Jeff Bezos's Wealth Soars to $171.6B to Top Pre-Divorce Record - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-01/bezos-s-wealth-soars-to-171-6-billion-to-top-pre-divorce-record <comment><USER2> These discussions are pretty difficult to have as it's clear that many people have dysfunctional ideas around corporate/brand worship (e.g. "he created such a great company") as well as success worship.

To what degree Jeff Bezos is benevolent doesn't factor into this for me. Whether or not Amazon is a great company doesn't factor into this for me. It's a larger discussion about whether or not it's grotesque for a nation with such a large number of billionaires to have some of the most serious socioeconomic issues of any modern, developed nation.

I'd feel more happy and congratulatory toward Bezos' increasing fortune if, say, homelessness weren't a serious problem in America, and if every child were guaranteed a decent meal, which seems like it could be accomplished with a tiny sliver of the overall wealth of America's billionaire class.

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with the sentiment, other than it seems you're somehow "blaming" Bezos for this. Why? The States has those socioeconomic issues for historical and political reasons. They're certainly something people can change.

But Bezos' wealth, large as it is, is _tiny_ compared to the wealth the government manages. The government's money is allocated via a democratic process. There's certainly good cases to be made for fixing a lot of issues - I just don't think those cases should start with "Bezos is too rich, while there are people in with serious issues". Better to just focus on the people with the issues and figure out ways to fix that.

<comment><USER2> My point really had nothing to do with Bezos in particular. He's one data point among hundreds of America's billionaires. And their collective wealth is by no means tiny.

You're right in that the U.S. has socioeconomic issues for political reasons. But we can't disconnect the billionaire class from our political class. Billionaires have ridiculous, outsized influence over politicians and therefore public policy in the United States. And that influence ranges from crafting tax law that benefits them to modifying rules and regulations that given their businesses advantage.

When wealthy people have tax law changed in their favor, we could charitably say that it is "indirectly" pulling money away from social programs that matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The bizarre scale of super richs (400 people in US) [https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel- wealth/](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/)

<comment><USER5> I rarely make blanket statements: Anybody who sees this and thinks the downsides of this society are _lesser than_ the downsides of undoing it (both the direct result of wealth redistribution, as though by a magic wand, and the indirect results of using the kind of heavy-handed federal regulatory changes that would be required), is immoral. You are somewhat less unreasonable to say, "yes, we must change it, but first we must find a way that doesn't involve gross socialism stuff", and I may reasonably disagree with the practicality of your position, but to cross the line into, "no, the state of things is natural and amoral", is monstrous, and such people must be defeated _at any cost_.

<comment><USER6> A logically defensible position against this is: "I trust those 400 people to do more good, to spread more wealth, to create more value, to create more jobs, to innovate more, than I trust the government." Its a calculation of best return on investment, and not just return in a dollar sense. It might be more efficient for those 400 people to dump all their money into a charity that redistributes the money, than it is to trust elected officials to understand how to handle it.

This isnt cash he has in a bank account. It's his money, reinvested into a conglomerate that builds, delivers, creates, serves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's important to remember that most of Jeff Bezos wealth is in Amazon stock. I say this because it seems like people see $171b and assume Bezos has that amount of spending power. In reality if Jeff tried to liquidate all of his Amazon shares into USD it would crash the stock price and he would get nowhere near the quoted figures.

<comment><USER8> That's just an artifact of a mass selling event right. If he had instead given more stock to employees as they worked for him over the years and helped him build the company, then the wealth would be spread around less unequally. It's not just a given that he should be worth this much.

<comment><USER9> They got a salary in return. They did not 'help him' build the company. They were paid to do so. They didn't take any risk working for a salary. Employees don't inherently deserve anything other than a salary. It's a matter of incentives

<comment><USER8> It's not obvious how your final statement relates to the rest of what you said. Care to elaborate about incentives?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With that kind of money I would keep a couple billions for myself and slowly liquidate the rest and give it away. Charities, public schools, research institutes, universities, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc. There's so much work to do.

I'd probably produce movies too, with zero expectations of them turning a profit, just to experiment with various storytelling ideas I have in mind.

<comment><USER11> So if you were the richest person in the world you'd donate your wealth to the second richest.. I kid, I kid...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would dump all that into cosmetic genetic research so we could all grow wings some day

<comment><USER13> Who says he's not doing just that? Probably funding anti-aging measures as well. All for the Ultra wealthy of course..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For reference, this is roughly the same as the GDP of Kansas, or the market cap of Toyota.

<comment><USER15> ~1/8 of market cap of Amazon, which is reaching almost 1.5 Trillion, that's a 10th of 2019 GDP of China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does one create a society that is both free and yet safeguarded against this kind of egregious, unnecessary and possibly dangerous amassing of wealth and power in the hands of so very few people?

<comment><USER17> One way is to get the state to tax the rich, like many first world countries did in the post-war period. It's hard because the rich get a lot of say in the government, and they don't want to get their taxes raised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Crazy. That means that he has $72B _more_ than $100B.

<comment><USER10> Correction: investors from all over the globe value the shares in Bezos' possession at 172B.

These investors could also arbitrarily declare these shares as worthless (theoretically), and Bezos' net worth would crater to only consist of his leftover cash and physical assets in his possession - real estate, art, cars, etc.

<comment><USER19> That's an irresponsible use of the word "theoretically". What actual theory would have them do that? You're describing a coordination problem of absurd proportions and you haven't even proposed a shared motive.

It like saying, "This specific aspect of society could change if a potency- majority were fully committed to the idea that it should be changed in that way."

<comment><USER10> You're absolutely right. I don't try to pretend that it would be possible in the slightest. Just that stock wealth is a societal, and thus arbitrary, construct, unlike, say, gold and precious gems, which have intrinsic value across time, space, and cultures.

<comment><USER8> At some point stock is as intrinsically valuable as gold, when it has legal support and billions of people buying and selling it. I have no interest in gold and I never will afaict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bezos' wealth is a function of the Amazon's stock price. It is a company with a P/E ratio of 137. That is not normal. He does not set his stock price.

So when people talk about taxation, its taxation based on the general stockholders speculation. Which seems fair if we think BTC or 401k holders should be paying taxes on their annual values. Pretty sure most on HN would want not want that.

So it's a question of limits, or a line, picked by society on how much something of arbitrary valuation one can own.

But I'd bet there are many here with >$1M is assets and >50% of the public would find that outrageous.

As far as AMZN being too big, I'd be fine with breaking it up as the components would probably be valued more than they are together (remember Standard Oil). Which would be good for my 401k.

The people have voted on the Walmarts and Amazons of the world. They lost something for the convenience, and it's 100% their fault, not Bezos.

<comment><USER6> >But I'd bet there are many here with >$1M is assets and >50% of the public would find that outrageous.

171.6/137 is still $1.2525B. Lets say 15 is a fair P/E ratio, thats almost $19B. 1900 Million. People with >$1M is assets and >50% of the public still cant fathom the difference between a million and 10 billion.

And historically, despite having a high P/E ratio, Amazon exceeds growth expectations.

I don't know who is saying to tax his assets. But the laws, rules, economies of scale, feedback loops, and anti competitive behaviors that allow one person to amass that much money should be treated as glitches that need to be patched.

<comment><USER20> Bezos doesn't care about his wealth or the valuation anymore than John D. Rockefeller did. It's just more paper. He cares about maintaining control of Amazon and dabbling in his hobbies.

Kneecaping Amazon would result in hundreds of billions in wealth loss spread across millions of investors.

<comment><USER6> If you look at it from the perspective of Amazons own internal wealth being its own currency, money has a different value in the system and outside it. He buy things directly with stock, like we would use cash. He can downgrade his value store from Amazon bucks to USD, but he doesnt have to to spend it. Knowing how Amazon shares convert to USD is probably less useful than knowing what you can buy directly with Amazon shares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope that he does something great with this - like building an open source medical record system and diagnostic tool that can be used for the global poor for free.

</comment><comment><USER22> Standing on the shoulders of giants.

And reaping all the benefits.

</comment><comment><USER23> Just a friendly reminder that this isn't normal and that you are responsible for helping to shape the kind of society that you want to live in.

<comment><USER24> What is the alternative? For people not to own the things they create?

<comment><USER17> You realize that Bezos didn't built Amazon on his own, right? There are many, many people who worked for that company (and many of these in this very forum), and all they got was a monthly salary. They own nothing. We are living in the alternative. Most of the people who built Amazon don't own anything of what they created.

<comment><USER24> They were compensated for their labor. That's how employment works.

<comment><USER25> In an ideal world, it would be.

He doesn't seem to like unions, which in principle would ensure his big powerful corporation was being fair to the labour force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Give it a few years and either Amazon won't be worth as much OR this is hyperinflation and we have bigger problems to worry about.

<comment><USER27> Like the climate crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Vladimir Putin's personal net worth was estimated to be between $70B and $200B in 2018, so it's quite possible that Bezos is not the richest man in the world.

</comment><comment><USER29> All that money and he can't cure baldness.

<comment><USER30> Or he realizes that being bald saves a few cycles when taking a shower.

If it's specifically to attract the ladies, I think having $165B and being the world's richest person would be a larger factor than any mane.

