These pieces are usually just advertising with more words. They want to frame Replit and their hero founder as being rebels who don't follow the rules or fear goliath.
This is fantasy fiction for VCs, founders, AI bros, and anyone else who isn't actually looking for information.
Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.
He doesn't seem pragmatic because everything I read about him or any time I hear from him it's about this geopolitical issue. Doesn't he have a company to run? What's the point of making this front and center part of your personality. His thoughts on the war in Gaza is literally the only thing I know about him. That and him firing an intern about a weekend project. It's all just exhausting.
How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.
Eh people get consumed by these things. It's very hard to resist when you have a platform and your own people are at war. Very very difficult to get past abstractions and just work to help in minute particulars.
Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.
I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.
thanks for sharing, that's an interesting perspective actually. It's easy for us "pro devs" to kind of ignore platforms like Replit as "training wheels." I look at it and think "why would I use that, I have all my own stuff set up the way I like it locally".
But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!
A friend used Replit to prove out a startup (it worked) and what worked for him is that Replit has a whole platform integrated with their coding assistant that include hosting and backend runtimes. So his cycle time of vibe-deploy-test was very short and very simple for someone non-technical.
No need to think about how/where to deploy, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), etc. Just vibe and deploy.
(He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
Not sure why this is controversial. I know it’s an issue with Cursor as they have to limit availability of models based on region. OpenAI specifically blocks India and Pakistan for example, among a long list of other countries.
Replit with vercel starter templates and supabase is amazing. I even have it do all my migrations and RLS policies. Also playwright automated testing in github action CI/CD.
I have it originated from a master prompt project I have architected with shadcn suggestions and how I like my app router setup.
I'm hooking this up to comet to be fully agentic with Linear tasks and human-in-the-loop approvals with up to 5 UI versions per feature. And ts contract request/responses for my nextJS api endpoints.
I also host a "LangChain" similar like tool in Azure C# minimal API in a shared replit secret. It's so nice to be able to re-use secrets for Radar, etc across all my apps.
I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.
Some criticize that approach, suggesting that you're not learning important skills, but I applaud that approach. Anyone who's ever been in a workshop at a conference, where you have limited time to learn a topic, knows how much time is wasted doing initial setup.
I remember that was like workshop, something like learn to code in 20 minutes, and after learning the concepts and realizing you can control all those devices that power the world, just with code was magical.
yes this is such a good point, the OG replit could've been the perfect conferencing / classroom tool
Running an IDE in a browser like that is not something I'd ever want to work with long time or experimenting on my "own" computer - maybe it's just me being weird but running the code on the metal I'm holding is much more satisfying.
I'm not sure what features / tools replit had in this regard, but I could easily see it dominating CS education and conferences as the go-to IDE. (then making the real money by monetising the students in the future, i.e. other tools you can sell - even something like replit as a cloud provider), by having features like
- templates you could share (i.e. one per lesson)
- live sessions (where the professor could log into many students replit instance and demonstrate)
- videos built into the editor / streaming / conferencing
- "homework had-in" features, automated test sharing, etc.
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
Having "Fuck You" money[1] means you don't have to listen to anyone (but you still can be shunned, as described in the article). You'll substantially greater wealth that FU money to make people listen to what you have to say and be "uncancellable", like owning a media outlet, hiring a PR firm, or buying a pet politician or seat in government. Amjad seems to have crossed from the former to the latter by economic power: not only can a deal with him now could potentially generate lots of wealth, but it may not be a good thing to be on his shit-list later when he is the bigger fish.
1. A subjective amount that depends entirely on the lifestyle, burn rate and life expectancy.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.
As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.
What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".
The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.
That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?
Not quite in the same league as IS, Al-Qaeda etc etc. Used to be a organisation had to murder and terrorise an entire population, or fly planes into city centres.
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.
Yes. They're a bunch of violent criminals. But that's not the point.
There are lots of violent criminals who harm businesses and injure, or even kill people. They should be prosecuted and imprisoned. It's not illegal to say "I support <name of criminal or criminal gang>", even if people strongly disagree with you.
However, by showing they could break into an RAF base and spraypaint the planes - that says to me that the RAF are completely shit at their job, how can they protect their base from Russians if they can't even keep out local criminals - embarrassed the Government, and the government retaliated by making it illegal to say you support them.
Say it out loud? Criminal. Wear a t-shirt? Criminal. Hold a placard? Criminal.
Might as well just hold up blank sheets of paper and wait for the police to arrest you because they know what you want to write on them, like they do in Russia.
