black box, that records position and speed. It may call emergency if it detects crash. If DRM is violated, car may refuse to start, or only drive like 50 kms.
I don't have a source, but anyone should be able to find relevant articles.
EU "directives" require matching laws to be passed within member states, EU "regulations" apply directly to member states as written. In both cases, enforcement is up to the country you're in.
Im curious what percentage of living expenses are covered by the project for the author. I have a few products generating over 50% of my yearly expenses and am feeling like going full time is almost a possibility now.
In general I've had like infrequent but large influx of money from the project, so it's hard to answer. Although I have relatively long runway, no small thanks to nlnet for their generous grant.
On some level it's all a gamble. Either I try to make this work somehow, or I close up shop and keep working as an office drone, because I really can't keep doing both.
My hope is that I'm able to make it work on a wikipedia-like model donation model, maybe supplemented with selling commercial API access (access is free CC-BY-NC-SA). My burn rate is literally my living expenses plus a hundred dollars per month of service costs to I don't have to be spectacularly profitable to sustain flight. ... all that is contingent on making it work quite a lot better than it does now, so I guess I have my work cut out for me.
It's also a weird project, since it's had an almost absurdly positive reaction. For example, many people develop a search engine and get almost lynched on HN for not working exactly like Google or not dealing with some query as expected. Someone found a link to my barely working search engine that didn't properly support multiple-keyword queries and this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
It's also a weird project, since it's had an almost absurdly positive reaction. For example, many people develop a search engine and get almost lynched on HN for not working exactly like Google or not dealing with some query as expected.
I don't know you personally, but you come across as an earnest lone developer doing something for the passion of it. I think that goes a long way on here, versus someone giving off "portfolio project", "hire me" or "seeking investment" vibes. I've not really found a use case for your engine yet but I am really enjoying seeing your progress.
It's not just on HN either. The project was mentioned in The New Yorker and I've done interviews with German radio. Just the weirdest stuff's been happening since basically day one.
It has a nostalgic feel about it. Not just the visual design, but how it wont answer questions but it will look for terms. Sometimes you want a less algorithmic engine. Takes me back to my first messing around with dialup in 1994.
In case you want to explore additional ways to extend your runway, there is the STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/challenges/ where they claim to offer €65,000 up to a maximum of €300,000 in funding to FOSS projects.
I do find it a bit strange you "punish modern design", while your own design is very hard to read. I'm not sure you made up that quote, or someone on HN did.
It's very hard to read your search results. I've always disliked grid views to represent data. It's very hard to find what you want.
Im not sure. But it looks like you didn't want to copy google and wanted to make something "authentic", same reason why often modern design is unusable.
Every competitor of Google just gave up trying finding a better sexier way. DuckDuckGo, bing etc. Pure copies. A list view, with a good contrasting header is the best way to scan and find the results you want.
If you want to keep it, at least provide a list / grid switcher so users can pick themselves.
I don't like the basic old school google style list though. It makes very poor use of the screen space. This is primarily a service for desktop users finding desktop content, but I still want something that's accessible to other screen sizes. Really hard to find a good design that works well.
For whatever it's worth, I personally like the screenshots of the pages that shows up when you browse random; I think it really helps in recognizing a site you may have been to before. If there were a way to incorporate that into all search results, along with a more information dense listing, I for one would find that quite useful. Kind of a 'I can't remember what it was called, but I'd recognize it if I saw it' sort of thing.
I also really appreciate the desire to use available screen space. It irks me to no end when a site forces a narrow column of info/content and wide empty borders wasting half or more of my screen. Wikipedia recently started doing this and I can't say they're better for it in my opinion.
Just echoing this. I was looking for a site the other day, and I thought I'd use marginalia since it throws up interesting stuff in general, and the site I was looking for had a distinctive look that I knew I would recognise again ... and was disappointed the "magazine stand" view was only for the random sites.
As far as layout is concerned, if you don't mind me brainstorming some ideas, I'll share some thoughts.
When a search term yields many results, it's left to the user to the user to search the results for the site that will yield the "best" match for what they're after. It seems like people assume that the better the search engine is, the better it is at predicting what the user is really after by putting it at the top of the listing. But this can be rather difficult when the original search terms are pretty generic and the user is required to scroll and check many results. If there were a way help the user sort the results based on relevant criteria, maybe that would make that search easier. And personally, I like things that give users a little more say in how they get fed information. Allow sort by popularity, frequency of search terms in page, number of pages in site's domain, date of last page edit (no idea if this is possible to get), etc...
Maybe have multiple columns of search results. One column that lists results that match all words in the query, another for only one or two words. Or maybe columns that list results that include the user's query plus likely related topics. Or a set of search refinement tools that can further help the user sort based on any number of criteria, or filter results by specific related terms.
Slightly related, I really like your encyclopedia site. In addition to being incredibly nice to use all on its own, perhaps it (from the 'See Also', 'Further Reading', 'Related articles', etc... sections) could be mined for suggesting additional search terms/info a user could add to their search or filter their results by. For example if I search for Tcl and get a bunch of results, some tools that suggested filtering (or a search instead option?) the results to those that included Tk, expect, and TclX might help me get to what I'm after quicker.
No idea if any of that is practical or would even actually be that useful in practice.
I like the list view on desktop, I would maybe make the title slightly larger to have a stronger contrast with the description.
They are not my colors, but the contrast is clear!
Mobile I think the cards are to high. Slightly smaller font, and cutting of after 2-3 sentence a read more link would probably make it easier to sift through your results.
If nothing else, you could open with just a Patreon or something. Basically as a way of outsourcing the "subscription revenue" implementation until such time as something direct yourself makes sense.
Please sell something business-like that people can purchase and expense.
A book, software, something. I can't quite expense patreon and others may have a similar issue. (Useful "free SaaS" where all there is is the cup of coffee button makes me sad).
My buyer won't even blink if I say that I need a $150 tool: I can just bill it to whatever project it's being used for as long as I get an invoice or a receipt or some kind of documentation. If I say that I found a free tool and I'd like to donate $10 to the author, no one will know how to do that.
I recommend saying 'Patreon' instead of 'Donate' on the site's main navigation menu! It does have a stronger effect because they'll associate it with a human being behind the screen.
You have my pittance! Your search engine is useful to me for recipes and that crazy cyberpunk network of back-alley Geocities-esque pages it's tapped into
The "main thing" is how hard it would be to get back in the business (i.e, get a job) if the whole thing explodes.
Also if you're going to quit anyway, you might as well ask the company you currently work for if they'll let you go on sabbatical, or part time, or consulting.
That can give you a bit of extra runway/feeling of security.
I suppose you can go back to any of the previous points in your CV as a software professional in today’a day and age if you never burned any bridges. Especially so if you make it obvious in your current job that you’re only leaving because it’s time to try your own thing - if it doesn’t end up working, people are likely to be very understanding.
In general all you need is an explanation for a break in work history and there are billions that will satisfy interviewers and HR; at worst just say “health reasons” and then sue when you don’t get the job ;) (/sarcasm)
