tomhow

We removed "Garmin" from the title and used some representative language from the site.

> lots of people on this forum should feel more shame for what they do

If we allow ourselves to feel virtuous by shaming others for things we unilaterally decree as being pernicious, we're on the fast track to hell.

For most people here, "what they do", they do because they need to make a living via the skills they have in an often-brutal job market, as do most people here, and they do it by working on things that are legal, and in the case of advertising, one of the few ways anyone has discovered for generating income for online products (and indeed almost all media products for decades before that).

To attack someone for doing something legal and widespread without offering any viable alternative is just lazy argumentation and incurious, low-quality discussion. It gives the shamer the feeling of being morally superior and pure, whilst avoiding the work of thinking about and articulating better ways that the online industry can generate income. All of this is what HN is designed to optimize against, and why shaming is never encouraged here.

The same applies to our moderation. Our role here is to point out where people have breached the guidelines, and remind them what the guidelines are, and in many cases, explain in some detail how they could get their point across while observing the guidelines. Everything we're asking people to do should be in the spirit of promoting healthy discussion and should be actionable.

Nowhere should you find HN moderators taking pleasure in shaming anyone. That's not what we're about. We're here to cultivate curious conversation, and a big part of that is posting comments that range from polite reminders and educational explanations, to less frequent stern warnings and then to occasional bans.

If you can find any instance where we stray from that, you're welcome to point it out.

Previously:

Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32222831 - July 2022 (16 comments)

Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573 - Jan 2020 (23 comments)

I appreciate you've been here since 2009 and are still contributing. Both of us moderators have been here a similar duration. If you want HN to be better, can you please do what others do, and use the flag feature (it alerts us to bad submissions/comments and will cause items to be killed when enough people do it), or if you have things to say, explain what you mean in your comments, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com)? Plenty of longtime users do this and it helps a lot.

It's not assuming bad faith to point out that a comment is not in the spirit we're hoping for on HN and to politely ask the commenter to try to do better in future.

It is assuming bad faith to assert that an industry leader is expressing an opinion primarily out of direct self-interest. And “stating an opinion shared by many” does not make for great discussion; it's repetitive and predictable and doesn't give us anything new to talk or think about.

The whole thread has been flagged now which is fine; the central topic has already had plenty of discussion here, and this thread is awful.

Sure, it's now been flagged off the front page, which is fine.

These lines in the guidelines are all directly or directionally relevant to this kind of comment.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously...

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

I really don't know what you're trying to say. If you look at the comment feeds of dang and me (or sctb or pg before that), you'll be hard-up finding a single day in the past 15+ years where there haven't been several comments from at least one of us (usually more) asking or reminding people to observe the guidelines. That doesn't mean we claim or even try to cleanse HN of anything bad ever being visible; the immune system takes time. But HN would not survive more than a few days if the moderation was as absent as you seem to be suggesting.

Please don’t post generic dismissals on HN. We're here for thoughtful conversation. If you want to say something, try to say something that isn’t the same negative take that first comes to anyone’s mind if they want to say something negative. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post sneering dismissals on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for that audio link. We've added it to the header of this thread, though you'd be welcome to submit it as its own post, perhaps in a few months (to allow time for it to feel fresh again once this thread has vacated the community's memory cache).

We've banned this account for attacking fellow community members (not just here, in other recent comments too), and ignoring repeated appeals from us to observe the guidelines.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060922 and marked it off topic.

I'm a moderator here, and defrost is right. It's not cool to berate or “shame” people on HN. The very first phrase in the "In Comments" section of the guidelines is "Be Kind".

We can critique issues and trends in the industry or broader economy, including advertising; that happens all the time here. But also, on HN we're trying for conversation that is curious and thoughtful, at a standard that is higher than the average discussion forum. If we're going to make sweeping assertions like “advertising shouldn't exist”, we also need to offer suggestions of viable alternatives for ways that companies can get their products known about by people who might need them, and for websites to generate income to fund their operations. These are absolutely valid topics of thoughtful discussion in the spirit of curious conversation, which is entirely what HN is for.

Shaming an individual for working in a domain you've decided you don't like (though legal and widespread) is never okay here.

Previously:

Using sed to make indexes for books (1997) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16080505 - Jan 2018 (17 comments)

Previously:

Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)

Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)

Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)

Please don't reply like this on HN. The comment you replied to was unkind and I've replied to the comment pointing that out. But this comment escalates terribly. It's not OK to infer political positions based on such little information that's available in their comment. That's unkind to the individual and disrespectful to the community. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post shallow dismissals on HN, especially when someone sharing their experience of a medical condition. It's just not kind, and the guidelines ask us to be kind in comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49040212 and marked it off topic.

