Where the Sugar Babies Are - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/where-the-sugar-babies-are/384547/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Seeking Arrangement is brought to you by the fine folks behind Ashley Madison. So I would take any of their data with a boulder-sized grain of salt. I'm surprised that The Atlantic would base an entire article on their data without doing better homework.

<comment><USER3> The two sites and companies are actually not related. Do your own research.

<comment><USER2> How right you are. Arrangementfinder.com is the company in this space owned by Avid Life. It simply didn't occur to me that there would be yet another company with such a similar name in this space.

<comment><USER3> The demand for sugar is pretty high, I guess!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So many questions.

What's a sugar baby? What's a trophy wife?

Are these terms sexist?

If I date someone with student loans then am I a sugar daddy?

Some of my friends have wives who stay at home but don't have children. How do you define those relationships?

Do all cultures fetishize the young? SeekingArrangements is in UK and Singapore too.

<comment><USER5> Well the phrase "trophy wife" doesn't exist on this web page and I would say that the expression itself is not sexist (because you could also have a "trophy husband" and everyone would understand what it means), but of course the practice's prevalence suggests a cultural sexism where the expression doesn't.

The term "sugar baby" comes idiomatically from the opposite of the terms "sugar daddy, sugar mama" as the person who is the target of the affections of the latter. Obviously, "sugar baby" is not a sexist expression because it is not gendered. As for what it means, to be clear: Alice is Bob's sugar-baby (conversely, Bob is Alice's sugar-daddy) if Bob is an affluent older person who is both dating the younger Alice and is gifting her with financially- expensive gifts. The gifts could be as immaterial as "I have this car I never drive, you can use it as if it were your own" or as material as "I will pay off your student loan debts." Usually, if Alice has her own professional career and is providing well for herself, then we'd not call it a sugar-baby relationship even if the gifts are expensive and one-way. Furthermore if she is taking care of the household and/or kids, that would tend to mollify the judgment. The essence of the judgment is the belief that if the sugar-parent were not providing the gifts to the sugar-baby then the relationship would not persist; the very terms themselves suggest that the relationship is too uncomfortably invoking a parent-child dynamic in a romantic context.

A stay-at-home wife is generally not a "sugar baby" since they are married and not dating; you could potentially extend the term to cover married couples but even so, if there are no expensive gifts or they're of comparable ages you wouldn't normally say that he's her sugar-daddy.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the detailed response. I feel most relationships have a large income disparity between the partners and would cease to exist otherwise. For example, if one childless partner stays at home then the other has to make enough for both. Does American society count housing and food as expensive gifts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does The Atlantic get all their data?

Do Sugardaddies and Sugarbabies publicly confess their activities??

Maybe I'm naive but I can't imagine that the average student goes this path except she has been already escorting semi-professionally or professionally.

<comment><USER7> Despite all the graphs, there didn't seem to be any real information in the article. Not one statement from anyone (older or younger) who has used the site. I would love to hear from someone who actually used the site. Is it purely sex? Is sex expected or even normal? After seeing someone else comment that the site is owned by the Ashley Madison people I doubt that there is much evidence behind those graphs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Was having dinner with a Belgian friend, an older man that has seen a lot of life and is conversant in modern political economy. He didn't believe that: a. students in US mostly pay for everything with debt, b. those debts are impossible to discharge if students hit hard times.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder tonwhat degree this affects graduation rate disparity amongst man and women.

</comment><comment><USER10> For those clutching their pearls, I'm fairly confident that you can find an order of magnitude more sugar and/or exploitation based relationships in any large field that depends on a stratum of youth and/or beauty, and involves tiered access to attention. (Music, modeling, acting)

Partially because sites like this are nebulous black-boxes, and partially because power corrupts.

Have fun stigmatizing.

</comment><comment><USER11> I hate to be pedantic, but: the size of the salt is directly proportional to the amount of the message you want to consume (because, as you know, in food there's a certain fixed ratio of salt to other ingredients).

