Ask HN: What Are the Pros and Cons in Using Asguard? - <AUTHOR>

We have been using AWS, and we create a different user with authorized_keys imported from github users who are the part of contribute team.
After looking at asguard (), it seems that we can give access to the devs with login credentials.
What will be the perfect use-case for using asguard? <comment><AUTHOR> Link to asguard: [https://github.com/Netflix/asgard](https://github.com/Netflix/asgard)</comment>


Ask HN: What is going on with the Boxee Box and Netflix? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any insight to offer about why the Boxee Box still doesn't support Netflix?  Netflix as a company doesn't seem to have many issues putting their service on every device out there, why would there be a hold up with the Boxee Box? <comment><USER2> They are planning an update by the end of January:

[http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/12/31/vudu-arriving-next-week- netf...](http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/12/31/vudu-arriving-next-week-netflix-by- end-of-january/)</comment>


Jury: Newegg infringes Spangenberg patent, must pay $2.3 million - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/jury-newegg-infringes-spangenberg-patent-must-pay-2-3-million/ <comment><USER3> Article starts with the most important two words:

MARSHALL, TX

From Wikipedia:

 _Marshall has a reputation for plaintiff-friendly juries for the 5% of patent lawsuits that reach trial, resulting in 78% plaintiff wins._

I've stopped myself getting surprised for any patent suits where troll gloriously wins and that decision comes from a court in Marshall. This town's economy probably runs on lawsuits that trolls bring in and jury members from the town seem to have special incentive to favor plaintiffs almost 4 out of 5 times!

<comment><USER4> Without knowing the percentage of cases that result in plaintiff wins in other cities, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from that stat.

<comment><USER5> Patent holders win 78 percent of the time [In Marshall], compared with an average of 59 percent nationwide, according to LegalMetric, a company that tracks patent litigation.

<comment><USER6> What is the variance? skewness?

<comment><USER7> How are you wanting to measure those for a Bernoulli variable?

In any given case, the plaintiff either wins or loses. Assuming different cases are independent (which is probably at least a decent assumption), there's no more to say about the distribution than the win probability.

You could of course ask about the variance, skewness, kurtosis, 17th moment, etc., of the distribution of damages awarded or length of trial or total lawyers' fees or something. But for the actual win-or-lose figures, the question doesn't make sense.

Well, it _kinda_ makes sense. Define the outcome to be 0 if the plaintiff loses and 1 if the plaintiff wins. Then with a win probability of 0.78 the variance is 0.17, the skewness is -1.35, the excess kurtosis is -0.17, etc., but there's no more information in any of these numbers than was already provided when we learned that the probability was 0.78.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand what you don't understand, given that you are yourself taking each county/town (not sure what is the atomic unit of judicial division here) as one RV to which you associate a winning rate. There are surely enough of them to get them in bins of winning rate.

Anyway, my point was to highlight that the mean alone is not very informative.

<comment><USER7> Ah! You were asking about the distribution of win rates across counties or towns or whatever. I completely misunderstood and thought you were asking for more information about the distribution of wins and losses within Marshall.

My apologies.

<comment><USER7> I am disturbed to see that the great-grandparent of this comment (the one saying "that doesn't make sense for a Bernoulli variable) has attracted 5 new upvotes since the parent of this comment (the one saying "oops, that was a mistake") was posted.

Everybody: Please stop upvoting my wrong comment. It was wrong. At best it may suggest a lack of clarity in the comment it was replying to, but that doesn't deserve 10 upvotes.

Thank you.

(Not that I mind being upvoted as such, but I do wish I saw more correlation between the quality of my comments and the votes they attract.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The patent involved basic traffic encryption (SSL or TLS combined with the RC4 cipher), and the company already has made $45 million off it.

Here's some more info on the company they lost to:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121109/02321120982/meet-p...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121109/02321120982/meet- patent-troll-suing-hundreds-companies-encrypting-web-traffic.shtml)

TL;DR: They're patent trolls.

<comment><USER9> >the company already has made $45 million off it

I know that saying "made" is the generic form for acquiring money through any means. However, it also carries the connotations of production, of creation. I would rather say that they have already extorted $45 million using it.

<comment><USER10> Well since Newegg made the money, perhaps TQP was _awarded_ the $45M that Newegg et al made, or TQP was _shown to deserve_ the $45M that Newegg et al made. But you're right, let's be clear: TQP didn't create any wealth here.

EDIT: I'm mixing numbers. Not all of the 45M was from Newegg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The original Anglo-Saxon juries were chosen from among local people because they _knew_ the witnesses who would be testifying. The idea was that they could judge the credibility of the witnesses based on their direct experience with them.

Then later on after the idea of an unbiased jury took hold, there arose a justifying theory that the jury could tell by careful observation whether or not a witness was telling the truth. This theory is dubious enough when applied to simple questions of outright lying. When it comes to judging expert witnesses testimony, it is totally bogus.

If they don't want to create a patent office court to adjudicate these cases, at the very least Congress should authorize the appointment of special masters to do fact finding in patent cases.

<comment><USER12> Moreover, there is a cottage industry of being an "expert" to testify for some of these technical issues. They are often experts in as much as they have been called before as "experts", even thought the industry they are supposedly explaining might consider them charlatans -- people who just know how to dress well and talk bullshit, but in a very convincing tone.

<comment><USER13> That's basically how I saw them trying to paint Diffie in this trial: by pointing out that he hadn't graduated from university, that he wasn't a professor, that he didn't even invent PKC!

It seems they managed to convince the jury at least.

<comment><USER14> If he claimed to invent PKC and the other side points out he hadn't, his credibility goes down the toilet.

I saw lots of love for Diffie's "I invented it" line. But if he overplayed his hand, he ended up hurting his side more than he helped it.

<comment><USER15> When there are museums that consider you to have invented it, and you DID invent it (just perhaps were not the first, though that was not known at the time), it seems fair to say that you did.

After all, we consider that both Newton and Leibnitz invented calculus.

<comment><USER14> Then he should have said that. "I am often called the inventor of public key cryptography.[1]"

But it would not have been as cool to quote on web forums.

[1] I don't know if that's heresy or whatever; Egghead's legal team, however, would know and could coach him appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Optimism please, they've beaten patents on appeal before:

> "We're certainly very disappointed," said Cheng. "We respectfully disagree > with the verdict that the jury reached tonight. We fully intend, as we did > in the Soverain case, to take this case up on appeal and vindicate our > rights."

> Soverain was the "shopping cart" patent that Newegg was ordered to pay $2.5 > million for, but the company then knocked it out on appeal. Soverain's > damage request was huge for Newegg: $34 million.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure why one should be optimistic. Even if they win, they've lost; the legal costs alone are silly and aren't paid for by the loser.

<comment><USER18> The chief legal officer of Newegg _wants_ these cases and to take them to completion in attempts to correct the problems with software patents. One should be optimistic because Newegg is putting up the good fight and winning rather often. If it were almost any other company, you'd be hearing about a settlement if you heard anything at all. As a Newegg customer, I am glad that some of my dollars are going towards these kinds of legal costs and that's the type of thing that comes to mind when making decisions about where to buy.

Some more information about previous cases:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes- corp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/newegg-nukes-corporate- troll-alcatel-in-third-patent-appeal-win-this-year/)

<comment><USER19> this is the sole reason i rather buy from them instead of amazon. before those cases, i steered clear of newegg as i do of any merchant that bores me with coupons and rebates.

<comment><USER20> This is an excellent point! I hope everyone who cares about this issue is doing their part and voting with their dollars. Yes, donate to EFF, write to your congresscritter/senator, but also reward the business that invests money in causes that you care about. Sure, they are doing it to benefit their bottomline, but they could just as easily have paid that money to make the problem go away like so many other businesses did.

Newegg has been my exclusive source of tech goods since they started standing up to trolls. I intend to keep rewarding them with my repeat business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps someone who knows more about the legal system can help me understand something: at this point, it's well-known that these areas of Texas are good for patent disputes: they receive national attention, and a massive influx of spending as companies travel there to fight court battles.

Given that, surely any jury made up of locals has a huge incentive not to kill the golden goose and deter patent trolling by letting defendants win. Is there not a conflict of interest here?

<comment><USER22> There are actually other districts that have higher win rates for patent trolls. One attorney told me that people use EDT simply because that district has built up a fair amount of knowledge and experience in this area of law, and thus the cases are cheaper to fight there. I don't know this to be true, this is just what I've heard.

<comment><USER23> > There are actually other districts that have higher win rates for patent > trolls.

This would be a good point if patent cases were randomly assigned to districts. But they're not, of course - EDT courts are stuffed full of BS patent troll cases. So of course the patent suit win rate is lower there. It's still famously friendly to patent plaintiffs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To those patting themselves on the back as we begin another round of Texas bashing (because, let's face it, for a number of people here that's their favorite part of patent stories), may I ask why you blame an entire state?

When things go wrong in California or New York or Massachusetts, those states aren't blamed: the individuals take the heat! (What a concept!) But whenever something bad happens in Texas, somehow all 26 million of us are involved and culpable.

Case in point: a few minutes ago there was a post here saying we should poison the water in East Texas to stop this. Thankfully, it has been deleted.

