When will people realize that slapping yet another startup's tech stack onto yours isn't going to magically fix anything and in fact just adds complexity and points of failure.
I've always done my best to err on the side of "let's try not to add yet another level of complexity" and this strategy has yet to fail me.
SolarWinds is a 21-year-old publicly-traded company.
They're not really "yet another startup".
I also don't think that the departments of the US Government are all going around all willy-nilly dropping tools from "yet another startup" into their core infrastructure.
While your overall point may be valid, it's tough to come to the conclusion that it is applicable here.
I believe that you have mis-read their comment - they aren't saying Solar Winds is "yet another startup", they're saying that SolarWinds is incorporating 3rd party technology (the so-called supply chain attack on their build) without vetting it.
And, if we're being honest, those technologies probably are based off startup tech; SolarWinds purchases and incorporates startup companies (such as Vivid Cortex recently).
That's very true, In my limited experience, they are tools sold to non-technical leadership that are either thrown to technical staff to deal with and implement or require letting yet another vendor have network access to manage. It adds up to a hot mess.
My favorite comment from a (authentication system) vendor, during a meeting where we were trying to figure out why users were having trouble logging into an internal app: "Do I have a charge code for this?"
I agree with the point, but that's not what happened here. SolarWinds Orion isn't some VC-backed panacea sold by SV hucksters to cure all your infrastructure's ills, it's a monitoring stack like Zenoss or Zabbix or (...) and is correctly marketed as such.
What makes you think that Tesla would be able to do that, given their reputation of not being able to manufacture cars that don't fall apart immediately upon rolling off the factory line? They kinda have to be able to build cars in the first place in order to build them faster with more robots.
Edit: you've already been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit with this account. Can you please not? Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333233 are particularly not ok here.
I frankly can't see how this is inciting a flamewar. Tesla has a pretty good record of being terrible at manufacturing. I've seen innumerable comments on this site where people make similar "what makes you think that..." comments that are inciting argument. I don't see why mine is special.
Furthermore, in the linked comment, the person I was replying to did, in fact, completely miss the point of my comment and make an entirely non sequitur resposne. Will they be getting warned too?
Tesla is a divisive topic with passionate feelings on both sides, and a swipe like "they [can't] build cars in the first place" is tossing a Molotov cocktail into the thread. Would you mind taking the spirit of the site more to heart? We'd appreciate it greatly. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Re the other person: I'd don't know which specific comment you're referring to, but generally it's not against the site guidelines to miss someone's point, or to be wrong, or to make a non sequitur. Such rules would be impossible to impose and would wipe out half the discussion anyhow (I'm being generous with "half").
If they broke the guidelines then we probably should have moderated it too, but that runs up against a different issue—we can't see everything that gets posted here, or even come close. We often don't read the threads in linear (depth-first?) order either, so a comment that appears adjacent to a normal reader might escape our attention.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Any kind of company that can inspire these kind of comments is worth investing in I tally how many comments I run into randomly over the week and use that to determine how many more shares I should buy.
Anything disruptive attracts this kind of attention and even if you don't think they will succeed it's hard to argue they are not disruptive.
The USPS already scans the exterior of every letter they deliver (perhaps a result of the 2001 anthrax attacks?). They let you see the scans online. You don't have to "speculate" about losing mail.
You don't understand what is happening. UPS made this mistake once and is not going to do it again.
For business customers, accepting a package and failing to deliver for the holidays is WORSE than accepting (a la USPS) with no limits and then having it get stuck.
UPS did this to amazon once, and that was enough for Amazon to decide to build out its own delivery network.
Shippers can do all sorts of things to help make things efficient if UPS communicates the limits. Ie, no sales with guaranteed 2 day shipping 2 days before xmass.
So you still think it's a good thing that a private company should be handling important infrastructure and be able to say, on a whim, "Nop, we're not going to handle this because reasons. Sorry not sorry."
How can you say for certainty that they won't do it again? Are you in a leadership position at UPS where you're able to make that assertion?
Ah right, because using other tried and tested methods like providing everyone better mental healthcare options are boring. Just make an app! Apps solve everything! Apps! Apps! Apps!
Oh right but providing better mental healthcare doesn't allow for people to receive bogus investements for their overhyped app and make millions.
Running unprofitable companies at a loss with no clear plan for making money (apart from the Pinky and the Brain plan of taking over the world) is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and only persistently low interest rates and a global savings glut have ever facilitated it.
This used to be called dumping, and was a crime.
The new part is that the companies don't even make any money at their core business.
Take Hailo, an uber-like startup that operated a franchise model. They made money, were expanding slowly and profitably, and followed the laws.
They were driven out of business by Uber who still (ten years later) have not made any money, and have been subsidised by deluded pension funds looking to juice their returns.
Whatever that is, it's not capitalism, which at base is a system designed for people to invest money in the hope of getting more money back in the future.
Hailo was capitalistic, Uber is some kind of weird mishmash of communism and hipsterism. It's like the performance art of capitalism; all of the trappings and none of the substance.
(For Uber, substitute your least favourite unprofitable unicorn).
However it works is how it works. Capitalism absolutely devolves into the corrupt oligopolies we have today, where businesses capture government and entrench their position and power over everyone else. Strong organized labor and various forms of social democracy can resist these trends, but what's happening in America is just Capitalism running its course.
You can't take "well this is happening but it's not real capitalism" even though everyone's calling it capitalism. It's capitalism. Capitalism is busted and rewards greed and concentration of wealth.
It doesn't take a galaxy brain super genius to figure out that an economic system that relies on infinite growth doesn't exactly pan out in the long run, and what we're seeing in America today is just the late effects of the capitalist system that we allowed to run rampant because apparently any amount of socialism is communism and scary because reasons I guess.
