DigitalOcean is laying off staff - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/17/digitalocean-layoffs/ <comment><USER2> Hey folks,

Cofounder of DigitalOcean here.

Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number.

Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here.

We are not prepping the company for sale.

As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 months and leadership changes that created competing directions in the business, which Yancey our new CEO, is now addressing.

We are not running out of money, nor do we have an immediate need to raise capital, and the lay-offs aren't related to any sort of "cost-cutting".

We last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have been since our founding.

There are no profitability issues with $5/mo customers as the unit economics are the same as larger accounts. As we have grown we have added more products and features so that scaling teams and companies can also be successful on DigitalOcean, but we are not changing our commitment to the individual developer and those who are just getting started.

Lastly, it pains me to see people let go, having been on both sides of the table, it honestly just really sucks.

<comment><USER3> DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends.

Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning.

Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them on).

And now with the new managed offerrings for the CORE technologies people need (databases, caches, K8S etc.) I'm happy to see that I can start being a little more productive with my side projects.

So, in essence I want to thank the people at DigitalOcean for what they've built and continue to build.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing.

Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology.

The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job.

I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made.

Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community".

She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest.

So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person.

That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.

<comment><USER3> I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was.

It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing.

I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted.

It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially.

Also, have a great weekend.

<comment><USER4> > I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to > those amazing tutorials and documentations.

Seconded.

<comment><USER5> more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.

<comment><USER6> I've actually added the site into searches for some things, since the tutorials are usually better. Though some should maybe be updated to current versions now and then, it's still overall much better than the rest of the internet in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan.

That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave broken programs running that chew through this precious resource for no reason. If you throttle them, they'll complain.

Then there's the support. Handling a support ticket costs you at least $3 in salary and benefits (remember, your typical customer pays $5/mo), and people will demand that you help them fix their broken MySQL server or whatever. They'll yell and threaten when you tell them that this is outside the scope of what you can do.

And don't forget security. Your customers will install broken-ass Wordpress sites and forget to upgrade them for 5 years. Then a worm sweeps through and now a whole bunch of them have been pwned and are mining cryptocurrency. Those pwned customers are complaining and demanding that you fix it, and the regular customers are also upset because of slowness due to the "noisy neighbor" problem inherent to all VPSes.

Speaking of which, preventing one VPS from hogging all the CPU or disk bandwidth is harder than it looks. The two dominant software platforms are Xen and KVM, and neither gives you great tools for dealing with disk bandwidth. Limiting CPU is much easier, but there's still the problem that you're overselling. Which is fine until half the VPSes on your machine are trying to mine Ethereum.

On the bright side: half your customers will buy the VPS, leave it running, and forget about it for years at a time. That's what makes the $5/mo business model work out.

Anyway, I do hope they can become profitable! They run a much better operation than the incumbents they replaced (slicehost, etc).

<comment><USER8> How is AWS so profitable then?

<comment><USER9> They charge you for _everything_. Data transfer in: charge, data transfer out: charge, DNS lookup: charge, storing a file: charge, etc.

It's one of those situations where it's a death by a thousand cuts. When you're cost provisioning, you can figure out the big stuff, i.e., we need 25 EC2s m4a.2xlarge instances with 40TB of S3 storage, and a 2TB Aurora instance. But once you get the bill, you start seeing the costs of ELBs, NAT gateways, inter-region transfers, etc. Individually, these costs aren't significant, but in aggregate, they can make up a health chunk of your monthly bill.

Plus, their managed solutions are fucking expensive. We moved a self-managed ELK cluster to an AWS-managed one and the costs went up by a factor of two.

<comment><USER8> This is why I don't use AWS for personal projects (S3 is the only one I'd consider using). EC2 for example is significantly more expensive than a Digital Ocean droplet.

<comment><USER10> Even S3 can hit random expenses when you least expect it. I let a process go crazy and create billions of objects in S3. Of course AWS was happy to charge me for all of this, but what I wasn't expecting was the charge just to list the objects to delete them. I spent more than $100 just to empty the stupid bucket out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm rooting for them as one of the best potential guardians against the cloud provider market becoming even more of an oligopoly.

Cloud resources should be a commodity. Providers should offer compute resources, persistent storage, load balancers, and MAYBE a small handful of other services.

The way Digital Ocean succeeds against AWS is by aligning itself with this idea, and competing on specialization. Forget competing with lambda; let me run my own serverless application. Don't worry about IAM; let me configure LDAP. Don't waste developer hours on service-ifying the latest NoSQL storage trend; write high-quality tutorials explaining how users can do it themselves.

And most importantly, continue to invest into open source and community resources. There are developers willing to fight the good fight against proprietary walled gardens like AWS/GCP/Azure, but it has to get easier. Configuring HA postgres is harder than paying for RDS. Paying for GKE is more feature complete than using rancher or kubeadm to make my own kubernetes cluster. This friction is an existential threat when Azure can make my problems go away for cash.

I don't know if Digital Ocean can succeed against the big cloud providers, but if they do it won't be because they made a better platform; it'll be by playing a totally different game.

<comment><USER12> I think they would benefit a lot from adding a thin Heroku-like PaaS layer while keeping the option to "build from scratch".

<comment><USER13> That's why they acquired Nanobox, presumably.

<comment><USER12> Never heard about Nanobox up until now. Interesting, let's see what comes out of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (Throwaway, obviously)

I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a ton this year, so that jives.

<comment><USER15> It could easily be both a re-org and dressing the profitability numbers prepping for a sale.

The fact that its mostly management is encouraging though.

<comment><USER16> I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.

<comment><USER17> I dont think an existing cloud provider makes sense since they've all ramped their efforts pretty hard to compete with each other. I would suspect AAPL would be the buyer. It is a big risk for all iOS apps to be backed by infrastructure belonging to other companies they compete with in consumer devices. I think AAPL would want to make another option available.

<comment><USER18> I guess iCloud is hosted on AWS? I never actually looked. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue for Apple though. And if it did happen I guess that wouldn't be so bad, I mean it could be worse. Oracle could decide to get into the cloud business by buying out DO.

<comment><USER19> If I remember correctly, iCloud is actually hosted by Google.

<comment><USER15> This was never the case. They are self hosted and for a while they hosted a fair bit of data on Azure & AWS. Not sure if they still use Azure and AWS, but iCloud has never been on Google's infra. (Other Apple content has been served by Google at various times, maps being the big/ obvious one)

<comment><USER19> As of 2018, I believe they moved it to Google[1][2].

[1]: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google- clo...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google-cloud- platform-icloud-confirmation)

[2]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses- googl...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-google-cloud- for-icloud.html)

<comment><USER20> They are hosted on all three, AWS, GCP, and Azure as well as on their own Server in their own DC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work.

That being said, and I can't put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you "graduate" to just using one of the major cloud providers.

<comment><USER22> I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

<comment><USER23> Not sure if it's applicable in this case as I'm not a DO user, but this is definitely a thing. For instance, think about web forms for anything 'official' \- it's almost as if the worse the UX is, the older the tech it seems to be built on even, the more legit it seems. It's a really counter intuitive effect.

<comment><USER24> Then you find out about some guy in Japan accessing the web form via fax. What people don't often talk about old stuff is the long tail ecosystems compatible with it

<comment><USER23> Oh completely agree, not at all saying using old tech is bad in any way and it's completely clear why offical public service stuff prefers it. Just saying it's interesting how this then makes old-looking stuff seem more official, because you're used to everything official generally looking about 10 years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money.

If they're close to being profitable (likely given their past fund raising, and how long its been), why would they want to sell more of their business?

They may also want to finally go public. 8 years is a long time to wait for a return. And it seems to me the stock market is tired of these unprofitable unicorns doing IPOs (at the moment anyway).

<comment><USER26> You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same time period.

I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a hard time vs. just restructuring to do some housekeeping... I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.

<comment><USER27> > I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as > AWS these days.

They aren't competing in the same space

<comment><USER28> They most certainly are, especially given the managed products DO has introduced recently (object storage, DB, Kubernetes, and load balancer). They definitely want a slice of Amazon's pie.

<comment><USER27> DO is still far from being a "premium" provider. Sure they're starting to offer a subset of AWS services, but if you compare their prices, they aren't aiming for the same type of costumers.