Battling bigotry with bigotry is not likely to work. When Hollywood pushes for another batch of draconian copyright laws no one here raises up there hands and hopes for the "big one" to knock LA into the ocean. When municipalities go after Uber or AirBnb no one begs to push that entire state out of the union. Why the double standard?

(I know why, no need to answer that question)

Certainly as a Texan and tech person I'm not a fan of this ruling but the vitriol displayed here towards an entire state verges on disgusting. FWIW, I grew up in the Bay Area and across California, I'm not some Pineywoods hick who never left the trailer park.

I am, however, quite tired of the hatred and, frankly, gleeful malevolence sometimes displayed on this site towards Texas.

<comment><USER25> _I completely agree with everything you have said. My reply is not about that._

But the comparison is not very apt. Hollywood's draconian copyright laws would mean that you can't watch a movie or listen to a song, which is no big sacrifice. Patents are an affront to your freedom. Any service, app or business you build will violate some patent or the other. Countries have chosen to hand over monopolies on ideas and thought.

This may not affect many of us. But having to watch helplessly while companies like NewEgg suffer is very, very painful.

<comment><USER26> That's exactly it.

Patents can affect anyone at any time, whereas copyright laws affect certain individuals that have violated the terms.

Theoretically of course. There have been cases of people being sued for piracy when they don't even have a computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It says this patent covers using SSL with RC4. SSL dates back to Netscape, was released in 1995, and has no one involved in it has anything to do with the patent holder here. RC4 was designed in 1987 by Ron Rivest who also has nothing to do with this case.

Someone named Michael Jones patented using SSL with RC4. Which in seems was a known and used combination at the time he did so, as was testified by the expert witness? But the jury thought that not relevant.

The patent would seem to avoidable if say using AES instead.

 _Caution: I don 't know what I am talking about and just looked the above up on wikipedia, which I probably misunderstood. Hopefully someone who understands this in more depth will post._

<comment><USER28> You really have to read the claims to understand what the patent covers instead of trying to understand it from what is infringing. This patent has pretty easy-to-read claims. It essentially covers an encryption method where the encryption/decryption keys are updated (edit to correct my misreading) if a certain number of bytes are detected to have been exchanged. It's kind of a key-synchronization method.

<comment><USER29> Then I'm actually puzzled by how it applies to NewEgg and so many other e-commerce companies.

<comment><USER28> US patent law counts as infringement making, selling, or _using_ anything covered by the claims. NewEgg uses SSL with RC4 to secure their connections, the combination of which TQP contends, perform the steps covered by their claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30>
      "We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public
      key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with
      that?"

      "Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the
      biggest understatement of the trial.

      "And how is it that you're familiar with public key
      encryption?"

      "I invented it."

I think I see the trailer for the TV Mini series right there :-)

<comment><USER31> And they still lost... what? Every time I read about our patent system the blood drains from my face, how do we fix such a broken system?

<comment><USER30> Its worth thinking what do we want?

\- That we have good and effective Intellectual Property laws. It seems one of the big lessons of the Industrial revolution was the right property laws. The principles behind patents and copyright law make sense in this regard. Its the specifics that have problems.

\- The analogy to physical property is worth following more deeply - <USER2> such as in S America, ie Chilie, are trying to undergo property law revolutions, and often local knowledge is clear - everyone "knows" that Juan lives in that building and has done since he was born, and maintains it for his family. Therefore it is "his" house. Our IP laws generally need to come to some agreement on a similar situation - where there is clear contentious dispute, local (ie expert) knowledge is needed.

\- This is more or less what is happening here - someone is claiming Juan's house was actually their house. A jury was asked to decide with clear expert local knowledge. So the process is _what_ we want. Its just in this example we choose a bunch of idiots for the jury.

\- Software should be copyright. This will cause difficulties in "porting" software, and in doing the same algorithm in php and then perl.

summary: IP rights is more likely to be a good thing than a bad thing, just like property rights. However bad implementations of property law have seemingly held back countries like Brazil / Chile, and we do not really know what IP law should look like to be most suited. I prefer allowing local knowledge to be primary in cases of dispute.

([http://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of...](http://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of_prosperity.html))

<comment><USER32> Intellectual property laws steal and misappropriate property - not protect it! My use of "your" idea doesn't exclude your use of that idea. There is no conflict of property.

According to the reasoning behind IP, if I chop some wood I should have to ask the person who invented fire if I can make a fire. IP is the idea that you own my uses of that wood, and get to tell me whether I can build a fire or not. You can then have a bunch of thugs take my wood if I even dare try to build a fire with it. Or if I do build a fire and use it to cook food, then the thugs also demand food.

The important part is that building my fire doesn't exclude you from building fires. In no way does my knowledge of how to build a fire _prevent_ you from using that knowledge to build fires.

> That we have good and effective Intellectual Property laws. It seems one of > the big lessons of the Industrial revolution was the right property laws. > The principles behind patents and copyright law make sense in this regard. > Its the specifics that have problems.

No, the principles don't make sense. IP is not based on the same principles as property. It doesn't even share the same legal history. Copyright law originated from the church attempting to regulate and control the printing presses. Copyright shares more legal history with censorship than anything else. Early copyright laws in England were even referred to (correctly) as "monopolies."

> The analogy to physical property is worth following more deeply

There is no analogy. Ideas aren't physical things. My use of "your" idea doesn't exclude your use of that idea. There is no conflict of property.

> Software should be copyright.

No, I have the right to use information as long as that use does not exclude others from using it.

<comment><USER33> The problem with this line of reasoning is that it simply hands power to those who _already_ have other forms of monopoly or property.

Intellectual property increases freedom by creating a form of property that individuals can create without needing to own a scarce resource. People can become property owners simply through usefully employing power of their intellects.

If you dislike this form of property, then you must articulate an alternative way to divest power from those who hold other forms of property, otherwise you are merely a defender of landowners, governments, corporate monopolists and other vested interests.

<comment><USER32> > If you dislike this form of property, then you must articulate an > alternative way to divest power from those who hold other forms of property

I don't follow. Why do my arguments against intellectual property depend on some your unstated arguments against owning any property at all?

I'm left to assume you support the decision in this court case, because it's perfectly consistent with the reasoning behind copyright and patents.

<comment><USER33> Your arguments against intellectual property don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in the world where other forms of property exist and give rise to power. An argument for or against intellectual property is an argument about who and what should be accorded power.

A corrupt court making a poor decision has nothing to do with the reasoning behind copyright and patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bring a California company in front of a Texas jury, and call wild-haired Stanford visiting professor Diffie as a witness? I'm afraid this says more about the bigotry of the jury members toward Californians than it does about the case. My hunch is they (wrongly in so many ways) thought they would teach the hippie a lesson.

<comment><USER35> Pot, meet kettle?

Ahh yes. Nothing but knuckle draggers out there. Am I right? Nevermind all the great engineering schools, top cancer centers, and major tech hubs. Nope. Texas is nothing but racist bigots despite being one of the most racially and culturally (the most?) states in the union.

Believe it or not, the lower right 1/3 of the US is a little more diverse than is portrayed on Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard.

<comment><USER36> I grew up and live in the lower right 1/3 of the US and his depiction is not that far off. Based on totally made up statistics that I'm pulling from my nether regions right now I'd guess at least one jury member had the exact thought the GP mentioned, while at least a few others just subconsciously would not lend credibility to the "dirty hippy."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Disgusting. This is one of the reasons Texas has such a bad reputation: Ignorant juries and judges in the pocket of patent trolls.

<comment><USER38> So do you expect everyone to understand how the ssl handshake occurs?

<comment><USER37> No, and that's one of the problems with our patent system.

But, in this case, all they had to do was judge the difference between the inventor of public key encryption and a paid shill for patent trolls. The expert witness on the side of the troll is a guy who does this for a living; the expert witness on NewEgg's side was Whit Fucking Diffie. The "Diffie" in "Diffie-Hellman".

There's a reason patent trolls have all set up shop in this backward little Texas town. It's biggest industry is stifling innovation for the rest of the country.

<comment><USER39> The average American is going to find Whit Diffie to be an ass.

I mean no disrespect to the man. I hold him in high regard. But watch an interview with him and tell me that you think most people are going to find him to be a humble and appealing man.

<comment><USER40> This statement (thanks for providing a concise version of it) sums up the problem with the whole idea of a jury trial. It is completely irrelevant if someone thinks he is an ass. He is there to provide expert knowledge, nothing else.

"Lack of evidence? Who cares? He looks evil, must be a killer .."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Makes me wonder why we allow juries to hear patent disputes. Do they really understand patents and their terse wording? I would rather have a jury of individuals that would be able to read, code and test the same concepts that they are deciding on.

<comment><USER42> This famously came up during the Apple/Samsung suit, where the jury's foreman went around making misinformed statements about patent law in mainstream media: [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120830/02063020214/](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120830/02063020214/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think Newegg was complacent, perhaps a bit cocky, bringing in the expert on encryption, pandering to the jury and going through a humorous exchange on his knowledge of it, thinking they had it in the bag after the shopping cart win.

And then the defense surprisingly declined at the end to rebut the damages claim of $5.1 million:

"Then came another stunner: Newegg rested its case. It did so without putting on its expert witness to rebut TQP's $5.1 million damage claim—even though documents in the court docket clearly indicate the company had such a witness."

