The Ritual Calling of the Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://joegaudet.tumblr.com/post/556424221/the-ritual-calling-of-the-engineer

<comment><USER2> Although it is a bit goddy for my tastes, I've always liked the Ritual Calling of the Engineer and the Iron Ring that goes with it, which is unusual because I'm certainly not one for ceremony. But I appreciate the serious tone and quiet underlining of the importance of the discipline.

I'm not an engineer, but one of my top software dev industry pet peeves: "Software Engineers" who aren't actually engineers. It drives me nuts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't agree more, that's why I like that in Canada you have to be a PEng to get to out right call your self an engineer on your resume or business card.

Me personally I am an EIT (Engineer in Training) which means I have a degree but not enough work experience (you need 4 years under a PEng) to be a full fledged Engineer.

<comment><USER3> Regardless of what the official reasons stated for the creation of such government enforced monopolies on professional titles are, the true motivations are always the same: protectionism. Requiring someone to have an official certification and then limiting the number of such certifications, either explicitly or implicitly by requiring extensive education and experience, reduces the number of certified individuals, resulting in higher wages.

<comment><USER4> I sympathize with this position, I really do. But in some cases, I can really justify the protectionism.

Are you prepared to call for removal of requirement for medical doctors to be certified and licensed next?

<comment><USER5> I'd be prepared to call for the AMA not to have a monopoly on their certification and licensing. As it is, we bypass them anyway by importing a bunch of doctors who went to med schools in the Caribbean. Why not run more U.S. med schools instead? At the _very_ least, increase the number of med- school slots in line with population growth; there are now fewer med-school slots per capita than there were in 1980, because the AMA refused to allow any new med schools to open between 1982 and 2001, and has put strict limits on enrollments at existing schools. Throughout the 80s and 90s they justified this with dire predictions of a "glut" of doctors, which of course turned out to be incorrect.

<comment><USER4> Sounds fair, but that concerns the amount of people licensed, not the requirement to be licensed in the first place.

If you create an AMA2 while maintaining present licensing standards, you're simply moving the ultimate responsibility for guarding the standards from AMA and AMA2 to an entity above them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a really interesting tradition, Joe — thanks for sharing. As an engineering student in the US, I was unaware of this, but I kind of wish we took part in such a sacrament too. Being an engineer is an honor and truly is something you must be called to do.

On a side note, I get really offended when people nonchalantly call themselves engineers. It's a title you have to earn, not one you just can decide to call yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe some schools in the states are starting to do a similar tradition.

<comment><USER6> According to Wikipedia, there is a similar organization (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Engineer>), but the chapter at my university is inactive (according to their website). Such a shame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating. Strikes me as somewhat a parallel to the Hippocratic Oath. Being that engineering often deals with taming huge forces (somebody here referred to a collapsing bridge), and also with the welfare of the public, the argument for a ritual hilighting personal responsibility can definitely be substantiated.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Here in Canada we take the term fairly seriously (it's copyrighted)."

Wow, I can understand a tweet being a creative work and therefore copyrightable, but a _single word_?

<comment><USER9> It's not copyrighted (of course you can't copyright a single word), but it is a protected term. You're not allowed to use it unless you're qualified.

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

<comment><USER5> Seems strangely Orwellian (in the sense of his politics-via-language writings, not the police-state kind of Orwellianism). It's a descriptive word that long predates these organizations, so it's sort of weird for them to retroactively take ownership of it. I can see specific, narrower terms, like Professional Engineer or Licensed Engineer, but _engineering_ is just a description of a kind of activity that people have done for millennia, and an _engineer_ is someone who does it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the non-Canadian-engineers in the audience, the picture is the Iron Ring that is given to all engineering graduates in Canada. It's worn on the pinky of the working hand, the original purpose being that it will smudge as you draw/write and generally serve as a constant reminder of the oath you've taken.

I know a couple of people who have stopped wearing it since graduation despite still doing engineering work. It's a little disappointing.

<comment><USER11> Maybe they don't want their work smudged?

<comment><USER12> Hard to smudge a mousepad...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interestingly, very few Canadian schools still offer _iron_ rings, most of them nowadays are made out of stainless steel.

I believe Camp one (i.e. University of Toronto and Ryerson) are the only schools left who offer real _iron_ rings (they're actually often rings returned by people who have retired/passed away, since it is asked that upon retiring from the Engineering profession you return your ring)... I'm not sure it's possible, but if you're a Canadian Engineer I'd highly recommend to drop by the Engineering Alumni office at UofT and getting yourself a real iron ring if you can, they're absolutely amazing.

<comment><USER10> See, I like the idea of the _iron_ ring, but there's a certain sentimental value to the one you got at graduation. I think I'm going to try and keep this for as long as I can even though it's stainless :S

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't wear the ring because it has undertones of being a status symbol. "I'm a smart engineer, with a ring to prove it."

<comment><AUTHOR> Which I always find amusing, because its intent couldn't be farther from a status symbol. I feel as though the actions of a few arrogant engineers have ruined what is a very good tradition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty good oath for being a good human being all around ... not just for engineers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good antidote to "Work fast and don't be afraid to break things". Even when there's a legitimate business case for sloppy work, somehow it just never sits right.

</comment><comment><USER17> I just entered the American equivalent, the Order of the Engineer. Our ring is smooth, polished stainless steel and the obligation is not as ponderous (written around 1970 as I recall). I think it's definitely a worthwhile thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nitpick: as the text itself says, but the title doesn't, the name is "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer".

</comment><comment><USER18> Absolutely unreadable dark grey on black. Are you nuts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was about to plead the old, I am an engineer, cut me a break deal.

But actually, in all honesty, I don't often look at my blog from the outside of tumblr perspective. And this is the first thing I've posted of my own on here.

So long and short, point taken, I'll look at some of the other built in tumblr themes... I don't want to spend time making a fancy one my self.

.joe

<comment><USER18> Thank you, and sorry for the harsh tone, in daylight I winced and could read nothing :)</comment></comment></comment>


Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence –Donna Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/11/donna-zuckerberg-social-media-misoyny-violence-classical-antiquity-not-all-dead-white-men <comment><USER2> Misogyny is not violence. Violence may be motivated by violence, but in itself it is not violence. She follow the disturbing trend to call words and speech "violence"

> "It is without doubt that social media has allowed this to happen," she says > of the toxic moment we're in. "It has created the opportunity for men with > anti-feminist ideas to broadcast their views to more people than ever before > – and to spread conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation

Even if you believe what shes trying to explain, why is it unique for men? Radical feminists do the same thing, just reversed. Anyone with any hateful opinion can speak on the internet.

<comment><USER3> Where in her book or in the article did she "call words and speech 'violence'"?

<comment><USER2> Have you read the title?

> [...] elevated misogyny to new levels of violence

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "...the Red Pill, which are men connected by common resentments against > women, immigrants, people of colour," she explains.

More like a common resentment toward people like her who classify anything and everything as misogynist and racist.

<comment><USER3> Nope, /r/TheRedPill (quarantined) is a shining example.

Highlights from [https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/top/](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/top/):

* Three ways to consciously manipulate women before they subconsciously manipulate you.

* 1000 migrants in Germany sexually assault, rob and rape women at one train station on New Year's eve. Feminists actively are trying to cover it up. (/r/cringeanarchy user)

* Now I am become Chad, the destroyer of pussy. (/r/milliondollarextreme user)

* HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD: 37 Rules of Approaching Model-Tier Girls

*Feminism is not a shit test. Feminism is a macro level compliance test, and we're all failing it. (/r/jordanpeterson user)

...etc. I'm not sure how you could be the least bit familiar with Red Pill culture and argue in good faith that it isn't exactly what she describes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Internet-wide crawl of ads.txt files aggregated into a CSV–for free - <AUTHOR> https://www.adstxt.com/ <comment><USER2> Seems to be a fraction of the coverage other aggregator sites have (i.e. [https://www.adauth.com](https://www.adauth.com))

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. We are planning to load all domains in Common Crawl soon. For now we only have domains in Alexa top 1M and other similar lists.

