Difference is that a comment that simply states "bad move" is voted down in short order. This comment makes a cogent point about scales and infrastructure. This might be valuable. I love Hacker News too, just without the snark.
How about a HN reader who is taking part in a discussion? They offered their view and why they believe that. Nowhere did they they claim "authority." Unlike your snide commentary they are actually contributing to the conversation.
Yes, the OP does claim authority, by stating his opinion as a plain fact, without knowing anything about it other than the publicly available information, and at the same time labeling a company that has raised 2.6 billion and has 100+ employees as complete idiots.
Good discussion would have ensued after a statement like "I wonder why they don't build out their own infrastructure because at this scale it is usually cheaper to...".
I could imagine that with this big a deal, they could get rate reductions that get the cost down to a comparable level to building out your own datacenters (at least 2) and hiring qualified ops people.
It might very well be a bad move, but you really can't say unless you know more.
Would it be better for everyone to preface their comments with "This is only my opinion but..."? Making a statement in a comment implies speaking your opinion, unless you start making strong claims to fact or citing sources. We don't need the extra linguistic clutter of framing every statement as a matter of opinion.
>"This sounds like a really bad move on their part and they ..."
That's hardly a "factual" statement.
>"Good discussion would have ensued after a statement like "I wonder why they don't build"
Do we really need to preface our comments with personal opinion disclaimers? When someone says "it sounds like", it seems pretty clear that they are admitting they don't know all the details, so how can what follows that phrase imply authority? That's absurd.
Especially as a fellow iOS dev, there's a few UI things I'd like to reverse engineer. Seems like every year they introduce something useful or cool-looking and I think, "Wait, how did they pull that off?"
That doesn't mean anything, though. "Some people who do X also do Y" does not imply that "people who do Y are qualified to comment on X."
For example: Elon Musk is a Twitter user. I too am a Twitter user. So's Kylie Jenner, Donald Trump, and random spambots. Using the same service does not mean they're equally qualified to speak with authority about the same things.
Correct. That's why I said "to be fair". I'm saying the playing field is quite level, so we shouldn't judge a comment on whether we recognize their username, but rather on quality of content.
> we shouldn't judge a comment on whether we recognize their username, but rather on quality of content
Ah right, I think I see the nature of our disagreement / misunderstanding. I totally agree with you on the general principle that quality of content should be allowed to stand on its own.
However, I believe that there are things that are context-specific things that the men and women in the arena will face. And these are things that those of us in the stands, however thoughtful and discerning, will never be able to appreciate them, because we simply do not know. (For a great read about this, check out Daniel Ellsberg's message to Henry Kissinger, on the reality of having access to top secret information: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber...)
So for example. It seems obvious to me that the top comment is sensible and correct. Snap's CTO or whoever else made that decision is surely very familiar with the costs of being dependent on something like Google. So if they decide to do it anyway, I'm of the opinion that they're quite likely to have done it because of concerns that I am not able to appreciate, because I am not in their context.
Of course, there's a non-zero chance that Snap is making stupid decisions. But I think it's far likelier that they're making decisions that SEEM stupid to a 3rd party, but make perfect sense once you appreciate their context.
I don't think you're wrong, but I'd like to point out something. Armchairing decisions like this is a wonderful learning tool. Not only does it give people the opportunity to mentally work through issues that most of us will never face in our careers, but it's a wonderful opportunity to practice diplomatic, yet persuasive writing.
You're right, we don't know everything that has gone into a decision, but that's part of the value of an exercise like this. Being able to debate about something, remain civil and deal with specific arguments is an incredibly valuable skill that only gets more valuable as you age.
That random person is right. One can run a DC at scale of 50 racks at least 20% cheaper than GCP. That's $80M a year to hire 20 smart people at $2M a year and 200 reasonably smart people at $200k per year. Snap will vanish like their pictures.
I think you're very conservative on that estimate. We run an infrastructure on dedicated leased hardware (Rackspace). Our infrastructure costs are a fraction of what the equivalent public cloud footprint costs. With technologies like Kubernetes and CoreOS, our private cloud practically runs itself. We focus on apps and the developer pipeline, much like we would do if we were on GCP/GKE. We have approximately 60 dedicated servers. We're almost at the scale where it makes sense to leave leased baremetal for colocation. For a company like Snap, it's hard to believe that they couldn't save a few hundred million by building their own footprint in leased datacenter space.
The days of needing massive ops teams to run on owned and colocated hardware are long gone.
For a company that has always been handed (basically free) money at obscene valuations, why would you assume they care about two billion? Maybe it's just as simple as that?
It's an excellent argument as to why I will not be purchasing this stock.
Bingo. They aren't paying advertised rates. Google will have margin but not as much as usual. Snap also has google by the balls here. What if snap comes out with a statement saying Gcp sucks and they're moving to aws?
Yes, I do think Google's biggest customer leaving their platform vocally would be more impactful than Google promoting/defending itself.
If Snap threatened to leave I'd wager that even the CEO of Google would get involved to keep their biggest cloud customer. Snap's revenue and brand name have enormous value to Google. There simply aren't that many $2 billion dollar cloud customers right now.
without knowing what's in the contract there is at least one way I can think. Make a statement saying all new workloads are being deployed elsewhere. Lots of ways to play the game.
Large companies aren't always right, but they're not always wrong either.
Snap has competent engineering execs that have built a very strong company. I would have a hard time believing that they haven't put way more thought into this than OP.
I don't think anyone is assuming they can't be wrong. I think it's more that the post said this was a bad move "with authority" when you don't have all the information unless you actually were involved with that decision.
It might be a bad move still but we don't have all the information necessary so it's strange to just assume we know better.
Completely wrong way to think about it. In fact, those companies are cases of fraud and lying, and we generally do not assume companies lie. When Google releases their quarterly earnings, we assume the numbers are correct, unless there is evidence to believe it's fraudulent.
Bear Stearns didn't fail due to fraud, it failed due to not adequately tracking and assessing the risk of its assets. It is worth noting that there have been serious allegations made a few weeks ago against Snap that they are lying on the S-1.
You comment would be stronger if you removed the snark and actually refuted the parent's points. If you want to refute the points refute them, but this kind of comment adds nothing to the discussion.
The parent made some good points about scale and infrastructure. I've worked with infrastructure on many projects and I can't come up with a coherent argument why any of the parent's points are wrong. Can you?
I think asking him to refute points gets to the heart of the issue -- in an environment where nobody has enough information to speak authoritatively on a subject, the people who are willing to do so anyways are advantaged. (Think about the qualifications or knowledge that one would have to have to make an informed assessment of this.) This is bad for productive discussion.
I agree that empty snark is usually unproductive, but in this case, I think there's a useful point being made. Still, always best to rephrase into non-snark. :)