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/newegg-trial- cryp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/newegg-trial-crypto- legend-diffie-takes-the-stand-to-knock-out-patent/2/)

<comment><USER44> Could NewEgg simply be wanting to escalate their appeal to a higher court, and thus have their eventual verdict carry more weight? This operates on the gamble that NewEgg believes they would be eventually triumphant and that the cost of a longer fight is less than the damages of a lower court. (Speculation, but perhaps reasonable, given NewEgg's previous victories.)

<comment><USER45> Don't forget going to a higher court will likely get the case out of that district's court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "Why Patent Trolls Worldwide Love Marshall, Texas" \-- [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060203/0332207.shtml](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060203/0332207.shtml)

Nearly 8 years ago. Unfortunately nothing whatsoever has changed.

</comment><comment><USER47> Doesn't this just motivate startups to incorporate somewhere where software patents aren't enforced, like New Zealand?

[http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/01/business/10-best-places-to- sta...](http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/01/business/10-best-places-to-start/)

I mean at the end of the day this lack of timely reform is fundamentally making people look for asymmetric ways to entirely avoid problems. Is that the way society should be driven? I think that is an unstable driver of future events --- a society that cannot reform itself in a timely manner, that cannot properly forecast events and repercussions, is a society that is forgetting it's responsibility for balancing itself.

I really do not like this behavior; it is abhorrent of a society that can be a seer. I mean there is the usual belief that we are all equal and deserve equality --- but that cannot happen as long as we inherit citizenship, wealth and networks. It is a nice belief but simply cannot be rendered in any sort of predictable manner.

This creates a situation. Their are private discussions on the ongoing nature of patents --- but I feel that more than anything people are forgetting that as the point of a corporation is it's superhuman predictable nature, that the further antagonization of new corporations will balance itself not with a mutated form of socialism but with an asymmetric alliance of corporations - one which favors unpredictability and an increased rate of change.

Wealth and the rate of innovation are separate --- and that fiction will reveal itself at a much faster rate if proper steps are not taken in a timely manner.

<comment><USER48> Not really. You're going to want to sell your products in the US anyhow; the New Zealand market is tiny compared to the US market. If you sell your products in the US market, you have to play by the US's patent rules or your products won't be able to be imported (but as Samsung has found out, popular US based companies like Apple can get federal government intervention to veto an import ban on their products, but Samsung can't do the same: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/samsung-loses- bid-f...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/samsung-loses-bid-for- presidential-veto-of-apple-won-import-ban.html)).

<comment><USER47> What if the real money is in B2B and this is simply going to push the expenditure into a special trade communication zone? Are American companies going to be banned from certain expenditures? Is is it possible that people would create a proxy corporation to leverage the service in different areas?

I'm probably acting like an idiot. But I mean I think this just is creating a recipe for crazy lawyers to try some shit on someones dime.

<comment><USER45> In the future the argument will be that with both patent trolls and government spying that doing business in the US is a bad idea in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > "I feel fortunate to live in a country with a judicial system like this > where a jury can decide these things," [Jones] said.

Of course he does. It's the very judicial system that presented him with an easy $45m. He is a parasite (quite literally) and he knows it.

<comment><USER50> Indeed, he might as well have said "No other country would let me get away with the shit I'm pulling over on people right now." This whole situation is quite disappointing. Kudos to Newegg for trying, at the very least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Here's coverage from the local paper.

[http://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/news/online-retailer- ne...](http://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/news/online-retailer-newegg-s- patent-infringement-case-begins-in- marshall/article_fe84fb88-636d-5c3f-a460-9abe0e4fbfc9.html)

Seems to be more of a TQP slant to it.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for that. It describes the sort of reasoning very well that the plantiff's attorney knows appeals to people in the area:

> Fenster described the _inventor of the patent_ , Michael Jones, as a _hard > worker._

> _"He doesn't have all these fancy degrees,"_ said Fenster. "He's a hard > worker, creative, smart, an innovative guy, and he loves technology. He's > great at recognizing problems of the future and finding solutions."

The article is entirely one sided and reads as if the plaintiff himself wrote it. As it is the only exciting thing happening in town, many of the jury member's family and friends will be reading articles of this sort during these trials, representing only one side of the case.-

Amazing that the article notes the patent was awarded in 1995 and fails to mention that RC4 was invented in 1987.

<comment><USER50> Wow, pardon my french, but what the fuck is this article. This sounds like a paid advertisement. "The company, owned by Erich Spangenberg, of Dallas, is seeking a reasonable royalty of $5.1 million." How much did they get paid for that line?

<comment><USER52> Used in this context, "reasonable royalty" is a legal term that describes the money that is to be paid due to the infringement. I don't believe the author was making a judgement call on the fairness of the award.

<comment><USER50> Oh! Okay, this explains a great deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Kudos to NewEgg for the immense risk in fighting these.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is the jury required to explain the logic of the decision, or it's simply "we decide this"? Rejection of such obvious proof of patent invalidity and existence of prior art looks pretty bad.

<comment><USER55> The topic of jury secrecy came up in the Apple vs. Samsung case. I can't find a link to the specific rules right now, but basically, jury deliberations are secret.

<comment><USER45> If there's no gag order, jurors will often talk about what happened. Now, whether to believe them or not is another thing.

<comment><USER54> So, did they explain here why they sided with the troll?

<comment><USER45> I have yet to hear of anyone coming forward. I guess the trial was not big enough news for someone to attempt to get their fifteen minutes of fame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A few have commented how, internally to the IP law industry, the district is known to have a lot of specific domain experience with the argument of IP law. I can definitely understand why that would be attractive to patent-holding firms, in the way that Delaware is attractive to large corporations.

Most of us not in the IP industry think a lot of these suits are ridiculous, and it's because we don't make our lives by the reality of how IP law is structured.

These cases are ridiculous because IP law is ridiculous. It's not Marshall, TX's fault that IP law is ridiculous, and these juries very well may be the most knowledgeable jurours out there. That fact is dangerous, however, because this town's specialized experience makes it as if these companies are arguing cases in front of a jury of paralegals instead of representatives of the public, which absolutely will bias results.

Part of the reason we have juries is to balance the law with common sense. Common sense means something different when you're almost as knowledgeable about the law as the lawyers in front of you.

<comment><USER57> "It's not Marshall, TX's fault that IP law is ridiculous, and these juries very well may be the most knowledgeable jurours out there."

As a lifelong Texan I do believe you overestimate the knowledge base of people that willing live in East Texas. Most of the technical smart folks in Texas have migrated to Austin, DFW, San Antonio or Houston for real jobs. And most of them don't have a fucking clue about encryption.

East Texas is a dream situation for attorneys considering the average knowledge is lower than the rest of this state. Have this trial in Dallas and you might get a engineer from TI or a statistician from my company on the jury. East Texas is what we in the city refer to as the "Sticks". The per capita income is half that of even the older suburbs in Dallas.

<comment><USER45> I agree. I, for one, am tired of seeing this nonsense that the jury pool in that district has a high-level knowledge and experience with matters pertaining to patents.

Patent trolls want that district because that's where they win the most. It's similar as to why they avoid certain districts, because that's where they lose the most.

If another district had the reverse stats, where a large number of patent suits are filed but patent trolls lose 80% of the time, you would have a district that had a "high knowledge base" in the jury pool. Patent trolls would avoid it like the plaque, despite having such a supposed intelligent jury pool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Depressing, but this might be a good time to donate to those fighting for patent reform, like EFF.org

</comment><comment><USER59> How can your average startup and company owner rest assured that they're not unconsciously walking into a patent troll's lair? I might be unknowingly infringing patents nobody has heard of (except companies like these).

Business idea: a service that investigates your stack (with your permission) and verifies that you're not likely to be sued.

<comment><USER60> Mission impossible, as any business that operates is likely infringing on thousands, it not tens of thousands of patents every single day.

Patent law has transformed into basic extortion, and it's interesting (for some definition of interesting) to see that such extortion is actually legal in the United States.

<comment><USER45> I agree, at this point if you do anything tech related you are infringing somebody's patent on something. Whether you get sued or not depends on how much money you have.

As for the legal extortion using lawsuits. That's an old game in the US, there are people who make an active living out of suing somebody for something and offering to settle. Get a copyright infringement letter from somebody? I guarantee you that the settlement offer will be much less than defending yourself in court, even if they are mistaken in their accusation. It's an industry that people have been abusing for years, if not decades.

The courts themselves have to do something to stop this but I see no signs they are interested in reducing the need for more resources to be spent on things the courts need to address these cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why are patent disputes resolved by laymen (juries) rather than experts in law and the area of study of the patent itself? I just don't see how people completely unfamiliar with the subject matter at hand can be expected to understand highly technical arguments necessarily to determine patent validity.

<comment><USER62> Who would judge whether someone was truly an "expert" in the area of study?

<comment><USER63> Why not judge by objective metrics, like whether the expert's name is included in one of the oldest and most important protocols in the area of study?

<comment><USER62> At the end of the day, _real people_ have to choose which objective metrics to look at, and _real people_ then have to look at those metrics and make the actual call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Can we put up billboards in East Texas letting potential jurists know what the stakes for the country are?

