Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsoft-beats-amazon-in-12-month-cloud-revenue-26-7-billion-to-23-4-billion-ibm-third/#559c49cd2bf1 <comment><USER2> These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like Office into "cloud revenue." When talking about compute cloud they are still way behind Amazon although you don't get that from the misleading headline.

<comment><USER3> This is nearly a "no true Scotsman" definition of cloud revenue, where if Amazon doesn't have a product in a market segment it shouldn't count. Google and Microsoft both have offerings in the cloud SaaS office suite market segment, and it's a real liability for Amazon that they do not.

<comment><USER4> Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery. That doesn't really make this cloud revenue.

Imagine if MS was forced to "unbundle" Office 365. Consumers could purchase a license to run MS Office on any platform. On of which might be hosted Azure. What percent of the Office 365 revenue would accrue to the products division compared to the cloud division. Sincere guess: 90%+.

Another hypothetical scenario. Imagine if Apple offered a deal on iPhones. Get an iPhone for free as long as you sign up for a grossly overpriced $1000 iCloud contract. All of a sudden Apple would have hundreds of billion in "cloud revenue". But no reasonable person would all of a sudden say that they're now the biggest cloud provider in the world.

<comment><USER5> >Not really. When people buy Office 365, they're primarily purchasing a the MS Office product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery.

And when people buy Amazon RDS, they're primarily purchasing a database product, and the cloud just happens to be the mechanism of delivery.

Imagine if Amazon was forced to "unbundle" Amazon RDS. Consumers could purchase a license to run the database on any platform. On of which might be hosted AWS. What percent of the Amazon RDS revenue would accrue to the products division compared to the cloud division...

\--

Yes, this is the literal definition of a "no true scotsman" fallacy.

<comment><USER6> But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL and the majority of those are run on the AWS cloud.

There is clearly a distinction here. For example, I don't know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to buy an O365 license.

<comment><USER7> > But there are unbundled DBs that people run. PostgreSQL, mongo, MySQL

And people can still buy standalone Office installations.

> For example, I don't know if the word Azure is even mentioned when I go to > buy an O365 license.

How does this matter? Microsoft includes this as Cloud revenue and not Azure revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ben Thompson of Stratechery precisely wrote about this last week:

>Given this week's theme, though, I wanted to focus on AWS: revenue was up 46%, and while that may be lower than Azure in percentage terms, it is almost certainly higher in absolute terms. AWS had $6.7 billion in revenue last quarter, while Microsoft's entire Server Products and Cloud Services — the majority of which remains on-premises — was $5.7 billion. Microsoft of course has other cloud revenue, including Office 365 and Dynamics 365; those are SaaS products though and generally don't compete with AWS.

[https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up- microsoft...](https://stratechery.com/2018/ibm-red-hat-follow-up-microsofts- earnings-amazons-earnings/)

<comment><USER9> wonder how much of those were attributed to Serverless revenues....probably negligible.

2018 is almost over and I still don't know if I should go fully serverless, more importantly, which cloud vendor has fixed the "cold startup time" for serverless functions. Google seems quite promising but still no recent study has been done on this. Would somebody like to see a test on this done? I've been wanting a straight up answer for a long time but hard to find a consensus, seems to be all over the place.

<comment><USER10> > _which cloud vendor has fixed the "cold startup time" for serverless > functions._

I'm interested in this problem area, so I would be interested in your definition of fixed.

<comment><USER9> no warm up period despite sporadic use.

<comment><USER10> It will depend a lot on "sporadic". The dominant factor is where your workload sits in the warmth hierarchy. RAM and disk space are limited, so less-frequent workloads will eventually be evicted from worker nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very anectodal, but some things are better on Azure, because they were late to the party, for example azure blob storage. It costs the same as s3, but it supports journaling, so you can do journal archives. You can run your main thing on aws and keep backups on azure. If you wanted backups with journaling on AWS, you'd have to use EFS at minimum, which is orders of magnitude more expensive.

<comment><USER12> Disclaimer: also very anecdotal: However, most things are way worse than either GCP or AWS.

Azure is just now rolling out availability zones. There are strange constraints everywhere, like you can only use premium storage accounts with specific VM types. You cannot use the same premium storage account for blobs. In general, not all configurations of skus for storage accounts, vms and disks are supported. You need to match availability set skus between scalesets and load balancers. If you connect an internal 'standard' load balancer to an instance, then it cannot reach the internet anymore. You can only attach one internal and one external load balancer to a scale set. You can't use the internal load balancer to loopback (same as internal AWS NLBs, but AWS has other options).

And so on. It all seems poorly integrated. Budget 5x as much time for a similar deployment on Azure as compared to AWS or GCP. Add more buffer if you need flexible automation, as you'll bump into those edge cases often as people change parameters.

They have a ridiculously huge amount of features compared to the other two major cloud providers, but integration between them is iffy. It is improving.

AKS seems pretty good, although it's still new and people are reporting issues. But it is promising, you can actually tweak quite a few things, and I have high hopes for the compatibility story (even more so than GKE). AWS's EKS is a marginal implementation at best.

On Azure AD, the tables are turned: it's AWS that provides an inconsistent story. There are many options, none are as well polished compared to Azure.

They did learn from some AWS mistakes. But technically speaking they have a bunch of polishing to do.

<comment><USER13> EKS is, without a doubt in my mind, among the worst products Amazon has ever released. You pay $0.20/hour for the "benefit" of a managed high-availability control plane, no matter the size of the cluster, then are forced into a seemingly incomprehensible mess of CloudFormation templates to spawn a set of VMs which you now have to manage yourself.

