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As a previously precocious young teen, I would have agreed with your point but as someone who is now a boring adult I disagree.

Projects are often and will continue to be judged by their marketing. There are many such cases of "I'm X years old and I made Y" posts on Hacker News reaching the front page. As a founder, you should use whatever you can to get eyeballs on your product. As a hacker, you should try to make something you think is cool.

While it is obviously cool to have something novel or technologically interesting to showcase, the value is often less in the actual product and more in the nostalgia and reminder that we too, as boring adults, were once younger hackers.

Let's not be so hard on each other. I think it's a pretty well designed landing page (although the mobile website needs some work in terms of responsiveness.) I don't think this is similar to Anki because there's no spaced repetition or flashcard retrieval involved (from what I could tell).

It does seem like a tool for cheating which is somewhat questionable. I do like the idea of a young hacker today figuring out how to automate their homework, but I think the tool can be a bit more tailored and more ethical if it focused on a specific use case students would equally pay for (ex: AP test prep)


> As a founder, you should use whatever you can to get eyeballs on your product.

I am not a founder so maybe my side of reasoning is flawed as a customer but I come in the belief that there is good advertising and bad advertising.

Some people consider both advertising to be good but I don't think so.

For example , the discussion we are having right now could be considered as an example of bad advertising I mean , think about it , why are we discussing about the age of the product's creator in the first place aside from the fact that he tried to catch our precious attention by such advertising.

I also don't think that the current apple intelligence ads are good advertising. They are in the news / It was my first time watching an apple ads intentionally (I have ad blocker) , and I cringed half way through. I felt even righter that as an android user , I am right (maybe it was a self serving bias that because I am an android user , I watched iphone ad to improve my ego)

Maybe its my open source mentality but I am way way more impressed not by marketing fuzzbuzz but rather the merit of the tool , I don't care if its a zero star repo on github , (eg: https://github.com/heroslender/lg-remote) I am his only star on his repo and I love his work that he has done on this project

My line of thinking is simple if the tool has merit (for ideological reasons , I prefer open source) , I am going to use it. But if you think that you can use catchy terms to catch my attention , well sure you got my attention , but in the long term I am going to remember how you got my attention in first place (whether on the basis of merit or marketing fizzbuzz) I really hate the latter


Yeah, the organizers are definitely taking an extreme route but that's probably the point. Extreme positions get more marketing hype so to speak. Once you have the attention, then you can start to influence a culture of questioning AI and AI usage.

I will say to your first point, it's possible they are trying to prove the model of this type of protest with the biggest and most well known company today to lay the groundwork of other protests at other companies. Someone has to light the match.


I think people are tired of extremism.

The culture of questioning AI and its usage already exists. I would agree if people said it needed to be more prevalent and have more people engaged with it, but going to an extreme to get a conversation started ignores that fact that the conversation is already going.


On October 21st, 2024 at 12:00 pm Stop AI will peacefully barricade, via sit-in, OpenAI's office entrance gate at 575 Florida St in San Francisco CA.

A longer explanation/commentary here:

1) https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nDLaCPpZTwK7o2vW9/...

2) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bAy6w3spwFrnguJqe/why-stop-a...


I’m curious if you (or anyone else) know of any other services that are paid-only in a traditionally free/freemium product space.

Perhaps for news, or video content, or music, or something else. What else do you use today for free that often feels like a Faustian bargain?

As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?


Jetbrains.

Well, up until recently. Now I'm paying hundreds of dollars for a cheap copy of VSCode and I'm really not sure why I shouldn't just use the free version.


Because of the new ui? Seriously it's terrible, but the classic ui is still benevolently available as a plugin. Don't know for how long.


>As a random aside, If Google released a paid version of their search engine, would you switch back?

Not if Google continue to make the bulk of their money from ads.


Is everything alright? How were you hacked?


I thought the structure was set up in such a way that only Automattic has commercial rights to the Wordpress trademark. To balance this, Wordpress.org has discretionary power on deciding whether Automattic are good stewards of the trademark. Can Wordpress.org directly ask for the 8%? It seems like it has to be done through Automattic.

This whole situation was handled poorly, but can it really be considered bullying? It definitely speaks to the heart of the eternal problem of open source: the imbalance of givers and takers at the bazaar.


Matt Mullenweg has said that the WordPress Foundation, which is separate from WordPress.org (it gets confusing), could revoke the licenses that he (personally?) and Automattic have.

The public license agreement that Automattic has says the license is "perpetual, irrevocable:" https://www.pluginvulnerabilities.com/2024/10/02/matt-mullen...