You can submit domains ([https://www.adstxt.com/submit- domain](https://www.adstxt.com/submit-domain)) or email a list to support [at] adstxt.com and we will add them to our index.</comment></comment>


Tesla Q1 2020 Update - <AUTHOR> https://ir.tesla.com/static-files/c1723af4-ffda-4881-ae12-b6f3c972b795 <comment><USER2> Since, things are slow, my notes....

Misc:

\- Fremont plant idle since March 23rd

\- raised 2.3B in February, which seems really well timed now

\- Musk venting with "FREE AMERICA NOW" tweet makes him seem almost crazy

\- can see why Elon is going crazy on twitter, he'd almost turned around Telsa and now they may be in the worst cash crunch of their long life

\- Shanghai Giga reopened on Feb 10th, showing the importance of multiple factories around the world( around 150,000 in capacity once they get going for Model 3, Model Y not yet and should be incremental on top of Model 3 number)

\- Berlin Giga scheduled to start producing Model Y's in 2021, so capex drain for rest of year and probably into 2021

\- TSLA trying to run an amazon HQ2 like process for Truck and Model Y factories, look for small, southern, and poor cities to bid and probably win

Numbers:

\- 1Q Revenue $5.99B vs Estimate $5.81B

\- 1Q Free Cash Flow ($895M) vs Estimate ($604.4M)

\- GAAP net income of $16M for 1Q

\- sale of ZEV in 1Q $354 million vs $133 million from Q4, not going to have this to bail out their quater in 2Q

\- 35 Megawatts of solar( down by about a third Q/Q)

\- sitting on $8.1B of cash, sweet!! but burn rate is approx ($3-4B) a year

After:

\- semi not until 2021

\- not reaffirming numbers, will check in again in 2Q, makes sense

Want to know:

\- Solar roof? give up or start committing, hard to sell to consumer during shutdown

\- battery storage for energy, growth area or sign of lack of focus and minor distraction to core business?

inventory growth? Building cars no one is buying or still not able to keep up with growth or finally found balance between the two?

\- Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things to take pressure of Elon?

<comment><USER3> \- Will Elon stop with tweets that hurt Tesla? Appoint a CEO, or COO to run things to take pressure of Elon?

I have read this from so many people for the last 5 years all the time. Sure, the tweets show that Elon wants faster growth, and frustrated, and I didn't like that tweet either, but if you want a conservative CEO, buy IBM or Oracle stocks, please leave Tesla alone.

<comment><USER4> I just don't want a batshit crazy person running a company I invest in.

<comment><USER5> I'm not the best in expressing this, but I believe to think like Elon Musk (except I'm lazy and not that bright), I think there are quite a few that think like Elon. Yes, I know how it sounds, but if you're obsessed about truth there's a chance you think like him as well.

IMO Elon Musk is rational and also expressive. He thinks from first principles (aka how does the world _really_ work?) and he communicates that way.

Most people can't handle that. They can't handle when someone is expressive (aka the Tesla @ 420 tweet, he simply expresses his opinion) or reasoning from first principles (weed is legal right? Yea, might smoke it, might not, does it matter? New experience is new data, hmm, doesn't seem too interesting).

They think he's insane. He isn't. He does live a bit in a bubble where he sometimes forgets that other people are judgmental, mostly in a conservative sense (compared to how he thinks). But those judgmental people don't see one thing: the guy is hunting for truth, finding it and he applies it to its product.

Nothing beats truth* (the fact that we're using computers now and not an abacus is evidence of that)

* All the standard considerations of science apply (falsification, learning from your mistakes and so on).

<comment><USER6> > Most people can't handle that

Right, we can't handle a billionaire demanding that everyone risk their lives to boost his stock price.

And since when are arguments derived from first principles delivered in 3 word all-caps tweets?

<comment><USER7> You think Elon Musk's motivation is greed? That people going back to work or not will greatly affect his lifestyle?

Is there any nuance when it comes to Elon Musk, or only fan-boys and haters?

<comment><USER8> Not the OP. I don't think his motivation is greed in a strictly financial sense but he's a complete narcissist. When a government guy comes and shuts his factory down due to a pandemic he apparently can't live with the fact that he's a non-essential business and needs to lay low for a while.

It's the same thing with the mini-submarine paedophile fiasco. Some regular dude who has experience in what he's actually talking about tells him to go away and he can't handle it because he thinks he's Tony Stark or something.

I don't think his eccentric behaviour really leaves much space for nuance, that's not really on anyone commenting here.

<comment><USER9> He has lofty goals that require massive resources. Each also requires a long timeline. Specifically he is attempting to populate another planet, link computers to brains and turn transportation green. Each is an earth shattering accomplishment on their own. He is trying to do all 3 and in his mind at least he is driven by saving humanity not greed. He feels the current restrictions are going to have severe impact on what are for him lifetime goals.

Now is it narcissistic to think that he has to do it? Maybe. Often times though I would think that the people that changed our way of life have to be narcissistic. Gates, Jobs, Rockefeller, Ford, Edison. They are real people with flaws but sometimes those flaws also drive them. Not malignant narcissistic though, there is a difference.

He is definitely ill served by his twitter account though and these recent tweets are not great in regards to the opinions of many of those that support him.

<comment><USER10> Along the lines of what others have said elsewhere in this thread:

No one reasonable is criticizing Musk for being a visionary CEO, someone who is interested in taking risks that overcome historically difficult challenges.

They're criticizing him going completely off the handle; calling someone a pedophile on Twitter when they disagree with him, talking completely out of his ass about "taking the company private", or trying to play armchair epidemiologist when he _clearly_ has a vested interest in a potentially risky avenue of behavior.

I'm very happy to see the things that SpaceX has achieved [0] and I'm also happy that Tesla has done such a good job popularizing EVs [1], but I'm blown the fuck away whenever I see people responding to _entirely justified_ criticisms of Elon's character by pointing out what he's accomplished and how lofty the rest of his goals are.

Do we just not have standards for people in Musk's position? Do folks really think it's reasonable for someone to comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does?

[0] Although let's be honest, the company treats its employees pretty damn badly.

[1] Accurately representing the self-driving capabilities of their vehicles, on the other hand, leaves quite a bit to be desired.

<comment><USER9> I mean at least 45% of the country things its totally fine for the president of the united states to 'comport themselves the way he _routinely_ does' so I have to think that many people are willing to overlook how Musk acts. For the most part I am too (in regards to Musk), I don't expect perfection from business leaders. He is a flawed person as are we all. Unfortunately for him he chooses to amplify his flaws to a massive twitter following.

I think the guy is a once in a life time visionary. With that said I would never want to work for him but I hope he succeeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I reading this right? They have 25% profit margin on each automotive? Feels like a tech company's margins. Does anyone know how it compares to traditional automakers?

<comment><USER12> Is 25% high? I have no clue.

<comment><USER13> For cars, yeah

<comment><USER12> And for tech?

<comment><USER14> SaaS has really high gross margins (>65%?), but I'm not sure that gross margin number is comparable with the 25% that Tesla reported.

<comment><USER15> Does anybody know why Saas on average have such high gross margin ?

<comment><USER16> It doesn't cost much to add a user to SaaS, but it costs a lot to write the software and convince people to pay for it.

Gross margins are calculated from per unit costs, so advertising expenses, servers, supporting SaaS, and the salaries of programmers and sales people are not included.

Also, physical products are made from relatively scarce resources. Software is typed, and words are not scarce.

SaaS companies have benefited from demand outstripping supply. SaaS replaces human labor, so it takes a SaaS competitor to drive down prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Serious question: I am confused as to why do we see so many comments lamenting, what is essentially freedom of speech of EM? I mean, it's not like he is conclusively wrong about "Free America Now" comment. He may be proven wrong over time or even right.

<comment><USER18> HN is the most "doomer" place on the net, vehemently anti free-speech and insanely jealous of Elon musk. This is the perfect storm.

<comment><USER19> Is it? HN seems very pro-free speech and EM compared to places like Twitter and Reddit.