So if you want a person to not accept the premise, you should say "take it with a tiny grain of salt", which implies "accept very little of the premise".

<comment><USER12> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006793) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER11> Apologies... I don't know what got into me, to bring this up.

<comment><USER12> It gets into all of us sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i mean shit, id be down to have a sugarmomma. that stay at home dad life, 10/10.</comment>


Saudi conference site apparently hacked to display image of murdered journalist - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/22/18009164/jamal-khashoggi-saudi-hack-davos-desert <comment><USER2> I've seen some annoying cookie banners, but one that sticks around after you've clicked accept is a new one for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> keep the memes coming:

I was thinking about a Dead Space mod or after effects gifs to put the white and or checkered keffiyeh headdress on the main character

Change all the seasonal haunted houses names to House of Sawed

make the association permanent until Wahhabism is a glass memorial to humanity's folly

</comment><comment><USER4> How though?</comment>


S3for.Me – cheap alternative S3 cloud storage - <AUTHOR> http://www.s3for.me/index.html <comment><USER2> So did you steal all of your website's images or is there some stock image service that has all of these? If it's the latter please share.

Yours: [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme1.png](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme1.png)

Salesforce: [http://blog.database.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/intro- db...](http://blog.database.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/intro- db.com_-300x213.png)

Your S3: [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme8.png](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme8.png)

S3 from 2011: [http://themetest.hollywoodtools.com/files/2012/06/s32.png](http://themetest.hollywoodtools.com/files/2012/06/s32.png)

You: [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme6.png](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme6.png) Unbrekable IT (2011): [http://www.unbreakableit.com/uit/wp- content/themes/unbreakab...](http://www.unbreakableit.com/uit/wp- content/themes/unbreakable/a/solutions_uptime.png)

Your roadmap: [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png) Oblaksoft (Nov 2012): [http://www.oblaksoft.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/cloud-ch...](http://www.oblaksoft.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/cloud-choice.png)

Albeit this following one could be a stock image: Your keyboard: [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme5.jpg](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme5.jpg) Cloudonlinebusiness (2010): [http://www.cloudonlinebusiness.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/0...](http://www.cloudonlinebusiness.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud-fingers-SQ.jpg)

Edit: Your TOS is Hetzner's almost verbatim. [https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb](https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb)

<comment><USER3> Current design was build by developers, not designers and will be renewed once the professional design is ready. We put all our efforts on backend and storage subsystem development and completely forgot about our temporary public website. Site images were taken from various public stock image services, I hope we didn't violate any rights by using these images.

<comment><USER2> Like I asked, can you let me know the stock image services you used? I really like that cloud that Salesforce uses and would love to be able to use it myself.

Also, if you go to [http://rest.s3for.me/](http://rest.s3for.me/) (the URL you use to calculate uptime) the error message in the document tree says 'The AWS Access Key Id you provided does not exist in our records'.

You mentioned S3 stands for Storage Should be Simple, what does AWS stand for in your company? Unfortunately cloud software isn't my forte, I would love to know what that acronym stands for.

My naivete leads me to believe that your status check is hosted with Amazon, and that your uptime checker would in fact be checking Amazon's uptime but I am surely mistaken.

<comment><USER4> Another curious coincidence: [http://rest.s3for.me/check/test.html](http://rest.s3for.me/check/test.html) returns x-amz-request-id and x-amz-id-2 headers.

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 20:37:05 GMT
      Server: Apache
      x-amz-request-id: 1378586225522b8e71190b5
      x-amz-id-2: storage1-1.s3for.me
      ETag: "444bcb3a3fcf8389296c49467f27e1d6"
      Last-Modified: Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:09:52 +0000
      Content-Length: 2
      Content-Type: text/html

      ok

<comment><USER3> These headers are part of S3 implementation an we left them to avoid any possible problems with S3 clients. Some clients are very strict on protocol validation and refused to work in some cases. The purpose of these headers are to track all requests and be able to find any problems with any particular request. You must include them when contacting support with problems with some request. This is true both for Amazon and S3For.Me

<comment><USER2> If you go here: [http://rest.s3for.me/check/](http://rest.s3for.me/check/)

Why is your key id called 'AWSAccessKeyId', why does your error message say 'AWS Access Key Id does not exist in our records' why is your error message identical to the letter of what S3 would return. Surely the error message _text_ isn't required for protocol validation.

