It did rise organically to the front page, at least as far as I can tell from the data. Eventually a moderator marked it as a dupe, since there had been a big thread about the product recently.
We did nothing to make it rise. We do that for Launch HNs, a special case described in the FAQ (https://hackernews.hn/newsfaq.html), but otherwise YC startups are subject to the same community whims that everyone else is. We also don't do any special penalizing of negative posts about YC startups (just the opposite, in fact: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
You guys need to understand that while you dislike some things about this product, other HN users find it interesting. That appears to be all that's going on here.
I may sound stupid, but I didn't even realize it was proprietary until it started asking me questions about data collection and too much bombarding on feedback collection. "Why did you uninstall fig". Your comment nailed it and I immediately uninstalled it.
This is just to show that even experienced developers like us could be easily misled by companies almost looking like an open source initiative.
No offence to the founders - but I am not going to trust access to my entire filesystem by a proprietary software just based off some projected goodwill + marketing.
You associate it with spam because spam uses effective subjects. There are a handful of effective subject forms that are used in essentially every email campaign and transactional email, and a sharp drop off to a long tail of subjects that people ignore.
Which is weird because if fig is good, it could easily gain adepts, especially here. I'd have nothing against trading my xterm or rxvt for fig if a) fig was better, b fig was was available on Linux and c) fig wasn't collecting data.
Meanwhile, after reading comments here, I eventually added fzf completions to my shell and I gotta say: it's quite good!
> A piece of proprietary software that collects data on basically everything on your machine and is unavailable on Linux? Nice!
new slogan: "it's like Grammarly, but for code!"
meanwhile, just like Crypto AG, Grammarly (so useful btw to have a program that gives full access to any text-editing a person does, outside of the browser) is a small NSA project. but seriously, the onus is really on these companies to disprove this, and they have been found wanting.
yes it does sound like a conspiracy theory... but we know better now thanks to leaks involving Snowden, Crypto AG, etc.
Of course commenters can and do criticize any startup here, YC or no. Every regular HN reader knows that. You're not, however, allowed to derail discussion by inundating a thread with angry/obsessive posts and made-up sinister scenarios. That's what you've been doing in multiple threads now, including over 20 comments in this one. That's not curious conversation, which is what HN is supposed to be for.
We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). but 'less' does not mean we don't moderate at all. Until now we've moderated your comments much less than we would if you had been behaving this way about any other topic, but enough is enough.
Standard HN moderation practice, when users do this kind of thing, is to penalize and rate-limit their account. I'm going to do that now. (Edit: I changed my mind later. See the explanation below.) Since the reaction this will educe is predictable, I might as well answer it now: no, this has nothing to do with criticizing YC or YC startups. It's because you've been posting a plethora of low-quality off-topic comments and otherwise breaking the site guidelines. This is standard HN moderation and the only thing different in your case is how long we held off doing it.
Actually, IIRC, you're rather a good commenter apart from this, so if you want to fix this, it shouldn't be hard.
Edit:
For some reason I realized later that I didn't feel good about penalizing your account. It's not that what I said about standard moderation practice was wrong or anything—I just have a feeling that you're a good HN user coming from a good place and that there's probably a much better way to fix this. So I'm going to go with that instinct, and have removed the rate-limit etc.
For me, moderating less/more is not as much of an issue as the values by which commentators are being judged by, such as intellectual curiosity, positivity over negativity, or fun — with specific respect to judgments on a YC-backed company on a YC forum (that being said, I'm all for fun-based moderation on technologies or politics in general).
I would feel similarly concerned if Twitter or Facebook moderated conversations on their partners or competitors by suggesting that some users weren't intellectually curious enough, or that they had entrenched positions, or that they were full of negativity, or that they weren't "fun" enough. In this perspective, judging a user by the aforementioned values seems to be the wrong tier of values for the stakes at play. I feel that community trust is what is at stake here.
Also, you have mentioned before how HN moderation is not secret. Is my account penalized in any way? Given that some users have been hellbanned before, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of perceived transparency here. As a regular HN reader, it is not my expectation that users shall receive transparency when they are penalized.
One of my takeaways from this conversation with the user <ushakov> is that they were initially opaquely penalize, and that we would not have received clarity on this issue had you chosen not to personally respond.
I'm sorry but I don't follow what you're saying in the first two paragraphs.
Re your specific account: your votes are downweighted. We do that when an account has upvoted too many stories or comments that break the site guidelines—particularly the sensational-indignant type of post, which is by far the biggest problem on HN and therefore the thing we try to dampen and downweight in every way we know how. If you want to commit to upvoting fewer such comments and/or stories, we'd be happy to take that penalty off your account. Other than that your account isn't penalized.
