The JOBS Act will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-obamas-jobs-act-couldnt-suck-worse-20120409?hn <comment><USER4> Securities laws, in general, have never been absolute in the United States. When companies offer stock or other securities to purchasers, the broad rule is that "you can offer anything you want, even something junky, so long as you disclose all material elements associated with the offering such that a reasonable investor can make an informed decision in deciding to purchase it." In other words, there is no all-seeing, all-knowing authority supervising the process who declares that the offering is substantively sound. It may or may not be. All that is required is that the issuer meet the requirements imposed by securities laws for disclosing all material facts relating to the investment. That is what the registration statement does in a public offering. And that is all it does. If that is done, and junk is offered, and the public wants to buy junk, the securities laws permit this.

Even respecting disclosure, though, the U.S. securities laws have always tempered the burdens associated with making detailed disclosures of the type required in a registration statement with important rules saying, in effect, "we as regulators realize that requiring companies to go through a multi- million process just to offer their securities to investors is too much and therefore we will exempt a broad number of categories from the registration and detailed disclosure requirements to enable small companies to offer their stock for sale as well." That premise underlies a whole range of securities law "exemptions" that permit small offerings, etc. so that companies can grow and develop without choking on process. The ultimate exemption under federal law is Section 4(2) of the Securities Law of 1933, which basically exempts private placements from the burdens of going through the registration process. Section 4(2) has been around forever and has no formal requirements. It simply provides that anything that is a true private placement, as opposed to a public offering, is exempt. Because the assessment of what is a private versus a public offering turned on detailed facts and circumstances, and this in turn led to substantial uncertainty and lots of litigation (is an offering made to 20 people "public"? how about if you don't know them? how about if you advertise the offering to get them interested? how about if they are small, unsophisticated investors?), the ultimate exemption - or, more accurately, "safe harbor" that assured an issuer that an offering would be exempt - <USER2> Regulation D, adopted by the SEC in 1982 and widely used by startups ever since that date to make tons of private placements that have been streamlined, simple, and cost-efficient ways of offering their stock to investors.

As is apparent from the above, the securities laws have _always_ sought to strike a balance between imposing regulatory requirements (and burdens) that are aimed at protecting investors, on the one hand, and moderating the burdens so imposed to facilitate capital formation for situations where it makes no sense to impose needlessly burdensome requirements on small issuers and where less burdensome, fallback protections can be used instead of the full panoply of protections that apply to larger-scale offerings. By definition, this means that U.S. securities laws have always recognized a trade-off between having strong regulatory requirements aimed at investor protection, on the one hand, and lessening such requirements for some situations so as to give practical routes for capital formation for companies unable to meet the rigorous requirements. At many points along the way, the legislators who pass such laws and the regulators who administer them make multiple social policy judgments saying, in effect, "this is a situation that calls for the maximum protections but this one will leave investors fairly protected with more minimal protections in place." That is why it costs many millions of dollars to do the legal and accounting work to take a company public but only a couple of thousand to issue stock in a new corporation and only a few tens of thousands to raise a few million in a Series A private placement. The law is designed to accommodate the practical needs of companies that want to raise capital. Securities laws don't vanish in the private placement context. They simply impose far fewer requirements aimed at investor protection and all the more so when investors are presumed to have a strong ability to protect their interests (this is why offerings are often limited to "accredited investors," i.e., high net-worth or high income individuals, among others).

The JOBS Act is a piece of legislation that takes the rather burdensome accounting requirements first imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley on all publicly traded companies - and adding $1M+ in annual costs to even the smallest issuer in order to attain regulatory compliance under those rules - and exempts a set of relatively smaller publicly-traded companies from having to comply with those requirements for a 5-year ramp-up period after first going public. This part of the Act says, in effect, "we realize that the IPO market has been moribund ever since SOX was enacted and, because part of the reason is the heavy regulatory burdens imposed by SOX, we will seek to encourage more IPOs by giving issuers more incentive to go public without having to face huge expenses right out the gate." Now, this social policy judgment made by Congress may or may not be sound. But it is a _policy_ judgment declaring that the SOX rules are just too much for relatively small companies just going public and therefore should be relaxed for such companies in order to enable them to realize their practical goals of going public, building momentum, and only later having to comply with the full SOX rules. One can question this judgment but one cannot question that it falls squarely within the pattern and practice of U.S. securities laws as implemented for decades. It is always a trade-off between optimum investor protections and practical limitations on such protections in the name of letting legitimate capital formation get done. Will this "legalize fraud," as suggested in this piece? I doubt it. The SOX rules have a short history and securities laws go back to the 1930s, more or less ably protecting investors during their long tenure before SOX took effect. Such protections will continue to exist for offerings made by these small issuers who will get some interim relief from SOX requirements. One can argue that it is bad policy to afford such relief. But to suggest that it "legalizes fraud" is to absurdly overstate the case.

The JOBS Act similarly loosens requirements for crowd-funding, for enabling private companies to have larger numbers of shareholders before having to register as publicly-traded companies, and for other contexts as well. On balance, it is aimed at promoting more effective capital formation by loosening otherwise strict SEC rules when new conditions warrant. This, to me, is very good for startups and the Act as a whole should, in my judgment, lead to many excellent results. That is why it has received almost uniform and very strong support from pretty much the entire startup community. It does not legalize fraud. It strikes a classic balance between formal investor protections and real-world practicalities. If the balance proves wrong, nothing will stop Congress from pulling back. In the meantime, let's see if crowd-funding can be used to give us new ways of raising capital and if the IPO market can't be rejuvenated after a long dead spell. The Act stands to benefit startups in major ways and, though not exempt from criticism, is by no means some radical departure away from investor protection under U.S. securities laws. On the contrary, it stands squarely within the traditions of those laws and is a good example of precisely how such laws have been implemented for many decades.

<comment><USER5> I enjoyed your lengthy comment but you are being selective in the historic context you provide.

In a nutshell, you show how private placements got exempted from certain securities regulations, how those depression-era exemptions were expanded in the 1980s leading to "tons" of new activity, and how those exemptions may now be expanded further, making startups very happy.

What you leave out is that federal investment-activity standards have been shown by recent history to be wholly inadequate. You leave out the recent financial meltdown, a direct result of replacing 1930s era banking regulations with looser laws in the 80s and 90s. And you leave out the dot-com collapse, caused by dubious IPOs of the sort that SOX -- which JOBS would partially repeal -- was subsequently designed to counter.

This context is vital. The aggressively deregulatory JOBS act comes st a time when our regulatory framework has been exposed as woefully inadequate, in the midst of quickly ballooning tech valuations, and as we are seeing financial misstatements already from companies like Groupon that went public under the old, supposedly over-regulatory regime.

So yes, we should consider the historical context around the JOBS act. And I'd choose a vastly different frame than you have: Financial regulations designed to prevent bubble-depression cycles have been steadily stripped away since the 1930s, leading directly to the collapse of our economy in 2008 and the ensuing malaise. Now the JOBS Act proposes to strip these standards down even further.

<comment><USER6> I don't consider myself a big-L libertarian, but I can't help but notice the "Regulation failed, we need more regulation!" template. If the incredibly burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley was nonetheless "inadequate", then maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of _inadequately_ protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances. To look at it another way, what your argument says is that a certain expensive purchase, namely Sarbanes-Oxley, brought less value than expected. Should we buy more of that stuff because now still more is needed, or buy less because the value proposition is diminished?

<comment><USER7> Just pointing out some basic logic that may or may not be present in the above, but is not apparent either way: Just because one solution fails, it does not necessitate "all solutions fail, the right answer is no solutions". Perhaps the problem was in SO itself. Perhaps the problem is in the concept of regulation. Maybe a systemic fix would work better than bolted on regulation, and better than same system, no fixes at the same time. Perhaps a rethinking of some of those core components would be nicer.

Edit for those who are apparently thinking this is some sort of troll: Why can we look at code, say a scaling problem, and say "the answer is not a bigger server or a tweak on the existing code base, but a rework of the core components to work horizontally" and get kudos, but when similar questions are asked of government/financial systems, it is instantly and unfathomably bad?

