I think the main point is in the closing of the article; that valuations of companies are driven up by OpenAI spent commitments, and that those companies combined now would represent 40% of S&P 500.
You’re right, this is not accounting debt.
I don’t think OpenAI’s spending commitments alone are the problem, but OpenAI imploding will have a cascading effect and a realization check for everyone in the industry. What are the real prices for profitability and are businesses and consumers willing to pay for that, will we need ads, do we need an integrated product offerings to amortize the cost instead of standalone chat, etc. Also, S&P 500 going down by 10-20% will have a real impact on the real economy. If it happens.
If the bubble bursts then lots of investors will discover that they're poorer than they thought. I think the big tech firms will come out of it okay, though, due to holding lots of cash and little debt. They have other sources of income.
But apparently there are ways to keep the debt used to build data centers off the books? What happens if the data centers are no longer needed? I can't tell if that's an accounting fiction (the tech company has to buy the data centers anyway) or if the tech company can say "never mind, I don't need any more datacenters" and bondholders lose their money.
And these programs, compiled in the ninetees, still run today on modern Windows with a functional UI. Microsoft, Borland and others then built developer tools and platforms to last. I think that cross-platform (including web) and touch changed the game because it wasn’t a simple and controlled ecosystem anymore. All of Microsoft’s successors to Win32 seem to be replaced sooner or later by something else, even in the Windows ecosystem, with Win32 still being supported. Let alone the web frameworks.
I also feel like this created a kind of positivity at the time rarely experienced today. I remember these Delphi conferences I used to go to as a teenager with my dad with many of the names Marco mentioned in his acknowledgments present, including himself. It was really rapid application development (RAD) without many of the stuff that parent mentions that brings so much struggle today (frontend) software development. People were having fun building software.
I’m happy to see that most of these names still seem to be able to make a living off Delphi. There’s probably still a lot of critical Windows enterprise software being maintained that needs consulting and support. Including my dad’s software he wrote 30 years ago which is still being maintained and used daily.
I worked for a company, back in 2007, who had two products, one written in C++ and WxWidgets, and another written in Delphi. The Delphi product was an online publishing platform, running on IIS. They started hiring like crazy to create a new Java based platform, they must have spend millions only to scrap the whole thing a year or two in. I left just as that was happening, as did many others. Nobody wanted to go from working on the new hotness to working on the ageing Delphi platform. I think they kept it running for another five years or so, then pivoted to an online ad platform and then bankruptcy.
For online I don't think Borland, or whoever owned Delhi back then, really had the resources to keep up with everything else. Even today it's pretty expensive to buy the tooling from Embarcadero to keep projects alive, but probably cheaper and less risky that porting to another language.
This is not entirely accurate. LoRa is a patented RF technology owned by Semtech. LoRaWAN is a standard maintained by the LoRa Alliance (which is not very different from other standards and marketing bodies). The Things Network (founded by @wienke and myself) is a developer community around LoRaWAN and a free to use cloud service intended for R&D and non-commercial use cases.
CTO & co-founder of The Things Network here! I've been working with LoRa for over eight years now, and I keep getting surprised by measurements like this. What started off as "line of sight works" went to a successful "LoRa moon bounce" [0] and now a sea level reception over 830 miles.
So, any physics people here care to comment how this works? Is this pure atmospheric refraction or is there something else?
To some extent it's statistics. Send enough messages and the odds are one will eventually get though.
> providing a standardized and objective measure of the technology's capabilities
Not really. The environment is still variable. A short message could have bounced off some random short duration reflector somewhere (aeroplane, meteor, lightning, ...) or have been refracted by some short term effect. Standardised and objective is an anechoic chamber or a cabled in attenuators/channel simulator.
Yes, this is an outlier and it took around 8 years for this to be emerge and be detected by the community run TTN mapper initiative. The main fun thing about this is more that it shows how cool it is to have a global community network where we enjoy sending messages for the sake of it just to learn technology. Like kids with 2 cans and a string between them.
This seems bizarre to me, as this isn't astroturfing at all - it's a marketing post on the official company blog! There's no suggestion whatsoever that this is coming from raw grassroots enthusiasm. This is clearly marketing content directly from the business itself.
To be clear, that's fine! This is definitely interesting content, and companies with genuinely interesting things to share should share them directly, that's great. I can't speak for the wikipedia behaviour, but I think complaining about this post is unreasonable.
Posted to HN, by an account that isn't clearly affiliated with the content, most likely upvotes by a bunch of company people, and from a company that has a history of using public resources like marketing channels.
As for whether or not this is fine: yes, it's fine. "Show HN: We reached a new RF distance record with LoRa" from an account associated with the company.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
"Plain obvious" is an argument that it's not astroturfing.
It's a link to a blog on the company site, linked by someone whose profile clearly discloses they're CEO of the company. (though based on comments below, the disclosure in profile might be an hour more recent than the post itself).
Personally, I find this interesting, on-topic, and (after the profile edit, if any) totally fine.
So, in your opinion plain obvious astroturfing can never be astroturfing?
It's obvious to me because (1) I'm aware of the company, (2) know that there have been issues with their WP entries in the past (and still are, they are essentially marketing copy), and finally (3) because it just so happens that the company is Dutch and I keep an eye on the local eco-system. But it probably wasn't that obvious to you.