<comment><USER29> Not so sure about that, nothing really compares to having a magnificent hairline. Take David Bowie, for example. Now imagine he was bald.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would love to know what goes on in someone's head when they could use their money to massively improve the lives of millions of poor or un-privileged people, or even save them from a premature and/or painful death, withough ever noticing the difference in your quality of life. But they don't.

<comment><USER32> it's not like he has a bank balance of 171b. it's mostly his ownership in Amazon, which he isn't going to just sell away.

<comment><USER33> While that is true, that is true for our entire society. Big projects are almost never started nowadays by selling somethings else (unless its a direct replacement). Instead, what usually happens is that you take a bank loan that is secured by assets, in this case his stock. Or to put it short: pretty much any bank would give Jeff a 10 bn loan that is tied to his stocks, its simply not true that there is any problem there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> People have been trained to justify these capitalists for whom we place on pedestals, while at the same time disparaging the common worker for some perceived lack of "merit" and "effort".

As programmers, we encourage open source work with little to no return on the effort when compared to how these projects are utilized. Amazon is a fantastic example for how it abuses this effort and the community.

</comment><comment><USER35> Society, humans, hell , mammals value others who provide leveraged value to them in a not linear fashion. Programmers should be able to graps this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I really don't like these kind of headlines and honestly I'm not sure why it's even posted on HN. What is here to discuss?

His wealth comes from his company and to brag about morale, justice and society usually ends up in fights.

I don't know Jeff, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't care much about money, like if it's $100B or $172B. From my point of view, money is only a way to make his visions come true. For me that is Blue Origin.

<comment><USER37> From watching from afar, it seems that right now he makes sure amazon grows just to be able to finance Blue Origin from his own pockets.

He is just a man with ambitions, whose "crime" people call out is amazon not paying profit taxes... With all the taxes from the non cash business amazon brings, that is the least ethical concern about amazon, specially since most of time they indeed have no profit as they reinvest.

Now the warehouse conditions is another thing, but hey it's america, those are spoken about because every its like that but amazon is a big target.

Amazon is a big corp like any other it has a bunch of faults, but to point Bezos simply evil over it is ridiculous, he does not have full control of amazon like Zuck has over FB

<comment><USER8> >but hey this is America

I think that's worth discussing (op asked what there is to discuss). I don't think rich people are evil. But I wish we could come up with mechanisms for them to share their wealth with their employees who helped them build that wealth.

<comment><USER36> I know where you are coming from, but that is basically what the salary is for. We just have the bad situation that not everyone is in a driver seat to negotiate his salary (or have a choice). I'm not sure how it is in the USA, but in germany for example, there is minimum wage. I think the society and politicians are responsible to make sure that employees are treated gracefully and to establish mechanisms.

<comment><USER8> Ya I am split on the issue myself. The USA has min wage, but it's pretty low and it there is more inequality than just that. It just feels like execs get more than their fair share. Like when the US is compared to Japan, Japanese execs have less extreme inequality among employees in the same company. I wish there were ways to incentivize that. No individual human needs to be worth a billion dollars. And while it's true that the execs have earned something, studies show that there is more luck and randomness to their performance than personality-cults will acknowledge. It's annoying that they are entitled so much wealth when studies shows that performance of their companies is much more Influenced by other factors than that one execs work alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> That's the power of leverage. Good for him. He is one of the greatest investors of all time, just only investing in growth of his own company.

I don't think any human needs that kind of wealth, but I also don't begrudge him of it. He earned it.

The problem with society is not that there are rich people - there always have been and always will be. It's in fact a sign of a healthy economy. If you have no inequality, it also means you have no growth or innovation - everyone is equally poor. Cuba and Soviet Russia tried to be examples of this kind of society, and few would argue they are desirable models to emulate.

The problem is rather the number of people who can't find steady employment, earn a livable wage, and take care of the basic necessities of food, shelter, and health. That does need to be addressed, and the sooner the better.

<comment><USER17> _He_ earned it? And what about all the people who work and worked at Amazon and built all of it?

<comment><USER39> What about them? They signed a contract when choosing to work for Amazon. They can negotiate their compensation before signing. They can renegotiate after signing. If they don't like what Amazon offers, they can go somewhere else.

It boggles my mind how much credit is given to the workers when it was Bezos who: knew how to hire the right people, started the company, provided the compensation and benefits, and has taken on the most risk.

<comment><USER17> First of all, many (most) of the people who work at Amazon are not engineers or managers in a position to "negotiate", and don't have "somewhere else" to go to work and get the money they need to eat. They cannot "renegotiate after signing", which in these situations is something traditionally done via worker unions, which Bezos has worked very, very hard to disable.

Second, without the workers who, according to you, don't deserve any credit, Amazon (the entire thing) wouldn't exist. These "right people" Bezos hired were workers, and hiring them is not what built the company. "Starting a company" is not exactly hard work. And he didn't personally provide the compensation and benefits out of his own pocket (besides the first 300K "from Jeff Bezos and his family" according to Quora), it was always investors' money, or the money generated by Amazon itself (who was running thanks to these people being compensated). None of these things are usually talked about, it's just Bezos and Amazon on the news. Do you really think that "the workers" are getting too much credit, when they never get none?

<comment><USER39> In a free market, workers are always in a position to negotiate. They can always renegotiate.

Is Amazon the only employer in the USA? No. So workers always have somewhere else to go for work.

The workers credit is the compensation they agreed to when deciding to work for Amazon. Nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing special about accepting employment. That's what the majority of people do.

"It's just Bezos and Amazon on the news" because Bezos willed Amazon into existence, a company that brings endless value to millions of people. You are right, starting a company is not difficult, but creating a company that brings so much value is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is QAnon? An introduction to the conspiracy theory that's eating America - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2020/08/16/what-is-qanon-a-not-so-brief-introduction-to-the-conspiracy-theory-thats-eating-america/ <comment><USER2> Apparently it's been discovered that QAnon is actually the founder of 8 Chan.

> If you type in on Twitter: 'Q Jim Watkins' you'll see how the true owner of > Q got doxed recently. Q . pub, Q-map/Q-anon is tied to current 8chan owner > Jim Watkins. He's known for escaping America to the Philippines after > suggesting that 8chan would be a safe-haven for: 'Peadophiles.' He's a > rampant conspiracy theorist. His IP not only tied to Q-anon it's also tied > to a obscure Twitter knock-off site that's popular with White-Supremacists > called GAB and also links to The Daily Stormer which is a Neo-Nazi: 'news' > site. Jim Watkins is Q and it's a essentially a viral front solely dedicated > to spreading anti-Semitism as well as white supremacy online through various > social media platforms.

[https://twitter.com/tamarafurey/status/1298052647686033408](https://twitter.com/tamarafurey/status/1298052647686033408)

[https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/1297616337984843776](https://twitter.com/HW_BEAT_THAT/status/1297616337984843776)

[https://twitter.com/bitburner/status/1298358752773431296](https://twitter.com/bitburner/status/1298358752773431296)

<comment><USER3> Twitter. That bastion of authoritative research.

<comment><USER4> Given that your preferred institution of authoritative research is Q dumps, I'd monitor the velocity of projectiles you're launching from your transparent-silicon domicile.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three- conspiracy-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy- theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531)

<comment><USER3> And what points have I made in discussion where I link attribution to a Q dump?

<comment><USER4> You basically never attribute your points to anything.

But the tracking of the things you say to Q-conspiracy nonsense is extremely telling regarding your info sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anything know if other countries have the same levels of conspiracy theory belief as the United States? I've tried to research this and largely come up empty.

<comment><USER6> from personal experience (born in Germany, lived in several EU countries, spent some time in the US), no. There are conspiracy theories that are somewhat equivalent to QAnon in spirit like the _" Reichsbürger"_ one in Germany which asserts that the state really is some sort of corporation owned by Jews or the US or something along these lines and it has a modest following, but it is completely outside of civil society.

The US seems relatively unique mostly because it doesn't have any legal or information infrastructure to battle these sorts of misinformation. As soon as conspiracy-theories venture into anti-semitism or hate (as they regularly do), there exist legal tools to shut them down in Europe, and there is a healthy public news/broadcasting infrastructure in most countries that manages to keep a common reality intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading that article, I can't help but wonder if the effects of solitary confinement begin to manifest as a kind of pervasive low-level mental illness after people have no physical, real life social contact for days on end. The plot points of the conspiracy sound like the experience of talking to someone who has been alone in their head long enough that they index on connections they made themselves, and they expect you to share their reference points. The details of these social hallucinations don't matter, it's the fact of them at all, and what might be causing them that is the important piece to me. I've met people seized by stupid ideas, and any attempt to dislodge the idea from the outside will trigger its immune response, so you just smile and nod and change the subject.

Having travelled the periphery of evangelical circles, there is an element of that culture where metaphor and belief blur. What secular people might describe using terms from psychology or literary narrative, some evangelicals use a mythopoetic framework for discussing everyday struggles instead.

