> The way Faulkner treats his characters, I treat domain name projects. I buy them with an intention to develop. And I let them take the lead. They’re the inspiration for the business itself. They guide me towards what they need to become. I’m just the dude behind the keyboard (sorta).
I feel the same way about personal projects and blogs. A good idea tends to be self-reinforcing. It just needs someone to uncover it. Selling onions on the internet seems unusual but to the right person that idea is gold.
The internet was originally promised as a way to disintermediate these kinds of supply chains, yet we often ignore these "boring" businesses for hype trains. The fact that he added a phone number and it sometimes out-sells the website is the cherry on top.
I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person.
The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.
The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.
I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.
It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.
can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued
The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.
The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).
So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.
author here : ) happy to answer questions if you have any. We also have a twitter account here if you want to follow along: https://x.com/vidaliaonions
I live in a mountain valley in Mallorca where hundreds of tons of perfect Canoneta oranges fall to the floor and rot each year because the cost of picking them outweighs their market value. The valley became wealthy from this fruit in the 19th century but the economics no longer add up. [0]
At the same time the price of orange juice (elsewhere) has skyrocketed [1], yet this rural community seems unable to take advantage.
How would you market such a business in 2026? I am from an Italian region where farmer grow many special coltures, and I was always a bit surprised why they don’t try selling on the internet. I ended up convincing myself it is not a viable business model.
I'd still lean into a great .com domain, as it still gives you instant credibility. Also leverage Facebook, as my typical buyer hangs out there a good bit. YouTube has been helpful as well, as we try to share "behind the curtain" what life is like as a Vidalia farmer.
I live in Sweden, and almost every year I discover someone I work with or have friends in common with, who has a friend or relative in Italy, or Greece who farms oranges/olives/cheese or what have you. And this friend in Sweden is selling their produce by word of mouth.
So once a year at harvest, the relative has someone drives a truck full of olive oil 2000 kilometers north, and dozens of Swedes turn up at an appointed time on a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot to pick up their order of six bottles of oil. The prices are no better than in the supermarket, but ostensibly you’d get a high quality product.
It’s a funny way to do business in 2025, completely without Internet infrastructure. Somehow, I don’t think it would work as a web shop.
If you grow them in the Vidalia region (20 counties around Vidalia, GA), you're aok... but if you grow them outside of that area, and call them a Vidalia, you'll get into hot water. The law mainly came into existence cause Texas farmers began growing regular yellow onions and slapping the 'Vidalia' name on it, and customers would get pissed. So all the Vidalia farmers got together and got a Federal law passed that says you can only call an onion a 'Vidalia' if it's grown in our special region down here where we have sandy, loamy soil that contributes to the mild, sweet taste.
Yeah thanksfully in Europe we have AOP / AOC (protected name of origin) so that names can have a meaning. Good that Vidalia farmers seem to have managed to do the same somehow.
Regarding Champaign, the funniest part is that Russia granted exclusivity of the name to some local sparkling wine, such that actual wines from the Champaign aera need to use some alternative names there ^^
It's a brand name, like any other. Usage of it requires fulfilling the brand requirements. It's like how you can't say a burger from Burger King if it's actually from McDonalds, even if it's a very similar hamburger.
But even then, this isn't uncommon for food and beverages. You can't call it "whisky" unless you follow certain requirements about the mash bill, barrel, etc.
(My dad, before his death, had started growing "Pennsylvania Simply Sweet" onions. Because you can't call them Vidalia.)
It's similar to French wines and cheese. News to me that we have this in the US but it totally makes sense. We have a few of these in the PNW, like Hermiston melons and Walla Walla onions.
It's a broader EU thing (named AOP - protected designation of origin) rather than French only, though you are right that France has plenty of those for wines and cheese. But it's also protecting Greek Feta, Italian Parma ham, Scottish Shetland Wool, etc
There are a lot of food and drink items with official legal definitions that include the region of origin. The most famous one is champagne, which can only be called champagne if it comes from a specific region.
You can think of the name as being inclusive of the region, not simply descriptive of the variety. So if someone made a sparkling wine in a different region and sold it as champagne then they would be committing fraud.
> Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do?
At your farmer’s market? Probably nothing. But if you came across a particularly grumpy person with time and money to burn on lawyers they would have a case against you. Not actually going to happen at that scale. But if you owned vidaliaonions.com and started selling fraudulent vidalia onions at scale, the farmers would likely get together and pursue legal action to protect their prices.
It’s almost like a brand. You can sell LEGO-style bricks but you can’t call them LEGO because they didn’t come from the LEGO company.
> You can think of the name as being inclusive of the region, not simply descriptive of the variety.
The term of art is terroir [1], which is the "character" of the environment the plants are grown in. It's often that a region will have some special characteristic due to geology that allows a unique flavor profile to grow so these trade names are the equivalent of a terroir brand.
Some designations are more strict than others, though. IIRC in the case of Vidalia onions the soil is low in sulfur so the biochemical pathways in onions that produce astringent compounds are nutrient starved. As far as I know most sweet onion varieties nowadays are grown in similar soil, but they're not legally allowed to call them Vidalias.
I've been doing some version of this since college. ...holy shit that's almost 20 years.
It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college.
Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and then "That's a good domain name" comes out. I'd make a quick note and think about it for a few days. I found that if I come back to it after a week or so then it's maybe worth something.
Business and domain names can make or break a company.
On top of all that, i've also bought and then sold hundreds of domains for a profit based off this bit. I use various registars when they have sales, buy em up cheap for a few years, then park em.
After reading the OP, it's kinda funny. I did something similar with a garlic grower back in the early 00's. I had a domain, my brother worked for a garlic farmer, the farmer wanted to export to asia. It worked out well for a few years.
Very interesting, I feel like domain names definitely have values but I don't know much about domain names that much but how do you buy or sell hundreds of domains?
Personally It would be interesting to see some domain names for cheap and if I have an idea, I can perhaps have domain name for cheap or something similar to it but I don't really know if I should go into this hobby perhaps and no guarantees that I would but I am curious about resources basically and I wish if you can tell me more about it
I feel like the issue I feel as if is that most domains would just be parked in there or would be sold for losses perhaps.
My guess is that he took a meme for normal people ("that would make a good band name") and twisted it into a more nerdy version ("that would make a good domain name").
author here... you're correct - it's highly unlikely I would have built anything unless I had this unique, exact-match domain. I needed that unfair advantage to start, as the name sortof branded the project for me in the early days and helped drive new customers.
I was also quite chocked that you did this ^^ I'm not sure who is the naive one, either you or me, but I would never have assumed that such a name would sell for more than 2k (but at least it was worth it for you here).
I'm really wondering how important the domain was here. I feel it's more just what got you the motivation to do something rather than anything else then your hard work and the quality of the product made the rest (that makes me think of Dumbo's magic feather) but I read in another comment and your bio that you seem to feel strongly about domain names and how much they impact the success of a business (you probably know better)
“ The way Faulkner treats his characters, I treat domain name projects. I buy them with an intention to develop. And I let them take the lead. They’re the inspiration for the business itself. They guide me towards what they need to become. I’m just the dude behind the keyboard (sorta).”
To me it makes sense. Without a domain name, it’s just an idea. The domain name makes it real, and it’s a foundation the biz can stand on. Too many people try to start a biz without a foundation.
been sitting on fullstackjavascript.com for years. been too busy writing javascript to do anything with it and now I work almost exclusively in elixir.
It's a good domain name for what its worth. But are you/ anybody not worried about the javascript trademark by oracle and the lawsuit of oracle vs deno and the times oracle sends cease and desist to even books about javascript one time or any conference with javascript as an example
This I think is the reason why javascript conferences are instead called ecmascript conferences
I’ve had swiftbestpractices.com forever and still haven’t done anything with it. Meanwhile I’ve been going ham on my latest purchase of myfacespacebook.com. It’s weird the things that actually motivate us.
