It's not the $7, but the principle - <AUTHOR> http://antti.vilpponen.net/2013/08/31/its-not-the-7-but-the-principle/

<comment><USER2> Does seem like an 'honest' bug. I did what the OP did (except I checked the middle option), and when you then look at the source of the page, it includes

<input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="1"  style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" />

<input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="2" CHECKED style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" />

<input name="cds_term_value" type="radio" id="radio" value="3"  style="margin-top:138px;margin-left:10px;" checked="" />

The 'div' that you had checked earliers has an empty 'CHECKED' attribute, while the third one has the 'checked=""' that firefox apparently picks up.

<comment><USER3> Agree. The author is jumping to conclusions her. Remind me of this great quote:

"Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" \- Napoleon Bonaparte

<comment><USER4> Probably not a Bonaparte quote. The below is an interesting history of how that quote got into the hacker consciousness. Mostly from the Jargon file.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)

<comment><USER5> I had never read that! Charming. The punchline is, it's actually Heinlein's razor. Which makes perfect sense.

(yes the wiki refers to a Robert Hanlon of Scranton, PA. This is probably only amusing if you're from America and know that Scranton is the archetypal funny place to be from)

<comment><USER6> > Scranton is the archetypal funny place to be from

Up there with Walla Walla, Washington and Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article: " I entered my credit card number with spacing like 1234 1234 1234 1234 and all the other information as necessary. After I clicked "Submit your order", the form returned an error and asked me to fix the credit card number so that there are no spaces ..."

Why do so many web developers insist on forcing me to enter a 16 digit number _without_ spaces when a computer is excellent (and fast) at removal of spaces and I am not so good at validating I've typed a 16 digit number correctly when that number lacks the spaces?

<comment><USER8> A lot of programmers are terrible at their craft.

<comment><USER9> And/or management that doesn't allow devs to spend time on user-friendly features.

<comment><USER10> Really? You think management is standing over the programmer's shoulder going "Whoa whoa whoa... the length validation was acceptable, but removing spaces for them? _Simply indulgence_. Just throw an error."

In any case I can imagine it would take less or equivalent code and time to do a string replacement than handle generating and reporting the error. In my experience, it's primarily been inexperienced programmers.

<comment><USER9> Not exactly. Typically it would be to keep them so busy as to never have time to get to it. If you don't actually use the feature it's not gonna be a priority.

Also, in some places you are not allowed to check in code without a ticket or req number. When you check in on your own you commit qa and others to support it, and other devs to maintain it. Big bureaucracy sucks but exists and sometimes even has good reasons.

This is a trivial example though, but you get my drift. I agree it sucks, just trying to explain how it happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh my god, how I hate forms that reset themselves over an error! It's newsletter subscriptions... or the misc textarea... or something... that gets lost when I enter a Canadian post code with the space in the middle. Or without the space in the middle. Both have triggered errors :(

Why can't you people just use Drupal which has a forms system that I have contributed to a lot and it handles rebuilds like this with ease :) ?

<comment><USER12> Because drupal does a lot of other things "interestingly", for example account name and email-validation?

<comment><USER13> What's so bad about account name an email validation in Drupal? It's one of the few apps/CMS/frameworks that get it right and allow people to use their real name instead of forcing them to come up with some poor ASCII-only string to represent them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's no evidence to suggest that this was malicious in any way, nor anything to suggest that FC intended to "trick" him. Plenty of service implement these types of defaults, and bugs occasionally happen.

He's taking a presumptuous "principled" stand against something that is not necessarily an ethical issue. Sometimes shit just breaks. He has no idea whether there was any malicious intent, nor has he even finished dealing with FC customer service. (I bet they'll give him a refund.)

He is writing a screed based on an unproven assumption about an incident that will probably be amended by FC. This seems like linkbait.

<comment><USER15> The company's web page is their agent to the web world. No matter why that agent cheated this guy; its the companies fault. That's how agency works.

Sure we as engineers can diagnose what web error caused the issue. But we can also surely imagine its not the first time tech support has handled the matter, and its still a problem.

At this point there is plenty to blame the company for, even with a liberal tolerance for incompetence. Why not fix the bug? Its easy to not fix a bug that's raking in money.

To be called a responsible company, they have to fix those bugs FIRST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could be something to report to email@example.com

      http://darkpatterns.org/submit_a_pattern/

</comment><comment><USER17> This might be subject to a chargeback. After all, they "sold", and charged, you something without your consent, didn't they?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure how it is in Finland but here in France it's very difficult to do a chargeback... I tried once for something that was never delivered and my bank blew me off. It's nowhere as easy as in the US.

It's not even that that I lost the chargeback, it's that they didn't even let me initiate it.

<comment><USER19> You'll need to jump through some hoops for that. Here in India, the bank's credit card department head didn't even know about chargebacks, and didn't believe me even after I showed him the Visa Regulations on Visa's website. I had to call customer care over 10 times and talk to the supervisors nearly every time before I found a person who was able to send me the chargeback form. Hell, the bank's local branch didn't believe me even after seeing the chargeback form.

After I got the chargeback form though, dealing with the Chargeback Department was a breeze.

<comment><USER20> Very interesting. I remember back in the late 60s and 70s when credit card adoption raised in the US, charge back was a key selling feature. Customers refused to use cards that didn't offer it.

Makes me wonder how the world is going to change when BRIC economies get bigger than the current "developed" ones (if ever). Banks and other oligopolies may get away with far lower customer, privacy, heath, etc. protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is this on the front page? It sounds like a bug with a web form and a problem with non-responsive customer service, neither of which are uncommon.

<comment><USER14> Because people would rather believe a provocative falsehood than accept a benign truth.

<comment><USER22> This one's going in the quote bank. So, so true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not like they intentionally "tricked you" into buying something, it was just a bug in a web form. Bugs happen.

<comment><USER24> But you're responsible for your bugs, so it's their job to offer easy refunds in that case.

<comment><USER25> Indeed, but the article doesn't say they refused a refund. The bug seems deeper than just their front end, their back-end is showing the "wrong" (actually right) subscription selected, but their payment provider clearly charged for the wrong one.

So I guess they now need to consolidate their payments received (likely via a payment provider) with their own system to see if this or any other orders are inconsistent.

They should refund the OP, and I suspect we'll see them do just that. But they also need to both fix their front end but also add automated systems to consolidate payments with orders to see if they match.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be and maybe it will go away".

<comment><USER26> If it's really just a front-end bug, chances are they're getting lots of calls just like yours. You may just be part of a pile of callback tickets once the bug is fixed and all the refunds are processed. Or, they could still be trying to track down the root cause of the bug in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like a clear case for Hanlon's Razor:

 _Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity_

</comment><comment><USER28> It might be a bug, but the networksolutions.com checkout process also acts opportunistically when you add a domain to a new account. It will ask if you want to 'auto-renew the purchased domains AND all others you previously purchased'. If you change the setting to 'don't auto-renew' and then make a validation error (miss the terms of service checkbox), it will keep state for all other fields, but magically the auto-renew value switches back to the default.

</comment><comment> UVB-76 Both parties are clearly in the wrong here.

Fast Company should ensure the product selection doesn't reset to default when the form is submitted and returns an error.

The customer should double-check their order before hitting submit. Like it or not, they had the more expensive product selected when they submitted their order. How are Fast Company supposed to know the product you had selected is not the product you wanted?

<comment><AUTHOR> Naturally the user is always responsible for the purchase he/she makes. However, if I (OP) make my selections and need to re-enter some information based on their request - I don't think that allows them to change my decisions from what I have chosen earlier, especially if you get an error message similar to "please check your credit card number".

