How the EU may force all artists to use Youtube forever - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/09/04/extinction-level-event.html <comment><USER2> This is one more reason for innovation to keep dying in Europe.

They are working on this regulations that stifle tech and are losing.

The EU had 16B VC investments agains 60B in the US, the market capitalization of Top 500 companies has been declining. [1]

Of the 50 countries studied in the Digital Evolution Index, which tracked the levels of digital development and attractiveness to global businesses and investors, the bottom 9 were European. [2]

From the video [1]: "Loser: Europe, which is becoming irrelevant when it comes to innovation. Only six of the world's most valuable companies are based in Europe, and venture capital funding has declined."

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiTz- NTEXAM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiTz- NTEXAM&feature=youtu.be&t=42) .

2\. [https://hbr.org/2015/10/europes-other-crisis-a-digital- reces...](https://hbr.org/2015/10/europes-other-crisis-a-digital-recession)

<comment><USER3> It's counterproductive to label all regulations as if they're the same.

Antitrust laws and consumer protections are very different from something like this designed to maximize profits for record labels and publishing companies in character and effect on the world at large. Some regulations are essential to a functional society, while others, like this, are disastrous and serve only to reinforce monopolistic strangleholds.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much any regulation harms business. The smaller the business, the more toll new regulations usually have on it. The more regulations we enact, the more big companies grow and small companies die/not started. It acts like a positive feedback loop because the whole reasons for most regulations in the first place was to tame big evil corporations, which in the end usually benefit more from regulations (less competition). Also, consumer pays for any regulation costs anyway, so everything becomes more expensive with more regulation. It might not be immediately noticeable, but it's definitely the trend in the long term.

I'm not saying that we don't need any regulations at all, but I think we should strive to keep it to absolutely bare minimum.

<comment><USER5> That's okay, because politics isn't just about helping businesses. It's mainly about helping people. Sometimes that means helping businesses, but sometimes it means harming them.

<comment><USER6> > politics isn't just about helping businesses. It's mainly about helping > people

Many politicians are not about helping people, many are about helping themselves. Also, sometimes you can harm people with the intention of helping them

<comment><USER5> So? The system isn't perfect. That doesn't help in deciding whether more or less regulation is better.

<comment><USER7> > So? The system isn't perfect. That doesn't help in deciding whether more or > less regulation is better.

The entire concept of "more or less regulation" is partisan ideology. Every regulation has a cost and a benefit. Good regulations have benefits in excess of their costs.

The problem is that calculating the cost is very difficult. You may have a regulation that increases costs by $10 and produces a $12 benefit. But if the $10 cost increase drives a competitor out of business and allows the remaining provider to raise prices by $20 in total, you're now paying $20 for a $12 benefit.

They also have opportunity costs. You may have a regulation that consumes $20 of a $30 surplus but produces $50 in diffuse positive externalities, which sounds like a good idea. But if there is an alternative that also consumes $20 of the same $30 surplus and produces $500 in positive externalities, you can't have both ($40 > $30) and enacting the first one is really destroying $450 in benefits relative to the second. Trying to enact both is even worse, because then you get neither one and even destroy any benefits inherent in the original transaction.

It's so easy to screw this up that it's better to err on the side of not regulating something than to convince yourself you gained $30 when you really destroyed $1000.

The regulations you want are the ones that have unambiguous, huge net benefits, like prohibiting people from dumping toxic waste in the river, because the cost is low and the benefit is enormous. But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because there is a way to do it for $10,000.

And the incentives are wrong for people to carefully evaluate things like this, because the people paying the cost aren't the people creating the rules.

Which means "all regulation is bad" is false but "any given regulation is bad" is a solid heuristic.

<comment><USER8> > But even then you have to be careful, because if you're spending $50,000 to > prevent $50,000,000 in harm, you could still be wasting $40,000 because > there is a way to do it for $10,000.

Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having not set up that regulation at all. The government spending e.g. 1M on experts hired to check whether, say, oil pipelines are built to spec and standards, and not break unexpectedly - is much better for everyone involved overall, than the company operating the pipeline paying hundreds of millions for the cleanup of the resulting environmental damage. Same goes for pretty much any and every other industry that we actually depend on. Yes, sure, be careful if possible - but personally, I'd rather see inefficient spending on necessary regulation than no regulation at all. Because then we'd definitely be picking up the bill for it, maybe not always directly with our wallets or government budgets, but we lose either way.

I do agree with the rest of your points.

<comment><USER7> > Yes, but even if you create a regulation that is $40k more expensive to > implement than the cheapest option, it still results in a $49.95M in savings > (regardless of who would be picking up the bill, at least when you consider > us as a society that depends on each other to function) compared to having > not set up that regulation at all.

Which is why those kinds of regulations are the ones you want.

But it's still worth carefully revisiting them from time to time, because $40,000/company/year is still literally having each company hire a person to waste their entire working life. This is what regulators should optimally be spending most of their time on -- evaluating the _existing_ regulations for ways to reduce the costs without losing the benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like a horrible law, with some really bad consequences. That said;

> This is an extinction-level event for the internet, folks.

Hyperbole like this doesn't help, and in fact often turns off people whom you might be able to sway to your cause.

The immediate reaction of most people to an absolutist phrase such as that is skepticism, which naturally leads to disbelief and scorn - not what you're likely looking to foster in your readers.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I suppose if it passes, it's going to be another application of John Gilmore's excellent "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

<comment><AUTHOR> The widespread success of the Great Firewall of China puts the lie to such optimism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tj-teej Copyright law, Net-Neutrality, it sometimes feels that our current Governments cannot bring forward decent legislation on complex tech issues.

Regardless of whether the cause is ignorance or cynicism; have there been other examples of times in US or EU history that governments passed such clearly 'anti-people' (for lack of a better term) laws?

<comment><USER11> 20 years later, the DMCA in the US actually seems pretty decent. It's not perfect but it strikes a pretty good balance between the interests of copyright holders and allowing for innovation.

<comment><USER12> In my experience, it's been used to threaten people who reverse engineer software to find bugs and take down content that is not remotely infringing. Not a "pretty good balance" in my book.

<comment><USER13> That is a downside. But it also makes it very difficult to sue a website/service for the actions of its users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why remove "How" from the original title? "How the EU will force all artists to use Youtube, forever".

Edit: even the original title is misleading: it should be something like "How the EU may force all artists to use Youtube, forever, _if_ that EU proposal is approved".

<comment><USER15> There is a character limit. I'm on my phone, so checking character count isn't convenient for me at the moment, but that's a common reason to drop words that add little meaning.

<comment><USER16> A very brief look at the HN homepage tells me this is not the reason.

<comment><USER17> I have had countless times these problems with the hn character limit. It is really tricky deciding which words to cut out or how to reframe titles when the hn limit sets in. Somebody is always going to be unhappy (if the submission ever makes it ot the front page).

<comment><USER14> But the original title doesn't even come close to the character limit. "How the EU will force all artists to use Youtube, forever" is 57-characters-long while the submission limit is 80. A quick look at the current homepage shows that exactly a third of its titles (10 out of 30) are longer than 57 characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is what happened with banks, where the regulatory requirements are so onerous that they constitute a massive barrier to entry to new competitors. That's both a curse for banks (it's not fun to be regulated to death) and a blessing (it does't matter how badly your service sucks, as long as it is about as bad as your few competitors).

<comment><USER19> The specific legislation in mind that relates to these banks in the EU is PDS2: basically banks have to make their data both machine consumable and portable for the user. Basically they have to make a public API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Please correct me if I'm wrong but I did read these articles back when the vote was up a few months ago and my interpretation was not that it is a requirement to have an automated evaluation system.

Sure youtube will of course implement an automated system but my point is that if you setup your own Peertube instance you can still screen content and let users report possible copyrighted content to you for manual screening.

So small scale, self-hosted or themed instances will still be possible but they will have to moderate their content and they will have to act on received copyright violation reports.

The author seems to be pointing out that small players cannot compete with Youtube because Youtube will have the means for automated large scale content screening.

Well small players can do it manually. It will only work up until a certain level but it still enables people to host small themed instances of peertube for example.

