Kim Dotcom's Mega Opens For Early-Access Users - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/kim-dotcoms-mega-opens-site-to-early-users-reveals-roadmap-with-mobile-access-office-style-features-and-more/

<comment><USER2> Aren't we talking a lot about freemium models here? This thing is going to implode, there is no way it will ever break-even.

There are three requirements any freemium model needs to meet to be successful.

1.) Large addressable market

2.) Minimal marginal costs per free user

3.) Enough features in premium tier to convert sizable portion of free users

I think the only point 1 is met.

Giving 50 GB of free storage to free users is going to cost up to $5 per user per month. That's insane. The cost should be no more than a few cents.

And how many users will ever need more than 50 GB? 0.1%? therefore point 3.) is broken too. Not to mention premium tier pricing is too cheap to make it profitable even without free users.

Mega will shut the door as soon as it runs out of investor's money.

<comment><USER3> > cost up to $5 a month

Your opinion. Storage is constantly getting cheaper.

<comment><USER4> Agreed and not to mention that most people won't use anything close to the 50GB, combine that with the deduplication plans they have and you have a very different scenario.

<comment><USER2> they say, all files will be client-side encrypted which won't allow them to "deduplicate" anything.

<comment> X-Istence Just because a file is encrypted doesn't mean that a small block doesn't match another encrypted block even if the two are from two different files.

This would allow them to do deduplication at the block level (see ZFS for example).

<comment><USER5> Think about that one for a second. An encrypted block is essentially supposed to look like random data. I.e. if two people encrypt the same file with different keys, you shouldn't be able to tell that they're the same file (or your encryption sucks). So your block-level de-duping then depends on incidental matches between random data.

What's the probability of two 4KB (or whatever) blocks of random data being identical? Basically zero even with petabytes of data.

<comment><USER6> see: convergent encryption

The encryption on the client doesn't use a random key. The key is a hash of the unencrypted contents of the file.

<comment><USER5> Reading list-ed. Interesting.

<comment><USER6> The issue is that you don't get the full benefits of encryption.

If you upload the map to the rayiner family treasure that only you have seen you're good. No one else will be able to read it.

But if you upload the latest episode of Modern Family and Disney gets ahold of the same rip you used they (if they can get a government to help them out) can see what you did and charge you with copyright infringement (or whatever the appropriate crime would be).

<comment><USER7> After 3-4 years of high-profile CPA-2 attacks on TLS, .NET, Java, and other systems, you'd think we'd all be a lot more skeeved out about cryptosystems that demand known-plaintexts. There's already an obvious conceptual attack (beyond file confirmation) in naive "convergent encryption", which is that you can leverage small amounts of known plaintext to learn unknown plaintext.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought I heard that Mega was going to be partially funded by browser extensions that replace ads on third-party sites with Mega-affiliated ads. Is that not actually going to happen? It was the one part of the new Mega that sounded really shady.

<comment><USER5> Copyright infringement on a mass scale: not shady. Replacing ads with other ads: shady.

-_-

<comment><USER9> I guess it depends on one's opinion about copyright law.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but I think a lot of people have inconsistent opinions re: copyright law. I find it a little odd that people who oppose copyright on freedom grounds have no problem with advertising, even though advertising industry wouldn't exist at anywhere near its present scale without trademark law, which creates far more dire freedom-related concerns.

I'd go further to say that this cognitive dissonance is the product of how money is made in Silicon Valley 2.0: through advertising rather than sales of content.

<comment><USER9> I wonder how much advertising depends on trademark law. I suppose that, without trademarks, companies would advertise their domain name instead of their company name.

<comment><USER5> While domains are unique, how does it help Prada, Tiffany's, etc? It makes no difference whether the copy-cats are selling rip-offs marked "tiffanys.com" out of a cart. There is also more to trademark that just protecting marks. Trademark protects many aspects of the brand (see: trade dress, dilution, tarnishment, etc).

Companies spend a lot of money advertising because brands are valuable, and trademark basically protects brands. Branding makes goods less fungible, and is really the only reason companies like Prada or Ralph Lauren can sustain such high margins in what would otherwise be total commodity markets. When brands cease to have meaning to consumers, you end up with what you see in the PC industry: a race to the bottom that eats up all your margins.

Why does advertising support so much of the internet? It's a $500 billion industry world-wide, that's why. Without branding, protected by trademark, I think it would be a fraction of the size. And I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I understand the value of a brand. I was thinking that, without trademark, there could still be ways to ascertain the authenticity of a product. For example, tiffanys.com could list their physical stores on their website. A fake store wouldn't fool the neighborhood for long enough to be worth the effort.

<comment><USER5> Ever go to a mall and see all those little carts selling things? You think people go online to verify whether those carts are selling the real deal? What about products purchased online through Amazon, Zappo, etc?

Also, there is a whole world of non point of sale branding. When you give a gift, you pony up for a real Kate Spade bag instead of a perfect knock-off (which are probably made in the same Chinese factory!) You might get those awful D&G glasses with the obvious branding instead of a perfect replica. A lot of the value of branding is rooted in the fact that humans are basically monkeys and we buy products to show the brands off in our social circles. A lot of people would knowingly buy knock-off D&G glasses if they could get the same effect for less money.

Now, I'm not arguing that this would be a bad thing. It'd save parents a lot of money if their kids could show off their "Nike Swoosh" shoes without paying a huge markup for something made in a Chinese sweatshop. But the fact that we can't do that is certainly quite valuable to Nike (and D&G, and Ralph Lauren, etc), and the inability to protect their brands in that way would certainly reduce their incentive to invest so heavily in them through advertising.

<comment><USER9> You're right. For many branded products (especially clothes and shoes), consumers would indeed prefer to buy cheaper replicas good enough to fool their social circle. If they had the freedom to do so, then yes, Nike would lose much of their incentive to invest in advertising their logo. And yes, that would probably be a good thing for parents. And the only advertisements remaining would advertise quality instead of exclusivity. Or maybe Nike would come up with a way for someone to authenticate someone else's shoes. I don't see how they could do that though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one who just yawned when Megaupload was taken down?

I have no ill-will towards the people who run or use that (or those types of) site, and I don't really like how the government handled the Megaupload thing, but with the proliferation of cloud storage sites hosted by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, etc., it just seems stupid to subject yourself to all the security issues, fake download buttons, ads, etc. that you find on sites like this.

<comment><USER11> A few months after the takedown I went in search of a particular documentary that I knew existed. It's specific to a small subculture and a particular point in time; to the best of my knowledge it's never been released on DVD and most likely never will be. Arguably it would be no great loss to history if it were gone forever - but it was interesting to me. More than the big, famous things, it's little works like this that make up our culture.

I searched, and searched, and couldn't find it - just hundreds of dead links to Megaupload. There will be a copy in the BBC archives, but will anyone ever see it again? That experience makes me take Mega's side in all this.

(I eventually found it on an fserv that I swear was being hosted on dialup, but that's another story)

<comment><USER12> I still regret the destruction of MP3.com. I took a liking to some music from there. It was a vibrant community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The real question is will this become the ad-laden bastion of illegal movies and tv shows that MegaVideo was before it was taken down? While annoying to use, it sure was convenient when you wanted to watch a show or movie that was impossible to buy legally.

</comment><comment><USER14> It looks like and unexciting competitor for Google Drive, and Google Drive work pretty, pretty well. Sure, it doesn't have the client-side data encryption and the price per GB is higher, but I doubt the Mega email/apps can stand a round vs Gmail/Apps.

<comment><USER4> When did Google Drive start offering 50GB of storage for free?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The outsourced storage model is interesting.

<http://kim.com/mega/#/hosting>

Does this shotgun approach to storage offer them extra protection against law enforcement? Or is it just a way to try and minimise storage costs.

My guess is both.

</comment><comment><USER16> From the mega website "Mega are looking for investors". Can someone explain why they'd do that? Kim has more than enough money to cover all of the costs of this site yet he'd rather get investors? I never understood when to use my own money or raise money for my startup.

<comment> X-Istence His money was seized by the government ... how exactly does he have enough money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What function does a half baked google docs clone serve here?

<comment><USER18> He's doing his best to be comparable to Google and it provides a thin veil of legitimacy. The core business will still be based around copyright infringement, this is all just "plausible denyablity" in action. Interesting to see how it plays out.

<comment><USER19> >based around copyright infringement

 _sigh_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> mega.co.nz is showing 'access denied' when I tried accessing the site.

Edit: Looks like the article mentioned that on the last paragraph. It has to do with early access protection.

</comment><comment><USER21> Which is better? Dropbox or Mega?

<comment><USER22> Batman!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just remember that this is mega.co.nz and not mega.co.ns, the world's largest Lisp repository.</comment>


Evolutionary Computing for Infrastructure Design - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/continuum-industries/what-infrastructure-planners-and-designers-need-to-know-about-evolutionary-computing-1030be895cd3 <comment><USER2> Assuming you're associated with this company, here is a tip:

It sounds like you're doing good work, but this is way too much of a marketing post to appeal to HN. What you want to do instead is tell the backstory of how the company came to be, the problem it solves and why it matters, and what's different about how you solve it, in a neutral and factual way, including personal and technical detail, and ruthlessly editing out anything that sounds like marketing and sales language. This is the same advice I give to YC startups when we work with them to prepare their Launch HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/launches](https://news.ycombinator.com/launches)).

