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Tailscale has raised $160M

(tailscale.com)
655 points louis-paul | 3 comments | 08 Apr 25 10:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.157s | source
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geenat ◴[08 Apr 25 17:36 UTC] No.43624362[source]▶
IMHO they should be a good steward and toss the Wireguard guy a mil considering Tailscale is pretty much Wireguard with a GUI on top.
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aborsy ◴[08 Apr 25 17:46 UTC] No.43624493[source]▶
This is not correct. Wireguard establishes a tunnel between peer A and B, and its simplicity stops there. Tailscale does tons of complex networking, filtering, nat traversal, DNS, file sharing, etc. Wireguard is a small part of the codebase today, which has grown a lot.

It’s a bit like saying Dropbox is just a GUI on top of TLS.

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aqfamnzc ◴[08 Apr 25 17:56 UTC] No.43624623[source]▶
> It’s a bit like saying Dropbox is just a GUI on top of TLS.

Well, it is. After all, for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...

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eddieroger ◴[08 Apr 25 18:07 UTC] No.43624752[source]▶
It'll be a sad day when this reference is posted and understood for the last time.
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tptacek ◴[08 Apr 25 18:29 UTC] No.43624995[source]▶
No it won't. The reference is universally misunderstood.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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johnmaguire ◴[08 Apr 25 18:47 UTC] No.43625215[source]▶
I think the parent commenter used "understood" to mean "recognized."

That said, I don't really understand the supposed misunderstanding you point out. It seems that dang argues that "the exchange was pleasant and successful." I've never seen someone claim otherwise.

Rather, I've seen it used as an example of how technical users can fail to recognize the complexity inherent in their workflows, and therefore may also fail to see the real-world business value in creating (and selling) simpler interfaces. See also a SMOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming

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1. tptacek ◴[08 Apr 25 19:06 UTC] No.43625409[source]▶
No, it's not that simple. This is an instance of context collapse; people dunk on that exchange because they believe it's an HN person belittling Dropbox as a product, when in fact it was an HN person helpfully offering notes on a YC application.
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2. johnmaguire ◴[08 Apr 25 19:11 UTC] No.43625444[source]▶
Whether the poster was "belittling Dropbox as a product" or "helpfully offering notes" seems like a judgment one can make about the exchange, regardless of poster's intent. I never understood this to be the reason it was referenced, more the SMOP thing. But I hear what you're saying about the details getting warped over time. (edit: And I do think people sometimes use it as a case of "if you listen to everyone's feedback..." but I think that still rings true: regardless of the judgment you place on it, it could have been demoralizing to Dropbox's founders.)
3. fngjdflmdflg ◴[08 Apr 25 21:31 UTC] No.43626673[source]▶
They dunk on it because the author didn't see the the benefit of the product over using FTP. And it's hard to say the usage of "quite trivially" isn't "belittling" in some form, although I don't think using a loaded word is useful here. Even the followup response shows the same issue with the commenter's thinking:

>You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece of functionality for Windows users. The Windows shortcomings that you point out are certainly problems, and I think that your software does a good job of overcoming that. (emphasis added.)

They still fail to understand that this is not a Windows or Linux issue but a reliability and ease of use issue. Not to mention the fact that the desktop Linux marketshare was probably less than 1% and therefore irrelevant in this context to begin with.