It is also a de facto standard in general that sites do not change once set selections when fixing errors in the original form and once you differ from this you're bound to increase burden on your customer support.

<comment> UVB-76 Precisely. It's bad practice on the part of the retailer, and if I were in their shoes I'd refund the customer immediately as a gesture of goodwill.

That said, it does not appear to be malicious, and ultimately the customer bears some responsibility for submitting their order without checking it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's a gold mine that will pay out for years, perhaps decades. Let's nuke the mine and get an extra 1/5th on the first payout, sacrificing all future gains. Real smart there boys.

<comment><USER29> Someone downvoted me. Probably didn't get the analogy, so I'll spell it out. The gold mine = a subscriber. The nuking of said mine = fleecing the subscriber on his/her first payment and thus losing the subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well, "tricked"... sounds more like a silly bug to me. Stuff like this is easy to miss during testing, because you test these things in isolation.

<comment><USER31> It's very unlikely that this is a bug.

There is no reason that that a failed form validation would save the states of all the input fields EXCEPT the bundle selector.

<comment><USER32> Radio buttons are more prone to logical errors than normal fields, just due to the way they work. They're not rocket scientist hard, but they're totally "I didn't have enough coffee and screwed up the logic" hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whenever anyone says "It's not x, it's the principle", it's x, it's always x.

<comment><USER34> Not really. I had a similar issues a while ago. Paid $5 for a test account (vps), customer rep lied to me about some issues then refused to refund. The $5 really wasn't worth my time, but I don't appreciate being lied to and having my time wasted, so I made sure make some public complaints on Twitter (after no response through their ticketing service).

So yes, it can be about the principle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Chargeback time. That action on their part might be viewed as fraud.

<comment><USER36> Actually it would be fraudulent to not charge what was selected to be ordered. It was a bug that didn't save the selection properly (possibly just in Firefox too, the template didn't look _that_ bad), but it was perfectly visible what was selected when the OP made the order.

<comment><USER35> IANAL, but this gets complicated. It all depends on whether a reasonable person, when seeing the error page with "no spaces in credit card field", would presume that nothing else in the form changed. If so, and the merchant is aware that most people presume that, then it could be fraud.

They are making a financial gain, by being aware that the terms have changed, and by misleading the customer into thinking that nothing has changed, they could be committing fraud.

The customer choose the original selection, and the merchant's systems swapped in a different, more expensive, version without telling the customer at the last moment, knowing that most people don't re-read everything again, then yes, that's fraud.

<comment><USER37> In addition, they claim that he purchased the 32.99 subscription. That step is unethical plain and simple. If you take 20 dollars from me and then claim I only paid 10, you bet it's going to look bad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salman-khan/the-learning-myth-why-ill_b_5691681.html

<comment><USER2> [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866)</comment>


Amazon Launches Managed Cassandra Service - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-managed-apache-cassandra-service-mcs/ <comment><USER5> Kudos for AWS for the ability to launch so many services, many of them are competing with each other or complimentary.

At first I (disclosure, ScyllaDB co-founder) called their serverless a bluff but I gave it a try and it's nice to create a table without waiting for any server. That said, I know personally that Dynamo scales really slow so they wouldn't catch up the speed. It also say 1 digit ms latency but state the plan to improve jvm overhead.

Another funny thing is (regardless of tech) that AWS folks have wonderful people talking about open source but this very solution isn't open at all. It's impossible to figure out what's Cassandra and what's Dynamo. How about a diagram?

Lastly, it's pricey (for 1M iops you'll pay $3.5M/year!!) and doesn't have counters, UDT, materialized views and plenty other features.

If you got down here, hey, give ScyllaDB a try, it's OSS (AGPL) and as a service on AWS and has features that neither C* or MCS has - <USER2> prioritization for instance. Dor

<comment><USER6> > Dynamo scales really slow

Quite arrogant attitude, dude. DynamoDB is not slow in scaling, quite the opposite. (disclosure: 6+ years at AWS, 2008-2014, and I know the main guy that designed DynamoDB).

If you want your startup to succeed, I suggest your first step should be to avoid criticizing the competition without substantiating it with hard evidence.

Be humble. There's plenty of space for great solutions, you don't need to bash the huge elephant in the room to get started.

<comment><USER7> ≥Quite arrogant attitude, dude

I find your lack of self awareness hilarious. You know the guy who designed dynamodb! Wow. Could I get you to send me his autograph?

<comment><USER8> LOLOLOL

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My guess is that this is on-demand DynamoDB wrapped with a Cassandra- compatible frontend. Just based on the pricing and stated characteristics. It would be really hard to provide on-demand capacity for compute and storage using anything remotely similar to off-the-shelf Cassandra. The pricing looks like DynamoDB on-demand + a bit extra to cover the cost of operating the frontend.

EDIT: confirmed by an AWS employee here [https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1201924979647905792](https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1201924979647905792)

<comment><USER10> Disclosure: I work for AWS

Off-the-shelf Cassandra has a fair amount of flexibility in its architecture. Open Source Cassandra is the thing that is in the front end. And the team is excited about the idea of collaborating with the development community around some of the generally useful abstractions needed to build this managed database experience. More at [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing- cassand...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing-cassandra- community/)

<comment><USER11> Has Amazon ever contributed anything meaningful back to open source?

<comment><USER12> Quite a lot: [https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/](https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/)

<comment><USER11> Let me give you an example.

"Amazon EMR has been adding Spark runtime improvements since EMR 5.24, and discussed them in Optimizing Spark Performance. EMR 5.28 features several new improvements."

Have these improvements been contributed back to Spark? When I take a look at the improvements themselves, it looks like all Amazon did was upgrade Spark from 2.3 to 2.4.

<comment><USER12> This seems completely random. EMR isn't an open-source project, it's a proprietary offering.

The page I linked lists plenty of projects if you're looking for actual OSS work.

<comment><USER11> EMR isn't open source but Spark is. What does the EMR Spark Runtime if not offer Spark as a service? And the changes to optimize spark runtime, why were they not contributed back to upstream Spark?

<comment><USER12> I'm sure some changes are upstreamed (assuming they're even accepted) but there's no requirement for them to do so.

Again this seems like a random example. What is so important about this particular change over all the other open-source contributions?

<comment><USER11> This is just an example. I'm sure there are many others. The developers that take the time to contribute to Spark are making Spark a better product. Amazon is not making it better. Amazon should not claim they made improvements to Spark in a newer version. What they did was upgrade Spark to 2.4 and claim that the improvements were done by them whereas in reality they were done by the community.

<comment><USER12> Again this is all wild assumption. They're not required to contribute to free software, but they do upstream changes.

The improvements they're claiming is for their own EMR product, not to Spark, and they do make updates to software to run better on their own own infrastructure. That's what their customers care about.

You seem dedicated to believing that Amazon has done nothing for open-source even I pointed you to an exhaustive list of their contributions. At this point, there's nothing more to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At reddit, we used Cassandra, and it was a huge pain to manage. At Netflix we used it, and had a whole team of engineers that built tools just to manage Cassandra.

If this service had existed then, it would have made life so much easier!

<comment><USER13> I find it a bit weird, that company that created a DynamoDB is now supporting a data store that supposed to be an open source DynamoDB. Does that mean Cassandra is better than DynamoDB since people would still prefer to use Cassandra in AWS?

<comment><USER14> Hasn't this been amazon's MO the last couple years? Competition with their in- house versions hasn't prevented AWS from building anything before.

It's not really an admission that one is "better" than the other, it's just an admission that people like managed drop-in replacements for tools that they're already using.

<comment><USER15> As a side note, I'm interested why Facebook doesn't have a cloud offering yet. I'd love to see more players in this space.