</comment><comment><USER65> It's getting late and I don't really have the energy to dig into this patent ([http://www.google.com/patents/US5412730](http://www.google.com/patents/US5412730)), but on a cursory reading I don't see how it differs from the encryption work that Claude Shannon and Alan Turing were doing during World War 2, later embodied as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY) ... is it just because it transmits the data in "blocks"? Pretty low bar for novelty, there.

</comment><comment><USER66> That's terrible but I feel like they will win once they appeal the decision.

</comment><comment><USER67> To put it bluntly, that fucking sucks.

</comment><comment><USER68> As a person with a computer science degree and years of experience in the software industry, I would love to be chosen for a jury like this so I could do my part in smacking down a troll. However I realize this will never happen precisely because I actually know something about the subject. Sadly, jurors are chosen for their ignorance and gullibility.

</comment><comment><USER69> Since we can't seem to stop these horrible patent trolls, perhaps they could be reined in with a law that limits how much damage they can do. If a new law limited these sorts of claims to a grand total of 10% of a company's gross sales for the year, a small business could survive these kinds of attacks without having to pay millions of dollars for lawyers. If a business was attacked by multiple patent trolls, then those trolls would have to fight each other in court as they each argued that they deserve the lion's share of the capped 10% of the company's gross sales for the year. Since our current patent system is being thoroughly abused, the question we should be asking is: What can be done to limit patent trolls so that small businesses can survive? Because right now it is very lucrative to be a patent troll, so in the future, we could wind up with a ton of them. It's not a bright future.

<comment><USER70> Unless you got sued by 10 trolls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> There is no way in hell I'd start a company in the US. This BS is absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine the thought of constantly living in fear I'd get sued for millions because I was using a fax machine, or some other ridiculously common piece of technology.

It doesn't help that juries are apparently the dumbest people on earth.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is sad but not surprising. The game is stacked against the accused (they either pay a lot to defend themselves or pay in an effort to get the case to go away) and then they have to deal with venue shopping (Texas).

</comment><comment><USER36> Yesterday I was reading an article about this case that stated Newegg didn't even bother to call their witnesses to dispute the amount of damages that would've been caused by their patent violation. It gave the impression that they were so confident that they had roundly destroyed the plaintiff's arguments that they didn't even bother to follow standard operating procedure for how to fight these types of cases.

On one hand, it's yet another nail in the coffin of innovation in our country. On the other hand, shame on Newegg's lawyers for being so hubris.

<comment><USER45> I was confused by that as well. I agreed that, from what I read, that they made the plaintiff's arguments look quite silly. I would say the plaintiff's lawyer half argued Newegg's case for them with his whole a patent is still valid if prior art was a secret thing.

My current thought was they planned to appeal from the beginning to get it out of that district. Why waste time in a district you know there's an automatic 80% chance you're going to lose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> "I feel fortunate to live in a country with a judicial system like this where a jury can decide these things"

I still feel fortunate to live in this country but the dysfunctional patent system has nothing to do with it.

The status quo is this: When you receive a letter from a patent troll, you're already out at least $50k or so, possibly several $100k or even more if you decide to fight on longer. You can receive such a letter simply for scanning and printing a pdf file, or operating a shopping cart on your site.

This situation _must_ be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm curious if these juries have any college education.

<comment><USER75> You're implying that their conclusion is the result of them being uneducated? Pretty sure it's the result of ideological bias, not intellectual ability or knowledge.

<comment><USER74> No I meant it in regard to being taught critical thinking.

College isn't a guarantee of being able to process things that way or the only way to acquire such habits, but it is a good indicator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Patent trolls are certainly a problem, but realistically you can't have laws without someone trying to abuse them.

I think it might be more effective to attack the problem from the other end: making sure patents like don't get issued in the first place. Maybe it's not reasonable to expect every jury to understand the basics of encryption. But it _is_ reasonable to expect the patent office to understand prior art in cryptography.

</comment><comment><USER77> I've never had the pleasure of serving in a jury. How does it work? I have been under the impression that all jury members must agree on a single verdict? I know for a fact that I would not agree with this verdict. And I can't rationalize finding against Newegg here. Can someone who can see the other side (whether or not you agree) explain it here?

<comment><USER78> You're thinking of criminal cases. Many civil trials only require a certain majority (say, nine of twelve) to find a verdict.

<comment><USER77> Ah! I didn't know that. And of course most (all?) of these cases are civil cases. That makes much more sense to me, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Stupid question to those who know the US law: theoretically, would it be possible for Newegg to refuse to do business with residents of Texas, so it is impossible for other conmpanies to sue them in Texas?

To other commentators: no offence meant for people of Texas, if it is how it works, it is just cold-blooded business decision, nothing more.

<comment><USER80> Companies in Texas can sue anyone they want as long that other entity is under United States jurisdiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Isn't $2.3m negligible for the size of companies involved and even compared to the legal expenses for this case?

<comment><USER82> It is, the more important point is that going forward this judgement has set a precedent that can be used to win or leverage in future situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm beginning to think that a sniper rifle is the best answer to these trolls.

Props to Newegg for fighting the good fight.

</comment><comment><USER84> Does the jury for a highly specialized patent case exist and function in largely the same way as a jury for other trials? Namely, "peers" instead of educated individuals on the particular topic at hand?

If that's the case, the United States needs some serious judicial reform.

<comment><USER85> By extension, would you prefer that a panel of doctors preside over malpractice cases?

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Were they expecting to set up a the criteria/grounds for appeal? If Newegg accomplished that, then they hopefully met their objective. I think the goal is to get it out of the Texas court and onto some place that is more objective.

</comment><comment><USER87> Just in time for me to throw some money at Newegg while I build out a new computer.

</comment><comment><USER88> I stopped reading a few pages in when kept talking about meta/social/gossip stuff rather that what the case was _actually_ about, what the patents were about. Low S/N.

</comment><comment><USER89> Imagine where we could be if everyone openly shared everything they discovered or invented. Just imagine a world where we co-operated instead of making life harder for one another.

</comment><comment><USER90> Marshall, Texas; population 24,751.

Definitely small enough for the entire town to know and understand that voting in favor of a plaintiff today brings more money to your town tomorrow.

<comment><USER45> It's the county seat as well, so lots of legal people walking around with town influence I'm sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Uhhh.... RC4 + SSL = broken cryptosystem, right?

We're not bummed about additional incentives to avoid this broken approach to TLS, are we? This is actually a fucking good thing.

<comment><USER50> We're not bummed out because the cryptosystem is broken, but rather that every victory for a faulty patent is a victory for the system around which faulty patents are allowed to thrive (and strangle out others). Regardless of the tech behind the "patent" and whether it's feasible or not, it's another situation where a dubious patent has wrung money out of someone by exploiting our vulnerable system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Does the jury give a detailed explanation beyond the judgement? Also how come all these patent trolls are incorporated in Texas?

<comment><USER92> A little bit information here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_fo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas#Patent_litigation)

While it would be interesting to know why it happens in Texas.

<comment><USER45> It had to happen somewhere. Lawyers just like to go where they think they have a better chance of winning.

You can see something similar on a local level.

Being accused of certain type of crime? You really want this judge.

Having an argument with your neighbor over a fence issue? Well, let's try to get this judge because I know he doesn't like that guy's uncle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> We'll have to hope it goes better on appeal. I would be very interested to hear the jurors reasoning.

<comment><USER94> If the glove don't fit, you must acquit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Can we troll the patent trolls yet?

<comment><USER96> Not really. Arbitrage is already pretty advanced. The analogy to bitcoin mining rigs and mining pools isn't far-fetched.

Some well-positioned people smell it and started refining the process while building up legal machines for consolidating power and squeezing every advantage out of the system.

They also have already moved ahead in protecting interests from retribution of the noble AND pitchfork variety.

Let's also not forget that there are parties shaking hands over a couple few million... and we're just sitting here worrying that someone is plotting a highway tax for when we finally ascend to such neighborhoods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I planned on shopping at Newegg this week anyway, but now maybe a bit more than normal.

</comment><comment><USER98> Great, another patent on abstract math upheld by our court system...

</comment><comment><USER99> It's cases like this that make me really miss Groklaw.

</comment><comment><USER100> So... when are we going to abolish patents?

</comment><comment><USER101> sadly, one word comes in mind : the new mafia.

</comment><comment><USER102> Well ... expect some bad stuff to happen. Like a company subsidiary shell company developing all business method IP overseas and "selling" it to the parent and when a lawsuit emerges they will have just enough funds to mount a defense and then blow the fuse company. That way shell companies will fight shell companies in court ... the fun.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm confused by people who both hold the position that these case are "patent trolls" while simultaneously supporting patents and copyright? This verdict is perfectly consistent with the reasoning and intention behind copyright and patent law.

</comment><comment><USER103> Why can't the world be just, I don't know, more decent and reasonable and just?

</comment><comment><USER104> what a disgrace

</comment><comment><USER105> Bullcrap.

</comment><comment><USER106> Oh. Crap.</comment>


Brief History of Google "Killers" (not so much) - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/05/19/a-brief-history-of-google-killers/

<comment><USER2> Not a bad article. I hadn't heard of a few of these.