<comment><USER21> From what I remember, you're right that it doesn't strictly require an automated system, but the only way to practically do it is with an automated system. With current safe harbor provisions in the DMCA, if someone uploads copyrighted content, the host isn't liable as long as they take it down when notified. The new EU rules would make the host liable for any copyrighted content uploaded by a user, no safe harbor provisions. So you're options are automated filtering/blocking of all uploaded content, or roll the dice and hope that if a user uploads copyrighted content, that you find out before you get sued by the copyright owner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The author of this article is a genius, able to express the problem so clearly. These types of regulation that have been coming through the EU are good for the biggest of businesses. Complex and difficult to follow regulation allows the big companies to build a big moat, they have the money to build systems to satisfy the regulations, even to game the regulations. And no new companies will be able to disrupt them. Who's going to risk $60 million dollars on your startup before they get anywhere, just so they can comply with regulations?

EU, get ready for Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Coca-Cola to choose what services and products you get, and how much you pay for them.

</comment><comment><USER23> The point is moot as soon as someone builds an API to take your user's uploaded video and run it through copyright detection. The software doesn't have to be good, it just has to do what the law asks. This article is pretty off the mark.

<comment><USER24> You can be pretty certain a EU law will be fairly specific in what is required.

And I doubt it will be simple.

Either way, it's still an absurd idea, regardless of whether it's doable in reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Car makers support safety regulation because it further entrenches their position and increases barriers to entry.

That does not mean that safety regulations are wrong, or that they need to be rolled back in the name of innovation.

The mantra that _any_ imposition on innovation is bad just does not hold true. There will be services that challenge YouTube's dominance, and there will be innovation in the copyright protection space to enable that.

You might believe that the increased cost to market entry is detrimental, but you have to actually explain why the inability for garage-startups to compete with YouTube is materially bad _for artists_ , rather than taking it as an article of faith.

<comment><USER26> Car makers were vehemently opposed to seatbelt requirements, and actually sent women after Ralph Nader in an attempt to discredit him when he was advocating for it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Industry_response)

Auto makers are also far less vulnerable to being unseated by startups than tech companies, due to the capital intensive nature of their business and the maturity of their market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Definitely an exaggeration.

You don't need every single startup to build a $60 million Content ID equivalent.

You just need one startup to build Content-ID-as-a-Service.

Which actually looks like a pretty good startup idea right now.

<comment><USER28> >Content-ID-as-a-Service

Some torrent trackers have pretty good databases of content. They can make some side cash instead of relying on donations. Win-win for everyone.

<comment><USER29> torrent trackers don't database content, they index it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone explain which large organizations within the EU are pushing for article 13 and why? The more I read about this law the more stupid it seems.

GDPR compliance isn't that hard but Article 13 is bad enough that it gives a compelling reason to just ignore the EU market for lots of applications. And it's really going to up the costs of unseating internet incumbents

<comment> barry-cotter Publishers of newspapers, books and music. The old content industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I did this a weird / specious argument

1\. Youtube, right now, flagrantly violates copyright - search for Peppa Pig - oh look dozens and dozens and dozens of videos on crappy channels. Same goes for pretty much anything. Maybe Disney does a good job

2\. As such _attribution_ is shit. youtube kiddies regularly strip something and post it for the "hey look" value. Trying to find the original creator of day an animated short you find on youtube is frankly impossible. This in a world wide web designed explicitly to be attribute friendly is crazy

3\. However, having one, government mandataed IP database is an even bigger crazy and Article 13 shoukd die. The point of the web and domain names is to solve this - surely?

/rant

Edit: What I have realised is that I think content publishers should be liable for the content on their platforms... Senator :-)

Frankly that solves pretty much everything. Want free speech? sure fine no one is stopping it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I cant even get Shazam to work on many songs in tv shows, due to music sold from companies that produce music for content creators and not the public.

Also noticed this trend is now happening into youtube creators using leased music from their creator company or 3rd party youtube music provider.

How the heck is Youtube able to identify music if Shazam cant?

</comment><comment><USER33> EU where innovation goes to die. However industry 4.0 and other initiatives are rather exciting. Wonder why they keep sucking at consumer tech.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's some irony in posting this here, given this is a user-generated site and all, but I'd love to see all the safe-harbor provisions be seriously rethought. It would wreck the tech industry, but save the internet by decentralizing it, and kill off cesspools where idiots wreck society while profiteering scum become billionaires amid the carnage.

<comment><USER35> That would do massive harm to transparency due to making it harder to find anything. Not to mention the effective end of anonymous speech - either they host wrote or reuploaded it and either way they can be attacked for it. Which means vanishingly few would upload content from another.

Really the tear it down and build something new mentality is faulty. You don't tear your house down and then build a new one before you die of exposure, you build the new one then abandon or tear down the old one.

<comment><USER34> We had a (mostly) working house, then money happened to it, driven by legislation which let the VCs and their friends avoid the liability that prevented others from doing the same before.

What we needed was tools to make it easier for people to publish to the shared internet. What we got was a centralized mess -- the bastard child of AOL and the advertising industry.

The past 20 years of growth in the internet have been a mistake. Not a "small, needs a bit of tweaking" sort of mistake, but a "burn it all" mistake. Twitter is a garbage fire. Facebook is a garbage fire. The world would be better without them. Not a "slightly modified" version. Burned to the ground.

The liability insurance required to hold data on a billion people should be unaffordable. Services at that scale should not exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's hard to take the story seriously when it uses hyperbole such as "this is an extinction level event"

</comment><comment><USER37> If a law is going to require an algorithm, the algorithm should be supplied by the government, open and free for all to use and they should be responsible for the correctness of the results.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is how centralization and sweeping censorship/fascism seems to work in the new modern era we live in. Govt bodies react to pressing problems by increasing regulatory footprint so much that only companies like Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, could possibly comply with. At the same time, these companies are at increasing pressure both from frequent public outrages to politicians to do something about users and types of content shared on their network. It's easy to dismiss how these companies comply with regulatory bodies and react to public pressure to ban certain types of content and users so long as it is possible to create alternative networks. With stuff like this, it's not so far fetched to imagine it increasingly difficult to launch platforms similar to YouTube and Facebook/Twitter, if not prohibitive without special deals and partnerships with major media companies. We need a new internet

<comment><USER39> > We need a new internet

Let me know when it's done; seems you've got your work cut out for you..

<comment><USER40> Most people will always flock to the "free" option that all their buddies are on. It's entirely possible for me to host streaming video on my web server that I pay for. Hell, it may even be within my skill set to deploy it. But if you watched my video(s) on my sever, there would be no easy, one-shot way to populate similar videos on all my friends own web servers. The same applies to (micro)blogging services like Facebag and the Tweeter.

You get what you pay for, and most don't want to pay a subscription fee to watch random cat videos whenever the feeling strikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Build your own platforms if you don't like your censorship", they said. "Private companies can do what they want. Go make your own."

Bwahahahahahaahahaahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahah.

When I was young and stupid, I thought tech would be an unfettered, unassailable force for individual liberty. Now, I realize that people like Evgeny Morozov were right all along and that the internet is a tool for totalitarian thought control like the world has never seen.

<comment><USER42> "Private companies can do what they want. Go make your own." I mean have you heard of this thing called laws? Like its not a new thing...

This is a stupid regulation but it was never the case of "Private companies can do what they want".

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> These clickbaity, overdramatic headlines are getting kind of tiring.</comment>


How Our Startup Was Bought by Google Without Even Trying - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@earlyclues/how-our-startup-was-bought-by-google-without-even-trying-e577cdbca479

<comment><USER2> Note: this is fiction and so is the press release. (if you're one of the reader who usually hits the comments before reading the article)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great story. I wonder what the price tag was ....</comment>


What is BleachBit? Little-known tool at center of Clinton email controversy - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/26/technology/hillary-clinton-bleachbit/ <comment><USER2> What is this FUD? I saw something on here the other day from BleachBit itself wanting to cash in on its 5 minutes of fabricated fame. I know Clinton was running Windows Exchange Server, and they may have had outlook set up, and maybe even used PST files, but BleachBit and CCleaner and the like don't let you manage or purge outlook files, or do anything beyond a glorified browser history cleaner. Anyone in IT who uses these tools probably also charges to stop by and run a defrag your windows XP box.

Under their features page and in their news/blog area, Bleachbit revels in any press they get, I guess wanting more people to use them to protect their privacy or something? Not sure if they are enjoying the limelight, wanting more donations, or NSA spyware, but this is a program that nobody needs or asked for. I smell something funky.</comment>


The Coming Microsoft Cultural Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2014/07/15/coming-microsoft-cultural-revolution/

<comment><USER2> This article is so bitter and dismissive of Microsoft that I have a hard time even taking it seriously.

