I have the same question. It’s hard to judge from the outside like this but there are Trump-ian displays of arrogance, disconnection and incompetence that seem at odds with his massive successes with SpaceX and Tesla in particular. He’s clearly book smart, but seems like a petulant, chronically insecure man-child in most areas from the accounts both public and insider. I find the incongruence strange.
Elon Musk isn't responsible for the success of his companies - they succeed in spite of him, because of the quality of the people who do the actual work, and their ability to manage him and keep him from doing to Tesla and SpaceX what he's doing to Twitter.
Unfortunately, modern American capitalism is obsessed with hero worship of CEOs and the myth of Elon Musk as a real life Tony Stark is just too compelling for people to shake off.
That's obviously false, because then it would be highly unlikely to have two highly successful companies (Tesla and SpaceX, not even counting PayPal) if it was just him being lucky with employees.
It’s a cheap, viable, vetted user acquisition model. For most startups it’s about the best CAC you can get without investing in channel development. Close enough to none of them are OSI open source, it’s all source available or open core, laying the cynicism bare.
There's really no need to do this, or to point out that some of the men (or women, or persons) were black or asian, non-heterosexual, had a physical or intellectual handicaps or any other particular attribute that I didn't specifically enumerate. It sort of implies malice or misogyny on my part, of which there is of course none. I could have said "people", but it's malicious to assume that by not having chosen that word that I somehow myself am a chauvinist.
Policing speech in this way is, in my opinion, detrimental to us all and to our ability to communicate our thoughts and have them interpreted charitably, where instead we might have to consider every possible negative interpretation, carefully tiptoe around those, and just perhaps not say anything at all.
Imperfect communication is better than none, and malicious interpretation stifles that.
It's impossible to become perfect, but I also disagree that saying "men" is necessarily wrong or "imperfect", much like saying "hey guys" to a group of people that includes women, it's just a figure of speech, not a political statement.
One of the many dangers is that instead of debating the merit of the core argument (that worthy people become wealthy), we sit here splitting hairs and nitpicking at the choices of individual words that are extremely tangential to the original argument.
Therefore, as I said, imperfect communication is better than none -- otherwise we'd never get to debate anything at all, and therefore can't learn and grow.
> but I also disagree that saying "men" is necessarily wrong or "imperfect"
I'm sure that you do.
> (that worthy people become wealthy),
Note that you used "people" and not "men". Almost like this is a more accurate depiction of the argument you believe you're making. So why say men in the first place? Maybe...a deeply ingrained bias?
> otherwise we'd never get to debate anything at all, and therefore can't learn and grow.
But...if you're committing to not learning and growing either way, by suggesting that opportunities for growth are "nitpicks" and "splitting hairs", you also can't learn and grow...
That's just it though, isn't it? I have to say "people" instead of "men" or I'll be argued with and attacked on a tangential subject instead of the substance of my argument about wealth and worth.
That means I might spend 15% of my time thinking about how I might possibly be misinterpreted instead of on the actual problem at hand.
It's overhead and expense that doesn't actually help anyone. It's just a veneer of pretending to help. Anyway I think we've covered the whole tangent now.
If you consider this interraction an "attack", I'm unsure how you're able to communicate with other humans at all. I've been very cordial, simply pointing out an alternative way of thinking.
> subject instead of the substance of my argument about wealth and worth.
If you'd like to talk only to yourself, maybe don't post on the internet? I'm sorry, but communicating with other people involves _actually communicating_. As in, they're able to respond to the things you write.
> That means I might spend 15% of my time thinking about how I might possibly be misinterpreted instead of on the actual problem at hand.
If it takes you that long to replace a single (to you) irrelevant word in a sentence, I apologize for having ruined so much of your day. It's really not that complicated.
> It's overhead and expense that doesn't actually help anyone.
Are you sure? It seems equally as likely that you're just demanding to behave however you want, regardless of other people's opinions.
To be clear I'm not trying to imply your participation is an attack, I just meant that in the general sense in the modern world it's something we have to consider, people overreact to everything.
I mean, you yourself think I am overreacting -- perhaps we all are, but whatever the case, it's definitely on many of our minds in many of our interactions, I think.
After all, when I tried to discuss wealth and human merit, at least 3 people (me and you and the original reply) got into a discussion about something totally unrelated: uninclusive word choices.
Maybe I should learn to say "people" instead of "men", maybe I should say "denylist" instead of "blacklist", maybe I should say "differently abled" instead of "disabled", but the list is very long, changes by the day, and is sometimes an extreme niche of offense that no-one is aware of.
