Ruby on Rails SQL Injection - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/504 <comment><USER2> Doesn't it make more sense to post the security fix release? [http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/6/12/ann- rails-3-2-6-has-...](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/6/12/ann- rails-3-2-6-has-been-released/)

<comment><USER3> Not everyone is on the 3.2.x branch yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone enlighten me on how easy this SQL injection vulnerability is to exploit?

I thought that SQL injection was "mostly" a thing of the past with newer frameworks such as Rails and Django. I mean, short of concatenating your query string together, it is much harder to set yourself up for failure.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at the test they added in the patch for an example of how the exploit would go down.

<comment><USER6> Looks like two tests (test_where_error_with_hash and test_where_with_table_name).

You can see those tests here:

[http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/att-504/3-2-sql- injectio...](http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/att-504/3-2-sql- injection.patch)

(this is for 3.2, you can change the patch name for 3.1, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the heads-up. I've updated the Rails Tutorial book accordingly.

<comment><USER8> For those of us following the tutorial, is the gemfile the only thing that changed?:

        gem 'rails', '3.2.6'

I also had to run "bundle update railties" to fix a couple of dependences.

<comment><USER7> Yes, the relevant change is in the Gemfile for each example project. Running

      $ bundle update rails
      $ bundle install

should bring you up to speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wasn't 3.2.4 specifically released a few weeks ago to address that very same SQL injection vulnerability? Is this a regression?

<comment><USER10> I was about to say, I swear I read an exact same vulnerability a few days/weeks ago, also in regards to the where statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I saw this post last night and assumed it was the same vulnerability from a week ago.

Thanks to everyone who upvoted and made the comment that it requires a whole new patch/upgrade, I would've missed it otherwise.

This is probably a case in which editorializing the submission title ("This is brand new from last week") would've been a good service

<comment><USER12> FYI you can get Rails security alerts directly to your inbox via <http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-security>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052807>

<comment><USER14> That was CVE-2012-2661. This one states:

CVE-2012-2695

Please note, this vulnerability is a variant of CVE-2012-2661, even if you upgraded to address that issue, you must take action again.

<comment><USER15> This vulnerability also adds 2.3 as an affected version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have an article on these issues but mostly focusing on the ones fixed in 3.2.4/3.2.5. Article is a bit weird because it was written before 3.2.4 and I thought some of the issues were user problems rather than framework problems.

[http://benmmurphy.github.com/blog/2012/05/15/abusing- dynamic...](http://benmmurphy.github.com/blog/2012/05/15/abusing-dynamic- types-for-fun-and-profit/)

</comment><comment><USER17> second in a month? I stopped using rails in favour of sintra+activerecord. Active record might need to go next :(

<comment><USER18> I'm using both Sinatra and Rails, but I would not advise someone to switch to Sinatra because Rails has more "fixed vulnerabilities".

Around me there are many times more Rails apps than Sinatra apps. I do believe that the increased exposure of Rails makes it more likely to detect vulnerabilities over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've looked at this and a few other ActiveRecord vulnerabilities that look arcane at first sight, but the simplest solution that covers all of them is to first check whether params[:something] is nil and refuse to do any DB stuff if it is, and second to explicitly convert all of your params[:something] input to the types of data you were expecting, using to_i, to_s or to_f. Additionally, if using where clauses, strip the input of all apostrophes or double quotes. I don't think there would be anything left to exploit if everybody were to adopt this semi-paranoid approach to protecting your code from bad input.

<comment><USER20> > strip the input of all apostrophes or double quotes.

This approach will be a hard sell for Father O'Reilly and Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> how lame, do AR devs need someone to remind them about bind variables/params ?

<comment><USER22> (rant) Since Rails devs don't appear to believe in databases (and to be fair, if I was targeting MySQL version 3 I'm not sure I would believe in them much either), they don't bother using database features for binding. Instead having their own half baked (well, it 90% baked now, but it still has the occasional squishy bit) binding system.

Same for validations, foreign keys, primary keys, indexes, enumerations, etc. (/rant)

<comment><USER16> the places where these sql injections were happening wouldn't be prevented from traditional sql bindings which are applied to parts of the where clause or set values. in JDBC land i don't think you can do "SHOW TABLES FROM ? WHERE ...."</comment></comment></comment>


Bill Joy muses on what's next - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bill_joy_muses_on_what_s_next.html <comment><USER2> Hey Bill, how about fixing Sun first?</comment>


Online courses don't work, but education can still be disrupted - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/education-seth-godin-altmba-jolt-nuschool <comment><USER2> Sweeping generalities don't work.</comment>


Racket News – Issue 5 - <AUTHOR> https://racket-news.com/2019/04/racket-news-issue-5.html <comment><USER2> Racket has sometimes seemed like a closely-guarded secret, outside of research and education circles, so it's great to see this new outreach.

I've used Racket very successfully in production, and Racket is overdue for a few startups to use it to get to launch.

There've been a few Lisp family industry success stories, including the one that famously lead to YC and HN, and Lisps still have a few tricks up their sleeve that all the stacks upon stacks haven't covered.

Small side comment regarding outreach to practitioners: when challenging a perception that Scheme descendants are only for problem sets in school and academic curiosities, we should try not to use a code example of a Fibonacci function. :)</comment>


Republicans Were Sent to Spam More Often Than Democrats - <AUTHOR> https://imge.com/news/email-providers-suppress-republicans-2018-election/ <comment><AUTHOR> From article:

Our team created email addresses with different email providers and signed up for the email lists of around fifty different candidates, committees, and political nonprofits. In the month leading up to the election, we tracked how many emails were sent from each entity, and what percentage of those emails made it into our inbox.

In Nevada, Democrat Jacky Rosen averaged over 90% placement in inboxes, compared to Dean Heller's over 90% placement in spam.

In Florida, 100% of Republican Rick Scott's emails went to spam in Yahoo, while 100% of Bill Nelson's emails went to our Yahoo inbox.

While these were the most dramatic examples, this pattern emerged in every toss-up Senate race we tracked.

<comment><USER2> I'm completely unsurprised that Heller emails ended up in SPAM at a high rate. I was bombarded with email from his campaign and various PACs supporting him. All of the emails were sent to an email address that was used to donate to an unrelated Republican candidate in 2008. There's a whole lot of really obvious list sharing going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I expected a lot more depth from this article considering the heavy implication that email providers are suppressing republican-sent emails in some purposeful way. This mostly just reads like a marketer trying to find a new customer cohort based on superficial analysis.

</comment><comment><USER4> Alternative headline: Did Republicans send more spam emails in the 2018 Election?

<comment><USER5> FTA

 _Democrats sent over four times the quantity of emails than their Republican opponents_

If quantity is one of the factors to be considered, unlikely.

<comment><USER4> Quantity and quality of emails are often related, but what if the Democrats just had 4x the number of people subscribed to their email lists?

<comment><USER6> The article is saying that to the tested inboxes (Yahoo, AOL, Gmail) the Democrats sent 4x as much as the Republicans. The number of subscribers has no bearing on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would it be possible that people are abusing the spam reporting for these email providers? Get a large enough group of people online to sign up for these candidates and mass report these emails as spam.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see some word counts and sentiment analysis as part of this.

</comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR: marketer fails to science.

</comment><comment><USER10> No.</comment>


Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress - <AUTHOR> http://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/

<comment><USER2> Scott Adams: "Passion is bullshit...My own experience is that when stuff works, I get really excited about it. Passion follows success.

Scott Aaronson: " The obvious thing to say is that, as a student, you should follow your talents and passions, rather than following the generic advice of some guy on the Internet who doesn't even know you personally!"

<comment><USER3> Aaronson's talking about a much narrower field than Adams though. While success _might_ beget passion in the case of science, I think that would happen in childhood and the seed would already be planted. If you make it to adulthood and pursue a career in theoretical science then I think you must have a very deep well of not only passion, but probably obsession to have any success at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article reminds me of "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", specifically when the author explains that he really struggled with the idea that as we learn more, we gain a better understanding of how little we know. As Aaronson says, "the subquestions aren't nearly as small as they originally looked", and Prisig had a tough time reconciling the idea that as humanity's body of knowledge grew, the number of answered questions grew even faster.

</comment><comment><USER5> >One final note: none of the positive or hopeful things that I said about philosophy apply to the postmodern or Continental kinds. As far as I can tell, the latter aren't really "philosophy" at all, but more like pretentious brands of performance art that fancy themselves politically subversive, even as they cultivate deliberate obscurity and draw mostly on the insights of Hitler and Stalin apologists.

