Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me? - <AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News,<p>I am a tech entrepreneur. I've dedicated my life to technology and building products that can help people. I'm relatively smart and really hardworking. My success thus far has been modest, though I have been able to raise funding from a prestigious VC firm. My standards are high so I do not consider fundraising any kind of success. I also detest self promotion and so I have not announced the fundraise. My startup feels like it has just recently found product market fit but I'm not sure. Either way I will go for it. The problem is everytime i try to hone in on myself and focus on my goals I hear about someone I know or someone "like me" (i.e. they have similar attributes, aren't friends but are in my peer group, and are working on a similar idea or an idea i've had in the past) whose raised a bunch of money and is all over the press and in some cases has achieved real success. I have this negative feeling for hours, days sometimes that I can only assume is jealousy. Perhaps because I am competitive. Perhaps because in addition to wanting to build products and help people, I am human and I want to be the "first" or the "best" in my peer group. I don't like feeling this feeling though because I know that I genuinely wish this people well and that if i myself were successful I wouldn't feel this way...or maybe I would? I'd love your help and advice on how I can do away with this feeling and focus on being a world class entrepreneur. I am not OK with being OK with failure and I do not accept being mediocre, but there has to be a way of being competitive in a healthy way without having to unfollow every stream of social media from peers that succeed and without having to feel envious of others. Sorry for the long rant but I'd really like to turn the leaf in the new year and I appreciate your help! <comment><USER3> A quote from _This is Water_ , the commencement address given by David Foster Wallace:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."

This is not an attempt to convert you to religion. I recommend reading or listening to the entire piece. Reflect on your motivations for doing what you do, and consider if they are even congruent to not being envious of others.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL- ydFMI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI)

<comment><USER5> Hearing David talk about "... the mind being an excellent servant, but a terrible master... " and then talk about adults who commit suicide "... it is not a least bit coincidental, that adults who commit suicide with firearms, shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master ..." sadly sounded like his own eulogy. The script of that talk is so lean. It wastes no words and tries to paint a specific picture for all in the crowd. I wish I heard it some time ago when I graduated in 2006.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Three things.

1) Success is a fashion, and a very dynamic and fickle one. Opinions of success (your own and everyone else's) are constantly changing. While it might seem today others are beating you, tomorrow could be your day in the press without you doing anything differently. This should help you see how little opinions of success really matter.

2) You are in control of the fashions you choose to follow and how you let them affect you.

3) Entrepreneurship is tough, and this is one of the reasons. The feeling will never get better; you'll find the more "successful" you are the worse it gets. Learn to accept this feeling and leverage it rather than fight it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Why do you think it gets worse with "success"? That seems counter- intuitive!

<comment><USER6> One, because "success" often comes with more responsibility and less choice. More people depend on you, in more ways, and you can't let them down if you want to keep your "success".

You might find it annoying to unfollow your successful acquaintances, but imagine how it feels to be on the other end, with multiple investors threatening to pull funding and kill your company when your "social media presence" is waning -- and you can't even express your frustration on Twitter because that would be company suicide.

Secondly, it gets worse because your standards of comparison change. You compare upwards to people with even more success. And, since "success" metrics are exponentially distributed, so is the gap that you feel between the people more "successful" than you.

<comment><USER7> "comes with more responsibility and less choice"

As everything in life - YOU are the one limiting yourself. If you feel pressure from society to do or avoid some decisions, then you shouldn't be in that position in the first place. Only strongest successful people can remain their autonomy despite investors and fame.

Look what people from Uber do. Steve Jobs, E-harmony folks or even GoDaddy owner. We disagree with their decisions and even sometimes boycot their companies - but they often remain unwilling to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The grass is always greener.

Whatever you have, someone else has a better version of it. Whatever you have, someone else would kill to have it themselves.

The only way to step outside of the cycle is to start comparing yourself to yourself. Whatever it is that you do, be better at it. Be the best at it. Don't focus on improving, focus on straight up dominating. It's counter intuitive, but the best way to get to the next level is to acknowledge that you aren't very good right now. It's difficult, most successful people refuse to admit any kind of fault or regret. That's fine for the merely successful. But you should be trying to become _godlike_. When you aspire to that level, how much money other people raise or how often they appear in the press won't matter to you any more than the business of ants on the ground. If you want to transcend envy[0], you must transcend yourself and your current level of ambition.

It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing, or what people think of them. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks of you. Show the world something wonderful and amazing, do things that people didn't think were possible. Solve a real problem for millions of people, or just impress yourself with how cool what you've made is. Do whatever is necessary to make your name shine, whatever the cost. Everything else will take care of itself.

[0] pedantry: "envy" is the desire for what others have, "jealousy" is the fear that someone else will take what you have.

<comment><USER9> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmx1jpqv3RA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmx1jpqv3RA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I suggest meditation everyday for some time. During meditation, over a period of time, you will pull all of your thoughts which are currently on different worldly material things back into your mind, remove undesired ones and re- release them towards desired goals. It is like sending car into garage for washing. It is automatic process, which happens during meditation/chanting mantra like "om".

Please note I am _not_ suggesting isolation or moving to forest for meditation ...etc. You can stay where you are but consciously allocate some time for meditation, in a room where you may not be disturbed by others for some time. Please note it is _not_ reflection on past activities of yours or others. During meditation, just forget outside world,time,circumstances and focus on mantra. It helps in bringing mental peace, strength and this will bring change in behaviour, feelings towards others. It takes some time and practice.

Also, please understand, though we are in same place at the same time, our origins,destinations,paths all are different in this journey called life. Once you realized that, you will start some mental search on your destination and its place in this world and focus on your material goals i.e. focus on others will be reduced i.e. qualities like jealousy will be reduced over period of time. Also, during interactions with others, ensure your focus will be on positive things. Our mind is like horse and as rider, we need to preemptively focus on what we want. It won't change on its own to where/how we want to go.

Hope it helps and if you wish, let us know after some time (may be one year) on your progress. There may be many books on meditation also. They may further help.

EDIT: Minor grammar corrections.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think you can comfort yourself with the fact that there _is_ so much success in this industry.

Imagine what it must be like for someone who is the best in a field where there's no money or success to be had. No thanks. Every time I see a big payout I think, "Good for them. This is a signal that I'm in the right business."

If my peers didn't have anything I could be jealous of, I'd start worrying.

</comment><comment><USER12> Are you avoiding self promotion at the expense of your company? Because not announcing a fundraise from a "prestigious VC" sounds like a mistake - you're basically throwing away free publicity and customers.

Anyway, I'd revisit your motivations for what you're doing. It sounds like you're chasing "achievement" defined by others rather than what you want.

</comment><comment><USER13> Eventually, you realize life is just a fucked up series of events that, once in a while, have no meaning, are cruel, or don't happen in a logical or fair way!

For example, the people behind the Yo app spent a few hours on the weekend building it as a side project, reaped tons of press and attention, and eventually landed themselves a boatload of VC money.

Is that fair to the people out there like yourself and myself, who are slaving away to make Real Change happen in this world? No!

But, that's life. Life is cruel, it's weird, sometimes it doesn't make sense, and sometimes it just comes down to a little bit (or alot) of dumb luck. It's shitty and raw to think about, but it's reality.

My advice is to use your jealousy as a motivator, but don't allow it get to you. Seek your own happiness and your own success, according to your own benchmarks for both.

Keep pushing, keep hustling, and keep hoping that, one day, luck swings in your favor and you land that massive success and or payday, too. And, all the while, remember in the back of your head that you may die before that day ever comes.

No matter what though: retain your sanity and defend your own happiness... forget all else.