<comment><USER16> Would you really want "sponsored" rows automatically appearing in your Facebook-managed database?

<comment><USER17> _golfclap.gif_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For the first 3 years of Stream we used Cassandra. Afterwards we switched to a custom RocksDB + Raft solution. (somewhat outdated stackshare interview: [https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for- ov...](https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for- over-300-million-end-users))

The difference is massive. Cassandra was hard to manage and after many years of our team using it still had random spikes. RocksDB+Raft has been extremely solid, doesn't require any maintenance, load times are flat, zero spikes.

Cassandra was awesome, but it definitely has some issues. That's also why companies like ScyllaDB see space in that market. I wonder if AWS's cassandra implementation is better than regular cassandra.

<comment><USER19> Something awesome is coming up for Cassandra 4.0

<comment><USER20> Can you add anything more specific? Something related to the storage engine?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Master stroke! Especially the pricing and autoscaling. Till they brought autoscaling and pay as you go pricing for DynamoDB, Google cloud data store was superior product (at least on paper) as you didn't need to think about preprovisioning the capacity. It is supposed to just scale. They have brought the same model to Cassandra. So no vendor lock in!

Also one of the reasons small projects stayed away from Cassandra is the requirement of an hefty cluster to get decent performance out of it. That too is taken care by AWS and made Cassandra much more accessible.

Now only thing that needs to be seen is how good this AWS product is. Especially for first year many AWS services get very average reviews.

</comment><comment><USER22> Excited to see a managed open source offering with the same pricing paradigm as pay-per-request DynamoDB. I frequently encounter projects for which a Dynamo-style storage layer would be a natural fit, but often use RDS Postgres because I don't want to lock projects into the AWS ecosystem or sign teams up for operating their own Cassandra or Riak clusters.

<comment><USER23> So instead of using the best solution, you chose to use a non optimal solution for fear of "lock in"? Were they not using any other AWS services? If not, why pay more for a cloud provider than a colo and not get any of the benefits of it?

<comment><USER22> I would disagree with that characterization and would instead say that DynamoDB's lack of portability between vendors made it a non-optimal solution. The services I work on need to survive specific vendors going out of business.

<comment><USER23> What's more likely to happen your company going out of business or AWS? Is your company better capitalized than Amazon?

Would you also refuse to use Windows just in case Microsoft went out of business?

<comment><USER24> Amazon going out of business isn't the only reason you shouldn't be happy to be tied to them.

If you want decent "high availability" and failover when shit hits the fan, that means multi vendor. Who else offers dynamodb?

If amazon were to increase the price of dynamo db 10x would you still just keep using it, because you're already using it, and eat the 10x cost increase?

The amount of comments that essentially boil down to "amazon is not going anywhere, you're stupid for worrying about lock in" is both staggering and depressing.

<comment><USER23> You mean if multiple availability zones go down? In AWS's entire existence, have they been known to raise prices?

How much time, energy, and development effort are you willing to spend on "avoiding vendor lock in" in the off chance that you will move your entire infrastructure as opposed to spending those same resources creating either revenue generating features or cost saving features?

If you're using a cloud provider as a glorified overpriced colo, you have the worse of all worlds. You're spending more on resources and just as much babysitting infrastructure.

It's just like the bushy tailed "architects" who create layers of "factories" and "repositories" just in case their CTO wakes up one day and decides to move their companies six figure Oracle installation to Postgres. All the while creating suboptimal queries to avoid using Oracle specific functionality.

<comment><USER24> So far most major AWS instances I've paid attention to have been ultimately caused by their own Rube Goldberg inspired infra. Nothing at AWS just is something, it practically all relies on something else at AWS, and when there are outages at the apparently lowest level, the issues are wide spread.

With such convoluted systems, fat finger syndrome seems to be a not insignificant factor in their downtime, and the interdependence just makes it blow up.

But sure. If you want to trust everything to aws you go right ahead and do that.

As for rising prices - I have no idea - no company has done anything until they do it the first time. AWS doesn't really need to increase prices to be a more expensive solution for the vast majority of companies using it.

If you don't rely on proprietary aws "solutions" in the first place, there's no extra "time and cost" involved. It's just running your setup process - whatever that may be - with another location, another vendor, whatever.

Like I said if you want real HA you're going to be running in multiple vendors all the time - it's not something you're going to say "well shit aws is down again let's go sign up for azure".

You're going to sit back and eat crumpets because your site is running fine in spite of aws or azure or whoever's latest brown pants event.

And to be clear I'm not suggesting using aws is a smart move over bare metal or even just regular rented virtual machines at a normal facility - <USER3> concept of HA across vendors applies the same.

<comment><USER23> Yes because colos never have a problem with reliability and most companies have better managed infrastructure than AWS/Azure/GCP.

How many companies need higher reliability than you get from any of the cloud vendors if you architect your site to across multiple AZ's or multiple regions?

And "running your setup" means duplicating functionality on VMs where you could use managed offerings - the absolutely most expensive and least reliable way of using cloud providers and it costs more in time and resources to manage.

And you are ignoring how much money you can save by not needing as many infrastructure people.

Heck, half the time you can get away with having a much cheaper shared services/managed service provider.

Are all of the companies big and small who are using cloud vendors proprietary solutions delusional?

<comment><USER24> I see you're a graduate of the school of strawman tactics.

Of course traditional colo and rental VM hosting have outages. That's literally why I said, multiple times, if you want actual HA, you need to be using multiple vendors, regardless of what that vendor provides you - <USER4> it's bare racks or a web GUI to "push a button to make it go now". I didn't explicitly state it, but I kind of assumed you'd realise that means different vendors in different physical DCs/locations.

Complaining to me that using basic VMs in a "cloud" service is more expensive, is like complaining to a duck that water is wet. No shit, EC2 is more expensive than even a regular rented VPS/VM service from a more 'traditional' hosting service, and much more expensive than either renting or owning physical gear in a rack.

 _I_ didn't suggest you use EC2 or AWS at all - but just because you use self- managed services doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the _one_ thing a "cloud" service offers which traditional VM hosting doesn't: essentially instant spin up and time usage billing.

If you want to split your workload across two or three cloud providers, and run resources split such that you have just slightly more than 100% of the resources you need for regular operations, and then when (not if) one of those providers has an outage, you increase the capacity at the other provider(s) to handle the increased load it'll handle.

I'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved.

I don't know what motivations each company has when deciding what technologies they should use. But if you're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive.

<comment><USER23> _I 'm not even going to dignify the "we don't need infra people" comment because it's not even a bad joke any more, it's more like a warning of management who have no fucking idea what is involved._

I didn't say that you didn't need _any_ I said that you didn't need "as many". But yes, at smaller companies you can get away with no dedicated infrastructure people and just use a managed service provider. At a slightly larger company you can get away with a few people on site that manage your MSP.

So you want HA by running in multiple DCs - Exactly what happens when you run in multiple AZs and/or regions.

 _But if you 're suggesting that companies don't ever make bad choices because of (a) uninformed/misinformed management decisions, or (b) short sightedness, I'll kindly suggest you're either being very sarcastic, or you're very naive._

So you think, Netflix for instance, who started off running all of their own servers and now are AWS biggest customers were being "naive"? Instead of thinking that all of these companies are being irrational - including major enterprises - by using cloud providers and their proprietary servers, maybe they know something that you don't know?

<comment><USER24> Smaller companies don't necessarily need dedicated infra people regardless. My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know.

.... You're either not reading what I wrote or being deliberately obtuse. I said multiple vendors, in different DCs. The same vendor in two DCs is not as good as two different vendors in two different DCs.

I didn't say the companies are naive. I said _you_ are being naive, if you think companies haven't made bad decisions.

