So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying.
If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind.
Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
Counterpoint: be afraid of lawyers. They may not be able to win s judgment against you, but they can easily bankrupt you. Remember the case where a man criticized Proctorio and was hit with a SLAPP lawsuit aimed to silence him. He ended up spending 100k on legal costs and the case is only beginning. He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right.
Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
It goes both ways. Imagine Replit’s attorney going after OP. If OP didn’t take down the site, then suing them is going to be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit really gonna pay some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour to harass someone? You don’t even need a lawyer to show up in court and say “I’m a broke ass new grad, and these guys are trying to take down my website. I don’t even know why, but I’m dragging it out because I don’t like being bullied.” A good attorney would say “it costs nothing to demand we take this site down, but if the kid wants to fight us, do you really think it’ll be worth the effort? I’m expensive and this is not a threat to your business.” A bad attorney will just bleed Replit dry to accomplish very little.
If you sue me, I’ll just say “ok, see you in court, let me know if you need anything for discovery“. You’ll be spending lots of money and I’ll be spending nothing. It’s only expensive for me if I get an attorney, and I don’t need one. What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take down my website? If there’s one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there’s two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.
A drawn out legal case can bankrupt you not only financially but mentally, too.
The quantity and the length of emails sent by the author, in addition to the writeup, suggest they spent considerable time worrying about the situation.
And it’s only been a few days. Imagine if this becomes a multi-year case.
I don't really know how the civil trial works in the US, but in my country you are not required to participate to the process and thus have a lawyer (while it's required for a penal trial). You can decide to not defend yourself, that doesn't means that the other party wins, but that you don't take part in the process, and thus it's only the accusation that can provide proofs and similar things, and then the judge decides.
In that case, I wouldn't even bother to try to defend myself, if he doesn't have any proof that something is copied as it seems, no way he will win. Worse case scenario and you are guilty, fine, you will have to take down your project? You will have to pay a compensation? How much can this be quantified? 100$? 1000$? I don't think more than that. And if you refuse to pay? They have to do another trial just to have your money. In the end, they will end up spending a lot of money and maybe in 10 years they hope to get something back (most probably nothing).
Not just the lawyers, but future employers as well.
It doesn't matter what the value proposition was, this will be a stain on his name "the guy who open sources the stuff he likes in our design/projects"
How does this even work? If someone sues me, but they have no case, and I’m not interested, why would I even defend myself. Even presenting no evidence the judge would rule in my favour.
> He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right. Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
Why? If you are 100% legally in the right then why wouldn't an entity with sufficient resources whose agenda is in line with that of yours support you? They will get all the expenses compensated after you+they win, won't they?
As much as I also hate the idea of giving in to legal threats/bullying, I don't think this is very good advice.
Lawyers may not like losing cases, but they like billable hours even more. So as long as their client is paying, they will follow their wishes as best they can.
Even "meaningless actions" such as "cease and desist" letters or "demand" letters probably need consultation with a lawyer for a proper response. This "admit no wrong" advice can actually be tricky. What may seem like an innocent or innocuous comment could make your situation worse.
By the time you have an actual civil action against you, you may have missed the opportunity to end the matter without getting to this point.
If you're unable to pay for it, you will not receive justice.
I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice, that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending on who you are.
So, you pick that fight. I've got a family and a life I need to protect; I'll stand on the sidelines and watch, thank you very much.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but this strikes me as very dangerous advice, especially framed as a blanket rule. Even more so when dealing with someone who has presumably far greater resources.
There's no way you can know what this person's legal exposure might be without seeing their employment contract. They may well be completely in the right and this CEO is all bluster, but it's unequivocally bad advice to suggest that there's nothing to be concerned about based on the information you have.
Even beyond that, I've (unfortunately) known companies that were entirely willing to dump money into lawsuits they knew they had no hope of winning just to set the precedent that you should not cross them or they'll bury you in legal expenses.
In the end your advice may be exactly right, but it's definitely not reasonable to make these kinds of blanket assumptions.
I was on the jury for a civil real estate case that was rather open and shut from the jury's point of view. Maximum damages awarded would have been in the 5 figures. It was on the docket for 4 years.
In the context of the article I took that as a gesture of goodwill while trying to talk out the misunderstanding. They had a relationship before this happened and it sounded like he wanted to maintain that relationship.
