In 2025, Affinity's trial was one week. Last year, hundreds of thousands of people saw ads and signed up for 6 month licenses. I signed up, but I didn't activate. There was no requirement to activate immediately in the offer, and the welcome email specifically mentioned the license would start after the downloadable products were activated.

Affinity announced in 2024 that the offer has been updated: the 6 month licenses would expire immediately if not started in the next weeks.

Since I had written my own desktop software products, I advised Affinity to email the hundreds of thousands of people and offer another long license, especially if they didn't activate or didn't use it.

I explained my advice to affinity@serif.com:

"I decided... I'm not going to be using my time to learn new design software in a week's trial... I think there is a very easy and (practically) free solution, like I wrote in the original replies, including extending a license."

"...it would only be in your favor to have a designer learn your tools instead of Figma and Adobe, because the reason they got popular is because people brought them to work."

And now, the 2024 web page with the offers redirects to the new announcement!

https://www.cics.umass.edu/

https://www.nsf.gov/news/ai-pioneers-andrew-barto-richard-su...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5789055

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5790799

Vladislav Yazhbin at Startup School with many early YC founders (Stanford, 2007):

https://vimeo.com/3170520

I don't know why I missed the talk by pg (Paul Graham) in 2005 when Y Combinator was founded, but I recorded videos in 2007 because I saw "Pirates of Silicon Valley" in high school about early days of Apple and Microsoft. It was obvious that my videos about Y Combinator could be valuable some day. And, I liked that Paul Graham studied art and programming with many people, while I had made a desktop product with paying customers all over the world. I even joined the companies that Y Combinator accelerated, Justin.tv in 2009 and DoorDash in 2020, to help them succeed.

I visited Boston in 1995 (to get an award in the Governor's Office for winning a poster design contest judged by reporters, politicians, and art critics). I visited Boston again in 2002 after 9/11 (September 11) for my US Citizenship. I applied to the US Naval Academy and was nominated by U.S. Congress, although I was already attending a two-year technical community college. I focused on programming, similar to MrBeast making videos while attending a community college. My college is where George Washington built the first federal armory for United States, but they did not have student email accounts.

In 2002, sitting in my Student President's office, I came up with the idea that I could verify students with the .edu domain name and I could make a website for my college. I was already Student President and already started a printed newspaper. Although each issue was funded with Student Activity fees, Student Activities Office wanted to review each article. However, an employee showed me she used "Black Planet" to share news, and MySpace and Facebook had not been invented yet. Unfortunately, I didn't want Student Activity Fees to be spent to buy server hardware and software because student had free personal @aol.com and @yahoo.com accounts already. I might have mentioned to a friend at Harvard University. Also, I worked as a high school volleyball official, therapeutic recreation aide at a nursing home (entertaining residents who have alzheimer's and dementia), and the campus police department on weekends. I also attended monthly meetings with other Student Presidents of Massachusetts public colleges.

In late 2003, I launched "assfirm" to find and watch items and pay later for merchants on eBay, Yahoo! and Overstock. It was a bootstrapped, paid app for middle-age users who bought physical items on their computers. This allowed me to market and support a product for people older than students but younger than nursing home residents.

In spring 2009, Sequoia was interviewing YC founders in the Mountain View office. I attended this event after arriving from the airport. I stayed in a Hacker House with some YC founders. I met new founders who were excited that I had "assfirm" as a company to buy physical products from merchants. I explained I wanted a name with A in the phonebook. I talked with Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide) in the street in Palo Alto the same week. His next company was named "affirm" years later.

Apple liked the user experience design of my Windows app in 2008. My company "assfirm" was selected by Apple to be the first to make native apps for the App Store in March 2008 before App Store existed. (At Startup School 2008, I don't think anyone else had been selected). I joined UMass Amherst for degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I proposed iPhone app designs for a Fortune 100 before I left to the four-year college, and built an app to track my phone's location as calendar events in university. I convinced the enterprise company and university to join Apple's corporate and education programs in 2008.

In summer 2009, I consulted at Justin.tv and co-founded "Hot Or Not Live" with Michael Seibel, Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Michael Seibel said he wanted to partner with me for their first API hackathon but said he was CEO and had no other contribution except his idea of rating livestreamers. I had better ideas like live shopping, maybe as a future company. Employees loved the "hot or not" rails demo that I built in hours. It had a video embed and used the REST API to find the next channel. Within hours, Justin.tv founders hosted it as hornotlive.com, and a new hot-pink design and logo, making sure it was on the company's heroku account in case they need to take it down. It was launched very quickly, like investors ask for. This scared Paul Graham and investors when they heard about it via Hacker News, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Also, the HotOrNot company threatened to sue. About two years later, Justin.tv founders launched "SocialCam" for chat and "Twitch" for gamers in 2011.

Before I joined YouTube founders in 2012, I applied to Y Combinator with a mobile app to send messages and photos, and to sell stickers/emojis.

