Of course it is. The apology is intended for damage control to repl.it and his personal reputation, given he has had an hour to digest the winds of HN on both and is clearly concerned by what he sees. Dollars to donuts he remains baffled why such a defense of his reputation and that of his company is even necessary in the first place. You don’t even need to be as cynical as I am to get there. It’s that transparent.

“I guess it’s just because of how I had to be as a struggling kid in Jordan” is the tell. He obviously has no idea why this feedback is happening if that’s his conclusion, so how can he apologize for any of it? He’s still retweeting sympathetic viewpoints on Twitter as we speak, so you can compute the honesty of this apology based on that fact alone.

Read “do better” as “avoid generating compromising receipts wherein I twice trot out lawyers and my ability to pay for them like I’m dramatically unsheathing Anduril, while privately maintaining my view that I’m being ripped off at every turn because someone had the gall to use Docker to build a REPL and I consider that clearly genius architecture to be sensitive intellectual property.” His takeaway going forward is to threaten people in a smarter way, and I’d bet my next paycheck on that.

Honestly, this whole saga is a hell of an invitation to compete against repl.it, in displaying such a severe decision-making and tactical weakness at the executive level.

It's really quite amazing how tone deaf and transparent it is. This submission has resulted in some great content.