<comment><USER8> Financial regulation is certainly a complex problem, and there are many ways of solving the problem, and my ignorance of the subject is vast.

As to why it's "instantly and unfathomably bad" to get rid of regulation: It seems to me that regulation, most of the time (and for most financial "problems") has worked pretty well. Other countries haven't had any where near as much trouble with, for e.g., the recent housing crisis, because they have had better regulation in place. So, At least as far as I can tell, it looks like regulations work fairly well. It's certainly better than no regulation.

There are already huge amounts of regulations in all sorts of fields, such as education, medicine, pollution, the environment, politics, etc... So we know how to make regulations work. There are certainly problems with regulation but it seems better than any alternative I know of.

So, and this could just be ignorance (or a lack of imagination) but I don't think the problem is in the concept of regulation. I honestly can't think of a systemic fix that wouldn't make things worse.

As far as it goes, the US has far more of a problem when laws and regulations are gamed by insiders for their own benefit, at great expense to everyone else. Another way of framing it is basically the "1% vs. the 99%" debate that's been going for the last year or so. So maybe that points at a systemic fix -- open government, especially open regulation, so it's much harder to game the regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The act allows mom and pop to invest with little or no "burdensome" ongoing disclosure. I run a startup and would love to have their cash, but the sharks will get it instead.

Instead of doubling down on opacity, Congress should take a leaf from the non- profit industry. There, at least everybody's tax return (Form 990) is available for public inspection. Some of them are very illuminating. Even just that would be a better start than this.

The idea that continuous disclosure has to be burdensome is a relic from the past. You want to raise money from my mom? Let me monitor your Quickbooks online account.

<comment><USER10> III. Requirements on Issuers (A) name, legal status, address, website, etc. (B) names of directors, officers, and 20% stockholders (C) "a description of the business of the issuer and the anticipated business plan of the issuer" – the devil is really in the details of this one, and it remains to be seen whether the SEC will require this "description" to be 4 pages or 40 in order to be sufficient (D) prior year tax returns, plus financials – see below for details (E) description of intended use of proceeds (F) target offering amount, deadline, and regular progress updates through the life of the offering (G) share price and methodology for determining the price (H) a description of the ownership and capital structure of the issuer, including a lot of detail about the terms of the securities being sold, the terms of any other outstanding securities of the company, a summary of the differences between them, a host of disclosures about how the rights of shareholders can be limited, diluted or negatively impacted, "examples of methods for how such securities may be valued by the issuer in the future, including during subsequent corporate actions", and a disclosure of various risks to investors

II. Requirements on Intermediaries

The JOBS Act requires crowdfunding intermediaries to register with the SEC, either as a broker (which is an expensive and onerous process), or as a new thing called a "funding portal". Funding portals will also be required to register with FINRA, the financial industry self-regulatory organization.

A) providing certain disclosures and investor education materials to investors (B) ensuring that the investor has reviewed educational materials and answers questions indicating that he/she understands the risks involved (C) performing certain background checks on the issuer (D) provide a 21 day review period before any crowdfund securities are sold (E) ensure that an issuer does not receive investment funds until its target investment minimum has been reached, and that investors may cancel their commitments to invest as provided by the SEC (no word yet on how these cancellation provisions are going to look) (F) ensure that no investor surpasses the investment limits set forth above in a given 12 month period in the aggregate – i.e. the limits described above with respect to investors apply to all crowdfunding investments in a given 12 month period, not just to individual investments, and the burden is on the intermediary to monitor this (G) take steps to protect the privacy of investors (H) not pay finders fees to promoters or lead generators with respect to investors (it appears to be okay to pay finders fees for issuer leads) (I) not allow the intermediary's directors, officers or partners to have a financial interest in an issuer using its services

There are /plenty/ of disclosure requirements and more coming down the pike when the Commission is through drafting what else is required.

It is not like there is going to be a Kickstarter where people just start throwing money at random ideas with no way to check who and what they are investing in.

<comment><USER11> (A) Name, legal status, address, website

(B) Names of directors, officers, and 20% stock holders

(C) Description of the business of the issuer and business plan of the issuer

(D) Prior year tax returns & financials

(E) Use of proceeds

(F) Target offering amount, deadline, and progress updates

(G) Share price and methodology for determining price

(H) Cap structure

A, B, E, F, and G are trivially generated (note that the sharks will have fronts to avoid having to put up the same names constantly). F and G are trivial to the point of boilerplating.

C and D may look like serious requirements, but if we're talking about early stage company investments here, how stringent do you think these requirements could be? What do you think the tax returns for a 1-year-old pre-VC tech company look like?

Even the full SEC disclosure policy for IPOs was insufficient to keep clowns out of the public market in '99.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author of Rolling Stone piece is focussing on the JOBS act as an enabler for stock fraud. They don't seem to be clear on its alternate function of enabling Quickstarter-type ventures where what's being sold isn't stock in a company that is trying to bypass accounting norms for an IPO, but a one-off product development (like the movie "Iron Sky", or any number of items on Quickstarter). It's a totally different business model.

(Random example: let's say I, as an author, announce that I'm going to write and sell a book _if_ I can get enough pre-purchases; let's set the gate at 10,000 readers willing to pony up $10 each in order to receive an ebook when I've written it, a year down the line. Right now, as I understand it, if I was in the US I'd be expected to undergo the same accounting procedures as a corporation prepping for an IPO because of the number of people involved -- which would make it a non-starter: the accountant's bill alone would exceed the total revenue, especially as writing a book is a one-off project. The JOBS Act is supposed to relax that requirement for the sort of venture I'm describing. But Taibbi doesn't seem to get this at all.)

<comment><USER13> Just because a piece of legislation has a nice feature doesn't mean it can't be horrible for its other properties.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely correct!

But it still seems to me that Taibbi is focussing on one particular aspect of it without any indication that he noticed the other angle.

<comment><USER14> Taibbi focused on _the_ aspect of the JOBS act because the angle you propose is already legal and the advertised angle (kickstarter for IPOs) is (as far as he and others are concerned) just a veneer used to sell it to the rubes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Researching and writing about Goldman pushed Taibbi around the bend on anything having to do with finance.

A few tidbits: Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give "pre-prospectus" presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the "pre- presentation."

Oh my gosh - you mean before I invest my hard earned money I should read the PROSPECTUS. Say it ain't so.

Then he goes on to say: In the same way, get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market. In fact, there are already supporters talking up future lawsuits as an appropriate tool to replace the regulations being wiped out by this bill.

Isn't "post-factum civil litigation" an even better mechanism for enforcement?

Look companies that are "bad actors" are going to cheat the SEC and the public anyway, and companies that aren't "bad actors" had to go through the additional expenses to comply with the SEC regs that have now been relaxed.

I would rather have motivated shareholders (and their lawyers) with an axe to grind policing the markets than bureaucrats. If you look at the job bureaucrats have done to date,the track record is not so great.

Read more: [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why- obam...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-obamas-jobs- act-couldnt-suck-worse-20120409#ixzz1rqj2pYk2)

<comment><USER16> I understand why you'd be skeptical of Taibbi's vehemence; I often am. But I don't think you make a good case here.

Nobody's saying people shouldn't also read the prospectus. But if people can lie in the pitch and then get out of responsibility through an obscure note in the prospectus, more people will lie. It allows classic "the large print giveth and the small print taketh away" scams.

Civil litigation is a terrible method for enforcement. The longer the feedback loop, the more opportunity for things to go wrong. Short-sightedness is a defining characteristic of most scammers. And litigation will only happen when there's enough money at stake and the chances of recovery are high. Small investors are fucked from the start, as is anybody who gets taken by somebody who spends the money in ways where there's little to recover.

Also, your "bad actors" vs "good actors" thing is a total false dichotomy. Actors aren't the problem; it's actions. If you make it easier for "bad actors" to act, you will have more (and more severe) bad actions. Further, through competitive effects, you push everybody in the direction of bad actions.

<comment><USER15> I agree that civil litigation can be a terrible method of enforcement, however it's like the criticism of democracy being a terrible form of government but better than the alternative.