Not really sure what's so crazy about that. A brick and mortar shop will spend way more than that on renting a good location for their business when they have no clue whether they'll turn a profit. This is just the digital equivalent of that. People trust authoritative domains like vidaliaonions.com way more than something like vidaliaonions-direct.net and they're given more SEO weight as well. At least I know that used to be true; not sure how true that is today but I'd imagine it still is.
Very interesting page, left me with a lot of mixed feelings after I read it. First, it seems like the biggest issue was not onion futures per se, but manipulating the market. It seems like banning onion futures was just a band-aid while ignoring the true cause. Second, if it really is the case that onions' perishable nature caused the problem, why not at least extend the ban to all similarly perishable products? Again it seems like they attacked the symptom rather than the root cause. But those criticisms aside, I kind of love that the government back then was willing to shut down shady money making schemes from finance bros. That would never happen in America today, so that part was pretty cool.
What a cool story. Not tech for tech's sake, but tech that grows into something simpler, more efficient, and more world-opening for something as wonderful as the Vidalia onion
I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names.
So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
What mainly caused it: I kept getting laid off, and that nonsense infuriated me. So I was actively trying to find ways to save myself. Great domains, via the expiry marketplace, slowly became an unfair advantage I could lean into and compete with larger companies, just because I owned this unique .com domain. Hope that makes sense. I've written a few essays on my experience being laid off, if you're bored and wanna read: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/how-on-earth/ ; https://www.deepsouthventures.com/on-being-laid-off-unplanne...
oop, didn't see your 2nd question... yes, I still monitor expiring domain names... it's a very sticky habit, and ruthlessly fun... it's sortof like my morning paper.
Oh at this point I am trying to stop myself from getting into it since I know that I would get sucked into it like you too :) since I wouldn't have the funds to buy websites anyway and with things like PPP (Power purchasing parity) working against my favour it would be hard.
I did buy fossbox.cloud for less than a $ per year (81 cents iirc) when I wanted to build my own cloud with its own nice-ities.
Currently its just hosting some simple python servers and nothing much because I feel extremely lazy to host anything there because of lack of time mostly due to the fear of studies or similar but yea (read my another comment here for more context, sorry if it got long)
Let me know if you want the domain xD, I will transfer it to ya for free so that people like you can work in cloud industry too perhaps xD. We need people like you working in vps/cloud industry and maybe I can try to better explain some other things too!
Imagine if this domain of fossbox.cloud supercharges your journey into vps provider/cloud provider xD (let me know what you think, maybe we can collaborate which can be insane haha, 100% tell me more about your thoughts on the whole thing please!)
Also another question but how much do you think a domain like fossbox.cloud is worth? Not that I am selling it to someone to be honest but Did I make a profit xD?
I had seen your comment 5 minutes after you sent it but decided to read both of the articles and think about it
You are one of the few people who can say that they declined the offer at google and I am sad that you didn't get the bean bag :<
Now on a serious note, I feel like there are some immense similarities between your story which happened 20 years ago and what's happening now with the AI hype
> It was a gut punch face slap. My replacement, who’d only been there a few months, avoided the hatchet (cheaper salary, I presume). I would have stayed and worked for free if they would have asked. They didn’t.
I am also like you, perhaps the thing which interests me is that for me coding/tinkering with homelabs/servers are just things which I want to do even as independence or even for free :)
Shame that the company didn't work out. In retrospect, its all good now but that does feel like an action of mismanagement from the company's part because you clearly loved the company and who knows what might happen with the person you trained for months and how much they loved the company or benefitted the company ykwim
You write really clearly and I really appreciate it a lot and I feel like this sense of flow guiding us to where we are is definitely true :)
I recently spent a quick chunk of my month or two thinking about a problem that I solved for myself but it felt like that it could have abuses to the point that maybe most large cloud providers/providers might shut things down or would be an hassle. So I thought of an cloud provider which can understand the idea of things similar to the fact that there are different instances and dont shut down the servers due to complaints or anything
I wanted to build a cloud where saas providers wouldn't have to worry about servers. The servers can be deployed for the people themselves and have hourly pricing for what they use instead of how most saas stuff work nowadays of fixed pricing.