Easiest way to compare is bandwidth costs: AWS/Azure/Google Cloud charge around $0.05/GB at their cheapest prices. DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr charge around $0.005/GB (and it comes with a VPS bundled).

If you're doing anything bandwidth intensive (several PB a month), one is viable, the other is not

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> WakaTime switched to DigitalOcean and we're loving their performance to cost ratio. Their compute droplet machines are much better than AWS ec2[1], especially if you need low-latency SSD IOPs. The only AWS services we still use are S3 and Route53, because S3's performance is better than Spaces[2]. Really hope this doesn't spell bad weather ahead.

[1] DigitalOcean Droplets > AWS Ec2 (based on our production metrics)

[2] AWS S3 > DigitalOcean Spaces (based on our production metrics)

<comment><USER30> I tell you what... If it weren't for Route53 being as good as it is and getting all of our domains sucked into it's gaping maw, we would be much more likely to hop to different cloud vendors. It is very nice having the entire enterprise tech stack managed through a single vendor when you are a tiny company like we are.

That said, I am losing patience with how slow the EC2 instances are considering what we pay. I've got management asking increasingly-probing questions about our monotonically-incrementing AWS bill. All of this would be fine if perceived/actual performance weren't also dropping for us over time (I.e. intel spectre mitigations). I can almost feel how the AMZN profit margins are squeezing us at this point... It's almost a weekly conversation now with Azure or even a return to on-prem being brought up. "Do we move now or later? Is the frying pan hot enough yet?"

Our organization is small enough to comfortably fit onto a single 2S 128 core AMD Rome system. Why shouldn't we just lease out a half-rack somewhere local (I.e. near the developers who can care for it) and then stick a few of their systems, a switch, router and management hardware in there? This all began on- prem with us moving to AWS, and after 6 years in the cloud circus it's starting to feel like a safe place to return to. Perhaps we will just move our compute to on-prem and continue to use AWS for backups and DNS. All I know is my TR 2950X workstation can compile our solution ~10x faster than our Jenkins server which is running on a T2.Large. Imagine giving Jenkins 32 Rome cores. This is something we could actually afford if we owned the hardware.

There are also some other compelling factors for us to consider moving back on-prem. Emerging technologies like Blazor create a strong argument for keeping your workers near the datacenter. Very few businesses truly require more than 1 physical datacenter. Yes, you might also have a DR site, but you can arguably run all of the functions for 95%+ of businesses out of a single physical location. Also, having a physical location where you can hook up any arbitrary hardware means we could also pull our iOS build machine in-house and use proper high-end Apple hardware on the same local network as the rest of our infrastructure.

<comment><USER31> For what it's worth, I think that was the premise of hybrid on-prem and multicloud. If you can trade-off availability in your stateless compute and worker layer and you're fine mostly managing it on prem, the cost savings could be very compelling. However, you'll still pay for bandwidth, which is the real killer and recurring expenditure. At the end of the day, there's no getting around that unless you move fully to your own metal, but then you'll likely realize costs related to maintaining your own metal that made you want to switch to the cloud in the first place. One way you might try to test this out is by using bare metal AWS instances -- if it's going on the right direction but you want more savings, you could move to using AWS Outposts with your on prem metal.

Just to make some conjecture here, I think that there's a difference between not liking the market's prices and thinking that the market is mispriced. Another commentator's point that the difference in bandwidth between AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI and DO/etc being a factor of 10x should give you an idea of some of the price discrimination going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We just switched to DO thanks to their Hatch program. The support they have shown and the energy we've been getting from the people at DO has been next- to-none. Obviously it's concerning to see people being laid off, and my thoughts and concerns go to those who are facing what is probably their worst days. Based on the stated reasoning from corporate I can't say anything other than I believe them. They have been releasing so many great things recently, and looking at the number of open-source projects on Github it seems that the proof of a flat organisation is in the pudding. We're spending +1.5k USD monthly and based on their product roadmap shared with us developers I have no reason to doubt that we'll be moving more of our infrastructure to DO soon.

We used to be on Linode and they were great too. The competition has really forced them to up their game and start innovating. The segment is vibrant and the cash is there. I'm not worried.

</comment><comment><USER33> Lots of <3 to the DO-crew...For anyone looking for work, I put together a post with resoures / thoughts on starting a job search.

[https://customerexperience.substack.com/p/find-your-dream- jo...](https://customerexperience.substack.com/p/find-your-dream-job)

\- Zach (Former DO employee)

</comment><comment><USER34> The RGPD wall of Techcrunch is a real put-off (Choice partners that cannot be deactivated, IAB partners that must be unsubscribed from the third party website (which _of course_ does not work), seriously?). No reason to accept this cancer, I will read about this subject elsewhere.

<comment><USER35> I stopped clicking on techcrunch links a long time ago for same reason. I am pretty sure that wall is not GDPR compliant, because the way to opt-out is not simple and straightforward.

<comment><USER36> And of course, GDPR is all about opt-in, not opt-out. The only statement that applies to opting out is 'withdrawing consent shall be as easy as granting it', which of course applies only after you've intentionally, explicitly granted opt-in consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning. As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells:

> In that context, it's notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO > last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It's been a while > since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean > last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed amount from Mighty Capital, Glean > Capital, Viaduct Ventures, Black River Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital, > Torch Capital and EG Capital Advisors.

Nothing in particular, but finance guys and VCs tend to squeeze companies dry or push hard for acquisitions. Hopefully I'm wrong here.

<comment><USER37> Might there be an opening bell in their future... almost entirely likely.

<comment><USER38> This exactly. I'm too tired to do some basic googling for citations but anecdotally speaking, I believe hiring financial oriented leadership like this and trimming the organization of "perceived" fat (management) is right out of the going public playbook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275M in [annual > recurring revenues] and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new > organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth > by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world."

If not obvious this can be translated as positioning the company so it can be acquired by a larger entity for it's customer base and remaining employees.

> It says it works with more than 1 million developers across 195 countries.

I always love marketing statements like this. For sure 1 million is a large number. But what makes someone a 'developer'? It's not something defined like 'Physician' or 'Pilot' or 'Attorney' which require some type of certification to use the title. To DO (in terms of the marketing) a 'developer' is almost certainly only someone who signed up for an account and perhaps (as with other web properties) multiple accounts.

(I have used DO and was happy although I don't have a need for what they offer anymore).

<comment><USER40> If they're counting accounts it's definitely much lower. Our firm manages web applications / web services / websites for multiple clients and they all have their own DO account and there isn't 1 developer per account.

We were pretty excited to become part of their partner program but after signing up we realized that if we onboarded new clients we'd have to do it all under a single account, which sadly doesn't work for us because extremely delayed payments are very common, and we'd be fronting hosting costs for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> DO will be just fine when GCP closes a few years hence, which Alphabet accidentally "announced".

[https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set- ambitio...](https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitious- goal-and-possible-deadline-for-gcp)

<comment><USER42> It seems insane for them to even be speaking about that internally given that:

1\. It could scare away enterprise customers who look for reliability on a much longer timescale.

2\. The extent of their investment into hiring for GCP. [1]

More likely the author of that article is trying to manufacture news.

[1] [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-single-largest- dr...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-single-largest-driver- headcount-growth-google/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sucks. Hope it's not financial. I run a bunch of projects on DO, much prefer it over AWS. It's easier to use and straight to the point.

</comment><comment><USER44> I love DO, been a customer for over 10 years. Maybe just me, but apart from AWS, it's the only cloud provider that has competent support team. Azure, Google Cloud are mostly unreachable. But raise a DO support request and you get a response in 1 hour!

</comment><comment><USER45> For my hobby projects, I strongly prefer DigitalOcean's $5/month droplet to Amazon's EC2 t2.nano instance (their lowest-resourced offering; ~$4.18/month) purely because I know that I can't screw up the DigitalOcean configs badly enough to get an unexpectedly enormous bill. For simple stuff, the DigitalOcean UI is just so much easier to navigate than the enterprisy AWS console.