It makes no god damn sense. They had every opportunity to look at how Azure or Google were doing it and just straight-up copy it. For Christ's sake, they were over a _year_ late to the game.

I remember during the original announcement, maybe its documented somewhere, they announced that Fargate was coming to EKS "eventually". They don't even have _managed worker nodes_ for normal VMs, if their intention is to bring Fargate as well we literally won't see it for another two years. It took them over six months to get from announcement to GA.

The only good thing I have to say about it is that it's pretty reliable. Which isn't saying a lot because it doesn't do much, but they're happy to charge you $150/mo for what it does.

Did I mention it takes over 20 minutes to create a new cluster? Well, actually, they "call" it a cluster, but its really just the control plane. The actual cluster can take up to 30 minutes for everything to actually connect and be usable. My company was interested in doing a "pristine" staging environment for every/some PR, throwing it away afterward. Interesting idea. Not worth it on EKS because their performance is so god awful.

EKS is literally the reason why we abandoned AWS in favor of Google Cloud. I'm not suggesting that the rest of AWS isn't overall pretty great, but when nearly all of your workload is defined as "90% inside kubernetes, a few cloud- managed queues, and blob storage" Amazon isn't doing themselves any favors by ignoring the most interesting infrastructure technology to be released in the past five years. Oh, and our bill dropped by ~50% because preemptible instances on GCloud are actually easy to use, instead of the sheer insanity of trying to integrate spot fleets with an eksctl cluster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> These numbers are so misleading. I understand why they are the numbers published, but AWS vs Azure last time I heard real numbers was approximately a 3:1 market share ratio.

Including Office 365, Dynamics, etc doesn't make sense to me. We don't include Prime in Amazon Cloud, AFAIK.

<comment><USER15> Not sure what the article is counting, but at least in the Q1 earnings call[0] Office 365, Dynamics, etc. are separate:

[0]: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/Investor/earnings/FY-2019-Q1/press-release-webcast)

(Disclaimer: I work for microsoft)

<comment><USER14> I'm also an MS employee. Are you sure no Office service revenue is included? I assumed from the size of the gap they must be piling it in. If not, that leaves an even larger unaccounted-for gap between Azure and the claimed 24 billion.

Under C+E, the last time they tipped the hand on cloud revenue it was ~18 billion with about a third from Azure AFAIK. To me, that is woefully misleading to compare us on 1:1 terms with AWS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to Gartner ([https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500](https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3884500)), the 2017 revenues were:

Amazon: 12.2B

Microsoft: 3.1B

Assuming Amazon continues on the same 25% YoY trend, it would be 15B in 2018. Microsoft could beat that number by reaching a 400% growth rate. That would be pretty amazing. But it's not the case.

<comment><USER5> This is comparing totally different numbers than what is being compared in the OP.

I'm not exactly sure what Gartner includes in its "IaaS" revenue figures, nor am I sure what Forbes is including in its "cloud" revenue figures, but even Amazon's official press release [1] (which is what the OP is comparing) gives completely different numbers for 2017 AWS revenues than Gartner.

1: [https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release- detail...](https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release- details/amazoncom-announces-third-quarter-sales-29-566-billion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (disclaimer: I was at AWS from 2008 to 2014, and VMware from 2014 to 2016)

Microsoft have been playing this game for years now. It's a joke.

Anybody with just a little sense of how the industry works knows that AWS still leads the market with 80% to 90% penetration.

Microsoft should be punished for misleading the public this way. And some analysts should be fired for not knowing better.

<comment><USER18> Even if you exclude Office 365, etc there your statement that AWS has 80-90% penetration is absolutely false. AWS has about ~45% of the market, Azure, GCS, IBM and Rackspace round out the top 5. Amazon & Google also both include their Office Suites in their Cloud numbers...so, it's not "a joke." Everyone does it. No one denies that for compute AWS is #1, right now.

<comment><USER17> You are blatantly wrong. Man, I've been in this industry for a long time, and I met literally thousands of cloud computing customers, from startups to large corporations.

The current state of affairs is that AWS still dominates. Your claim of 45% shows that you are simply repeating what some myopic analyst has written. Talk to industry experts, and you'll see why I'm right.

<comment><USER19> In Belgium, I see way more roles for Azure than for AWS. Perhaps some bias for both of us, speaking to industry experts aren't numbers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work for a company that sells software which is often deployed in the cloud. I'd say the ratio is about 30 to 1, with AWS far ahead. I'm always surprised when somebody starts talking about Azure - they usually work for a company where some executive was talked into Azure by Microsoft.

<comment><USER21> or companies that are already 100% Microsoft based

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

There are arguments on both sides about "Should Office count as Cloud revenue?". We have the same decision regarding GSuite. If you take the "Cloud is anything a business depends on" argument, then it obviously should count (but then all sorts of things like SaaS would count).

I like to think of this from an investor's standpoint: what do they really want to know? In _my_ estimation, they want to know about potential hyper- growth market opportunities for the company.

For Microsoft, more than anyone else, _Office_ isn't a high growth opportunity. There is some amount of revenue uplift from customers "upgrading" from Office on prem to Office 365 (like Adobe when they forced Creative Suite to be subscription) but I doubt there are going to be lots of net new customers just because Office is on a subscription model. By contrast, Cloud _infrastructure_ is a large opportunity for Microsoft.

For Google (and to some degree AWS), "productivity suites" is actually a reasonable growth market, particularly as market share often comes from Office. However, the raw productivity market is still "only" $XXB (it's predominantly $X/seat, and there are only so many employees in the world) while people talking about "cloud" usually are talking about the opportunity being "all money spent on IT".

tl;dr: I watch the YoY "Azure growth was XX%" numbers and ignore the headline revenue.