In the end, this was a hobby project for the author, and I can understand he might not want to deal with the stress involved with possible legislation. The bully is the aggressor here and lets try not to blame the victim.
That's true, but there is no legal backing behind a laywer-initiated nastygram, so why fold before it even gets to that point?
It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive, but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that point if you're sure you're in the right.
While studying fine art I built a site that was intended to experiment with disrupting advertising by picking on a bullshit pseudo-scientific term, "bifidus digestivum", used by the company Danone as the live ingredient in their yoghurts, and ranking highly for that term on Google - it eventually got to the number 1 spot. Danone's legal team got in touch and we danced around each other for a bit. It was clear that the original domain used their trademark and that would be enforceable in court, so I gave that to them a couple of weeks after setting up a new domain that wasn't just their trademark and redirecting all the traffic until Google caught up with the move: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ (They'd changed the magic ingredient's name by that point, partially because of the ridicule the initial name provoked). I replied to their emails addressing their points - no, I was not making any money from it so there's no commercial harm, I was just laying out the facts so there was no defamation etc. and after two or three bits of back-and-forth they went away. The site's had something like 500,000 visits since I built it in the late 2000s, which isn't a lot in the large scheme of things, but I hope it helped people who wondered whether it was bullshit know that it was bullshit.
I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced sense of righteousness.
You don't have contact information listed in your profile. I posted a comment in this thread offering to pay for your legal fees (and many people, upon seeing my comment, contacted me offering to help). It'd be helpful if you could publish your contact info in your HN profile too.
I already cancelled my subscription for the hacker plan on Replit, I not going to support a bully. Also, I expect people to upload mirrors of riju the same way they did with youtube-dl when Github decided to take it down.
It seemed obvious the OP had some loose threads or lack of confidence in his positioning. A hard "no" only applies if you know you're right. If, on the other hand, you're hearing confusing, well-articulated words, from important people, caution nearly always is rewarded. Let them play their cards (if they will) and then afterward fully informed with whatever advice you choose to seek, decide whether to resurrect the project.
The OP doesn't have an operating business, he can decide to put it on hiatus, as a resulting of bullying or for any other reason.
Love this comment and support it 100%. I think what the OP tried to express and not everyone might have picked up on: there's usually a step between where this case is at right now and a lawsuit being officially filed - that step would be a cease and desist letter. In it, the company (aka, their lawyer) would state the basis for their claims and would make a clear case for why they think they are entitled to those claims. At that point, you'd have a better idea if you're being bullied or if they have a case. IANAL so take this all with a grain of salt, but it would be unusual for a claimant to optimize for taking you to court over optimizing for actually resolving the case. The latter can be achieved at a fraction of the time and cost with a cease and desist letter, so that's where that step comes from. The downside is that the letter could be officially registered and could become a public record, which you would have to proactively disclose in your interactions with current and future investors.
Even if they get paid in advance, lawyers are acutely aware of the costs of litigation (even when you ultimately win) and that losing cases is one of the most common triggers for lawyers being sued, so, they really don't like losing cases even if they are getting paid. (There are caveats and exceptions, sure, but as a broad rule...)
I agree. One of the things the judge is going to ask both parties is if there were any attempts to resolve this issue in good faith outside of court. If you show up penniless with no lawyer, and they show up with a high end legal team to show off punitive damages and the only dealbreaker is that the little guy won't sit down and die quietly; you're in pretty good shape.
The judge will tell you all to go away and try to find an agreement. This agreement will either be Replit leaving you alone or Replit buying you out.
IANAL, but I was in a similar situation and I cannot see any circumstance where you get raked over the coals.
Not quite - if your lawyer believes they have a case, especially a strong case, there is quite likely a good opportunity to settle out of court and the other side's lawyers (acting in their own client's best interest) will go out of their way to try and encourage them to accept a reasonable settlement.
You're only boned if it actually goes to court - and even in that case you're still free to settle until the judge announces a verdict.
Is not too difficult to find a decent employment or IP lawyer to spend an hour with you for a few hundred dollars to go over a document and advise you on how to respond.
> Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda.
Most lawyers don't care since they are getting paid anyway.
And something like a website that could be easily transferred into another jurisdiction or throw-away company? Good luck. This is not real estate where you are a sitting duck.
Many attorneys offer free consultations, so OP (or anyone in a similar situation) should've contacted an attorney and asked them what to do. The attorney would know very well if he was in actual danger or the CEO was just bluffing.