<comment><USER23> _My point is that using "a cloud" doesn't change your level of infrastructure experience/knowledge needs, it just changes what they need to know._

It very much does change what they need to know. You don't need to know how to set up a database with multi region failover, load balancers, server maintenance, switches, routers, storage, firewalls, etc. Have you ever used managed services at any scale?

Yes I've done both - hosted our own servers in house.

<comment><USER24> A good chunk of my work is getting clients out of shit situations with "The cloud" because someone drank too much of the "Cloud means no more ops" Kool aid.

For most small to medium companies, the alternative to a managed AWS service is not "lets go buy some switches".

It's "let's use open source software on rented virtual machines". The "cloud" model is only useful if your staff have no idea how a database server works. If they _do_ , it's going to make a heap of basic tasks harder (and more expensive) because you don't have access to the software itself.

I'm done discussing this with you. You can make all the same arguments everyone else does when trying to justify "the cloud", and you won't convince me, because your arguments are, as usual for this type of "discussion" comparing against the most extreme alternatives.

Right from the start you've declared literally no cost of being at the complete mercy of a single vendor for your entire infrastructure (and one with a history for dirty tactics to "win" a market)

If that approach works for you, good for you. I, and my clients once it's bitten them, aren't willing to do that.

<comment><USER23> And your method of getting them out of "shit situations" is not by showing them how to do it correctly - it's by moving them to something you know.

So now, the same people who don't have the expertise to manage a colo, are now going all of the sudden have the expertise to manage VMs and open source alternatives and know how to manage a fault tolerant multi region database and other HA setups at multiple colos?

Again, how much experience do you personally have with actually using cloud services from the big three? I've done both, I had to. The cloud vendors didn't exist when I started. Heck we had a "server room" with raised floors for our "massive" 2TB SAN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Poor Datastax. Another company killed by AWS.

<comment><USER10> Disclosure: I work for AWS, but this is my personal opinion.

I don't know of any company "killed" by AWS, and I don't think that Datastax will be either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh you don't know about them because they don't exist _anymore_.

I know at least three founders who had to shut down after AWS launched a feature at re:invent.

One went on to start another company that was acquired by Facebook in an 8 figure deal.

<comment><USER10> Were they in angel / seed rounds? Which AWS features?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This seems to be very good for people who don't want to be locked in to DDB. The prices are very similar to DynamoDB(slightly higher), and the model is pay as you go.

Prices: Managed Cassandra:

Write request: units $1.45 per million write request units

Read request: units $0.29 per million read request units

Storage: $0.30 per GB-month

Dynamo DB On Demand:

Write request: units $1.25 per million write request units

Read request: units $0.25 per million read request units

Storage: $0.25 per GB-month

<comment><USER26> Tangentially: I don't understand why they have storage costs so high for DDB still (hasn't changed since 2013) when Aurora's charging $0.10 GB-month (with 6 way redundancy at that, vs DDB's 3x)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So many questions

\- per-cell timestamps (this is IMPORTANT for online data migration with no downtime)?

\- can you choose compaction strategy?

\- access to sstables for rapid data loads/custom backups?

\- triggers?

\- UDT?

\- how will upgrades work?

\- are they using rocksandra or other techniques?

\- how about a scylladb option?

</comment><comment><USER28> They could have offered a managed ScyllaDB service and saved themselves and their customers a lot of money while staying CQL / Cassandra compatible. Or what am I missing here?

<comment><USER21> Scylla is licensed under AGPL. Most of the cloud services companies try to stay away from AGPL.

However, I think the real reason is not even that. I suspect underneath it uses modified version of DynamoDB and it's just wire compatible with Cassandra. That's how they are offering pay as you go pricing and auto- scaling.

Considering the kind of resources Apache Cassandra requires to run, I don't think they can offer this kind of pricing. This is the same company that charges $0.2 per hour to run a K8s cluster.

<comment><USER10> Disclosure: I work for AWS

The new Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service does use the open source Apache Cassandra code. The team is excited about working with the development community on Cassandra. See more at [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing- cassand...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing-cassandra- community/)

<comment><USER27> Did you guys swap out the storage guts like Rocksandra did?

Can we access the sstables of our tables?

Can we do triggers and UDF?

Can we access the timestamps at a CELL LEVEL like cassandra proper (VERY important for online/downtimeless data migration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If AWS runs everyone's open source for them as a metered service and people don't run their own software... then they can't edit that software and make contributions back into open source. The open source model breaks, no new projects except from the likes of Amazon.

AWS would have to step up open source contributions to match users' and they in fact do the opposite: they are extreme leeches compared to Google and Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER30> One of the killer features of Cassandra is cross-region replication with location aware consistency for queries. It looks like in this preview of Manages Cassandra Service they are only supporting single regions clusters. I do hope they support multi-region clusters in the future.

It would also be nice if they documented any differences from Apache Cassandra, like if Amazon MCS improves secondary indexes so they can be used in more cases.

<comment><USER27> I personally don't trust dynamodb's mat views/secondary indexes since they never explain how they maintain index coherency behind their black box.

If they do have better tech for that, I also hope they can solve the mat view problems in cassandra 3.x

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's about freakin time. Dynamo's lack of query language has always been a pain point for me. Congrats AWS team!

</comment><comment><USER17> ScyllaDB's take on the new announcement: [https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/04/managed-cassandra-on- aws...](https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/04/managed-cassandra-on-aws-our- take/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm the author of Elassandra (Elasticsearch plugin for Apache Cassandra) currently under Apache 2. I think i'm going to release the next major version of Elassandra under AGPL like ScyllaDB...

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there any reason to actually use Cassandra instead of Scylla?

<comment><USER34> Biased as a cassandra committer, but:

\- Feature sets aren't the same yet

\- History / maturity

\- License

\- Actual savings dont tend to match proposed savings

\- Development isn't driven by a startup that AWS can kill with an announcement like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm curious if this plays out like their MongoDB debacle where Amazon burned all their goodwill, only extracting value from the community and returning nothing

<comment><USER36> The contributors for Cassandra are from a group of companies that use it, not a single company that is trying to be profitable from it. I think this is a positive for the community, even if they don't contribute back since it would provide an easy getting started platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Amazon taking from open source without giving back.

<comment><USER37> [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing- cassand...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing-cassandra- community/)

<comment><USER29> Right. Total bullshit PR you're supposed to be smarter than.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Cassandra hasn't changed their license like MongoDB yet?

<comment><USER34> Cassandra is an Apache project and will always have an Apache license.

It's not a startup-driven product that is worried about AWS as a competitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd bet money this is actually dynamodb and will be insanely expensive.

<comment><USER22> Pricing is available at [https://aws.amazon.com/mcs/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/mcs/pricing/)

MCS has a very similar pricing model to on-demand mode DynamoDB ([https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/on- demand/](https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/on-demand/)) but is ~15% more expensive on all line items.

<comment><USER39> Wow super psyched I got triple downvoted when I dared to say something mean against one of the great deathstar companies. I've noticed if I ever dare to say anything mean against amazon or google I get instantly downvoted. It is more reliable than a bot.