Re transparency in general: that's a complex question. We take the following approach: we don't publish a full moderation log of every decision; we do answer specific questions when people have them. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution (it isn't, and we have ideas for making it better), but this is a super hard problem to get right. It's popular to argue "everything should all be completely transparent all the time" but having been at this job for a decade now I'm extremely wary of the unintended consequences that would have. I'll try to dig up some old links about that in case you or anyone cares. Edit: ok, there's https://hackernews.hn/item?id=30141232 and a bunch more at https://hackernews.hn/item?id=27307075. If anyone reads those and has a question on this that I haven't already answered, I'd be happy to know what it is.
For the first two paragraphs I'm talking about your conversations with <ushakov> and the faults you've listed so far about that user.
---
I've always been surprised when HN took moderation actions against my account, so it's hard for me to commit to not abusing when I don't have a clear mental compass about what is what. I just conduct myself in a way which aspires for personal authenticity in discussion.
I feel sad that the sum of my behavior on this forum is considered problematic and requires penalizing.
I know that you were talking about those conversations but I don't understand what you're saying about them that I haven't already answered.
Re the penalty: I don't want you to be sad so I have removed it from your account. It's kind of hard to get into the details because we don't discuss specific vote data.
I too, sometimes get into personal fights and push for emotional arguments but nothing good ever comes out of this. I have my HN account downgraded multiple times.
Here on HN, we have something absent everywhere else: A moderator who treats you as a person and spends time and energy to explain why something is the way it is. You may not agree with the reasoning all the times but almost everywhere else you don't get the reasoning and only the results(shadow ban, censorship, lock out).
Can I offer you something? If you believe that HN is not run fairly, collect the evidence and write a thorough article about it and post it here or on Reddit and other places. If you articulate your ideas properly and if you have a point I bet you will receive traction and response from YC people.
A bunch of legit users upvoted it—perfectly normally, as far as I can tell from the data. A lot of users simply find this product interesting. That only seems impossible to you because of your pre-existing hostility to it, which I'm sure is sincere but which is causing you to derail these threads. You posted 17 comments derailing the earlier thread and 20+ comments doing the same here. This is way over the top and we need you to stop it.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story*, but 'less' does not mean 'not at all'. When users turn threads into shitshows with false accusations and off-topic drama, we have to do something about that, YC or no.
How does one even disprove your statement? If indeed it organically got upvoted how does one even prove that to you? Your argument against them is posited in way that is impossible to counter.
I for one upvoted because this genuinely seemed like an interesting feature. It's clearly hitting a pain point for me as a developer, whether or not it actually ends up solving it satisfactorily.
Hm, interesting. I suppose it does prevent mass bot downvotes, but it also stops the community from pre-emptively removing posts such as this one that just stir up rage. Reddit would probably be unreadable without post downvotes.
Users can flag posts, which is kind of like a super-downvote. HN also penalizes posts that generate too many comments too fast, which it interprets as controversial.
Flagging would be an abuse of another feature. I don't think the original post is quite wrong as in illegal or harmful or off topic.
The commenter here's upvote counted, my downvote did not count.
And I won't just use any other available form of attack like falsely accusing the post of some wrongdoing just because I want to criticise something and that's the only way to do it.
I did leave a critical comment but that is a seperate issue because you can leave a positive comment and upvote. So the ability to comment nulls out.
> otherwise how is it possible that a niche product of a YC company right now has the first spot with 400 upvotes?
It's not a secret that YC startups get promoted and placed on the hackernews frontpage. If I remember correctly it looks different than this, so what exactly are you accusing them off? Using a hidden promotion mechanism instead of the known and accepted one? That makes no sense to me! If they have the ability to promote YC startups on the frontpage and it's generally known and not done in secret, why should they do it in secret here?
I think it legitimately got upvoted here. Maybe with some friends&family help. But not by some hidden moderator action.
I certainly found it interesting, but I would also never use a tool that privacy-violating.
i’m not accusing them of anything and i think it’s alright to use some help, but just look how big the number of upvotes is compared to the amount of positive comments? why does a niche product take such a high spot?
why are so many people upvoting but only so little commenting? how is it that only a minority commented positively the product?
Not really. It isn't uncommon. The target audience for this is bigger than you think, and those it appeals to are happy to see their niche discussed regardless if the actual link is a good or bad fit for the niche itself.
> collect the evidence and write a thorough article about it and post it here or on Reddit and other places. If you articulate your ideas properly and if you have a point I bet you will receive traction and response from YC people.
Talking about fun for the community with respect to a product discussion on a YC-backed company on a YC forum has complicated implications, as opposed intellectual curiosity on the matter of Go or Rust.
I'm all for keeping Rust discussions fun and curious.
How does that make it ok? Mods moderate, ...and their moderation action caused this flood of negative reaction which wouldn't have been their otherwise.
If it's valid to criticise a critic, it must also be valid to criticise a critic critic.
