Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/ <comment><USER2> Took a quick look at the API. For context, I was involved in the early days of Google Cloud Storage.

It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API -- at least for common object/bucket create/delete. This will require more code to be written and it will be harder to adapt client libraries.

The API documentation is here: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/)

Other notes:

* The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL followed by doing the actual upload.

* They _require_ a SHA1 hash when uploading objects. This is probably overkill over a cheaper CRC. In addition, it means that users have to make 2 passes to upload -- first to compute the hash and then another to upload. This can slow uploads of large objects dramatically. A better method is to allow users to omit the hash and return it in the upload response. Then compare that response with a hash computed while uploading. In the rare case that the object was corrupted in transit, delete/retry. GCS docs here: [https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#che...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gsutil/commands/cp#checksum-validation)

<comment><USER3> > It is surprising that they didn't make it compatible with the S3 API .... > The lack of scalable front-end load balancing is shown by the fact that they > require users to first make an API call to get an upload URL

And... you answered your own question. :-) We reduce our operating costs by not having as many load balancers in the datacenter and pushing off the responsibility to the API. It all comes from our traditional backup product where we wrote all the software on both sides so we could save money this way.

With that said, we are actively considering offering an S3 compatible API for a slightly higher cost (basically what it would cost us to deploy the larger load balancing tech).

<comment><USER4> I, for one, prefer the directness of not having to go through a front-end proxy. It probably eliminates some failure modes. I think that, instead of Backblaze providing an S3-compatible API, someone should do an open-source S3-compatible front-end for B2, that any interested user can run on a cheap VPS.

<comment><USER5> I work at [https://kloudless.com](https://kloudless.com). While not S3-compatible, we offer a similar proxy that provides a single API to multiple storage services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, SharePoint, etc. We've also released support for S3 and Azure and are looking into B2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whether or not I decide to use this service, this is one of the most _useful_ announcement blog posts I've read in a while. The tone is not just "ok we released this" but instead " _we released this, and here are some practical use cases if you are already doing X, Y, or Z_ " \-- nice job.

<comment><USER7> Yev from Backblaze here -> I cannot describe how pleased I am to read this comment. Thank you!

<comment><USER8> Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Let's say I backed up 8 TB of data for a small business, and I need to restore in 24 hrs, is it possible to request overnight shipments of hard drives of data so I can do the restore locally instead of taking weeks to download all that data

I know amazon has this feature, not sure about google.

Another question, what's the max number of buckets can an account hold?

Looking forward to try this service out, Thanks

Bedros

<comment><USER3> > Is there a possibility to request the backed up data in physical form.

Yes. In our traditional 8 year old product line of online backup, you can order a restore on an external USB hard drive for $189 (you keep the hard drive, and the cost includes world wide shipping). We FedEx the restore to you anywhere in the world. (We ship to Europe all the time, but add an EXTRA 24 hours for that to arrive.) Oh, if you only have 128 GBytes of data you can order a USB thumb drive of that FedEx'ed to you for only $99.

B2 absolutely supports this USB drive restore functionality. We call the feature "Snapshots" (you take a "Snapshot" of some of your data, then you can either download it as one large zip file or you can have it sent to you via USB Hard Drive).

Our online backup product tells you that the restore is up to 4 TBytes, but we have prepared Drobos as "special orders" for customers that were much larger than that. We aren't trying to make profit from that part of the business, just kind of break even on materials and shipping and create customer goodwill. You would be AMAZED how happy some customers are to receive 8 TBytes of Drobo with all their data they thought they might have lost. :-)

<comment><USER9> I'm really glad to hear this. I haven't kept up w/ Backblaze, other than to read blog posts on hard drive reliability and the storage pod designs. This comment made your services vastly more interesting to me, and much more applicable to my Customers. Gonna go read about your product offerings now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to the good point raised by @jcreedon regarding their single datacenter (which I think is a bit of a bigger deal than he does, primarily because I don't think it scales linearly per-GB for the first few datacenters, though it might thereafter), I'm more concerned about the bandwidth.

There's no talk about their backbone or their network capacity. I get that they have terabytes of upload coming in, but as anyone who's used their software can tell you, it's throttled. I don't know how many users they have to tell you how much bandwidth they're actually handling, but can they handle people using B2 as a distribution point for large files for customers? For example, I have a huge S3/CF monthly bill from customers downloading ~400MiB ISO images tens thousands of times a month. Amazon CloudFront is ~$0.085/GB for the first TB, while BackBlaze B2 is an incredible $0.05/GB - but at what performance? Will my technical support representatives be getting angry phone calls about halting download speeds or do they have the capacity for something like this?

Hosting the world's data is no tiny task, I hope they're ready for it and I do, truly, wish them all the luck. I've been a BackBlaze customer for a few years now (at least 5 or 6, I imagine) as a tertiary or quaternary backup (haven't had to restore... yet), and B2 looks and sounds promising, but as far as technical details go, this post is nothing.

EDIT: In response to the reply below, I believe it's throttled by default in the client, though that can be turned off in the application settings. Also, you've replied to my claims of throttling but have ignored my question regarding backbone capacity and network readiness...

<comment><USER3> Sorry about skipping your network capacity question. I just got over-excited about throttling. :-)

We currently have about 100 Gbps symmetric capacity into our datacenter on a couple of redundant providers, but the key is we have open overhead and we'll purchase more as our customers need it.

But here is the best part (if you want OUTBOUND capacity) - our current product fills the INBOUND internet connection, but currently we only use a tiny, tiny fraction of the OUTBOUND connection. So if you want to serve files out of our datacenter we have a metric ton of unused bandwidth we would LOVE you to use. And if you fill it up, we promise to purchase more.

But also keep in mind, Backblaze is very experienced with STORAGE and I have a lot of confidence we won't lose any of your files. What we don't have a huge amount of experience with yet is serving up viral videos and such. So just bear with us during this beta period while we figure it all out. Personally I'm looking forward to that part (all the CDN/caching layers).

<comment><USER11> But if your inbound capacity is pretty full these days, how can you manage to onboard _large_ new clients at this point? Can you scale your inbound bandwith as fast (and at the same cost) as adding a new vault a month?

<comment><USER3> Our inbound is not completely full, and we always try to have extra capacity/headroom for new customers. But if you plan to upload more than 5 petabytes at a rate of faster than 15 Gbps sustained, you probably want to contact us ahead of time to let us know it's coming and we'll increase our capacity for you. We can absorb anything less and it won't cause us any issues.

As somebody else mentioned, since we're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it.

<comment><USER12> > __ _we 're in a commercial datacenter with a bunch of network providers > already serving us, it's pretty easy to dial up our capacity as we need it._ > __

Whats the lead time in your case?

In my historic experience doing this regardless of if I was even in MAE- West... cross connects and provisioning were eons in internet time...

<comment><USER3> I'd estimate a week? That's probably what you meant by "eons". :-)

It could go faster, but _if_ we need to buy a new (expensive) network switch that can take a few days to arrive. And as you mention, the datacenter guys are happiest if you give them 3 - 4 days and a work order to do the cross connect.

Building out more vaults (the blocks of 20 storage pods we store data in) is usually about the same if we rush it, but we have a big (multi-petabyte) buffer spinning ready to accept data at anytime. We have a regularly scheduled delivery of pods once per month based on projections, but we have been known to tell our provider to go ahead and build three months worth of pod chassis (everything except for the drives) immediately and ship them to us. We supply the hard drives, so that either comes from our own stashes or we quickly order some more from various sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm thrilled that we can offer this raw cloud storage for just $0.005/GB/month. Would love to hear from the Hacker News community what you do with storage today & what you might do with B2.

Here are my thoughts on our announcement today: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage- provider/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-provider/)

Gleb

<comment><USER14> Do you have any plans to offer some sort of WORM model where you could "seal" a bucket, file, etc. to prevent future changes? This is really nice for protecting against malware, human error or malice, etc. and a regulatory requirement for certain industries.

<comment><USER13> We're at the very beginning of this journey, and heard from a lot of folks that they wanted access to inexpensive cloud storage. I imagine we'll learn a lot more about needs & use cases from people overtime. I can certainly understand the value of WORM storage and it is something we'll definitely consider adding. Appreciate the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tarsnap seems to rely pretty heavily on Amazon's infrastructure, so I'm guessing it won't support this? Which is a shame because I'd really like to use it, but can't afford to right now as an individual.

Arq seems really good at supporting a broad variety of cloud providers though, so hopefully they'll add this too. I'm hesitant to use cloud backups generally; I've never seen an audit of how secure Arq's backup scheme is, for example (though it seems pretty simple - [https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt](https://www.arqbackup.com/s3_data_format.txt)). I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure. It's probably good enough for my use, given that I'm not storing state secrets or anything, but it's still a little unsettling to 'lose control' of one's data.

