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Comment by shenberg | Hacker News Reader

Some example >1B companies off the top of my head: DataDog, Sentry, Snowflake, Okta, MongoDB

Isn't Dropbox the canonical HN example of a "stupid and obvious idea" that anybody could build for themselves and would never pay for?

Now with a 6bil market cap is seems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

(Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)

> (Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)

BrandonM doesn’t mind:

> I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070138

But dang does:

> my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281

It’s thoughtful context that I think everyone mentioning BrandonM and Dropbox should be familiar with.

> DataDog,

It's just grepping logs on steroids

> Sentry

Hooks on error handlers in JavaScript

> Snowflake

Anyone can just use parquet or DuckDB

>Okta

No digital sovereignty for those who can't manage users' passwords

> MongoDB

JSONB fields in Postgres, anyone?

Even his examples (Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber) are "hated and accused" mostly by pundits and activists. Their users and investors are overall rather happy with their services (all have healthy competition) and their employees can quit and work for somebody else at any moment.

It's almost like the people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives of a particular company/service come to different conclusions than the people who make money off the company or are directly marketed it.

> people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives

If only we could trust such big hearted people who selflessly donate their time and expertise for thinking and researching - without asking those pesky little questions like "what do they stand to gain? what hidden agenda do they have? what ideology dictates their value system? what axes to grind and biases do they harbor?"

I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.

>I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.

That seems like a wild statement to me. Just so I understand what you're saying. Are you saying you would trust Meta's statements on if their algorithms are harmful to youth/society over independent researchers because those researchers might have some hidden bias?

No, I am not saying I trust Meta's statements at all. I am just saying that I have ZERO trust in those "independent researchers".

I am old enough to remember when "researchers" and "experts" where warning us about the evils of violent FPS gaming, the whole panic over teens and kids playing Doom. The Columbine shooting. The end was nigh! Of course, it was all blown out of proportions...

If you ask any of those questions to people directly involved, the answer is the same for all 4: money

At least for meta, its employees, and its customers (advertisers), and its users, you can infer easily why they are involved. Researchers have other motivations like currying favor via an opinion or paper with a particular benefactor, or the tenure game, or 1000 other hidden things you cannot reason about without disclosure on their part.

PS I'm not a fan of Meta.

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