Why you should join a big company first - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2013/kids-startup-hype/ <comment><USER2> I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own.

A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer.

The one point in this article that's valid is the last one. Startups take over your life. So if you want to focus on other things besides work, you're better off with a regular job than trying to start a startup.

<comment><USER3> What are your thoughts on joining a big company vs joining a startup (as opposed to starting a company yourself)? On average, it seems one would still learn faster and be able to take on many new roles as an employee at a startup, but an employe also is in a chaotic world that he or she doesn't completely control (and often working with incomplete information).

Do you think this trade-off is worth it? And, since I'm guessing you lean towards 'yes' on that question, do you think there are different questions a prospective startup-employee should ask as opposed to the questions a potential investor in the startup would ask?

<comment><USER4> Joining, not launching, a start-up is what the article's author is actually comparing to a corp job: "Should I join Microsoft or a startup?"

Financially and over the long term, a stable well-paid job early in one's career combined with low expenses (no kids, no mortgage, often no car and cheap health insurance) results in a larger lump of money accruing compound interest over a longer period of time.

<comment><USER5> _a stable well-paid job early in one 's career combined with low expenses (no kids, no mortgage, often no car and cheap health insurance) results in a larger lump of money accruing compound interest over a longer period of time._

And yet you won't get rich. The chances of getting rich as an employee of a startup are admittedly small, but nonzero.

<comment><USER6> Smart, hardworking people (the same people who might succeed with a startup) can absolutely get rich (in the "don't really need to worry about money" sense, not in the "absurd conspicuous consumption" sense) working for $BIGCORP in their 20s.

<comment><USER5> How, and over what timeframe?

<comment><USER7> Define a target (say, 1MM), a realistic interest rate, and head over to any compounding growth goal calculator; it'll tell you how much you need to set aside over 10-15 years to hit that target.

To compare meaningfully to startup careers, you need to factor in the premium you pay to work at a startup (in reduced wages) and the very low odds of any given startup making its employee equity liquid.

Generally, the difference between the BigCo path to 1MM and the startup path is that, barring dramatic changes in the nature of our industry (which changes would also confound the startup comparison), the BigCo path is reasonably contingent only on your execution. You can fire on all cylinders in every startup you work at and never end up in the money.

<comment><USER8> It all depends on the startup. Don't go work for a startup just because it's a startup. You're better off at BigCo. But if you really believe in the startup, and they'll give you meaningful equity and compensation that is enough for your lifestyle, and you want the responsibility, I'd lean towards the startup. Again, the key here is that you really believe in the startup. There aren't many that you can honestly say that about early enough to make the compensation difference worth it.

Also, depending on your life phase, presence of employer-paid health insurance should be seriously considered.

<comment><USER7> What's "meaningful equity"? 1% of 0 is the same as 50% of 0.

<comment><USER8> That's part of my point. My main point is that you should only do a startup if you truly believe in it (and you should realistically assess this before accepting, as hard as it may be). I think the biggest point of these articles is "don't join a startup for joining a startup's sake." That said, I like to think joining Dropbox or Google while a student and they are startups would have made sense (even discounting hindsight being 20/20, sorry for using these two, but they were the best examples I could come up with) if you were an avid user of either or had the opportunity to meet Larry/Sergey. Meaningful equity to me is enough that if it hits, you at least have enough money to spend a few years doing what you want. My main point is, there are some startups worth joining. But don't join a startup because working at a startup is "better."

I personally love working at the startup I work at, although we are later stage and moving out of the startup phase (I get paid market, and have solid insurance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article opens with the question:

        > "Should I join Microsoft or a startup?"

but really seems to answer the question:

        > "Should I join Microsoft or start a startup"

which is really very different.

<comment><USER10> I think his audience is people who already know they want to start a startup, but aren't sure about _when_.

And as someone who worked for 2 startups, founded one, ended up at a big company, and hope that there will eventually be another startup in my life: I agree with him. I learned _a lot_ working for a big company, and had I known that when I started out, I probably would've been much more effective at evaluating the startup opportunities that were available to me. Having a couple years at Google or Microsoft on your resume doesn't hurt you when you're doing your own thing, and can give you a bunch of experiences that you simply can't get when you're bouncing around between startups.

<comment><USER11> What would you say is the minimum number of years you should "put in", without looking like a job hopper?

<comment><USER10> It's heavily dependent on what you want to get out of it. From a resume POV, you want to show that you fully exploit the opportunities that are available to you, and yet also will seek out new opportunities if there are no more opportunities available to you. How long that translates to depends on how many opportunities are available to you.

I would say that if you're looking for technical skills, those max out at about 18 months. If you're looking to develop leadership, sales (as an engineer) or soft skills, plan on staying a minimum of 4 years, because it takes 2 years or so before people recognize that you have the technical skills to be worth listening to, and then another couple years to actually develop the soft skills. Persistence is another hard one: if you're trying to develop persistence, you need to get put on an ambitious project, and then you need to stick it out until the moonshot succeeds, which frequently takes 3ish years. Soft intrapersonal skills like recognizing your own blind spots and learning how to compensate for them are _really_ hard: many people will _never_ develop these skills, but if you do it usually takes being put on a project that's outside of your comfort zone, and then seeking therapy to deal with the anxiety and avoidance this creates, which usually takes all the time required to develop the skills above plus a year or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This really resonated with me, I was one of those cocky, over-achieving kids who thought I could start a company fresh out of college.

Instead, I've worked in Product for 26 months and learnt some really good skills: how to write real requirements, how to manage expectations (up and down), how to negotiate, how to measure and to focus on moving the needle, how to build a GTM plan and execute against it, how to deal with fireman issues, how to develop with a SOA, the list goes on.

And picked up a bunch of payments industry expertise along the way.

I'm still determined to start my own business, but definitely a hell-of-a-lot more confident in my chances of success.

<comment><USER12> You do learn lots of good things at companies, but you can also learn bad habits -- you can acquire a predilection for long meetings, acquire a taste for political point-scoring over (more difficult, less fun) compromise, and a default position of creating process over improving communication. Those things are survival skills at a big company, but very bad for small ones. The trick is to identify which of the skills you're picking up are good or bad and using them appropriately when you strike out on your own.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent point - I find the long meetings aren't such a difficult thing to avoid - but certainly politics and unnecessary process have no place in a startup.

The other big lesson I learnt, the hidden cost of complexity, and importance of keeping things simple (I don't think you can get this until you meet the real world): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331082](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6331082) (just submitted to HN, realised it hadn't been shared yet)

<comment><USER13> It had: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5914209) :)

<comment><AUTHOR> apologies - well it was a damn good article :)

<comment><USER13> Certainly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This attitude is Seattle's m.o. and I think it's unfortunate.

Recently I was talking with a CS advisor at the UW, my alma mater, and "corporate first, startup later" seems to be their default advice to students. His advice gave me the impression the UW was now a staging ground for Microsoft and Google lifers. Contrast this with Stanford's embracing of early entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and you get a sense for what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER15> I'd be interested in some numbers as far as Stanford goes. If we restrict it to students who don't come from already well-off families who can backstop a risky career (say, look at students from families making <$100k/yr), what proportion get a salaried job right out of school? I would be surprised if it's <90%.

<comment><USER16> 2011-2012 Salary Survey from the Stanford Computer Forum

CS/EE Undergrads

Data: I received 135 responses which described 380 job offers. 95% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 5% were from the Midwest and East Coast. _10% of the job offers were from start-ups._

Salary offers ranged from $65,500 to $92,000. The average salary offer was $79,360. The median salary offer was $ 78,750.

About 70% of students were offered stock options. About 80% of students were offered signing bonuses. And about 60% were offered relocation assistance and there were others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply to them. Relocation assistance ranged from $3,000 to $10,000 with an average of $3,500. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $25,000 with an average of $5,700. I did not calculate the range of stock options because stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values.

Students who replied averaged about 2 job offers. However, students may not have reported on all the offers they received. The average student who replied to the survey all had some job experience, nearly all of it through summer internships and averaged 3 summer of work. Location, scope of work, salary/benefits, environment/culture, company were the important factors in accepting the offers for the undergrads.

CS/EE Masters

Data: I received 150 responses which described 345 job offers. 94% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 6% were in the Midwest and East Coast. _15% of the job offers were from start-ups._

Salary offers ranged from $70,000 to $105,300. The average salary offer was $98,246. The median salary offer was $87,650.

About 78% of students were offered stock options. About 66% of students were offered signing bonuses. And about 43% were offered relocation assistance and there others who did not report the statistics since relocating did not apply to them. Relocation assistance ranged from $3,000 to $8,000 with an average of $2,500. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $35,000 with an average of $6,325. I did not calculate the range of stock options because stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values.

Students who replied averaged about 3 job offers. However, students may not have reported on all the offers they received. The Masters had a little more summer experience than the undergraduates, an average of 3 summer internships.

Like the undergrads, location, scope of work, company, and salary/benefits, and environment/culture seem to be the important factors for the MS grads.

CS/EE PhD's

Data: I received 30 responses which described 75 job offers. 80% of the job offers were primarily located in the Bay Area, 20% were in the Midwest and East Coast. _30% of the job offers were from start-ups._ 5% of the job offers were from a university.

