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Comment by withoutboats | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty obvious that this person has essentially lied: they have not implemented the complex features they claim while they hype benefits like compile time and lack of non-zero cost features that will have to disappear when they have implemented what they promised. But I think what's more interesting, more telling, is the level of vitriol over 12k/year in patreon subscriptions. Funding in open source is so absurdly unequal that people are outraged over someone earning table scraps.

EDIT: No idea why this was flagged, I don't understand the norms of this strange website.

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An indication of why you might have been flagged and a pointer to the norms of this strange website are given in dangs request to us not to post as you have done, some time before you submitted the post.

You seem like a really unpleasant person and it doesn't really seem worth my time to interact with you, but I want to point out that your post actually contains no relevant information: "to post as I have done" is a tautological reference to my violation, as "to post as I have done" describes the entire sum of my post and behavior. This provides no insight, and seems mainly an opportunity for you to be smug.

My suspicion is that people object to calling this persons' claims essentially a lie, which is just the truth. It is dishonest to use the performance numbers of an incomplete project while listing the features of the complete project, which will certainly decrease performance. The website is replete with obviously absurd claims, like a completely baseless claim about throughput that assumes compile time is linear in code size.

But what's actually pathetic in this affair is the anguish and upset of a bunch of internet nerds over a project that has received, in its 3 months of existence, less than $2500 USD. This is peanuts, but everyone is outraged over a "scam" because the real scam is open source getting a bunch of people to work for free, hoping at a chance of getting peanuts like this.

You're assessment of me as a "really unpleasant person" and other critics here as "internet nerds" also indicates a lack of understanding of the site's rules.

Please refrain from personal insults and take the time to read the guidelines before commenting further.

I won't be doing that.

Cool. Keep insulting people then, your prerogative.

The only thing developers seem to hate more than closed source software is a funded open source project.

Not in general, but many open source developers do hard work and do sometimes not even get praise, so they don't like it when someone who they feel did not work so hard or not at all and just promised unrealistic things, get's the money.

(not judging about that case here)

This sounds to me like that same attitude that keeps people from saying how much they make; that your coworker will get mad at you, and not your boss.

A bit, yes. Except in cases where people make money from a limited avaiable fund, by lying.

He hasn't lied about anything.

If you do a search in these comments for people who have actually given him money, I think you'll find that none of us have done so under the pretense that all the features he listed on the website are finished.

We're also not "buying" anything. We're supporting a developer who is writing a language we would like to one day use. How else is it going to get written? Do we expect somebody to toil away in obscurity for no pay for 5+ years first?

I would consider it money well spent even if he never finishes it. I'm voting for the language I want with my wallet.

Yes, this opens me up to making me feel like a sucker if he is a scam artist. But, he's delivered things in the past and he's delivered things even since the last conversation. Most frauds don't ship.

It's not about founding or donation, it's all about false promises. How you can give false assumptions about something which does not exists and it's not provable. I'm thinking here about all the optimistic features the author is acclaiming. As some of the commenters mentioned practically is impossible to build a product (a new programming language) in solo and having only a couple of thousands of LOC.

You need to stop. There are no false promises or false assumptions going on here. If there were, then the negative coverage over the past three days would include outrage from his patreon subscribers and his patreon donations would have gone down considerably. Neither of these things have happened.

I said very clearly, I am not judging about this case as I did not follow it enough. From what I saw I also do not think so.

You clearly implied the author of this project is a liar and now you're trying to walk it back without admitting fault.

Why is it so many people online can't admit when they're wrong? "I'm sorry. I was wrong." Is that really so hard to type?

"limited available fund" ah yes, the software industry really does barely manage to scrape by, good point.

Funding programming language development via Patreon is relatively new that it might be a reasonable characterization. I do think that many PL projects are underfunded and should have better BMs to sustain itself, and one positive aspect of V is that it showed you can actually have a good chance of sustainable cash inflow with proper marketing (more generally, [1] is a good start).

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Not to pick on the guy, but when you're asking for funds before releasing source: is it "funded open source" ?

Surely people would have been a bit pissed if a strange project got backers, but the problem here was snake oil PR.

"It's amazing, better than anything else, just give me a bit of money and I'll give it to you when it's finished"

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