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If the secrecy wore him down, why is he moving to Tesla which is equally secretive? I'm not convinced by this argument.
by pilif 10y ago
If the secrecy wore him down, why is he moving to Tesla which is equally secretive? I'm not convinced by this argument.
- pcurve 10y agoIt's not. the linked BI article speculates on other possible reasons.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>why is he moving to Tesla which is equally secretive? In what way is Tesla secretive? They make all kinds of announcements about things that aren't actually "real" yet.
- pilif 10y agosure. but they share none of their engineering insights. As Mr. Lattner is an engineer, I would assume that sharing engineering-related stuff is more interesting than pre-announcing marketing information.
- pkd 10y agoDidn't they open source [sic] all their patents? [1] I'd call that being pretty open. [1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
- guptaneil 10y agoPatents are open by design. "Open sourcing" a patent just means Tesla is agreeing to license the patent to anybody and won't sue you for using it. That's still a marketing/business decision, not an engineering one.
- dv_dt 10y agoWasn't that mostly supercharger patents? There's a shared network effect that helps every electric car maker if they all use the same charger standard...
- jaxondu 10y agoI also not convinced. Chris was with Apple for more than a decade. He must have adapted to the secrecy culture after so many years.
- Gorbzel 10y agoOf course secrecy is not the sole reason he left. Swift was developed 100% in secrecy for the first 3 years of its life, and even after that, Chris was able to navigate the open-sourcing culture shifts required of Apple to make that a reality, no small feat. Though boring and lazy, it's extremely popular for the hivemind to take aim at the throne. Note it's why any article critical of Apple (or every damn blogger's tbMBP/macOS -> Linux article) goes immediately to the HN frontpage, while interesting technical discussion re: Apple products or news showing they're still the market leader remains barely discussed.
- fenomas 10y ago> any article critical of Apple ... goes immediately to the HN frontpage Considering that this article (as I write this) has 184 points, and is sitting one spot below a slightly older article with 35 points, there seem to be two sides to that story.
- solipsism 10y agoTesla is much smaller than Apple. They may be secretive with the outside world but not between internal compartments/silos.
- mikeash 10y agoTesla doesn't strike me as secretive at all. Elon Musk is constantly tweeting about future plans, they frequently discuss new features before they're released, and they talk about new products and new product lines years ahead of time. For example the Model 3 was first talked about a decade ago, and they have explicit public plans (up to and including allowing customers to buy the option right now) for fully autonomous cars which will no doubt take years to actually come to fruition. Tesla in many ways has the opposite problem that Apple does with secrecy: they talk so much about what they're going to do, and it doesn't always work out, so people start to mistrust what they say.
- microtherion 10y agoI don't know how secretive Tesla is or isn't at the moment, but with their aggressive approach to rolling out autopilot software, and the results that can already be observed, it seems likely to me that the autopilot division will see a significant amount of litigation over the next few years, and it would seem equally likely that this would lead to considerable caution in public communication.
- GuiA 10y agoBI's source: "someone in Lattner's circle of developer friends" There is nothing to indicate this isn't some random guy who's met Lattner twice and has no idea what he's talking about but wanted to feel special by being a "source" to BI.