Everything on HN should be taken with a big ol' bag of salt. To do otherwise will cause you to miss out on both employment and investment opportunities you won't find elsewhere.
Definitely true that HN comments should be taken with a grain of salt from a business / investment / employment perspective.
But it's more useful - though still not the full story at all of course - as a finger on the pulse of the people who actually implement software products, rather than their business models and their sales and marketing.
This is not intended to downplay the importance of any of those things! Those people are just not the majority of the audience here. (I honestly wish I knew where they hang out, but I'm not sure there is such a place - all the people I know in those roles just play their cards much closer to their chests than those of us who participate here.)
It's not really a pulse of implementers either. It's a particular kind of engineer. Having been early in a big tech and watching it grow and now being in another startup, I can tell you that the attitudes for SaaS in the industry are much more either positive or calculating than the broad negative attitudes and the constant calls for NIH on here. If anything they remind me of my cohort of college undergrads, excited to write lots of code and poo-poo existing solutions because of how "easy" they are. Our attitudes changed once our time was worth more.
As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here? The community chants grift, scam, and enshittification at pretty much any change in the customer contract these days. Is that the kind of environment that someone on the business side will find welcoming?
Well, nothing can give a fully accurate pulse, because response bias is pretty much inescapable. There's always a huge part of the iceberg that is submerged. To me, HN rings as a truer pulse of "silicon valley / startupy software developers" than the alternatives on reddit or twitter or mastodon or elsewhere that I've read to a significant degree. Everyplace has its own unique culture with their own unique echo chambers and blind spots driven by the people who opt in to that particular place, and HN is no different.
But having said that, your comment (and the thread-starter) is a pretty good example of "getting a pulse"! A pulse isn't just "the average viewpoint", it also includes the distribution. And for every bit of conventional HN wisdom like "splunk sucks and is too expensive", there is pretty much always a comment like "splunk is pretty successful, actually". Your "I've been around a long time and attitudes toward SaaSes are actually pretty positive or at least calculating" is part of the "pulse" in this thread.
To wit: I honestly had no idea about splunk. I played with it in the distant past and thought "cool!", but I've never used it in the auspices of an enterprise license, and I've certainly never tried to purchase one myself, so I just didn't know anything about this. And if you had asked me about their recent earnings, I would have similarly had no clue. I just had no idea what the "pulse" on splunk was, either way. And now, because of the zeitgeisty comments making fun of how expensive it is, and also the comments like yours and the thread-starter's pushing back on that narrative, I have an updated prior on the splunk. It surely isn't the full story, and I wouldn't walk into a conversation and be all "I'm an expert on splunk, folks!", but I have a much better sense than I did a few hours ago. That's what I mean by "pulse".
> As far as the business types, why do you think they'd be here?
I didn't say I think they'd be here... I'm the one who pointed out that they aren't! Honestly not sure how you read into my comment what you seem to have read into it. But I'm glad I gave you an opportunity to rant a bit!
I read everything I can consume (news, analysis, mailing lists, etc), but find smaller or private forums to be most valuable for participation. "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
