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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

Title is a bit misleading, he became a popular academic/author and the proceedings are for charity. Once you are well known, you can charge for a lot of things, especially if it's for a good cause.

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The weird part is that when he was well known, nobody reached out to get the "lot of things". I think it's because a lot of free stuff comes with a catch - free internet for one month, catch is you're stuck on a year long contract. Free consult but the catch is you're in their systems now, agreed to something in the small print, and you now get cold calls to sell you stuff. Free social network but the catch is your data and personal photos are used for marketing and training AI.

But charge $100 and that's it, that's all the strings attached. Straightforward transaction.

That’s how it used to be but there’s a trend of more companies double dipping now and justifying it by saying they would charge MORE if they weren’t allowed to attach all those strings.

The title is ridiculously misleading when people are donating to charity.

It is sort of entertaining to see the gymnastics writers (or LLMs) do to get clicks.

To the contrary, I did not even send this post to my mailing list. It wasn't exactly a throwaway post but it was something more like that. A post I didn't expect anyone to care much about.

Sorry, I shouldn't have presumed. But the prior probability these days is so high. And I don't blame anyone for doing what they need to do get attention, especially if it is putting food on their table.

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