Salary offers ranged from $133,250 to $146,980. The average salary offer was $143,083. The median salary offer was $140,115.

About 50% of students were offered stock options. About 50% of students were offered signing bonuses. Bonuses ranged from $5,000 to $19,500 with an average of $7,200. Relocation assistance ranged from $5,000 to $10,000 with an average of $6,500. However, they may not have reported on all the benefits they received. I did not calculate the range of stock options because stock options offered by companies are so different in their actual and potential values.

Students who replied averaged about 3 job offers. However, students may not have reported on all the offers they received. The PhDs had about the same amount of summer experience as the Masters, an average of 2 summer internships and with the exception of 2 full-time experience.

Like the undergraduates and masters, location, company, environment/culture, salary/benefits, scope of work seem to be the important factors when it came to accepting their job offer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yep. If I had it to do over, I'd do it that way. The options are better now, though. 15 years ago, if you wanted a big software company you had Microsoft, and, uh... Sun? Oracle? Now you have Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, not to mention the in-betweeners like Square, Dropbox, and Github. It's an incredible time to be starting off in Software. Unless you're sitting on the idea of the century (hint: probably not) it's not a bad idea to accumulate up cash, pay off debt, and build a great network.

<comment><USER18> How many employees does Square have?

<comment><USER19> A friend of my works at Square, I believe he said there were 600ish in the office here in San Francisco

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is clearly from a business perspective.

But if you're an engineer, I personally think that working for a big _software_ company early in your career is important. It's just plain easy to work on software in a small company because you don't have legacy code, existing products, existing customers, existing practices. Also you have no real way to judge whether your code is good or bad until its come under the glare of experienced engineers.

Also, people shouldn't take any of Robert Scoble's advice.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. I'm glad I left TripAdvisor when I did, but what I learned there was incredibly valuable. Working with very, very good people and learning from them early on has proven to be a really big long-term benefit.

But I fucked off to a small medical-software company that I could work at while making video games, I have no taste for the work-for-my-social-startup- so-I-can-buy-a-Lotus world.

<comment><USER11> So do you make the games for fun, or do you plan to switch to them fulltime in the future?

<comment><USER21> I'd like to make them full-time, but unless I move to the hinterlands or something I don't know if I'll ever be able to pay my rent on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I believe big companies are a good route for most devs early in their careers but most of the bullet points about why big companies are helpful are only applicable for senior team members. For junior people almost all of these would be faster/easier to accomplish at a startup where you've negotiated for more salary/less equity.

</comment><comment><USER23> > You learn how (and how not) to run your own business—on someone else's dime.

I have worked everywhere from startups where I was hired employee #1 to Fortune 50 companies. Odds are your own business will start small. You learn about how to run your own business when you sit 20 feet from the CEO and the sales team and finance and HR and marketing etc. You don't learn as much about how to run a company when you are the company's 104th Java programmer in that particular city. Maybe at a big company you learn about their particular, complex procedure that it takes to change one line of production code.

</comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't agree with this more. I worked at startups first, and I think I would have been much better off getting a decent amount of experience under my belt first.

</comment><comment><USER25> Recently I graduated from college and decided to go for a big multinational company with employees all over the globe and customers also. The reasons I chose to do so are similar to the ones the author chose.

Some drawbacks so far are the politics it takes to get a project going and the maze of people in a large corporation. Many times it takes several meetings just to find the right person to answer a question. Also having to interface with people around the globe to get sign off on things pose a time zone conflict and more hours are wasted.

Sometimes the answers to the problems that I face are not known to one side of the business because they have no idea how the other side does things. There are massive silos of information and systems that make it harder to navigate than a smaller shop.

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel like getting a job at a larger company as an engineer is easier than getting a job at a startup anyways. Sure when you start your own thing there are no rules, but any startup with a couple senior engineers that have had to train up some employees from scratch know how much work it is. If you are joining a large company then you have a better opportunity to learn from more people. Your support base is larger.

Side note: who can you actually hire within your network if you join/start a startup? I thought I knew people, but every time I've ever asked if anyone wants a referral for (enter reputable startup brand here using awesome tech) I get no responses among my network. Every good engineer I know right now actually has a job that they like.

</comment><comment><USER27> the experience i had in large-company life (ages 21-25) gave me the confidence to dump a large amount of personal money into my startup. if i didn't know it was possible to make decent money at such an early age, i would have been scared to death. to me it was no big deal.

in retrospect it was a pretty brave/risky thing to do, but it didn't feel like it at the time. money came, money went. simple as that.

to a certain extent, i feel the same way now. if everything went to hell tomorrow, i could just get a job and probably earn in the neighborhood of $150k/year on salary.

we, the founders, have 100% ownership of our company, which is profitable and growing at approximately 75-100% a year.

5 years spent in megacorp life versus seeking funding and giving up ownership was well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER28> if you aren't willing to take risk right out of college, not even a midlife crisis will be enough to motivate you to build something great

</comment><comment><USER11> I think more and more young talented developers choose to work for small cool companies or even attempt to start their own, instead of choosing to be a cog at a corporate giant. And this probably has the giants worried.

It's true that corporate experience is useful, but it can also cause depression and frustration, seeing your youth fleeting while you implement inconsequential features and fix trivial defects in a mammoth project you couldn't possibly be more emotionally detached from.

Get out as soon as it makes sense and not a moment later.

</comment><comment><USER29> Joining a big company has many benefits such as being able to see what leads to bureaucracy in order to avoid it, meet at least one awful manager so you will never be like that person, meet at least one amazing mentor and grow, and learn see beyond appearance to recognize truly skilled/smart people vs. overconfident fakers. I think many of these skills are necessary for building a successful company and the relationships formed at these companies are invaluable.

</comment><comment><USER30> The time window for playing the startup game is very short. Fresh out of college you don't have as many financial responsibilities as a few years down the road. Take that financial freedom as a license to risk working at or launching a startup.

You won't be able to do it when you have a mortgage, two kids to feed and clothe, and college savings on the horizon.

<comment><USER31> If you learn to save and manage your money intelligently instead of getting on the consumer treadmill as soon as you score a real job then you'll be in great shape to start later. You'll have savings, connections and experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great article, but as usual I'm put off by how the headline frames this as universal advice, a practice that's reached epidemic proportions in blogging. If this comment were a post on my blog, I might call it "Shooting people who frame their advice as universal and why you need to do it"

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't know that startup vs. big matters as much as small vs. big. If you can work for a profitable small company where you matter and you wear many many hats, you will be far better prepared to make an impact on your own if/when you do start your own company.

</comment><comment><USER34> What really is a startup, these days? A handful of hackers in a garage or a co-working space? Somewhere established but still youthful and fresh- Path? Square? Quora? Someplace much older but with a sense of dynamism and a startup ethos- Google? Apple?

<comment><USER35> If there's a chance your paycheck won't clear, it's a startup.

/I kid, I kid. Sort of.

<comment><USER36> If you work at a startup with a decent runway worth of funding, this should never be an issue.</comment></comment></comment>


How to achieve success - <AUTHOR> http://bozzie123.blogspot.com/2011/04/trying-it-alone.html

<comment><USER2> You are much more likely to be taken seriously if you use punctuation correctly in your blog posts.</comment>


Apple App Store fees are 'highway robbery,' says House antitrust committee chair - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/18/21295778/apple-app-store-hey-email-fees-policies-antitrust-wwdc-2020 <comment><USER2> Dick Turpin lives and prospers on the Apple app store. "Stand and Deliver" [http://stand-and-deliver.org.uk/highwaymen/dick-turpin.html](http://stand- and-deliver.org.uk/highwaymen/dick-turpin.html)</comment>


Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? (1984) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html#m01 <comment><USER2> This is a fascinating piece - especially concerning Pynchon's coverage of the class warfare aspect to machinery-as-capital.

My favorite parts:

\- His treatment of Luddism as class warfare; a recognition that the access to the means of production by the machines paired with their replacement and downward pressure on individual wages concentrates power. We have (had?) a myth that the internet would be 'democratizing' in its power, but it's gone much the same way toward concentration.

\- Pynchon eerily predicts biological sciences, AI and robotics starting to converge and how it will catch us flat footed - and already we are seeing the emergence of extremely rough AIs contain people in information bubbles.

\- Pynchon spells the paradox of deluge of information available to us so very well; while we might think that anyone can become an expert in anything the opportunity cost and the amount of information immediately relevant to our fields isolates us from being broad renaissance men.

Gravity's Rainbow was more than a pleasure. I wish Pynchon had written more of these short critical lens essays.

<comment><USER3> I have been following the trail of these ideas - of machinery as capital, of power, robots, AI, McLuhan, Ginsberg's Howl, etc (did you catch the Beat generation reference in this Pynchon piece?)

Can you say more about this? "already we are seeing the emergence of extremely rough AIs contain people in information bubbles."

Any other reading to recommend?

