Fuck the Cloud (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717 <comment><USER3> While Jason Scott raises interesting points six years ago, the principles of data management remain the same as the days of dedicated servers with on premises systems. If you have only one copy of data and that machine goes down, then the data goes with it. In my experience in a business context 'the cloud' discussion is about the business' desire to expand capacity without the need for the capital expenditure needed to buy equipment and server admin salaries. By the numbers it is just better to rent instead of buy at the infrastructure level.

The cloud is a murky, ambiguity-laden concept though. Both Netflix and my 92 year old grandmother on Facebook 'use the cloud', but the former is much more sophisticated in their network and data management practices. My grandmother just wants to see fun pictures of her family and great grandkids.

<comment><USER4> That's what the author is getting at, "The Cloud" is sold as this awesome thing that will never die or break, and worse yet it's sold to people who often don't know any better.

No one realizes that the Cloud is running on the same crap we've always had and is vulnerable to the same issues as everything else. MAYBE the company is better at data management, MAYBE the employees take pride in their job and do it properly, but that's all MAYBE MAYBE MAYBE, and could just as well be "no" and you're entrusting your data to people who really have nothing to lose if it goes into the garbage tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> Eh... I think that the maybes you are using are a little bit misleading. When a company sells space in their "cloud", like maybe Microsoft or Amazon, there is a business guarantee that goes along with it. If Amazon were to randomly lose a big chuck of Netflix data, AWS's business would tank immediately. AWS is a giant system that uses its scale and number of customers to efficiently provide a more stable system at a lower cost than all of those individual customers could achieve by building and maintaining their own IT.

I think it is sort of like a delivery system. If USPS or FedEx or USP started losing a massive number of packages (I know that they do lose some) then they would get abandoned, just like "Cloud" companies have an incentive to maintain a baseline level of quality. The alternative is that every business would have to create their own shipping services. I think it makes sense to assume that in most cases, unless the business is already massive enough to warrant it, that it is cheaper and more reliable to use the aggregate, dedicated ones for hire. The "Cloud" will be cheaper than individual implementations, and it won't be nearly as suspect to individual implementation errors because the identical system will have been proven by many other customers (otherwise it would be abandoned).

<comment><USER6> That must be why Amazon's SLA is defined as follows[1] :

If amazon loses more than 3 datacenters (only total loss of external connectivity for all of your instances in an entire availability zone, or total loss of hard disk access, again only counts if all your instances completely lose hard disk/EBS access) for more than 45 minutes in a month you get 10% of what you pay as a voucher for future ec2 usage. If they lose it for more than 7 hours you get 30%.

So no, Amazon, or at least their legal department, does not trust their own competency. Or at least, they're not willing to risk any revenue on that, but they're willing to give you a small future discount to encourage you to restart using the service. Oh and you only get that if you explicitly ask for it.

If they lose your data on EBS/S3/Dynamo/..., you get nothing. So having any data exclusively on any Amazon service should be cause for getting fired, and this of course also means that using Dynamo for storing anything non-trivial is a big no-no from a disaster recovery standpoint.

So I have to say, I would suggest you do not trust Amazon with either your data, nor with keeping your site online. Yes, historically their performance has been better than this, but ...

This reads worse than the SLAs on internet connectivity from places like level3 and cogent (pay 10% less if they fuck up completely for more than 2 days).

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/)

<comment><USER5> You completely tunneled on the wrong portions of what I was saying. For one thing, Amazon's "real" liability extends far beyond their SLA. Yes, their immediate financial compensation is small. But there are two things wrong with your conclusion here. First, that is not indicative of how much they "trust" the service. They are always going to take the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it? Second, if a company on AWS was severely impacted by a genuine Amazon screw- up, the compensation SLA is the least of Amazon's concerns. It would be like if UPS lost 20% of Amazon deliveries for one day. They wouldn't be nearly as concerned with the explicit liability of compensating Amazon for those deliveries, however much they guarantee for them contractually, they would be far more concerned with everyone immediately switch to another shipping company because they could no longer trust UPS. That is the motivation.

Second, you've completely ignored the actual key points. For one thing, "Cloud" companies make their business by providing a stable service. You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the exact same infrastructure without serious service failures. That is a huge amount of statistical reliability. Compared to hiring your own IT department and cobbling together your own system, that is actually really good indicator. Second, the cost difference is potentially massive. Again, it is for similar reasons that shipping via UPS is a much better deal than shipping via your own private distribution network. You might have to still pay some people to handle your own inventory from its source (like you'd have to have some people to work on your system in the cloud) but you'd be taking advantage of a much larger, more efficient system instead of having to build and maintain your own.

<comment><USER6> I think the original point I made stands. Hosting on Amazon's platform essentially means I risk my revenue on Amazon's uptime. Actually using their infrastructure like S3 means I don't just risk my revenue but actually get locked in. Amazon is not willing to do the same, according to their total crap SLA. That tells me a lot. And to top it all of, Amazon is famous for "eating" businesses of their customers : use their infrastructure to see how one of their customers do business, then take it over.

So if it's all the same, I'd rather have a decent SLA. Furthermore this sounds a lot like Amazon's not in fact giving me anything.

Your point is that they'll do the right thing because otherwise their customers would leave. Customers you said in the previous paragraph they give "the most conservative amount they can get away with, and they are "getting away" with it just fine so why up it?".

Sounds like they really care about customers doesn't it ?

> You have the "guarantee" based on thousands of other business using the > exact same infrastructure without serious service failures.

I can get that guarantee at 1000 datacenters and colo providers, at least. Some of which have a decent SLA. But even among cloud IAAS, both Azure and Google provide both Amazon's guarantee, and better SLAs.

<comment><USER5> Again, you are tunneling...

I used Amazon as an example. If you actually read what I'm saying, about how Cloud businesses _in general_ depend on meeting their guarantees and not screwing over businesses, how their superior quality is because of scale and specialization, how they are reliable because one failure would doom them and they haven't failed yet, you could see that this has nothing to do with Amazon at all.

You keep arguing that Amazon is a bad provider. So what? I was never interested in that at all. I'm not comparing them to Azure or Google or the supposed "1000 datacenters and colo providers" you seem to know of. I don't care who is better or worse, I was talking about using cloud services in general.

Pay attention to the topic, pay attention to what my arguments were. Amazon's SLA is utterly irrelevant to anything, what are you even trying to convince me of? None of anything you've said is remotely relevant to my point. It's like arguing about whether Ford or Toyota makes better hybrids in a discussion about whether electric cars are a good idea, I just don't care.

<comment><USER6> It's funny how you put just the opposite argument of common sense forward and present it as an axiom. The more customers a company has, the worse they treat them. Called comcast recently ? The less choice customers have the worse they're treated. How's your electricity company ? But when you can easily switch ... surely that's better right ? Hmm companies with lots of customers that can easily switch. Have you called Bank Of America recently ? And frankly, they're one of the better ones.

Amazon has superior quality ? They have at best average quality as a vps provider, unless you accept their products that cause lock-in. At which point you're at their mercy, and they have even less reason to treat you well. Amazon doesn't match, say, digital ocean (especially not in the transparency in billing department. WTF). There are other reasons to pick amazon of course, but quality, not one of them. Price ... not one of them. Service ? Not one of them. Stability ? Not one of them. Geographical reach ? At the moment Amazon does better (not that it matters unless you're in Asia).

One failure would doom them ? Just from memory I know two big amazon cloud failures that you could not protect from with availability zones, the ones in a single datacenter, they don't even publish.

The fact that they refuse to publish single cluster failures is probably another aspect of that superior quality you mentioned.

Also, you can get fucked on an ongoing basis just by getting scheduled on a machine. I guess that's part of their superior quality (a lot of VPS providers of course have this problem, others are better at it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jason's follow up post to this: [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4352](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4352)

<comment><USER8> tl;dr Renting remote computational power is cool (AWS), but renting remote storage is not.

I have a complete history of email archives since I started using gmail (ie cloud), but have lost years of archives from the years I managed email myself.

It turns out that companies focused on data storage and retrieval do a better job than me. And that's fine. I pay someone to do my taxes and I don't build my own furniture. Specialization is a good thing.

<comment><USER9> The tax accountant analogy goes pretty well with this:

The accountant is specialized in doing your taxes (aka serving up your data/files) but you still need to keep a copy of your tax records, receipts, and etc.

<comment><USER10> And so, ideally, I want to be able to tell my accountant to store my archival tax records in _my_ safe-deposit box, not in his office. Compute infrastructure is a commodity—doesn't matter who's paying for it—but all the services you depend on _should_ rely on storage infrastructure _you_ have an SLA agreement with.