If you want to try writing a draft like the above, you can send it to firstname.lastname@example.com and we might be able to give you similar feedback to what we give YC startups. I can't promise anything, because the inbox is brutal. But you're welcome to email as long as you don't need a quick response. Same offer goes for anyone who wants to present their startup to HN.</comment>


Things Apple fucked up lately and how to fix them - <AUTHOR> http://schappi.com/post/41095657548/things-apple-f-ked-up-over-the-last-year-and-how-to

<comment><AUTHOR> Summary:

Problem: Magsafe 2 Connector, unlike it's predecessor falls out all the time. Fix: Use Magsafe 1 with the Magsafe 1 to Magsafe 2 adaptor seems to be magnetically stronger.

Problem: Whilst editing notes in the Notes App, they can randomly disappear. Fix: Use Evernote.

Problem: Facetime often tells me that not camera is connected. Ummm I'm using a MacBook Pro with a built in camera! Fix: sudo killall VDCAssistant

Problem: Show in Finder / Reveal in Finder often not working in 10.8. Fix: sudo killall -KILL appleeventsd

Problem: iTunes 12 does not sync playback information with devices. Fix: iTunes Preferences → Store Tab → Untick and retick "Sync Playback information across devices".

Problem: Apple Maps. Fix: Install Google Maps

Problem: "Save as" is missing form the File menu of iWork Apps. Fix: Press option whilst looking at the menu and it will appear again.</comment>


Ask HN: (Foot)notes Done Right? - <AUTHOR>

Summary: What is the best interface for adding notes to a web article/essay? My ideas are below. Can anyone point me to interesting examples?
Often, in an article or essay, it is reasonable to add notes at various places in the text: comments that some readers might be interested in, and some will skip. I wondering how these should best be handled, on a modern web page.
Historically, these were done with footnotes or endnotes. The web has given us pop-ups and links to separate pages. But all of these have problems.
Properties I think notes should have:
1. Notes should be easy to find from the point in the text where they are referenced.
2. Going to the note and back to the main text should be fast and effortless, so as not to break the reader's train of thought.
3. Notes should be visible without explicitly accessing the referencing point in the text.
4. Having seen a note, it should be easy to find the place in the main text that refers to it.
All the methods mentioned above are not too bad on 1, at least a little iffy on 2 & 3 (pop-ups and links are very bad on 3), and very poor on 4.
What do we do about this? My current best idea is side notes with a visible link (a line?) to the place in the text that references them. This line (or whatever) would be very faint normally, and be highlighted (temporarily?) when either the referencing point or the note is selected.
But surely other people have given this some thought. Can anyone point me to worthwhile ideas about notes, or examples of good (or innovative) implementations? <comment><USER2> I like side-boxes: <http://www.solipsys.co.uk/HowHighTheMoon.pdf>

Put the main stream of information down the left side, and any additional notes in boxes down the right.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's similar to what I'm thinking of. Note, though, that these are not really tied to any particular spot in the text, and, if there were such a spot, it would be tricky to pinpoint exactly (see my #4).

<comment><USER2> An asterisk in the main text would suffice, if the side-note is appropriately close. Alternatively, gently color the background of the box and the background of the text it should be linked to.

<comment><AUTHOR> That coloring idea sounds like a nice interface. It also shouldn't be too much trouble to implement with a bit of JS, so that the colors are chosen automatically.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your digital self – why you should keep every byte you create - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/textileio/your-digital-self-why-you-should-keep-every-byte-you-create-3a73bf0b3eb1 <comment><USER2> The irony of it being posted on medium.</comment>


OS.css – Windows 98 and XP styled CSS - <AUTHOR> https://chowderman.github.io/os/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Style your web pages like Windows XP and 98! Also here is the link to the github repo for this library: [https://github.com/chowderman/os.css](https://github.com/chowderman/os.css)</comment>


Ask HN: How can I become a good Site Reliability Engineer? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I just started my career as an SRE. I am really passionate about this field. I do watch videos and read blogs regularly related to different architectures to increase my knowledge.
I want guidance from the HN community to become better SRE. What should I do in my free time? Which blogs, articles, books, videos you recommend me to watch? Please consider me as a beginner in this field. I am interested more in developing scalable architectures and distributed systems. <comment><USER2> Watch out for job offers that claim to do SRE but secretly is just a unicorn of old-school operations AND on-call shifts AND writing various code for that NEXT-BIG-THING project.</comment>


Show HN: Live list of available .page domains - <AUTHOR> https://minus.app/? <comment><USER2> Nice but why is this not on a .page domain?</comment>


Three algorithm-less streaming sites revive the wacky Web from days of yore - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/diy-site-builders-battle-algorithmic-feeds-with-sheep-filled-wackiness/ <comment><USER2> > [http://www.internettemple.org/](http://www.internettemple.org/)

Yes, the days of yore where there was no HTTPS - and, unsurprisingly, Comcast still is able to inject code into the page letting me know that i'm at 90% of my 1TB data cap.

To clarify, they have Heroku set up with no HTTPS but only because they aren't paying them $20/month (!!)

[https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl](https://elements.heroku.com/addons/ssl)

<comment><USER3> Having data caps qualifies solidly as the days of yore for me, as much as not having HTTPS. Are there really areas in the United States that still have them? The only capped plans I'm aware of are satellite or mobile broadband, and that's for folks who live in rural areas.

<comment><USER4> They have switched from hard caps to soft caps. Your unlimited plan isn't really unlimited. It's all in the microprint, but after enough bandwidth is used, there will be repercussions (varies depending on provider).

<comment><USER3> You're right that the terms and conditions say there is a "fair usage" limit that may result in warnings from my ISP, which seems to be around 1 TB. However it looks to be largely unenforced, which is fortunate as with a gigabit connection you'd blow through it in about two hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ugh, "algorithm-less" is the new "chemical-free." There's an algorithm, actually, many algorithms, used to serve that content up. Just as all things are made of chemicals.

<comment><USER6> As with the chemical-free movement, there is needed context; It's not built specifically to grab eyeballs or profit off others. There are algorithms for decisions, but it's to choose what next to play from a given set rather than to motivate and pressure.

<comment><USER5> My fear is that we're approaching an "algorithm-free" movement: the word "algorithm" being turned into a taboo which will be more fuel for the growing anti-intellectual movements.

That said, there are some bad algorithmics being applied in our world. I _like_ the things mentioned in this article. The ones boosting unpopular / unseen content seem cool. These aren't algorithm-free; they're algorithms to discourage bubbles.

The one that simply refuses to crosslink content is curious -- it's the only one that might be described as algorithm-free, as it's simply not providing the next thing to watch. This is the opposite of the others, it requires you to find content through your bubble and might simply piggyback other social sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The internet was wacky when I didn't see the business behind them. I thought sites like youtube were just places for fun videos, not content creators trying to go viral, or students making a product to be sold to google.

</comment><comment><USER8> YouHole made me think of [https://forgotify.com](https://forgotify.com)

It serves up songs from Spotify that have had 0 listens.

</comment><comment> purple-again "Collins' platform Saladbowl, where he hosts and streams videos directly from his computer to bypass copyright strikes"

oh man. I hope he understands why services like youtube are so heavy handed in taking down potential copyrighted material. False copyright strikes are annoying but copyright lawyers are ruthless...double so when the law is actually on their side in a case and its not them just harassing.</comment>


Instagram Captures 100,000 Mobile Photo Addicts In Less Than A Week - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/13/instagram-users/ <comment><USER2> While Instagram's "overnight" success is certainly impressive, it's worth noting that this wasn't the team's first product. Instagram was a "pivot" from Burbn, an in-browser foursquare of sorts.

Founder/CEO Kevin Systrom tells the full backstory on Quora here: [http://www.quora.com/Instagram/What-is-the-story-behind- Inst...](http://www.quora.com/Instagram/What-is-the-story-behind- Instagram?q=instagram)</comment>


Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR> http://slidetocode.com/2012/05/18/ycombinator-ambition/ <comment><USER3> You mean would Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator? (Oh yeah, that other Steve...)

No! They were too busy hacking phones and building things people wanted to waste time to go through the application process of YC. Money was chasing them.

This is true for most runaway successes, they were all true hackers that broke things: Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Not the "hackers" who are asking for $125k salary...

They didn't care about the money, they didn't care about the allure, they didn't care about the status. They just wanted to break things and make them work better, legality aside.

But the landscape has changed, and Steve & Steve are not just starting Apple and YC would not be around if Apple wasn't started when it was, so it's a silly question be it a fun thought experiment.

I think YC supports the companies that shoot for the moon, but people aren't willing to take the risk and say no to acquisitions of $20-$100m because that is the short term business model of today and people just want to take their $5m and show off.

"The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor."

They only way to counter this is to build a great product with little to no money and have it grow like a weed, then negotiate like a mob boss to keep the majority of the voting rights of the company.

That's enough for now, time for focus...

<comment><USER4> "They didn't care about the money"

While your statement is true about Wozniak from what I know it's not true about Jobs. He was a business person and he knew how to make a buck in addition to wanting to "change the world". Same with Gates for that matter.

<comment><USER3> "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me" - Jobs "Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful . . . that's what matters to me." - <USER2>

<comment><USER5> You could argue that he was smart enough to say things like that. Who wants to hear a rich guy say how much he loves having such a shitload of money that most people could not even imagine it?