This looks like you just took an open source S3 REST API clone (there are many) and stuck it on a Hetzner server without bothering to change any variable names.

To me there are a lot of questions, the most obvious tell is that I highly doubt Salesforce would use a stock image as the logo for their cloud database solution considering the level of investment they made in it.

<comment><USER3> 'AWSAccessKeyId' is part of XML Schema and can not be changed. You are right regarding AWS text in error messages, I removed it, thank you for noticing this.

This was the first thought - to take an open source S3 REST API clone, install it on Hetzner servers and work this way, but it is not the case. Any of the available solutions fit to us for different reasons. All core software is build by our team. We use Open Source software a lot, but the core of S3For.Me was developed from the first to the last line by our team.

I've checked Salesforce site and do not see anything similar to our logo. It will be replaced in the nearest future anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like they should get ready for the trademark infringement letter.

Also, the math they use to get their 99.9999% durability is a bit sketchy - that 1% failure rate for a HDD isn't independent of its age, stress level, temperature, batch number, etc., and likely doesn't include the odds of corruption as opposed to failure. At scale you can't simply rely on your vendors' claims.

<comment><USER6> Amazon has trademarked names like "Amazon S3", "AWS", "Amazon EC2" and "EC2" but not S3

[https://aws.amazon.com/trademark- guidelines/](https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/)

<comment><USER7> Doesn't Trademark law operate on the basis of possible confusion? And I definitely see that risk there. IANAL though.

<comment><USER3> S3 means "Storage Should be Simple" in our case :-) No one has ever contacted us regarding this.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm... Well you may want to actually put that on your website. And you probably want to be careful, since you've posted comments on here like "all the rest documentation can be found at Amazon S3 documentation site, it is basically the same with small differences" and you have "Amazon" on the sign, which is above the "fold" on my screen and pretty much the first connection I made on S3. If your entire website doesn't scream "we are just like Amazon S3" then I must be missing something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure who this is targeting. As a (very) small-scale user of S3 I hardly pay anything per month and would not even consider switching.

Large companies on the other hand need to have the reliability and security of a big name behind the storage. Why would they even consider moving to a no- name company that hasn't proven itself? Sorry, it just seems like the wrong niche to step in to.

<comment><USER10> I'm actually facing a decision right now in building a new app that has relatively heavy needs for data storage and number crunching. Each paying customer would have a relatively large amount of data per person compared to your average CRUD app.

I'd like to use DigitalOcean or Linode VPS machines for processing and as web servers, but then I need a large object store like S3. Rackspace and AWS have both object storage and VPS, but their VPS machines are underpowered for the price.

So ideally I would use Rackspace-Files or Amazon-S3 for storage, and DigitalOcean for number crunching, but I'd get killed on transfer rates from S3 to DigitalOcean (for example). Amazon and Rackspace have a trump card with free data transfer within their data centers. You have to use their slow machines to realistically use their object stores in this type of a use case.

So that's the 'S3' problem I need solved, which still isn't quite what S3ForMe is going after. Extremely cheap data transfers to/from major VPS providers.

<comment><USER11> Why not use Rackspace-Files and get dedicated servers from Rackspace? That would solve your transfer rate issue and likely get you far better performance than Linode or DigitalOcean.

<comment><USER12> Because dedicated servers from Rackspace are _expensive_.

<comment><USER13> I've been happy with unmanaged servers from Incero. Their severs use ECC RAM, their support seems competent, and they offer buy-down prices for things like RAM.