I don't care about the "distributed computation" promises of Diaspora or Sandstorm.io; I think they're wrongheaded. Anyone can do compute. But I really _do_ hope that one day that my Facebook account can be canonically "stored on" a database instance I'm paying for, that Facebook's app servers will reach out and connect to and treat as the canonical source for "me", treating their own records as a secondary cache. This kind of setup would makes all _sorts_ of things simpler and clearer and more secure; there would be a definite boundary where "my data" stops (the DB I own) and "Facebook's data" starts (the DBs they own.)

And, to be clear, I'm not talking about everybody running their own infrastructure, or even everybody knowing what an IaaS provider is. Ideally, PaaS providers could get into the "consumer instances" game the way Dropbox is in the "consumer files" game. My "Facebook account database" above could be transparently launched into my own cute little private cloud by my PaaS provider when Facebook requests it through some OAuth-like pairing API. I wouldn't need to think of myself, as a user, as "owning cloud database instances." From my perspective, I'd get an abstract "Facebook account" (which is actually an app instance and attached DBs) sitting in my Heroku-for- consumers account. The _important_ bit is that I'd be _paying_ for the resources that "account" object consumes, that I'd have an SLA on those resources, and that the PaaS company would have every incentive to make it easy for other third-party services to interact with my "Facebook database" in a way Facebook themselves aren't. I, as a user, have no need to "manage" a cloud of my own; I just need to be considered to _own_ it.

<comment><USER11> If I'm a Facebook engineer, I would never agree to this because there is no possible way to optimize performance in this scenario.

What happens to Facebook when your data provider goes down, or just gets slow? What if they mess up permissions or change their API?

Maybe you're thinking "that's fine, if my provider isn't reliable, my Facebook account becomes unavailable and it's up to me to choose a better provider." But what about all the people who are sharing your feed (or whatever it's called these days, I don't really use Facebook)? Do they query your stuff, and then timeout when it doesn't respond in time? Now other people's stuff is slow to load.

Just seems like an engineering nightmare, to me.

<comment><USER10> Think of the Datomic architecture[1]: some nodes are "storage", while other nodes are "transactors." The transactor nodes pull "chunks" of rows/objects/documents _from_ storage nodes, compute relational indexes locally, answer queries from those computed indexes, and finally persist computed index "chunks" back _to_ the storage nodes.

Now, note that the "canonical" storage that gets read from doesn't have to be the same storage that the indexes get written to. The first can be owned by the user, while the second can be owned by Facebook.

Presuming an architecture like this, the latency and availability of the user's "Facebook account" database is relatively immaterial. While writes would have to be synchronous (so, like you said, Facebook would have to give the user a "sorry, your account is unavailable" error), _reads_ could be asynchronous. Think of an online RSS feed reader service: the "primary sources" are the third-party sites with their RSS feeds. Sometimes those sites go down. When they do, the reader-service can't retrieve the feed–so that feed just goes stale.

Things like Facebook's graph, meanwhile, are fundamentally indexes. The base- level "documents" in the graph are relationship assertions—a copy of "B accepted A's friend request" stored in B's database. The graph is a computed value built on a pile of those. When Facebook can't reach someone's database, things like these relationship assertions just go stale.

The crucial idea, here, is that for Facebook to do its job, it probably has to cache a majority of the stuff in the user's database in one form or another—just like an RSS reader caches RSS feeds. But this _is_ purely a cache, in a fundamental sense. Users who don't "check in" with Facebook could be cache-evicted from its database. Other users would still have relationships with them and be able to post on their wall and such (they'd be putting those documents in their own outbox); Facebook would just no longer bother computing anything that's personal to the user, like their news feed. There would be every incentive to set up the architecture such that user data that wasn't needed would be "garbage collected" off of Facebook's servers, because it could always get put back on, the moment that user's account-instance woke up again and said hello.

This would also mean that Facebook wouldn't need to store any of their user- data in anything resembling a relational normal form. Every table would be a "view" table. The _canonical_ database, owned by the user, could be relational and full of nice constraints and triggers (and the user could even add these themselves); but since Facebook can just query out of that to get any data it's missing, it wouldn't need anything like a "users" table. (Fascinatingly, if Facebook was built as a microservice architecture, this means that each microservice would probably _separately_ query the canonical data from the database in order to generate _its own_ indexes; the Search service would know one "face" of you while the Photos service would know quite another. These could even—in theory—be separately ACLed within your own DB instance, giving the user true, actual control over what Facebook can do with their data, component by component.)

[1] [http://docs.datomic.com/architecture.html](http://docs.datomic.com/architecture.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this gets to the heart of "what people value" and Jason is looking at it from a perspective of a collector. I'm also a collector so I feel much like him.

I wonder if there's a relationship between collecting and being an introvert. I have no evidence but feel like there is. I think most people just don't value "things" the way our types do. What most people value is their social life. They post pictures to Facebook not to store the pictures but to get a reaction from their friends about the picture. That's what they value. The social interaction, not the thing.

<comment><USER13> I really don't like to marginalize others by what type of personality they are. This is yet another way of putting people into buckets so that you can more easily go about your day without thinking about it much. Before facebook people would keep large collections of photo books so that when family and friends came over they could easily share them. It doesn't mean they valued those pictures any less because they were extroverted vs. introverted. People still keep hard copies of the pictures they cherish the most, like a wedding album. People value all sorts of things, but maybe they see cloud storage as perfectly secure, for the moment. Maybe personality plays into that, but I think its more about your approximate knowledge of the underlying technology that keeps people up at night.

<comment><USER12> > I really don't like to marginalize others by what type of personality they > are.

Me either, I hope that's not what it sounded like.

> Before facebook people would keep large collections of photo books so that > when family and friends came over they could easily share them. It doesn't > mean they valued those pictures any less because they were extroverted vs. > introverted. People still keep hard copies of the pictures they cherish the > most, like a wedding album.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think people do still keep the photos they care most about today. I just think we overestimate how many of those photos exist. I think the overwhelming use of taking photos is for social conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand why people are upset about the word. It's misused.

But I remember what it was like before "the cloud"... You had to provision machines one by one, often via email or phone. It took hours or days. Billing was usually done by the day. It sucked.

Now you can just send a POST request to a machine and in a few seconds you have access to a new instance. You can send 1000 requests and get access to 1000 instances. And then you can send some more requests and only get charged for a few minutes of time. When this transition happened, we called it "the cloud" because it's a big undifferentiated mass of computers. We could've called it "the soup" but we didn't.

That's what it has always meant to me. I don't understand why people want to eradicate the word just because it's misused. People misuse the word "internet" all the time, but I don't think we should strike it from our vocabulary.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. When I read the title, I was thinking "Oh, so you'd prefer to pay for dedicated servers? What a pain!".

Though, I don't think the author is upset about the _word_. He's just warning against services that fall within his definition of "cloud" \- which is pretty fair. Losing your stuff is no good, and there's always cruddy services out there.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I guess you're right. Weirdly he's not talking about the cloud at all, he's just talking about storing things on someone else's servers. So I guess he's one of those people misusing the word cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When everything was "moving to the cloud" a few years ago (around when Jason wrote this), I started to have similar feelings. It all felt like something marketers were over-hyping. "Your computer in the cloud" (ever had a shell account that was your main system? This isn't new), "your games in the cloud! Ever played Nethack using that shell account?

I guess the only 'new' thing that I saw was the scaling capabilities based on capacity, but we've had time-sharing (albeit, slightly different) for many years.

<comment><USER17> My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod.

Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?

<comment><USER18> You aren't timesharing your tiny mainframe, so it is quite different, yes. The cloud is _precisely_ what your mom had on a mainframe 50 years ago, including virtualization, on-the-fly scaling of resources (maybe a little more difficult because of the larger equipment), and even renting time on computers you didn't have in your offices, since not every institution could afford their own computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The points in this article also apply really nicely to websites and other services, many of which seem to make the mistake of outsourcing everything to other people's platforms. Oh sure, you may be using 'the cloud' to host your webmail, or your forums, or your chat, or anything else... but what if that goes missing? You're in an even worse situation than the individuals using these services to host their personal files. Remember what happened to IPBFree? They were shut down for some weird, unexplained reason (rumour has it as a raid for illegal activity), and literally everything on their servers was wiped out. Now imagine if the same sort of thing happened to one of these services, like Dropbox or the likes... Millions of people would lose most of their files overnight.

Use such services for backups, sure. But don't rely on them too much, you don't know what might be going on behind the scenes at the other end of the line. You don't know their financials (usually), whether they're under investigation for something, whether an intelligence agency is spying on their servers, whether their security is up to par in every possible sense...

And if they're offering it for free... well, they don't have much invested in keeping you as a customer when things get tough. Became unpopular recently, for saying something controversial or 'stupid' on social media? Made enemies in the political world? Then a lot of companies will be quite happy to shut down your account to avoid bad PR. By using these services, you provide a nice target for the social media mob the minute you do something that a lot of people don't like...