EDIT - Your perception of 'success' may also have little, or transient meaning. For example, lots of people think the current 'success' of the tech industry is a facade, and we're due for a bubble-like collapse (er, 'contraction'). If that happens, all of those successful acquaintances you currently look up to don't sound so successful now, do they?

</comment><comment><USER14> I get what you are saying and don't know how you would change your feelings, but I know a number of years ago I read a book (can't recall now which one) on being a successful entrepreneur. The key takeaway I had from that read was to ignore what others are doing because their success or failure has no relation to what you are capable of.

That said, the book also pointed out that you shouldn't ignore others success or failure, but instead use it to learn from, i.e. it isn't about the person it is about how they failed or succeeded. IMO, using another person as your measuring stick of success/failure is limiting you to their lows and highs, instead measure yourself to the goals you set, and if you are failing there be critical and fix it, but if you are winning you are golden regardless of what Jill, Jack or Danny did.

You have already done something that a very small percentage of people ever do, regardless of how it looks from the inside of the tech industry. You made a team of people believe in your idea, help you fund your idea and think it has enough merit to potentially have a great outcome. That is awesome.

BTW -- Self promotion is the hardest thing for many (if not most) intelligent, honest people to do, but what I have learned is that if you are not telling people who you are they will make assumptions and draw conclusions on their own and very likely those assumptions and conclusions will be half-truths, hearsay or made up and likely not in your favor. For whatever reason our society loves to scream negatively much louder than positively, don't let that be your fate by not being your own best advocate. Of course, balance & moderation in everything seems prudent.

</comment><comment><USER15> Peter Thiel says competition is for losers, and he's not just talking about business strategy. Does Elon Musk waste energy comparing himself to other people? Does Larry Page seem obsessed with outperforming others? Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? Notice that these people respect and support each other.

Finance, Law, and Politics are more common destinations for people obsessed with finite games[1]. Best school, best firm, corner office, most socially respectable spouse, biggest bonus.

Work is more fulfilling when you wake up every morning focused on creating value for your customers, or finding a larger goal where you can make a contribution. If you focus on defeating others, you're going to be miserable.

My sole practical suggestion: once a week, find a way to help another person succeed. Even something small. You /can/ feel happy when others do well.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games)

</comment><comment><USER16> Someday (very soon, geologically speaking) you'll be dead and even if you're successful (personally and/or publicly) enough to be remembered past your death entropy will eventually win out.

On a long enough timeline nothing you ever do will actually matter.

So don't worry about it. Have fun. Do what makes you happy.

<comment><USER17> You have a point, but your supporting assumptions don't make it. "In the long term things don't matter" doesn't matter unless you're going to be around in the long term to see them matter.

Either way, I wholeheartedly disagree with you. "Have fun, do what makes you happy" helps ensure that what you do doesn't even matter now -- never-mind it not mattering later. You are basically saying "since you can't be a god, you might as well not even try hard." It's black-and-white thinking at its worst.

You should do what you know matters; what your experiences are telling you is important. And even if 'you' die, the you that is a generic human with basic human needs and social identity will not die. It will live on in other people. You're not that different from humans that lived 50,000 years ago. The important parts of what you were then haven't died in that time. Make the world a better place for those who would live 50,000 years in the future -- because someone very much like you might want to know what you had to teach.

That person might even be an exact replica of you. Surely someone will generally want what you want and feel what you feel. Care for that person: they are your second chance.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure you disagree with me as much as you think you do.

To clarify a bit more:

If being a successful entrepreneur is what makes you happy, do that. If raising a fantastic family makes you happy, do that. If tirelessly helping the poor makes you happy, do that. Yes, these things matter in the shortish term. And by "happy" I don't mean a minute-to-minute happiness. All of the things I do that make me happiest in the end are fraught with stress, pain and hard work.

My point wasn't that you should sit around watching reality tv all day, there are very few people I know for whom that would actually make them happy. It is just meant to put things into perspective relative to long-term thinking patterns like "how am I doing vis-à-vis the Joneses". It really doesn't matter.

<comment><USER17> I disagree that you should care about your own happiness. Happiness is not a meaningful goal unless you are willing wrap it in nonsensical notions like "actual happiness."

Actual happiness? How is that different from happiness?

My recommendation is to get good at _making decisions_. That way, should happiness be needed, you will be better able to produce it. But if you need something very different, you will be prepared to produce that, too. Happiness is just too myopic and selfish. Good decision-making will often result in happiness, but it's not the sole justification for it. (It will often result in unhappiness, too.)

Talking about long-term entropy isn't a reliable way to make decisions. If we think of 'meaning' as "that which separates signal from noise", you would be saying that -- eventually -- we will be unable to separate them. But we don't live in a reality in which that is the case: we can separate signal and noise right now. So arguing from that point is an argument from fiction. It's kind of like saying "we shouldn't build technology because someone might make the Terminator and everybody will die." Your responsibility is to make the Terminator first and design him so that he gives out hugs and candy. Or whatever else that is good.

I probably sound overly argumentative about this. You have a good point, I'm just trying to dig more deeply into it. I don't think there is a good answer to OP's concern. I would just say "don't worry, just consider your life an experiment," (as is my approach,) but then 'worry' is just part of the experiment. Maybe worrying about it is exactly what he should do. Maybe he shouldn't be happy. Maybe that's the only way to be a better person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For this purpose, I've explored a variety of what I'd call "human algorithms" to explore the emotional response to situations in life. I would describe these as structured forms of self-questioning that a person can perform on himself.

Generally, these have rather "New Age" titles: some popular ones include _Core Transformation_ , _The Work_ , the _Sedona Method_ , the _Wholeness Process_. Tech and computer people are often rather skeptical of such things, but I would recommend giving one or more of them a try. If you don't like mystical or spiritual explanations, it's often easier for sci-math inclined minds to think of these as algorithms that you run on your own neural hardware, for the purpose of improving your subjective experience of well-being in life.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think you can completely stop being jealous. Jealousy of other people who have things that you want (or think that you want) is totally normal. To try to deny that is to deny that you are human.

I have found personally that the best antidote to jealousy is to accept that I have it 100%, rather than trying to suppress those feelings. The problem is not actually having the feelings of jealousy, but in not being ok with having those feelings. Once I have acknowledged those feelings fully, I often notice that they quickly pass, and I can go back to focusing on whatever I was doing before the feelings came.

<comment><USER19> And, to add on to this, when I think about it a bit more, I usually realize that I'm jealous not of the thing the person has, but of the feelings that I believe that thing will bring (happiness and fulfillment). And the truth is that perception is often wrong - success can bring unhappiness, while it is possible to be happy and fulfilled without conforming to anyone else's perception of "success."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How a company is really doing is often disconnected from the press. I know people in companies that appear to be doing fabulously on the outside, but internally are horrible places to work.

There's two sides to every story. A lot of startup news articles are written after the writer has a Skype call with a founder / exec, so you're only reading what the founders choose to reveal (ie. only the positive stuff).

> I also detest self promotion and so I have not announced the fundraise.

Don't think of it as self promotion. It's company promotion.

Announcing funding can be particularly helpful if you're hiring.

<comment><USER21> It's definitely a point I look at when applying to startups. If they aren't well funded then it leaves doubt that I may not have a job in a year after taking a position there. I tend to skip over startups who don't appear to have a good runway because there are so many companies hiring already who do post that information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure I have any good advice for you, but I'd at least like to say that I can relate. I think we all have to deal with feelings of jealousy or inadequacy from time to time. I would imagine it tends to be worse among people in the tech world since the industry is so competitive and the bar is so high.