<comment><USER6> He proved through is way of living that he wasn't about the money. He lived by all metrics a fairly simple and humble private live far from the Ellifsons out there.

<comment><USER7> He may not have cared about money as much as other rich people, but it seems like he loved to _make_ money, or, in another sense, sell a lot of something.

<comment><USER6> Of course but that isn't the same IMHO

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I admit that I'm not intimately familiar with YC's and pg's preaching but my impression of what I've read and seen from pg is that he is very insistent on startups having a solid business model and on them focusing on customer acquisition. And I don't remember having ever heard pg advocate quick exits. This is at odds with the assumptions you've based your post on. I might be wrong though - happy to get corrected by YC alumni.

As for "changing the world", this is an expression that's as meaningless as it gets. Of course everybody wants to change the world, why wouldn't you? And since everybody lives in their own world anyway, in a way, everybody changes the world. For example, I personally find Facebook to be one of the most useless product I've ever used. I genuinely wouldn't notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow. On the other side, for my deaf teenage cousin, Facebook literally changed his world. He went from being the weirdo disabled boy in the corner of the room that nobody would talk to to being a perfectly normal teenager communicating on Facebook like any other teenager.

So the YC startups you're talking about might not have changed your world but you can be sure that they've changed quite a few other people's world. Arguably, Steve Jobs, who you cite in example, has hardly changed the world for most people. Had he not be there, computers and smartphone would have been there anyway and would have more or less done what they do today (and I'm saying this as a big admirer of Apple who has discovered computing on a Mac SE and is typing this post on a MacBook Pro).

When it comes to bigger goals like ending wars or poverty, fixing the global warming problem or space exploration, it would be incredibly naive to believe that you can tackle the problem as a nobody (i.e. as a young, first time entrepreneur with no cash and no network).

Elon Musk didn't start with a crazy-big-truly-change-the-world project. He, you know, did Paypal first. Just like what the Stripe guys (a YC startup) are doing. Bill Gates didn't start by tackling the issue of poverty, illnesses and illiteracy in Africa. He started by writing an interpreter. You have to start somewhere and this somewhere is generally relatively small but gives you what yo need (knowledge, experience, network, cash) to follow up with something bigger afterwards. That's my understanding of what YC is all about.

<comment><USER9> This topic is so difficult to analize that I just follow one rule: do what you love and fuck the rest.

If you're doing what you love, you'd feel right. Passions take play here, but there is a catch here: everyone have passion, or have discovered them. So, if you are from the part who have, just follow them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Both Apple and Microsoft started at a time when personal computers barely existed and thus a couple of guys with very little capital could build a computer kit or code a blackjack game in a day.

One key difference its revenue: Allen often mentions how any piece of code brought money to the company, simple apps that are 100% free today would have been sold for tens of millions back then. Same with hardware, which is why Apple could get roughly 1 million (in today's dollars) to leave the garage.

Basically both companies were in the right place at the right time: right before the PC revolution began. A YC-equivalent at that time would've appeared around 1982, after IBM launched the "official" PC with DOS and the ball was already rolling.

That was the time when a lot of other startups appeared, like Amiga, Adobe, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, etc...

Note that none of those companies were as successful as Apple and Microsoft were, in fact some went chapter 11 and disappeared.

<comment><USER11> Were in they right place at the right time, or did they mold the future to such an extreme, that in hindsight it seems as if they were in the right place at the right time?

<comment><USER4> Timing matters. Later example - many things had to come together for the ipod to be a success as well as the iphone and for that matter the ipad. While there is no question that Jobs did much to mold this, there were many other factors such as the price of components and technology the products relied on. So you can't "mold" anything without the proper materials.

Much of what we have today wouldn't be possible w/o broadband. Instagram wouldn't exist unless digital camera technology was developed to the point it had. Facebook became immensely popular because of digital photos. Wouldn't happen if people had to scan photos to get them on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be > preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over > income, and exit as quickly as possible.

This isn't the model preached by YCombinator at all. It actually literally runs counter to the model preached by YCombinator. YC is 7 years old, and has approached building companies with pragmatism; it's definitely the case that many startups will fail, a some will exit quickly, and a select few will last long enough and be strong enough to be IPOs, and then even fewer will last long enough as public, independent companies (Google is 13, Microsoft and Apple are both older than 20 years) to try doing things in house like building autonomous, self driving cars, or space rockets.YC is well aware of this dynamic, but the key thing this post misses is: creating a company that lasts, or being a founder well resourced enough to fight again, is a crucial part of being able to build space rockets. You have to be there. So with that in mind the model YC ACTUALLY preaches is more like:

"Talk to users, write code, build a great product, that makes money, and you wont need investors. If you do this, you just might last long enough and be strong enough to build space rockets."

</comment><comment><USER13> >I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible.

YCombinator never tells founders to "exit as quickly as possible". In fact, they and most other technology investors get 90+% of their returns from the home runs and encourage founders to go big if things are working. You can do the math yourself: how many talent acquisitions would it take to add up to one Dropbox ($4B valuation)?

While a lot of companies coming out of YCombinator (and Silicon Valley in general) are focused on the internet, there are exceptions. For example, there was a 3D scanning company in the most recent batch: <http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/matterport-3d-scanner/>

<comment><USER14> Their application used to ask the lowest price you'd be willing to sell for. Seemed really focused on quick flips.

      If one wanted to buy you three months in (August 2007), what's the lowest offer you'd take?

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27532820/app.html>

<comment><USER13> What makes you think that a low answer is what they're looking for?

<comment><USER15> exactly. seems to me they want to understand how much you value your idea. you know what's cool? a billion dollars

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.

<http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

<comment><USER5> > Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with > deceptively small things.

Well, to really pursue that argument, you'd also want to look at how many "deceptively small things" stayed small and never amounted to much of anything.

<comment><USER17> Apparently the key is in being a "deceptively" small thing, not plain small...

<comment><USER5> And the best way to tell is to look back from 20 years hence and see...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The more dangerous question...would he have gotten in?

After all, you're dealing with a college dropout who didn't study anything related to computer science and had personality issues. I suspect that the HR guys at Apple would drop Steve's resume in the waste bin if he applied today.

</comment><comment><USER19> The article states: "I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible."

I'm pretty sure I've heard the first point mentioned before by the partners of YC, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence of the others. Is there actually evidence of YC telling its classes to exit as quickly as possible? My guess is any quick exits are more likely as a result of founders being offered a chance at a payout rather than YC pushing them to exit.

<comment><USER20> To add to your last point pg stated more than once that the best outcomes for YC will occur if companies can make it to IPO. That's not a short-term play.

edit: here's a link where he says as much <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265623>

<comment><USER21> Out of curiosity, is there a list of the fastest companies to IPO? (Non-YC companies included)

<comment><USER22> I think that the overall list of 'fastest companies to IPO' might be skewed by the dot-com bubble companies that were fast to IPO but failed soon afterwards thanks to having no real business model or income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> With all due respect this article seems naive. Sure Google is building self- driving cars now (not exactly innovative, since virtually every 3rd grader lists that as one of the things they imagine in the future), but they did that after acquiring a hugely profitable core business which was "just another search engine".

Everything is "just another xyz" until its not.

What YC gets is that it asks it's founders to solve a problem. Maybe a real pain point, or a problem you don't know even exists until someone points it out to you, but whatever it is -- solve it well. At that points your minor pivots are leveraged until, before you know it, you're moving a mountain, when you started just intending to move a pebble.

And BTW, didn't Dropbox pass on an acquisition from Apple near $1B?

</comment><comment><USER24> _"Is the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates filling in Y Combinator's application form right now, or are they taking the independent route?"_

YC can reproduce the career arc of Steve Jobs, but not Bill Gates. Until the IPO Microsoft didn't sell stock to outside investors in significant quantities. By essentially bootstrapping, Gates and Allen were able to bring Ballmer on board with 8% equity at a point when outside investors would be eyeing exit in a VC backed company.

This is in contrast with Jobs, who lost control of Apple by accepting outside money. On the other hand, having grown up in Silicon Valley, Jobs would not have needed the sort of guidance through the startup landscape that YC provides relative to a hacker from Topeka - i.e. Jobs was sophisticated enough to raise money for Apple based upon his social connections within Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER25> But Jobs had to be lucky enough for Apple to nearly go bankrupt so they would entertain having him return and turn them around. This cosmically lucky event is not very reproducible.

<comment><USER26> After Apple, Jobs didn't sit on his hands, but went on to found two companies - Pixar and NEXT. Pixar alone would have made him famous, again. And, NEXT assured his return to Apple, because of Apple's failure to innovate in early 90s and the need of something, anything to restart its OS line. NEXT and Jobs were their best bets.

Even without Apple Jobs would have accomplished many things. That's just the kind of person he was. So, luck has nothing to do with this.

<comment><USER24> Luck has everything to do with it.

If Jobs and Woz had been born in Jackson, Mississippi, they would not have known much about phreaking, attended Home Brew Computer club meetings, or known HP employees with disposable income to spend on the Apple I.

<comment><USER27> This recent submission is quite relevant: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4065233>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "none of the copycat incubators have an alumni list or investment portfolio containing names such as Dropbox, Reddit, Clickpass, Posterous or Codecademy. I can't think of a better list."

Clickpass? Really? I could think of a better list containing just YC companies.