<comment><USER18> [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=free%20speech%20absolutism&sort=byPopularity&type=comment)

edit: Also not exactly the most sane places to compare :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmmm, I have been a ardent Tesla supporter for many years and actually own 2 teslas (my post history would confirm that), but alas starting today I am done with Tesla and Elon. I have given him a pass for \- Promising autopilot in 15 days (after they abruptly terminated their contract with mobile eye) when I bought my model S in 2016 \- saying FSD features are 3-6 months away in 2016 (some of these features launched this month in 2020) \- pedo guy tweet \- 420 tweet \- other absurd hyperbolic claims like battery swap, coast to coast driving in 2018, top line Model S loaner cars for everyone, blah blah blah \- a neural net driven rain sensor that barely works

I still believe that Model 3 and S are the two best cars I have ever driven. But I can't support Tesla anymore, which is not build for a mission, but seems to be build to squeeze workers and lie to customers.

<comment><USER21> I wonder if it'd be better with him more removed from the CEO role. I really like how innovative their designs are. But being abusive is a damnation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Page 16 blew my mind. From 70 pieces of metal => 2 pieces of metal. Does anyone know how they do that?

<comment><USER23> Tesla is going ham with thixotropic aluminum casting. Big-ass machines, big- ass castings, no heat-treat.

The goal is to get that down to a single casting. Not only does this simplify production further, but you can do it with no machining afterwards, no datums, nothing. You just tap the holes and put it together.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pih4kU6yvz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pih4kU6yvz8)

The Y is realizing a lot of things they were promising with the 3. It's a much more exciting vehicle from a production standpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Curious to know how Tesla will (if it will) repatriate China profits. Perhaps they don't, but just ship China-sourced parts to Fremont and Berlin paid for with China profits?

The political climate could take a very ugly turn, China will want to keep cash within its borders.

<comment><USER25> According to their loan agreement w/ China, they must pay off their loans until they can repatriate anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As an investor, I like the format these results are presented in. The slide deck approach is a lot more approachable than the typical text-only SEC filing. An average investor is much more likely to open this and read it than the typical financial statement. It's not over-the-top marketing agency gloss, but it has some nice touches. Of course, you also get the text-only filing to follow.

As far as the key numbers, Tesla continues to push profitability and I think beat estimates by pulling off a profitable quarter in Q1. I can't imagine they will do it again in Q2, and they've suspended their guidance, but compare and contrast to, e.g. Ford, which is currently drawing all their credit lines to the max to stay afloat (to the tune of $15 billion).

They've never had spare inventory before, it will be interesting to see how fast they can clear it when things pick up. In a _very_ long shutdown scenario, Tesla will come out way ahead of standard auto makers because their cars somewhat forego the "New Model Year" craze, and they can software update all their inventory. So while most carmakers will be looking at bursting full lots of "late model year" new cars, Tesla will be selling "Model 3" and "Model Y" through their configurator same as usual.

It's been fun watching the Munro tear-downs of the Model Y. I'm curious when and how quickly those improvements will make it back into a redesigned Model 3. They have definitely improved and simplified the design in important ways. They highlighted this in their slides at the end showing underbody components of Model 3 (70 pieces) vs Model Y (2 pieces, eventually 1).

Solar is unfortunately MIA in this report. Buffalo managed to get Solar Roof ramped up to 4MW per week (1,000 homes per week) just as the shutdown hit. I would imagine a lot of momentum has been lost in their installer recruitment and training efforts. I would have been very nice to see some ROI in 2020 from Solar Roof, but I'm not sure we'll get it this year.

Looking forward to getting to see a Model Y in person and feel how much more space it has. It seems like they've left a good deal of acceleration "in the tank" to unlock in future software updates, that will also be fun to see.

<comment><USER27> Not an investor, but Tesla is looking increasingly like a money printing machine to me with so much untapped potential that they could pivot to in many ways.

The genius of the whole setup is that it's a car company that is basically a battery company but also a power infrastructure company.

IMHO, any battery produced in the next decades will have some way of being sold profitably. It just so happens that cars are a very profitable way to monetize them right now. But there are lots of other places where batteries could be equally useful (which Tesla has been exploring). When EVs commoditize over the next decade, they are ready to start pivoting to other things that will have a similarly insatiable demand for battery. Tesla using the same batteries in cars, semis, and grid storage means that any penny invested in more production capacity for batteries is not lost.

The reason semis are delayed is that they lack production capacity because it's maxed out. They're adding capacity as fast as they can at a jaw dropping pace and it's maxed out. That's not bad news but good news for Tesla.

Solar is a risky but genius move as well. I know they've gotten a lot of criticism for that and the so far underwhelming adoption rate. But it's a smart move if they can get that working. Pairing solar with batteries and car charging options (and maybe car to grid/house) is going to be a killer deal. And that's just the consumer market.

There are a lot of solar panel manufacturers out there but not a lot that are also selling grid storage solutions, mass producing cars, or have experience with building out direct sales to consumer type organizations. Add to that their approach to innovating mass production of batteries, cars, and indeed factories & machines. Tesla does all these things for the very simple reason that the sum of these things is more than the value of them individually. IMHO they'll bang on this until it starts working just right in a couple of years while dropping production cost at a pace that basically very few will be able to match and own the solar market as well.

<comment><USER28> I expect the prospects for the cybertruck are good enough to require an entire new battery factory of its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Numbers and all aside, the Solar Roof photo is very satisfying. Very clean and elegant for a solar installation.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is the craziest rollercoaster of a stock I've seen.

Props to Elon for everything he does.

He gets a lot of flak about his tweets, I for one, couldn't care less.

Big picture, he's the Henry Ford of this generation.

</comment><comment><USER31> TSLA to the moon! Or to Mars ..., Where art thou has our little Starman gone, so afar. Prices up / Prices Down. Let it fly high to where you are. As far to Deep Space like no man (or women) has gone before. Chasing you all the way to the light core. TSLA will lead the way. To new advances to tech, explorations, energy arrays, and more ... > cq cq cq cq jp-7ffecb3b54ada1e35e69814b3eaa7fd4 Open the door and light the way.

</comment><comment><USER32> Infographic: Highlights of Tesla Q1 2020 earnings report [https://news.alphastreet.com/tesla-inc-nasdaq- tsla-q1-2020-e...](https://news.alphastreet.com/tesla-inc-nasdaq- tsla-q1-2020-earnings-results/)

Tesla Inc. turned to profit in the first quarter of 2020 aided by strong revenue growth, continuing the positive trend seen in the trailing two quarters.

</comment><comment><USER33> Not a big deal but FYI Tesla IT people the page title is "Q3 2019 Updated".

Edit: fixed.

</comment><comment><USER34> Excerpt:

"We enabled stop sign and traffic light recognition and braking for our Early Access Program users at the end of Q1 and to the wider public in April 2020".

That's awesome! They may very well release FSD in a year or two!

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm watching in disbelief at the stock market making a V shaped recovery. Nasdaq is only a few percentage points off it's all time high.

I guess don't underestimate the American consumer even at a time of economic uncertainty? I don't know how else to explain record sales from Tesla, Facebook, and Microsoft today.

<comment><USER23> Don't lose sight of reality; business closings left and right, layoffs, pay cuts, etc.

Don't let the zero-hedge crowd turn you off to arguments about funny-money from the fed. This is a fairly predictable result. Fed supplies money. Money has to be put to use. Where is productive capital? Interest rates are itty bitty. Stocks look high but .. what else to do? Risk buying high now or inflation later.

But this can only remain decoupled from the economic reality for so long.

<comment><USER35> Outside the stock price movement the earnings today were all good though. Advertisers still seem to be spending money on ads, even into April.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's nice when the good guys win.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, let me know when it happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I dig Tesla, but I wonder if Elon's own goals would be better served if they only produced motors and batteries and novel tech for the other car makers.

<comment><USER39> The only reason anyone would buy them is because tesla forced them to take electric seriously. And now that's why they can't, they need in-house tech or they're just Teslas with different chassis shapes.

Its a sad paradox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What's included in the list of things Musk promised for this year? I only remember 1 million self driving Teslas as taxis [0]. Would surprise me greatly if anything close to that happens.