 _" Nadella begins at the altar of innovation, a word that at Microsoft has traditionally meant stealing technology. Of course he is the company cheerleader to some extent but Microsoft's tradition of innovation is hard to even detect, much less celebrate or revive. This is revisionist history. Can he really believe it's true?"_

Seriously? We're going to poopoo them stealing tech and completely dismiss everything they've _ever_ done? I guess Apple/Google/IBM/HP get a pass...

I'm a Linux fanboy first and foremost, so I don't exactly view MS with rose colored glasses. With that said, regardless of how they did it, MS has left a mark on the world. Show me a huge tech company that doesn't "steal tech" or engage in anti-competitive practices. That doesn't make it OK, but completely dismissing MS's history seems silly.

If the author missed the mark this bad on what Microsoft is and has done, I have a hard time taking him seriously when talking about the future.

<comment><USER3> What Microsoft has done: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp)

<comment><USER2> Nobody here is denying that they've done bad things, but name a public tech giant that hasn't done stupid/bad things. They all suck. They answer to profit, first and foremost. They're going to bend rules and push the limits in the name of making a few pennies for their shareholders.

Apple does it, Google does it, IBM does it, Amazon does it, they all do skeezy things in the name of profit. MS isn't special in this regard.

<comment><USER3> None of the companies you mention were almost broken up by the Justice Department, fined billions of dollars for this one event, or put under Federal oversight for almost 12 years.

<comment><USER4> Well, IBM certainly had problem with antitrust back in the 60's and 70's.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services)

<comment><USER3> "...the Justice Department finally concluded that the case was "without merit" and dropped it"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I almost gave up when he said "I don't mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first? Only one thing can be first."

If you don't recognize that those are two different areas then you are either dense, or being intentionally contrarian. Given the earlier statements he made it is clear the latter is certainly true and quite possibly the former as well.

<comment><USER6> It has nothing to do with the areas being different or similar. The point is that _only one thing_ can be _the first_.

<comment><USER7> They are two sides of the same coin. What use (aside from the incredibly useful feature of making actual phone calls) is a smartphone if there aren't services in the cloud that account for the "smart" part?

<comment><USER8> Lots of use, unless we're lumping the internet and e-mail into "the cloud." I'm quite happy to have my photos stored locally, my e-mails and documents handled by my company's exchange server, etc.

<comment><USER7> I think unless you or your company is managing their own email servers then yes, email is now "cloud".

<comment><USER8> Don't most large companies still manage their own e-mail servers?

<comment><USER7> Sure, but what about everyone else? What's the worldwide install base for smartphones these days, several hundred million if not a billion or more? For all those people that don't work for large companies and their email is synonymous with the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Mobile-First, Cloud-First

I dunno. I see this as "devices and services" rephrased.

<comment><USER10> I don't think so, especially because Nadella specifically mentioned that D&S is not the governing principle (well, he didn't say that exactly, but almost). What Mobile-First means to me is that mobile is _the_ platform, and being present on portable devices is the key to survival for Microsoft (and don't forget, almost every end-user device is portable, including dockable mobile workstations). That means that MS cannot afford risking not being present on dominant mobile operating systems, for example -- it would be stupid to risk the survival of the company and only push stuff on Windows Phone, for example.

Other than that, I disagree with the article on a many points.

> Microsoft's tradition of innovation is hard to even detect, much less > celebrate or revive.

The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the best funded institutes. The tradition of polish is not there. Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on. It has a bad record of taking stuff out from R&D departments and delivering them to end users in a neat and easy-to-use way.

> I don't mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first? > Only one thing can be first.

I think the opposite: the two goes together hand in hand, and cannot really live without each other. That's the big problem of Apple: they are not that good in cloud services, and a phone (or a tablet) increasingly relies on cloud services. Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services. It's the cloud services why Google can release Android for free, it's them why many iOS users slowly gravitate towards Android ('because Google stuff works better'), it's them why many people don't want Windows Phone ('I don't use too many apps but I need Google Maps and GMail').

<comment><USER11> > The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the > best funded institutes... Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones, > voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on.

I don't see how you can claim Microsoft has been innovative, ever. Windows was a reaction to the Macintosh, the Zune was a reaction to the iPod, C# was a reaction to Java, IIS to Apache, Surface to iPad, MSN to AOL, MS Money to Quicken, XBox to PlayStation, Bing to Google, Internet Explorer to Netscape Navigator, Excel to Lotus 1-2-3, DOS to CP/M, Windows Phone to iPhone, Azure to AWS, etc., etc.

Microsoft's history is a long list of occasionally successful (but mostly not) efforts at me-too-ing the competition. In the 90s this worked -- occasionally -- because they were able to enter those markets and dominate from their sheer size. Now, however, it does not. In any case, I cannot think of a market that Microsoft created or a product that they introduced that has seen success since the 1990's.

> Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services.

I don't understand this at all. Apple is making the lion's share of profit in mobile. Last time I checked, Google wasn't making much money form Android at all.

<comment><USER12> By this standard, who is innovative? Wasn't the Macintosh a reaction to the work at Xerox PARC? Wasn't the iPod a reaction to the existing MP3 players on the market? Wasn't Google a reaction to AltaVista et al.? Everyone takes inspiration from the products that have come before.

<comment><USER11> In some ways, yes. But, in the case of the Macintosh, Apple took what was available and made it successful in the consumer space. They helped to usher in a new market. The same can be said of the iPod, although not to as dramatic an extent as with the 512K Mac. For Google, their innovation was AdSense. You could say that this "innovation" was just a natural evolution of the banner ads of the era, but only in hindsight.

Contrast both Google and Apple with Microsoft and you will be hard pressed to find a time when Microsoft had the foresight to see where the market is going, or what the potential is. They react to established players, embrace & extend, and (occasionally) profit. They have never been able to successfully create new markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the content, I can't tell if the allusion to the disastrous Chinese Cultural Revolution is intended or not. It seems more like Cringely's actually talking about changing Microsoft's culture, which makes the title quite poor.

<comment><USER13> That was the intention of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, too. It failed in the long term, but from the perspective of its architects, most of what we call its disasters were actually its successes.

<comment><USER14> Mass starvation? Technological stagnation? Which success are you referring to?

<comment><USER15> Presumably breaking forever the grip of the Confucian design pattern (left behind by the former imperial bureaucracy) on the imaginations of the low- level functionaries, without who no top-down empire can operate.

An example uppermost in Mao's mind must have been that, despite Lenin's putsch of 1917, by 1927 the USSR ran along lines that would have been instantly recognizable to a Tsarist-era bureaucrat from 1907. The structure of governance of the vast Russian empire re-asserted itself under the guise of Actually Existing Socialism, once the Vanguard Party had replaced the top and middle tiers of the Imperial nobility and bureaucracy with nominally-loyal functionaries. The same sorts of person are attracted to power whatever the ideology of the regime, and aside from joining a party and paying lip service to the party's ideology, they make the same set of assumptions about how power is to be exercised. True revolutionaries are discredited, expelled, or purged: see the fates of Trotsky and Zinoviev, for example.

Mao and his inner cadre saw the Chinese people, a generation after the revolution (itself largely pushed through by force of Russian arms, in the shape of the Manchurian campaign of 1945 that kicked the Japanese army off the Asian mainland), reverting to the social and political patterns of the Confucian bureaucracy that had run the empire they supplanted. True, the new bureaucrats paid lip service to communism as a guiding eschatology. But they weren't _communists_ , much less revolutionaries. This was repugnant to Mao, so he fired up the whole social revolution that cost so many lives precisely to break that design pattern.

It sort of worked. In the short term, it caused chaos and starvation and massive deaths: but in the long term, it laid the foundations for a technocracy. Today's Chinese party politburo are primarily engineers and scientists who grew up during the cultural revolution, not the spiritual heirs to the earlier system. Although I think the direction they've taken China in probably has Mao spinning in his grave so fast they could hook him up to a dynamo and power their national grid ...

<comment><USER16> Great comment, and I'm not Chinese, but did they really break away from Confucianism?

It looks like a civil service with an emphasis on standardized testing at the entry level and tending towards organizational politics at the medium->high levels.. where's the ideological sea change? The biggest difference from the dynasties seems to be the handover between premiers every decade.

<comment><USER15> _Great comment, and I 'm not Chinese, but did they really break away from Confucianism?_

As Zho Enlai allegedly said when asked about the significance of the French Revolution, "it's too early to say".

(Spoiler: he may have misunderstood the question, but it's still a great anecdote: [http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean- nicholas/zho...](http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean- nicholas/zhou-enlais-famous-saying-debunked) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the comments there is a link to a critique that I think hits the nail on the head:

[http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo- need...](http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-needs-an- editor/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I just read the comments on posts with "Microsoft" on the title so I can laugh at the people who says "I do not care about microsoft" (but I am here commenting on a topic about it anyway).

