Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success. I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
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I'd argue that we're seeing various indicators that suggest we've passed a tipping point. We can look at things like the high national debt vs unprecedented low tax rates on the wealthy, the wealth of the top 1% surpassing that of the bottom 90%, how government agencies and safety nets are being gutted when we have the highest GDP in history, how the wealthy build gated communities instead of relieving even the most basic suffering (like infant mortality), how tech profits get vacuumed up by a handful of people through financial instruments and crypto rather than going towards investment in new businesses, how private equity firms own a 5% stake in most companies and are buying up all housing and real estate along with foreign investment to turn owners into renters, how politicians are so involved with insider trading that we can no longer distinguish campaign contributions from Wall Street bribes and kickbacks.. the rabbit hole goes so deep that we fall forever if we get sucked into it.
Meanwhile how many of us are struggling to win the internet lottery with our 2nd, our 3rd, our 10th startup? When deep down we know the odds of succeeding are perhaps 10% or less, and the system feels rigged to deny us access to any capital at all, especially when we need it most to cover a mortgage payment or health emergency that should have already been covered by our exorbitantly high insurance rates and taxes going into a private healthcare system that's twice as expensive as the rest of the developed world.
In many ways, I consider us to be in a worst-case scenario. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. We could have had a technotopia like solarpunk with full automation and UBI, instead we're racing towards fascist dictatorship. Where we once had democrats and republicans at least symbolically opposing one another, now we effectively have a single center-right party funded by the same private donors, which uses wedge issues to keep the population divided and conquered.
I'd even say that we got here by banning political content on HN and elsewhere. So we have a generation of young people who never knew an America before everything was privatized. We can imagine what a center-left government would look like, a we society instead of a me society, where most profit flows into a pot shared by all, with equal pay regardless of gender or race, a national surplus as large as our current debt, free college and healthcare paid for by that endowment, nearly free renewable energy, climate change reversing back towards baseline, etc etc, an ivory tower so high it would reach the stars.
But sadly that's all just a dream now, so far away that it's hard to see a way to get there without going through societal pain that as recently as the late 1990s could have been completely avoided.
Ours was supposed to be the quick and easy path. Is it any wonder that we succumbed to the dark side?