TBH this article makes me more confident that Lambda is overall Good. They found a single program that was substantially deficient, some disorganized operations, and some exaggerated marketing claims.
It's starting a new form of education! There are going to be operational headaches and a few misses! While the referenced cases aren't good, we can assess Lambda on their overall contribution, not their mistakes alone.
I think it probably is fraud, even legally, but only because “qualified education loans” subject to rules against discharge in bankruptcy are also eligible for tax deductions on interest, so while falsely claiming the status was intended as a dissuasion against recourse to bankruptcy for past customers (and not fraud, though clearly unethical, when that’s all the claim serves as), it also was a material misrepresentation which could encourage new customers to purchase services based on it, which is fraud.
Actually, since the loan is structured as an all-principal, no-interest $30,000 loan, deductibility of interest isn’t an issue, so it wouldn’t be classic fraud.
I would be a lot more inclined to believe anything they said in this article if they didn't show such blatant bias for sensationalist reporting.
> His previous work was mostly concerned with “growth hacking,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for finding underappreciated (or, less charitably, underhanded) ways of marketing something.
So anyone who put the term "growth hacking" on their resume will now get publicly discredited as being underhanded? If they tried just a little harder to stick to the facts, all of the other research they have done in their reporting would carry a bit more weight.
If you put that on your CV, I’ll probably put your CV in the garbage. It’s one of the major red flags.
Along with: various flavours of monetization specialist; pimps; politicians; used car sales; basically all the same category of exploitation-oriented narcissists that will poison your brand and your culture, create nothing themselves, and ultimately destroy more intrinsic value than they vampire from others.
I’ve been around this industry for decades. Joe MacMillan is an archetype, not a parody character.
It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.
Dang, is this a normal feature? Since when are users able to retroactively change the profile that made the comment? This looks like covering up a YC founder's past comment, but the archive still exists. According to snapshots it was modified over 2 years later.
We take care of privacy requests for HN users every day. 99% (maybe 99.9% – I haven't counted) of those users aren't YC founders. There's no special treatment.
If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, there's an explanation there about how we usually don't delete entire account histories, but we do other things to help, and invite people to email us if they have concerns. There are tradeoffs between individual needs for privacy, fairness to the other commenters who participated in a thread, the community's interest in preserving its archive, and so on. We care about all of that and do our best to help whoever asks; as I tell people who write in, we just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion, and have built up a bag of tricks for that over the years. Obviously that doesn't extend to the Internet Archive or whatever other caches of HN posts are out there; users understand that.
When it comes to this sort of issue on HN, it's important for people to understand that there are no good answers—it's all tradeoffs. Because the pendulum has swung towards privacy concerns in recent years, we regularly get flamed for not deleting entire account histories. But we still get flamed from the classic internet perspective (nothing should be censored, etc.) too.
Appreciate the clarification that it's not YC-founder specific and a further read of your comments and newsfaq on this makes it clear the tradeoff between privacy and maintaining HN thread history, and I think the right choice has been made. Thanks
The usual best way to get in touch with dang (or another mod) is to email hn@ycombinator.com. Likely to get a better answer via email, or perhaps he'll comment here if you call attention to it that way.
If something like this really happened, this is pretty disturbing. The _pecl account that now owns that comment was created on the same day the comment was posted, has 1 karma, and has not posted anything else.
Edit: just emailed hn@; hopefully someone there will follow up on this.
The full range of everything we do is available to anyone who asks. You have to email hn@ycombinator.com, as the FAQ explains (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but there's no restriction on whom we help, or how. We help people who have abused this site for years and then ask us (sometimes exceedingly impolitely!) to clean up what they did, and we treat them the same way as we treat anyone; I may grit my teeth while doing it, but that's all. Why? Because it's best for the community in the long run if we treat everyone the same way, and because—as I tell users who email—we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.
Even more than that, one of the administrators previously told me via email that HN is not able to rename accounts (presumably they use account names instead of numeric IDs as a key somewhere). So the only explanation for the displayed author on that post having changed is that they switched the author of the post, the original author's account could not have been renamed.
The incredibly gross thing is that all but two replies are encouraging of that kind of behavior. The two that are negative and call out the dishonesty are downvoted.
Note that the author of this piece was the founder of Coderpad, not some industry entrenched journalist. After watching his interview with Jason Calacanis(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hUT8VZNvm8), where they discuss the content of his piece, I'm more inclined to believe what Woo wrote.
Listen, I wrote underappreciated first and then had the parenthetical second for a reason. You read the entire piece and this is the bit you reacted to? Jesus Christ. The entire piece is completely factual. Name even one bit of the piece not based entirely in fact, I dare you.
I think it is an entirely fair description of the overwhelming majority of the times I see it used. I suppose the person using the term does not always think the thing they are describing is unethical and so do not intend it as a euphemism.
What's missing in your description is the timeline. Note that the term was first introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010, and according to Google Trends it peaked in usage in 2014. At some point (2014?), it became a buzzword and suddenly every marketer started using it. So in 2021, when someone puts "Growth Hacker" on their resume, you draw a very different mental picture than you did in 2010. Is it fair to put the 2010-people into the same bucket as the 2021-people? I have no idea when and why Austen was using this term. But calling him underhanded for that reason alone comes across as biased.
Btw, "growth hacker" is not the only term whose perception changed throughout its lifetime. Here's a fun one: PHP. Actually, many other technologies suffer the same fate (Java, Rails, etc). Sort of related: NoSQL.
Prediction for a future liability term: AI (what are the chances that in 2030 people will feel about it the same way they feel about it today?).
This is a bad way to get in touch with us; it's unreliable. If there's something important that needs responding to, you should email hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> So anyone who put the term "growth hacking" on their resume will now get publicly discredited as being underhanded?
That is good thing! These 'growth hacks' people should be viewed in the same light as a 'SEO tricks' people. Both damage the quality of results and bring bad faith actors to the top.
I dunno if "underhanded" is the right word, but it feels like "growth hacking" is something one does only when the higher-than-usual moral cost is worth it.
It's starting a new form of education! There are going to be operational headaches and a few misses! While the referenced cases aren't good, we can assess Lambda on their overall contribution, not their mistakes alone.