I think there's also somewhat of a culture in tech of treating "smart" people like they're somehow innately different than "non-smart" people or that it's hard for a "non-smart" person to become a "smart" person. You could also substitute the word "smart" for "successful" in the previous sentence. Some people might disagree with this assessment, but I'm fairly confident that it's a wide-spread phenomenon.

I think a culture like that would tend to exaggerate feelings of jealousy and such. If one person is made to feel like they can't possibly achieve the same things as another, or if they suspect they're being denied opportunities on account of another person's opinion of them, that would breed resentment and jealousy. I'm not sure if that dynamic is at play in your life, but it's worth stating all the same.

Anyhow, I wish you luck in dealing with those feelings. I know how crippling they can be.

</comment><comment><USER23> Stop looking at others so much and concentrate on your product and you'll have a much easier time of it. All success is relative, it's not so much a yardstick as an 'these were your opportunities and this is what you made of them' thing.

Once you realize that you'll have an easier time of it. And keep in mind that what you see in the press is quite rarely the unvarnished truth. It tends to be a lot more glossy than reality.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am by far the least successful person in my "tech" peer group and have struggled with jealousy and depression because of it.

I don't have the answer for you, but a couple things I've done. (A lot of this might not work for you, because I'm not ambitious and I do accept being mediocre)

For my "real" friends (defined as people who would like me even if I were homeless and broke), I focus on what makes us friends: it's not technology or success, it's experiences and time spent hanging out. I emphasize those behaviors and de-emphasize "work" discussions.

For friends who just want to talk about their businesses and successes, I distance myself. It might not be nice, but I have to take care of myself emotionally first, and having my face rubbed in someone else's success doesn't make me feel good.

I also try to befriend (even just as casual acquaintances) people significantly lower on the economic scale. That way when one of my successful friends posts on Facebook about their third tropical vacation in as many months (and my default response is to get upset that I can't afford the time or money for that kind of trip), then I also have another post to read about someone who is struggling to make rent, and that gives me perspective. Really I am in a good place overall, not the best place, not anywhere close to what SV would call "successful", but there's a whole big world out there.

While we all squabble over who has covered more of the top half of Maslow's hierarchy, there are a lot of people still working on the bottom half. It's important to have a few people to put real faces on that to keep me grounded in reality.

</comment><comment><USER25> * I've dedicated my life to ... building products that can help people.*

You need to ask yourself if that's really true. If it is, then your success is easy to measure: number of people helped. If you haven't helped enough people to feel satisfied, then your course of action is _also_ clear: help more people.

 _raised a bunch of money... is all over the press... in some cases has achieved real success_

The root of all unhappiness is believing something that isn't true. What's more likely, that you've dedicated your life to helping people, or that your motivation is money and recognition? One litmus test is to ask whether you'd be happy making a fortune (complete with a big house, million dollar income, maybe a writeup in Forbes) writing software for, oh, I don't know, a paycheck cashing firm.

The fact is that you are selfish, greedy, egotistical. I don't say this to be mean, but to be honest - it's true for 99.9% of humans. Each of us wants to be special, to be the winner of our peer group; we all want to be envied (which is precisely how people shape their image on social media).

One possible reconciliation is to firmly assert that people spend money on things that they think will benefit them. Money is the primordial "like" button. This implies that if you have a lot of money either: 1) you've provided real value to lots of people, or 2) someone with lots of money believes you can provide lots of value to people (e.g. a raise). (This doesn't always seem to be the case; in fact, much of the wealthy people in the world don't _appear_ to be doing much for it, although software firms are a clear exception there.)

Bon chance.

</comment><comment><USER26> If your products help people, then it's not self promotion at all, but an offer you are making to those people who need that help. Some may find them not useful, and a few may dismiss your efforts as self promotion, but why are you ignoring the many who will find them useful if only they had heard about them?

</comment><comment><USER27> I have one quick tip. If you regularly read the typical startup press, like TechCrunch, GigaOM, The Verge, etc (or heck, even Hacker News): STOP.

Stop reading about other startups. Instead, turn your news consumption to general news topics, or better yet - news about your industry & your customers. (If your customers are other startups, then, well, sorry...)

It sounds like a few of the ways you are measuring yourself are by raising money, being in the press, and whatever you define as "real success".

I would argue that the first two are inconsequential, and ironically, you know that too, because you haven't announced your fundraising.

If you cut out the inconsequential news from your news diet, you may find yourself feeling a bit better. It may not resolve your feelings entirely, but it may help. I know because I've been there, and this worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> Appreciate the rant, surely something that we've all felt at one time or another. I was in the military years ago and one of the things someone said that stuck with me is, everybody gets measured at their own level at their own pace. That you can't take someone else's journey and where they started from and act like that you need to use their benchmarks to measure yourself.

That's why it's so important for YOU to set YOUR goals, because only you can know where you began and how to honestly assess where you're going. You can enlist others and get help, but ultimately, it's gonna be up to you to make those determinations.

Letting other people's accomplishments cloud where you've reached or still have yet to reach will just make you crazy.

</comment><comment><USER29> A few things spring to mind

1) You are comparing yourself to the highlights reel of many others.

2) You can't run a race whilst looking over your shoulder

Try to change your mindset when hearing of others successes. Instead of thinking 'why not me?' remind yourself you have not seen any of their struggles. When you hear of an idea being successful that is similar to yours, be glad that it proved your thought processes right and validated it for you without effort.

Wouldn't it be more dis-heartening to consistently hear of people similar to you, with similar ideas that did terribly?

All the signs of success are showing you that you are on the right path.

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't worry. Even achieving more than the people you are currently jealous of, there will be a whole new group of people to be jealous of. It will never end until you die or understand.

Hope this helps put things in perspective.

</comment><comment><USER31>
        focus on being a world class entrepreneur

You are setting unrealistic standards for yourself. Whoever you consider a "world class entrepreneur" most likely didn't succeed because of his skills alone - there are so many more circumstantial effects involved in every endeavor that we undertake (especially in a modern, highly complex and very liberal economy like the US/EU). In short: working hard isn't enough, you gotta be lucky too. And being jealous of other people's luck is just stupid.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not all basketball talents play at the NBA. And there are musicians after Mozart and the Beatles. Look at people you can admire, and make even tiny steps by their standards. You can be 10% Bill Gates (example, pick your own), or 1%, or 0.01% or 0.0001%. But you are both on the same track. The important thing is to push your limits to something you believe is worthy and that you can give a unique contribution that pushes that something an inch forward. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd take a look at your standards and ideals and the role they play. I'm willing to bet they are unrealistic, and are the root cause of your envy. You're not concerned with simply doing well for yourself, you have to be number 1! but the problem is there can be only one #1, and its foolish to be unhappy or envious because you are #2, or #300. Stop comparing yourself to others, and start comparing yourself to you from yesterday, or last year.

</comment><comment><USER34> The best thing you can do is be happy with where you are in your life right now. It wont matter what other people are doing.

If you arent,

working on personal fulfillment should be your priority going into 2015.

*spelling

</comment><comment><USER35> Stop looking at others so much and concentrate on your product and you'll have a much easier time of it. All success is relative, it's not so much a yardstick as an 'these were your opportunities and this is what you made of them' thing. Once you realize that you'll have an easier time of it. And keep in mind that what you see in the press is quite rarely the unvarnished truth. It tends to be a lot more glossy than reality.

</comment><comment><USER36> Focus on whatever you do - success is part fortunate circumstances, so as long as you do the right things to develop yourself or run your own business, that is what matters. Some areas of tech earn more money than others, but what should matter most to you is that you are passionate about what you are doing.

