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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal. Don't really care that they didn't hit the ambitious goal of providing 300+, it is already more than 15x better than the next best option available for me.

T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.

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Yeah there's a pretty common routine of SpaceX & Tesla having some of the best results in the world for what they are trying to accomplish AND being much worse than what was promised.

And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

> he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers.

Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.

How many startups start by telling investors, employees and customers, "We're going to fail"? They know the odds are that's going to happen. Are they pathological liars?

No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.

I think plenty of entrepreneurs emphasize that they are scrappy underdogs, that it’s a long shot, and that it’s going to take hard work. That’s you know, the optimistic side of the truth that they’re going to fail. I’m sure Musk has said things like this. He’s also just lied about stuff. He’s remarkably careless about what he says/tweets for a CEO. Might have something to do with his drug use, who knows.

Careless? Oh yeah. A bit of filtering would improve the public's perception of him. But when you've gotten to where you are because of who you've always been *and* it's worked out well, very well, there's simply no incentive to change. At some point it's simply unreasonable for anyone to expect it to happen.

There is a huge amount of space between saying that "We're going to fail" and promising something will be done in "6 months".

> Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident

The real world describing this is delusional. Which I don't think he is (or was at that point anyway).

I'm not seeing that space. In fact, given what we know about startups, "in 6 months" has better odds of happening than pitching and ignoring the high risk (i.e., failure is inevitable).

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, simply asking you to show me the space you speak of.

> I'm not seeing that space.

Really? You don't see anything between "we're certain to fail" and "were going to accomplish this thing (even though we haven't got the slightest clue how) in X months"? Would you feel differently about it if Musk said they'll do it in 3 weeks? Because I don't, besides "6 months" being slightly easier to believe.

No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do things, and it’s integral to the task of building cool shit. It’s simply not lying. It may look that way to those on the outside, and you can say it’s irresponsible not to recalibrate, but even the adjusted estimates are optimistically recalibrated. The estimating well is poisoned by vision. Lying is something very different.

1) It's not just engineers and software developers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy#Empirical_evi...

2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.

Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter

> No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do

He's not one though. He's a business executive, so someone who in theory who would have the job to reconcile those lofty dreams with reality.

However, I'd bet quite a bit that the actual engineers and software developers were that optimistic and certainly didn't believe they could achieve FSD in 6 months (they'd be horrible incompetent engineers if they actually believed that).

> it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths

It definitely does, although I don't understand why.

One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?

To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?

It's pretty obvious why it's such a big deal recently.

> It definitely does, although I don't understand why.

Maybe because it's a kind of lying, and people who do it on a regular basis are untrustworthy people?

> JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts.

Remember that he didn't phrase it as "we will do this", he phrased it as "this is our goal". He referred to it as a goal we're choosing, not as an inevitability.

Musk isn't goal-setting, he's making promises. The difference between the two is critical. One is being a leader, the other is being a liar.

If that's lying, then the c-suite of every large auto manufacturer does it on a fairly regular basis.

In general, they don't seem to get as much negative attention in the media, and I'm guessing that's because they pay a fair bit for advertising.

I’m not familiar with this, what are you referring to?

General Motors, a company that advertised how safe their vehicles were, knowing about faulty ignition switches in their products but only deciding to perform a recall 10 years after they became aware of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_swit...

Almost every manufacturer's claims about EV production, range, etc.

Almost every manufacturer's claims about how hard and expensive it would be to add different safety features and/or fuel efficiency improvements.

Except Musk was goal-setting, and there's literally a comment upthread that responds to this factual correction by stating that published goals need to be held to the same standards as promises. Can't win against critics willing to bend reality and forgo consistency of beliefs...

You don’t think there was any consultation between JFK and NASA before he gave that speech?

A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.

Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.

JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.

I think there are some lines you shouldn't cross. Like having people pre-pay a bunch of money for FSD, claiming it's going to be ready in a certain amount of time, but wildly missing that deadline and not offering to refund people's money.

And certainly there's a "pile on" element as well. Musk is, to put it mildly, a controversial character in general. It's easier to take someone you already don't like, and criticize them more harshly for other faults than you would for someone (like JFK, perhaps) that you otherwise generally like. Maybe that's not fair, but it seems pretty human-nature-y.

Another point: is there a way to make bold forecasts in order to motivate your employees, without making it feel like a promise to your customers? If so, Musk generally fails at that.

Perhaps, but he does deliver. As a rural internet customer who has been told for a decade now that "fiber is coming to our area" by the local telco, I am more than happy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as one of the cleanest players in a filthy industry full of lies and graft.

For the record, I am ecstatic with my Starlink service, no bad taste whatsoever. I upgraded from a rural wireless broadband service that gave me peaks of 10Mbit, for pretty nearly the same price.

I don't know who these ungrateful people are with the bad taste in their mouths? Starlink is the only game in town for me at this point for broadband: my only other option is DSL from Centurylink at 3Mb/.5Mb - they've had 30 years to improve service here and hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies, and they haven't done it. The nearest T-Mobile signal is about 7 miles away. I for one, am grateful.

However if Starlink can't compete with mobile broadband in medium (and sometimes even lower than that) density areas they don't really have much of a market. While there are certainly quite a few people in the developed world living in remote areas who don't have any better options for > 50/5 Mbps besides Starlink are there really enough of them to justify such a massive investment?

> I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal.

Your anecdotal experience is not a refuting of statistical data from the overall population of users. Starlink consistently does not provide that level of service to a large swath of its users.

Yeah, the median is about 65 Mbps. That is still more than 6-10 times better than what a lot of rural areas are limited to.

T-Mobile Home Internet launched in April 2021, not 30 years ago

That's just a brand name of their 5G service. They have been providing hot spots for close to two decades. Their customer base goes back about 3 decades (easier to upsell your existing clients on a 5G hot spot than start from scratch to build a customer base like Starlink had to), and Sprint's (whom they acquired/merged with, and gained a lot of valuable wireless spectrum from) customer base goes back much further than that.

LTE hotspots have not been a viable option since..well, basically any time. They have extremely high costs vs the amount of data you get. I guess it's better than absolutely nothing and may be manageable if you don't stream video, but it's not considered home broadband for a good reason

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