Coding Horror: Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001198.html <comment><USER2> "Also, having programmers who believe that their employers actually give a damn about them is probably a good business strategy for companies that actually want to be around five or ten years from now."

This is probably the most overlooked reason to get at least semi-good hardware. Part of the reason I quit my last job was because of management's stubborn refusal to get us tools that would make us be more productive.

<comment><USER3> I applied to a job in the spring of 2006 and when they were showing me around the development area I noticed that everyone had single smallish CRTs and what seemed like older computers. I asked about it and they told me that most people had P3-500's! Unsurprisingly their salary offer was low also and I did not take the job.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, at that point you can pretty much conclude that the company is doing something incredibly wrong, and it's only a matter of time before it bites them.

If you have crappy pay and perks, then you won't attract good talent, and whatever good talent you had will eventually leave. Without good talent, it is highly unlikely you'll have a good app. If your app sucks, you will slowly bleed off customers, and revenue.

Of course, that's not a scientific fact. For exceptions start with: Contracts, Government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a ridiculous myth that I wish we could just put to rest once and for all. If your overpaid programmers are writing O(n^2) algorithms then that cheap hardware is going to get expensive real quick. Even if hardware was _free_ you still need to put it somewhere, power it, cool it and so on. There's no excuse for sloppy coding.

<comment><USER5> _If your overpaid programmers are writing O(n^2) algorithms then that cheap hardware is going to get expensive real quick._

Well, that depends on the value of _n_ , right? Not every piece of software is Google or Twitter: They don't _all_ have a userbase that grows virally to encompass every breathing human in existence, plus animals and robots. Especially if you charge the users money.

<comment><USER6> _Not every piece of software is Google or Twitter:_

Worse, almost _all_ software isn't like a Google or Twitter. In almost all cases hardware is vastly cheaper than programmers. The Googles and Twitters of the world are extreme outliers and are no where near the median.

<comment><USER7> I don't believe that's true. Google sure, but twitter is just another message routing system, like any one of the IM networks.

The average irc server probably handles more than twitter - certainly email software does.

There's a ton of software that needs to scale, and be able to handle a large volume of data.

<comment><USER6> _There's a ton of software that needs to scale_

Yes, but there's vastly more that doesn't, you need to stop thinking that most software runs on the Internet and has tons of users, it doesn't. The vast majority of software is written for businesses and runs either on an intranet or is available on the internet to the users of that business.

For every public app you know about that needs to scale there are a hundred you don't know about that don't need to scale. Most programmers work on systems that will never need to scale, EVER. It is a tiny tiny minority of programmers that actually work on systems that become publicly popular on the Internet and actually face scaling issues.

Secondly, we're talking about programmers here, not the software, most email systems use _existing_ mail software written by that tiny tiny minority of programmers who write such systems. The vast majority of programmers will _NEVER_ write a mail system, a chat system, or anything that handles large volumes of data or users. Most of them of doing one thing, biz apps for in house projects at big and small companies exposing relational data to in house users.

How many IM networks are there? Now how many programmers are there? I'll say it again, most software does not need to scale. Because a lot of software does need to scale does not make that statement in any way false because a shit load more doesn't need to scale.

<comment><USER4> _The vast majority of software is written for businesses and runs either on an intranet or is available on the internet to the users of that business._

That doesn't mean a thing in terms of scalability. One user can max out a fast machine with OLAP cubes or other DSS. Or any sort of simulation or modeling. Think in terms of datasets, not in terms of users (all many users are is a large dataset with a requirement for a quick turnaround of each computation).

<comment><USER6> If an app only has one user, it doesn't need to scale, it needs to perform. Scalability is all about users and only loosely related to performance. Datasets are irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> I don't know what dictionary you're using, but here are a few definitions from mine:

scalable - How well a hardware or software system can adapt to increased demands.

scalable - the ability of a product or network to accommodate growth

The ability to scale hardware and software to support larger or smaller volumes of data and more or less users.

the ability of a computer system to shrink or grow as requirements change

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I started as a programmer in the late 70s the relationship between hardware costs and programmer costs were just about the reverse to those described by Jeff. It was always cheaper to optimise the code than it was to invest in new hardware. I must admit that it is hard to shrug off the frugal approach to the hardware that I adopted at the start of my developer career - I think it still pays off to err on the side of low hardware overhead whenever the option arises.