To me, that's a free speech issue. What an affront to free speech it is. Saying you support criminal scumbags should not be a crime. You should be able to say you support a bunch of violent yahoos, to whoever will listen to you, and I should be able to laugh at you and call you a simpleton for your idiot beliefs.
Why are you surprised that people who sympathize with terrorists are called terrorists sympathizers?
Roughly 75% of Palestinians support terrorism (the number changes with every survey but it's consistently over 50%).
The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations. That's not really terrorism; insurrection would be a more accurate description. But she certainly wasn't a good person deserving of any sympathy.
> The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations.
A hysterical take like this isn't really credible. "Obstruction", sure, but calling a stopped vehicle a "weapon" because it's slightly in the way defies the English language to the point where you damage your own credibility.
It would be equivalent to call this comment a "weapon" I'm using to impede you announcing your opinion unopposed.
She's absolutely deserving of sympathy; she was killed unjustly. We don't have a law on the books allowing capital punishment for parking a vehicle somewhere law enforcement finds it inconvenient. Just because you happen not to agree with her actions at the time, illegal or no, doesn't imply "and therefore she deserved death". I suggest you consider the consequences to your own self of people applying your own logic to you, and how long you would last if this was the general state of affairs.
I'll do you one better: Palestine Action is bankrolled by notorious pro-Russia tankie Fergie Chambers, who supports Vladimir Putin's genocidal campaign in Ukraine. So please add genocide sympathizer to your list.
Spray painting a bunch of airplanes is terrorism. Got it.
Oh, and don’t come crying when the same authoritarian laws put in place for Palestine Action are used to label your cause as terrorism to quash dissent.
I think they are just hitting the consumer market hard. I have friends who have never coded & are using Replit. That said, not a single one of them has launched.
Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
Seriously? She was a fake in every sense of the word, copying everything down to Steve Jobs' mannerisms, photo-ops, and black turtleneck sweater.
The only interesting bit is how so many investors were unable to see through the obvious act and also failed to do the due diligence which is the One Job of VC firms (i.e., if I'm an investor, I'm trusting the VC to do real due diligence, otherwise why wouldn't I just invest directly in the companies).
Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
replit worked really well as a way to play with code ideas. Going from 0 to running code on their site is very handy. I can try something out in python without much setup, as someone who rarely uses the language.
I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.
It is not political; I did not know the owner had political opinions. I started using Replit before it had AI, had some ideas and they gave me a free year of AI last year when I complained it is so far behind the rest. And imho, it still is.
Like the other comment here: I just have much better outcomes with the same prompts with other tools. That is all I meant to say.
My opinion on him shifted because along with Paul Graham, they're the only tech leaders who have stood up for Palestinians. I don't agree with Graham on everything either, but I've gained a lot of respect for him speaking out against Zionism. They're rich, but it still is difficult to go against the entire venture capital industry to do the right thing.
Completely agree with you on this. It will be an unfortunate exercise for future historians to look back on this time, crunch through the enormous amount of data with their quantum computers, and end up realizing just how many people were willing to condone the slaughter of innocent civilians.
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
I agree with you that it’s a genocide, but that is not universally accepted, so I think the scare quotes are OK. This article isn’t seeking to litigate the genocide in Gaza.
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel:
He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.
I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.
Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
The Saudi war against Houthis was more brutal than the Gaza war. 70,000 dead from only starvation for starters. But not only is it not genocide it doesn't even enter conscious awareness as a thing that happened. I wonder why.
So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Pareto principle in action - smartphones are good enough for 80% of use cases. And so is AI for a lot of junior-level work.
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training
That's research. Engineering would be programming, but well. Taking into account future maintenance concerns and so on. Seems like the software world doesn't do a lot of it.
that quotes attributed to "investors," according to Masad. but some of the most heinous stuff people said to him is public: https://x.com/rabois/status/1943804360863232513 "your friends should have not raped murdered and killed kids."
He and Paul Graham, truly are the only people speaking out against Zionism though. The rest of the VC industry is either staunchly pro-Israel or silent on the matter.
What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then:
"He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
“Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days. People call Ms. Rachel a “terrorist sympathiser” and “antisemite of the year” for not wanting kids to die or become amputees
All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.
Everyone stands up for their people. Tribalism is the most primitive form of society. Standing for principle is harder because sometimes you have to speak against your tribe.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
Trying to frame the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as just "Jews trying to live in their own homeland".. isn't working in 2026 and nobody needs to read the thoughts of a man who saw Cecil Rhodes as a kindred spirit.