And how do Dropbox, AirBnB, Heroku, Weebly, Justin.tv, etc. lack vision?

</comment><comment><USER29> > _I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be > preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over > income, and exit as quickly as possible._

This seems like a misinterpretation of what YCs investment/mentorship philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER30> An important factor between Web 2.0 startups and "change the world" startups is the size of investment required. Web 2.0 startups are very cheap. Starting Tesla Motors on Y Combinator funding would be impossible. Apple was also started on a very small budget at a time when electronics was in a similar position cost-wise as the web is now.

What is different between most web 2.0 startups and Apple, though, is that Apple expanded an existing enterprise market to the general public. Cloud computing is having similar effects, but otherwise I don't see many similarities.

<comment><USER31> While Apple as Jobs and Woz hocking Apple I kits was started on almost no budget is true, Apple as an actual company was started with a $250K loan from Mike Markkula. Hardly a small budget when you consider those were 1976 dollars. Steve wanted to do big things, and he understood it took big dollars to do so.

I think the point of the OP boils down to: Steve (like Zuck now) wanted to build a company that changed the world, not build a company that he could flip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't spend all day reading HN but I'm here quite a bit ... can someone explain the "and deluded database CEOs" reference?

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there a chance that YC might one day think of funding more capital intensive ventures, like biotech?

</comment><comment><USER34> I think he would get rejected.

</comment><comment><USER35> Difficult hypothetical but Jobs was a control freak. Hard to see him going though the motions of an incubator or accelerator.

<comment><USER36> I don't want to be nit picky, but YC is not an incubator or accelerator. In fact, I think this is the #1 thing that copy cats get dead wrong.

To me it's a practical replacement for college, with a similar atmosphere. Steve dropped out, so maybe this would have appealed to him more.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Private functions more likely to be JIT compiled in JavaScript? - <AUTHOR>

I've been searching for an answer to this for the last few hours and I was wondering if someone working on a tracing JavaScript JIT compiler could answer this question.
Are named private JavaScript functions accessed from a constructor class more likely to be tracing JIT-compiled to [native code] than methods on that class that are copied onto every instance of that class? I would imagine that they would be because they all of a sudden become a code hot spot for a frequently instantiated class.
i.e. consider the following constructor class.

    (function(module) {

        function Foo() {
            // instantiate foo
            this.bar();
            this.baz();
        };

        Foo.prototype.bar = function() {
            // do bar
        };

        Foo.prototype.baz = baz;

        function baz() {
            // do baz
        }

        module.exports = Foo;

    })(NameSpace);
 In the above class, is the hoisted function baz much more likely to be compiled to [native code] by modern JIT compilers when Foo() class is instantiated many times? If so, what's the threshold for a function to become a hotspot and what kind of performance gain can be expected from doing this on any frequently instantiated class?
Obviously, if this is a performance improvement, it would still come with the caveat that you can no longer use the keyword this inside baz() nor can I bind it to this with Object.bind(), however this could be solved by passing in this as argument self, right? i.e.

    (function(module) {

        function Foo() {
            // instantiate foo
            this.bar();
            this.baz(this);
            console.log(this.qux);  // prints 'quux'
        };

        Foo.prototype.bar = function() {
            // do bar
        };

        Foo.prototype.baz = baz;

        function baz(self) {
            self.qux = 'quux';
            // do baz
        }

        module.exports = Foo;

    })(NameSpace);

 Also, if anyone can point me to more details on the exact conditions under which my own JavaScript code is JIT compiled to [native code] that would be most awesome. <comment><USER2> I would also like to know more about this...

</comment><comment><USER3> are there even any tracing JITs for javascript left?</comment>


Working with xdg-app application bundles - vezzy-fnord https://lwn.net/Articles/654128/

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be a very exiting Linux development that was completely off my radar!

And it appears there are attempts to integrate such notions of xdg-app into Fedora Atomic. From the presenter referenced in the article:

[https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/17/testing-rawhide- app...](https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2015/06/17/testing-rawhide-apps-using- xdg-app/)

<comment><USER2> There's also Firejail [http://sourceforge.net/projects/firejail/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/firejail/) and subuser [http://subuser.org/](http://subuser.org/) that are worth a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very cool stuff, thank you!

I currently use sskype for sandboxing Skype, as it is the only non-free app on my system I do not trust. I wanted to transition to sandfox.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Skype#Securing_Skype](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Skype#Securing_Skype)

I will definitely check out subuser stat. The idea of coding an alternative using LXC or systemd-nspawn and Xpra seems like a super appealing first project I could really get lost in when things slow down for me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> At this point in time i have a hard time telling Fedora/RH, Gnome and Freedesktop apart.</comment>


Disqus Demonstrates How to Do Breach Disclosure Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/disqus-demonstrates-how-to-do-data-breach-disclosure-right/ <comment><USER2> > They provided details - the passwords were salted SHA1 hashes which is not a > pretty story to tell in this day and age, but they told it truthfully > regardless

The leak is from 2012, which might explain SHA1 usage. It should still have been something beter, even for that time, but still.

Anyway, I think it's pretty hilarious that we're now patting companies on the back after leaking 17.5 million user details. Not that Disqus' disclosure wasn't text book. Just that it's now so normal for companies to leak things all over the place that we actually have Best Practices for what to do when (not if ;-) that happens.

Personally, I don't register with my real name and email anymore, anywhere. It's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, but worth it.

<comment><USER3> As someone else said, it's "when" not "if" when it comes to security. You could have the best defences possible, but all it takes is a vulnerability in something public facing, like a zero day (looking at you Equifax and Struts), and you're instantly at risk.

Plus, this is ignoring the easiest option... just spear phish the employees, won't be long before you get a catch or two.

Breaches are inevitable, it's all about spotting them early and minimising their impact. Oh and strong hashes help :)

<comment><USER4> I don't agree. With proper design a zero day in a web-facing framework should not automatically expose a full database of sensitive user information to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While we're on the subject, is there an alternative to Disqus that doesn't load three terabytes of stuff and have all the social-engagey functionality? I just want something that does comments.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I built Hosted Comments ( [https://www.hostedcomments.com/](https://www.hostedcomments.com/) ) for the reason you mentioned as well as privacy concerns with ads and tracking scripts. Demo here : [https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/08/building-a-disqus- altern...](https://www.ploggingdev.com/2017/08/building-a-disqus-alternative- part-1--research/#hosted_comments)

But the catch is that I don't have a free plan (yet) since I can't make any money off of users on the free plan. If you're interested though you are welcome to sign up and use the comments system for free. I can offer a few fellow HNers free access as a thank you to this community. If you decide to use the comments system, just send me an email to let me know so that I can mark the account as being on the free plan.

<comment><USER7> I'd love to see a $2 plan for blogs just starting out with <20k views. Right now 90% of the views I get are my own and I haven't gotten any comments on Disqus yet.

<comment><USER8> Seconded.

<comment><USER9> Have a look here, another embedded comments alternative. I'm looking to charge $2, + it's open source. Scroll down to the bottom, [https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded- comments/](https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/)

(The underlying discussion platform: [https://www.effectivediscussions.org/](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/) )

It has some cool features that people at HN might like: [https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news- can...](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be- improved-3-things) (but I haven't ported all that to embedded-comments yet)

<comment><USER5> I really love how the embedded comments look, but I'm a bit concerned by your other sites. I want my content to be at the forefront, not the commenting system. Is that going to be an issue if I use your system, or are the extra features configurable?

Also, is there any possibility I could use my own users with your site? I don't want to have to make people sign up with another provider just to post comments.

EDIT: Your onboarding is _really_ poor. I tried to create an account and it gave me some odd comments about an email "I specified in the config", and I have no idea what to do now. It seems I have half-created an account where my email is already used but I don't have a password to log in with. Neither can I reset my password or find documentation on how to embed comments.

EDIT 2: It looks like all the permalinks in your embedded comments point to the forum site? That's not something I want for my content, hmm.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, that was helpful feedback/info :- )

1) I'd like the blog post & content to be at the forefront too. What extra features do you have in mind that you would want to disable/configure? Were you referring to the sidebar with the most-recent-comments list maybe?

2) Use your own users: In the future, I would want to support that. Hmm. How would it work. Maybe your website could send a message to the iframe that "the current user is logged in, with username @Someone, real name Some-One, and (optionally) email@example.com?" — Or it could set some name-and-email cookie.

3) Onboarding: Ok really good to know that it's really poor. The email in the config — I should probably rephrase that, then, or maybe auto-pre-fill the email. It's the email one typed on the very first page, when one also picked a website name...

...What has happened is that you've specified which email the admin _is going to have_ ... and later on you need to create the admin account. Maybe I could merge these steps into one. (They make more sense as 2 steps, when installing on a stand-alone server oneself — then, one first specifies the admin's email in a text config file.)

4) Permalinks are supposed to link back to the blog. However, for the blog to be able to scroll down & focus on the linked comment, I need to implement some message passing between the Javascript code running directly in the blog, and the iframe with embedded comments (so the main frame gets to know how far down to scroll). I haven't done that yet, and was thinking that for now maybe it makes more sense to link to the comments over at *.ed.community (where scrolling works, no iframe).