As someone who regularly rereads about the Sokal Hoax for laughs, I had to stop myself breaking down here.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47805860/Scott- Aaronson-...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47805860/Scott-Aaronson-on- Philosophical-Progress.md.ogg)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does "formal intelligence" mean that construction is involved in its development?</comment>


UK Met Office Climate Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/monitoring/dashboard.html <comment><USER2> This is brilliant. If you ask me this is exactly the type of approach that has been missing from the climate discussion. As a natural born skeptic, the current approach of simplistic, repetitive, and often technically incorrect news articles and half-informed scolding by politicians, celebrities, and internet armchair climatologists smells way too much like propaganda or a cult.

> The front page shows the main indicators. Beneath each one there is > _additional detail, drilling down into why the indicator is important, how > it has changed and how it was calculated_. The pages also _link through to > the data_ so that you can explore it for yourself.

Just the facts (well, it's a start anyways) presented visually (presumably honestly) so the the meaning is obvious, with the ability to drill down to learn _why_ the numbers are important, where the data comes from and how to get to it yourself, as well as links to where to learn more. Beautiful.

Under democratic governments, people need to largely align their opinions before we can finally start doing something about this problem, and I believe this is a crucial part of the type of persuasion it is going to take. I think there is still room for improvement, but I haven't seen this approach taken before and hope it becomes more popular. In fact, I believe the "pro" side should team up and produce one single authoritative website, and advertise the hell out of it - the fact that such a resource doesn't exist has always added to my skepticism.

<comment><USER3> > the current approach of simplistic, repetitive, and often technically > incorrect news articles and half-informed scolding by politicians

That's not "the" current approach, that's your selective perception and/or framing. Democracy restrains governments, not people. At some point "failing to convince" has to translate to "shun and withdraw support from". We can't possibly throw away the human species because "some people weren't convinced there is an issue", as if they were children and the others adults with a burden of convincing, which does not exist. Climate change has been warned about since I can remember, it's certainly been a topic in the last 20 years. At this point, no adult has a solid excuse anymore.

<comment><USER2> So why is nothing being done? I think we both want something done, and yet here we are.

Democracy doesn't restrain people, really? The issues are numerous, but each person gets one vote for one party/person, effectively they are approving all of the subsequent decisions of the party they've voted for, when what they're really doing is accepting the _aggregate_ of their _promises_.

Shun and withdraw support all you want, is that producing results, or not?

If your approach isn't producing results, am I crazy for suggesting we think more deeply about strategy?

<comment><USER3> > Democracy doesn't restrain people, really?

Not socially, not when it comes to the individual relations. I didn't mean convicing or voting are pointless, but it's not the end-all, be-all. It works for the lucky cases, but the bulk of the problem will require stepping on toes and deciding between mutually exclusive things.

Nobody who denies climate change actually wants to grow up in a refugee camp in 100 years and die at age 10, after 10 years of horror, to name just one of the consequences. Or in a society ravaged by Neonazis (unless they're Neonazis, then fuck what they want). So it's up to their betters to enforce their lack of consequence and intellectual integrity on them. They can't _leave it at_ "failed to convince". Which, by definition, contains prior attempts to convince, just not an infinite number of them.

> If your approach isn't producing results, am I crazy for suggesting we think > more deeply about strategy?

Who will "convince Trump", for example? You are simply are assuming good faith, functioning humans on the other hand without mental health defects, so what's your answer to where that isn't the case?

<comment><USER2> >> Democracy doesn't restrain people, really?

> Not socially, not when it comes to the individual relations.

My democracy has produced a very long list of laws that I must follow or they will put me in jail.

> I didn't mean convicing or voting are pointless, but it's not the end-all, > be-all.

I absolutely agree with you on this. As I see it Democracy _as it is_ is largely a fraud, when compared to how it is advertised to be.

> So it's up to their betters to enforce their lack of consequence and > intellectual integrity on them. They can't leave it at "failed to convince".

Oh but they can leave it at "failed to convince", is that not more or less precisely where we are at, with little sign of a likelihood we'll be moving beyond it any time soon? This is the point I am trying to make, that no climate change enthusiast one seems willing to even consider. The irony of the situation is delicious.

> Who will "convince Trump", for example?

It's not Trump that needs convincing, it is the public. Understanding in detail why people voted for Trump in the first place would have yielded very valuable knowledge that could have been used towards persuading people to support fighting climate change, but instead we seem to have chosen to use our imaginations to decide why people voted for him. People who behave this way, which is mostly everyone I've encountered, are unintelligent in this respect, and the same style of thinking seems to be what is being deployed in the public relations campaign against climate change. I wish you luck, but it doesn't seem to be producing much change, so I will continue to advocate for improvements in strategy.

> You are simply are assuming good faith

Incorrect, I am assuming nothing, except where I have explicitly noted. You on the other hand, *seem to be assuming bad faith. You may be right, but I would recommend studying the matter to find out for sure.

> so what's your answer to where that isn't the case?

As always, I recommend studying the situation: find out the detailed reasons why people do not support climate change, study what the failures seem to be in why the current messaging is unsuccessful, make iterative changes to the strategy, and measure results as you go. If people thought of the situation more like playing a video game, perhaps that would diminish the sense of identity involved and result in the ability to think more clearly (for example, thinking of people as having mental health defects).

<comment><USER3> > for example, thinking of people as having mental health defects

I asked you how you would convince Trump, as an example of a specific individual we both "know". Your answer is to study someone else, to just assume I haven't thought or observed anything, and that I just declare people as evil or deficient because it's easier. I am not a "climate change enthusiast", my identity in this is zero. You might say I think I see the writing on the wall about forcing humanity through the eye of a needle into endless totalitarianism, and hey, I write a lot about that, but if all that just resolved itself, I would be _so glad_ that I could just sing and hum and take nature photographs all day.

That not all of this is based on misunderstandings and able to be resolved peacefully is not a happy insight, but it's what my data points to, if you will. Just take the stories about (not always) elderly relatives being radicalized by some fake news on FB: these may be well meaning people, but they are in the clutches of not so benign people. Confront and overcome those, and then we'll see how much remaining confusion even exists.

Last but not least, if someone gives their child poison because they're _either_ too ignorant or too evil to know better, do you a.) first try to convince them b.) take the child away by force, then explain to them why you did it? What if it is _your_ child? Yes, it's not a clear cut imminent threat with climate change, but we'll get there. It's not _just_ about the people who "have a right to arguments that are sweet to their gums to make them stop destroying our future voluntarily", it's also about the people after them.

<comment><USER2> (meta: holy smokes, I'm getting a particularly strict timeout for posting "too fast" today)

> I asked you how you would convince Trump, as an example of a specific > individual we both "know". Your answer is to study someone else, to just > assume I haven't thought or observed anything, and that I just declare > people as evil or deficient because it's easier.

Ironically, you are assuming a fair amount of detail about my beliefs about you.

What I said was: "It's not Trump that needs convincing, it is the public." I mean, if you think energy should be invested in changing Trump's mind, knock yourself out, but that seems like an incredibly ambitious task, and he might be out of office soon, replaced by someone else who may pay a lot of lip service to climate change, but continue kicking the can down the road when it comes to action.

I do recommend studying public opinion in depth though, I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with this idea or not. Hopefully not.

> That not all of this is based on misunderstandings and able to be resolved > peacefully is not a happy insight, but it's what my data points to, if you > will.

My data (to be fair, little more than paying very close attention to the nature and content of individual conversations) suggests that a massive misunderstanding (particularly: the perceptions individuals have for the thoughts, motivations, and desires of other people) is at the core of the gridlock. It's not everything, but it's a key component.

> Just take the stories about (not always) elderly relatives being radicalized > by some fake news on FB: these may be well meaning people, but they are in > the clutches of not so benign people. Confront and overcome those, and then > we'll see how much remaining confusion even exists.

An excellent point. I wonder though, how "radicalized" are these people, _really_ , as opposed to just frustrated, confused, and illogically angry in general about a complicated mixture of this and that? If it was me, I'd put some effort into finding answers to questions like these, rather than guessing (which typically takes the form of assuming the worst).

> Last but not least, if someone gives their child poison

I would advocate for taking the child away. If it was my child, depending on the circumstances that person may suffer extremely negative consequences that may not be proportional to the harm they inflicted.

On the scale of the population of the planet, or at least the individual citizens within democratic countries, you can't just take these people away or execute them, you have to _persuade_ them, within the incredibly flawed framework of governance that we call Democracy. I am simply saying that the current approach doesn't seem to be successful, and we should expend some effort in figuring out why. That this idea seems so offensive to so many people to me seems more like a symptom of the problem I'm describing, rather than a problem with my idea. I believe there is a strong but unrecognized element or tribalism at play in this debate, on both sides, that is holding back progress. On the right, this manifests as people saying utterly idiotic things about climate change, and on the left this manifests as things like getting angry at or downvoting someone for suggesting we stop mistaking our perceptions of reality for reality itself, and think and study the issue more deeply.

