Nvidia  Pascal GPU to Feature 17B Transistors and 32GB HBM2 VRAM - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-17-billion-transistors-32-gb-hbm2-vram-arrives-in-2016/ <comment><USER2> > With 8Gb per DRAM die and 2 Gbps speed per pin, we get approximately 256 > GB/s bandwidth per HBM2 stack. With four stacks in total, we will get 1 TB/s > bandwidth on NVIDIA's GP100 flagship Pascal which is twice compared to the > 512 GB/s on AMD's Fiji cards and three times that of the 980 Ti's 334GB/s.

> The Pascal GPU would also introduce NVLINK which is the next generation > Unified Virtual Memory link with Gen 2.0 Cache coherency features and 5 – 12 > times the bandwidth of a regular PCIe connection. This will solve many of > the bandwidth issues that high performance GPUs currently face.

To point out the obvious, this sounds like it could be fantastic for deep learning. Not just is the RAM big enough to hold a lot of current datasets, it'll help alleviate the latency bottlenecks in updating stuff.

<comment><USER3> Yup, this is exactly the marketing angle Nvidia CEO was using in his GPU Technology Conference presentation (10x speed-up on deep-learning vs their current Maxwell architecture):

[http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/pascal/](http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2015/03/17/pascal/)

<comment><USER4> This also seems to be the motivation behind the already available Titan X with its 12GB of RAM. Some of the gaming hardware reviewers are scratching their heads as to why anyone would need 12GB attached to one die. I chuckled when I saw those reviews that were totally oblivious to the deep learning applications.

<comment><USER5> The community as a whole is completely oblivious. It's pretty funny to see the youtube reviewers get all worked up over how nvidia and amd are going at it again and such. As if gaming is what's driving this battle. Anyone working in computer science knows the battle is over machine learning, not first person shooters.

Soon headless, socketed solutions will be the preferred form factor for HPC. I image the desktop and server product lines will diverge at that point. It'll be curious to see what will happening to PC gaming at that point.

<comment><USER6> The gaming hardware junky community is aware, if only as a result of most Titan Black/Z reviews arriving at the conclusion, "a gamer's money is better spent elsewhere, as all a Titan really provides over the latest consumer offerings is good workstation performance (double precision floating point)."

For reference: Titan Z DP FP: 2707 GFLOPS ATI 5870 (released sept 2009): 544 GFLOPS Titan X (current generation - NVidia recognized that gamers don't value DP performance): 192 GFLOPS

I sometimes wonder how it came to be that the Titan Z preceded the Titan X...

E: to clarify, review sites are aware that STEM people need double precision and 6/12GiB GPU memory for _something_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AMD get it together, pretty please. Nobody wants to live in a world where only NVidia produces discrete GPUs!

That 32GB seems too high for cost constrained consumer market though - may be they will have a leaner variant for desktops/gaming.

<comment><USER8> It could be argued that AMD does have it together. If you look at the benchmarks for pretty much any particular price point, AMD & nVidia cards are roughly comparable. AMD is better at some games and resolutions, and nVidia is better at others. Rarely is the difference more than 10%. nVidia used to have a sizable power/noise advantage, but Fury appears to close that gap. AMD even seems to be closing the driver stability gap.

But the Internet effect on the video card market is huge. There are hundreds of online benchmarks, huge fanboy communities, et cetera. The benchmarks magnify small differences causing a winner-take-all effect. The communities create a bandwagon effect. It's a wonder that AMD maintains the share that it does.

Yes, AMD is obviously #2, but it should be a close #2. In most markets close #2 is not a bad position to be in.

<comment><USER9> Not sure about their graphics division, but AMD has stopped innovating in the CPU department...

<comment><USER8> So has Intel. Skylake (2016) and Sandy Bridge (2010) have roughly comparable single core desktop benchmarks. Power/performance ratios have increased drastically, but that's mostly because of process improvements. AMD has been stuck on 28nm for a _long_ time, but that's not AMD's fault.

<comment><USER10> > Skylake (2016) and Sandy Bridge (2010) have roughly comparable single core > desktop benchmarks.

That's not quite true -- Intel aims for a big IPC (instructions/clock) improvement for each "tock" generation (Nehalem -> Sandy Bridge -> Haswell -> Skylake), and IIRC has pretty much delivered. Some benchmarks are really hard to push because they're memory/cache-miss bound (so it's really just about throwing in more memory channels and clocking them up), but a lot of things have gotten seriously better for tricky integer code, especially in e.g. branch prediction/uop cache in the frontend and available execution ports in the backend.

<comment><USER11> [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/intel-confirms- tick-t...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/intel-confirms-tick-tock- shattering-kaby-lake-processor-as-moores-law-falters/)

While the headline is hyperbole, the fact is that Intel has passively admitted that newer process sizes are taking more time to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 4096bit memory interface is surely supercomputer territory.

My ZX81 only had 8192 bits of _memory_ (1KB).

<comment><USER13> And it could do 3D graphics. Sort of. 3D Monster Maze: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKvd0zPfBE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKvd0zPfBE4)

<comment><USER14> Nice - who needs 8K. 8. K. I haven't even updated to 4K. I don't think I have anything that runs 1080p.

<comment><USER15> Virtual reality would benefit a lot from from 16000x16000 PER EYE. Rendered at 120+ frames per second with 10,000Hz eye tracking for foveated rendering (120fps may be too low for that though).

For the goal of full VR, computing tech has a long way to go

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The 17 Billion transistors on the Pascal GPU are twice the transistors found > on the GM200 Maxwell and the Fiji XT GPU core which is literally insane

Seems like Moore's law is alive and well in the graphics/attached processor space.

<comment><USER17> That's because GPUs were frozen at the 28nm node since like 2011. It'll be ~4 years of no die shrinks at the top end of GPUs when they finally transition to 16nm. If anything, Moore's law is behind schedule in the GPU space.

Note, that both NVidia and AMD rely on TSMC to manufacture their chips, so they're completely constrained by TSMC's ability to implement new process nodes.

<comment><USER18> 2011: GTX 580, 1.5 TFLOPS

2012: GTX 680, 3.0 TFLOPS (~2.0 attainable)

2013: GTX Titan, 4.4 TFLOPS (~3.2 attainable)

2014: GTX 980, 4.6 TFLOPS

2015: GTX Titan X, 6.7 TFLOPS

Looks to me like they're doubling perf roughly every 2 years.

Meanwhle, my Core i7-5930k's SOL is <1/2 of 2011's GTX 580 at 672 GFLOPS and it still doesn't have fast approximate transcendentals. Skylake begins to fix this, but c'mon, GPUs have had these for almost a decade now...

<comment><USER19> Moore's law isn't about performance, it's the number of transistors on a single IC. Perf is related but irrelevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER18> GTX 580: 585M transistors

GTX 680: 3.5B transistors

GTX Titan: 7.1B transistors

GTX 980: 5.2B transistors

GTX Titan X: 8B transistors

Core i7-5930k: 2.6B transistors

What the data above suggests to me is that relying solely on Moore's Law to predict performance is a fool's errand. Going forward, process transitions are obviously slowing down and IMO victory will go to those who make the best use of the available transistors. Just like programmers who make the best use of the caches and registers in these processors get dramatically better performance than those who can't be bothered to even think about such things.

