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IIRC they were random letters that do not occur naturally in English words, in order to serve as easily searchable annotation/footnote identifiers. He somewhat already knew they were extra details that would not make it to the main body. Later these get changed [1], [2], etc but you don't want to use these at the outset due to possible reordering/deleting.

Source: I was one of the founders of Stypi and we asked him when porting the data from Etherpad to Stypi.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/09/yc-funded-stypi-is-etherpa...


In a lot of situations, no additional time is spent (and thus wasted). This happens with advisors in the general case too: they become an advisor and never meet again.


And what benefit is the company getting from saying a person that is not going to contribute to the company in any way is an “advisor”?

I guess the company should just do that with every former employee? I mean, why not.

This is the behavior of a person and company playing startup and not actually trying to build a strong company.


Probably because founders tend to have strong influence over a company and tend to have their share of personal fans and supporters among the userbase. So they try to avoid alienating them by pretending that they still get along.

Like when Carl Pei left OnePlus, we all knew it would go to shit once Oppo took over but they kept up the pretense for a while to protect the brand before they started undermining it.

For the 'advisor' there's probably a financial arrangement to this to keep them quiet and from shoveling up dirt in the media. It's hard to just give someone money like that so again a fake role comes in handy.


Slab | Software Engineer | REMOTE (Worldwide) | Full-time

At Slab (https://slab.com), we believe that knowledge is the foundation of any organization's success. When a team's collective knowledge is more accessible, that team's potential is limitless.

Our product helps teams easily create, organize, and discover knowledge across the entire company, from non-technical to tech-savvy. Each day, thousands of customers rely on Slab across their entire workforces, including Asana, Benchling, and Fivetran.

You'd be joining a team of thoughtful and experienced engineers, distributed worldwide across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Stack: React, GraphQL, Elixir [1], Phoenix, Kubernetes

* Software Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c6fae7c-980e-4875-be9f-76ae1ebfa...

* Product Manager: https://jobs.lever.co/slab/002d52c5-adbf-49d0-ac7e-8ee4eb18b...

[1]: Why we use Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/11/17/real-time-collaborat...


Slab | Software Engineer | REMOTE (Worldwide) | Full-time

At Slab (https://slab.com), we believe that knowledge is the foundation of any organization's success. When a team's collective knowledge is more accessible, that team's potential is limitless.

Our product helps teams easily create, organize, and discover knowledge across the entire company, from non-technical to tech-savvy. Each day, thousands of customers rely on Slab across their entire workforces, including Asana, Benchling, and Fivetran.

You'd be joining a team of thoughtful and experienced engineers, distributed worldwide across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Stack: React, GraphQL, Elixir [1], Phoenix, Kubernetes

Apply here for our Software Engineer role: https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c6fae7c-980e-4875-be9f-76ae1ebfa...

[1]: Why we use Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/11/17/real-time-collaborat...


At first https://twitter.com/theryanking/status/1485784882173255680 seemed pretty damning but if you hover over the dates of the HN posts, the title attribute shows the timestamp, and it would appear Stripe's came in a couple hours before Bolt's. Add in Lyft and the "facts" around this story really seem to fall apart.


Stripe also launched the product that day on their blog. If anything it seems like Bolt tried to preempt the Stripe launch.


By add in Lyft, I assume you mean the fact that Lyft is not actually a YC company? (vs, the tweets refer to Lyft as Stripe's batchmate)


Yes, Lyft not being YC is is mostly it but also from an early Stripe employee [1]: "Lyft was also not originally on Stripe. They were on Braintree and switched over to Stripe after both Stripe and Balanced (another YC-funded payments company) competed for their business." Balanced was definitely a payments company also backed by YC. I cannot verify the switching from Braintree as I'm mostly an observer in all this but the other details are easily verifiable.

https://twitter.com/cjc/status/1485803509110894596


Post IDs also support that observation, per elsethread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068454


Slab | Software Engineer | REMOTE (Worldwide) | Full-time

At Slab (https://slab.com), we believe that knowledge is the foundation of any organization's success. When a team's collective knowledge is more accessible, that team's potential is limitless.

Our product helps teams easily create, organize, and discover knowledge across the entire company, from non-technical to tech-savvy. Each day, thousands of customers rely on Slab across their entire workforces, including Asana, Benchling, and Fivetran.

