Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | AznHisoka's commentslogin

Same here, having YC attached to your name is not the flex you think it is, its even the opposite for me

Their brand has been associated with hacking-around and gaining advantage via rule breaking for a while. Didn't their founder application at one point ask "Tell us about a time where you hacked some system for your advantage?" At this point, I think everyone knows they're signing up for dark patterns and questionable practices when they get involved.

It still does.

> Please tell us about a time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage:

I suspect it can be an excellent barometer of someone's:

- alignment in terms of pro-social vs. anti-social

- decision making under desperation

- "social filter": threading the line between 'interesting'/'compelling' vs. 'off-putting'/'concerning'

which are important signals for evaluating potential future C-suite executives.


Their brand has been associated with hacking-around and gaining advantage via rule breaking for a while.

Yup, this type of behavior is pretty much as I would expect and it's something I've seen since I first started posting here.


Maybe I am missing something, but can’t you simply not show the email address in a git commit? (Sincere question, not saying this is trivial. i am dumb and like to ask dumb questions even if might be embarassing)

If someone wants to message someone, it goes through github notifications or github emails them

Also banning an account doesnt seem like a heavy punishment, given they can simply move to gitlab, bitbucket etc


Git commits have a email address as a required field[0], although some people put something bogus in there. And then it's in the data provided when you clone the repo onto your machine even if you aren't using the GitHub APIs.

To his point, you can set that to the no-reply email address GitHub gives you if you don't want mail but do want the commit to be linked to your GitHub account.

[0]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#_commit_information


That would be a fundamental change to how Git works, not just GitHub. Even if the web UI didn't show it, a simple `git log` would reveal it.

You can mask your email address in git commits but a lot of open source projects won't accept that. And some pseudo-open-source ones insist on sending you an email to authenticate before they'll give you access to the GitHub repo (looking at you Unreal Engine!)

So, no, I don't think they could simply "not show the email address".


fyi, you can also see the author email by appending ".patch" to the end of a commit URL

Makes sens! Appreciate the explanation!

Git commits are identified by a hash of their entire contents[1]. The way hashes work, if you change even one bit, the hash becomes completely different. Every commit contains the email address of the committer and the hash of the parent commit. If the email address in even one commit is changed or removed, that changes its hash, which in turn requires you to update its children, changing their hashes etc. So, updating a commit from n years ago requires you to update all commits that have been made since. By default, git will refuse to pull from such an updated repository, as commits are considered immutable once pushed.

[1] In practice, it's a bit more complicated. Merkle trees are involved, so it's hashes of hashes of hashes instead of hashing a multi-gigabyte blob on each commit, but that's a performance optimization that doesn't affect semantics much.


You should be using the email address "username@no.reply.github.com" or similar

There's never been an obligation to use a real email address for git


Anthropic at least seems to be doing well with enterprises. OpenAI doesnt have that level of trust with enterprise use cases, and commodization is a bigger issue with consumers, when they can just switch to another tool easily

Yeah, Anthropic is inarguably in a better position, but I don’t see how they justify their fundraising unless they find some entrenched position that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

Enterprise switching costs aren’t 0, but they’re much less than most other categories, especially as models mature and become more fungible.

The best moat I can think of is a patentable technique that facilitates a huge leap that Anthropic can defend, but even then, Chinese companies could easily ignore those patents. And I don’t even know if AI companies could stick to those guns as their training is essentially theft of huge portions of copyrighted material.


> Yeah, Anthropic is inarguably in a better position

OpenAI's biggest problem as well as their biggest advantage is that they have way, way more users than anyone else. Unfortunately for them the users they have dont pay for shit and they dont serve ads so more users = more money wasted right now. But its unlikely that will always be the case. If OpenAI turns on ads, most users will not leave because retail users hate change, and suddenly their massive user base is a boon instead of a problem.


I am working on Bloomberry, an alternative to tech stack lookup tools like Wappalyzer but for detecting what backend/SaaS tools a company uses. https://bloomberry.com


I an building Bloomberry, an alternative to tools like Wappalyzer.

It helps sales teams find companies that use any product/technology, but not limited to frontend tecnologies.

So for instance, you can find companies that use Canva: https://bloomberry.com/data/canva/ or Cursor: https://bloomberry.com/data/cursor/


Your project just so happens to be named the same thing as the Windows 11 ice cream flavor.