</comment><comment><USER46> While better pricing is always nice, I really wish they would refocus on the user experience in their platform. When adding up droplets + storage + LB + database, the price difference is there, but mostly you don't feel it's worth it - you still have to do configure everything yourself. If they offered something more akin to Heroku or Now I'd be jumping all over it.

<comment><USER47> Based on user surveys I've completed for them, it seems they are at least exploring the idea of releasing a Heroku-like service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Slightly unrelated, but does anyone actually use DO in production?

We're on GKE and with their new Kubernetes offering, I've considered switching but just haven't talked to a single person who uses it in production at work.

</comment><comment><USER49> All that ops automation they were working on finally comes to fruition. Automation creates surplus labor, and that surplus is realized with the elimination of humor labor, reaping profit in the form of lowering costs.

</comment><comment><USER50> FULL DISCLOSURE - My name is Edward, I was one of the earliest team members at DigitalOcean and lead the customer success organization there in the early days.

I have not been at the company for 3+ years so want to make crystal clear I don't know "intimately" what's going on at the organization. With that said, I still know enough about the business to say the following.

Been reading about developers, business owners, etc worrying about your application stability or fearing the need to migrate to another infrastructure, all warrented feelings. I want to share some thoughts as an (old)insider.

DIGITALOCEAN IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE. You don't make $200M+ in ARR and all of a sudden shutdown. Especially as a company who has always prioritized the BEST product experience. Prioritized the BEST customer experience. If you've been a customer of DO, you know they go above and beyond you. DigitalOcean's offering is still by far the most developer-friendly and delightful infrastructure experience on the market.

One of my biggest frustrations when I worked there was the lack of advanced features offered for scaling applications, I'm shockingly surprised that in the past few years they quickly launched Kubernetes, Database as a service, and Object Storage, granted all table stake stuff that AWS already has, but nevertheless has made DigitalOcean a very mature product. I'm low-key annoyed they didn't launch this when customers were yelling at me as the customer success point person, begging for all these features...anyways good for those that are customers today :)

As the co-founder mentioned above, the business has gone through several CEO changes with the purpose of preparing for an even grander expansion. So far hasn't worked as planned. When leadership changes, rockiness always occurs, and it's up to the next CEO to steer the ship. I don't know the new CEO and have no clue if he's any good, but I wish him good luck. Layoffs happen when businesses are tanking, but they also happen when a business is preparing for another launch at greatness. I'm truly empathetic to those that were laid off today, as a fellow DO-Shark that can't feel good. Even though you are likely folks I've never met, my thought are with you.

If you are a developer, DigitalOcean will always be a place for you to incubate, innovate, and grow your business. I'm confident of that.

</comment><comment><USER51> Omg!

Yesterday I read a post where the author admitted that if people believe it's an advert then it is because they want great people to come and work in the company.

[https://blog.digitalocean.com/from-15-000-database- connectio...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/from-15-000-database-connections- to-under-100-digitaloceans-tale-of-tech-debt/)

<comment> sunny--tech Author here.

I think you might be referring to this:

[https://dev.to/digitalocean/from-15-000-database- connections...](https://dev.to/digitalocean/from-15-000-database-connections- to-under-100-digitalocean-s-tale-of-tech-debt-43bj)

Same post, just on a different platform.

For context, I was responding to someone who said the article read like an advertisement for DO. To clarify, this post has nothing to do with the layoffs and was not coordinated for it. I had no prior knowledge of the org restructuring.

I've been working on that article on-and-off for over a year. The timing of its publishing and the layoffs are coincidental and unfortunate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> DigitalOcean hater here.

I won't counter any of the praise I'm reading; if anything this will probably validate it.

I'm on the other end of the DO equation.

My small mail server is relentlessly targeted for spam from DigitalOcean IPs - and has been for years.

In fact there are 4 networks I block (by ASN) - DO, OVH, AWS (new!) and Psychz Networks. (note: No mail from outside N.Am/EU allowed)

Forget to stop my mail server when dropping the firewall for 20 seconds? Get a ½ dozen spams from DigitalOcean IPs.

I actually like that there are hosts for dodgy services. I also get that conscientious hosts get bad customers and it takes time to overcome their bad behavior.

However from the time I 1st heard of DO until now, it's an unbroken timeline of DO being a toxic source. (note: The difficulty of reporting spammy IPs in bulk - using firewall not mail server logs - is another post)

So like a lot of orgs, DigitalOcean treats people on the inside really well. But for those of us on the receiving end of unwanted attention from DO networks, it's a rough ride.

</comment><comment><USER53> Sad to see. They've been nothing but great with me as a customer and should serve as an example of how to do good business(yes, I know, I know..scandal this, scandal that).

Hope the laid off find something else and maybe better soon.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is it just me or are we starting to see the first signs of mass lay-offs in tech? Mozilla, now DigitalOcean, I feel like we're starting to see the first bleeding cuts of the recession take hold.

And I just got my life together, too.

<comment><USER55> It is January: layoffs often cluster during January. I'm not yet seeing a flood of candidates for our open roles, so I'm not worried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Everyone knows DO for their VPS but their object storage prices are some of the lowest.

$0.02 per GB stored

$0.01 per GB transferred.

That includes CDN too.

I haven't found a better deal anywhere. Even Blackblaze doesn't offer CDN (AFAIK).

<comment><USER57> Could flare cdn vs digital ocean?

<comment><USER56> How much does Cloudflare CDN cost?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> From the tail end of the article:

It's been an active week for layoffs among tech startups. Mozilla laid off 70 employees this week;

What is the cutoff age for an organization to be a "startup"?

<comment><USER59> It just means tech company these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> totally irrelevant, but wanted to throw here.

Their documentation and simple blogs are very very useful.

</comment><comment> awinter-py IMO part of the value of DO is to have a cloud host that isn't running a competing business.

netflix has done fine on AWS but that still feels iffy to me.

<comment><USER42> Anti-trust fear offers some protection to companies like Netflix.

I wonder if health insurance companies have the same protection given Amazon's moves into the space. [0]

[0] [https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-jpmorgan-roll-new- healt...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-jpmorgan-roll-new-health- insurance-plans-part-haven-joint-venture/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I, spread across multiple ventures, spend a significant (to us) sum with DigitalOcean.

I was a bit panicked by the story and, I imagine like many, Was already thinking up migration strategies to communicate to the team in the morning.

The response given by the cofounder allows me to rest this weekend, and keeps me from harassing engineering staff while off.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER62> SpinUp also offers $5/mo VMs, mine have been extremely stable so far. They even have a $50 credit for new users [https://spinup.com/pricing/](https://spinup.com/pricing/)

</comment><comment><USER63> I think DO is wanting to go public at some point and needs to get their margins up.

</comment><comment><USER64> Weird, when I go to the link, the page immediately redirects to [https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1....](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1.....).

Even if I try to just go to techcrunch.com/, same thing. I only notice this because *advertising.com is in my host file on my router so instead of redirecting, I just get a "server not found" error page in firefox.

If I open a private tab, techcrunch.com loads fine. Looking at the network tab in the dev console when trying to load techcrunch.com seems to show that no redirect is made, just that techcrunch.com automatically becomes guce.advertising.com... Have I been pawnd?

<comment><USER65> Sounds like adware. Check your browser extensions.

<comment><USER64> I don't see anything. I'm running on debian and never used any extensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Interesting story of Hyper-funded DigitalOcean vs Bootstrapped Linode

<comment><USER44> Wow, didn't realize linode is bootstrapped. How did they manage to build so many cloud centers with no investment? Do you know more of their story?

<comment><USER67> Profit margins back in the day were a lot better than they are now. I started a web hosting company back in 99' as a high school senior with a couple hundred dollars, bootstrapped it to half a million in a couple years, and then over a million by year 10 (and sold it!) At that point margins had gotten skimpy and AWS with all their backing was eating up the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I am planning to apply for an open position at DO. Does anyone thinks it's the right time to switch there?

</comment><comment><USER69> I wonder if its because I just destroyed that $5 droplet I had running

</comment><comment><USER70> If this cutoffs are made for the sake of increasing profitability of an already profitable company, they are a bad sign in terms of management style and quality - it will affect morale, creativity and enthusiasm of remaining employees.

</comment><comment><USER71> With all this praise, time for me to check out DO!