Back to pgrove's point, though — there are trade offs with using a dedicated server. The storage isn't as reliable as S3 and the server itself is likely less reliable than a VPS (since some hardware problems on a VPS can be solved by migrating to new hardware and only involve a small downtime, rather than the large downtime of restoring from backup).

A major advantage to dedicated servers that I don't hear much about is simplicity. Dropping everything on a dedicated server means I can use local services like the file system rather than having to deal with S3 and latency and bandwidth costs.

Edit: I just realized that the idea was to use Rackspace files + one of their servers rather than S3 + EC2. Somehow I missed that bit and was thinking about just storing everything on the dedicated server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lets see, it has less durability, unknown reliability (new company), and is housed in only two data centers in one region. So that means two of your three replicas are probably sitting on a rack right next to each other.

I can't imagine why it is marginally cheaper.

<comment><USER3> Personally I can't understand why Amazon S3 is so expensive!

<comment><USER15> LOL wow. This needs to be on @ShitHNSays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Allright, i won't be on the _haters_ and _trolls_ side this time. I'm actually very interested in your product as i was looking for an Amazon S3 replacement.

Pro: \- Servers are located in Europe (WOOOW, fuck spying govs)

Not so good: \- I think you had a great idea, got one (maybe 2,3) developers working on it for some time and rolled out this product. Which obviously is quite unfinished (on the business point of view, i have no hint on how the technical side is working as i never used it).

So, question for you guys: How the hell invoicing is working? As you could guess most of us work/own companies, we need freaking invoices for every cent we spend. No billing, no invoices, nothing like this in the private area, ideas?

<comment><USER17> The US has more legal ability to spy outside the country than inside. If you host in Europe, but do business in the US it is my understanding that both the NSA and the CIA can snoop on you, whereas if you are solely US based, you do not worry about the CIA.

<comment><USER18> It's a double edged sword though. Outside the US you can be spied on, inside the US you can be served a warrant from a US court.

<comment><USER16> Considering the number of downvotes, i guess at least 3 americans got hurted by my comment. Sorry for this. All i know is that if a business is based in germany accountancy is a lot easier and i _might_ be able to recover VAT and other stuff. US weird invoices cause problems on this side.

That said, if i get (as an example) a search warrant from a US court and i'm based in EU, i will simply ignore it. This is quite enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a European citizen, my first concern for US cloud storage is now a question of confidentiality.

This is not mentioned on the site's FAQ.

What is S3for.me's policy regarding NSA warrantless surveillance? Will S3for.me release a NSA transparency report, like Yahoo?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_%282001%E2%80%9307%29)

<comment><USER3> Absolutely not. edit: I meant that we do not disclose any user-related data to anyone without a court order.

<comment><USER20> Are you saying that you will "absolutely not" release an NSA transparency report? That sounds... odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the sign picture you guys made looks unprofessional - [http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png](http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png)

Otherwise good stuff!

</comment><comment><USER22> Anonymous domain registration, no about us page, total lack of info about who's behind it = deal breaker

BTW: websites hosted by Germans are required to have an imprint ("Impressum") with full contact data incl. phone number.

</comment><comment><USER23> Question for the company - why bother writing your own distributed object store when you could use Swift or CEPH?

<comment><USER12> Or Riak CS (which a large VM vendor is using to store VM-associated snapshots)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm interested on more detail on this. How does it work? Object storage at scale is not a trivial problem to solve. Are they using their own storage engine or are they using an open-source one? Where are the docs? "Just look at the S3 docs" is a little vague since so much of S3 has to do with AWS product integration rather than just storage (eg billing, regions, identity/ACLs, etc).

<comment><USER3> We are using our own self-written software to implement S3 protocol. We do not support all enterprise-features like extended ACL, regions, encryption, this makes our software much simpler and easier to develop. You can find basic documentation here [https://my.s3for.me/client/docs/index](https://my.s3for.me/client/docs/index), all the rest documentation can be found at Amazon S3 documentation site, it is basically the same with small differences. Edit: can't post comments for some time (You're submitting too fast...), will reply later.