But of course, all of this is just my personal opinion based on observations, it's completely possible I'm wrong. But it seems worthy of some thought and investigation, considering the gravity of the situation and the current state of gridlock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do you approach people who doesn't have trust in science? It feels so surreal that the science is settled, but some people still don't believe climate change is real.

<comment><USER5> > It feels so surreal that the science is settled

????????

Is the global mean temp for the earth hotter:

1\. Right now

2\. During the Bronze Age

?

What parts of the entire field of psychology from the last 50 years have _not_ failed to replicate?

What parts of nutrition science from the last 50 years are useful, or at least predictive?

What assumptions were we _certain_ about in anthropology and history 50 years ago that we now know are completely wrong?

It feels so surreal that people think science is something you settle, at all. I cannot imagine the confusion that would lead an educated person into in thinking that.

<comment><USER6> This is not a discussion about nutrition, or psychology, or anthropology. It's a discussion about two very concrete questions:

1\. Is global warming happening right now?

2\. Are humans responsible for it?

The answer to those two questions is absolutely unreservedly settled: it's "yes". It's as settled as any question in science can be, it's as settled as the fact that electrons exist.

<comment><USER7> There's nothing "settled" about question #2. The extent to which humans are responsible for climate change, comparative to external factors (such as the sun heading towards the end of its hydrogen-burning life), is very much debatable.

You can use adverbs like "absolutely" and "unreservedly" but that doesn't make your statement greater than an opinion.

<comment><USER8> You know, people use that as some kind of defense, but I would find it even scarier if humans were not responsible for it.

Being responsible for about all of it makes it possible for us to be in control. Not being responsible would make the situation akin to being hit by a meteorite.

Some people might find that preferable, since they do not have to change, but I find it far scarier.

<comment><USER9> And there you find why people make up ridiculous claims and become "skeptics" when they are not that way about any other facts of their life: because if they acknowledge the truth, then they commit themselves to doing something about it.

And when you have decades of fabricated political identity that says that we can't switch from fossil fuels and we can't change any aspect of our life that threatens the profits of a few very wealthy corporations, acknowledging these facts also means going against one's own identity.

The very same propagandists that let tobacco companies persist with false claims about smoking and cancer came back for fossil fuel companies' defense with a highly honed bag of tricks.

That's why we see massive anti-science responses in these comments, just like every media mention of climate change brings out hoards of denialist a to barrage the media outlet and scientists that show up: people perceive it as a personal attack on them and act accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting graphs, but it's a little confusing that all but one of them use difference of the metric (i.e. relative values) instead of absolute values -- what and when are the differences relative to?

<comment><USER11> The titles indicate the baseline for each graph. e.g. "Global mean temperature difference from 1850-1900"

They are plotting the anomalies which tend to be much more useful for climate studies than the absolute values. e.g. [0,1]

[0] [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring- references/dyk/anomalie...](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring- references/dyk/anomalies-vs-temperature)

[1] [https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/abs_temp.html](https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/abs_temp.html)

<comment><USER10> Right, so what is plotted is the deviation from the mean reading in the time range given? Thanks for the links, those are insightful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All of the charts should use the same time scale. It's confusing and misleading to use different scales for each.

The argument for doing it is likely because that's all the good data we have for each, but it would still be better to scale them the same way.

<comment><USER13> I wonder why the chart for CO2 concentration starts at 1960 vs 1850 for the global mean temperature difference

<comment><USER14> Without knowing, my guess would be that's when we started measuring & recording those things?

<comment><USER8> That is the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like the facts-based graphs, with multiple data-collecting sources. However, I think somewhere among these graphs should be some kind of 'speculative' graph that shows potential remedial efforts impacts on one or more graphs. Even something as simple as a "when we are gone" graph that predicts what would occur if all industrial, agricultural processes stopped... just so people can see what is the realistic asymptote of moderating conditions we can expect, under an extreme condition. Or, perhaps, put in a more optimistic tone, a 'magical-antimatter-grid-power-source-without-co2' scenario.

<comment><USER8> The IPCC has many of these, for example here:

[https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/)

The older reports have even more of them.

I find this one especially informative:

[https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-10.jp...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-10.jpg)

There is historical data and the results for different emission pathways (timelines of human emissions).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about charts for the positive counter-cyclical measurements? Off the top of my head, if there's more CO2 there should be more plant growth, right? Is there a chart for that? The problem with these current charts is while momentum is usually a good predictor, if you aren't looking at the full picture you might miss key indicators that could drastically change the future (ie. if you just looked at charts that showed the WeWork narrative you want to present, the future would look predictable until a couple months ago).

<comment><USER8> More CO2 might not be a good thing for plant-based carbon sinks: Some plants with less stored carbon might outcompete others, lowering the sink storage. This issue is quite involved.

[https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the- liana...](https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-strange-case-of-the-liana-vine- and-its-role-in-global-warming)

<comment><USER16> Interesting. Thanks for the link. More reason to have more charts on this dashboard tracking countercyclicals like plant density, green acreage, etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do you measure the level of the sea at the mm precision? It is highly doubtful we are able to do that with any kind of instrumentation, more so around the whole world at the same time.

EDIT: they say they measure everything with satellites, but that does not mean there is no incertitude in the measurement. No measurement is 100% accurate, and I'd certainly like to see the error range of satellites, when even GPS can't do better than +/\- 30 cm precision.

<comment><USER18> AFAIK, satellite sea level measurements are only really accurate to a few cm. But when many measurements are averaged over long periods of time, that's still good enough to observe trends on the order of a few mm per year.

A bit more information about the measurement process: [https://research.csiro.au/slrwavescoast/sea- level/measuremen...](https://research.csiro.au/slrwavescoast/sea- level/measurements-and-data/sea-level-measurements/#SatAlt)

<comment><USER19> That is very interesting! how do they know that a difference in a satellite measurement is not due to slippage in its orbit?

<comment><USER18> The nice thing about satellite orbits is that they are extremely steady and predictable. Over long time scales, a satellite's orbit drifts due to many effects, such as non-uniformity of Earth's gravity. But over short timescales, its motion is very precisely determined by its orbital parameters.

In particular, there's a precise relationship between a satellite's orbital period and its orbital radius (technically, its semi-major axis). A one- centimeter variation in altitude would result in a timing error of several hundred microseconds per day, which is enough to be detected using precise clocks and Doppler effect measurements.

<comment><USER20> > A one-centimeter variation in altitude would result in a timing error of > several hundred microseconds per day

Source or math for this? Because for any signal in the MHz range, I'm not sure I believe it necessarily.

Several hundred microseconds of a 150Mhz wave is several thousand cycles. That seems... questionable.

I did a check on a decibel calc with a 150Mhz signal and a 1 meter change was approx .01db... which is effectively undetectable to a real world application. Signal strength isn't the same as propagation delay, I know. But yea...

I look forward to being corrected, but I can't say that claim seems legitimate on its face.

EDIT: Nope. Did some probably bad math on this on my own, claim is very nonsense. Esp because the delta distance is in space where radio has the speed of light.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand what you think is nonsense about this claim. Can you elaborate?

The timing numbers I quoted are purely based on the orbital motion of a (hypothetical) satellite, and have nothing to do with radio signals. Kepler's third law states that a body's orbital period varies in proportion to the 1.5th power of its semi-major axis. A 1cm altitude difference for a satellite in LEO corresponds to a change of about 1.5 parts per billion, which translates to a 2.2 ppb change in orbital period. As I said, this amounts to a cumulative difference of a couple hundred microseconds per day.

And it's actually much easier to precisely measure frequency differences than amplitude differences, if you have sufficiently accurate clocks. If you have a 150.000000MHz reference signal and a 150.000001MHz doppler-shifted signal, you can simply multiply them together to get a 1Hz beat frequency. Using this technique, you can measure phase differences that are considerably less than a single cycle of the original signal.

A major limiting factor, of course, is the stability and precision of your reference clocks. Apparently, the Jason-2 satellite that (until recently) was responsible for a lot of these measurements had a high-precision quartz oscillator that was stable to roughly one part per trillion: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30004875](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30004875)

Measuring the absolute position and velocity of a satellite is comparatively a lot more difficult. But with sufficiently precise Doppler relative-velocity measurements from multiple points, you can solve for both the orbital parameters and the slowly-varying perturbations with a high degree of accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Glad to see climate change denialism has spread HN, what the fuck is happening?

<comment><USER22> Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening.

Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight?

Maybe HN got too popular?

<comment><USER23> Honestly, it is really, really bad.

The worst comments are of the "just asking questions!" type. The asker will preface it with an apology about them being "genuinely curious", and then continue by stating their "concerns" about how the established and agreed upon consensus was reached, and say they "couldn't help but notice" how the "other side" gets "suppressed/censored".

This type of concern-trolling is straight out of grassroots propaganda rulebook (which the asker is either consciously following, or has been a target and victim of themselves), and it's quite depressing how many posters here fall for it and engage the asker in good faith.