The license that exists for WordPress.org, which seems to really be just him, doesn't appear to be public. It would be interesting to see who it really is with and what the terms really are.


Honest question because I have no idea what the truth of the matter is: who even is WordPress.org?

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41692300, Matt Mullenweg said at some point in that long interview from a couple of days ago that he was operating WordPress.org personally, rather than the WordPress Foundation as I think people would typically assume.


Here it is straight from the horse’s mouth:

> > Do you really individually own http://WordPress.org?

> > Not Automattic? Not a different LLC or something? No employees? No board of directors?

> > Just you?

> Just me.

https://x.com/grigs/status/1840958978043605361


Yes, I'd say Automattic puppeteering Wordpress.org, the org set up as a visible layer of separation, to make their competitor look back and then poach their customers (https://pressable.com/wpe-contract-buyout/) is bullying, or "market distortion".

Matt's just mad he didn't capture the enterprise Wordpress hosting market earlier, with WordPress.com always being aimed at more casual users and Pressable only aquired in 2016.


> Matt's just mad he didn't capture the enterprise Wordpress hosting market earlier, with WordPress.com always being aimed at more casual users and Pressable only aquired in 2016.

WordPress.com VIP is a thing though, and I think they've done a great job selling it to huge organisations.


True. I think it's the middle to high end (but not enterprise) part of the market that WPEngine are dominating at the expense of Automattic.


The CEO of Automattic is the sole active board member of wordpress.org There's no balance there.


There is no board of Wordpress.org, it is owned personally.


> but can it really be considered bullying

No it's much more like extortion.

And it goes against everything open source has been about.


What is the unique value proposition of this book? How does it stand apart from the numerous amount of other books on the same topic?

Marketing is hard when there isn't a clear brand. Branding is hard when you don't have a very simple and clear differentiator to promote.


Thanks for the questions! I hear you it does sound like a generic book name. Well, we have the domain and we couldn't really name it to something else as we think software engineering has many elements and we wanted to cover them.

Our book isn't just a technical book on software development. Instead, it goes into the life aspects of being a software engineer such as migration and parenting.

Many of us have wished for mentors who could guide us beyond the technicalities, offering insights into personal growth and career navigation. Recognizing this gap, we've created a resource that provides practical wisdom.

By taking a holistic approach to software engineering, we address both personal and professional development in a way that few other books do. This unique blend sets our book apart, offering a clear differentiator that defines our brand.


Isn't the computer science version Peter Novig's, "Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" table?

https://norvig.com/21-days.html#answers

Edit: This version is also quite nice - https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375


Some of the claims here feel like leaps of intuition. You claim companies don't but many companies, especially ones that are not in the tech industry, do employ personality quizzes in their screening process. Even tech companies, now that I think about it, employ a personality test in the form of a "cultural" interview. I am dubious on how helpful they are but they highlight the real issue which is that there simply isn't enough signal during the interview process.

Every hiring process boils down to a risk mitigation problem and the goal is to get enough positive (or negative) signal to make a hiring decision. If that's the case, making the interview an "adversarial" process seems like an awful idea. As you pointed out, why would a candidate share information that puts them in a bad light? It creates an environment where it is hard to extract meaningful signal.

Furthermore, if there's no free lunch from analyzing personality, then why is it worth thinking about in this way? Perhaps it is more critical and effective to verify their skills and experience with the limited interview time and rely on references to validate their work habits.


I think that "cultural" interviews are underrated as a distinguisher; just because they seem so subjective. However, if the correct, non-domain specific, person conducts the interview, it can be a great source of information. At the most basic level, it assesses whether the candidate is a complete nut, or not; it assesses whether that individual, outside of any skills considerations, can work with others in the organization, either as a follower, peer, or leader. A competent person doing these types of interviews is essentially conducting an unstructured, informal, personality assessment and producing some very valuable insights to others later in the process. We ought not discount intuition, or "feel". A genuinely insightful person conducting a good screening interview may be the most valuable person in your hiring organization.


Great caveat, not trying to throw away the baby with the bathwater when it comes to cultural interviews or even personality based assessments. It can be done well. My personal take (which I admit is equally a leap of intuition) is that there are probably more cost-effective ways to gain more signal. Anecdotally for instance, I'm seeing an increase in pair-coding/work-along type interviews where both sides get an intuitive sense of the other's depth of technical expertise as well as a taste of what it's like to work with each other.


Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.


It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless.

Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.


Inferring negatives from positive information sharing seems pretty adversarial to me, both in spirit and in substance.