The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael K Kater. [0]
The push for a Zionist state started and accelerated in the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. Most of the Jews that moved from Europe to Palestine, which was part of modern day Israel, were by the Zionists. Reason is because the only jobs at the time were farming so people would have to give up their current triad.
Number of these individuals actually supported fascism. Even after WWII the mind set was not that fascism was bad but poorly implemented. That mind set was shared by a number of Germans and Jews that moved to Palestine before Israel became a state.
It was not until the late 1960s that younger culture started to shift that mind set to fascism is bad.
If you think I am wrong about the summation of the book ... read it.
Connecting these two concepts like Netanyahu et. al. are constantly (insincerely) doing, is actually breeding real antisemitism. I wish more people realized this.
What are you even talking about? My family is Argentine and 100% assimilated, speak English, love and embrace American culture and values. No one has ever treated us any differently in any context both in middle America and on the coasts.
It’s not a racial issue either, because my friends who are first generation Asian, Indian, etc, would all share the same sentiment. America is the most welcoming place on Earth for immigrants who are willing to put up even the smallest effort to assimilate into the culture.
So racism has been (more or less) eradicated in the US? Just trying to understand your comment before I respond more substantively because that’s a very striking claim and I want to be sure that’s actually what you mean.
I'm not making a normative judgement here, it's just my observation as the child of immigrants myself. There are of course exceptions to the rule. I'm making an argument in the context of political economy, please don't take it personally.
I don't understand this comment. Are you saying that Masad is not assimilated into the US because he doesn't support Israel's genocide against his people? Israel is not the US and supporting it is an increasingly unpopular position in the US. If anything he's more assimilated due to his position.
The majority of Americans are of British ancestry and the polarization between Dems and Reps is pretty high. You think that a coastal elite immigrant British descendant and Asian-American are farther apart than the same chap and a similar counterpart in Appalachia? I doubt it.
> The majority of Americans are of British ancestry
No they aren't.
Even if you narrow it down just to white Americans, British ancestry is almost even with German and does not hold a majority once you include Irish, Italian, etc. [1]
I don't blame you for thinking they are tough, as Anglo culture and language has been unusually dominant, probably because the original 13 colonies were very Anglo and the whites that trickled in later largely assimilated.
"Albion's seed" is an interesting book on this topic.
Edit: British doesn't usually denote an ethnic group so I took it to mean Anglo, but if you take it to mean Anglo+Celtic then it would indeed make a majority of whites in the US due to the very large Irish population.
That’s a fair point - as demonstrated by Amjad’s high regard for libertarian values.
People are multifaceted. We’re complex and sometimes irrational. I can also believe that you can share certain views yet still not be fully embraced or respected for them.
As a crude example, a Caucasian man who was born and raised in Japan thought of himself to be Japanese ideologically. Yet to the Japanese he was always an outsider - as a result, he has never felt truly at home anywhere.
I will remind you that most of the world and many Americans consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide: the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. Israel intends ethnic cleansing by genocidal means and continues to attack civilians despite a "ceasefire". Just today I got a terrified text message from a teacher as they airstriked in her camp while she lives in a partly destroyed house that cannot be repaired. They previously bombed the ppl in tents outside who had run from the north with nothing.
I hope there is some humanity left in this country.
A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
Considering circumstances all over the West, pretty soon everyone will be “terrorist sympathizers” or a sympathizer of whatever the next enemy boogeyman du jour is of the abusive ruling class. And it’s not your favorite political sport team that is good and never does that, while the other team always does it and is evil. It’s being done in the US and it is being done in the EU as well as in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; not even to mention Israel, but that can’t be considered the West.
It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.
> The Hamas Charter explicitly called for the “annihilation” of the Jewish state.
See, this is what grinds my effing gears. On one hand you have a party "calling" for the "annihilation" of Israel. On the other hand, you have a part who is calling for the annihilation of palestinians AND they are ACTIVELY doing it. But no, you have to draw an equivalence somehow ...
Please don't comment like this. It's not a substantive contribution to the discussion to tell us that you stopped reading the article, and it's generally fulmination or curmudgeonliness or a shallow dismissal or something else that's against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> “Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?”
I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.
I know this isn't very on the topic, but these articles make me cringe physically.
> “You should compete,” I suggested.
> He smirked. “I always compete.”
Feels like a vocal jerk-off. Just tell me the details, idc how tuff the interview was.
This is a style of writing called "narrative journalism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_journalism
I find it pretty distracting too.