</comment><comment><USER72> If EIG buy them I'm out.

</comment><comment><USER73> Why does DitialOcean not offer GPU instances? It would be a great addition!</comment>


Ask HN: Any forums/blogs where advertisers hang out? - <AUTHOR>

I think this is a long shot, but do you know of any forums or blogs or online communities where advertisers hang out?<p>I'm trying to generate some/any early interest in an advertising experiment. <comment><USER2> As a rule advertisers use agencies if they are slightly larger, the smaller ones you might find on the adwords forum.

<http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords?hl=en></comment>


Canadian court ruling orders Google to block sites worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/the-law-page/bc-court-seeking-global-reach-orders-google-to-block-sites/article19212708/ <comment><USER2> This is insane.

The plaintiff, Equustek Solutions Inc., says the main defendant, Morgan Jack, sells networking devices that infringe on their trademark.

The defendant sells these things online; the plaintiff wants his websites to be dereferenced from Google.

The court agreed and asked Google to remove the links on all its properties worldwide (not just google.ca).

But what does Google have to do with this?

Why does the plaintiff not go after the infringer, to shut his websites down and/or fine him and/or get him in prison?

Telling Google to remove the links (worldwide!!) is like issuing an injunction against all restaurants the world over to stop selling food to anyone called "Morgan Jack" in the remote chance it will have an effect on his business.

<comment><USER3> Some part of me wonders what would happen if they were to turn off Google to Canada for a day and list the judge's phone number as the person to complain to.

(Probably one very angry judge, but I wonder...)

<comment><USER4> Sounds like something from here would apply:

"Contempt of Court includes the following behaviours:

\- Fails to maintain a respectful attitude, remain silent or refrain from showing approval or disapproval of the proceeding

\- Refuses or neglects to obey a subpoena

\- Willfully disobeys a process or order of the Court

\- Interfere with the orderly administration of justice or to impair the authority or dignity of the Court"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#Canada](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#Canada)

<comment><USER5> I agree, out and out Contempt of Court.

Further, the Judge themselves is in charge of deciding whether Contempt of Court has occurred.

No possible jury to convince or appeal to, just the judge.

They can have you imprisoned in under a day.

Contempt of Court is very serious.

<comment><USER6> _They can have you imprisoned in under a day._

Only if you're in their jurisdiction. And Google isn't a person to jail. And corporations have a way of making these things not attributable to any one person.

However, it would be better to state the argument given by the law professor in the article: "what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database". Find something that the judge cares about personally, and you'll find a country that opposes it. Google can also complain that it's being targetted - why not Bing? Yahoo? Any other search providers? Does Wikipedia have a page for the company? What about reseller companies, that resell the competitor - not only are they facilitators, they're witting facilitators? What about sites with user reviews? At what point do we draw the moral line about shooting the messenger?

<comment><USER7>
      And Google isn't a person to jail.

Which nicely illustrates one of the major problems of having granted corporations 'legal person' status: the punishments for various crimes were originally intended to punish natural persons and have never been sufficiently adapted to punish corporations. What's a proper punishment for flagrant contempt of the court by a corporation?

      And corporations have a way of making these things not
      attributable to any one person.

That is in fact their raison d'être.

<comment><USER8> > That is in fact their raison d'être.

This looks like an example of @ziobrando's "Bullshit asymmetry principle" in action. You whip out some bullshit (unless I'm really misunderstanding what you are saying) in a one liner with no citations, but to refute it, someone would have to talk about the history of corporations, legal theories around them, compare and contrast with societies that never developed a similar idea (an interesting take on things: [http://www.amazon.com/Long-Divergence- Islamic-Held-Middle-eb...](http://www.amazon.com/Long-Divergence-Islamic-Held- Middle- ebook/dp/B0046A9MA4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=&tag=dedasys-20) ), and so on and so forth. That's a lot more effort than simply spouting some snark.

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I have long been trying to pin down the description of, and term for, that principle. [http://t.bigboxcar.com/post/87256202522/bullshit- asymmetry-p...](http://t.bigboxcar.com/post/87256202522/bullshit-asymmetry- principle-via)

There's still a corollary in need of succinct definition/labeling: in context of a casual discussion, you make a fair point in a one liner with no citation, then someone criticizes it (in effect) for lacking peer-reviewed encyclopedic depth & thoroughness. (Ex.: "this car does 0 to 60MPH in 10 seconds" "uh, NO, you're not taking relativity into account! and you didn't cite any certified testing labs!" and from social context you feel compelled to elaborate on why your comment was sufficient, while the other loudly labels you a liar, ignores your objections, and marches off to disrupt other sane conversations.)

<comment><USER7> Which is why I'm not going to challenge the accusation of 'bullshit'. I don't think the principle applies here.

It does suggest I need to clarify that I believe that it is both the great strength and the great weakness of corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Justice systems the world over have been itching for a way to force this whole _interweb thing_ to fall in line for more than a decade, but they couldn't find a solid-enough target in a quickly-changing landscape. Now that things have matured, they are going after the big established players: Google for search/advertising, Facebook for social activity, Twitter for censorship/regulated speech, Amazon for commerce, Youtube for copyright. It will happen more and more and there is no way around it. The classic cyberpunk countermeasure of finding a friendly nation to hide behind just doesn't work in the long run, as Sweden has proven with the PirateBay case.

It might be an unpopular opinion here, but I believe the rise of a global network will inevitably force the rise of a global government. A higher authority is now necessary to sort out this sort of problems in a consistent way. It's the natural evolution we've seen in the past when trade and knowledge networks reached a dimension where differences in legislation made it too difficult for them to flow. The question is: how do we define this global government? Which interests will it represent in practice? I think it's something we should embrace, because otherwise we will be forced to accept it at the point of a non-metaphorical gun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I expect at least in the medium term it will look more like a global (or at least multilateral) treaty, rather than a global government. But I agree that now is the time to think about how we could like such a thing to be structured. As much as some people would like it to be, the internet can't be the new wild west forever. It will be regulated. The hope is to have it regulated in a fair, consistent, and manageable (minimal?) manner.

As a web-based business owner, I find the prospect of having to comply with an increasing list of obscure regulations from various different entities rather overwhelming. Something comprehensive could be a relief, if it's done right. (Of course, there will still be differences between countries, but perhaps an overarching treaty could at least limit their impact.)

<comment><USER11> Good luck regulating my encrypted anonymized connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> The regulation would be on the other end. Tor won't help you when your favorite site shuts down because they can't comply with conflicting court orders from Canada and Australia (or wherever).

<comment><USER11> Sure it will -- they could run it (at some loss of bandwidth) as a hidden service. When "my favorite site" gets court orders, they can take down their official server, and spin it up somewhere else behind a Tor hidden service.

Yeah, I know -- Hidden Services need some work. As I understand, the problem is solvable, it just needs a few more heads thinking about it to get solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This shit needs to end. Even the obvious jurisdiction overreach aside, what happened is the court ordering Google - a party not in any way involved in the conflict at hand - to withhold information from the public. The idea that this "western" form of censorship is in any way better than, say, the blocks on porn in Pakistan or political censorship in Russia is either extremely short- sighted or simply serves somebody's interests (as in case of the plaintiff lawyer here). How it is OK for anyone to have such authority is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not only about free speech. Different cultural, social and economic conditions mean different countries live by different laws.

I don't know the circumstances of the case, but it seems plausible that given an opportunity a German, Emirati, Chinese or Brazilian court may reach a different conclusion as to the legality of Morgan Jack's business. Countries are known to have very different labor and copyright laws. It's plausible that some circumstances (e.g. mistreatment, authorship, limitations on copyright transferability, nuances and even legality of the contract the parties had entered) could make courts elsewhere consider Morgan Jack to be the rightful owner of the design.

What if such a court elsewhere made a contradictory ruling and also demanded from Google that it be enforced worldwide?

<comment><USER14> At a guess, this is the risk you take by doing business in two or more jurisdictions: you might be subjected to two mutually-incompatible rulings, in which case your only alternative is to stop doing business in at least one of those jurisdictions.

<comment><USER13> Assuming courts you deal with don't overreach like the B.C. court just did, you can easily resolve this problem by complying with each law within each respective jurisdiction.