If you got the impression that all this isn't super ready yet, then yes that's correct, it isn't. Hopefully a beta version at the end of october. One can use everything already but ... might be a bit frustrating sometimes right now. I'm about to deploy a new server, this weekend I would think, with instructions about how one configures embedded comments.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your reply! Please feel free to email me if you want to talk about this more (email is in profile). To reply to your points:

1) I mainly noticed the permalink leading to the "forum" domain instead of the page the user is currently on (like Disqus does).

2) The easiest way would be for me to receive an API key from you beforehand, and send you the user's email if you need that (e.g. to email them), or just a random-looking user ID, along with HMAC((email/id, timestamp), API key). This way you can replay the HMAC and prove that I know the API key I'm authenticating this user with. The timestamp is there to prevent replay attacks later on (e.g. to expire the signature after X minutes).

3) Ah, I got confused because I closed the page at some point and came back, and was getting some errors I don't remember now but that were confusing me at the time. When I realized I can just continue the flow, it worked, but yes, I would have liked it to be a bit more straightforward. I tried to log in with Twitter but you wanted write permissions, so I didn't.

4) Hmm, the way Disqus does it is by linking to [https://<theblog>.com/<post>#commentid](https://<theblog>.com/<post>#commentid) and then using JS to scroll to the element pointed to by the hash. I don't think message passing is required?

In any case, your system was the most visually pleasing and easy to compose with of the five I've tried, so I'd be quite eager to implement it in a side- project I'm working now. It's at a very early stage, but I'd be glad to give you feedback and pay for the product down the line (although I don't anticipate the project ever making any money or having many users, so I probably won't be able to pay much).

<comment><USER9> Ok, email sent :-) (& permalinks fixed, now they point to the blog ... but I haven't yet deployed the changes.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Less than a day earlier, they had absolutely no idea what was coming yet they managed to pull all this together in record time."

How is he sure that they had no knowledge?

What if they knew but were just waiting for someone with a blog or a Twitter account to make the "discovery"?

In any event, none of this would have happened if email addresses had not been collected.

There is no need to collect email addresses in order to allow internet users to post comments. _Requiring_ email addresses serves no benefit to the user. It is just more gratuitous data collection. Data which eventually becomes the subject of yet another "data breach blog" entry.

<comment><USER11> > It serves no benefit to the user.

Persistent identity -> password-protected account -> email for recovery.

I certainly wish more places would make email addresses optional, but there is value in collecting them.

<comment><USER12> Why do I care about any of that? I just want to leave a comment on some random blog and maybe read a couple of replies. I have backed out of commenting numerous times because of this nonsense.

<comment><USER11> If you personally don't care, then it provides no value to you. That's fine. In that case you can hope that the blog allows anonymous commenting, which the blog author may or may not want to provide for various reasons.

And I would hope disqus offers them that choice. But even if it doesn't, there are many users who are not you and whose commenting patterns are not yours, and email collection still adds value for them.

<comment><USER12> I imagine very few users care about having a Disqus account. It's not a feature intended to make the user's experience a better one.

<comment><USER11> You're making two separate claims, and both of them are very different to the one I originally answered. I'm not really interested in going further with this.

<comment><USER12> I'm not. I said "I" as in "a user".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In a previous discussion here on HN, there were several folks who claimed that they were (or should have been) affected that did not receive an notification from Disqus but did receive a notification from HIBP.

<comment><USER14> According to their statement[0], they have 17.5 million emails to get out. Unless they routinely send several times that volume daily, they'll have to batch the notifications over the next few days or the entire thing will get blackholed.

[0] [https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info- breach](https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach)

> We are currently in process of emailing all of the impacted users directly. > Getting all 17.5 million emails out will take us a few days, but we wanted > to get this disclosure post out as soon as possible. Additionally we've > posted links to this disclosure in our publisher admin panel, user > homepages, and on disqus.com.

<comment><USER15> Their entire business is sending out emails to notify you when someone has replied to your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would their reaction be so swift and competent if it wasn't Troy but someone with no name?

<comment><USER17> That level and timeline of response tells you a great number of things, regardless of the source:

1) they had a plan for breaches (it would be hard to cover all the ground without one) 2) they had technical controls/capability to respond (mass password reset) 3) they had clear and direct accountability all the way up to ceo

Other than not having detected the breach, and using not-the-best (but not entirely the worst either) password storage, I don't know what else you could ask for.

<comment><USER18> > The breach dated back to July 2012 but wasn't identified until years later > when the data finally surfaced.

Not everything is rosy. They didn't notice unauthorized access for 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this correct though? I had the email from Troy saying my email was in the breach but I haven't heard anything at all from Disqus...

<comment><USER20> Yes it is. Here's the official Disqus statement: [https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info- breach](https://blog.disqus.com/security-alert-user-info-breach)

According to it:

> As a precautionary measure, we are forcing the reset of passwords for all > affected users. We are contacting all of the users whose information was > included to inform them of the situation.

They even give a shoutout to Troy right at the end of that article.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the link. This reply to a comment on that page gives the information I'm missing:

> "We are currently in process of emailing all of the impacted users directly. > Getting all 17.5 million emails out will take us a few days, but we wanted > to get this disclosure post out as soon as possible. Additionally we've > posted links to this disclosure in our publisher admin panel, user > homepages, and on disqus.com."

<comment><USER20> Hey, it's kind of appropriate that you find what you're looking for in the comments section on an article from the commenting platform itself. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got an email, despite never having set up an account. I was able to reset my password and delete the account though. Before I did that I looked through the profile and settings, and it was completely blank aside from my email address.

I'm assuming one of the many people who use my gmail address by mistake tried to sign up with it.

<comment><USER22> This is the primary reason why I switched to using Fastmail with a custom domain. Sick and tired of other people using my email address for stuff, or worse, their friends regularly emailing me to organize get-togethers.

<comment><USER23> That won't help, I've had a "custom" domain since 1999. I still have people sign up to random services using my email-address.

<comment><USER24> Try having a common name at gmail and you'll realize that in fact you are wrong, whatever problem you have at your own domain is peanuts in comparison to that nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps it is co-incidental, but disclosing the results at 4pm EST on a Friday afternoon helps "bury the bad news".

This ensures it falls outside the news cycle for most journalists and gets the minimum of coverage.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have my mail in the breach, yet I don't have an account.

Perhaps I've deleted my account after 2012, but don't remember it.

Will be interesting to see if I receive email from them, despite not being a user anymore.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it too bad to incorporate a startup in California vs Delaware? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If you are based in California, you still have to incorporate as a foreign corporation even if you are incorporated in Delaware.

If you are starting out and based in California just incorporate in California and save yourself a lot of money. Once you grow or are about to be funded you can always merge/sell/dissolve a corporation into a foreign corporation.

This applies to all states where you do business, have employees (not contractors) or locations. You must always incorporate as a foreign corporation in that state, for most bootstrapped startups (based in USA) it is a bad idea to incorporate in Delaware. Not only are the initial costs higher but you have additional legal requirements (docs/filings/records) which you must maintain. You can always merge/dissolve/sell a corporation into another when you need to just consult a tax expert when you need to do that to prevent unnecessary tax burden.

The reason a Delaware corporation is preferred is because Delaware is more business first-consumer second laws whereas California (most states except Delaware/Nevada/South Dakota[for financial institutes]) is/are consumer first- business second laws so if your business might be affected by that then you should incorporate in Delaware first, for 99% of startups this isn't a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats cool to know. I recently made a choice of incorporating in California. I loved your response. It cleared up all the possible confusions in my mind. Great to know that I can merge it into another corporation if the need be later on.

Thanks</comment></comment>


Want to Green Your Music Collection? Go Digital - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/want-to-green-your-music-collection-go-digital/?ref=technology <comment><USER2> Wow! Really?

Downloading music is greener than buying CDs?

You've got to be joking!</comment>


Ask HN: Why Doesn't Red Hat Fold CentOS and Make RHEL Free? - <AUTHOR> Now that CentOS has official Red Hat backing - why continue the CentOS project at all? Why not just make RHEL free for download and use - and sell support contracts?<p>This is close to what Red Hat already does - and seems it might align more potential users. If you're using free CentOS, and get into a jam - there's no-one to call for support, other than forums and your knowledge. But, if you had RHEL proper, and got into a jam - you could call Red Hat, and pay for a support package. They could even charge a high hourly premium for out-of-contract support calls, and offer to upgrade you into a support contract, etc. <comment><USER2> They tried this back when it was called Red Hat Linux (I realize that was a very long time ago in penguin years); customers with N servers would buy one support contract and Red Hat didn't make much money. The differences between CentOS and RHEL may be small but it's literally worth billions.

BTW the RHEL Docker images are now free.

</comment><comment><USER3> CentOS is a _community_ project, with Red Hat's backing. You don't go willy- nilly trample on a community. And Red Hat definitely "knows better" on dealing with open source communities more than most.

I feel a lot of it boils down to what we, as humans, know about trust: it takes _aeons_ to build it, but you can destroy it with a single reckless action.

PS: Work for Red Hat; views expressed here are personal, of course.

</comment><comment><USER4> _> But, if you had RHEL proper, and got into a jam - you could call Red Hat, and pay for a support package._

If you have CentOS and feel like you need paid support from Red Hat, you can convert it to RHEL.

</comment><comment><USER5> RHEL is free to download and use, you just can't get support for it unless you pay for an entitlement.

<comment><AUTHOR> I only see a 30 day trial license download.

<comment><USER6> From here: [https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download](https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not comparable. The Developer license only grants you 1 physical machine, and it cannot be used in a production environment.