If anything is going to take market share away from Google, I think it's Twitter. Being able to search "live" information is really useful.

<comment><USER3> In tech, what tends to happen, rather than someone losing or gaining much market share, is that the market is redefined, or new ones open up that are bigger and more important. I.e. Microsoft didn't take any mainframe share from IBM, Google hasn't taken any OS market share from Microsoft.

<comment><USER2> You're right, the pie is always growing, but there are some queries that just work better on Twitter, even though you might get reasonable results on Google with enough digging.

In those cases, Google loses as people learn to start trying Twitter first.

An example: Last night I was trying to find a stream of a live hockey game. Google was finding lots of forum threads about previous games, but nothing current. So I tried Twitter, and there was a link in the second result.

Next time I'm looking for a live stream, I'll probably search Twitter first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Setting yourself up as a goog killer seems like a way to get ms interested in acquiring you though.

</comment><comment><USER5> no twitter nor facebook will replace my google position in search, I use Google simply because it's fast and crawl a lot.

Google don't give best results (and no search engines can do) even human edited search engine can't do, just because information add up every day.

solution? May be a shared search, where people vote for the best results and comments, I see Google Wiki a good step, I alwas vote for the best results and comments on interesting links (or may be fav them).

If google succeed in this technology (considering the trend of the search queries), nothing can't beat him. Even if Microsoft does implement it, it won't succeed because it needs a lot of users to get votes and comments.

Twitter? No results are bad, they are good only for news, if twitter grow really (and not 60% quits!) then it may be a better place for news.

right now nothing will beat Google (only my secret startup :LL)</comment>


Google App Engine Pricing Angers Developers, Kills PlusFeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/09/google-app-engine-pricing-ange.php <comment><USER3> Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places.

So back when I worked there Google had _no clue_ what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their machine usage? That really crystallized when the bottom fell out in 2008 and suddenly there was going to be no more new machines/data centers for a while and everyone had to 'make do.'

They mobilized an effort to figure this out, its not like it isn't knowable, and ever the data driven company the first signs of light were appearing just as I was leaving. It should not be a surprise but they discovered many things they did not previously believe was true, and I don't doubt it has driven a lot of change going forward. One of the more interesting outcomes was that projects/products were actually getting cancelled if they cost more to run than they could generate in revenue (I'm looking at you Goog-411)

So this knowledge is being applied to GAE, which is great, its also another way to back compute some of their operational efficiencies.

But that it costs money to run stuff? Well that isn't really news is it? That it costs _that_ much? Well there is the whole if it doesn't make money it will get cancelled threat.

And the kicker is pricing out the scarce resource. It looks (and I've been gone over a year and half so I am speculating based on this move on their part) like their 'scarce' resource is web server front ends. (the labeled "Frontend instance") Traditionally they've been like most multi-tier web properties split between front end machines which host the web facing stuff, and back end machines that do the heaving lifting and storing. And by this change one can reason that residency on the 'front end' is more valuable than crunching in the 'back end.'

I'm guessing PlusFeed gets a lot of web traffic. So they spend a lot of time 'actively' on the front side, and from their numbers they do practically nothing on the back side. This fits well with the sudden massive price increase.

This gives you an insight into Google's business dynamics as well. Where page- views are the limiting resource, and computation is not. When you look at it that way, you can see that most of their 'revenue' has to be delivered through their front end services, and so consuming that resource reduces (potentially) their income. Hence the charge inconsistency.

Now contrast that to Billy-Bob's Web Farm (fictitious service) where every machine in their data center can be a web server, and front end serving is trivial, its all about the bandwidth. Their pricing would probably be more gigabytes transferred.

I would not be surprised at all if it is impractical to run such 'translation' services (basically all web traffic very little compute) on a hosted environment like Google's.

<comment><USER4> Your last point is very confusing. You're saying you think Google can't spin up more App Engine front ends if it wants? ("every machine in their data center can [not] be a web server") Or any other kind of front end?

<comment><USER3> Google historically splits off their "front end" which is dealing with messages from the internet and their "back end" which is processing what those messages want to do. It was briefly described in the original search paper they presented.

Of necessity, most machines that Google runs have 'private' (as in not directly addressable) addresses. This is how it seems that everyone runs things when they get above a certain number of servers.

Thirdly because one can assume that 'attacks' (whether they depend on XSS, overflows, or what not) are coming from the Interwebz its prudent to present the smallest possible attack surface on a machine which is being fed internet stuff. As you can imagine, those security constraints make for uncomfortable restrictions on what you can do in the 'front end', so a machine that is 'front end' has a different set of security constraints than a machine that is 'back end' (they are still constraints there of course but having gone through the filter of the front end machine which has greatly attenuated the possible exploit vectors).

I believe it is this armored 'front end' resource which is the scarce resource, but again, I've been gone over a year and things change quickly inside the 'plex.

<comment><USER4> Not trying to piss all over this, since I thought you might have been saying something I didn't know. But I have worked at Google for a long time and basically everything you wrote is incorrect and has been since at least 2005 before App Engine even existed (why would a paper written in 1998 be relevant?).

Without going into too much detail, it shouldn't surprise anyone that physical machines are interchangeable via cluster management software, so application front end and back end software all end up running on the same machines. They aren't addressed through DNS but by another mechanism. There is no special system administration for application-specific front ends vs back ends. Spinning up more instances of a particular server is a 1 line change. Reverse proxies (i.e. a non-app-specific front end) are also involved but they're not a bottleneck AFAIK (this problem is well "commoditized" in open source whereas other parts of Google's stack are not).

I would be curious to see a comparison with competitors like Heroku, which I've heard are pretty expensive too. Theoretically Google should be cheaper because Heroku runs on AWS and thus is paying for Amazon's profits (I have no idea how they compare.)

<comment><USER5> The original point is "almost right". The scarce resource reflected in the new pricing model is not machines, but RAM. The old pricing model assumed CPU time was the essential resource. The new pricing model bills you for the amount of time your instance (which has a fixed RAM reservation) stays resident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> buff-a Here's my complaint:

I, and many others, spent a lot of time figuring out how to write apps that do it the "app engine way":

      * Fast completes (30 second timeout)
      * Offloading to task queues when you cant
      * Channels
      * Blobstore two-phase upload urls
      * Mail eccentricities

We did so, because we believe Google when they told us _If you write your apps in this really weird way then we will be able to give you scale and cost benefits that you wont be able to get elsewhere_

We believed them, because it seemed reasonable. We laughed at those who complained that django would hit the 30-second limit: "Its not a general hosting! Figure out the App Engine way!" And we educated on how to do it right, and many were happy.

Well, it turns out that it _is_ general purpose hosting, with all of the costs, and yet also with all of the (once rational, now bullshit) idiosyncrasies.

\---

But that's not the biggest complaint. The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, _they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot_. And I _really_ don't like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google's _engineers_ and they have _utterly destroyed my credibility_. THIS more than anything is the _cost_ to me.

<comment><USER6> I'd recommend GAE to people who are prototyping - it's easy to do simple stuff in.

But mostly, GAE doesn't make sense for larger apps. You can't buy your way out of trouble, by putting your db on a dedicated server with fast drives and tonnes of RAM. You can't really use relational data without performance and reliability issues.

It's not just about the "app engine way". It's not like learning C or Haskell, and having to find a new way to write the code. You fundamentally cannot do big ad-hoc database operations.

And consider this - it was July last year that they introduced the MapperAPI. Before then, I don't think you could do Map-Reduce without manually re- implementing it yourself (on top of the cantankerous Appengine Datastore). Just think about that for a minute - how were you meant to do stuff the Appengine way without map-reduce?

Anyway, I don't think your credibility was "utterly destroyed". It was really hard to know whether or not the learning curve was worth climbing until you had tried. You just had to judge the book by its cover, and the "Google" brand is pretty compelling to an engineer. It's not the first time someone has been fooled into buying something because the provider has a good reputation.

<comment> buff-a I have several ideas that would scale well on GAE and neither want not need a relational db. I'm not making do without SQL, I'm actively not using it and its very successful. Even when I move to EC2, I still wont be using SQL. In fact I have only one idea that needs any kind of relational data and that is _so_ relational that SQL is a bad fit too. EDIT: Actually, sorry, all my data is relational. Its just that I put the (small) effort in to figuring out how to make it work without joins. In the last 15 years, I've not done a single project that could not have been done with a NoSQL database.

In fact if you look at the recent comments of certain GAE engineers, they seem to believe that GAE is precisely for scaling, and that's why it now costs so much: its _only_ for the big boys.

The problem is that I can never become one of the "big boys" on their system, because pretty much as soon as I get _any_ traction, I have to move to EC2 or heroku or go broke. Their new found belief in the scalability of their system is just arrogance. Anyone can claim to handle lots of traffic when you require that your customers run 20 times as many frontends as they should reasonably need.

Good luck to them in the Royal Wedding market.

EDIT: on the nature of "relational"

<comment><USER7> _Its just that I put the (small) effort in to figuring out how to make it work without joins._

Care to elaborate?

<comment> buff-a Denormalize. Match your data rows to your access pattern (i.e. your UI). Naive example: if you have a webpage that displays a list of employees, and it must have their department name and boss in that list, you put that data in the employee row. What is the probability that a boss will change his or her name causing you to have update a ton of records? Very low. (not zero mind you, so you have to be able to do it). So why pay for the join every query?

