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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

It seemed particularly appropriate for the HN t-shirt to raise money for Watsi, since you guys in a sense discovered Watsi. They'd had some publicity before, but it was after their highly upvoted post on HN that their growth really took off. That was also how we found out about them.

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And by the same token raises visibility of Teespring, a current YC startup.

The question was raised in the HN DDoS thread about what value YC derives from HN, so there are two examples right there - discovery and promotion of investment opportunities.

That's not bad per-se IMHO, after all still HN even with the "ghost news" appearing and all the rest is a decent place.

What is a big issue IMHO is that, given it's starting to be obvious how important is to have a completely neutral HN-style news site for hackers world-wide, nobody tried to do a serious no-profit to create a replacement that is able to guarantee a more democratic and not interested management.

So YC does a good job at taking HN not too business-driven, but still HN community does a very poor job at trying to start something completely not-business-related.

lamer news?

That was a failed attempt from my side too, because you can't just trow a site there, and don't handle the community, create a super-partes organization, and so forth. My problem is lack of time unfortunately.

I'll retry with something in Italian language soon that is smaller and more manageable, and much needed.

Make sure the people want it; I'm for example native from Spain, and there's nothing that comes close to HN in Spanish, but I know an attempt to make something like that would fail miserably because the people simply don't want it (that's probably also why it doesn't exist)

In Italy it is much needed, and apparently there is demand, not because we need to discuss the same news in Italian language. Every semi-decent programmer can read-write some basic English. The point is to work in a "show HN" alike way to create the community that can be used to found new startups. Basically it's an economic/startup-dynamics need, not an actual news need.

Well honesty there is also a small news need, that's news relevant to Italy that would not have a place it, like startup days, new rounds of italian stuff, and so forth.

Makes sense, I wasn't thinking of a community with a focus on show/ask HN kind of posts. Make it happen then ;)

The problem is that if someone from HN were to start a news aggregator site competitor it wouldn't be long before they started looking for profiting posibilities (people reading HN like making companies, in case you didn't notice :-) ). At least HN doesn't run ads or has a "HN Gold" program (yet, this comment may backfire though, seeing how pg is reading the thread).

I think we'll be fine though. YC doesn't really own HN, the people here submitting and commenting stuff do; if it gets too compromised eventually most folks will migrate to somewhere else.

It's been done: https://lobste.rs/

It's also invite only, and I don't know about you, but I can't see the value in spending a lot of time trawling through there, looking to see if there's a name I recognize from HN, and then try to figure out if I know that person well enough from posting here to ask them for an invite. And that's even assuming people would use the same name on lobste.rs that they use here anyway.

I was surprised to see that the price is only $13.00. You could charge more in my opinion. I normally am not seeking a bargain when my purchase is affiliated with a group that I have a strong affinity for and when the proceeds are going to a good cause. Most of my past purchases of charitable t-shirts were in the $20-$30 range.

Perhaps you will test a higher price for the next iteration and share the results in true HN style.

$20? Definitely. I think that's a great floor. $30? Meh. It's a small window for "I don't care about this purchase that much" vs "Hmm, I'll think about it".

$13 is okay for us non-USians having to pay the $10+ shipping. So, an option for an additional donation might be better.

I think $13 is right. Shipping makes the shirt ~$15, which is pretty standard if not above the market precedent for a shirt. (It's probably 10x the average price of my shirts.) Obviously, rates become really burdensome for international customers.

Too bad they don't integrate with Coinbase.com!

We're working on accepting Bitcoin through Coinbase, just wasn't quite ready for this tee!

SWEET! Can I pay via coinbase by sending to an email address instead? It's super easy :)

For sure, shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com and we'll organize it!

While you're working with CoinBase, can you ask them to accept green addresses so we can get instant payments instead of waiting an hour?

"Green address" means whitelisting addresses from the big online wallet sites because you trust them not to launch double-spending attacks against you. Coinbase would also be a great green address provider.

Tried to buy one, but I just get a message that says "Your card will not accept a charge at this time". I know my card is OK, it is the card I use to buy books from Amazon.

I've been coming up with some Bitcoin tshirt ideas. As soon as you support Coinbase I'd love to put them up.

Shoot me an email (in my profile) if you need a beta tester!

Also can you please please please get American Apparel 50/50 shirts? They're the only shirts I buy now.

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