<comment><USER23> If Google Cloud included all Google services (such as Google Search) that run on it as "customers", that would change the numbers a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Microsoft trying to win the PR battle...

<comment><USER25> To be fair, the VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016, surely has no dog in this hunt.

// The enemy of my enemy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Am I reading correctly that they're including LinkedIn as Cloud revenue?

<comment><USER27> They include all their SaaS offering in their Cloud revenue I believe.

<comment><USER28> I think Linkedin is classified in the Productivity and Business segment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I came to the comments fully expecting first comment to show false advertising. This is what I come to expect from Microsoft, I just don't trust anything coming from their PR department. This can't be good for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER30> You can now scale excel in the cloud.

<comment><USER28> In seriousness, isn't this where Microsoft should have a competitive advantage? If Excel integrates with Azure easily, doesn't it incentive Azure adoption? I guess I'm picturing a bank analyst running a derivatives model that in the background, spins up 10 Azure server-less functions in parallel that hit a database hosted on Azure? The banker is now happy Excel "works quickly" but it really is just connects a front-end people are comfortable with alongside cloud resources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Azure interface is such a crazy mess I don't know how prople live with it.

It's so MS with 50 menus with uninteresting options intertwined and error messages usually make no sense, just like Windows.

I've even chosen to use another provider for running Windows, even though running it on MS feels more safe.

I'll never want to work for a company with pure MS stack.

</comment><comment><USER32> Cloud revenue numbers are database benchmarks for 2018

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh, that Forbes author once again...</comment>


Gabe Rivera and Techmeme - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/meet-the-man-who-shapes-techs-narrative <comment><USER2> Gabe Rivera is hilarious on Twitter, if you enjoy "clever asshole" humor a la Maciej Ceglowski's schtick: [https://twitter.com/gaberivera](https://twitter.com/gaberivera)

Behind the veneer of snark, he's also a very smart commentator on the biz.

Techmeme River is one of my bookmarks for keeping a pulse on what's happening: [http://techmeme.com/river](http://techmeme.com/river)

<comment><USER3> Gabe, Maciej and Jason Hirschhorn all have a "ill build the product i want to use every day, feedback and scaling be damned" attitude, and I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gabe is the man. Fun fact: We hired some great people through Techmeme's pretty clever who's hiring in tech section.

<comment><USER5> I can't stand his personality on Twitter but techmeme is useful. I suspect, as this article touch on, he is not as mean spirited in meat space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even though tech is my primary passion, I find I use his Memeorandum site (for political news) way more than I ever used Techmeme. For me, the front page of this site serves my tech news needs better than any other.

EDIT: Didn't mean to be off topic. Put another way, "If you really like Techmeme, don't miss Memeorandum for politics."

</comment><comment><USER7> I am new to the scene and definitely gonna bookmark Techmeme. So basically, if my understanding from skimming the article is accurate, TM is very similar to HN except that they have a team hand-selecting the articles rather than relying on a vote system?

<comment><USER8> Techmeme mostly has human curation and a little bit of automation, though it is hard to tell from the outside how much that factors in. Human curators also rename article titles to provide a summary of the contents in an attempt to save you a click if you don't want more detailed information.

<comment><USER9> Isn't the other way around? Mostly algo / automation with a layer or curation? At least that's how I think it used to work, maybe that's changed.

At the very least it seems like the clustering is algorithmic and "most" of the ranking.

Source: Too lazy to look up the 6 year old article that I kinda remember talking about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have loved TechMeme since the beginning. Awesome product. My only dig is that it is not very useful until about 10-11am PST. After that, I check it a 3-5 times per day.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any insight about the technology stack Techememe is using or any other technical article about how they crawl & rank news? TKS!

<comment><USER12> It's done manually. They have editors who select news. You can tip news stories via Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to have a Techmeme for the finance industry.

<comment><USER14> I am building an engine that might be able to power it. E-mail me (see my profile) and I will be able to help get this off the ground.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> LOVE Techmeme! & Gabe's quirky funny post on twitter is awesome lol Shoutout 2 Techmeme & Gabe!

</comment><comment><USER16> Just realized that I'm commenting on a post about an article about a person who republishes news articles from other sites. Deep.

<comment><USER17> Every medium has a tendency to create work about itself, the subject its makers understand the best. Hollywood does La la land. Buzzfeed covers Techmeme. Novelists write novels about novelists writing novels: Misery, The Sportswriter, half of Philip Roth, some of Joyce.

</comment></comment><comment> grey-area Just in case this wasn't meta enough, his twitter linked in comments here now references this thread as _Important thread on how I 'm an "asshole"_, how deep can this recurse?

[https://mobile.twitter.com/gaberivera/status/843917237916319...](https://mobile.twitter.com/gaberivera/status/843917237916319744)</comment>


Dutch Police Trained an Eagle to Attack Illegal Drones - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/4202469/dutch-police-eagle-drones/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter <comment><USER2> Should have named it the IllEagle Drone Hunter</comment>


Ask HN: Using search ads to target potential employers Good or Bad? - <AUTHOR>

Curious what HN thinks about targeting current employees of a startup where I would like to work with FB ads that express my desire to work there. My thinking is that anything that might help me stand out from other candidates can't hurt, but do you think this is too much? Potentially negative even? <comment><USER2> Let's say that between thinking this up, questioning the utility of it, asking HN, and actually implementing it takes only one hour.

You know what you could do in an hour, trivially? Find the person who can say "Hire Taylorlb" and invite them to lunch or coffee. Alternatively, find someone who they trust and get a warm intro like "Still looking for a $FOO? You should talk to Taylorlb."