These pieces are usually just advertising with more words. They want to frame Replit and their hero founder as being rebels who don't follow the rules or fear goliath.
This is fantasy fiction for VCs, founders, AI bros, and anyone else who isn't actually looking for information.
I don't know what it is but I don't think that it's an ad. Otherwise I guess they wouldn't have that snarky pro-israel undertone towards him.
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Are you accusing the SF Standard of running a paid promotion without disclosing it as such?
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Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.
He doesn't seem pragmatic because everything I read about him or any time I hear from him it's about this geopolitical issue. Doesn't he have a company to run? What's the point of making this front and center part of your personality. His thoughts on the war in Gaza is literally the only thing I know about him. That and him firing an intern about a weekend project. It's all just exhausting.
How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.
Eh people get consumed by these things. It's very hard to resist when you have a platform and your own people are at war. Very very difficult to get past abstractions and just work to help in minute particulars.
Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.
replit is actually quite popular among teenagers and basically third world youngsters trying to spin off a service or a "product" of their own.
- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.
just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county
I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.
thanks for sharing, that's an interesting perspective actually. It's easy for us "pro devs" to kind of ignore platforms like Replit as "training wheels." I look at it and think "why would I use that, I have all my own stuff set up the way I like it locally".
But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!
How long do those customers stay customers?
Are their customers making money?
Will they be able to build retention?
I've got this question of every platform like this - Lovable, etc.
Cursor and IDE tools and models cater to a smaller audience, but they're sticky, repeat customers, big spenders.
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Why don't you just use Claude?
I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them
A friend used Replit to prove out a startup (it worked) and what worked for him is that Replit has a whole platform integrated with their coding assistant that include hosting and backend runtimes. So his cycle time of vibe-deploy-test was very short and very simple for someone non-technical.
No need to think about how/where to deploy, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), etc. Just vibe and deploy.
(He did end up moving off the platform once he had enough validation)
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Because i can do it on the phone.
claude is just too expensive and u need to atleast a bit technical expertise in it.
replit has made it like, even a 11 year old can make something out of thin air and acutally publish it to get a link to share
Third world country could be region blocked.
Not sure why this is controversial. I know it’s an issue with Cursor as they have to limit availability of models based on region. OpenAI specifically blocks India and Pakistan for example, among a long list of other countries.
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which country are you from?
Going by the username, I'm guessing India or perhaps Bangadesh
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Replit with vercel starter templates and supabase is amazing. I even have it do all my migrations and RLS policies. Also playwright automated testing in github action CI/CD.
I have it originated from a master prompt project I have architected with shadcn suggestions and how I like my app router setup.
I'm hooking this up to comet to be fully agentic with Linear tasks and human-in-the-loop approvals with up to 5 UI versions per feature. And ts contract request/responses for my nextJS api endpoints.
I also host a "LangChain" similar like tool in Azure C# minimal API in a shared replit secret. It's so nice to be able to re-use secrets for Radar, etc across all my apps.
In the immortal words of Peter Stormare in the VW ad, "what does this do??"
Well, at some point in time, his workflow produces a landing page where you can express interest in funding his projects
I remember learning to code with replit, the people from the course recommended replit because there was no setup to do
I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.
Seems to have worked out for them, mind!
Such a shame, it was really good for that
Some criticize that approach, suggesting that you're not learning important skills, but I applaud that approach. Anyone who's ever been in a workshop at a conference, where you have limited time to learn a topic, knows how much time is wasted doing initial setup.
I remember that was like workshop, something like learn to code in 20 minutes, and after learning the concepts and realizing you can control all those devices that power the world, just with code was magical.
I think that it had a big potential for that.
yes this is such a good point, the OG replit could've been the perfect conferencing / classroom tool
Running an IDE in a browser like that is not something I'd ever want to work with long time or experimenting on my "own" computer - maybe it's just me being weird but running the code on the metal I'm holding is much more satisfying.
I'm not sure what features / tools replit had in this regard, but I could easily see it dominating CS education and conferences as the go-to IDE. (then making the real money by monetising the students in the future, i.e. other tools you can sell - even something like replit as a cloud provider), by having features like
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
So success buys you ideological latitude
Do you know how many politicians switch sides once they have lost their power? (well, not many have been in that situation, but still!)
As a powerful figure, you become a literal puppet in front of the public. Your opinions don't matter
What's the minimum threshold for that, I wonder?