<comment><USER10> Hrm. I guess the guy cited in my online journal was really thinking ahead:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of- progr...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/12/04/the-economics-of-programming- languages-in-the-1950s)

It's an extract from a paper from the 1950'ies by Backus (yeah, that Backus) saying pretty much exactly what Atwood says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This argument is applicable only to code that runs on only a small number of machines. Using roughly his numbers, you can afford to pay somebody US$100 000 to work for a whole year to make your code 10% faster if that code uses 100% of a million dollars' worth of hardware, which is only 200 high-end US$5000 servers or gaming machines, or 2000 low-end servers.

But that's assuming that the benefit of the speed improvement is merely improved throughput resulting in data-center savings. If the issue is that your non-AJAX UI is frustratingly and inconsistently slow and so your ex- customers have switched to your competitors' AJAX app because it has consistent 200ms response times when they click on buttons, it may not matter if their app actually uses more CPU cycles than yours (because half of it is written in JavaScript and your ex-customers aren't running Chrome yet.) If your game gets 20 frames per second and your competitor's game gets 35 frames per second with nicer-looking graphics, you're going to lose sales, even if the customers run the game for only 10 hours each.

And that's why gamer games and desktop apps are _still_ written largely in C, C++, or Java with some Lua, and Google's large-scale apps are mostly written in C++ and Java, while small-scale server-based applications and the stuff developed by the in-house IT guys are written in all kinds of higher- productivity, lower-performance languages.

<comment><USER12> He is really writing this from the perspective of web applications. If you app is humming along nicely on a single EC2 instance, it isn't even worth an HOUR of your time to DOUBLE the capacity of your app.

The last big app I was in charge of ran 1M pageviews a day on $500/month. At my standard rate, it isn't even worth a day of my time to double the capacity of my app on the same hardware.

He certainly isn't saying don't optimize. He's simply saying that scaling web apps STARTS with throwing hardware at the problem. Where and when you cut over to developer optimization depends on your -actual- costs, size, and growth.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I agree, although it might be worth an hour of your time to improve the app's responsiveness if it makes the customers happier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What this article lacks is an eye toward things that _must_ be optimized when you get to a certain level.

For example, when you replicate databases, the replication overhead grows quadratically (n^2) to the number of servers. So, eventually you can't just throw hardware at it since eventually it's all overhead replicating between the servers and you can do any selects/updates/deletes. Most people will never get to this level and the article is probably written for people that won't have to deal with this.

So, at a certain level, you need to optimize your code to shard data, avoid joins, etc. because you simply can't throw hardware at it.

Most people will never get to that level so throwing hardware at the problem is often the answer, but if you have a lot of quadratic algorithms in your code, you're going to hit scaling problems that will make throwing money at it expensive to the point where you'll loose money.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do software programmers really worry too much about optimization? If that's the case, why are so many programs slow as a crippled sloth? Why does it take 10 seconds to open a freaking email client, when 1980s technology can do this in less time than is humanly noticeable?

<comment><USER4> Well, no, they don't bother, because people keep telling them that hardware is cheap and they're too expensive to work on anything that isn't new features.

</comment></comment><comment> old-gregg This argument works only for enterprise/server development, where hardware is under your control.

When developing for the consumer market, hardware is not "expensive", hardware is simply not available: users control their hardware, and even the argument of "ever increasing gigabytes and gigahertz" doesn't work anymore, as more and more prefer to trade speed for increased portability or (surprise!) smaller price.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's an issue of need satiation. Once a need is met, further improvements can't be absorbed. Like water when you aren't thirsty, it doesn't matter.

Hardware helps performance - but this only matters when more performance is needed. For example, if features or usability are needed, extra performance doesn't help. This is obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to get caught up in improvements that are better, but that don't matter.

For productivity of programmers, faster hardware only helps when performance is a problem. The article says: _If [it] makes them merely 5% more productive..._ \- that's an "if". Will a faster PC make you more productive? These days, compilation is too quick for me to squeeze in a swordfight. For other hardware (eg large screens) there is also a limit beyond which extra real estate isn't useful (Joel on Software talked about several of his coders that don't use their second monitor). It depends on the task, of course.