This is made easier by the fact that your company is usually represented by separate local legal entities whose business is within each jurisdiction.

<comment><USER15> Which jurisdiction is a web page in? Where it's hosted, where it's controlled from, where its ads are served from, where it's read, where its payment processing is done?

<comment><USER13> A website may be complex enough and distributed enough to straddle multiple jurisdictions (this isn't an entirely new situation though since similar issues came up with radio spectrum regulations).

The bottom line is this: your jurisdiction extends as far as your control. A court may be able to issue injunctions against the systems which are located on its jurisdiction which may only be a subset of systems supporting a given site. In places where it is legal, it may also censor the internet. If everything from hosting, through advertising, payments and readership are outside the jurisdiction then it can do nothing directly and must resort to seeking assistance from foreign jurisdictions. I'd say in those situations it is entirely appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I fail to see how this judgment is any different from those where the courts ordered ISPs to block sites like the piratebay. If you're ok with one kind of interference about third parties linking to stuff you should probably be ok with all of them, and if you're against interference in this case you should probably be against interference in general.

It's very hard to argue consistently that the one is ok and the other is not. I strongly believe any kind of interference is bad. If you have beef with someone sue them, don't involve the facilitator.

<comment><USER17> I think the difference here is that the court is asking Google to remove the links worldwide, not just for people accessing Google from within Canada.

<comment><USER16> There was a similar case a few years ago with Yahoo vs France, iirc France prevailed:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/news/04iht- yahoo.2.t.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/news/04iht-yahoo.2.t.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Haha. What a hilariously nonsensical ruling. The United States should quickly issue a ruling that expressly forbids Google from blocking sites in Canada. Then we can fight over it!

As a I would like to see all countries in which Google has an office claim their nation's full tax rate on Google's worldwide revenue. All rates combined I think it might be possible for Google to owe ten dollars in taxes per dollars of revenue.

<comment><USER15> There's already a US law limiting the extent to which UK libel damages are enforceable.

<comment><USER19> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Direct link to the ruling: [http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb- txt/SC/14/10/2014BCSC1063.ht...](http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb- txt/SC/14/10/2014BCSC1063.htm)

<comment><USER21> The ruling is very clearly written, and does an excellent job of explaining the difficulty the British Columbia Supreme Court is was faced with in this decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not that new. Most of the DMCA take down notices are also executed worldwide.

<comment><USER23> DMCA take downs are only effective because Google is a US company. If I have a company in e.g. Slovenia, DMCA is ineffective, and they would have to go through Slovenian courts to take down the website (unless they just seize the domain).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and no. Some countries (Canada being one) have treaties with the US that let court judgements in one country be enforced in the other. So even if you have no assets in the US or income from the US, a US court decision could still affect you if you live in such a country.

Of course, most internet companies do do some business in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So I am going to assume that the plaintiff will also be filing against Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines individually too? Cos you know, Google is not the only search engine out there...

<comment><USER10> It's more likely that, if this trend continues, Google itself will eventually drag competitors through the courts to force them to comply with rules they are forced to obey. Or they might lobby the US Congress or EU Parliament to pass laws that "clarify the position of all search engines".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Internet is going to become a country-by-country intranet at this rate.

<comment><USER26> The world wide web. Off topic, but I think we tend to forget that most legislation affects websites. Nothing keeps you from writing your own version of DNS, your own protocol (who says it has to be HTTP) etc. That's the beauty of TCP/IP! :)

<comment><USER10> They'll just start writing laws regulating TCP/IP instead. They already do in China, after all.

There is no technical answer to this sort of problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> At this rate google is going to shit.

By the time every court in the world is done removing all the stuff they want the only thing left will be cats.

There won't be any porn though that is too controversial.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article is quite sparse on details of what, exactly the website is selling. Has anyone found a link to it?

<comment><USER20> Plaintiff: [http://www.equustek.com/](http://www.equustek.com/)

Defendant: [http://www.gw1000.com/](http://www.gw1000.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr British Columbia Supreme Court determines that Google is conducting business in British Columbia, despite no servers, facilities or employees in the province, and can be ordered to remove links that infringe on the plaintiff's intellectual property rights.

</comment><comment><USER29> What happens to Google if they comply in all of Canada but do not comply for the rest of the world?

It would be cheaper for Google to offer specialist SEO and web design help for these aggrieved parties - "here's how you get your story out and ranked higher than the attack sites" \- than to fight legal cases through the courts. Although I am pleased thay're taking the cases to court to defend their position.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google was the defendant in this case, so they had little choice but to go to court. Let alone the consequences to their Canadian business, US and Canadian courts cooperate in enforcing judgements, so they couldn't ignore it regardless. (Of course they are choosing to appeal, which is optional but obviously a good idea given the pain this precedent could cause.)

<comment><USER30> > Google was the defendant in this case

No they weren't. In fact, the decision linked at the top of the thread specifically refers to Google and Google Canada as "non-parties".

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, right you are. Google was a non-party, but was named and served: "Non- parties affected by Mareva injunctions are not normally before the Court, because applications of that kind are brought without notice. Google was named in this application, served with materials, and attended the hearing."

So the rest of the comment stands, but you are correct that they were not a defendant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You would have to think that ceasing to do business in BC would be an option competitive with accepting rulings like this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why only google? is that the only search engine that displays those links?

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know what this censored site is? Time for some Streisand Effect.

<comment><USER33> Apparently it's any site that sells the "Datalink GW1000".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you think this is bad, just wait until July 1 and CASL gets introduced. As a Canadian I'd like to apologize for this:

[http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/25293/how- canadas-a...](http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2014/25293/how-canadas-anti- spam-law-affects-email-marketers)

[http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm](http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl- lcap.htm)

<comment><USER35> Having consent, a person who can be replied to instead of ano-reply and a mandatory unsubscribe doesn't sound so bad to me. What are the main arguments against it?

<comment><USER34> Mandatory unsubscribe is totally fine, obviously.

But CASL includes making confirmation, welcome and update emails opt-in, or else risking an up to $10 million dollar fine.

Yes, really.

Even if you're not a Canadian business, this will apply to you if you email Canadians.

Yes, really.

Say goodbye to your opt-out email drip courses.

<comment><USER36> Wouldn't confirmation and welcome emails fall under "implied consent"? [http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/com500/infograph3.htm](http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/com500/infograph3.htm)

Seems like update emails might too, depending on the circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is Canadian court trying to change the definition of so called "Internet"..? This is insane.

</comment><comment><USER38> I am pretty sure Google is not going to comply.

</comment><comment><USER39> What happens if Google just says no? Fines?

<comment><USER40> Hahahaha, that would be a good one. Probably extremely high fines. It's not the way a democracy works to say _no_. The appeal was the only sensible way to go.

The problem is not this case per se. The problem Google faces is the precedent. If this goes through, every one who thinks that there is an irregularity about a website will go to court in order to bring it down from google.

If _many websites_ stop being listed on Google, people might start looking for new search engines and... You can imagine how the story goes from there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> "No"

now what?

Sorry Canada, I like you guys, but you don't really get to make rulings for everybody else.</comment>


Tell HN: Put all effort into mass testing to stop Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> This is a non-expert perspective. Please feel free to criticize the naivety of it but I believe that it has some substance that is worth considering.
I have been thinking what could be an effective strategy to avoid wider outbreak without throwing a huge wrench into economic gears.
It appears that we can't necessarily expect an effective treatment or a vaccine soon. This would be possibly the most effective solution.
Another solution that has been currently implemented is a widespread quarantine. It does not appear to be fully effective and will cause huge economical cost. The last point makes the deciders to hesitate when considering this option. I am really concerned that the world economy may become halt because of wider implementation of quarantines. Imagine the world when everything is on short supply. The effect to the monetary system would be devastating.
I thought about other possible solutions today in reflection of recent outbreak in Italy and realized that what is missed is more up to date data about the spread of the virus. Currently we are only reacting and we are reacting too late.
We already have a test to verify the presence of the Covid-19. I think what we actually need to effectively fight against it is a mass implementation of self testing kits among the all populace that must be used daily to report back the results.
First effect of this is reduction of fear and the second effect is the possibility to respond more rapidly to smaller outbreaks to avoid wider silent spread.
In principle the kit does not even have to detect Covid-19 directly but only if there is a viral infection or not. Then the specific case could be handled by a medical team to more precisely analyze the situation.
I believe that national states should put their full economic strength into implementing this solution because this will save lives and will keep the society functioning. <comment><USER2> Having easy, open access to testing kits _would_ be helpful, but unfortunately it's not feasible: the test kits are already in short supply, and it would be impossible within the next few months to scale up to providing 300 million tests per day or even per week, and that would be for the US alone. There will almost certainly be a shortage of the reagents needed for quite some time.