I am not sure but this idea required me to build my own cloud of sorts or build on another and I am just a 17 year old guy so I thought that most major cloud providers are really kind of no go so I looked at more hidden cloud providers like upcloud and scaleway and so so many others and I think OVH could be good for that idea or upcloud is good too but the thing is that upcloud has some nicer features like auto-scaling in vps's/a really good support system that I liked.
Well I still didn't have a credit card but since I wanted to buy vps's or similar. I started looking at lowendtalk and black friday and started talking to vps providers on lowendtalk and here and I think that its a very resource/cost intensive process and I just didn't feel right about reselling
Then I started feeling like how to build my own cloud. I found WHMCS + virtualizor and they were paid and so I started tinkering even more and just today found incus and started to self host incus and I bought myself some domain name and some cheap netcup server to play with things.
All while I was preparing for one of the toughest exams (JEE) so that definitely took a hit but talking to vps providers about finances and etc. makes me feel like right now is just not the time about it and the best thing I can do is to familiarize myself more with hardware stuff and buy cheap laptops and create homelabs with incus and play with hardwares too and get a job at IT/any related perhaps. Lets hope that any company looking to hire can take hackernews points into account too :)
I am still in school and I feel like coding is something that I can do too (Although vibe-coding hell is real so I am probably gonna learn it and give it time) and then contribute to real projects along the way
Honestly I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I feel like working at such providers or any similar things where I can do things like this, maybe perhaps even working at any massive hyperscaler perhaps if I "grind" extremely hard from here on out for career opportunities.
This is also the reason why I got interested in your story of domains because the vps providers usually provide domains too and I wanted to know the finances of it and why you got addicted and other things so once again thanks for telling me about it
Its funny but I used to be a coding -> finance -> started using linux ..... -> extremely coding oriented (both software and even appreciation of hardware nowadays)
I find your story really inspiring because one of the issues I felt is that I will always be judged by the degree I have and things like these don't really matter but your story is something that I resonate with a lot in my own way and I am super happy that you are now doing things which you are satisfied with. I wish to do something like this in my own way. I just want "enough" and I don't know if it would be jobs/business which would be the key to that (I hope jobs personally) but I am keeping an open mind on the whole situation and sorry for the long message
But your articles are something which have just resonated with me unlike none other right now. I am going to join the newsletter and have a merry christmas and a new year from here on out. Wishing the best for you, your family and your business and have a nice day Peter!!
I think I might take a drop year perhaps just to study JEE again to focus to get into a good college since the competition here is immense if things don't work out but from here on out, I do wish to keep these ambitions in check as they impact my studies but I study so that one day these ambitions/hobbies can be my job :)
Although I love the idea of a business and I might start one from my extra funds of jobs perhaps but the thing is I just want a job one day of things which I enjoy doing because I thought about it from sides of finance in the sense that retirement/financial independence would just mean doing things I like and I can have something like this in the IT/CS industry and I am young enough that I am still in school and even right now I can spend 1 year again to just prepare to get a good college which can play a massive role in my country atleast to get a job.
I wish the job market was less of a fear mongering pester right now where I feel like I need a degree for which I need to study things like chemistry (No offense chem, but you just don't tinkle me the same way containers do) and the immense competition and everything makes me feel like odds are definitely stacked against me but we don't know how it pans out but hopefully I can carve a niche for doing the things I enjoy as a job one day and get highlighted from this "passion" that other people name so. My mother says that I should stop doing these things and focus on my studies and she's probably right but man oh man I can't really explain it to anybody how I feel sometimes but its something that I am gonna have to figure out I suppose. Probably gonna go back to studying. Took a one hour long break :) writing it and thinking about it but well worth it.
> Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insights
> Me: I sell onions on the internet
That's exactly how I feel about AI! Instead of all that useless nonsense, just keeping it real, doing something that's actually useful for individuals and for society.
Got these many years back after having been posted here. Very happy with the purchase, but wouldn’t order again as my wife hated the smell. Highly recommended everyone order these at least once.
Sometimes you start a business. Sometimes a business starts you. Awesome that the author saw this as an opportunity and not a down side to owning a name he never really wanted to begin with.