The merits of a given argument or action do not rest on "because daddy said so". There is and must be a daddy, but no daddy is above critique themselves even though their job is to moderate others.
The downweighting in the case of ushakov's comment wasn't done by a mod. It was done by a regular user who, along with a small number of other longstanding HN users, has the ability to downweight subthreads that are either too generic or offtopic. This is an experiment that we've been running for several months now. Actually the experiment has been quite successful—this sort of downweighting is the probably highest-leverage thing we've ever discovered for improving thread quality, and I'd like to find a way to extend the experiment to more users.
IIRC, the downweight was correct in principle, because the subthread wasn't about the particular story, it was just a generic complaint about the general topic. We want those downweighted because, regardless of topic, they have a strong tendency to sit at the top of a thread, accumulating upvotes and choking out more specific and more interesting discussion.
It was a mistake to downweight it, though—not because the subthread was good, but because the topic was a YC startup. By far the most important rule of HN moderation is that we intervene less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
The user who did the downweighting didn't know that Fig was a YC startup, so it was an honest mistake. Certainly none of this has to do with trying to suppress criticism of YC or YC-funded companies. We know how to take our lumps and do so all the time. We also know that community good will is the only value that HN actually has, so doing anything to jeopardize that would be really dumb.
sometimes you can get 2, 3, 5 times more upvotes than another post in half the time, if some HN admin/mod don't like your post then it's artificially ""downvoted"" and leave the front page(s)
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
The problem appear to be people have a high expectation from HN. People think that HN to be a discussion platform. But it is actually a PR platform implemented via a discussion forum.
just imagine how much of the HN comment section is manipulated by these elites
i guess some YC-investor isn't happy that us regulars are devaluing his investment and downranks negative comments so that people will give Fig a try after reading bunch of good ones
I don't know why you are 'a regular' if you have such a toxic opinion of and attitude towards HN.
Also although this is not going to sway you, I at least want to mention it as I found it interesting when I came across this - see the response and embedded search link in the FAQ question "Are negative stories about YC suppressed on HN?" here [1]
Edit: also want to note that I'm thankful for you and others who bring up the privacy issues because I likely would have looked at the fig.io page, thought 'hey this looks cool' and upvoted the post without thinking much further... which is likely where a lot of the upvotes come from. So IMO putting things more lightly (even in your original response 9 days ago) would have sufficed. Perhaps if you had qualified what you meant by fig relying on "free labour" (it just sounds like a hectic accusation) your comment would have stayed at the top. Though overall I agree it doesn't seem like the kind of comment that should have been suppressed and it's good to push back against that a bit.
I think I would very much be dissatisfied as well after finding out that someone can arbitrarily devalue my opinions. The original comment by the author wasn't even that negative in my opinion, it just outlined real problems with Fig. Someone didn't like that though and the author got the hammer for it.
This is the disconnect. HN wants to come across as a discussion of free ideas that can be voted upon, but some users can down-weight comments to the bottom? That’s well within HN’s prerogative since it was started by YC, but they should be straight forward that YC companies are given preferential treatment.
Most lurkers and users think YC companies make it to the front page organically and based on merit alone.
Other than that, YC companies have to compete for attention on HN along with everyone else, and I can tell you that most find it maddeningly difficult.
For example, the tedious angry-generic-repetitive sort of subthread that tends to get upvoted on most common topics is exactly the kind of thing we downweight as part of standard moderation, but we do that less when a YC startup is the topic. That's not because such discussion is any higher-quality in those cases (it isn't), but rather because people are quick to jump to the conclusion that we're doing nefarious things and we need to be able to answer those concerns in good conscience.
The fact that there's all this drama about one such subthread having gotten downweighted is actually an indication of how we don't do that. It happened, but only by mistake.
They definitely don’t get preferential treatment outright.
But if some users can down-weight comments and that happens on a thread about a YC company, I hope you can see why it would raise some concerns. I personally didn’t know some users had this ability.
You're right. I would put it this way: the rule "we moderate less when YC or a YC startup is being criticized" has to take precedence over the rule "we downweight generic and/or offtopic subthreads when we notice them at the top of a page". And it does take precedence—it is literally the #1 moderation principle here.
It doesn't work perfectly though—the system is just too complex. In the case we're talking about, the user (not mod) who downweighted the comment was quite aware of both those rules and of their precedence. They just didn't know that Fig was a YC startup. There are thousands of YC startups and people can't remember them all.
Since mistakes are inevitable, I think all we can do is be open when they happen, fix them if we can, and explain our general principles are. That's what I've been trying to do in this case, and if there's a question I haven't answered yet, I'd be happy to. None of this is secret.
I suppose "arbitrarily devaluing" is another way of saying "moderated". HN is moderated. We try to be as fair and as principled as we can but inevitably it involves making interpretations and judgment calls.