These guys have nice tech, but they are working the web in a way that doesn't sit right with me. If you're ok with this then no problem, let's see how you feel when HN and WP are
overrun by advertising that masquerades as organic postings.
Correct. I don't think the CEO of Y can ever say "I'm the CEO of Y and here's a link to a blog on Y company website about something related to Y company that I think is worth sharing here" and have it be astro-turfing for Y. It might be advertising or even spamming. It might become too frequent or annoying or otherwise negative.
I follow TTN (and Helium), have a TTN gateway plugged in, and a dozen or so LoRa dev boards sitting around (two are within reach, albeit buried under some dust of recent disuse).
I find the LoRa tech interesting in general and a new RF distance record specifically interesting, whether it's on the TTN blog, the Helium site, on an Andreas Spiess video, or elsewhere. It sounds like you have some relevant history with the company's behavior that is shaping your opinion of their action here. We perceive their action here differently as a result.
But that's the point: they didn't say they were CEO of Y. If you didn't happen to know the name of the CEO and match that to the HN handle there is absolutely nothing either on that page, nor was there in the CEO's HN bio to advise you of those facts.
The submitter is a low karma anonymous account that just so happens to match the last name of the CEO of the company, so it isn't disclosed. Also this shot up on the 'new' page suggesting more than one company vote, this isn't the first time this happens with that particular domain either.
Similar stuff is happening on Wikipedia, read the talk page there (and the LoRa page) to see what I'm getting at.
Are comments really the best place to hash this out?
Why not just flag and move on.
People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.
Hell, I used to have a pretty comprehensive bio, until I replaced it with an icloud relay email because random internet people would look me up outside HN and try to dig up stuff to use as ammo in response to comments I posted that they disagreed with.
HN can be a nasty place. I don't fault anyone for hiding their identity.
> People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.
Companies aren't people. That's one of those things I just don't subscribe to. If you are the CEO of a company and you are engaging in what can only be termed as marketing activities, effectively advertising your company I think you should be up front about that. Otherwise you can no longer see the difference between organic interest in a technology and marketing push, which are two entirely different things.
> Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.
Not that I'm aware of, but their WP talk page is pretty clear about them abusing WP for marketing purposes and that doesn't give them the benefit of the doubt with me when interacting with HN in this way, besides that the initial votes were so fast that I doubt that it was organic. But when dang wakes up I'm sure he'll be able to rule that out or confirm it. For all I know it is all legit but it certainly looked weird. Also note how the CTO nicely disclosed who he was but the CEO did not well after joining the thread until prompted to do so. Which makes me suspect this is a bit more organized than it may seem at first glance, but then again, that's not my call to make.
If he had used another "anonymous" name I might've agree that it could border astro-turfing but if your handled matches your last-name it's probably more of an over-eager CEO that thinks the world revolves around his ideas and interests (Being the company at the moment), so I'd rather put it in the spammy-behaviour box (But that seems accepted to a certain extent here still for obvious reasons).
It's the combination of company URL, posted by a company person, commented on by another company person pushing questions (i.e. generate engagement) that seemed weird, and feels orchestrated.
It's well possible that this was really an innocent accident, but it would have looked better if something like this engagement post was posted by the same account as the original link.
If the content is good and nobody is hiding their affiliation with it then the correct word is just "posting". Otherwise it might fit within one of the categories you mentioned.
I agree that it would be better if they were up front with their affiliation, but hiding it (astroturfing) is not the same as not divulging.
I think I don't know 99% of the CEOs posting here, and I also don't need to? In the end similarly as any other employee posting for his company, and disclosure in the post is just fine? Don't get it.
HN is weird in that there is a format for that, which, as a relatively new entrant you may not be aware of, but that's what 'Show HN' is for, so that you know that whoever is posting something is associated with the article. Otherwise you will get to the point where HN is just another advertising medium, only with the ads not labelled as ads.
Is that written somewhere? Maybe just different understandings and expectations.. but for me "Show HN" is about here is my work/project I'm proud of, want to share with the rest of the world, want to have it discussed. For a normal news, even if you are the author of submitting, not sure if that's necessary. "Show HN" is imo not the anti-astroturfing disclosure, and for my expectations I would actually be a bit surprised and sad if a "Show HN" here would have lead me to just this little announcement, and maybe even downvote it :)
Yes, that's written somewhere but I'm not going to quite from private correspondence. I was recently corrected when I mentioned that Show HN is for projects rather than for companies and apparently it is for companies as well. As you can see by clicking the 'Show' link at the top of the page.
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread
Feels like it fits exactly my understanding? Not company vs person/project, but press release/announcement vs something to play with, something easily accessible and tryable, detailed?? And it goes much further that it must be something like this.. and no mention at all that this is the necessary disclosure if this is your article, newsletter or similar.... this one here definitely not a "Show HN"!
You’re right, this is not accounting debt.
I don’t think OpenAI’s spending commitments alone are the problem, but OpenAI imploding will have a cascading effect and a realization check for everyone in the industry. What are the real prices for profitability and are businesses and consumers willing to pay for that, will we need ads, do we need an integrated product offerings to amortize the cost instead of standalone chat, etc. Also, S&P 500 going down by 10-20% will have a real impact on the real economy. If it happens.
I don’t think this should have been flagged.