<comment><USER24> Can you share more about your implementation? (Disclosure: I'm very interested since I work on OpenStack Swift.)

Starter questions:

How does data placement work? How is data checked for correctness? How do you do listings at scale? During hardware failures, do you still make any durability or availability guarantees? How do you handle hot content? How do you resolve conflicts (eg concurrent writes)?

<comment><USER3> > How does data placement work? Each object bigger than some size is split in > small parts, these parts are linked to the metadata object with all > information, such as name, bucket, size, date, checksum, etc. All data is > split in server groups - each group is at least 3 mirrored servers with no > more than 5TB of data to make system flexible. Server groups can be added to > increase system capacity or removed to decrease.

> How is data checked for correctness? With checksum. Once the data is > uploaded by user he will receive its checksum and must compared it with > local checksum to make sure that it was correctly transfered and stored. The > same checksum is used to ensure server-side data correctness.

> How do you do listings at scale? There is a trick - we support only one > delimiter (/), this means that we can use very simple listing algorithm > which scales very easy.

> During hardware failures, do you still make any durability or availability > guarantees? Yes, all data is split in server groups by 3 servers each. If > one of 3 servers will fail, this group will still running like nothing > happened, some running requests may fail though. If 2 servers will fail at > the same time, then this group and all data in it will be put in read-only > mode to avoid any possible data damage.

> How do you handle hot content? It is cached in RAM by OS, we do not perform > any additional measures. OS does a pretty good job.

> How do you resolve conflicts (eg concurrent writes)? Some conflicts are > resolved by the software if possible. Unrecoverable conflicts are returned > back to user with HTTP 400, 500 errors to make him know that something is > wrong and he must run request again. For concurrent writes we use simple > rule - the last one wins.

<comment><USER24> Interesting, and thanks for the response. If I may probe a little further, I have a couple of follow-up questions.

1) Server groups of at least 3 mirrored servers, with a max of 5TB.

This seems like an interesting design choice. What do you mean by "at least"? Does this mean you'll have some data with more replicas? Are these server pools filled up and then powered down until they are needed? How do you choose which server pool to send the data to? And since you have a mirrored set of servers, when do you send a response back to the client?

Is the 5TB number something that is a limit for the storage server (ie 15TB total for a cluster of 3)? That seems rather low. It also doesn't divide evenly into common drive sizes available from HDD vendors today. So what kind of density are you getting in your storage servers? How many drives per CPU, and how many TB per rack? Since you're advertising on low price, I'd think very high density would be pretty important.

2) You say you split data into smaller chunks if it crosses some threshold. Let's suppose you split it into 1MB objects, once the data is bigger than 5MB. And each 1MB chunk is then written to some server pool which has replicated storage (via the mirroring). How do you tie the chunks back to the logical object? Do you have a centralized metadata layer that stores placement information? If so, how do you deal with the scaling issue there? If not, another option would be to store a manifest object that contains the set of chunks. But in either case, you've got a potentially very high number of servers that are required to be available at the time of a read request in order to serve the data.

Just as an example (and using some very conservative examples), suppose I have a 100MB file I want to store and you chunk at 10MB. So that means there are now 10 chunks replicated in your system, for a total of 30 unique drives. Now when I read the data, your system needs to find which 10 servers pools have my chunks and then establish a connection with one of the servers in each server group. This seems like a lot of extra networking overhead for read requests. What benefits does it provide that offset the network connection overhead?

And what happens when one of the chunks is unavailable? Can you rebuild it from the remaining pieces (which would essentially be some sort of erasure encoding)?

Overall, the chunking and mirroring design choices seem to me like they would introduce a lot of extra complexity into the system. I'd love to hear more about how you arrived at these choices, and what you see as their advantages.

In order to not make my long post even longer, I'll not pursue more questions around listings, failures, or hot content.