You can try more exotic ways to break into $TARGET but walking through the open front door is a good place to start. Bonus points: many people competing with you are pathologically unable to find the front door because they think it is cheating.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually know one of the people hiring the position and have traded a couple emails with him about my interest. I also had someone he respects recommend me so perhaps I'm already doing better than I thought I was.

I put the ads on hold after reading a couple of these comments since no one seemed to have a "totally. go for it" response. For what it's worth, the CTR was actually really high. Hope those who clicked did so with a smile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it would be creepy to target rank & file employees of your target employer with FB ads. Most of them aren't in a position to help anyway.

It might be interesting to buy AdWords on your name so your preferred spiel comes up when people Google you. I'm not sure if it's all that much more effective than just having a decent homepage though.

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually "invented" this idea back in 2008 ( here's my post: [http://www.onedayonejob.com/blog/use-facebook-ads-to-make- em...](http://www.onedayonejob.com/blog/use-facebook-ads-to-make-employers- hunt-you-down/) ). A lot of people have come up with it independently since. Because it's done before, it's not nearly as interesting as when people were first doing it, but it's great if you want to get into online advertising or marketing--shows your skills.

If you're having trouble getting on people's radar, it's worth a try, but it's probably not your best bet.

</comment><comment><USER5> What type of work do you want to do that startup? If it's something marketing related, then use marketing tricks, but if you want to write code, then make something useful for their startup and offer, perhaps, as open source. Unless you are trying to brainwash them to remember your photo subconsciously, ads aren't going to do any good.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a marketing position. I don't expect much to come from running ads, but I am curious to see if it can give me some sort of mind share advantage perhaps. Maybe someone unrelated to the position sees it and then emails someone who is involved in that dept pointing out how "this guy is really eager". I'm more than qualified for the position, but I'm concerned it's so competative I'll get lost in the noise.</comment></comment>


Announcing Community: A Guide To Start, Grow and Engage Your Community - <AUTHOR> http://startupnerd.co/community/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome</comment>


Why non-Muslims are converting to sharia finance - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/10/20/why-non-muslims-are-converting-to-sharia-finance <comment><USER2> I had the opportunity to translate technical documents for both conventional and sharia financial products a few years ago, and I find the market fascination of them mind-boggling.

These products seemed to incorporate convoluted jargon and concepts which dramatically increased complexity but at the same time, produced no extra utility for end-users.

On top of that, the addition of ongoing shariah-compliance introduced a level of uncertainty that was simply not there in conventional finance. If the building you constructed ended up being used as a cinema, then the shariah debt you used to finance that building needs to either be restructured or unraveled. Why on board such a risk?

Even as a muslim myself, I feel like sharia finance is a step backwards.

<comment><USER3> I agree that your experience is exactly what sounds like: taking a conventional financial instrument, replacing all mention of the word "interest" with something way more complicated, and adding rules that seem difficult to always stay on the right side of. That happens to be exactly what Tarek El Diwany (mentioned in the second last paragraph of article) is saying.

Shariah banks have to operate in a world that has completely accepted conventional banking. As a result, it is in a constant state of playing catch up in terms of fitting in (e.g. having to implement a software interface in which you reject some central tenets of the interface).

I don't know the answer one way or another. What I do know is that conventional banking remains imperfect in spite of it being totally dominant: the boom-and-bust economic cycles have grown more catastrophic, and we are still grappling with accurately adding phenomena like health and pollution into our financial models.

I applaud you for trying to understand how conventional and sharia financial products fit together. I don't find your reaction offensive: it just means we aren't done trying find a good solution that makes both technical and moral sense.

There's a really long Wikipedia article here about profit-loss sharing, which central concept of how sharia banking is meant to work: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_and_loss_sharing)

N.B. I apologize for any typos since I typed/tapped this out on my phone.

<comment><USER4> >> the boom-and-bust economic cycles have grown more catastrophic

While agreeing with your post more generally, this one statement seems a bit off the mark. Shouldn't the Great Recession should fairly be compared with Great Depression? So far, at least, the Great Depression was far more catastrophic, as was for that matter the Long Depression starting in 1873. All three of these were real financial sector collapses, not simple recessions. Independent central banking seems to have done great good, generally, despite of course being imperfect.

<comment><USER3> That's a fair point. I was including the smaller recessions as well: there is a boom and a bust within a ten year span.

That the IMF changed the definition of a global recession is a little weird, but they know better than I do.

From wikipedia:

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), "Global recessions seem to occur over a cycle lasting between eight and 10 years."[48] The IMF takes many factors into account when defining a global recession. Until April 2009, IMF several times communicated to the press, that a global annual real GDP growth of 3.0 percent or less in their view was "...equivalent to a global recession."[49][50] By this measure, six periods since 1970 qualify: 1974–1975,[51] 1980–1983,[51] 1990–1993,[51][52] 1998,[51][52] 2001–2002,[51][52] and 2008–2009.[53] During what IMF in April 2002 termed the past three global recessions of the last three decades, global per capita output growth was zero or negative, and IMF argued—at that time—that because of the opposite being found for 2001, the economic state in this year by itself did not qualify as a global recession.[48]

In April 2009, IMF had changed their Global recession definition to:

        A decline in annual per‑capita real World GDP (purchasing power parity weighted), backed up by a decline or worsening for one or more of the seven other global macroeconomic indicators: Industrial production, trade, capital flows, oil consumption, unemployment rate, per‑capita investment, and per‑capita consumption.[54][55]

By this new definition, a total of four global recessions took place since World War II: 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2009. All of them only lasted one year, although the third would have lasted three years (1991–93) if IMF as criteria had used the normal exchange rate weighted per‑capita real World GDP rather than the purchase power parity weighted per‑capita real World GDP.[54][55]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#Global](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#Global)

<comment> village-idiot I'm under the impression that the boom and bust cycles of the late 1800s were far more extreme than anything we've seen in our lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Spain the Catholic Church created a series of banks for lending to poor people, and investing profit in social causes. I think the concept came from Italy.

