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A few years ago I thought Facebook Marketplace was a goldmine.<p>The messages never stopped.
“Is this still available?”
“Can I pick it up today?”
“Very interested.”<p>On paper, demand looked insane.<p>In reality, most of it was fake.<p>I was selling higher ticket items and services to everyday people. Many of them had bad credit, unstable income, or financial stress. Facebook Marketplace put me directly in front of that audience, but it did not filter for ability to buy.<p>I confused attention with intent.<p>I spent hours responding, explaining, following up, and holding items. Deals would feel close, then fall apart at the last moment. Financing applications would fail. Cash buyers would disappear. People would ghost after long conversations.<p>At first I blamed the platform. Then I blamed the buyers.<p>Eventually I realized the problem was me.<p>I had built a system optimized for volume instead of qualification. Facebook Marketplace is incredible at creating conversations, but terrible at signaling seriousness. Bad credit was not the real issue. Unclear expectations were.<p>Many people reached out because it was easy, free, and low commitment. Not because they were ready or able to buy.<p>The failure taught me something important.
You cannot scale sales on hope.<p>I had to change everything.<p>I tightened qualification early. I stopped treating every message as a lead. I asked uncomfortable questions sooner. I stopped chasing people who wanted possibilities instead of decisions.<p>That reduced my message count but increased my close rate.<p>The biggest lesson was this.
Bad credit customers are not bad customers.
But unqualified demand will burn you out faster than no demand at all.<p>Facebook Marketplace still works, but only if you respect what it is. It is a conversation engine, not a closing engine.<p>Once I stopped expecting it to be something it was not, my results improved and my stress dropped.<p>That failure probably saved me years of wasted effort.
created Crystalline Protocol. It treats the blockchain state not just as a key-value store, but as a mathematical set governed by the Axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.<p>The PoC (written in Rust) demonstrates an "Axiomatic Engine" that enforces the Axiom of Regularity. It physically prevents circular dependencies (logical loops) at the VM level. If a transaction creates a cycle, the "Logic Firewall" rejects it before it can ever be executed.
I have been cranking out apps for the past few years and loving it. Then one morning a week or 2 ago I got a little ambitious and decided to build a desktop email client because outlook was so-so and superhuman was ridiculously expensive.<p>Is this a big mistake? Am I wasting my time ?<p>So far I have Microsoft and Google working and I can do the normal email interaction read, reply, archive etc. I also got local AI working and training on your emails (all local).<p>Let me know your thoughts.<p>PS: my target audience is developers not the general public
RevisionDojo is a YC-backed test prep company ($3.4M raised) that sells International Baccalaureate (IB) test prep. Over the past year, users on r/IBO sub-reddit have documented a pattern of unethical marketing practices:<p>*Astroturfing:* Coordinated campaigns where accounts pose as students sharing "cheatsheets" and "predicted exam leaks." Other accounts then upvote, leave supportive comments, and ask follow-up questions—creating the illusion of organic student excitement. Multiple threads have exposed this pattern [1][2][3].<p>*Paid fake posts:* High school students report being offered payment to write promotional Reddit posts [4].<p>*Pressuring critics:* Users who post negative reviews report being contacted directly by company representatives, told it's "a shame" they're posting publicly [5]. Critical comments receive coordinated mass downvotes [6].<p>*Soliciting copyrighted materials:* They use TikTok influencers and fake reddit posts to persuade students to sell them official IB exam papers, violating IB policies [7].<p>The r/IBO moderators are actively investigating [8].<p>These practices appear to be working great for them. Recently, they acquired OnePrep (oneprep.xyz), a free SAT prep tool that was already popular on r/sat. Since the acquisition, the same manipulation tactics have been deployed at scale: 150 Trustpilot reviews in a window of a few days [9], and widespread coordinated Reddit manipulation—multiple accounts posting "tips" that recommend Oneprep, coordinated upvoting, and fake enthusiasm in comments. The most prominent example was a 2,000+ upvote post removed by moderators for manipulation, but it's part of a sustained campaign across the subreddit.<p>*Sources:*<p>[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1p55qun/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1jsb00a/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1ohcohi/
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1p55qun/comment/nqmhal3/
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/na94upv/
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/na8zvs4/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1mej900/
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/nagdkl5/
[9] https://www.trustpilot.com/review/oneprep.xyz
Hi HN,<p>I’m a former C++ dev turned Product Manager.<p>I’ve noticed many engineers struggle with the "politics" side of things when they become Leads. To help with this, I’m building a text-based simulator.<p>It is NOT an AI chatbot. It is a hand-crafted, branching narrative (logic tree) based on real experiences.<p>I just launched the first scenario: "The Backchannel VP."<p>The Setup: Your VP Engineering is bypassing you and giving tasks directly to your juniors, causing chaos.<p>Your Goal: Stop the backchanneling without getting fired.<p>It’s a short, specific puzzle. I’d love to know if you think the "Correct" path I designed matches your real-world experience, or if I’m off base.<p>Link: <a href="https://apmcommunication.com/scenario/backchannel-vp" rel="nofollow">https://apmcommunication.com/scenario/backchannel-vp</a>
Why - I got sick of apps abusing notifications on my Android phone. While the OS does give you the ability to switch off notifications based on channels, most apps either don't use it or abuse it intentionally. In my case, I live in a gated society that uses an app called MyGate to allow visitors, and the app intentionally pushes ads through the same channels since you cannot block them.<p>What - DoNotNotify is an app that logs all incoming notifications, and displays them grouped by app. It also captures the action behind the notification, which can be triggered from the app itself. From this log, you can create rules to whitelist/blacklist notifications from apps depending on their notification content. These filters can even be regex expressions, which allows for more complicated use-cases. The app ships with some pre-defined rules for popular apps like Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, Reddit etc.<p>Where - The website is at <a href="https://donotnotify.com/" rel="nofollow">https://donotnotify.com/</a>.<p>Would also like to call out that the app runs purely on your device, never communicates with anything on the Internet, and only requires notifications access to work. It is completely free, and there is no advertising or hidden gotchas.
Hi HN,<p>This is a small RISC-V emulator I’ve been hacking on in Emacs Lisp as a fun weekend project.<p>It started mostly as a way to better understand the RISC-V spec by implementing things myself, and also as an excuse to write more non-trivial Emacs Lisp. It currently focuses on RV32I and related basics, and is very much not optimized or production-ready.<p>If you’re into RISC-V, emulators, or just enjoy seeing unusual things built in Emacs Lisp, feedback and comments are welcome<p>Happy hacking!
I’ve always struggled with traditional habit trackers. Filling out boxes every day feels robotic to me, and missing one day ruins the whole aesthetic.<p>So I built Voronoi just to use it myself. Instead of a rigid grid, it uses organic shapes to visualize your year. Your consistency paints a unique map associated with your time, rather than just checking off a list.<p>I've been using it for a while and it actually helps me stick to things, so I thought I'd share it here. I added a few other little tools and features that I personally needed along the way, but I'll let you discover those on your own.<p>Hope you find it useful.<p>https://getvoronoi.com