Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app

Hacker News just got a new guilty-pleasure toy: a deliberately simple “Regret Calculator” that turns your missed investments into a GLOBAL PAIN INDEX and splashes them onto a cheeky WALL OF SHAME. The vibe? Equal parts therapy and roast. Folks plugged in their coulda-woulda-shoulda moves on shouldhavebought.com and the comments went full cry-laugh. One user clocked a jaw-dropping $2.5 million “what if,” while another told the tale of a buddy who sold a $200k stock grant to buy a San Jose townhouse that’s… worth the same today. Ouch, but hilarious.

Then the drama kicked in. The rationalists argued it’s unfair to judge past choices with today’s knowledge—what economists call hindsight bias. A pragmatist reminded everyone that buying crypto or chip stocks “at the time” didn’t look responsible. Meanwhile, the app itself played villain: people got zinged by snarky errors like “CAUSALITY_ERROR,” and one frustrated commenter insisted “Zero is also a number.” Techies asked if the app could survive the “hug of death” (internet traffic flood), while another took the concept further with a life-regret scoreboard at whentheywere.com. Between the dark humor, the public humiliation theme (“We sell presence”), and the shareable regret links, this is the internet’s new favorite pain machine—and everyone’s inviting friends to suffer, too.