The author references the idea of a "Big Lie," which I see as a fast filter for building a pipeline of people who are susceptible to being unmoored from reality if you just give them some enticement. From this, I think QAnon most resembles a new folk religion of isolated people, which is the effect of their social atomization. It's what you get when you disconnect people from each other and they need to understand the world in stories and create new ties. Viewed that way, it could look less like a single conspiracy theory and more like a modern variation of something like a "Voodoo," or a reactionary "syncretic religion," as described in wiki: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism)

<comment><USER8> Interesting idea, but QAnon dates to at least 2017. Also, are people who believe in QAnon actually isolating? I would guess that if COVID-19 is a hoax to you and your social circle, you're continuing to meet in person.

<comment><USER7> The isolation I'm referring to is the effect of post-social media polarization that started around 2008 and the social isolation that seems to result from it, where the people attracted to QAnon are ones who are among the "left behind," in the progressive worldview. It's reactionary, as they are the focal point of a global movement whose defining attribute is that it uses these people and their culture as a symbol and a reference point to align against, so many of them resort to whatever community they can still find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the sad thing is this recent media hysteria has done more to legitimize Q in the eyes of Qanon'ers than anything else. Since the very first Q post to /pol/ on 4chan back in the end of October 2016, where Q prophesied that Hillary Clinton would be arrested the next day for treason, the community of Conspiracy Theorists have been evenly divided about whether Q is real or a LARP. clearly, a majority of the Q prophecies have turned out to be false and never happened (i.e "Trust Sessions, Trust Wray").

But now that the Leftist media is putting Qanon on the front pages and in the opening monologues of their talk shows, it's causing the opposite unintended consequence: if Qanon was so fake, then why are famous journalists and billion dollar media conglomerates talking about Qanon as if it is real? Therefore, it must be real.

The media always needs a boogeyman. And if no boogeyman exists, then the media will fabricate it. In 2016, it was the AltRight, which didnt really exist in a big way in meatspace. Now in 2020 the new Boogeyman is Qanon, which also doesnt exist in a large physical sense outside of obscure forums and memes. I really hate how the media does this. It's a form of bullying, to pick a fringe group that nobody takes seriously and elevate them to the next National Enemy. It's also stupid, because instead of the media focusing on real issues, like oh say COVID or the economic collapse or civil unrest in 100's of cities, naw, the media chooses to focus on the lamest most powerless and kooky group of conspiracy theorists.

thanks a lot media. no wonder everyone calls them the Fake News now.

I guess this is the media's version of Trust the Plan.

<comment><USER10> This is a little disingenuous, isn't it? I'm no cheerleader for mainstream media and agree that they can/often manipulate facts or selectively report certain things, but I'm not sure if QAnon is that thing.

Is it realistic to say that QAnon is being covered instead of "COVID or the economic collapse or civil unrest in 100's of cities"? I think these topics still take center stage in reporting currently.

And QAnon is not merely some small internet thing -- many QAnon followers have won primaries, so assuming that in aggregate these candidates have some chance at winning (they do; see GA-14 for example) it's also weird to dismiss them as powerless when they are likely to hold elected office.</comment></comment>


What is your COBOL? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hsribei/what-is-your-cobol-374528baf21a <comment><USER2> My COBOL is actionscript (flash plugins). I got started programming with ActionScript 2, writing games and doing some freelance projects building things like image carousels and navigation. Not nearly as lucrative as $350/hr quoted here but I doubt a lot of new projects consider flash unless there are no alternatives.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I recently saw ATT looking for an actionscript person their internal apps must require IE and run on flash, can't imagine its for customer facing applications.</comment></comment>


Wal-Mart Asks Employees to Deliver Packages on Their Way Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-01/wal-mart-taps-employees-for-quick-deliveries-to-take-on-amazon <comment><USER2> This makes a lot of sense for Wal-Mart. They are asking employees to opt in to drop off order(s) on their way home for extra money. It supposedly optimizes the deliveries for each employee's route home. It's like giving your employees a little uber opportunity. I wonder if there will be enough employees to make this viable.</comment>


How to build a sentiment analysis engine in Python - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/daviducolo/how-to-build-a-sentiment-analysis-engine-in-python-6jn <comment><USER2> I notice you are in Italy. Warm thoughts to you all</comment>


Open Software Packaging for Science - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@QuantStack/open-software-packaging-for-science-61cecee7fc23 <comment><USER2> Really exciting to see the development of an open source conda server, getting locked into "Anaconda Enterprise" is a huge barrier to leveraging the environment at scale in a medium to large size organization.

</comment><comment><USER3> mamba feels so much faster than conda, it is awesome.</comment>


On Language and Humanity: In Conversation with Noam Chomsky - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/noam-chomsky-interview/ <comment><USER2> It's weird to think that Noam Chomsky, who is so well known for his politics, and is reasonably well known for his contributions to linguistics, is also a significant contributor to automata theory & programming language design, despite having a very minimal direct involvement in CS. Imagine strongly influencing an entire field and not really working in that field. What an intellectual giant.

<comment><USER3> He's probably spent the least amount of time dealing with politics but it's what grabs him the most attention. This also causes lots of people to dislike him for no good reason; there was a VC on twitter recently who basically said his work on linguistics and politics have been debunked and then proceeded block a few engineers who (rightly) pointed out his considerable contributions to PLT.

<comment><USER4> >He's probably spent the least amount of time dealing with politics

I'm not sure about that--he's written a lot of political books about particular countries/wars, each of them lengthy and painstakingly researched and footnoted--they alone would have been an ample life's work for most people. (I mean the earlier books, not the recent ones mostly based on interviews/conversations.) Then there's all the speeches, conversations, interviews etc on political topics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's fascinating that to get attention and acceptance for his theories, Chomsky had found modern linguistics in the concrete sense of creating departments, training students and so-forth.

Over the last few years, I've become more aware how dependent ideas are on fitting into institutional frameworks - some are outside such frameworks but without people to systematically develop them, such ideas tend to be ephemeral.

<comment><USER6> Will a better-connected, more searchable record of academic output allow talented thinkers to sidestep this historic need for academic track hoop- jumping and obtain reasonable assurance of future recognition for independent work?

<comment><USER7> No, because search isn't the problem, curation and education is. Search by itself is a waste of time, if you don't know what you don't know, and don't know what to look for.

Institutional frameworks solve those problems.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know", telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field, provide structure and guidance while a person spends time attempting to address a given question, etc, etc, etc.

All these things are powerful and shape most modern intellectual endeavors. And by that token, someone who apply discipline and rigor in approaching questions outside an institution can have an incredible effect - back to Chomsky essentially creating the field that he's dominated (theoretical linguistics, one thing I didn't know 'till this article).

<comment><USER7> The key question that people are trying to answer in the field of fluid dynamics is how to find the solution to the Navier-Stokes set of equations.

There you go. You have the question. You have a search engine. Go solve it. Oh... Hmm.

'Knowing which question to solve' only helps for easy problems. A search engine can help you solve easy problems. It won't do a damn thing for hard problems. You need someone to curate what is known in the field, point you in the right direction, steer you away from dead ends, help you break the problem down into bits that you might make headway in.

Academic institutions do just that. They don't always do it optimally, they can get stuck in local maximums, they are occasionally blind-sided by some genius that attacked the problem from an unorthodox angle.

But they do a hell of a lot more then a search engine ever would.

<comment><USER6> The whole notion that there is a field and it has a key question and there's a goal to solve it is already a triple set of local maximums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me, the most important work in linguistics in my lifetime has been the modern ability of computers to convert spoken language to written language and thus use it to control software, which I use daily in things like Alexa and CarPlay driving directions. What I'm not sure about is, has the Chomskyan style of analyzing language been useful for that at all?

Basically, a lot of pre-1980 theories of mind seemed promising at the time because they had some explanatory power and made sense. But more recently, machine learning techniques of treating the mind more like a large-dimensional statistical object rather than something with complex internal structure seem to be proving more effective. I wonder whether in time the Chomskyan style of linguistics will prove to be a dead end.

</comment><comment><USER9> I just have to say that, assuming this was a spoken interview, Chomsky can _talk_. I can scarcely comprehend using the same number of choice phrases Chomsky employs in a sentence if I had a paragraph - and I certainly wouldn't be able to do it at the speed of speech.

I've heard of people disgruntled by his economics and political activism denigrating him as "not particularly smart". This article is proof to the contrary, politics notwithstanding.

</comment><comment><USER10> he keeps blowing me away. even at 90. seriously...who can come remotely close to his breadth, dept, and consiousness?

<comment><USER11> i am sad to see him go sooner or later, and also sad that the left has no replacement for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting how he bashes ML translation as having little scientific interest

<comment><USER13> Anybody who speaks more than one language knows to not trust translations(even those made by humans), especially if they're made by some black box algorithms. It's one of those tasks where quality is almost (objectively) immeasurable and perfection is impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me, or whenever I try to read what Noam Chomsky says or listen to him I have to constantly read over it to understand it?

<comment><USER15> I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the sentence itself is about.

Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday:

"When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept."

This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to break apart long boolean expressions.

It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because _they_ know what they mean.

<comment><USER16> I would go further and say that many academics hide their banal or confused ideas behind overcomplex language. They learn to write that way by reading all those awfully written texts and imitating them. But Chomsky is not like that - he usually has something insightful to say expresses it plainly.