<comment><USER24> > "just asking questions!"

I recently learned that some people call these comments and posts "JAQing off"; such a term isn't going to change anyone's mind, but at least there's something to sadly smirk about when I see the same bad-faith questions posted for the umpteenth time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> awwww shit

<comment><USER26> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nothing that the earth hasn't been through before, at much higher degrees.The earth will be fine and will recover. Humans, hopefully, will not.

<comment><USER28> the rate of change this time is ridiculously high. that is the problem, not the actual temperature

<comment><USER29> I hear the rate of change argument a lot, but I haven't been able to comfortably arrive at how the comparison is made. Historic temperatures (pre- nineteenth century) have to be inferred from proxies—ice formations, fossilized tree rings, et cetera. Those, in turn, must be put into a date range based on some form of (I assume) radiometric dating. Carbon dating can get you +- 80 years. The other common techniques have even less precision. Uranium-lead dating can peg down a 2 million year window, for example.

How can researchers say that the rate of change is so much greater now when, not even counting propagation of error, the granularity of measurements pre- nineteenth century is, at best, of the same order-of-magnitude as the WHOLE of the era of modern precision measurements?

EDIT: I realize my question is inconvenient, but downvoting without meaningful response is no way to counter skepticism. This topic gets more religious as time goes on.

<comment><USER28> this is how science works. it is the best model and projection using current data. if you can improve it, please go ahead

<comment><USER19> You aren't addressing the arguments at all here. With the error bars that black6 suggests, we cannot possibly infer anything of meaning over long periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why can't people just make honest graphs? If you're trying to convince a skeptical person, the last thing you should do is use known dirty tricks for deceiving them.

CO2 and arctic sea ice graphs' vertical axes don't start at zero, making the change look worse than it really is and meaningless without something to compare PPM or km^2 to.

Other graphs use a sensible difference for the axis because there's no meaningful absolute zero.

It would be nice if they aligned the time axes on all of them for extra readability.

The different start dates are a red flag because they might be cherry picking the start date to avoid something embarrassing before that. I guess they just used easily available data which is fine if they don't have the resources to do it more thoroughly, and they explain that for sea level. But it would be more transparent to show a longer history with clear explanation of how start dates were chosen.

Actually, sea level really needs a longer history because it has been rising since the ice age and it's important to separate that natural increase from the anthropogenic one.</comment>


Your Laptop Ruined Your Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/laptops-killed-work-life-balance/606334/ <comment><USER2> No Amanda, my laptop has not ruined my life. It has made it much more bearable. Why not title this article "Unchecked greed ruined your and billions of other lives?" Right, no one will click on that.</comment>


VW Presentation in 2006 Showed How to Foil Emissions Tests - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/business/international/vw-presentation-in-06-showed-how-to-foil-emissions-tests.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1 <comment><USER2> Yes, the defeat device VW employed for emissions is an environmental tragedy, but this is just a symptom of a much more central issue. That is, VW was actively promoting technical and business leaders that lacked any sort of moral compass. How can we have faith in global corporations and their (grossly overpaid) leaders if these are the choices they're making and the examples they're setting?

<comment><USER3> The 'trust but verify' model of your morality was broken. If you give the opportunity to cheat, there will be cheaters. The emissions tests were bad and made it easy to cheat.

Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself, and entirely more predictable and preventable.

Solve solvable problems like bad testing and not unsolvable problems like unscrupulous businessmen.

<comment><USER4> "Providing an environment which makes cheating easy and profitable is just as morally corrupt as the cheating itself"

No, it isn't. This is called victim blaming. It is like saying not locking your door is as morally corrupt as the thieves that walked into your unlocked house.

We create standards for emissions. And companies should comply with the tests even without the need for tests. We expect people should follow the laws, and we should use the minimal amount of enforcement to get compliance. But it's silly to blame the epa for poor tests. The vault is with VW for selling cars that didn't comply with emissions standards.

<comment><USER5> The fault lies with _both_ of them. It is VW's responsibility to be moral and comply with laws. It is the EPA's responsibility to catch those who attempt to cheat. They both failed, in easily preventable ways. They are both at fault.

VW's management should be jailed, and the EPA should probably be reprimanded or have someone fired for letting this go uncaught for so long.

<comment><USER6> Then we can as well say that the whole general public of USA has failed. Because it is their responsibility (indirectly and ultimately) to see that the legal and enforcement machinery works as expected. Let's see how do they (the general public) behave now. Do they push heavily for severe punishment for these criminals (both individual leaders and companies) or not?

Or do they keep mum even if the leaders (like the recently resigned VW ceo) who not only got scot-free but also were rewarded millions if not billions of dollars ultimately for such crimes by the company and its shareholders?

<comment><USER7> Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed, if we're going to ignore people's job descriptions, and their direct connection and responsibility for the design of all systems involved.

<comment><USER6> I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on the EPA too.

But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people" even for smaller scale crimes.

The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any business in US.

What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce. Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The justice has become farce in this case.

>>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed,

Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state. As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned, we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying god failed doesn't get us much far.

<comment><USER8> There are those that are directly responsible (manufacturers, regulators), and those that are indirectly responsible (the people in a state, shareholders in a company, humanity, God, etc).

The people don't get to vote on specific issues, they get to vote on representation. The people representing them are directly responsible. Hold the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if ineffective.

<comment><USER6> >>Hold the people directly responsible to account, remove and replace if ineffective.

And who is going to do "that"? and what if those who are responsible to do "that" don't do that? Then who is going to hold 'those' people who didn't do anything to hold those people responsible for the VW? I mean somewhere down the line, the general public must become active and show that it is not sleeping altogether, if that doesn't happen, well, society as a whole has to pay its price, and this price generally is very big, it can be so big that society may be crushed under its weight.

My point is let's see how USA deals with this VW crime and the other important criminal called Saudi Arabia for its role in 9/11\. The government and enforcement agencies have already shown that they won't punish them much. So it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not.

<comment><USER9> _So it remains to see if the general public holds them accountable or not._

That's not likely to happen. The American public is generally quite apathetic.

For example, one of the current leading candidates to become the next president of the USA had the following good fortune a while ago[1]:

\- did not have any previous experience trading commodities futures

\- deposited less than $1000 in cash into a futures trading account

\- Made hundreds of trades. Each futures trade incurs a significant bid/ask spread, much greater than stock trades. And yet: _Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day._

\- cashed out for $100,000 nine months later

To me, that $100,000 was nothing more and nothing less than a bribe. And, although corruption is endemic in many parts of the world, one would hope that in the USA such obvious grift would unequivocally disqualify someone for the office of the President.

But if you took a poll, probably 99% of the electorate wouldn't even be aware of this little incident. And the majority probably wouldn't care.

So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.

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

<comment><USER6> Good post indeed.

>>So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.

It's sad. With all the "information age tools" at hand, we see that people are just choosing to remain ignorant. Reminds me Huxley's brave new world [1]

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This level of criminality requires some kind of response, or really, lets just drop the idea of crime as a concept and just monetize "justice". At least we could dispense with some of the more galling hypocrisy, without changing how the system works one iota.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, one wonders why the government (of the US or of Germany) continues to tolerate the existence of this company at all. They've clearly conspired at the executive level to mislead regulators. The corporation is a figment of the government's imagination. It seems like the government should just stop imagining it.

<comment><USER12> If the US were to push too hard they are at risk of souring relations with Germany. For Germany the problem is damaging their own economy. In a democracy a recession is an existential threat to the current government. That's much scarier than a company flouting emissions standards.

<comment><USER13> It's not about shutting down VW, it's about jailing one person, the CEO. Or, if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company, the lower level of management, recursively. It will lightly hamper VW, but provide a personal responsibility baseline for all management in car companies. It's mass, oragnized crime we're talking about here.

<comment><USER14> > Or, if he proves he wasn't aware or wasn't in control of his company

That's not how the burden of proof works. That said, would this case actually be prosecuted seriously, they would find information relating to how he was informed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its common for competing companies to test each other's products as a benchmark for their own. So all of these companies will have known that other companies were doing the same and no-one said anything. That's thousands of people.

</comment><comment><USER16> Those Germans, always meticulous in their record keeping. It amazes me what people will upload to a server and communicate through email. If whistle- blowing hadn't been as under attack as it is I'm certain a lot of other companies would be found to have been knowingly violating laws in order to squeeze additional profit.

</comment><comment><USER17> When a company willingly and knowingly foils rules put in place to increase lifespan and reduce the death toll of cancer due to air pollution, shouldn't these top-executives be charged with mass murder? Why can't we compare this with a war crime? Millions of healthy life-span-years could have been lost due to these acts.

<comment><USER18> Because most people make decisions with a bit of perspective. Trucks (I'm not talking semis, really anything over 6000 pounds, I think) are still allowed far more emissions than any VW diesel car, and anything built before the new law went into place is still on the road doing it's carcinogenic thing.

