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Comment by StevePerkins

1 year ago

$75 license. I assume they want people to be wow'ed by the unrealistic zoom shots, and pay money before realizing that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.

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.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

> that it's little different from JetBrains Mono or Roboto Mono in a real-world editor or terminal.

On the contrary.