I would expect the free consultation to be "Hmm, that depends. Can you give me a copy of any contracts you signed with them? Oh and $$$. Send me $$$ too."
Well, the US News coverage and TV made being really afraid of lawyers the norm. Especially when you are poor. In the countries in the EU where I lived, I do not even have to open the threat email, but if I lived in the US, I would be very afraid. No idea if that is true or not but the system seems geared for bullying the little guy over there.
No, you absolutely should be afraid of lawyers. They can waste boundless amounts of time and money over bullshit nobody else cares about. In many cases lawsuits are nothing but state-sanctioned bullying and extortion. Nobody sane actually wants to waste their time and money going to court over any minor thing, only corporations can afford to do this because they have more than enough money to burn. Suing competitors into oblivion is a viable tactic even if you lose in court because it delays their profits and burns their cash reserves. Sony vs. Connectix is an example of this.
Obviously the right thing to do is to stand up to this bullshit. I have massive respect for anyone with the balls to do that. Everyone else is better off doing things as anonymously as possible. Can't sue you if nobody knows who you are.
In terms of legal liability, it would be a lot harder for Amjad Masad to prove damages from this post versus the webapp. Especially since Masad's emails are there in plain site. It's sad riju is offline, but at least there's a record that it happened. Putting ethics aside, I think this move reduces financial risk at least.
But this situation is terrible. I've seen multiple YC CEOs bring out the fancy lawyers that they got connected to through the incubator. In some cases, these were multi-million dollar arguments that really arose because the YC CEO screwed up (in very very basic ways!) and then the they got butthurt when things didn't go their way. And YC is connected with they very kinds of lawyers who are happy to make money off of bullying their way through "deals."
Why does YC keep funding CEOs who get their egos bruised so easily? If you're a CEO and you're using your legal leverage irresponsibly, just imagine what the company books must look like.
I have received a few 'love letters' from lawyers and a few company CEOs.
It is scary but first few times but don't forget it will cost them money to take you to court. So ask yourself: Will it cost them more money to sue you than they will save?
In this case will it would cost them stupid amount of money to swat down every person like you.
P.S. I looked at using them but 'loved' totally transparent demo.
In this case I believe OP was trying to salvage their relationship. I would also like to note that OP does not seem to be operating on fear, hence the public disclosure.
A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the least of their worries.
They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.
I would play devil's advocate here and say that the situation is probably muddier than it is presented in the blog. Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the most entertaining path it can take)
Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
It's kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time that they are the best company in the world, with the best product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn't even created to compete.
He blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet. Told me everything I need to know about that guy.
Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.
Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.
Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?
In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.
Well the product is obvious and easy to replicate without specialised knowledge. CEO likely realises this as much as everyone else so feels the need to overcompensate with personal marketing (and apparently now lawyers).
Gosh, I wish I received 20 million in funding for that idea that needed three days to be technically replicated by an intern.
My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence".
Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.
The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.
How long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is Twitter worth millions? I think so.
I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they're doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't replicate in a weekend.
The CEO is actually worried that this weekend project will make it hard for replit to raise fundings from investors because it makes it look like there is no moat to hosting hundreds of programming languages. The investors don't know that the code here doesn't scale.
Also, there is no moat. As far as I know, there are no major protected intellectual properties, technical or business learning curves, regulatory hurdles, intensive capitalization requirements, economies of scale... I suppose there may be some amount of network effect, but not so much that it's hard to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.
Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing... whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it... and while everyone is pretending they would never be afraid of an intern stealing their business, I doubt many of them saying that have been through this experience and know how it feels like running a business and trying to stay on top of all the scams and bullshit that will get in your way, including from previous "allies" like ex-employees who think can do better.
Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business as usual in the corporate world.
> Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing.. whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it...
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
>Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
Two things, first: You write like the company did the teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ... out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their employees money to do these things.
Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even happens all the time employee leave and even found direct competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked previously, I mean he build an interactive website.
I'm sorry but this is a lot of words to say "be subservient to your old boss". There's nothing wrong in what this dude did. He made an open source experiment and for that he was threatened practically at gun point. The contents of the emails he received are highly unprofessional and childishly antagonistic
It's pretty much understood that your institutional knowledge will go for a walk in this industry. Taking it personally is more unprofessional than what the intern did.
> it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" as Shockley Semi?