Any car company is in the business of polluting the hell out of the environment (save Tesla, unless you watch a lot of Fox News). VW polluted a little bit more than they were allowed to for a few years and the executives are "mass murderers"? That's a hell of a president.

<comment><USER19> The excess deaths can be calculated. So can the ill gotten gains. Why shouldn't the management be made accountable for both?

<comment><USER20> It is very uncommon for people to be held criminally responsible for so-called 'statistical murder', which is actually quite common. The case has been made that airbags have killed more people than they have saved; should the people who wrote the airbag laws and regulations be put to death?

<comment><USER21> While I disagree with the original comment - your airbags analogy does not work here, airbags were not created to work around a law, there is a law on emissions and vw deliberately built a workaround to "comply" with a law on tests, but they knew that outside the test facility their cars would violate that law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel that this is only the first of a series of scandals in which respectable companies and institutions will be found to have done nefarious and harmful things: attempting to secrete their misdeeds in the seemingly impenetrable and arcane minutiae of everyday software.

</comment><comment><USER23> I bought a new car in March and I really wanted to get a VW.

But the behaviour of VW's executives in this matter completely put me off the brand.

I feel sorry for the factory workers and the people who have nothing to do with this, but it will take a while until I will trust VW again.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It increasingly seems that the cheating at Volkswagon was systematic and not the fault of rouge engineers as they claim.

<comment><USER24> Please don't rewrite titles when the original is neither misleading nor linkbait. This is a rule here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

The submitted title was "Volkswagen seriously made a PowerPoint deck on how to cheat emissions tests". That's _more_ linkbait, which is driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

<comment><USER25> It might be a good idea to link to or explain submission title rules on the submit page as most new submitters probably won't go looking for the Guidelines page. Many new users could be coming from forums or sites where editorializing headlines it the norm and/or expected.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Middle ground between bootstrapping & VC? - <AUTHOR>

We need a small runway ($250K) to get our first customers, but we don't want to take on debt, give up equity or otherwise have an exit strategy. We want a sustainable private company. If we're looking beyond friends and family, who should I reach out to? <comment><USER2> Not sure if you're able to get something for nothing... you're going to have to compromise on at least one of your values.

Possibly consider an Angel investor, who would more than likely invest in your business as a hobby, rather than a professional VC who is just looking to flip start-ups.

Start off with Angel List (www.angel.co)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there other ways for Angels to get their capital out of a startup other than an acquisition/IPO?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What SQL tools have you used for agile development? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for applications around Microsoft's SQL Server. I am trying to gather data on which tools would make a DB team agile by automating a lot of their current manual tasks. Some of those tasks include automatic/promoted deployments, database versioning, source control, and being able to reliably test their scripts without having to muck with the database.
Some of the tools I have started to investigate are:

  - Redgate's technologies

  - ApexSQL's technologies

  - SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools)

  - Navicat for SQL Server
 Are there others out there that I might be missing out on? What have you used to solve these kinds of problems? <comment><USER2> None of the things you're looking for are going to help your team much unless they already have a good understanding of relational DB theory and some experience.

That being said, I do like DataGrip by JetBrains for general SQL usage.

Visio is fine for generating diagrams if you've already got licenses, though there are far better products if not.</comment>


Ask HN: Does the Dale-Carnegie approach work in business? - <AUTHOR> As a startup co-founder, I often find myself having to manage freelancers and vendors.
I've recently read Dale Carnegie's classic "How to win friends and influence people", and am trying to put into practice the lessons given in the book. Particularly when dealing with freelancers or vendors who aren't living up to our expectations, and whom we have to continue working with in the short-term at least.
The Dale-Carnegie approach that I'm trying to follow:
- Do not argue, belittle, nag, scold, yell, make a scene, etc etc
- Tell them what you need, and frame it in a way that appeals to their self-interest
- Compliment them, and let them know how highly you and others think of them
- Emphasize to them the importance of the problem you're facing
- Let them know that everyone is counting on them, and encourage them to live up to their high ideals and reputation
My co-founder's style, which I've also seen in many corporate managers/directors/VPs, incorporates some of the above lessons as well. But it diverges significantly in that it involves a lot of "nagging", "scolding", "playing bad cop" and "raising hell" when problem occur.
Lately my co-founder and I have been butting heads over this. She thinks that I'm being too "soft", and that my approach isn't going to get the best results. I'm certainly willing to embrace conflict where I think it will be helpful - but I genuinely believe that the Carnegie style can deliver the best results. Am I being too naive? <comment><USER2> The key is to control emotional response. A big part of the Dale-Carnegie thing is to blunt a visceral reaction.

Personally, I keep an internal bozo meter and use that to guide responses. A key area of concern is to make sure you are not the bozo as well!

Most people are acting in good faith and poor performance is a symptom of some problem. The priority with them is to get your needs prioritized.

At some point you start to understand that some people are acting in bad faith, or are too incompetent to know the difference. In those cases, you need to compel performance in a way that is appropriate. It's never productive or moral to belittle people, but is appropriate to nag.

Another key thing that you and your cofounder need to respect is that you have different styles and you don't cross boundaries. You don't want to be a sheep, she cannot be a jerk.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is no one true approach.

Although, treating people who work for you like you would treat any other adult human who is equal to you is a good approach in general.

After watching "The Social Network", when i became an executive and stuck in some interaction where i didn't know to raise hell or back off, i always asked myself what Zuckerberg would do?

And that explains the leadership strategy i use.

Since your co-founder is strict like Dad, you can be caring/kind like a mom. Maybe it's a false equivalence but you get an idea. Both of you don't have to use same approach.

</comment><comment><USER4> The book was advised to me years back by by an acquintance who thought I could come off as a jerk at times although my intentions were never so.

I read, and acted on it for some time, And then shifted some. I am an idealists so I was actually looking to educate myself on how to do it best.

Carnegie is right about what people respond to. The part that worked for me was to keep a bright personality. People also wanna be heard. This second one is more taxing on me as it is not my natural mode of thought. Some are far better listeners. I can only spend a small portion of my time on hearing what people have to say. I presume the economy of such efforts is different for others.

Unfortunately some people are not worthy of good interaction. Some are incompetent and some are not good people. They may construe your kind gestures as something they can ride. So a selection process should be in place.

What works for one, may not work for another. Giving ad hoc advice may also backfire.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the key question you're trying to ask here is what to do if you're having issues with a freelancer or vendor who aren't living up to your expectations. And in that situation what communication style works best.

I just let people go and try to terminate those types of relationships as soon as possible when I know it's not working. It's not worth it to focus on any communication style in my opinion. Sometimes you just have to cut losses quickly and professionally.

I try my best to learn from these situations and get a lot pickier about who I work with. If you're having lots of issues with people who aren't meeting your expectations I would check whether there's miscommunication or whether you need to increase your standards whether for freelancers or vendors. You should be picky with both the people you hire and your clients. I learned that the hard way. :(

Sorry if this was not helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> IMO nagging, scolding, etc only serves to motivate people to get you off their back, not to become better.</comment>


Starting a Web Design Firm from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thejournal/starting-a-web-design-firm-from-scratch-c7d88caf5764 <comment><USER2> Best of luck to you! You already have achieved a major milestone: Actually doing something. Lots of people say "Maybe I should do X..." or "If I were to do X, here is how I would do it..." Fewer people actually do the work to launch the business. Even if your business fails (which I hope it doesn't!) you will have succeeded in that you "showed up," you tried and you ran your own business. That is something to be proud of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! That's so inspiring! Thanks a lot for your inspiring words mate. Actually I have put a lot of project on side many times, this time it ain't happening. A part reason to write the progress is accountability. So that I keep pushing even when I feel like I don't want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good luck. I had a moderately successful web design business with multiple employees etc. in the early aughts (early on didn't specialize but by 2006 our niche was home builders whooops!) and it can be pretty emotionally rewarding work if you develop strong relationships with good clients small biz clients.

Keep your overhead low.

<comment><USER4> Few other things I learned: 1.) Don't personally guarantee anything for the business, including a real estate lease.

2.) Do create three separate bank accounts for taking money in, for paying your labor, and for paying bills with a debit card. It's never fun when a vendor dings your card and accidentally adds an extra zero at the end of a bill and you needed to make payroll.

3.) You are not a Bank, don't lend money by working first then getting paid, take deposits on phases before you start a phase. If a client has a big project and needs NET terms then use a factoring company to check the credit worthiness of the client and to take over your accounts receivable for your company.

<comment><USER5> > Don't personally guarantee anything for the business

How do you do this though? Banks/creditors generally demand a personal guarantee on any small business credit cards, loans, etc. Specifically because small/new businesses are very risky.