Sometimes the right business just finds you and you’re at the right place at the right time to see it.
> Some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do.
My grandfather and my cousin, who he pretty much raised were eating regular red or yellow onions like apples like that. I had never seen anyone else do that. They would make an onion "salad" which was just cut up onion with olive oil and salt.
author here.. our Vidalia season usually starts in late April - FYI. If you visit our website, submit your email there and I'll drop you a note when our order lines are open.
I checked and its the 47th most upvoted post in all of hackernews. (Btw each algolia page gives 30 articles so it could've been simpler for me if I didn't manually read till 30 :) but yea, hope it gives some context)
47th most upvoted story is wild but so true. I feel like although we might upvote AI and what not posts in HN which can casually reach 1000+ at times. Deep down what really sells us more isn't AI but rather a fever dream of sorts that one sells onions and maybe the freedom we attach to it
I feel the same way about personal projects and blogs. A good idea tends to be self-reinforcing. It just needs someone to uncover it. Selling onions on the internet seems unusual but to the right person that idea is gold.
The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.
The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.
I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.
It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.
The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).
So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.
At the same time the price of orange juice (elsewhere) has skyrocketed [1], yet this rural community seems unable to take advantage.
What would you do?
[0] https://ruralhotelsmallorca.com/guides/The-History-of-Soller... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c397n3jl3z8o
So once a year at harvest, the relative has someone drives a truck full of olive oil 2000 kilometers north, and dozens of Swedes turn up at an appointed time on a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot to pick up their order of six bottles of oil. The prices are no better than in the supermarket, but ostensibly you’d get a high quality product.
It’s a funny way to do business in 2025, completely without Internet infrastructure. Somehow, I don’t think it would work as a web shop.
Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do?
Seems kinda weird they have a government granted monopoly on them.
Regarding Champaign, the funniest part is that Russia granted exclusivity of the name to some local sparkling wine, such that actual wines from the Champaign aera need to use some alternative names there ^^
But even then, this isn't uncommon for food and beverages. You can't call it "whisky" unless you follow certain requirements about the mash bill, barrel, etc.
(My dad, before his death, had started growing "Pennsylvania Simply Sweet" onions. Because you can't call them Vidalia.)
You can think of the name as being inclusive of the region, not simply descriptive of the variety. So if someone made a sparkling wine in a different region and sold it as champagne then they would be committing fraud.
> Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do?
At your farmer’s market? Probably nothing. But if you came across a particularly grumpy person with time and money to burn on lawyers they would have a case against you. Not actually going to happen at that scale. But if you owned vidaliaonions.com and started selling fraudulent vidalia onions at scale, the farmers would likely get together and pursue legal action to protect their prices.
It’s almost like a brand. You can sell LEGO-style bricks but you can’t call them LEGO because they didn’t come from the LEGO company.
The term of art is terroir [1], which is the "character" of the environment the plants are grown in. It's often that a region will have some special characteristic due to geology that allows a unique flavor profile to grow so these trade names are the equivalent of a terroir brand.
Some designations are more strict than others, though. IIRC in the case of Vidalia onions the soil is low in sulfur so the biochemical pathways in onions that produce astringent compounds are nutrient starved. As far as I know most sweet onion varieties nowadays are grown in similar soil, but they're not legally allowed to call them Vidalias.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir
It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college.
Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and then "That's a good domain name" comes out. I'd make a quick note and think about it for a few days. I found that if I come back to it after a week or so then it's maybe worth something.
Business and domain names can make or break a company.
On top of all that, i've also bought and then sold hundreds of domains for a profit based off this bit. I use various registars when they have sales, buy em up cheap for a few years, then park em.
After reading the OP, it's kinda funny. I did something similar with a garlic grower back in the early 00's. I had a domain, my brother worked for a garlic farmer, the farmer wanted to export to asia. It worked out well for a few years.
I found websites/newsletters like https://ungrabbed.com/
Personally It would be interesting to see some domain names for cheap and if I have an idea, I can perhaps have domain name for cheap or something similar to it but I don't really know if I should go into this hobby perhaps and no guarantees that I would but I am curious about resources basically and I wish if you can tell me more about it
I feel like the issue I feel as if is that most domains would just be parked in there or would be sold for losses perhaps.
