5 ms·

You have a domain, why not get a domain email? Seeing a firstname.lastname [at] gmail loses the professional feeling the website is giving off.

RandomDistort 1y ago
To add to this, if you use Zoho's free plan this can cost you literally nothing.
- minraws 1y ago
  As a abuser of Zoho Free plan, I concur.
- WilliamCranna 1y ago
  I never heard of it, thanks. I never thought people would be so thrown off by a temporary personal email.
Grimblewald 1y ago
Because near everything about this appears to be a low effort scam. The gmail is to add to the "authenticity" of the scammer being 16, because this way they can add a presumed birthyear, wheras with domain email it would make no sense. Proof is in that the address williamcranna@gmail.com is avaliable, which would be the first thing a reasonable person would have tried, before adding the year like a dickhead.
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  …or they could genuinely be 16 and thus have no experience in how to do this professionally. I’m sure when you were 16 you might have made the same mistakes too.
  - uoaei 1y ago
    FUD
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      It might be more productive to explain how this scam works instead of dismissing my counter argument with an incorrectly used meme. I really don’t see how a learning app for students who also frequent HN is a valuable enough demographic to target. And ironically, the red flags identified would be mistakes a scammer would know not to make. Everything about this submission can be easily explained by inexperience but it’s a lot harder to explain why it’s scam. You could apply Occam’s Razor here and reasonably say that this being an inexperienced 16 year old is the hypothesis with the fewer assumptions.
      - WilliamCranna 1y ago
        Thanks for commenting this. This is my first ever app and thought why not get some input from HN. Didn’t expect people to take it this way.
  - Grimblewald 1y ago
    Nah, I don't buy it. Theyre good enough at higher level skills / comprehension that such enormous failures in more foundational skills makes no sense. the website advertises a product that makes use of web infrastructure signficantly more complex/sophisticated than webmail tied to your domain. It's a zero effort zero cost addon for most hosting services these days. so either this whole thing is a LLM project, and the 16 year old just has their name and reputation as a biological human of young age propping up / hyping the llm based product, or its a scam. bottom line. It's either unremarkable or untrustworthy, likely both.
    - hnlmorg 1y ago
      > Nah, I don't buy it. Theyre good enough at higher level skills / comprehension that such enormous failures in more foundational skills makes no sense It wouldn’t make sense for a scammer to make those mistakes either. So you’re not proving anything nefarious by pointing out those mistakes. All you’re proving is mistakes have been made. You might be surprised to learn this, but people makes a lot of mistakes at the start of their career. And 16 is very early on. I suspect there might have been some “vibe coding” going on, but that’s the worst criticism I’m willing to make. And even if I’m correct here, everyone has to start somewhere. I grew up with massive printed books, others on here learned from Stack Overflow. Vibe coding is only a problem if you don’t learn from it too.
      - Grimblewald 1y ago
        I've already pointed out why a scammer might make this mistake - adding credibility to the "im 16" angle. lets take the HN account, created 9 days ago. No "2008" or anything of the sort. Only in the prominantly displayed email. Only to help support the lie that helps gain attention. It reeks. It reeks of the marketing tactic along the lines of "my brother is autistic, here's my subpar contribution of "their" work to a subreddit dedicated to artisinal skills" and watch the karma roll on in for them, only to check their comment history and it being a clear case of karma whoring via lies. this smells the same. now, if i am wrong and its just a vibe coding thing, then the "im 16" part plays no role, it would be impressive if the 16 year old did this in a responsible way, but anyone can vibe code their way to such a product woth zero real skill or effort, making the "im 16" point lose the context underwhich it would be pertinent information. Llm's have changed our world in many ways, this being one of them. Imagine someone asks some agentic llm framework a research question, and a series of unrelated tangents later this agentic framework solves a nobel prize worthy problem. Should the human get that prize? Of course not, it would otherwise recognize skills/brightness in a human who doesnt actually posses it. If this isnt just a scam, then this would be no different. last example. If someone posted, "im 16, here is my art portfolio" and its all AI generated content, would you care? Would it demand the same response as if this was a gallery of high quality and beautiful work, painted by hand? Of course not.
  - WilliamCranna 1y ago
    Appreciate it, I didn’t expect this post to get as much attention as it did, this is just a small idea I had. I didn’t think an email yet was necessary.
- WilliamCranna 1y ago
  The reason I have is even less believable, lol. I made my personal email when I was 7 so I just made it that. If you don’t believe me check out my Twitter @willcranna .