<comment><USER2> I didn't catch any references to the Beats and have not read Howl (my Beat generation is weak - could only ever get into small amounts of Boroughs and smaller amounts of Kerouac) - but otherwise yes and I would say I'm surprised Postman and Mumford, and maybe even Kaczynski, somehow didn't make the cut; and of course the constellation of other notables who have contributed to the sphere of ideas. It is difficult to define a surface area to this large volume, but if I were to suggest a few I would also add the Extended Mind Thesis and Nudge (or something like it).

Certainly. Take the Pew Research study on news media trends [1]. The majority of younger people are getting their news primarily or entirely from Facebook and Twitter - both of which have algorithms that decide and organize which news and information should populate each stream. What's worse is that these algorithms are not only private, and difficult to understand in their ancillary affects, but also they are controlled by parties whose incentives are not in line with providing people with the information that helps them to be the most informed; and in fact what's worse is both Facebook and Twitter are major stages for both state sponsored and funded propaganda and PR campaigns.

Beyond this, Google, Bing, Baidu and other search engines can not on principle provide links to news on regular search terms, as people do not and can not know what news has happened to search without first being introduced to it. In both search and news aggregation, these search algorithms prioritize items according to profiles they believe match the underlying personalities performing the search. First, the same fundamental problems are present in this search aggregation - studies have been done by governments on reordering search terms to get elections and population affects they desire (and wide scale search engine manipulation has been seen in at least one national election in India) and that for search engines the customer is not the person searching but the PR firms and advertizers who pay to use the searcher's screen real estate establishing incentives which if not wrong on their face are askew and should call for transparency.

Now, this is before other effects are taken into consideration. Presuming aggregation were neither malicious, political or gamed by SEO and that somehow this aggregation is done in a way tailored only to the expectations and demands of the consuming entity. There exists what people call an 'information bubble' of the sort Pynchon predicted I had quoted - where the availability of the information in theory is overshadowed by the immediacy and digestibility of the information that is familiar. And in fact, however anecdotal this may seem, this is my experience with myself and the people who I know. Effort beyond merely searching for new information must be sought. An imaginary and completely invented scenario is as follows: Some scandal happens within government and from outside the internet a left leaning young person hears about it. When they perform a search to get more information about this scandal they will almost certainly be presented - by a 'well working' algorithm - a left leaning perspective on that event aimed towards a young audience cruely devoid of evidence that perspectives from the right, the middle, the top, the bottom, other countries, older people, etc even exist.

Adversarial case aside (e.g. United States Special Forces are known to purposefully surround the media consumption of adversaries and their families in crafted information bubbles to break their faith and ideologies), and poor incentive structure aside (e.g. Digg) there are significant challenges faced by the paternalistic arrangement of algorithmic management not the least of which is knowing the 'ground truth' (a term scientists use to refer to the ideal objective result from an intelligence algorithm) and how far a complicated algorithm is from reaching it.

I tend to wax and wane, but I guess that's what you asked for. :P

[1] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how- social-m...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media- is-reshaping-news/)

<comment><USER2> (I can not edit the comment, but wanted to include Nicholas Carr on the list).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> UK Comedian Mark Steel gives highly recommendable comedy history lectures, in one on the industrial revolution he explains that the Luddites weren't against the machines themselves, but the lack of remuneration or retraining for people made redundant by the machines.

In this sense, the original Luddites were much more progressive and forward thinking than the current use of the term suggests.

It's still a good article.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really wish Pynchon had written more essays (or have I simply missed them?). His writing style often seems quirky in his novels (in a very good way, IMHO, but still), but in the few essays of his I read, he manages to make topics interesting that I would not have given much thought otherwise.

<comment><USER6> His essay on the Watts race riots is pretty great, too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your SEO checklist on new software releases? - <AUTHOR> As a software developer, I would be interested what you are doing SEO wise when you are releasing new software or a major new upgrade for existing software.
It would be good if we would have an easily to follow checklist instead of reinventing the wheel every time.
My current list looks like this:
-upgrade the documentation (since this is also new content, it might be relevant here)
-refresh the software homepage with latest changes (such as extend the feature list)
-announce on the "News" page on my website
-write a blog post (optional if worth)
-announce on our company Facebook page
-post a link to Twitter
-write a relevant article and post it to 1-2
relevant website (time consuming)
-create a video and post to YouTube (very time consuming)
-send email to a few old customers who might be interested in the new features
I would like to extend my list with a few more actions for better SEO, so I am here to look for your recommendations. <comment><USER2> Serious question for you: how is that going to help with anything but searches for your company/product name?

To actually bring in new and useful organic search traffic, you have to start creating valuable content when you're not releasing software.

What you're describing is promoting a product release not anything really "SEO" related at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> I only bother with one item on your list. Blog posts.

Twitter, facebook etc I don't care about.

Traffic from search engines is the be all and end all of SEO and to capture that traffic you need a big bloggy fishing net.

</comment><comment><USER4> My SEO checklist: \- make sure to not do any SEO crap.

Done,

</comment><comment><USER5> You're asking the wrong question: What's your marketing strategy to reach your target market?

(of which your website and SEO could be an important component - or not)</comment>


Hackers stole GitHub and Gitlab OAuth tokens from Git analytics firm Waydev - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-stole-github-and-gitlab-oauth-tokens-from-git-analytics-firm-waydev/ <comment><USER2> The companies that were hacked as a result (Dave.com, Flood.io) must have been storing secrets in source code, which has got to be one of the most negligent ways to suffer a breach.</comment>


Dyn.js - invokedynamic-based javascript implementation for the JVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dynjs/dyn.js

<comment><USER2> Any benchmarks?

<comment><USER3> Not yet, but it'll come soon. Between, so far I cannot see any use in benchmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those like me who have left the Oracle world behind, apparently Java 7 has a new bytecode mode called invokedynamic which allows for dynamically typed language support:

<http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/DynTypeLang/>

It's not spelled out very well, but I assume this Dyn.js will make interpreters like Rhino obsolete??

<comment><USER5> Rhino is going to support invokedynamic in the next version, and I believe Oracle is doing a new invokedynamic based interpreter too.

<comment><USER3> You can find more details here: www.infoq.com/news/2011/10/dynjs</comment></comment></comment>


Two pieces of code someone really ought to write - <AUTHOR> http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/08/two-pieces-of-code-someone-really-ought.html

<comment><USER2> There are a few attempts to make sockets look like a Unix filesystem, but none seem to have caught on, perhaps partly because sockets are pretty portable, while fs-like interfaces, unless one gets widespread support to the extent of being a POSIX-like "assumed to be on all UNIXes", are inevitably tied to a particular OS flavor.

I believe Plan9 was the first to have support for the idea, though, and NetBSD has had it as an option for about 15 years, though I'm not sure if it's currently maintained. Here's an old paper about NetBSD's implementation: <http://www.kohala.com/start/portals.ps>

The existence of netcat also makes it a bit less pressing imo. In the cases where I want a quick shell script that does sockets, I can use netcat as basically a socket library. It's not the everything-is-a-file style of Unixy coding, but it is at least the pipe-simple-utilities style of Unixy coding. And if I want to write a "real app" in some higher-level language, the language can wrap socket-opening at the library level to look like file- opening if it wants to, so it doesn't _really_ have to be done by the OS.

<comment><AUTHOR> > while fs-like interfaces, unless one gets widespread support to the extent > of being a POSIX-like "assumed to be on all UNIXes"

FUSE runs on pretty everything, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> It runs on most popular Unix-ish systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regarding the first point (socket as file), Plan 9 operating system is not using any system call for socket but use a pseudo file-system /net.

<http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/net/>

Using the same approach in a fuse implementation would make sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> FWIW, Bash has this built in;

        cat </dev/tcp/www.google.com/80

It's unfortunately disabled in the bash that ships with debian, but should work pretty much everywhere else.

<comment><USER6> Is there anything similar in zsh? That could be quite helpful?

<comment><USER7> There are two much more powerful tcp interfaces built in to zsh:

The zsh/net/tcp Module:

<http://tinyurl.com/3alarxf>

And zshtcpsys:

<http://tinyurl.com/32z6bwe>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you allow this:

open("/fuse/sockets/www.whatever.com/tcp/80", "r+")

Then what do you do with these?

/fuse/sockets/www.whatever.com/tcp /fuse/sockets/www.whatever.com /fuse/sockets

They and other variations would each need different semantics, some allowing rw, some ro, some wo, and some not being allowed at all. Some path segments would not allow arbitrary names (tcp/udp, port number) while others require a specific format (host/ip) and others are arbitrary. Some have to be directories, some have to be files, and some are neither. None of this is very filesystem-like. I think the current design is right: opening sockets is kind of special, but you get a filehandle that is very much like an ordinary filehandle.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Then what do you do with these?

The same things you do with any other incomplete path name. I don't see why this is an issue at all.

<comment><USER9> There's no such thing as an "incomplete path name", those have to be directories.

<comment><AUTHOR> So treat them as directories (or more specifically, as mount points). I still don't see the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first issue is a programming language problem, not an OS problem. His language of choice exposes the direct low-level API, which is not usually what application-level programmers want.

A few library functions, and the problem is solved without FUSE or a performance impact. And it's still portable to everywhere.

<comment><USER11> But then you have to implement the solution in every language, while with FUSE, you implement it once and each language runtime instantly has access to it.

