Hacker News Reader

Comment by hughesjj | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: The Tailscale team is the highest concentration of leading network engineers from any company in the world today, at least when it comes to consumer products. If we ever get a true 'next gen' internet that removes the protocol cruft we've layered on over the years, I could see it coming out of them moreso anyone else.

View on HN

I'm a very happy Tailscale user and am impressed by its quality and reliability... But why is the team constantly put on the highest of pedestals here on HN? They seem like one of many groups of competent people making good software to me. Perhaps the answer is that they're so good that I vastly underestimate the complexity of the problem Ts solves?

Their devrel is incredible, and to be fair the UX of their product is really good and resembles magic to someone unfamiliar with wireguard.

HN falls for dev marketing really hard every time (see: vercel, stripe, etc)

they take a complex problem, AND a complex solution, and make it beautifully simple so /it just works/, in a way no other system has. The documentation is superb and frequently just makes sense when you do it.

Well that's certainly a hot take. While I have no doubt the Tailscale team has some talented minds, I am not so naive as to expect a truly reimagined Internet—i.e. one that puts privacy, anonymity in first place, and removes the need for Cloudflare-like MITM—to come out of a government or private company, especially one that's fueled by grow-fast venture capital money.

I'm talking more at the protocol level. My number 2 contender would be Google with spdy/quik, but that was 2009/early 2010s.

I'm probably biased because some tailscale employees gave me some of the best written explanation for the evolution of networking infra protocols I've seen, will dig it up from my comment history in a sec

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20170810

Reply on news.ycombinator.com