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186 points drak0n1c | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.649s | source
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Roritharr ◴[] No.38483715[source]
Anduril is one of these companies I would leave my own startup for to work for. I love what they are doing.
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throwaway234a ◴[] No.38484777[source]
It's not that great. I would know, I work there. The marketing is the shit though. It makes all the tech look like it's the greatest thing ever. The mentality here at this company is hack hack hack and the quality of the product reflect this. Don't expect German engineered precision. Expect products with poor quality, poor reliability and a failure rate that is very very high.

What is good about this company is that we build things fast and there's not of lot of slacking going on that you see in most of the defense industry. We make things fast and cheap, but they're very poor quality.

To give one example take a look at our counter UAS:

https://www.anduril.com/capability/counter-uas/

Watch the video it will give you chills. What the video won't show is how ineffective this product is. The enemy sends one drone, maybe it will work. If the enemy sends 3 or 4 we're done. This shit barely works, I wouldn't trust my life with it at all. All tests and demonstrations showed utter failure and STILL even though we failed on all the tests we STILL got a contract from the government. There's for sure money changing hands behind the scenes.

It also doesn't show you how crappy the UI is. You think we have a custom UI device to control this thing? No. It's react running in chrome on windows. It's also really poorly designed. The initial UI was made by some kid straight out of school and it was just poorly optimized. And despite this... The government still bought it, simply because a crap product is the only available option.

And to be real with you, we can't beat China tech. In terms of the quality, price and speed ratio, China dominates anduril by a landslide. The US can dominate on quality, but we we give up speed and price as a result. And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all.

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1. kanwisher ◴[] No.38487208[source]
UI for spacex rockets in the ship is html and JavaScript. There is zero issue having a front end be in something easy to hack on
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2. throwaway234a ◴[] No.38495700[source]
That's for internal use. For military customer use, usually it's expected that the UI be similar to a UI you get in an air plane cockpit. What happens when you go fly a passenger plane and you see chrome with some front end UI? Come on man.

Anyway, a front end UI can still work even though it's not ideal, but there's huge performance issues with what we have. Huge. The thing doesn't even run webgl for rendering, it's layering svgs on top of mapbox and those svgs are redrawn every frame with no caching. It's poorly designed and clunky and slow and buggy.

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3. throwfurther232 ◴[] No.38511060[source]
SpaceX does use web-based UI's on the capsule. But we're not shipping UI's for passenger planes. And the guys using our products really don't care about whether or not the UI is caching some element. They care that they can perform maintenance, updates and C2 with their tablet in the field rather than air freight some magic 200lb box with a dozen custom cannon connectors from rural Connecticut.