Uhhhh... side note: you only gave him 5 minutes to respond according to those timestamps. Going offline for a bit is probably a good idea if only for the passage of time; if I were him (especially in a time where shit is hitting the fan), I'd want to take some time to think things through before responding to anyone, even friends.

I had the exact same reaction, and even briefly panic'd that that might be the case. I saw some DMs come in, and I was like "he's going to give some reasonable explanation, isn't he?"

But those DMs were other people. I got silence. And I spent all day pondering what the hell had just happened.

You're right. This is the first time I've ever posted someone's DMs without their consent. And yet for the life of me, I can't bring myself to feel even slightly bad about it.

In that vein, I'll post here what I DM'ed him with five minutes ago. https://gist.github.com/shawwn/150f2711efc1d4a7821806ec23aeb...

I don't know whether he'll listen. And me making it public will make it even harder for him to listen.

But you know what? I felt the switch flip from "on" to "off" for "do I care whatsoever about repl.it?"

And that's sad. I was... just, such a huge fan. Still might end up one.

People usually feel like "yeah! fuck this dude! I hope X bad thing happens to them!" in situations where there's a lot of outrage. But all I feel is sorrow. I grew up on HN, and by extension YC's mission, since HN = YC was true from 2007 til ... 2015-ish, I think. That's around the time the cynical masses truly overwhelmed the YC founders, and they all fled off to Bookface. Who wouldn't? I've been curious about bookface not because of "oh look, a bunch of powerful people are here," but because "man, I bet so many interesting conversations happen there. I wonder what they're like."

pg and jessica forged YC's reputation by hand, from day one till now. It was not easy. And I hate that this incident has made me question whether I was falling for an intelligent rich person's selfish ploy this entire time, and all those words about earnestness (http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html) and niceness (http://paulgraham.com/mean.html) were just a siren's song for the young and the naive.

Thankfully, I know I'm not wrong about pg being genuine. he writes lisp. amsad writes js. :)

the only other thing I want to say is, I'm so sorry to Radon for casting so much suspicion, and making up completely crazy theories. You didn't do anything wrong. I was wrong.

Keep on building stuff, and everything will work out.

Remind me not to become your "friend" who you're so willing to rat out in public the second the road gets a bit bumpy.

Please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without stooping to that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To my surprise, Amjad said he was sorry for letting me down, and that he apologized. It caught me off guard, and I had no idea what to think. Against my better judgement, I've decided to put in a good word for him here.

(Firstly, to dispense with your reply: ditto! If you're using your position of power to punch down at powerless people for vanity reasons, we probably wouldn't have much in common anyway. The synonym for that is "abuse.")

He ended up not saying much, and I did most of the talking. I was mostly working out what to make of all of this, and testing the waters about whether I was foolish to still give the benefit of doubt. But as I kept talking, I got the impression that maybe the magnitude of what happened had hit him, and that perhaps he was being genuine.

I've been a really shitty person in my past. It cost me my best friend, which was a wake-up call. If certain people hadn't been willing to extend me the benefit of doubt, I would've ended up spiraling further into depression rather than working on myself and improving. That's why I truly believe in everybody's ability to change, if they take a hard look at themselves and their behavior.

The two things that restored my faith in amjad somewhat were (a) he seemed to actually care that "he let me down," which I didn't expect. As for (b), that will take more context, but humor me: I thought amjad's apology was posted online somewhere. So I started talking about ways he might be able to approach Radon and chat with him. I mentioned that Radon's 5-year college buddy showed up in the thread to defend him, and that perhaps amjad could reach out to them as an intermediate step. It would show that amjad wasn't, in fact, a mustache-twirling demon brandishing a pitchfork – it helps to have a third party's opinion on that. But mainly I was just nudging him towards apologizing to Radon directly.

amjad said he'd called Radon and apologized. I didn't expect this. I've fallen victim to manipulative people in the past, and neither of these actions were typical behavior of those kinds of people, in my experience.

Look. Think whatever you want about amjad. It's probably reasonable to think he only apologized because of all the outrage. All I'm saying is, the vibe I got from him was the polar opposite of someone who was just doing one of those standard PR containment maneuvers.

The whole reason I believed in amjad in the first place was that he was willing to do things that others weren't: to be goofy, to chase oddball ideas, etc. And I ended up feeling like he was genuinely unaware that his pride was getting the best of him – that he was so caught up in his work and himself that he forgot to think about what he was doing. So perhaps that's where the lawyer bullshit came from: it's fucking hard to build a company, let alone one that's on the path towards "massively successful."

That's not to excuse any behavior. It's a reminder: any of us could get tunnel vision, and forget to think about other people, or how they're treating others. Again, lost my best friend from doing exactly that damn thing. It's shockingly easy not to give it a second thought until too late: to feel like they owe you something because X, or that your behavior is justified because Y.

When the reality finally sinks in, you end up sort of in a state of shock. Or at least I did at the time. And – I might be completely misreading this, since evidently I do – perhaps he felt the same tonight.

So. Points in his favor. One, he took responsibility. Most people would rather go to the grave than admit they were wrong, let alone self-reflect or change their behavior. Two, he went straight to Radon and tried to make things right.