<comment><USER16> ... AND expresses it plainly. Oops.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody have any success with NLP sentiment classification? - <AUTHOR>

If yes, can you point me to some resources? I know it's a hard problem and one that hasn't been solved yet, but my domain is very limited.
I just need to classify text as positive or negative.  Of course this can't be done with full accuracy.
What approaches have you used? What libraries? <comment><USER2> I have a good friend (comp sci PhD) working on this problem, although I don't think her research is published yet. Do you have a blog / site / public notes / anything? Your HN profile is empty.

I'd be happy to pass whatever site you have on to my friend, and she can get in touch and talk shop.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Do you have a blog / site / public notes / anything?

Well, I do write sometimes at <http://prag-matism.blogspot.com/> and recently started writing at <http://blog.shopyist.com/>. But I haven't written anything about NLP yet(guess that's the part your friend would be interested in).

> I'd be happy to pass whatever site you have on to my friend, and she can get > in touch and talk shop.

I don't think I would be able to afford someone at this point of time:-). Thanks for pointing out though.</comment></comment>


Apple announces Mac transition to Apple silicon - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23603866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23603866).

<comment><AUTHOR> Bummer because this one has the price for the transition kit $500 (which is why I posted it)... but I get reducing the apple noise. Thanks for mentioning they were moved.</comment></comment>


Productivity Hacks – The Pomodoro Technique (What, Why and How?) - <AUTHOR> http://joaoperibeiro.com/procrastination-hacks-pomodoro-technique/ <comment><USER2> This is really rough for timed tasks that take more than 25 minutes, like meetings. Is the solution to get everyone on-board (like the meeting organizers in my example)?

I've tried this and liked it, but had a hard time sticking with it over more than a few days. The magic is not allowing interruptions, though -- and sticking with that is the hard part.

"How do get more stuff done in one easy step? Just don't let yourself be distracted/interrupted, ever!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the system lives around the idea of tasks taking 25 minutes or being able to break down into chunks of 25 minutes. But the trick (in my opinion) to not be overwhelmed trying to fit this method into your workflow, is to use this on everything because not all the tasks, like meetings, will fit this method. But rather use this only in a small block of the day (2-3 hours), where you can be more quite, to tackle all the tasks that have little or no dependency on other people.</comment></comment>


UX Professional Isn't a Real Job - <AUTHOR> http://thinkvitamin.com/opinion/ux-professional-isnt-a-real-job/

<comment><USER2> What if I'm not designing a web page?</comment>


Show HN: Far Manager v3 and some plugins bootstrap script - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/przemoc/far3-bootstrap/blob/master/far3-bootstrap.sh <comment><AUTHOR> Far Manager is the first application I run in Windows. Always.

Lately I've noticed that my Far and plugins set diverged slightly on different computers, so I decided today to create kind of bootstrap script, so I could easily recreate them.

It's maybe not the cleanest script and lacks a bit of scaffolding to even further ease adding plugins, but it's already usable.

Currently following plugins are added:

      - Integrity Checker
      - Regular Expression Search
      - <USER2>
      - Renewal-supported plugins, i.e. FarPlugs:
        - Audio Player
        - <USER3>
        - Disk Menu Editor
        - File Unlock
        - <USER4>
        - <USER5>
        - <USER6>
        - Image Viewer
        - <USER7>
        - Media Info
        - Name Editor
        - PE Analyzer
        - <USER8>
        - <USER9>
        - Sqlite DB
        - <USER10>
        - <USER11>
        - Torrent Info

I've created also topic for it at Far Manager forum:

[http://forum.farmanager.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9835](http://forum.farmanager.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9835)</comment>


Homeless Man Leaves Behind Surprise: $4 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111091624

<comment><USER2> What a great post.

Reminds me of this: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314070/Eileen- Nearn...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1314070/Eileen-Nearne- funeral-Mourners-gather-British-spys-memorial.html)

Imagine being a spy in WW2, dropped into occupied France, captured by the Gestapo, put in prison camps and repeatedly escaping and never mentioning it to anyone!

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I read that story when it was on Reddit and it was probably the best thing I've read this month, along with this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Posted and "[dead]"ed yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1744855>

<comment><USER5> Why would it be killed? At first glance this looks like someone who hacked the system to have no permanent address, yet was able to execute financial trades.

That seems masterful to me.

<comment><USER6> I was unaware that being homeless was now considered "hacking the system to have no permanent address." I agree, however, that he demonstrated considerable mastery of the telephone at the senior center.

<comment><USER5> I guess you're trying to make a funny. Have an upmod for effort.

What you may not be aware of is how difficult it is to perform certain types of financial transactions without a permanent address. Trading in stocks, for example. Quite often you need to do certain things in person and need to provide identification, which in turn may require a fixed address.

He may have been using the seniors centre as his address, he may have been doing something else.

The key here isn't that he was homeless and used the telephone in the senior's centre, the key is that he was homeless and used the telephone in the senior's centre AND managed an investment portfolio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would find it very enlightening to find out what kind of organisation system he used for his trades/paperwork. Did he have a stash somewhere where he could store documents? Did he have a PO Box?

How would people on HN organise themselves without any permanent address...or by the looks of it, laptop/smart phone/access to computer, whilst tending to a portfolio that would end up being in excess of $4 million?

<comment><USER8> Probably did it the old fashioned way, called his broker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for this post. An uplifting article to start my Friday. While I know I am romanticizing the story in my mind, the blurb sort of translates into the last line of a Haiku.

</comment><comment><USER10> > "He was an atheist and I'm a very profound practicing Catholic, and I'd > never met an atheist," Belle says. "And that just blew my mind that somebody > could not believe in the Lord."

I guess she doesn't believe in the existence of, say, India or China or Japan either?

<comment><USER11> A conspiracy of cartographers.</comment></comment>


Twice on the front page of HN, but no journalist is interested. What to do? - <AUTHOR>

I have submitted my algorithmic music projects - computoser.com and the related android app to hacker news and both times it got to the front page, with many positive comments.
That made me think I can get the algorithm covered in some tech blog/magazine, so I wrote to news@..., but nothing happened.
Then I tracked down journalists that have written on the subject of computer-generated music, got their emails (around 15 people), and emailed all of them, each with a personalized message, mentioning why I've picked them. No reply.
I've also written to multiple editorial teams with a suggestion for a guest article on computer music - no reply.
These include Mashable, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Ars, Wired, TheNextWeb, The Verge, GigaOm.
Why is it that something seems to be much appreciated by the community, but no journalist seems interested? Should I continue writing emails to these people until they either block me or reply? Or should I skip tech journalists and try to find another way to make service visible to more people? <comment><USER2> For what is worth:

1) Try music tech journalists first.

Computer Music, Keyboard, Future Music, The Mix, Electronic Musician, and such.

2) Also try "Popular Science" style of magazines.

3) Make sure your emails dont go directly to the SPAM folder. No plethora of URLS (looks like spam), capitals (looks like spam) etc. They should also not look like desperate pleas for publicity, or they will trash them manually.

Better send a short message to each journalist, to pitch the idea (1-2 paragraphs), and only then send the full thing, when they will be waiting for it.

4) Go with lesser players than Wired, Gizmodo et al. If those lesser players pick your story up, there are high chances it will also be picked by the majors (most news are recycled from source to source).

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a good one. And it seems you've made the common mistake to email news@. My general advice is: Never, ever email news@. A news site doesn't cover you, a writer does. So go after writers, not publications.

This article should outline all the steps you need to follow: [http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get- Media-...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media- Coverage-For-Your-Startup-A-Complete-Guide.aspx)

(It should be easy to get a post based on the traction you have shown above)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I knew that, that's why I also found people that could be interested because of previous related articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Why is it that something seems to be much appreciated by the community, but no journalist seems interested?_

Hard to say. Bloggers are usually always hungry for content, but the popular blogs are harder to crack, as they get enough eyeballs that people compete to get on their sites. Remember that they're ultimately eyeing everything through a lens of "What is going to get me the most ad impressions and generate me the most revenue"?

Getting press coverage isn't necessarily as simple as "get on the front page of HN, get mentioned by $FOO publication". The field of PR is a big area, with a lot of accumulated idioms, patterns, experts, relationships, etc.

 _Should I continue writing emails to these people until they either block me or reply?_

I would. What do you have to lose? Don't be annoying or whiny or turn into a stalker, of course. But there's a lot to be said for persistence.

 _Or should I skip tech journalists and try to find another way to make service visible to more people?_

One thing I'm a big fan of, is the work of Ryan Holiday, author of _Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of A Media Manipulator_ [1]. You might also find some value in a fairly basic book on PR like _The New Rules of Marketing and PR_ [2] or some of the "Guerilla Marketing" stuff by Jay Conrad Levinson[3].

Also, if it's really important to you to get coverage, hiring a PR person isn't always a bad idea. I know there's been a lot of negative stuff said on HN lately about PR agencies and startups, but part of the "secret sauce" is the pre-existing relationships these guys have with journalists. It may or may not be fair, but a good PR person can help you get coverage that would be hard to generate organically. If you're even slightly interested, I know a good PR guy who might be able/willing to help. Shoot me an email and I can arrange an introduction.