There are no longer, in my view, any situations where a SQL db is the best idea. You either want a giant NoSQL database, or you want a massive in-memory object-graph using pointers. Or you want something for $20m from Oracle or IBM.

<comment><USER8> The problem is not having to update tons of records, the problem is seeing one day, after 2 years of having the app in production, that the listing shows that employee X works in department Y and her boss is Z, but Z is not the head of Y. Bugs happen and referential constraints go a long way towards keeping your data clean.

<comment> buff-a Yeah, I was worried about all that. Hell, I was worried NoSQL couldn't possibly work at all, given my experience of SQL and the joyful things that happen there.

But I've found that my object model has evolved to handle the "scariness" of the back end. If someone wants to change the boss of an employee, they are doing if via an http post. So I've got to check that the key I was sent over http is even an employee at all and not some javascript bug. Since I have to do that, I might as well read the data into my employee object. Then the code to update employee X with employee Y as a boss is pretty straight forward and thoroughly unit tested. The code to serialize an employee is thoroughly unit tested.

Not saying shit cant happen. Now look me in the eye and tell me you never had some noob drop a constraint and forget to put it back.

<comment><USER6> You could periodically run a script that checks all the records for errors (especially embedded records that might have drifted from their current value, and not been properly changed by the app-level constraints), and automatically correct them (plus log the error).

If Michael Arlington changes his job from "editor in chief" to "founder, former editor, occasional contributor, and CEO of Arlington Investments", and his old posts aren't all updated, it's not the end of the world.

It really depends on the problem domain. You wouldn't run a bank's ledger off MongoDB. On the other hand, a bank's ledger should be radically simple, with little need for normalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi folks,

I'm on the App Engine team, and I just wanted to clarify one thing: The main difference between CPU hours and Instance hours is that CPU hours are charged based on CPU usage, while instance hours are based on wallclock time. The high ratio between the two you can see with PlusFeed is because it's spending a lot of time to serve each request, most of which is spent doing nothing - <USER2> because it's doing outgoing HTTP requests.

Previously, we had no way to account for apps like this, that take a lot of wallclock time but very little CPU time, and as a result we couldn't scale them well. Under the new model, the charges reflect the real cost here - memory pressure. Every second an instance sits around waiting is a second that the memory occupied by that instance can't be used to serve other requests.

As others have pointed out, we're in the process of launching Python 2.7 support - it's currently in Trusted Tester phase - which will support multiple concurrent requests, and services like PlusFeed are likely to be able to take great advantage of that, reducing their instance hours by a large factor. Likewise, doing asynchronous URLFetches (where that's practical) can cut a huge amount off instance time.

<comment> buff-a First of all, thank you for chiming in, here, on HN. Your presence might also be welcomed on the google forum, since I've read most of the posts there and no one has managed to answer this question.

If memory pressure is the issue, how are the trusted testers finding their memory pressure when they have a whole number of in-flight requests? If the PlusFeed fellow got 2.7 working, we'd expect to see 100/3.5%= 28 in-flight requests. Do you have data on how big the base memory vs per-thread memory requirements of these apps are? Python isn't famous for freeing up memory.

Which is to say, do you have any solid numbers that tell us that when we switch to 2.7, you wont have exactly the same memory pressure and either have to up the instance-hour cost, or start charging for ram, or just limit in- flight request to 3 or 4 so that our costs are only 5 times as much instead of 20?

Bottom line: what we all woke up to is that fact that as of right now:

* _you_ set the price of an instance, _and_

* _you_ get to decide how many instances I'm going to pay you for

Some of us are thinking that while that was a great idea when engineers were in charge, its not such a great idea now the bean-counters have taken over.

<comment><USER9> That's a good question. I can't point to published figures, since the 2.7 runtime is still fairly new, but I can say that based on both my personal experience and based on fairly basic reasoning, the per-thread memory overhead is definitely a lot less than what's required by the whole instance. The entire of the Python standard library, along with your framework and other libraries, are shared overhead between all the threads.

The issue with charging by CPU hour was that you could occupy memory-seconds as much as you wanted without charge; that's no longer the case - by charging for instances, we're implicitly charging for the memory they use.

As far as determining how many instances you run - you can do this to a large degree, both by setting budget limits, and by setting scheduler parameters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's most interesting to me about this article is that the management of GAE seems to actually be getting _worse_ over time.

GAE has always had two main disadvantages. First, there is vendor lock-in because you code specifically to the data store, worker API, and so on (though arguably there are alternative platforms that implement the GAE API). Second, you cannot run custom code (custom C in some virtual machine) or have a custom architecture (if, say, Redis might be useful to have around). These disadvantages probably aren't changing and are probably necessary for auto- scaling, security of Google's infrastructure, and so on.

However, there are lots of little things that GAE has been getting wrong for a while that are totally unnecessary. Lack of hosted SQL support. Lack of SSL for custom domains. Just little things that are probably annoying to implement and boring, but totally necessary for real websites or websites just gaining traction. (I know these are in varying stages of early support at the moment.)

But now, the GAE team almost seems to want to actively disappoint users. With hosted SQL being a request for years, Guido appears to have spent a bunch of time re-architecting the API for the datastore instead. With this pricing increase, they're pushing the many developers who came to their platform based on price (due to the very interesting scaling properties of the Google front- end) off the platform.

Overall, I'm very confused.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, the hard limitation to request duration is pretty nasty too. It's a pretty limited platform overall, and never took aoff, so maybe they are trying to push people off it so they can eventually sunset it?

<comment><USER12> Deliberately pushing people out? Probably not. They had a major decision point available when they chose to either exit beta and step onto a release product schedule or drop the project entirely. The fact that they chose to productize it bodes well for the immediate future. Adding SLA and SSL was also non- trivial from a product perspective.

But, that does mean that you have to figure out what your revenue-producing tenants are going to look like, just as you would do in physical real estate. Yes, it looks like the high-traffic commodity-product (think Halloween store) doesn't make a good tenant. But that doesn't mean that a jewelry store or office (low throughput, high value per-square foot) wouldn't be a good tenant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love using GAE and got 8 apps running currently. At first the new pricing model shocked me. But please take a 2nd look. Sure it's more expensive than the old model. But you can set the maximum number of idle instances in your Application Settings page. Just set it down so no more that X instances get spun up:

> The Idle Instances slider allows you to control the number of idle instances > available to your application at any given time. Idle Instances are pre- > loaded with your application code, so when a new Instance is needed, it can > serve traffic immediately. You will not be charged for instances over the > specified maximum. A smaller number of idle Instances means your application > costs less to run, but may encounter more startup latency during load > spikes.

There is another setting for latency:

> The Pending Latency slider controls how long requests spend in the pending > queue before being served by an Instance. If the minimum pending latency is > high App Engine will allow requests to wait rather than start new Instances > to process them. This can reduce the number of instance hours your > application uses, but can result in more user-visible latency.

So if you are fine with a little higher latency for your app then you can reduce your bill by a great deal. If you want all that GAE can offer with max. instances available and lowest latency you gotta pay - as you would when you run n instances at another cloud provider.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the info. Is there a setting for max number of simultaneous instances? If your app gets slashdotted are your potential costs completely unbounded?

(Just out of curiosity, I'm not a GAE customer)

<comment><USER15> No there isn't. Just "max idle instances". So you'll get a huge bill if you get slashdotted.

<comment><USER16> You won't, because you specify a maximum daily spend in the budget settings. So when you get slashdotted the scheduler will spin up X hundred instances, your budget will run out in 1/2 hour, and your site will be down for anything up to the next 23 1/2 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think Google just doesn't really get how unique GAE was. It was a fantastic platform for small apps, and inevitable some percentage of these would grow to big, paying apps.

Also (sorry for the armchair quarterbacking here, can't resist..) it was exactly what Google can do better than anyone - best server infrastructure + Guido Van Rossums - while stuff like Google+ is exactly what Google haven't a clue how to do.

<comment><USER18> This is amazing. You've hit the nail on the head. Google would be much more successful if it focused on being Google and didn't try to be Apple+Fecaebook+X companies all in one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases. (Which they told us were coming by the way)

And by the time the pricing takes effect the updated python runtime should bring costs down even more.

The instance costs are comperable to Heroku AND you get a high availability data store AND the ability to store really huge amounts of data in the blobstore AND a CDN for serving images from said blobstore. Not to mention background processes, task queue, XMPP, memcache, Multitenancy and multiple versions of apps so you can easily roll things back or test out updates painlessly.

Try and replicate that setup on Heroku or AWS for anywhere near the costs and time that you can get there with app engine.

While you're fighting with AWS and playing sysadmin or trying to think of ways to bring down the costs of Heroku's database services by using RDS instead or being nickel and dimed by add-on fees I'll be shipping code. Code that actually takes advantage of the platforms strengths.

<comment><USER20> "An alternate perspective: Google App Engine is still a fine platform even with the new price increases."

This depends a lot on what you're doing. GAE is now pretty terrible if you're using it for high-bandwidth applications (say, a data proxy or similar). Especially when you compare it to other providers for whom bandwidth prices have been dropping (AWS, Linode, etc now offer incoming bandwidth totally free and the rates on outgoing are very low as well). If you're using it as a number-crunching backend with relatively small in/out datasets, the new prices aren't too bad at all.