<comment><USER10> Knock yourself out, then. Every language I use (including C) already has a sugary socket API, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Regarding your first point... You forget one thing: you open a file and get a file descriptor. If you open a socket (though it takes 3 calls), it also returns a file descriptor. Sockets can then be written to and read from just like files. Won't even get started then about the fact that sockets allow you to do just about any type of networking, and are very abstract by purpose, to allow a variety of uses.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like opening a socket could be reduced to one call, so why not fopen()? Seems like it'd be an easy thing to get into a kernel, any reason not to?

<comment><USER12> The question is if fopen() would then still work with embedded or archaic architectures. Examples such as radio links on tiny 16-bit hardware come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> NO NO NO!!! For the sake of all that is holy don't do it!!!!

Or rather, read & understand the fallacies of network programming: <http://www.jezuk.co.uk/cgi-bin/view/jez?id=2650> before you do it.

The failure mode of networks is quite different to that of files, and the programming model reflects that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The failure mode of networks is quite different to that of files

Actually, with a remote file system, the failure modes of networks is necessarily exactly the same as that of files.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and you'll note that a huge amount of the remote file driver code involves dealing with those failures.

If you drop that down a level and turn sockets into files then suddenly programs that are written to work with files will try to deal with these kind- of-file-but-not-really things, and fail in unexpected ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "But now suppose that I have a single machine with a single IP address hosting multiple virtual servers, and I want to replicate this setup for each virtual server, i.e. I want each virtual server to have its own instantiation of the custom server application. Now I have to _manually_ assign _each_ instantiation of the app to a separate TCP port number. If I have hundreds or thousands of virtual servers on the same machine (Oh? You think that's not reasonable? Can you say "multi-core architecture"?) that can become a serious administrative (to say nothing of security) nightmare."

Not quite sure I'm interpreting you correctly here - but woudln't you be using localhost for this and/or using loopback interfaces?

Also - if you were designing an application that had to scale out to that many cores, you'd be dealing with things at a system level and using sockets anyway. Whether you are opening unix domain sockets or assigning ports, you still have to track and configure everything - and that can still be automated. While it would be a neat feature - it doesn't seem like a terribly necessary one.

Yes, it would be cool if apache could forward things to a local unix domain socket. Agreed there.

But there's no security nightmare unless you create one - in the instance you describe you bind applications to loopback interfaces, either on ports or creating more loopback interfaces. Designing the applications to use TCP sockets rather than unix domain sockets also leaves you with more flexibility when it comes to design decisions later on - you don't have to leave them on the same machine.

ALso - one wouldn't generally use apache for this - one would use something else as a front end these days that's better suited to forwarding requests and dealing with timeouts, resources, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Not quite sure I'm interpreting you correctly here - but woudln't you be > using localhost for this and/or using loopback interfaces?

Sure. But you still have to assign a port number. And you still have to make a round trip through the network stack. It's also a potential security hole if you're not careful to configure the server apps to only listen on the loopback interface.

> Also - if you were designing an application that had to scale out to that > many cores, you'd be dealing with things at a system level and using sockets > anyway.

Why? Running N servers on N machines is completely straightforward. Why should it not be just as straightforward to run N servers on one machine with N cores?

> you still have to track and configure everything - and that can still be > automated

Of course it _can_ be automated, but automating the assignment of virtual servers to TCP/IP ports is not straightforward. You have to coordinate the port assignment on both the client and the server side. You have potential synchronization issues if one virtual server goes down and another comes up and wants to use the same port as the one that went down. Port numbers are a scarce resource. The file system namespace is essentially infinite. Why make things harder than they need to be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> About the first point: several people have mentioned plan9, GNU awk also handles sockets as a virtual filesystem. You seem to think it's better handled at an OS level (and I agree), but it's a good way to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Nginx can proxy incoming connections to unix sockets

<http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpProxyModule#proxy_pass>

</comment><comment><USER18> You can sorta get what he's asking for with a bash feature. <http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/devref1.html#DEVTCP>

<comment><USER19> Yes but thats a hack built into bash

The point of unix is to do everything in the file system then anything that can open a file can do everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My network programming background is a bit small. Could someone explain for me the difference between what OP calls for with sockets and a tun/tap device?

<comment><USER21> A tun/tap device is a way to write a user space network driver for a piece of hardware to make it look like a network device to the OS. ie: you could make a serial serial cable look like a network device.

What this blog is asking for is a different way to access network resources so instead of calling a function like socket(some_ip, some_port, SOME_PROTOCOL); (which is a gross over simplification for the typical way it is done) he wants to be able to say open("/net/some_ip/protocol/some_port", "rw");</comment></comment>


Behringer's Clone of Apple's Homepage - <AUTHOR> http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/04/behringers-latest-rip-off-job-apple-com/ Follow up article detailing Behringer's history of lawsuits here: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track-record-value-and-copies/ <comment><USER2> who cares. this is between their lawyers and Apple's.

<comment><AUTHOR> "who cares."

-Hackers -Musicians -Apple Fans -Behringer Customers -Behringer Haters -Behringer Competitors -IP Lawyers -Copyright Crusaders and so on.

Lots of Hacker News users are musicians. Lots of musicians are hackers. Lots of them own Behringer gear. Lots of them own Apple gear. Many of them are interested in issues pertaining to Trademark, Copyright, Patents, IP Theft and other legal issues.

<comment><USER3> What is wrong with the ripoff? It's not an exact copy, and it's still in a slightly different market than Apple is. If someone took a deceptively similar coke can and converted it into a speaker, would that infringe on Coca-Cola's look & feel?

Microsoft ripped off Apple's windowing look & feel, and Apple ripped it off from Xerox's Alto.

<comment><USER4> > Apple ripped it off from Xerox's Alto

Apple licenced it from Xerox

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's also a follow-up to the article covering Behringer's notorious IP thefts over the years.

[http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers- track...](http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/06/on-behringers-track-record- value-and-copies/#more-7315)

<comment><USER5> Boo hoo. I laughed out loud at seeing Behringer's copies of the KRK speakers that sit on either side of my monitor...and good luck to them. Behringer gear is not that great * but it is affordable, and they're a friend to the broke musician. Also, Uli Behringer is a really nice guy.

* With the exception of the Composer compressor, which is a little masterpiece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's different in a lot of little ways, almost all of which make it inferior to Apple's site.</comment>


How Amazon took control of the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/01/how-amazon-took-control-of-the-cloud-john-naughton <comment><USER2> Move to the cloud, all fine and everything, as long as you're an US company.

Can't speak too detailed because of NDA, but at work we cannot use innovative tools like Google Docs, Google Mail for Business, Dropbox, Office 365 and the likes (and for our privacy-conscious clients, no AWS, only Azure) because the US government can compel the providers to turn over our confidential data to them. We're stuck with Lotus Notes 8.5 and Office 2013 because our IT wants to migrate to Office, but our client NDAs prohibit us from using cloud stuff with their data (again, fears of the clients of US industrial espionage. Snowden actually proved them right).

The NSA and the US government effectively killed their cloud business for non US customers with their spying crap.

<comment><USER3> That's more likely to do with the cloud in general or even more likely with platform specific compliance issues rather than anything to do with the US.

EU's data protection directive and various local legislation like the DPA don't have an issue with the cloud, but are quite stringent on the fact that the data doesn't leave the EU so you are restricted to EU data centers.

Google and Microsoft have services for EU customers that more or less ensure that the data never leaves an EU data center (MSFT guarantees it, google slightly less so) and as far as infrastructure goes most if not all PAAS/IAAS providers have a European data centers. [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/eu- data-protection/](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/eu-data-protection/)

I know for a fact that at the least British, German, Dutch and Italian companies and governmental organizations even in heavily regulated industries like health care and defense use both Azure and AWS for both corporate IT and production (and if we count less regulated verticals such as banking, financial services, and telco then everyone and their mother within the EU uses Azure, AWS, and many other cloud platforms).

So no while there is some issues with some US companies and services in regards to privacy especially around the safe harbor rulings there isn't any global or even meaningful resistance to the use of US services providers and software.

P.S. Also the fact that you use Lotus Notes and Office 2013 also has very little to do with US phobia, you could've used Exchange just as well, and office 2015 just came out and very few organizations have actually migrated to it.

P.S. 2 You've likely already broken your NDA by admitting you signed one or that one exists, as the existence of an NDA is the first thing that is by it. Not to mention that while you didn't gave any technical detail the fact that you've mentioned the restrictions your company and or organization is under is also most likely a breach of any potential NDA as well as organizational opsec protocols.

<comment><USER4> That hasn't been my experience, I don't know from where you're getting your facts from. But I'm involved with two very big German companies and I've heard of many others that are banning US-based services and it's not enough for those services to have servers in the EU. There is no such thing as AWS or Azure, their usage would be unthinkable. Everything happens on their own infrastructure and installing Skype on your computer for example can get you fired. The reason is quite simply fear of industrial espionage and the Snowden leaks made things a lot worse.

<comment><USER3> From actually doing security and compliance(ISO, PCI, FCA) related work within the EU, as for getting fired for installing Skype, you can get fired for installing any unauthorized software in a company with a strict computer use and computer security policy.