Intel's business strategy of backwards-compatibility is a giant albatross for them here in that they spend a lot of transistors on this, but clearly otherwise profitable. In contrast, while GPUs are mostly backwards-compatible, they usually oops I meant nearly always oops I meant always need some refactoring to hit close to peak performance. But that usually leads to ~2x performance improvements per generation so far.

Whenever someone complains about having to do this I ask them if they prefer this over hand-coded assembler inner loops for maximally exploiting SSE/SSE2/SSE3/SSE4/AVX2/AVX512? Usually, I get some dismissive remark about leaving that to the compiler. Good luck with that plan IMO.

<comment><USER19> Just to nitpick, backwards compatibility isn't really a huge issue for Intel. Most of the really old stuff that's a pain to maintain can be shoved in microcode; compilers won't emit those instructions.

There are obvious downsides to the architecture, but the need to be backwards compatibility shouldn't hurt it too much.

GPU workloads are very different in that generally you don't have to look particularly hard to find a bunch of parallelism that you can exploit (if you did, your code would run terribly); so you can generally gain a load of performance by just scaling up your design.

CPUs are super restricted by the single threaded, branching nature of the code you run on them, and this is what makes CPU performance a little more nuanced, and not directly comparable.

<comment><USER20> That's not really true; backwards compatibility on x86 architectures takes a tremendous amount of power and die space, and the 'throw it in microcode' solution only partially mitigates this issue.

A paper ([http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~ra045840/cardoso2013wivosca.pdf](http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~ra045840/cardoso2013wivosca.pdf)) states that a mostly-microcode solution would still require 20% of the die area to be dedicated solely to microcode ROM.

I can't remember where I read it but something like 30+% of an Intel CPU die area/power consumption is due to the x86 ISA. Apparently the original Pentium CPU was 40% instruction decoding by die area. And the ISA has grown enormously since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Now, if only I could get a MackBook Pro with 32GB of system memory... Does anybody happen to know why that is such a difficult thing to achieve? It's amazing that, starting next year, there will be mainstream graphics cards with more memory than top-of-the-line laptops.

<comment><USER22> I don't think you could get 16GB SO-DIMMs until earlier this year could you? I know you can get 32GB in a W550s which is probably the thinnest/lightest laptop capable of 32GB.

<comment><USER23> Can you? I have a W550s and didn't see anyone hocking 16GB SODIMMs even earlier this year.

<comment><USER22> Yeah a colleague ordered one about 2 weeks ago. Lovely machine and Lenovo have done an amazing job with the weight. I still prefer the T series over the W series as I don't need that much power and prefer the much lighter machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm waiting for the comparisons between NVidia's offerings and Xeon Phi in real benchmarks

<comment> semi-extrinsic I believe the Xeon Phi is doing quite bad in that comparison, so you don't see much benchmark trumpeting from Intel. Here's one from Nvidia though (so add a pinch of salt or two), showing a 2x - 5x advantage of Tesla K80 over Knights Corner:

[http://www.nvidia.com/object/justthefacts.html](http://www.nvidia.com/object/justthefacts.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The 17 Billion transistors on the Pascal GPU are twice the transistors found on the GM200 Maxwell and the Fiji XT GPU core which is literally insane. "

[https://xkcd.com/725/](https://xkcd.com/725/)

<comment><USER25> [https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=literally+now+means+fi...](https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=literally+now+means+figuratively)

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks like the next few generations of GPUs are gonna be fast!

<comment> norea-armozel I think this may be specs for their Tesla cards. I doubt they would throw 32 HBM2 even on a Titan unless they can keep the price point the same (even for folks who can spend 1k USD have limits on their budget or at least their perception of a budget). But I wouldn't doubt by Q2/2016 Nvidia will be bringing more competition to the market with chips based on HBM usage.

IMO, AMD pulled the trigger a tad too soon on their HBM cards, but to be fair their last line of R9 and R7 cards weren't interesting at least to me (and I have a Radeon HD 7870). So, they had to go first to get their customer base excited for the future.

<comment><USER27> Surprises me that RAM hasn't increased more, the machine I'm on is 5 years old and it has 2GB of RAM on the GPU (HD6950) which I paid ~200 quid for 5 years ago.

<comment><USER17> Memory bandwidth/throughput has been a far larger bottleneck on gaming performance than total video memory for the last few years. They've been trying to deal it by using ever faster and slightly wider memory interfaces, but now they've hit the wall, thus the move to HBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What are the parts marked "R125" around the edge?

<comment><USER29> I believe they are inductors, part of a switch-mode power supply to reduce the voltage of incoming power to the level required by the cores (AFAIK ~1V).

<comment><USER30> The definitely are inductors (being labeled "Lxx" on PCB is a sure tell-tale sign), and the small 48ish pin packages near them are most likely SMPS controllers. Seems bit crazy that there are total of 18 of them, but I suppose that's what you gotta do when you are pushing possibly hundreds of amps of current.

<comment><USER31> Makes the normal buck converter arrangement too. Controller, inductor, diode. The GPU will be taking like half a volt so things are definitely going to be getting toasty.

<comment><USER30> Those big two-legged components look like caps to me though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is not a real site, they have a review from 4 months ago benchmarking a 990 Ti 24GB card with 'minesweeper' and 'solitaire'.

<comment><USER33> Was that review written on April 1st?

<comment><USER32> It must have been. They mixed in it with all their other headlines and the date was '4 months ago' so it wasn't labeled April 1st. All their other stories are shaky rumors so I thought the whole site was joke articles predicting extrapolating the next press release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why so much VRAM, is that really necessary?

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been look at gtx 750 ti which has maxwell processor in it. I don't care too much about playing games on ultra but the sheer quiet, cool temperature on load, and low power consumption is what makes me attracted to it. I wonder if the new Pascal GPU will make room for more such low power consumption and quiet cards that pack plenty of punch?</comment>


Kit - <AUTHOR> http://john.jubjubs.net/2010/03/23/kit/

<comment><USER2> Good post. I've never quite figured out how "users shouldn't have to mess with their devices to get them to work" became conflated with "users shouldn't be allowed to mess with their devices". Especially when the company most responsible for that idea produced Mac OS X, which is widely praised by both technical and nontechnical users.

<comment><USER3> OMG sign up for the developer program and calm down. Or buy a zenPad. Or both.

Only people who have written assembly code for an embedded system, or installed an open source OS on a mobile device should even be allowed to make these "everything should be open" comments. The capability for you to tinker has been around for years, and in that time what have people created? Apparently nothing as good as Apple's closed system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Don't misunderstand: I don't think it's a real problem that I can't change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web._

This is so true. Growing up, what I remember most was playing with web tech - buying my own server space, hosting my own sites, installing random stuff like Wordpress and Drupal and messing with the code running these sites; learning CSS, HTML and doing random stuff in PHP ...

So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads? It may very well be that the TV/computer/Heathkit equivalents today are Wordpress/Rails/Opentape installations, that kids run on their servers and play around with. We may not have another Apple on our hands (which resulted from arguably the king of tinkerers himself, Wozniak) but we might have the next Larry Page/Sergey Brin/Mark Zuckerberg.