[0]: [https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self- dri...](https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-robo- taxi.html)</comment>


Company raises 18 million, uses it to sue college students - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/chadwbennett/posts/10101517554625339

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://siliconslopes.com/2014/07/remote-tech-support- company...](http://siliconslopes.com/2014/07/remote-tech-support-company-itok- raises-18m-equity-funding/)</comment>


Carl Icahn Takes $100M Stake in Lyft - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/icahn-takes-100-million-stake-in-lyft-1431698445 <comment><USER2> I love how greenmail was rebranded to "activist investing". For those of you who don't know, greenmail is basically going to a company and saying: "Hey, I can convince your investors you suck and should be replaced, or you can pay me to go away." That's also activist investing (but activists are good right?)

Yet to be fair, if some random guy can convince shareholders that the board needs to be replaced, the board may be screwing up. Maybe those are the ones most likely to pay someone to settle down.

<comment><USER3> It's actually a shame, because the term "activist investor" already had a meaning.

It's what you would call nuns in the 80s who used proxy votes from pension funds to push pro-people corporate policy. Or Harvard students in the 60s who used proxies from their university endowment to agitate against corporations profiting off the Vietnam War.

These days, that doesn't really exist anymore, but if you have to refer to it its usually called "shareholder activism." Even then, most people who read that assume that you're referring to greenmailing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible to change the link to the Google one, so people don't find themselves firewalled

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Ficahn- takes-100-million-stake-in- lyft-1431698445&ei=6h9WVa_3MYSdsAXp04HABg&usg=AFQjCNGCBlXqHUlq_W5PG-2Gh84UEaBuww&sig2=xZX7DfeSPn34vIRxWiKzXQ)

<comment><USER5> You could also pay for WSJ journalism. I'm surprised HN doesn't ever seem to care about this issue.

<comment><USER4> The two are not mutually exclusive, and I'm not even sure about the net effect of linking to the non firewalled article. If I couldn't read any article from the WSJ, I don't know how likely would it be that I'd sign up.

<comment><USER5> fair point. Though if you never hit the firewall, you'd also probably never sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how things will go with Icahn and Andreessen on the same board?

[http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-04/the-icahn- vs...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-04/the-icahn-vs-dot- andreessen-fight-a-blow-by-blow-explainer)

<comment><USER7> wait Ebay did spin-off paypal, Andreessen is still at EBay's board?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Icahn for sure just invested so he could be higher in a liq pref stack than A16Z, so when things go south he can take away anything that A16Z could have potentially recouped

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a theory that Icahn is so rich and old that the money doesn't really matter to him much anymore. Instead he gets the most value from investing his money in ways that entertain him and sometimes that's by poking people he doesn't like in the eye (Ackman, Andreessen).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Carl Icahn's shenanigans were part of what drove Marvel Comics to bankruptcy in the mid-90s. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Lyft.

<comment><USER10> He ruined TWA airlines before that. Argue as you want about his success as a businessman, he is bad bad news for employees, board members, and usually (other) stockholders.

<comment><USER11> Motorola didn't end up so great because of him either.

<comment><USER12> Well remember he's only getting involved in risky projects because that's where he can maximize upside. If your company is doing well to begin with he's not there.

<comment><USER13> Not quite. Netflix was doing fine, and yet he kept trying to do his shit to them so that he could chop the company up and sell it off, piece by piece. I'm glad the Netflix board was successful in telling him to go fuck himself.

<comment><USER12> You're forgetting when he showed up at Netflix. It was after their disastrous splitting of the DVD and streaming biz when they lost 1 million subscribers and their stock price crashed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a Houston resident, we don't have any competition from Lyft anyway: they exited the market last year.

What's interesting is whether Icahn is for or against autonomous cars supplying the service. Obviously Uber/Google have one opinion, but Carl may disagree since lyft has no autonomous car technology.

<comment><USER15> > but Carl may disagree since lyft has no autonomous car technology.

Which they could buy from Tesla or Delphi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _> Lyft raised $530 million in a funding round earlier this year led by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten. Mr. Icahn's investment is the largest portion of a $150 million extension to that round at the same valuation, the company said_

 _> The money is an extension of a round of funding Lyft announced in March that values the three-year-old company at $2.5 billion._

Doing back of the envelope math, Lyft is valued at $1.97B premoney. This $680MM round gives the new investors 25.6% of the company. Uber raises even bigger rounds while giving away much smaller fractions of the company each time. Fascinating to see how market position dictates these terms in such dramatic ways.

</comment><comment><USER17> Carl Icahn is a contrarian. There's no question Uber is ahead, but Lyft has material market share. I don't see this as an activist investor issue. In Silicon Valley, people fight, and they get over it and move on. I'd be surprised if Marc and Carl can't, and don't, do the same.

<comment><USER18> Icahn is a raider. He has no plan to grow Lyft. He wants to sell it to someone and make money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how much of the company the Lyft founders still own. They have raised over $1B at relatively (compared to Uber) low valuations.

</comment><comment><USER10> What a great PR move for Uber!

</comment><comment><USER20> sigh... and tomorrow lyft will adopt worse printing tactics than uber. that guy makes uber founders look like madre Teresa

</comment><comment><USER21> I find the Icahn hate very curious, and very similar to the outrage towards Donald Sterling.

Both people have done questionable (I'm trying to be charitable) things that have hit the public limelight, and have been ostracized and scapegoated by their peers so that the public has a visible enemy they can attack instead of realizing the problems are endemic to larger systems and groups of people.

Honestly, if you think Sterling/Icahn are even in the bottom 25% of their equally immoral peers you're being duped. Continuing to vilify the symptoms of larger diseases will only allow the disease to spread, and will solve nothing. Maybe we should take a better look at the environments that create such people?

It all rather reminds me of this Scarface scene: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzfX0T4LDD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzfX0T4LDD8)

</comment><comment><USER22> Dangerous move in what could end up being a 'winner take all' market.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems he already lost interest in eBay.

<comment><USER23> That's cause he won.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bye bye, Lyft

</comment><comment><USER25> this is Lyft committing suicide and donating its zombified corpse to Carl Icahn.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why anyone would accept a single red cent from Carl Icahn boggles my mind.

<comment><USER26> He's no different than anyone else playing the money game (just take a look at his accusations towards Mr. Andreesen, who, I think, is a nice guy). He's just better at it.

<comment><USER13> He's an ass who has a long track record of basically destroying businesses, chopping them up, and selling them off. Fucking over anyone who isn't himself in the process.

There are others who do this, too. He's just the worst at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> To HackerNews, Please don't include stories in your feed that go to paid site.

<comment><USER28> Why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> N=1 but all of my friends use uber and none use Lyft. Not sure how long they'll last.

<comment><USER30> Doesn't Uber need Lyft to be around so they won't get called a monopoly?

<comment><USER31> It's not illegal to have a monopoly. The real issue is if the company employs illegally anticompetitive business practices.

[http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust- monopoly/](http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/)

<comment><USER32> Especially because Uber pretty much created the market for ride sharing</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The NFL's extravagant demands for Super Bowl host cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/6/8/5790704/nfl-super-bowl-demands-host-cities-minneapolis

<comment><USER2> This seems completely par for the course. An organization wants to maximize the revenue. There are many cities competing for the honor of hosting a Super Bowl. Why leave money on the table? The list of demands pales in comparison to even the low end estimate of $60-90 million in economic value.

Unless the issue is that the NFL is a non-profit?</comment>


As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Cloud Bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-aws-use-soars-companies-surprised-by-cloud-bills <comment><USER2> When I joined a particular startup 4 years ago I was surprised that they owned their own servers mounted in racks in a rented colo. I was all, how retro! But then the head of IT showed me the cost savings over AWS and how he orchestrated it all using VMWare images, and I saw he had a point. He saved more than enough money to pay for his full time salary to keep it all going, even dealing with hardware maintenance. What was unique was that the company had a predictable load that didn't change much. If we had needed to change capacity level drastically over a regular cycle then AWS would have started to make sense.

<comment><USER3> I have worked at a startup that was paying > 20k _per month_ for AWS. I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade. There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of "spin up another box" for every silly little tool. I have met self taught dev ops people who did not understand that you could create more than one user on a aws ubuntu machine. I was like: "if cost is a big issue, then lets spin up one beefy machine and create users for each dev", because thats what everyone using unix did back in the day (it works fine). The reply was "thats not possible" so every dev got their own dedicated instance that was 99% idle. We are paying >3k per month to aws and the business team is complaining about waste. _sigh_. old guy rant over.