I use skype to communicate with German clients including in the banking sector like ING-DiBa, so anecdotal evidence aside not every company has some aversion from US companies not to mention that Amazon is pretty much handing out free AWS credits in every large accelerator in Europe (If you want anecdotal German examples then Deutsche Bank's innovation hub in Berlin) including fin-tech and health care specific accelerators and the participants are eating them up (and if you want bigger companies than AWS's case studies have quite a few of big German clients [https://aws.amazon.com/de/solutions/case- studies/all/](https://aws.amazon.com/de/solutions/case-studies/all/) including Siemens health care solutions and Software AG, and Nuremberg's Airport so 2 regulated industries, and the 2nd largest German software house). With the exception of 1 startup in the current Barclay's accelerator run in London every company in IIRC is running on AWS because of that, heck some companies in the the MSFT accelerator across the hall are using AWS even tho that Azure is pretty much complementary.

Big companies always are slow in adapting new technologies but it doesn't mean that there is some generic no cloud or non US policy in it, yes if you are handling data protected under local and EU data directives you need assurances but if you can achieve those or flex them enough to maintain compliance you will be able to use them.

Yes if you are giant org that has it's own data centers and 100% control over all of it's assets you won't be jumping on the cloud bandwagon and you are more likely to deploy a "private cloud" in house which is just a fancy word to say that you will have more modern resource management and deployment infrastructure, and sure the likes of Rackspace are still considerably more popular in Europe (as they are in the US) than AWS as far as managed services go mostly because they've existed for much longer and they still offer traditional types of managed infrastructure / data center as well as cloud-ish products.

You are also way way over estimating the impact of the Snowden leaks on the industry.

<comment><USER5> When avoiding US Services it's not about the whole company. At least 4 DAX companies research departments I know about enforce GPG Crypted mail transport since Snowden. Everything else bounces. The same companies asked us to exclude the US and the UK out of sensible data routes. I know that's not gonna do it, and there's a lot more to do but... I know that you know why I can't go into further details.

<comment><USER3> Research departments have always had different operational procedures, 4-5 years ago i did a project for a company called Interhyp(financial services mostly finance management loans and mortgages) in the building across them there was a Siemens facility which had cell jammers that leaked through the street if you were too close well tough luck.

Different departments and subsidiaries will operate according to different procedures based on the specific threats and requirements, this happens even in already highly regulated and restricted fields for example Lockheed Martin'a Skunk Works and Boeing's Phantom Works operate on a completely different level than their civilian and even military BAU aerospace departments when it comes to operational security and secrecy.

Not every company, and not every department can and has to operate using the same ruleset, departments that are relatively sensitive or can afford to work under stringent rules may do so, departments that can't or don't really need too won't, life isn't binary there's more than 2 ways to skin a cat ;)

<comment><USER2> Cell jammers? Shit these are illegal no matter where you want them...

<comment><USER3> Depends where and for what use, some company in the US got hit in the rear because of that, but if you are working in the defense industry you might get exempted, heck in South Africa there was a scandal this year when they jammed the signal inside the parliament even tho it was illegal. [http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Reports-of-a- cell...](http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/Politics/Reports-of-a-cellphone- jammer-in-Parliament-20150212)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have about 5 years experience with both AWS and Google Cloud (App Engine, Google Compute, ..). I agree that AWS has more services to offer than Google. Initially Google took the route of the App Engine and fell behind AWS. However, recently its Compute Engine and other related services like Container Engine, Datalab (IPython, Jupyter as a Service), Big Query, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and more started outshining their AWS counterparts. Google's network is way faster than AWS. AWS network is too slow and flaky. For anyone taking the route of microservies, Google Cloud offers a huge advantage. Google new cloud console (which is still in beta) is sleek and sexy. Google's cloud services are a pleasure to use compared to AWS (other than a few pain points). I recommend small and medium Cloud-based shops to relook into Google Compute again. Google Cloud is adding services to its arsenal at a super fast rate (much faster than AWS). Just take a look at their engineering blog: [http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/](http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/). In a year I see google Cloud overtake AWS in terms of the capability.

<comment><USER7> Have been running a behemoth of a web application on AWS for 3 years on multiple regions, using ec2, s3, elastic beanstalk, elastic transcoder, sqs, dynamodb, cloudfront and rds. Have been pretty happy with both performance and cost effectiveness.

That said. I have deployed some newer / smaller stuff on Google Container Engine. Used Cloud SQL and Storage services along with it. I think Google has a solid offering right now. Performance is great and tooling / management interfaces are, IMHO, better than AWS's. I think it has a bright future as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It now has annual revenues in the $8bn range, which is bigger than Amazon's > entire retail operation

If Amazon's total revenue (for 2014) was just shy of $90B[1] how can $8B be more than their retail operation?

[1] [https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN+Income+Statement&annua...](https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN+Income+Statement&annual)

<comment><USER9> I remember reading that "operating income" of AWS is greater than the retail arm

<comment><USER10> In the most recent quarter it essentially matched the retail side of Amazon's _North America_ business on operating income.

In North America Amazon generated $528m in operating income. AWS generated $521m.

AWS is growing extremely fast of course (78% sales growth year over year for the quarter). In three years it'll probably be spitting off $4 to $5 billion per year in operating income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazing, but not surprising, that AWS is overtaking the retail operation in terms of profit and growth. For all the minor frustrations involved in running a big operation on AWS (good luck actually provisioning 1000 instances of a single type on a whim during peak hours), the service itself is nothing short of miraculous to someone who ran physical server farms a mere decade ago.

All that said, of course, Amazon's dominance will become a problem if no other competitors find a way to seriously compete. Certainly their newer services are designed to foster lock-in as much as they are made to provide simpler architectures and automated resource management.

But I sincerely hope one of the smaller players grows into a real contender as well. Amazon, at least at first, seemed like a disinterested player making a hedge bet. Their customers were not competitors. With Google and Microsoft the same can't be said.

<comment><USER12> Any players are good that encourage Amazon to do a better job. I really think AWS improved since Azure and GCE came along. Moreover, when I dealt with Amazon on calls and in meetings, any time we mentioned the Google or Azure words, they immediately wanted to proactively respond (and eventually did). We were a customer of both their competitors so this helped, but I give Amazon some credit.

Regarding lock-in, I think you are right but everyone seems to be doing this.

I think for better or worse, part of what Amazon has done has been adapting what they already were doing in-house into a product. Sometimes when people just come up with products to compete or "just because," they add in a lot of nonsense and architect things badly. Microsoft seemed to be going both routes at different times with Azure. I was an original user of Azure including the various data stores/data stores they asked for at the time. To say everything on Azure, whether the machines, data stores, services, libraries, or anything else were horrible would be an understatement (might be one of the worst major platforms I've used ever). Amazing how they turned it around when they were sure they had to compete stronger.

<comment><USER13> It's irony manifest that companies would consider moving away from vendor lockin in data centers they own to data centers they do not own yet still locked into one vendor's platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm only a small user of cloud providers, but find Google cloud engine much more user friendly than aws, so why is amazon still capturing the market? I don't see the downsides of GCE.

<comment><USER15> I am a user of Google App Engine and found its performance unsatisfying. I can execute the same Java programs 10 times faster on my local machine than in an app engine instance with the same GHz and RAM according to Google. I.e. what takes 1 second locally (CPU-bound, no i/o), takes 10 seconds in app engine.

<comment><USER4> Google App Engine != Google Compute Engine (GCE), of which presumably the parent is talking about.

<comment><USER12> I agree that is what the parent is talking about, however in the context of GCE, Google Cloud Services which include App Engine and a whole slew of other services are relevant. Given that if you've used them, there are integrations and even shared admin areas/dependencies, it is very relevant to talk about how other services perform in the Google Cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article didn't answered the how part. All but last two paragraphs are the things every programmer takes for granted, second last sounds like an ad and last stats.

But these sites do know how to get people to click their sites.

</comment><comment><USER17> Their growth is amazing. Q3 2015 revenue up 78% YoY

<comment><USER18> That's why Amazon can afford the huge salary increase they offered Jeremy Clarkson and the old BBC Top Gear crew.

<comment><USER19> Which is a horrible thing to do from a moral standpoint:

Yes, the Top Gear crew will make you profits.

But is it morally okay to hire someone who just got fired for punching their director? Isn't that rewarding horrible behaviour?

EDIT: Please explain why you disagree in a comment – I'd love to hear other opinions.

<comment><USER20> I bet on a big Hollywood movie a assistant producer screwing up an evening meal for a big star would be fired that day and probably black listed.

And he wasn't fired the BBC didn't take up a new contract at least in part due to lobbying by other media owners who don't like the BBC having a hit show.

Additionally is it fair that James may and Richard Hammond and the rest of the TG crew lost their jobs

<comment><USER19> No, it is not fair that the others lost their jobs.

And he was fired – the BBC instantly suspended the show and stopped even broadcasting all further recorded episodes. That's as "fired" as it gets.

And it was not that the assistant producer "screwed up", it was that Clarkson insisted they would stay longer out, then they came so late to the Hotel that the hotel had no warm food anymore, and then Clarkson punched the assistant producer.

