Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067895

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

What's on the approved stack? I imagine .Net and Java/spring are the standard, right? anything else like php, python, go etc?

How can you possibly have this assessment without looking at the code/infra?

There are many things that affect cost beyond the visible features. The project isn't in a vacuum. It's interlocked with their other services infrastructure.

You can judge Google however you want, but they're not stupid or amateurs. These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

They've built the service and run it for many years for billions of people. A more realistic guess would be that for whatever reason, the price is higher than what's visible on the surface and they're not willing to pay it.

Related discussion (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998549

Discussion of the previous announcement in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719272

  1- Always longer than necessary with a lot of fluff

  2- Favor lists and hierarchy

I asked Gemini to "write an article about self hosting" and the output structure and content is eerily similar

Here is a side by side comparison: https://i.postimg.cc/kXXpWgnZ/why-it-look-like-LLM-generated...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40961790

Points: 30

# Comments: 23

Not OP, but they said the following in an answer to similar question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40940707

"The technology is extremely flexibile, off the top of my head:

* Education (Linux, Programming, Security, ...)

* Live docs for arbitrary languages and binary libraries

* Preservation of historical software and games

* Virtualization of legacy Windows enterprise apps.

* Dev environment for Web IDEs

Just a few examples, the list could go on for long"

I'm also reminded of Mike Tyson's quote: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face".

Things rarely go as planned, so you should favor following leads and taking advantage of opportunities, instead of sticking rigorously to some plan you put together when you were less experienced.

Unless there's evidence the original plan is still viable, oftentimes, being attached to it and ignoring what's the market is telling you is just your ego speaking.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914265

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

If anything that goes against the parent comment, how Apple has more revenue per engineer while not being a feature factory by any stretch

In any case, taking both of the comments combined kinda prove my point, that higher revenue can be attributed to many things completely outside how many products/features was shipped:

- Pricing strategy

- You can have a monopoly with a single shitty product

- You can be middle man/broker with no product to begin with

- You can be running a Ponzi scheme or committing fraud

So it doesn't make sense to use revenue (or revenue per team member) as a way to compare teams between different companies and furthermore possibly across completely separate markets and industry

You can have millions of dollars in revenue without producing anything, on the other hand, you can also provide a lot of services and products for free

This is like saying your evaluation of my property, back when it was in bad shape was wrong... because after renovating the entire thing and fixing its issues, I got a different price.

From the linked article:

> Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes

So, of course if you manage to change the input, you'll get a different output.

Today's Microsoft (WSL, Edge, Bing, Azure, VSCode, copilot, etc) is so different from 2007 you wouldn't even recognize it as the same company. Just like what Paul Graham has said they needed to change if they were to survive.

When Paul wrote this, the industry was witnessing a technological revolution across the board (smartphones, AWS, Google docs, etc) while Microsoft was drugged and lacking behind on all fronts. At the time, their latest product launch was probably Windows Vista.

It was a different company back then and it's such an amazing feat of Satya to manage to steer a ship of Microsoft's size.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40892259

Points: 193

# Comments: 132

Your comment was pretty harsh. Google X has been around for what? only 14 years? The number of projects they funded and the researchers they employed during that time frame is great initiative and admirable on its own.

A failure in what sense? It's their research arm.

It feels crazy to bash down what they're doing even if it led nowhere. I'd prefer the money goes toward funding "failed research" than sit in their bank accounts.

Do you feel the same way about NASA, CERN, scientific research in general? There are many areas that receive significant funding for decades and lead nowhere by the looks of it.

Are they the same people? The vast majority of users are consumers, they don't even think about these stuff, they only complain when the product degrade.

I don't see the privacy crowd who were conscious about their data and algorithmic feeds, are treating commercial LLMs products differently.

How do you know they're trying to sell you something without even reading the email?

Your question was "Do you read/answer cold outreaches then? Why?" which doesn't make much sense. For me, and I imagine the same applies for most people:

1. You read until you find a clue that its content is not of interestt. Usually the email subject doesn't say much.

2. You only reply if you need.

Cold outreach are genuine emails that covers colleagues, new clients, job opportunities, someone reaching out to collaborate, etc. How you deal with it depends on your profile and who you've given your email address to. Personally, I have many email addresses, for some I don't even check my inbox.

But that's inconsistent with the example you put forward. For the email to be interesting a human would need to research and approach every prospect independently, how many emails a day they can do? 5, 10, 20, 100?

It's simply not possible for a human to generate 100,000 personalized email by hand. That's the difference.

Do you only read emails from recognized addresses? No new communication whatsoever unless it's initiated by you?