And that's not entirely a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> Especially as the TV / Computer / whatever electronic hacking crowd still exists, and _creating_ things from scratch has become _insanely_ easier thanks to things like the Arduino.

Though the average consumer product is _definitely_ less hackable now than it used to be, mostly due to significantly increased complexity, the intentionally-hackable world has if anything _improved_ , and lowered the barrier of entry to the level where almost anyone can jump on within a day or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article underestimates kids -- but the sentiment is understandable given the short history of computing. These guys witnessed the birth. Now things are vastly improved, just like how you open the hood of a car and it looks like an amorphous plastic object ("Back in my day, you could see how everything worked."). So while I enjoy the nostalgia, I suspect kids will be tinkering far into the future. That kids have the web to learn from is still amazing to me (I can't imagine programming without it) -- and it is itself a great platform for tinkering.

<comment><USER7> have you ever tried to fix a modern car? it's really not that hard. sure, you need a manual, and yeah, there are parts you can't fabricate with a good machine shop now, but it's still pretty accessible.

<comment><USER8> makes sense, it's just intimidating because you open the hood and it resembles a source file with all the whitespace removed.

<comment><USER7> the thing is, compared to what you see in the computer industry these days (I'm given to understand this wasn't always the case) the manuals for fixing cars are /ridiculously good/

"Does the car start? if so, go to page 45, if not, go to page 2." etc... There's a word for it but I call it "choose your own adventure documentation" - It's quite effective, even an inexperienced mechanic can solve most problems when given the factory service manual. (I'm speaking of the factory service manual here, The much easier to obtain Chilton brand "Book of Lies" is considerably less useful, but still much better than most of what you get with a computer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know what I want?

I want a handheld that is so easy to program that you can do real app development, right on the handheld itself. Not just toy app development, the real deal. It might not be as awesome as Eclipse or Xcode but if it's doable without an external host, kids will start playing with it.

The Newton could do this, 15 years ago.

From my limited knowledge only WebOS is close to being simple enough that you could reasonably develop for it without a "real" computer and all its baggage. Which is too bad, because it's a long ways from taking the world by storm.

<comment><USER7> the nokia n900 is essentially a full-scale Linux box; hell, it's a lot more powerful than the computer I had when I started learning Linux myself. the only handycap is the small monitor and keyboard; but it does have TV-out and bluetooth, so you can fix those parts yourself, if you like.

<comment><USER9> The nokia N900 is open, but hardly easy to develop for.

<comment><USER7> it's not any harder than any other linux platform; you just need to account for the small screensize (800x480 if I remember correctly)

The big win is that you can port existing linux apps targeted at other mobile platforms (or even desktop platforms, if you can make them work at 800x480) You also have a full linux stack for debugging on-device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My understanding of the argument for the iPad is: we (technical guys/early adopters) don't want one, but it's not for us, it's for the mass market.

The diffusion of innovation is well studied. (Read more here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_%28business%29>) If technical people don't buy something, no one else will. My geek friends bought an iPhone the second it came out. They won't buy an iPad.

So how do you convince the "early majority" that it's something worthwhile, something they should own, if _you_ as an innovator or early adopter, don't want one. (Answer: _you can't_.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat off topic, but has anyone seen this?

<http://www.xgamestation.com/> "The XGameStation is the world's first build- it-yourself video game console kit."

.. cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> I dunno about the part about it being inborn or not though - I had been taking things apart for as long as I can remember, and the fact that I was 'different' didn't not bother me AT ALL - until puberty.</comment>


Show HN: Pickle – An app for guessing what the crowd thinks - <AUTHOR> http://www.trypickle.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been working on an app, Pickle, for a few months now out of a tech accelerator based in Memphis.

The app is based around a voting game - people upload photos they're comparing, and other users try to guess which of those photos will be most popular with the crowd. We've been seeing some really interesting/unexpected results since our launch a few days ago - it's been taking off with the college crowd, and instead of just the "useful" applications of the app (getting instant feedback on outfits, profile pics, etc.) that we predicted, we've been seeing people use it for all types of random and fun picture-based surveys.

We'd love any feedback you have - contact us at email@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER2> Looks fun, addicting and useful! Downloading now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just downloaded Pickle. I have a feeling this is going to be my new daily distraction.</comment>


Show HN: Why the US got downgraded - <AUTHOR>

    U.S. Tax revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
    Fed budget:          $3,820,000,000,000
    New debt:            $1,650,000,000,000
    National debt:       $14,271,000,000,000
    Recent budget cut:   $38,500,000,000
 Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

    Annual family income:                   $21,700
    Money the family spent:                 $38,200
    New debt on the credit card:            $16,500
    Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
    Total budget cuts:                      $385
 Puts it into perspective a bit, huh?
(Source: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115560790731793704368/posts/5TRu4CdDW3R) <comment><USER2> This line of argument is basically BS. Families lack the power to tax, the power to issue currency, and the power [currently] to borrow for 10 years at less than 2% interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> True; however, it seems to have at least some validity. (Please expound if I'm wrong.)

Obviously because the US borrows in Dollar-denominated bonds they can control the value of those bonds, but the difference is still staggering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a wrong way of looking.

Rating is based on associated risks not the income and expenditure. Certainly they help calculate risk but you can't rely on it purely.

The U.S. credit rating was changed after a political crisis arose, which put some uncertainly to pay creditors ontime.</comment>


A power plant for the Internet: our newest data center in Alabama - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-power-plant-for-internet-our-newest.html

<comment><USER2> >> Data centers need a lot of infrastructure to run 24/7, and there's a lot of potential in redeveloping large industrial sites like former coal power plants.

I can see rust-belt cities like Detroit being prime for this kind of development. Real estate would be cheap or nearly free and local governments would love to get a big name like Google into a tax-free zone.

<comment><USER3> Trouble is a dc doesn't employ that many people- especially with the way google have their dc's structured.

I bet you could run a google DC with 3 or 4 technical people per shift plus a few security guards plus their fury alligators (guards dogs)

<comment><USER4> Google stated that it would bring 75-100 permanent jobs.

<comment><USER3> Yes I am sure they did to the local politicians ;-)

Unless you collocating a call centre for adwords support I cant see how any DC would need 100 people full time - anyone got the org chart for a google DC?

<comment><USER5> There's just no way you can run a facility of that size with three people, sorry. In addition to DC techs you need building engineers, HVAC people, electricians, and probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of.

<comment><USER3> But post build and commissioning you don't need most of those full time. And given the way google run the dc the workload is a lot less than say an big IBM sysplex.

I bet you could run a Google style DC in normal ops with 3 or 4 people per shift plus security guards.

That's assuming they even bother with a 356/24h shift

You just fly in the specialized teams and new hardware already racked up when you need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We've built our own super-efficient servers, invented more efficient ways to cool our data centers, and even used advanced machine learning to squeeze more out of every watt of power we consume. Compared to five years ago, we now get 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy."

I'm probably missing something, but isn't that just brought by the usual performance improvements between CPU generations?

<comment><USER7> > I'm probably missing something, but isn't that just brought by the usual > performance improvements between CPU generations?