And how is this behaviour rewarded? With a raise.

(And the "that other group is behaving immoral, so I should too" defense is in no way relevant)

<comment><USER18> Well, to quote James May 'Jeremy Clarkson is a complete nob but I like him' And for the next useless tidbit, heard May was holding out for more cash from Amazon for the new 2016 series and got it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone shed some light on how much it actually costs to run your own infrastructure? Say that I use 5 large instances of RDS database and then around 100 large EC2 instances along with ELB's. This will roughly cost around $1M a year with AWS. Will running your own infrastructure be costlier than this?

<comment><USER22> running a rack of servers will basically cost you $50k a year including the finance cost of the machines and switches.

it's not the money, it's the expertise that's the limiting factor. very few people know how to do it reliably.

<comment><USER23> I think this $50k number is way low unless you are talking bargain basement data center. Also, doesn't contemplate needed bandwidth. I agree with the expertise point, though.

Rough numbers:

Server = $5k, straight line depreciation over 3 years, 40 per rack Switches = $6k, each, "", 2 per rack Rack = $2k/month Power = $2k/month

That works out to: Servers: 40 * $138/server/month=$5555/month Servers: 2 * $333/switch/month Rent: $2000/rack/month Power: $2000/rack/month

Total: $118,656/year

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Nowadays, startups just rent AWS servers and storage, and if they suddenly need an extra thousand servers, they just click on a link and put the cost on a credit card."

Where's this magic autoscaling link? Last I checked, AWS provided an extremely unfriendly API on top of extremely buggy services at prices that'd allow you to build your own data center with the money spent on a few months of renting VMs. They are indeed the 90's Microsoft of the cloud: incredibly expensive, buggy, and widely adopted by people that I assume burn cash to keep warm because they're so rich.

Add to that the possibility that one's account will be closed for no reason and without recourse, and you have the most unstable platform for apps imaginable.

<comment><USER25> > Where's this magic autoscaling link?

Locate the relevant auto scaling group, click "edit" and increase both the "maximum" and the "desired" number.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/as- manual-scaling.html)

I know that it's hardly ever that simple to scale up the whole architecture of a running system, but ask a trivial question...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> AWS and Azure are now household names in enterprise. Clients who once only allowed on premise IT solutions are beginning to bend to vendors will by using "the cloud".

<comment><USER11> This year's AWS re:Invent conference was totally focused on winning over the corporate enterprise to the Cloud. Compliance, enterprise-scale resources, and migration solutions were major major pushes in the keynotes and sessions. Day 1's keynote was more for the CEOs in the crowd than for the techies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "It now has annual revenues in the $8bn range, which is bigger than Amazon's entire retail operation and growing three times faster."

The math seems wrong there...

</comment><comment><USER28> Does the article answer the 'How' part of the title? Or am I missing something?</comment>


John Carmack mentioned Rust as modern PL choice - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1299574198365495297 <comment><USER2> ...And the (HN) crowd goes wild. (Again)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they went really wild in here........</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has Diigo gone bust? - <AUTHOR> I've been a loyal Diigo user since Delicious went awkward... Today I discovered their website - www.diigo.com - doesn't work anymore (sometimes there's a godaddy error), that most news on social website are between some months and some years (!) old, and that there're just 5 employees on LinkedIn.<p>Somebody knows what's happening? How could I find out? <comment><USER2> I noticed the same thing yesterday, but thought it was probably just routine maintenance. When I saw that Diigo was still down this afternoon, that got me worrying. I've also been worried that this may be a sign of them going under.

Diigo is still down for me, however. I haven't seen it up even once since yesterday afternoon. Are you still able to access it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's working now, but i have backupped my links.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now the website seems to work again... but the discovery I made about the "social" and news part makes me nervous.</comment>


Who Killed the American Arts? - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.us/killed-american-arts/ <comment><USER2> Who did? _We did._ We pushed a "STEM uber alles" education policy, cut funding for art and music classes in the public schools, insisted that the only justification for higher education is getting "a good job", and discourage the young by pushing the message that anybody who can't monetize their art has no business even trying to do art.

We live in a _suicide society_.

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


The Brains of Flint's Children, Imperiled by Lead, Could Still Escape Damage - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brains-of-flint-s-children-imperiled-by-lead-could-still-escape-damage/ <comment><AUTHOR> I find this to be a fascinating article because simplistic emotional arguments disseminated in the press, presumably by researchers and regulators themselves and scientifically illiterate journalists ("lead is unsafe at any level and children with a Blood Lead Level of 5 are poisoned"), are then tempered when real people are involved:

 _This does not mean that children at this level are poisoned," Dietrich says. "There are very few studies of low-level lead exposure, but there is nothing in the data that suggests that children will have negative impacts of short- term low-level exposure" over their lives. In fact, he notes, the 5 μg /dL figure was set because 97.5 percent of young children fall below it, not because blood lead levels at that threshold result in permanent harm_</comment>


Dianne Feinstein's reply to constituents' opposition to EARN IT act - <AUTHOR> https://pastebin.com/CYbtjtb8 <comment><USER2> Sigh, another feel-good law being proposed with no consideration for second or third order effects.

Tech companies would be required to police their systems for this data. There's no good automated way to do this, so an army of compliance workers would be needed if you have a non-trivial amount of content on your platform. For small tech companies, this would be prohibitively expensive.

Then there's the 800lb gorilla in the room: the encryption issue. How can a company police its content if it doesn't know what it is? Are we really suggesting that every end-to-end encryption technology be nuked in favor of "saving the children?" How many children will it really save? And how many others will it endanger in oppressive, dictatorial regimes? Not to mention the myriad other criminals seeking to exploit unencrypted and non-private technologies?

This is akin to vehicle manufacturers being required to monitor the audio of vehicle occupants at all times in case a rape occurs.

"Think of the children." This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's disgusting.

I'm counting the days until Feinstein leaves office. EARN IT causes more harm than good.

<comment><USER3> > Are we really suggesting that every end-to-end encryption technology be > nuked in favor of "saving the children?"

Yes. Their _goal_ is to nuke encryption. The children are a red herring. This is solely about government power.

<comment><USER4> No. Their goal is to protect the children. They don't understand technology and do not care how many enterprises are destroyed by their clumsy fumbling. Stop trying to reframe stupidity as conspiracy.

<comment><USER5> "Conspiracy" makes it sound like the US government hasn't been building the largest spying apparatus in history over the past 2 decades. Reality says otherwise.

<comment><USER6> And Feinstein has always been on the side of surveillance, except of course when _she_ is affected:

[https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/13/politics/feinstein-cia- sn...](https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/13/politics/feinstein-cia-snooping- hypocrisy/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I was deeply disturbed by recent reporting by The New York Times about the > nearly 70 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse that were > reported by technology companies last year.

If the tech companies are reporting 70 million photos and videos, doesn't that mean current measures are already effective at finding and reporting massive quantities of child sexual abuse content? It's like complaining about firefighters putting out too many fires - even if there is some real problem causing an excessive amount of fires to start, there's no reason to interfere with the firefighters successfully combatting the problem.

It is quite frightening that the bill's prominent supporters won't list even a single problem with the current system that they hope their new "best practices" would rectify.

<comment><USER8> It's quite troubling, too, that the senator does not provide a baseline against which to assess the 70 million figure. How many of the pictures are duplicates or substantially duplicates? What is the report actually counting? How does that translate to number of victims? How many more images does the senator believe that the EARN IT act will uncover?

The senator quoted the 70 million figure not to inform us, but to shock us and make us suspend judgement. It shouldn't be the norm for senators to respond without carefully sourced statistics, and it shouldn't be the norm for them to present a single statistic without a baseline or without something to compare it against, leaving it to our imagination, what the effect of their policies will be or what the scope of the issue is.

<comment><USER9> As someone that's had to submit CP reports to NCMEC before (very rarely fortunately), I find that 70 million figure to be pretty strange and suspect. If you consider that Facebook has 2.45 billion active users, if it was one report per person it would represent 3% of Facebook's entire user base. I'm assuming there's some sort of automation in this, and perhaps a lot of duplicates (but MS PhotoDNA is supposed to catch this) or false reports. I wouldn't take that number at face value, it feels very off from my experience.

<comment><USER10> It is a bit suspect, likely for the reasons you suggest. I can imagine that large caches of CP media does get transferred some portion of the time, which might be inflating the numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got a very similar reply from Bob Menendez.

>Thank you for contacting me to express your concern for the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act. Your opinion is very important to me, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to you.

The EARN IT Act would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to require companies to "earn" their liability protection for violations of laws related to the trafficking of child sexual abuse material. The EARN IT Act lays out best practices for companies to maintain immunity from child sexual abuse material statutes and bolsters enforcement if companies choose not to comply with the practices. The companies would not lose Section 230 protections for other content like defamation and threats.

> As someone concerned about internet freedom, you will be pleased to know > that I am an original cosponsor of the Save the Internet Act. This bill > would remand the Commission back to its February 2015 ruling protecting and > promoting an open internet and make the net neutrality permanent. This bill > would also prevent the Federal Communications Commission from reissuing any > rulings or orders unless specifically authorized by law.