What other people are doing have little relevance to what you are doing except that you can learn lessons from the successes and failures of others.

</comment><comment><USER37> 1\. Realize it's impossibly unlikely for two people to build the same thing, even if they were sitting next to each other sharing their plans. The only competition is with yourself.

2\. As a consequence: stop sprinting. Stop trying to release something inferior by a certain date out of fear of competition. There is no time pressure.

3\. As a plan: work on what only you could do best.

Expect nothing. Expectation is a prison.

</comment><comment><USER38> It helped me when I realized that I am jealous of almost everyone, but I always compare my weakness to their strengths. Now when I'm jealous, I just say to myself "I'm focusing on their best attributes, I'm sure I'm better than them in other things", and the jealousy quickly fades away.

</comment><comment><USER39> Success = hard work + skill + Spinning the Wheel of Luck + some other stuff.

If you conflate self worth with Success, you leave your feelings up to chance. Rate yourself on stuff you can actually control. Also don't forget that personal relationships are an integral part of happiness and success throughout your entire life.

</comment><comment><USER40> The more you let it get you down the more you are doomed to failure in future. Jealous thoughts will zap your motivation which is certainly NOT what you want.

It's the people who are able to nip these jealous thoughts in the bud and plough on with single-handed determination that will have the last laugh.

</comment><comment><USER41> If you ever want to be successful, you need to just let go. I used to be like this but I quickly recognized it achieved nothing. The hours you spend being negative could be spent working on your product. If it doesn't end up working out, so be it.

</comment><comment><USER42> I suggest learning more about yourself and your motivations before moving any further.

Try reading The 7 habits of highly effective people.

I'd say that your attitude toward failure is what's going to prevent you from succeeding in the first place.

Also, don't be too hard on yourself!

</comment><comment><USER43> _Control your emotions or they will control you_ \- Chinese proverb

</comment><comment><USER44> Turn jealousy into motivation. I know it's easy to say than to do. But, if what you have been longing for is really what you want, there is no other way around but go get it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Would you be more envious if there was a million people that are better at whatever you're envious at or if there was exactly one such person?

</comment><comment><USER46> Someone else's success is not your failure, internalizing that message is the key.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was a successful kid. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. I had my pick of the best colleges in the country. If you'd have asked anyone to guess who'd grow up to be the most successful person in my circle, most people would have guessed me. I was "successful" at that age because I was smart, but more important, because I literally did nothing but study, study, work, and study some more. This was a fantastic strategy for succeeding in a highly structured, grade-based environment. Unfortunately, the world is not as highly structured. The world doesn't give you letter grades. In school, there is a direct correlation between effort and reward. In life, the correlation is certainly there, but it's indirect and messy. Luck also plays a big role.

Flash forward to today. While I am modestly successful, I am far from the most successful person I grew up with. Two of my elementary-school friends are huge movie stars (one of them has been Oscar-nominated, and will probably win at some point). One of my high-school friends is a phenomenally successful musician, who also stars on a highly rated TV show. One of my early colleagues, from when I was fresh out of college, is now the #2 production executive at the world's most successful movie studio; his name is listed in the credits, as Executive Producer, of almost every $1B+ movie released in the last six or seven years. Many of my friends are TV writers, and some of them earn millions of dollars a year. (In case it's not clear at this point, I grew up in LA!). At least one of my friends is a tech entrepreneur worth close to half a billion dollars. An ex-girlfriend (ouch!) was an early Google employee.

These people make me jealous as fuck. I'm not going to lie about it, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. If you're the competitive type, you'll _always_ feel a pang of envy over the success of your peers. Doubly so when your peers are successful beyond their wildest dreams (or yours).

The first thing I'd recommend is accepting the jealousy, and recognizing it for what it is. If you're a smart and introspective person, you won't be able to bullshit yourself -- to will the jealousy away through new-agey mantras and mind tricks. Instead, try to mine the envy for productive lessons. What about these people made them as successful as they are? Are there any operative takeaways for _you_?

Second, and much more important, is learning to be genuinely happy for the success of others. _Especially_ the success of your dear friends. First, because it's awesome when good things happen to people you like. Second, because even from a highly cynical standpoint, wouldn't you rather be _friends_ with all these fabulously successful people? I don't know about you, but it does me absolutely no good when my friends are struggling. Schadenfreude is a terrible investment strategy. Its ROI sucks.

I'd also recommend some light reading on the concept of "EQ" and management of emotions. Emotional self-regulation doesn't always come naturally to me. I had to study and practice. Like everything else in life. Most of the literature will tell you that there's no use in hiding from, avoiding, or pretending your emotions don't exist. Acknowledge them, be mindful of them, and actively attempt to short-circuit them, to channel them in more productive directions, or to move to their adjacent (and often more beneficial) emotional correlates. Jealousy, for instance, seems somewhat adjacent to ambition on the emotional color wheel. When you find yourself feeling jealous, don't try to make the leap from jealous to happy. It doesn't work that way. Instead, move from jealous to driven.

Finally, some of the best advice I've received on the topic of envy comes from pop culture: "Do you." You can't control whether your best friend wins the lottery, or your second cousin sells his startup to Facebook. You _can_ control what you want to do, and how you're doing it.

</comment><comment><USER48> "Comparison is the thief of joy." ― Theodore Roosevelt

</comment><comment><USER49> ohm-ing is very helpful

three part ohm a-o-m (aaaaaahhhhhhhh ooooooooooooooooooooooo mmmmmmm)

as low pitched as possible

</comment><comment><USER7> I will tell you quick story when I had same problem as you.

I was once extremely successfully person in my field of expertise. It was specific niche, small market (global, but still small considering there was estimated 10K possible leads in it). At the peak I would manage a bit short of 100 people working for me as contractors and I have tapped around 6-7% of global market (per estimates top providers of service shared with itself). Everything was going extremely well, I was doing amazing financially. But the issues began rising within me. I felt I wasn't ready for this. I hit the ceiling. I couldn't scale anymore. I was blind and my decisions in other fields were extremely poor (it took some balls to acknowledge this - since I didnt liked to critique my business methods).

It was strange - depression like feeling. I didn't expect to get it AFTER I got so successful. Living the dream (I moved to remote location in tropical paradise) I would sit all day at home with shutters closed. I couldn't go forward. I didnt expected that I couldn't grow any more. My market was limited and my ambition was hurt. The success came too easy to me and I wasn't ready for it.

Upon a lot of thinking and stressing I would finally close my company within a week, let go all contractors after giving them away all my leads to them so they could offer the service directly to customers, and would move to different country while "burning all the bridges". With enough money to sustain myself for 6 months I would do something completely stupid just to prove myself I wasnt that good, that I was doing it all wrong - I have created company in a market I didnt know anything about, market that was over- saturated and hostile.

After few months of barely having any revenue I run out of my money and was left with scraps. Got in to deep depression, being mad at myself that I hurted one person I cared about - my partner, as I have dragged her with me in to this (but with her agreeing this was best for us, so at least it was our choice, not just mine).

Got back to my home town, moved back to my parents house and started rethinking everything from basics - why I am who I am. I understood how many lies are in entrepreneurship world and how "survival of the fittest" is the most important lesson. Good taste is everything in online biz world, and as with failed startups people wont tell you you are wrong, they wont tell you the true way of doing business. They will say "Great Idea! I love it! I would use it anytime! Now join me in Twitter, like XXX pages and pay back b*tch for me being nice to you!" Circle of narcissistic, spoiled kids.