Those banks were called "Cajas de ahorros". Most people had their money there instead of private Banks.

The concept worked very well for something like 200 years. Until politicians changed the law to control the Cajas themselves.

After politicians took control,they did things like private lending at 0 interest to their friends and party(they even lent to one of the biggest party 50 Million euro and then totally forgave the debt!!) or putting their almost illiterate friends as counselors.

It took only 15 years after that to totally bankrupt all cajas in Spain, and now they are owned by private banks.

<comment><USER6> The Catholic Church has always tended to see charging interest as being equivalent to committing the sin of usury and throughout history they've tried to ban it several times. See for instance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit#Historical_contex...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit#Historical_context) In practice these prohibitions weren't too effective because people always found loopholes and ways of charging interest without calling it interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting--I had never heard of this before.

It seems the higher interest rate is predicated on finding investors who want to take loans at higher-than-market-clearing rates. Does anyone have any insight into why non-Muslims are getting loans through these banks? I don't see how this scales to consistently provide higher returns, especially as more money moves into this system. Are tobacco and alcohol related loans failing at a higher rate than the rest of the market?

<comment><USER8> I would expect a sharia bank to provide market-beating returns to investors because it can charge above-market mortgage rates to borrowers who have no alternative. From the article:

> Al Rayan's home purchase plan (its sharia-compliant version of a mortgage) > charges 4.24% in the first two years, almost double the market average. Even > so, 12% of Al Rayan's home-purchase customers are non-Muslims.

I'm as stumped as you are regarding that 12% number though.

<comment><USER9> Paying a little more makes sense for religious or preference reasons , but paying twice the rate (when it's significant) doesn't make a lot of sense for a preference. It seems likely that there is something wrong with the comparison , either the effective rate is computed incorrectly, or there's a significsnt difference in terms or underwriting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I recognized person mentioned at the end of the article: Tarek El Diwany (same first name as me spelled differently) had a part in the "Four Horsemen" documentary ([https://youtu.be/5fbvquHSPJU?t=3479](https://youtu.be/5fbvquHSPJU?t=3479)). I found an article about him in [https://meic.cfainstitute.org/2012/03/21/islamic-finance- tar...](https://meic.cfainstitute.org/2012/03/21/islamic-finance-tarek-el- diwany-on-the-problem-with-interest/) .

<comment><USER10> The hypothesis that the war on terror (pointless as it may be) is actually driven by Western banks and the concept of intrest and that the solution lies in sharia banking laws is quite something to get your head around.

<comment><USER3> El Diwany isn't saying that the solution is sharia banking in that part of the "Four Horsemen". Instead, he is rightfully calling out that there is a mismatch between public intentions and the actual incentives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great. I'm not a Muslim, but learning that there are banks that don't invest in arms and tobacco - this is great news, and I guess I'll take a closer look at halal banking soon. For too long I've been bothered by the fact that I don't have much say in where my funds are invested by the 'normal banks' \- the fact that there is an option for those of us who don't want to participate in the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex, is indeed great news.

<comment><USER12> See also Ethical Banking, here's a list of regular banks in the USA who dont lend to certain industries: [https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/socially- responsible...](https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/socially-responsible- banks/)

Maybe its not a very big thing in the USA. Ethical Banking is pretty big in the UK.

<comment><USER13> Big enough that, for example, the Money Saving Expert site, a popular independent comparison site for savings accounts and similar products, has a separate category if you decide you only want good savings IF they are with an ethical bank.

e.g. You can get about 1.5% interest by choosing the best rates (whereas many popular banks offer 0.1% or lower) but the ethical option is 1.35% from Yorkshire Building Society (which is a mutual so your money is being spent buying houses for people and both you & they share the profits from operations). Lots of people will decide that actually not supporting dubious industries is worth 0.15% interest.

Not least because the mutuals tend to have fewer aggressive anti-consumer practices, after all the consumers own them so that would be kinda crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The fact that central banks have set the interest rate near zero already must play a role.

<comment><USER15> It seems if you save money at the bank they will actually loose money for you since their interest rate is lower than inflation. The financial market is such a clusterfuck lmao

<comment><USER16> I'm not going to claim that finance isn't a clusterfuck - but paying people to store things securely isn't exactly strange.

If anything the amazing thing was that people would pay us to look after our money in the first place!

<comment><USER17> You give them $100,000 and they store $5000 of it, at best.

If other people take their money out first you'll end up with zero, if you're lucky though a government bailout will come along and the loss is outsourced onto future taxpayers.

The bank doesn't have your actual money on hold in case you want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of more ethical banks, but I think the article is overselling the popularity of Islamic institutions in the UK. I live in London and whilst I'm aware that Sharia banking exists as a concept, I've never heard of BLME. Also the opening sentence comes off as slightly absurd:

>THE HALAL restaurants established by Muslim migrants in Britain quickly inspired an almost religious following among non-believers.

<comment><USER19> Here in UK, I'm a fan of halal chippies as they always use vegetable oil instead of beef dripping for their chips and patties.

<comment><USER20> Interesting. Why? Halal definitely allows beef to be combined with potatoes.

<comment><USER3> The beef has to be halal beef. In this context of using beef fat as an additive to other food, the beef fat has to be halal as well.

<comment><USER21> right, but the the gp said halal establishments _always_ used vegetable oil instead of beef fat.

