I think this comes off a bit too strong (as well as the replies to this to be fair)
The example isn't quite accurate. If a friend bought you lunch, the social norm of reciprocity would incline you towards buying them lunch in the future (i.e part of your paycheck)
Free open source software is a public good. While there is no obligation to give back, giving back helps that public good become more useful to other people (including your future self). I'm against making contribution an obligation, but I'm not against light social pressure upon philanthropists who have the means (which is what the parent comment was doing).
In the lunch example, reciprocation would be releasing additional software under free software licenses, not payments.
There should be zero social pressure, as gifts do not convey obligation. It was the software author’s explicit choice when licensing and publishing the software to make clear that payment is not expected.
Do you routinely struggle in social situations? Do you frequently have people tell you that you misinterpreted social cues?
You are correct that no legal obligation was passed, but generally people feel that if you got something from a community that helped you succeed greatly you do have an obligation to throw something back to the organization to help it help others.
If you don't, that'ss generally classified by people as being a jackass
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)
I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up. Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4 looks like!
I'm using Windsurf IDE so have all the main models available. Mainly doing Python, JS, HTML, CSS, some Go. I have found Claude 3.7 outperforms Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 4.1, 4o, Deepseek, etc, for my work in most cases.
I suspect that I experience some performance throttling with Gemini 2.5 in my Windsurf setup because it's just not as good as anecdotal reports by others, and benchmarks.
I also seem to run up against a kind of LLM laziness sometimes when they seemingly can't be bothered to answer a challenging prompt ... a consequence of load balancing in action perhaps.
Blaming the “system” is easy but is it the whole picture?
How much of it is due to culture? Teachers in western countries are not as respected as teachers in other parts of the world. A few teachers abuse their authority and that results in outrage and lawsuits from parents, rightfully so.
I can imagine in many schools in the US, if a cellphone ban were to be implemented, there would be a large outcry from parents on how restrictive or overreaching that policy would be. Even if the net positives (as shown in the article) are proven to outweigh the pragmatic concerns (i.e I might need to be in communication with my child) why take the risk?
Not to be supporter of “the man” but it seems unfair to point the finger at a system that takes steps to preserve itself without also acknowledging the hostile environment in which it operates.
Parents have greater zeal in suing the school than they have in attending open board meetings.
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.
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.
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.
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