At the end of the day, I can try, but people will still get offended by something, so I think the friendlier, more productive option is to assume that people have good intentions, which is what I think my original comment was:
> After all, when I tried to discuss wealth and human merit, at least 3 people (me and you and the original reply) got into a discussion about something totally unrelated: uninclusive word choices.
I suppose what I'm trying to impart, is that just because _you mean something_, doesn't mean that's what other people get, and saying "Well what they got isn't important because it's not what I meant" is just kind of...not really how communication with other people work? Previously you said you don't believe that saying things like "what's up guys" is a problem which, _you_ think that, but the people around you might not? And again, you're communicating with them, so demanding they accept your standard of communication is just kind of closed off.
> Maybe I should learn to say "people" instead of "men", maybe I should say "denylist" instead of "blacklist", maybe I should say "differently abled" instead of "disabled", but the list is very long, changes by the day, and is sometimes an extreme niche of offense that no-one is aware of.
Or maybe you can exist mostly-similarly to how you're currently existing, but instead of arguing with them and acting adversarial, simply acknowledging their point? This all happened as a result of a person saying "Women too". Would a "Totally." not have been a validating response? Does that type of behavior compromise your opinions too much?
The common trend seems to be, if a person points out some kind of language issue like we're experiencing now, the person that made the original comment kind of flies off the hyperbole-handle and assumes they must correct every possibly contentious word, when really it seems way less complicated than that?
> At the end of the day, I can try, but people will still get offended by something, so I think the friendlier, more productive option is to assume that people have good intentions, which is what I think my original comment was:
I will turn this comment back on you, and say that the person that said "Women too" may have also been being friendly, and your response opened the less-productive negative-intentioned path.
WEI sounds like another security theater play by Ad corp. When web first come out it is because it's sandbox that made it so attractive. The server doesn't need to know what client it is, as long as it is speaking http.
With intro of html5, (webgpu, webgl, web audio api), that sandbox has being slowly opened up.
That will be pretty much the same situation as on mobile where the third party rom developers and users are pretty much the only ones affected by design by this concept.
Who will have some trouble with this new concept on the web? Smaller browser maker, software developers and crawlers from competitors
Not a single scammer or ad fraud will be affected, same as on mobile.
Easy to see why Google wants that, its attacking the competition
No it doesn’t. Anyone can take AGPL code and wrap it up as a SaaS. AGPL forces you to publish changes even as a SaaS which GPL does not. But that doesn’t close the AWS problem that Elastic and others faced.
The "loophole" is that you can modify and use the software without contributing back your changes. This has bad economics because then someone can take the work you've done, add 10% more effort to make it 10% better, and outcompete anyone else because their thing is 10% better than the free thing even though the original authors did 90% of the work and are still carrying most of the maintenance burden.
People using free software for free is not a loophole.
They’ll consort with an inner circle of “industry” accomplices to “address concerns”, keeping everyone out while covering the “we consulted widely” angle. This will get pushed through under cover of darkness with enough of a fig leaf of due process to plausible deny anything other than good intent.
>bears repeating slowly and often to people in any kind of power.
They don't care. And they aren't paid to care. That's the issue. If they can make $100m profit at the cost of being fined $10m and some financially useless metric like environmental impact, that's still $90m profit and makes the shareholders happy. It's not incompetence, it's a calculated risk.
At this point the question should shift more to making those sharehoolders care about this stuff so they can tank companies for being incompetent. But they also have short sighted trigger hairs, and it's easy for them to pull out either way.
This has got me wondering: what if all publicly listed companies are required to have an ethics officer whose job is to point out ethical concerns regarding management decisions (whereas management is usually only concerned about legal compliance, no more, no less)? The recommendations of the ethics officer are non-binding -- i.e. management is free to ignore them, but they do so at their peril: if an issue arises and management is found to have ignored the recommendations, then they are accountable. If the ethics officer fails to raise the concern, then they are accountable. What form that accountability takes, is something I haven't thought about.
The “EU bad” line gets rolled out so often on HN it has become its own truth. “Everyone knows” that the EU tech industry is getting strangled by its technocratic regulators and that’s why the EU fails at tech har har look at these idiots. Etc.
> Where are their datacenter scale computing companies
There are loads. OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
> How many decades did it take for that to arrive there?
Less time than the US. We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting Europe is better than the US. Just stating that this “innovation could only happen in the US” meme is bullshit.
