Hacker News Reader

Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

Awesome story, and good response by Hegarty. It reminds me of something similar (but with an opposite response), where an intern who worked at Replit built a basic repl site (not even a clone) but was threatened by the CEO that he'd be sued.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

View on HN

I always remember that story and is the reason I’ve boycotted replit. This dude let the smallest amount of success go to his head and immediately started acting like a tyrant.

The threat of suing very much loomed in the background if they did not cooperate. Hegarty is just more slick, buttering them up with (well deserved) praises and attention from grownups to get voluntary cooperation.

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

Diplomacy often comes across as friendliness. I've been in situations where I've not acquiesced and seen how quickly things can change. As they say, don't take friendliness for weakness. Wonderfully managed by all parties though.

Yeah, chances are Hegarty was actually impressed and alarmed, and the best way to reconcile both of those was to befriend this kid, share the info so that HegartyMath doesn't get damaged from the leak, and send some praise their way for identifying a glaring security and utility issue in the app.

Wow what a dick. Yeah they backed off after the backlash but that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

I’ll use Codespaces next time

Reply on news.ycombinator.com