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Reposting my comment on the first HN submission of this page

"The claims made in this interview are extremely suspect, it just not make sense. Absolutely no relevant details are included. The developer claims he was able to built an AI trading strategy that is profitable 95% of the time. No technical details about the strategy or platform for trading is provided. A few trading buzzwords thrown in a few places. The rest of the interview is platitudes and inspirational hacker talk

I think IndieHackers needs to investigate the claims and be provided proof, otherwise this appears to be a fake project for the developer's own publicity. If IndieHackers are fine with that, I will stop visiting as I cannot trust that the content is not just shallow, exaggerated claims to raise peoples profiles."

After expressing my concerns directly to IndieHackers, the interview was changed in multiple places to flesh out a number of the spurious claims which I had criticised.

Without further details or some proof from the developer, this piece stinks. Taking into account the rest of the interview which contains stereotypical inspirational hacker talk, the whole thing feels like a badly done promotional bit for SV style status.

If I am wrong, I will apologise and the developer is going to be a multimillionaire very, very quickly. Until there is more details, I am going to be totally sceptical of IndieHacker interviews going forward. Which is a shame as I think IndieHackers is a great site. How can I trust that the other submissions are not baseless, PR pieces?



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The claims made in this interview are extremely suspect, it just not make sense. Absolutely no relevant details are included. The developer claims he was able to built an AI trading strategy that is profitable 95% of the time. No technical details about the strategy or platform for trading is provided. A few trading buzzwords thrown in a few places. The rest of the interview is platitudes and inspirational hacker talk

I think IndieHackers needs to investigate the claims and be provided proof, otherwise this appears to be a fake project for the developer's own publicity. If IndieHackers are fine with that, I will stop visiting as I cannot trust that the content is not just shallow, exaggerated claims to raise peoples profiles.


You are strongly defending him.

What proof do you have of his claims?

If this turns out to be a dodgy submission for self promotion it is mildly embarrassing for IndieHackers if they admit error in this instance.

If it turns out you have seen no solid proof for these claims and amidst the heavy skepticism express by multiple people in this thread you do not investigate and demand proof, than that calls into question the rest of IndieHackers


I went through the same exercise as you, I carefully read the thread for any information that could be under NDA or even evidence that the thread author even worked for Shopify and found nothing credible. The author does claim to be an employee but all of the supposed inside information is either publicly available or so vague and unsupported I can't take it seriously. This is not a credible piece.

Thanks for replying with your stance, genuinely.

I genuinely wanted to just add the additional context for the Hacker News community to discuss as it seemed relevant. If you believed the person this was a story from their past. If you are uncertain about the veracity of random posts on TrustPilot (as some commenters are) this was a data point too.

What was initially met with a dozen upvotes as people seemed to appreciate the context then shifted as comments were made about me as the OP and now the point balance is in the negative.

I wasn't intending to "rally a defense" and I was especially not intending a "punch down". I listed my disclosure at the top to ensure everyone knew any potential bias upfront rather than reading and then having to retroactively update their thinking.

I honestly think I'll keep any future knowledge to myself in situations even if I have additional context. I tried my best to remain neutral and upfront and it still faltered. "Make of it what you will" was a literal request and it seems HN decided that I was a shill / defender and reacted that way rather than using the data point or reflecting on it themselves.


I'm skeptical of company claims on Hacker News as well. But it met the condition described by the parent poster, and really has no more or less veracity than any other anonymous comment.

I suppose to see what others thought about it. I specifically mentioned in the parent comment that I was on the fence and that "This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money". I did mention the proof in the article, which is real. I'll admit my initial judgement of the article was off, but not entirely wrong given that I never said I wholly agreed with it. Or maybe I'm moving goalposts or whatever. Anyway, I thank you for pointing out what I did not realize.

>You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."

I am not negating it, I am admitting that I am wrong.


The only bit of information I’ve found in support of their credibility is their willful “self-doxxing” in the announcement they made post-attack on their discord. Mind you, the names they gave for themselves could be completely false, they did not follow it up with any more identity proofing, but if the projects’ founders identities are what they say they are (and there is no cofounder/person involved with the project), logic dictates that save for some 4D-chess level scheme, no attacker would identify themselves immediately after the attack.

Then maybe point to the blog posts rather an AMA that clearly doesn't contradict anything that I said before stating "this is an obvious lie"? Yes, they worked on the project without making revenue initially. Was it that good then?

(Kagi founder)

Kagi never did bait and switch tactics and certainly doesn’t have a “history” of this.