The problem with "ex ante" regulations governing conduct is you force a lot of wasteful work on a lot of people and companies that becomes a drag on the economy, productivity, whatever you want to call it.

Let's make an analogy that's appropriate for this time of year. Some people cheat on their taxes. Some cheaters get audited and caught, some don't. Since we know that some people cheat on their taxes and an audit will uncover it should we force every tax filer in the US to submit receipts and other documentation for every deduction claimed on their return, at the time of filing?

Can you imagine how much time that would take for filers and the IRS? Can you imagine the outrage on the part of filers?

The Taibbi article sites to a Bloomberg opinion piece that baldly states that people can lie in their pitch and get away with it. However, if you read the legislation (or at least credible legal analysis of it): A) the pre-prospectus presentations can only be made to qualified investors and institutions (meaning you are supposed to be a sophisticated investor, not the general public and will read or pay someone to read the prospectus when it is filed) and B) the actual regulations that will enact the law haven't been written yet.

There definitely will be (and need to be) reasonable regulations to enact this law, I don't argue that at all. I just think the whole tone and content of this article is over the top and biased. I enjoyed reading his evisceration of GS, but I do think it has influenced his writing about anything having to do with the securities markets or finance in general.

<comment><USER17> > The problem with "ex ante" regulations governing conduct is you force a lot > of wasteful work on a lot of people and companies that becomes a drag on the > economy, productivity, whatever you want to call it.

You're asserting this based on religious beliefs; you've read and heard this statement a lot in the popular media, and it's part of the Republican catechism. But it's false. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite - <USER3> heavily regulated environment is the BEST for business, the economy, and productivity. The United States is a good place for business precisely because it is heavily regulated. Nobody steals your plant equipment because there are lots of cops and Marines. People pay their end of the contract because there are lots of courts. Banks don't steal your deposits because the bank regulators are strong, well, that one may be inoperative in 2012 but it used to be true.

The closer the United States comes to non-regulated countries like Somalia, the closer its economy will be to Somalia's.

<comment><USER16> Excellent point. But I think it's not _just_ dogma that drives this.

There's also tendency toward convenient over-simplification that's common among we nerds. It's a valuable tool; classical mechanics is a lot easier to learn and reason about if you ignore things like air resistance. One of the most important skills for a software developer is willfully ignoring 99% of the complexity to extract the 1% it's worth teaching the computer about.

But it's also dangerous. The simplifying assumptions of economics are things like perfect information, perfect rationality, unlimited mental processing power, unyielding will, and entirely unbiased cognition. That's useful in theory, but misleading in practice. Misleading twice over, because that's how people would _like_ to see themselves. "I don't need regulation! I'm too smart to ever be fooled!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a feeling that the JOBS act could actually be a very, very good thing if the right company (or, better yet, marketplace of companies) came around to offer a gateway service to these micro-investments.

Personally I would implement - or would purchase an account on - such a site where companies would advertise for investment, and would be required to provide a certain minimum of disclosure. The site would provide avenues for that disclosure (basically, a feed of reports issues by the companies themselves and perhaps also relevant news stories, a'la Google News) as well as investment portfolio tracking.

It would (still) be up to the user to verify the disclosure and make sure they are looking at companies that are disclosing the right quantity, quality, and purview of information - but the site would hopefully make it very clear what is and isn't being disclosed and how that compares to other companies.

Of course another key feature could be investor/analyst reviews, but this would need an extremely well-engineered system to prevent or discourage astroturfing & other social engineering schemes. Personally I doubt anything less than only allowing authenticated professional journalists (affiliated with reputable publications) could be acceptable, at which point you wonder about the real utility of such a thing.

I feel like this would make an excellent Startup, actually, and might do some work in that regard. I think step 1, though, is spending a lot of time reading about the ins and outs of the law. It would be very easy to grab a 'legal third rail' with both hands with this project and expose yourself to a lot of liability. I find that intimidating, but maybe not too much so.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like a free market version of a SEC regulated exchange. Not sure what the free market theory is for why it would be less susceptible to regulatory capture.

<comment><USER20> It wouldn't be susceptible because there could be more than one competing. Different providers would optimize for different types of investors.

<comment><USER19> There would be two types of customers to compete over between the exchanges, startups and investors. Since there is a natural tension between investors and the businesses as far as how much disclosure and oversight there is, it would probably depend on which class of customers was more profitable as to which side the industry as a whole would favor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if all the problems with Groupon's train wreck IPO would have been discovered ahead of time under this new regime.

<comment><USER21> Seems it would be the opposite:

 _The law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market._

<comment><USER17> Correct! If Groupon started today we would still be at least a year and half away from having any chance at all to discover their fraudulent accounting, and their stock would probably be at $1000/share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> He seems to be griping about all the best parts.

Now small businesses and producers can get financing from the crowd? I've been dreaming about this. Yet I really had no idea the jobs act was pushing it.

Whoever needs a developer partner to launch a crowd funder for private shares, hollar at me. I want to focus on local goods and manufacturing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Haha. Honest startups are going to be at a disadvantage to those who make their projections on the back of a napkin.

We're honest as hell but if you invest based on the detailed and honest projections we made in the first five years and not more so on the team, market and other _real_ data, you're an idiot.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just discussed this bill with the head of a mid-size investment bank today. The crowd funding provisions are not really that important. He said that the most impact will be the reduction of disclosure requirements for emerging growth companies enabling them to raise up to $50 million rather than just $5 million.

It will mostly be institutional investors buying into even smaller size IPO shares -- these are savvy investors and the mania of the dot-com bubble has certainly not been forgotten.

The thing is there isn't really a huge market for these deals at the moment -- his bank specializes in deals of this size and I asked him if he thinks more mid-range banks will popup to serve this market and he said that probably not until the deal flow comes in.

<comment><USER25> Can you disclose the bank?

The JOBS act really helps my company -- we're too far along for VC, but not far enough along for a public IPO. The post-VC, private equity market makes the most sense, but as you noted, the amount of money you can raise that way pre-JOBS act is far too low, making companies like mine (Pixar for live-action filmmaking) either at the mercy/generosity of a Steve Jobs-like figure (literally), or simply not funded at all since we exist in the Government- created financial no-mans land. Either is far from ideal.

The JOBS act, at least for our company, changes this and makes a previously non-viable-through-inadvertent-regulation company suddenly viable. That's why I supported it, and continue to do so.

<comment><USER24> I don't want to post on a forum but send me you email and I can connect you.

<comment><USER25> Thanks! My email is email@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Apparently third time's the charm for this story. See also:

<http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3160-lets-ride-this-bull>

</comment><comment><USER26> I disagree with Taibbi on this one. Making it easier for startups to raise money does not equate to fraud on Wall Street. Yes, there are some who will take advantage. But it will also means that the engines of the economy, small businesses and startups will get a massive lift off.

In the end, you have to balance regulation with ease of doing business, raising capital, etc.

<comment><USER27> According to [0] "...new research by the Treasury Department finds that small businesses — defined as those with income between $10,000 and $10 million, or about 99 percent of all businesses — account for just 17 percent of business income, and only 23 percent of them pay any wages at all." It's pretty hard to argue that makes them the "engines of the economy."

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/small- businesses-a...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/small-businesses- arent-key-to-the-economic-recovery.html?_r=2&ref=opinion)

<comment><USER16> Not quite.

When people say things like "the engines of the economy, small businesses and startups", they are referring to job growth and innovation. Large businesses have most of the revenue, but small, new businesses are where tomorrow's champions come from:

 _Each wave of firm startups creates a substantial number of jobs. In the first years following entry, many startups fail [...] but the surviving young businesses grow very fast. In this respect, the startups are a critical component of the experimentation process that contributes to restructuring and growth in the U.S. on an ongoing basis._ \-- <http://www.nber.org/papers/w16300.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any investor that is worth their salt will do their own homework and come up with their own metrics for how they value a company.

The government should get out of the business of deciding what is appropriate for companies to report. As history has shown the government does a terrible job(Volt, Solar, etc.) of investing / guiding investments(mortgages).