<comment><USER4> If you are running a service business you shouldn't need any loans if you manage the business properly. You can use factoring services to get paid on deals that require terms (negating the need for a loan to make payroll).

Small businesses are risky. It doesn't pay to put your personal financial well being on the line to sign up a customer. You aren't starting a bank. Good factoring companies do a monthly credit worthiness check on your clients for you. A real asset for this kind of business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a comedy show on in the UK the moment called Bad Move in which the central character (played by Jack Dee), is a web designer.

His father-in-law enjoys pointing out that this is today, a rather absurd career. Anybody can go online and create a website using a builder in an evening and get near professional results.

I don't wish for a moment to suggest that this business is up against it, but I will be curious to see how businesses will react compared to some years ago: most people who want an online presence, are either happy enough with nothing more than a social media presence, or are able to get something together that's good enough in wix.com or similar.

Of course for premium brands, they will hire in marketing agencies or even in- house staff, but that's not this niche market approach.

It could be a challenge to make a profit at this sort of gig soon!

<comment><USER7> I _love_ it when competitors think this way. They are basically giving away a potentially huge comparative and competitive advantage.

That said, there are a few questions:

1\. Do the gains of getting a professionally designed website offset the costs in some way? It should, but in many cases it does not.

2\. (Mentioned elsewhere in this thread) The market has a lot of participants (saturated?), and the median end user is not good at differenting quality other than by personal reference (kind of... sort of...). As such, being a provider in the market can be a bit sketchy.

3\. Anyone who is really good at web design (esp. if it extends to other aspects of the digital experience) will quickly realize that they can make a lot more money (and consistent money) by owning one or more businesses and crushing the online presence aspect of those markets. The startup costs are higher, but the ROI is really good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You really need to put proper fake content in your demos–they are as much marketing content as your homepage.

"Bla bla bla" is not going to cut it.

<comment><USER9> I think it's even degrading dog trainers. As if all they said was _bla bla_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this is so foolish of me. I totally forgot to update the demo text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ive had great luck selling squarespace websites for around $3k to small businesses. Look into that.

You need to partner with a copy writer. A business website lives and dies by its copy.

Good luck. There is good money out there. You just need to stand out. :)

<comment><USER11> Do your clients know from the off you will be using SquareSpace — and, more importantly — do they know what SquareSpace IS?

Kudos to you, I'm just amazed people will pay that for what I tend to view as a DIY service!

<comment><USER5> People will pay for what they don't want to do, even if they know they _could_ do it.

A business client will be focused on their business. Their website, while important, is likely not their core competency. So it makes perfect sense to outsource that and they won't care what the underlying platform is.

<comment><USER11> Sure, I get that - it's probably just me, but I'd expect a site I'd commissioned to be built 'for me' and become 'my property', not merely a fulfillment service that locks me in to two external suppliers.

I just find it odd, is all.

<comment><USER12> You're on HN though. When I used to do websites I would give options with tiered prices. Something on SquareSpace (or similar) would be a cheaper option but I would let them know why. A custom, scratch built site would be 3-4x more money so they would usually go with the cheaper option. Very few clients truly cared about the website. They just knew they needed one and didn't really care about the method used to achieve it.

<comment><USER11> Your last point is very true! it's been a few years since I was a full-time web designer, but I always had my own range of starting templates from which I'd work from - the equivalent these days of which would be the likes of Bootstrap or something. THAT I can get my head around.

Perhaps I should poke my head back into the space then, help to pay for the occasional holiday here and there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good luck and congrats on getting started!

I'm curious about how you decided your niche and pricing. Did you do market research? Specifically, talking to dog trainers and see if they would be interested and how much they are willing to pay for your services?

As someone who has tried to sell to niche markets like that before I've found many niches are very stingy with cash. Some of them are likely sole proprietors and what you are asking for their website might be an entire week's pay for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for your inputs on this. As I am doing this first time, inputs from experienced people is GOLD for me.

Frankly, I have not done such market research. I saw a niche where people are actually buying website (by looking at Insta accounts of Dog Trainers), then checked for competition (there are a few, and that's good; I avoid Zero competition markets).

Before writing the copy I did some research on Dog Trainers, what they like, what they love and what they hate. Without knowing my target public I can't write a good copy. If you find places of improvement on my current copy then please let me know.

Also, thanks a lot to mention that the price may be expensive for them. This means I have to do one of two things - either lower the price, or build a copy that make them realize the ROI.

Thanks again mate :)

<comment><USER13> You forgot the third option... I could be wrong and that price is completely OK for them :) I haven't talked to your target audience either, I don't know what there price point is. I have only talked to adjacent markets.

<comment><AUTHOR> True! Oh god there are some many awesome inputs here from you guys, I have to take out my notepad and start taking notes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good luck. It's tough to compete in a saturated market. You'll need to make 1-2 sales per week. I'll be following closely :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your well-wishes mate :)

1-2 sales per week - that would be a good target for me. Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Suggestions for improvements:

Change the headline on your landing page to clearly say what you do. E.g. add "Bespoke web sites for dog trainers" after the "More ..." bit.

The CTA at the bottom is easy to miss on skimming. Make that bigger.

<comment><USER16> Dog training ERS might be more familiar with the word "custom" than "bespoke."

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, I will split test ;)

Thanks for your input friend :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have you read [http://gettingreal.37signals.com/](http://gettingreal.37signals.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Good Luck. You sound exactly like me, for better or for worse. Hopefully you can make something of yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate :)

Would like to be in touch with person who thinks I am like him/her!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Appreciate you putting this out there. Best wishes, and keep journaling!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mate, means a lot :)</comment></comment>


Introducing JetBrains Toolbox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2015/09/03/introducing-jetbrains-toolbox/ <comment><USER4> One of the things I liked about the previous model was that I could continue using an older version of the software, assuming it met my needs and evaluate future planned features and future versions before deciding to purchase an upgrade or new license. If I don't renew, I don't get support and I can't use the new features in the new version - but I can still use the software I purchased in the state it was in.

If I'm understanding correctly, there's no option not to upgrade and continue using an old version of the product under the new model - the instant you stop paying, the product can no longer be used (after the month has finished). Personally this makes me feel like I don't 'own' the software anymore - instead, I'm just renting it.

I'm also interested to see if IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate will continue to offer the other language plugins (PHP, Python etc) that allows it to do what the other IDEs do under this pricing model.

I'd have no problem with this pricing approach if it was available alongside the existing system - so developers who use many different languages can use the subscription service if they feel it offers better value for them. Developers who prefer the previous model can opt to continue renewing annually to receive support and updates. I'm somewhat surprised and disappointed to see JetBrains forcing everyone down this path once their existing licenses have expired.

<comment><USER5> If you have an existing perpetual license, you can use it infinitely, just as the license agreement stated when you purchased it.

We do however offer a switch to the new model if you like it and if you're interested in new versions that your perpetual license doesn't cover. If you do switch to the new model, you pay as long as you need to use a tool, and you always get the latest version.

IntelliJ Ultimate will continue to offer language plugins, nothing changes in this regard.

<comment><USER6> Adobe did this - I adapted to alternative tools, which also turned out to be cheaper in the long run.

I love PHPStorm, but I'm not married to it. Once this rental plan goes into effect, it will be time to find something else.

<comment><USER7> Agreed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm already in 10 subscription services, from Dropbox and iCloud to Abobe, music plugins, etc. How much worse would it be in the future, when we'd regularly have to fork $500 per month or so (rent money in most of the world) just to keep using our software?

The situation reminds me of this part from Ubik by Philip K. Dick:

Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime, and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the - to him - very unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen minutes had passed; he therefore vigorously strode to the apt door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt.

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

A knock sounded on the door. "Hey, Joe, baby, it's me, G. G. Ashwood. And I've got her right here with me. Open up." "Put a nickel in the slot for me," Joe said. "The mechanism seems to be jammed on my side."

A coin rattled down into the works of the door; it swung open and there stood G. G. Ashwood with a brilliant look on his face. It pulsed with sly intensity, an erratic, gleaming triumph as he propelled the girl forward and into the apt.

<comment><USER9> On top of the money going out periodically, it's about the cognitive load it places on the customers. I have enough decisions to make every day; additional services to consider adds the amount of time I need to think about writing off certain subscriptions from my taxes, whether or not I renew, time to make sure my credit card is up to date, check to make sure my subscription doesn't require when I'm on vacation without Internet and want to code, etc. A one- time purchase loads all of that into a single occurrence where I need that product instead of bringing it up at a calendar-determined interval.

My company uses WebStorm regularly because it's a solid IDE for Linux; I've heard of Visual Studio Code running on Linux; have people found that comparable?

<comment><USER10> Visual Studio Code isn't an IDE. It's a text editor, similar to Sublime Text and Atom.

