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Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#71

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

petercooper wrote: post #26
gravypod wrote: post #22

I find it interesting that you can write RMS, the leader of the Free Software movement, and he'll respond to you within the day for no charge because he think's that's a morally important thing to do. You can in contrast write Marc Andreessen, one of the figure heads of the propriatary software and privacy violating movement of every bigger information companies, and he'll charge you for the pleasure. Interesting dic…

Sometimes RMS's access to technology limits the value of his responses, however.. ;-) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.linux.advoca...

The people in that link are being plain jerks.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#72

Post by ttam »

vijayr wrote: post #32
gravypod wrote: post #22

I find it interesting that you can write RMS, the leader of the Free Software movement, and he'll respond to you within the day for no charge because he think's that's a morally important thing to do. You can in contrast write Marc Andreessen, one of the figure heads of the propriatary software and privacy violating movement of every bigger information companies, and he'll charge you for the pleasure. Interesting dic…

Never tried personally, but read somewhere Steve Wozniak does the same

Yeah, I cold-emailed Woz once with a bunch of questions and he replied to me.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#73

Post by jph »

bykovich wrote: post #30
jph wrote: post #16

Yes. I paid $100 because I want to encourage volunteering. > To Marc Andreessen. From Joel Parker Henderson. Hi Marc, what are some of your favorite charity causes that could benefit from pro bono coding help? I work at [X] and we have many programmers who volunteer for social progressive causes; we love coding and we love to help. Thank you, Joel

why didn't you just talk to your favorite charities instead of deferring that judgement to Andreessen

I talk with many charities. I also like to ask people about charities where pro bono programming may be especially helpful. If you have ideas, that's great.

A successful example is Benetech.org, a SF Bay Area technology charity that is doing wonderful work in tech and social good; I learned about Benetech because of direct personal advice.

Here are some of my favorite charities in case you're interested in learning more and/or donating. Thank you!

For tech: Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Software Foundation (FSF), Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).

For social causes: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Benetech for Global Literacy, Center for Environmental Health (CEH), Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#74

Post by TomSherlock »

He answered my $20 question regarding whether he thought the SoLaTiDo wearable keyboard/controller would be accepted by the mobile enterprise AR community, or was too early to the market. His answer was that it was cool, and that he wanted one on his wrist. This means he barely considered it, since it clearly requires both hands and all fingers, to offer workstation level control. My follow-up question (at $100) told him of the mistaken assumption, and asked him what he thought deskless workers would do to gain workstation level control of AR devices. His 48 hours to reply has just expired, so maybe he's swamped.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#75

Post by kenferry »

gravypod wrote: post #52
kenferry wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would regard that $100 as an indicator that you have a real question that is important to you. Marc doesn't need or care about the money.

Makes total sense. Let's suggest the same thing to our local, state, and federal representatives. They should charge $100 to get their ear to make sure people only raise important questions. Maybe we should even set it at $1000! Raising the bar really filters out all of those annoying and pesky people. If you can't tell it just feels wrong to me. Just something's off about this concept.

Not endorsing it. For starters, $100 means a lot more to some people than others. But it's not like this is a money making venture for him, it pretty well has to be operating as a filter.

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#76

Post by sjs7007 »

gravypod wrote: post #29
sjs7007 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Have you ever written to RMS?

Two or three times. Once about emacs, and I think the others were either questions about the morality of specific program distrobution methods. His responces were long winded and tailored to my situation although they did include his talking points. It's listed at https://stallman.org/ under "Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org." He'll happily explain or debate any points he has with you…

Oh man I went down the RMS rabbit hole and found this : https://www.craigslist.org/about/best/bos/533096562.html?lan....

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#77

Post by gwern »

gwern wrote: post #62

No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering. Some notes about the process: 1. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user (!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and without any kind of er…

To update:

My message idn't make it in the first time and 21co notified me it has been canceled:

> Thanks for using 21 to contact Marc Andreessen and donate to Black Girls Code. Demand for Marc's time was extremely high and it was not feasible to respond to your message in 48 hours. As such, your credit card has not been charged. Marc still wants to hear from you though, so we encourage you to resubmit your message at 21.co/pmarca! The new estimated response time is one week given the high demand. We are working on adding code to dynamically update wait times in the presence of surges of demand, but in the interim we want to make sure you have a good experience. Thanks again for using 21 and supporting Black Girls Code!

I decided to try submitting again (I'm still curious and at least the price didn't increase).

I also mentioned my comments to 21.co. To summarize their response:

1. PNG: should be supported, they don't know why it didn't work 2. they'll check that the emails arrive in an actionable order 3. it's a flat 10%; it is to cover payment processing (so the user may be donating to charity but they're not) 4. performance is a known issue 5. you are not allowed to deposit Bitcoin, they have to be earned via the site; deposits may or may not be available in the future. Verification for withdrawals are required because of fear of abuse. 6. the responses are supposed to be private/confidential (I guess Horowitz simply doesn't mind or know about that one being passed around). So should I get an Andreessen response, I guess I will confine my comment to whether it was a good response or not and whether it might be worth the money.

(I don't entirely agree with some of the reasons.)

Re: Ask HN: Did you pay Marc Andreessen for advice and was it worth it?

#78

Post by gwern »

gwern wrote: post #77
gwern wrote: post #62

No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering. Some notes about the process: 1. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user (!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and without any kind of er…

To update: My message idn't make it in the first time and 21co notified me it has been canceled: > Thanks for using 21 to contact Marc Andreessen and donate to Black Girls Code. Demand for Marc's time was extremely high and it was not feasible to respond to your message in 48 hours. As such, your credit card has not been charged. Marc still wants to hear from you though, so we encourage you to resubmit your message a…

Got a reply this morning, 98 words. I think it was a good reply - it was mostly what I was thinking but it's valuable knowing that someone like Andreessen, who may know many secret things and has seen many tech sigmoids come and go, takes a similar view of things.
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