> I also voted for S. J. Res. 52, a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution > which would reverse the December 14, 2017 vote by the Federal Communications > Commission to repeal the Open Internet Order of 2015. The resolution, which > I cosponsored, passed the Senate on May 16, 2018. In addition to > cosponsoring the CRA, I cosigned a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai opposing > the FCC's vote to eliminate net neutrality. Access to information and open > communications are critical to maintaining democratic internet practices, > supporting small businesses, and protecting consumers. The EARN IT Act was > introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and although I am not a member > of this Committee, please know that I will keep your views in mind in the > future.

<comment><USER2> Wow. So they can't even take the time to write their own thoughtful reply to their constituents on heated issues? They simply plagiarize the work of others or pay some intern to do it?

How insulting.

What the heck is wrong with these politicians? Do they think their office is simply a place where they can "play Game of Thrones" and sit back and smirk?

And we wonder why Americans band together in excitement for non-career- politician presidential candidates like Yang and Trump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As far as form letters go it's not too bad ... but I thought this was surprisingly frank and undermined any note of reason she was trying to strike:

> Media reports, however, make it clear that ....

So she admits they had no basis for these laws other than some news articles? It seems crazy they'd shift fundamental aspects of how the internet works with no more basis than some media reports.

<comment><USER13> It reads to me like "thanks, but fuck off."

<comment><USER14> Having received the same letter from DF a couple weeks ago, this is exactly how I took it as well.

Except maybe s/but/and/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this horrid bill going to pass? Do we stand any chance in getting this canned like SOPA/PIPA, or is the coronavirus too big of a distraction?

Shame on these folks for using this crisis to shove this into our legal framework. This is tyranny.

</comment><comment><USER16> Think of the children! ...

Don't let them grow up in a police state where the government spies on their conversations and whereabouts, forever.

On the other hand, _do_ enact universal healthcare in the US, so that they get decent medical care when they're sick. But as we all know - Mrs. Feinstein is definitely _against_ that.

<comment><USER17> Where do you get that she's against universal healthcare? Googles turning up that she supports universal healthcare.

<comment><USER16> Well, she's not proposed a bill, and not supported Sanders' Medicare for All bill which is the current leading proposal for universal health care in the US. And - she gaslights about it, see:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbq6t7bg2ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbq6t7bg2ro)

To explain why I claim she's gaslighting, note that universal health care in Capitalist societies has basically two options:

1\. Government insurance, non-governmental provision 2\. No insurance, government provision

US Medicare is option (1.), US veterans' healthcare as well as UK national health service is option (2.) and is quite viable. Option (3.) is only for non-Capitalist economies. In the clip, Feinstein gaslights by pretending Medicare for All is (2.) rather than (1.) and declaring opposition to (2.)

Finally, several days later, health insurance industry lobbyists organized a fundraiser for Feinstein, as mentioned here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFZxVixSjDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFZxVixSjDc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Totally void of content. Think of the children sweetness, no proper legal, civil or even political reasoning.

Just: hey, you must agree if you are not a pedophile.

<comment><USER19> If there were content then there would be points to argue against.

This is the same vein of response I'd get from Obama, or really any politician who has every word they say picked apart by a dozen staffers trying to make sure the decision that's already been made stays made while not saying anything that will cause blowback.

Mild, uninformative, intentionally misunderstanding the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Summary: FOR THE CHILDREN!!!

</comment><comment><USER21> Orwellian.

Similar "but the children" fallacious legislation BS took down Craigslist's personals section.

This makes encrypted, zero-knowledge customer data an insurance liability.

Porn is next. And then the regulation of abortion and consensual sex between adults. Oh wait, the first is already happening.

Next will be individual social media licensure, individual journalism licensure, and internet licensure... "it's a privilege, not a right" they will say.

Watch when the wealthy elites begin to lose their grip on power from below, the restrictions on freedoms, eliminations of rights, and sanctioning of more abuse and violence against dissidents will accelerate markedly. If the people cede one inch, they will take a mile and never give it back without a revolution.

</comment><comment><USER22> Dianne Feinstein is the absolute worst, especially on these issues, but also many others. I don't know how she keeps getting elected. Here's a quick rundown:

Feinstein on internet freedom and free speech:

* Feinstein was the original Democratic co-sponsor of a bill to extend the USA PATRIOT Act.

* In 2012, Feinstein voted for the extension of the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions.[41]

* On May 12, 2011, Feinstein co-sponsored PIPA.

* Following her 2012 vote to extend the Patriot Act and the FISA provisions,[41] and after the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures involving the National Security Agency (NSA), Feinstein promoted and supported measures to continue the information collection programs

* She was the main Democratic sponsor of the failed 2006 constitutional Flag Desecration Amendment.[43]

* In 2010, Feinstein voted in favor of unilateral US censorship of the Internet by voting in favor of COICA

* In 2013, Feinstein called for the immediate extradition and arrest of Edward Snowden

* Feinstein has supported Hollywood and the content industry when it has come into conflict with technology and fair use on intellectual property issues. In 2006, she co-sponsored the "PERFORM Act", or the "Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act of 2006", in the Senate, which would require satellite, cable and internet broadcasters to incorporate digital rights management technologies into their transmission

Feinstein on marijuana:

* Feinstein has a "C-" rating from NORML for her voting history regarding cannabis-related causes. She considers marijuana a "gateway drug", and has opposed the legalization of medical marijuana without further research

* Feinstein voted in support of legislation to override a Department of Veterans Affairs' prohibition on allowing doctors to recommend cannabis to veterans in states that sanction its use as a medicine.

Supporting pork-barrel farm subsidies for her constituents:

* In March 2019, Feinstein was one of thirty-eight senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program.

Not understanding how markets work:

* In May 2011, Feinstein was one of seventeen senators to sign a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler requesting a regulatory crackdown on speculative Wall Street trading in oil contracts, asserting that they had entered "a time of economic emergency for many American families" while noting that the average retail price of regular grade gasoline was $3.95 nationwide. The senators requested that the CFTC adopt speculation limits in regard to markets where contracts for future delivery of oil are traded

Knowingly employing Chinese spies:

* On July 27, 2018, reports surfaced that a Chinese staff member who worked as Feinstein's personal driver, gofer and liaison to the Asian-American community for 20 years, was caught reporting to China's Ministry of State Security.[95][96] According to the reports, Feinstein was contacted by the FBI five years ago warning her about the suspected employee. The employee was later interviewed by authorities and forced to retire by Feinstein.[97] No criminal charges were filed against the individual.[95]

Sourced from:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinstein#Political_pos...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianne_Feinstein#Political_positions) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Dianne_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Dianne_Feinstein)

Please stop electing this woman.

<comment><USER23> Gerry Mander.

You can't talk about any of these individual problems without talking about how the corruption of democracy that is the Gerry Mander and is the norm on both sides of the aisle.

I have no idea about Feinstein but everything said here is consistent with the actions of a person who can only lose office through criminal prosecution. And is being blackmailed by those who have the surveillance data.

Mad conspiracy theory. Zero evidence for it. As insane as the things Assange said before Snowden showed he was absolutely right.

By the way. I don't /like/ Assange any more than the editor of the New York Times or any other public figure. I have a lot of trouble swallowing the rape story. I'd that normal nowadays or people still hate him because he's as Russian as Donald or something?

<comment><USER19> She's a senator, so gerrymandering is not the problem. It's a statewide election without districts.

The problem is that she has a (D) after her name in CA and that's all it takes to get elected. She did some good things in the 80s, apparently, and has been riding on that since then because my entire adult life she's been on the wrong side of just about every big vote.

<comment><USER4> It is more complex than that. People who actually vote consistently tend to be older. Many such have strong feelings for Dianne because she was there when it happened and many old voters associate her with their feelings when they heard that they had lost Moscone and Milk together in a senseless freak out that disrupted their local government. This is part of why she and her followers keep trying to do to guns what we did to drugs.

Wanting to rebel for justice is great, but daring to trivialize the past will tend to trip you up. If the present situation teaches us anything is that morons can be formidable foes.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I am aware of the loyalty older voters have to her and why. I wish they would pay attention to what the impact of her actual decisions are in the present, but I do get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thank you for your letter. I haven't read it and won't be answering any of your questions or concerns. Here is some bs from a pre approved press release about how great I am and why this is important. You are important to me, which is why I haven't read this and won't be reading it, now be quite while the adults make decisions that will wreck your life.

</comment><comment><USER25> There should be an age cut off where politicians aren't allowed to create Internet legislation.

<comment><USER26> She's not like this because of her age. It's because she leans more towards the authoritarian side of things. That's not a new position for her, it goes back decades. Hell, she voted in favor of adding a "disrespecting the flag" exemption to the 1st Amendment

<comment><USER27> Yes, she's authoritarian. She supported the Clipper Chip, along with Al Gore. Which is one of the reasons why he lost to Bush.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A politician spouting empty words, imagine that.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm amazed by _how_ vague this law is. Basically it all depends on what the National Commission decides later on. It could be as simple as a checkbox or some kind of crazy filter database thing... who knows... no doubt it'll keep changing and be a good opportunity to make money for some.