Having "Fuck You" money[1] means you don't have to listen to anyone (but you still can be shunned, as described in the article). You'll substantially greater wealth that FU money to make people listen to what you have to say and be "uncancellable", like owning a media outlet, hiring a PR firm, or buying a pet politician or seat in government. Amjad seems to have crossed from the former to the latter by economic power: not only can a deal with him now could potentially generate lots of wealth, but it may not be a good thing to be on his shit-list later when he is the bigger fish.
1. A subjective amount that depends entirely on the lifestyle, burn rate and life expectancy.
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Billionaires wouldn't run their mouths, if that wasn't the case.
Effect weakly linked to Affect
I absolutely love the idea of Replit and I think it's an awesome platform and idea.
I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs
As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc
The title is a non-sequitur.
“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.
Your comment fails to mention that the accusations of sympathy for terrorism are lies.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
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It was kind of the focus of the article though - how his pro Palestinian politics interacted with being a SV founder.
It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.
> It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff.
TIL. Big fair-play to him, and I'm very sincere about it, he must of have left a lot of potential money on the table from possible investors as a result of his view on the genocide in Gaza. Again, fair play to him, we need a lot more people like him in our (pretty sad) industry from this point of view.
As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.
What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".
The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.
That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.
Just look at Tal Broda for one example.
It's ridiculous to frame an opinion that's extremely common and popular as some kind of expression of rebellion against "the man". What a puff-piece.
Two people got black bagged by the federal government less than a year ago for expressing this opinion
And the FBI has a wrongthink list for this opinion filed under anti semitism / domestic terrorism now.
exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things
well, it's not a high bar – these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action" or "she was murdered by ICE" is called a terrorist sympathizer
> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.
> "she was murdered by ICE"
They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.
"They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers"
Do you have the name or names of the person accused of 'attacking police with sledgehammers'?
I've heard a lot about this, but it's difficult to get to actual sources about exactly what is alleged.
Even if this did happen as you say. attachking police with sledgehammers is assault, potentially even attempted murder. There's plenty of laws for that.
It's not terrorism.
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Congratulations, you've reached the level of "terrorist well-wisher"
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> They have a video of her being shot
Why was her vehicle in gear, engine running?
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> It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support
How is direct action on Palestine impacting Ukraine support? (We are also not intervening in Ukraine)
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The UK military is and has been operating in Gaza, the UK government is just lying about it. Public flight tracking data makes it obvious.
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> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"
You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?
Not quite in the same league as IS, Al-Qaeda etc etc. Used to be a organisation had to murder and terrorise an entire population, or fly planes into city centres.
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.
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"Damaged a bunch of UK Military's planes" == spray painted two planes
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Yes. They're a bunch of violent criminals. But that's not the point.
There are lots of violent criminals who harm businesses and injure, or even kill people. They should be prosecuted and imprisoned. It's not illegal to say "I support <name of criminal or criminal gang>", even if people strongly disagree with you.
However, by showing they could break into an RAF base and spraypaint the planes - that says to me that the RAF are completely shit at their job, how can they protect their base from Russians if they can't even keep out local criminals - embarrassed the Government, and the government retaliated by making it illegal to say you support them.
Say it out loud? Criminal. Wear a t-shirt? Criminal. Hold a placard? Criminal.
Might as well just hold up blank sheets of paper and wait for the police to arrest you because they know what you want to write on them, like they do in Russia.
To me, that's a free speech issue. What an affront to free speech it is. Saying you support criminal scumbags should not be a crime. You should be able to say you support a bunch of violent yahoos, to whoever will listen to you, and I should be able to laugh at you and call you a simpleton for your idiot beliefs.
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If your standard for designating someone a terrorist is "they did something quite naughty" - go at it.
Damaging military equipment is the farthest thing from terrorism. That's literally the one thing that can never be terrorism.
Why are you surprised that people who sympathize with terrorists are called terrorists sympathizers?
Roughly 75% of Palestinians support terrorism (the number changes with every survey but it's consistently over 50%).
The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations. That's not really terrorism; insurrection would be a more accurate description. But she certainly wasn't a good person deserving of any sympathy.
> The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations.
A hysterical take like this isn't really credible. "Obstruction", sure, but calling a stopped vehicle a "weapon" because it's slightly in the way defies the English language to the point where you damage your own credibility.
It would be equivalent to call this comment a "weapon" I'm using to impede you announcing your opinion unopposed.