I came up with the idea of a chat app with self-deleting photos, plus the way it would grow quickly. At Startup School, I overheard Evan Spiegel talk about Picaboo. I decided to excitedly share my ideas to a group and walked with him for a bit. When I joined YouTube founders in late 2012, a coworker told me she used Snapchat.

At Startup School one year, Paul Graham smiled at me as I entered the building with a "Mohammed" nametag.

When I was at Startup School to watch Emmett Shear's talk, Justin Kan said "you didn't do anything!" about my three months at Justin.tv, which was completely not true. I noticed that Sam Altman was staring at me with a neutral face. I didn't know what to say. I thought that maybe Sam Altman thought I looked like Elon Musk, which I heard before from YouTube founders (who worked at PayPal with Elon Musk), Instacart founder (who said I looked like half-Elon Musk, half-Jimmy Fallon), co-workers, etc. In 2019-2022, I built a gym at my house in San Francisco and thought I could be a magician, singer, and do impressions as Elon Musk, Jimmy Fallon (I wanted to interview BTS for "Dynamite" while I was in South Korea in summer 2020), Dimash, Keanu Reeves (who filmed Matrix 4 in 2020 in San Francisco but I hadn't seen the movies), etc.

Another YC memory: I started a tech show on YouTube in April 2007 after Startup School. It's possible that I'm the first YouTuber to make videos to ask viewers to do things that help with algorithms (like leaving comments) while having almost no content about the topic. Also, an early usage of "Let's Go...!" Here's the episode about Justin.tv:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210109212744/https://www.youtu...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43303914

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586535

Points: 24

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586495

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Any codebase that is simple to understand and modify is a second party's canvas to add complexity in record time, for the purpose of telling a third party they added complexity in record time.

Imagine you get permits, rip out a bathroom, choose tiles and spend a long time cutting them. Someone comes in overnight and superglues them to the floor, and not even the pattern that was intended, but they did the main work and in only a few hours.

Regardless of technology, I think CLI's tend to maintain their original size, or get smaller over time. If you choose to use a CLI built with Elixir, I imagine it could gain a web-based GUI without a large increase, if each build already includes a runtime environment and system libraries. Or if a CLI is written in another language and advertised as very compact, I imagine its size will also stay consistent, but might not gain the same fancy features. And in any case, popular compilers or packaging tools tend gain optimization improvements over time.

Any entity may list and accept job applications, schedule meetings, and ask candidates to write code. It may be a great way for leadership (tech/people/product) to run their product ideas past candidates and identify how to improve their interview process or product.

[0] Some recruiters may work for free (100% commission) for many companies at once, until a company extends an offer that is accepted.

[1] Software may also be "free" when the company already prepaid for an annual plan; or a license includes X interviews per month; or, the recruiter brings their own tooling, question banks, and services for screening candidates.

Maybe less need for mirrors, lint rollers, and large make-up kits with similar colors (maybe it's easier to adjust the tint in the photo?).

More competition might reduce fees, but won't turn ticketing sites into state lotteries. Just like some domain name registrars, these sites provide a service but also benefit from powering the technology.

Software engineers who are hired to think, and not just type, can provide a lot of value to teammates, product managers, and designers, and also supplement these other roles. But typing lots of lines is the way to look good in a spreadsheet during layoffs. And, many engineers want projects where they get to type for 4-12 months before users use the features.

Note, the above is not a complaint: I recommend software engineers track and ship a consistent number of diffs every week. It forces you to ask yourself if someone's blocking your reviews, or if maybe it's a good time to squeeze in several quick, safe unrelated improvements, etc. Shipping code should not feel like a chore; the company "owes" you the ability to ship code to production since they value your performance based on that.

As far as Meta, I don't understand why recent articles criticize it. The engineers themselves are just posting on LinkedIn to seek new opportunities. This was Meta's first layoff and they're paying people for 3-4 months before the 60 day period even begins.

And when locals are let go, coworkers say "Oh, but it's good that you're not on a Visa". Should that really be a factor Meta takes into account when laying people off?

And for many tech companies, many or most of their engineering employees are on Visa; it's expected that percentage reflected in the layoffs, too.

Aside from Visas, Meta had a hiring freeze below E7 for most roles since May, which might be seen as a signal they were trying to preserve existing employees in favor of onboarding new ones.

Also, many people who last more than a week are later let go right before stock vests. Most everyone in that position will have wished they were let go their first week and got paid for four months, while they accept another offer from that same interview cycle.

I registered it when I arrived to Startup School 2007. All of us had never seen or heard PG speak online or video, but just essays. The nerdy idea was, what if there's a blog or twitter account that sounds like PG's essays but about mundane topics?

I could have transferred it myself, years earlier, but I forgot I even did that until an article came out.

I also registered "docs" when Facebook allowed apps to have custom usernames. It was re-assigned to Microsoft the next day.