<comment><USER20> > like Dropbox or the likes... Millions of people would lose most of their > files overnight.

That's false. Files in Dropbox are also stored locally on all your Dropbox- enabled computers. They would simply stop syncing, and you'd plug in another syncing service. If Dropbox disappears, your Dropbox folder just becomes a regular folder.

<comment><USER21> I think it is an accurate assessment that many (potentially millions) people would lose their files in such an event. Many people use cloud storage (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive) without a native client. Even on mobile, it is common to delete photos from the device after they have been synced/uploaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article is a lot of fun with the Cloud To Butt Chrome plugin installed.

<comment><USER23> That is by far my favorite plugin. Just don't forget to turn it off before presenting in a meeting...

<comment><USER24> Why would you be presenting Chrome in a meeting?

<comment><USER25> Because you've built your slides with Reveal.js ([http://lab.hakim.se/reveal- js/#/](http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/#/)), for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This seems unnecessarily angry. I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

I'd love it if Facebook and Twitter had a rolling deletion period option - everything more than six months old is shredded forever, as far as the service is concerned. While people can obviously store shared photos and this wouldn't actually destroy them, I'd like that new contacts wouldn't be able to go back and look through someone's entire history. It's like a more social and longer- lived Snapchat.

<comment><USER27> > I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people > just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like.

"This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark).

He's a digital historian; his _job_ is to save everything he can.

[https://twitter.com/textfiles](https://twitter.com/textfiles)

[https://archive.org/about/bios.php](https://archive.org/about/bios.php)

[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

<comment><USER28> This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.

<comment><USER29> > _This article doesn 't really stand on its own; it comes across as a > rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch._

Remember that next time you're red with rage because a cloud provider lost your data or a service you depended on is now bought/closed/gone.

<comment><USER28> My point was more on the quality of the article. The article's point is a valid one, if you can find it.

To constructively disagree, though: I keep backups. I have a Synology NAS device that I really like. But for your average person, I have to wonder - <USER2> their digital photos really safer on their laptop than they are on Facebook? Facebook is a fairly stable company. Laptops are lost, stolen, and damaged all the time. Files are accidentally deleted. People get viruses. People forget the password to their full drive encryption. When Facebook does bite the dust, it's hard to imagine that data just disappearing - it's incredibly valuable, and in the worst case, someone would buy it just to sell it back to people. Not ideal, but it isn't lost, and you had free storage for several years anyway.

<comment><USER30> Think about the future too though. Facebook strips exif and may have resized/recompressed your images. 20 years from now when we can do more super cool things with that data, the data won't exist in your FB photos.

Tangentially related, this is why I shoot RAW. Not because it might give me better pictures today, but because it WILL give me better pictures in 5-10-20 years. You can take a RAW today that was shot 5 years ago and pull detail that was impossible to pull when it was shot, and that ability will only improve.

<comment><USER31> Ideally, you'd want to keep RAW + JPEG. I'd be worried about reading some of the more obscure camera RAW formats in the far future. JPEG seems like a good backup (at the cost of the data loss you mentioned).

<comment><USER30> Yep, sometimes I convert to DNG for that reason, but that seems like pushing the problem out...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don't run, don't control, don't buy, don't administrate, and don't really understand.

<comment><USER33> I think most people have more of there savings in stuff than banks. (Clothes, PC, car, House etc.) At scale cash is a proxy for wealth not actual wealth.

PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say no when you sell it.

<comment><USER34> > PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say > no when you sell it.

They can, unless you satisfy the loan by paying it off as part of the process, at which point they no longer have an ownership-like interest.

In the unusual cases where you try to sell a house _without_ doing that, the bank _absolutely_ can -- and often will -- say no.

<comment><USER33> If you have the cash to pay them off, then they don't get to say no even if it's a short sale.

Alternatively, you can generally walk away and sell it to them for the value of the loan.

<comment><USER34> > If you have the cash to pay them off, then they don't get to say no even if > it's a short sale.

If you _actually_ pay them off, then they don't get to say no, because paying them off is, essentially, buying out their interest in the property, under the terms of an existing contract. That doesn't negate the fact that they have legally-enforceable rights in the property until and unless you do that.

> Alternatively, you can generally walk away and sell it to them for the value > of the loan.

Only if the mortgage is governed by the law of a jurisdiction where pursuit of mortgage deficiency isn't allowed (either in general or for mortgages in the specific conditions yours has.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> >Don't blow anything into the Cloud that you don't have a personal copy of.

I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources I have for making guarantees on the decade level let alone millennia.

With that said I keep personal copies, but the authoritative copy is what's in the cloud, because its a hell of a lot more stable.

TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn't perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. "not invented here" syndrome won't save your data.

<comment><USER36> Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF.

It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities.

The degree to which people rely on others to take care of their stuff is a huge blind-spot. Jason's advice is spot on in this respect, no matter what the up-time guarantees of the cloud solution you are using (and no matter what the redundancies), if you store all your data in the cloud without an off-line copy your company is 3 mouse clicks away from being history.

<comment><USER30> The 3-2-1 rule is a rule for a reason.

3 copies

2 formats

1 copy off-site

The cloud is a great place for that 1 off-site copy.

<comment><USER37> No argument at all about the last sentence, but you should have skipped the first four lines as wildly premature optimization.

The vast majority of the world would be much better served by (to appropriate your jargon) a 2-1-1 rule, because it's a straightforward treatment for a straightforward problem that is easily implemented. Yes, "format skew" and double-failure of backup solutions does indeed happen, but at a much lower incidence than "oh crap I deleted it!".

<comment><USER36> I think the 'three copies' rule refers to cyclic backups, not necessarily three copies of the one piece of data.

This protects against data corruption that is not detected immediately.

Another common way of doing this (and one that I prefer) is one where you rotate out a backup medium with ever larger intervals. So one gets set aside per week, then one gets set aside per month and so on. That gives you a series of snapshots in time that will allow you to pinpoint with some accuracy when an event happened. Longer ago you'll have less accuracy but this can help a lot in trying to triangulate who or what messed up. Just being able to answer the question of whether or not 'x' happened before 'y' was hired or after can help in narrowing down the number of suspects in case of a breach or other nastiness. It also prevents against back-ups for whatever reason not wanting to be reloaded (and you should guard against that by loading your back-up immediately after you make it, even so, the medium might fail the next time you try a read).

Better still if there is a streaming log of everything but only very few companies can afford that sort of solution for all their data. Those can be hard to restore from (by replaying) so there too a snapshot system can help.

<comment><USER37> Oh sure, there's lots to say about the design and effective use of a backup regime. I agree with all that stuff.

But if you're going to condense it to a "rule" that will help people not well- versed in the field, that rule can only be "MAKE BACKUPS!", because at least 90% of the data loss scenarios in the real world happen because simple backups weren't made.

Don't make it more complicated than it is, because someone will stop to do it "right" and then lose data because they didn't just make a copy on a USB stick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, it's seemingly trivially easy.

Don't _move_ to the cloud; _copy_ to the cloud.

Also applies to other storage media.

</comment><comment><USER39> AWS customer since 2007. Just pulled the plug on our last EC2 instance this week having migrated our stuff to a provider offering root servers for the cost of m3.medium. Our requirements are simple and we have no need for high- load/high-end layers. We used to have 50-100 VMs depending on the time of the day, now less than 20 with the rest of the workloads migrated to Docker containers.

P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vaults for now as AWS enforces a cooling period.

<comment><USER36> > P.S. Can't delete Glacier Vaults for now as AWS enforces a cooling period.

That's a good thing. And in the case of Glaciers an excellent pun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Well, that's one way to break the ice :)

I have a bit more of a nuanced view on this than Jason, but I totally understand where he's coming from and when the whole cloud gravy train started rolling our perspectives overlapped much more than they do today (and quite probably since then Jason's perspective has changed as well as perspectives do with the passing of time).

There are use-cases where the cloud is absolutely and utterly the wrong way to go about it. When you're running a bank, a government institution (ever a lower government one) or something else that is mission critical and where total control of the data and maintaining end-user privacy is paramount then the cloud is _probably_ not the right solution.

There are also use-cases where the cloud is the right solution in principle but the wrong solution in practice because of cost. Above a certain scale bandwidth and storage costs of cloud operators will always command a premium over those you get from dedicated hosting providers.

As for 'not owning the machines', plenty of companies lease their servers, so technically they don't own them anyway.

The big problem with 'the cloud' as I see it is that companies tend to rely utterly on it and do not have a 'what if the cloud fails' line in their disaster recovery plans. Lose the cloud data and the company goes up in a puff of water vapor, which is what clouds are made of after all.

So if your use case _does_ match the cloud solutions well then make sure that whatever else you do, have at least a copy of your critical data, code and your configuration information _outside_ of the cloud provider. And while you're at it, make sure that this is done in such a way that there is a separation of duties with respect to those that can administer the cloud portion and those that can access those just-in-case-the-shit-hits-the-fan backups.