</comment><comment><USER19> Decent windows on unlocked devices with root and sideloading to the users. Still a winning idea.

<comment><USER20> It would nice if they don't follow Android and iOS by having everything totally locked down. (Unless you root or jail break). They can see Microsoft give you flexibility, freedom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only thing that will keep Microsoft and Apple going in the consumer markets over the next few years are patents and binary blobs. Once chips become fast enough and non-free drivers become irrelevant their days will be over.

Already a $150 smartphone contains as much CPU power as a desktop of 5 years ago. Add a keyboard and attach it to big screen, presto you have a desktop. Their days are over and they are living on sales hype and clever apps.

Once developer lock in ends, thats it for them.

<comment><USER22> _Already a $150 smartphone contains as much CPU power as a desktop of 5 years ago. Add a keyboard and attach it to big screen, presto you have a desktop._

Microsoft is working on unifying their OS versions. Please catch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't really care what Microsoft is doing. I don't use any of their products. I don't intend to in future either. It took me years to fully extricate myself from the disaster zone which was Microsoft Windows, and having done that I have no desire to return.

<comment><USER22> Typical *nix closed-box thinking.</comment></comment>


"Dress for the job you want, not the job you have." - <AUTHOR> That is a nice maxim that I got by today and it got me wondering. Being on a technical role myself I do not dress very well at office. I'm not wearing rugs but I'm not even close to the business-casual realm let alone the costume one. Do you think that the way a technical employee dresses is important? Do you dress up at the office? Do you think the way you dress played a role in a promotion you got or lost? <comment><USER2> Recalling an old boss who admonished the staff-- business casual doesn't mean dress like a slob. Look professional people.

New research shows that when workers wear nicer clothes, they achieve more. >[http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-dressing-for-success- leads-t...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-dressing-for-success-leads-to- success-1456110340?mg=id-wsj)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why I always dress like Flavor Flav.</comment>


Is calling your startup "the Airbnb of X" poison? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a startup called Stayhound - we use social connections to help pet owners find pet sitters for less than kennels charge. Will calling ourselves "the Airbnb of pet sitting" help or harm us with potential users and investors? <comment><USER2> From a user's perspective, after describing your company as the "Airbnb of pet sitting" you may have to follow that up by describing what Airbnb is. My parents (the benchmark by which I judge all potential customers) would have know idea what Airbnb is...but they do know that their golden retriever needs a cheap place to stay while they go on a cruise next month. So the best way to describe it to them is:

 _Stayhound - we use social connections to help pet owners find pet sitters for less than kennels charge_

I can't speak from experience with investors, but to me describing your business as the "X of Y" makes it sound derivative, like the old style of movie pitches (e.g. "it's When Harry Met Sally meets Beetlejuice...on the Titanic!"). I think it's better to succinctly describe your product or service, while avoiding marketingspeak or names of other companies. Of course, investors may think otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the perspective. I'm always leery of assuming the person I'm talking to knows who the X in "X of Y" is - hearing that the comparison trope sounds derivative is an interesting data point.

I'll definitely stick to the simple description, thanks.</comment></comment>


"Nobody at Tesla has ever seen rain before." - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/snazzyq/status/1109250289704427520 <comment><USER2> The s has a lip around the door so rainfall doesn't go into the trunk. It seems stupid they dropped that on the 3.

</comment><comment><USER3> My Cadillac has a similar issue. It's also a known problem with certain volkswagens: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSuyXnCSO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSuyXnCSO4)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a Model 3. Not a serious problem. I have seen a few drops of water fall into the trunk once, but only when parked on a slope. If the car is relatively flat the water will fall to the side. Also, you can access the trunk from the back seat if you really don't want to get water inside.</comment>


Wordpress on AWS: smooth and pain free - <AUTHOR> https://cloudonaut.io/wordpress-on-aws-smooth-and-pain-free/ <comment><USER2> This is one way to do it, though I can't recommend it as the best way.

The first step is building your WordPress site correctly, and for me, that starts with using trellis ([https://roots.io/trellis](https://roots.io/trellis)) and bedrock ([https://roots.io/bedrock](https://roots.io/bedrock)).

He's partially correct about S3 for media and uploads, but you want to take it one step further and use Imgix for actual image (jpeg/png) delivery because it'll do all of the transformations, cropping, etc. for you without WordPress mucking it up. At that point you have a fairly stateless WordPress installation and can spin up any number of instances of it. Here's my plugin for handling both S3 and Imgix: [https://github.com/jawngee/ilab-media- tools/](https://github.com/jawngee/ilab-media-tools/)

CloudFlare is really the best thing to happen to WordPress since Imgix. Using CloudFlare's ability to cache at the root and sending correct caching headers from WordPress to CloudFlare, you are virtually indestructible.

We run a news site that gets about 500K uniques a month off a $20 instance on Digital Ocean this way. Granted, it's static, eg no user directed dynamic content like comments, votes, etc.

We build a lot of WordPress sites this way.

<comment><USER2> And avoid caching plugins. Most of them are garbage.

<comment><USER3> If you're going to add (full-page) caching, Batcache [0] is the best solution. Combined with a Memcache plugin [1], you can use this to store your page caches in AWS Elasticache.

[0]: [https://github.com/automattic/batcache](https://github.com/automattic/batcache) [1]: [https://github.com/tollmanz/wordpress-pecl-memcached- object-...](https://github.com/tollmanz/wordpress-pecl-memcached-object-cache)

<comment><USER4> You see Taylor Lovett's SimpleCache plugin? nice solution to those too [https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple- cache/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-cache/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I'm not a fan of Wordpress, as it is neither cloud-ready nor serverless.

Well that's a funny opener.

TL;DR: rather than configure your uploads to go to S3, one of AWS's most battle hardened and time tested offerings, use a service that was launched 10 months ago and can definitely scale perfectly and will never have any issues. Then you can even keep on managing your htaccess files using a WordPress plugin and skip that pesky version control!

</comment><comment><USER6> It's always validating to see someone else write a blog post of the same decisions you made. This guide is good. For doing the uploads folder onto s3, I couldn't recommend S3-Uploads more it has served me well [https://github.com/humanmade/S3-Uploads](https://github.com/humanmade/S3-Uploads)

<comment><USER3> I work at Human Made (owner of the above repo, and an enterprise WordPress agency), and we run all our sites on an all-AWS stack. We have a few other plugins for related AWS pieces, including email via SES [1] and a dynamic image thumbnail generator that runs on Lambda [2] that might also be relevant.

Using S3 for the uploads solves our problems without needing EFS, as we disable file system changes through other methods. Plugin installs or upgrades are great, but aren't tracked in the git repo, so we do those via local upgrades and deploy out to AWS instead.

The article also mentions installing WordPress as being a pain, but you can easily automate this using wp-cli [3] if you want to. Your RDS containing the WP data is going to be shared though, so there's no real need to install more than once.

[1]: [https://github.com/humanmade/aws-ses-wp- mail](https://github.com/humanmade/aws-ses-wp-mail) [2]: [https://github.com/humanmade/node-tachyon](https://github.com/humanmade/node- tachyon) [3]: [http://wp-cli.org/](http://wp-cli.org/)

<comment><USER6> Hey thanks for your work, I wanted to mention wp-cli, too, which is especially excellent. Especially with one of my applications where the content portion of the site is wordpress, and the "app" portion is other tech, I needed a way to integrate with the wordpress site, and found wp-cli made some tasks incredibly easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone chime in why hosting this behind Cloudflare is a bad idea? For something which is a blog/CMS (put another way the # of readers >> # of creators), I'm envisioning using a single instance behind Cloudflare with heavy caching turned on? Cloudflare caches and serves everything. For free (you can pay them if you want). Host your assets in S3 or GCS, also put them behind Cloudflare. If your instance goes down, you have a rough chunk of your caching window to bring your instance back online (which if it's well encapsulated should be a few scripts to spawn a new instance and re-point the cloud provider internal DNS which will update ~1s)

<comment><USER8> > Can someone chime in why hosting this behind Cloudflare is a bad idea?

It's not a bad idea. Who said that?

Put your blog behind cloudflare. It will cache most of the requests and save a lot of load and bandwidth on your instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This guide is spot on for WordPress on AWS.

The persistent and shared EFS volume was the missing piece for running WordPress without frustrating patches.

And CloudFormation is the AWS best practice.

Convox has a few serious WordPress installs. The only difference is that it uses ECS so those EC2 instances can be utilized for more apps.