<comment><USER3> I can think of another reason too: these chippie vendors might also want to cater to other people who don't want to eat beef e.g. some Hindus. Some halal Indian restaurants in San Francisco do something similar: they serve halal chicken and lamb, but no beef.

tl;dr Vegetable oil ticks boxes for multiple sets of clientele.

<comment><USER20> That makes a good deal of sense. I'm a vegetarian, I appreciate it, but was merely surprised given that halal beef and halal beef fat exist. Thanks for these further speculations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The title and article are using reglion as a context when it's not. As a consumer I am not _converting_ to Sharia finance, I have just found a product which meets my requirements.

The index fund I am invested in turns out to be mainly high tech stocks with a low fee, just because it has 'Islamic' in the fund name doesn't mean I'm a convert to the religious philosophy.

<comment><USER23> Would you still be concerned if the title said "Why non-Muslims are converting to financial institutions which abide by sharia law"?

They're a publication; the job of all headline is to convince people to read articles, and on the "clickbait" scale, this seems to be pretty solidly "not clickbait".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Who wrote this article?

<comment><USER25> Common question here - standard Economist policy is never to name their writers and correspondents, except very very rarely. Their content is published under the name of the newspaper, not the individual author.

<comment><USER26> [https://www.economist.com/the-economist- explains/2013/09/04/...](https://www.economist.com/the-economist- explains/2013/09/04/why-are-the-economists-writers-anonymous) explains why

<comment><USER3> They should have a "Who is the author?" byline that points to link you posted (at least that's what I would do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> usury ?

<comment><USER3> Are you asking for the definition?

Usury (/ˈjuːʒəri/)[1][2] is, as defined today, the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. Originally, usury meant interest of any kind. A loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors. Historically, in some Christian societies, and in many Islamic societies even today, charging any interest at all would be considered usury. Someone who practices usury can be called a usurer, but a more common term in contemporary English is loan shark. [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very interesting but need a non-paywalled source.

<comment><USER3> I was able to click and see the article, and I'm not a subscriber.

<comment><USER29> I've reached the limit too. What does modern banking have to do with religion?

<comment><USER7> The article says that Muslim financing tradition prevents banks from paying interest, and they must instead share their profits. In recent years this has been higher than the meager interest offered by banks' traditional savings accounts, so it is attracting non-Muslims at a growing rate. There is some debate as to whether all of these products technically fit the definition/custom--as some banks are advertising a certain rate of return through profit sharing, making it very similar to interest.

<comment><USER30> Would it make sense for a retail customer of Big Bank Co. to also be a shareholder thus enabling them to share the profits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you think they aren't funding terrorism through these banks, I've got a bridge to sell you.

<comment><USER32> That's flamebait, which the site guidelines ask you not to post. More generally, could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for better than that here, so eventually ban accounts that do it.

On HN the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> What's next - Feng Shui financing. Making sure all the corporate buildings of the companies you invest in point in the proper orientation?

</comment><comment><USER34> I once read that "sharia finance" is just a buzzword and those banks are doing business as every other bank, just with different naming of their processes/products.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we enumerate FOSS chat, messaging, voip and collaboration software? - <AUTHOR> Please list noteworthy FOSS that provides any of the below: instant or non-instant messaging, voip, forum, discussion, collaboration, etc.<p>To start off, I'll mention mailing lists, irc, matrix protocol[1], ring[2], tox[3].<p>[1] https://github.com/matrix-org [2] https://ring.cx [3] https://tox.chat <comment><USER2> Long lists of "chat" applications that are open source or not are the main problem I have with those applications. The dominant theme in this space is that unlike email or the web, no standard has emerged, so there are always new things like "Facebook Instant Messenger" that seem to be "AOL Instant Messenger 0.999999 or 1.000001" but aren't compatible.

If you are involved with a few work projects, family, open source projects, etc. you have to have ten or so communications apps open, deal with the overhead on startup, software updates, overhead while it is running, all the various foibles of these things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I associate this with greedy closed software that relies on network ownership and overly tolerant consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Done: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted)

<comment><USER4> Awesome indeed!!! :-)

Just started reading the list, and already found _several_ apps that I've wanted to host = overjoyed!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Privacytools.io ([https://privacytools.io](https://privacytools.io)) has a good collection. A lot of privacy software is FOSS.

Standard Notes ([https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org)) is up there which is a free open-source encrypted notes app that I work on.

</comment><comment><USER6> That seems like a very broad request. Are you looking for clients? Servers? Self-hosted web solutions? Just names of protocols? Say that I spent a few minutes listing off every piece of related software that I can think of. What's the purpose and benefit?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question. Purpose and benefit is the promotion of free software in the niche of everyday communication. We list and discuss FOSS options, maybe furthering their use.</comment></comment>


A Twist on the Spoon Theory - <AUTHOR> https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-twist-on-spoon-theory.html <comment><USER2> Consider also: [https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/178856511571/conserv...](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/178856511571/conservation- and-momentum-models-of-brains)

This is probably the key quote, pointing out that "resource conservation" models (e.g., "spoons") doesn't work for everyone:

> I talked recently to someone whose brain works very differently from mine. > If they have the structures in place that they need to succeed, they will > just keep on being able to do stuff until one of those structures breaks > down. They can pack their weekend and then work all week; they can have > something after work every single night. But if a structure crumbles on > them, suddenly they can't do much of anything.

> The person I talked to was familiar with resource conservation models, and > this really harmed them when their structures crumbled. They found advice to > cut back on the stuff they were doing, save energy, commit to the minimum > necessary, cancel plans. And none of that helped, plus it's actually really > depressing and isolating to do the absolute minimum you need to survive > every day, so they ended up just as stuck and now without any of the things > that made them happy.