Load balancing arbitrary computation is definitely a software problem as well as hardware. This is basically the halting problem on an industrial scale—you divvy up work without being able to understand it until it's done. At this scale, I'm also betting there is nearly infinite room to move computation around the data center and a lot of room to save money computing the same number of tasks on fewer cpus.

<comment><USER8> Google just published a great paper on that topic: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/6/4/paper-heracles- impr...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/6/4/paper-heracles-improving- resource-efficiency-at-scale.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sitting in St. Louis, I'm about half way between the two, and I can feel the power, Captain!

</comment><comment><USER10> " _A power plant for the Internet_ "? That's a bit presumptuous of Google, assigning themselves the position of powering the Internet. It's like if China would call itself "creators of the computers for the Earth". In both cases, the viewpoint has technical merit, but it's a bad sign for the rest of us that they chose that particular way of putting it.

> _Every time you check your Gmail, search on Google for a nearby restaurant, > or watch a YouTube video, a server whirs to life in one of our data > centers._

I see. Hmm, I don't use Gmail or Google Search, but I _do_ watch things on YouTube. I take this as a sign that I should stop. No real loss – I have other things to do with my time.

I suddenly realize what this reminds me of; it's that quote from _The Matrix_ :

" _The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes._ "

<comment><USER11> I guess the logical conclusion of your line of thinking is that you should stop using the Internet altogether, as there is no telling which sites are using google analytics or are hosted on the app engine, all of which will do the same thing

<comment><USER10> Please don't be silly. Just because a person tries to cut down on salt doesn't mean that the "logical conclusion" is that they should cut out salt completely, or indeed completely eschew all forms of spices or flavorings.

(Also, I block Google Analytics, and as I understand it, relatively few people use the Google app engine compared to other hosting solutions.)

<comment><USER12> Make sure and stay away from anyone who might be using Google's JS or font CDN's too.

<comment><USER13> I didn't realize how prevalent Google's JS and font CDNs were until I ran uMatrix for a while. It seems between GA, jQuery, and fonts, 80% of web sites I visit are tied into Google in some fashion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTTP Shaming - <AUTHOR> http://httpshaming.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> I was recently called overly pedantic for telling somebody they should change an example in their blogpost which used http rather than https to transmit credit card information.

Sad to see such prominent sites use http for transmitting credit card data in the wild.</comment>


Online backup to S3 for the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

<comment><USER2> This page could really benefit from a screenshot or if you're feeling adventurous, a screencast.

I don't want to commit to downloading this app without seeing how it functions. I understand it lets me back up to S3, but how?

I dare say if you add these images, your conversion rates will skyrocket.

Assuming this is your site, anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably (hopefully?) right. It was on my list, but maybe I'll move it to the top of my list.

<comment><USER3> Most definitely, I for one don't try many new programs without some sort of screenshot (if you do a screencast also put screenshots up as not everyone can always watch a video or wants to watch a video).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had Mozy and I used their built-in encryption to backup ~250GB. I went to restore some wedding photos while at my parents' house, so I downloaded their decryption utility, and started the decryption of a 10gb subset of my backup.

Only about 1/3rd of the files decrypted correctly. The rest of the files were totally corrupted -- not cool. I contacted support and we investigated the problem for ~3 months. Luckily I didn't have dataloss, but what exactly was I paying for here?

We never got the problem resolved and I ended up getting a full refund for 1.5 years of service. Make sure to test your backups no matter where you store them.

<comment><USER5> _what exactly was I paying for here?_

You were paying for not worrying about whether you would lose your data. And that's exactly what Mozy gave you... at least until you discovered the corruption. :-)

<comment><USER6> This has just reminded me I've got a lot of data backed up with you and no idea if the restore works :)

<comment><USER5> I'll be happy to accept $0.30/GB while you test restores to your heart's content. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As the author of Tarsnap, I'm a bit biased, so I'm going to refrain from comparing the two; but I have one question for the author: Aren't S3 per- request fees a problem? One of the reasons I have all Tarsnap data go through the Tarsnap server is to allow me to "bundle" blocks together and amortize per-PUT costs.

<comment><AUTHOR> The per-request fees ($.01 per 1000 PUTs and $.01 per 10,000 GETs) aren't a problem for 2 reasons:

1) Arq packs small files (under 64k) together into "packs", a bit like git does. So instead of thousands of PUTs of tiny files (which would also be very slow) it does fewer larger PUTs.

2) Arq caches indexes of those pack files locally, and caches the list of larger S3 objects as well. So it doesn't have to do a GET to figure out whether an object with a given SHA1 is already in the S3 account. (Arq stores every object by its SHA1 hash, like git does).

The file format is open (it's your data after all): <http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/s3_data_format.txt>

<comment><USER5> _Arq packs small files (under 64k) together into "packs"..._

Ok, so if you have lots of 64 kB files they're all PUT separately, using 15625 PUTs/GB (i.e., $0.15/GB)? I guess that's not too bad.

 _The file format is open_

Nice! Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)

One thing caught my eye glancing through that document, though: "The name of each blob is its SHA1 hash." That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right? (If not, it definitely should be!)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Ok, so if you have lots of 64 kB files they're all PUT separately, using 15625 PUTs/GB (i.e., $0.15/GB)? I guess that's not too bad._

I guess I could ask you to choose the threshold instead of picking 64k, but generally I've tried to choose reasonable defaults so that the user doesn't have to make those kinds of decisions.

 _Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)_

Well, you could actually write your own code to read the files, since the format is open.

 _That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right?_

It's the SHA1 of the contents of the object, and the object is encrypted data, so yes.

<comment><USER7> >Well, you could actually write your own code to read the files, since the format is open.

I think the parent's point was not vendor lock-in but rather, that publishing the source code to _your_ particular implementation would lend more credibility to it since anyone can inspect it and verify that it does what it says it does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but with Arq, unlike most online backup offerings, you have direct access to the files being stored online (they're in your S3 account). So you can verify that Arq says what it does because you can look at the results.

<comment><USER8> With source code, you can reason about edge cases.

No matter how many tests you do, you can never catch all of these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good thing somebody brought up the problem of encryption with other backup providers (like Backblaze).

Still, problem is that if you want to back up a lot of data, S3 quickly becomes rather expensive. In my case, storage costs alone for around 550GB that I currently store on Backblaze would run me $82.50 a month. Not exactly small change.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't judge how much it'll cost to back my iMac up. I have about 750Gb of data.

<comment><USER11> You can't figure out what 750 * 0.15 comes to?

<comment><USER12> Perhaps he is saying that the per-gig cost is not clear. It says buy now for $29, but the extra $0.15/GB/month to use S3 is hidden under "Why use S3?" (you might not expect costs to be there)

We both know what S3 is, and know that they charge per gig. But the market of people who want online backups for their macs don't necessarily know this.

<comment><USER10> true, but this service is also incremental so it'll (in theory) backup more than 750Gb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been using Arq for the last 3 weeks. It's very basic software at the moment, but it does the job. It lets me see file revisions and restore files as necessary. Unfortunately these files can't be seen directly in S3 due to the packing nature of how they're stored.. so if your mac crashes and you want a file, you'll need to find another mac and install Arq to retrieve your files.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. The files are named using the SHA1 hash of their contents (to enable de-duplication) and small files are packed together (to dramatically improve performance). I thought that was the best solution given the limits of the S3 API. JungleDisk does something similar I think.

