Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

They did compare it to all of these

Perhaps not the greatest example was provided, but the general sentiment I was aiming for was when disdain is expressed for tools without taking the time to understand what their intended (and practical) purposes are, and how they are effectively used.

When you have used a tool and understand it well, and witness another person go off on a tangent about how "Android is complete garbage, why would they ever do this this way", you naturally question that person's capability or whether they know what they are doing. In my experience, the person venting about how a tool sucks will 15-20 minutes later realize "oh. that's why.", or otherwise head off to roll their own implementation and 15 working days later realize "oh. that's why." or get into production and cause an outage from missing several edge cases.

On the macOS topic, it is odd that the root user no longer functions as one would expect in the Unix model (for example, cli tools which can no longer list OS processes, which haven't had any issues during the amount of time I've used them). It is frustrating that a wide variety of tools no longer work correctly as a result of some of these changes as well; for example, emacs can no longer navigate my filesystem. All said and done, my day to day work has been via Linux workstations for nearly all of the past 15 years, which is partly why some of those effects are more jarring than others to me.

Again, thanks for your input!

That's great input; not flame war enticing, just facts, and I respect your 20 year head start - implicit memory is only attainable by experiencing things first hand, and I appreciate that.

Perhaps not the greatest example was provided, but the general sentiment I was aiming for was when disdain is expressed for tools without taking the time to understand what their intended (and practical) purposes are, and how they are effectively used.

When you have used a tool and understand it well, and witness another person go off on a tangent about how "Android is complete garbage, why would they ever do this this way", you naturally question that person's capability or whether they know what they are doing. In my experience, the person venting about how a tool sucks will 15-20 minutes later realize "oh. that's why.", or otherwise head off to roll their own implementation and 15 working days later realize "oh. that's why." or get into production and cause an outage from missing several edge cases.

On the macOS topic, it is odd that the root user no longer functions as one would expect in the Unix model (for example, cli tools which can no longer list OS processes, which haven't had any issues during the amount of time I've used them). It is frustrating that a wide variety of tools no longer work correctly as a result of some of these changes as well; for example, emacs can no longer navigate my filesystem. All said and done, my day to day work has been via Linux workstations for nearly all of the past 15 years, which is partly why some of those effects are more jarring than others to me.

Again, thanks for your input!

Take aways from this marketing push; this company:

> does not observe the best practice of having security-oriented products be open source.

- It is crucial for software in this category be open source, in order to have them widely vetted, and for vulnerabilities not to be incentivized to hold onto (and sold), vs reporting to the vendor. The team have reached their decision that they will NOT open source it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24720669 If I cannot build my own binaries (even if unreproduceable builds), I cannot trust the vendor. Additionally, I must trust them to operate and secure it as a public multi-user system better than one could in their own infrastructure under several layers separating it from the public. Humans are prone to mistakes, closed source software engineers make the same mistakes made in open source, only they have employees who's primary task is shipping new features-not fixing a bug which no one may see until it comes out that it's been actively exploited for years; let people improve the overall security, and encourage the only people looking for vulnerabilities to be those who would benefit from exploiting them personally, or by reselling them to the highest bidder.

> attacked otherwise neutral competitors, misrepresenting them.

- FTP is a protocol associated with a general air of insecurity and poor practice. Most technical people would immediately say not to use it, and that there are far better solutions which aren't fundamentally insecure. Vault is not anything like that. That is a misrepresentation and additionally an attack on the usability of their competitor's product, which is unmerited.

> demonstrated that the are willing to say things which aren't true, or that they just didn't care to verify the details before stating them as fact.

- The authors make the black/white distinction between "you use Dropbox if you aren't paranoid" and "there are self-hosted options if you care about that, but they aren't qualified because you can only use them this way", despite it not being the case. It's a spectrum, and you can achieve the same results with either offering, only with one your only choice is to trust them and that they have things so tight that several malicious employees would be subverted.

> used their employees' previous employers to legitimize their product.

- As someone who may be selecting security-oriented tools for a project, and as a someone who has experienced a lot of issues specifically with their engineering/operations firsthand, Uber engineering as a point pushes me away from considering this tool. Uber has also been criticized many times for unethical actions; sure, engineers may often be simply heads-down and following a spec, but I would rather work with someone who didn't just "follow orders". As someone evaluating your offering, my specific feedback is that you will push people like myself away by leaning on that as part of your marketing/branding, particularly when it involves secret management - a topic which is highly dependent on unbreakable morals.