Faster is _always_ cool and impressive. But like a 300 miles per hour station wagon, will it help you?

</comment><comment><USER16> It's rare that I come across a problem where resource and speed constraints do not become an issue. Javascript and the DOM and latency has been an issue with client side web-apps. DB bottlenecks have been an issue on the serverside. Numerical performance and AI performance is an issue in CAD/CAM/CAE games and scientific analysis. In every scenario there have been algorithmic and software level improvements that have speed up the system by a factor of ten or more. Certainly it plateaus after a while, but one cannot hope to throw hardware at complicated problems and expect them to be solved without some serious elbow grease on the part of the programmer. Programs become increasingly more ambitious, and expand to fill the resources allocated to them: a kind of Hacker's Parkinson's law.

</comment><comment><USER17> Simplest method is still the best:

Write something that works. Run it at production loads. If it's not good enough, work on it. Don't worry about speed until you hit that. Only exception is if you know N's going to be big enough to be problematic.

In that case, do just enough optimization to make it reasonable.

Why? Optimization and maintainability* are often at opposing ends. It's best to avoid the costs of it when it's not needed, and the increasing capacities of computers should make you bias towards maintainability.

* and ease of debugging, and concerns for low software complexity, and likelihood that it will be well documented, and .....

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one thinking those salary figures are around 30-40K too low?

<comment><USER19> It's the whole US, it isn't broken down by geographic region or anything.

<comment><USER20> But even then, 30-40K is weak. 40K should be your starting salary. Anything less, and you're being taken.

<comment><USER21> He said "30-40K too low", as in "30-40K lower than I would reasonably expect".

<comment><USER18> Yep, you read that correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I practise the 'path' method of speed optimisation: If you can not execute a piece of heavy code every 10 in 100 runs, you save a lot, just by a simple data/value check before it.

As for memory opts, pass by reference instead of value (in C++).

I've sped up code by a factor of hundreds by doing some crazy stuff (without going to assembly).

<comment><USER4> Yep, memoization is often a big win, and so easy to do in Python with a decorator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Managing servers can be a real pain in the ass. If you can get everything to work on one server, life is much simpler.

</comment><comment><USER24> i'd say programming environment (unix/mac, vim/emacs) and skill levels (algo, data structure, etc) matter more than hardware

it costs less to hire a skillful (but expensive) developer on ok machine than less skillful one(s) on expensive machine(s)

the 10-100x gain myth on skill is pretty much true

</comment><comment><USER25> Now on Slashdot: [http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F20%2...](http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F20%2F1441203)</comment>


Flexe finds spare warehouse space for e-commerce merchants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-11/this-startup-is-the-airbnb-of-warehouses-and-has-amazon-in-its-sights?cmpid=socialflow-facebook-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social <comment><USER2> Great problem they're tackling. Some issues:

Splitting inventory is an expensive activity. Often times you need to purchase more overall inventory and incur more warehouse receiving cost when you try and divvy up your stock around the country to decrease average shipping times.

They don't own their warehouses. This can be an issue if something _goes wrong_ (eg they lose track of a large portion of inventory). Often warehouses hire temporary and low-trained workers. Things can go wrong if the warehouse doesn't have proper operational controls and can stay wrong for days (months even!) if a warehouse doesn't have a proper support team. Since they don't own the warehouses these issues are difficult to control for.

There's some competition in the space like Shipwire owned by Ingram Micro (who also lease space to Amazon). Also I believe you can use Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) to fulfill customer orders even if an item isn't listed on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Flexe did it without spending a nickel on facilities and already has 25 million square feet of storage, about 25 percent of Amazon's capacity...

This comparison is extremely misleading. Amazon either leases or outright owns their warehouse space and thus has total control over it. But Flexe's 25 million square feet are just listings; the property owner, not Flexe, has control over it, and if a better marketplace comes along they might choose to leave Flexe and list somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER4> The big opportunity here isn't serving the US, a place already well served, with though competition from Amazon, but creating a platform to serve smaller countries, without fulfillment infrastructure services or with a weak one, , earning margins closer to an e-tailer margins than a warehouse supplier, and with the possibility, since the country is small with fewer competitors - maybe manage to carve out a long terms table position.

</comment><comment><USER5> So - do they get bought or crushed? I feel like it's a 50-50, but that's more on my gut than out of any particular insight.