What sort of alternative for restoring would you be interested in? Maybe an open-source command-line utility?

<comment><USER14> A command-line utility is always a big plus for those who like scripting. Maybe a FUSE script/app/plugin?

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted an open-source command-line utility on github for restoring (downloading) Arq backups from your S3 account:

<http://sreitshamer.github.com/arq_restore/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the Carbonite Backup Bouncer test:

One of backup-bouncer's tests is called "combo-tests" where it tests several different file metadata types on the same file. Carbonite didn't restore this file at all.

Instead, Carbonite left a file called "Carbonite_Restore_F161_G1.tmp". It's a 1-line text file that reads "gotta boogie".

</comment><comment><USER16> The price scaling issue worried me at first, and then I noticed the monthly budgeting — great feature. In the long run, you'll always sacrifice price (vs. an external hard drive) for off-site data persistence anyway.

In any case, this looks really awesome for documents/projects backup to supplement my TimeMachine drive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I use it as a supplement to my Time Machine drive as well, for my most important stuff (documents + photos).

Maybe I should call out that use case on the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds nice. Just too bad the contents of my NAS would cost $700 a month to keep on s3.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking of adding Pogoplug support. That way storage would be much cheaper, although backing up to a Pogoplug at a friend's house may be much less reliable than backing up to S3.

Would anyone be interested in this?

<comment><USER11> I'd be far more interested in a generic ssh target thingy, than support for specific peripherals.

<comment><USER17> I second the motion. I have a ton of storage on Dreamhost that I could totally be using as backup. (And have tried a bunch of times, but it's a pain getting cron and rsync to do the right thing, and then remembering to set it up again when my computer gets changed around...)

<comment><USER18> Keep in mind that they don't allow unlimited private backups (they allow 50GB of backups store in a special backup user account), the data you store there is supposed to be web accessible.

[http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/policy- clarificati...](http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/10/17/policy- clarification-personal-storage-back-ups/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm confused how this product can charge so much more than JungleDisk but not really do anything different? Is there a difference I'm missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, JungleDisk is a monthly service from $2-5 month (plus S3 charges) depending on the plan you choose. Arq is a 1-time $29 cost (plus S3 charges). The other big difference is that JungleDisk is a Java app and doesn't have a native Mac look and feel.

Also Arq is a lot simpler to use. I really need to put up a screencast to show that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone tried both Backblaze and this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have. I chose my own encryption password, but in order to restore files, I had to enter the password into the Backblaze web site. Backblaze used it to decrypt my files on their server and assemble them into a zip file on their server. They then sent me email saying I could download the zip file.

Also the Mac metadata weren't restored properly: [http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/backblaze-backup- bouncer...](http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/backblaze-backup-bouncer- test.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there some way to make the app not suck up all the bandwidth on my teeny weeny cable modem?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can set a maximum transfer rate. You can also choose "automatic transfer rate" which slows backups when you're using the Internet interactively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I do not have S3, what would be the total effective cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't work without an S3 account. The total cost is $29 (one time) plus monthly S3 charges. For example, 33GB backed up at S3 would cost $4.95/month in storage charges, plus some (relatively small) transmission and transaction charges. Upload transmission to S3 is free through June 2010.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks good. What about workgroup admin?</comment>


Scopeleaks.js: detect variables leaking into the global scope - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ruidlopes/scopeleaks

<comment><USER2> Related: my "LeakHelper" project, which goes beyond top level global variables by traversing the entire reachable JavaScript object graph, executing a function of your choosing for each object: <http://github.com/tlrobinson/leakhelper>

All it really does is the traversing (but it handles the gory details of that using a couple different set implementations), but it's easy to use it for various purposes like finding newly created objects, or objects you expected to no longer be referenced anywhere (logical memory leaks), etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks pretty neat, especially while we have to wait for Strict Mode to be supported in all the major browsers.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool helper. Namespace pollution is still an issue even with popular libs.</comment>


A little more detail on the Timberline investigation - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024888170_fbinewspaper1xml.html

<comment><USER2> "FBI created fake Seattle Times Web page to nab bomb-threat suspect"

= Published headline

?</comment>


McAfee suffers heart attacks in Guatemala jail - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/05/guatemalan-police-arrest-mcafee/1749997/ <comment><USER2> Evidence is he is a raging "bath salt" addict. These are common symptoms. They will get worse for awhile if he de-toxes.</comment>


Sell it or run it, there is no middle ground - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/sell-it-or-run-it-there-is-no-middle-ground <comment><USER2> This is a counterintuitive point, and I think mostly gets glossed over in a lot of high level thinking. For example, if you're reading some generic advice about valuing a small company, it will usually point out that "profit" needs to be expressed net of the owner/manager's salary, the salary a buyer would need to pay someone to be General manager of this business. Economics textbooks do something similar.

This might give you the impression it's normal to hire general managers for businesses. In reality, it's rare that a "small company" (say a turnover of $1m-$10m, for a typical software or services company, or even 10X that) does this.

A clean break between ownership and management is a difficult thing.

Jacques does an admirable job of breaking it down in a way that gets the message across. To go further, I actually think it could be a great topic for an out-of-the-box young economist to take on. Like a modern Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm." It's got tentacles in a lot of interesting questions. The unpopularity (these days) of "adult supervision" investor supplied CEOs, for example. The relative obscureness of SMEs as an investment class outside of high risk VC for another.

It would be very unusual for someone to put his/her net worth (say $2m) into a small business unless they can run it. Does an economist-ic explanation exist?

<comment><USER3> Human capital - the original owner/manager knows infinitely more about the business than the new manager does.

For example: I recently took a class in college where a team of engineers and business students would pick up and run with a venture from the previous semester. My team was producing mechanical agricultural products for rural women in Ghana. I was technically the "Project Manager" but in reality, I had no idea what was going on for the first two months: who were our contacts in Ghana, why should they trust me, how had the design of our products changed over time, who was supplying our raw materials, what was the state of our financials & grant proposals, how about marketing and sales channels, what even is a Cassava?! It was really disorienting and frustrating. Yes, there was documentation [1], but reading something vs. doing something are completely different.

The most valuable members of these teams are always the ones who have stayed on the project for multiple semesters, with the overseeing professor (6 semesters of experience) being simply indispensable. If he had been replaced, the project would've fallen apart immediately.

Of course, this becomes less and less essential as the company gets larger. Replacing the CEO at a Microsoft or an Apple may change high-level decision making, but most of the human capital is stored within the large, diversified, hierarchical employee base.

As for putting your entire net worth into one investment, that's a simple risk/reward profile. If you're going to put all of your monetary assets into one investment vehicle, you're probably going to put all of your other assets (skills, contacts, time) into this investment as well. Capital attracts capital, be it fiscal capital or human capital.

[1] The documentation was actually excellent as each exiting team had sworn to do a great job so that the next team wouldn't have to go through the same frustration that the exiting team had experienced. Wishful thinking.