One final thought, is to try using a press release submission service like PRWeb[4] or PRNewsWire[5]. It will cost you a little bit of money, but it's an option to get some attention. Note that you won't get TechCrunch / Gizmodo type coverage out of this (well, probably not anyway), but your thing should at least wind up listed in Google News.

There's also a lot of interesting PR related advice on Quora. Check out this question[6] and some of the "similar questions" links around it.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions- Manipulator...](http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions- Manipulator/dp/159184553X)

[2]: [http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Marketing-PR- Applications/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Marketing-PR- Applications/dp/1118026985/)

[3]: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search- alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=guerilla%20marketing)

[4]: <http://www.prweb.com/>

[5]: <http://www.prnewswire.com/>

[6]: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-blogs-and-sites-a-new- sta...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-blogs-and-sites-a-new-startup- should-send-press-releases-to)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks for the extensive tips. I'll try these. I'll probably even try the PR option. This is my side project, so I'm not super-keen on getting it to market (I'm not sure if the business model is workable), but I do like the idea and I think I can afford to thrown in some money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Music blogs/forums will be interested.

Matrixsynth, Muffwiggler, Gearslutz, check all of these out.

"I've also written to multiple editorial teams with a suggestion for a guest article on computer music - no reply.

These include Mashable, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Ars, Wired, TheNextWeb, The Verge, GigaOm.

Why is it that something seems to be much appreciated by the community, but no journalist seems interested?"

Because they specialize in people who consume, not creators.

Actual creativity on the internet that isn't "viral" is niche and doesn't bring in pagehits.

"Tech journalists" really are catering and pandering and not interested in all aspects of technology. Pay attention to the content that gets published, is it really ~that~ interesting or is it pushing popular nerd'ry to a mass audience?

</comment><comment><USER6> Can you paste the copy of one of the emails you sent to these journalists here? Right now you are the common denominator in the problem, so maybe there is something in the way you're communicating or asking that could be improved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

I'm contacting you, because I read an article of yours about computers and music ([article title]), and thought that you might be interested in my project as well - <http://computoser.com>

It provides a very simple web interface to a (practically) unlimited set of music tracks, generated without any human input. And although it is not the first algorithm to generate music, I think it's the first web-based, user- friendly interface to such an algorithm.

When I first released the project, I submitted the story to HackerNews to gather initial feedback from fellow "hackers", and the it was very positive - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819269>, which inspired me to make some improvements.

The improvements are already in place, and although the algorithm is not perfect, I think it's worth taking a look at. I'd be happy to get your feedback, or in a best-case scenario - get it covered.

<comment><USER7> You need to work on your PR-speak. Simple = "dumb". You need a word without such unfortunate connotations, like elegant or uncluttered. Try something like this:

I recently read your article about computers and music titled ([article title]). Thus, I thought that you might be interested in my project as well Computoser](http://computoser.com>Computoser), which provides a very accessible and intuitive web interface to a virtually unlimited set of music tracks, all generated without any human input. Although it is not the first algorithm to generate music, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first time such an algorithm has been available via web with a user- friendly interface.

Announcement of the project, and later the related app, made the front page of Hacker News, an accomplishment in itself. Initial feedback from fellow tech professionals was very positive (See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819269> and {the other hn link}). I was surprised that it did so well on such a large and competitive forum. The experience inspired me to make some improvements. Those improvements are already in place. There is no doubt still room for improvement but initial response is extremely encouraging.

I am currently looking for feedback from industry insiders like yourself and offering you the chance to be the first to cover the story, assuming you find it worthy.

Thanks so much for your time.

Respectfully, Bozho

Edit: "Computoser" should be clickable but it should be the name of the site, not the url. Similarly, you should name the two hn links. But hn is mucking up my formatting etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why 42? - Douglas Adams Explains - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.douglas-adams/msg/d1064f7b27808692?pli=1 <comment><USER2> This is my all-time favourite reply to a mundane fan question: [http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi- bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cg...](http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi- bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2)

<comment><USER3> I'd expect a less boring answer from a writer, or at least not along the lines of "well, it's just a book I wrote, there is nothing beyond it". As if we are so stupid not to understand that. Every good fiction book is a world within and beyond for the reader. And I think questions like this are more like a test for the writer: "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

His answer on why 42 is as disappointing.

<comment><USER4> > "Are you that great?". No, apparently he's not.

That's not really fair - there are plenty of very good motivations for writing (and reading) fiction other than immersion in a sustained imaginative world. By that criterion, "Avatar" is a better film than than, say, "Casablanca," because James Cameron knows more about the flora of Pandora than Michael Curtiz does about Morocco.

Adams is a great writer precisely because of his lack of pretension, his humility, and his irreverence -- I'd be disappointed if he didn't regard his own work with the same outlook he had for everything else.

<comment><USER5> The grandparent is getting modded to all hell, but there is a genuine point here about the sort of writer Douglas Adams was. Not that he's a bad writer, but that he's the sort of writer who would say his main character _has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people's minds._

Some writers would consider their characters to have some kind of additional existence inside their (the writer's) own mind. They would "know" things about their characters which they never put into print; not to the level of what sort of computer they used, but certainly a more fully-functional mental model of the character beyond the words on the page.

Douglas Adams wasn't one of these writers, he was a writer for whom the characters were always to a certain extent subservient to the joke and the narrative. And Arthur Dent is a particularly strong example of this since there was never all that much to Arthur's character; he's essentially just an unidealised version of Douglas Adams himself who travels around the universe reacting to things in pretty much the same way that Douglas Adams would if Douglas Adams found himself with no home planet and no tea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Then again, his brain is part of the computer that is supposed to calculate the question, so maybe his random thought was not really random.

<comment><USER7> 7 == representation of divinity

6 == what comes short of divinity, i.e., humankind (the number of man)

666 == emphatic rejection of the influence of the divine in humankind's affairs

42 == 6 * 7, the product of interaction of the divine with humankind, being the most elevated object in creation -- the understanding of this interaction is the ultimate answer, Douglas Adams stumbled on it

<comment><USER8> And 4 == number of corners in 4 corner simultaneous world time cube. Or something.

<comment><USER9> A cube has 8 vertices, not 4.

<comment><USER10> Duh, it's a planar cube!

<comment><USER11> A two-dimensional hypercube.

<comment><USER10> A Hypocube?

<comment><USER11> Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm one of those developers that frets over the small things. I'll spend what feels like hours trying to figure out how to name things.

I'm working on simply saying "that'll do. The end."

I'll get so much more done.

<comment><USER13> If you can't come up with a name for something, you probably don't need it.

<comment><USER14> ...or it doesn't need a name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It had to be completely arbitrary for the story. If there was some deep hidden meaning, it wouldn't have been nearly as funny. Even if the number meant something to Adams, it was important that it was meaningless and random in the story, so I'm guessing he'd never let on.

Its the same kind of humor as "a duck!" weighing more than a witch. There's no "ooohhhh" of deep understanding, just a delightful WTF!?

</comment><comment><USER16> Read this response somewhere. Included in The Ultimate Guide I believe.

Check out this wildly entertaining speech by Adams published last month: [http://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_and_everything.html)

<comment><USER17> I had no idea TED had been around that long. Do you know if there's any way to view their full archives?

<comment><USER18> It's not a TED talk, it's in TED's "Best of the Web".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's breaking a cardinal rule of artists - maintain mysticism. It's the reason the inspiration for American Pie will never be known. Collective human imagination can come up with a far more interesting opinion than any individual can, regardless of how talented they might be.

Mr. Adams, with due respect, I don't know what the Tibetan Monk explanation is but it sounds way more interesting than your garden.

<comment><USER20> FYI Douglas Adams is, alas, deceased.

<comment><USER21> The post is from 1993

<comment><USER22> The comment addressing him directly is from 2010.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What do you get when you multiply six by nine ?

<comment><USER23> Um. 54? Am I missing a joke here?

<comment><USER24> 54 base 10 = 42 base 13. To quote Douglas Adams, "I may be sad, but I don't make jokes in base 13.".

<comment><USER25> Alice In Wonderland has an easter egg along these lines. <http://www.eeggs.com/items/20350.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In college, we had an assignment where we had to update an interpreter to always output 42 when it say 6 * 9.

</comment><comment><USER27> How fitting: <http://www.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/pictures/42.png>

</comment><comment><USER28> Did you know that 50% of Douglas Adams fans do not realize that they constitute half of this guy's fans population?

<comment><USER28> Erm... actually I find this phrase funny; it can be of course related to anything, and this thread seems relaxed enough to insert it.

But whatever the collective wisdom says...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love douglas adams, but I don't see how this is vaguely news worthy...

</comment><comment><USER30> You're welcome.

</comment><comment><USER31> I hereby demand the world produce another Douglas Adams. I will gladly prepay for this hypothetical man's 1st 10 novels. Now I sit back and wait for the market to satisy my needs. Perhaps a startup whose sole purpose is to produce a Douglas Adams clone? Heck I'd not only be a consumer I'd invest!