Anyway, dynamodb is insanely expensive compared to postgresql and I'd recommend only using it when you need to expose a datastore directly to the user as it's attribute based access control is easy to use. Postgresql serverless is now a thing as well. Anyway, if you truely want a WAN datastore, exposed to web clients, with attribute based access control, run dynamo.</comment></comment></comment>


Things to do while in self isolation or quarantine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mike_knight/6-things-to-do-while-in-self-isolation-or-quarantine-1100761ad239 <comment><USER2> I've got a wife and two kids at home ....I WISH my biggest problem was boredom.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for local peer discovery solutions - <AUTHOR> I'm in an internal network with a somewhat strict firewall, looking for a protocol/aproch for local peer discovery (e.g. like bittorrent) after distributing an app with GPO.<p>I cannot use a seed server, nodes need to find other nodes by themselves. <comment><USER2> AllJoyn? PNRP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'll take a look.</comment></comment>


Ttyd 1.2.0: Share your terminal over the web - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tsl0922/ttyd <comment><USER2> Is this how people do those "watch-me-code" things? Also seems like it might pose security issues though maybe not given the sandbox nature of browsers (then again, webaockets...).

</comment><comment><USER3> A terminal emulator running inside your Web browser, which you can share as read-only (other can only view) or read-write (others can type things as well).

Very cool!</comment>


Sourcetrail 2018.1 – Visual Source Explorer for C, C++ and Java - <AUTHOR> https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/release_2018_1/ <comment><USER2> I was actually interested in Sourcetrail, but the biggest drawback for me was not being able to use it without GUI. Is there any way to get an option to work with the dependency tree from the commandline?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like an interesting idea, so I installed it and started trying it out, and it started talking about having to create projects and source groups and whatever, so I'll get back to it sometime, maybe.

Suggestion: lower the friction of getting started, have knobs to tweak behind the scenes for advanced users by all means, but the default mode should be able to do something interesting if you just point it at the root directory of your existing project.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been a user of this Sourcetrail product for 3 years and I rate this as one of the best product in reverse engineering a design out of an existing C++/C repository. In my case, it was Mozilla Firefox: I wrestled with extracting a stand-alone JS engine out of this at version 52 and later 58.

This is an AWESOME product, and is far better than using some import feature of some expensive UML modeler.

This guy who created this product did it as a Google employee.

Kudos!! And keep it up.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like Source Insight for Linux/Mac.

</comment><comment><USER6> What I would love to see is code running, extremely slowed down and in a zoomed out view of all the source files in a project.

So say I have a server running, I could make various web requests and very quickly get an intuitive sense of the major paths that the executing code takes.

If anyone's keen - please build a plugin for IntelliJ! I'd love to build it myself but have too many other projects taking up my time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any plans to support other languages like C#/Ruby/JavaScript (Node.JS)?</comment>


Zenefits Scandal Highlights Perils of Hypergrowth at Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/technology/zenefits-scandal-highlights-perils-of-hypergrowth-at-start-ups.html <comment> throwaway-zcs It's so convenient for everyone if this is all on Conrad. Mr Sacks did an excellent job of throwing Conrad under the bus, but as COO for 16 months, a board member and with a desk adjacent to Conrad and a seasoned guy, it strains credulity that he didn't know. There's some schaudenfreude here (and an anonymous account) because these guys all acted like they were smarter than everybody else. I hope regulators do a real investigation and I suspect Mr Sacks will come out more culpable than he would have you believe.

<comment><USER2> My guess on this situation... You have a group of people sitting around the table saying, "If we do nothing, the value of the company goes to zero. We have to do something visible and credible." Conrad had to agree to jumping on his sword - as the largest shareholder, he has the most to lose if the company goes under. So he jumps on the sword, and lets everyone kick him while he's down, because it increases the likelihood that the company survives.

I have no real information though, so for all I know he could have been stabbed in the back instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting how Uber, Airbnb and Draftkings blatantly broke laws and won. They set the precedent that if you're growing fast enough, the laws will change to fit you.

Didn't work out that way for Zenefits. They seemingly lost.

<comment><USER4> I think the reason that {Uber, AirBNB, DraftKings} succeeded in flouting the law is that they operated in industries that are consumer-facing, and where the cost of regulation is obvious to consumers.

Many people understand that taxi regulations (for the most part) negatively affect them, and in many cases are extremely frustrated with them: see Washington, DC. Most people aren't familiar with and don't care about the company that manages their health insurance, and as a result there's little public support.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, but I'd phrase it a bit differently: when it comes to taxis and apartments, regulations are bad for _you_ , the consumer, and good for the people in your community (taxi drivers, neighbors), while in insurance, regulations directly protect the consumer.

Because people (especially in the US) couldn't care less about other people, regulation that annoys consumers is "bad", and the consumers then defend the companies breaking those particular laws. Those companies exploit the fact that in _every_ industry, consumers always outnumber providers (or conversely, every person consumes from many more industries than those where they provide), and so the disregard for this kind of regulation will always work. Every new company will get consumers to gang up on the far fewer incumbent providers until they break the regulation that protects them, and so on, industry by industry.

It's a little like the robber barons, who used every new wave of immigrants to beat up the previous generation of immigrants who tried to unionize, and then hired the new ones in their place... that is, until the next wave of immigrants. Except the new way of doing this is far more effective, because it's always easy to obtain a majority that supports you _and_ feel like they're doing the right thing at the same time.

<comment><USER6> For the most part I think you're spot-on, although it's worth emphasizing the nuance that not ALL taxi/hotel regulations are bad for the consumer.

Most of the AirBnB and Uber horror stories you hear are things that don't happen, or happen far less relative to the overall volume, in a world of licensed taxis and professional hotels/B&Bs.

Does the good of current regulations outweigh the bad? Likely not, in many cases. But there are reasons (at least some of) these regulations exist outside of capitalism being terrible and the successful trying (and succeeding) at pushing out competition.

<comment> nommm-nommm I would argue that many (most?) housing regulations are good for the consumer. My landlord has to provide me with a safe and structurally sound place to live, which is good for me. If my heat breaks in the winter he's obligated to fix it, he can't evict me and leave me on the streets on a whim, or turn off my water if I am late on the rent, etc. Laws around security deposits are usually good for the consumer as well. Nobody wants what is referred to as a "slumlord."

Landlords often are annoyed about regulations (and some tenants unfortunately abuse them) but many came about because of the abusive practices of the slumlords.

Our society deems having a safe place to live pretty essential so landlords have a massive amount of power over their tenants if unchecked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like a recurring theme in these "scandals" is that if you put too much pressure on your executives, they end up either quitting or doing something they shouldn't be doing in order to keep up with your demands.

Another example is with VW and their diesel emissions.

I feel like people just have a difficult time saying they were wrong or pushing back and saying they can't do something. I am guilty of this myself.

<comment><USER8> "You" who?

The system can be as rotten as you like, but in any particular case, at some point, someone said, "Let's start cutting corners."

<comment><USER9> > The system can be as rotten as you like, but in any particular case, at some > point, someone said, "Let's start cutting corners."

Yes, but... Normally things like this build up gradually from "just one step" on something that is patently stupid.

And, let's face it, if you can get a certification from an online course, it's stupid, prima facie.

So, you need to get one more person online to file benefits. Get them certified. Okay, these certifications are stupid and any idiot can sit through these. Okay, let's get the same idiot to sit through each one. Okay, we're still not getting certified fast enough. Okay, hire more idiots to sit through this. Okay, but they'll have to learn this. Okay, let's put some programmers on this so we only need one idiot to do things on multiple sessions. Okay, now that we have the macro, we don't need the idiot anymore. etc.

If the feds weren't clamping down on this, everybody would be singing their praises like Uber and AirBnB.

It's all about the bandwagon, baby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article:

" _Growth broke stuff. To increase revenue, the company moved beyond small businesses to customers with hundreds of employees — and the software struggled to keep up. Instead of pausing to fix bugs, Zenefits simply hired more employees to fill in where the software failed, including repurposing product managers for manual data entry._ "

From a different article about the downfall of Target Canada[1], which also suffered from trying to ramp up too fast:

" _Getting the details from suppliers largely fell on the young merchandising assistants... "There was never any talk about accuracy," says a former employee. "You had these people we hired, straight out of school, pressured to do this insane amount of data entry, and nobody told them it had to be right."_ "

Don't underestimate the proliferation of data entry jobs, especially when there is chaotic growth/lack of a proper plan.