From Backblaze's point of view, I guess this is either smart (diversifying themselves–people can use other backup software if they like, and Backblaze still profits) or less smart (turning themselves into a commodity), but it seems like their software is still first rate, so I guess it'll work for them.

<comment><USER16> > I've used CrashPlan a lot and basically take it on faith that it's secure

They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long- obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES.

I can only assume they do this because migrating would cost them money, and being able to advertise "448 bit encryption" actually sounds like a plus to most people and not the glaring red flag it actually is.

> it seems like their software is still first rate

What, like their backup client that can't actually do restores? It's still all "log in to our website and let us decrypt your data for you" :/

<comment><USER15> > They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long- > obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was > faster than 3DES.

Not defending it, because I know it's old and there are weaknesses, but aren't Blowfish and 3DES both still technically secure? This is a genuine question. It was my understanding that if implemented correctly, with a random key etc., that neither has been formally broken. 3DES is 2^112 no? which is still not practically accessible by brute force. Not that this means anyone should use them, of course, AES is a standard for a reason...

As you say, I had just assumed the migration cost was too high to move to something newer, but I don't think it necessarily means data stored there is unsafe?

<comment><USER16> Sure, but it's not exactly putting them in a good light is it? Dressing up obsolete stuff as state of the art "same as your bank uses", while either being unwilling or unable to migrate to something more era-appropriate.

Calls into question their competence, their honesty and their architecture all at once.

<comment><USER17> Wait, what about Blowfish is insecure? BCrypt is built on top of Blowfish.

Blowfish supports key-lengths up to 448-bits. And I've never heard of a single criticism of the function. Its just kinda... less used than Rijndael because it didn't "officially" win the contest. But otherwise, it is a fine function.

EDIT: Confused Twofish with Blowfish in the AES finalists.

<comment><USER16> Obsolete is not the same as insecure. But it is old, it does have its weaknesses, and there have been better options out there for a very long time. Why continue to use it? Is upgrading your crypto _that_ difficult that you'd rather just leave it for another decade or two?

It also calls into question the nature of all the other crypto they're using - is that all >20 years old too? Still tuned for a world of 486's and 68040's?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Updated object store comparison:

[http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store- comparison/)

<comment><USER8> your chart is missing [https://nimbus.io/](https://nimbus.io/) which is .02 per GB/Mo.

<comment><USER18> I added an issue to track this since Nimbus is still in private beta:

[https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store- comparison/issues...](https://github.com/andrewgaul/object-store- comparison/issues/9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For context, OVH offers object storage with 3x replication for $.01/GB [1].

[1] [https://www.runabove.com/cloud- storage.xml](https://www.runabove.com/cloud-storage.xml)

<comment><USER20> It is certainly interesting how OVH undercuts the competition by quite a large margin in everything. We use them for dedicated servers, but I wonder why they're not as well known as AWS...

<comment><USER21> For me, there's a combination of reasons.

First, they weren't in North America until recently. Having a server in France means high ping times for me and latency for the vast majority of my visitors. OVH started operations in Québec in 2013. So they've had less than three years to establish themselves. EC2 is 9 years old.

Second, it's hard to figure out what to buy. With EC2, they're all Xen instances and you decide on the right CPU/RAM configuration. DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, etc. all are easy. With OVH, what am I supposed to buy? Do I want a dedicated server or an infrastructure dedicated server? And then if I click for dedicated, I need to choose from Hosting, Enterprise, Infrastructure, Storage, Custom, or Game. I know computers - tell me the processor, RAM, and storage without breaking it into categories. So, I go with Hosting and half of the options are for "Delivery from September 30". Ok, that's more than a week out. Maybe I want more flexibility like hourly billing on VPSs. I can go to Cloud -> VPS. And now I can choose SSD or Cloud with different prices. Why is the SSD so much cheaper? $3.50 vs $9 and they're both 1 core, 2GB of RAM, 100Mbps network link KVM boxes. Then I wonder if these are the same things as the RunAbove labs vs regular. The labs ones shared the processor cores, but this seems to indicate that both don't have the noisy neighbor problem. So I check RunAbove. Wow, everything has changed. Looks like they don't offer the SSD of Ceph instances anymore, but they have SATA backed instances. So, they're running all sorts of different combinations. And should I be looking into Kimsufi or SYS brands? Do they still exist? What if I want object storage. Ok, the US site takes me to RunAbove which tells me that it's now part of OVH proper which brings me to their UK site with apparently no way of loading it on the American site. Compare that to DigitalOcean where you just get a very simple, "here are the plans, there's no complex stuff with weird names or categories, buy what you need." Even Vultr manages simple with SSD VPS, SATA VPS, and Dedicated Cloud. Perfect. Most likely I want the SSD VPS, but maybe I need more storage or maybe I want metal servers sold to me like cloud servers. Easy.

And to be fair, OVH used to be a lot more complicated and a lot worse. It looks like they're streamlining a ton. But they should still simplify a lot more.

Third, OVH is terrible at marketing. I want to define what I mean by marketing. DigitalOcean is a king of marketing. You go to their site and you see brief comments from the creator of jQuery, the creator of RailsCasts, the creator of Redis, and a Rails core member. You might not use those technologies or even like them, but you recognise that DigitalOcean can't be total crap given that these are people with options and a reasonable amount of taste. DigitalOcean sponsors hackathons like woah. Giving students a dozen or so dollars in credit makes them well-known and an easy service to try. DigitalOcean's site inspires confidence in its simplicity. You don't feel like there's some hidden thing because it's just simple plans that increase rather linearly. Finally, try searching for VPS + some tech term. "VPS Ansible" has a DigitalOcean blog article as #3. "VPS elasticsearch" has DO with the top two spots. The point is that you see that and it's an indication that they're part of the community (supporting some free content) and kinda get it.

OVH, on the other hand, inspires none of those good feelings. OVH has a generic site that you can't tell apart from other generic sites. It has the kind of "throw everything at the user and see what sticks" design that I don't think users want. We want DigitalOcean to say "this! this is good!". OVH is like, we have a lot of different things and someone has written "enterprise" or "cloud" on some of them without really indicating how some options are more "enterprise" or "cloud". And there are stock images of network switches and RAM and such like a pizza place that has a stock picture of a pizza on their take-away menu that isn't their pizza. Do they get it?

I really wish OVH well. More providers means downward pressure on pricing which is good for me. I mean, 2GB of RAM VPS for $3.50? Awesome! Glad to see that graduate from RunAbove. But OVH still has a ways to go. Lots of the time you have to wait for servers. If I want a dedicated SSD box, they're quoting a 10 day wait for all except one model. The entire "hosting" range has quotes of 3-12+ days. "Enterprise" has one box for 120 second provision, two that are 3 days out, and two that are 10 days out. It seems like OVH is a place to get a good deal if you're willing to deal with complicated process, waiting for a box, and them switching things up on you. But maybe OVH is stabalizing. I'm hoping their VPS offering will be a lot more stable than it has been. Seems like they're cutting down on using alternative brands like SYS and Kimsufi.

I can see OVH being a good company, but it's no surprise to me that they aren't as well known as AWS.

<comment><USER22> Agree with everything above. Especially the complexity.

Runabove, OVH, VPS all those. The worst part is they keep posting about their streamlining and deep thought into reorganization. And yet no body understand "their" why.

To many it seems more like a reorganization for the sake of reorganization.

Then there is their Network. Which could range from Very good to VERY VERY bad.

And the final final thing? Is their lack of support or communication. You fire a email or ticket at least other host gives you a reply. OVH? None.

And when you add their non active support, unable to talk to sales or people for inquiry, and their overall complexity it is not hard to see why they dont pick up as much customer as they should have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.

<comment><USER24> Something to note: Unless you're storing data in us-east-1, all other regions in AWS are "one datacenter". Yes, they have AZs, but those aren't datacenters, they're just compartmentalized segments of the same datacenter.

So! If you can tolerate the loss of a datacenter, store in Blackblaze. If you need geo-redundancy until Backblaze can offer it? Store in us-east-1 (which is geo-redundant between Virginia and Oregon).

<comment><USER25> This is incorrect on almost all points.

All AWS AZs are physically separated facilities with redundancy on all their infrastructure, although they're obviously in the same general area.

us-east-1 is _not_ geo-redundant. It is entirely on the east-coast, as the name suggests. Although S3 does have geo-redundancy in all regions.

You may have been thinking of "US Standard", but it is the same as "us- east-1".

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_r...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region)

<comment><USER24> > This is a feature for EU and US-West. US Standard is bi-coastal and doesn't > have read-after-write consistency.