<comment><USER32> For me Terry Pratchett is an entirely acceptable substitute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why 42? - Douglas Adams breaks the Myth</comment>


Amazon releases Cloud Player for iPhone, iPod touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=nav_sap_cldplyr_ios_1?ie=UTF8&docId=1000776061

<comment><AUTHOR> Brag disclaimer: I'm a developer on this.</comment>


Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing - <AUTHOR> https://www.arador.com/ridiculous-bandwidth-costs-amazon-google-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> Meh.

The big cloud platforms offer a rich selection of different offerings, which (just like in every other industry) cross subsidize each other.

When I go to a restaurant, I don't expect that they will be making the same profit margin on every item on the final bill, and in fact, they almost never do. Drinks tend to have a very high profit margin, some labour intensive items may be a break even at best, and the complimentary bread sticks or chips and salsa (if offered) will certainly be a loss.

I guess I could write a very upset article about how my local mexican restaurant is SERIOUSLY SCREWING ME OVER with their drink prices, but if I don't write the companion piece about their cheap burritos (subsidized, of course, by the drink prices), it would only show half the picture.

The reality is that I'm buying a whole package (at AWS _or_ a restaurant) and I should evaluate the whole picture. Yes, I can get bandwidth cheaper outside AWS (or a can of coke a lot cheaper from a big box retailer). But I _can 't_ really get the total package of integrated, managed services outside AWS (certainly not for the cost they charge), any more than I can get someone else to show up in my kitchen and cook a three piece meal and then do all the dishes. (Which is to say, I totally could hire a chef to do that, but it would cost me a lot more. I could BUILD an internal SQS clone if I had to, but my employer would never break even on the cost of getting me to do so.)

AWS is very cheap for some things and very expensive for others. Depending on your usage and workload it may or may not be economical to buy the package they offer. If it is, go for it. If not, don't. Just like, you know, every other good or service you purchase in both your personal and professional life.

<comment><USER3> There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN.

It costs me less than $5 with my current configuration (which is also a global CDN). It's way over our "soft limit", but it's an awesome site so I don't care. The important part is, I don't have to care.

This isn't about slightly more expensive tacos. It's about spending $560 on tacos instead of $5. "Meh" wouldn't exactly be my first reaction to getting that bill at the taco cart (or the fanciest taco place in the world, for that matter).

I can get IP transit in datacenters from $240-$600/Gb right now. So even his $960 transit cost for datacenters is off by quite a bit. He's comparing with a pretty high price and it still looks ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> It's the drinks that are expensive, not the tacos.

And soda has a 1,150% markup [1], so it actually is like that.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/products-high- markups-2014-7](http://www.businessinsider.com/products-high-markups-2014-7)

P.S. You could host it on Github for even less, if you were _really_ price conscious.

<comment><USER3> Alright, so $560 for a soda instead of a $5 soda.

> P.S. You could host it on Github for even less.

I'm not going to attempt to save an inconsequential amount of money by hosting a site I'm hosting on another host.

But that strategy probably wouldn't end well. The $560 site uses 25x more bandwidth than Github's fairly low soft limit of 100GB ([https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github- pages/](https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github-pages/)) and is likely above the 1GB site limit (which is also just the sum of any changes ever, because git) of a Github pages site.

From seeing who their CDN provider is (one that charges basically the same CDN rates as AWS), my guess is that Github is paying a lot more for CDN transit than I am. It's perhaps not a coincidence that the 100GB BW limit was quietly introduced after they started using the CDN.

<comment><USER5> Yeah Fastly (github's CDN) is ridiculously expensive and they charge for requests just like cloudfront which can become very expensive. They are the only major CDN provider other than cloud services which charges for requests.

We went from cloudfront -> edgecast -> keycdn and our bill dropped from $3000 -> $500 -> $120

Edgecast when you buy is through a reseller is quite cheap but we moved because we needed custom domain SSL which is quite expensive in edgecast

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a provider of IaaS Cloud and of dedicated servers and colo, I hear this argument all the time. No one ever seems to include the Network Engineers, monitoring systems, the routers (better have more than 1!), the switches (distribution and access layers), the maintenance, software licenses (where applicable), customer support, cost of IP addresses, Account Payable, ARIN membership, RADB membership, cross-connects, optics, spares and/or support contracts, etc... and finally, you do not use a 1Mbps at 100% for 24hrs per day, so while 1Mbps for a month is ~320GB, in reality, the way most people transfer data, 320GB would look more like 3Mbps at 95th percentile (the way burstable bandwidth is billed)

A basic 1Gbps commit on a 10Gbps port in a data center might cost you from $0.50/Mbps (something like Cogent) to maybe $1.50/Mbps (let's say Level 3), other providers could be $4+/Mbps. By the time you factor in all of the above overhead costs, the true cost of the bandwidth is much much higher on a per Mbps basis.

Don't forget to significantly over-build your stuff, or you might get knocked off-line for anomalies or DoS attacks.

Admittedly, the scale of Google, AWS, Azure makes the cost per Mbps much much lower, but when as others have pointed out, AWS, Google, Azure don't need to charge less than they do.

<comment><USER7> This is bull. I've used colo and been paying 95th percentile billing for a decade. We've run our own hardware. Much of your list didn't even come in to it. E.g. you don't need your own router, you get awesome ddos mitigation from upstream providers like NTT super cheap. It's been a major competitive advantage to get bandwidth this way.

Cost of IPs? Memberships? Wtf are you talking about? Cross connects? This stuff is all free, not needed or cheap and a one time fee.

<comment><USER8> Really depends on your scale. If you just run half a rack of equipment a lot of these costs are factored in by your housing company. But you come to a certain point where you need to invest in a RIPE membership, where you need a router that costs 100k€. Plus a spare one. Where you need someone to watch the monitoring 24h sitting in the DC - just in case. Even if a lot of this stuff is free, it needs to be setup up and managed all the time.

Let alone the cost for DDoS mitigation. Thats an easy 300k€ worth of equipment plus lets say 2x40 GBit/s links for lets say 40k€ each per link and month. Over the course of two years thats easy 1 million euros, just to handle DDoS. Even if you just need 10 GBit/s capacity, you might need 10x that capacity in a DDoS situtation.

<comment><USER9> Here's the reason no one thinks about those things: no one makes their numbers public.

Or at least I've never stumbled across a blog post with anything like a line item cost range for everything that goes into DC or cloud networking.

And in the absence of transparency, yeah, people are going to assume they're getting screwed.

(I understand why this is. The networking free market seems to do a decent job at fulfilling needs, but it turns all those things into secret sauce that shouldn't be shared.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Router? Gateway? Firewall? Network Access Control? VLANs? Ability to manage all this through declarative version controlled code w/ rollback?

The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap.

Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap.

You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or corporate expense report those aren't the same.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Olive Garden is $10 for a pasta plate. I could have bought the ingredients for less than $2.

It takes times and skill to turn the ingredients into something useful.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are IaaS/PaaS, not ISPs.

<comment><USER11> Want to disrupt the restaurant industry?

Sell food at cost!

/s

<comment><USER12> Restaurants operate on pretty thin margins. You're confusing the cost of raw materials with the cost of prepared and served meals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account.

For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s blended bandwidth connection billed at the 95th percentile for $150/month.

<comment><USER14> 1\. Will Dell servers magically appear in your racks all mounted correctly? Shipping delays is a very serious and real problem.

2\. Will Dell servers arrived with 0 problems on its components? Any time I ordered meaningful amount of servers, I usually get about 5% fail rate. VMs aren't perfect but you can destroy and recreate in different region almost real time.

3\. Ever had to deal with difficult-to-work-with network admin? The cloud is significantly less pain in the ass.

<comment><USER15> #3 is why we went to Amazon, and its one of the reasons we were successful. Sad as that was. No weeks/months of delays/hassles/fights/sabotage. Just success as fast as we could do our part and figure out the few small hurdles.

<comment><USER16> ...That sounds more like an HR problem than a technical problem.

There are network engineers in the world who don't live in caves and gnaw at the bones of administrative assistants.

<comment><USER17> There are, but they are hard to find.

Networking is a great place for assholes to build empires and exert control. In 20 years of professional engagement with distributed and data center networks, most of these guys (and they are almost always guys) running network orgs are an impediment and spend more time helping out their vendor of choice than anything else.

I've run into awesome network guys in position of power only a few times, and they are 100x employees. The last major rollout of a service that I did was literally 3 months ahead of schedule solely because of the efforts of this awesome network dude snowman as recently put in charge.

<comment><USER15> We saw some good people, but they generally left because they didn't want to work in that environment.

Eventually replaced with someone helpful, it was amazing what we started to get done. Got lucky there we found the replacement and he stayed long enough to be there when needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This analysis is way too oversimplified. It completely ignores the shape of the traffic (real apps have peaks and valleys of usage - they don't pump exactly 100 Mbps every second of every day). Cloud providers charge the same amount regardless of how bursty your app is, and they have to provision capacity so that all customers get good performance even under unusual spikes (the more spiky your traffic, the better a deal per-MB pricing is for you). And of course it ignores all the ancillary networking HW and SW that supports these services, and all the labor you save by not having to manage that stuff yourself.