<comment><USER6> It's hard for me to see what their moat is. Having negotiated enough warehouse partners that retailers can expect to find space and warehousers can expect to get free space filled? That can get imitated with a lot of straightforward work in local geographic areas, and if customers are spending enough money to make it worthwhile, they can make the physical back-end interchangeable.

There's also many buyers that make sense for the company, too. From "make it easier to build a business" things (like Stripe), to "we have a bunch of warehouses and could synergize with usage & market data".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is exactly what smaller e-tailers need in order to begin to be able to compete with Amazon -- most of them eventually learn that they have no chance if they try to actually rely on Amazon as their primary platform, but it's so hard to compete with that infrastructure without a service like this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Darkstore is another startup thats claiming to provide warehousing/delivery/fulfillment services utilizing unused spaces at malls, etc.

<comment><USER7> Looks like Darkstore is offering full 3PL</comment></comment>


Maryland clocks thousands of E-ZPass drivers speeding - <AUTHOR> http://www.wusa9.com/story/news/local/2015/01/10/maryland-clocks-thousands-of-ez-pass-drivers-speeding/21577385/ <comment><USER2> New York does this too. It's important to emphasize they are talking about the speed you're going through the toll booth. It's not some tricky thing about measuring your time between two points or anything like that. It's kinda dangerous to speed through a tollbooth.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to figure out if you're speeding between two toll booths. They know how long the road is, they can tell how fast you're going. I've often wondered why police don't do more of this. It seems like a relatively easy way of catching a lot of people.

<comment><USER4> > I've often wondered why police don't do more of this.

Wikipedia claims[0] that this is not allows in California, though the citation has suffered link-rot.

I think enforcing speeding limits could also discourage the use of things such as ez-pass, which may very well result in more revenue, compared to the same tolls collected in cash by real people. So it could hurt the revenue stream from tolls.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit_enforcement#Averag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit_enforcement#Average_speed_measurement)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A toll near me (NC) has cameras and an electronic sensor over the highway; it reads your pass if you have one, or takes a picture of your license plate if you don't so that they can mail you a bill later. (there are no humans, nothing to stop for)

When they first put it in, I noticed there are 3 or 4 of those in-road "buttons" (weight pads?) right in a row under the toll platform. They could be used to trigger the timing of the reader and camera, or I figured they could be used to determine speed quite easily.

So for a while after it was first put in, I would carefully hit my brakes and ensure my speed through the toll was right at the speed limit, then go back up to normal speed. But after a while I got lazy and stopped doing that, since nobody else appeared to be doing the same. "Everyone" was speeding through it.

I never received anything in the mail, and nowadays I rarely go through the toll. But now this article makes me think I could have been right, maybe they are recording speeds (or capable of doing so) and just doing nothing about it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm here in MD and our interstates are filled with these horrible speed cameras.

Anything over 12 mph and bam you get a ticket in the mail. They are making tons of money thru this as who doesn't speed?

They need to increase it from 12 to at least 16mph or more over the limit! If it's 65 on the highway I'm naturally driving close to 80. I don't think I'm alone here either!

<comment><USER7> If you don't want speeding tickets, don't speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Maryland law allows the agency to revoke a driver's E-ZPass transponder for > 60 days after a second violation within six months.

If they can revoke a transponder only of someone from MD, I know at some point you could just buy your transponder from another state. VA, PA, OH, NY.</comment>


Ask HN: What jobs allow you to build products while you work? - <AUTHOR>

A fire fighter dispatcher said that he had most of the day to write (he was an author).<p>So I'm asking Hacker News: what are the best jobs if you want to have free time at the computer to code, write, and create? <comment><USER2> I used to think and strategize about code while working full-time in a factory. If you get a job that's not mentally demanding, you can do that, and be ready to code when you get home.

</comment><comment><USER3> * graveyard shift * student with low class load * vice president of USA (what does he do?) * unemployment</comment>


Young, pregnant urged to take blood tests for lead after Notre-Dame fire - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/05/world/science-health-world/young-pregnant-urged-take-blood-tests-lead-notre-dame-fire/ <comment><USER2> It was my impression that because the boiling point of lead is so high, and the vapour pressure so low, that airborne lead is unlikely even in a big fire.