After 6 months I was ready, I opened new business with €100 investment for domain and hosting I had left after spending rest for food (I refused anyone to help me financially) and quickly started making revenue and getting back on track. I removed all limits, I do not limit myself any more. I do not think of "making $XX.XXX profit target" which is counter-productive. Who cares whats the profit? Is it better to have $100K company and make $60K profit, or have $100Mil company and make $3K profit a month?

You cannot succeed - go above your targets because you are limiting yourself. People will tell you some BS like "its not you" \- dont listen to this. Every single problem you might have right now will have root inside you and way you are doing this. You will need to learn how to remove those limits now by failing, or by really going back in your life and trying to understand yourself and judging/reviewing every single action that lead you to position you are in. Perfectly both though.

Once you remove those limits you will be free and happy again and everything will come 2 times easier to you.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER50> "Jealousy is when you worry someone will take what you have. Envy is wanting what someone else has."

\-- Homer Simpson (seriously)

i'm an entrepreneur too, with some modest success. my company makes single- digit millions/year in revenue, i take home a low six figure annual salary - <USER2> don't mention specific numbers because it changes all the time.

it sounds like you need to figure out what you're _actually_ envious of, and decide if you want to achieve it or not. otherwise you're just being pummeled helpless by your own subconscious desires, which is a type of personal hell.

personally, i don't give a shit about recognition or fame or doing a great thing for society (right now), i just want lots of money. i'm not ashamed to admit it - i tell people this in real life too. i want to make a lot of money, so i can buy a lot of cool shit and not struggle with bills (not that i ever have, but you know what i mean). i came to this conclusion after a considerable amount of thought and self-reflection, and it took a while for me to be able to admit it to myself (and others).

some people aren't in it for the money - they're in it for the fame, or recognition, or they want to prove their dad wrong, or some other completely personal reason, and the money is just a side effect since it's so pervasive in our society.

once you identify what you actually want, and admit it to yourself, you can set about on your mission of achieving it without being caught up in your own petty mental nonsense. that's just an indicator you aren't being honest with yourself (and possibly others).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the honest feedback! How does being honest with yourself prevent you from being envious or jealous though? In your case let's assume you were NOT making a six figure salary and you were making say $60K /yr and you had admitted to yourself (and others) that you wanted to make lots of money and then a friend of a friend who you aren't close to but familiar with (who you know also wants to make lots of money) starts something and starts making $1M/yr when just last week they were making $60K alongside you. How do you prevent yourself from being envious/ deal with being envious? It seems at best orthogonal to the issue of honesty and at worst seems like complete open honesty will make it even worse because people now expect you to be jealous (unlikely).

<comment><USER50> first, i would recommend travelling to a poor or developing country and taking a hard look around for a good solid week or more.

second, be aware of your feelings and emotions, don't try to suppress them. analyze them and use them as motivation.

third, learn what you can from successful people, either directly or by observation.

finally, when you get older, you will realize all that other stuff you find so distracting now has literally absolutely no bearing on whether or not YOU will succeed at your goals, so there's only one thing you can do, and that's work on your own shit. once you come to this realization, a lot of the stupid crap floating around in your head will just sort of disappear.</comment></comment></comment>


Digital Ocean needs to start showing outages on their status page - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/f9b57df6d938 <comment><USER4> In any infrastructure beyond the tiny/small stage, there are always pieces that are failing or have failed. In some cases these failures are observed by customers. In other cases they are not.

It would be unreasonable to have a company-wide status page that constantly lists "some customers are experiencing some problems". That's not the point of the status page - the status page, as the author suggested, is there to highlight issues that are affecting a significant section of the customer base.

The right thing for Digital Ocean to do in cases like this is to allow you, in your private dashboard, to see the problem and follow up on a master ticket for escalation and resolution.

<comment><USER5> As an infrastructure provider, I disagree. Customers expect to find the answer to the question "did I do something wrong, or are you having problems?" on the status page.

While we've listed every outage affecting >1 customer since 2004 on our status page, the issue is always expressing each outage in a way that allows a customer to identify that _their_ server is affected by a particular entry.

That sometimes involves knowing that their server is in a particular data centre, or that it is connected to a particular switch, etc. and we do our best to make sure that people can identify their problem, if nothing else than by timing, i.e. making sure we list something ASAP.

But status pages are still very useful once people start calling in - <USER2> can positively identify that yes, you are affected by this problem and you can track progress at that URL. If we keep updating as we promise, bang, that's one support call (at most) per affected customer.

So even for a minor problem - broken switch, VM host machine, power failure in a rack, that's worth listing from my point of view.

As I said above I'm looking to tie our databases and some basic network monitoring into it this year. That way we can proactively notify people affected by a particular problem, as well as continuing to list even small problems publicly.

<comment><USER6> At the scale of DigitalOcean (~10k physical nodes), Amazon (>250k physical nodes) or Google this seems wholly unreasonable, there's a definite signal to noise ratio issue because there will be hundreds of failures per day in any large infrastructure, some of which will have customer impact (ranging from minor to major). It's a statistical reality.

A lot of the other suggestions seem to centre around extending your status page to be more personal to the end user, this is (to some extent) the route Amazon AWS has taken in allowing you to see which instances are scheduled for retirement (because they lack live migration capability, a la GCE), etc.

I note that Amazon now sends out maintenance e-mails advising when certain IPsec connections will go down for them to perform upgrades, this is also great, and others should copy.

This leaves the 'globally visible' bit (i.e. [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/)) for critical outages affecting a large proportion of your customers.

<comment><USER7> I was just discussing how we could provide this level of granularity without overwhelming the status page as we scale. What if we provided an api endpoint for you to check the health of the node?

<comment><USER8> Status needs to be hosted not on the infrastructure being reported on. If the issue is an API endpoint outage, having an API endpoint for status reporting is...counterproductive :)

<comment><USER7> If there was an API outage we would report it on our status page, the blog post is about the health of individual physical nodes on our network that bring down clusters of VMs. If there was an API endpoint outage we'd post it to the status page. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had 48 hours of downtime on a DigitalOcean node last week. All events on the node was stalled so I could not boot down or take an image to spin up a new instance. Had to hammer their support with a dozen ticket before someone didn't just give me a canned reply. Of course they did not acknowledge this very long outage on their status page. I like DO but stuff like this just can't happen without anyone checking on it stat. I have become very vary about using them for critical infrastructure since then.

<comment><USER10> Using a budget IaaS for "critical infrastructure" is your mistake.

<comment><USER11> You seem to think every business has a budget for a big contract with DO or Amazon or Google.

Some people run their email server on these budget IaaS. Some prefer to host outside of Google or Amazon's power. so where else should they host their own server? Home?

Ideally if we have continuous streaming backing up a node, then when the host machine failed a second machine can pick up to serve the last backup. This is of course expensive for any provider for every customer. But asking DO to actually report the status of the node, its host machine and the region is the right thing to do.

Customers don't need to know the full technical detail but even a nice friendly message (email, sms or even on the status page) will ease the conflict: "Your host now appears offline because the host machine is offline. Don't worry! Your data is safe with our backup! If you have any concern, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com or at xxx-xxx-xxx."

Conclusion:

* report the status of the droplet on personal dashboard

* for non-isolated incident, report it on both droplet personal dashboard and public dashboard.

<comment><USER12> Digital Ocean is absolutely not meant for critical infrastructure, nor is it meant for running a production mail server (there's a good chance the IP has already been flagged somewhere for spam in any shared cloud server IP space). You're paying for a low-budget VPS with no phone support. Yes, they have a 99.9% SLA, but the penalty to them if they exceed that is minimal.