<comment><USER3> 1) I've made a typo, not "at least", but "at maximum", meaning that each server can store up to 5TB of data, it's 2x3TB hard drives servers. The density is very low because we use cheap hardware which fail regularly and such a small data amount means high recovery speed. 5TB is a soft limit and can be different for server groups, but it is not at the moment. Each group of 3 servers has a total capacity of 5TB because data is mirrored.

2) We have a centralised replicated metadata layer which is stored on the same servers as the data itself. All object chunks are stored at one servers group at the same time, so there is no need to connect to multiple servers to serve a file, it is enough to connect to one server from server group to get all the data. Metadata may be stored at different server group though. All chunks are replicated to 3 servers at the same time using a sequential append-only log to ensure that all servers has the same data. This may introduce replication lag and if it is too big for some server then it is removed from the server group until replication lag back to normal (1-3 seconds usually).

Actually, it is much simpler than I explained, data layer with replication, data consistency and sharding is completely transparent to the application layer and it is really-really small and simple. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll share with you software details and you will understand how simple it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> hmm. so if storing/transferring <1TB

Amazon (standard): $0.095/GB/mo |transfer out: $0.12/GB/mo

S3for.me: $0.060/GB/mo |transfer out: $0.04/GB/mo

</comment><comment><USER26> Minor Advice: On your interactive chart, I'd arrange it so s3forme was first or last, and that it was a steadily increasing (or decreasing) value.

Also I'd consider changing the font/color on s3forme so that it 'pops' a bit more compared to your competitors. As is my guess is the user's eye is drawn to Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER27> If the quality, clarity and thoroughness of the public website is representative of the backend... I shudder to think.

<comment><USER3> Backend is much better, but the public site must be redesigned, it is awful, I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It almost seems more like someone testing out a concept (mockup) than an actual final product.

I can't think that those prices/durability promises are realistic unless you're operating at massive scale.

</comment><comment><USER29> What's the long-term plan for competing with Amazon on price?

<comment><USER3> Our prices will aways be lower than Amazon S3, I can tell this for sure. But our main advantage is support - you can always open a ticket and get an answer on your question within 24 hours, but usually much faster.

<comment><USER29> Presumably, Amazon gets enormous volume discounts for the disk drives that would be a main cost of running S3, and they run their business with notoriously tiny margins. It would seem nearly impossible to undercut them for the same product at the same level of service.

<comment><USER30> what about bandwidth price?

<comment><USER3> Right now it is $0.04 per GB which is 3 times cheaper than Amazon and customers with a lot of traffic will get additional discounts.

<comment><USER30> what happens if a file becomes very popular?

like a ddos or a very popular video

how many servers can transmit one file?

<comment><USER3> Each file is stored at 3 different servers at the same time. Hot files are moved to RAM automatically and will be served very fast without even touching the disks. Our tests shows that each servers group has about 500Mb/s free bandwidth capacity at this time. And it can be increased to several Tb/s in a matter of days if needed. Additional servers will be added in 2-3 days do the server group if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Where are they located? (Outside of the US?)

I can't find anything on their website that lists physical contact information.

<comment><USER3> Or datacenter is located at Germany

<comment><USER3> No, we use self-written software, this means that we can fix any issue or add additionally functionality very fast and do not depend on any vendor.

<comment><USER32> Both Ceph ([https://github.com/ceph/ceph](https://github.com/ceph/ceph)) and Openstack Swift ([https://github.com/openstack/swift](https://github.com/openstack/swift)) are open source, allowing you to add functionality and not be dependent on a vendor.

I'm sure you still have valid reasons why you rolled your own, and I would be interested in hearing about them.

<comment><USER3> Yes, of course we have our reasons. One of the most important are: \- We didn't like internal storage implementation, we believe that we can do better. Very self-confident, I know, but I still think so after almost a year of development and production use. \- Production deployment from the start required a lot of hardware investments, we decided to put these investments into development.

Personally I think that we made a right choice and I don't regret about it. We learned a lot about cloud storage, scalability, performance, possible problems and I believe that this knowledge is very important for every team who works in cloud storage business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 99.99 over a year (@365.256 * 86400) is about 52 minutes downtime.