Also you can hack on the WordPress site locally with Docker via 'convox start'

[https://convox.com/docs/wordpress/](https://convox.com/docs/wordpress/)

Disclaimer: I work on Convox.

<comment><USER10> Do you have anything to say about EFS and WordPress (or other PHP CMS that are basically designed for a single instance?)

Latency on stat() - PHP is often a oop-monster these days with thousands of fs reads as it loads the code? (there are certainly ways to dodge that overhead though).

Have you seen the filesystem stall for any reason? Any caveats with concurrent writers (such as cache/ directories or generated images with deterministic paths etc).

You say without frustrating patches - are there any general limitations with using EFS?

Have you used self-managed NFS for the same purpose before? Any comparison with EFS?

<comment><USER11> We have some notes on small file performance for EFS and ObjectiveFS at [https://objectivefs.com/howto//performance-amazon-efs-vs- obj...](https://objectivefs.com/howto//performance-amazon-efs-vs-objectivefs) that you might find interesting. Scaling out PHP on AWS is definitively easier with a shared file system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before you hop on board with this "pain free" solution, you should accept the fact that you may end up maintaining this: [https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf- templates/blob/master/wordp...](https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf- templates/blob/master/wordpress/wordpress-ha.yaml)

There should be easier way, e.g. in Azure you can start WordPress (includes MySQL, limited to one app service instance) with one click, not sure what are the costs of maintaining that, but at least starting one in that case is pain free.

<comment><USER9> Infrastructure as code offers a lower maintenance cost over time in many scenarios.

Sure you can click to set up WordPress on other hosts.

But how do you scale capacity of the servers or the database? How do you peer the network to your other cloud resources? How do you mirror the stack in another region?

With CloudFormation resource management is a few API calls away.

You can also use CloudFormation in point and click mode to create a stack and update its resources.

It may be overkill for some cases but for serious systems it's the best practice.

<comment><USER13> Quick shout out to Sandstorm.io where you can run Wordpress and many other useful apps fairly easily...

[https://apps.sandstorm.io/](https://apps.sandstorm.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And this cloud setup is going to cost probably for few hundreds of dollars a month.

Has anybody working towards serverless version of wp?

<comment><USER15> > Has anybody working towards serverless version of wp?

I'm curious on what a "serverless version of wordpress" consists of, please enlighten us on the technical details of a serverless wordpress, sincerely. And how would you have a "serverless shopping card" too ? I'm really curious about the how it. If you're talking about a static blog generator then it already exists (Hugo,...) is this what you call serverless ?

<comment><USER14> By serverless I mean version of the wp which could use Google functions ([https://cloud.google.com/functions/](https://cloud.google.com/functions/)) or Amazon Lambda ([https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/)) or Microsoft Azure Functions ([https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/services/functions/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/services/functions/))

It would provide unlimited and automatic scaling, simplified setup/architecture and we would pay only for what we use.

<comment><USER15> Most blog content is static, why would you need to use lambda for anything ? you already get automatic scaling by putting static files on S3. What Wordpress functionality would need to be implemented with Lambda ?

<comment><USER16> I run a static blog on S3 using Lambda. I upload a markdown post to an S3 bucket, Lambda runs Hugo (could be Jekyll, or whatever) to regenerate the appropriate files, then uploads it to an output buckets, invalidates the files it needs to in Cloudfront, etc.

Not infeasible to think you could use Lambda to generate a static cache of a WP site onto S3 and update files on demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, you can do this. But, what about a staging environment? How do you keep data and code in sync between environments? My company runs a lot of wordpress instances, and we've wound up shipping most of them to Pantheon. (pantheon.io) Not only does it take care of environment issues, but it gives you redis and implements caching as a service. As the post says, wordpress fights AWS a bit. We leave it to the people who are experts at winning that fight.

(I know this reads like an ad. I'm not affiliated with pantheon except as a user. Pantheon comes close to making wordpress not suck.)

<comment><USER18> Requiring the $100/mo plan and charging an additional $30/mo for HTTPS seems.. dated. It makes me wonder if they're behind the times with other things too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can host several WordPress sites on a 5$ / month droplet. How much would this AWS version cost? In 99,99% of the cases it's not every an option

<comment><USER20> Stick CloudFlare as a CDN and configure it, enable some caching plugin on WP and you'll need some serious traffic to saturate that small droplet.

<comment><USER8> What's serious traffic?

The first page of HN can send 10k users to a blog in about one hour. (don't know the peak rate per second).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see the bill of materials for that.

Its _only_ running 2 PHP instances + 2 RDS instances + EBS storage costs + S3 buckets fees + ELB fees + CloudFront fees + traffic costs.

<comment><USER21> Came here to say the same thing - I'd love to see a monthly cost on a setup that looks like this... or anything on AWS. I can run many many WP sites on a $10/month box (not AWS) with proper config tunings.

<comment><USER22> FYI: This post is not about your personal 2-reader a month Wordpress setup but for sites scaling to the size of TC.

<comment><USER8> FYI: You can run a professional blog on wordpress.com for about $100 a year (highest plan) and it will take millions of visitors.

The smallest production instance on AWS is about $100 a month (c4.large) for 1 core (+intel HT) + 4GB ram + a few GB of EBS volume.

The setup requires at least 4 hosts, thus that's a start price of $400 a month + the other fees (hardly 10% more :D).

It's f __ __ __* insane to pay more than $400 per month to run a blog. No matter the traffic.

<comment><USER23>
      >It's f* insane to pay more than $400 per month to run a blog. No matter the traffic.

It's insane if your site isn't being monetized at all and downtime doesn't cost you anything. What you spend on infrastructure should be a formula of risk vs. reward taking into account availability vs. lost revenue for downtime or visitor bounce due to errors, speed, etc. Site owners will happily pay whatever the cost is as long as they are not losing sales and their net income is positive.

<comment><USER8> Wordpress.com is more available, more stable and more dependable than a hacky setup on AWS you made yourself.

Not to mention that guys who can do that kind of custom setup are going for $150-300k a year nowadays. And it's gonna take man*months of work and maintenance.

<comment><USER23> I am one of those guys who can do that kind of custom setup for large scale high volume sites and the actual setup is not as complicated as it sounds. The maintenance is literally a day a month, if that. You can even automate it if you like. And if you have me on a maintenance retainer then you are not paying the equivalent of my $X00K per year salary. All of my clients who don't have their own corp DevOps team like having someone they know and can call at any time with issues instead of submitting a support ticket and waiting. Again, it all comes down to what percentage of our income do we feel comfortable spending on infrastructure? It has nothing to do with oh my - $X00 or $X000 per month sounds expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to disagree with the author. I have setup Wordpress using OpsWorks and it is a much better way to do this especially considering all of the stack can be auto managed via Chef. Updates are handled automatically and if you get a surge of traffic, autoscale kicks in.

The only issue is getting the plugins to auto update on all of the servers, which I am fairly certain you can do with Chef or WordPress just handles it.

</comment><comment><USER25> In my humble opinion, WordPress is something to be surpassed, that is why it fails on being cloud-friendly. If someone makes a system as customizable and flexible as WordPress it would be a huge success.

<comment><USER26> I've been waiting on this for awhile, currently I run most sites through jekyll and for clients that need CMS options I hook them up with [http://cloudcannon.com/](http://cloudcannon.com/)

I've gone the WP a number of times and it's been more headaches then it's worth. Everything seems like a hack on a hack. There are things like sage/roots that make it a "little" better.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> Everything seems like a hack on a hack

My experience with WP has been the same. Seems like you get a basic theme installed, and then whatever functionality you need you just download, install and configure a dozen or so plugins. Can't find a plugin that you need? Oh, then you can just write a plugin that you download, install and configure on your own.

The bloat from that approach just drives me nuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My company used WPEngine for a while until we wanted to move from a blog. subdomain to a subfolder for SEO reasons. WPEngine doesn't support this, so we decided to host our own.

We are on AWS and have a pretty sophisticated Chef setup, but I want to stress that if you are a SaaS company, you do _not_ want your Wordpress install as part of your production network. By running Wordpress yourself you're taking on upgrade responsibilities, and you need to be pretty diligent in upgrading in order to avoid exploits. At minimum you should put Wordpress in its own VPC; we ended up running on Heroku instead to keep it as far as possible from our production infrastructure.