She's absolutely deserving of sympathy; she was killed unjustly. We don't have a law on the books allowing capital punishment for parking a vehicle somewhere law enforcement finds it inconvenient. Just because you happen not to agree with her actions at the time, illegal or no, doesn't imply "and therefore she deserved death". I suggest you consider the consequences to your own self of people applying your own logic to you, and how long you would last if this was the general state of affairs.
I'll do you one better: Palestine Action is bankrolled by notorious pro-Russia tankie Fergie Chambers, who supports Vladimir Putin's genocidal campaign in Ukraine. So please add genocide sympathizer to your list.
[1] https://lamag.com/news/cox-family-heir-james-fergie-chambers...
"Palestine Action" is terrorism.
Spray painting a bunch of airplanes is terrorism. Got it.
Oh, and don’t come crying when the same authoritarian laws put in place for Palestine Action are used to label your cause as terrorism to quash dissent.
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What kind of dumbass title is this? 99.99% of the world is not afraid of silicon valley.
You can be a controversial figure politically and still build a generation defining product. The market rewards utility, not ideological purity.
The headline frames this as a paradox, as if these two things are incompatible. But they aren't mutually exclusive, he can be both.
Replit seems to be another company that doesn't justify it's valuation in this bubble
Replit has been around for years, has real users, and now reportedly real revenue
My bet is they sold lots if data for llm training
I think they are just hitting the consumer market hard. I have friends who have never coded & are using Replit. That said, not a single one of them has launched.
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Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.
Model Y and Falcon 9 are fakes?
You've got to admit Holmes is an interesting character though.
I really don't.
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Seriously? She was a fake in every sense of the word, copying everything down to Steve Jobs' mannerisms, photo-ops, and black turtleneck sweater.
The only interesting bit is how so many investors were unable to see through the obvious act and also failed to do the due diligence which is the One Job of VC firms (i.e., if I'm an investor, I'm trusting the VC to do real due diligence, otherwise why wouldn't I just invest directly in the companies).
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Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.
I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.
The coin is wealthy people. They're different sides of that coin. Hence why the commenter above is sensing some malice from both sides.
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Last I checked the Koch Brothers weren’t Israeli. Do read up on them. Oversimplified narratives are bullshit.
The only difference being that he wants to replace those with himself and his.
As the article mentions, Saudi Arabia is aiming to build its own deep integration with big tech, which Masad is enthusiastically participating in despite the Saudi government's own human rights issues. (He argues, quite conveniently if true, that the Replit tools he sells to the Saudi government won't be used for any of the bad stuff.)
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What does "Zionist" mean to you? I honestly don't understand what it means when Israel has existed as a Jewish state for 76 years and seems likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
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> is how he's just the other side of the same coin.
Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.
Is it apartheid that a jewish person cannot buy land in Palestinian controlled areas?
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I'm not a fan of a guy who builds a brand around politics. It will come around.
Like it has to other business guys who have built a brand around politics?
I think it has negatively affected Elon yes.
GPT wrapper.
Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.
replit worked really well as a way to play with code ideas. Going from 0 to running code on their site is very handy. I can try something out in python without much setup, as someone who rarely uses the language.
I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.
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It is not political; I did not know the owner had political opinions. I started using Replit before it had AI, had some ideas and they gave me a free year of AI last year when I complained it is so far behind the rest. And imho, it still is.
Like the other comment here: I just have much better outcomes with the same prompts with other tools. That is all I meant to say.
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Personally speaking, I get much better outcome from Lovable than Replit using same prompts.
Public opinion on Amjad shifted quite a bit in 2021 when he threatened to sue a former intern for his open-source project.
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
Definitely was the end of Replit for me. I have that open source project (Riju) bookmarked though and use it from time to time.
My opinion on him shifted because along with Paul Graham, they're the only tech leaders who have stood up for Palestinians. I don't agree with Graham on everything either, but I've gained a lot of respect for him speaking out against Zionism. They're rich, but it still is difficult to go against the entire venture capital industry to do the right thing.
Completely agree with you on this. It will be an unfortunate exercise for future historians to look back on this time, crunch through the enormous amount of data with their quantum computers, and end up realizing just how many people were willing to condone the slaughter of innocent civilians.
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This was the first thing I remembered about Amjad. I have never thought highly of him since.
This guy isn't a mold-breaking radical, he's just a garden variety sociopath https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
Yup.
> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.
This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."
I agree with you that it’s a genocide, but that is not universally accepted, so I think the scare quotes are OK. This article isn’t seeking to litigate the genocide in Gaza.
Scare quotes don’t mean that it’s not true.