Am I mistaken, or are there other mechanisms at play here?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure, and it's strange that this is the first time I read about the recommendation. But for a comparison, many years ago it was usual to add a compound with lead to the gasoline and it was almost banned because it was toxic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead) . I'm not sure that the comparison is relevant here.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a safe way to encrypt databases? - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN,
Is there a safe way to encrypt databases?
My understanding of the issue is that if it is encrypted, then the key has to exist on the same machine anyway, so there's not much point. <comment><USER2> What data are you trying to protect? There are a number of different approaches to this, all of which vary by what you're trying to achieve. You can encrypt certain fields generating an encryption key based on non-encrypted data in the row (ex. your key may be sha256(primary key value + create time + application secret), and rather than protecting one master key you must protect the key-generation algorithm). Or you can have one master key that you use to encrypt data - this key should never be written to disk (the key should be decrypted into memory from your key custodians' passwords). Or a combination of both. You should also have a way to version keys so that you can perform key rotation. Certain DB engines allow the entire database file to be encrypted (SQLite offers this with some paid extension, I believe). Or have the user encrypt the data before sending it (as some backup services do).

Consult an expert. I could give more details about effective encryption strategies, but I don't want a newbie finding my post, reading half of it, and implementing something dangerously bad. At least no encryption is at a known level of safety; data that's been encrypted incorrectly gives a huge false sense of security.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a point, because if your sysadmin is competent, having access to the database of a webapp (webapp break-in) is much easier than being able to dump the server memory (OS break-in).

You can go hardware with a cryptographic accelerator PCI card (good luck integrating that in your webapp)

</comment><comment><USER4> You could use the user's password, when they log in?

<comment><AUTHOR> What if they lose their password?

The password has to be hashed in the database, so there is no way to decrypt the data.

Furthermore, it introduces problems for sharing between users.

<comment> mike-cardwell Generate a key for each user. Encrypt the users key with their password, but then create a second backup encrypted copy using public key crypto. If the user loses their password, then you can have systems in place to retrieve the key from the backup encrypted container.

The process of retrieving the key could involve somebody manually approving the decryption of it on a secondary system where the private key lives, and then copying it over to the original server to be re-encrypted with the users new password.

EDIT: If data needs to be shared between users, then a new sharing key can be created, and encrypted with both users passwords and the backup public key. That data can then be re-encrypted with the shared key.

<comment><USER4> It's nice to read this, because I have recently been involved in creating just such a system, and it's pretty close to how you describe it.

<comment> mike-cardwell I'd be interested to read about such a system if you ever have the motivation and opportunity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shopify goes after Amazon with new Walmart deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/shopify-amazon-deal-walmart-c5a76abf-5d5f-44eb-88ad-9d1c5e6428ad.html <comment><USER2> I hope shopify understands the extremely long history of how walmart has dealt with their corporate partners in the past. Walmart typically extends a friendly hug and then slowly squeezes their corporate partners to death. They had better be ready to unravel the relationship at any sign of trouble and be working on a parallel plan to replace walmart. It seems like an unnecessary shorcut that may backfire.

<comment><USER3> Shopify* has three non-merchant-driven discovery channels now: Walmart, Facebook, and their own Shop app.

I think Shopify is in a much better bargaining position than Walmart.

<comment><USER4> I don't think Shopify really needs discovery or awareness among customers/buyers.

Shopify's customers are merchants, businesses and manufacturers, each advertising their very own store and sales channels. For them it's hard not to consider Shopify as their ecommerce platform of choice. Meanwhile I'd argue that end customers couldn't care less about which ecommerce platform their store of choice is using. Therefore I think the Shop app isn't all that important actually. Or do people really seek out Shopify stores in particular? That seems ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER5> As a fun fact, a former Directo of ine from Amazon, ops side, joined Shopify a while ago. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what an ideal Amazon-"killer" would look like. And came to the conclusion it would something with aPOS-system, a rudimentary inventory management for bric and mortar shops, a webshop solution, the possibility to interface with fulfillment software and other marketplaces. That would transform every single brick-and- mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center. It would create abasically global dropshipping network. Withou any real fix costs, while Amazon is building fulfillment centers by the dozens.

Amazon could have done so, but they didn't. Shopify can do so building upon there Webshop and POS environment. And they seem to do.

