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Comment by mbanerjeepalmer | Hacker News Reader

This is an ad.

I know the author has a long history here and I'm sure the post is a genuine reflection. But how is posting "I used my own product and it felt really good" anything other than self promotion?

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Hello! It probably doesn’t make much of a difference now that the post is flagged (I assume that it has something to do with people thinking it’s an ad?) but just for the record, I really didn’t intend this as an “ad”. No one asked me to write this and I didn’t plan on writing it. It basically happened just how I described it - I went home, had some extra energy, wanted to build something that needed both 1) an LLM to help me build the thing and 2) an LLM to use within the thing I was building. So I decided to try the Modal endpoint bc it was top of mind and I didn’t want to upgrade my Claude account. Had I not thought it was cool I would not have written about it, but what made me write the thing wasn’t “Modal is cool”, it was the feeling I describe in the post. I was a little worried it might come across as an ad and considered removing the links but figured, “oh well”. It was a nice plus that it involved the company I’m at doing something cool, but that wasn’t really the point. In any case, I’m glad some people found it interesting, and maybe this was flagged for some other reason, but thought I might as well respond, even if I may not convince anyone :) Possibly even given the above it’s not HN-appropriate somehow but I thought that the sentiment might be appreciated

Why can't builders promote their products if it's truly good?

I don't have a problem with that if "truly good" is measured by something other than "feels good to me".

Karpathy doing "vibe check" on models was fine, though. Why they can't do the same thing on something they provide?

We have seen self-criticism and self back-pats here. There's no need to be so critical. Others can test and have their own opinions, too.

Sure, I mean, I don't care. It's just useless. Not sure why it's upvoted so much. The post is barely intelligible. The information content is zero.

If someone explains really well why they find their own product great, that's different. I don't mind that at all.

You might see no information, but I see someone having their opinions really moved, in a serious manner. It's not upvoted because it advertises Kimi. It's upvoted because someone tried something different, and genuinely surprised.

I see this as a post from someone who understood the value of "open". Now they're open to understand the value of "free" (as in unencumbered). In the age of AI, we need to understand the value and embrace more open and free, both as in models and software.

It's good food. It's worth thinking about.

The honest thing is to add a note that tells readers that you are also selling the product you feel good about.

Advertisement is not sharing, it's manipulation.

They already did, in my opinion. The text reads:

> ...personal account. I work at Modal, and today we just launched Kimi K3 on managed endpoints, and I know Kimi K3 is supposed to be pretty solid, so instead of upgrading my Claude plan, I wanted to give it a try. (I didn't directly contribute to this feature, so I haven't gotten to play with it yet.)

Emphasis mine.

Yes they did. The point stands. He would never write Using an open model feels surprisingly bad even if that was what he would be thinking.

We can't trust for him to give honest opinion. The information value is near zero.

When I read the post I read nothing about Kimi-K3. I read about someone who used something open and being surprised about the effects of using something open.

I read about owning the data, knowing the path, being able to control what you have and the lightness it brings. That feeling came through his employer, which is something we can debate all year long, but I see nothing about advertising Kimi-K3 or managed endpoint or whatnot.

Maybe because I'm in all this for a long time, and having an AI capable server near is not something alien to me.

Anyway, in short, there's no AI related content for me in that post. I'm more on the experience side.

It would be acceptable iff the author prefixed it with Show HN. My suggestion to mods if the post is worth keeping up is to do that.

So all the blog posts, every 10s on HN, shilling for Anthropic are not ads but this is?

The author works for a company that provides Kimi. It’s different.

It doesn’t mean the post doesn’t accurately reflect the author’s views - it probably does. And the conflict of interest is well disclosed in the brief post. In fact, it’s quite natural for somebody who likes open models to work somewhere associated with them.

So personally I don’t find any impropriety going on here - but yes, it’s an ad.

Huh? He says he works at Modal, not Moonshot. Are they connected?

I’ve edited my comment to be more accurate, thank you.

I mean, many posts on HN are self promotion; whether they reach the front page discerns the interesting ones from the ones that are not. An interesting self promotion is still interesting.

Yes, but are self promotion posts not required to use "Show HN"/"Tell HN"? Or at least a disclosure on the comments...

Classic HN. Usually people write longer blogs to hide the self-promotion/products promotion. Better hide the promotion into 2000 character mumble jumble.

Reminder, this post is also an ad:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878515

Reply on news.ycombinator.com