I don’t understand this.
The name still makes me giggle. I'd love to build something relevant and silly enough to put there, but I haven't found it yet.
Suggestions are welcome! :)
I'm really wondering how important the domain was here. I feel it's more just what got you the motivation to do something rather than anything else then your hard work and the quality of the product made the rest (that makes me think of Dumbo's magic feather) but I read in another comment and your bio that you seem to feel strongly about domain names and how much they impact the success of a business (you probably know better)
To me it makes sense. Without a domain name, it’s just an idea. The domain name makes it real, and it’s a foundation the biz can stand on. Too many people try to start a biz without a foundation.
This I think is the reason why javascript conferences are instead called ecmascript conferences
[1] https://xcancel.com/searchbound/status/1996247844080996549#m
I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names.
So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
I did buy fossbox.cloud for less than a $ per year (81 cents iirc) when I wanted to build my own cloud with its own nice-ities.
Currently its just hosting some simple python servers and nothing much because I feel extremely lazy to host anything there because of lack of time mostly due to the fear of studies or similar but yea (read my another comment here for more context, sorry if it got long)
Let me know if you want the domain xD, I will transfer it to ya for free so that people like you can work in cloud industry too perhaps xD. We need people like you working in vps/cloud industry and maybe I can try to better explain some other things too!
Imagine if this domain of fossbox.cloud supercharges your journey into vps provider/cloud provider xD (let me know what you think, maybe we can collaborate which can be insane haha, 100% tell me more about your thoughts on the whole thing please!)
Also another question but how much do you think a domain like fossbox.cloud is worth? Not that I am selling it to someone to be honest but Did I make a profit xD?
I had seen your comment 5 minutes after you sent it but decided to read both of the articles and think about it
You are one of the few people who can say that they declined the offer at google and I am sad that you didn't get the bean bag :<
Now on a serious note, I feel like there are some immense similarities between your story which happened 20 years ago and what's happening now with the AI hype
> It was a gut punch face slap. My replacement, who’d only been there a few months, avoided the hatchet (cheaper salary, I presume). I would have stayed and worked for free if they would have asked. They didn’t.
I am also like you, perhaps the thing which interests me is that for me coding/tinkering with homelabs/servers are just things which I want to do even as independence or even for free :)
Shame that the company didn't work out. In retrospect, its all good now but that does feel like an action of mismanagement from the company's part because you clearly loved the company and who knows what might happen with the person you trained for months and how much they loved the company or benefitted the company ykwim
You write really clearly and I really appreciate it a lot and I feel like this sense of flow guiding us to where we are is definitely true :)
I recently spent a quick chunk of my month or two thinking about a problem that I solved for myself but it felt like that it could have abuses to the point that maybe most large cloud providers/providers might shut things down or would be an hassle. So I thought of an cloud provider which can understand the idea of things similar to the fact that there are different instances and dont shut down the servers due to complaints or anything
I wanted to build a cloud where saas providers wouldn't have to worry about servers. The servers can be deployed for the people themselves and have hourly pricing for what they use instead of how most saas stuff work nowadays of fixed pricing.
I am not sure but this idea required me to build my own cloud of sorts or build on another and I am just a 17 year old guy so I thought that most major cloud providers are really kind of no go so I looked at more hidden cloud providers like upcloud and scaleway and so so many others and I think OVH could be good for that idea or upcloud is good too but the thing is that upcloud has some nicer features like auto-scaling in vps's/a really good support system that I liked.
Well I still didn't have a credit card but since I wanted to buy vps's or similar. I started looking at lowendtalk and black friday and started talking to vps providers on lowendtalk and here and I think that its a very resource/cost intensive process and I just didn't feel right about reselling
Then I started feeling like how to build my own cloud. I found WHMCS + virtualizor and they were paid and so I started tinkering even more and just today found incus and started to self host incus and I bought myself some domain name and some cheap netcup server to play with things.