I've analyzed the cost of cloud services to death (I've worked for a couple of them) and the only way they aren't great deals is if you don't need high quality operations (i.e. if you can deal with slow-downs or occasional outages then you can do better elsewhere). Otherwise, if you're small-scale then these marginal cost differences don't matter, and if you're larger scale then call up these cloud providers and get yourself a discount off the list price.

</comment><comment><USER19> (Bandwidth is ambiguous in this context so I'll use "data transfers" instead)

I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers.

Customers with transfer-heavy applications will always buy their servers from providers with unlimited transfers like OVH[0][1], where you can do hundreds of terabytes a month with no extra charges (1.5 Gbps * 3600 * 24 * 30 = 486 TB). Even if AmaGoogSoft lowered their transfer prices by 100 fold their pricing still can't compete with OVH.

Companies with enough engineering resources can always go with the best of both worlds: transfer-heavy servers on OVH, and "regular" servers on AmaGoogSoft. The expensive data transfers will only hit smaller outfits, but these customers won't switch because it's not worth the hassle to split your hosting across two providers.

[0] [https://www.ovh.com/us/private- cloud/options/bandwidth.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/private- cloud/options/bandwidth.xml)

[1] [https://www.ovh.co.uk/web- hosting/unlimited_traffic](https://www.ovh.co.uk/web- hosting/unlimited_traffic)

<comment><USER20> > I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data > transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it > won't attract more customers.

I know a handful of scientists, myself included, who would consider cloud computing were it not for the expensive egress costs. The ease of spinning up lots of computing power for scientific modelling is useless if retrieving the vast quantities of raw output data is costly. I will have to investigate OVH though as a potential opportunity--thanks.

<comment><USER21> May I ask why you want to retrieve it? Wouldn't you just leave it there, and download only the conclusions?

<comment><USER20> I can think of a few off the cuff.

You're likely not running a model just for yourself. You have collaborators at other institutions that need data to compare or combine with something else.

Your grant may require you distribute the output for use by other researchers. That could either entail being hosted by you or by an agency or other entity. But you still have to get the data to them.

A reviewer for your publications may request the data.

That brings up another point that the review process can be upwards of a year.

Oftentimes you have to go through an exploratory data analysis, where you don't even know what your final analysis will entail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forever because your customers never own anything.

I've done the math many times and it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.

<comment><USER23> Theres other hidden costs as well.

What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust.

GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.

<comment><USER22> These are solved problems though. RAID works great around 99% of the time and for the others you can use off-site backup. It's extremely rare that something needs a true 100% uptime. Salesforce and Reddit still go down for maintenance windows in 2017. For one project I setup log streaming with Postgres to the cloud(since inbound BW is free :) ) and ran a hot backup there just in case.

Really though in my experience the cloud is far less reliable than colocation. I've had AWS VMs "degrade" or randomly die countless times but I can't remember the last time my Colo boxes went down, probably not since I last upgraded the OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Worth noting that Digital Ocean doesn't _actually_ bill for bandwidth. They say they do in their Droplet template descriptions, but they really don't. I've pushed many many terabytes to/from my Droplets and never received a bill for it. But you need to cap your individual Droplet bandwidth using something like tc[0] around ~400MB/s or they'll shut off the network interface (DDoS detection).

[0] [http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control- HOWTO/intro.html](http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/intro.html)

<comment><USER25> indeed. I'm surprised how buried this comment is, because it's a _really_ good deal (until they change things). anecdotally, DO sent me an email when one of my droplets was sustaining around 200MB/s, but it wasn't a "knock it off" email, it was an "is this intentional" email. is the ~400MB/s figure from your own experience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The bandwidth is the soda: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129)

</comment><comment><USER27> I dont think its fair to compare GCP's egress costs to a colo's. A collocation is simply sending your packets straight to the internet, where-as GCP routes your packets over private fiber to its closet POP to your user. Giving you better latency.

<comment><USER22> This is only true with Google as far as I know. And I'm fairly sure that all cloud providers only have maybe 10 edge routers in the US so the utility is limited. You can't have too many edge routers because they rely on IP Anycast which is dangerous to do if your routes are too similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Back of the envelope calculation:

\- assume $100/TB for cloud data transfer

\- assume one employee full time equivalent to manage colo'd servers ($10,000/mo), plus $30/TB data transfer

The break even point for the colo'd setup from a networking perspective is:

        10,000 + 30X = 100X
        X = 10,000/70 = 142 (TB/month)

At 1MB per "request" I believe this works out to about 50 requests per second average to reach this traffic level.

Weaknesses of this model:

\- Data transfer only. Depending on what else you're doing you could also save a lot on compute and storage.

\- I don't know that much about how colocated data transfer would be priced ... i.e. do you need overprovision to guarantee availability, etc.

\- one employee to handle servers to replicate the Amazon AWS experience ... could be highly variable depending on what AWS features you are using.

<comment><USER29> This calculation is an all or nothing affair though. The reality is that you can avoid most AWS bandwidth charges by direct connecting to an internet exchange. It's still only worth the effort if you're looking at a 6 figure bandwidth bill, but it doesn't require new employees.

<comment><USER28> I guess what I'd like to know is: at what point is it worth seriously evaluating alternatives to just using cloud services and paying the sticker price -- which means evaluating the labor cost as well as the cost of the service, where this submission and many others I've seen will quantify the cost of the services and say that bare metal is so much cheaper while ignoring the cost of managing it.

<comment><USER29> The general break even point is circa 200k USD per month, assuming the company has spare capital, and the ability to commit to using the same gear for 3 years.

It's useful to keep in mind that in this type of scenario the goal is not to replace a cloud provider but to leverage capital to get better bang for the buck on select services. ex. using in-house compute farms and leveraging s3 for storage

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When you buy in mbps, you're actually billed based on 95th percentile usage. So this comparison is way off, depending on traffic patterns, 1mb/s committed can work out to about 120GB in a month on average. If you use reasonable GB per mb/s numbers the cloud providers don't look all that bad.

</comment><comment><USER31> Cannot agree more with title. I did a comparative model of AWS bills and colo bills in the context of companies of different sizes ([https://blog.paxautoma.com/buy-or-rent-the-cost-model- hostin...](https://blog.paxautoma.com/buy-or-rent-the-cost-model-hosting-the- cloud-and-in-a-colo-2/)). It turned out frequently overlooked costs for bandwidth and provisioned IOPS can be responsible of large chunk of the EC2 bill.

</comment><comment><USER32> I suspect the high bandwidth price is a targeting tool and is primarily for repelling those wanting to host seed boxes, porn sites and the like. You can probably get a much better deal if you're paying > 10k$/mo.

Even then, cloud bandwidth is insanely expensive. For example, Hetzner offers 1.3$/TB (if you happen to exceed their generous 30 TB quota). In comparison, Amazon is 70x more expensive at 90$/TB.

<comment><USER33> Hetzner is great. I'm running a site with ~45TB monthly traffic on 3 physical servers and it costs me just over $150. I would have to pay many thousands to any cloud hosting provider and it wouldn't pay off in my case.

Sure, if high availability is critical for you business and money is not an issue, it may be worth it. YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Pitchfork mode on: Outgoing bandwidth should be even more expensive! Then maybe, just maybe my mobile data cap wouldn't be drained that quickly by bloated webpages and stuff.

;)

</comment><comment><USER35> Keep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.

<comment><USER36> Yet they charge zero for the SDN and crazy high prices for Internet bandwidth.

<comment><USER35> True, and it's still probably overpriced... but a lot of the SDN expense is in the stateful routing between networks (e.g., traffic going to/from the internet).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Screwing their customers? What kind of entitled attitude is this? This is a highly competitive market and the customers are voting with their own dollars. Don't like it? Don't eat it.

</comment><comment><USER38> FWIW cost for a small biz at most major metro US facilities is closer to $1/mbit for a multi-carrier (which means generally multi-route and high quality with some caveats), and $0.20 if you do something like he.net. For higher volume customers you can easily cut both of those rates in half right now. And you can also participate on public peering switches for generally just a low setup fee at the best facilities.

AWS, GCE, azure seem like the platforms of yesteryear in all dimensions when compared to something like packet.net. I think these providers could be in a rock and a hard place due to the unsuitability of native Linux containers for secure multi-tenancy. This does leave a nice runway for Joyent as both a provider and software vendor for at least a little bit, but I think packet.net is really going to change the economy of infra.

</comment><comment><USER39> While public bandwidth is indeed significantly more expensive on clouds, not all traffic needs to be public and different clouds charge different amounts.

I wrote a blog post on Google Cloud latency and pricing across zones and regions which may be useful for others:

[https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices- and-...](https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-network- latency-between-google-compute-zones-and-regions/)

</comment><comment><USER40> It's suffice to say that the cloud providers have a different set of customers in mind. I have servers on both OVH/Linode variety of service providers as well as one single app running on AWS. For the products I run on OVH/Linode, I sell the service at less than $20/month. The one on AWS sells for $200+ per month. Again, it's because of the requirements/SLAs. Based on experience, AWS is a lot more robust for what I'm using it for.

</comment><comment><USER41> As others have pointed out, this view is extremely short sighted.