> It will be the same story with AI.
I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe. And my company is hardly an isolated case.
> European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
> We also have, in general, faster internet at cheaper prices and better rural connectivity too.
What country are you talking about? Definitely not Germany.
> America might have Silicon Valley but it’s hardly the only tech hub in the world.
Berlin startup scene is a joke compared to the Silicon Valley though. Cambridge, London, Zürich, maybe Munich I would agree to a certain degree - but not Berlin. The rule of thumb is that it's better outside of EU though.
OVH is a hosting company. I am not talking about hosting. Where are the companies with knowledge on how to deploy data center scale compute jobs? Where are the pioneers in this?
That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability. This is the price. Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products. I hope for your sake that I am wrong.
> That knowledge exists now in Europe, but there was easily a lost decade in terms of capability.
You keep saying this but I’m not seeing any evidence it’s true. There have always been plenty of companies in Europe that have had data centre scale compute too (plus managing a data centre requires that level of understanding as well so I don’t agree with you dismissing OVH.
Plus you keep saying it’s taken a decade for the EU to catch up and on those timescales it would put things before GDPR et al. Thus EU legislation would have no impact even if your point was true.
> Similar will happen in AI and you will be stuck relying on American products.
At risk of sounding repetitive: I work for a European AI firm.
We actually have a lot of American clients — so the exact inverse of the point you’re making.
> Although Europe has many high-performing companies, in aggregate European companies underperform relative to those in other major regions: they are growing more slowly, creating lower returns, and investing less in R&D than their US counterparts.
which is exactly what I’ve been saying. There are plenty of high performing companies in Europe, we just aren’t as aggressive in chasing growth for growths sake.
If you want to ask why that is, then I’d argue it’s more a cultural thing than it is to do with legislation.
Should that culture change? Personally I’d rather it didn’t. Personally I think America needs to change to become more customer focused because a lot of American businesses are really shitty to deal with.
I get this point will be an unpopular opinion on a VC forum like HN. But it just goes to demonstrate that the situation isn’t so black and white as you’ve been making out.
> OVH and BT for example. Both of which predate AWS and GCP.
How is this not an own goal? These companies had a head start and they still lost. Not by a little, but by such a staggering margin that AWS does two OOMs more revenue.
> I literally just said I work for an AI tech company in Europe.
The argument is not ”there are no AI companies in Europe.” The argument is ”there are no competitive AI companies in Europe.” The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
What are these European tech companies that are competitive with Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, etc? I’d like to learn more.
> You do realise that London, Berlin and other European tech hubs have their fair share of talented engineers who have moved to that country for work too?
A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
> The only one I can think of is DeepMind, and they are A) English (no longer EU) and B) were acquired by Google ten years ago.
England was in the EU 10 years ago, EU legislations were carried over to English law after “Brexit” and the fact that they were good enough to be bought by Google also demonstrates that European companies can be seen as a threat.
> A lot of them work for subsidiaries of American companies.
And a lot of them don’t. I had my worked for a single American subsidiary in my 20 years of experience in Europe. Same is true for a lot of my friends too.
I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
> They’re hugely successful corporations. Saying they’ve “lost” is a tad ridiculous.
Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?
> Europe is also a hotspot of AI research
This is absolutely true. Amsterdam for example produces outstanding ML research. But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies!
> I really do get fed up with how some Americans believe it’s impossible that any other country could be successful.
For what it’s worth, I live in northern Europe. As you point out, European universities are great. They are an AI research hotbed and they produce highly capable undergrads. But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
> Let’s quantify it so it’s not ridiculous. Since getting their head start, they have ”lost” about 90% of total market share to American companies who are doing a better job. And this is before the new transfer framework that cane out this month. What is the value prop of OVH without regulatory capture?
This is a different argument to the one originally pitched though. And you cannot just assume the reason OVH hadn’t exploded like AWS did was due to EU regulation.
> But where do their freshly minted phds go? American companies
Again, I work for a European AI tech firm.
> But this clearly isn’t translating into world class tech companies, and we should ask ourselves why.
I think it is. I just think European tech firms are generally happier to grow organically. I think it’s more a case of different cultures. America is all about growth above all else. Whereas Europe is often more about user experience. European firms are often less aggressive at advertising outside of Europe too (maybe that’s a language barrier?)
I do honestly think the European tech market is healthy. It’s just different to the US market. The problem is the American school of capitalism is all about market dominance whereas European companies seem a little less obsessed with that. But that doesn’t mean Europe isn’t doing some exceedingly good work.