RandomDistort 1y ago

To add to this, if you use Zoho's free plan this can cost you literally nothing.

minraws 1y ago
As a abuser of Zoho Free plan, I concur.
WilliamCranna 1y ago
I never heard of it, thanks. I never thought people would be so thrown off by a temporary personal email.

Grimblewald 1y ago

Because near everything about this appears to be a low effort scam. The gmail is to add to the "authenticity" of the scammer being 16, because this way they can add a presumed birthyear, wheras with domain email it would make no sense. Proof is in that the address williamcranna@gmail.com is avaliable, which would be the first thing a reasonable person would have tried, before adding the year like a dickhead.

hnlmorg 1y ago
…or they could genuinely be 16 and thus have no experience in how to do this professionally. I’m sure when you were 16 you might have made the same mistakes too.
- uoaei 1y ago
  FUD
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    It might be more productive to explain how this scam works instead of dismissing my counter argument with an incorrectly used meme. I really don’t see how a learning app for students who also frequent HN is a valuable enough demographic to target. And ironically, the red flags identified would be mistakes a scammer would know not to make. Everything about this submission can be easily explained by inexperience but it’s a lot harder to explain why it’s scam. You could apply Occam’s Razor here and reasonably say that this being an inexperienced 16 year old is the hypothesis with the fewer assumptions.
    - WilliamCranna 1y ago
      Thanks for commenting this. This is my first ever app and thought why not get some input from HN. Didn’t expect people to take it this way.
- Grimblewald 1y ago
  Nah, I don't buy it. Theyre good enough at higher level skills / comprehension that such enormous failures in more foundational skills makes no sense. the website advertises a product that makes use of web infrastructure signficantly more complex/sophisticated than webmail tied to your domain. It's a zero effort zero cost addon for most hosting services these days. so either this whole thing is a LLM project, and the 16 year old just has their name and reputation as a biological human of young age propping up / hyping the llm based product, or its a scam. bottom line. It's either unremarkable or untrustworthy, likely both.
  - hnlmorg 1y ago
    > Nah, I don't buy it. Theyre good enough at higher level skills / comprehension that such enormous failures in more foundational skills makes no sense It wouldn’t make sense for a scammer to make those mistakes either. So you’re not proving anything nefarious by pointing out those mistakes. All you’re proving is mistakes have been made. You might be surprised to learn this, but people makes a lot of mistakes at the start of their career. And 16 is very early on. I suspect there might have been some “vibe coding” going on, but that’s the worst criticism I’m willing to make. And even if I’m correct here, everyone has to start somewhere. I grew up with massive printed books, others on here learned from Stack Overflow. Vibe coding is only a problem if you don’t learn from it too.
    - Grimblewald 1y ago
      I've already pointed out why a scammer might make this mistake - adding credibility to the "im 16" angle. lets take the HN account, created 9 days ago. No "2008" or anything of the sort. Only in the prominantly displayed email. Only to help support the lie that helps gain attention. It reeks. It reeks of the marketing tactic along the lines of "my brother is autistic, here's my subpar contribution of "their" work to a subreddit dedicated to artisinal skills" and watch the karma roll on in for them, only to check their comment history and it being a clear case of karma whoring via lies. this smells the same. now, if i am wrong and its just a vibe coding thing, then the "im 16" part plays no role, it would be impressive if the 16 year old did this in a responsible way, but anyone can vibe code their way to such a product woth zero real skill or effort, making the "im 16" point lose the context underwhich it would be pertinent information. Llm's have changed our world in many ways, this being one of them. Imagine someone asks some agentic llm framework a research question, and a series of unrelated tangents later this agentic framework solves a nobel prize worthy problem. Should the human get that prize? Of course not, it would otherwise recognize skills/brightness in a human who doesnt actually posses it. If this isnt just a scam, then this would be no different. last example. If someone posted, "im 16, here is my art portfolio" and its all AI generated content, would you care? Would it demand the same response as if this was a gallery of high quality and beautiful work, painted by hand? Of course not.
- WilliamCranna 1y ago
  Appreciate it, I didn’t expect this post to get as much attention as it did, this is just a small idea I had. I didn’t think an email yet was necessary.
WilliamCranna 1y ago
The reason I have is even less believable, lol. I made my personal email when I was 7 so I just made it that. If you don’t believe me check out my Twitter @willcranna .