Actually the dream would be to have a community system that could regulate itself without any such special moderation, and the experiments I described upthread (https://hackernews.hn/item?id=31227642) are all about inching in that direction, but it's just a hard problem that we have no general solution for.
Moderation is great as it usually keeps a certain essence to a place. The fact that there are users who have a stronger downvote button, but who don't seem to adhere to the same standard as actual moderators, is the issue for me. It needs to be clear and transparent, otherwise trust is eroded.
This is the first time I've seen something like this on HN though, so if anything it might show how good the HN policies normally are. I just wasn't aware that some members of the community are more equal than others; now that it is clear and communicated, I can make better decisions myself.
They're definitely supposed to adhere to the same standard as actual moderators, and from what I've seen, they do. I was reviewing every decision quite closely for a while, but eventually stopped because it was too repetitive- it was always basically 'yup, that's ok'. A few exceptions but there's always variance - calls differ among actual moderators too.
The intention is to try to inch in the direction of a more self-regulating community while improving the quality of the discussions. Improved discussion quality is by far the most important thing and as far as I can tell this experiment is a big success in that department, so the essence of the HN is definitely not being diluted by it. If it were, we'd stop it immediately.
Not sure if that helps or not!
Edit: if anyone wants to see a typical example, here's a top subthread that one of the users we're talking about correctly marked as offtopic: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=31231858. That's the kind of pointless flamewar stuff that tends to get stuck at the top of a page. Downweighting it makes everything better, and having more eyeballs out there to catch it sooner is super helpful. That's the intention behind this experiment.
I don't think this is the proper use of the word. These are just people with vested interest in making a product more popular - it has nothing to do with any "elite."
That makes them merely select, like the janitor. People do commonly use elite as a pejorative stand in for select group, but elite still does mean in some way better or superior, and surely you don't mean to say they are superior in any way than position.
We've been doing experiments for many years with the intention of extending moderation abilities to broader segments of the community. Some of these experiments end up getting dropped, while others end up as official features on the site.
For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be).
That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that.
I’m not affiliated with YC in any way, I sometimes mock YC companies, and I can tell you with certainty that a comment can be downranked out of human discretion to the bottom without the involvement of a “super-mod” or anyone affiliated with YC. Not sure if I can disclose further than that.
Also, I tried fig the first time round and was not impressed.
You have a very curious definition of super-mod. One would assume a super-mod needs to be a mod first.
> confirm you know more, but don't want to give out any information
People are sometimes entrusted with non-public information they aren’t at liberty to disclose, at least without asking for explicit permission first. Still, when they see false accusations thrown around they sometimes would like to do something. I thought this is a forum for adults, that much should be obvious.
How many times do they have to hint that the set of people is not limited to users of any stripe.
They've said enough, and there simply are situations where that's all you can say, and it's neither pointless nor wrong, nor even unusual or all that remarkable. It's common even.
It's interesting and useful to me merely to be given the heads up that it's possible to hack the system.
The details would be even better, but I can think of at least a few ways a person might become aware of a fact like that without being able or morally obligated to disclose more than that heads-up, and without even themselves having necessarily ever done anything wrong.
Unrelated, this will be my last comment on this topic: let me observe how absurd the original claim “you are not allowed to criticise Fig here” is, when most of the top level comments in the original discussion were negative, without getting moderated. Does moderation occasionally misfire? Sure. (No comment on whether I think it misfired that time.) Are over-emotional users harmful to the quality of discussions? Yes.
Then are you using some limited definition of hack that only includes breaking someone's password? I was not. Substitute the word perturb for hack if you will.
> confirmed that my comment's ranking was manipulated
Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated", that's just how a upvote / downvote based website works. The comment was likely downvoted because it was just plain out wrong as the first comment to your post already says.
> YC companies get tips and notifications when they're about to get featured
That's not what happened. Certain users have additional moderation power to downweighted generic/offtopic comments. I encourage you to read the answer dang posted in his linked thread. The linked post is also not the one that got downweighted.
Just to be clear: I don't think there is anything outrageous about such a system. It's probably positive for the community.
what happened is i pissed some people off and they manipulated the comment section so it ended up looking like the product is well-received by the community
my comment was on-topic and had valid points contributing to the discussion
the generic/offtopic is just a cover up
in fact why don't we just downrank your comment right here and mark it as generic or maybe off-topic? /s
That's not what happened. I've explained in detail what did happen, many times, so this doesn't seem to be about facts.
We cut users a lot more slack when they're making shit up about HN, YC, YC startups, and so on, but the amount of slack we cut is nonetheless finite and it's time you stopped.
Lest we hear more about how you're being repressed: people criticize HN, YC, and YC startups all the time here with zero problems. You, however, have derailed more than one discussion now by inundating it with dozens of sensational, false, and/or offtopic comments. That is not what HN threads are for, and even though we moderate HN less when YC startups are the topic, we eventually have to draw a line.