<comment><USER4> Did you weigh these costs against the value of the developers not stepping on eachother's toes using the same instance?Separate users with sudo privileges provides zero isolation.

I'm unsure what use case was, but if it was a testing or staging environment dedicated to each developer, having a separate right-sized instance for each is quite sane and reasonable.

EC2 instances such as the T2/T3 series are cheap enough that there's normally not a need to be so miserly in my experience.

<comment><USER5> >> I am certain the whole system could run on one dedicated blade. There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of "spin up another box" for every silly little tool.

> Did you weigh these costs against the value of the developers not stepping > on each other's toes using the same instance? Separate users with sudo > privileges provides zero isolation.

Each developer's machine _is_ a separate instance. If the whole system could run on "one dedicated blade," then the developers could easily run a local instance on their own machines (either directly or in a VM) without stepping on anyone's toes.

Using AWS for local development seems wasteful and over-complicated to me. The only good reason I can see for doing it is if you're _really_ vendor-locked into AWS-proprietary services, and it's impractical to run your code _anywhere_ except on AWS (but that's arguably a mistake in itself).

<comment><USER6> > _Each developer 's machine is a separate instance. If the whole system could > run on "one dedicated blade," then the developers could easily run a local > instance on their own machines (either directly or in a VM) without stepping > on anyone's toes._

What the parent you're responding to likely meant was that, by running everything on one system ("one dedicated blade") you are causing all of the things on that system to share certain things. The set of system-installed packages; if nginx needs to be installed and running, is its configuration now shared between all of the services on that machine; and even the very OS itself (e.g., if it needs to go down for updates, or it needs to do, say a dist-upgrade, which means that _all_ of the associates services on that instance need to dist-upgrade together, and one laggard can thus hold everyone back.)

Even in the case of developers using an instance on AWS, the same applies, really: a dev, legitimately developing some component, could have cross-talk to others, in all of the same ways listed above. I do agree that giving devs dedicated instances might not be appropriate in many instances, and it perhaps wasn't appropriate in yours. But there's two points here: whether the devs needed those instances, or could develop on local laptops, and whether putting all instances or users on a single instance works well.

Even for development, given that most corps seem to love giving devs that code primarily for Linux servers OS X laptops, there might be advantages to allowing them to develop on the actual target hardware.

> _There was just this culture (made easy with docker containers) of "spin up > another box" for every silly little tool._

Docker here should make it rather _trivial_ to combine everything onto a single instance, since that's what isolation gets you: a well defined unit that doesn't have endless unknown dependencies on the host system.

<comment><USER7> Sounds cheaper to just give them VMware fusion and a dev OS image which is mostly identical to the target architecture.

I really don't see why many run their environment on macOS through Homebrew etc which is surely going to require modifications here and there when deploying to Linux servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally feel many things in AWS are purposely made in order to hide the real costs from you.

For instance how you are charged for S3 traffic your buckets receive even if you don't have any files there. Or how traffic between zones that is outside of your control is still charged. Or how things like AZ replication cost a ton and you have no metric to show if it even makes sense to enable them. Heck, even usage alerts cost money.

<comment><USER9> S3 traffic cost is a funny topic. I remember ~3 years ago we had an issue with AWS, where they kept charging us for web traffic to an S3 bucket we deleted. When we complained, their response was like: Well, then stop sending traffic to that (non-existing) bucket. That of course wasn't going to happen as the URL was out in the wild and got requested quite often automatically by third- party services.

<comment><USER10> Did you not control the DNS for that hostname? Not supporting AWS' stance, but you should always maintain control of your traffic flow using DNS. Reverse proxying is the latest hype for SEO juice (blog.somewhere.com->somewhere.com/blog), but subdomains are the bees knees when you need to point traffic somewhere else on demand.

<comment><USER9> Back then we already had the bucket for a few years and the person who set it up probably didn't think about the implications and simply chose to use the AWS-provided bucket URL.

And that person isn't alone. If you look around, you'll find a lot of services on the internet which directly link to S3 buckets using thee AWS-provided endpoints.

<comment><USER11> A tool my company always pulled data from was depreciated and the web ui and api got shutdown. They used the awe bucket url though for the web ui downloads and those had predictable url patterns. Turns out they didn't stop generating the data we needed, so we still just go straight to their urls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After years of working with AWS this is not surprising. You can have developers with minimal sys admin / dev ops building instances and running jobs. Back in early days of my startup I recall my team launching a big model run and leaving for weekend. We can back on monday to a 10k bill and thousands of compute hours... That did not go well, 10k on a few days of compute for a small startup haha! Still to this day we've got tons of EC2 instances lying around racking up charges. We dont have the devops support to build proper auto-scaling, making things really fit AWS. We just needed a server to run 24/7 and this was easy.

Can only imagine the insanity that goes on at huge Pinterest level scale. How many EC2 instances do they have? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

<comment><USER13> if you just have webservers, api gateway + lambda is the way to go Edit: to make myself clear, I meant the backend, frontend, of course, should be served like below

<comment><USER14> Cloudfront + S3 for static sites.

I've seen so many people just create an EC2 instance for serving static content.

If you have a banging new React app that generates static files, you don't need anything more.

<comment><USER13> of course, I meant it backend-wise

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pay-for-what-you-use pricing has the ability to escalate. You don't buy a server for $30k, and go through whatever procurement paperwork is set up for that. You just increase average usage by here and there. There's no procurement hurdle, so it can be a blank check.

..just like it's easier to get I to debt with a credit card than a personal loan. Credit card debt mounts one purchase at a time. Personal loans require you to decide to borrow €X.

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of reading how US Armed forces in Iraq being forced to buy NEW printers because their procurement system didn't allow buying toners to replace used up toners in practically new printers.

MBAs/Accountants...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just joined a new company who is doing nothing but helping companies figure out how to save more money on their cloud costs. This is such a timely article.

The same costs that are being used to justify the value of the cloud are now being used to justify going back to buying servers. Which is the wrong solution, by the way.

With anything it just comes down to education and best practices. People need to utilize the incredible tools out there along with understanding better how the cost structures work.

<comment><USER18> Servers the wrong solution? Maybe in a few situations. AWS is just too expensive.

Eg. 600 TB data out and 100 TB in is $37300 on AWS, and by going with colocation a price of < $500 is very achieveable.

That's ~1/75th of the cost!!!

There is nothing to understand here, except that AWS in insanely expensive and colocation is a way better option in this situation.

<comment><USER19> I agree that the price is high but you're not comparing the same things. Is the $500 a month DDOS protected bandwidth with as much redundancy as AWS is providing? I definitely shift as much bandwidth away from AWS as I can with any solution I make but they do provide more than a dumb pipe

<comment><USER20> > Is the $500 a month DDOS protected bandwidth with as much redundancy as AWS > is providing?

Sometimes you don't need that.

AWS S3 provides reduced-redundancy options for less cost. It'd be nice if the same applied to other services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> i honestly cannot believe that this is still a thing! well, actually, i can. :(

i run a large AWS consolidated billing family for a sizeable computer science graduate research lab and tracking our AWS spends are an absolute nightmare.

if you think about it for a minute, why would it be in the best interests of amazon/AWS to allow us granular, easy to parse and (most importantly) easy to customize and use billing reports? they're in the business of making money, and providing mechanisms for folks to limit their spends will limit profits.

another thing to consider is that the billing subsystems for all of these cloud providers are literally one of the _first_ things to be engineered, and after release, one of the _last_ to ever be updated.

for instance, it took amazon two years to release OUs (organizational units): one year in closed beta, one in open. while these are great for organizing accounts, you still can't see how much an OU spent w/o a bunch of python/boto gymnastics!

i was on a call w/some of the leads of the aws billing subsystem about a year back, and asked about what the roadmap for billing features and the response was "2020 at the earliest".

<comment><USER22> What are you having troubles with? I find the billing page to be pretty good, once the tags are configured for billing.

Far better than any internal tool I had the chance to work with.