Only 4 states plus the CDC presently have the ability to test for Covid-19 in centralized testing centers: [https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-coronovirus- test.html](https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-coronovirus-test.html) So we are far, far, far away from deploying test kits to individual households.

Furthermore, a very large percentage of the population would a) refuse to take the test on a regular basis, and b) refuse to self-report in the event of a positive test, because many people are belligerent about quarantine.

If we already had a massive supply of the necessary reagents, and the ability to quickly scale up manufacturing, your approach might work. But given current constraints, it's unlikely.

I wonder how microfluidics might some day help to deploy the kind of household-level testing you are wishing for. Actually, if there's any hope for your solution, it's probably through this guy's lab + multiple industry partners, or something similar: [https://www.bioanalysis- zone.com/2020/01/02/microfluidic-dev...](https://www.bioanalysis- zone.com/2020/01/02/microfluidic-device-identify-viruses/)</comment>


Shopify Revenue Surges 97% - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestreet.com/investing/shopify-tops-q2-earnings-forecast-as-platform-volumes-surge <comment><AUTHOR> My personal hope is that Shopify can create a premium Amazon experience with their Shop app eventually.</comment>


Chef Is Contracting to ICE - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/shanley/status/1173692656192385024 <comment><AUTHOR> Extra interesting as things like [https://github.com/sethvargo/chef- sugar](https://github.com/sethvargo/chef-sugar) have removed themselves pending Chef canceling that contract.

</comment><comment><USER2> From the same Tweeter:

"if you are a high level official at a tech company and can demonstrate a credible instance of you sabotaging infrastructure in protest of fascism, i will make you a whole album of custom nudes."

<comment><USER3> High level officials at tech companies can get better than weev's crazy ex nude in person.</comment></comment>


The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2014/june/14-the-mapmakers-mystery <comment><USER2> Note that the map image at the top of that article is not at all medieval; it's from the 18th century. The one the article talks about (13th century) is farther down: [http://discovermagazine.com/sitefiles/resources/image.aspx?i...](http://discovermagazine.com/sitefiles/resources/image.aspx?item={8D1F57A0-B157-4C9A-AF19-2D24F94CDA37}&mw=900&mh=600)

<comment><USER3> I just about flipped a table when I glanced at that image and then started reading about a supposedly 13th century map. I find the use of that image at the top suspicious, perhaps akin to link-bait.

<comment><USER4> I'm with you - it's also extraordinarily obvious given the level of detail/explored regions represented - relatively surprising that the author did this given the level of detail the article goes into...but may not have been her call though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This research doesn't seem to be published anywhere, but here's a 30-page presentation at Hessler's academia.edu page, which contains some nice data plots.

[https://www.academia.edu/1666460/Bi- dimensional_Regression_R...](https://www.academia.edu/1666460/Bi- dimensional_Regression_Revisited_Studying_the_Geometry_and_Form_of_the_Medieval_Portolan_Chart)

Hessler also seems to have a personal blog devoted to related topics: www.warpinghistory.blogspot.com

<comment><USER6> I have found one editorial by Mr. Hessler, one review of his book, one review made by himself and a paper ( _Warping Waldseemuller: A Phenomenological and Computational Study of the 1507 World Map_ , printed in cartographica) but is is about a different piece of cartography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And the mystery of how northern Canada and Northern Pole had a common shore. Now rethink the amount of ice that has melted.

<comment><USER8> As others have pointed out, not much was known of that area at that time (1746).

In James Boswell's "THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES WITH SAMUEL JOHNSON", which occurred in 1773, he writes:

"Talking of Phipps's voyage to the North Pole, Dr Johnson observed, that it 'was conjectured that our former navigators have kept too near land, and so have found the sea frozen far north, because the land hinders the free motion of the tide; but, in the wide ocean, where the waves tumble at their full convenience, it is imagined that the frost does not take effect'."

So there was certainly speculation about the Arctic at this time by educated people, but clearly they didn't know a great deal about it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah the facts that 1) the arctic ocean is covered in ice even in open water and 2) The north pole is in the arctic ocean (rather than on some potentially undiscovered land) weren't conclusively proven until the Fram expedition by Fridtjof Nansen in 1896.

There was enormous speculation in the papers and in the scientific communities about what would come of Nansen and what he would find in the lead up to during his expedition so practically speaking the extremely high northern latitudes remained a "blank spot" until the turn of the 20th century.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Indexing Everything Valuable in ECommerce - <AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News!
We've been working hard on making this huge collection ( http://ecommercestack.co/ ) of more than 350 resources for eCommerce founders.
I scoured the internet and couldn't find a place that's got all eComm content in an organised, systemised and sensible way
We've curated what I believe are the BEST resources for anyone looking to build, validate, scale or grow their eCommerce store
We'll be putting hours of dedicated work each week to put in the BEST content for you to enjoy.
In addition each week, you'll get the latest and greatest resources to blow up your eCommerce business, for free of course <comment><USER2> Epic list! Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Helpful content!!</comment>


Lotfi Zadeh has died - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.berkeley.edu/2017/09/remembering-lotfi-zadeh <comment><USER2> When I first was going to college I was going to major in International Affairs. The summer before my freshman year, I read a book about fuzzy logic. (this book - [https://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Logic-Revolutionary-Computer- Te...](https://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Logic-Revolutionary-Computer- Technology/dp/0671875353/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505092876&sr=8-1&keywords=fuzzy+logic) to be exact) and it so captivated me that I changed my major to electrical engineering. RIP Lofti Zadeh, you had a major impact on the course of my life, however indirectly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had the pleasure of having lunch with Prof Zadeh my first year in CS right around the corner from Soda Hall. I had my book out studying and he came over and talked to me and it really made me appreciate the program. Not sure about sticks out in my head so much. I think it was just the congeniality, he made me laugh and I was stressed.

My condolences go out to his family and friends, but he made a small impact on me at least.

</comment><comment><USER4> RIP Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh.Form an interview "Obstinacy and tenacity. Not being afraid to get embroiled in controversy. That's very much a Turkish tradition. That's part of my character, too. I can be very stubborn. That's probably been beneficial for the development of Fuzzy Logic."

<comment><USER4> Same interview:

 __Interviewer:Would you say that Fuzzy Logic turns Aristotelian or Classical Logic on its head?

 __Lotfi:(Laughs). Back in Aristotle 's day, people tried to be as precise as possible. That's the Aristotelian tradition, the Cartesian tradition. Looking at things as being entirely black or white stems from such a tradition. But take the example of good and bad. What we're beginning to understand now is that sometimes things that we perceive as bad really turn out to be good, or perhaps, not as bad as we originally thought. Things can serve a purpose. People back in Aristotle's time and even later thought that by perceiving things in black and white (in absolute terms) that they gained alot. And they did. But they lost a great deal in the process. Fuzzy Logic represents a swing in the opposite direction but I would like to stress that there is much more to Fuzzy Logic than multi-valuedness of truth.

Classical logic has erred in devoting so little attention to approximate reasoning and focusing to such a high degree on exact reasoning. So when you take a course in logic, you learn all kinds of things which are of very little use in everyday life. We encounter approximate reasoning all the time. For example, "Where can I park my car?" Where should I have lunch? Should I place this call "person-to person" or "station to station"? Should I buy this house? How do I get from this side of town to the other when I'm in a hurry? Classical logic, operation research, decision analysis-many other disciplines have nothing to say about this topic.