My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.


> It’s a miracle, folks. Donald told the truth for once. It’s the most important election of our lifetimes. And I will win it.

Curiously, his tweet from just 18 hours ago seemed like he was still in the race. I wonder what changed.


I think it was pretty widely understood that he was going to have to be adamantly in the race until the exact moment he wasn’t in the race. The second he showed any public wavering it would have been over.


I can understand that perspective too, but a problem with that approach is that he might seem arrogant and out-of-touch - and I would have difficulties trusting a party who is so clear in their communication for so long, and then abruptly change direction completely


This is how it works everywhere. Do you go to your boss and say "well, I'm thinking of quitting and taking a different job, but I'm not sure yet and I'm still deciding. I'll let you know when I've decided!"


Once. Never again.


I guess it depends somewhat on your goals? It may not be optimal for your own career but it may be better for your boss to know?


People with good job security and good position in the labor market can do this. Lot of people already do shop around and try to get a raise, etc.


But are they letting their boss know that they are doing it?


Not during the process necessarily, but if they've received a viable offer sure.


Yes for sure, but that is the parallel. You won't let your boss know during the process.


I mean, the US president very much doesn’t have good job security, though.


resignation and successful impeachment rates are pretty low, so basically it's 4 years, and then later basically one can do whatever they want, they instantly have an amazing audience/market.


good thing he's not running for anything then


I believe the leaked polling of Harris vs Trump around July 4th was the pinhole that sunk his chances to hold on.


You behave as though you’re in the race right up to the moment you are not.


It's bizarre people don't get this. What's he supposed to do, tweet "thinking about not running" and flip everybody out?


That would be such an Elon Musk thing to do. No fucks given. ;)


I think he would tweet something like "42.0% of all polls are wrong". Like a clever pun using the weed number (420) :)


Heh, you're probably right. ;)


He's so funny :)


Well, yeah.

Then we could have had a better primary process, instead of putting huge amounts of effort into pushing a critically weak candidate.

People have been saying this for many months, and were basically told to stop helping Trump win. Turns out those people were right - so why defend the lies?


President Biden does not control his tweets. Even if he wanted to tweet that, his handlers would not let him.

The stepping down announcement was probably a layoff notice to his staff. I bet many are/were shocked.


They hadn't told the people running his Twitter account yet?

There was already an incident [1] where his press secretary tweeted about running for president on her own account, so she or her people are presumably in charge of it.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...



How is that related to this?

Even if Biden had personally authored and posted every one his tweets, that would have nothing to do with whether aides were kept in the loop about major campaign announcements.

This thread is discussing an alleged inconsistency (or quick reversal) in his Twitter messaging.


How is what related to what?

I agree with what you wrote. The people running Biden's campaign were not told the news 10 hours in advance - nor 10 minutes in advance. I doubt those messages were sent by the same people.


Friday: "The business is doing great! We are expanding on all fronts!"

Monday: layoffs


Exactly, people are overlooking how much he did not want to quit.


Threat that they will use article 25 to get him removed as president if he didn't playball


I was waiting for the House to censure him for not stepping aside. It was pretty clear that the flood of leadership democrats and donors insisting he step aside was building.


The _Republican_ controlled House? Censure a __candidate__? For staying in a race?


25th amendment requires a 2/3 majority of both houses of congress to remove the president if he objects. Not a credible threat to Biden.


The timing of Joe Manchin declining to endorse this morning certainly correlates.


I think the Sheldon Brown announcing he should step down was far, far more impactful. Joe Manchin isn't nationally relevant nor a Democrat anymore.


[flagged]


The entirety of West Virginia, evidently. And all Americans should be interested in the views of one of the foremost “swing vote” senators.


West Virginia is not in play for presidential elections.


Your original comment was belittling towards the people of West Virginia, which is still a member of the Union as far as I’m aware.

The latter half of my comment was obviously more salient in regard to national politics. Not sure why you ignored that.


Until the electoral college is eliminated, or we at least get some kind of system like rank choice voting, there is no point in pretending that the votes of any more than a handful of swing states actually matter.


I think a lot of Kabuki theater was needed to make it acceptable for Manchin to cast some critical votes is what I think.

Remember 90% of politics in public is a mix of Kabuki theater and WWF Wrestling.


I do.

Manchin is a centrist. In a divided America, that's a very good thing.


Does he write his own tweets? He's no Elon Musk or Donald Trump, I would assume some staffer is tasked with writing those tweets. And they obviously wouldn't tell the staffer to do anything different until the decision to drop out was final.


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