Just so you don't end up like codespaces did.

Finally, the cloud is not so much an end-station as it is a step on a much wider scale from absolute control with certain administrative duties on one end and much less control but great convenience on the other. Where on that scale constraints indicated by your comfort level, your application and your fiduciary duties allow you to pick your solution is something that is likely different for every company (and likely for every person).

Customers of companies would do well to research their service providers when it comes to how they are architected, just in case something goes drastically wrong so they don't end up holding the bag.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm definitely going to start renting my own server somewhere in Europe starting from January. I absolutely agree with everything he said and I really want to claim my own data again (run my own email server and things).

<comment><USER41> Do you have a write up on running your own email server?

<comment><USER40> This was the article that convinced me to try: [http://www.27months.com/2013/10/its-always-sunny-in- iceland-...](http://www.27months.com/2013/10/its-always-sunny-in-iceland-or- how-i-nsa-proofed-my-email/)

I read both that one and the one posted here like an hour before this one got posted on HN and they have convinced me to give running my own server a try.

In the meantime, I have just downloaded a backup of all of my data from Twitter and Facebook (Facebook's archive was like 15x as big as the Twitter's archive even though I'm using Twitter way more) that I am going to save on my server, I have switched to POP instead of IMAP on my current email service and I am testing out ownCloud in a Docker container.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you use Snapchat a lot, you may notice how often you get updates from people or see their public story change. Do you ever stop to think about the old snaps, or miss them? No, because you have a constant stream of new ones. You can always make more memories.

Nothing about the cloud is that different from what we had before. With shared hosting providers, you and 50 other users would fill up your disk quota on one or two hard drives on some dinky 1U server running Apache and ProFTPD. If the drives died, along with it went your data. Which is why you kept a copy on your own computer. Back then, nobody expected anyone to keep their data for them, so they just kept their own backups. The same was true for managed services and colo with the exception that you had to do more of the work yourself.

Because the industry has gotten better about preventing data loss, we get complacent and stop saving our stuff as much. But why piss and moan over more reliable, more massive services for cheap or free? Because it isn't perfect, or innovative, or more transparent?

The status quo of the industry is to reinvent the wheel, so it's hard to get mad at people for re-packaging the same solution in a different container. The obsession of holding onto all your old stuff just makes this look even more unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER43> Salutations, ass-end of the Tech Elite.

As someone who has generated a pretty hefty sandbag of verbiage over my decades online, it's always amusing to see what the Grand Eye of internet arbitration decides is an incredibly important and pertinent subject to discuss in my back catalog. Whether it's my work in guiding volunteers for in- browser emulation ([http://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary](http://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary)), my delightful coterie of 1980s BBS textfiles ([http://www.textfiles.com](http://www.textfiles.com)) or perhaps my documentaries on BBS culture ([http://www.bbsdocumentary.com](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com)) Text Adventures ([http://www.getlamp.com](http://www.getlamp.com)) or the DEFCON Hacker Conference ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw)) ... or, as it is today, one of my many long-form written-down thoughts on all manner of this silly medium many of us have chosen to live our lives.

Oh yes, also that my cat is on twitter and has a million followers. ([http://www.twitter.com/sockington](http://www.twitter.com/sockington)) - Lots of people are loaded with knapsacks of opinion about that one as well.

I have found that Hacker News (which is, be clear, an unexpectedly lively extension of Y Combinator) is composed of several diverse groups, all with variant approaches to a linked subject. A linked subject which, as some have pointed out, I wrote 6 years ago, deep in the mists of time.

One group is literally in it for the Money, the gain, the ROI, the endless quest for the "Unicorn", and all their commentary is pungent with the bias and filter of either finding the precious gold coin at the bottom of the shitpile, or are rife with attempts to promote or play up subjects and links of great interest to their financial agenda. Be assured that I could not care less about the current status of the beating of your heart.

Another group seems to be happy to drill down as deep as they can into the mathematics, algorithms, and code of a situation, thinking that if they napkin-blart out enough "facts", they will win some sort of day. I find these people tend to be unhappy about flowery language or effusive phrasing, simply because they've left-brain-dominated themselves into deep pits of nut-sorting and bolt-counting. They use "TL;DR" a lot, as well as, I assume, Adderall. Their heartbeat status is of greater interest to me, if only because I think they are coming from a good place, even if that place smells of Cheetos and sweat.

And, of course, there are Opinion Tourists, my favorite, who might as well be equated with a loud and cantankerous pit of waving hands, waiting for the newly linked (if not newly written) event/opinion/image for their to raise in a mighty roar with a hastily cooked "hot take" on the item. Some of them even optimize the process to not even click on the provided link before the horn honking ensues.

So, "Fuck the Cloud" was written in the deep miasma of when everyone used the term "Cloud" interchangeably with "Magic"; that it was an approach and glory that would lead the experience of computing to a new shangrila. Like any old- timers rife with memories of how we got into that world (and of the echoes of cloud-dom going back 50 years), I decided to write out some of my own thoughts, especially on this attempt to dumb down the populace and separate them from not just responsibility, but control and agency with their data. I have been entirely correct in the general theme - there is a divide within the technical community, of people with admin access and the ability to control any aspect of their work, and then a very large, almost overwhelming set of users who are, essentially, meat stock. And in the same way that meat stock has no particular seat at the table when negotiations of an agricultural nature are conducted, so in the same way are the "users" left out in the cold as a whole range of abilities and ersatz "rights" are stripped away, under the guise of "ease of use" and "leave it to us".

All of this was written without the revelations of the deep, intense surveillance apparatus that is now in place, ensuring that any of this data you control or thought was within your own private space is actually destined to meet you again in an investigation, a courtroom, a warrantless intrusion or a physical SWAT attack. That wasn't even the point.

The point was that user data, treated as something to abuse, monetize, and ultimately discard as a whim, was a complete betrayal of the early promises and experimentation of the Internet. To counteract this trend, I co-founded Archive Team ([http://www.archiveteam.org](http://www.archiveteam.org)) and our delightful success in many areas would warrant a completely different essay itself - and it has, along with myriad speeches and presentations in the years hence.

I'm sure it might be delightful entertainment for Hacker News to find this or that out on the net and go off, endlessly, in the loop of "This Needs Me" and "Fuck You For Thinking That", but ultimately, these are ridiculous showboat- dances of "what if" and "why not", and I've discovered in the years hence that truly, actions and achievement s speak louder, ever so louder, than words.

Enjoy your day.

And fuck "The Cloud".

<comment><USER44> I could have done without your insulting tone, no matter how proud of your opinions you are.

<comment><USER45> You are an adult. If you miss the message for the messenger you've got no one to blame but yourself.

<comment><USER46> So is textfiles an adult. If he/she is a jerk, he/she has nobody else to blame.

<comment><USER45> I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said. While it is certainly the case that one can catch more flies with honey, I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us. This isn't about textfile's delivery, but that it's useless bordering on childish to take a response from an author and respond simply with "I don't like your tone."

<comment><USER46> > I think we'd all rather be people who digest the message instead of > disregarding it because we don't like how it was delivered to us.

That would be good, yes. We should all try to be like that. However, HN has guidelines as well, and I'm pretty sure that textfile's post violated some of them. And the way HN maintains it's status as the kind of place where we care about the message is partly by discouraging statements that needlessly distract with an offensive tone.

<comment><USER45> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the guidelines only seem to state:

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. > Avoid gratuitous negativity.

I guess this is the point where we'd be arguing about taste, but it seems to me that while textfile's comment was clearly negative, it was well constructed and well thought out. Not to mention it was in the _exact_ same tone as the article he'd written years ago that the conversation was about. In this case we should be very careful not to immediately jump on people being upset or negative. It's a powerful tool that, in this case, is being used wisely. I think a bruised sensibility here and there is a worthwhile risk in the name of maintaining a network like HN that accepts dissent and spirited disagreement.

As a slight tangent, in reading the guidelines I found that more than an attempt to tone-police, they are an attempt to lower the noise:signal ratio. The reason I feel that this discussion is important is because it's the reply, not textfile's response, that adds noise to the discussion even if you feel targeted by the authors response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There is no alternative approach presented here. I can only assume that the author has never had to scale a piece of software to server hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

<comment><USER48> The implied alternative is "something you run, control, buy, administrate, and understand." Don't overthink this. You need it to scale to one (1) concurrent user.

Go buy an external hard drive. Start saving important things locally, and also automate backups to the external drive. You now have two copies of everything you can't afford to lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I like the guy's writing style and use of English.

</comment><comment><USER50> In many ways the cloud is one step forward, two steps back. I look forward to the day when I can use my phone as my "cloud".