As a European, I value the fact that we have such a vibrant ecosystem.
>European developer brain drain will continue with the brightest minds coming to America.
No need to deal with all the US emigration issues and challenges. US big-tech already have offices in Europe where European devs, scientists and researchers contribute to the prosperity of the US tech sector because they get paid more than at EU companies, while still getting to enjoy the benefits of living in Europe vs the US.
What's your point? There are places in California more expensive than most of Europe, and there are places in Europe which is more expensive than most of California.
What I said was that if you take two cities which have same cost of living, the salary is like 2-3x higher in US.
I thought my point was pretty clear: there isn’t two cities with the same cost of living AND where the US still pays 2-3x higher in the US.
Every time this conversation comes up on HN, the only examples people can cite is when remote working is taken into account. Which isn’t a fair comparison at all.
It'll probably be "good enough" for most industry usecases ;) And you can run it offline and on-prem, which is a big deal to the many companies who DO NOT want their internal data leaking to OpenAI.
OVH has roughly 15% of the revenue that Google Cloud makes in Europe. So I'd put them at a similar size to Oracle Cloud, but clearly larger than DigitalOcean.
I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR. It is only praised by the Eurocrats themselves or the whole pack of NGOs/think tanks who lives off EU funding. As a guy with a startup I naturally fear this will be as counterproductive as GDPR or the decades of lawsuits against various foreign tech corporations. The fundamental problem is however with the political class.
> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR
Then I suspect you haven't spoken to anyone technical. Every single person in my company on the dev team (myself included) is extremely pro GDPR, not the least because it provides us safety from leeches that would try to impose some horrid user-violating tracking in the app we make.
The greedy suit wants us to track every millimeter of the user's mouse on the page? Nope, thanks, better luck next time!
> As a guy with a startup...
If your startup can't exist without hoovering infinite user data in perpetuity, then your startup shouldn't exist.
I agree. I just wish there would be a browser setting where you could say "only ever functional cookies" and never see a cookie banner again. But I guess that would need to be forced on companies via another legislation. The free marked doesn't do such a user friendly thing.
I want it to be standardized and guaranteed that it works with every website and every browsers. E.g. if something like the `DNT: 1` header is set don't even show me a consent banner, only give me functional cookies. And a law that requires websites to do that. Then there is no need for an add-on that constantly has to play cat and mouse with all websites and that only is available for certain browsers.
The problem is that many European startups don't exist because potential founders don't want to have to deal with GDPR when they could focus on building a good product first.
And yes, tracking what users focus on is very relevant to building a good product. But that kind of entrepreneurial mindset is largely absent in Europe - my guess is most Europeans with such a mindset eventually go to America, whether they were born in 1850 or 1985.
> ...when they could focus on building a good product first
So not tracking every single molecule of detail about your users is incompatible with building a good product?
If being entrepreneurial means that I have to violate my user's privacy then I'd rather not be an entrepreneur, thanks. And again, if your business can't survive without being invasive and malicious to your users, then your business shouldn't exist. You won't see me or anyone else reasonable weeping about the dissolution of such entities, either.
If you’re building B2B software, It’s not that you can’t track but rather that you need to spend time building data retention infrastructure before customers would even consider trialing your solution.
There are no shortage of European startups and GDPR is really doesn’t prohibit a startup…unless your business model is trading personal data. And if it is, then you deserve to be regulated.
One press announcement from 5 years ago isn’t proof. Companies shutdown all the time and cite reasons beyond “our business model just wasn’t profitable”. Many other companies are just Trojan horses for data harvesting — and if those get shut down then good riddance because they’re exactly who GDPR was intended to protect us from.
If GDPR was really that problematic then it would be all over the news instead of a few nationalists outside of EU arguing about hypotheticals on random message boards.
> I haven't spoken to a single technical person in Europe who doesn't despise the GDPR.
I'd like to know those people, especially if their job is connected in any way to the practices the GDPR is fighting against, because, although it may have been created better, I can't find a single reason why ordinary honest people should believe the GDPR shouldn't exist.
I am a technical person living in EU and changed my mind about GDPR and the upcoming laws like AI Act and CRA, now thinking it is embarrassingly stupid trying to achieve any means of personal privacy that way.
Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.
How so? GDPR has done so much for personal privacy, I can't see why you would think it's stupid. It's been a pain to implement when it was introduced, sure, but since then it's pretty much become routine and privacy has become a key value of nearly all (EU) tech companies.