<comment><USER3> As your link says, I think people use a mix of different resource models. For myself, I seem to have a momentum model for "thing-y" work (engineering, paperwork, cleaning, etc.) but a resource model for "people-y" work. Most importantly for me, depleting my "people-y" resource will knock out my "thing-y" faculties: 10 hours of coding leaves me tired but OK and I'll be good to go again the next day. A two hour client meeting leaves me drained for a couple of days, during which I'll be no good for client meetings OR coding.

<comment><USER4> > A two hour client meeting leaves me drained for a couple of days, during > which I'll be no good for client meetings OR coding.

I wonder if anyone knows a good hack for this problem. I suspect physical exercise works to some extent. Perhaps meditation?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm an extrovert with a compromised immune system. I generally find meetings energizing because I'm a people person.

When I don't, it's usually because the people I'm meeting with just are unwell and germy, even if they aren't actively coughing and sniffling. In such cases, showering as promptly as possible afterwards and engaging in self care to support my immune system helps me recover faster.

I will note the coffee and alcohol mentioned in another comment both have moderate medicinal effects, as does spicy food. (But it does so at a cost because it's a stimulant, not nutritional support. It doesn't give the adrenals more to work with. It just runs them on high, basically.)

Alcohol is an antiseptic and helps kill germs. Anecdotally, I have heard of cases where an improperly prepared meal caused food poisoning in the folks who did not have alcohol with the meal, but not in those who did have alcohol with the meal.

Caffeine boosts the adrenals, which helps with immune function generally and allergies in specific.

YMMV and similar disclaimers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related, this is an excellent story about a millionaire who lost it all to become homeless, and then how he pulled himself back up: [https://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to- fail/](https://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-fail/)

<comment><USER6> A very exciting story.

But in order to be fair, having $500k in savings is nowhere close to being a millionaire.

<comment><USER5> True and a very good point. I was thinking more in terms of his net worth, house, cars, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As the link to the Spoon Theory link was blocked (hello, blockadblock.com) becaues of the 8 plugins that I have, here's the Wiki on it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory)</comment>


Show HN (again): Download free PSDs made by Dribbble users. - <AUTHOR> http://freebbble.com/?launch=2

<comment><USER2> Other freebie resources:

<http://psddd.co/> (pulls posts tagged with "psddd")

<http://freethroww.com/> (pulls top posts that are freebies)

<http://dribbble.com/tags/freebie> (all posts tagged "freebie")</comment>


Show HN: OAuth.io released with 70+ providers - <AUTHOR> https://oauth.io <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5777102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5777102)

From a security perspective, this is a horrible idea, adding a completely untrusted intermediary. OAuth.io will technically have access to all of your user data, and any security flaws that they have will impact your service and user data.

<comment><USER3> Worse than that. You are at the mercy of what service providers think of both them AND all of their clients.

Suppose that they have a customer who uses their service to install malware in people's accounts, and Google catches them. Google isn't going to just shut off one customer. They are going to revoke the client_id associated with OAuth.io, causing every customer to lose access. (A malware author could try this because they would hope that malicious requests are more easily lost inside the torrent of other stuff coming from OAuth.io.)

And it isn't just a customer who is intentionally bad. If a customer gets compromised by a malware author who uses that as a vector, well, same story.

You do not want your access to business-critical APIs to depend on a third party reseller who cannot guarantee their own continued access. Really.

<comment><USER4> I received an invite to this service today and just checked it out - this is not correct.

You have to generate your own keys for each service, then store them with OAuth.io. This doesn't mean they can't access your users' data, just that there isn't one "master key" that could shut everyone down.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the correction.

In that case, I fail to see the value add that they claim to provide.

<comment><USER5> I feel it is made for fast Oauth integration. We use 4 oauth providers into one of our app, and it took us really 4 full days to implement them without bug. We are not Oauth experts but it was really boring and IMO useless implementation time.

Also I'm personaly making a client-side app on a Github page and it seems that with oauth.io I could make a serverless Facebook/Twitter authenticated app.

<comment><USER6> Facebook and Twitter OAuth implementations both support response_type=token for serverless authorization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is a step backward. The OAuth specs were designed to make it easier to work with different services and now we have to utilize yet another service to communicate with those services?! Via a priority protocol even!

As a developer, I understand the pain when you have to deal with more than a handful of providers but this approach is a no-go IMHO. Would be a better idea to use something like HybridAuth and handle everything from your servers.

Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

Apology to OP if this comment appears to be offensive.

<comment><USER5> Oauth has been made to avoid to store passwords, but it is not a simple protocol to implement. I just think you are talking here about the main debate between protocol versus applications/platforms.

\- Protocols provide standardization, and independance, often as recipe/instructions to follow. Protocols keeps things open, into nodes not hubs.

\- Applications/platforms provide easy comsumption, with a user design but also dependancies. It is like a menu to order, as you choose what you want to eat but you don't have to care about how to do it (the recipe). They mutualize things as code librairies, CPU etc... but are hubs, not node and close the network in counterparty of user experience.

To see in depth the difference of design between a recipe and and a menu, more explanations in the Donald Norman book " The Design of Everyday Things"

Edit: To see the difference between a protocol and an application, why people are using Gmail instead of STMP? _User experience vs implementation_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A bit annoying that the site breaks the back button.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice stuff! Definitely beats using Gigya or Janrain which cost quite a bit. This is the only part we were interested in anyway so... Are you guys planning on adding services and maintaining the services for regular updates across all these services?