[http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/24_folder/24_a...](http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/24_folder/24_articles/24_fuzzylogic.html)

<comment><USER5> thankfully, he gave a fantastic talk recognizing Alfred Korzybski in 1994.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I met him once, he came for a conference at my university. During lunch he sat next to him. What had struck me was how kind, humble and considerate he was. Sometimes people of his caliber have the "I am too important or to busy to talk to some no name student like you" attitude but he was the opposite of that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Darnit. Fuzzy sets and logic just made sense to me in so many ways and I found his writings quite interesting. RIP.

<comment><USER8> Would you mind concisely explaining one example and application of it? I've read (for example) about possibility theory, but I hardly understand what it helps us do that probability theory didn't.

<comment><USER4> Here you are

[https://youtu.be/J_Q5X0nTmrA](https://youtu.be/J_Q5X0nTmrA)

Fuzzy logic reminds me Albert Einstein quote about mathematics. "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

<comment><USER9> Whoever decided on the trembling text is a monster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A kind, patient mentor when I needed much kindness and patience.

Dear God, who is going to clean out his office?

<comment><USER11> If he were still at MIT, that would be my wife's job; as a curator for the MIT museum she does a lot of cleaning out and cataloging objects from retiring or deceased professors offices. I'm sure she has a counterpart who will be doing the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> RIP. Set theory has always been an interesting topic but Prof. Zadeh stirred up the pot by proposing and strongly advocating fuzzy sets, which have opened up both new theoretical and practical paths for others to explore.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am sad to learn Lotfi has died. He was a friend and a frequent speaker in Stanford's EE380 Colloquium. He was a inspiring pragmatist whose fuzzy logic was understandable,explainable,functioned as expected, and quickly became incorporated into real products. The competing technology, knowledge systems, was far less transparent, slow to leave the lab, and often not as effective.

</comment><comment><USER14> 179371 citations and 104 h-index [1]. But what is more important is that he founded a whole epoch in AI which is a rather rare event.

[1] [https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=S6H-0RAAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=S6H-0RAAAAAJ)

</comment><comment> j-pb I'm sure that there will be a renissance of fuzzy logic, its sad to know that he will not witness it. His character will be missed, but his contributions won't be forgotten.

<comment><USER15> If you strip away some cosmetic differences, most deep learning is _basically fuzzy logic_ , so he did witness it.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity can you elaborate on this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of my favourite subjects during college. I recommend the book by Timothy Ross - Fuzzy Logic with Engineering Applications for anyone interested.

</comment><comment><USER18> Most unfortunate. I did have the pleasure of seeing him when he came to Villanova University to accept an award from the Franklin Institute.

[https://www.fi.edu/laureates/lotfi-zadeh](https://www.fi.edu/laureates/lotfi- zadeh)

</comment><comment><USER19> RIP Professor Zadeh. His work inspires aspects of my graduate research in logic.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hamba Gahle.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is web development so hard to learn? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> ...really depends on your background -- and, to some extent, who you work for.

but i do agree with you saying that web development has become hard. it has, indeed. we made it hard. i have seen beginners struggle with getting started, and i do struggle with it myself sometimes, even though i am no beginner.

the advantage that i, and experienced people, have over people just getting started is having witnessed the whole thing grow and change over time. it means it's easier for us to dismiss silly ideas because we have seen them over and over, and recognize good ideas. we became good at filtering the signal from the noise.

example: jsx (from reactjs) is a good idea. why? php has done before and it worked. it got many people into web development. now, some people rediscovered that embedding html in a programming language is not bad and applied it to modern javascript and modern web. for some of us it's deja vu.

i guess what i want to say is there's no need to despair. most people don't know the history of our field and continue to re-invent things over and over. i have recently been enjoying beginners tutorials much more than the so called experts talks. there are plenty of them on youtube. grab any of them and have fun!

</comment><comment><USER3> I reject the premise. It's such a broad subject that I'm not sure there's any meaningful answer to your question, but of all the ways I'd describe it, "hard to learn" isn't on the list.

Most web development involves gluing together existing components. It's cut- and-paste programming until you have to scale things up. All the problems have been solved. When I'm working on a web application (which has been about half my career), I rarely feel challenged. Usually I'm writing the same application for the tenth time, just in a different language or framework. There are hundreds of web frameworks, and it can be frustrating having to learn a new set of tools and libraries every time flavor of the month changes, but that's not hard; it's just tedious.

The primary challenge for most web systems is scaling. There's a huge difference between being able to handle thousands of visitors a day vs millions. Very few sites ever need to scale to millions, though. And scaling is a problem for any system; it's not a challenge unique to web development, and not something you even need to think about if you're still learning the basics.

Is there something specific that you're struggling with? I'd suggest picking a framework (arbitrarily) and going through the tutorials out there. Something like Node/Express is pretty easy to get started with by following online tutorials.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you trust Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious. Why or why not? <comment><USER2> Not even remotely. Facebook has a clear history of taking a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" approach to privacy. You never know what they're going to do with your information or what they're going to suddenly open up that you have to go set complicated privacy settings to fix.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would I trust Facebook? What reason have they ever given me to trust them?

</comment><comment><USER4> About as far as I can throw it!</comment>


Hire More Women in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiremorewomenintech.com/

<comment><USER2> I think this is one of the best campaigns of its type that I have ever seen, but as a man I found the "Re-evaluate your job post descriptions." to be incredibly sexist in both directions - implying stereotypes of both genders.

Key words for men:

Dominant Boasts Determined Competition Strong Influencing Superior Manage Direct Objective

Key words for women:

Community Relationships Committed Understanding Intimately Collaborate Support Team Complimentary Activity

That part of the page should be removed or rewritten, as it really does a disservice to the message, and I don't see how a woman wouldn't be offended in the same way.</comment>


Security: better to be proactive or reactive? - <AUTHOR> https://dadario.com.br/security-better-to-be-proactive-or-reactive/ <comment><USER2> > However this way you will focus on fixing only real world attacks. Still, > it's somewhat a shameful thing to put vulnerable applications on production > and rely solely on bug hunters to find bugs before attackers. Shameful > because of the disrespect with customer data and your own data / reputation. > In the end it's still insecure. Bug hunters should only be considered "an > extra help" and nothing else.

Shameful? Sure, if you know about the vulnerabilities. But in most case they're honest human mistakes that make it out to production or because we've failed to educate people on properly securing their web apps and properties in general. And that sucks. And sometimes these bugs live on for years. But calling it shameful is rather harsh and it doesn't improve any of it either. If anything it makes people feel crappy over it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting, daenney.

> Shameful? Sure, if you know about the vulnerabilities. Maybe from a non- > secure mindset you're right, but my point is about strategies for a security > program. And it also has another problem, without prior checks you'll end up > paying much more money. Facebook and Google paid millions already, but that > amount would be much higher if they didn't check for vulnerabilities in > their home.

Talking about security strategies, you don't really need to know about the vulnerabilities in order to consider this very act "shameful". It's just that you're lacking due diligence. You shouldn't blindly trust bug hunters as a single mechanism to reduce the number of bugs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who got into YCReject? - <AUTHOR>

Did you apply to YCReject?
Did you get "in"?
What is YC Reject doing? <comment><USER2> I don't believe anyone that's applied would know by now if they've made it to the interview. Here are the dates of notification + interview:

Notification of interviews: Thursday, May 12 Interviews: May 23-26 Final Selection: May 26</comment>


Automatic 'ls' after 'cd' in the Terminal - <AUTHOR> http://runtime-era.blogspot.com/2012/05/automatic-ls-after-cd-in-terminal.html

<comment><USER2> I think I'd get disciplined for 'hacking' if I even tried to add this at work.

mmm maybe ls could be piped into more to stop an infinite screen scroll..

<comment><AUTHOR> what would be the reasoning for discipline? afaik this isn't doing anything wrong, besides the risk of bringing down a system when CDing into a huge dir... but then, you could do that anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> it feels like a good idea, right up until the point where you cd into a directory with 100s of files while you're using a slow vpn collection.