</comment><comment><USER29> Could an existing company take advantage of this by doing some new stock offering? They could put parts of their business behind this "wall" and operate unreviewed for five years. That's plenty of time to drain the coffers and set sail for a sunny island.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm no expert - but I did work part-time for a new business.

It was hard as heck to raise capitol. So much so that it was nearly not worth the effort. We spent as much, or more, time on investing than we did working.

At one point I was named as a defendant by one state for the content of an email I sent on behalf of the CEO.

We settled that, the boss got me removed from the thing, paid the fine. Paid the investor back his funds.

The investor took the money, went to his _other_ home across the state line, sent the money back.

It seemed like a lot of work on the part of the state regulatory branch - going after a small company for a negligible amount of money, on behalf of the sole investor from that state who really wanted to invest.

It sure soured me on the idea of taking any company I launch public.

</comment><comment><USER31> What? There isn't fraud in the stock market today?

Free Jon Corzine! Oh, nevermind...

BTW, Univac (I believe) got their start issuing stock in exactly this fashion. You could buy a share for either $1 or $5.

</comment><comment><USER32> What will this mean for RSUs?

</comment><comment><USER33> If its legal is it fraud?

Just sayin..

</comment><comment><USER34> As opposed to the fraud that IS the stock market today? (For the average person the stock market offers no return, the 20th century was good but now it is so efficient that any extra is skimmed off by the smarter hedge funds).

There is an overinvestment in the stock market today, the excess money needs to go somewhere so elsewhere, which for the past few years was the housing bubble. However housing is not a wealth producing exportable industry (and is already overinvested/iverpriced), and so the capital needs a new outlet - private equity (which includes venture capital). The fact that this investment option has been closed of to ordinary people is the real fraud (that has been occurring for 80 years now).

<comment><USER35> Don't forget the scum that is HFT...ooh, I'm sorry, I meant to say "liquidity providers".</comment></comment>


The Scary Smart Are The Scary Rich: Examining Tech's Richest - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/09/24/the-scary-smart-have-become-the-scary-rich-examining-techs-richest-on-the-forbes-400/ <comment><USER2> Here's the zinger quote from the article: "As FORBES' publisher Richard Karlgaard puts it: "[The scary smart] have inherited the world. The surest way to become a billionaire today is to be born with a 150-plus IQ and 800 math SAT skills."

Hmmm... what was it about "correlation" and "causation"?

<comment><USER3> If he had an 800 math SAT, he would know the odds were still pretty damn low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Based on this article 12% of the 400 richest people have been in the tech space and are 'scary' smart. 12% seems like the upper range of a bell curve. This is link bait.</comment>


The Creativity of ADHD - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-creativity-of-adhd/ <comment><USER2> Contra-point: in Buddhist countries where the children do not have ADHD problems (that's a fact because their religion already tell them about meditation and dharma etc) are less creative. Sometimes I think as a curse itself creativity: ideas gives rise to more ideas and never end. This quote from Ernst Gombrich:One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. Great works of art seem to look different every time one stands before them. They seem to be as inexhaustible and unpredictable as real human beings. p. 33. (which I swear I read somewhere in pg essay)

Anecdotally I can tell you ADHD friends are more creative and most of them are bored to death in class. They are charismatic and have many friend and I wouldn't doubt that when I will meet them again in decades to be CEOs or successful ventures.</comment>


Ask HN: Any suggestions for visual resume site? - <AUTHOR>

Landing page: http://cvisual.me/
Hi HN,
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on my online visual resume project. I'm being brief here in order to see how well my current landing page communicates the ideas that I want to convey :)
I'm most interested in three areas:
1. What do you think about the concept of a online visual resume?
2. How well does the current landing page communicate the idea to you?
3. What's one thing you would do to improve the current resume mockup?
Nowadays I'm endlessly hacking away at the backend but I decided it would be best to see how the idea holds up to scrutiny before I get ahead of myself.
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I really appreciate your help! <comment><USER2> clickable: <http://cvisual.me/>

Interesting and I would like to see and understand more: \- what is the meaning of this colorful plot? Especially, what is on the y-axis? \- can you import data from linkedin? you should do, otherwise nobody will interesting in pimping up their resumes having to copy/paste everything once again but into a different format \- I understand that you can describe this idea as "building infographics from your resume", if so you really should have a readable and workable example of such infographics to demonstrate its visual attractiveness.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mgl. The idea of the colorful plot is time on the x axis and intensity on the y axis. This will be dynamically generated based on an input list of experiences/skills and some drag and drop.

Good point about the linkedin import - that's going to be very important. I'll add it to my list.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just updated the concept into more of a business card / resume hybrid.</comment>


Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/timestream/ <comment><USER2> At my day job, I build a lot of machine learning systems that require data to be fed in a time series manner[1].

Often this means building systems to analyze terabytes of logs [semi]-realtime. All I have to say is - thank god! This is going to make my job a lot easier, and likely empower us to remove our current infrastructure setup.

I know at one point we actually considered building our own time series database. Instead, we ended up utilizing a Kafka queue with an SQL based backend after we parsed and paired down the data, because it was the only one quick enough to do the queries.

Should make a lot of the modeling I've worked on a bit easier[1].

[1] [https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/batch-and-streaming- in-t...](https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/batch-and-streaming-in-the-world- of-data-science-and-data-engineering-2cc029cdf554)

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at Clickhouse for timeseries data? It's the one database I've found that can scale and can query in near-realtime.

I've loaded a 100 Billion Rows in into a 5 shard database and can do full queries across the whole dataset in under 10 seconds. It also natively consumes multiple kafka topics.

<comment><USER4> > I've loaded a 100 Billion Rows

Have you done any load tests that would more closely mirror a production environment such as performing queries while clickhouse is handling a heavy insert load?

<comment><USER3> I'm working on developing benchmarking tools for internal testing, but both Yandex and CloudFlare use Clickhouse for realtime querying. I'm still in development phase for my product, but I'll make sure to post information & results when we launch here.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-analytics- for-6m-requests-p...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-analytics- for-6m-requests-per-second-using-clickhouse/)

But I've spent a long time looking at the various solutions out there, and while ClickHouse is not perfect, I think it's the best multi-purpose database out there for large volumes of data. TimescaleDB is another one, but until they get sharding it's dead on arrival.

<comment><USER4> Very cool, I'll check this out!

<comment><USER3> It's a quirky piece of software and has limitations that need to be considered when standing up a production cluster- such as you cannot reshard it currently. If you have a 3 node cluster, it's messy and requires downtime to add another node.

<comment><USER5> Still a bit messy, but the clickhouse-copier utility helps a bit: [https://github.com/yandex/ClickHouse/issues/2579](https://github.com/yandex/ClickHouse/issues/2579)

<comment><USER3> I have open issues about it on GitHub. It does not work correctly at this time. If you dig through the issues, there are statements by the devs saying the tool has been neglected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not cheap for the "DevOps" use case.

Imagine you have 1000 servers submitting data to 100 timeseries each minute. That's 100,000 writes a minute (unless they support batch writes across series) At $0.50 per million writes that's $72 a day or $26k a year.

Now imagine you want to alert on that data. Say you have 100 monitors that each evaluate 1GB of data once a minute. At $10 per TB of data scanned, that's $1,440 a day or $525k a year!

<comment><USER7> Well, that depends on what you consider cheap. Hiring someone to manage a time series system like graphite or prometheus is going to cost you a whole lot more than $26k a year

<comment><USER6> You're ignoring half of my example scenario. $26k writing the data, $525k for querying it just for alerting, plus whatever it costs to store and to query ad-hoc. That's over half a million dollars. Even if you hire someone for $250k, you can self-host your time series system for cheaper than that.

Self-hosting isn't the only option though. For example, that hypothetical 1000 server scenario would cost $180k a year at list pricing on Datadog or SignalFX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually impressed at how incredibly expensive they made this. $0.50 per million 1KB writes, which is _20x_ what aurora charges, since aurora allows 8KB writes. And Aurora is already expensive if you actually read/write to it.

<comment><USER9> I get the feeling this is for important data (banking etc) so I have a feeling this is 200x cheaper than whatever else is available.

