Please don't fulminate or post flame bait on HN. This low-effort comment started just the kind of flamewar we're trying to avoid on HN. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't post dunks like this here. HN is for curious conversation and the guidelines ask us to be kind. We have no idea whether the thing they had in mind when they asked that question 8 years ago is relevant to what they think about the current topic. You could ask them rather than piling on like this.
I didn't ask how to do a bait and switch to offer a good free product and later ask for more money or else I'm going to make it worse. But I guess nuance is hard to understand.
Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.
So fork and offer your better free version. Holy fuck. What's with this persistent attitude that open source creators should slave away for free forever?
Either you support an economy where everyone gets a meager living wage just for existing and then once that's established you can complain about people trying to make money off open source, or you say "capitalism as it exists is great" and swallow the fact that people who you don't pay don't work for you. Which is it?
There is no bait and switch and it's ridiculous to suggest there is.
They have a free product and a paid product. They've used the documentation as an awareness channel for the paid product. The paid product influences and pays for the free product. A tail as old as time.
They're not asking you to buy the paid product and they're not saying they are going to make it worse. Did you even read thread? He literally says "I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it."
Not prioritizing it now does not make the product worse, it just doesn't make it better in this particular way today.
This attitude really tires open source maintainers enormously. They are not allowed to earn money connected to the thing they are giving away for free?
I know there may have been some weird stuff going on lately (nginx, redis, etc.) but this is not one of them.
It's okay to be confused, but please do not continue this.
This breaks down because Tailwind is not monetized, is completely free, and hasn't indicated it won't be.
There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.
I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.
Which of those are evolving at the rate of frameworks?
BTW I'm of the opinion that frontend tooling developers should actually try to contribute things to HTML and CSS instead of building "component libraries" on top of them.
If the native controls were good and if the browsers allowed using "uniformly styled" versions of them then there would be no good reason for such libraries to exist.
Your comments in this thread are terrible, all of them. You are part of the reason why working on open source projects is so hard for people who obviously want to do good in this world. Check Adam's work: his work has been a net positive for the OSS community. Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
As someone who paid for a lifetime license of Tailwind UI, unlike, I strongly suspect, simlevesque - I 100% agree with this. The negativity is completely uncalled for, please take this somewhere else and do some self-reflection.
> Go spread your poison and nasty comments elsewhere please.
I have been on HN since 2008, his comment is by far the worst encounter ever in my memory. The sense of entitlement, not only in one comment by literally every single one of them in this thread and despite all the explanation he still believes he is right.
And to top it off he manage to drag HTML and CSS standards into it.
I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.
We are a deeply unserious society.
Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!
I think the part you're missing here is that the author here is under no requirement to accept changes to their project and everyone else is welcome to fork it if they disagree with choices made by the author.
The author did not in fact, make the project worse, all they did was not accept a change, and that is entirely different than making it worse.
Even those who stood to benefit from the change have not received a degraded experience in comparison to the current state of affairs, but the same experience as the current state of affairs, since no change occurred. It is truly within the author's rights to do this, in any case.
One should avoid a sense of entitlement to additional and ever-increasing quantities of free work when free work has already been done.
At what point did they make it _worse_? Tailwind didn't remove any existing functionality here. What they did was refuse to merge a PR while they're trying to figure out how to navigate a difficult financial problem, all while being fully transparent about what's going on, and saying that they're open to merging the PR if/when they manage to get things together.
This is very different from, say, the minio situation, where they were actively removing feature before finally closing development down entirely. Whether tailwind will end up going down this route, time will tell. But as of right now, I find this reading to be quite uncharitable.
It's not even funcationality to the library code, it's a PR to their docs. If you just want optimized docs for your LLM to consume, isn't that what [Context7](https://context7.com/websites/tailwindcss) already has? Why force this new responsibility to the maintainer.
You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.
The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not
The old guidelines assumes the user is literate. Apple's focus has changed since then. I'm not saying it's working well, but this vision leads to things like this.
You and OP both work for the same "High Performance AI Inference" company, you might want to disclose that.
EDIT: and while you're at it, you might also want to work on your attitude. "you idiot", "get lost" and "you need to touch grass" are not helping any HN discussions
Well, in that case I'm curious... Why did you think hijacking OP's stance of "Claude did rewrote lots of my original messy code" with your own opposing position of "the project itself is not AI", and getting quite offensive about it, would benefit any discussion about this 13h old project?
It's a personal project of your dear ex-colleague, mind you!
Sure, the author just happened to one-shot a project and a landing page on new year's eve. And their writing style is just coincidentally very similar to Claude's.
The repo being a single commit doesn't mean it's AI. It is quite common to first develop on a private repo and then clean up the commit history for the first public release.
Its an extract of two weeks of work. And yes Claude did the website and rewrote my code that was absolutely without comments and a gigantic mess. It's an extract of the fourth attempt actually. Src4/ was the original folder. But my goal my to test the architecture applied to nats not to say I've done it without ai?
a model is not software, it is a bunch of weights.
you are more than welcomed to pick whatever model or software you choose to trust, that is totally fine. However, that is vastly different from bad mouthing a model or software just because its release note contains a single sentence you don't like.
If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.
In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.
I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."
Surveillance technology doesn't stop property crime, so it isn't a tradeoff question.