<comment><USER6> _That would transform every single brick-and-mortar shop using that POS software into a fulfillment center._

That's how thousands of businesses have operated for decades or more.

<comment><USER5> Sure, locally. Combined with a global E-Commerce platform, that is pretty powerful.

<comment><USER6> Not locally. Globally. My wife works with this sort of thing every day and has for her entire career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In all honesty who is buying from these third parties, if something on Amazon isn't fulfilled via Amazon, I'm not buying. If I'm looking for something on Best Buy the first thing I'm doing is looking for the Best Buy only toggle. Is it strictly to make points on the vendors sales? To give a false appearance of massive inventory? Could a third party vendor list "Item A" on eBay, Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart and have access to cross site APIs that when "Item A" is sold it's removed from all market places? As a Canuck I'm happy for Shopify, as consumer I'm losing interest in online shopping, which might be futile with how everything is trending.

<comment><USER8> I opened a Wal-Mart account precisely because I needed to buy a specialty tool from a vendor that was on Amazon but I couldn't purchase because of "reserved for Prime" BS. The same vendor magically had it available via Wally world. Amazon doesn't have everything in house.

<comment><USER7> That's fair, I personally avoid those third party sellers for the off chance you get ripped off or get a bootleg/knock off.

I hope your experience(s) had neither of those?

<comment><USER8> I vet the sellers that seem legit but I don't want my financials and contact info lingering in their sketchy backend systems. There are plenty of good businesses out there with poor IT skills where Amazon/Wal-Mart/Shopify can be a trusted middleman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (Disclaimer: I work in the e-commerce space.)

I have to say I'm concerned about Shopify's growing dominance in the e-commerce market. They're selling a 'David vs Goliath' story about taking on Amazon, while at the same time becoming a Goliath themselves.

They are gradually building what seems to be an unassailable lead: preferential card processing rates with Stripe, hard-to-match discounts on shipping with the major logistics companies, warehousing to help retailers fulfil products, an anti-competitive app only for Shopify retailers, an exclusive arrangement with Facebook for Facebook Shops, and now a partnership with Walmart.

They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG.

<comment><USER10> > They are rapidly becoming the next FAANG.

Shopify isn't remotely close to joining the big tech club, outside of their comically inflated bubble valuation (trading for 56 times sales).

Let's compare, trailing four quarters.

Amazon, $296b sales, $14b operating income

Apple, $268b sales, $65b operating income

Alphabet, $166b sales, $35b operating income

Microsoft, $138b sales, $52b operating income

Facebook, $73b sales, $26b operating income

Netflix, $21b sales, $3b operating income

Shopify, $1.7b sales, negative $178m operating income

One of these is very much not like the others. Investors think they've found the next Amazon, it's not. It's a slightly better Etsy as a business, and if they're really lucky, in 10 years they might be an eBay. Amazon is only what it is today, thanks to the AWS margins and op profit (not because of its retail business, which has very low growth and terrible margins). There's no evidence of stellar margins hiding in Shopify's business. 14 years, zero profit, and a weak gross profit margin (eBay's gross profit margin is 2x that of Shopify, and was even better in years past; even Etsy has a far better gross profit margin).

Compare Square to Shopify to further amplify the obviousness of the context:

Square has $5.1b in sales (3x larger, trading for 8 times sales), an operating profit for 2019, still growing fast, and is worth about 2/5 what Shopify is.

SHOP's valuation is obviously lunacy, which is quite common in this market at the moment (the Dave Portnoy market). See: Nikola or most any cloud company. It'll end in tears or a decade-long stagnation in the stock, there are no other possibilities. How long will it take SHOP to generate a $3b annual profit? That's the future stagnation clue, their market cap represents a decade or more of returns pulled forward (if everything goes right for them). The only thing qualifying SHOP for consideration among big tech, is their market cap.

If we were going to spread the insanity around more evenly, ETSY, adjusting for its slower growth rate relative to SHOP, should have a $25-$30 billion market cap. Every investor generation thinks their bubble is the one that is different and is going to last.

<comment><USER11> Shopify is _incredible_ at marketing themselves, and so far they've been able to churn their way out of the bubbles this creates, but it's going to catch up with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazon is likely grateful for the "competition" amid greater scrutiny from regulators around the world.