<comment><USER10> That's not what is says in the release:

"With Timestream, you can easily store and analyze log data for DevOps, sensor data for IoT applications, and industrial telemetry data for equipment maintenance."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quite excited for this! We have currently been experimenting with using DynamoDB, and managing our own rollups of our incoming data (previously on an RDS, which is not a good choice for this kind of data).

\---

I've seen a lot of people complain about pricing, so I thought I'd share a little why we are excited about this:

We have approximately 280 devices out, monitoring production lines, sending aggregated data every 5 seconds, via MQTT to AWS IoT. The average messages published that we see is around ~2 million a day (equipment is often turned off, when not producing). The packet size is very small, and highly compressable, each below 1KB, but let's just make it 1KB.

We then currently funnel this data into Lambda, which processes it, and puts it into DynamoDB and handles rollups. The costs of that whole thing is approximately $20 a day (IoT, DynamoDB, Lambda and X-Ray), with Lambda+DynamoDB making up $17 of that cost.

Finally, our users look at this data, live, on dashboards, usually looking at the last 8 hours of data for a specific device. Let's throw around that there will be 10,000 queries each day, looking at the data of the day (2GB/day / 280devices = 0.007142857 GB/device/day).

\---

Now, running the same numbers on the AWS Timestream pricing[0] (daily cost):

\- Writes: 2million * $0.5/million = $1

\- Memory store: 2 GB * $0.036 = $0.072

\- SSD store: (2GB * 7days) * $0.01 (GB/day) * 7days = $0.98

\- Magnetic store: (2 GB * 30 days) * $0.03 (GB/month) = $1.8

\- Query: 10,0000 queries * 0.007142857GB/device/day --> 71GB = free until day 14, where it'll cost $10, so $20 a month.

Giving us: $1 + $0.072 + $0.98 + $1.8 + ($20/30) = $4.5/day.

From these (very) quick calculations, this means we could lower our cost from ~$20/day to ~$4.5/day. And that's not even taking into account that it removes our need to create/maintain our own custom solution.

I am probably missing some details, but it does look bright!

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

</comment><comment><USER6> It's got to be a rough day for the team at [https://www.influxdata.com/](https://www.influxdata.com/) . This could become serious competition for their InfluxCloud hosted offering.

<comment><USER12> At what point are open source projects going to change their licensing to prevent the major cloud providers from just stealing their products? I highly doubt AWS built this from scratch. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are going to choke the life out of these projects

Redis and MongoDB at least seem to have woken up

[https://www.geekwire.com/2018/open-source-companies- consider...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/open-source-companies-considering- closed-approach/)

<comment><USER13> > At what point are open source projects going to change their licensing to > prevent the major cloud providers from just stealing their products?

There's a lot to unravel in there.

I prefer 'free software' to 'open source' as it has a clearer meaning, especially in this context. Even so, no one can _steal_ free / open source software (or as you say, product -- though that turn strongly implies a commercial offering).

By definition you can't really stop _anyone_ from using your free software, unless perhaps you start naming companies explicitly, but I can't imagine it'd be an easy process, or have a happy outcome, if you started targeting 'major cloud providers' for special conditions.

Note that I am _not_ an apologist for AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc - but it feels like the fundamental problem here is not massive corporations charging other people to access free software.

<comment><USER14> Free software and open source aren't always the same thing though. Free Software is software that through the license enforces a philosophy.

Open source is software that through the license enforces the source code to remain open.

I'm not a fan of RMS or his attitudes on most things, but am a strong OSS fan as it is the best way to develop and maintain software.

<comment><USER13> > Free software and open source aren't always the same thing though.

Entirely agree, hence I drew the distinction. I eschew 'open source' as it's highly ambiguous, and mostly misses the point.

> Free Software is software that through the license enforces a philosophy.

I would disagree. Free software ensures the user has certain freedoms.

> Open source is software that through the license enforces the source code to > remain open.

This is a very circular definition -- open source is open.

> I'm not a fan of RMS or his attitudes on most things, but am a strong OSS > fan as it is the best way to develop and maintain software.

As it happens, rms is no fan of OSS.

<comment><USER14> RMS has said publically that proprietary software should be illegal, and that free software guarantees user freedoms. This is a philosophy, and one that opines every user wants to become a developer. For things like emacs, and much of GNU, this is true, for most of the rest of the world, this is not.

I eschew free software because I'm not about forcing my views on others (which is literally the mission of GNU). I'm about developing software to be the best it can be, and maybe meeting some friends along the way. Open source, being the best software development model overall, allows me to meet that goal. You could almost say some of RMS's more extreme quirks border on authoritarian (see the example with the abortion joke in the libc manual he FORBADE removal of and demanded be re-added when a dev simply overruled him). He's not acting in a manner that encourages "freedom", but as a simple and obvious dictator of all things GNU or claiming to be GNU. He's frequently tried to shape the path of GNOME (which I am a former foundation member and was on the sysadmin team) in areas he literally has no business weighing in on. Then there are some more gross personality problems, like his sexism, or tendency to actually eat his toenail gunk[1], or to ever refuse to be wrong on anything, even when an entire community disagrees with him.

Dr Stallman has done a great deal of good for the world with Free Software, however like the VAX and PDP-11, his time has passed. Open source won just like Linux won over GNU/Hurd. It is ok that he won, by losing.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ)

<comment><USER13> rms's toenails aside, I'd suggest that _every_ licence is about enforcing a set of views on others. There are plenty of licences to choose from, so it's fairly easy to find one compatible with your own views.

In the context of GP's (beginningguava) comment about 'open source projects' needing to change their licensing to prevent corporations making money by SaaSing various tools, my point was twofold - first, by definition you can't have free software with restrictions like that, and second you'd be merely fighting the symptoms (with little chance of success).

Aside - I'm curious what you mean by the 'open source software development model', as I don't think that's actually a thing.

<comment><USER14> Fair enough, the open source software development model is no different in reality from the free software development model generally speaking.

It goes back to ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar and is what he deems "the bazaar model" or "bazaar style" before him, Larry Augustin, and Bruce Perens (if memory serves) went on to coin the phrase "open source". Even if you don't necessarily agree with ESR (I see him in a similar vein as RMS fwiw), his thoughts on software development models have generally speaking, been proven true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice to see, this has felt like a gap in cloud offerings for a while... and the open source options have difficulties.

From the little that was said, going to guess this uses something like Beringei ([https://code.fb.com/core-data/beringei-a-high-performance- ti...](https://code.fb.com/core-data/beringei-a-high-performance-time-series- storage-engine/)) under the hood

</comment><comment><USER16> The financial read cost of this database makes it practically unusable for customer facing dashboards, disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER17> A place to put the timestamped data they download from yesterday's Amazon Ground Station.

</comment><comment><USER18> Been searching for years to a good alternative to postgres for storing gobs of weather timeseries data. So far we have been running postgres system for many years in production and have hired multiple contractors to implement a 'real timeseries solution'. All of which have been utter shit and complete failures. The AWS services are expensive as all hell. With a little bit of imagination we created a unique schema for timeseries data that doesnt require terabytes of space, and processes billions of data points a day, and has blazing fast queries into said data.

<comment><USER19> I moved a decade's worth of weather time series data from well indexed Sqlite to InfluxDB and was nothing but pleased. It ended up taking an order of magnitude less storage and so much faster to query that I didn't even bother to benchmark it. You can probably write a simple query to your Postgres database to cough out the text file to load InfluxDB to see how it works for you. Then it comes down to how easy it is to replace your query and insert functions… So it's all easy except for the hard part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So what will this compare wrt boundary, signalfx, stackdriver, etc types of previous services...

Ill have to go look into this, because if aws historic pricing for any large volume stream, quickly becomes untennable.

Its very easy to have gobs and gobs of time series points... aws might make using this way too expensive for anything at relative scale for a small startup?

<comment><USER21> It appears that ingestion alone is more expensive than the commercial metric services. Might not matter for small scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how this compares to KDB

<comment><USER14> The core of Amazon's timeseries db likely doesn't fit into a CPU's L1 cache. It does with KDB :)

<comment><USER23> >The core of Amazon's timeseries db likely doesn't fit into a CPU's L1 cache. It does with KDB :)

Does it?