If I were setting up a new wordpress blog for a company I'd go with WPEngine if possible, if not I'd host on Heroku, and only if it needed to scale a lot would I consider hosting it myself on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER28> Most blogs consist of trivially addressable content (that is, everything has it's own URI, and the page is essentially "functional" \-- the same URI will return the same content each time) and is thus trivially cacheable. Cloudflare or its many competitors will handle this extremely well.

It's trickier when there is content on a page that has to be dynamically generated fresh (or nearly fresh) per page load. Most blogs never get into this territory (or have no reason to, at least) and most of us have experience with WordPress at the "look y'all, ima start a blog" level of sophistication, so there's this kneejerk toward feeling like this is total overkill.

But it's not if you have the problems that owners of complex, interactive, heavily-trafficked WordPress sites have.

</comment><comment><USER29> Unless you pay for a larger instance where the cost turns out to more like 50 bucks a month you get very limited bandwidth out of AWS, which is why I stopped using it. I suppose if you are running a corporate blog and cost isn't an issue then AWS probably works fine but for smaller sites and individual users there are vastly cheaper very good hosting options out there. I don't want to seem like a shill so I won't mention them by name. It was the super crappy bandwidth on AWS where basically my site would die regularly with just one or two visitors that made me abandon the platform.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why use CloudFlare? If you're already on AWS why not just use CloudFront? I've been using CloudFront on my WP installations for a few years now, ever since they've started supporting GET and POST requests.

<comment><USER31> The article doesn't mention CloudFlare?

The common argument is pricing, many people seem to prefer a relatively reliable monthly amount (that in the beginning might even be zero) to CloudFront's potentially expensive traffic costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I do similar for my personal website on Azure, they have a Wordpress plugin that maps the upload folder to use a blob storage instance. It's a bit dated and doesn't support things like custom domains using https (for the blob.) Something I hope they address (it's 2016 guys.) I don't know if this Amazon solution does the same thing or not. However currently I have to use my Blob's CNAME domain to serve assets over https. I use Cloudflare to manage my certs instead of Cloudfront like they do here.

I'm looking for a solution for my agency to put sites onto hosted instances like AWS or Azure, but my hesitance is that they aren't managed solutions and I'm afraid of getting hacked. Does anyone have any insight on how secure these solutions can be? My Azure instance has been running for years without problems, but that's my gamble with my one site and not hundreds of customer sites. I use CloudFlare's page rules to add extra security and caching and have WordFence just in case.

I'd love some insight into how I could scale a solution like this to be hundreds of sites on cloud instances while maintaining security. Perhaps they should all be separate? Would my personal solution be good for my company's clients? Managed solutions like WPEngine are just outrageously expensive for some of the sites we have that only get a handful of traffic (Azure offers Wordpress on Azure websites.)

<comment><USER33> I'm assuming you're on Debian or Ubuntu. You can set up automatic security updates on Apt, and if you have a firewall you're halfway there. Then I would make sure each website has its own user, group, and www-user and using file permissions, make it so each virtualhost doesn't have access to others' files.

If you wanna be extra safe you can have each site on its own vps. Although what's nice about keeping a bunch on 1 big vps is that you get to save a lot of time managing it as it can take a while to propagate changes across many VPS and if they all have different setups it can get confusing.

To do 1 site per vps properly, you should have fleet management going like Ansible or Puppet so that you can maintain them all easily. That way all the code is hosted on a build server, and individual environments get built for each site.

<comment><USER33> DM me or shoot me an email, email@example.com if you have any questions about it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I do performance WP hosting and would like to try out EFS but it is not available locally yet.

What I do is use redundant RDS, ELB etc but on all the WP installs have an inhouse plugin that with any change it ioniced rsyncs that vhosts tree to all webservers and ssh's a command to them all to dump their WP cache.

It may seem hackish but the sites absolutely fly, have tried several clustered file systems but all that complexity hits reliability and speed.

<comment><USER35> Why not roll your own NFS, then?

And if your cache is all on disk, a very quick win would involve moving that to memcache, no? That also makes forced expiration very easy.

Of course there are managed services for all of these things anyway.

<comment><USER34> I was thinking where is the memcache in all those diagrams, AWS has very simple redundant memcache setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Please could someone estimate, what would be a cost of hosting a site like this, with around 100K articles and 5M monthly pageviews?

</comment><comment><USER19> EasyEngine would be easier for creating wordpress websites :p

ee site create mysite.com --wpfc --php7 # install wordpress + nginx fastcgi_cache, with php7

ee site create mysite.com --wpredis --php7 # install wordpress + nginx redis_cache with php7

I have yet to see a site of mine, which breaks my limits on a 5$/month droplet.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great short/quick piece. I also do multi-EC2 instances in AWS, but do NFS instead of EFS, and another CDN. WordPress still has its many challenges, but it definitely scales for many different web publishing businesses.

</comment><comment><USER38> No thanks. I'll stick with Roots. [1]

[1] [https://roots.io](https://roots.io)

</comment><comment><USER39> I appreciate this article. It gives me another solution when contemplating how to host CraftCMS in AWS.

</comment><comment><USER40> kindda surprised he wasn't using SES (sendy) for mailing list.. instead mailchimp...

</comment><comment><USER41> I've run a sporadically popular (100s of thousands of uniques on some days) blog on Wordpress for years. All running on a single spot instance (if it was killed I have a script to roll over in minutes).

The database, Wordpress, the file storage. Entirely self contained.

I occasionally persist the AMI so I can spin up a new updated system base, and have regular backups of the files and database. My monthly cost is ~$9 on AWS. I've had literally minutes of downtime over the past several years.

Obviously this guide is geared to a more serious installation, but there is the danger that the more reliable a system becomes, often the less reliable it becomes. EFS and NLB configuration changes or problems taking the system offline, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's WordPress, not Wordpress.

<comment><USER43> Someone needs to convert `capital_P_dangit` to a userscript :)

[https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dan...](https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dangit)

<comment><USER44> You mean like this? [https://github.com/jonathanbardo/capital_P_dangit](https://github.com/jonathanbardo/capital_P_dangit)

<comment><USER43> Nice! I figured it existed, but a cursory search didn't find it. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Bans Adwords use for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.willshouse.com/2011/07/26/google-bans-adwords-use-for-facebook/

<comment><USER2> Google recently suspended all my ads for advertising services (AdWords competitors) and for ad tracking services (Analytics competitors). These are sites Google had advertised for as long as 6 years without issue. The reasons all seem a stretch (<http://www.w3roi.com> is suspended for 'misleading claims' - what claims?).

Someone's rewriting policies and cracking down over there, and it's a big problem for any business when the largest display and search advertising service in the world decides they won't allow you to be a customer anymore. Sleepless nights for me, as I had just mortgaged a new house before my ads turned up suddenly suspended.

<comment><USER3> This is why you don't stake the well-being of your company on the good intentions of another's.

<comment><USER2> Monopolistic market share makes that difficult. Every store stakes their business on their electric company providing service.

Poor analogy, but for internet businesses whose prospects find solutions through search, Google refusing service is going to impact you no matter where else you advertise. They're too big to easily substitute competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And this wouldn't have anything at all to do with Facebook first banning adverts for Google+?

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20080054-71/facebook- bans-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20080054-71/facebook-bans-google- ad/)

Or Facebook banning Adwords in all Facebook apps?

[http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=91182&...](http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=91182&p=2)

More: [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Facebook+ba...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=Facebook+bans)

</comment><comment><USER5> The article is a second-hand account of a discussion with a low-level call center employee. I hardly think we should extrapolate Google's corporate policy from this account.

Interesting to note the parallel with the post which claimed Facebook was blocking G+ ads a few weeks ago. Many jumped to conclusions, bit in the discussion on HN [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2770237>], it was determined this was more likely a trademark issue than a competitive action.

Don't jump to conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Before we jump to conclusions, it's equally possible Facebook is behind this. Google gets lots of nastygrams from companies who view ads containing their name as trademark violations.

A few years ago I had trouble running an iPod related ad on Google, not because of Google but because of Apple. Is there any indication this is Google and not Facebook's doing?

<comment><USER7> Interestingly, a search for "find friends" on Google still returns an ad promoting Facebook from Facebook itself. That's one data point in favor of the Facebook-initiated trademark hypothesis.

<comment><USER8> Screenshot? I see FB as the top organic result, but not as an advertiser.

<comment><USER9> Screenshot from just now <http://i.imgur.com/7r1Lt.png>

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Are you in the US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One potential reason for this:

[http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/a-clever-adwords-hack-how- to...](http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/a-clever-adwords-hack-how-to-get-your- advertorial-on-marketwatch-com/)

When people run ads pointing to a site they don't own, it's often in an effort to get an implicit endorsement from that site. Note: I have no evidence that this is going on, but it is a risk with any site that has a recognizable URL and allows user-generated content.