Actually I have the impression that you're rather a good commenter in general and this isn't personal in any way, so if you want to fix this, it won't be hard.
Go back and read the thread friend. It’s not normal downvotes. Some users have the ability to down
weight a comment. When that happens on a YC product thread and the comment was critical, anyone would be slightly suspicious. The reason was that the comment was off topic, but I disagree.
> Being flagged / downvoted by users isn't "manipulated"
Did you even read the comment?
> even-though it had the first spot with 30 upvotes
The comment had upvotes and a mod confirmed that the ranking was later manipulated, meaning it didn't lose ranking because of down votes.
My lord, it's one think when people just read article titles and skip the actual article, but it's incredibly immature and perplexing when people just read the first line of a comment!
Please don't jump to criticism and read the things properly, if not, try to refrain from commenting .
No, the point is that it was downvoted / downranked / flagged because it was a low quality comment that is spreading FUD and it doesn't matter who did it.
You seem to be under a mistaken impression of how HN works. Upvotes are an important signal but far from the only one. If HN were to go by upvotes alone, it would consist of little more than sensational flamewars about the same few hot topics over and over again (plus tons of meta drama). This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Lots of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Since HN's mandate is not to be that, we have to have countervailing mechanisms to compensate for that weakness. Otherwise the system would get stuck in one of its failure modes. The countervailing mechanisms include things like flags, software mechanisms (including automated up- and down-weights) and moderation (including manual downweights and other interventions). All this is happening all the time. If it weren't, HN would be a completely different place.
None of this is secret; it's not all transparent in the sense that we don't publish a full moderation log of all the factors, but we're happy to answer specific questions.
At least in theory, you can get people worked up with inflammatory, wrong, inciteful, off-topic, meta, or similar content. I don’t know if your comment(s) fit into those kinds of categories, but as a user I’m fine with those sorts of things being downranked/flagged so more interesting things can rise to the top. I think they do a pretty good job generally with moderation, though I’m sure mistakes are sometimes made and maybe your situation was one.
What I mean is that you can get people to upvote those kinds of things, so pointing to them as having been upvoted isn’t on its own proof that it isn’t inflammatory, meta, off-topic, etc.
I checked the post in question at your request, and to be honest they way I read it is a bit off topic picking fights or meta discussion around the politics of HN. I read it as a bit inflammatory as well. Some of your responses here seem kind of similar, maybe you’re experiencing it differently but it seems like you are angrily responding to almost every branch of the threads here. But that’s all just my personal opinion of what I’m seeing.
> why isn't HN respecting user's opinions and manipulating the positions as they wish?
Because certain comments can be quite agreeable, but don't encourage interesting discussions. Your particular thread had more discussion about bitterness and etiquette than content. Even though your points are valid that's not the kind of discussion one wants to have at the top of any article.
Derailing the comment section about this article with your own agenda isn't particularly helpful either. But at least I appreciate that I now know about that feature.
> Inevitably, there will be users who, for whatever reason, don't want their usage of Fig to be personally tracked. Of course. It's your data and software on your device. You shouldn't even need a reason. We want to cater to these users. And we will. But unfortunately, we are so early on in the process of building Fig that we need to be able to speak to our users. De-anonymising telemetry for the time being while minimisng the events tracked enables us to do this in a non intrusive way. But it is of course not for everyone. Therefore, once we reach a critical mass of usage in the coming months, we will then anonymise all telemetry, making Fig more accessible.
It has been several months since this was written. Are they still collecting de-anonymized user data?
I just installed it. You are presented with an option to disable telemetry once setup is complete in the form of a CLI command (fig settings telemetry.disabled true). But, for some reason, you can't disable it during setup.
However, during setup, you need to "sign-up" by sharing your email - you can't skip this step as far as I could tell.
> Telemetry: Fig has basic telemetry in order to help us make product decisions. We currently give the you option to opt out of all non-essential telemetry by running `fig settings app.disableTelemetry true`. This removes everything except for one daily ping. We use this ping to help us understand how many people were using Fig.
That statement means that they have chosen, by design, to be unavailable in Europe.
In Europe you must be able to prove that your software was designed from the ground up with enough safeguards for user privacy, as opposed to considering privacy requirements as a bolted-on afterthought.
I won't flag because I don't think it's wrong (although it approaches qualifying as spam, but, technically not quite, it's topical for this site, and I believe functions as advertised, and I'm sure a few mac users may legitimately find it useful), just bad and of no value and "do not recommend" and I'd merely like to do the opposite of upvoting, which is neither accusing of wrongdoing nor abstaining.
Considering it's a YC project and a commercial one, it's at least "spammy" if not quite 100% qualifying as pure spam. It's somehow, in a way I'm struggling to articulate, worse than merely not interesting to me.