<comment><USER13> The right way to defend a company is not by contradicting their own marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Many people here claim "it's a $5 box, what do you expect".

First it may be a $10 or a $20 box. But more importantly, every VPS provider of the few I've tried my self (e.g. Linode, XenCon), sends an email and opens a support ticket every time a $10 VPS goes off.

So please, do not try to change the norm. A server is a server no matter the cost and should be reliable. I like digital ocean but they won't get better by petting them.

<comment><USER15> Neither Leaseweb or OVH send me emails when my $1000's in Server/VPS/Compute appliances go down unless I sign up for a paid SLA (I do). Rackspace _sometimes_ emails me about downtime, but usually only after the fact to let me know I'm getting $40 back. Amazon doesn't really let me know either, their status board remains in the green barring natural disaster or the AWS region literally catching on fire.

Unless you're paying for an SLA which defines uptime and notification time, you're at the beck and call of Best Effort support, which may mean no notification and no reimbursement for downtime. Notification within minutes of your VPS going down isn't necessarily the norm.

<comment><USER16> OVH doesn't inform you because you're paying commodity pricing for unmanaged servers. It's actually your job to keep track of the downtime, not theirs.

Digitalocean stands to make ~$10,000 monthly of of a "$1,000 server" because it is somewhat managed, and thus has the responsability of informing the 100 or 1,000 odd customers affected because of their mistake imho.

<comment><USER17> Agree totally. Physical servers are fully managed by DO and they absolutely must inform customers when they fail at their job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Founder of statuspage.io here.

This is 100% a tool problem, and a problem we're actively working on for customers of ours that plan on having thousands of customized "views" for what they normally consider a "status page". Per-user functionality is one use case, but it can and will go deeper than that. If they could post an incident such that only you can see it, or such that only you are notified, they most certainly would.

I disagree that posting everything to be globally viewable is the right course of action, as this outage doesn't necessarily implicate fault on DO as a provider, but it also doesn't mean that you as an individual customer shouldn't have access to your specific view of a status page as it relates to exactly what infrastructure you live on.

You'd be surprised how prevalent this issue is, and how much inaction it creates on the provider end.

<comment><USER19> Or the OP could use a cloud IaaS provider that creates tickets on his behalf. The fact he submitted a ticket to DO and got a response indicating what the issue is, and that they are working on it is fine IMO since you get what you pay for. He's embarrassed and angry that he didn't plan for HA and had down time.

<comment><USER20> I disagree.

The whole point of IaaS is that the hardware/hypervisor/network is the provider's responsibility, and everything inside of your VM is yours. If the provider isn't doing due diligence to monitor their infra, then what infra are you selling as a part of your IaaS?

<comment><USER21> How do you know that they're not monitoring their infra? The OP is complaining that they didn't post an update on the status page. I see no evidence that they were not aware of the issue at the physical hypervisor level before he filled the ticket.

<comment><USER20> What's the point of monitoring your infra if the report never reaches the party who cares?

<comment><USER21> that you can proactively fix an issue before some/many/most of the users become aware of the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was thinking about a feature providing callbacks when the hypervisor running your instance fails.

I think it's completely unreasonable to expect a status update on every single thing that might go wrong in Digital Ocean's infrastructure. If a single hypervisor/server fails, that could be ANYTHING. Bad drives, flaky memory, failed fans, etc., etc. This stuff happens ALL THE TIME and does not warrant a system wide update that something is wrong with the service, simply because there is nothing wrong with the service. All the other bits are functioning normally.

A loss of a box is expected and shit happens. Architect for it, or expect it to fail at some point. Everything dies eventually.

Also, $5 a month.

<comment><USER23> Just playing devil's advocate,

So, I'll get a callback from my provider when my server is down...

Unfortunately, that callback is POSTed to a server that is already running on my provider, so I never see it :)

(Assuming that you mean that the callback is an external thing, i.e. provider -> customer. Also, I suppose I could host the callback receiving server on another provider. But I don't want to.)

<comment><USER22> Something like AppEngine would be a good callback handling mechanism. Something that could start more boxes, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Linode opens a ticket for all affected users and emails them proactively, I think this is the right way to message this type of outage.

<comment><USER25> Yep and it's one of the main reasons I pay $20 an instance per month instead of $5.

Sometimes you actually do get what you pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So an individual vm instance in any cloud provider is unreliable. Welcome to the cloud. Its foolish to assume otherwise, keep backups and restore to another instance or go HA. What's unreasonable is to assume they should publish a status update saying that one of their thousands of machines is having an issue. Fwiw, I've had the same 'hypervisor' problem' response from DO one time when i couldn't terminate a droplet.

Otoh when they have whole api outages for creating or destroying vms (like also happened last week) i'd expect and did find a status update. What their threshold is for reporting isn't clear.. but a 1 machine issue isn't something any provider would report on.

<comment><USER27> Plus this isn't cloud, just normal VPS with marketing.

<comment><USER28> What's the difference?

<comment><USER29> Some people feel that cloud means high availability vm's. So that when a host fails the servers are transparently migrated away. IMO this is the exact opposite of what you want.

The people that want HA like this generally custom build every server and don't use configuration management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://forum.bytemark.co.uk/category/outage- notifications](http://forum.bytemark.co.uk/category/outage-notifications) \- every single one of Bytemark's outages since June 2004. It's a great sales tool, at least when someone asks "so how reliable are you?". I a few using statuspage.io but without having an entire network map & customer list uploaded (so it knows who to notify), it's not going to be better, and I'm not sure it's geared to presenting historical outage data.

I'm hoping to finally build a tool this year incorporating some network monitoring (i.e. "unconfirmed reports") and a copy of all our internal rack/network database, so that we get to the holy grail: 1) customers get notified by email/SMS of stuff that definitely affects them, 2) it's easy for an engineer (or the whole team) to write notes on outages as they happen, and have them presented in a way that doesn't confuse customers.

</comment><comment><USER30> > IMO a status page should be a public record of all the times your service > has experienced a catastrophic failure, even for a small number of > customers, if not also small hiccups like packets loss or lag.

This is the most important point. Status page should be a _log_ rather than a transient message as with so many providers.

edit: as other people have already namedropped, I'll point out that OVH do a pretty good job with the status page[1] and network maps[2].

[1] [http://status.ovh.net/](http://status.ovh.net/) [2] [http://weathermap.ovh.net/](http://weathermap.ovh.net/)

</comment><comment><USER19> What level of support are you expecting for $5 a month? If uptime and support of your website/ application is important to you it's likely time you invest more in your cloud infrastructure.

<comment><USER31> What if I'm giving them $10 a month? $20? At what point have you as a customer "bought the right" to updates?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sounds like what Digital Ocean doing in respect to status is common industry practice.

One startup I know was using Heroku to host their website. One day the website had problems and was unavailable for extended period of time. Heroku team worked hard to resolve the problem, but it still took them several hours. Heroku did not update their status. They stated that if 99% of customers do not have problems, they consider any problems to be local and not reflecting status of the whole infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER33> With the outages I've had at DigitalOcean and the AWS price cuts, I'm prepping to move over to AWS unless DO can make a good case against it ... I'm tired of seeing timeouts and droplets hanging which affects my business.

<comment> wc- You will definitely have downtime due to hardware issues with AWS as well, and every other host out there... Maybe it would be better to spend the time you were going to spend switching to AWS investigating a load balancing setup and other things you would need to remove the dependency on one instance always working correctly?

The flexibility of the cloud is awesome but sometimes it does get cloudy up there. Redundancy is a must with digitalocean, aws, or anyone else.