I wouldn't want to promise that.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like how the sign up button appears 5 times. They should A/B test that and see if it works. /s

<comment><USER3> Our marketing guys said that it is a good idea :-)

<comment><USER35> I would seriously reconsider putting that button on a page more than once or twice. It makes it look unprofessional.

It looks like an interesting storage service, but like others mentioned, you should consider renaming it. I was convinced you were reselling Amazon S3 storage when I visited the site.

<comment><USER3> I agree, maybe you can suggest a good name for it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Worst name ever but nice service.

</comment><comment><USER37> So, there's no company info at the website at all, why should I trust "unknown" to host my data? Who's liable? Do I know you don't run out of business next week?

</comment><comment><USER38> Why would someone use s3for.me service instead of Mega ? In terms of speed, security and pricing how much worse/better is this service ?

<comment><USER39> Last I checked, Mega does not support the Amazon S3 protocol nor even a RESTful one. IIRC, the majority of Mega magic is done in browser using a ton of JavaScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Doesn't it have a free plan? Like amazon free 5gb storage per month, 15gb transfer.

<comment><USER41> They give you $50 worth of credit when you sign up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Six 9's. Hmm, that is a lot and hard to digest.

</comment><comment><USER43> Wish to see the API before to even try it.

<comment><USER3> API is the same as Amazon S3, you can find documentation here: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRest.html](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRest.html)</comment></comment>


Quora for Startups: Sprouter Pivots to Focus on Q&A for Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2011/02/quora-for-startups-sprouter-pi.php

<comment><USER2> I'm using the market leader for Startup Q&A to type this comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> HN is one of the ''current'' market leaders. Recently though we're starting to see a trickle of Quora links here; over time I suspect it'll be more and more common to ask elsewhere and post here.

At least for me, HN's not that great for startup Q&A. No question I've asked here makes it to the front page, so people almost never respond. Meanwhile Quora's topics and the ability to direct a question to somebody give a lot of major advantages. Over the last two weeks I've had conversations on Quora with a journalist I didn't know and with a CEO of a company in the news. Both of the links came up on HN as well but I don't believe either of them posted here.

<comment><USER2> I agree that Quora can and maybe should leech some of this away. However, I personally dislike seeing SO and Quora questions posted here. The fragmented discussion is a sign that something is amiss.

If HN is a bad place to ask questions because they don't make it to the front page but it's a good place to discuss questions, my guess is that the community's perspective has some value.

Maybe it's time for HackerQuestions.com with users/karma integrated between HN and HQ. It's good that you can chat with journos on Quora. It's also good to have amore focused conversation within HN, that's why people discuss Quora or SO questions with such energy.

<comment><AUTHOR> HN's threading and voting for comments make it a much better place for discussion than Quora. Conversely Quora's answer summaries, categories, and social media integration make it better for pure Q&A.

Agreed that it'd be great for something that's integrated with both. I believe Quora has API access and if so there are some interesting weekend projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sprouter is an odd beast. It was started a few years ago as a twitter for entrepreneurs. Its based in canada so that was part of its marketing and was founded by a woman which was also part of its marketing. It had a terrible interface for a while which they sort of improved over time. I tried to use it for a few months and found it was loaded with spam. It also has a very small userbase in general so theres really nobody to follow and no real discussions taking place.

Why they are now becoming a quora clone is frankly bizarre. I think they are becoming another digg or myspace or hunch where they just are becoming desparate and are probably either losing users or just not having an increase in traffic. SO they are just throwing different plans out there to see which ones stick.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this Sprouter's 2nd pivot? I seemed to remember they had some sweeping changes back in early 2010 but can't find any evidence online or in my email (been a member for some time)...

</comment><comment><USER5> I am not a fan of Quora -- but you can't outdo Quora for entrepreneurs as so many of the VCs seem to be on Quora. Entrepreneurs will always go to where the VCs are.