It's so right on the edge. I sat with this comment open for a few minutes waffling between submit, or cancel and flag. It can be argued convincingly either way.
Just wanted to share my subpar experience as an interviewee at Fig. The initial phone screen consisted of a series of around 7 lightning fast questions on React basics (this was for a typescript role) followed by a basic leetcode question all in 15min.
I was then presented with a take home which was to make a minimal clone of https://explainshell.com/ using the Fig API. Needless to say this task was not only overly time consuming but it was extremely disrespectful to receive a reply over a month (!) after I submitted the task. They cited that my submission was “lost” while moving to a new system. If their management of new hires is this poor I shudder to think of what their internal management is like. Awesome product can’t say the same about the team though.
On startup they send request to versions.withfig.com, tel.withfig.com, VS marketplace, Sentry, AWS Cognito and a couple more.
My firewall blocked all of these and I couldn't use the app. It needs api.withfig.com, app.withfig.com and AWS Congnito to work. After signup I blocked all these and I saw they ping their servers every few seconds.
Removing it permanently.
What's the business model of this and why I'm not allowed to use it without signing up?
The same thing with wrap[0], to have autocomplete, somehow giving special permissions in the OS is not enough to function; I also need to give my identity and communication details. It feels wrong to me.
The answer is usually "They'll upsell me for business/commercial/corporate use". Similar to what happened with Postman (they started nagging you to sign in and sync your accounts).
IMO that's totally OK. I'm glad people are building stuff like this and if it requires an account to sign up, I am happy to do that.
> why I'm not allowed to use it without signing up?
I want to politely raise this question – is it not rude to have expectations for something you didn't build and be entitled that it to be offered to you for free? You're more than welcome to ignore it and find dozens of terminal emulators out there.
> is it not rude to have expectations for something you didn't build and be entitled that it to be offered to you for free
Well, Fig or any other free to use software wasn't commissioned upon my request therefore I don't think that I owe anyone anything. Engagement is worth quite a lot thise days, they earned my engagement by offering me something but did not disclose the requirements to use their product upfront so I ended up not benefiting from the product.
Think of this, you are walking down the street and someone really nice offers you a free meal. You accept, sit on the table and the food arrives but to let you eat the food they ask you for your contact details and a copy of you key for your home. You say, no thanks, would rather pay and they say no, it's only free meal in this restaurant.
I'm not sure I will accept it and assume that they will upsell me a boiler.
Okay, there's probably nothing nefarious but they stole my time and attention without giving me anything back. The restaurant shouldn't have advertised free meals but meals for key and contact details. I would have had gladly skip the offer, so they can concentrate on those who really need the meal and are willing to fulfil the request of the restaurant.
> You accept, sit on the table and the food arrives but to let you eat the food they ask you for your contact details address and a copy of you key for your home. You say, no thanks, would rather pay and they say no, it's only free meal in this restaurant.
The correct analogy would be if you ate the meal for free but didn't want to provide your contact information so they can upsell their catering services to your business in the future.
All they want is a contact information to sell you stuff in the future for not paying today. You can use a anonymous email address and hide your identity. But, since this is a Terminal emulator, there is always a risk of privacy.
This is all pretty obvious. The argument really is "I want to have this thing for free, but I don't want to give anything back including contact details to further contact me".
Well, then how do you suggest a good business plan for building a commercial product if not having some ability to contact your users?
I hadn't any meals. The autocomplete app doesn't work without my e-mail.
The contact details requirements are mentioned for the first time after install and just before start using the software, this creates a pressure to give my details. Probably that's the idea anyway(a dark pattern). This makes me trust them even less.
See, we are no longer in the age of nerds making great software and giving it away for free.
We are in the age of high profit software, be it through sales of product(x$ to use y), sales of extra features (x is free but this specific feature is y$), sales of services(x is free and your life can get easier if you use it with y for only z$/month), land grab(x is free for you because it's paid by y, who hopes to make money later somehow), data grab(x is free for you because we use the data collected here to build y), sales of access to people(x is free but we let other people reach you) or straight up criminals(you pay us x$ or y happens to you).
We can no longer talk about thankless customers of free products. There's even no longer free text on the internet, people write stuff only to show ads or influence your decisions(political or consumerist). The customer must understand how they are paying for it.
To give someone the benefit of doubt, they need an explanation for it. Clearly, contact details are irrelevant for the apps' primary function. They can ask for a license after a trail, I guess(free license obtained by signing up). They can let you use the app and offer you extra functionality(like syncing history between devices) through an online account.
It is not O.K. to make people install your app and only then require this one thing, irrelevant to apps functionality, to let you use the app. That's a known dark pattern.
We get asked this question a lot and so as a final note to our launch, I thought it would be good to address it.