The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general
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As it happens, genocide scholars disagree with you, and in any case, Gaza's population has not increased.
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interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.
I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.
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Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
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More than 70000 including 20000 children? Wow thats a lot.
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If your primary cause is Palestine then it's pretty internally consistent?
Pecunia non olet.
[money doesn't stink]
It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.
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> blowing up kids
not to refute the difference in extent but this is somewhat notable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahyan_airstrike
The Saudi war against Houthis was more brutal than the Gaza war. 70,000 dead from only starvation for starters. But not only is it not genocide it doesn't even enter conscious awareness as a thing that happened. I wonder why.
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So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.
Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.
Unfortunate.
Unsurprising, the Diary of a CEO guy is a snake oil salesman. Awful interviewer, but very good at self promotion.
The idea of "advanced users" of vibe coding is interesting.
"one being so good that anyone can become a software engineer".
Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?
And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?
Yes but smartphones decimated photography jobs, especially on the low end.
Pareto principle in action - smartphones are good enough for 80% of use cases. And so is AI for a lot of junior-level work.
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
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Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training
Programming is mostly a craft. Engineering would be more like designing algorithms.
That's research. Engineering would be programming, but well. Taking into account future maintenance concerns and so on. Seems like the software world doesn't do a lot of it.
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Just like word processing software and LLMs meant anyone can become a journalist. /s
"was called" - who was behind that?
Weasel words, basically. All too common in journalism. It's also common on Wikipedia but Wikipedia acknowledges it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
that quotes attributed to "investors," according to Masad. but some of the most heinous stuff people said to him is public: https://x.com/rabois/status/1943804360863232513 "your friends should have not raped murdered and killed kids."
It's Twitter - that's how a lot of people (or bots) say hi.
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“Masad insists he speaks up even when it hurts his business. In that regard, ‘I’m probably the only contrarian in Silicon Valley.’”
The only contrarian, just like everyone else.
He and Paul Graham, truly are the only people speaking out against Zionism though. The rest of the VC industry is either staunchly pro-Israel or silent on the matter.
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What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?
Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"
This is the way, right?
“Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days. People call Ms. Rachel a “terrorist sympathiser” and “antisemite of the year” for not wanting kids to die or become amputees
> “Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days.
I guess it means almost as little as "fascist" then.
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All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.
But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.
In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.
Excellent reference at the end, thanks for making me feel old. :)
I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.
Everyone stands up for their people. Tribalism is the most primitive form of society. Standing for principle is harder because sometimes you have to speak against your tribe.
Yes, it would be dishonorable to be mercenary, but being a tribalist is merely the default position. We’re all so at some scale.
> Palestinian man is ok working with the Saudis At least it isn't the UAE but... really? Still happy for him though.
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I'd say SBF takes that title, followed by holmes and the wework clown
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Please do remind people more because they sure as hell need it.
No. Jews have the right to live in their own homeland and anyone who thinks otherwise is a racist.
I suspect most people that spend their time online ranting out 'zionists' (meaning 98% of Jews) haven't bothered to read any Herzl.
Trying to frame the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as just "Jews trying to live in their own homeland".. isn't working in 2026 and nobody needs to read the thoughts of a man who saw Cecil Rhodes as a kindred spirit.
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The focus on a particular location is a religious one (in the scriptures there was a Jewish homeland before Israel or Egypt, and Israel is singled out because God told them to go), but it's also a selective one that ignores all the times God arranged for Israel not to be there; and crucially does not stop and wait for His opinion about the present. It is the most dangerous kind of religious opinion: one invented by us.
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Damn those racist Haredi Jews, right?
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I recommend _Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael K Kater. [0]
The push for a Zionist state started and accelerated in the 1920s to the end of the 1930s. Most of the Jews that moved from Europe to Palestine, which was part of modern day Israel, were by the Zionists. Reason is because the only jobs at the time were farming so people would have to give up their current triad.
Number of these individuals actually supported fascism. Even after WWII the mind set was not that fascism was bad but poorly implemented. That mind set was shared by a number of Germans and Jews that moved to Palestine before Israel became a state.
It was not until the late 1960s that younger culture started to shift that mind set to fascism is bad.
If you think I am wrong about the summation of the book ... read it.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300253375/culture-in-naz...
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Yes I'm sure if the settlers who forced Amjad Masad's people into refugee camps were a different religion he'd be fine with it.
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Connecting these two concepts like Netanyahu et. al. are constantly (insincerely) doing, is actually breeding real antisemitism. I wish more people realized this.