From what I can see, it looks like ads pointing to FB were a) big brands advertising on their own brand names in order to promote social sites (e.g. 'windows 7' or 'hennessy'), b) big brands advertising on generic terms (e.g. 'hummus' ads taking you to the Athenos Facebook page), or c) house ads for navigational searches, including one for the notorious "Facebook login".

These ads are also growing in popularity. It looks like they doubled between April and June.

<comment><USER10> > These ads are also growing in popularity. It looks like they doubled between > April and June.

Source?

<comment><USER8> I buy lots of data sets on this stuff. My company analyzes SEO and SEM campaigns to help investors understand what they're getting into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone with a US legal background know if this raises any antitrust issues?

It would certainly raise some red flags under Australian competition law.

<comment><USER12> IANAL, but in the US whether you actually hold a monopoly is the key. I think it would be bough to show that Google holds a monopoly in this space. They definitely command the biggest market share, but I'm not sure it would be enough to show that they have a monopoly. 65% (as reported here: [http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/02/11/googles- lead-s...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/02/11/googles-lead-search- market-share-narrows-comscore/)) is certainly the lion's share, but not quite a monopoly by US standards.

<comment><USER13> it's in google's best interest to get studies to show them with lower market share. I'd bet if you tallied up the stats for 100 biggest sites, Google would have at least 90, if not 95% of all search engine traffic

<comment><USER12> I doubt that just for the fact that IE comes with bing as default. I don't think enough people actually care to change it. I would not be surprised to see it higher, but I highly doubt greater than 80%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Facebook removed Adsense from their list of "approved ad providers" earlier this year. <http://developers.facebook.com/adproviders/>

This may be a response to that.

</comment><comment><USER8> [http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=facebook+blog)

"Facebook Blog" is still showing me AdWords ads for Facebook Advertising. (facebook.com/ads/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Google "Facebook ads" and check out the Adwords ads. Facebook themselves advertise directly via Adwords. I'm going to transcribe myself talking to a brain-dead call centre rep about alien life and give it a catchy article headline to complete the troll.

</comment><comment><USER16> Touché. It all seems rather petty, though. They can either both allow ads, or both ban ads, and the public probably doesn't care which scenario happens.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps not directly, but they result will indirectly affect them when developers resort to shadier monetization practices because they can't use one on the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This feels just like the prelude to WWII with all these conflicting alliances or maybe the Cold War is more appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if it is simply Eric Schmidt's ties to Google preventing a DOJ anti- trust suit. Owning the largest advertisment platform, owning the advertising adjacencies, and using that leverage against your competition is very much rubbing up against illegal use of a monopolistic position.

</comment><comment><USER20> Facebook did the same thing to _me_ when I tried to advertise my social networking service on Facebook. This is anti-competitive - on both counts. But it's illegal if you are deemed to have monopoly power.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be curious to see some real numbers on this. How much is this costing Google directly? How much does the offensive damage Facebook in the pocketbook?

Unless there's a genuinely huge advantage at play, I think this is a bad move by Google. They're supposed to be the good guy against Facebook, and they're just pissing that competitive edge away.

</comment><comment><USER22> Legal battle? I thought Google and Facebook haven't sued each other _yet_. Have they?

</comment><comment><USER23> humorously, if you search for "facebook ads", the first ad (at least for me) is an ad for facebook.com/ads. If you search with the quotes, that is followed by two sites that promise to optimize your social media ad presence.

Those might be from existing contracts or something, and after the whole email contact "reciprocity" spat I could believe some form of this is happening, but it would be nice to see some actual confirmation.

</comment><comment><USER24> As with the Apple TOS issue, I also call shenanigans on this.

Sigh whatever happened to just competing fairly?

</comment><comment><USER25> payback time!</comment>


Silicon Valley's Secret: Proximity, Stolen Parts, and the Kindness of Strangers - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/geek-life/history/silicon-valleys-secret-involves-proximity-stolen-parts-say-atari-alumni <comment><USER3> I've spent the last two months in Canada, taking in bits and pieces of the investment landscape and technical culture I left for Silicon Valley two years ago. I'm interested in the contrast.

To preface, I love Canada. I love Toronto. I was born and raised here. (Yes, Drake's pretty cool, too). But my biggest criticism of the industry in Toronto is that it seems to be missing this _spark_. A meeting in Silicon Valley isn't just a meeting. Due to proximity and kindness of strangers, it's the start of propagating wave of influence. As you create more of these waves, constructive interference forms peaks that manifest in specific individuals who are not only willing to help you, they're willing to champion for you.

Toronto doesn't lack kindness of strangers. At all. But it lacks a large-scale cohesive human medium via proximity that Silicon Valley so readily provides. As a Toronto-born Canadian, I'm deeply interested in how Canada's ecosystem can better facilitate and grow this kind of critical mass of talent and connections. There are good places to start, my friend Ahmad Nassri runs TechMasters ([https://techmasters.chat/](https://techmasters.chat/)) and is bringing thousands of developers together.

I think a great approach might be heading towards deepening SV ties and becoming part of a larger social medium instead of trying to bootstrap its own. I think this is a huge part of the NYC tech community that is blossoming and I've been able to witness first hand as well. I guess we'll see how far SV influence can reach. :)

<comment><USER4> Also Toronto born-and-raised and living in SF. I'm not sure what this spark you speak of is, but I feel a ton of energy, enthusiasm, fearlessness, and widespread talent in SF that barely exists in Toronto. I believe that much of it has to do with self-selection - SF is full of people that decided to be there and _intentionally_ moved there - wanted to learn programming, or wanted to start a company, or didn't feel comfortable being homosexual in their small town, or wanted to live somewhere with warmer winters and hiking in December. It feels like most people in Toronto were born there or moved there as young kids when their parents immigrated. The self selection of people in SF has dramatic influences on its culture. Maybe you can call it homogeneous and sure there's a big tech industry in SF, but it's hardly the largest industry there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> " I graduated 256 out of a class of 256 (at the University of Utah). That is, I had the most efficient degree possible. I got a degree, but I didn't do one bit more than I needed to."

LOL!

<comment><USER6> Well in the 1960's, just having a degree meant more than it does today.

<comment><USER7> That was before making student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy (1976) created an educational finance industry[1] requiring the world to produce more postsecondary students.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had breakfast with Nolan Bushnell back in 2013 at GameTech and he's been a huge inspiration to me. The dude is 80? and has the energy and enthusiasm for tech that is simply contagious. We talked for 20 minutes over bacon on how he wanted to use his company BrainRush to bring high school education down to take just six months. Everything he does, he does with gusto and a full heart.

He's one of my favorites. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it!

Disclaimer: I am not Nolan Bushnell. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> > One of the nice things about Silicon Valley, is, you all have worked next to > an idiot who has gone off and been successful

That sort of under-cuts the meritocracy message by a lot.

I think success is a product of more things than talent, it could be about projected talent as much as what's underneath the hood - confidence as a product of ignorance and narcism is indistinguishable from the real thing, unless tested.

And guess what, some of those people who talk big actually become those people by a mixture of opportunity and hard work - I feel like one of those imposters :)

But asking a lottery winner on picking the best numbers is nearly as useful as picking a loser on how not to pick them - it's what they do after they win a dice roll that matters (invest, avoid going bankrupt etc).

This is not without lessons though - that the failures were made in a consequence-less environment ( _sic_ at Nutting & their bankruptcy) and those lessons were carried into aa future success instead of being the opening chapters of a student loan driven panic.

<comment><USER10> > > One of the nice things about Silicon Valley, is, you all have worked next > to an idiot who has gone off and been successful

> That sort of under-cuts the meritocracy message by a lot.

What meritocracy message? If there is one thing Silicon Valley ISN'T it's meritocratic. Success here is a function of luck, access to capital, personal connections and shameless self-promotion. Nothing meritocratic about that. We HAVE all worked with idiots who have gone off and been successful. It's an encouraging message--if you're an idiot.

<comment><USER11> Silicon Valley is a hell of a lot more meritocratic than just about any place on earth. I've lived in Europe, Asia, West Coast, Midwest and East Coast. SV is not perfect but it is magical compared to the norms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is so true. I didn't steal any parts (though I was given free office space and other stuff), but much of the success of CircleCI was strangers (or at least "very new friends") giving me advice, referring me to their friends and colleagues and investors.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In addition to reinforcing my already-entrenched belief that Proximity and the Kindness of Strangers are key ingredients in Silicon Valley's success, this article TIL'd me that Nolan Bushnell, Larry Ellison and Ray Dolby all worked at Ampex (whose big sign I've driven past many times on 101). That explains why there are so many buildings in San Francisco with 'Dolby' signs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't Silicon Valley's biggest secret its close relation to the US military?