Quote from Jeff Barr @ AWS: [http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after- write-consistenc...](http://shlomoswidler.com/2009/12/read-after-write- consistenc..).

<comment><USER26> Their documentation is really inconsistent on this...

<comment><USER24> I've emailed Jeff to get clarification on it.

<comment><USER27> You did? I didn't see it...

<comment><USER24> From my gmail account :/ I'll resend!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Fair warning: Backblaze has a habit of making major changes silently (without any indication to the user), and their customer support is TERRIBLE. I was a customer for several years and never had a positive interaction with their support staff. The final straw was losing several files last year after they changed their backup method without notifying users, a method that contradicted their documentation. I got full IDGAF treatment from their support. That's right - a backup solution failed to backup, then support basically shrugged and said "your loss, too bad, so sad" when I contacted them _even though they admitted it was their fault._

Buyer beware when it comes to Backblaze.

<comment><USER29> How did it change that you lost data?

<comment><USER28> They started picking and choosing which parts of AppData they backed up, but never informed their users and kept on claiming they backed up "everything." See, the backup app used to be set up so you could see what was being excluded, and modify it if need be. I had the entirety of AppData selected as "for backup," then had several bits of saved user data wiped out. One of those was an extension that stored its data in the browser user profile, something I used frequently and had restored a half-dozen times from backup. Then it was gone. Backblaze stopped backing it up, deleted it from their servers, and I had no way to restore it. Three years of data lost and zero effort from Backblaze to recover it, not even an apology.

The technology isn't bad, but their customer service is some of the worst I've ever seen. I was a Backblaze customer for three years and not once did I have what I'd consider a positive experience. If anything goes wrong they leave you hanging. They're not a company I'd ever trust with valuable data again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reading the API, it seems that I need to precalculate a SHA-1 before uploading? This makes it impossible to stream data to b2 from another source, I'll need to store it first then send to b2.

<comment><USER3> Right now your only option would be to "buffer" packets of say 1 MByte in RAM, calculate the SHA-1, then store them as separate files in Backblaze B2.

We do plan to add file offset access and larger file support very soon, so you would be able to append a 1 MByte chunk to an existing file in Backblaze with a SHA-1 of only the 1 MByte chunk. That should allow you to stream?

All great feedback, by the way. We really want to hear about these shortcomings in our API right away.

<comment><USER31> Having to know the SHA1 in advance would be a show stopper for rclone ( [http://rclone.org](http://rclone.org) ) as it uses a streaming model internally (it can stream between cloud providers).

Being able to append to a file in 1 MByte chunks (or larger) would be perfect - that is exactly the way Amazon S3 multipart uploads and google drive multipart uploads work.

<comment><USER32> I'm planning on storing files as encrypted X megabyte chunks (where X is TBD) - would calculating per-chunk and then uploading solve it? There's metadata support which could store original filenames etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Finally some more reasonable prices in this space.

Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download your data to analyze it.

What I'd really like is a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.

<comment><USER34> Amazon might not be open to it, but I would bet Digital Ocean would be.

<comment><USER35> I would rate the likelihood of AWS offering free, multi-path, multi-Tbps connectivity into their AZs to a competitor to be effectively nil.

If the alternative cloud ecosystem wants to compete effectively against AWS, it desperately needs a more sophisticated authorization scheme. Don't forget that IAM/STS is a major enabling factor in applications integration of EC2 and S3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The price is being heralded as the thing to get excited about, but I'm also very concerned about the security and availability of my data. I suppose those details are somewhere, but they're not in this article which is quite lengthy.

I would like to know more of the implementation of this and more information on policies to protect access to my data. And I would like to know where the data is stored. I suppose I got read the manual, but maybe some info tidbits could be included in the announcement.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy and pretty much everything we do. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage- architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage- architecture/) You can also read about our "Backblaze Storage Pods" (the things filled with drives) here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage- pod/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod/)

Also, we are the only company we know of that releases our drive failure rates. We release them quarterly, here is the most recent failure analysis: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability- stats-...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats- for-q2-2015/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> You should allows period (.) in your signup form email field. I know you can just remove the period and the email will still get delivered to my gmail, but plenty of people likely don't know this.

<comment><USER3> You mean a period at the end? Like email@example.com. ? We'll fix it...

<comment><USER37> No. The form wasn't allowing firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER38> Accepted my firstname.lastname@example.com just fine, unless they just fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> One feature that I'd love to see: the ability to update part of a file (e.g. replace bytes 512-1023 with new content of the same length) and/or append to an existing file! For whatever reason, these cloud storage products are always implemented as either block-based (so you can replace parts of the file) or as file-based (so you can create a hierarchy of files with names and metadata). Why can't I have my cake and eat it??

<comment><USER3> > Why can't I have my cake and eat it?

:-) We definitely plan to add an API to append to an existing file. The current largest file size is 5 GBytes, and we want to support much larger (imagine a 1 TByte encrypted disk image). That will be by appending chunks to files followed by a "commit" declaring the file as complete.

I think the reason most of us cloud providers don't like replacing parts of files is it helps our caching layer be much simpler, and it would change the SHA-1 checksum on the file which just means "more complexity". But it isn't out of the question, it might just come with a "cost" (like you can replace the span but it might take a while and then we provide you the final checksum of the whole file in the response).

</comment></comment><comment> martin-adams I couldn't tell from the docs, but is it possible (or will it be possible) to generate a single use download URL to return to clients? I wouldn't want to have to pay double for outbound traffic going from B2 -> my server -> client.

<comment><USER7> Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes, you could get a URL and give it to somebody. Every time that person accesses it though, there'd be a charge (unless you're within our free parameters). If I understand correctly...

<comment> martin-adams Thanks Yev, is it possible to have the URL auto expire after a time period or number of accesses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Real attention to detail in this announcement. I signed up right away.

If there's attention to detail with one thing, odds are you'll find it in other places, too.

<comment><USER7> Yev at Backblaze -> So pleased to hear your say that! I'll forward it to the engineering team. They have LITERALLY been working nonstop on this for a year and deserve some praise! Thank you for signing up, I'm excited for you to start using it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> cmd+f redundancy, availability, durability, 99: 0 results.

Only on [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/why-b2.html) it is that I can cite the following: "the B2 Cloud Storage service has layers of redundancy to ensure data is durable and available". What that exactly is or what it translates to is nowhere to be found. If you want corporations or developers to use your storage services for their precious data, I'd be a bit more specific.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here: We're really transparent about our redundancy. We use 17+3 Reed Solomon across 20 computers in 20 different locations in our datacenter. You can read about it here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault- cloud-storage-architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud- storage-architecture/)

<comment><USER42> I have read plenty of posts from Backblaze in the past including the linked post, but I admit I also wanted to see details about the replication factor on the marketing site for B2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Now we know why the sub-$200 6TB drives keep going out of stock.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here. We can't find them either. We buy either 4 TB or 8 TB right now, and we're experimenting with 10 TB drives. We don't know why the 6 TB drives appeared and then disappeared...

<comment><USER43> Tigerdirect had them for $170 for a few days.

Note TDs are air-filled 7200rpm regular drives.

Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow.

<comment><USER44> _Are those 8TB and 10TB the helium ones with HAMR? Very slow._

My understanding of HAMR is that it is probably perfectly fine for Backblaze's backup products, which are (more or less) write-once, read-rarely. Shingled magnetic recording should also be OK for that use case.

But clearly not good for cloud storage.

<comment><USER43> Heat assisted is fine for write once but helium filled drives actually leak over time and fail because their molecules are so small.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nine months ago, I said the following. It feels good to predict things before they happen:

 _Backblaze should expand their service to a cheaper cloud storage service similar to Amazon S3. They already have the infrastructure and the know-how._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8756119)

<comment><USER7> Yev from Backblaze -> Yea, it was hard not say..."we're working on it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just yesterday I was discussing with a friend that I'd like to use Backblaze as backend for our zero-knowledge backup at [https://cloudfleet.io](https://cloudfleet.io) and that I'll ask them for a metered pricing model when we're big enough.

And voilá ... here it is.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.

<comment><USER48> AltaVault sounds like the thing your looking for. [http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection- software/altava...](http://www.netapp.com/us/products/protection- software/altavault/)

<comment><USER49> AltaVault is a backup target, but not a backup product that the OP was likely asking for. But many companies use products like Arq, BackupExec, or NetBackup in combination with AltaVault to achieve what the OP described.

Disclaimer: I worked on the predecessor to AltaVault at Riverbed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is this going to work for static asset hosting such as for low cost FE assets? Can this be set to serve an index file from the root directory? Doe's it provide you a public URL to your (stealing s3 terms) bucket?

Just curious as to why I would migrate from S3 for FE assets to Backblaze.

