It says "Our users are everywhere" and shows some logos for the companies these users are from.
If the users are from those companies, this is not lying.
If they added logos for companies their users are not from, it would be lying.
Adding a logo to your webpage has started to follow different patterns for the stage of the company.
Early stage companies show things like "people at X, Y, Z use our product!" (showing logos without permission), whilst later stage ones tend to show logos after asking for permission, and with more formal case studies.
They may not have asked for permission to show these logos, but that's not the same thing as lying.
There's a lot of heavy lifting in the idea that someone who tried it / used it of their own volition that happens to work for, say Google, is the same as indicating that your product is "used by Google".
> If the users are from those companies, this is not lying.
Do you really believe all of those companies allow employees to install pre-release software on their computers which records company meetings and interacts with a long list of 3rd party APIs? I doubt it.
They could have had people who are employed by these companies use it on their personal computers for some purpose, but the implication they’re trying to make is that those companies have chosen this software. That’s a lie.
> and interacts with a long list of 3rd party APIs? I doubt it.
It does not interact with 3rd party API.(except opt-out-able analytics) It uses local-ai models. No data leave user's device. It helps users in large org to try it.
> but the implication they’re trying to make is that those companies have chosen this software.
We used "Our *Users* are Everywhere" to avoid that implication. It is not typical B2B software, but open-source desktop app that individuals can use.
What I’m learning from this thread is that there are at least as many ways of speaking English in India as there are in the UK. I’d noticed this with pronunciation (one colleague propels P and T sounds with explosive force, but none of the other Indians I work with do this), but I hadn’t picked up on grammar and vocabulary differences.
Aspiration is contrastive in some Indian languages but not in English. (It's regular in most native speakers' English, but never distinguishes words by its presence or absence.) I could imagine that some Indian language speakers would learn to pronounce English /p/, /t/ consistently as [p], [t] and others consistently as [pʰ], [tʰ], even though English native speakers would have this difference in realization conditioned by other things.
The [pʰ], [tʰ] versions would probably sound "louder" or "stronger" when they occur in unusual contexts in English (I guess, I don't have enough control over aspiration in my speech to record a useful sample; maybe I could synthesize it?).
This is a feature of many Indian languages. Word order doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter as much.
गाय वह चऱायेगा, वह गाय चऱायेगा, चऱायेगा वह गाय all mean “he will take the cow out to graze” irrespective of word order, but of course there can be subtle shifts in meaning. (Apologies for any typos / potentially bad translation). Eg चऱायेगा वह गाय could be “he WILL graze the cow” if vocal stress is applied to चऱायेगा.
A lot of “Indian English” traits make more sense if one understands a few Indic languages. Southern Indic languages have their own super interesting traits as well, eg Tamil speakers often insert “simply” into sentences, this reflects usage in Tamil.
While I agree to an extent, I think it's not ideal. The point of documentation in my opinion is to explain intent. If want to figure out the functionality of something the code is just as good as documentation, arguably better.
AI ,because by default only sees the code, in general describes the functionality not the intent behind the code.
> The point of documentation in my opinion is to explain intent.
Of course, that's what your tests are for: To document your intent, while providing a mechanism by which to warn future developers if your intent is ever violated as the codebase changes. So the information is there. It's just a question of which language you want to read it in.
"Updating docs" seems pointless, though. LLMs can translate in realtime, and presumably LLMs will get better at it with time, so caching the results of older models is not particularly desirable.
This is one area where i think a LLM can really help. It's not going to produce perfect documentation but it's so much more productive to edit/update docs than create docs from scratch. Staring at a blank screen and getting started on docs is the hardest part in my experience.
Super interesting, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts!
HN is still one of the few places on the internet to get such esoteric, expert and intellectually stimulating content. It's like an Island where the spirit of 'the old internet' still lives on.
Am I missing something, or are HN readers assuming (incorrectly) the author is non-technical and looking for someone to build out their ideas?
From what I can see, the author is a CTO who is ex-meta and Stanford computer science. They look like a technical co-founder to me.
I know there's this annoying and widely prevalent persona of co-founder dater with only ideas, and no skills to build them, but this author doesn't seem to be that.
If you take a look at the Linkedin resume it seems his last technical job was 12 years ago and in an unrelated area to what he's currently trying to build. All in all his on-hands professional software engineering work seems to be limited to 2-4 years. Most of his experience seems to be product-related type work, including his work at Meta.
Combined with him calling himself a non-technical founder it seems pretty on point. He's not looking to be coding and making all the nitty gritty engineering decisions, there are better people for that in his opinion. Which is totally fine.
If the example is something like this: "I am non-technical and can handle Sales, Marketing, and Product. " it does seem to be written from a non-technical person.
Ex-meta doesn't mean anything. As far as i know manager / non technical people work at meta as in any other 'tech' company.
The OP reads much like the archetype - it doesn't make any mention of building parts of it while searching, or of finding funding, or actually if contributing anything other than some ideas. Good to hear this OP can build stuff, doesn't really change the contents of the article as written.
As a long time HN reader, eventually participating in YCW21, the main thing i would like to highlight is there's so many misconceptions about YC on HN.
It would take too long to refute them all, but just remember the HN readerships' view of YC is pretty distorted. ("it's all about VC money" , "it's just for ivy league grads" etc).
I could go on, but just read Paul Graham's essays - that's probably the best way to understand how YC thinks.