<comment><USER14> What close relationship? That all changed in the 1980s, when consumer electronics sped past DoD purchases. This bothered many DoD agencies at the time.

Not well known: BSD Unix was supposed to die when DARPA cut off funding. DARPA had decided to support Mach, which was more of a research project and potentially could have better security. But instead, BSD Unix was taken up by Sun as a startup.

<comment><USER15> I'm failing to find anything on it now, but I remember rumor from the 90s that the NSA was an early SUN customer. If true, Eric Schmidt is all the more interesting.

<comment><USER14> NSA probably did buy some SUN workstations. They'd buy a few of anything in those days.

I was at an aerospace company that made satellites and ground stations back then, and we had a few Sun workstations in the early 1980s. One had a TV- resolution color display in addition to the black and white display. Someone ported an orbital elements program plotting program for satellite orbits and positions, and the positions of the ground stations, providing a real-time display. An Air Force general was visiting, and demanded that the entire machine be immediately moved over to the USAF Satellite Control Facility (the old "blue cube" in Sunnyvale), which was still running on the 1960s technology used by NASA for Apollo. This was done, and the in-house machine was replaced at USAF expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hm. Short article, very fun to read about these alumn though. I'm not so bought in on the idea that silicon valley itself was the thesis her - <USER2> like it's just an argument in general for real world networking. I'm bought in to that, I've never regretted a single meetup I've been to.

</comment><comment><USER17> > A guy working on a database at Ampex was Larry Ellison. A guy working in > audio was Ray Dolby. Ampex was incredibly generous about letting these > people start their own companies.

This just can't happen today, anymore. Everybody/-thing and their dog is bound at least by NDAs, if not worse by non-compete agreements.

The only exception I know of is Google's 20% program, but IIRC even this has been scaled down.

<comment><USER18> I work for Google, and I've asked for -- and been granted -- IP for a side project I've been working on. Actually under California state law I probably had rights to the IP anyway (I haven't worked on it at work or with work resources) but I've been officially granted a legal promise that Google won't sue me into bankruptcy to try and assert ownership. :)

It wasn't a hard thing to do, and I get the impression that unless you're planning on directly competing with something they care about, they're pretty liberal with such releases.

<comment><USER19> Seems like a bad idea, why would you ask for permission? If you're not using company resources and unless you tell the company about some IP they don't know about, they aren't going to sue you. You're just giving them the option to assert themselves.

<comment><USER18> If nothing ever comes of it, it doesn't matter either way.

If it becomes successful enough to launch into its own company, there is a huge disadvantage to not having the IP situation clarified up front. For one thing, investors get very concerned about even the remote possibility of someone else trying to claim copyright to your code. And once you are successful, it's not safe (or ethical, really) to just assume your [former] employer will never hear about it and connect the dots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title sounds like China scene.</comment>


Python script to download all Springer books released for free during Covid - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexgand/springer_free_books <comment><USER2> Actually I had done this:

      wget -O ~/Downloads/books.csv 'https://link.springer.com/search/csv?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&package=mat-covid19_textbooks&fbclid=IwAR14_P6ZT4OoaHCYpxQCu_NtGLENhKOhfVD-b648OmS3TFM39gDZEhkDBS0&facet-language=%22En%22&sortOrder=newestFirst&showAll=true' && awk 'BEGIN { FS = "," }; { gsub("book","content/pdf",$9) ; if ($9 ~ /^"http/) { print "wget --content-disposition -P ~/Downloads/springer " $9; } }' < ~/Downloads/books.csv | bash

</comment><comment><USER3> RIP Aaron Swartz

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice tool and the Dockerfile is quite handy, but my guess is these books probably have a download limit per book since more used to be available.

Maybe use the script's category or individual book modes to ensure more people can get access to them?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty useful; thanks for sharing.

There's some good books I always wanted to take a look, but wasn't ready to commit; this will help me decide. Smart move by Springer.</comment>


Hacker turned manager? - <AUTHOR>

I have been a hacker for over 14 years. Recently, the company I am working at has been on a hiring spree which has led to me managing more people than ever before. Have any of you gone through this transition successfully? Are there web tools or books that are particularly helpful? <comment><USER2> I suggest "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, as well as "Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp (or read his blog Rands in Repose, full of thoughtful geek-oriented essays on managing software teams and navigating organizations)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a talk at The Last Hope entitled "From a Black Hat to a Black Suit - How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul"

16 kbps: [http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/16kbps/From_a_Black_H...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/16kbps/From_a_Black_Hat_to_a_Black_Suit_- _How_to_Climb_the_Corporat.mp3)

64 kbps: [http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/From_a_Black_H...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/From_a_Black_Hat_to_a_Black_Suit_- _How_to_Climb_the_Corporat.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER4> I found Amit Rathore's essay 'Against all Oddities' to be very helpful in bridging the gap.

[http://epistemologic.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/againstoddi...](http://epistemologic.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/againstoddities.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've done it but I hated it.

Never again. I have a standing agreement with my business partner that if we ever find ourselves in the position of having to hire people that she will take care of that end. I really am not the right person for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed Rapid Development from Steve McConnell for giving me some vocabulary and back bone when I needed to manage up.</comment>


First results from search for a dark light - <AUTHOR> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/first-results-from-search-for-a-dark-light <comment><USER2> Interesting! Thanks for sharing.</comment>


I'm looking to buy a small SaaS business - <AUTHOR> Does anyone have side projects or products they're not working on anymore that they'd be interested in selling ?<p>I'm looking for products, preferably SaaS, making $300 to $4000 in MRR <comment><USER2> Do you have an overall budget for this? And on this topic -- does anyone know of a place where profitable businesses can be sold? I know of places like [https://1kprojects.com/](https://1kprojects.com/) and similar sites but the listings are not exactly "businesses."

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - about $70k

I know of 1kprojects, Transferslot, flippa, empire flippers and FE international but it's a bit hard to sort through everything to find quality products

<comment><USER3> The problem is that if it is a really good quality product that ALSO makes some revenue, I doubt people are looking to sell on those sites. You have to go hunt yourself. Once in a while, you may be able to find a Gem on those sites but yea, most are not worth the time/money unfortunately if you are looking for something more than a simple side project.

<comment><USER2> FWIW I have multiple revenue generating businesses that I'd be open to selling for the right price, but IMO there's nowhere to list them that warrants my attention. I don't want to list my business alongside bunch of $0/MRR side projects asking $10k.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you share which ones ?

<comment><USER2> Feel free to email me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered funding a team to build one of your own ideas or perhaps finding a team that has ideas of their own but need funding to pursue them? If you'd like to discuss in more detail, you can find my email in my profile.

<comment><USER5> Why would he do that? He is paying for the time spend to market and building a product.

<comment><USER4> I was just throwing it out there, just in case he doesn't find some more developed that he'd like to purchase.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but I also have my own side projects / products, the goal with this would be to invest in something to get a decent return without all of the risk associated with creating something new!

<comment><USER4> Absolutely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi -- I am looking for a home for dndemail.com. It offers do not disturb on your gmail inbox, across all devices.

If you are interested, michael at dndemail dot com.</comment>


Eddie Antar was an innovator, disrupter, and crook - <AUTHOR> http://www.city-journal.org/html/his-life-was-insane-14743.html <comment><USER2> He also influenced many other similar retailers. In the Wisconsin/Iowa area until a decade or so ago there was "American TV and Appliance" run by Lenny Mattioli, known as "Crazy TV Lenny" in his commercials.

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up seeing his commercials on WPIX out of NYC. He was probably the most memorable huckster on tV.</comment>


Apache CloudStack AutoInstall Script - <AUTHOR> http://buildacloud.org/blog/264-cloudstack-autoinstallation-script.html

<comment><USER2> I'll be trying this out next week. Great thing to have.</comment>


Ask HN: Security tools used to test AWS infrastructure - <AUTHOR> What security tools are you using to test your AWS infrastructure in 2017?<p>Some people recommend Netflix SimianArmy, but I'd be happy to learn about other tools also. <comment><USER2> CIS Benchmark -- [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/tag/cis-aws- foundation...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/tag/cis-aws-foundations- benchmark/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Evident.io. We're using it to monitor hundreds of AWS accounts in our org.</comment>