<comment><USER34> Can anyone recommend a very simple load-balancing setup for a bunch of tiny cloud servers serving a static app?

I'm currently using round-robin DNS for load-distribution as the simplest thing that could possibly work, but it obviously doesn't actually balance load and it doesn't remove dead servers from the pool. What's the next step up that doesn't cost and arm and a leg to implement?

<comment><USER35> Choose your favorite provider's load balancer service and add all the machines. Configure the health check to listen for a 200 on /. This will leave you with a SPOF at the LB, but you can round-robin DNS between two LBs on different providers if you wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When the cloud was first being introduced one of the core principles was that your instances should be considered ephemeral - and that they can terminate at any time, without any notice or further explanation. I think some people sometimes forgets that this still holds today.

Don't expect your instance to run forever. Design your architecture with this in mind. There is a reason e.g. aws provides multiple availability zones.

<comment><USER29> It's interesting, because these days there are people that define cloud as "high availability VMs". They expect that in the case of a host failure that everything can be transparently migrated to another host.

<comment><USER36> I'd say that depends on what kind of service the provider is offering. Later generation cloud providers might specializing in providing such VMs - <USER3> and GAE comes to mind. But on providers that offer more "bare metal" VMs one should not expect such migration. Indeed it would be almost impossible to do, since it would require a lot of information about the application you are running. Heroku and GAE solves this by limiting the capabilities of the VMs so that they have more control/information about the running applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> i think this just goes to show that the DO platform is not suitable for sites that require uptime. The price point justifies the simplicity, but sometimes simple isn't enough. AWS still has everything a startup needs to run their stack

<comment><USER38> Just to provide another data point.

I've been with Digital Ocean for over a year, and I'm fairly certain that I haven't had any downtime at all. The site is used by thousands of users a day, and I've never had any complaints. Pingdom is set to a resolution of 1 minute, and hasn't reported any outages either (that weren't caused by me).

<comment><USER37> We run our forums on DO as well and it hasn't caused a hiccup at all. Uptime has been great for me, but at this point there isn't enough tooling around DO for me to be comfortable with doing more than just simple web sites

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I was thinking about switching to Digital Ocean. Thanks for letting us know they aren't as professional as everyone claimed.

<comment><USER40> Budget VPS is budget VPS, there's nothing unprofessional about it, if you want excellent support you are going to pay for the privilege.

<comment><USER41> That's not support, that's them failing at providing what they advertised. I have used OVH for years, and they always fixed everything in their end very quickly. And that was for unmanaged dedicated servers, so I never had "excellent support", I had 0 support, but they provided what they advertised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's been at least 5 hours and my droplet is still unresponsive, and their status page still says everything is all good.

<comment><USER39> Welcome to the cloud!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> OVH does a much better job at this I think. It's not the prettiest status page, but it lists a lot more things. [http://status.ovh.com](http://status.ovh.com)

<comment><USER24> Yeah, this is why spamming your general status page with lots of information is a bad idea. I have no idea what's going on there. At first glance it looks like half their services are having issues, which makes me think it always looks like that, which means it tells me nothing without digging into the detailed issues.

<comment><USER43> OVH is a multinational broadband ISP in addition to colo, cloud/vserver, dedicated, voip, domain registrar, etc.

Looking at the columns at a glance, there are almost no events "in progress" (most are Closed) and the vast majority of the open events are early warning for maintenance windows affecting very specific services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> You are asking a bit much. Your site is so insignificant in the grand scheme of goings-on at Digital Ocean that it would be far more misleading to mention it on their status page.

</comment><comment><USER45> I agree that you get what you pay for. Just because you don't have a budget for a $1000/mo dedicated server does not mean you have the right to that service level at a lower price.

As fellow geeks I am sure we have all been asked for advice on buying computers from our family and friends. I'm a mac person and use a $3000 laptop but I know most of them will not be willing to spend this much money. I normally quote them a $600(ish) computer that has at least an i-Series processor and 6-8GB of RAM. I tell them to avoid a couple vendors that I consider to be bottom of the barrel. It never fails though, that for all the reasoning and advice I give them, if they find a computer for $400 in the Sunday paper all that gets thrown out the window. They don't want a computer that fits their needs they just want the cheapest computer. It also never fails that the moment it starts having problems they come to me for help and if I give them any slack for buying a cheap POS that I am suddenly considered an a-hole for not helping since that's all they can afford.

The way I look at it is I spend my hard earned money on a reliable machine so I am not put out by the type of issues you get with cheap hardware or cheap services and you did not head my advice to avoid the same issues and thus by asking me to give up my weekend or even a couple hours to help you makes you the a-hole not me.

I have used, Rackspace, Linode, DO, AWS, and Google Apps among others and none of their status pages are every very helpful. It's really a problem with Google Apps since my users know to check there and then claim the problem is not with Google even though it is. I frequently have issues with their IMAP servers failing where a user can connect via the web interface but not through a IMAP client. This is never shown on their status page. Of course I am going to check the status page.

The only hosting provider I have no complaints about is Rackspace but those servers are almost $1000/mo. On the other hand they do open up tickets for me faster than I can log into the management portal to do it myself. Even still I have had hour-long outages. If you don't have HA you WILL have outages no mater who you use or how much you pay. Ironically the worst service was from The Planet even though those where still $800/mo dedicated servers. Their status page was a twitter account that they did not advertise on their homepage.

I have debated moving our average SMB size clients with no HA from linode to DO just because tools like Packer can interface with them easier. Still don't know about that.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is very true. It is the nature of cheap unmanaged services that the user bears the bulk of the burden of maintaining their server instance. But this makes it even more important that providers fess up when they have issues.

I have only been with DO for a short time but I have already encountered several of these silent outages where I can't query the status of my server through their tools and there is no status update. It is very different to Linode. They are a fantastic service for personal sites but I wouldn't host anything professional with them until they do more to gain my confidence.

</comment><comment><USER47> I love DO but their infrastructure is not stable. I get random downtimes very often (get error emails at least once a week with connection errors). It's definitely cheap, and I'm using it for a side project web app, but I don't think I would use it for an actual business yet. I hope they keep growing though until they can completely gain our trust.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is really very simple.

Low prices and popularity bring growth.

Growth brings more customers than you can support as well as infrastructure problems that you can't handle. Because your company has not scaled up over a long time it has to hire people and shove things through the pipeline quickly which means mistakes (both in process and people) will inevitably be made. Rome wasn't built in a day as the saying goes but startups are. And they end up growing quicker than they should. Someone has to lose and it's the customer (not all of them but some of them). [1]

Not to mention the fact that if you are charging very little ($5 per month is pretty cheap obviously for the base service) it gives you less profit to handle things in a way that are perhaps more robust or doesn't give you the ability to paper over problems by building in redundancy.

The saying "price quality speed" pick any two applies here.

DO will get better of course but it will take time as they iron out and encounter the various issues that they face.

[1] I've observed this since 1982 when PC clones came out and competed with IBM. The clones shoved things into the channel and all the sudden hardware problems were shoved on the customers. Previously IBM charged enough that those things were handled by IBM not their customers. Because they had the profits and took the time to pay attention to details.

</comment><comment><USER49> I had HTTPD and MySQL server running on my $5 droplet, and I had no SWAP partition. I recorded the outages using pingdom. It was interesting to see that the droplet went down too frequently and sometimes never came up. Had to manually restart the droplet from the Digital Ocean Interface.

</comment><comment><USER50> The choice of showing the status of our hyper-visors permanently was not an easy one amongst the team. But in the end, we figured customers have a right to know.