The users have already shared their ideas with an AI company’s chatbot. The “IP” you’re worried about is already more than half the output of LLM chatbots and it could already be trained on.

Everything you’re speculating about regarding YC’s potential to steal ideas, along with the notion that they are “coasting”, is easily disproven by what YC is doing, literally right now.

Startup School 2026 is the most costly and elaborate event YC has ever presented. YC is hosting about 7500 people at the event, and entertaining them (meals, parties, small-group sessions and dinners) and paying for flights for many of them from elsewhere in the country and world. They recently did a similar thing in India, and are constantly running outreach events at colleges around the world. That’s in addition to running four YC accelerator batches per year, funding nearly 1000 companies annually (and hoping to grow that).

This is the opposite of “coasting” and is completely at adds with any notion what YC really wants to do is steal IP or ideas. YC’s business collapses if it loses the trust of the most promising talent.

You ignored the rest of my comment. The maximum theoretical benefit to YC from “stealing” IP or trade secrets from chat transcripts is immaterial, relative to the benefit to YC of finding good talent and building positive, trusting relationships with them over the long term.

It's literally the hardest thing in business for investors and employers by far: finding good talent to invest in or employ, and earning/keeping their trust. YC spends unimaginable amounts of money and effort each year to keep doing that, as it has done for two decades. Startup School is just that latest and biggest example of that.

It doesn't even pass basic logic that YC would steal some gem of an idea from someone's transcript and hand it to someone else to build. Everyone who is talented enough to build it is busy building products based on their own ideas, and the very best person to build a product is the person who had the idea to build it.

It doesn’t deal with code, it deals with chat transcripts, and only those in the directories you explicitly choose to share (yes I know transcripts include some code but you’re not sharing a working app codebase or anything close to it).

The entire purpose of Startup School for YC is to build great relationships with the most promising talent. The scale and cost of the event is vast, and the benefits for attendees are huge.

It’s a three day event with main-stage interviews with several top figures in the tech world and many other intimate events with YC partners, industry experts and fellow attendees. Much of the effort in organizing the event is maximizing the chances that attendees will meet other attendees with things in common so they can build relationships and maybe work on important projects in the future. Of course, YC hopes to be able to fund the most promising startups that come out of this, but nobody is obligated to apply to YC or take YC funding if it’s offered.

What I’m trying to convey here is that it’s in YC’s utmost interests to build trust and earn respect from the people who are participating in these programs, and there is no way in a million years that some code or implementation detail exposed in a chat transcript is going to be more valuable than building very positive, mutually trusting relationships with all participants and applicants over the long term.

No.

It uploads only the AI coding agent transcripts in the directories you explicitly run the upload script in.

It only uploads your AI agent transcripts, so if you don’t use AI there’s nothing to upload.

Right, and you have to pay for the privilege :)

Sure - and people are able to audit what the software is doing and call it out if it’s operating in a way that’s unintended or inappropriate, just as has happened here.

Edit:

I’ll add this point as people always seem to want to raise the spectre of YC or the AI platforms stealing people’s code or ideas via these sorts of tools.

The value of any code or ideas is immaterial compared to the value of identifying talented people who can then be offered opportunities such as attending Startup School, being funded by YC, getting jobs at YC-funded companies or YC itself.

It’s one of pg’s oldest dictums, that ideas alone are worthless, and only working products and the people that build them are worth anything. Nobody at YC thinks any differently about that these days.

Sure - though that’s all generated by the coding agents. So it shouldn’t be uploading original hand-written code (unless the coding agent is running on a legacy codebase).

Obviously it’s not something everyone is going to be comfortable sharing, but YC is transparent about what is shared and how it’s used.

Edit:

I now see you have to explicitly run it in every directory you want shared - i.e., it doesn’t t scan your whole disk looking for stuff to upload. So there’s every opportunity to limit what it uploads to only what you want to share.

It doesn’t upload code (it’s not meant to, anyway); it uploads coding agent transcripts. It’s meant to be a fun app like Spotify wrapped - that’s how it was described when presented internally.

Please don't act like a jerk on HN. There are articles and comments criticizing Apple all the time and it's fine.

We've banned this account.

> Why?

Because it set off a horrendous flamewar subthread, containing not a single substantive comment.

> Just delete the comment if you're going to do that.

We don't delete comments unilaterally. We made it clear where it was detached from so people could find the context if they wanted to.

You're welcome to post another reply that is not so clearly in breach of the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't sneer like this on HN. You've been here long enough to know we're trying for much better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016139.