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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

on edit: There are so many of these companies that are basically stylized versions of Alibaba listing pages or are basically re-skinning of some business process that, turns out, doesn't actually need to be disrupted. Transporting gasoline to fuel up someone's car? Really? We're going to be energy wasteful just to shave 10 minutes off someone's week?

The other disturbing thing is how many of these gadgets are IP enabled. I really hope YC has some kind of IoT advisor who insists upon security at a low level.

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Snarky dismissals of other people's work are not welcome on HN, so please don't post like this.

I tend not to post as many moderation scoldings in YC-related threads, but that was such a bad HN comment that I'll break the pattern for it.

Edit: you rewrote your comment to make it (somewhat) more substantive and less snarky. In principle that's fine, but it would have been more respectful to preserve the original context for the reader.

Have you considered that these companies might not actually be that innovative and that the parent comment was a legitimate criticism?

The parent comment has been completely rewritten.

It's terribly easy and not very useful to dismiss things in a vague way like this, and it's often wrong, particularly if talking about an entire category or market.

e.g. google could have been dismissed as just a search engine but it turned out eventually to be exactly what a lot of people wanted.

(As written now) I think it can be legitimate critic. Google really grew out of making a better search engine algorithm and all. Some of these businesses are essentially reselling things and not really focused on innovating the substantial part of the business. That can also work of course, but I can see why it's less interesting.

>it would have been more respectful to preserve the original context for the reader. //

Sounds like a fault of the forum [as well] ...

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