[https://kx.com/discover/in-memory-computing/](https://kx.com/discover/in- memory-computing/) seems to indicate that it takes up ~600 Kb (I'm not sure if this is bits or bytes, but even if it's bits, that turns into 75KB)

L1 cache is per core. Skylake Xeons have a 64KB cache per core, 32KB for data and 32KB for instructions. Even with an even split there, you're not fitting 75KB (or 600KB) into the L1 cache.

Bits would be a weird measurement to use when talking about memory utilization, so I'm pretty sure that it's 600 kilobytes. You're not anywhere close to fitting that into the L1 cache. L2 cache, sure. But you get the relatively spacious 1 megabyte for L2.

I'm also not sure that the "core" fitting into the CPU cache is particularly meaningful for performance anyway. it doesn't say anything about how much outside of the core gets used, how big the working set size is for your workload, how much meaningful work is done on that working set of data, etc. If you're frequently using parts of the software that don't fit in the cache, or getting evicted from it for other code, or your working set of data doesn't fit in the cache and you're constantly going to main memory for the data you're working on, the "core" fitting in L1 cache (or L2 cache, which looks more realistic) is going to be basically meaningless.

<comment><USER14> Gah, I meant L2 cache, but was being entirely too smug. I remember a presentation a KX rep gave at our office a few jobs ago where this was one of their bullet points. I found it amusing, and a bit odd.

<comment><USER23> Gotcha! Definitely an interesting marketing point. I probably would have had the same reaction :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems positioned to compete with Azure Data Explorer (MSFT's log/time series optimized service). I know Azure runs a lot of services on top of Data Explorer (previously called Kusto) I wonder if this is a true internal battle tested product or a me-too offering.

<comment><USER25> I might be mistaken but wouldn't Data Explorer be more similar to AWS CloudWatch which has been around for a long time.

<comment><USER24> Azure Data Explorer/ Kusto is more of a database that is optimized for the log use case than a service. There is a front end tool and a lot of the use-cases are around log management, but it is database you can do general SQL or KQL things with. Time series is one of the core use-cases for it also but it has less marketing around it.

<comment><USER21> Sounds more like AWS CloudWatch Log Insights launched yesterday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems like this could be a great remote storage backend for Prometheus.

<comment><USER27> Oh yeah! Would that need a custom storage peovider in Prometheus?

<comment><USER26> Yes [0]. I haven't had time to fully look into the details. But from looking at the existing integration -- it would be fantastically convenient to have something cloud native [1].

[0] [https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage/#remote...](https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/storage/#remote- storage-integrations)

[1] [https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote- en...](https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote-endpoints- and-storage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Honest question: when dealing with time-series data, do you actually need every data point? Is that level of granularity really necessary?

IMO, it makes way more sense to decide the aggregations you want ahead of time (e.g. "SELECT customer, sum(value) FROM purchases GROUP BY customer"). That way, you deal with substantially less data and everything becomes a whole lot simpler.

<comment><USER29> Really depends on the use case. Working in healthcare, vital signs can be modeled as time series points, but are lower frequency than, say, metrics from servers. However we want to store every point so a spike is not missed. One could argue an unsustained spike is noise, but in the healthcare domain there may be a correlation with some external event (the purpose is surprised and their heart rate spikes).

<comment><USER30> The clever thing to do in this scenario would be to keep every spike but delete all the data between similar data points after storing. So you get low granularity for identical/nearly-the-same data points and high granularity when something interesting happens. I don't have any experience with time- series data so maybe this is commonplace.

<comment><USER31> That would be impossible to run any new analyses on.

What some would do is record in blocks where every point after the earliest is stored as a delta. Then each block is more compressible as it contains a lot of 0s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We had applications where we were tracking guests in a venue through various means. We tried a number of queuing systems to manage the flood of events, but they'd all fall over. I'll love to run my old "venue simulator" through this and see if it can stand up to actual guest load as they walk around, ride, purchase things.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm wondering if this shares any technology with the CloudWatch metrics backend. They've been making improvements there all year, and most of them generally align with what's announced here.

CloudWatch metrics are also very expensive for what you get, so that's another similarity to Timestream ;)

</comment><comment><USER34> I couldn't tell from the page is this SQL based similar to timescale or a more similar to influxdb?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is looking like a managed druid... that would be very nice to have.

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know if this is what CloudWatch Insights uses? If so, it doesn't even come close to competing with Elasticsearch performance (with a tiny cluster), it seemed quite slow.

</comment><comment><USER37> There have been a lot of amazon links this week

<comment><USER38> AWS Reinvent is happening. Kind of like how's there's a lot of Google links during IO or a lot of Apple links during WWDC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> where is the docs?

</comment><comment><USER40> There are at least 7 Amazon-related stories on the HN front page right now, what's going on?

<comment><USER41> [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20big%20tech%20conference)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A quick look at the Hacker News frontpage shows a bit of a problem,

        1.  Amazon Timestream (amazon.com)
        3.  Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (amazon.com)
        8.  Amazon FSx for Lustre (amazon.com)
        13. AWS DynamoDB On-Demand (amazon.com)
        14. Amazon's homegrown Graviton processor was very nearly an AMD Arm CPU (theregister.co.uk)
        21. Building an Alexa-Powered Electric Blanket (shkspr.mobi)
        30. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (amazon.com)

<comment><USER41> [https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20big%20tech%20conference)

<comment><USER42> Ah, sorry. I should've known you'd already be on it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> jesus christ six amazon articles in a day? AWS is undeniably the body of christ for HN but am i missing something? FSX, blockchain, timestream, Graviton, ground station, and cloudwatch... all of these articles are advertisements for mundane shit.

<comment><USER44> It's AWS re:Invent day/week. I've never been, but I get the impression that it's like Apple's keynote, or Google I/O, in which big product announcements are made. On those days, you'll see multiple submissions about the respective conferences too.

<comment><USER45> This is _exactly_ what re:Invent is. Most teams dream of launching a new AWS product at re:Invent (and not missing their date and launching at a later time)

<comment><USER44> It'd be an interesting blog post topic to look at how AWS:Invent (or I/O, or F8, etc) product threads on HN compare to actual product impact. I remember Rekognition getting decent discussion 2 years ago [0], but not along the angles or magnitude of how Rekognition is usually discussed in recent months. OTOH, other things I've been interested in as a data geek, I've barely heard of since reading about them on HN -- e.g. Athena [1]

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072956)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072245)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I count 7 separate Amazon posts on the front of HN. Is this some conspiracy? #NotAmused #ShouldBeBundled

<comment><USER47> The conspiracy is called re:Invent</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs' last gift - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237313

<comment><USER2> While yoga is beneficial, the same can be said about any type of exercise. I think this article just highlights this western culture's obsession with eastern.

td;dl Exercise is good for your body and mind. Do it often.</comment>


Google Apps a Productivity Killer?  (from a Microsoft guy :) ) - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/02/are_google_apps.html <comment><AUTHOR> I like this guy's blog and he's usually got some good stuff, but this one smells a bit funny. I've actually found since I got my Mac that you really don't need the Microsoft software as much s you'd think. I love Office 2007, but honestly at this point I greatly prefer web mail, and the online and open office suites are almost there.</comment>


Assange Hearing Day 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-10/ <comment><USER2> Remarkable that the bbc website shows 1 article about the current hearings [0].

Meanwhile there are about 20 on Johnny Depp's recent libel case [1].

I'd love to see bbc reports on each day of Assange's hearings, in the sort of detail they did for Depp's case. But for some reason they are not reporting it. I wonder why?

[0] [https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c82wm9yvv05t/julian- assange](https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c82wm9yvv05t/julian-assange)

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c6jx58xrrnmt/johnny- depp](https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c6jx58xrrnmt/johnny-depp)

<comment><USER3> They are not reporting on anything embarrassing for the west: The Assange Hearings, The attacks on Yemen, Gaza

<comment><USER4> This is a worrying trend recently. And lets not forget the conduct from Laura Kuenssberg over the last few years.