This is the third time you are accusing Kagi using the same words although I have addressed this already in a comment to you before [1]

I would like to ask you to stop spreading this nonsense or at least substantiate your claims so that we can have a discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684449


This is a false accusation made in incredibly bad faith. I don't know whether you're suffering paranoid ideation or what's going on, but someone sharing links to a tech they're discussing (which I edited out after your previous accusation that you deleted, in a failed attempt to keep the peace) is hardly evidence that I'm a founder of said company engaged in underhanded promotion. The mods can check my IP address and see I'm in a different country to the founders if they really wish (not that that would put your mind to rest, you'll probably just think I'm using a VPN).

It's a rather elaborate scheme that you're accusing me of: make a HN account, spend hours writing 20 posts, all to plug my startup in some comment that nobody will read. Think through the plausibility of that one.


I don't know if they would lie in this case or not. Probably not about the exact wording but when it comes to context, well, they've certainly published bizarre and untrue claims in the past on other topics.

Re: other outlets. I don't think any outlets are reliable on those topics because the whole idea this is really happening at scale seems to be made up.

Re: on what basis. Having read them. See the paper this thread is about. Also, having worked on bot fighting professionally before at Google.


> but the search is still anonymous

Is this verified though? I ask because Brave is known for some shady things, like pushing their alt coin or sneaking affiliate links into internet browsing.


Without any evidence? Really? Here's the account I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vlang1dot0

Everything else can be found in the "V is scam" articles. There will be a big article by me covering all that.

"Immature" != "not ready for production".

Regarding that immaturity comment, here's a good summary by someone else from this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945442


> What kind of proof would satisfy you? Italicized text? A blog post?

I try not to take any of these things as 'proof'. Also you say that "nothing has been offered up" which isn't true. Someone wrote a post and copy/pasted emails into it. Sure, you can question the veracity of the post but it isn't really fair to say that nothing was offered. It's just that what was offered doesn't seem sufficient to you (which is fine, btw. I'm not saying I believe it all just because of a blog post).

Yes, an accusation was made with some italicized text. People may be giving the OP the benefit of the doubt. You are not. Why aren't both of those ok? I doubt anyone here is going to start a picket outside Kickstarter's offices nor start flaming elsewhere on the net. They might post their displeasure at Kickstarter here.

Your issue isn't really with the post but how folks here seem to be reacting to it. I get that, but isn't it always going to be the case with David/Goliath-type stories?

If her story turns out to have any chinks in it then she'll lose all credibility with this crowd and if not, then Kickstarter should have something to say about it. In a couple of days this will have either been resolved, forgotten or a 'proper' news story (ie more than just a HN submission).

Edit: More downvotes? If I'm missing something please let me know what.


I'm happy to explain!

Upon finding my code on his site i emailed him. He didnt reply, i commented on a post, he didnt reply so i sent him a notice.

4 hours later he sends me the same notice back + to the marketplace and my host. The blogs about it!

I click the tweet button on the blog to monitor why and what he does, i come across this blog, i send him an email warning him to remove my code, delete the blog and move on.

He hasn't done so and continue's his story so i'm happy to provide all my evidence to show this person is lying.

still, I've absolutely no idea why he would take a lie this far, but i have all the proof which i will be providing on this thread very shortly!


No, you literally said 'all his claims are facts until proven otherwise'.

I am not being vague, I literally posted a link to a rebuttal thread.

This is why I don't post on hacker news any more.


I'm editing this comment to be more of a question.

I'd like the understand the reflex to immediately assume this is a lie. The information is readily verifiable as we are a public company and 3rd party sites like data.ai will verify this.

What is your impetus to make such strong accusations from what in my view can only be your intuition? I don't think you have taken the time to try to diligence your claims.


I've personally spent countless hours working on HN's anti-abuse systems. From everything I've seen, what you're saying is quite false. It's also pernicious because it undermines people's faith in the community, so unless you can point to actual evidence, please don't post such insinuations. There's a site guideline about this, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Lots more explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Short version: people make these accusations up based on nothing more than patterns they imagine they see.

If you do have any evidence, such as links to posts that you think "get on the frontpage" with "managed accounts", you should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. It's highly unlikely that the Economist or Bloomberg are trying to game HN. There are plenty of voting rings but the ones we've seen come from quite different places.


It should be noted, as discussed by other HN people below, that there is a good chance that OP is quite sketchy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730865

At the very least, they are not telling their story with an attitude of transparency.

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