I have a lot of respect for what repl.it is and their vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain features.
OP had anticipated your complaints in his post, and pre-replied to them. For example:
Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
...
Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project were “internal design decisions”: they’ve all been published publicly on Replit’s blog (I knew this because I’d been asked to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And my project also wasn’t any more of a Replit clone than any of the other websites on the first few pages of Google results for “run python online”, most of which look exactly the same.
You may disagree with these claims, but the general / hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.
For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific about what OP's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's clothes are.
Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there
With this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.
If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of people not talking about it, or experimenting with the knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries. The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.
> If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge
Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
If what the ex-intern did can be summarized as slapping an eval() around a form submission and that would somehow threaten your business model then your product is intellectually void and garbage.
I think this is a bad a take. How many different positive ways was there to approach this situation? The response from the CEO was incredibly unprofessional and seemed unnecessarily antagonistic to the point of provocation.
If they were that valuable why would you ever let them leave?
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
The whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of lucky founders 'chosen ones' who get a ton of VC funding; as soon as they accept VC funding, users 'magically' start pouring in (cabal/manipulation?), which attracts more funding... Then some megacorp acquires the startup for millions of dollars. Easy peasy.
Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
I wouldn't underestimate the potential of that project.
I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
Exactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
My reaction as well. I’ve used Replit lots. It’s great! No offence to Radon, but I would not consider his project a threat to Replit. The best case scenario is it’s a price-sensitive OSS alternative which would naturally have a much much smaller market. Interesting that the CEO was so threatened by this.
VC funded companies aren't some tech billionaire funding a cool new project.
VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
> VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.
The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea?
Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel? I think what has the Replit guy upset is not that some random person did something similar, but rather that someone who worked at Replit did something similar.
As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."
> Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel?
No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.
And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.
> is there a list of languages it supports
No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.
There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.
There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I have cloned locally.
I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.
Yeah wasm is definitely getting interesting as a platform for these. As long as you can build/compile a language VM (such as the Python VM) or a language compiler itself in wasm there shouldn't be much stopping you.
Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM implemented directly in JS.
Lively Kernel all runs in the client, though, while repl.it runs the code server-side. Not that this was new, either, but it seems confusing to compare to Lively. (It's been years since I've checked out either of these projects so sorry if I'm misremembering or missing new developments.)
Not quite, Lively runs code both client side (JS, languages implemented on top of JS) as well as server side. The Lively server has a "subserver" system [1] that allows you to connect to VMs, compilers, etc.
I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent applying.
That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
> That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably) unabridged email thread.
Not only am I not interested in working for repl.it but I have asked my org to never pay for their products due to this behavior, we should not reward it and money has the loudest voice.
Yes, it would be against the rules at the top of the Who Is Hiring threads.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day - normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little, to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing precedent.
It would likely go against the spirit of the community to hound a job posting like that. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but turning the hiring posts into any sort of flamewar/off-topic discussion dilutes the value of those threads.
If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty unprofessional communication and petty threats.
I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.
I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.
> they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.
With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary.
The tone here is "uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it might be bad but I dont think so". Tbh, the tone he kept here is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.
The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.
What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.
I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional legal defense would actually require/entail. And so they're stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point in the court of public opinion.
Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.
Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.
Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid of losing his company's dominance/marketshare to some simple intern/developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of heat.
This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.
Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent me a PM there.
Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
I’d agree with you if this was just a random person, but from this thread (I haven’t read the article) I gather that s/he was actually an intern... surely every intern/employee would sign some kind of non-compete / trade secret / intellectual property agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in pursuing to enforce that agreement!
Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you haven't read the article? You've come at this with a terrible take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the CEO. Why bother?
I could understand an over eager lawyer but this is the CEO of a company with $20 million in funding personally threatening to sic the lawyers on a one man open source project. This is evidence that: 1) he doesn’t have anything better to do, bad news for Replit, 2) he’s afraid of this little project, also bad news for Replit.
I’m also gonna add that, if I invested in a company and the CEO used any fraction of that funding to crush a non-competitor with legal might, I would seriously regret my investment. It seems to me this guy doesn’t understand his own value prop more than a former intern.
Yep. At $20m raised, the CEO should be building product, closing customers, building positive press for the company (oops), and recruiting. Time spent on anything else is highly suspect.
How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?