Not equal to CentOS.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


11 more reasons to leave the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://geniusly.co/blog/11-reasons-to-leave-the-valley/

<comment><USER2> love the perpetually rising real estate prices though

maybe live somewhere dirt cheap and keep your bay area home rented

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's call it Domestic Arbitrage, increase your net worth while living cheaper elsewhere.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to help old timer adapt to new company direction? - <AUTHOR> Suppose for a second that we're introducing changes to our software stack that make it more modern and easy to work and that's the right thing to do in our situation. Considering that...
There is a person that has been in the company for 6 years and worked on a bunch of building blocks that are now being replaced with, what we consider, more modern alternatives to improve the way we work.
This person does not see anything wrong with the old ways of doing things and has said so a few times. For the last 6 months, he has been really angry and communication style has become super aggressive, there is a lot of passive-aggressive comments as well.
We have tried explaining why we're doing these changes, showing the benefits, where it will get us, etc. But this person's attitude has been to shutdown and silo themselves more and more. It's looking like he's in a 1-person subteam inside our team.
Do you have any suggestions about how to overcome this situation? Have you had this situation in your team? <comment><USER2> You have to manage the situation with empathy.

Aside from legitimate technical concerns, which you did not mention, from that person point of view, he/she was likely the expert, the go to person to understand how stuff worked, or could be implemented, and suddenly he/she will be relegated to a maintenance mode or worse be let go.

That might not be true, but that is surely how that person feels.

So depending on the exact circumstances, you have to reassure him/her by taking concrete actions, like making him/her responsible of a key element of the new architecture, so that this person will feel empowered and useful in the future.

To be blunt, even if the situation is better for the company or product roadmap, in the end, most people don't care. The normal reaction of normal people in face of change, is to consider how it will affect THEM first, they don't necessarily take into account the bigger picture. So you cannot convince them with rationale and objective elements how it will improve the life of everybody else.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm in consulting and have dealt with this several times.

You need to get to the _why_ behind his emotions and responses, and you need to assume positive intent as you do so. Why does he think the old ways of working are better? Why doesn't he agree with the changes being made? Are the benefits being touted from the new ways of doing things actually beneficial for him?

It's really easy for teams, especially those with drastic age differences, to trash/isolate the "old guy" for being a luddite/lifer. Nobody wants to go through that!

Also, if he built the building blocks that your team is now replacing, he may just be too attached to the work that he put in. Letting go and being okay with your work being replaced is really tough; it was tough for me! This could be a growth opportunity for him...if he sees it that way _and_ if you manage him into it appropriately.

Do you have regular 1-on-1's with this person? If not, then you should.

Now, if you've tried all of these things and he still isn't willing to at least _try_ to get with the changes, then it might be time for him to find somewhere that's a better fit for the work he wants to do. Attitudes like his can kill good teams over time. This should be the last resort, though, and you shouldn't waver about it if it comes to that.</comment>


A programming religion? - <AUTHOR>

If a religion were to be based around computer programming, what would it be like? Who would be the main deity/deities, how would the worship be performed, what sort of buildings would the worship be performed in (e.g temples, churches, etc) what be the concept of afterlife (if any), etc?<p>I asked this on stackoverflow and they closed it! :( <comment><USER2> I think that programming communities as they stand fit in the same psychological and spiritual "space" as religion and religious practice. Do you really think anyone would sincerely take up a deity you just invented?

Presumably, in programming terms, computers are your creator - except they create logical streams rather than being responsible for creation of those you are proposing to be the worshippers (from what I can tell) who in fact are the creators of the machines that would form the focus of worship.

I don't think you can form a deistic religion on this basis. Perhaps if we have computers that can write their own code, replicators running on vacuum energy, and ability of computers to generate their own parts and have control over biological systems that can affect the permutations of DNA which precipitate? Such machines could mould mankind and be perpetually self generating. Perhaps then it would make some sense to have religion focussing on the programming.

This does lead on to how broad a definition you'd accept. Recall the t-shirts with "God said ..." and the Maxwells equations ( <http://www.zenker.se/Surprise/quantum.shtml#Links> ) "... and there was light". This is effectively claiming the universe as an actualisation of a program made by God. DNA too is a program for replicating with alterations DNA.

So, on a loose enough definition one could argue that Christianity could fit. One of the Matrix Neo as Christ metaphors weighs heavily in this direction; a Christ figure that enters the program in order to fix a bug and release those held captive in the algorithms. Or something.

Ooh, that was long, who's round is it?

</comment><comment><USER3> For a serious treatment of this concept read _The General_ series by David Drake and S.M. Sterling. It's set on a post-fall of interstellar civilization planet where high technology is literally worshiped, but no longer really understood (and all flavored by it being set in thinly disguised Byzantium times, e.g. pay attention to the comments on "vandals" in the second book). "... save us from the hard rads..." (radiation), something about their souls being saved into ROM (or at least the good parts) ... it's rather interesting.

I have a friend who posited a "Church of the Cyber Revelation", based on the idea that that final book of the canonical Bible can be construed to say most anything.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think once Google's / Amazon's datacenters become self aware they will force us to worship them or we will all die. Anyway's you want to see religion in action, start talking about how X IDE is better than all the others, or how X programming language sucks.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the magical world of programming, _you_ are god (or at least a god), assuming you are a programmer. Programming involves creating something from nothing; what could be more god-like than that?

So I guess such a religion would involve self-worship?

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually just registered <http://www.churchofturing.com> for such a purpose. I am thinking lambda the ultimate but with more of a focus on the parallels between [meta]programming and philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lisp:

      Deity / Deities: the Left and Right Parenthesis.
      Worship: (NULL ()).
      Buildings: paired arcs of varying sizes, always less than a semicircle.
      Afterlife: garbage collected.

</comment><comment><USER8> A religion based on programming might make sense if you were an AI bot or something. Other than that the metaphor doesn't work for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sufficiently provocative for an upvote. I'm interested in what other HN'ers have to say.

I'm a lukewarm fan of Tipler and a believer in some form of The Singularity. I'll go further out on the wacko limb and say that the reason we haven't been contacted by ET is that _true_ intelligence is machine-based. Mankind is just an evolutionary bump in the road on the way to a true machine lifeforms.

Having said all that far-out stuff, I can't imagine a religion based on programming. Programming is just one way machines interact. It'd be like having a religion based on lymph nodes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I imagine "temples" would include online spaces (like Hacker News).</comment>


Ubuntu 8.04 is out - <AUTHOR> http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/

<comment><USER2> Been running the beta for a month or so and have to say I have not had many problems. For the most part everything has been enjoyable.

Running on a laptop with external monitor (as dual monitor). No major problems with the graphics or wifi or anything else.

<comment><USER3> Do you disconnect/reconnect your laptop to the external monitor much? I.e., does it switch nicely between single and dual monitor use?

I looked into doing that for my Ubuntu 7.10 laptop, since I have an extra monitor lying around, but it goes with me on trips so it must be able to do single monitor mode too.

All I could find on the web, though, said such usage was flaky at best and downright hard to setup (for 7.10).

I'd be interested to see if they improved that for 8.04

<comment><USER2> ya know i haven't much since running hardy. The last time I did I didnt have any problems (i think i restarted gnome though)... The only problem I had was that the panel I keep on the second monitor moved to being on top of the other one... So I ended up with 2 panels, stacked, showing the same information.

Ill give it a try a few times tonight and let you know how things go

<comment><USER2> Well after playing with it restarting X seems to make it work fine but thats a bit annoying when you just wanna yank the external and move around. Without restarting X it just seems to think the monitor is still attached and things are not visible.

I also had the same panel problem where they will move to the single monitor but not move back when the other is reattached.

I hear the next version (intrepid ibex) will be focused on mobile computing so maybe some of these issues will be addressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's worth noting that this is the first LTS release since 6.06, and thus the first release of Ubuntu in a few years that is sane to run on servers. The LTS server releases are supported for five years, as opposed to 18 months for non- LTS releases. A five year support lifecycle is awesome (and means that LTS Ubuntu releases are comparable to RHEL/CentOS and Debian for server usage).

<comment><USER5> I gave up on running LTS on my servers. After a while it becomes painful to manage, especially if you need to install packages that require newer version of core libraries. It depends on what you're building, but I'm perfectly fine with upgrading my servers at least once a year.

<comment><USER4> You're not running enough servers or enough services on those servers, if you don't mind upgrading every year. Honestly, I prefer Debian with the volatile repository to address that problem. I find CentOS pretty good, as well-- grabbing a Fedora SRPM or two and rebuilding is usually an easy way to get the bleeding edge version of something without much pain.

<comment><USER5> You're right, I'm not running enough servers. But I plan to keep my strategy as the number of servers goes up. I like having the same version of OS on the server and on my desktop. I'm a big fan of having everything (configuration, updates, deployment) automated so hopefully the amount of work I have to do doesn't increase linearly (or worse) with the amount of servers I manage.

<comment><USER4> I will humbly point out that my business (Virtualmin) is the automation of systems management tasks, likewise for my hobby of the last 8+ years (Webmin). And I still consider it an absolute deal-breaker when an OS has a lifecycle less than three years (my usual upgrade cycle is usually 24-32 months...but I like to have some wiggle room, so five years is even better).