</comment><comment><USER51> Getting resource limit reached error

<comment><USER52> [http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=ptr%3a204.109.60....](http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=ptr%3a184.108.40.206&run=toolpage)

I bet that wouldn't happen if he'd host his blog on a scaling cloud provider with a proven track record. I could think of a few that might be good candidates... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is an old article and is almost entirely op-ed. No idea how this got to the top of page on HN. :/

<comment><USER29> Maybe because opinions are also valid intellectually?

Mere data driven conclusions get nowhere without a point of view and an end goal to accompany them.

<comment><USER52> These statements are true, but may not be reflective of why this story gets top billing on Hacker News. See techdragon's extrapolation comment that's a sibling to this one. ;)

Place smells more and more like Slashdot every month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's rather interesting that HN mods allow posts with this kind of language but the moment you are even mildly critical of a comment or commenter, you get a warning about language. I guess the thinking is we look the other way as long as its not hosted on the ycombinator domain.

<comment><USER41> I think it's more he (the article) is saying fuck to an idea, not a flesh and blood person (as when responding to a comment).

Also, it is possible to have civil debate around a profanity riddled article. That's what this site is trying to achieve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> In enterprises, you either trust the cloud, or your local data center people.

The local data center people will threaten and lord over you with their hardware powers unless you have the cloud alternative.

And you're not entirely wrong about the cloud.

So don't trust either.

A modern business should have at least two external cloud providers and a local option.

</comment><comment><USER56> OldManYellsAtCloud.jpg

</comment><comment><USER57> Oh, right, this is the guy that wrote the "facebook is the worst thing ever" screed.</comment>


Advice From My 12 Year Old Self - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/personal/advice-12-year/ <comment><USER2> I'm really tired of seeing this stuff.

Now granted, this one is from a 12 year old, so it's no surprise that it's just a bunch of trite self-help nonsense.

But I've been seeing a lot of this "believe in yourself!" "work hard and you'll be successful!" "all you have to do is want it bad enough" from adults who should really know better.

I would like some content, please.

<comment><USER3> I liked the article because it conveys the message that most self-help drivel is at the level of a 12 year old. Although I'm not sure that is what the author intended to point out.</comment></comment>


Singapore activist found guilty of hosting 'illegal assembly' via Skype - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/03/singapore-activist-found-guilty-of-hosting-illegal-assembly-via-skype/ <comment><USER2> I see people in this thread surprised that this is happening in Singapore, a "modern" country. Singapore is certainly wealthy, the population is highly educated, institutions aren't corrupt, all of which is great. However, the political system resembles a democracy only superficially. Every election since 1965 has been won by the same party. It is inconceivable that the People's Action Party wouldn't win an election either now or in the future.

Some find this surprising. Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn't be so wealthy and successful. Turns out Lee Kuan Yew is that one Dictator in a million who managed to do pretty much everything right. Almost every decision he took turned out to be the right one for Singapore, including rigging it's politics so he could stay in power throughout his lifetime. But he's gone now, so it remains to be seen if his successors can carry on his legacy.

Source -

1\. A glowing obituary in The Economist, a publication harassed in Singapore for criticising the PAP - [https://www.economist.com/obituary/2015/03/22/lee- kuan-yew](https://www.economist.com/obituary/2015/03/22/lee-kuan-yew)

2\. The Dictator's Handbook

<comment><USER3> >that one Dictator in a million

Also called an enlightened despot; In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition- a 明君 "míngjūn". There have been instances of them throughout history. But like you said, the problem is usually what happens once the ruler is gone. It's never a (long-term) good idea to have the success of a group dependant on a single person. A political system that produces mediocre-but-stable success (over several generations) seems preferable to one that produces a superior- but-brief success.

<comment><USER4> >In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition-

Oh my, can I ask you where did you pick that up? It feels to me that an average Western person nowadays has been taught more of that stuff than a well studied Chinese.

<comment><USER5> You're assuming this person isn't Chinese?

<comment><USER4> I do. I can not imagine an educated Chinese person these days going at that, moreover somebody from mainland China who is not a party member.

<comment><USER6> Not the poster you're replying to, but an examination of Legalism was presented in both law schools I attended. Additionally, I know it is also addressed in East Asian studies faculties (with additional historical context above the legal philosophy aspect of it, albeit with less emphasis on the functional qualities).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is everyone focusing on the fact that someone spoke via Skype?

The fact is that

1\. Jolovan Wham did organise a physical gathering of people 2\. The gathering/assembly meets the definition as in the Public Order Act[1] 3\. The venue, The Agora, meets the definition of a public place as in the Public Order Act

[1]: [https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/POA2009](https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/POA2009)

They could have been watching a recorded video and it would have been the same.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that a recorded video would have been the same. The source for the techcrunch article says:

> The Singapore Police Force in an earlier statement, said that Wham had > organised an indoor public assembly _featuring a foreign speaker_ , which > required a Police permit.

Although given that political films are also banned, maybe a prerecorded video would have been illegal under a different law.

<comment><USER7> The problem is the intent of the gathering, not that it had a foreign speaker. (Not that I agree with the law, but that's what it says.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In Singapore, it is a criminal offence under the Public Order Act to > organize or participate in a public assembly without a police permit.

:(

<comment><USER10> I suppose that organizing or participating in a public assembly without a police permit is illegal more or less everywhere in the world.

The question is whether "the Internet" is a public place or not.

Case in point: Italy.

A) According to article 18 of the consolidated act on public security (TULPS) it is mandatory to inform the police whenever a gathering is organized in a "public place" [1].

B) the Corte di cassazione (the Italian supreme court) has repeatedly stated that public websites are equivalent to public places [2].

Exercise for the reader: draw the consequences of combining A and B.

[1] «I promotori di una riunione in luogo pubblico o aperto al pubblico devono darne avviso, almeno tre giorni prima, al Questore. E' considerata pubblica anche una riunione, che, sebbene indetta in forma privata, tuttavia per il luogo in cui sarà tenuta, o per il numero delle persone che dovranno intervenirvi, o per lo scopo o l'oggetto di essa, ha carattere di riunione non privata.» [http://www.normattiva.it/uri- res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:regio.de...](http://www.normattiva.it/uri- res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:regio.decreto:1931-06-18;773!vig=)

[2] [https://www.lastampa.it/2014/11/17/italia/molestie-cosa- rien...](https://www.lastampa.it/2014/11/17/italia/molestie-cosa-rientra-nel- concetto-di-luogo-aperto-al-pubblico-zbnxRf0N26LRUQkPRcz8hL/pagina.html)

<comment><USER11>
        I suppose that organizing or participating in a public assembly without a police permit is illegal more or less everywhere in the world.

In Germany, per the Versammlungsgesetz'e of the federal states as well as the federal Versammlungsgesetz that applies to all states without one, you do not need a permit for an assembly, you only have to notify the police or Ordnungsamt (part of city government) 48h in advance of public announcement. This is actually meant as a direct departure from the Third Reich policy where permits were required.

If the police deems your assembly a danger to the public or unable to be held as notified (e.g. when you want to hold an assembly on an Autobahn or other major street, or in security zones during foreign state visits) they can either forbid the assembly in its entirety (which is _very_ rare) or modify the time/location (e.g. not _on_ the Autobahn but on a parking lot, or directly outside the security zone). In this case the assembly initiator can go to the courts and initiate emergency hearings, which sometimes (e.g. with the G20 Hamburg protests) can go up to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (our Supreme Court equivalent).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/](https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/)

Old but good essay by William Gibson on his trip to Singapore in the 90s. "Disneyland with the Death Penalty". An interesting read and relevant to this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Key points from the article -

TL;DR - Speaker was on Skype. 121 people gathered together to listen to him. Police had told the organizer to get a permit, which he didn't. Location was inside a public mall.

>>> On November 26, 2016, Wham organized an indoor forum called "Civil Disobedience and Social Movements" at a small event space inside a shopping mall in Singapore. The event featured prominent Hong Kong student activist Joshua Wong who addressed the audience remotely via a Skype video call.

The event's Facebook Page indicates that 355 people were interested and 121 went. The Skype discussion, which lasted around two hours, was also live streamed on Facebook by The Online Citizen SG, a social media platform focused on political activism, and garnered 5,700 views.

Despite being advised by the police prior to the event to obtain a permit, Wham proceeded without said consent, according to a statement by the Singapore Police Force. Wham faced similar charges of organizing public assemblies without police permits and refusing to sign statements under the Penal Code.

<comment><USER12> I assume that in summary you're not taking a view..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Im not sure I understand the story. He was judged for illegal assembly regardless of the Skype call, as far as I understand. Anyone else can comment?

<comment><USER15> ""The law says that any event which is open to the public, and is 'cause related', requires a permit when a foreigner speaks."

There was a foreign speaker participating over Skype. As idiotic as the law seems to be, I do believe the case is rather clear. The foreigner did indeed speak at the conference, which was public. The fact that Skype was used as a medium to facilitate that doesn't really change anything.