<comment><USER4> This is part of the reason why working for a company as part of buying the company exists. In small businesses, it is possible for an interested purchaser to actually work under the existing owner for months or years to receive training and ensure the business will continue to survive. Even founders of lifestyle businesses take a lot of pride in what they've built, so there is a sentimental reason to sell this way too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What size company is he talking about -- 5 employees? 15? 50? 500? 5,000? Public companies are certainly run with ownership being different from management.

But if we're talking about a 15-person company, the author says:

 _" This means that before long there will be a general feeling of resentment, after all if you (and possibly your co-founders, also lying on the beach) are going to receive all or at least a very large chunk of the profits then why do all the hard work?"_

That big chunk of profits comes from the fact that you took the initial risk, you worked the endless hours at the beginning, you created the whole thing in the first place. Why on earth should they resent you continuing to take your fair share of the fruits of your previous labor? If they have a problem with that, the problem isn't with you, it's with capitalism in general.

You _do_ need to make sure everyone continues to be appropriately invested in the company, including the new CEO. But the idea that you should either run a company or not own it at all is ludicrous -- taken to its logical conclusion, this means investors shouldn't exist!

<comment><USER6> You raised a good point in bringing up that phrase "fair share." What is the fair share for someone who doesn't do anything? What should someone get for mere possession?

I'm asking not in the present-day legal sense (where the answer is, whatever's fair is whatever you've clawed out for yourself), but in the moral sense of how much should ownership of _anything_ actually be worth if you're not continuing to put any effort into a venture, but are totally passive--a name on paper.

Where does "setting up and creating a thing and then profiting as an absent owner" cross over into rent-seeking?

<comment><USER7> > for someone who doesn't do anything

Presumably that person who "doesn't do anything" now spent many years working 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, for zero pay building the business. It would not exist in any form without them.

<comment><USER6> So, someone spends 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, for zero pay, for some period of time (say, a year), and for the rest of their life, they receive free money.

Tweak the numbers but that's what you're saying in a nutshell... and that's certainly the way the world works now.

Should it? Do we like the idea of "receive free money" because there is entrepreneurship involved? What if it someone who was born into owning a business? Do we still like the idea as much?

<comment><USER8> The other side of it is that the entire enterprise would theoretically not exist without that initial effort.

While it may not appear fair under certain ethical frameworks for someone to receive free money _, it seems to be that the choice is "everyone gets nothing" versus "someone gets more than others because they created it".

_ in my experience, this is a red herring. I know very few founders who don't work harder after an acquisition or capital investment than before. Those who are sitting on the beach tend to have sold their interest.

<comment><USER6> Again, how long after that enterprise has existed _should_ a person get to claim free money? I think that phrasing, "may not appear fair," is kind of a weaselly way to say "rent-seeking is ok and let's keep it" (which is, I get it, a common sentiment among people who think they might be the rentiers some day). I don't think it is good for society, certainly not the one I'd _like_ to live in, though it sure is good for the person getting that free money.

(And yes, I know this is largely in the realm of hypotheticals, because it seldom happens that the owner is totally absent...)

<comment><USER9> I get the moral argument you're making, but there's a practical side to it, too.

In any capitalist system, the fruits (profits) of an income-generating asset (such as a business) accrue to the owners. Assuming that the idea of private property ownership exists, I can't think of any other coherent place for the profits to go, other than the owner.

Sometimes, a business might be an unexpected hit, taking off and generating revenues beyond the wildest dreams of the founder. Suddenly the company is flush with cash. Now assuming all the employees are fairly compensated, and all the company's other financial needs are met, then beyond a small buffer, what is there to do with the excess cash aside from paying it out as a dividend to the owner?

So I guess my point is that we can make moral hypotheticals all day (about whether it's "right" for the owners of a profitable company to get "free" money "forever" without necessarily "doing anything" further), but I'm not sure what other system we could put in place within a capitalist framework. If a company is treating its employees well, meeting all needs, and still generating an operating surplus, where else would you have that money go, if not to the owners?

Also I think your use of the term "rent-seeking" here is incorrect. A business owner receiving "passive" (or at least "not much active involvement") income from the business they own is kinda the antithesis of rent-seeking.

Rent-seeking behaviour is the attempt to increase your share of the wealth, by means other than generating additional wealth. When you're the one who owns a profitable company, you're the one generating that wealth.

The classic example of rent-seeking is someone installing a chain across a river that happens to run through their land, and then starting to charge people to pass through "their" bit of river. They add no value to the economy in doing this, no product is created nor any service rendered; they are simply extracting rents from river-users.

Another example might be when a company seeks to tilt laws/regulations in its favour (e.g. through lobbying), with the intention of increasing the share of the wealth without the business actually having to generate it. Just like the river, no additional wealth is generated as a result of this action: existing wealth is merely being redistributed (toward the rent-seeker) by government policy.

The key concept in rent-seeking being that wealth (the so-called "rent") is being captured by a party (the rent-seeker) without them generating it.

<comment><USER6> Where you said...

"Rent-seeking behaviour is the attempt to increase your share of the wealth, by means other than generating additional wealth. When you're the one who owns a profitable company, you're the one generating that wealth."

When you own a company, you and everyone else who shows up that day to work are the ones generating that wealth. Ownership by itself doesn't generate anything. Activity does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One way to work this is to have the person who replaces you be "you, but only a few hours a week".

That is, automate your business to the point that it takes substantially less than one full time person to run it. Kill off all manual recurring tasks, automate all the common customer service interaction, get the infrastructure ticking away so that it stops routinely blowing up on you. Get things down to just a handful of customer emails that actually need a human response, then book that flight to Ibiza.

They have wifi, I imagine. Run your business over coffee in the morning, then go off and live your life.

<comment><USER11> As an employee, why should I bust my ass working all day if you're just going to answer a few emails over coffee and that's it?

<comment><USER12> Because those few emails might bring in more customers which might bring you a bigger paycheck.

<comment><USER13> I'll put it in a less charitable way - because those few e-mails are probably worth more to the company that a month of your work.

I find those "The Dog in the Manger" assertions weird. Most businesses are started by people wanting to make big money - often to secure not only themselves, but their families and causes they care about. Can't blame them, because frankly, even 8h of work week most of us are trapped in seems like a ridiculous waste of life. So the system promises them more money for less effort if they shoulder the risks and initially work their asses off to build a business. They do so, and now we should renege on the promise? Sounds like a great idea if you want to ensure the next people decide not to bother starting anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet I know several founders who do exactly that and with great success.

I think it comes down to what kind of business, what your business is based on (IP, network, patents, technology, marketing) and if you are the kind of person who understand how to hire the right people and delegate the right kind of jobs.

There is always a middle ground.

<comment><AUTHOR> For every rule there are exceptions. If you're 100% confident that you can do this by all means, go ahead. But my experience to date suggests this is a recipe fraught with all kinds of trouble and just hiring 'the right people' isn't going to cut it (if only because people change over time). In the end you'll either end up returning to recover from some disaster (it's still your problem after all, as a majority shareholder), you might lose the company altogether or you'll end up selling it anyway but in worse shape than when you left.

There is always a middle ground, but sometimes that middle ground isn't quite wide enough to stand on and it's better to go for clarity, have your hands on or have your hands completely free.