>Capitalism is busted and rewards greed and concentration of wealth.
Capitalism always had a cyclical nature presumably because humans are cyclical. Things go wrong and then they go right and then they go wrong in an endless cycle. It's like an engine that breaks down every now and then. You can fix it and you should.
>It doesn't take a galaxy brain super genius to figure out that an economic system that relies on infinite growth doesn't exactly pan out in the long run
Capitalism doesn't rely on infinite growth. It drives growth by rewarding increased productivity and innovation. However, since it does so through monetary rewards it is entirely possible that government policies make it easier to acquire money through non innovative or unproductive means. QE and low interest rates are a pretty good example of this. That money can be used to acquire competitors or simply stay alive for much longer.
Rewarding greed would indicate that the companies would be making money in some unwholesome way (e.g. selling formula milk to mothers in countries where there is no decent water, leading to the deaths of babies). Ditto concentration of wealth.
What I'm giving out about is the opposite, where money is thrown at these deeply unprofitable ideas which keep expanding on the basis of the greater-fool theory.
That's a really big departure from what capitalism used to mean, and I think it's worth calling this out.
> Who cares. That's where capitalism is now because letting it run rampant created and caused this.
So you're not engaging with my argument, and just spouting off anti-capitalistic talking points (which I would agree with, if they were any way germane to the points we're making here).
I'm not sure there's much point in engaging further with you. Have a great day :)
But if all businesses are run at a loss, the entire system will collapse, so the system requires some companies to be run profitably.
I still maintain that structurally unprofitable companies are an abberation caused by negative interest rates, and I don't think it would be recognised as capitalism by time travellers from the 70s.
>But if all businesses are run at a loss, the entire system will collapse, so the system requires some companies to be run profitably.
Not if all the businesses are monopolies. The concentration of wealth allow for an ever greater capture of markets as well as the government that would reign in their monopolistic behavior. This should be obvious with what just happened with Uber, who successfully bought legislation to defend their unprofitability but movement towards monopoly, and has large executive overlap with the former Obama/soon-to-be Biden administrations.
>I still maintain that structurally unprofitable companies are an abberation caused by negative interest rates, and I don't think it would be recognised as capitalism by time travellers from the 70s.
Maybe its not an "abberation," but fiscal policy put in place to further the wealth and power of existing Capital owners? It's also irrelevant in practical terms what people 50 years ago called something versus today. Countries, businesses, religions, ideologies etc both persist and change, regardless of whether they remain recognizable to anyone at a given point in time.
> Not if all the businesses are monopolies. The concentration of wealth allow for an ever greater capture of markets as well as the government that would reign in their monopolistic behavior. This should be obvious with what just happened with Uber, who successfully bought legislation to defend their unprofitability but movement towards monopoly, and has large executive overlap with the former Obama/soon-to-be Biden administrations.
Are you joking?
You seem to be making some kind of corruption argument around large companies, which I think is fair. That's not what I'm saying though.
I am saying that if company A earns $90 and spends $100, then the extra $10 must come from somewhere (normally further investment).
As a thought experiment, I noted that this would not work if every company spent 10% more than they earned, because where would the money come from? You seem to say that this doesn't happen because the businesses are monopolies.
Can you clarify your argument on this specific point further, as I really don't understand it?
The point of capitalism is that people with capital get to make decisions about what to do with it. They don't have to put it into things that make money, they just need control over it.
Yeah, structurally unprofitable companies are not capitalistic, as they do not facilitate the accumulation of capital.
There's a transfer of capital to service users and employees (and definitely executives), but this is dependent on the infusion of external capital (as the company does not produce enough capital to fund its own activities).
I feel like either I have gone crazy, or the world has.
In the context of this article and conversation, you are saying that companies that give away their product, for too low of a price, and too cheaply, in which consumers benefit too much is.... parasitic?
Giving things way to people for less than they are worth may not be good idea, but I don't think I would call that parasitic.
You make it sound like the companies who run this shit are penniless, they're not, they're making millions of dollars of actual cash. There's no charity going on here.
By force, eventually. Those daring to have their own interest in mind instead of the greater good should receive a healthy struggle session and their wealth confiscated. For all mankind!
Or its just a matter of not letting bad players to ruin all the game.
Too many greedy blood suckers will drain and kill the cow eventually.
The word here is balance to have a sustained long running system that can benefit the maximum number of people.
It doesn't need to be a false dichotomy between what it is now and stalinist Russia comunism.
Note: the blood suckers is not the whole of the capital market of course, they produce value. The problem is some players and some practices..
The article doesn't say that VCs shouldn't be self interested. Nowhere does it say that greed, for lack of a better word, is bad. The herd mentality of the VCs investing in WeWork wasn't about greed, or self interest. It was about Kool-Aid, a term the article does use.
The point of the article is that it is this Kool-Aid thinking which deforms actual capitalism.
"If you’ve ever ... peaked at the dash of your obnoxious neighbor’s new Tesla…you’ve used OSM."
1. peeked, not peaked
2. Teslas do not use OSM for the on-screen maps. They use Google maps. Tesla only uses OSM for the data regarding parking lot layouts for the automatic parking features, nothing else.
I've heard that claimed. But on several occasions tesla owners have found a problem with nav, found the error on OSM, fixed it, and 1-2 months later the Tesla picks up change. From what I can tell Tesla pays some 3rd party to help improve their maps, and apparently on of the data feeds the 3rd party uses is OSM.
I've always done my best to err on the side of "let's try not to add yet another level of complexity" and this strategy has yet to fail me.