<comment><USER21> _the new prices aren't too bad at all._

c1.xlarge on EC2 is $1.16/hour. How many of the $0.08 GAE units does it take to match one of those? How many of those GAE units can run optimized SSE4/AVX? (Answer: none of them). I've run 250 c1.xlarge units at a time. GAE wasn't even possible, let alone affordable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this comment from Wesley Chun on the GAE team is key:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google- appengine/obfGjbIkOTI...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google- appengine/obfGjbIkOTI/Qji2eUm0cO4J)

"your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- [http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app- creat...](http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creators- talk-google-app-engine.aspx) \-- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding- be...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding-bells-in- cloud.html) ... _these_ are the reasons for using App Engine. it was not meant as free/cheap generic app-hosting but to provide a premium service that's difficult to get elsewhere in the market. if you're just after the former, there are plenty of options for you."

My take-away is that GAE is hard to justify unless your usage pattern is unpredictable and spike-y. I'm taking the long weekend to give dotcloud a serious test-drive.

<comment><USER23> DotCloud is not cheap if your application is database intensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The strength of GAE is the magic scaling beans, but to take advantage of it you need to lock yourself in massively. It's probably not realistic to port an existing application that actually needs real scale to GAE given the complexity of most apps by the time they reach that point. Therefore, the key funnel for them is new apps with hopes of becoming truly massive. Fortunately for Google way more people dream of scaling than actually will, but they need to A) not scare poor startups away with the price today and B) not scare them that they're going to get bent over and raped on price changes later.

Personally I'll never touch GAE with a 10' pole simply because of the support issue and perpetual-beta-culture uncertainties.

</comment><comment><USER25> We tried to use GAE several times on our heavy traffic production, and was just too slow. We contacted google several times, but never received any help from them. So, thanks to this, we don't use them and we are not affected but the price change.

</comment><comment> sasha-dv That's unreasonably expensive. For $68.46 he payed for a day you can have an "el-cheapo" dedicated box or a great VPS for a month. I still don't understand why people trade a bit of system administration and superb performance for a vendor lock and insane prices.

<comment><USER14> But it's 880 instance-hours per day. So assuming that "el-cheapo" dedicated box has similar performance characteristics to one GAE instance, then you'd need _37_ of those boxes.

My question is why the heck 31.42 CPU hours turned into 880 frontend instance hours, and whether this is something a lot of other GAE apps are seeing as well.

<comment><USER26> Google's instance-hour is process-instance-hour. The current GAE Python can only serve one web request by one process. Multiple web requests coming in would spin up multiple processes. Besides the CPU, Google charges the app while the process is waiting for IO, like waiting for receiving/sending to the browser.

But measuring process-instance-hour is misleading. In a typical web box, spinning up an extra process takes very little resource since most process memory are shared with the parent process, and most web apps are IO bound, like waiting for network/file/DB, idling taking little CPU. In a server box, many processes can be crammed in (like the shared hosting box). But Google counts those duplicate processes as separate ones and charge the idle time these processes take. That's why you see the outrageous bill.

What's more insane is that Google charges the process-instance-hour like a machine-instance-hour. GAE charges $0.08/hr for process-instance-hour while AWS charges $0.02 to $0.08/hr for the whole machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Yeah I still don't understand why the Khan Academy and other educational/open source developers are using Google App Engine when it suffers from vendor lock-in.

<comment><USER28> some of it yes, but if you write modular code then its a none issue. Doing Java development, GAE supports most Java EE and popular frameworks, so if done correctly porting would not be an issue. I can't say the same about Python stack.

<comment><USER29> Unless you're doing regular integration testing on an alternative platform, you're bound to inadvertently introduce some painful GAE-specific dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Our charges are going to be increasing from $0/day to $5-11/day. While bearable, it's a serious problem given so little notice, and disappointing since we invested in their infrastructure & optimized for their previous pricing plan. This is a serious hit for a bootstrapped startup getting off the ground. No doubt it will kill a lot of startups.

</comment><comment><USER31> 1.5gb out with 880 frontend instance hours in 24 hours.

Someone needs to rethink their architecture.

<comment><USER32> That works out to be about 36 instances each pushing 40 megabytes for the day. That's crazy.

<comment><USER33> It's not fair to make assumptions like this. I have a Google App Engine app which doesn't push put a lot MBs each day, but does use a fair amount of CPU, and I'll pay for it. It's not a poorly designed service, it's a service which doesn't generate a lot of traffic (when measured in MB), but I'm getting value from it elsewhere. In this case, my app on GAE is an API which my front end (hosted elsewhere) is consuming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My understanding of all these GAE pricing story is that Google decided that GAE is not a strategic business and that business unit need to break even or they will be canceled. Does this make sense?

<comment><USER35> If that were the case, wouldn't apps like google calendar get cancelled long time ago? I doubt the ads on google calendar are sufficient to sustain the number of users it has on a daily basis.

<comment><USER34> Maybe Google Apps (Calendar) are part of strategic vision (connected with Chrome OS)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm wondering if google is just trying to encourage an architecture which is less bad for their site.

I'm guessing a small minority of apps were doing things in a way that was eating up tons more resources than they were paying for. I bet for many apps, this could end up no worse or better.

<comment><USER35> I don't think it's a small minority of apps. 100% of the people I know who are using GAE are seeing the minimum of a 4x price increase for their app (before the 50% discount). The price increase would actually prevent some small ISVs from reaching ramen profitability. There's a thread somewhere on the GAE google groups containing many angry users.

<comment><USER13> Even if most of my apps would increase by 10x they would still be cheaper than running a single AWS instance for them. Not even taking into account the easy of management and automatic redundancy that GAE offers.

<comment><USER35> As Wesley Chung noted in his reply on the GAE mailing list, GAE is designed for companies who get very unpredictable traffic. If you get a very predictable traffic, it's significantly cheaper hosting on AWS. Some of my apps previously cost $40 a month, now cost almost $300 per month. I can definitely run these apps on Linode for a fraction of the cost.

I picked GAE mainly because it was fast to setup, but I could have equally chosen Heroku over app engine when I first built it. In hindsight, I wish I had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It sounds to me like the scarce resource was found to be RAM, not CPU. If an "instance" uses a big piece of RAM to serve a request, and doesn't give it up while waiting for a backend, then scalability is RAM-bound, not CPU-bound, and they should probably charge that way.

</comment><comment><USER38> His app generated no revenue, so any price other than trivial would have him jumping ship. Why does Google want apps like his?

<comment><USER39> The $2.63 a day comes out to $81 a month which for hosting is a non trivial amount. It does come down to whether Google can turn a profit at these levels for someone using this amount of resources but I don't think customers willing to pay $50-$100 a month are ones you want to push away.

<comment><USER40> $81/month for a fun project that gets you noticed and looks good on your resume is nothing to sneeze at. Blog about it, and suddenly you have a hidden revenue stream from it. Let people know its yours and suddenly you have some weight to throw around.

<comment><USER35> For $81/month, you can get a 4 processor 2GB Linode box, which is enough to run a few dozen fun projects on there.

<comment><USER41> For $69/month you can get a 8 GB dedicated server with Core i7-920. [http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- produktmatrix-eq)

With Google the only thing you'll get for $69/month is a sore ass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can people list their choice for python hosting and the main benefits?

What are some good services layered on top of EC2 to provide more management and automation?

Does anyone have any experience with whether DotCloud is priced reasonably?

<comment><USER43> I've been playing with ep.io for a while (nothing serious), it's a standard Python + PostgreSQL stack using few inis for configuration. Their pricing is a bit high on bandwidth though, so I'll probably wait for Heroku Cedar to officially support Python and use that instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In my mind, the problem is not so much the extreme pricing difference, but the change in what's being measured, so not only is there a price increase, but it's nearly impossible to figure out how to compare the old vs. new schemes vs. competitors.

The huge price jump _is_ a serious problem, but the weird metrics switch makes it feel like such a bait and switch. I'm going to be highly surprised if this isn't challenged in court.

</comment><comment><USER45> I am currently playing with the idea of moving an application from all-GAE to part GAE, part EC2 with some spot instances running jobs when cheap enough. According to my sloppy math, this should reduce the load on the GAE side by at least 60%.

Anyway, this is all theoretical (in the worst sense of the word) - the app is not even public.

<comment><USER46> But is it really worth the headache of such a Frankenstein architecture?

I initially fell in love with the "no sysadmin" aspect of App Engine, and started building apps around it. Eventually I realized that (for me, anyway) the upside isn't really worth the trouble of having to contort my apps to work in Google's sandbox- can't run SQL, have to deal with datastore timeouts, CPU timeouts, etc. When you're done coding work-arounds for all of these things, are you really coming out ahead?

<comment><USER47> This is so true. The first step to correcting a problem is admitting you have one, and everyone on App Engine clearly does (locked-in). What I'm doing about it? Moving to Tornado/MongoDB/EC2 as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER45> You could also move to Django-nonrel, but I know - it's a lot of trouble. Like I said, I am exploring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think we're missing a big part of this...