The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are:
1. Secure the stuff.
2. Take repeat criminals off the street.
Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to commit a crime comes from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence-- and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling the opportunity is critical.
Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking them out of society is very effective. Because they are repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you fail to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance will ever help, as they'll keep doing it again and again.
Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness, stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation. They're committing crimes at all because for whatever reason they're already not responding to all the incentives not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at most.
The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many many people have had the experience of having video or know exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors, or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.
Can you explain in more detail how the repeat criminals get caught in your scheme?
I can see how surveillance could help in identifying the criminal, finding him or her, and as evidence of crime in the trial, but what exactly happens without it that gets them identified, found and convicted? As of now clearance rate of property crimes is <15% according to a quick search.
There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology. I'd agree that having some at all is of value, my argument was that you don't need much past that to get what we need and certainly don't need the kind of pervasive surveillance that some want: It won't move the needle on crime much past a baseline level but it will enable abuses that are much worse than the level of property crime we see today. Authoritarian governments are the number one mass murderer throughout human history by a wide margin.
Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").
But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
>There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology.
Do you mean that all the people who are installing Flock cameras now do that not because they think there is not enough surveillance but for some other reason? Like help a YC company to raise more money? Or help LEOs to stalk their exes? Or some other crazy reason mentioned in these threads?
Do you have a neighborhood social network (NextDoor and its kind)? If you do, check out reports of theft, they rarely have any surveillance and ones that have are very poor quality, usually not showing the perp enough to ID.
> But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
This does not follow. If your math had been valid we'd have to agree that hunting elk in a forest where 15% of animals are bears would result in 90% chance that every 15th elk would turn out to be a bear.
That's easy. Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.
That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse, expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
> Person gets kidnapped, government surveillance camera helps police find the car before the kidnapper kills them. Or, probably more common: murder happens, government surveillance camera helps police find murderer and jail them before they kill someone else.
It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position, but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
I don't think it's wishful thinking. Flock advertises how many actual, real-world cases their cameras have contributed to solving, and even just reading news reports on murder trials you'll often see comments like "suspect's car was caught on camera traveling such and such direction" in the timeline of events.
The question isn't whether these cameras help law enforcement. Of course they do. The question is whether that's sufficient justification for continuous government surveillance of the public movements of millions of law abiding citizens.
I don’t mean that I can’t imagine a scenario in which an imagined world has cameras covering every square inch, a 911 operator with their fingers hovering over the keyboard and ready to enter a license plate into the InstaLocate system, which then automatically triggers SWAT to be quick-released from a drone directly onto the current location of what is still called a “getaway car”, rather than “evidence.” But I can also imagine a situation with less steps wherein a spoon takes down an F-16, but I equally haven’t heard an argument for using spoons as air defense. ;)
Helping to solve a crime after the fact is certainly a thing, and that discussion has merit, but I think you’re taking creative license again with stopping a serial killer or spree killer “before they kill again.” That’s not really how murders play out, which is why there are special names for them.
It would be helpful for discourse, and for making your own argument, if the discussion was grounded in the reality of the sour world we live in now.
So is it your position, based on what you just said, that people who have committed murder but have not yet been caught are no more likely to commit murder a second time than the average person?
I think my example of helping police catch a murderer "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.
Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is another matter entirely.
My friend, I've said only what I've said. Past my casual "that's not really how murders play out", through the comma, sits "special name”, which isn't "the general population." Serial killer, serial murderer, and spree killer aren't synonyms for general population. The mere existence of those terms gave you all the information you needed to determine that they’re distinct from the general population and simple “murderer”, and my mention of them should have implied my understanding of the same.
Your assertions in every comment so far have been fully balanced on what you ‘feel like’ should be the case, not on known facts. I’ll give you an example:
“quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.”
‘
FBI monograph, July 2008: "Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators"
Introduction on page 1:
"Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year."
‘
The FBI used to classify serial murder as 3+ murders with a cooling off period between them, but that resulted in too few cases to bother studying, so by the time of the quoted statement they had reduced it to 2+ separate murder events. Seems like it fits our discussion.
In 2008 there were 16,465 homicides, so if we take “less than 1%” to be a healthy 0.5% that would be ~82. Even if you assume every year spawns a fresh new set of 82 serial murderers then Flock would have needed to contribute to catching every single one this century in order to meet the minimum requirements for “thousands.”
Of course there’s no way of telling if the murderer you caught would have become a serial murderer if not caught, so here’s where your intuition can be helpful. Take the 82, spread them around the country in densities that you ‘feel’ are appropriate. Do the same for the density of Flock cameras. Then use the same rigor when guessing at how many of the 82 just got witnessed committing a murder, and their license plate was noted, and they happen to transit an area with Flock camera license plate readers in the future while still driving the same car. Feel your way through to how many of them might be caught, then intuit what it would take to catch “thousands.”
Okay, dozens, not thousands. My point still stands.
If you really want to split hairs over the exact number, maybe also consider the number of murderers who committed other crimes prior to their first murder, and whether getting caught sooner in their criminal career might have prevented such escalations, plus the larger society-wide deterrent effect of the increased clearance rates of crimes in all categories.
You don't need to run any numbers to see my original comment was obviously correct, I'm not sure why you're contesting this so hard.
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