<comment><USER5> Can you explain for those not familiar with this? Specifically the comment about Kuenssberg.

<comment><USER4> The criticism section on her Wikipedia page probably gives a fair appraisal of the situation. Fairer than I can give anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case."

...

The US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters (Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers) could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the "great liberal media" of the USA are not in court to hear it and do not report it .. !

<comment><USER6> They (the government) have _always_ said this and the courts have backed them up on it. Always. Ellsberg should have gone to jail and were it not for incompetent prosecutors and Liddy, Hunt, and the rest of the plumbers along with some FBI wiretapping Ellsberg would have been in prison until at least the Ford administration and possibly until Carter took office.

<comment><USER7> Why was no one prosecuted for publishing or receiving the Snowden leaks then? I remember the Guardian and the NYT both receiving leaked information from Snowden. Can you give a single example where the courts backed them up? Even the prosecution in this Assange case seems to be agreeing that there has never been a successful prosecution.

<comment><USER6> Receiving and publishing are not specifically crimes and that is why the New York Times and Washington Post won in the Pentagon Papers case. Gathering the info or soliciting it are crimes. The latter is what Assange is being charged with the in US and the former is what Snowden would be charged with if he ever left Russia. The Espionage Act charges made against Assange are fairly weak and I expect them to eventually get dropped or any conviction to be overturned on appeal, but the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge is both an overt act and one that is not protected by any claim of being a 'journalist'.

<comment><USER7> That is what most people understand the law to be. What is surprising in this case is that the US prosecutor is arguing that it is an incorrect understanding and that merely publishing or receiving classified information is a prosecutable crime under the espionage act.

> James Lewis QC: Do you accept that the Pentagon Papers judgement is the most > relevant one?

Eric Lewis: Yes, but there are others.

James Lewis QC: A close reading of the Pentagon Papers judgement shows that the New York Times might have been successfully prosecuted. Three of the Supreme Court judges specifically stated that an Espionage Act prosecution could be pursued for publication.

Eric Lewis: They recognised the possibility of a prosecution. They did not say that it would succeed.

James Lewis QC: So your analysis that there cannot be a prosecution of a publisher on First Amendment grounds is incorrect.

...

James Lewis QC: The United States Supreme Court has never held that a journalist cannot be prosecuted for publishing national defence information.

Eric Lewis: The Supreme Court has never been faced with that exact question. Because a case has never been brought. But there are closely related cases which indicate the answer.

The case they are mentioning is this one (or more specifically the dropped related case against Rosen) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Franklin)

Read the legal principles by which the judge was planning on allowing it to proceed with.

<comment><USER6> The prosecutor can make whatever claims he wants in an extradition hearing, but until the case actually sees the inside of a US courtroom I do not think anyone really knows how these are going to hold up. In this case you are running into a situation where the US prosecutor may be (significantly) over- playing his hand, but I am not sure how much latitude this court has to call bullshit on the claims being made by the US prosecutor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The jittery audio on the gallery link can hardly be considered public access to the proceeding. Whatever makes it on to the court transcript is not witnessed by anyone in the public, and while that's not a necessary condition for the transcript, in a case like this where the entire intelligence establishment has a huge interest in the outcome, since this is litigating the legitimacy of state secrets by proxy, it risks the credibility of the court.

How much exculpatory evidence is marked <unintelligible>?

</comment><comment><USER9> "Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act."

Wow

<comment><USER10> The Supreme Court's ruling in the case said exactly this and the opinions of some justices implied the government should pursue such charges post publication.

<comment><USER6> The shock and pearl clutching by people who obviously have never read the relevant opinions and have nothing but second or third-hand understanding of the major points of the majority and concurring opinions. Ellsberg _should have gone to jail_ for what he did, he knew it, he was prepared for that outcome, and he would have spent years in prison if not for a completely bungled and borderline incompetent prosecution aided by criminal breakins by Liddy, Hunt, and the Whitehouse plumbers.

<comment><USER11> While the law hasn't changed, the prosecution policy has. USG had not charged the NYT, WP etc. with criminal publication of the Pentagon Papers, and of the many leaked classified data published before and since. A consistent change in the policy (prosecuting the NYT and its individual journalists and editors, and not just Assange) would have a huge impact on politics. An inconsistent change, successfully prosecuting but only charging the journalists that the current government finds inconvenient, would have a different but also huge impact.

<comment><USER6> This argument does not address the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge. Please provide examples of the NYT, WP et al sending reporters out to do this and not being charged.

<comment><USER11> That's a separate matter, which shouldn't affect what I wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this turn of strategy could convince at least a part of the mainstream media to push the story.

the "Assange is not a journalist" take was something they liked. The "any journalist can be punished anyway" take should raise some alarms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, will be interesting to see if it changes anything, but I doubt it will. As Murray suggests, it's probably becuase prosecution has seen so little media interest in the court case that they've now changed tack:

> The purpose of the earlier approach was plainly to reduce media support for > Assange by differentiating him from other journalists. It had become obvious > such an approach ran a real risk of failure, if it could be proved that > Assange is a journalist, which line was going well for the defence. So now > we have "any journalist can be prosecuted for publishing classified > information" as the US government line. I strongly suspect that they have > decided they do not have to mitigate against media reaction, as the media is > paying no attention to this hearing anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suspect we would be hearing almost nothing about this case except for the "Assange warned by judge over outburst" type soundbytes if it weren't for Craig Murray.

Well done. IMHO he deserves support.</comment>


2014 Hetzner and DigitalOcean are still sending root passwords by email - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Hi,

We recommend that customers instead use our built in SSH key manager which allows you to add public SSH keys to your account which can then be added to your droplets during creation.

When you using SSH keys no root password is emailed and instead the SSH key is used for access. Some customers who are just starting out want to test things quickly so we provide an alternative where the password is emailed.

We've also started testing new base images which will auto-expire the root password on the first login, so after you login you will be asked to update the root password as well.

However, we still recommend that customers instead opt to use SSH keys for access.

We also provide how-tos and tutorials in our community section to help new users who are not familiar with how to use SSH keys on how to set them up and use them for authentication into their virtual servers.

Thanks, Moisey Cofounder DigitalOcean

</comment><comment><USER3> Umm, I'm confused. What's a better alternative? Logging in somewhere and viewing the password isn't really much better. And I'm sure a lot of places do this. I get password, log in, change password.

<comment><USER4> a. Ask for a root password before spinning up the machine.

b. Ask for a public key before spinning up the machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was setting up PCI guidelines for our servers and from my experience I can tell that there's nothing inherently sending root passwords by email given that the user is forced to change it on the first login.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, unfortunately they can't enforce that so its up to the user to change the root password as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't speak about Hetzner, but I gave DigitalOcean my public key before spinning up a vm with them the other day, and they didn't send me a password.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they give you 2 options; get a root password by email or use a provided public key. I understand thats not good for sales but they should drop the first option.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This seems pretty weird considering the amount of customers they have, what competitors do in this regard (eg. Amazon with EC2 provisioned machines)</comment>


Deploying Go servers with Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/docker

<comment><USER2> They demonstrated an easy way to deploy a Go application utilizing Docker ( [https://docker.com/](https://docker.com/) ) and Google App Engine. The Docker Engine container comprises just the application and its dependencies. It runs as an isolated process in userspace on the host operating system, sharing the kernel with other containers. Thus, it enjoys the resource isolation and allocation benefits of VMs but is much more portable and efficient.

If you take a look at the example's source at: [https://github.com/golang/example/blob/master/outyet/main.go](https://github.com/golang/example/blob/master/outyet/main.go)

You will notice, that they import "net/http"

Which implements an http server - that's all, see here for more details: [https://godoc.org/net/http](https://godoc.org/net/http) It is not necessary, nevertheless possible, to use something like nginx or apache in front of a Go web application.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems strange to me. What is the point of installing Go on (presumably) your production servers? Seems like you could just an easily cross-compile a release binary and put THAT in the Docker image.