How many users were using it?

<comment><USER16> More than 100,000: <http://goo.gl/wiDj6>

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> A question for anyone on the AppEngine team that may also be useful for other developers:

I have an app that I want to deploy and control my costs. I would like to pay for 1 FE instance to always be running and limit temporary FE instances to a maximum of 1 (free?) instance when needed. I expect my app to have a relatively small number of users, but they will be active.

I would like to prevent the scheduler from ever spawning more than these 2 FE instances. Occasional unavailability when the site is busy is OK. Except for bandwidth and storage, I would like to know roughly what my costs will be.

Just to be clear, how do I set this up?

</comment><comment><USER49> Can anyone tell me how the new and old prices compare to running a similar app on AWS, Heroku or other competitors?

ie was GAE ridiculously cheap before compared to other options, and now comparable? Or was it somewhat cheaper than competitors before, and now somewhat more expensive?

I realise it's never that simple, but nearly everyone's complaints seem to be (understandably) given in relative terms of before vs. after. I'd be interested to know how it stacks up before vs. after vs. if-we'd-taken- another-route.

<comment> buff-a It was cheap by comparison. Now it appears to be orders of magnitude more expensive. I base this on the fact that their billing estimator is claiming that 1 cpu-hour on the old system equates to 100 instances-hours on the new system. Its not the $0.04/hour cost that worries me - that is a competitive number - its that their instances only appear to be able to do the work of a 80286.

<comment><USER49> Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It appears that the chart is being misinterpreted. The cost per hour is less under the new pricing and I believe the total hours is calculated for the month.

<comment><USER51> Agreed. The number of instance hours is vastly different on the two charts; the price seems to be going from .10 / hr to .08 per hour (currently .04).

<comment><USER52> That's the point. Appengine is changing their pricing from CPU hours to Instance hours, so an app that previously had 3-4 hours a day is now going to have 48-72.

<comment><USER50> Damn it. It appears the only solution is limiting the amount of instances in the application settings. I manage a free sync service with approximately 20,000 active users on App Engine. I just checked the billing history for our application and saw similar results, the cost will increase 10 fold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I also have an app on GAE. <http://www.tubesmix.com> Right now there's no charge as there's only a couple hundred users and the resources used are low. But this change worries me a lot. Even more so since all my backend code is tied to GAE infrastructure. This is very disappointing coming from Google. Since when did they become so nickel-and-dimey?!

</comment><comment><USER54> Can someone please explain frontend versus backend instance processing? Does backend here mean processing that takes place in data storage systems?

<comment><USER55> I believe frontend means requests handled through normal frontend hits from end users, while backend instances are for longer running background processes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Everything Google does, they do in a half-assed sort of way. And it's getting really annoying. Even their core business of search is showing signs of neglect. SEO experts have learned to game the system such that the quality of search results is pretty abysmal now.

GAE is a half baked AWS. Google+ is a half baked Facebook. Google Docs is a half baked MSOffice. They have no blood in these projects and don't really care whether they succeed or not, which coincidentaly means they probably won't.

Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform.

<comment><USER57> > Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search > advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and > I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform.

Except for the largest business on the internet... Well search, video delivery, mobile phones, email, mapping, news, RSS, web analytics, and web browsers. Getting clobbered in almost everything else though.

<comment><USER56> They make no money on those products. They can't charge money for their products because they are half-assed knockoffs that nobody will pay anything for.

<comment><USER57> They make a ton of money on those products. It's all part of the ecosystem. Android users use Google search. So do Chrome users. Analytics users use AdWords (get too many hits with Analytics and you need to start spending some sweet AdWords bucks). YouTube and Gmail users see ads (Google Apps business users pay money directly).

<comment><USER56> Nonsense. Google makes 97% of their revenue from search advertising, they can't make any money elsewhere and they even say so themselves. Everything else they do is to keep up appearances that they are a market leader, which is very far from reality.

Android is a junky iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free because it can't be sold. This comapany can't produce a single product worth paying for other than search ads, and even that is going down the tube. Sure, maybe their shareholders have been fooled, but the paying consumer hasn't. Whether they admit it not, Google is in severe trouble if search advertising decreases even a few percent.

Everyone seems to have a crush on Google, but they are going to get fucked pretty badly long term unless they find some alternative, major, multi-billion dollar sources of revenue of which they've found zero so far. Self-driving cars maybe?

<comment><USER57> Those products bolster search advertising... That's the point. Android produces a ton of search revenue. So does Chrome.

> Android is a junk iOS-knockoff operating system they pawn off for free > because it can't be sold.

It's the most popular smartphone OS... Is Linux free as well because it can't be sold? Your blind hatred of Google is bizarre.

<comment><USER56> I said they are half-assed products. Google is not commited to GAE, or anything for that matter. Perhaps they lead in indirect ways to advertising revenue. But that's no excuse for having no support at all for any of their products. The poor quality of GAE is a symptom of an ambivalent company that doesn't deserve your respect.

<comment><USER58> Poor quality? Did you not read the posts of all the devs saying they really like GAE, some of them so much that the pricing change isn't really even an issue?

You're not contributing to this conversation at all, you're just spewing opinionated venom with no support for your claims.

<comment><USER56> My original points of Google building half-assed products they don't care about was succinct. It's others on this board that keep dragging on and defending the company for some reason or another. Perhaps it's because they're employed by them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I've been developing for app engine since 2008 when it came out and absolutely love it. The price changes are a result of turning a successful and massively growing product into a profitable one a la search, youtube, etc... Google should be praised for this. The changes in price also accompany an SLA that guarantee developers will receive three years notice before a breaking API change or service shut down.

The SSL problem is a limitation in some browsers that causes the type of certificates that GAE needs to use a CNAME, not IP, based routing to display huge warnings.

</comment><comment><USER60> I hope PlusFeed's author read this:

Man that's some nasty code, horrible, don't open source that kind of "code"... it's bad, even for a 5 minute projects, it's really bad.

Open Source software is not a dumpster of your bad code.

<comment><USER61> He wrote software that many people found useful and gave it away for free. That's awfully damn generous as far as I'm concerned. You see an improvement that can be made? Then make it. But stop complaining.

<comment><USER60> I don't want to sound like a troll... but you're better off re-writing the whole thing... I mean look at it.

[https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed/blob/master/plusf...](https://github.com/russellbeattie/plusfeed/blob/master/plusfeed.py)

Global variables galore, tabs no spaces, no documentation, compares to empty not just once but multiple times, pokemon style exception handling (you gotta catch them all!), 'is not None' lol, type checking instead of duck typing... Just to name a few.

14 pople forked it already, I hope those are Github bots.

<comment><USER62> You realize that you're looking at a 399 line script, right? A couple of globals are perfectly reasonable at that scale.

Also note that checking for "x is not None" is the recommended, idiomatic Python style (see <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/> for reference).

More importantly, the script works, and was apparently used by quite a few people. Rewriting something that is already known to work, just because you don't like its style, is generally a bad idea.

<comment><USER63> This code is a complete abomination, why would you stick your neck out and defend it? What igorgue is saying is, even if somebody gave me this code, I wouldn't take it, and I concur.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any startups not based out of India but having developers in India? - <AUTHOR>

Just wanted to know if there are any startups/small companies that are not having an office in India but have developers (as regular employees, in their payroll) based out of India. Am trying to understand the legalities and taxation details involved. Would it cost a lot for a startup in US/Europe to maintain a workforce of developers in India?<p>Disclosure: I am a programmer based in India. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how this would work. Perhaps you would first need to define the term "regular employee." In the U.S. the best way to define a regular employee is by the tax form. Generally a regular employee is considered a W-2 which means you have to do things such as pay into that employees social security (and other social programs) among other things. If your employee isn't a W-2 then he/she is generally a contractor.

Since an Indian citizen doesn't live in the U.S. then none of these sorts of laws apply. So, from the U.S. perspective, you would simply be a contractor and your services would be a tax write-off.

You specifically mentioned you aren't asking about companies which have a business in India, so that's out.

Conclusion: I don't know about Europe but I imagine it's the same as the U.S. Because you don't live in the U.S. you will always be a contractor and the only tax / legal implications is that payments towards your services are a write-off. You would be a regular employee in name only. You wouldn't necessarily receive any of the benefits that typically go along with the status of "regular employee."

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey there, i can't give you insight about the legalities and taxation details.

But in the most cases(Germany) its the lack of trust why we are not offshoring to india or bangladesh. The customers or even management have some anxiety about sharing their specification/code with other firms outside of europe or even outside of germany.

I worked for 2 years in a company where the long term goal was to offshore all of their technical stuff to india. And i can say it took us a long time to build the confidence between the employees(project manager etc.) to work with india in an efficient way.</comment>


Weekly list of all books recommended on the Tim Ferriss podcast (newsletter) - <AUTHOR> https://timferrissbooks.carrd.co <comment><AUTHOR> Any Tim Ferriss fans that like to read books? I will send you one email per week with all books mentioned on the podcast during that past week.

Ps. If you want all books that were ever mentioned, these guys have a great list - [http://fourhourbook.club](http://fourhourbook.club)

There is also the same thing for books mentioned on HN - [http://hackernewsbooks.com](http://hackernewsbooks.com)</comment>