I love Hacker News, where a random person can tell a company their $2 billion plan on infrastructure is "a really bad move" with authority
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.
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.
>"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.
(observation based on the fluidity of their app)
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?"
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.
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 could be wrong about this, of course.
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.
The days of needing massive ops teams to run on owned and colocated hardware are long gone.
It's an excellent argument as to why I will not be purchasing this stock.
- GCP will always have a margin that high
- Snapchat is paying the advertised rate
- They can find the requisite talent in a reasonable timeframe
Surely they don't.
>What if snap comes out with a statement saying Gcp sucks and they're moving to aws?
Then we question why Snap committed billions of dollars to infrastructure that "sucks", and wonder why they couldn't figure it out, but Google could.
You think people will take Snap more seriously than Google 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.
What about the cost of writing the software services that you could pay Google Cloud to use?
How much would it cost to write your own Compute Engine, or Datastore, or Pubsub, or Bigquery?
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.
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.
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 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. :)