<comment><AUTHOR> thats a good point, i wonder if theres a way to protect against that... maybe the script checks size first?</comment></comment>


How to Find a Business Model for Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://thenetsetter.com/blog/business-models/how-to-find-a-business-model-for-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> Nice article! Currently this is what consuming most of my thinking about how should I proceed next on my venture. To further iterate on dev cycle or solve the money problem first. And since we are not funded, and now have gone private beta bootstrapping from our own pocket, I think the monetize-first approach seems to be the practical one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Which business model/mindset do you think may have contributed to the current world recession?</comment>


China is using debt traps to control the South China Sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/china-mission-to-control-the-south-china-sea-2019-3 <comment><USER2> At least it's better than using military to control there. isn't it, US?

<comment><USER3> Is it though?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you were to start Linux from scratch, what would you do differently? - <AUTHOR> It surely is just me, but I have noticed several people in the HN community and others openly complaining about the Linux kernel, and mainstream operating systems in general. I'm sure that, along the way, decisions were made and trade-offs had to be faced, and that resulted in the operating systems we have today.
What, in your opinion, do you think are the decisions that, in retrospective, should have been made differently? Like, for instance, is the concept of File the right abstraction? Is the use of bitwise to assign permissions in files the right one?
I'm looking forward to your answers. <comment><USER2> IIRC, one of the creators of Unix said he'd spell creat(2) with an 'e'.

</comment><comment><USER3> fork has to go - it's unsafe, slow and worst of all - there is a ton of software that uses it - it's not an easy fix because of this but there are a few of us looking at ways of slowly getting rid of it

<comment><USER4> Out of curiousity, what's the alternative?</comment></comment>


Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world <comment><USER2> Do they _consume_ as much as half the world? If the money is invested, where's the problem? Wealth inequality only matters for the well-being of the poor insofar as it affects consumption inequality. Why not talk about how much more they consume than everyone else instead of how much more wealth they have? Because talking about wealth makes for better rhetoric: wealth is understood as an indicator of social status and Oxfam doesn't think the very rich should have that much social status. It has nothing to do with the economic well- being of the poor.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxx...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxxxxxx.html)

<comment><USER3> The assets of those eight are almost certainly going to be invested, so it's not really as if they can spend all the money without changing the value of the assets that make up their wealth.

However, absence of evidence of a consumption inequality comparable match the wealth inequality does not imply there is no consumption inequality -- something which really cannot be denied -- it just won't be as horrific a ratio as with wealth, but it could still be quite eye-opening.

For what it's worth, I very much doubt the eight wealthiest are the top eight consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was under the impression about half the world had zero or negative wealth.

Is this one of those statements where you could also say someone with $1000 net worth also has more than half the world, but they chose the billionaires to be more inflammatory? Or was the 50% line chosen because the 45% of the world has zero/negative wealth, and 8 billionaires happen to have more than than sliver of 5% in between?

<comment><USER5> If you go just by the statement of current accounts then the poorest half isn't who you think they are. If you live in some underdeveloped country and live on 1 dollar a day you also often don't have debt because you are unable to acquire it. That said it's also hard to claim that some middle or lower middle class family in a western county with 100-150,000 dollars in long term debt e.g. because of a mortgage is poorer than some poor guy in Bangladesh that would not be able to be in any institutionalized debt in their life because of just how poor they are. Negative wealth is arguably a privilege of the lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For that reason we should all be grateful that money doesn't buy happiness.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/05/10/money- doe...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/05/10/money-does-buy- happiness-says-new-study/#2d4c36d56150)

Money does buy happiness. In the US, though, only up to about $75k/yr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This again. This comes out every year and is equally misleading each time. Here's an article from 2014 going into exactly why it's misleading [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26613682](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26613682)

<comment><USER3> That reference you give cites two people. The first makes the point that low wealth does not mean you are poor, citing students in debt in western countries as an example. Some would disagree with the assertion that having a net worth of less than zero does not make you poor, but that's beside the point. There's a lot of subtlety that is conveniently ignored in the analysis of the article you linked to.

If you're in a Western country you benefit from goods made in countries where wages are very low and the cost of living is low. People of these countries cannot access many of the commodities that westerners can, such as oil, which generally has a worldwide price floor. That is, despite the price of food fluctuating between countries, the price of oil does not. That oil represents a natural resource that many in the west can enjoy, but the bottom 10% on < $2 per day cannot. How much of our development, how much of our lifestyles in the West are dependent upon being able to afford oil? Does an entrepreneur in Central African Republic have the same access to cheap manufacturing (relative to their earning ability) in the same way that an entrepreneur in the West does. No.

The second person used in the article to "explain" why the figure is misleading, despite having a career made largely on the back of denying wealth inequality as a problem and the link being to a website called "cafe hayek", merely divides $17.5 trillion by the population of the world at the time and gets approximately the same as what I do.

What, precisely, did the top eight do that was so great a service to humanity that it entitles them to the same* purchasing power of natural resources as the poorest half of the world, especially given that the more valuable resources accumulated over millions of years? There's at least three of those figures whose vehicles of wealth accumulation are not universally worshipped in this community: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Larry Ellison (Oracle).

*ignoring asset liquidity, which is arguably a big problem when discussing the assets of the super rich.

EDIT: to "debunk" this claim -> to "explain" why the figure is misleading

<comment><USER8> Nobody is 'debunking' the claim and everybody agrees that the numbers Oxfam are using are technically correct. The problem is that the numbers don't measure what people think they're measuring.

According to Oxfam someone in the "bottom 10% on < $2 per day" might very well be wealthier than a recently graduated US doctor from a top medical school if he's taken on student debt. And when that's the case then you have a bad measurement of wealth.

Oxfam is doing the whole inequality debate a great disservice by putting out misleading and underhand data that takes the focus away from the real debate.

<comment><USER3> > According to Oxfam someone in the "bottom 10% on < $2 per day" might very > well be wealthier than a recently graduated US doctor from a top medical > school if he's taken on student debt. And if that's the case then you have a > bad measurement of wealth.

Would income be a better metric? If so, you're not going to see something like (the income of the top n) == (the income of the bottom m %) because it's very hard to quantify the incomes of the poor. And in many ways that is misleading, because you can be on a low income but managing fine and on a high income and not managing at all, just depending on where you live.

> Oxfam is doing the whole inequality debate a great disservice by putting out > misleading and underhand data that takes the focus away from the real > debate.

They use the term wealth. They're not saying income. On seeing the headline I never had any doubt that wealth was assets less liabilities, because that seems to be the main measure of wealth that is thrown around. Should they instead remain silent on this?

<comment><USER8> _Would income be a better metric?_

Lots of things would be a better metric. Purchasing power (as you mentioned in your original reply) would be a much better metric (but obviously harder to measure). Someone who's got salary of $200k a year, a house, two cars and a net wealth of negative $100k should not rank below someone making $2 a day and lives in a shack in any valid metric.

 _Should they instead remain silent on this?_

Absolutely not, they should do the exact opposite. Publish reports with meaningful numbers that have real relevance to the underlying problem at hand. All they're doing now is generating headline grabbing, easy to ignore, clickbait. I mean I get why Oxfam is doing it (sexy headlines get likes of Facebook), but I feel it cheapens the very serious underlying issue they're trying to talk about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These Oxfam reports always go for the sensationalist headline, but it is utterly meaningless. By their measure, some middle-class family with a mortgage (which implies access to credit markets, jobs, stability and all of the comforts of a healthy economy) is in worse situation than some homeless person and no debt.

<comment><USER3> Wealth is wealth. Income is income. Here's an analysis of income of the wealthiest by Oxfam: [https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-01-19/...](https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-01-19/annual- income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four)</comment></comment>


Demo: sending Bitcoin to m-pesa using telegram and withdraw cash from an agent - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/143249662 <comment><USER2> I read an interesting article a while ago which as its tl;dr stated:

Mobile money transformed Kenya. Rural Kenyans prefer to pay more, but have Mpesa's convenience (Mobile Money competitors are cheaper). Fees could reduce drastically, if Bitcoin is used. Safaricom sees Bitcoin as competition, but competition is good for the poor end user. Western news about Kenya can be misleading. Foreigners starting a business in East Africa tend to have a better chance of success if their model is not solely based on the local market.

[http://www.coinscrum.com/2016/01/12/bitcoin- competitiveness-...](http://www.coinscrum.com/2016/01/12/bitcoin- competitiveness-in-kenya/2/)</comment>