<comment><USER15> I know a couple people with businesses like this. In each case, it's because they stumbled into a business that was unexpectedly profitable, but which wasn't something that they really wanted to be in. Usually it's not something that can really be _sold_ either - typically they're taking advantage of temporary market niches, are too small to be of strategic value to a big player, and have a geographically-distributed and lightly-attached employee base that's not a good candidate for a talent acquisition.

Under these circumstances, usually the most rational course is to treat the business like an annuity: while it lasts, milk the profits, do all the stuff you really want to do like travel the world or write a book, and save up a bunch of money. The gravy train will end eventually, but they never wanted to be in this business in the first place, so "losing the company altogether" is a plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The missing piece if the puzzle is that the road to passive income is passive investment. Cashing out and investing the proceeds in suitable syndicates is the what is likely to work. If you retain significant equity, you didn't cash out and you've got a passive investment portfolio with no diversity.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an excellent way to look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Incidentally, this is also true of renting a condo or house you own. A couple friends have attempted to rent their condo or house and move somewhere else. This has never worked out well. It is possible to hire a company to manage the condo or house, but that is expensive and the profits never quite arrive.

I have seen a couple friends successfully rent places they live near.

<comment><USER7> > It is possible to hire a company to manage the condo or house, but that is > expensive and the profits never quite arrive.

This makes sense if you think about it from a capitalist perspective, though.

Adam owns a condo and rents it out. He makes $500/mo after his expenses. Unless competition for property management is very high (quite the opposite), the "perfect" amount to charge for that service is going to be as close to $500/mo as possible while still getting Adam to pay it.

The most common complaint I've heard about property management firms is that somehow their prices always seem to be somewhere in the 95-105% of net profit for a single well-appointed property.

<comment><USER18> I've discovered that this is a general rule in any similar industry- time- shares, boat-charters, etc. There are people who are professionals in that industry. They know where the money is, and they get it. We are basically amateurs that they are welcoming to their playing field.

EDIT: s/we/they/ in the last sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm currently working for a smallish family-owned company and I'm tempted to forward this to the owner.

He doesn't want to retire but also doesn't want to commit to the time requirements of the day to day operation of the company. This wouldn't be a big deal because he has set himself up with some great managers and a solid foundation.

However... about once a month he gets an itch and decides to get in the middle of the smoothly running operation he spent decades creating because he "wanted to help." It just causes chaos and anger by the people running the company for him the other 25 days each month.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't agree that it's this black and white, but it's likely to be true for most small-scale companies.

The way I always describe it to people is that salary != profit. Let's say that you are making $100k a year running your company. How much would you have to pay someone else to do your job with the same level of effectiveness? If it's $50,000, then you're making $50k a year in profit for being the owner. If it's $150,000, then you are actually giving up $50k per year for the privilege of being your own boss.

It's certainly possible to be a non-participating owner and make a good profit on a business. This is what Warren Buffett does with Berkshire Hathaway -- he buys profitable, well-run companies and usually keeps the former owners on to continue operating them. Doing it from the other direction is much tougher, because you either need to make yourself redundant or hire your replacement.

</comment><comment><USER21> I might be missing something here, but isn't hiring somebody new to do your job exactly what the new owners of the company have to do if you sell it? Maybe this will be delayed by golden handcuffs, but sooner or later it has to happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you sell it you won't be hovering over whoever gets placed in your position to tell them how to do their job and technically it is now the buyers problem, not yours.

Bill Gates did it with Microsoft and at that level I'm sure that there is enough momentum in the business to keep it moving along or even to improve. But most smaller businesses (say < 30 employees or so) are both culturally and dynamically much more personal and being both gone and still present in the background creates a strange power dynamic (who's the real boss?) and frustration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has everyone forgotten about the "family owned business" or the business where you just keep it? I feel like I'm saying something foreign, where it shouldn't be foreign at all. Why does everything _have_ to come down to selling the company

Here's my point: Everyone believes in growth. And everyone believes in small business, but people also believe capitalism is fine the way it is.

And we can believe all of those things at once, and wonder why we have poor people in our society, cheque cashing stores and inequality.

You can believe in those three ideas all you want, but they don't believe in each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> It says 'run it' right there in the title. Keeping it is definitely an option but running it by remote control is something I advocate (strongly) against.

<comment><USER22> It does, but the slant always seems to be towards _selling it_ as a better option. I agree remote-management doesn't work. But even here on HN, very rare to see a pro-"keep it" stance on anything. Silicon Valley seems obsessed with "get rich" outcomes.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on the business, the persons involved and it depends on your future plans. If you see it as 'leveling up' then selling it is the best way forward, if you want a nice business where you call the shots that you grow at your own pace then keeping it would seem to be the best course. But that's a totally different discussion and a much more complex one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I worked at a company in this situation. Revenues were stagnating and senior employees started leaving. The non-CEO partner was uninvolved and kept pressing for a sale at all business meetings. The atmosphere at the company was pretty dreary.

The CEO remedied this situation by choosing a new CEO from within the remaining senior staff, while giving himself a new position of chief product officer/biz dev.

However, this was all merely a title swap, as the ex-CEO kept tight hold over the finances. So a weird power dynamic formed, as the new CEO was essentially effete. Anything that incurred a cost had to be discussed with the ex-CEO. The new CEO enacted a rigid fiscal policy by reducing headcount and the expenses under his immediate control. Morale fell and the new CEO eventually resigned.

The company is still in existence, and the owner is considering selling it now. Hopefully it's not too late.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is the exact same lesson I learned, painfully, with rental property. I think it probably applies to everything. In my case, despite owning property in a college town (which you would think would be a sure win), I lost a lot of money and experienced a lot of stress, and finally came to realize that I could either be a landlord, which requires personal skills I didn't have at the time (I think I might have gotten mean enough now - age helps), or I could just sell the damn thing and walk away. Doing the latter was a good move. I wish I had done it a couple of years earlier.

</comment><comment> SG- I'm seeing this exact thing at a restaurant I work at during weekends. Owner shows up once a week to drop off pay checks and lives in another city (1.5 hours away).

All those points pretty much apply.

</comment><comment><USER25> > if you (and possibly your co-founders, also lying on the beach) are going to > receive all or at least a very large chunk of the profits then why do all > the hard work?

So... basically the stock market?

<comment><AUTHOR> The stock market applies to companies that have gone 'public', not to privately held companies currently being run by the founders.

The article is not aimed at those that are about to go public or that have already done so but rather at the founders of companies with up to ~30 employees or so and < a few million dollars of turnover per year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What about moving to a board position, like Bill Gates or Alexis Ohanian? You're still part of the company, but don't have to worry about day-to-day...

<comment><AUTHOR> You can do that, and with a large company it will probably work. For a smaller company (especially one that is held privately or that only ever received small bits of funding) it likely is not going to work. One of the companies I've invested in went through this whole cycle and now has the original founder back as the CEO after several years of being absent.

The opportunity cost for the founder in that particular case is something I really don't want to think about even if for me as an investor his return to the CEO position is good news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >take off to Ibiza and watch the money roll in while lying on the beach. Passive income if there ever was, it seems such a good idea!

I wish the blog author would have addressed the employee-empowered hands hands off approach suggested in 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris. That book seems to suggest (mostly) passive income approach is possible if done right, but this blog doesn't address that alternative to its suggested bad-outcomes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are for the most part 'employee free' businesses as far as I understand it. Any company that needs a real person for its day-to-day management will not fit in the '4 hour work week' concept.