1\. [http://www.marketingmag.ca/?p=166300&preview=true](http://www.marketingmag.ca/?p=166300&preview=true)

<comment><USER11> >"You had these people we hired, straight out of school, pressured to do this insane amount of data entry, and nobody told them it had to be right.""

My first guess is that it was worse than this. The people doing data entry who took the time to do it right were likely showing up as doing worse on what ever metrics were being ran and were replaced by people who were fast but error prone. Bad metrics leading to bad optimizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder why "The Macro" doesn't also highlight the perils of clueless regulators imposing moronic laws on HR departments.

The specific law that Zenefits violated was a law insisting that before selling insurance, your employees need to sit at a computer and click "next" for 52 hours. Once they've clicked "next" sufficiently many times, only then are they permitted to take the exam to determine whether they have enough knowledge to sell insurance.

Shouldn't this scandal also highlight the perils of a regulatory state?

<comment><USER13> Modest amounts of wasted time? Oh no.

I suppose one way to estimate how onerous this requirement is (I agree that to the extent it is arbitrary that it is dumb) would be to compare how much compensation the insurance license makes available to how much compensation spending the equivalent time learning a skill like welding makes available.

(I think most people wouldn't be very good at welding after 50 hours of training and practice)

<comment><USER12> All you propose measuring is the _individual_ benefit to sitting through training. That's a terrible way to measure the social cost of a bad regulation.

The social cost is 52 hours of productive output from moderately skilled employees. (Or moderately less - if learning the material takes 20 hours, then the waste is 32 hours assuming people can simultaneously learn the material and click.)

The right thing to do is simply make people take the test, and if the test isn't accurately measuring people's insurance selling ability, fix the test.

<comment><USER14> And what's the social cost of unlicensed, untrained people selling insurance? What's the societal cost of people who have not studied selling insurance that they might not understand?

<comment><USER12> I don't see a very high social cost from licensed insurance salespeople who passed the exam selling insurance. Do you? If so, what is it?

Again, note that we are discussing _spending 52 hours clicking through a powerpoint_ before you are allowed to take the test to get the license.

<comment><USER14> "I don't see a very high social cost from licensed insurance salespeople who passed the exam selling insurance. Do you? If so, what is it?"

How do you know that they passed the exam? They told you?

"Again, note that we are discussing spending 52 hours clicking through a powerpoint before you are allowed to take the test to get the license."

No, we are not.

<comment><USER12> All anyone has accused Zenefits of doing is using a macro to prevent people from being auto-logged out of training. E.g.: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let- in...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let-insurance- brokers-fake-training#.qmexedRMl)

 _The Macro functioned to keep a person logged into the course and prevented the person from being logged out for inactivity. The Macro did not advance through the required material or quizzes in the education course — the Macro only kept the person logged in. The Macro only pertained to the prelicensing education course and did not affect the broker exam taken later._

If you have even accusations of some other activity (let alone evidence of it), go ahead and post it.

<comment><USER15> Have you not read any of the articles? The cheating on the time is just one issue. They had unlicensed brokers selling insurance in two states, which is an actual crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rhetoric aside, isn't this really just another example of "... Highlights Perils of Hard-Charging CEOs"? It's that simple. We can wander far from fast- growing startups and find the same kind of conduct anywhere in business.

The guy running my corner grocery store decided to set up a sit-down cafe without getting a city license. The folks running a nearby office suite are in no hurry to put in city-mandated sprinklers. Business founders/owners like to get things done without asking permission. That's how they roll. Trying to invoke unicorn valuations, VCs, etc. is silly. It's a classic case of finding an exciting anecdote and trying to attach causality theories after the fact.

<comment><USER17> > The guy running my corner grocery store decided to set up a sit-down cafe > without getting a city license.

The guy at the corner grocery store isn't discussing my employee's private medical records with me in between slamming down hits on the beer bong.

<comment><USER18> Are you referencing something in particular with this beer bong comment, or just being hyberbolic?

<comment><USER19> Reasonably sure it is exaggeration for comic effect. We are not in a court room.

<comment><USER8> Bam! mdonahoe is overruled!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Being good at starting a company and raising funds is no guarantee of being any good at running a company. Add to that growth from 15 to 1600 in two years is also likely to be a massive failure. Add to that insane pressure from investors to do the impossible (that you promised). I've seen a lot of people crumble at a much smaller size.

</comment><comment><USER21> Come on now, NYT, there is virtually no evidence of corruption at startups being any worse than any other business or human endeavor. NYT, you're just spreading FUD because people look to you for guidance and you need to respond to their fear.

Yes, these guys (Zenefits) were, in one area, dishonest and cheated. But it's not like Cigna, PacTel, BoA, Citizens and zillion other companies are paragons of virtue. Nevermind Volkswagen.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_collapses_and_scandals)

</comment><comment><USER22> Alternative title: "Zenefits Scandal Highlights Perils of Excessive Occupational Licensure". What exactly is the purpose of requiring a license for selling insurance? If consumers desire some assurance of quality in their insurance brokers, then certification, not licensure, would be sufficient. The only justification for licensure over certification is a paternalistic one: consumers are simply too ignorant to choose their own insurance brokers, even if some are certified and some are not. As Milton Friedman said in Chap 9 of Capitalism and Freedom, this argument "amounts to saying that we in our capacity as voters must protect ourselves in our capacity as consumers against our own ignorance."

This isn't to say that Zenefits hasn't made a huge misstep for seemingly little benefit (bypassing a 56 hour course?), but I wish there was some discussion of the absurdity of the law that was broken alongside the bashing of Zenefits for breaking it.

<comment><USER23> Insurance is _important_.

Unlike many other consumer products you really don't have any idea what you're buying until after you've bought it. Making an incorrect or misled choice in health insurance is sufficient -- literally -- to completely ruin your life financially in a matter of hours, or cause unnecessary death via untreated illness.

If you want to claim that you can read a health insurance policy binder and understand it be my guest. I am a frequent writer and editor of technical literature and capable of writing code and I have a pilots license and I find health insurance policies almost incomprehensible.

We make sure that you don't get a bad _haircut_ by requiring licenses for barbers. You can't fix my sink or chimney without licensing. We require licensing and testing to act on someone's behalf in the legal system, and in nearly all sales of securities, and of financial products, of which insurance is one mind you.

If Zenefits wanted to make an in-public argument that these rules are not necessary they were free to do so. I would have disagreed, and I'm sure others would have shared my opinion. Maybe they could have won the argument.

They didn't do that. They aren't righteous crusaders passionate about consumer choices and regulatory issues, they're opportunistic business people who broke the law and committed fraud instead of following the rules or working to change them.

<comment><USER12> Since you would have disagreed, can you explain why you think 52 hours of clicking "next" is a necessary step in becoming a broker?

Zenefits employees did pass the exam, and they possess the knowledge you believe is necessary. It's just that the law requires 52 hours of clicking before you are even permitted to take the exam. Why do you think this is a good law?

<comment><USER23> You're being disingenuous.

The requirement isn't "clicking next for 52 hours" it's spending that amount of time studying an online course. You're required to actually pay attention for 52 hours and then certify that you did.

For another example, the requirement inherent in a multiple choice exam isn't a matter of "filling out a semi random sequence of the letters A, B, C, and D" it's _knowing the answers to the test._

The filling out the letters is a signal that you know. Signals aren't perfect, in that example if you don't know but copied answers from someone else that's cheating and the signal would be unreliable then, and you've subverted the actual intended requirement.