All while I was preparing for one of the toughest exams (JEE) so that definitely took a hit but talking to vps providers about finances and etc. makes me feel like right now is just not the time about it and the best thing I can do is to familiarize myself more with hardware stuff and buy cheap laptops and create homelabs with incus and play with hardwares too and get a job at IT/any related perhaps. Lets hope that any company looking to hire can take hackernews points into account too :)
I am still in school and I feel like coding is something that I can do too (Although vibe-coding hell is real so I am probably gonna learn it and give it time) and then contribute to real projects along the way
Honestly I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I feel like working at such providers or any similar things where I can do things like this, maybe perhaps even working at any massive hyperscaler perhaps if I "grind" extremely hard from here on out for career opportunities.
This is also the reason why I got interested in your story of domains because the vps providers usually provide domains too and I wanted to know the finances of it and why you got addicted and other things so once again thanks for telling me about it
Its funny but I used to be a coding -> finance -> started using linux ..... -> extremely coding oriented (both software and even appreciation of hardware nowadays)
I find your story really inspiring because one of the issues I felt is that I will always be judged by the degree I have and things like these don't really matter but your story is something that I resonate with a lot in my own way and I am super happy that you are now doing things which you are satisfied with. I wish to do something like this in my own way. I just want "enough" and I don't know if it would be jobs/business which would be the key to that (I hope jobs personally) but I am keeping an open mind on the whole situation and sorry for the long message
But your articles are something which have just resonated with me unlike none other right now. I am going to join the newsletter and have a merry christmas and a new year from here on out. Wishing the best for you, your family and your business and have a nice day Peter!!
I think I might take a drop year perhaps just to study JEE again to focus to get into a good college since the competition here is immense if things don't work out but from here on out, I do wish to keep these ambitions in check as they impact my studies but I study so that one day these ambitions/hobbies can be my job :)
Although I love the idea of a business and I might start one from my extra funds of jobs perhaps but the thing is I just want a job one day of things which I enjoy doing because I thought about it from sides of finance in the sense that retirement/financial independence would just mean doing things I like and I can have something like this in the IT/CS industry and I am young enough that I am still in school and even right now I can spend 1 year again to just prepare to get a good college which can play a massive role in my country atleast to get a job.
I wish the job market was less of a fear mongering pester right now where I feel like I need a degree for which I need to study things like chemistry (No offense chem, but you just don't tinkle me the same way containers do) and the immense competition and everything makes me feel like odds are definitely stacked against me but we don't know how it pans out but hopefully I can carve a niche for doing the things I enjoy as a job one day and get highlighted from this "passion" that other people name so. My mother says that I should stop doing these things and focus on my studies and she's probably right but man oh man I can't really explain it to anybody how I feel sometimes but its something that I am gonna have to figure out I suppose. Probably gonna go back to studying. Took a one hour long break :) writing it and thinking about it but well worth it.
Once again have a nice day peter!
> Me: I sell onions on the internet
That's exactly how I feel about AI! Instead of all that useless nonsense, just keeping it real, doing something that's actually useful for individuals and for society.
Like Newcomen, Watt, Faraday, Turing, Sutskever and Hinton. These guys are worth a lot of onions.
How much money does it take to start something like this?
Sometimes the right business just finds you and you’re at the right place at the right time to see it.
My grandfather and my cousin, who he pretty much raised were eating regular red or yellow onions like apples like that. I had never seen anyone else do that. They would make an onion "salad" which was just cut up onion with olive oil and salt.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
I checked and its the 47th most upvoted post in all of hackernews. (Btw each algolia page gives 30 articles so it could've been simpler for me if I didn't manually read till 30 :) but yea, hope it gives some context)
47th most upvoted story is wild but so true. I feel like although we might upvote AI and what not posts in HN which can casually reach 1000+ at times. Deep down what really sells us more isn't AI but rather a fever dream of sorts that one sells onions and maybe the freedom we attach to it
I Sell Onions on the Internet (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32053044 - July 2022 (89 comments)
I Sell Onions on the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 - April 2019 (435 comments)
It's not onions. It's lead generation.