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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Downvote me for your life here, I don’t care.

This sort of comment is why I have a love/hate relationship with HN. Love, because yesterday I learned some amazing stuff that I told my partner about in bed.

Hate, because of the assumptions that so many people are so quick to jump to. You know nothing about this guy’s motivations. (His name’s Neil. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a really solid dude. He probably has thicker skin than me.)

So you come in here and you imply that this thing is essentially a scam to rob you of $75. You imply that Neil is a scammer, trying to rob you of $75.

It’s really shitty and I wish people wouldn’t do it.

Edit: I’m not saying “don’t criticise the site”. If you don’t like the site, say so. But don’t criticise the motivations about which you know literally nothing.

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Very much agree. What's wrong with computer people that they won't spend money on tools?! Especially since they are made by people in their own industry. Machinists (aka metalworkers) wouldn't sneer at other machinists and refuse to purchase their tools because someone else in their own industry dared to charge someone money for it.

But the very same people will happily work for an advertising company under the guise of being a programmer and take a wage and bonus. Right on.

I agree with you on the general principle. That said, software is kind of an odd duck in that huge amounts of valuable code are just given away for free to whomever wants it. How much would you pay for a shell? A better ls command? A mailserver? All of those require considerable effort to create, and yet people have made wonderful implementations of each of those and said here ya go, have it, enjoy!

I can understand the skepticism against a paid font. There are some pretty grand ones available for free to anyone who'd like to use them. In this case, it was worth the premium to me to pay anyway. I don't think someone's automatically a cheapskate for thinking I'm nuts to buy a license.

> I can understand the skepticism against a paid font.

Me too! But that's not what upset me. What upset me was the assumption of deceit in the parent post.

It's like drive-by shootings here sometimes; people see a thing, they don't like it, and they assume that the person creating it therefore has bad motives. I've been on the receiving end, directly, and it stinks. It makes this place worse.

I’m with you. You don’t like a thing that other people do? Nod and move on. I made a different purchase with my money than they would have, and that’s fine. I’d do it again. It was an unnecessary luxury, but no more than the nice dinner I had last night, and I’m still enjoying the font today.

Yup, lots of people here saying $75 is too much while they make multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, never once stopping to consider how much effort a product like this takes. The irony is palpable.

I think it’s a bit out of touch to suggest that even a third of the people on this site make more than $200k/yr.

Coincidentally I read a comment today along the lines of “at HN, Cynicism-is-Intelligence” which really hit the nail on the head for me. This isn’t at all a nice community, overall.

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