<comment><USER21> we have a lot of projects, and i use OUs to track the N-ary tree of lab->project->people and their spends.

since the aws billing subsystem can't map OU->$$$, i wrote a thing: [https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit](https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit)

it'd be also super awesome to have OU-based budgets.

we use teevity ice when we really need to dig deep ([https://github.com/Teevity/ice](https://github.com/Teevity/ice)) but it's pretty much abandonware at this point.

i've also explored a couple of commercial offerings (ronin & teevity) but they don't work well in our AWS research credit-based model.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure about OU, didn't use them much.

In commercial tools, I would have a look at [https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/](https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/) and [https://cloudcheckr.com/](https://cloudcheckr.com/) and there was a third I can't remember the name.

They should have good reporting since that's the only point of the tool, but they charge an arm and a leg.

<comment><USER21> those look just like the other services i looked in to, but w/o diving too deeply in to their whitepapers i can guarantee they use instance/resource tagging as the shim between AWS and their system(s).

with consolidated billing, and a couple of hundred linked accounts (with plenty of turnover), enforcing a sane tagging is pretty much out of the question.

thanks for the links tho! when i have a spare few minutes i'll definitely take a closer look.

<comment><USER22> Consider revisiting your account strategy. Hundreds of accounts is way too many and it's unmanageable. Even a company with tens of thousands of employees couldn't have anywhere near that.

Enforce some tags on purpose, team, business unit, dev or prod. It shouldn't be allowed or possible to create instances without any information. Enforce the rules, if an instance has no information it will be shutdown next week and deleted next month. People will take tagging seriously very soon.

I've seen businesses who adopted AWS without any strategy and with revolving contractors as employees. A few months later, it's a hundred instances without a single name or tag, each one costing thousands of dollars a month for the more expensive.

If the company cares about costs and resources management, it's easy to achieve. If it doesn't care, then doesn't matter, not your money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just wanted to make a shoutout to Corey Quinn, who has a consultancy which literally works on lowering your excessive AWS bills. He also runs the most excellent Last Week in AWS newsletter [https://lastweekinaws.com/](https://lastweekinaws.com/) and podcast Screaming in the Cloud: [https://www.screaminginthecloud.com](https://www.screaminginthecloud.com)

I've personally known Corey for 10+ years and he's a good dude, so if anyone is looking to lower their AWS bills, talk to Corey.

<comment><USER24> > literally works on lowering your excessive AWS bills

these companies are a dime a dozen, no personal offense intended to yourself or this company.

<comment><USER25> The fabulous level of trolling and entertainment he offers on his twitter account however is priceless.

<comment><USER23> And both the newsletter + podcast are quite fantastic. He really is unrivaled in the space. If you use AWS, you should be keeping tabs on those things. Bonus points that they're free and amusing.

I know him from back when I was helping maintain the Saltstack python config management tool[1]. He was a user and we were doing training on contributing code to salt. It turned out that I did teach him a thing or two and he did several contributions to salt[2]. That's literally it.

[1] [https://github.com/saltstack/salt](https://github.com/saltstack/salt)

[2] [https://github.com/saltstack/salt/commits?author=quinnypig](https://github.com/saltstack/salt/commits?author=quinnypig)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Where I work there's a monthly report sent out that shows what each team is spending. Periodically teams poke around their infrastructure and remove anything they don't need any more. A few times there have been company-wide "spring cleaning" days.

That's all it has taken to save a _lot_ of money.

<comment><USER22> Same. It's pretty amazing to be able to see where the money is going and adjust anytime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> With the rise of lambda+managed services, I think we'll start seeing finance and development start to blend and merge.

Besides giving businesses more legibility into what specific parts of their business logic cost to operate vs. the value they generate, you can start building higher-order financial systems based on flows of capital+information within businesses. From there you can implement all sorts of financial engineering like insurance and options+derivatives that could allow businesses to do things like dial up leverage against these flows. Certainly half-baked ideas, but fun to think about the possibilities.

<comment><USER26> I'm moderately hopeful that the basic idea (close association between activity and cost) will improve, but I have some caveats.

One is that not everything will fit. Lots and lots and _lots_ of workloads exist in their current form and are not going to switch overnight. Whatever bookkeeping method that gets developed needs to deal with the mix of costing models.

Another is that you still need to assign costs. In a lot of companies this is the subject of intense corporate politics. Whether such a method is adopted will depend on who is wielding what cudgel.

Related to which: there will be cases of premature optimisation on the visible. Optimising for cost is fine, but costs often include estimates that can be overlooked. It's one thing to optimise for "least dollars spent per invocation". Another thing to optimise for "fewest pissed off customers". The latter is harder to measure but in many cases more important.

But overall? Yes. I think it could be a step forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was always incredulous at how many free credits AWS hands out to startups (up to $100K per startup), but then every time I see an article like this I'm reminded how large the recurring infrastructure bill can be for a successful business. Such a great business for Amazon.

<comment><USER29> It's quite clever, too, as it likely encourages setups that are pretty inefficient on long-term AWS spend.

<comment><USER30> It's like the apocryphal drug dealer who gives out free doses to unwitting kids until they are hooked.

<comment><USER31> This article is one of the first shots fired in the 'War on Clouds'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Part of this is that AWS is often more expensive than on-prem.

The other part, though, is that dev teams in large companies often aren't held accountable for on-prem costs.

The on-prem costs are often in a big baseline number with little visibility into how much of that big number belongs to each team.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find it interesting that while the price of hard drives has decreased by about 50 percent over the past five years, the price of cloud storage has remained roughly flat.

As margin continues to expand, the need for alternative models and competition in 'Cloud' is becoming increasingly apparent.

[https://storj.io/blog/2018/11/the-high-price-of- traditional-...](https://storj.io/blog/2018/11/the-high-price-of-traditional- cloud-storage/)

<comment><USER34> I think the end game is probably something resembling electrical grid markets. Electrical power is bought and sold in real-time by traders, as the supply and load fluctuate. There are many players in a competitive market, like nuclear plants, gas plants, solar, wind, etc. There are even complex derivatives (like "swing options") traded in the electrical markets. Someday computing resources will be bought and sold in this way too, with a large number of players in a competitive market, which will drive down the currently inflated cloud computing costs. We can already see an embryonic version of such a market in the form of AWS "spot instances" and the AWS reserved instance secondary market. AWS is fighting tooth and nail to avoid or delay such a commoditization of computing utilities, which is why they announce 50 new vendor lock-in software products every week instead of focusing only on the hardware resource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> "The Cloud" is a euphemism for extreme centralization of web and other hosting.

<comment><USER36> I joined this company to build out a software stack for being able to do disaster recovery of sites off site. This resulted in building a system that takes incremental backups of client systems and uploading them to our servers. In a DR event we would spin up VMs backed by the images we had copied to our servers.

Throughout the processes the word "cloud" was brought up. Who's cloud would we use? Over and over again I tried to explain we were actually building a "cloud" service. And by that I mean we are just offering a service that runs on our servers.

Due to the feature set and cost we ended up settling on bare metal servers from SoftLayer (IBM). The entire solutions has been made to run on commodity hardware.

For the longest time the company kept marking that we were using "IMBs Cloud".

Every now and then I get a request to ask what it would take to move to AWS. My response is always the same. More operating budget, and less features.

We spin up DR environments for many servers2 in seconds -- and can do so because we have full control over the hypervisor, so moving to anything like AWS, Azure, or what not means we give up the ability for near instance restore. Owning the entire stack has its own set of problems, but in the long run we should be able to move much faster.

"The Cloud" -> "The Internet"

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The two most insidious things I've found in AWS billing:

\- If you want the AWS dashboard metrics to have 1 minute instead of 5 minute granularity, that's $2.10 per instance per month. 5 minutes is pretty useless, so either you set up other monitoring or you pay a tax on the number of instances you have.

\- If you use AMIs (which you probably should) to launch EC2 instances with all your software baked in already, you will probably end up with dozens or hundreds of old, unused AMIs. Furthermore each of these AMIs is linked to a snapshot, which is stored on S3. S3 pricing is very cheap but it's a significant amount of work to determine which AMIs are no longer in use and to delete both the AMI and the corresponding snapshot. Every 100 AMIs you have at the standard 8GB root volume size costs you $18/month.

