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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?

#41

Post by unhelpful »

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…

RMS contributed some incredibly influential and useful software back in the day, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than Andreessen is charging to read the ranting drivel he passes off as philosophy.

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

#42

Post by jonlucc »

EternalData wrote: post #7

I think it's just a really interesting way to gate a contact form and get people to think twice about sending off an email. Lots of people have thought about how to avoid spam: finding a way to have to pay to get into an inbox might just be the ticket.

I suppose this is just a slightly more expensive version of the idea that we could do away with spam by charging a penny or a tenth of a penny per email sent.

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

#43

Post by gravypod »

unhelpful wrote: post #41
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…

RMS contributed some incredibly influential and useful software back in the day, but you'd have to pay me a lot more than Andreessen is charging to read the ranting drivel he passes off as philosophy.

I don't think that's a fair or charitable charictatization of his opinions and if you do feel that way, even after you've read his works, you can still email him about technical questions. I don't know how much of a help he'd be but you can always try and ask his opinion on how to do something.

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

#44

Post by gravypod »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #40
gravypod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension Coincidentally I don't like using Google Chrome. I stopped using the browser after they removed that ad-confusion extension and switched to FireFox. I never used it but I think it's not right for google to do it. I mean, I expected it to happen but it broke the camals back. If I had known that there was a $5 charge for chr…

Which extension are you referring to?

The one that clicked on ads in the background to pretend you visited the site. It was an attempt at hiding your identiy by making it difficult to track click behavior.

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

#45

Post by azeirah »

gravypod wrote: post #38
jdminhbg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money's all being donated. It's a fundraiser.

You know what's funny... I heard a very similar thing said by a company making a device for medical purposes. They said that they needed to charge a high price because it was for the betterment of humanity. They were planning on donating some of the raised funds to charity and put the rest of the money back into R&D to make more life saving drugs. That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serve…

In Martin Shkreli's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a pharmaceutical company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be saving lives.

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

#46

Post by gnicholas »

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

from his LinkedIn:

contact: ideas@woz.org

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

#47

Post by amenod »

gravypod wrote: post #44
mediocrejoker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which extension are you referring to?

The one that clicked on ads in the background to pretend you visited the site. It was an attempt at hiding your identiy by making it difficult to track click behavior.

https://adnauseam.io/press.html

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

#48

Post by gravypod »

azeirah wrote: post #45
gravypod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's funny... I heard a very similar thing said by a company making a device for medical purposes. They said that they needed to charge a high price because it was for the betterment of humanity. They were planning on donating some of the raised funds to charity and put the rest of the money back into R&D to make more life saving drugs. That excuse was made by Martin Sshkreli on a news show if memory serve…

In Martin Shkreli's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV. How is it an excuse for a pharmaceutical company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be saving lives.

In Marc Andreessen's case it really, really makes sense though, at least from my POV.

How is it an excuse for a technology company to ask for more money so they can do more business? Their business just happens to be giving people technology.

-----

To put it in clearer terms, Marc Andreessen is with the crowd that has the most to gain from charity contributions. He's got his fingers in all the right pies to make a lot of money from the results of more charity activities. He can is described as "a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook,[5] eBay,[6] and Hewlett Packard Enterprise,[7] among others" according to wikipedia and he was apperently involved with Free Basics.

You can read more about this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Criticism

The Free Basics thing is exactly the worst possible thing for any third world county I can think of. Getting spoon fed the "right" information from an overload mega-corp.

I think it's fair to say that his buisness is collecting data on people and manipulating them and that "just happens to include providing technology" which is one of the things he can do by finding selective charities.

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

#49

Post by kenferry »

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…

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.

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

#50

Post by emorse »

gravypod wrote: post #36
superasn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not implying this is the case here but sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension. The small investment is like a filter for really in-demand people to separate the wheat from the chaff.

> sometimes people charge like Google chrome store charges $5 for submitting a chrome extension Coincidentally I don't like using Google Chrome. I stopped using the browser after they removed that ad-confusion extension and switched to FireFox. I never used it but I think it's not right for google to do it. I mean, I expected it to happen but it broke the camals back. If I had known that there was a $5 charge for chr…

Just to be clear, the $5 is a one time charge to be able submit extensions to their store, not a charge for users to download extensions. I think it's a good solution to help keep pure garbage from being uploaded... if you upload something, you think it's worth $5 (hopefully a trivial sum to you.) If you don't want to pay the fee, you can tell people to download your extension from your own page and manually install it. Uploading it to the store just helps people discover your extension and makes installing the extension a one click thing.
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