A word on Radon. When you're the target of a threat like he faced, as I once was, this type of thing can haunt you for years. You end up not really trusting whether people are just going to fuck you over, or second-guessing whether you were in the right, or other destructive things. And when you're facing someone who's casually waving legal threats at you, you're never quite sure how far they're willing to go. It could be a bluff, or it could ruin your life. It must've been pretty scary. Thank you for having the courage to speak up and say that this happened.

All that said: obviously, form your own opinion. You've seen today how easily mine has swayed. But I couldn't go to bed tonight without at least trying to put in a good word for someone who went out of their way to make things right, for what it's worth. Which is approximately nothing, but perhaps it rounds closer to 1 than to 0.

This is none of my business, and I should probably refrain from offering unsolicited advice. However, in the interest of one human being looking out for another:

**

Friend, the best thing a person like you could have done in a situation like this was: nothing--to not get involved.

Instead, you have really, really gotten involved. You seem to have taken it upon yourself to attempt to direct the public perception of these parties' respective characters by investigating and pronouncing judgment on him. You privately inquired as to the inner self of this person you admire(d?), and then you published your private correspondence (within mere minutes), implying it to be evidence of bad faith. You've written at-length about your personal experiences with the man and how your feelings about him have now alternated between admiration and contempt (probably several thousand words now).

You seem to feel like his possibly mistreating another person is equivalent to his mistreating you, personally, and so you join this crusade (or brigade?) against his reputation--perhaps with some hesitation at times, nevertheless with vigor.

**

Why?

**

It's disappointing that the only person who pointed out the natural consequence of your actions was heavily downvoted and finally even chastised by dang. He was trying to do you a favor, but keen language is frowned upon here--it's required that one dress up one's arguments in verbosity and appearances of ambivalence. (I can imagine how a classic writer like Twain would be treated here, but I digress.)

He was certainly right: anyone who has seen the way you've reacted to all this would be wise to keep interactions with you to a minimum. Otherwise, someday you might do again what you've done here, and with friends like that, who needs enemies?

Well, if we want to supply character evidence, I know Radon.

And I believe that not only were his intentions good, but also his actions.

Although I would still like to hear Amjad’s side of the story.

I just... Amjad has been excellent, and I’ve never gotten the sense he would do something like this. It doesn’t even make sense for him to worry at all, let alone to send legal threats. Replit is at “early google/Microsoft vibes,” as pg put it. It would be hard for anything to kill replit, unless they do it themselves.

I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas station, but I was so shocked that I wanted to urge caution. Now that I’m back, I too will look carefully at all sides. Thank you for vouching for Radon — it helps to know that this isn’t just someone with a chip on their shoulder making up stories.

Admittedly, if I have to reach for “maybe it’s a lie,” it’s not looking great. But the fair thing to do is to wait and hear from amjad.

What kind of stuff have you done together? I haven’t worked directly with Amjad, but some years ago I almost joined, and we’ve since thrown around ideas for how to use ML to build some great tooling at replit. He strikes me as extremely reasonable, and I’ve seen him change his mind from talking with him. (It wasn’t just a technical plan that he changed his mind about; it was a tricky social situation thing.) I didn’t get the sense he would stomp on someone.

I agree it’s possible I was off the mark, and if so, I’ll readjust. But I believe in him. So I won’t let myself be dragged to a certain judgement without listening to the other side of the story first, no matter how bad it looks.

But it’s fair if other people don’t feel that way. It’s just, the inside situation often looks much, much different, y’know? It’s good to wait and see.

I can understand now why you would doubt the blog post. Radon and I are friends from college, and in my approximately five years of knowing him I have no reason to believe him ever capable of faking a blog post so he can get back at his former employer. He certainly fights for what he believes in, though.

I suppose we can only wait to hear what Amjad has to say.

Oh boy.

I don't know you, but I really don't think you're making that up. And that means, as a scientist, I now have to contend with the new evidence of "a longtime personal friend of the author, who seems quite reasonable to me, is saying that the blog post should be taken at face value."

...I'll keep asking around. It's not looking good, but it's also unfair not to listen to the other side.

Welp. Time to dive in to the details of this post. Fwiw, if it's genuine, then I empathize greatly with Radon; I've been in a similar situation, where I wanted to build a business but decided against it due to vague threats. I can only imagine what it'd be like to have the threat of sic'ing YC's extremely well-paid lawyers on your ass to hunt for any small violation of your employment terms that they can leverage legally.

Ugh. It just sounds so frickin' cartoonishly evil that I'm having trouble even forcing myself to admit it's possible. But I do admit it's possible.

Can I ask, have you spoken with Radon about this? Did you get the impression that there might be some details omitted, or ... anything? Something other than the cartoonish evil story that I'm being asked to accept as true.

(I admit I'm reaching pretty far with this line of thinking, but, it's possible that there was some crucial context omitted from the post. If so, a five-year college friend should be able to sense whether something like that might've been the case. I'm hoping maybe you did, and maybe you'd be willing to say so if so.)