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_11_Bloomberry


It doesn't fit your criteria of being open-source/free, but I built Bloomberry (bloomberry.com) as an alternative to Wappalyzer for exactly this use case. It analyzes DNS records, subprocessor lists, DNS traffic data to find the real technologies a company uses. So stuff like you mentioned like Snowflake, and even the enterprise LLMs like ChatGPT/Claude.

If you're looking for something truly free/open-source, you probably have to stitch together various sources. You can analyze job postings to see what technologies they mention on job ads (although this can give u some false postives too as companies love to spam long lists of technologies). You could look at what appears when they search for their domain in subdomain tools, which can often give you a clue if they host stuff like CI/CD internally. And just good old-fashioned snooping around the Linkedin profiles of engineers who work there.


Thanks, I just signed up for Bloomberry and it definitely fits the bill on what I was looking for. Was even able to find companies that use chatgpt, which wappalyzer missed.

Job postings was another thing i was thinking of. U are right that it can be flawed and you gotta do a bit of discerning but if a company keeps mentioning the same stack in all their postings, it probably means they use it.


Oh and one thing your tool is missing is a browser extension. That is what makes Wappalyzer so much easy to use (and its alternatives like SimilarTech, etc)

It would make my workflow so much more convenient. Instead of logging into an app every single time. Have you thought about building one? I imagine with ChatGPT you can just vibe code one these days!


I have looked into it but it is hard to build one that works in real-time like Wappalyzer’s. But I will definitely look into it. My only concern is it might reveal my code and the way I detect frontend technologies.

Take a look at WhatRuns though if you are looking for a browser extension. It is also another decent alternative to Wappalyzer


True, you pretty much have to open source your code if you are gonna build a browser extension.

I have tried WhatRuns and it is pretty bare bones. Not useful at all. Wappalyzer’s browser extension is free as well and much better data. It just is missing a lot of data on companies that use backend tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but so far Bloomberry has been pretty useful in that area.


Thanks! And just so you know that I am not biased, Bloomberry isnt the only alternative out there :) https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-tried-6-wappalyzer-alternative...


Rule of thumb: never ask chatgpt about its inner working. It will lie or fabricate something. It will probably say something completely different next time


This is precisely why i cancelled my claude max account and switched back to chatgpt. Claude is much better but not when it silently stops workinf


1. You need something called a technographics tool to find companies that use a specific enterprise technology. Bloomberry comes to mind. Here’s the data they have on new ChatGPT customers: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt/ . They track companies not individuals so you wont get contact info unfortunately.

Other options if you need contact data also include: Apollo.io and Zoominfo.

2. You can search job postings for companies that mention “chatgpt” and “training”/“provisioning” or something like that captures companies that just started using ChatGPT.

Not a perfect method and u probably need to go through a lot of false positives, but its doable IMO.

3. Go hang out in the official OpenAI community https://community.openai.com/ and you will likely find people asking questions on how to get started, etc. Not sure how u could cross link them to the company (maybe googling if their name is unique)

4. Find some Slack community for ChatGpT beginners. Not sure of any on the top of my head.


Thanks! Those are helpful!

For number one, any idea the best person to contact in those companies? They probably dont got a head of AI person so wondering if a VP of Engineering is the next logical person.

Also I haven’t thought of forums/communities! Any idea whether I am more likely to find small companies or big enterprises there?


I am actually not sure about the first.

For the 2nd, based on my experience you are likely to find developers from both big and small companies equally hanging out in communities. Most lean technical btw, so if you arent targeting developers, communities probably arent the best venue to find potential users.

I also forgot to add: finding followers of OpenAI in Linkedin might also be a good way to find ChatGpT customers. Or people who comment on their product announcemnts in Linkedin.


Would followers or commenters usually be recent customers though? Because that really is my target audience: users who just decided to purchase and use ChatGPT.


They probably wouldn’t be recent customers, that’s true. I would say if we were talking 4-5 years ago, followers/commenters would be a high signal they just started using ChatGPT; but it seems most of them are just bots now.


This is just my personal opinion, but if they didnt change the price of Evernote and never made any changes, I probably would remain a customer for a very very long time. There is a high switching cost for me to use any app to move all my docs, and notes.

I dont know if the same can be said for Vimeo, though


I would still be a happy Evernote customer if they hadn't rewritten all the apps from scratch.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: