This post will not name anybody.

I came across a HN post about a subject rarely discussed there, and one of the posters (let’s call him M) had apparently founded a startup revolving around it. He claimed that he could drastically cut the cost of part of the process, turning an initial ‘dream idea’ into an affordable project, thus broadening significantly its appeal.

In that thread, M addressed many of the pitfalls, errors and misconceptions that people may have about the subject. In fact, he mostly started with the negatives, emphasizing how hard the idea is in the first place, and making sure that his solution did not suffer from these obvious potential flaws. It was interesting to read because it mirrored the exact thought process I had when discussing the idea with people that knew nothing about it and would naively think that ‘it is easy to solve’. To me that was a good indication that despite the other small issues with M, that was the real deal. Some of the claims were particularly impressive –probably oversold, but that is not unusual in the startup world.

M also mentioned that he was looking for co-founders. Since it was a business idea that interested me for a long time, I contacted him with one of my business addresses, and we talked. Well, he talked. A lot. It went on for more than 8 hours, when we started the call barely before midnight. After a while, it was like a feverish dream, and about as coherent. He finished by “don’t you have work today?”. Well sure, there was only half an hour before the dreadful daily SCRUM meeting.

Why did I let the call go on for so long? Because M has a way to formulate things in a way that makes a brilliant, revelatory idea dangle in front of you, then meander in the numbers relative to a specific subproblem, and bounce back to grand general theoretical ideas. That makes you very eager to get the genial eureka that solves a problem in such an efficient way. While going through that, it was apparent that it was fake: any subproblem he talked about, he had a brilliant idea that gave him an edge over the competition. But each one of those ideas would have been more interesting than the problem he claimed to have solved, and easier to market. Terry Tao mentioned about a theorem that it had to be false because one corollary that was used in its proof was actually more powerful than the result itself.

So, for a number of hours I was hanging to the hope of getting, in the middle of the deluge, the shimmering diamond of a brilliant idea. Despite the grand claims, and it being on hn, I thought M could be one of these 10x geniuses; in university I had been in class with individuals who were in another intellectual realm entirely, so it didn’t seem impossible. There is also the idea that it would require so much effort to fake that it wouldn’t be worth it. Except maybe if you were fully unemployed and not totally mentally sound.

I reached out to another hn member, who has contact info on their profile, as I knew they had interacted with M. In their case, after they tried to reason with M they were met with torrents of abusive language.

That made me more wary in general. For some months I was so shocked by the experience that I refrained from almost all online interactions. It was the first time I got in touch with a mad person online, and I hope the last.

From time to time, I check M’s hn profile. He’s still active, still making some grandiose claims. Sometimes people directly reply to him that he is spewing BS, and sometimes one gets hooked and asked to get into contact via email. I hope their experience will be no worse than mine, and certainly not as bad as this other victim.

Which makes me wonder: we have this bias that this is a forum frequented by some elites, geniuses, etc. How many are actually desperate to pretend and simply maintain a year long presence, a form of digital double-life? How different is it from Instagram double-lives?