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Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snake%20oil
snake oil (noun):
1: any of various substances or mixtures sold (as by a traveling medicine show) as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth or properties
2: poppycock, bunkum
Who are these people, companies, entities etc. in the tech world?
- joegahona 3y agoMost SEO tools or “experts” are snake oil.
- cpach 3y agoIf you look in blockchain, antivirus or AI, you’ll find heaps of snake oil salesmen.
- pawelduda 3y agoWhy antivirus?
- cpach 3y agoMany of those companies don’t know what they’re doing. They make the computer less secure instead of more secure.
- mikewarot 3y agoIn order to have a 100% effective AntiVirus program, you'd effectively have to be able to solve the halting problem, and predict the behavior of every program before you ran it. If, instead, the Operating System did its job, and enforced the choices of the user, we wouldn't be in this pickle.
- pawelduda 3y agoMaybe nowadays it's not required. Back when I used Windows XP connected to the Internet, it was mandatory. Ofc it wasn't better than common sense but it saved me a lot of times.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIt is still defense in depth though? Having email attachments run though AV is going to save someones ass even if said person should be cognisant of phishing attacks.
- 8BitArmour 3y agotechlead,joma tech,99pc of Indian YouTubers,people who gaurantee you a job after buying a course,scaler academy
- mlhpdx 3y agoBasically all consumer security apps?
- Billy5561 3y ago[dead]
- yevyevyev 3y agoWeb3 aka distributed ledger aka blockchain
- coldtrait 3y agoPeople are still grifting in this space and I hear these guys on twitter talking about how they made six figures working in web3/dao/whateve buzzword
- throwaway167 3y ago99% of Nostr
- mikewarot 3y agoAnyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example. People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NukedOne 3y agoIt's wildly insulting, defamatory, and detached from all reality on several levels, to classify Rust as snake oil.
- an-account 3y agoNot a memory development guy, but I am a rust programmer and have managed cybersecurity teams. Rust is amazing for memory safety and good programing practice. And cyber… is a lot more than the OS.
- trealira 3y agoI would be more worried about the opposite: future software and devices will use memory-safe programming languages like Rust, with C and assembly limited as much as possible, so things like the iPhone and the successors to the Nintendo Switch won't be able to be hacked or jailbroken to run software that wasn't approved by the hardware vendor, because there will be no buffer overflow exploits or dangling pointer vulnerabilities in them.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoIs that supposed to be a bad thing?
- trealira 3y agoIt's a mixed thing. Good for reducing piracy and increasing revenue, probably. It does mean that people who want to be able to install whatever they want on their devices, or write software for themselves to use on their own devices, will have to start buying ones explicitly marketed with those features, because you won't be able to just jailbreak it anymore.
- rl1987 3y agoAgile coaches who never wrote a single line of code. Blockchain people. Coding bootcamps and content/course creators promising unrealistic timelines to developer jobs. Pretty much anyone talking like they just made OVER-9000-DOLLARS(!!!) in a week with ChatGPT/Midjourney/Bitcoin/affiliate marketing/whatever the latest fad is. To lesser degree consumer grade VPN companies.
- dcminter 3y ago"Agile coaches who never wrote a single line of code." Hard disagree here. Of the agile coaches I've bumped into over the last decade or so the most excellent one I worked with was entirely non-techy and made a dramatic difference to the quality of the team.
- samstave 3y agoSocial Media Influencers - and the platforms they ~~rode~~ wrote in on.
- Ekaros 3y agoAnyone selling anything at all...
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[dead]
- eimrine 3y agoSo sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments". But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.
- coldtrait 3y agoAre you a Balaji S fan?
- eimrine 3y agoMy fanness is full of Satoshi N.
- PM_me_your_math 3y agoDemocracy is hell on earth. Whether it is a system of government, or a means by which groups make decisions or peddles their wares. The majority tends to encumber, enslave, and/or murder the minority. The eventual outcome of any purely democratic state or process is tyranny. This is why the founding fathers choose a republican form of government that uses democratic processes. Recall that Socrates was sentenced to die by a majority vote. With that in mind, then yes, the faux value assigned to "tech influencers" is a form of democracy that's just as poisonous as people who seek to "save democracy."
- eimrine 3y agoYou are right my man. I can not say I understand democracy as well as Bitcoin, all I can say that cryptography field is among the least trivial things in the Universe.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gnz11 3y agoI suppose McKinsey could fit the bill and much of the tech consulting world for that matter. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ
- Vaslo 3y agoUnderrated comment. McKinseys delivery to price ratio is very poor. We get a slick talking salesman and then smart but underprepared analysts, at least for we should be getting for that price!
- twright 3y agoA fun search I do is “McKinsey estimates” and see some bonkers numbers about hyped things that never really took off, at least nowhere to the degree they estimate.
- lurn_mor 3y agoThe ones we've already caught and convicted: FTX, Theranos, ...
- tacostakohashi 3y agoVendors of elaborate, configurable, "enterprise" tools for software development and monitoring. JIRA, SonarQube, VeraCode, Coverity - all these apps that seem like a good idea in principle, but end up being misconfigured with complicated workflows, and generally get in the way of ever making changes to software and get used to tick the security box instead of actually fixing anything.
- mharig 3y agoMicrosoft Selling a gaming OS as a tool for companies.
- pg_1234 3y agoCrypto bros
- rasz 3y agoIBM Watson
- mawadev 3y agoLow code and no code tools claiming it's over for programmers
- howth3wut 3y ago[dead]