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I understand the snark but this is hacker news after all. Any kind of technical innovation is awesome to me as an HN reader even if it may not make business sen
by pm90 6y ago
I understand the snark but this is hacker news after all. Any kind of technical innovation is awesome to me as an HN reader even if it may not make business sense.
Also, I’m totally fine with them using all that investment money for R&D rather than lobbying or returning to shareholders among other things.
- dmoy 6y agoI agree with you. When there was a SpaceX article about bazel, it'd be a bit unfortunate to see a top comment be something about an exploding rocket. (In reality, there were zero comments, so w/e)
- quest88 6y agoWhat about profitability? R&D is fine if they're profitable, but they're not.
- bhupy 6y agoUber doesn't need to be profitable yet, they have $10B in cash. While this doesn't mean that they can continue to be unprofitable forever, it means that they have latitude to engage in R&D (like this post) while also moving towards profitability, at the same time.
- lhorie 6y agoAdopting an open source build system doesn't exactly strike me as R&D
- bhupy 6y agoSure, I mean that Uber can engage in whatever cool tech projects that they want and publish whatever blog posts that they want. This documented project's usefulness to the tech community is totally independent from its balance sheet. It's not like NOT publishing this eng blog post makes some material difference in Uber's long run ability to turn a profit...
- lhorie 6y agoBy that logic, companies should never open source anything. Yet, they do. Typically, the reason is to attract talent. Not everything has to be focused on short-term ROI.
- bhupy 6y agoYes, we are in agreement. I'm attacking the notion that we ought to bring Uber's profitability into this, it seems totally irrelevant to the merits of using Bazel in a Go monorepo.