<comment><USER3> Yes! RIGHT NOW (during beta) we don't have the top level folder feature yet, the URLs all come from https:://f001.backblaze.com type of URLs. But this is one of my favorite uses (I have a private website I plan to move over) and we'll definitely be adding this feature soon.

<comment><USER50> Wicked! Time to start writing all those gulp-backblaze upload scripts!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Are there any plans to add application hosting along with this offering? Specifically, it could be useful to have a shim application that has direct access to the data without traversing the Internet, to minimize what needs to be transferred. For example, if used for a backup application, each day's incremental delta may be in one archive, but a periodic operation would be to move files from one archive to another. Or a full system restore may be pulling some data out of multiple archives, and a "shim" app (running within Backblaze's data center) would eliminate unnecessary transfers out.

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here. We'll add a LITTLE bit of app hosting support around this, but you won't be seeing a full blown EC2 type of product out of Backblaze for a while, realistically we don't have a large enough team to charge down that path and still do a great job at B2 and also our traditional online backup product that we still maintain.

What I'd really like in the short term is to do a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> What provider does Backblaze use for SMS verification? I'm using a Twilio number and it seems that the two disagree with each other. (It might be due to short-code use, but I'm not sure what their outbound number is.)

<comment><USER3> Backblaze uses Plivo (and we have a short code if that makes sense to you).

<comment><USER52> Thanks! Twilio isn't able to handle incoming SMS from short codes at this point so that would explain the issue. I'll use another method to verify for now until they do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Good lord, that's affordable! I cannot _wait_ until someone writes a Duplicity[1] backend for this... :-D

1 [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/)

</comment><comment><USER54> Looks like you still don't accept customers from Montenegro. "For security reasons, we are blocking your country's IP address." Why?

</comment><comment><USER55> This is a really cool service, I can already think of a few cool uses for this. I once participated in a project (movie to gif library), and one of the biggest constraints was the cost of cloud storage - hopefully more competition in this space can drive prices down to where they become even more negligible.

</comment><comment><USER56> Please tell me you're working on a PowerShell module. Microsoft is pushing PowerShell HARD (because it's awesome) and admins that do use it know its power and want ALL their vendors to use it.

You can open yourself up to a large number of customers by making it easy to get started via PowerShell.

</comment><comment><USER57> Congratulations on the launch! And I am also happy to announce, that the official command line tool, b2, is already ported to FreeBSD: [http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/](http://www.freshports.org/devel/b2/)

</comment><comment><USER58> For me, the signup page loaded once but now I get redirected to a 404 page at [http://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.html](http://www.backblaze.com/cloud- storage.html) when trying to load the signup page.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is awesome! I've been waiting for this for awhile.

I saw the comment about getting drives shipped to you, which is pretty neat, but what about the other way? I have about 50 TB of data we'd like to store, but only 5mbps upstream. Can we ship drives to you?

<comment><USER3> We call that feature "drive seeding" and it is requested often. Realistically I don't think we'll get to implement it in the next few months, but maybe in the 6 month timeframe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I didn't see this - are data centres available in different regions? Or is this a US-centric offering?

I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were _very_ slow.

<comment><USER61> They only have a single data-center.

> I ask because I tried Backblaze a while back, and uploads from the UK were > very slow.

Curiously from here in Japan, I've managed to clock 80 MBit/s backing up to Backblaze. I presume it all has to do with what kind of international peering your ISP has.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Great stuff.

What's the setup for file permissions? Can I have multiple people writing to the same bucket? Can I restrict deletion & write rules?

<comment><USER3> Brian from Backblaze here. It's pretty simple for now. You can have as many people reading and writing to the same bucket, but they would all need to share the same credentials. Buckets are either "allPublic" or "allPrivate" (and you can flip them back and forth at any time between those two settings). But that's it at this point.

We're actively looking for feedback in this area, so as developers ask us for something like Amazon's IAM (AWS Identity and Access Management) we'll be filling that functionality out. Hopefully without adding too much complexity to the simple model we have now.

<comment><USER62> That makes sense, release and iterate!

Personally I'd like to use some access management, and there's one case that I've not seen solved particularly well (though would appreciate anyone chiming in with things I've missed):

Distinct write and create permissions.

I'd like to be able to grant someone permission to create files but _not_ allow them to modify or delete them later. I end up generally adding this externally.

I think B2 is really close to this, as you've got the file ids for multiple versions, so I can effectively ignore the filenames and use the file ids instead. It'd need a difference between "upload new version" and "delete version" though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I asked Arq support if / when it would support B2 and got this reply:

Hi Robert,

I don't know whether or not Arq will be integrated with B2.

\- Stefan

</comment><comment><USER64> Awesome. Can't wait to see this added to Déjà Dup as a backup destination.

</comment><comment><USER65> What do we think about the charges for deleting on b2?

</comment><comment><USER66> Are they using Ceph?

<comment><USER49> From their previous blog posts they built their own storage stack

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> > Downloads are just $0.05/GB

Can anyone compare that to other similar providers? While the storage is cheap, it seems more useful for cold storage.

<comment><USER52> [http://gaul.org/object-store-comparison/](http://gaul.org/object-store- comparison/) mentioned by @gaul a little bit ago has outbound pricing listed for a bunch of providers</comment></comment>


SEO Isn't Dead, Long Live SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/11/19/seo-isnt-dead-long-live-seo/

<comment><USER2> I am a long time SEO. I do a lot less consulting than I used to because truthfully I can make more money SEOing my own content than what most companies would pay me.

Commodity SEO outsourced to India hurt the reputation of the industry. The Pump and Dump link building made people stop trusting SEO. With good reason in general, but the companies like mine that offered good results based on things like helping companies construct quality pages that worked for the bots and the humans alike suffered.

But I can tell you SEO isn't dead. Not even close. We are all just too busy to mess with telling all the Social Media Experts how to rank, because they don't invite us to their parties.</comment>


Is college worth the cost? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/generationdebt/43193 <comment><USER2> This article includes one of the most misleading statistics concerning higher education: "People with bachelor's degrees... still earn an average of about $1.2M more than high school graduates over a 40-year career". Yes, there is a correlation between higher education and higher salaries -- no, this does not imply causation!

There are many confounding factors: People who are more intelligent, have parent(s) who pursued higher education, have parents with higher income, or are white are both more likely to receive a bachelor's degree AND on average earn more than other people with the same amount of education. (In the past, being male was a predictor for both higher education and higher earnings, but this is not a significant factor for people born after 1980.)

In addition, the statistic ignores the fact that pursuing higher education shortens one's career -- people who spend 4-5 years in college on average work for 2-3 years less than those who started their careers immediately after high school. As a result, comparing "40-year careers" is bogus -- the only reasonable comparison is between the total careers of individuals, including the time when one person is at college while the other is working.

Finally, even if the statistic were computed correctly and reflected causation, it would be misleading: Different careers are not influenced equally by education. Generally speaking, people don't finish their education before they start thinking about what career the will pursue; someone who was planning on becoming a plumber isn't likely to suddenly decide that he wants to become a brain surgeon just because he finds that he has a bachelor's degree.

Decide what you want to do (either as a single career, or more likely thinking of a number of careers which seem interesting), and look at what qualifications are needed for those. And never forget what Benjamin Disraeli said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".

<comment><USER3> As noted, these influences can be very disentangle from any real-world analysis.

There was an interesting study a few years back that looked at the "outcomes" of a cohort of people who had all been admitted to an Ivy League school. Part of the study group attended and graduated from the Ivy League school they were admitted to. The control group ended up matriculating elsewhere for whatever reason.

Past studies showed at a significant improvement in earning potential for Ivy League grads, but they didn't have a distinguished control group. What this recent study found was that for most students of similar qualification (all judged to be Ivy League material by the admissions boards at Ivy Leage schools), attending an Ivy conferred no obvious advantage compared to attending a non-Ivy.

The only difference was for students who came from more challenging backgrounds, those whose families may have flirted with poverty and/or didn't have significant educational attainment. In those cases, attending an Ivy conferred some advantage over going elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a reference for this study?

<comment><USER5> It's probably <http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf>. I found the link from an article on CNN at <http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/20/pf/expert/ask_expert/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is an interesting group of ideas around intelligence, education, credentialism, and signaling.

Getting a degree is a sign that you are smart enough to get a degree. Getting one from a good school is that much better. The biggest loss if you learned the exact same material on your own outside a university is that others aren't signaled that you've received that education.

If you build something good, it doesn't matter where you are. People know you're smart from what you've done.

There are millions of people paying for a credential that means less as more people get it. Companies treat college degrees as a sign that you're not a total failure.