Your major options for a web development IDE on Linux would be Aptana/Eclipse and Netbeans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Will I be able to upgrade my perpetual license to a new perpetual license or renew my upgrade subscription? No. Major version upgrades for perpetual licenses to new perpetual licenses will no longer be offered as of November 2, 2015. As an existing customer, you will be able to switch your perpetual license to our new subscription based model with a discount."

Well let me be the first to say, this sucks. As a user (and lover) of Jetbrains products (pycharm, IDEA, phpstorm) over the years, I never though they would ever go down this path.

<comment><USER5> Let's discuss. Why do you think this is bad?

<comment><USER12> Because right now, we can pay a one time fee and use the software as long as we want, without incurring any more cost in return for not getting updates or imposing a cost on JetBrains.

However, from November, that will no longer be possible. If Jetbrains decides, in 2016, to increase the license fee to $300 per year, or $500, then we will have 2 options: Pay it and continue to have access, or don't pay, and lose all access to the tools, despite the fact that we have already given you money. If I have a cashflow problem, I can no longer decide to stay with last year's version for a while, instead I lose access.

I'm sure you know this, I'm sure everyone at JetBrains knows this.

<comment><USER13> The license seems to say that if you stop paying, you can still use the most recent version as of when your subscription expired. So technically you could subscribe for one month, get the software, and keep using it until you saw a version that was compelling enough to upgrade to.

<comment><USER12> That's not how I'm reading it, and I'd be amazed if that was the case, because then, you literally could pay £6 and get PHPStorm to use forever.

<comment><USER13> That's according to a post earlier in the thread from the guy I presume is from JetBrains. It's also similar to the license Epic had for Unreal Engine, before they got rid of the monthly fee.

<comment><USER12> You seem to be conflating the perpetual licence, which is what we have currently and will stop being available in November with the new subscription. If I do not move to the subscription model, I can continue to use my current version of PHPStorm, in perpetuity.

However, I cannot subscribe under the new terms, and keep using the software if I decide to stop subscribing. Earlier in this thread you suggested that we could subscribe for a month and keep using the software afterwards. This is incorrect. Once you stop subscribing, you lose the rights to use the software

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm actually quite upset about this. I love PyCharm and I've always upgraded to most recent major version because even though I didn't necessarily need all the new features, I wanted to support JetBrains for making such great software.

So now I'm stuck using PyCharm 4.x forever unless I pay a monthly fee to upgrade. And if I stop paying I lose access to my IDE? Truly an awful way to treat loyal customers.

I can only hope that JetBrains abandons this new SaaS model or has some plan to allow users to purchase either a perpetual license or a subscription a-la Microsoft Office.

If not, then I hope Atom or Sublime Text get some robust debugging plugins for Python like PyCharm has.

<comment><USER7> I agree, im a cLion and a PhpStorm licensee, and this is a disaster. Im going to have to start moving back to netbeans.

We where about to kit out our entire department with phpstorm but now its going to be really really hard to justify this. This is nothing about being more convient for customers, its about screwing more money out of people. I am very very disapointed.

<comment><USER5> For commercial PhpStorm licenses a rough comparison would as follows.

Before November 2: First year: $199 a seat Each subsequent year: $129 a seat

After November 2: First year and each subsequent year: $119-149 a seat (with/without a promotion available)

<comment><USER4> Except that before November 2nd a company could pay $199 once and never again until they felt the need to upgrade.

Following November 2nd, a company has no choice but to cough up the yearly fee or the software stops working and the developers can't do any work without changing the software they use.

<comment><USER15> _cough up the yearly fee or the software stops working and the developers can 't do any work_

Yup, and all it takes is for an invoice to get misplaced or delayed in your accounts payable team and development grinds to a halt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to fix this and regain some of the respect that you've lost in the past few hours, here's my suggestion.

Keep the subscription model. Set the non-discounted prices for a year's subscription at the same price level that perpetual license upgrades were. The monthly prices can be higher, maybe 20% more for a year billed monthly than annually. Offer a 10% grandfathered discount to apologize to your current customers for forcing them onto a subscription model. Don't offer any kind of promotional discount on the "all the Jetbrains" package deal - it's already underpriced. I think that this is a reasonable compromise that allows switching to a subscription model without screwing over either old or new customers.

Additionally, be honest. Many of your customers and most of your users are developers. We understand the upsides and downsides of a subscription model from both perspectives. Trying to spin away those downsides will backfire and leave us feeling taken advantage of. You've spent many years building up all this developer goodwill, it would be a shame to lose it over something like this.

<comment><USER5> That's a great comment, thank you. Let me check how all the prices relate once again and come back to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If they're interested in doing this for the customer's sake, they should offer the customer a choice. If they're ramming it down people's throats, then they're really just doing it for their wallets.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am struggling to see how this benefits the consumer.

I read that whole release wondering if they actually believed that this was some sort of reaction to consumer demand or if they just think people are incredibly ignorant.

No thanks.

Surprised I didn't see a tweet that read:

"Dear JetBrains. I loved buying your product so much I want to do it EVERY month!"

<comment><USER19> Personally, as a polygot developer who works a lot in both Visual Studio with ReSharper and IntelliJ, this is an overall cost savings for me and simplifies things a lot. Instead of paying my $99/yr to renew IntelliJ, and another $129/yr to upgrade ReSharper - I can switch to the $149/yr 'everything included` plan and get a couple tools I don't already have (CLion being a big one).

If you're the kind of person who doesn't maintain their existing S&M subscription then it will end up costing you more, but typically this will break even for people that do regularly maintain them.

EDIT: Am I honestly getting downvoted because I'm not hopping aboard the wold- is-ending-because-subscriptions-are-bad circlejerk? I expect this kind of behavior on Reddit, not HN.

It's not like I'm telling anyone "you're wrong" for not liking the changes, but I certainly hope I'm allowed to state my opinion too.

<comment><USER20> This is a short-sighted view. JetBrains now controls pricing, and the relationship itself is coercive.

This means that you have no control over pricing, and that JetBrains doesn't need to worry about whether you'll renew year-to-year if they don't produce upgrades that make your renewal worthwhile.

Long-term mutually beneficial economic relationships are rarely built on top of coercive models that give one party such an enormous advantage.

<comment><USER21> I am having trouble understanding this viewpoint. For my position, I buy PyCharm Professional license, paying about $50 for each one year license. I plan to keep buying that license every year to get upgrades. To me, I end up paying the same price every year. If I want to try a tool for a month I can pay a few dollars for it, then let it go. To me, that's an advantage.

I am curious about "JetBrains now controls pricing". Haven't they always? If they raised their price outrageously for yearly upgrade model, they would lose customers, so that's true of new and old system. I have control of whether I pay their price or not, but they get to control the price, as always.

I understand to some degree that losing access to a tool is an inconvenience, but it doesn't strike me as a terrible burden. It's all just a view into the code, there's nothing irreplaceable about it. So renting compared to having guaranteed permanent access is a loss, but it doesn't seem that awful - <USER3> that's very different person to person.

Anyway, I am legitimately curious to hear more about this viewpoint. I _kind_ of get it but don't have the strong visceral reaction to it as many others on here. Is it a use case difference, of people who skip upgrades versus those who don't and pay every year? Or is it fundamentally a philosophical stance on own versus rent?

<comment><USER7> If you are on the subscription and jetbrains sudenly hikes the price beyond your pain point, then you lose the tool completly, you cant even run the out of date versions. Under the old scheme you could just stop paying the upgrade and not get any new versions, but still carry on using the product.

<comment><USER19> > If you are on the subscription and jetbrains sudenly hikes the price beyond > your pain point

Certainly a reasonable concern, it'd be nice if they implemented some kind of pricing guarantee. It sure wouldn't alleviate the concerns of everyone, but I think it'd go a long way towards showing goodwill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My department (for the most part) has a "no subscription" policy when it comes to most things, especially tools. I love using ReSharper and 0xDBE (possibly the number two application in my toolbox), but it will be hard to justify this to management. If you offered a perpetual license after 12 months, or kept both SAAS and the perceptual license(you could charge quite a bit more in this case) it would be excellent.

Edit: If you charged me 10 bucks a month for 0xDBE I wouldnt be able to get it approved even on a good day. Charge us 500 a year then the check would be cut that afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dude - just no! Stop making me rent desktop tools which ought to be just there after I pay for them. I will not be upgrading PyCharm and PHPStorm annual after this. It will happily stay in the old version. Even though my cost of $49 that I paid last year is still the same in this pricing model, but instead of that price being the norm, it is qualified with a double asterix.- as in for existing users.

So new users are getting shafted an extra 30 bones on top of what I pay. So in solidarity with new users, thanks but no thanks. Pretty bogus if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER24> if anyone from jetbrains here, in India it is showing prices using hindi (devanagari) numerals which are no longer in common use, even when text is in Hindi, most people will not even understand it. Would recommend to regular numerals.