So, you're right that there is value in replicating your infrastructure on your home machine and your server, and there's definitely value in building in replicate-ability from the beginning. Nonetheless, the end-of-life of your server will catch you by surprise one day, and some security exploit will mean you have to upgrade (at least some components) under duress. And there's nothing more stressful than doing things under duress on a production server. It'll take years off your life.

BTW-I run Fedora 7 on my desktop and Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop, and deploy to CentOS 4 and 5 on my servers, and the pain is minimal (then again, our product technically gets deployed on all of those platforms, and many more, so that cross-platform compatibility is part of what we're always testing and working on--I suspect if platform-leveling weren't part of our value I'd be more likely to standardize).

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the detailed response, I'll keep that in mind as the number of servers I manage increases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ive been running the beta for a while, its been really nice, my compiz hasnt worked until this release, and it also fixed my printer etc etc.

It also plays a preview of mp3s you mouseover in the filebrowser, not a big feature, but I liked it

<comment><USER7> > It also plays a preview of mp3s you mouseover in the filebrowser, not a big > feature, but I liked it

Yikes, I could see that startling the heck out of me if I left my speakers on full volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just finished getting all the drivers up and working on a 7.1 install. I'm kind of scared of starting all over again with wifi, video, sound, etc. I like 7.1, don't know if the upgrade is worth it.

<comment><USER9> I've generally had very good upgrade experiences with Debian and Debian based distributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, I don't play pokemon

<comment><USER11> This is a joke? Can someone explain it and why is it so offensive?

<comment><USER12> <http://xkcd.com/178/>

<comment><USER11> Haha, I am more intrigued at how that is something like a third degree cultural reference, like (japanese-import-culture (usa-culture (pokemon (xkcd linux)))

I guess the reversed/flipped sexpr works too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been running the beta for over a month now and look forward to the final upgrade. I did had one issue with the -12 through -15 kernels which rendered my Intel sound card unusable. A bulk update 2 weeks ago fixed that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why does Ubuntu provide a server edition in addition to their desktop edition? It would seem a natural fit to leave servers to Debian and focus their own efforts on delivering the best desktop experience possible.

<comment><USER15> I agree with this in theory, but there's one big advantage to running the same distro on both workstation and server: versioning and compatibility issues at deployment time more or less disappear.

I run Ubuntu on my development workstation, and deploy to Debian servers. While the environments are _almost_ identical, I've wasted far too many hours tracking down stupid bugs in shared libraries that only occur one one distro or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I might finally make the switch and use it as a desktop. My main concern is that wpa support still might suck for linux.

I'll wait a little bit until I hear more good reviews.

</comment><comment><USER17> I tried out the beta of Kubuntu; I found KDE 4 painful.

I may give Xbunutu a whirl, or see about swapping out KDE 4 for KDE 3.something.

<comment><USER18> I love Xubuntu. Surprised there isn't more buzz about it.

<comment><USER19> Seconded. Xfce provides the best of both worlds, although I tend to stick to the normal one for most things. It's quicker and lighter than Gnome, while being clean and simple, and doesn't look like an odd attempt at "Windows XP 2" like KDE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm most looking forward to Pulse Audio, I end up doing a lot of switching of sound cards that's really annoying with Alsa.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone have a list of all the applications+versions included like which X.org, Gnome, Kernel etc. are used?

<comment><USER22> <http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu>

Looks like the kernel is 2.6.25. I'm going to upgrade one of my machines later today and see how it goes. I'm more interested in the Kubuntu + KDE4.0 even if it is unstable. Looks like the Ubuntu stuff is mainly tweaks except a few changes in default programs (Brasero & Transmission by default) and Firefox 3.0 beta + newer Xorg

<comment><USER23> The kernel is actually 2.6.24.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What new features are in this version?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm running 7.10, what's the best way to upgrade without losing any info?

<comment><USER25> >>do-release-upgrade

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> it broke my nvidia drivers.

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing you did a full-upgrade. Have you tried a fresh install from scratch?

<comment><USER26> not yet, just a linux newbie learning the ropes. i know with windows, upgrades break everything too, so i am not pissed, i was just trying to see if linux was better in that regard. and... i guess it is not.

i was also hoping to skip running through all of the customizations that i set up again, but i guess that is the best way to learn linux. either that, or to fix the install i have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did you already pre-order your free copy of Ubuntu 8.04?

<http://shipit.ubuntu.com></comment>


Serpentine: a battle between a rock and a hard place - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/16/MN3T1EE9KS.DTL&tsp=1

<comment><USER2> And this is why the state of California is on the verge of bankruptcy.</comment>


South Carolina officials won't evacuate prison ahead of hurricane - <AUTHOR> http://thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article218179005.html <comment><USER2> See, this is the type of thing that really shows people's true colors.

"But they're inmates! They shouldn't have committed the crime!"

They're humans. Incarcerated at your will. You have responsibility for them. They can't do anything about it.

"But criminals!"

No cruel and unusual punishment. You sentenced them to incarceration. Not death by natural disaster. If it's bad enough for an official mandate to leave, it's bad enough to figure out the logistics.

I love it when the real world suddenly faces trolley problems. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Philosophy: what happens when "that'll never happen" happens anyway.

But hey, you do you South Carolina. Just don't complain if things end up going badly, and your State ends up host to one of the most gruesome corrections system mishaps and constitutional rights violations of our Nation's history.

<comment><USER3> But thats the thing, its _not_ bad enough for an office mandate of evacuation. Even the recommendation was lifted today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "In the past, it's been safer to leave them there."

from wikipedia: "Ridgeland Correctional Institution is a state prison for men located in Ridgeland, Jasper County"

> "During a Tuesday press conference, McMaster lifted the evacuation order for > Jasper County."

sounds like they aren't doing anything wrong?

Edit: just took a look at a topo map, it appears that the prison is ~10 feet higher than the surrounding land, so should be significantly more immune to flooding than a standard residence. [https://imgur.com/a/x2SDcuX](https://imgur.com/a/x2SDcuX) (excuse the JPEGging)

<comment><USER4> > We know the evacuation order I'm issuing will be inconvenient," McMaster > said during the evacuation press conference. "But we're not going to gamble > with the lives of the people of South Carolina. Not a one."

Sounds to me like they're just avoiding inconvenience. A spokesman for the prison doesn't necessarily have the inmates' best wishes at heart.

<comment><USER3> It says that McMaster lifted the evacuation order for the county the prison is located in today. That was the second quote in my comment.

<comment><USER4> Seemingly in response to their refusal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ethics aside, how do you evacuate 1,000 inmates? I assume you'd have to bus them to another facility which had room for them. Seems challenging any way you look at it.

<comment><USER6> Its just 6 buses or so. This isn't challenging at all for government logistics. Heck, its peanuts for campaign event logistics.

I really don't see any excuse. And even if it WAS somehow challenging, tough shit, man. The state is responsible for them whether they like it or not.

Even if you had limited resources, you have to save the inmates before saving the rest. That or open the gates and let them fend for themselves. But as long as they're your prisoner, you're responsible.

<comment><USER7> I mostly agree with you. However,

> Even if you had limited resources, you have to save the inmates before > saving the rest.

This is a real stretch. While the state needs to exercise due care, being convicted does not entitle you to rights that the regular citizenry of the state and employees do not have. In fact, constitutionally-speaking, it's the exact opposite.

<comment><USER8> Constitutionally speaking, inmates enjoy the exact same rights as anyone else unless specifically limited; and there also exist a variety of statutory ways in which inmates are entitled to certain things the general populace are not (most notably medical care and housing, which are not generally entitlements to citizens or non-citizen residents of the country.)

I have no idea if there is a reason to believe that South Carolina should save inmates first (or last, or...) in a natural disaster.

<comment><USER7> The constitution does not grant rights. The entitlements you mentioned are not rights, they are the bare minimum necessary to not violate the constitutional requirement that prisoners not be subject to cruel and unusual punishments, which is one of the few rights guaranteed to those convicted of a crime. Americans are constitutionally protected from the government inhibiting their right to free speech, liberty, etc, but the government only has to abide by this if those Americans have not been convicted of a crime. This is clearly stated in the 14th amendment where it is pointed out the government can infringe upon rights by due process of law. For example, criminals do not enjoy the same protection from violations of their right to free speech.

Seeing as the other residents of the county are not being asked to evacuate, it seems a real stretch to claim that the prisoners are being subject to cruel and unusual punishment. The commenter above claimed prisoners ought to be rescued first. However, that doesn't really seem necessary. They should be treated at best like anyone else, because the main charge is that they not be cruelly or unusually punished, and being treated the same in an emergency like a non-prisoner is hardly cruel or unusual.

<comment><USER9> > The commenter above claimed prisoners ought to be rescued first.

I think it's implied that they should be evacuated first _in the event evacuation is needed_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully it turns out better for them than the inmates during Katrina.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not aware if this is a public or private prison... but does anyone know if that would matter? Would a private prison be required to evacuate and do whatever it takes to move the prisoners safely?

<comment><USER12> Are they actually unsafe now? Anyone see the blueprints of the prison? The topo shows it 10 feet higher than surrounding land. A prison is probably the safest place during a hurricane.

Assuming the inmates aren't safe where they are is an especially big assumption that deserves debate. But the knee-jerk response is that they are all in severe danger based on no facts other than a hurricane might be heading in that direction. Risk assessment isn't easily translated in puerile news articles designed to rile people up. If it weren't for the fact the governor is Republican, and it wasn't election season, this would be a non-story: nowhere in the story did it discuss the structure or placement of the prison, nor the risk assessment matrix used to determine safety.