It would be nice if there were better tests for ability. They work for things like the SAT II, but I can't imagine an accurate test for post-graduate ability besides a review of what you've made.

But companies are lazy. They don't have the time or money to really look at the quality of most candidates, so they use signaling tools as filters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me propose the radical idea that a college education is not solely justified by it's monetary value.

<comment><USER7> Can one really put a price on learning how to do a kegstand properly?

<comment><USER8> $27.95

<comment><USER7> Who are you charging for this, and how can I get in on the action?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For me, college was absolutely worth the cost. Focusing on more than just the money, I met dozens of current and potential business clients. My side work as a freelance web developer has come mostly through people that I met in college.

I went to a community college paid for entirely by scholarships, so the cost to me as far as money goes was only that of the books. The largest cost to me, though, was the time invested in classes where I learned very little.

Back to money though, my pay jumped $2.75/hr at my day job as a direct result of getting my two associates degrees.

<comment><USER10> There's another cost, some jobs you just won't be able to do when you have a wife, kids, and lots of loans to pay every month. At college age is part of the very short time in your life where you are free from all this and can easily focus on something harder than virtually anyone else.

Of course, the majority of people will never consider even performing at this potential. But could it be different if college as we know it wasn't so severely required?

That's the first cost that came to mind when I read the title. On the other hand, there were some good parties and women.

<comment><USER11> Shotgun weddings and medical emergencies aside, nobody's going to force anybody to get married, have kids, and take on a heavy debt burden. Screw the Joneses. And this isn't to say you should be a bachelor for life; I'm sure there are women out there who value freedom and a man who's willing to make sacrifices and go his own way in search of that freedom.

<comment><USER10> Should I limit myself to that supposed "woman out there" who is willing let me work for many months at a time?

I hear that worked out great for hans reiser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Take it from someone who quit. If you want to climb the corporate ladder than definitely go to college and sell your parents house to finance it. It will be worth it. I've seen it work. If you want to build your own ladder (as what I am doing now), then I suggest you check that college thing again. I look around and I see my friends who graduated from school and they all make 1.5 to twice what I make a year, but not for long. The difference shows sometimes in our lifestyle and the way we look at the future. They see title, I see users. They see corporate car, I see users. They see 401k, I see Acquisition. Their biggest dream is to make Project manager or CEO. Fuck it I am CEO, and my wildest dream is to get that call from Sergey asking me for advices.

<comment><USER13> Cool post. Do you have a website going right now? What do you do?

<comment><USER12> I sort off have a website for the consulting stuff I do now, but because I sometimes get crazy here I would like to keep that aside. As for what I do, I had 2 jobs and left one lately. Now I am focus on my main one, as a part of a mobile software devel team ( I am not a coder, just a talker, but I sure know how to bring in deals ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Private, no. (Northwestern and NYU are up to $48K a year just in tuition. Are you kidding me?)

Public, especially an in-state school if your state is fortunate enough have a quality one, definitely yes.

College: still the best four years of your life. (Then again, I've yet to live the four years one would experience after selling a startup for big money. Maybe we could get input from pg or that Broadcom guy who built the underground party den)

<comment><USER3> You do know that a lot of people going to private schools aren't paying full- price, right?

Need based financial aid grants are often available (ie not loans) and sometimes they are substantial. I've known people who have paid less for a private school than they would have at a state school.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I guess I didn't really consider that -- based on how the question was phrased I was trying to consider the whole range of potential costs of college from the most outrageously high to free.

<comment><USER3> It's a fair outer bound to place. I just like to be really clear about the fact that people don't necessarily pay sticker price at private schools. I've volunteered for my alma mater at college fairs and there are a lot of people who are interested and then freak when they see the tuition. I have to imagine that there are an equal number who don't even stop by our table because they've done just enough research to think "expensive."

<comment><USER14> How about a "nutrition chart" requirement for each college of any type? It would disclose the lower, more average charge per student over 4 years computed by each college using federal standards.

Secondly, the government should run the loan program themselves for public universities, since it's a lot cheaper for it to offer loans than to subsidize banks to do the same.

<comment><USER3> The government used to have more involvement in the student loan programs. My father started up a non-profit under the state board of regents to service guaranteed student loans in Utah in the late 70s or early 80s after the feds passed some big program. They did quite well for a few years, until the regents made them transfer everything to various banks and shut the thing down because it had the potential to be fabulously profitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Name one other place where are surrounded by smart, thinking people of the same and opposite sex constantly for 4 years.

Name one other place where the law basically doesn't apply and you are basically encouraged to take huge risks with your friendships, your learning, and your life (sometimes).

Sure, college is expensive. Sure, you have to do a lot of things you don't want to do. But, you also don't have many opportunities to learn things that are totally impractical from true experts in the field. Take advantage. Love every minute. Get out of there and do something amazing.

Last, a lot of the people I met in college are incredibly smart and amazingly successful. Some of them work on the most innovative software around. Some write for world-renowned publications. And some of them just have really rich parents. No matter what, if you go to a good university, you will meet people that will help you someday later. Yah, privilege is a bitch, but if you have the opportunity to have it, why not?

<comment><USER16> Because it makes you feel guilty?

I find the feelings of guilt and responsibility are very much intertwined. It seems the best-adjusted people don't feel either.

<comment><USER15> I try not to feel guilt about it. Rich white folks get what they want through privilege. Going to a top notch college is a great equalizer for everyone else who wasn't lucky enough to be born to the right parents - if you can get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you haven't realized it yet, most of the education you're paying for in college isn't found in a classroom. College is a nice buffer against the transition to the real world where you can take risks without consequences for the most part. A lot of a college's value comes from your peer group, which is why smart people congregate at the top schools for the most part (aside from career prospects and prestige).

</comment><comment><USER18> Like a lot of things in life, it depends on what you want and how you want to get there. It also depends on the institution's culture (we're going to ignore GetDrunkAndParty U).

For technical and engineering pursuits, a good college is a great place to get a fast and wide overview of theory, competing technologies (or philosophies), and different specializations/tech aspects (database, programmer, ...). (I think this is why I'm more of a generalist as opposed to java or php master...)

More importantly, (a good) college puts a lot of smart, driven people in the same place and time. Going to college allows you to form important relationships with these people that can strongly affect both your personal and professional life both now and in the future. I think both Apple and Microsoft are great examples of my last point.

Finally (assuming you got a useful degree), in case all your entreprenuerial endeavors fail in the short term; a degree can net you a high paying job with a lot of free cycles to relax/regroup and get ready to start that next idea you have =)

</comment><comment><USER19> Mine was free. However, a flaw in my character led me to believe that a) It was trade applicable 2) They would teach me to build things. I studied electrical engineering, and it was mostly applied mathematics and physics with little systemic perspective. If I had to do it all over again, I would have studied pure mathematics, comp sci, and physics and built things on my own. But hey, free is free.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's some interesting numbers. Let's say you go to a college for four years and it costs $25,000/year, $100,000 total. To pay for it, you take out some college loans at 7% interest that have to paid back in 10 years. So, your loan payment is $1161.08/month. In total you'll pay $139,329 by the time the loan is paid off. So, you earn 1.2 million more over your life time than the non- college grad, but after the cost of college you're only ahead by about $1,060,000. I'm supposing here that by "over your lifetime" means until you retire, that is say from age 22 to age 65.

Now, suppose you don't go to college but instead you start working at 18. You apply yourself to your job, learn what you can on your own time, and by age 22 you've got four years experience and you've been promoted the point that you can sock away $1161.08 per month in savings. Say you do this for 10 years and keep the money in a conservative mutual fund that earns an average return of 7% per year. After the 10 years are over you've got $200,965 in savings. At this point, you stop investing. Even with no additional money, by the time you're 65 (33 years later) you'll have $2,011,064.27 or roughly $1 million more than the guy who invested his money in college.

Of course these are just some made up numbers. A lot of people who aren't motivated to go to college are probably also not motivated to save that much money and live that frugally. If college costs you less than $25,000 per year it might be worth it, or you might go into a profession that allows you to earn way more than $1.2 million more than the average high school grad. On the other hand, lots of colleges cost a good deal more than $25k/year. Also, the high school grad might invest his money more aggressively and earn more than 7% interest. It would be interesting to see where the crossover point is in terms of college cost, loan interest rate, investment interest rate, and so on. The point remains that a return of 1.2 million over 43 years on a $100,000 investment is pretty crappy (around 5.8% compounded monthly, slightly better than an online savings account)

</comment><comment><USER21> Yes it is. I believe that the best investment you can ever make is in yourself. Colledge cost me $40K and I have made more than $160K in 2 years after Colledge working. I have made an 33% ((40/120) * 100) on my investment in myself and its still growing. The growth of my investment in myself is infinite and way bigger than any other investment.