Also what are companies going to do once they find such material? Just remove it from their platform and sweep it under the carpet?

</comment><comment><USER30> I emailed her in response to the Snowden revelations back in 2013. I noticed some similarities in her format. Here's what she emailed back:

\</comment><comment>

Dear Cale:

I received your communication indicating your concerns about the two National Security Agency programs that have been in the news recently. I appreciate that you took the time to write on this important issue and welcome the opportunity to respond.

First, I understand your concerns and want to point out that by law, the government cannot listen to an American's telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause. The programs that were recently disclosed have to do with information about phone calls – the kind of information that you might find on a telephone bill – in one case, and the internet communications (such as email) of non-Americans outside the United States in the other case. Both programs are subject to checks and balances, and oversight by the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary.

As Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I can tell you that I believe the oversight we have conducted is strong and effective and I am doing my level best to get more information declassified. Please know that it is equally frustrating to me, as it is to you, that I cannot provide more detail on the value these programs provide and the strict limitations placed on how this information is used. I take serious my responsibility to make sure intelligence programs are effective, but I work equally hard to ensure that intelligence activities strictly comply with the Constitution and our laws and protect Americans' privacy rights.

These surveillance programs have proven to be very effective in identifying terrorists, their activities, and those associated with terrorist plots, and in allowing the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prevent numerous terrorist attacks. More information on this should be forthcoming.

· On June 18, 2003, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there have been "over 50 potential terrorist events" that these programs helped prevent.

· While the specific uses of these surveillance programs remain largely classified, I have reviewed the classified testimony and reports from the Executive Branch that describe in detail how this surveillance has stopped attacks.

· Two examples where these surveillance programs were used to prevent terrorist attacks were: (1) the attempted bombing of the New York City subway system in September 2009 by Najibullah Zazi and his co-conspirators; and (2) the attempted attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in October 2009 by U.S. citizen David Headley and his associates.

· Regarding the planned bombing of the New York City subway system, the NSA has determined that in early September of 2009, while monitoring the activities of Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan, NSA noted contact from an individual in the U.S. that the FBI subsequently identified as Colorado-based Najibullah Zazi. The U.S. Intelligence Community, including the FBI and NSA, worked in concert to determine his relationship with Al Qaeda, as well as identify any foreign or domestic terrorist links. The FBI tracked Zazi as he traveled to New York to meet with co-conspirators, where they were planning to conduct a terrorist attack using hydrogen peroxide bombs placed in backpacks. Zazi and his co-conspirators were subsequently arrested. Zazi eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to bomb the NYC subway system.

· Regarding terrorist David Headley, he was also involved in the planning and reconnaissance of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India that killed 166 people, including six Americans. According to NSA, in October 2009, Headley, a Chicago businessman and dual U.S. and Pakistani citizen, was arrested by the FBI as he tried to depart from Chicago O'Hare airport on a trip to Europe. Headley was charged with material support to terrorism based on his involvement in the planning and reconnaissance of the hotel attack in Mumbai 2008. At the time of his arrest, Headley and his colleagues were plotting to attack the Danish newspaper that published the unflattering cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, at the behest of Al Qaeda.

Not only has Congress been briefed on these programs, but laws passed and enacted since 9/11 specifically authorize them. The surveillance programs are authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which itself was enacted by Congress in 1978 to establish the legal structure to carry out these programs, but also to prevent government abuses, such as surveillance of Americans without approval from the federal courts. The Act authorizes the government to gather communications and other information for foreign intelligence purposes. It also establishes privacy protections, oversight mechanisms (including court review), and other restrictions to protect privacy rights of Americans.

The laws that have established and reauthorized these programs since 9/11 have passed by mostly overwhelming margins. For example, the phone call business record program was reauthorized most recently on May 26, 2011 by a vote of 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House. The internet communications program was reauthorized most recently on December 30, 2012 by a vote of 73-22 in the Senate and 301-118 in the House.

You may be interested to know that the Senate Intelligence Committee will be proposing changes to these programs to ensure transparency and to make public additional facts. Attached to this letter is an opinion piece ([http://tinyurl.com/NSA-OpEd](http://tinyurl.com/NSA-OpEd)) I authored in the Washington Post on July 30, 2013 that further highlights our proposed changes. While I very much regret the disclosure of classified information in a way that will damage our ability to identify and stop terrorist activity, I believe it is important to ensure that the public record now available on these programs is accurate and provided with the proper context.

Again, thank you for contacting me with your concerns and comments. I appreciate knowing your views and hope you continue to inform me of issues that matter to you. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my office in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein United States Senator

<comment><USER31> An intern definitely wrote that. Source-was an intern for a public official at one point

<comment><USER32> Not exactly a scandal there...I would hope that a congressional staffer would handle all mass communications with constituents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Somebody needs to primary her.

<comment><USER34> She's been the _senior Senator_ from the USA's _largest state_ for over _27 years_. How many major legislative accomplishments has she achieved?

Some may name the Desert Protection Act, until one looks closely at the specifics -- it was primarily a vehicle for pork and to financially benefit her family.

Some may name the "assault weapons" ban elements of the 1994 Crime Bill, but that lapsed 15+ years ago, and its failure to accomplish its stated goals was so pronounced that even _she_ hasn't moved it again.

Anything else? For 27 years in what should be the most prominent seat in the Senate?

<comment><USER16> She's secured fantastic profits for her donors. Doesn't that count for something?

<comment><USER34> I was shocked to read that according to the source I read (since forgotten, it was a study of net worth changes for US legislators since 1990), Feinstein/Blum net worth actually went _down_ a touch since 1993, perhaps even in nominal dollars ( _not_ counting inflation).

<comment><USER16> I haven't looked into that. However - she's in her 80s. Look at the net worth of her children, grandchildren and other family members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What would happen to non-US based platforms? Could this lead to offshoring of social media or does the bill cover this case somehow?

</comment><comment><USER36> The horseshoe theory comes full circle as both the left and the right despise her.

</comment><comment><USER37> FYI: This was carefully written by a professional legislative correspondent.

</comment><comment><USER38> Obligatory Franklin quote: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

<comment><USER39> FWIW, the liberty Franklin was speaking of was the liberty of Pennsylvania to tax land, specifically the Penn family's lands. The Penn family was offering to make a one-time contribution to Pennsylvania's military defense in exchange for Pennsylvania forswearing the power to tax them.

The point was that the state should jealously guard its powers so that it has the flexibility to enact policies that secure the long-term safety and welfare of its citizens, even if that comes at the _literal_ expense of some, such as the Penn family.

<comment><USER20> This is the view advanced by Benjamin Wittes, made popular in a recent NPR piece which you may have heard or read. I am not convinced it is right. Have you read the rebuttal by David Brick, currently the first comment on [https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered- be...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-benjamin- franklins-quote-on-liberty-vs-security/) ?

The entire rebuttal is a bit long to repost, but essentially, Brick says Wittes is taking that statement of Franklin's as applying to the entirety of his letter when in fact "[t]he real context of the quote is actually a very small portion of that letter in which the authors are discussing the defensive needs of certain 'freemen' living on the frontiers, or 'backwoods' areas of the colony." Furthermore, Brick states that Franklin made very similar statements elsewhere where the meaning is very clear--and in line with the conventional pro-liberty understanding, not Wittes' pro-government-power understanding.

I would like to see some historians argue it out.

<comment><USER39> But the usage of "Liberty" only makes sense as the liberty of self-governance through the Assembly. As I read that paragraph, Franklin is rebutting the hypothetical counter argument that the governor is simply doing what he must to keep the frontiersmen safe in exigent circumstances. (I.e. s/frontiersmen/children/\--Franklin is anticipating the "but think of the children" deflection.) And Franklin is saying 1) at that very moment those who want arms have been armed, 2) all the Bills the Assembly has tried to have signed by the governor have been precisely to help for their defense, and 3) that any frontiersman willing to give up the "Liberty" (i.e. his right to implement policy, and particularly defense policy, through the Assembly) for whatever additional modicum of security the governor's plan might temporarily provide deserves neither the liberty being denied him (vicariously via the Assembly) nor any security.

Even ignoring all the other paragraphs, in no way could the liberty imply the frontiersmen's individual freedom (or civil rights, as we would call them). The contended Bill doesn't encroach on the frontiersmen livelihood or freedoms; it's a Bill to raise money for their defense (it literally says that in the next sentence) by taxing proprietary estate holders, who are definitely not the same people as the frontiersmen. It doesn't effect the frontiersmen directly, except by providing for more consistent defense funding. It's a pretty difficult piece to work through and I wouldn't claim that I fully understand all that Franklin is arguing, but whatever he is saying there, it can't possibly be referring to individual freedom. There's not the slightest hint of such a connotation. Rather, whatever the precise point, it's clearly an equivocation of the Assembly's rights with those of the People.

Yeah, he uses that phrase again years later and the arguments are different in those contexts, but it's obviously a cool phrase. Of course he would repurpose it to suit whatever point he's trying to make.

For others' convenience, here's the whole thing: [https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...](https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-0107)</comment></comment></comment></comment>