<comment><AUTHOR> But suppose a lot of angels and VC's decide that Sprouter's a better place? For example anybody wanting to do business with international companies can't be happy with Quora's English-only attitude ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I freaking hate how everyone is now using the word "Pivot"

<comment><USER4> What you do you propose?

<comment><USER2> Reboot?

<comment><USER4> Ha, that is what I call it myself ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't Quora supposed to be Q&A for entrepreneurs?

</comment><comment><USER8> hmm, I thought Quora already was "Quora for startups". Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought Quora was the "Quora for Startups."

<comment><AUTHOR> Quora certainly hopes so. But Sprouter could give them a run for their money.

On the one hand it's not like Quora has to dominate every market space to succeed -- StackOverflow will be better than them for programming questions, and there's a law site whose name I forget that rocks for legal stuff. But since this is so close to their core (Silicon Valley web startup scene) it's potentially a real challenge...

[Apologies for the duplicate comment]</comment></comment>


What is Two Dot Ooh? - <AUTHOR>

What's the hacker perspective on 'Web 2.0'? Is it just a crossroads of technologies that have matured? Is it about the community aspects? How would you defined Web 2.0? <comment><USER2> Marketing. I wouldn't call it good marketing, because like AI in the 80s, if you promise more than you deliver, people stop trusting you.

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm waiting for the first service pack to be released before i install it.</comment>


Making a swift macOS password manager for people who hate the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/swlkr/day-12-swift-macos-password-manager-for-people-who-hate-the-cloud-1pmn <comment><USER2> Fun read. Also reminds me that I wish I knew of a better password management strategy. I'm currently using an rsa encrypted text file on my laptop

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good strategy to me, although yeah I guess if you want to have those passwords on your phone too, might be a pain</comment></comment>


Android app scans products, reveals SOPA support status of creator - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.boycottsopa.android

<comment><USER2> I think something more powerful could be done here. Imagine app that lets you understand all the politics and dirt on companies. Like how green are they or do they do animal testing . I see so much shit and choices, but who am rewarding

<comment><USER3> Please refrain from making comments like this on HN, they are not welcome and the site owner does not want this kind of discussion on the site [1][2]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3105036> [2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3104144>

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. Are you saying that the person you are replying to is only interested in aligning consumer action with consumer beliefs because of a shallow interest? He is explicitly saying he thinks a roughly shallow idea could be taken further...

Or are you saying we should avoid topics that could broadly be considered political? If this is the case I don't understand why you didn't reply to OP instead of this comment (and how that meshes with pg taking a stand on SOPA in general).

Or that you think the suggested application isn't of the caliber that ideas would have been in the old days pg refers to? I have only used hn for a year or so, but have read some of the archives and this doesn't feel correct. It's an interesting idea -- perhaps a browser extension that modifies sites like amazon.com?

Please explain what you meant; I am very curious. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The app doesn't deal with corporate hierarchies. For example, it correctly identifies Cheerios as supporting SOPA, but not Gold Medal flour; each is labeled as "distributed by General Mills Sales".

</comment><comment><USER6> >Users who also viewed this also viewed: Go Daddy Mobile

Oh, the irony.

</comment><comment><USER7>
      Our app makes one request over the internet to our
      server to find if the product is a SOPA supporter.
      We do not access any other data.

It would be useful to have statistics available for this data. Which items are most frequently scanned? How many dollars worth of goods has this application steered users away from?

<comment><USER8> ___How many dollars worth of goods has this application steered users away from?_ __

That sounds like the SOPA promoter's "how much money did piracy cost us" considering each download as one missed/lost sale. Please do not fall for that yourself.

<comment><USER9> Companies support SOPA based on that reasoning, it only seems consistent to say "by your own metric, you lost $XM of sales".

<comment><USER8> I'd consider it much more important to stay truthful than to descent to such blatant propaganda.

<comment><USER9> I am disappointed that the mob downvoted you for an honest, reasonable, principled statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>