<comment><USER16> He did not. Some electrons were converted into photons of different frequencies mostly in the human visual spectrum, and some electrons were converted into other frequences in the spectrum that can be converted into a meaning by a human.

If I rant against Disney land with the dealt penalty, and the video is later played there, I have not given a speech there.

<comment><USER15> > Some electrons were converted into photons of different frequencies mostly > in the human visual spectrum, and some electrons were converted into other > frequences in the spectrum that can be converted into a meaning by a human.

If someone live-streams a keynote and a Q/A session as a part of an event, then the person speaking is obviously participating.

Please note, that I have no problems with remote participation of events. It just happens that our favourite south-east asian police state requires a permit for such events. Our opinions on whether that law is a good one or not has nothing to do with the medium chosen for the event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should make a move about Singapore and call it "Crazy Strict Asians".

</comment><comment><USER17> I would never go to Singapore.

They'd probably end up whipping me a hundred times for something I did without even being aware of it. [1]

IMHO that whole country should serve as a counterexample to all the rest.

Humans really _are_ good at making life miserable for each other aren't they?

[1] Maybe farting in public, or wearing my shoes on the wrong feet or whatever.

<comment><USER18> In all fairness I'd be hesitant to live in Singapore on account of its high cost of living and poor work-life balance. However, there is a method to the madness as far as the legal system goes, which makes it tame to visit compare with other large cities in SE Asia or even western europe.

<comment><USER19> > In all fairness I'd be hesitant to live in Singapore on account of its high > cost of living and poor work-life balance.

As an expat, that would likely not affect you much. Lots of MNCs have fairly nice working hours, decent pay and 20-25 days/year paid leave (on top of the numerous public holidays)

Cost of living depends on whether you need a big apartment in a posh location and a car. Sending kids to international school is also pricey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My main interest in this article was not about Singapore, but at what point does an online gathering cross the boundary to the physical world where limits are placed on the size of the gathering, or if and when it crosses countries' borders.

What's not to say the HKer was the host and the Singaporeans were individually the guests? Obviously that isn't what the court decided in this instance but perhaps that is what could happen next time.

Was it the physical location of the Singaporeans that made the difference? What if they had attend a Skype concall at home, would the court be looking at who sent the meeting invitation?

<comment><USER20> From what I've read about Sg's government, they won't care. If they want to do something they won't let a legal technicality stop them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does everyone assume democracy is good? It clearly wasn't necessary for Singapore. A well run "dictatorship" is much better than your average democracy. I would concede that a democracy filled with the right people is the best but in reality it is very rare to come upon a population that is actually ready to govern itself. People generally have extremely reductionist and incorrect opinions about such things in my experience.

<comment><USER22> Democracy is awful in all sorts of ways. Its one major advantage is non- violent succession, something other systems really struggle with.

Dictatorships can be great for a whole, but eventually you get a mad dictator or two people who both think they should be the dictator and it all falls apart.

<comment><USER23> So, perhaps people should be able to vote for their dictator? :)

<comment><USER24> This is how the Romans thought of dictators, yes. The dictator was elected by nomination and then given supreme authority over state affairs, although usually only in a specific area of governance and with severe term limits.

The last guy who said "screw term limits" was ol' Julius Caesar, but he was iced not long after on the Ides of March and the office of dictator was abolished.

The title of dictator has taken on a negative connotation in the recent past for obvious reasons, but the idea of a competent or even brilliant man being given total control in order to accomplish a specific task for the good of a country is certainly something to consider regarding governance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This the country my country's idiot politicians want to model us after, post- Brexit. I despair.

<comment><USER25> It's possible to imitate their trade policy without copying their lack of civil rights.

<comment><USER18> Singapore does have many positives (ease of forming a business, low crime, low corruption, a cost-effective single-payer healthcare system, good urban planning, taxing car ownership as an externality). I don't see how these go hand-in-hand with authoritarian government.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Facebook Cards : a Google Now approach to the Facebook timeline - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aminezafri/95dc415317a1

<comment><USER2> Facebook has been moving towards making the same experience on all platforms. From the images provided I'm not sure how well it would translate to mobile.

Looks really good.</comment>


K-means of color trends in Oscar nominee posters - <AUTHOR> http://cateches.is/post/59914762687/oscars-in-colors

<comment><USER2> Really cool idea, but it's hard to get a grasp of the trends at this level.

One of the handful I can pick up is that earlier films tend to have stronger brighter yellows in them that have faded almost completely out, but I have no idea _why_ or _what that means._

What I'd implore you to do is to give me some more low-level data to explore (maybe show me a full picture of the poster with the film title when I hover over a color palette), make it easier to spot trends (perhaps flatten everything into a single column to make it easier to compare them), and give me more high-level information (average out the colors of a decade as "the average color scheme of the 200Xs," show me the most popular color of the 1930s compared to the 1970s).

This is certainly cool, but I can't do anything with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate the feedback! I guess the Best Picture nominees don't give you a great range of what was popular, so this needs to be expanded. I'd love to be able to do general color schemes by decade or year. This was just an afternoon project, so I'll definitely do more with this.</comment></comment>


Programming languages: Don't bother learning these ones in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-dont-bother-learning-these-ones-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> What ever you do, stay away from perl! It might give you access to CPAN, one of the finest crowd sourced solution libraries ever created... with modules for delving into data structures dating back to the earliest days of the Internet, and plenty of shims into other things.

The way perl embraced regular expressions and integrated them into the language structure cannot be beat.

Most perl vs. python discussions these days go like this:

python user: "It so much better then perl where you are forced to [contrived and arbitrary example with weird syntax]"

perl user: "Looks OK, though I could do that better. How is it done in python?"

python user: "In python, we just [contrived and arbitrary example with weird syntax]. It's easy!"</comment>


Monitor network utilization on the shell with Slurm - <AUTHOR> http://www.wormulon.net/slurm/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand this submission, it links to some tarballs. I've used SLURM before, it's pretty good, it's homepage is here:

<https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/></comment>


Git Rev News Edition 9 - <AUTHOR> http://git.github.io/rev_news/2015/11/11/edition-9/ <comment><AUTHOR> My favourite recent addition to Git Rev News is the developer spotlight interviews.

This edition's spotlight on Matthieu Moy is really interesting, as he talks about some of the changes he has helped implement in git, particularly in the user interface.

 _Q: How did you start getting involved with Git?

A: My first non-trivial contribution to free software was on version-control, before Git existed. I got involved in GNU Arch, then its fork Bazaar 1.x. And then GNU Arch and Bazaar 1.x died, and I moved on to something else. At the same time, I started teaching version-control, hated centralized systems enough to migrate to Git. Teaching Git in 2009 was a funny experience: the tool was starting to get a decent user-interface, but was lacking a lot of polishing. One of my favorite examples is what happens when you push to a remote that has commits that you don't have locally. Initially, users were getting a message like:_

        ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)

_I wrote a rather straightforward patch to change it to:_

        ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
        To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected.
        Merge the remote changes before pushing again.
        See 'non-fast forward' section of 'git push --help' for details.

_The students went from "Huh?" to "Wow, a 3-lines long message, that's long. What shall I do now (given that reading the actual doc is not an option)?". Then, I added an explicit mention of "git pull" in the message, and the situation became manageable for most students. Many of my contributions to Git follow this principle: see what users have difficulties with, and try to improve the tool to help them. In many cases, a staightforward patch to improve the error message was sufficient: in case of error, explain what's going on to the user, and give the way out ("did you mean: ...?" or "use ... to ...")._</comment>


Harvard P2P lawyer: file-swapping is fair use — no, really - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/harvard-p2p-lawyer-file-swapping-is-fair-use--no-really.ars

<comment><USER2> Oh dear. From the one lecture of his that I attended, I knew that Charlie Nesson had some unconventional ideas, but this is a bit excessive. (You know you should be worried when Lawrence Lessig dismisses your fair use argument.)

The student he is representing should be worried that all this showmanship is angering the judge, who would then give less credence to legitimate arguments.

<comment><USER3> Nesson's a character, no?

One of the most distasteful aspects of legal practice is that most legal arguments take the form of factual statements (or at least claims of fact), but the factual content of the speech is secondary to the effects it's hoped to have (on its listeners).

So put yourself in Nesson's shoes; he's doing this case pro-bono, and therefore has no real worried about being paid for his time. Thus, Nesson has no incentive to artificially shorten the length of his defense (out of concern for working longer than his client can afford).

Nesson also wants to win this case.

So you've got someone for whom: time is no real object, and winning is a goal.

In that circumstance, what's the harm in trying a "fair use" defense? It probably won't fly, but it's one more thing to try, and one more thing for the plaintiff to have to argue against (thereby further draining plaintiff's resources, because plaintiff _is_ paying for their representation's time here).