<comment><USER4> Many people do just that. Here is a post I wrote outlining the details, including how to handle cases where you want to disable CGO, but still need access to an SSL cert bundle. [https://medium.com/@kelseyhightower/optimizing- docker-images...](https://medium.com/@kelseyhightower/optimizing-docker- images-for-static-binaries-b5696e26eb07)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this to be somewhat wacky. Go applications are portable by design. There's no dependencies in the first place. As long as your web servers don't clash on ports or directories, you can deploy as many as you want, built with a dozen different versions of go.

<comment><USER6> I was considering asking about the point of using Docker with Go binaries on Twitter last night, my thinking similar to yours. Hours later an article on HN shows how to do it.

The only thing I could come up with is maybe you have additional dependencies outside your binary required to make the environment run?

I've been looking for a good reason to use Docker, but I'm not seeing the benefit given my Go based environments. If I need fine grain container-like control FreeBSD Jails have been working just fine for me.

<comment><USER5> It's certainly valid that if your Go binary needs a specific version of Mongo out something that it could be useful to wrap that up in a container.... But just installing go in a container so you can build your Go code from scratch when you deploy is silly. Just like no one builds Mongo from scratch when they deploy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What does this mean - is a "Go server" an application without a base operating system image?

If not, why is this significant or different?

<comment><USER8> It's a debian image.

It really isn't "significant" \-- it's just stringing together docker containers and the Google Cloud as a demonstration of how quickly someone can deploy a Go service. It's like the old Rails scaffold.

Like Rails scaffold, this isn't enough on its own. There's many concerns for putting something on the open web and making it ready for production use. But what is really slick about this is that it shows how low the barrier of entry is to containerizing and deploying apps very, very quickly.

Google Cloud is just one example. dotCloud, tutum, orchardup, and others are out there. I'm sure a self-hosted, possibility open source, solution will be on the way a la openstack.

The benefit of containers over clouds are widely documented--but as a developer it means FAST phoenix servers that mean I can iterate on deployment orchestration, configuration management, etc.</comment></comment>


KubeCon postponed - Novel Coronavirus Update - <AUTHOR> https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/attend/novel-coronavirus-update/ <comment><USER2> Just clarifying that this is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon _Amsterdam_, which was scheduled for March 30 - April 2, and that it is being postponed to sometime in July or August (TBD).

Also noted in the post is that KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit Shanghai is cancelled entirely.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Conversation on Twitter - [https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/123523543451668070...](https://twitter.com/CloudNativeFdn/status/1235235434516680704)</comment>


As of today Google is blocking the use of YouTube on Amazon devices - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-blocks-youtube-fire-tv-echo-show-1202631248/ <comment><USER2> The date on the article is 12/5\. I believe apple and google have come to an agreement about this some days ago and "all is good" for the moment.

<comment> james-skemp *Amazon.

And that's what I last saw as well; Amazon would start selling Google devices.

Edit: Just tried it on my Fire TV Stick and I'm told to try Silk or Firefox.

<comment><USER3> Weird thing: after you click either of them, it's the same YouTube app, with a little lag.

<comment> james-skemp Yeah, noticed that when I tried Firefox. Super easy to login via my phone to authorize it, so not sure what the point is on Google playing hardball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazon banned all stores on their market place from selling the Google products. That is like Walmart owning a strip mall and saying all the stores can not sell certain products. That if someone interested you instead have to sell them this competing product. Even though all their other stores not in the strip mall do.

Amazon purchased Twitch and removed the app from the Roku. Amazon behavior is getting worse and hope Google can use their muscle and force Amazon to behave. Google has all the cards and Amazon played the only one they had.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. I'm no business strategist but I feel like this is the wrong move on Googles part. It would have been a fine tactic against pretty much any other company. But Amazon is probably the one company with the infrastructure (and will to expand/diversify) to create its own video hosting service and be competitive.

<comment><USER6> So, Amazon not selling google devices is okay, But retaliation from Google is not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If amazon is going to be anti-consumer and anti-competitive (by refusing to sell certain products), then this is a very reasonable response from Google.

</comment><comment><USER8> I kept seeing 'promos' for Firefox on the Firestick, and realized why.

</comment><comment><USER9> Customer Obsession meets reality.</comment>


CloudAMQP experiences ops nightmare today - <AUTHOR> http://status.cloudamqp.com/incidents/vj62pnp62tj9

<comment><USER2> So I just read this, the CEO added the below

        insts = [
          @ec2.instances.with_tag('Name', "CloudAMQP-#@name0*").to_a,
          @ec2.instances.with_tag('Name', "CloudAMQP-#@name-*").to_a,
          @ec2.instances.with_tag('Service', 'CloudAMQP').with_tag('Name', "#@name-*").to_a,
        ].flatten

unless they have a variable named "@name0" that first line would've evaluated to "CloudAMQP-*", which would then have the fun happen.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> CloudAMQP's CEO/CTO from the support chat room:

      Yes, it seems to have been a bug in our instance deletion code,
      that deleted all instances in that region, instead of one.
      This of course is a disaster</comment>


Show HN: Twitter Bootstrap Grid Generator (draw rects over ANY site) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bootstrap-grid-generator/hnhmbddaldgbmknmobkokdjmgchclohp?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog

<comment><AUTHOR> The concept is you can make rectangles over any website to generate a Bootstrap 12 col grid. No more class="row" or class="md-col-*" by hand [1][2]

You can even nest rectangles inside each other to create nested rows and cols.

The source code is here: [https://github.com/minutephp/bootstrapgridgenerator/](https://github.com/minutephp/bootstrapgridgenerator/)

Sorry it asks permissions to run on all websites but it runs as event pages not background pages (so nothing happens until you click the "draw" button).

I wish there was a less intrusive to get the same working with less permissions but I couldn't find it yet.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome as always.

Hope the designers will find it useful.. Happy hacking! :)

[1] [http://getbootstrap.com/css/#grid](http://getbootstrap.com/css/#grid)

[2] Demo video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFEeVQsB9j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFEeVQsB9j8)</comment>


Woolly mammoth cloning attempt revives ethical debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/woolly-mammoth-cloning-attempt-revives-ethical-debate-1.2867654 <comment><USER2> Good grief, I think some people are just addicted to debating or creating "moral dilemma."

On one side, you have scientists that want to bring back the wolly mammoth. They have some pretty convincing arguments in terms of bringing back a extinct species that may have a beneficial niche to fill and pioneering techniques to revive extinct species to boot.

On the other side, you have a guy who thinks the fact that the scientists requiring the use of a elephant surrogate mother is animal abuse, and the whole thing should be called off, at least until we can create an artificial womb(which isn't even on any scientific radar that I have been privy to). Elephants in captivity are already bred for a variety of reasons, and breeding is a pretty nature animal endeavour.

I say, bring them back. Or at least try to.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Of course we should. Tundra steppes are the way to go.

You can't seriously damage frozen swampy tundra forests because noone wants them already. Our ecosystem is already badly damaged wrt large polar animals.

We should also have every threatened animal cell structure so we may revive them when we figure out ecology.

I really hope that we do have something like that. Any 12 yo will think out of it.

<comment><USER3> Raindeers will love it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to try a mammoth burger.

<comment><USER5> The Explorers Club served mammoth meat during their annual dinner in 1951 using a 250,000 year old carcass: [http://mentalfloss.com/article/57100/time-250000-year-old- ma...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/57100/time-250000-year-old-mammoth-was- served-dinner)</comment></comment>


Miami banker gives $60 million of his own to employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/904842.html <comment><USER2> This reminds me of what the owners of Kingston Technology did when they sold their company back in the 90s. They allocated a large sum to be distributed to the employees, and also were helping employees with startups. I think they eventually bought the company back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Onion eyes inducing.</comment>


SmartBird - science-fiction came true - <AUTHOR> http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369.htm <comment><USER2> Is there really a working model? The 'film' looks like CG superimposed on a live background.</comment>


Which security measures make sense for a static web site? - <AUTHOR> http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/142496/which-security-measures-make-sense-for-a-static-web-site <comment><USER2> HTTPS always makes sense from both a performance and privacy standpoint. HTTPS/2 is significantly faster than http/1.1 and cant easily be eavesdropped on.</comment>