</comment><comment><USER9> I clicked the login button on your oauth.io site' and I was surprised to see a basic email/password form. Why not use your own product to allow login through Facebook, twitter, github, etc?

<comment><USER10> That is ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is not what I want in an OAuth provider.

Instead, someone should write a simple daemon I can execute http+json REST functions on to create and verify login cookies and transfer them back and forth to the user's browser using my webapp normally.

The daemon can be written in any language as long as it is not a JVM language.

I would write such a thing, but OAuth is somewhat confusing, and OAuth.io brings up a good point, a lot of the existing OAuth implementations are a bit flaky and if I just copy what they do/use them directly I risk inheriting that problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anybody watch the little gif in the corner? Just kind of stared at it for a while, it never seems to end.

edit: Oh, the whole thing isn't a GIF. It just has a looping programmer gif and then puts some text around it. Maybe it will go on forever then :p

edit2: [https://oauth.io/js/stubborn.js](https://oauth.io/js/stubborn.js) So definitely does go on forever :p

</comment><comment><USER13> So... Where can I find more information on what this is and how it works? There isn't even a description on the website on what oauth.io is, just a small code snippet. Why am I supposed to sign up for something I know nothing about? I was expecting at least a small video that explains how this all works and what it does for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is still beta page. I can't see list of 70 providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, you just have to sign up to access the full list. We'll add this list for non registered user asap. Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would recommend rolling your own consumers, or using one of the following libraries:

\- [http://hybridauth.sourceforge.net/](http://hybridauth.sourceforge.net/) (PHP)

\- [https://github.com/intridea/omniauth](https://github.com/intridea/omniauth) (Ruby)

Anybody have any equivalents for other languages?

</comment><comment><USER16> Nothing really wrong with wanting to make money, but this should be an OSS library instead.. I guess I am too idealistic :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for breaking my back button.

</comment><comment><USER18> I, for one, welcome our new OAuth overlords.

If it works the way it's supposed to I'll be using it for sure.

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't register on their website using OAuth? Really?</comment>


Maker's Schedule, Manager's Software - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/31399044182/makers-schedule-managers-software

<comment><USER2> I just read about this the other day in The Slow Web [1] by Jack Cheng:

"iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you'll find an updated calendar when you wake."

I like that it can be used as the opposite of a todo list. Instead of a list telling you what to do, you tell it what you've done.

1\. <http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web>

</comment><comment><USER3> Something that the FAQ doesn't answer, but probably should: If for some reason my company decides we no longer want to use this service, is there any way to export all of my company's data in a usable format?

<comment><USER4> Good point that we should mention this in the FAQ. You can export in plaintext and PDF easily.

(And I know you can export your personal entries as CSV but I'm not actually 100% certain about companies -- but you definitely should be able to and it's something we'd help you with.)

It's absolutely our belief that the data is yours.

Thanks to gsmaverick to answering as well.

<comment><USER5> I'd suggest adding this piece of (important) info in the FAQ in <https://idonethis.com/accounts/register/>, as an additional sentence to the answer for _Do I have to sign a long term contact?_

Congrats on your product. Looks great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the idea of a morning email that reminds you of the things that were accomplished the day before. I've read a few articles recently about the importance of the first activity of the day. This positive reinforcement strikes me as empowering; do that and then follow up with accomplishing a discrete task and you'll feel productive for the rest of the day.

<comment><USER4> Definitely. Many of our members tell us that they read their morning email on their phones in bed, and it gives them a little boost to go out into the world and accomplish great things.

<comment><USER7> My habits with iDoneThis are a little inverted compared to this. The last thing I do each day is reply to my "what did you do today?" email (seriously the last thing - I get into bed, reply to that email, and then sleep). I find the thought of wanting to have something worth putting in that email drives me to do more throughout the day, it's a great motivational tool.

The other big advantage I have is that at the end of the week if I'm feeling like I haven't really achieved anything, I can look back through my calendar and get a nice overview of what I did - it's a good pick-me-up for the perceived-lack-of-productivity blues.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome to hear.

I suspect you're using the "personal" iDoneThis. With the business iDoneThis, we have the same evening email, and in the morning, we summarize yours and your team's achievements in an email digest. It hopefully has the effect that you describe of looking through your calendar, except that it shows up in your inbox on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You should make it possible to sign up without credit card. It's a big barrier to cross, as the potential customer not only has to leave his comfortable chair or sofa to find his cc details, but also has to remember to unsubscribe if the service is uninteresting. I personally pass on trying out any service that has this requirement (unless it looks extremely interesting right off the bat, which is quite seldom).

<comment><USER9> Look at it the other way: requiring a credit card up-front gets you less unqualified tyre-kickers so the people who do sign up are probably far more motivated by the pain you're solving, and so are much more likely to become a paying customer. Ideally, after reading your sales site your potential customers should be begging you to take their credit card details ^

It's a choice between a higher throughput into the funnel, or a higher conversion rate. Neither is necessarily wrong.

^ My one problem with the upfront credit card system is the <$1 test transaction which is usually applied and then instantly refunded. This makes the anti-fraud systems at my bank go into meltdown and puts a block on my credit card until they can confirm the transaction with me.

<comment><USER8> In the realm of web-apps though, unqualified tyre-kickers i.e. people who just try the demo, have an almost non-existing cost (a bit of traffic and a few system transactions).

So I can't see why you would sacrifice more potential customers (higher funnel throughput) for an artificially higher conversion rate.

I mean the conversion rate is just a metric. A conversion rate of 5% of 1000 is better than 10% of 400. The goal must surely be, at least as long as the cost of serving a tyre-kicker is almost nothing, to get as many to try as possible.</comment></comment></comment>