It's not entirely harmless, sure -- a few too many wild conjectures and Nesson's credibility in court may be somewhat tarnished (though, even there, keep in mind Nesson's (1) something of a legend and (2) already known as a loose cannon, so compared to a run of the mill attorney the impact of one or two wild arguments on his in-courtroom credibility is harder to calculate) -- but it's one more thing that _might_ work and it's one more way to try and exhaust the plaintiff's will to proceed (and I guarantee you this is not the only line of defense Nesson's got).

So, regardless of whether (1) Nesson thinks file-sharing is actually fair use and (2) Nesson thinks he can convince anyone else file-sharing is actually fair use (note: (2) is independent of (1)) it's possible to reverse-engineer the thinking that might make the risk/reward calculation on advancing this line of argument look promising.

But, due to the practical constraints of legal speech, you'll never see any of these statements:

\- your honor, I personally don't think file sharing is fair use and I actually don't think I'll be able to convince anyone else in this courtroom that filesharing is fair use, but in the interest of exhausting my opponents with every hare-brained scheme I can conceive I'm going to spend a couple days arguing the point. Let's proceed.

\- your honor, I personally think file sharing is fair use and am savvy enough to understand I won't convince anyone here of that via any amount of argumentation, but I am cocksure enough of my argumentative abilities that I won't say anything so immediately laughable that all y'all will be hard- pressed to give a reasoned explanation for why you should shut this line of argumentation down prematurely so you should plan on hearing me out over the next several days.

...or anything similarly candid, ever. Instead, you'll just hear something like what you've heard, which is a straight-faced assertion with no qualifications or caveats; it might be more honest to give a statement like one of the impossible statements above, but giving the statement such a form would be self-defeating in light of the intended effect of making any such statement.

<comment><USER3> And, having read his blog post that was referenced in the linked article, this sounds about right.

Strategy-to-win is step 1: get a jury trial going.

Step 2: build an argument that the notion of "fair use" is one of those constitutional notions that can be inferred from the constitution even when not mentioned explicitly (eg some notion of privacy being inferred from 4th amendment, etc.)

Step 3: argue that stuff like the "4 factors" test are not definitive but merely illustrative -- they serve to illustrate the considerations that one ought to consider when making a judgement of fair use, but do not _define_ the notion of fair use, which is inferred directly from the constitution and thus precedes any later developments like "4 factors"

Step 4: argue that b/c "fair use" is an affirmative defense (meaning, a defense you can make when you're brought to trial, as opposed to an explicit grant of rights to the "fair user") the meaning of fair use is always and everywhere up to a specific jury in a specific case to decide. Remind jury of step 3 (that stuff like 4 factors is actually only illustrative and not definitive) and that at the end of the day whether or not the defendant is making "fair use" is entirely up to the jury and the jury's conscience.

Step 5: argue from conscience that there's no way the current set of file- sharing penalties are in any sense "fair", and again remind that it is ultimately the jury's responsibility to make a decision as to what is or is not "fair use" and thereby ensure fairness.

This is a better strategy than it sounds in summary, though it only stands a chance of working if Nesson's hopes for a hollywood-type free-ranging trial come about; the threat of such a thing may be all he needs to get this case to settle, which counts as a win for his client, even if it's a sub-optimal way to win for Nesson himself.

The argument for "illustrativeness" is genius if fully developed; it's basically an attempt to transform the restrictions on the grant of authority to Congress to institute copyright and patent laws ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts") from dead letters to the source of a notion of "fair use":

\- on the one hand, if such-and-such a use is shown to promote the progress of science and useful arts then laws restricting such a use require scrutiny (to ensure the net effect of the restriction balances out to promotion of progress of science and useful arts)

\- on the other hand, if a restriction on a particular use does nothing to promote science or useful arts, then it's perhaps consitutional

...and in this picture the "4 factor" test would just be a useful set of guidelines for determining when a law-as-written is unconstitutional as applied to a particular set of circumstances.

It's also clever for its effect on the judiciary: Nesson's hardest targets there will hail from the right-wing, who typically lean towards strict constructionism (supposedly, only considering the raw language of some law) or an originalist (supposedly only considering the original intent of the writers of some law). However, it'd be _difficult_ for either of those two schools to straightfacedly argue that the constitutional language about the "progress of science and useful arts" is just decorative fluff -- it'd put them in the position of having to argue that "yes, that language does mean something, we just disagree about what", which is in-and-of-itself a huge win.

And, secondly, if he can get this to a jury all he has to do is get done with steps 2 and 3 and then he's converted the trial from a nitpicky study of specific statutes to a general debate on "fairness", and then he's on much stronger ground.

He could, from there, abstract from the specifics of the case at hand to arguing that from the position of someone who isn't that familiar with the law -- eg, a 10 y/o -- it literally would make _no sense_ for copying a cd for a friend or downloading something from the internet to carry fines in the 6 figure range, using argumentation along the following:

\- tv ads for isps are always emphasizing download speeds for downloading music and movies etc. and sending files, etc.

\- tv ads for computers always talk about how easy it is to send files or burn cds and dvds, etc.

\- blank cds and dvds are available at supermarkets and 7-11 and all that

\- stuff like ipods or cellphones with music capacity are source-agnostic; even with the itunes store it doesn't stop you from loading mp3s from elsewhere

\- youtube, etc is full of music videos and so on, often with hundreds of thousands of views and not uploaded by anyone "official"

\- tv and radio and internet radio stream free content over the air and it's legal to record it

\- school projects often involve xeroxing stuff and making collages and so on

\- there's libraries (run by the government) that loan stuff out for free, it's fine to let friends borrow stuff, and if you're going to loan to friends it's more convenient to just burn a copy than actually loan the disc

...but then wtf? I downloaded some tunes and now my parents are being sued for $150k+?

It's not an airtight argument, but on grounds of pure fairness it's not unconvincing.

I doubt Nesson'll get his day in court to argue this line of reasoning -- and if he does it'll probably be shut down earlier rather than later -- but the apparent strategy (once fleshed-out) is an inspired mix both of legal interpretation and lawyerly strategy.

<comment><USER4> It's quite a convincing argument against $150k fines, but I'm sure it has anything to do with fair use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excusing peer-to-peer file-sharing because it falls under the nebulous cloud of "non-commercial" use seems ridiculous. Espousing a social-contract model for copyright doesn't suddenly mean that only the end-users get to dictate the terms of the contract.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean, "espousing a social-contract model" ? The authority to create a copyright law is explicity granted in the US Constitution for the precise purpose of a greater social good, "to promote the useful Arts and Sciences". So there is a contract there - congress is allowed to make copyright laws, but the rest of society gets promotion of the useful arts and sciences.

It's not an accidental addition; in Europe, copyrights and patents and other monopolies were handed out by Kings to reward friends, often with disregard to who the inventors and authors were. Our system gives the copyrights and patents to the authors and inventors, and it has to be for a limited time, and if the system does not promote the useful arts and sciences but instead a form of welfare or subsidy of certain interests, then you have to find authority to do it under some other part of law; it may in fact be unconstitutional.

Also, I find your remark about "doesn't mean that only the end-users get to dictate the terms of the contract" silly. Of course you realize like any literate person that a contract is a "meeting of the minds", that neither party gets to dictate the terms, but both parties have veto power and can not sign on.

I am on both sides of the contract, as a person who writes copyrighted computer code, and a person like the rest of the US who is restricted in copying other people's copyrighted work. I don't see the contract as a good one, and I'm willing to scrap the whole thing if it cannot be modified.

There is little evidence that the current state of copyright is helping the economy, the "Useful Arts and Sciences", or society as a whole. Not only is there ample reason to exclude the non-commercial distribution from it, I would sign on for eliminating the whole of copyright and patent law, the entire Title 17 and 35 (I think) of the US Code. Allowing the free copying of anything in a non-commercial way is nice little experiment we could run for a couple of years, and if starving silicon valley workers aren't forced to resort to canibalism, we ought to can the rest of the system too.

I'm not alone in pointing out the system is not function to incease the economy; numerous smart people over the years have said the same thing. Fredrich Hayek, whose work is generally considered staunchly right-wing and pro-capitalism and etc, said as much in "The Road to Serfdom" in the 1940s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Seems to me to be an understandable principle that it's okay to consume and share nonrivalrous [sic] good which are available on the net for free."

I keep hearing this argument that the owner of the original file does not lose anything if you copy it. Well, the owner of a banknote does not lose anything either if you make 10000 copies of it.

Both files and money have an abstract value, and copying dilutes the value, hence copying is forbidden.

<comment><USER8> Also, your argument is fallacious. A digital good does not really have any instrinsic value in and of itself, only what people make of it.

Whereas a dollar bill is worth just that, a dollar.