<comment><USER16> The _price_ of college is only a small fraction of the _cost_ of college.

And yes, I learned this in an economics class... in college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> People should be apprenticed at 13, and should enter professions at about 18. Only jobs requiring memorization of a large body of prior work (medicine or science) need more than that.

<comment><USER23> Well, I liked your comment. High school has mostly been a waste of time for me. I don't see why kids can't get apprenticed or go to college or do something productive at that age.

<comment><USER16> High school wasn't all that bad, and hell, I learned some things - a lot my own, but a lot from good teachers, too. Something I noted when I hit a rough spot a few months ago was that there is no teenage angst when you're working from six AM till eight PM doing hard labor. Not that I was asking for it!

I think it's simply a matter of human nature; given too much leisure, or too high a quality of life, our brains will still be physiologically unable to feel a proportional level of happiness. At the chemical level, there are only so many neurotransmitters to go around.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I would have been thrilled to get a "real" job at that age, but I'm not sure that was right. I was always very much in a hurry to finish school, and now that I have a job and am in college early, I keep wondering if, and feeling like, I've made a terrible mistake.

And a separate point about the article: The cost of college is almost entirely the fact that it uses up the four most productive years of your life. That most people choose college almost on instinct surprises me. Forget buying a house or a car - this decision is orders of magnitude more expensive. If you want to have an extraordinary life, you're going to be on that path by the time you're 22, or you're not. It's worth noting that Einstein made his contributions to physics at the age of 25, and even that was somewhat old to develop something so innovative. At the same time, while he stayed influential and productive in physics, he never published anything as revolutionary. At a certain age - I'm inclined to think it's usually in the early to mid twenties, based on anecdotal evidence only - you just lose that ability. If you go to college, you're basically saying "I'll trade my ability to change the world for a predictable life." And honestly, right now that's a trade I would like to make, but I'm just not doing it, and I don't know why.

And besides, every time I put this in writing I am struck by the incredible level of arrogance and hubris in my words (I'm no freaking Einstein!) and I really don't feel like writing again for a long time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What kind of jobs exist for Computer Scientists in social justice? - <AUTHOR>

Hello.
I am a soon-to-be college graduate. I've always been top of my (CS) class, but unlike all of my fellow classmates I won't be immediately jumping into an awesome job to get rich when I graduate. I know they won't actually be doing that either, but I don't even have the desire to do so.
Instead, I have a burning desire to work in a social-justice related field. I would like to help the world become a better place -- I know it sounds corny, but I do. I'm so frustrated with it right now I'm shaking. Nobody so far (professors, advisor, or parents) has been able to give me any substantive advice in this regard.
I'm college educated and I have a skill which is supposedly indicative of intelligence. I want to do some good with it. I would like to do a lot of good with it. Please give me advice. <comment><USER2> All of the organizations you admire have computer systems, and substantially all of them suck. So you've got that going for you. Word to the wise: they suck for a reason, and finding out exactly why they suck may not be a pleasant experience for you.

You're wonderfully fortunate in that you have a skillset which scales to infinity and beyond. Many of the people who are doing things you think are important are working in the virtual stone-age. You can alleviate that, and give them force-multipliers which will let them spend more of their sharply limited time/effort/money on stuff that matters and less of their time/effort/money on doing largely worthless things in inefficient ways.

Feeding the poor: worthwhile! Inventory management which relies on having a woman with a graduate degree count cans and tally them on paper: waste! Human factors which make eliminating her 'job' sound like you are attacking 'the cause': substantial!

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you have something particular in mind when you said that "finding out why they suck may not be a pleasant experience" for me? Or, did you simply mean that such work would not be easy, ie. because of human factors: _"This is how we do things here! Why do you want to do everything with computers?"_

<comment><USER2> _something particular in mind_

I do, but I felt it might be impolitic to spell it out. Let me try: say we have this company that makes widgets. People who want to make widgets go get jobs at this company. Many of them love their jobs and it is a great place to work, especially if you love to make widgets. Their departments expand, recruiting more people to make widgets, and people to manage people making widgets, and people to raise funds to manage the people making widgets, and people to promote the people who raise funds to manage the people making widgets, and people to track the progress of the people who promote the people who raise funds to manage the people making widgets.

Note that in this hypothetical company, you don't really need to be making widgets at all, if you're sufficiently skilled at raising money.

As to what relevance this has for organizations you care about -- oh look at the time, I have to go attend a status meeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why do you assume that "jumping into an awesome job to get rich" and "help[ing] the world become a better place" are mutually exclusive?

I'm not sure what you mean by "social justice." If you mean it in the sense of ensuring equality of outcome, that's a path shown to make things worse for individuals and the societies in which they live.

If you're using the term to mean social-welfare, then join the Peace Corps, go to africa. Use your education and skills to make the distribution of resources and aid more efficient. Or start a company that links resources, aid, capital to those who can make use of them. Or take the best paying job you can find and send the disposable part to those in need. Don't avoid getting rich, it's the best welfare program we've got.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies. I didn't mean to imply that getting rich and helping the world are mutually exclusive.

By "social-justice related field," I meant I do not want to work in a job where the ultimate purpose is power, profit, or "customer satisfaction." Rather, I would like to work where I am in some way (hopefully more direct than indirect) helping people exit the poverty cycle, helping to survive diseases which are already a non-issue in developed countries, helping to end human trafficking, etc. Obviously, some of these tie more closely to Computer Science than others.

You were on the same page as me when you thought of resource/aid distribution systems. That's the only idea I've come up with for relating social justice to this field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a huge number of things you could do, what's more important is finding something you're passionate about.

If you want to work on the US west-coast I'd recommend biotech and cleantech, also have a look at places like Google.org.

If you'd be willing to work in a developing country then there's lots of things you could work on. Corruption in particular is something that's often being tackled by computerization (by taking humans out of the loop, or by automating checks on them), for example the computerization of land records is taking place in quite a few countries. Don't underestimate the impact something like that can have, read Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital if you want to understand why.

Mobile development is something that's having a major impact in developing countries at the moment, things like mobile banking are huge in Africa because they allow people who would never previously had access to bank accounts to gain access. Information systems are also transforming economies, the fact that a fisherman can now know what the market prices are in the major city (often several days walk away) means that not only can he tailor what he fishes to maximize profit but it also means that the dealer (who buys fish from him and sells it in the major city) can't rip him off by lying about market prices. The Economist had a special section on this topic a few months ago which is worth reading if you find this interesting.

Also have a look at the Grameen family of organizations, they've come up with a lot of innovative businesses and non-profits in developing countries.

If you're want to be more entrepreneurial there's pretty much opportunities in any area you can think of. So I'd recommend just reading around various problems and find something that strikes a chord with you.

One of my interests is social mobility, and from my research I found a major factors that prevents social mobility is that children from less priviledged backgrounds often get little or poor careers advice, so as one of my side projects I'm developing a website which tries to tackle that problem.

If you want to help people and make money at the same time I'd recommend having a look at self-help web/mobile applications, as there's a lot of potential in that area.

On a more general level you could consider the problems charities, ngos, etc have and how you could tackle them. In some cases the answer could be something as simple as taking standard enterprise software (CRM, ERP, task tracking, etc) and making versions designed for non-profits.

Think about the more general problems non-profits have as well (try volunteering for a few or talking to some volunteers to get ideas). From my experience non-profits often suffer from poor organization and management, how could this be tackled ?

Handling volunteers is also a major issue, if volunteering has a high barrier it puts people off from volunteering. Think about ways of reducing this (perhaps an open source approach where people can "check-out" small projects, distributed call centres that let people volunteer on an ad-hoc basis, a mechanical turk for volunteer work, etc).

As you might be able to guess I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this sort of stuff, so feel free to email/msn me if you want to talk about it !

<comment><USER4> On a slightly different note, if you're not sure about what to do, I'd recommend figuring out what skills you're weak at and improving them.

If I was in your situation right now I'd probably think about working as a consultant for someone like McKinsey or Deloitte which have strong NGO links (both through alumni and philanthropic consultancy work), where you could get exposed to a lot of companies and non-profits and develop your problem solving and people-handling skills at the same time.

Too many developers only see the "small picture" which prevents them from being able to make a major impact, being able to understand wider issues as well as pure tech will go a long way in making you better able to tackle your goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stats. Lots and lots of stats. Get good at doing number crunching on big data sets using hadoop, R/incanter/etc and learning how to derive meaningful and defensible insights from all of the public data that is floating around out there. Pick an org that suits your interests and see if they need help with general computer systems stuff while you work on a side-project that will impress them. If you are good at it and this particular skill set interests you then you will also have a wide range of jobs to pick and choose from if you decide to go into the private sector.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stats, wonderful. I deplore math. Your advice is interesting and highlights my major shortcoming.