You'd be joining a team of thoughtful and experienced engineers, distributed worldwide across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Stack: React, GraphQL, Elixir [1], Phoenix, Kubernetes

Take a look at our open roles:

* Software Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c6fae7c-980e-4875-be9f-76ae1ebfa...

* Support Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/3088ea25-df14-4692-b338-e18248f32...

[1]: Why we use Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/11/17/real-time-collaborat...


Slab | Software Engineer | REMOTE (Worldwide) | Full-time

At Slab (https://slab.com), we believe that knowledge is the foundation of any organization's success. When a team's collective knowledge is more accessible, that team's potential is limitless.

Our product helps teams easily create, organize, and discover knowledge across the entire company, from non-technical to tech-savvy. Each day, thousands of customers rely on Slab across their entire workforces, including Asana, Benchling, and Fivetran.

You'd be joining a team of thoughtful and experienced engineers, distributed worldwide across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Stack: React, GraphQL, Elixir [1], Phoenix, Kubernetes

Take a look at our open roles:

* Software Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c6fae7c-980e-4875-be9f-76ae1ebfa...

* Support Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/3088ea25-df14-4692-b338-e18248f32...

[1]: Why we use Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/11/17/real-time-collaborat...


Slab | Software Engineer | REMOTE (Worldwide) | Full-time

At Slab (https://slab.com), we're making the workplace a source of learning and purpose through knowledge-sharing. Our product helps teams easily create, organize, and discover knowledge across the entire company, from non-technical to tech-savvy. Our customers include Asana, Benchling, and Fivetran, who rely on Slab daily across their entire workforces.

You'd be joining a team of thoughtful and experienced engineers, currently distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Stack: React, GraphQL, Elixir [1], Phoenix, Kubernetes

Take a look at our open roles:

* Software Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c6fae7c-980e-4875-be9f-76ae1ebfa...

* Infrastructure Engineer - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/1c7b4ed6-fdb1-4b8d-adff-85f3b02c0...

* Software Engineer, Support - https://jobs.lever.co/slab/3088ea25-df14-4692-b338-e18248f32...

If this piques your interest, email jason.chen@slab.com with your resume or LinkedIn with HN in the subject line!

[1]: Why we use Elixir: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/11/17/real-time-collaborat...


This post makes some salient points about the challenges of team knowledge sharing:

- Tree structure is too strict for cross departmental content ex sales to customer success handoff - should that be under sales or customer success?

- The right answer can be found in multiple tools - companies are not going to ditch Google Sheets / Excel for Notion tables

- A common source of truth needs to take into account the variability in skill - some users are going to be heavier users or more technical than others

- Collaboration needs to be as good as Google Docs or else people will just use Google Docs

It looks like the author is envisioning a new solution with Dokkument but if you want an existing one, take a look at https://slab.com. It’s designed to focus on team knowledge sharing while recognizing that it will be part of the productivity stack. For example, there is have a Content Map feature that shows a bird’s eye view of the entire information topology (with filters and drill down possible) and even mass reorganize from there. Integrations are first class with search retrieving results from other tools and rich linking that will preview external content. Knowledge sharing used to be an afterthought for a lot of teams but with the world going remote it’s exciting to see the innovation and prioritization pick up in this space.

Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Slab


Some friendly criticism. I was curious how slab topics work but could not find the details after a minute of trying to click and scroll around. The marketing bit about topics does not link anywhere. I finally made some progress by scrolling to the bottom, going to the support section, and searching for "topic". I had to scroll past results that described how to reorganize topics, assign permissions, until I arrived at the basics of topic usage. Even that did not provide an insight about how topics are different from regular tags, and I still am not sure what the difference is. So a "features" or "concepts" page would be nice, and even better if it was the main page. (I am an engineer.)


Normally I would not promote my own company to the HN community without contributing something of value, but from the looks of the UI decisions in the "juicy screenshots" I would venture to say we have already done so: https://share.slab.com/v1uy96K8

So if Confluence and internal knowledge sharing is problem for your team but you want to try out a ready and available product, please give https://slab.com a look.


Cheeky, but all is fair in business I guess. I had a look at every product I could possibly find (Notion, Confluence, Slab, Bear, CodeStoryApp, Evernote, Dropbox Paper, Google Docs, GitHub Wiki, Quip, Guru, Slite, Coda... listing them out makes me anxious) and made sure to incorporate what I thought were really smart product decisions. From Slab I really liked the table of contents and having the search bar up the top left, I can't say much more was included in Scribe that doesn't exist in every other product tackling this space though.


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