If the CEO didn’t throw a tantrum over the exact things his company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would know about the intern’s weekend project. But he did, and now we’ll see something of a Streisand effect [0].
To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here.
Well, let's hope repl.it wasn't started by someone working on the same kind of tech at another well-known brand. It would be ironic or "kind of suspect", no?
I had nearly the same feeling while reading this and specifically finally getting to the part where the author mentions they were an intern. Being an intern at the company is kinda important to this story, had they not been an intern at the company I think this would have been a vastly different conversation.
I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models.
I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
I think for something to be legal defamation, it has to be demonstrably false. This article seems pretty safe, since it's mostly direct screenshots of the emails sent by the CEO.
While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
They should have just been happy with that.
It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.
That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!
My guess would be more the available source rather than the website itself. I think it's fair to say somebody who interned at a place would have had things explained to them and had access to internal design docs which the intern themselves wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch.
Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The intern's clone, according to them, had nothing of this (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If they'd rebuilt all that too I'd see the point, but really, what great secrets are there in those "design docs" that just refer to the part of the service where you put in your code and click run? These things have been around for at least a decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.
If it is bizarre for an intern then how does it look when "employee #1 of Code Academy" starts Repl.it right after working on the same kind of thing there? This smells like someone who saw himself in the intern and disliked it.
Readit News
So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying.
If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind.
Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
Links:
https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898651
If you sue me, I’ll just say “ok, see you in court, let me know if you need anything for discovery“. You’ll be spending lots of money and I’ll be spending nothing. It’s only expensive for me if I get an attorney, and I don’t need one. What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take down my website? If there’s one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there’s two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.
The quantity and the length of emails sent by the author, in addition to the writeup, suggest they spent considerable time worrying about the situation.
And it’s only been a few days. Imagine if this becomes a multi-year case.
In that case, I wouldn't even bother to try to defend myself, if he doesn't have any proof that something is copied as it seems, no way he will win. Worse case scenario and you are guilty, fine, you will have to take down your project? You will have to pay a compensation? How much can this be quantified? 100$? 1000$? I don't think more than that. And if you refuse to pay? They have to do another trial just to have your money. In the end, they will end up spending a lot of money and maybe in 10 years they hope to get something back (most probably nothing).
Linkletter has a gofundme here: https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
I've donated, and would recommend others do the same.
this depends on where the case is brought really. and if they can get any money from you there. Which is often partially effected by where you live.
It doesn't matter what the value proposition was, this will be a stain on his name "the guy who open sources the stuff he likes in our design/projects"
Why? If you are 100% legally in the right then why wouldn't an entity with sufficient resources whose agenda is in line with that of yours support you? They will get all the expenses compensated after you+they win, won't they?
Lawyers may not like losing cases, but they like billable hours even more. So as long as their client is paying, they will follow their wishes as best they can.
Even "meaningless actions" such as "cease and desist" letters or "demand" letters probably need consultation with a lawyer for a proper response. This "admit no wrong" advice can actually be tricky. What may seem like an innocent or innocuous comment could make your situation worse.
By the time you have an actual civil action against you, you may have missed the opportunity to end the matter without getting to this point.
If you're unable to pay for it, you will not receive justice.
I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice, that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending on who you are.
So, you pick that fight. I've got a family and a life I need to protect; I'll stand on the sidelines and watch, thank you very much.
https://gawker.com/how-things-work-1785604699
It’s not any definition of justice, its simply the rule of the powerful over the weak.
There's no way you can know what this person's legal exposure might be without seeing their employment contract. They may well be completely in the right and this CEO is all bluster, but it's unequivocally bad advice to suggest that there's nothing to be concerned about based on the information you have.
Even beyond that, I've (unfortunately) known companies that were entirely willing to dump money into lawsuits they knew they had no hope of winning just to set the precedent that you should not cross them or they'll bury you in legal expenses.
In the end your advice may be exactly right, but it's definitely not reasonable to make these kinds of blanket assumptions.
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In the end, this was a hobby project for the author, and I can understand he might not want to deal with the stress involved with possible legislation. The bully is the aggressor here and lets try not to blame the victim.
They don't need to push it very far to cause a lot of harm to an individual and relatively bury them in costs.
It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive, but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that point if you're sure you're in the right.
Very immature behavior on Amjad's part. I'm considering pulling our corporations subscription and moving to Stackblitz now....