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Ridiculous. Most of the world has a negative view of Zionism, as they should, and ethnosupremacy in general.
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That doesn't make sense. Zionism depends on antisemitism, so true antisemites are by definition pro-Zionist.
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Citation needed.
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It's in consensus, even by Hamas themselves.
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What are you even talking about? My family is Argentine and 100% assimilated, speak English, love and embrace American culture and values. No one has ever treated us any differently in any context both in middle America and on the coasts.
It’s not a racial issue either, because my friends who are first generation Asian, Indian, etc, would all share the same sentiment. America is the most welcoming place on Earth for immigrants who are willing to put up even the smallest effort to assimilate into the culture.
So racism has been (more or less) eradicated in the US? Just trying to understand your comment before I respond more substantively because that’s a very striking claim and I want to be sure that’s actually what you mean.
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I'm not making a normative judgement here, it's just my observation as the child of immigrants myself. There are of course exceptions to the rule. I'm making an argument in the context of political economy, please don't take it personally.
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I don't understand this comment. Are you saying that Masad is not assimilated into the US because he doesn't support Israel's genocide against his people? Israel is not the US and supporting it is an increasingly unpopular position in the US. If anything he's more assimilated due to his position.
The majority of Americans are of British ancestry and the polarization between Dems and Reps is pretty high. You think that a coastal elite immigrant British descendant and Asian-American are farther apart than the same chap and a similar counterpart in Appalachia? I doubt it.
> The majority of Americans are of British ancestry
No they aren't. Even if you narrow it down just to white Americans, British ancestry is almost even with German and does not hold a majority once you include Irish, Italian, etc. [1]
I don't blame you for thinking they are tough, as Anglo culture and language has been unusually dominant, probably because the original 13 colonies were very Anglo and the whites that trickled in later largely assimilated. "Albion's seed" is an interesting book on this topic.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/10/2020-census-d...
Edit: British doesn't usually denote an ethnic group so I took it to mean Anglo, but if you take it to mean Anglo+Celtic then it would indeed make a majority of whites in the US due to the very large Irish population.
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That’s a fair point - as demonstrated by Amjad’s high regard for libertarian values.
People are multifaceted. We’re complex and sometimes irrational. I can also believe that you can share certain views yet still not be fully embraced or respected for them.
As a crude example, a Caucasian man who was born and raised in Japan thought of himself to be Japanese ideologically. Yet to the Japanese he was always an outsider - as a result, he has never felt truly at home anywhere.
> The majority of Americans are of British ancestry
Wildly inaccurate
I will remind you that most of the world and many Americans consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide: the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. Israel intends ethnic cleansing by genocidal means and continues to attack civilians despite a "ceasefire". Just today I got a terrified text message from a teacher as they airstriked in her camp while she lives in a partly destroyed house that cannot be repaired. They previously bombed the ppl in tents outside who had run from the north with nothing.
I hope there is some humanity left in this country.
He seems assimilated as fuck. What are you talking about?
A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.
The article clearly states that he lost business and risked bankruptcy.
Considering circumstances all over the West, pretty soon everyone will be “terrorist sympathizers” or a sympathizer of whatever the next enemy boogeyman du jour is of the abusive ruling class. And it’s not your favorite political sport team that is good and never does that, while the other team always does it and is evil. It’s being done in the US and it is being done in the EU as well as in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; not even to mention Israel, but that can’t be considered the West.
It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.
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Likud government and charter explicitly calls for all land between the river and the sea to be for Jews.
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The Hamas charter indicates that they would accept a two-state solution with 1967 borders.
This is not something the state of Israel will accept and is quite blatant in declaring that they would prefer to keep up the genocide.
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> The Hamas Charter explicitly called for the “annihilation” of the Jewish state.
See, this is what grinds my effing gears. On one hand you have a party "calling" for the "annihilation" of Israel. On the other hand, you have a part who is calling for the annihilation of palestinians AND they are ACTIVELY doing it. But no, you have to draw an equivalence somehow ...
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Stopped reading after "shooting range".
Please don't comment like this. It's not a substantive contribution to the discussion to tell us that you stopped reading the article, and it's generally fulmination or curmudgeonliness or a shallow dismissal or something else that's against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> “Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?”
I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.
I don't understand why the word genocide is quoted, as if it was an odd opinion of the person they are writing the profile about.
Replay will implode once the AI mania cools off
Who in this current political climate hasn't been called a 'terrorist sympathizer'? Feels like 80% of the population qualify
Well, he still is a terrorist symphatizer, just rich now.