<comment><USER25> Hey, that's quite funny if you consider these "numerals" were actually developed in India eons ago. That's full circle enough to me: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> tldr: We learned that we can charge much more for our products and we're doing just that. Here are some useless tweets.

</comment><comment><USER27> From the FAQ:

> 9\. Can I use my personal license on multiple machines?

> You may install the license on more than one machine but it may be used on > only one machine at a time. To run multiple installations simultaneously, > each instance requires a separate license.

[https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb](https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb) (#9 under License Types and Users)

Will I still be able to run multiple instances of ReSharper on the same machine? This is pretty essential to my workflow. For example, I have three instances of VS2015 open at the moment: One for my Unity project, another for a C# plugin, and a third for the installer. ReSharper runs fine in all of them.

I can also run these on my Windows machine while having IDEA open on my Mac. (Actually the Windows machine is a Parallels VM, but same difference.) Will this capability go away? That would be unfortunate.

<comment><USER21> This is a good question. I usually have multiple PyCharm instances running and have never had a problem. I never thought about it until my wife started up PyCharm on my other computer and I got a notice saying another computer on the network was using a license and one of us needed to quit.

JetBrains needs to reassure us multiple instances are ok on same machine and across VMs. Will running the IDE in OS X and also a guest Linux VM look like multi-machine use? If so, that's really a bad flaw in licensing.

<comment><USER27> I was under the impression that they treat a VM like a separate machine - <USER3> now I'm not sure. I started IDEA in OSX and a Windows 10 VM on the same machine ten minutes ago, and so far neither instance has complained. I know IDEA has complained when I've run it on the Mac and my ThinkPad.

If this is legit and I can run IDEA on the host machine and in one or more VMs on the same machine, that would be a very good thing for multiplatform developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really really really hate renting software.

On the flip side - IntelliJ comes out with a new version every single year, and if you don't upgrade you are kind of screwed (At least as someone who codes latest cut of Scala)

So not a big change to my wallet, but it does make me sad a little.

</comment><comment><USER12> Odd that this is suddenly on the 3rd page of HN - has it been flagged or attracted some kind of penalty?

<comment><USER29> I was suspicious of this, too, as I am anytime a seemingly-popular article suddenly vanishes from the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I understand that people wouldn't like the idea of not "owning" their copy, but is this really that much different than what we're doing already?

current model: purchase new upgraded version of resharper every year (or two). abandon old version.

new model: subscribe to resharper. upgrade when new version comes out. abandon old version.

Is anyone really using a copy of resharper 6 right now? and VS2010?

<comment><USER31> The difference is that the new purchases provided a strong incentive to JetBrains to make their software better. If the new version doesn't add anything useful, people wouldn't upgrade.

Now you have to keep paying whether they add features or not.

<comment><USER32> OTOH, if the subscription price is substantially lower than the pre- subscription purchase price, JetBrains has to keep improving faster than the competition long enough to get you to keep buying the subscription for several cycles instead of switching to a competing option or they are losing money from going from outright purchase to subscription.

<comment><USER33> But it isn't unless you purchase the bundle with every application, the worst offender is WebStorm, with a price of 99 USD/year vs the price of 29 USD/upgrade it had in the past.

<comment><USER32> > But it isn't unless you purchase the bundle with every application

The initial buy-in is cheaper for many products than it was previously, so for _new_ developers they have to have some ability to retain people to even break even with subscription licensing.

The annual subscription seems to be more expensive than the current per- upgrade add-on price for most products, though. And, of course, there are some, like WebStorm, where the annual subscription price is more even the new- purchase price under the old model.

So, its kind of a mixed bag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If this change is so beneficial to users - lets put it to the test. JetBrains - put up public voting (which you do not have control over) and let us vote on which licensing deal we like more: old one or new one. Then we can talk if this is really something that developers really want.

<comment><USER35> Honestly if the pricing was better and some of the smaller tier plans let me use more products, I might be good with it. But this is literally the same cost for less product unless I want to pay more to get everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's pretty cool to finally have a discount option to subscribe to all of the JetBrains products. When my existing IntelliJ license free upgrade period expires I'll probably subscribe to the "all products" option. That said, it's a bit upsetting they don't seem to offer corporate perpetual licenses anymore. It's a lot easier to justify the expense when it could be a one-time expense. Suddenly having your critical work tools stop working (for instance, during a budget freeze) is somewhat unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the change applies to corporate licenses, too. As a bonus for them, there's a transparent model of discounts based on number of licenses and term of payment ([https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/#commercial](https://www.jetbrains.com/toolbox/#commercial))

We're used to helping users of commercial licenses who are faced with delayed payments in their companies, and I'm sure we'll be doing this with the new model as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Better buy Webstorm now so I can get it as a perpetual license.

I can see October being a huge month where people buy perpetual copies of tools they were thinking about buying in the past.

</comment><comment><USER38> I can find no mention about what happens to the community edition. Will it still be available, or is it going to disappear?

<comment><USER5> IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, dotPeek and all other free tools stay free as before. Nothing changes in this respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> As someone who mostly uses PyCharm and doesn't do web work, I guess this will have no effect on me for quite a while. Almost all the new PyCharm features I've noticed in 4.5 have had to do with web frameworks, none of which I use.

</comment><comment><USER40> This came up earlier and I ended up writing a lettering to Jetbrians.

If you are upset by this change, please let Jetbrains know! Customer input has helped companies reverse similar policies in the past.

You can quickly customize and send it out here (this site has been a side project for me): [https://www.sincerelyme.org/everything-else/jetbrains- subscr...](https://www.sincerelyme.org/everything-else/jetbrains-subscription- based-model_i50)

\</comment><comment>

It's also copied into the post below:

Email at: email@example.com

Facebook at: [https://www.facebook.com/JetBrains](https://www.facebook.com/JetBrains)

More at: [https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/](https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/)

\----

Dear Jetbrains,

I am writing to express my thorough disappointment with the decision for Jetbrains to switch to a subscription based model. While I understand the need for businesses to monetize, I feel that this monetization strategy is completely over looking the needs and desires of your historically loyal user base. I could understand this decision if your products were serviced-based or hosted (i.e. cloud) solutions, but as a stand-alone, desktop software this decision only serves to benefit one party.

Not only are you questioning historically loyal users by continuously asking them to show their support for your product, you are literally devaluing your product by requiring me to repurchase it on a recurring basis. No longer do I have the option to purchase a high-value, life long, perpetual license for your product. I do not understand how Jetbrains can drag themselves to the ranks of often, lackluster subscription based software.

I have long been a loyal and vocal advocate for Jetbrains software and customer service. Your software does make my job easier and I do enjoy using it. Your customer support and involvement with your loyal community has long been top notch. I often go out of my way to explain why I love using your products, like Webstorm and PHPStorm, and have convinced many people to switch to Jetbrains. After this decision, I have no desire to continue advocating your historically incredible software and intend to make it very clear to potential users of how you've decided to treat loyal users.

This decision shows a lack of empathy for the community you have worked so hard to build and I am extremely concerned about your future considerations of myself and the rest of the community. Unless Jetbrains decides to amend this new policy with consideration for traditional, perpetual based licenses, I will no longer be purchasing new offerings. I will use the current version of software. When I feel they are no longer suitable for use, I will look for alternatives offering perpetual licenses or simply use a text editor.

Again, your software does make my job easier and I do enjoy using it, but I want to make it clear that I do not need to you your software. There are plenty of acceptable alternative IDE's and, of course, I can always use a standard text editor.

I hope Jetbrains can recognize the error of their ways and address this issue in response to the community. I want to continue enjoying your products and advocating for a historically incredible brand.

Sincerely,

{Your Name}

</comment><comment><USER41> I do not "rent" software. Full stop.</comment>


Fuck.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.html <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to hear the rest of the story as I guess it was registered eventually:

[https://www.whois.com/whois/fuck.com](https://www.whois.com/whois/fuck.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> yes I agree - was not registered until 2001 - this article was written in 1997</comment></comment>


US.gov, MPAA Celebrate Handing Hollywood Their Own Special Copyright Powers - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120627/00392419502/us-copyright-office-mpaa-celebrate-handing-hollywood-stars-their-own-special-copyright-monopoly-powers.shtml

<comment><USER2> I worked in "anti-piracy" (read: a DMCA chop shop) for a long time. This is one more bit of idiocy that will continue to push people to seek alternative outlets than the big content guys. In the last twenty years we've seen the nominal rise of self pub outfits like Lulu (and now Amazon), musicians like Marillion, NIN and King Crimson taking broad control of their releases, and scads of different business models/approaches that effectively shut out BC and their sycophants (the most recent that I thought was pretty sharp was the moves by Louis CK).

I think its a matter of time; BC will get more draconian for their current assets, which in turn will feed a culture that will want to create more of their own without a sword of IP damocles overtheir heads.</comment>