<comment><USER38> > If you use AMIs (which you probably should) to launch EC2 instances with all > your software baked in already, you will probably end up with dozens or > hundreds of old, unused AMIs.

We previously had this issue. What we do now is instead of leaving old ones on S3, we download and archive them. We just tag them on the dashboard and a nightly script does the rest.

In general tagging is an extremely powerful way to organize your AMIs. This article[0] has good examples of tagging you can follow. We use something akin to the "Business Tag" strategy, with an Excel document. Definitely requires some internal organisation but the cost savings speak for themselves.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/answers/configuration- management/aws-...](https://aws.amazon.com/answers/configuration- management/aws-ami-design/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think that everyone who's used AWS or a competitor knows that it's very easy to rack up a large bill by accident. For companies, the main issue isn't the expense but the unpredictability.

<comment><USER14> The use is that most people use AWS like if it was a datacenter they don't own.

If you're going for AWS, you should consider rewriting a lot of your services to use AWS features well.

Auto Scaling Groups and Fargate EC2 are some common components I see few companies using.

If your instances are the same size through the day, you are doing it wrong!*

*Exception: If you provide the same level of service and traffic 24/7.

<comment><USER40> I recently gave Fargate a try and was very unimpressed with the costs.

Anecdata is terrible, but my experience running 1 Fargate container 24x7 on the lowest specs (0.25 CPU and 512 MB RAM) to handle baseline was was going to cost as much as a no-contract T3.micro EC2 instance with much more capacity (2 CPU and 1 GB RAM). AWS Kubernetes was also a bust at $120/mo just to get started (that's the cost before an EC2 server is provisioned).

<comment><USER14> Fargate has two flavors, ECS or EC2.

EC2 is just EC2 with scaling groups while ECS is a fully non-managed solution that's for small items.

<comment><USER41> The ECS one is weirdly difficult to set up. If you just want Docker Repo (ECR) -> deploy with some config -> expose a single ingress point it sounds perfect, but I had a TON of trouble with it recently

<comment><USER40> If it helps, I had the exact same experience. Setup was possible but involved way too many decisions for the obvious use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is one of those predictable things, that is conveniently ignored by certain layers of a business. The more entertaining situation (from my position anyway) is the drama that the rapid Azure adoption by otherwise very non-cloud companies will cause in a year or two, when the free credits Microsoft stuffed into their ELA's go away.

I love running stuff in the cloud, but without a conscious decision in an organization to prepare for, and avoid, the various pitfalls, its just a giant cost sink.

</comment><comment><USER43> A lot of people don't realize that Reserved Instnaces don't show up on your monthly invoice. So once every 3 years you're hit by a large bill for RI renewal.

<comment><USER44> You can choose how to setup your billing for reserved instances.

> You can choose to pay for your Reserved Instance upfront, partially upfront, > or monthly

source: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts- reserved-instances-application.html)

<comment><USER43> You get the best discount by paying fully upfront. If you do this, the AWS bill doesn't show the RI on your monthly bill what-so-ever. Leading to a suprise 3 years down the road.

<comment><USER22> And more importantly you're engaged to pay for the full year no matter which option you pick, with (almost) no possibility to cancel.

Long story short, only play 1 year full upfront.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One of the basic tenants of engineering is "why is this feature appropriate"; much of AWS can be sliced away with this razor, much of the time. Appropriate tool for the appropriate time. A lot of the AWS systems simply are special purpose and not good for general application.

I'm working on a Kubernetes configuration at home that provides the common & popular features AWS in a consistent & portable manner: blob store, database, etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> AWS is really expensive. Even for running a small personal websites. I thought I could gain AWS experience AND run a few personal websites on them. What a mistake.

I've moved off all (well like 2) my personal sites to other VPS provider, that starts at $5/month for 512MB VPS.

The worst annoyance is 'Reserved instances'. You are basically signing up for a long term contract that you can't get out of easily.

<comment><USER46> Lightsail is even cheaper, _AND_ AWS

[https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm reminded of this article - [http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/12/4/the- eternal-cost-s...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/12/4/the-eternal-cost- savings-of-netflixs-internal-spot-market.html)

Netflix run a spot market for instances to drive down costs for exactly the reasons mentioned here

</comment><comment><USER48> companies that think that they can treat aws like their own colo and dont have any semblance of budgeting will always be surprised by their bills. the cloud can be very expensive...it can also be significantly cheaper (think: a retailer with mostly static websites with some light javascript here and there that peaks on black friday). doing an analysis and being responsible can help here.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sometimes I wonder whether AWS makes more money than GCP because average GCP users develop better optimized systems.

</comment><comment><USER50> Missed opportunity:

As AWS Use Soars, Companies Surprised by Soaring Bills

</comment><comment><USER51> Paywall, cannot read article past third paragraph.

<comment><USER52> I'm curious if all of these comments here are people who paid to read it or just extrapolating off a the headline.

<comment><USER53> This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence. Please don't post like that here; it's a toxic trope that people are nearly always imagining and projecting onto one another. Mind you, your post was far from the worst example of this—but it still needs nipping in the bud.

In this case, the history of the users commenting is enough to make it overwhelmingly unlikely that they were paid, and the well-known propensity of users to comment just on a title clinches it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER52> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply astroturfing. My comment is asking how many people "paid to read the article" (because it's behind a paywall), and not "were paid to comment here".

Still not a great comment I admit, but with the amount of discussion going on I would be surprised if everyone is subscriber or if they are going off of the headline alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Paywall.</comment>


Had a debate with Google engineer and the page was removed from Google. Related? - <AUTHOR> The page with the commenting thread is here:
https://volument.com/blog/sendbeacon-is-broken
Yesterday, the page was the first result in Google search with "sendbeacon is broken". Now it's completely gone from the Google index.
Still first on bing.com and duckduckgo.com
How is this possible? Really wish someone can answer this. This sounds a bit scary.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> >One former contractor the WSJ spoke with described down-voting any search results that read like a "how-to manual" for queries relating to suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline came up as the top result. According to the contractor, Google soon after put out a message to the contracting firm that the Lifeline should be marked as the top result for all searches relating to suicide so that the company algorithms would adjust to consider it the top result.

>Or in another instance, sources told the WSJ, employees made a conscious choice for how to handle anti-vax messaging:

>One of the first hot-button issues surfaced in 2015, according to people familiar with the matter, when some employees complained that a search for "how do vaccines cause autism" delivered misinformation through sites that oppose vaccinations.

At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should "let the algorithms decide" what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.com—which states on its home page in large black letters, "They f—ing don't." (The phrase has become a meme within Google.)

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/google-search- re...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/google-search-results-have- more-human-help-than-you-think-report-finds/)

tl:dr - Human oversight / manipulation.

<comment><USER3> I think this is the WSJ article mentioned there:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with- its-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-search- algorithms-and-changes-your-results-11573823753)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "This method is for analytics ... before the document is unloaded"

so nothing a user should ever care about. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, another garbage to stub out in my userjs, navigator.sendBeacon = undefined; bam!

</comment><comment><USER5> I see your page and this thread when searching on Google, it is probably some hickup in their algorithm.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also see this thread under Hacker News, but not the article on volument.com, which was first yesterday with "sendBeacon is broken".

<comment><USER6> Try searching in an incognito window; it might be just an issue with your personalized search results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21838234)

</comment><comment><USER8> A friend of mine had a discussion with Matthew Garret (Google) here on HN and his account was banned without a warning

Related?

<comment><USER9> No idea if it's related or not but it's certainly terrifying.

I guess instead of a polite "no, thank you" I'll stop responding to Google recruiters altogether, for the safety of my Google account.</comment></comment>


C2 Lang design (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://c2lang.org/docs/c2lang_design.pdf <comment><USER2> I understand _why_ it's attractive to integrate more and more into the language proper, but I don't like it. Almost all tools which still embrace the unix way of doing things are written in C, and it's not just because that community is conservative. C feels like unix, because it's one of the only languages that abides by that philosophy. C-the-language is only part of the experience of programming in C. Programming in C includes DSLs and code generation and makefiles. Even what we consider C-the-language can be decomposed into preprocessor code and actual C.

