Here at Haystack, we provide an industry leading cross-platform application to help obfuscate, disguise, and confuse your data that increases security by decreasing its ability to be found in a search.
Hi I'm Yuval, one of the devs behind haystack, I messed around with needl + other alternatives (e.g unleash, getcommande, glean).
I talked to Max as a user over needls privacy policy.
The biggest difference is that haystack gives you search results relevant to your query. Just like google.
needl and alts are more of a spotlight/raycast alternative, great as a productivity tool, they require you to know exactly what you're looking for beforehand, in my opinion which leaves more to be desired as a search product.
Another big differencee is around data privacy, haystack is open, free and most importantly self-hosted.
Also we allow building low code custom data connectors into haystack!
Having just looked at the data, it's pretty clear to me that this entire exchange was fake. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again.
It's particularly uncool that you're doing this, given the number of times that you posted at length accusing us (falsely) of nefarious actions in moderating this site.
Btw, I took special care to make sure that your own startup got a nice amount of exposure on HN, despite the fact that the posts were obviously ringvoted. We make a point of not holding grudges and try to make sure that good, interesting content gets seen. But please stop using manipulative promotional tactics either for your own stuff or your friends.
No, I meant that (assuming I'm reading the data correctly) the exchange was orchestrated and not at all organic.
I don't normally post publicly about these things but when people try to mess with another startup's launch thread, it gets my goat (YC-related or not), and to use manipulative tactics while doing it goes over my threshold for saying something.
I'm not sure of the data, I was linked this by a friend, I'm not really sure how a proprietary saas company ends up as the good guy, while we're trying to ensure the next big search platform remains open, end up as thugs.
It seems the main mods problem with what I did is plugging our github url, which made it obvious I diverted attention from needl's launch, mistake I made.
I'm not deleting any comments, because I prefer context to mod interactions stand in broad daylight.
I'm truely sorry, I like this forum, mods here are awesome.
Don't worry! as long it doesn't happen again, it doesn't need to be a problem.
Obviously I can't know what happened off the site, but to judge by what I'm looking at in the data at our end, this exchange was obviously not organic, nor was this the first evidence of collusion that I found.