<comment><USER9> A dollar is worth a dollar because a lot of people want it that way. Gold is "worth" 900USD because a lot of people want gold. But not _too_ many people - otherwise the price would rise.

My point is that nothing has intrinsic value. The market parameters of supply, demand and prices are one way we assign value to things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even though his argument seems optimistic, hopefully he can reduce some of the crazy awards and "lost revenue" or perhaps expose some of the inadequacies in linking actual filesharing to a particular person.</comment>


Honeybees are found to interact with Quantum fields - <AUTHOR> http://www.neuroquantology.com/repository/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65:honeybees-are-found-to-interact-with-quantum-fields

<comment><USER2> A more accurate title for the article would be "wild hypothesis is proposed without a shred of evidence".</comment>


ASK HN: FREE FOOD? - <AUTHOR>

1) Would you post about your excess (leftover) food to a network that would notify organizations in need? (i.e. homeless shelters etc.)
2) Would you subscribe to a service that would alert you (based on your preferences) whenever free food was available in your area?
For both of these questions please assume food is safe and liability is NOT a concern. <comment><USER3> Probably not in both cases. There's usually no need to post - <USER2> always have leftovers and organizations like City Harvest can partner with them. Scheduled pickups work just fine. If you're talking about posting individual portions (e.g. my dinner currently) there's no way it's cheaper for them to come pick it up than to cook something fresh in bulk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even with organizations like City Harvest, Food Runners, food banks, etc., there are still 263 million pounds of ___consumable food_ __wasted every day. How can we address this?

<comment><USER4> If you implement these food halls I would be really happy.

<http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/2012/04/the-new-halls/>

I imagine them somewhat different: food by subscription but paid by the government instead of financial aid to ensure people eat healthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. No I probably would not because of the hustles it involves. 2\. No I not unless I was homeless and broke. And if so I would most likely only look for unopened things. Otherwise I might as well just look in dumpsters by myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) What if all you needed to do was snap a photo and maybe write a brief description of the donation and select an 'expiration day and time'?

2) Imagine you are a college student and this food is coming from on-campus sources and events -- would that change anything?

<comment><USER6> I thought about #2 a few years ago, then I realized there's a Facebook page for it (literally free food at [school]). You'd be stuck with adoption of people posting free food and then visiting the site to the the free food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Absolutely. This is a great idea. I think you would just really need to make it as painless and automated for your user/food-provider as possible.

2\. Perhaps. However, as a food provider, I would be less willing to provide if I knew that the food was going to "just anyone". I would be much more likely to sign up if I knew it was going to the disadvantaged. There's an Australian organization called OzHarvest who does a similar thing, but gets food from restaurants. It's an incredibly successful social venture.

</comment><comment><USER8> This title was misleading.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple administration of a Postgresql HA cluster? - <AUTHOR> Postgresql is my go-to database for a couple of years, but so far I had operated most of my DBs on a single machine with ad-hoc backups. I'm also operating a CockroachDB cluster, and I really like the simple administration of it: joining and upgrading a node is seamless. It has some rough edges, but most of the time it doesn't take more than a few minutes of my time.
Is there a similarly simple cluster administration for Postgres? Ideally it should be dockerized, multi-master (master-slave may be a fallback if everything else is there), and at minimum capable of electing a new master and continuing operations.
What are the tools that you are currently using for such setup? <comment><USER2> There are no good multi-master solution with a HA focus available for Postgres, at least no open source ones.

The patroni project checks most of your other requirements: docker/containerized design with leader election/continuing operation via etcd or another external DCS. Not sure how easy upgrades are but I think the procedure is at least documented.</comment>


Redbox's machines take on Netflix's red envelopes - <AUTHOR> http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090622/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_netflix_s_nemesis

<comment><USER2> I've been wondering why there are no pizza delivery services that also deliver movies. But then it seemed backwards to consider physical delivery of movies anyway.</comment>


Ask HN: Use OpenStreetMap in paid service for start-up? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a project which is based on using Open Street Map and the tile drawer on tiledrawer.com. However, this is licensed with a Creative Commons license.
Can I still make this software using Open Street Map data as a paid service on the Internet?
And if I decide to use data from the Open Street Map project, will I have to release all my source code with the Creative Commons license?
Thanks! <comment><USER3> To sum it up: it depends on your business model, and how you intend on using the OSM stuff, so we need more data to give you a better idea.

As far as source code goes, you only need to release your source if you use and modify the actual OSM rendering engine source code. Your code used to display maps (rails, django, php code whatever) is your own and won't be "compromised" by using software licensed in even a restrictive open source licensing scheme.

An example using my site: I plan on using OSM for parts of ridewithgps - <USER2> will make money by selling accounts that have special features shown on an OSM map. So, that person can print or redistribute the maps according to the Creative Commons, but I won't lose "value" because features my business model relies on revolve around performance analysis of their own data, not displaying something on the map.

If your business model is making topographical trail maps and selling them, using OSM data, then you will may have a barrier to success: anyone can print out the map and distribute it freely or for money, regardless of whether it was made through your site or not.

</comment><comment><USER4> An explanation of the legal requirements of using Open Street Maps is found here: <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ>

They also have a number of mailing lists, including a legal one intended to address questions such as yours which can be found here: <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mailing_list>

</comment><comment><USER5> The map database also has some really well thought out licensing behind it to prevent vendors from taking the data, adding one or two gps points, and then keeping things proprietary. I believe OSM had the license custom-made because source code licenses didn't translate to databases, so you may need to do some extra reading.

</comment><comment><USER6> You might want to have a look and see how CloudMade <[http://www.cloudmade.com>](http://www.cloudmade.com>); has been commercializing OSM data.</comment>


Closure - <AUTHOR> http://words.steveklabnik.com/closure <comment><USER2> Question for Steve: How did Summer of Code go? I understand you mentored a student who developed for Hackety Hack a few summers ago?

By the way, I'd love to contribute to Hackety Hack :)

<comment><USER3> Summer of code went really well. I had a fantastic student that contributed so much.

I'd love to have more contributors on Hackety. Development is basically frozen while we re-write Shoes to pay off the technical debt involved. (CORRUPTION really spoke to me...) So the best way to help is to get on <https://github.com/shoes/shoes4> and firstname.lastname@example.com and start pitching in!

<comment><USER4> CORRUPTION kind of explained a lot :)

Hey, you're going the JRuby route? Are you using Swing and what-not to get rid of the platform specific code? How's it working out? I'll grab the source and see if there's anything I can help with. I don't get a lot of time away from my day-job while my children are so young, but as they grow up Hackety Hack is the sort of project I'd very much like to help out with.

<comment><USER3> When I first started hacking on Shoes, it took me 6 months to compile. o_O.

We are going a few routes:

1) The first iteration will be JRuby + SWT. 2) It's written in a way that the DSL is separate from the backend, so that SWT can be swapped out for Swing or whatever. 3) Same with the Ruby: ideally, someday we can move back to an embedded MRI.

It's working out pretty well so far, a lot of the example code runs.

Due to my Shoes burnout, I'm playing semi-absent benevolent dictator for now. A great team of people is doing all of the actual work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I've been googling around and I think I've got most of the pieces of this puzzle figured out (_why was a great, eccentric developer, he disappeared and commited info-suicide).

But what I don't get is why the author of this article waited a year ('So I marked my calendar for the 18th, and waited. That was yesterday.') --- What indication did he have to mark his calendar for the 18th (was this an anniversary?)

I'm so very confused about this, but I'm intrigued.

<comment><USER6> Jan. 2013 was _why's first reappearance. He had actually updated his website with the first couple entries in the print queue in December, but no one noticed until January. After people noticed ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5015087> ), _why started updating it with more pages in the print queue, one of which said the print queue was going down until April 18, and would then be up during the hours of 4 to 12. Which sounded like _why was going to do something big that day.

<comment><USER5> Ah; much clearer now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where was the IF game within _why's spool?

<comment><USER3> The part about "Sacred Clowns" is valid INFORM 7 code: [http://playfic.com/games/waxpancake/sacred-clowns-by-why- the...](http://playfic.com/games/waxpancake/sacred-clowns-by-why-the-lucky- stiff)

<comment><USER8> I can't figure out how to get to the red shed :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <BLINK> Your homepage is brilliant. </BLINK>

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a mirror for CLOSURE.pdf only? Github won't allow download, and I'm on a terrible connection to download the whole repo.

<comment><USER3> No problem: <https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5764687/CLOSURE.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's weird to see people so flagrantly posting stuff without a copyright license. Is it just because _why only put their past work on the internet temporarily that people feel like it's OK to distribute this new stuff freely?

<comment><AUTHOR> I find you're assertion, that something that lacks a copyright license shouldn't be shared, far more troubling.

<comment><USER3> Technically, according to the law, they are 100% correct.

<comment><USER12> He means according to Justice and Good, not the law.</comment></comment></comment></comment>