That said, C needs to be improved, but I think it should be done via the build system, adding layers on top of C, in a tasteful, thought-out way. Some ideas below:

If we're expanding on C by adding build system complexity, Makefiles need to be improved. Make is a great tool, but it's unityped, like shell scripts. And it's essentially a preprocessor over shell, which leads to a mess of sigils. Maybe redesigning make as an embedded language in some lisp would do it. Additionally we could unify the notion of linking to a library and importing code into the makefile to allow dependencies to specify build steps. This could make some of the added build complexity implicit.

Namespaces could probably be implemeneted as a preprocessor, taking module declarations and import statements and converting all identifiers into they prefix qualified equivalents, emiting warnings when there would be a collision (like if module "foo" declared "bar_baz" and module "foo_bar" declared "baz").

Rust-style syntax-case macros can be implemented as a preprocessor.

Go-style defer statements could be implemented in a preprocessor, and avoid the somewhat verbose goto-style error handling.

As I said, this approach requires a lot of care to avoid adding a huge amount of complexity to the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thoughts as I read:

1\. "uninitialized var usage is error": unfortunately impossible without at least one of the following compromises: Automatically initialize variables (wastes CPU); False alarms (see Java); Built-in formal proof system; or, Require compilers to solve the halting problem.

2\. Removed keyword "static": kills one of my favorite tricks, "self-init'ing functions".

3\. New keyword "as": A good invention in Pythonland. Good call to bring this in.

4\. New keyword "nil": Redundant with NULL?

5\. Example - Base Types: Uses uint8 in place of char. This obscures intent and makes code less readable. Compare: int library_fnc(char asterisk errmsg) versus int library_fnc(uint8 asterisk errmsg). (HN wants to turn my asterisks into italics...) In the former it's clear errmsg is a string, in the latter it's not clear (it could be a pointer to a flag).

6\. Example - function types. Doesn't one usually typedef the function pointer, rather than the function itself? So making that require two lines is annoying. Aside that, the author is right that C has confusing function pointer typedef syntax.

7\. Multi-part array initialization: Encourages unmaintainable code. Depending on what's in those "..."'s, might require compiler to solve halting problem?

8\. Multi-pass parsing: Trades maintainability for instant gratification.

9\. Symbol accessibility: The author makes "public" (and implicit "private") modify entire structs rather than individual fields...

10\. Multi-file module: May lead to unmaintainable code

11\. I'm worried about the language arbitrarily defining things like "the results of building are stored in the 'output' directory". OTOH the recipe.txt idea could help standardize what amounts to a lot of ad hoc Makefile programming.

12\. Build process difference: Theoretically could speed up compilation. I'm worried for social reasons. In module-based languages, we tend to fall into module hell: one symptom being the infamous 20-page stacktrace (see: Java, Clojure, etc.) The nature of C's #include incentivizes shallow dependency trees (a very good thing).

13\. "Language scope": trades portability for convenience

14\. Tooling: This shouldn't be part of the language, it should be separate.

<comment><USER4> I agree with a lot of your thoughts. Here are some areas where I disagree

> 1\. "uninitialized var usage is error": unfortunately impossible without at > least one of the following compromises: Automatically initialize variables > (wastes CPU); False alarms (see Java); Built-in formal proof system; or, > Require compilers to solve the halting problem.

I don't think this is true. It should be pretty easy to detect if a variable is initialized or not. I can potentially see how a false alarm would arise, but I don't think that matters in practice. (All the situations I'm imagining involve writing bad code)

> 10\. Multi-file module: May lead to unmaintainable code

Go does this already and it is fine.

> 12\. Build process difference: Theoretically could speed up compilation. I'm > worried for social reasons. In module-based languages, we tend to fall into > module hell: one symptom being the infamous 20-page stacktrace (see: Java, > Clojure, etc.) The nature of C's #include incentivizes shallow dependency > trees (a very good thing).

I can see why this is a concern, but I think it is more a problem with JVM languages because of the type of programming Java encourages.

> 14\. Tooling: This shouldn't be part of the language, it should be separate.

I thought this way too. Then I used Go and realized the huge benefit tooling integrated into the language provides. (Go has other problems, but tooling is not one of them).

<comment><USER5> >I don't think this is true. It should be pretty easy to detect if a variable is initialized or not. I can potentially see how a false alarm would arise, but I don't think that matters in practice. (All the situations I'm imagining involve writing bad code)

It's easy to trace the code-paths between a variable's declaration and its usage, _as long as those don 't involve procedure calls_. Then that problem becomes "static-analysis complete".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there an advantage to this over say a more modern and safe language like Rust? It seems to be just reducing the complexity of the language, but doesn't look like it will reduce memory related bugs.

<comment><USER7> Since you have to rewrite everything, you might as well switch to another language (we switched to OCaml). If there was an incremental path or a safe subset of C or something like that, that would be more interesting.

<comment><USER8> You can use D, which shares a lot of syntax with C, although you cannot directly reuse C code because there is no preprocessor in D. Some people use D as a "C development compiler".

The incremental path is the official C standards. C will probably gain modules for example.

<comment><USER7> In the project I'm working on right now, there are 277,617 lines of C (using gcc extensions). The incremental path either compiles all of that directly, or we rewrite it. There's hardly any middle ground, and actually rewriting it isn't a realistic option either.

(For comparison the same project has 63,972 lines of OCaml and 31,605 lines of Perl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is cool. I've often toyed with a similar idea of creating a language that improves/fixes the thing C messed up. If you aren't worried about safety (memory bugs can largely be avoided by changing how you do memory allocation, i.e. switch from individual mallocing to region based memory management) then C is actually a pretty nice language since it is simple enough to hold the entire language in your head. Plus it's nice to know how things are actually laid out in memory. The problems C2 solves are really the main things that frustrate me about C: header files, lack of a build systems, no modules, spiraling type signatures.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks extremely interesting. I'm skeptical of some of its claims (faster compilation when incremental compilation is removed sounds unlikely, for example), but nothing that worrisome.

Anybody have any experience? Is it still basically a toy language?

<comment><USER10> The main site makes it look like the language is about a year old.

I have no doubt that they can make the _parsing_ stage faster, as they won't be parsing the same headers over and over again. This is often a bottleneck in C++, but much less often in C. (I've seen 10+MB C++ files after preprocessing).

<comment><USER11> If people used precompiled headers (which have been available for about 20 years) that problem wouldn't be there... However I'm not sure that the parsing is such a bottleneck these days; I think all the complex constructs are a lot more of a time sink (templates etc). That and linking! Takes an hour to link the webkit library with the regular linker :-)

<comment><USER10> It's been a while since I tried precompiled headers, but the last time I tried it, the experience was unpleasant and error-prone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very similar to Ark: www.github.com/ark-lang/ark. Except Ark has no GC, has tagged enums, ownership is enforced, and a few other smaller differences.</comment>


Are Internet Explorer users dumb? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/07/29/internet.explorer.dumb/index.html?hpt=hp_p1&iref=NS1

<comment><USER2> Other reports of this story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818847> <\- This has all the comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822935>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822162>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2823808></comment>


Show HN: Search code using natural language - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MetacodeInc.metacode <comment><AUTHOR> Google, for your codebase. Search code using natural language with our vscode extension, Metacode. Let me know what you think!

Queries like 'user sign up', 'delete file' etc. work even if those specific keywords don't exist in the code. Example gif is Metacode searching linux kernel.

</comment><comment><USER2> How does it work? Can I see the source code? Why is the homepage asking for my email?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're likely not going to open source it, and we're using machine learning. We're in beta, hence the email page.</comment></comment>


Specification for ventilators to be used in UK hospitals during the outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/specification-for-ventilators-to-be-used-in-uk-hospitals-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak <comment><USER2> Hi HN. Another user shared this link in a comment and I thought it warranted a direct submission.</comment>


Image Recognition Services Benchmark: Amazon, Clarifai, Google and Microsoft - <AUTHOR> https://thedarkside.frantzmiccoli.com/experimentation/2017/03/25/image-recognition-benchmark-amazon-clarifai-google-microsoft.html <comment><AUTHOR> For some reasons, SSL is not working in Chrome on Mac for some ... and I don't get why. Sorry for that!</comment>