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I bought back my acquihired startup

steveridout.com

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Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#41
> It turned out that people were using Readlang for card testing fraud. After I helped them to fix the problem

How does one fix the card testing fraud problem? Certainly you can refund people after the fact, but it seems to me any point where small-dollar service/product can be purchased by card is vulnerable and you'd have to kinda guess whether the usage makes sense?

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#42

> It turned out that people were using Readlang for card testing fraud. After I helped them to fix the problem How does one fix the card testing fraud problem? Certainly you can refund people after the fact, but it seems to me any point where small-dollar service/product can be purchased by card is vulnerable and you'd have to kinda guess whether the usage makes sense?

There a lot of ways to reduce, just some ideias: turn on 3dsecure authentication whenever available. Check user location vs card location. Validate cvc code and postal code. Check for user activity and user signals (user agent, screen size etc) on the website, and other methods.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#44
post #31

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; > DiG 9.10.6 > a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER

dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often think about this precise scenario. There are so many cases and times where a big company shuts something down that would be perfectly viable at a different scale. My previous company got acquired by Verizon and then shut down because it didn't scale to a $1B business within five years (or something like that). I'm not claiming it was a viable business in the first place (it probably wasn't) but now we'll neve…

I worked for a tiny, independent project for a giant corporation for a couple of years. It absolutely would have worked as a 2 or 3 person company but it was definitely the wrong place for a dozen engineers as part of a giant corporation. They shut it down, but now I'm wondering whether they would have entertained a small offer to buy it. Probably not, but I guess I'll never know.

Remake it with a clean codebase. Version 2 is always better.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#46
Working in a larger company it's sad to see all the perfectly viable projects canned because they aren't billion dollar businesses. I wonder if there is a marketplace play here where companies can easily resell and offboard these kinds of companies rather than kill them off.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#47
post #31

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; > DiG 9.10.6 > a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER

dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?

+short is your friend.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#48
I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it.

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#49

I cannot wait to use your website tomorrow. I've been dying for a resource to learn Serbian outside of the only book that exists ( pretty much ) and my own efforts in getting flash cards, childrens' books, etc. together. You're seriously a life saver, I cannot wait to try this out. I wish I had heard of it a year ago. _Thank you_. You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I r…

> You have produce a connection to my heritage and ancestry that nobody else has, and I really appreciate it.

Awww, this is such a precious sentiment <3 it always makes me happy to see people's lives changed like this online~

Re: I bought back my acquihired startup

#50
post #31

Small suggestion: You may want to fix your DNS configuration which currently only resolves readlang.com and not www.readlang.com. This might confuse some visitors (it confused me when I typed readlang and pressed Ctrl+Enter): ~ $ dig a www.readlang.com ; > DiG 9.10.6 > a www.readlang.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER

dig has the worst output I've ever seen in a CLI tool. Fantastically useful when I've bothered to learn it, but it's just not intuitive. I always forget what everything means. What am I looking at here? The _lack_ of an answer section?

Yes, it's horrible. It helps if you know the actual syntax used in zone files, and yes, it's the lack of an answer section.

Alternatively use the short format as suggested by another comment:

    $ dig a www.readlang.com +short
    readlang.com.
    139.144.234.197
Although now it's a bit too short and you can't see the record types (CNAME, A). Sigh.
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