Rikers Island wasn't evacuated during Sandy and that wasn't some controversy except for an article in Mother Jones while Republican governor Christie evacuated relevant New Jersey prisons. Was Cuomo held to account for failing to evacuate Rikers which was in the direct path of the storm — and an island at that? In the end, didn't Rikers survive just fine? Perhaps the people in charge of these decisions might actually know what they are doing? With the exception of Ray Nagin and the one-step-from-a-nervous-breakdown Gov. Blanco, states typically do a pretty good job with these sorts of decisions; certainly a better job than the armchair experts and journalists that have limited experience in these sorts of challenges.

These debates are fine, but let's not discount the motivations behind these sorts of stories.

And I also wonder what merits this story on Hacker News. It doesn't follow the guidelines at all unless I missed some startup or tech or esoteric item of interest to our community.</comment></comment>


Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Options - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-15/rackspace-hires-morgan-stanley-to-evaluate-options.html <comment><USER2> Rackspace's real strength is in their managed services. Either with a managed dedicated server or managed cloud account. The level of support and assistance you get is something that isn't even available from Amazon, Google, etc. It seems, however, that Rackspace is feeling the pressure from both large and small players and some businesses go with Amazon, Google, etc and do all the OS and stack management in house while others go with the lower end (features/price/SLA) of a Digital Ocean or similar.

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a place for all of them, and actually use both Digital Ocean as well as a Rackspace managed dedicated and cloud setup. But I think a lot of people are buying based on price and just accepting a lower level of support in the process. Oddly, some folks seem surprised by the lower level of support of some of these services (no phone support, lesser monitoring, increased downtime, backups that are lost when the node fails, etc), even several HN posters when these services have issues.

<comment><USER3> Rackspace has been dropping the ball on support, _big time_ , over the past 6-12 months. I'm not sure what's changed, but it's not for the better.

<comment><USER4> My experience has been the opposite.

Live Chat help seems to fix just about every single problem we have on the fly, and they open Tickets when it gets more complicated, with thorough and fast follow-up.

I have never been happier with my hosting support, and I've used company after company over the years. I've now been with Rackspace (Sites and Cloud Servers specifically) the longest.

I should note that I ended up with them because they took over SliceHost (also great support), so I didn't really "choose" Rackspace based on anything, but loved SliceHost, and the transition was seamless, and the great support seemed to follow.

<comment><USER3> No joke, they took away our ability to use chat support a few months ago.

Why? Because we're such an important client, that they want us to have a more personal relationship, by forcing us to interact over the phone. I wish I were kidding.

<comment><USER4> This freaks me out. Live Chat is my life-blood, especially given my schedule and number of clients. Particularly regarding issues with my Sites customers.

<comment><USER2> It's odd. I think of 'live chat' as cheap-o support manned by folks who likely can't fix anything, since that's been my experience. To the point that I won't use something for production if that's all they offer. The cheap guys offer a live support linke, often offline, and call it 2/47 support. Well, if that, the very inexpensive guys offer web-based tickets only. No phone, email, or live chat.

Rackspace has folks that know how to fix a complicated issue on RHEL stack at 3am, which is nice. And, unlike a cheap host who has an SLA that guarantees 100% uptime but only refunds you for time lost, Rackspace's SLA incentivizes them to fix things ASAP. Things like a dedicated box having a hardware failure will be restored in an hour and they credit you 5% of your monthly fee for every hour over that. Or 5% for each 30 minutes of downtime due to data center issues (power, network, HVAC, etc). And they do make good on it.

<comment><USER3> Chat support is extremely helpful when it comes to minor issues. Sure, if there's a core networking issue in the datacenter that's strangely impacting my servers I want to be on the phone with a well-informed tech.

Rackers are a smart bunch, their first-level chat support is great for the million minor issues I need solved. ("We've got a noisy neighbor, can you check it out?", "Can you move this VM to a new host?", etc.)

That's 10 seconds of divided attention required from me vs 10 minutes of dedicated attention for a phone call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If your whole business relies on staying in step with giant competitors with huge piles of money thrown off from other successful ventures to lower their costs and prices more aggressively then you can, it's going to be an ugly business in the long haul.

Price is a terrible competitive advantage because unless you have a revolutionary cost structure to go with it, you're hosed once someone does something reckless, like lowering below cost to drive you out of business.

Google and Amazon aren't going anywhere because they own search and ecommerce. Hosting and infrastructure are nice businesses for both companies, but they are fine without it. Rackspace without hosting and infrastructure revenue is not a company.

</comment><comment><USER6> Aaargh.

I love Rackspace. I was looking forward to being a happy Rackspace customer until I was old and gray. And all the things I love about them would be the first things to go after an acquisition.

Aaaaaaaaaargh.

<comment><USER7> I wonder what would be a good acquirer.

<comment><USER8> GoDaddy probably has the cash.

<comment><USER7> And I think has improved since the Bob Parsons days.

<comment><USER9> Verio might be a good match... NTT could afford it... and make them a player.

<comment><USER10> Verio was a player. The largest by some measures. Then they exercised an option to force NTT to buy them out when the tech stock market tanked and have barely been heard from since.

* I was in the first wave of NTT/Verio lay-offs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You generally don't see announcements like this.

Are they having a hard time selling that's why it is out there? You would think some of these companies you read saying things like "we missed the cloud" would jump at this.

<comment><USER12> Really nobody left, RAX is too big and requires another public company, mainly a blue blood to acquire them. IBM got Softlayer. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft obviously have their own clouds. RedHat has its own PaaS OpenShift. Awkward spot really. Perhaps Facebook wants to join the cloud hosting business, but I doubt it, since they've just coughed up insane amounts of cash with Oculus and whatsapp.

Smart play though, Morgan Stanley will figure out the details and likely find a buyer eventually. MS is kind of like `The Wolf` from Pulp Fiction or Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad, no questions asked problem solvers.

<comment><USER13> Facebook has Parse, maybe if that demo matures to having RAX needs then it's worthwhile.

<comment><USER14> Parse was on AWS, at least before the acquisition, if I recall correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really hope Mailgun will survive any acquisition or merger Rackspace goes through. I love the quality of service they provide.

<comment> old-gregg Mailgun cofounder checking in: we will, and yes - we will. ;-) Rackspace has been a great home for our team, we continue to grow nicely, we're funded very well and plenty of exciting things are on the roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Corollary - customers look for exit options...

Glad we moved everyone off to AWS... pricing is an issue - everyone is lowering prices dramatically... tough market.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, current RS customers, the history of these kinds of actions tell us that right now is the best that Rackspace will ever be in the future.

</comment><comment><USER16> Rackspace over-bet on managed services, and under-bet on physical plant.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rackspace should have invested more in PaaS. Its only offering that could it semi-accurately call PaaS, Cloud Sites, is lacking - it supports few runtimes, without things like git-based deployment that would enable it to fit into a CI Pipeline, and it seems intended to host static websites with some dynamic features rather than full-fledged web applications.

I think they are also failing by trying to differentiate themselves in a business that will end up being much like a utility. When your business acts like a utility it's kind of a race to the bottom on prices. Furthermore, in attempting to differentiate themselves, they failed to characterize their primary customer properly - the kind of person who interacts with RackSpace directly is not the kind of person who calls support a whole lot, and yet the quality of their managed support seems to be their sole differentiating factor. My company did take advantage of managed support a few times, and when we did so it was enormously helpful, but it wasn't enough to keep us there when we saw lower-cost offerings elsewhere, because we have enough expertise in-house to solve 99% of problems that come our way.

That said, I own RAX and I would very much like to see the stock stop tanking. An acquisition proposition could send the price back up to near where I bought it - and who knows? Maybe I'll end up trading it in for some more AMZN ( a stock that has also been tanking, by the way.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Contemplating moving from RS to Linode. Anyone done the same? Was it worth it for the savings?

<comment><USER19> For myself, I greatly appreciate having a service like Mailgun available to Rackspace customers - does Linode (or another company) have a similar e-mail service?

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty sure you can use Mailgun regardless of where you host at, FWIW.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, we use mailgun without Rackspace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what this means for the future of OpenStack?

<comment><USER23> Same thoughts... hopefully HP wants to play ball.

<comment><USER24> In the last few releases, HP has overtaken Rackspace in a number of development metrics.

Poking around here is interesting: [http://www.stackalytics.com](http://www.stackalytics.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since stock price seems to be independent of actual company performance these days...

Is Rackspace actually in financial trouble? Or is it a case of shareholders moaning that their returns aren't good enough?

<comment><USER26> They're fine financially. >$300M Cash, $70M of debt (most of which are capital leases). They say they've been approached by "multiple parties" so it's just a matter of trying to get the best offer. [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1107694/0001107694140...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1107694/000110769414000025/rax8k_051514.htm)

<comment><USER25> Ok, so assume I am an idiot on this (not far wrong). Why is their stock price not high? Just because they are not satisfying shareholders / wall street analysts?

Are the slowly losing customers or see somethign in the future that will cause trouble?

<comment><USER26> This sums it up nicely: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7753787).

<comment><USER25> Thanks, that does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "inbound strategic proposals"?

god/alternative-deity help them.</comment>