The requirement in this case is _spending about a week of your life actually studying this material_ and the clicking of the next button as well is a signal that you did it.

Don't confuse the means with ends. You could have argued that the amount of hours spent studying the material is also a useless metric. But that's a more nuanced argument that you haven't made, and one that has defensible positions on both sides.

Clearly clicking next isn't a meaningful requirement, but so what, it's not actually the requirement. Spending time studying is, and they cheated and lied about it.

<comment><USER12> What the law actually requires is clicking for 52 hours.

But lets take your claim as a premise; why is it important that a person spend time learning? Suppose two people know the material equally well, but one of them learned it faster than the other. Why is that a good regulation? How does it benefit consumers to make it illegal to learn things fast?

I know a former algebraic geometer (lots of category theory) who learned Haskell very rapidly. Would it benefit consumers of his services to pass a law saying he needs to learn Haskell at a slower rate comparable to a RoR hipster without a math PhD?

<comment><USER23> I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have no idea what the law actually requires in detail. It's ok neither did I. Here's an example of what it looks like, there is a _lot_ more on the linked pages, which collectively comprise the actual requirements:

[https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/ID813F6A0622011E4A...](https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/ID813F6A0622011E4A9828577DD5F1BF2?viewType=FullText&originationContext=documenttoc&transitionType=CategoryPageItem&contextData=\(sc.Default\))

> why is it important that a person spend time learning? Suppose two people > know the material equally well, but one of them learned it faster than the > other. Why is that a good regulation? How does it benefit consumers to make > it illegal to learn things fast?

I don't know. But I do know that basically every educational institution requires some level of engagement measured in time. You can't just pass tests to get an undergrad degree or a PhD either. The requirement to spend actual time is hardly cruel and unusual.

I also know that the requirements were clear enough to be known to Zenefits and they willfully evaded them.

What is the difference between a Harvard graduate in Economics and someone who attended and completed all the requirements for an Econ degree but was short one art elective class and never got a degree? Should he just fudge his job applications since the art class isn't important?

What's the difference between someone assigned 100 hours of court ordered community service who did it and someone who went back to court with forged paperwork saying they did it?

In all the examples, and Zenefits as well, the difference is that the person is committing fraud, is lying, and is not ethical.

Cheating on requirements isn't the same as arguing to change the rules, regardless of how confused you continue to pretend to be about it.

<comment><USER24> _You can 't just pass tests to get an undergrad degree_

Yes you can. Almost every school has a procedure for taking a test or convincing a professor that you have the knowledge the class provides. You still pay the cost of the course, but do not actually attend it.

Getting my degree many, many years after entering the field, I skipped a huge swath of undergrad classes this way. Stuff like non-computer related classes was all that I needed to do 'in person'.

In other words, I skipped 'pressing buttons' for a large chunk of time due to fact that I knew the material and could prove it.

The main difference to the above being that the school recognized that it was possible for a student to understand the core material completely without taking the class, and the above rules do not admit that possibility.

<comment><USER25> _Getting my degree many, many years after entering the field_

So would you say you had experiential learning in the subject matter of the classes you were being allowed to skip after demonstrating both evidence of this experiential learning and the attendant competency?

Testing out of a course due to earned knowledge is different from passing a multiple choice exam with Cliff Notes awareness of the material.

<comment><USER24> _is different from passing a multiple choice exam_

Some of the classes did just have multiple choice tests that would have been easy enough to 'Cliff'. Though it's not really relevant to larger discourse.

That still doesn't change the facts of the original situation. The test is the determining factor of whether or not they 'completed' the course. Indeed, someone who 'Cliff'ed the notes, and passed the test, and watched Netflix on a second screen while pushing all of the right buttons would still be accepted. Which is the ultimate failure here. Either the time limit is necessary and can't be skipped (due to the physical limitations of some inherent process), or the time limit is artificial and the actual possession of knowledge is sufficient.

Who is served by putting an artificial time limit in place that does not actually prove knowledge of the material?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wait, all it did was prevent auto-logout? That's it? Seriously?

<comment><USER27> It does seem to be low scale cheating but a culture of writing and distributing internal software to cheat on tests required for certification sounds toxic.

<comment><USER22> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they were cheating on the broker license course, not the exam. It would be similar to skipping a class with an attendance policy because you already know the material.

<comment><USER14> It still shows an incredible amount of unethical behavior, and more of this pattern of "I'm a startup! I'm special! The law shouldn't apply to me!" Special snowflake syndrome, just exhibited by a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If we are to use this [0] definition, then "Hypergrowth at" can be omitted. It seems like a better title would include "in highly regulated industries."

It's interesting to note that the essay only includes discussion of law as it relates to defending startups from incumbents, not as a caveat to the advice: "The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place." Is it the case that Zenefits merely failed to grow fast enough to present a more credible threat to state prosecutors?

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> This article is terrible. The takeaway is the hypergrowth ultimately overcomes. Cleaning up the mess will be comparatively easy. Zenefits flouting regulations was silly and didn't appear to be necessary. With Sacks at the helm, a huge and growing business and $500m in the bank, Zenefits is very well-positioned.

<comment><USER30> You may be right, but it isn't that one-sided.

1) Sacks was COO when all of this happened. These were specifically lapses in policy and operations. Are you sure he is immune to the repercussions?

2) "[H]uge and growing" as of last year. Every one of these articles discourages new companies from signing up and talented people from joining the company. Trust is a tremendous factor in health insurance, especially when there are many other options on the market.

If I have other options, why go to a company under investigation with a horrendous culture?

3) Based on the state of their operations (poor), company culture (dismal), and customer feedback (even worse), I would push back on them being "well- positioned."

$500 million can buy you a lot, but if culture, brand, and operations were that easy, Comcast could turn itself into a modern company in a few months.

<comment><USER29> 1\. Sacks has a sterling reputation (and a JD from U of Chicago). He's immune.

2\. Zenefits now has a PayPal CEO, exec staffer and board member plus the backing of A16Z. It is an attractive to place to work and obtain services from.

3\. I think those things will come around (if they are even as bad as you opine).

Comcast is a 50 year-old, former monopoly, $140b company. SO not only a bad comparison but a terrific outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Regarding unicorns (> U$1 billion valuation), the U.S should implement certain regulations.

These startups have market caps that are larger than thousands of public companies that go through several laws and openly disclosure their financial information.

Not only does this lack information hurt shareholders that are not "part of the club", but also stakeholders that rely on the company in other matters.

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674420](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674420)

"Regulation of unicorns should recognize that outsized power."

<comment><USER32> I'm not actually sure I agree with this.

Consider that the people & companies investing in pre-IPO U$1B companies are _extreme_ expert investors. They take the risk on.

Now if we're talking about post IPO, then actual financial regulations kick in and market-traders are afforded the protections that they have now (which is still sometimes significant)

Imposing additional regs on a 'privately held' company simply because they accepted enough money to give them a U$1B valuation punishes them for growth.

Additionally, valuations are sometimes voodoo calculations for example (and someone else can check my math) but is someone gave me $1 for 1/10,000,000 of my company, wouldn't that be a billion dollar valuation?

Obviously not a _credible_ one - but - where's the line? $1M for 1/1000? It's still not a billion real dollars.

If you look at linkedin's valuation it's based on current potential for future revenue. But revenue that is like 10 or 20 years in the future. (reference: my foggy recollection of Peter Thiel's lecture in Sam Altman's startup school)

Maybe I'm confused as to how valuations actually work.

<comment><USER14> "Consider that the people & companies investing in pre-IPO U$1B companies are extreme expert investors"

And regular employees getting paid in options.