I've heard the idea to "work on a side-project that will impress" your desired future employer many times around the HC site. Is that the entrepreneur speaking, or are you offering that seriously? I have to learn their business backwards-and-forwards before I can independently produce something which NGOs may find universally useful. I guess I have to start small to go this route.

<comment><USER5> I was never much into math until after I left university and now I am constantly kicking myself for not finding the small little subfields of math that I now find useful and interesting. You can get a long way in stats with a pretty basic understanding of how it all works; a lot of what you might do here is the sort of stuff that you can pull out of intro stats books -- you are not going to be writing the stat anaysis code, you just need to know when and how to apply it. You would probably also be well-served by learning a bit about visualization and how to present quantitative information to a lay audience.

Do not aim for a side-project that will be universally useful to all NGOs or even to one NGO, aim for a side-project that someone in a position of authority will think is cool or which can serve some small facet of the organization. Think mashup or something small like a heatmap that shows where most of the volunteers/donors live, etc. Don't solve their big problem as your side-project, solve some small problem that can be used to show them that you are capable of solving the big problem (if they hired you to do that task, for example.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Education: Making education cheaper and more effective to more people than ever.

Health: Tools, apps, and services that make providing healthcare cheaper and effective throughout the world.

Energy and Environment: Tech, tools, apps, services that help increase access to reliable electricity and/or help save the planet

Food: Take your pick from growing, distributing, health, or environmental impact. Scalable solutions that provide healthy food, at low cost, to everyone, while reducing the food industries environmental impact are desperately needed.

And more...

The problems are complicated and global, and they require creative and elegant solutions that scale. Help solve these problems and you can help make the world a better place and get rich in the process.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about this place?

<http://www.palantirtech.com/government>

You say you hate math, so they may not be right up your alley, but worth a shot.

<comment><USER8> Seconded. I have a friend on the inside and it's a terrific job. Not only full of insane perks but they do a great job. There is actually a game-demo of their software, somewhere on the website. FWIW it's actually one of if not the hardest interviews in the valley. Above and beyond google/facebook

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's hard to find advice on this because no one really knows. You're getting into relatively unexplored territory.

One thing you might consider is applying for Peace Corps (or some other volunteer development agency). What you end up doing may or may not be directly connected to CS, but it will put you into an environment where you're dealing with application of specific knowledge to practical situations. Think of it as a social justice internship. You get good professional networking out of it too.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you're among the top in your CS course, then you probably have the skill- set needed to excel in technology-related fields and (possibly stereotyping here) may not necessarily be able to directly apply your skills to whatever good causes you're passionate about.

Get an awesome job to get rich then use your money for whatever causes you deem are important.

Your cause maybe the most important thing in your life but that doesn't mean you can't also enjoy a challenging job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which technology-related fields are you referring to, or are you just speaking in general terms?

>> "...may not necessarily be able to directly apply your skills to whatever good causes you're passionate about."

I'm hoping there's a niche.</comment></comment>


Anger mounts after corporations tap small-business relief funds - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/finance/493759-anger-mounts-after-corporations-tap-small-business-relief-funds <comment><USER2> We have the same discussion here in the Netherlands now, one of the poster childs of the (entirely rightful) public anger being Booking.com.

Companies like this have been raking in billions of revenue and profit until very, very recently, but instead of using even a tiny proportion of it for contingency planning they decided to take on more debt and buy back their own shares to boost their stock price instead, to 'reward' their shareholders. And at the same time they used every loophole imaginable to evade taxes, effectively contributing next to nothing to tax revenue to be used for the public cause.

Now things went sour and within 1 month they are already out of money and cannot continue paying their employees, so they are begging to be bailed out with money that was intended to save small businesses that were forced to close by the government. They made $15 billion of profit last year alone, which would be enough to pay their ~17.5K employees for years to come, but decided to throw it at all their shareholders. The hotels and BnB's that use their platform will go down because the government aid is limited, but Booking.com needs to be saved...

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, always the same thing. It's frankly quite disgusting and I have no sympathy for these companies at all.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, a really good (in my opinion) reason to return profits to the owners via dividends or buybacks is that management can often not be trusted to act responsibly when they have access to a huge pile of unused cash. And I think it's worth keeping in mind that many of the owners are normal people and/or normal people's pension programs.

<comment><USER4> Why do you invest in a company if you do not trust it to manage itself? Otherwise, it is not investing, but speculation that stock value will rise to sell for a profit.

<comment><USER3> Why are balance of powers necessary in politics? Why not just elect a president or PM that we can trust not to abuse their power?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So ive got a few questions about this legislation now that its in effect...

>Businesses rushed to apply for the loans, which the government said would be forgiven...

 _Forgiven?_ Then its not a loan anymore is it? Its a bailout. Was the intention to give a handout of cash to small businesses free of charge?

>Democrats have since called for rules that would ensure smaller, community banks, particularly those that service minority and underbanked populations, have a leg up in the lending process.

I mean, the program ran out of money a week ago. What exactly are we legislating? these are businesses that are likely already shuttered after waiting five weeks to be told they either dont qualify or the money sacks empty.

This isnt something you get a do-over on. Rubio doesnt seem to care that Hilton is a nine billion dollar multinational corporation that could afford to keep the lights on in every hotel they franchise for the next year, easily, without federal aid. They could give away old hotels as makeshift hospitals. Hilton is the thirty-sixth largest company in the USA and the fact that they qualified for something called a small business relief fund can only be attributed to a completely detached legislature if you're being amicable and giving the current legislation a fair chance to be anything but corrupt but frankly thats hard to do when the presidents friends are getting kickbacks from this program.

[https://www.npr.org/2020/04/20/839455480/company-with- ties-t...](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/20/839455480/company-with-ties-to- trump-receives-millions-from-small-business-loan-program)

What Rubio has basically managed to do is wipe out coffee houses, machine shops, shoe repair businesses, daycares and nail salons in every north american city. Its pretty transparent that this funding was never intended to make it to taco trucks and barbers.

<comment><USER6> > Forgiven? Then its not a loan anymore is it? Its a bailout. Was the > intention to give a handout of cash to small businesses free of charge?

Yes, it's handing out free money to some and not others based on basically nothing. What's worse, the banks are collecting a cool 1% whether someone pays back the loan or not. 300B in loans is 3B to the banks, 0 risk.

> Its pretty transparent that this funding was never intended to make it to > taco trucks and barbers.

Sadly, I don't think the congress people are that smart. They probably actually thought this program would work in some useful capacity.

<comment><USER7> "Yes, it's handing out free money to some and not others based on basically nothing."

It's not based on "basically nothing" \- at least from the banks perspective as originators in this case - it's based on which corporate accounts are deemed to be of greatest financial value to them. They can, will, did pick and choose loan beneficiaries in their portfolio based on how it will benefit them - nothing less. This means that business customers with big debts to the bank were a priority. It's absolutely a bailout of the banks in a difference scheme, albeit a bit more blatantly nepotistic than we're used to seeing so far.

And yes, they get a point in services for treating themselves too...

All that said, your gist is correct in that it's basically free money benefiting some at the expense of others which is why personally, morally, I am not in favor of corporate welfare under any circumstances - impossible to do so "fairly".

<comment><USER6> Great points about bank favoritism. I assumed (possibly wrongly) that the loans were being handed out on a first-come, first-served basis, but as you indicate, banks are most likely fast-tracking applications that benefit their largest debtors the most.

It seems all bailouts are bank bailouts, and all bank bailouts are CDO bailouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the anger here is justified, but part of me is also thinking: does this really surprise anyone? All of these companies are doing everything they can to stay afloat, including some really distasteful things like this.

Do we really expect companies to start acting morally when the economy is tanking? They exist to make money, which isn't inherently immoral, don't get me wrong.

But if you're hitting $100M annual revenue, chances are that you've done something at some point that exists in an ethical gray area, because the end goal is making money, not being morally responsible.

Reminds me of that piece on Gresham's law from earlier today.

<comment><USER9> I don't see any evidence whatsoever that being unethical has anything to do with the size of the company.

<comment><USER8> Simple question: do you consider tax evasion unethical?

I'm not arguing that every mid to large size company is guilty either, but we can't ignore how common certain activities are in the market, things like share buybacks, the legal cases around corporate personhood, offshore tax havens, etc.

Name a top tech company that doesn't have an office in Ireland for taxation purposes. Joe's tire shop down the street probably doesn't, but I'd be willing to bet that a pretty significant percentage of the Fortune 500 do. Facebook, Apple, Google, Dell, Amazon, and many others do. They've created business structures that allow them to funnel money around the globe and avoid paying taxes on it. Is that illegal? Obviously not. Is it the right thing to do, especially as we live in a time where millions are out of work and starting to go hungry? Corporations that have expatriated billions in earnings on work done in the US are now asking for billions in bailouts, is that ethical? Again, mom and pop shops don't have the influence to do this, but the Fortune 500 do.