First, Fig will always be free for individuals. We want users to feel confident that even if they sign up to Fig and become the biggest power user, they will never be charged.
Our pricing model is inspired by GitHub's:
For individuals and open-source projects, Fig is completely free.
For team products that require hosting, Fig will charge a small fee per person per month.
This quote has been cut in the middle. The latter part is:
Of course, not all projects succeed - most fail. Should this happen to us and we fail to gather the number of paid customers necessary to make the product self-sustaining, we will try to sell it. If we succeed, everything we said before becomes null.
Autocomplete usually drives me crazy in IDEs - often it covers up nearby code that’s relevant to what I’m currently typing, so I end up hitting ESC all the time just to get it to go away. I guess you don’t have that problem here if the popup is always below your cursor, since there’s never really anything below your cursor in a terminal when you’re entering commands.
But also autocomplete often suggests the wrong thing but I’m typing too quickly to notice, and then I hit enter and get the wrong thing filled in.
What I want is just non-automatic completion - which we already have. Ctrl+R gives me exactly what I need when trying to find some odd command I ran last week. Add in fzf integration and it’s perfect. Tab completion covers everything else. When I don’t want completion, it stays out of the way. In an IDE, you can usually bind completion suggestions to Ctrl+Space or something and then turn off automatic suggestions, or something like that.
Maybe you can set up this tool that way too - then it might be nice to try out. But as I mentioned generally I find the terminal to be pretty ergonomic already for completion stuff.
I've done battle with the VSCode autocomplete many times over the years, trying to stop things from popping up automatically when I'm typing. My escape key has gotten more of a worked out over the years than a vim user on speed. I've twiddled every option in Settings but it has defeated me every time.
Yesterday was my latest battle and I think I have the upper-hand. I set the "millisecond delay until show" to some very large value and it seems to have worked. I can now typed without stuff flashing and popping up all the time.
I came back late yesterday to the computer. VSCode was still open, and showing one lonely autocomplete pop up on screen. pfff.. Time to add another zero to the delay setting I guess...
I had the same issue until i took the time to check out the docs and config it to my taste, it offers a fair amount of customization.
Granted, you shouldn't need to fiddle with it to make it usable, but i really didn't mind spending some time to get to know better the tools i'm using every day.
My config file is like 1500 LOC long and it's a bit messy, but in a quick search i found i severely limited the available options, changed the position of the box so it does not cover the text immediately underneath, changed some colors and put some suggestions as inline hints instead, among other stuff:
Thanks. I was thinking about switching to VS Code from IDEA (because VS Code has evolved a lot, to my surprise), but looks like I need to wait a little more.
edit: oh, it's a private company and it's mac only. Something about proprietary extensions to my command line is a huge turn off. Functionality itself looks great though.
Yeah, and I find it peculiar people rant about both about the same time. Making cross-platform stuff takes time, so it makes sense that Fig ( and many others) focus on a single platform only initially, if they haven't chosen a cross-platform stack. Which sucks as a user, which is why I prefer Electron apps to X-only apps.
While this looks incredibly useful and productive, it’s also extremely hostile to users and security. I can not recommend. The volume of data collection far exceeds its utility. The argument that it’s needed proves it’s not about auto-complete. It’s about selective exfiltration. Prove me wrong.
We are making really good progress on this and will have a cross-platform prototype in the next month or so. See the Github issues for Linux[1] and Windows[2]
That page is way more beautiful and unique with it's use of vibrant color and gradients in dark mode. Also it doesn't share the most obvious thing between the others (Built for speed... section).
I think almost straight copying landing page designs and layouts is basically fine and common practice. Using the same or very similar copy... not quite.
Agreed. It has been slowing down my overall usage and no much added value.
I decided after 1-2 months of usage that it doesn't worth it and uninstalled Fig.
I installed Fig about a year ago, it was not working on my machine and I remember I was getting spammed for no reason until I hit that unsubscribe button.
I use hstr to get autocomplete suggestions based on my history.
No email or signup needed.
Its like ctrl+r but a selection menu is visbile.
http://dvorka.github.io/hstr/
It's basically a small UI change, but I think I would actually benefit from having a real window instead of the in-terminal completions. However, I want ONLY that UI change.
If someone could pull the autocomplete list out of fish and style it as a floating window that moves with the courser, that would be wonderful. Sounds more like a tool developed by one person than a venture funded startup though.
Another terminal to try - cool! Another terminal that wants me to log in - not cool.
I wish I could try both Fig and Warp, but I can't: giving my email to a terminal is insane and I would never do that.
I wonder what is it that two similar projects popped up recently for quite non-business lucrative usecase but both require something that the very target audience will mostly never agree to?
> All cloud features are opt-in. Data is encrypted at rest.