"Imposing additional regs on a 'privately held' company simply because they accepted enough money to give them a U$1B valuation punishes them for growth."

No, it doesn't. It shows an acceptance of reality.

<comment><USER32> > And regular employees getting paid in options.

Ahhh... That makes more sense to me.

> No, it doesn't. It shows an acceptance of reality.

Fair point. Consider my mind swayed.

I'm not sure valuation is the right meter stick, but as another point in the thread, total $$ raised _might_ be closer to the right answer.

There is probably something there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Had some personal experience in bending the rules (a very ugly experience) - and its better to follow the laws, even if the laws don't make sense.

In a B2B business especially, follow very closely and to the letter.

</comment><comment><USER34> It is unfortunate that the public doesn't know much about insurance or how it's regulated. While what Zenefits did was wrong in several cases, there are some important things to understand: \- This macro program didn't have anything to do with whether an agent would/could pass an insurance exam. That's separate and in order for someone to practice, they need to pass the test. \- If this training program were so critical to understanding and effectively selling insurance, why wouldn't all state adopt it? \- The unfortunate fact is that the details you must study and know to pass the test have very little do with how you will sell insurance. The study packets, courses etc. do not prepare you in any way to sell these products better. Actually a lot of the test talks about annuities and things completely unrelated to medical insurance. \- The licensing issues largely relate to non- resident licenses, not the actual resident license where the test is required to pass. It's a common practice in brokerages across the US to get licensed when business is closed or about to be closed in the different state. \- If you want a comparable, lawyers obviously have to pass the bar to practice. But they can actually practice legal advice before ever passing the bar as long as they are working under a licensed attorney. This is how many pro-bono cases are worked by students in law school etc.

</comment><comment><USER35> So what will Zenefits eventual business model look like if they survive this ?

I don't think they can be an insurance broker; customers would have to be incredibly stupid to buy insurance from them.

If they are going to be an HR software company, then do they even deserve that kind of valuation, as their current valuation seems to be base on an expectation of hypergrowth. HR s/w companies rarely have hypergrowth , what with SAP and Oracle owning large chunks of the enterprise market.

</comment><comment><USER36> What I found particularly illuminating was this:

'Some investors said Mr. Dalgaard was as instrumental as Mr. Conrad in pushing for steep revenue targets, and that both men's ambition pointed in the same direction — toward hypergrowth.'

(in fairness, later on, the article says this:

Another person familiar with the board disputed this, saying Mr. Dalgaard, who formerly ran the cloud software company SuccessFactors, was among those asking Mr. Conrad to restrain Zenefits' growth plans and fix the culture. )

This is the same person that had a glowing profile written about them in the NYT:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/business/lars-dalgaard- bui...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/business/lars-dalgaard-build-trust- by-daring-to-show-that-youre-human.html)

With this beautiful paragraph: 'I learned so many things from my dad, but in particular he taught me about ethics and that there is no easy way to get to your goal. You've got to be like Lambeau Field in Green Bay and build for bad weather. That's basically the only way to achieve any type of success.

But you often see with some companies, particularly start-ups, that they're telling themselves and others a bit of a story, and not being honest about what the real issues are. Instead of taking all that energy and focusing on the core outcomes, they're just glazing over it and hoping it will be O.K. There is no such thing as a quick fix.'

There's no way to know what the real truth actually is - but, wow, that's quite a contrast between the two articles.

<comment><USER37> The most telling quote for me was "The two men also differed over whether to address employee morale by re-pricing stock options to the new lower valuation, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Conrad favored the move, but Mr. Dalgaard believed it would train employees to expect a re- pricing any time the company's fortunes changed."

So the "we support founders" mantra may also mean we support founders and ourselves at the expense of employees. Despite all Conrad's miss-steps, such as the ill-mannered Quora response, I now have a new respect for him. At least he was trying to fight for the employees. Sad to see a16z in this light. With fantasy valuations crashing to reality, repricing options should become the standard. Or you can follow the current SV playbook and hope employees don't really understand what's going on with equity.

<comment><USER38> Ok, so I have a new interview question for any startup job: "Will you reprice options should valuations decrease?" They say No, I walk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> At the center of this 'scandal' is a program that prevents auto log-out during license training.

Being licensed: Sitting at a computer for 52 hours and clicking on it before passing an exam.

What a waste of time. Pretty much an entire week and a half of full time staring at a screen to get a license to sell insurance. They were just skating bureaucracy, plenty of companies do this.

<comment><USER40> At the centre of this scandal is a company selling insurance with unlicensed brokers.

That means people advising others on what insurance to buy where their health is concerned who didn't know what the hell they were doing.

The software made to skirt the licencing requirements is only a subset of the overall issue.

Frankly, I'm getting a little tired with the group of commentators on here that think its a-ok for a company like zenefits to tell people "Sure, you're covered for that in this policy" when they frankly have no idea if that is the case.

Selling insurance advice without a license is exactly like selling financial services advice without a license. And both actions are illegal for very good reasons.

<comment><USER41> I worked with mortgage brokers for a while. They had a big exam, all complicated and they were supposed to be able to advise.

What they actually did was put 5 figures into a computer and pick the mortgage nearish the top with the biggest commission.

I have no idea how complicated health insurance is in the US as I'm from the UK but I'm willing to bet £100 that's what 90% of health insurer brokers do too.

<comment><USER40> >I have no idea how complicated health insurance is in the US

Exactly.

<comment><USER41> Your comment just drips with enlightening anecdotes and interesting exposition explaining how picking health insurance is so much more complicated than all the other financial advice that today is basically little more than:

Put client's answers in brokerage program

Choose highest commission in top 10

Recommend product

<comment><USER40> 1\. Mortgage brokerages are not financial advice brokerages. A mortgage broker finds the best deal for the consumer, usually for products that are more or less the same.

2\. A financial planner or investment advisory is about helping a client gauge what product works best for their particular situation, and being able to communicate the very real downsides of certain courses of action.

3\. An insurance broker acts in a very similar way to #2, in that there are some very real concerns that may not be obvious to the layperson that the broker should be providing advice on. For example: what a health insurance product covers, and why (for example) not providing coverage for children in your female dominated company could result in very real losses to your employees, and by extension, you as a company.

>Put client's answers in brokerage program; Choose highest commission in top 10; Recommend product

..is PRECISELY the type of thing that licensing is designed to protect the consumer from.

Group health insurance is extremely complex, particularly in the US where it is really the ONLY health insurance a person has. These are people's lives we're talking about here...you can't wait until you HAVE cancer to find out that your plan doesn't cover it.

The only thing this entire thread is showing is exactly why not having licensed, knowledgeable professionals advising on insurance is a very real concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It is very interesting to read about other approaches for growth. For example, Google waited patiently several years until a business model worked.

Imagine Google starting today with a protoversion of PageRank.

</comment><comment><USER43> it's a matter of risk.

when you're trying to be a billion dollar company, you have to take big risks. in that context, the risk of getting caught for breaking the law becomes palatable.

when you're trying to create a stable, profitable, but more modest sized company, that risk becomes a threat to your business.

it's a big problem when these types of risks start to make sense from a business perspective, because it's the public, not the people that create this environment, that end up suffering.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't understand what all the outrage is about. The online training keeps you logged in for a period of inactivity that COUNTS towards your 52 hours, which is perfectly legitimate. All they did was create and use a tool which extends this period of inactivity. How in the world is it that this is outragous in any way? This is a very minor fault, certainly not worthy of all the sensationalism that NY times has created, once again.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Zenefits scandal highlights the perils of breaking the law at startups"

</comment><comment><USER46> >Mr. Conrad had overseen a company that had become _derelict_ in its culture and ethics

Zoolander much?</comment>