[http://www.tailoredclouds.com/cloud- status.html](http://www.tailoredclouds.com/cloud-status.html)

<comment><USER20> To be honest, 9 host machines is nothing like displaying status for hundreds if not thousands of host machines in a large-scale deployment in major IaaS providers.

<comment><USER50> I understand your point. We decided to put only the most crucial 9 hyper- visors. We are a startup after all and a self-funded one. more will come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I suspect this is because it looks bad to display the individual status of every node, because they'll have more common failures; keeping it limited to DC-wide issues is good for business.

They should have a private/client-only per-hypervisor status page.

</comment><comment><USER52> DO need to to a _lot_ of things. They don't even have IPv6 yet, which is, TBFH, beyond a joke, even for a $5/mo provider. Then the censorship guarantees I will never use them even past that.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't get why more HN-type startups don't look at using dedicated machines instead. Every dollar counts.

Exelion.net is running a special for HN users. 50% off for life for any server. Or more than one server. Or quite a few servers. Just use HN50 when checking out.

Exelion does top of the line E3-1230v3 Haswell (8 thread) + 16gb + 2x240GB SSD RAID 1 + Gigabit port + 33TB/mo bandwidth for $115/mo.

DO does 8 thread + 16gb + 160gb SSD + 6tb/transfer for $160/mo plus another $1350/mo for the full 33TB/mo bandwidth.

And if you wanted unmetered gigabit? Exelion does it for $200/mo extra flat rate. DO does it for an equivalent of $16,120/mo for that plan (based on 5 cents per gigabyte and 6TB already included with the plan).

It just doesn't make sense financially to keep using them.

</comment><comment><USER54> two is one and one is none. doesn't matter where it's hosted.

servers fail, and you need redundancy. you might as well get angry at the sky for being blue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did I complain about them failing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is why you use a more substantial, long-standing service, like [http://prgmr.com](http://prgmr.com)

<comment><USER56> I don't know anything about their reliability, but their prices quite high: [http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html](http://prgmr.com/xen/plans.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is a little crazy. Linode doesn't put up a security advisory when a single node has hardware problems.

</comment><comment><USER58> I receive new relic alerts about Digital Ocean outages way too frequently.

</comment><comment><USER59> For those interested in monitoring their websites and services and create custom status pages, I run webmon.com for this exact reason.</comment>


Iceland considers pornography ban - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/iceland/9866949/Iceland-considers-pornography-ban.html

<comment><USER2> A curious opening sentence: "Iceland could become the first Western democracy to attempt censorship of the internet under radical proposals to block online pornography."

The US has the 2003 Protect act, which has already been used against someone importing paper (not electronic or online) manga into the US.[1]

The UK has the Internet Watch Foundation which maintains a list of websites and Usenet forums which shouldn't be carried and which coordinates legal activities. We have several laws making some forms of pornography illegal.

Australia has (had?) their well known block list.

And I'm not some free-speech extremist - I see a clear difference in regular porn and images of abuse where the participants have not (and can not) consent.

> _"We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all > agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link > to incidences of violent crime," he said._

I am disturbed by the rise of horrible porn, and the easy access to it. Even though I'm happy to ban some types of porn and some images of abuse I know that blocking porn is a wrong-headed approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> "But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the internet."

If I recall correctly, it wasnt Iceland that sent a man to the moon. Oh well, at least they are protecting their women.

<comment><AUTHOR> And men. Let's not be sexist here.

<comment><USER4> And children. Let's not forget the children here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Barbaric</comment>


The Black Vault: A FOIA obsessive's UFO-filled empire - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/special_report/black-vault-foia-john-greenewald.php <comment><USER2> > The Black Vault's biggest score to date may be its material related to > MKUltra, a top-secret CIA project that involved dozens of mind-control > experiments on US citizens and others. [..]

Why would this be the biggest score (title doesn't reflect it)? Was this the first documentation regarding MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE/BLUEBIRD?

For those interesting in CIA's attempts to explore New Age (e.g. apply "remote viewing") I can recommend the documentary The Men Who Stare At Goats [1]. There's also a Hollywood adaptation of it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats)

<comment><USER3> I assume the CIA leaks mkultra and related stuff to keep the crazies busy and troll other countries.

There's also patents for seemingly impossible technology filed by the Navy.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30645682...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a30645682/navy- ufo-patents-compact-fusion-reactor-inventor/)

<comment><USER4> Except MKULTRA was part of CIA's "family jewels" —- indeed, it was so infamous that a cover letter to the DCI suggested they not familiarize themselves with the program in order to maintain plausible deniability. And MKULTRA was only part of a set of equally concerning operations, such as its progenitors, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, or Project OFTEN, which collaborated with pharmaceutical firms to uncover drugs too risky for release that might have covert applications (and which were then tested on unwitting military personnel).

While CIA certainly uses disinformation for a variety of reasons, this doesn't obviate the fact that the agency has been — largely if not quite entirely in the past — a very, very amoral actor.

<comment><USER5> I have to wonder about the extent to which the CIA really believed this was possible, or if it was more along the lines of "well sure, it sounds batshit, but the Soviets are doing it and if there really is something to it, we don't want to be behind in the game."

When one has infinite funding and no ethical oversight, the pit really is bottomless.

<comment><USER6> Mkultra seems pretty plausible to me, at least with the science they had at the time. LSD was making huge waves in the psychiatric community, and many humint objectives like interrogation and brainwashing are inherently applied psychology. LSD was a breakthrough tool that laid the psyche bare, if only they could discover how to harness it.

Combine that with amoral thinking about the cold war and "greater good" and it's understandable, yet reprehensible, that they dosed prisoners and johns in brothels.

<comment><USER5> It's funny you mention that, because the first thing that crosses my mind, whenever I run across stuff like this, is that the people who perpetrated these things were probably nice polite folks who had friends, got along with their neighbors, were kind to their families, and held the door open for people when they went to the supermarket.

And then they went to work every morning and played their part in monstrous endeavors that—on coming to light—make the rest of us question our faith in humanity.

I don't doubt that some people who wind up doing these things are legitimately sociopathic. But I also have a disturbing suspicion that many of them were probably normal, and bought into the idea that drugging and blackmailing some random person played a role in defending America. What matters more—some lowlife from the streets, or national security? Sacrifices have to be made, etc.

Pretty much every atrocity I know of—while spearheaded by evil people—relied heavily on the ability of normal, decent people to rationalize what they were doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd say this looks like a hit:

"I asked Greenewald if he considers himself a journalist. After all, when he files foia requests, he does so under the news media category in order to get fee waivers."

[...]

"But Greenewald doesn't identify that way. "Even though I write articles and interview people and get quotes, I've just never considered or labeled myself a journalist, simply because I didn't do the formal schooling," he said. "

Cue a spiteful bill from those agencies for back waived fees and other means to take the site down or punish him with process. I hope the gofundme for his defense gets posted here too. :)

I'm sure it's nothing.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Back then, the turnaround time for a request was far quicker than it is > now. "It's really night and day," he told me recently. It averaged, by > Greenewald's estimate, a couple of months before he heard an answer; today > the wait is often measured in years._

This is sad, and something we should be pushing back on hard. FOIA needs an SLA agencies can be held accountable to.

</comment><comment><USER8> if you are having trouble scrolling: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Acjr.o...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Acjr.org%2Fspecial_report%2Fblack- vault-foia-john- greenewald.php&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS876US876&oq=cache%3Acjr.org%2Fspecial_report%2Fblack- vault-foia-john- greenewald.php&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2655j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER9> You need to allow facebook.net in order for the page to scroll..... It is a UFO page...</comment>