The most generous interpretation is this is misleading (I would consider it outright lie) given they currently also have telemetry which isn't even opt-out, it's always on. See last time this was discussed:
I use Z to jump around in the shell. Jump around, btw, is how it's purpose it offically defined.
It uses some sort of substring/edit distance matching and LRU heuristics, and it works almost every time. Sometimes it feels like it's reading my mind.
The homepage says: "Fig isn't a standalone terminal. We integrate with the tools that you already use." and then shows 3 icons of terminal applications, including macOS Terminal.
How do they open those dialogs for completing commands on them? Those menus don't seem to be text based, but part of the terminal window GUI.
I believe they "hack" accessibility hooks in the OS to position the floating window as if it was part of the app. That part is actually quite impressive and works well.
I imagine it's quite a bit of engineering effort to make that not janky. I wonder how hard it is to make cross platform. Maybe other OSes have easier hooks? Easier permissions for sure.
I am so tired of these hipster terminal apps for mac only.
As soon as I thought "hey a cool-ish terminal app" I was already sure that it would be macOS only. So I searched on the landing page, documentation and FAQ but couldn't find any info about platform support, which gave me some hope.
Only once I subscribed to the mailing list and got to the download page, I was told that Linux and Windows users are on a "waiting list".
I'm going to refrain from using any app that settles on macOS only as a first target, even if they plan to support other platforms in "the future".
Like the ecosystem wasn't already a walled garden without deliberately excluding viable platforms for no reason other than being "cool".
I am currently pleased at the current renaissance of CLIs.
If you use Python, Rich and Textualize is leading the forth. I am currently using it to build a frontend to a DRF backend and I am really enjoying the experience.
I had a suspicion that this was Mac-only from the looks of the site and docs, but after some clicks I gave up trying to find out; reading comments on HackerNews was faster.
Demanding an email address for "sync" makes me feel really uneasy. That was almost enough to make me back out of completing the installation, but I've given a throwaway email, disabled launch on startup, and disabled auto-launch to try this out.
The terminal auto-completion is nice looking. I want to like this, however for me I'm not seeing enough value to justify having a third party potentially snooping my terminal.
Apparently you use it with iterm2 or whatever terminal you want...on a mac.
And I think it's an interesting idea to move the autocomplete out of band where it doesn't write to the same window where my work is (if I were on a mac), especially if it's still keyboard driven as they say.
But I still wouldn't touch this for other reasons.
I don't see any justification for this being proprietary.
There are already decades old autocoplete in most shells and the enhacement concept that this brings is just not that special that it deserves putting up with having to install proprietary binaries, being limited to their mac-only platform support, tolerating their data collection, and of course whatever their licensing arrangement is or will be.
It's not a bad enhancement idea, it just seems like it's barely a little spiff-up over ordinary bash completions.
Ordinary completions are already a flexible system that you can customize to do quite fancy things if you wanted. They already execute commands to generate output. It's a trivial addition, conceptually, to feed that output into any of the many xdialog-alikes instead of directly to stderr. This is a little slicker that literally just that, but not by much.
And the existing shells are already on all platforms not just mac, and fully open source, and don't have any telemetry or client/server architecture, and so are the xdialog-alikes, and so are the autocomplete definitions.
I've been using it since it first appeared on HN and I absolutely love it. The suggestions are actually smart for majority of commands that I use. When I type 'yarn add we', it fetches the list of packages from npm and suggests webpack. When I type 'git add', it lists the two files I actually modified.
> When I type 'git add', it lists the two files I actually modified.
Is not typing `-u` really worth installing a whole app that spies on you? Especially since shells like `fish` (FOSS!) will have you just write `-u` + up arrow?
This seems objectively worse to me but I guess we'll see whether they find a real market.
I really like those websites that are so greatly integrated with javascript trackers that when I purposely block all of them on all lists I could find, the website appears for a fraction of a second and quickly disappears afterwards. The web is amazing!
I have started with web dev on windows 10, is there an alternate to cmd/powershell
like terminal for linux where I can run basic linux like commands but for windows 10.
I really don't like seeing companies use GitHub just as an issue tracker for a proprietary product. Something about that feels... wrong, almost like they're using the platform but giving nothing back.
I’m sure Microsoft is crying all the way to the bank.
Though…if they make it simple to get a refund on the ‘Microsoft tax’ you have to pay whenever you buy a new computer but have no interest in running windows past making sure the thing actually works I might have a tiny, tiny bit of sympathy for them.
To give credits where it's due: Fig's data collection policy is explained in a very straight no-bullshit language and is perfectly reasonable. Instructions on how to disable telemetry are written right there. I would be okay with that policy but I will be disabling it anyway without any consideration.
The terminal has been such a core part of my workflow for so long that I sometimes forget how difficult it can be to use; I've just learned to hack my way around the friction.
It's so refreshing to see a product try to reinvent something so core to developers everywhere. Really excited to see where this goes!