To add to the mix - what if you need a multiple data-center deployment/replication? Both Amazon and Google will provide you a greatly discounted traffic there $0.02 / $0.01. And that's only start. You can easily migrate from one data center to another, with no or little cost attached to it (try that in colo).

</comment><comment><USER42> I've always figured that the point of this was to allow a) overall costs to generally scale with the "size" of the customer while simultaneously creating a sticker shock effect on migrating out of whatever cloud. For example, looking at Google, the cost to transfer a terabyte out of their Cloud Storage product is six times the cost of just keeping it there for month. Of course some of this collapses if you really look into it (e.g. you are going to pay that egress anyway if people are actually accessing the data) but I'm not sure that that is always clear to execs doing back of envelope math. I think that to some degree this desire for lock-in is explicitly visible in the asymmetric ingress/egress pricing but I do think that it's a little bit underhanded if I am right because it would mean that slightly-deflated e.g. instance prices would be subsidized by lockin.

</comment><comment><USER43> This subject is never productive on HN because almost every reply argues with a certain use case in mind but people never actually outline that use case. Those who read your post and reply do so with their own use case in mind and obviously what that other person suggested is madness (in your scenario that you never actually verbalize). Ultimately no one learns anything because they all think everyone is in exactly the same scenario as they are. Or maybe they think their personal choice is a "silver bullet". Probably depends on the poster.

Then it all repeats next week.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would imagine contention ratios would also factor into pricing. At least in Australia you might have a 8:1 ratio of actual bandwidth available for a consumer plan, and 3:1 for a business plan. I'd imagine that you pretty much get all the bandwidth you pay for in a data centre. I've certainly saturated 100mbps connections on servers in the past, 24x7. But perhaps people more knowledgeable than me could comment on this?

</comment><comment><USER45> Fundamental methodological error: It compares _provisioned_ capacity (colo & Google Fiber) to _utilization_.

In order for this comparison to be valid you'd need to get 100% utilization of your colo or Google Fiber pipe. You only pay for what you use with AWS et al. And quite obviously the pricing of GF and Amazon Lightsail assumes less than 100%. Nobody's getting "screwed".

</comment><comment><USER46> I mentioned this in the price reductions of S3 announcement

People fail to realize the true cost of operating on S3, specifically when hundreds of TB of usable data is in play

"By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that. AWS is great, but as you get into high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive."

</comment><comment><USER47> As the author of this post I need to clarify something. I love Amazon AWS, and I love the flexibility and awesomeness of cloud computing. I just don't like the bandwidth pricing ;) Sorry for the interruption, feel free to continue crucifying me. P.S. If someone has more accurate data I'd be happy to update the post or add a guest post. Cheers, Love Arador xoxox

</comment><comment><USER48> If colocation actually cost that much, it would make sense for a connection that allows extreme bursting to charge 3x as much per byte.

The real number to compare to is the google data for business rate. You can do lots of colocation in that price range. And _that_ is why the cloud prices are unreasonable.

</comment><comment> FLUX-YOU New fun:

Take credit card churning and apply it to cloud data. Build tools to seamlessly move apps between cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER49> Since Lightsail is mentioned, it's probably worth including Digital Ocean since they offer almost identical network transfer for the money [1].

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER50> It's also worth noting that Digital Ocean gives you half the amount of RAM that Linode[0] and Vultr[1] offer for the same price point.

      [0] https://www.linode.com/pricing
      [1] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

</comment></comment><comment> throwaway-1209 Amazing to see the number of people who try hard to justify this blatant rip off pricing. This is coming from the same group of people who complain endlessly about the cost of wireless data and telco data caps.

<comment><USER51> With telcos, there are only a few companies to choose from. If you want to run your own dedicated servers, nothing is stopping you. So what if people want to pay more for the ease of cloud platforms?

</comment></comment><comment> m-j-fox > Google Fiber for Business

Maybe worth renting an office in Provo just to get the deal.

<comment><USER52> SLC if your employees like the mountains but might want a beer or caffeinated beverage once in a while ;)

<comment> m-j-fox I'm not cruel enough to locate actual people in Provo, just servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> As an ISP architect, I think you overlook a great many cost centers in your apples-to-doughnuts explanation.

</comment><comment><USER54> So is Lightsail really worth jumping into?

</comment><comment><USER55> Houses are such a rip-off! Just look how much more expensive they are than a pile of wood!

</comment><comment><USER56> "Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges."

Disagree. There's no false advertising here, they're making you pay for their service and convenience of using a combined [Paas, Iaas, Saas ..etc]. It's unfair to view these services as a singular function, you typically touch MANY features/products in production. The cost includes the convenience of offering everything under one roof, because, face it, doing everything by yourself at the SLAs provided by the giants is no trivial task.

Unless you're a BIG company that likes to distract itself with infrastructure instead of building and sharpening the core offerings, chances are that you will NEVER really build anything as reliable, inter-operable, configurable and manageable at cost.

<comment><USER22> I disagree strongly with this. Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable than they are now. I was around back when Apache and CGI was all there was, even then uptime was so good that it was rare to hit a website that was down.

There's a lot of koolaid being thrown around by the companies with cloud to sell. Unfortunately these also happen to be the big "market leaders" so it's hard to deny what they're saying and get taken seriously.

It's like six sigma, agile, or stack ranking. The big guys are doing it so it must be the right thing to do... Right? Until everyone realized it's mostly a ploy to make money selling books and conference tickets, or in this case rent out a bunch of excess capacity for huge profit.

I disagree with reliability as well. Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most AWS VM's die after a year or two. With the cloud you have to worry a lot more about fault tolerance whereas with dedicated equipment simple offline backups are often enough to meet any reasonable SLA.

<comment><USER57> > Before all these cloud providers websites were not noticeably less reliable > than they are now.

Before all of these providers existed:

1) The volume of internet traffic that exists today didn't exist then. Mobile devices didn't exist. Mobile devices that aren't always connected to the internet and consume hours of our day didn't exist. Large downloads (1GB) didn't exist. They couldn't exist because the infrastructure that exists now can properly support it...at scale.

2) Websites that had large volumes of traffic had top tier expensive admins to maintain them (surprise surprise, Amazon did and turned it into a service)

> Most of my bare metal and colocated machines have uptime of many years. Most > AWS VM's die after a year or two.

3) What's your definition of "most"? Sources for those numbers please?

<comment><USER22> As we've gotten more device computers have gotten more powerful. Server software has gotten better. HTTP has Keepalive and multiplexing now. Encryption and networking are offloaded to hardware and we have a lot more cores.

I would guess a single server can handle thousands of times as many users as it could handle years ago. HAProxy, Netty, Nginx, and others can handle over a million (simple) HTTP requests per second. That's more requests than Google.com gets.

Most as in I've been watching over 100 AWS VM's and maybe 30 on Azure for years and they die or crash far more often than than the VM's hosted here, at colo, or our old bare metal machines. It's anecdotal but it seems like AWS doesn't really care about warning you before shutting off your machine. Azure is slightly better but still goes down regularly.

I know everyone says "it's okay! Just make your servers fault tolerant!". Well that works great for load balancers and frontend, but doesn't work at all for SQL databases. ACID compliant transactions require a single source of truth and a true multi master SQL database is impossible. Failover yes, but you always risk losing data in the switchover unless you use two phase commit which actually makes your multimaster database slower than a single system. In practice the failover almost always causes some data loss and log conflicts you have to diddle with later. And God help you if the replica falls behind more than a couple seconds.

Anyways, for SQL databases system reliability is as essential as ever and it's a lot easier to get high SLA numbers when you control the hardware and the power switch. The closest you can get to the Holy Grail is running KVM VMs locally and doing live machine migrations when hardware starts to fail, but even that won't keep your database running if something really bad happens.

<comment><USER58> Thanks for the info very useful, I didn't realise how unreliable AWS is for database servers. You're correct random unannounced shutdowns of db servers is just not acceptable for critical data. I will be launching a new business based on Postgres soon and the thought of this is terrifying. I'm not keen on the RDS type services or CoLo so this is an unexpected problem I need to overcome. Do you know whether VPS provider such as Digital Ocean or CloudSigma would be more reliable?

<comment><USER22> I would say colocation is most reliable. I'm sure dedicated VPS is better but most still reserve the right to pull the plug for hardware replacements. Colo isn't terribly expensive if you buy used equipment.

Really consider how important 100% uptime is though. Google and S3 have gone down multiple times without killing the internet or losing a ton of customers. Plenty of large SaaS providers still use maintenance windows. Heck, GitHub went down today. Not sure if you use ADP but that goes down for a couple days a week!

I know it's not the popular thing to do but you can get much better relative reliability by running a single database per tenant and running a limited number of tenants per VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Did he factor in latency? if you want to ride in first class you have to pay more.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is a super irritating feature of "enterprise" vendor pricing. What almost everyone on these platforms is doing is moving most of their bandwidth out of one of the CDN services (like say cloudfront) and then negotiating custom pricing on that bandwidth that is often as much as a full decimal place cheaper as long as you sign a couple grand a month yearly commit. There's still this massive massive pricing cusp between using the cloud as a utility and jumping into the suits & drinks & lunches sales guy game.</comment>