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Comment by ironjunkie | Hacker News Reader

I had to read this whole thing twice to find what it is all about.

A lot of self-congratulatory corporate speak there. I wish companies could just clearly state what is going on sometimes. Then I'm not surprised, this is Facebook...

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It reads almost like they choose to shutdown because the program itself is too successful. The irony.

Arguably they have to give some context for people that are not as deeply informed about that project as many HNers are. I don't think it's that bad to state the vision, progress and outcome before announcing they will not manufacture their own planes anymore.

Maybe it's a way to advertise what they've worked on in case someone reading it might want to contract with them, for corporate or military uses (whatever they may be, knowing they have built drones is definitely applicable to a range of projects).

Facebook doesn't bring anything of real value to the planets population but they are masters of appearing like they do.

They are a gossip magazine where people are the celebrities themselves. Useless.

Company hires more people => probability of critical human error rises => company introduces more processes and internal norms => the average individual in the company starts to feel less free => the culture shifts from "ask forgiveness" to "ask permission" => people start to think about what they can do wrong much more => it also applies to all outward communications.

I mean, it's not neccessarilly a bad thing: don't we all want to Facebook to be more responsible and cautious in what it does with our private data, for example? Of course we do. But company's culture is a non-separable thing, so we shouldn't be surprised by this corporate-speak from them now. Days of "I'm CEO, bitch" a long, long over.

I would be surprised if there wasn't corporate speak about it.

Honestly, if you were running the corporation would you just boil it down to "We stopped building our Internet airplane thingy. Sorry y'all" ?

There is plenty of honest closure notices, generally along the lines of "lessons learned", "goodbye", and such.

Or an honest post-mortem that explains the shortcomings of the proposed aircraft concept: design, aerodynamics, autonomous stationkeeping, RF comms, logistics, or whatever.

The current trend of publishing positive results but completely hiding negative results is deeply harming to research and engineering, since it doesn't allow future attempts to learn from previous mistakes.

That's pretty much the first line I would write. And then I would continue explaining. If you can have both, start with honesty and not wasting people's time. You'll be more likely to earn it.

Wouldn't the shutdown be the thesis of the memo?

...don't catch you slippin' now

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