<comment><USER10> You are describing tax avoidance, not evasion.

<comment><USER8> That's fair, but the main point still stands. Is tax avoidance ethical? I'd say no, but I'm sure many would disagree.

<comment><USER11> So when you file your taxes, you don't claim any exemptions I assume?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Odd that more aren't discussing the incentives for banks to secure the funding for their clients who have debt on the books with the banks.

e.g. take two companies who both applied at the same time and each is doing $1M in revenue. However, company A has $250k in debt with the bank whereas company B does not.

Now all of a sudden the banks give the cash to the company with the debt because they know if they fail they will have to eat that on their balance sheet. They are incentivized to distribute the $ in a priority that fits them not on a 'first come first serve' basis which is the fair approach.

<comment><USER13> This would also explain why Bank of America initially required an existing credit account. It makes sense that they would want to bail out their own bad debt with PPP money.

<comment><USER14> I do not think that this criticism is fair. Banks asked but were not allowed to relax their legal KYC criterias.

Existing customers already fullfill these so they can be served while the others are processed. And ofcourse the whole system is completely swamped.

That being said i don't doubt that banks would have acted like this anyway.

<comment><USER13> Hanlon's razor is usually true but assuming the opposite is usually wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The whole system is rigged. It always has been. And I don't mean the last twenty years. Want to invade Germania? You better know a great banker. Want to be the first on the block to buy a couple of these new things called printing presses? Better know a well-connected banker.

<comment><USER16> Want to unblock your online video? Want to fix a bad online review?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Greedy bastards. Apparently the law says companies with fewer than 500 employees are eligible - that's 500 employees per location!

No wonder the money ran out.

<comment><USER18> Its not 500 employees per location [1], it is 500 employees total but there are exceptions for restaurants, hotels and franchises.

[1] [https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/PPP--Fact- Sheet.p...](https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/PPP--Fact-Sheet.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How many of these companies even report the bulk of their revenue in the US?

Future bailouts should include specific provisions disallowing applications by companies that have less than (say) 2/3rds of their global (including subsidiaries) profit in the US (or whichever country they apply for aid from). Denmark, etc have this correct - you don't get to ask for government support from countries you avoid paying taxes to.

</comment><comment><USER20> Typical

Create crisis through destroying government by a thousand cuts.

Resort to greasy palms Pork Barrel Politics under the umbrella of "hey, at least I'm doing something in this crisis".

When called out say "see, I told you government doesn't work"

</comment><comment><USER21> This always confuses me when people are mad at the businesses. You are mad that a company, a legal entity which exists for the sole purpose of making money, which has a legal obligation to its shareholders to try to produce returns, is taking an opportunity to get free money?

I mean, be mad I guess, but surely don't be surprised. This is the least surprising, most rational behavior ever.

Maybe we should get mad at the politicians who are creating the legislation that hands it to them.

</comment><comment><USER22> Still hard to believe. Just pray it's a live and let live. Get rid of the bullies and manipulators.move forward always.

</comment><comment><USER23> Simply give the money to the people, not to the businesses.

</comment><comment><USER24> why not limit SBA to companies with <10M yearly revenue?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a convenient sideshow. PPP is a pittance compared to the >$4B the Fed will be distributing to favored wealthy cronies. No one believes in "capitalism" anymore. In a system of free enterprise, we'd be happy to see businesses fail while the state supported humans in need. Instead, we have the opposite: humans are forced to suffer while corporations are bailed out with their money.

<comment><USER26> that's the issue - politicians keep saying that USA is free market, capitalist country but it's not. it is socialist capitalism with inversed relationship as you mentioned. it's time to start naming things as they are in reality

<comment><USER25> It's not just politicians, as evidenced by the legions of HN status quo defenders eager to downvote this sort of message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, in the O.C. people are out on the beach... and social distancing is not as strictly observed as one would expect.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes, Wells Fargo didn't even open proper application until the same day the SBA said they were out of money. Here's hoping I'll be part of another class action against them.

<comment><USER29> The only reason I can imagine staying with Wells Fargo is to keep a few bucks in an account to be part of the yearly class actions.

<comment><USER30> Another reason is that I can write a heck of a lot of code in the time it would take for me to change my business to use another bank.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure I understand this. Can you not continue writing code while moving to another bank? Did itnfor a no profit last year. Wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turning on your Reality Distortion Field - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/04/22/turning-on-your-reality-distortion-field/

<comment><USER2> I have always wondered how Steve Jobs' so-called reality distortion field worked, since its myth makes him seem supernatural.

However, if you spend enough time circulating, you start to see how it works. I encounter a lot of people pitching in my line of work. In fact, I spend a lot of time pitching too.

Some universal things I've learnt that lead to getting people on board faster:

0\. Listen, listen hard. Understand where the other person desperately needs to head next.

1\. Paint a vision of the future that fulfills both parties' desperate needs.

2\. Be genuinely passionate about that vision. If you're passionate, it's easier for the other party to be passionate. It's also hard to be dishonestly passionate.

3\. Turn that vision into immediately actionable steps.

4\. Start moving yourself on your own commitments and __lead __that person into taking those steps.

<comment><USER3> Applies equally well to sales as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started emulating something I see in the successful people I know, and that's acting as though I'm right. My mind is constantly filled with dozens of points of nuance and a half-dozen objections or "yeah, buts". The people I know that are successful plow forward anyway, separating the important nuance from the unimportant. And that heuristic is INVALUABLE, and I think it contributes way more to the 'reality distortion field'. iPad doesn't have a market? It doesn't solve a need? In a sense, it doesn't matter, because Jobs -KNOWS- it will work, and everything else is just details. (As long as you're right...but it's easier to be right when you're convinced you're right.)

It's not that such people are unaware of the same concerns I have, they just don't see them as important (because they're only important in a context), and they act as if they've already succeeded. I act as if I could 'lose' at any moment: they act as if they've already won.

My initial forays into this behavior were VERY hard for me, and I still feel like I'm completely faking it. But it's starting to grow on me, and I'm already seeing people change the way they bring ideas to me. THEY'RE handling the objections, use concerns, nuance as a response to MY vision, which is...I don't know what it is yet.

Maybe, at the end of the day, all it really is, is taking responsibility for the decisions you make, and that makes people react to you instead of you reacting to them. I don't know, I'm still working through all of this.

<comment><USER5> I think what you're experiencing is that people are naturally inclined to look for direction, if someone provides that direction that saves some work they won't have to do, and it absolves them to some extent of the responsibility that goes with decision making.

People working in disaster areas are trained to 'take charge', that gets stuff organized quickly and moving, it unites an otherwise disorganized workforce and gets results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the deal with the hilltop compound in the banner of Steve Blank's blog?

<comment><USER7> Entrepreneurs need to keep their eyes on the prize. That was the prize.

<comment><USER8> I don't remember reading a post about you developing that goal and specifically how you attained it. Did you ever write about it in detail?

<comment><USER9> From his about section:

"After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I started my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits."

Epiphany, Inc. (previous NASDAQ symbol: EPNY), previously known as E.piphany and Epiphany Marketing Software, was a company developing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. On September 29, 2005, Epiphany was acquired by SSA Global Technologies.[1] Epiphany CRM software is now produced by Infor, which acquired SSA Global in 2006.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love this as I think it does a good job explaining one of my favorite cartoons by Hugh MacLeod, which screams: "I'm not delusional. I'm an entrpreneur."

If you think someone is delusional, maybe they're onto something and just haven't turned on their distortion field yet?

[http://gapingvoid.com/2010/02/28/random-thoughts-on-being- an...](http://gapingvoid.com/2010/02/28/random-thoughts-on-being-an- entrepreneur-2/)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article points to one of the most important survival skill of any struggling entrepreneur, which in the past I have summarized as follows, "Make the hard stuff look easy and the easy stuff look hard."

</comment><comment><USER12> On the same lines, I think us hackers need to understand a pitch for investors / consumers.

I've seen hackers read a pitch and say "bah..what expectations and grandeur." But its not intended for us - its intended for the non-technical folks. Simplifying an idea might make it sound more general. Its really not always grandeur.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love this article and even though I've always respected Steve Blank, he just went up a huge notch. The question I always ask people who pitch an idea / tell me their startup is:

"If you succeed to your fullest extent how will the world be different in 5 years?"

</comment><comment><USER14> "Customers need to stop being satisfied with the status quo and queue up for whatever you are going to deliver."

I thought this was key.</comment>