Until, curiously enough, today...
My guess is, his "top lawyers" and other advisors gave him instructions which amounted to - in layman's terms - "Dude, STFU."
Edit: disregard, he did show up and start commenting here.
I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced sense of righteousness.
If yes, please by all means reach out.
Edit: nvm it's already happening: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
The OP doesn't have an operating business, he can decide to put it on hiatus, as a resulting of bullying or for any other reason.
They will if they get paid.
The judge will tell you all to go away and try to find an agreement. This agreement will either be Replit leaving you alone or Replit buying you out.
IANAL, but I was in a similar situation and I cannot see any circumstance where you get raked over the coals.
By this point, you have already lost (hundreds or thousands of dollars of lawyer fees and possibly countless sleepless nights).
"Stop letting people be bullies" is unfortunately hard unless you are sure that you can afford the cost.
You're only boned if it actually goes to court - and even in that case you're still free to settle until the judge announces a verdict.
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That is true, but most people don't have their "own lawyer" to ask.
Most lawyers don't care since they are getting paid anyway. And something like a website that could be easily transferred into another jurisdiction or throw-away company? Good luck. This is not real estate where you are a sitting duck.
My attorney: Never respond ever.
Well, the US News coverage and TV made being really afraid of lawyers the norm. Especially when you are poor. In the countries in the EU where I lived, I do not even have to open the threat email, but if I lived in the US, I would be very afraid. No idea if that is true or not but the system seems geared for bullying the little guy over there.
Obviously the right thing to do is to stand up to this bullshit. I have massive respect for anyone with the balls to do that. Everyone else is better off doing things as anonymously as possible. Can't sue you if nobody knows who you are.
But this situation is terrible. I've seen multiple YC CEOs bring out the fancy lawyers that they got connected to through the incubator. In some cases, these were multi-million dollar arguments that really arose because the YC CEO screwed up (in very very basic ways!) and then the they got butthurt when things didn't go their way. And YC is connected with they very kinds of lawyers who are happy to make money off of bullying their way through "deals."
Why does YC keep funding CEOs who get their egos bruised so easily? If you're a CEO and you're using your legal leverage irresponsibly, just imagine what the company books must look like.
Specially in the US, where justice is mostly a rich man's game.
Same in Pakistan.
P.S. I looked at using them but 'loved' totally transparent demo.
Sure you would.
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Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.
Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?
In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.
Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.
My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence".
Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.
The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.
I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they're doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't replicate in a weekend.
Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business as usual in the corporate world.
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
Two things, first: You write like the company did the teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ... out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their employees money to do these things.
Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even happens all the time employee leave and even found direct competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked previously, I mean he build an interactive website.
> it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" as Shockley Semi?
I have a lot of respect for what repl.it is and their vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain features.
Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
...
Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project were “internal design decisions”: they’ve all been published publicly on Replit’s blog (I knew this because I’d been asked to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And my project also wasn’t any more of a Replit clone than any of the other websites on the first few pages of Google results for “run python online”, most of which look exactly the same.
You may disagree with these claims, but the general / hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.
For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific about what OP's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's clothes are.
There was respect shown.
Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea - many have done this so many times before
Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.
Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?
Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
hUHH ???
[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/evidence
With this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.
If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of people not talking about it, or experimenting with the knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries. The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.
Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are not property, and so cannot be stolen.
Acting this way is superbly entitled.
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
Just don’t do that, it’s in poor taste.
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VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.
The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.
[1] https://lively-kernel.org
[2] https://lively-next.org
[3] https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html
As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."
No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.
And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.
> is there a list of languages it supports
No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.
There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.
[1] https://lively-web.org/core/servers/HaskellServer.js
[2] https://ace.c9.io/
[3] https://github.com/harc/ohm
I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.
https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-...
Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.
Link?
Edit: NVM, found it: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM implemented directly in JS.
[1] https://squeak.js.org/
[1] https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/cor...
That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably) unabridged email thread.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day - normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little, to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing precedent.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.
The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary.
That's my unsolicited .02
The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.
Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.
Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.
This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
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Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
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Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?
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To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models.
I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
Edit: They aren't technically "illegal" in CA, just unenforceable.
If the product was really unique, maybe. But from the description it seems to be a generic online repl.
This whole saga is pretty sad really.
While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
They should have just been happy with that.
It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
Really strange / insecure attitude.
That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!
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I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.