<comment><USER27> You missed the example of his own original company, he had employees, the moral of that part of the book was proper delegation and giving employees decision budgets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> _This means that before long there will be a general feeling of resentment, after all if you (and possibly your co-founders, also lying on the beach) are going to receive all or at least a very large chunk of the profits then why do all the hard work?_

If they like their job and you redistribute a good share of the profits, I don't see how this can happen.

</comment><comment><USER29> _...after all if you (and possibly your co-founders, also lying on the beach) are going to receive all or at least a very large chunk of the profits then why do all the hard work?_

This same resentment may (will) occur with early employees if the cofounders are part time. Have same issue at current company.

<comment><USER30> And the same resentment can happen if the founders are full time. This has happened to me 2x:

The first the sole founder was seen as fiddling while Rome burned, long lunches on with rich friends and always on the phone, never doing anything (and getting paid well for it). Now I recognize he was probably trying to line up another round - but this was dot.com 1.0, we were young and didn't know how the game was played. Also he just wasn't good at communicating this downward - or at least as far down as we were.

At the second place the founders were all regarded as incompetent, and thus getting paid well for doing useless work. I think they where just nerds, and bad at interacting people.

I think management is hard and resenting your boss is common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _Why not hire someone reliable to run the company_

I remember reading a blog post by Derek Sivers, of CD Baby fame, how he did just that. But I cannot find it now.

</comment><comment><USER32> > This means that before long there will be a general feeling of resentment, > after all if you (and possibly your co-founders, also lying on the beach) > are going to receive all or at least a very large chunk of the profits then > why do all the hard work?

Isn't that the point of capitalism? Profits go to owners, not workers?

<comment><USER11> The point of capitalism is that profits go to those who work hard to earn them. Why would I bust my ass as an employee if you're just sitting on your ass, and you're still going to receive the bulk of the reward?

<comment><USER33> > The point of capitalism is that profits go to those who work hard to earn > them.

No, the point of capitalism -- and for which its critics named it "capitalism" \-- is that profits go to those who own capital.

The idea that the proceeds generated by hard work _should_ go to those working hard rather than being captured by capital was sort of the central criticism aimed at the dominant system of the developed world in the 19th century by the critics that gave that system the name "capitalism".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone tried this site? [http://www.startupadoptionagency.com/](http://www.startupadoptionagency.com/)

</comment><comment><USER35> The best way to sell your company is by running it well.</comment>


Open Source PaaS Built on Docker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ooyala/atlantis <comment><USER2> I've been following PaaSs built on docker for a while, and it seems like the new swarm mode in version 1.12 makes them pretty much obsolete. I was a huge fan of deis (deis.io), but it seems like they are pivoting away from docker to do something different (deis.com). At this point, think docker has become big enough such that building a platform on top of it is pretty much redundant, but something like this may prove useful for more modular container systems such as rkt.

<comment><USER3> My brief skim over the Swarm announcement was that, while it focuses on the orchestration problem, it's not a fully-fledged PaaS. It's somewhere closer to where Kubernetes is working.

Essentially, you turn on a swarm and then ... oh, I still need routing. And service injection. And I need something to build the app. Something to hold the images. I guess I need standard debugging interfaces. Standard performance measurement. And ... and ... and ...

PaaSes require a _lot_ of engineering.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal on the fringes of one such PaaS, Cloud Foundry.

<comment><USER4> PaaSes also require a lot of operational prowess. Once you have the engineering prototype up and running, keeping it running is a whole other story.

<comment><USER3> This is also true.

At Pivotal we dogfood the latest releases of Cloud Foundry by deploying it to Pivotal Web Services: our public, we-make-money-from-this, there-are-legal- and-marketing-consequences-for-fucking-up cloud service.

By and large, nobody notices when we do it. BOSH is pretty good at that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This project has not been updated since February. Cursory searches are not showing more active forks. It might be interesting to look at the code for educational purposes, but I wouldn't recommend building on this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Last commit 6 months ago

</comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare against dokku ([https://github.com/dokku/dokku](https://github.com/dokku/dokku))?

<comment><USER8> Also deis and flynn. [http://deis.io/](http://deis.io/) [https://flynn.io/](https://flynn.io/)

There's quite a few options in this area. I've recently started using dokku for personal projects. My current plan is to migrate to deis in future if/when I want multiple nodes.

<comment><USER9> If you're only targetting 2-3 systems for redundancy (each the same apps), you could configure them exactly the sime behind a load balancer, then have each deploy just run to all 2-3. Did this as a POC early last year.

<comment><USER10> How do you handle databases in that configuration?

<comment><USER9> In that case, it was using Azure Tables and an ElasticSearch cluster. Also, you'd probably want to manage databases used by multiple systems outside your dokku anyway, but I would just assume use a DBaaS offering given an option is suitable, I have less desire to manage a database/backups, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool - there is Convox who does this as well.

one question - there have been a few open source PAAS out there for a while. But no real competitor to Heroku till now. What's missing ?

<comment><USER12> You mean like Scalingo [http://scalingo.com](http://scalingo.com) ? ;-)

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder

<comment><USER11> interesting.. serious advice: get a SAAS marketing expert. Pay whatever they want. Your discoverability is really bad.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the advice. We'll do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really pleased to see that they've open-sourced this work! I interviewed at Ooyala back in 2013 when they were just getting started on this project so it's quite satisfying to see how far they've taken this project!

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks cool. I'm using dokku to do that and I'm very satisfied with it, but I would like something closer to core docker experience, which would make it easier to integrate with other tools/process (like swarm, which not to have on dokku is a big problem).

This is where I want to see docker go, being able to handle zero downtime deployment without pain, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why this was necessary given Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes, AWS... Can someone elaborate?

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, none of those services or projects existed when we first started building Atlantis at Ooyala. I haven't been at Ooyala for a while now, so not sure what their plans are for this project now that open source tooling with wider support exists.

<comment><USER3> This is a good reason.

I hear similar questions about Cloud Foundry: "why did you write Diego instead of using Kubernetes?" \-- because Kubernetes didn't exist. "Why BOSH instead of Terraform?" \-- Terraform didn't exist (and has different opinions, anyhow). "Why Garden instead of Docker?" \-- Docker just didn't exist. And so on.

I call it NIYS: Not Invented Yet Syndrome.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Super cool! I've been using Singularity ([https://github.com/hubspot/singularity](https://github.com/hubspot/singularity)) for the last year and love it.

(Also I work at HubSpot where Singularity was developed)

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't forget supergiant.io which addresses the very kludgey way that Docker addresses stateful distributed apps

<comment><USER19> Your software, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I assume the "aaS" stands for "as a service", but what's the P stand for?

And yes, I looked at the link. It uses "PaaS" without defining it.

<comment><USER21> Platform as a Service - applies to services like Heroku and the like.

<comment><USER20> Would it really have been that hard to type the word "platform"? Sigh.

Thanks.

<comment><USER22> it's not exactly esoteric. paas, saas, iaas are broadly used terms and have been for a while.</comment></comment></comment></comment>