EDIT: I’m still a bit in shock, but it turns out that you’re completely correct. Thank you, very much, for vouching here for Radon.

He sounds cool.

> I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas station, ...

You're doing it wrong.

> But the fair thing to do is to wait and hear from amjad.

This.

I feel it's likely your GP comment will turn out to be the most constructive one on this whole thread. It seems like a clear case of bullying, but if Amjad is like you describe then one must postulate some additional factor(s) to account for his behaviour.

I'm reminded of a story I once heard about a sweet little old lady who suddenly became highly irascible and it turned out she had lead poisoning. These things happen. God forbid, it could be a brain tumor.

Hey, you might want to chat with him if you know him, since it seems like he has a personal issue with "copycats".

I don't think he was twirling a moustache, but it seems like the idea of being cloned is very personal to Amjad, and he gets emotional about it. You see this both in this exchange and in previous tweets about "copycats".

This doesn't look to me like one of those cases where new information is going to come to light.

Nor do I want to commit the fundamental attribution error, like 80% of this thread. Even though there are a few other people offering personal experiences of Amjad rubbing them the wrong way. That tends to happen in a thread of this character.

Here's my best guess: your friend had a bad day and fucked up. Then he doubled down, and now it's out in the open.

Good news is, this is salvageable. He's not getting MeTooed, he didn't embezzle money or steal code. He got paranoid and bullied a former intern.

I think a simple apology and some self reflection would go a long way here. There will always be a mob which takes that as blood in the water, and will say awful things on Twitter. But the bulk of the community, the people who matter, will notice, and accept it if it's sincere.

> I think a simple apology and some self reflection would go a long way here.

The CEO is continuing to double down today, more than 2 months after the original conversation, so I'm not sure that's likely: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369

This is bizarre.

If the intern did steal code, the CEO only wants the project to be taken down?

Any IP agreement worth their salt would require Replit to send a formal/legal request asking the intern to destroy and return any stolen IP.

So I call bullshit on the CEO, and the intern should probably sue Replit for slander.

> should probably sue Replit for slander.

If the CEO is making the stealing part up (seems likely) the intern probably could sue Replit. Intentional copyright infringement/trade secret violations are a crime and my understanding of US law (not a lawyer) is that that makes it actionable regardless of damages.

Should he though? If he wins it seems likely he'll get nominal damages. He'll have invested a huge number of hours of his life into it. He'll be risking being on the hook for some or all of his lawyers fees depend on how the judge feels about awarding costs.

It doesn't seem likely to be worth it. Public shaming of Replit like this is a very cost effective way of punishing Replit... the legal system not so much.

Exactly. If the source code (or parts thereof) where copied, you could easily say which parts by just putting both things side by side. The interns project was open source after all.

This way you had to expose your own code, but it would easily win you the case in the court of public opinion. The only reason not to do this (that I can think of) is that the intern did not actually copy your code.

I don't have a dog in this hunt but it's plain to see in black & white where Radon says:

"I'm not a business person."

Radon only needs to say it once, it's straight and to the point.

Now at Replit, Amjad is claiming not to be a business person either.

Over and over again.

That's correct, and OP himself feared as much. But Amjad explicitly refused an offer to uncross those wires. As much as the benefit of the doubt should still be given and this may indeed just be a miscommunication issue, at that juncture he really has no one to blame but himself for this fallout.

The miscommunication angle could have been argued after the first emails. But once double downs and legal threats ensue, Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply.

It sure screams of malicious intent. It would take a redaction/clarification from the CEO to prove otherwise. But my guess is he will try to ignore it and hope the problem goes away without too much brand impact. Would love to be wrong about that.

Are you aware of how statements like these look to those on the outside of whatever particular good old boys club it is you're referencing here?

It doesn't scream miscommunication to me. It's of course possible to save face claiming that, but they're talking about the very same thing, IMO.

You shared in public a screenshot of a private conversation?

(Yes, I know, Radon did it too. Still rubs me the wrong way.)

Directly threaten a person with a lawsuit without any remediation is just wrong.

When will society learn the lesson that people's goodness and "pureness" is based on the actions they take, and not on the opinions they hold or the manner they hold in private company.

In fairness, you’re absolutely right. I’ve even see this play out from the other side, where everybody thinks X is pure and noble, but X was doing worrisome things when no one was looking.

But look at this from an “out of body” perspective for a moment. Isn’t it just a little convenient that the first thing you read, right at the top of that blog post, is also the most cartoonishly evil thing? Are you absolutely certain that we’re not missing some crucial context here? How often have we seen this kind of outrage where, later on, it turns out that was a lot more complicated than we’d originally assumed?

All that said, yes, you’re correct. And that’s really all that matters. But I can think of a few other things that might be going on (admittedly, I have to be pretty creative to think of something plausible, but they do exist).

I’ll keep reading and start asking around. Maybe the cartoonishly evil thing is the true thing, but if it’s not, at least I won’t have fallen for it.

(And it it was the true thing, I will be hat in hand with apologies. Heck, I’d be the first to bring a pitchfork if this was true at face value.)

Take a minute and read before posting, because you are really wrong here buddy...