<comment><USER13> I am not sure why people think Amazon is such a dominate force on the commerce front, especially with respects to Walarmt. It isn't even close between the two. I am more worried about the cloud technology space being down to basically two choices now.

<comment><USER14> Not sure where you live, but in Ontario Amazon delivery trucks outnumber all other delivery trucks combined.

Seemingly 50% of every package sitting on anyone's doorstep has the familiar Amazon branded packing tape surrounding it as well.

They're definitely dominant.

<comment><USER15> Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019.

I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"

<comment><USER16> Can you provide a link for your stat?

Link I found for 2018 e-commerce net sales in Canada [0] has amazon and amazon.ca combined for 4.7b, costco at 1b, walmart 0.9, apple 0.79, the bay 0.47 etc.

So amazon eclipses the other other 7 competitors all on its own.

[0] [https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top- online-...](https://www.statista.com/forecasts/871090/canada-top-online- stores-canada-ecommercedb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, Hacker News now used for stock pumping. nice.

Now that the longs had their say, here is the short side.

Shopify has an API. Someone wrote a plugin to allow a shop keeper to publish inventory into the Walmart API. When sellers sell on Walmart's platform, Shopify sees zero transactional revenue.

That's the actual technical story.

The linked "article" which actually included a quote from the COO includes a page of bullet points about how Shopify is really knocking it out of the park. Including the "Facebook deal".

Actually the Facebook deal is FB pulling the cart & payments features into their FB & Instagram apps. So, effectively killing Shopify web store use. Apparently FB is doing something special for Shopify so that Shopify can charge 2% on top of FB's 5% fee. But sellers can also just make their shops directly on FB and skip the 2% Shopify surcharge.

I would have expected fellow programmers to understand a bit of math & show some constraint with bubble valuation stocks!

<comment><USER18> So sellers will create a different FB shop, a different Walmart shop, a different website shop, download and pay for a whole bunch of software to keep all the inventory in sync, and have to merge different interfaces and APIs to try and figure out what their final sales, revenue, etc are.

Or they can use Shopify and get all of those, and manage their inventory, and pricing, and shipping rules, etc all from one place and pay Shopify a few hundred dollars a year, when they would have paid thousands in software annually to replicate the same anyways.

Yeah, I can totally see why they would go the non Shopify route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if Shopify is going to help Walmart with warehouse automation as part of this deal. Last year, they purchased 6 River Systems ([https://6river.com/](https://6river.com/)), a company very similar to Kiva (Amazon Robotics).

[https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify- buys-6-river-s...](https://xconomy.com/boston/2019/09/10/shopify-buys-6-river- systems-for-450m-to-boost-new-fulfillment-centers/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Dealing with third-party sellers is no fun. Newegg is probably the only major e-commerce website whose search feature can exclude third-party sellers.

<comment><USER21> You can do it on Walmart. In fact, I was just about to post that this announcement is a negative for me. I have such a hard time shopping on Amazon these days and tend to try Walmart first but always select Walmart.com from the retailer filter. I don't want to see a bunch of random junk that I have no desire to purchase.

<comment><USER20> Ah right, it was under the "retailer" filter (was looking for "Seller").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Shopify clearly announced its intentions when it went ahead with Google Cloud couple years back and the bets placed are lining up pretty nicely with recent partnerships with Facebook and now Walmart. Although it also begs the question if Walmart's discontinuance of Jet.com might have prompted this deal? [1]

1\. [https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will- disco...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/walmart-says-it-will-discontinue- jet-com-which-it-acquired-for-3b-in-2016/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Amazon has a "good" part: high quality goods of known provenance delivered quickly. Consumers love this part. And they have a bad part: random sellers with zero vetting selling garbage from an infinite number of procedurally- generated storefronts (love buying from Cayzzzqq, that's the store for me!). Consumers hate this part. (I ignore the human costs of Amazon's warehouses and look only at consumer perception.)

Walmart sees this and decides: let's double down on the bad part!

</comment><comment><USER24> Shopify is really going all out. Good for them. First the Facebook deal, now this.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am not sure why this is getting much attention. Walmart is selective about which merchants they will take and Shopify is estimating only 1.200 will be onboarded by years end. Shopify claims to have 500,000 stores so this penetration is so minuscule its really not worth mentioning. In the same vein, this was all already possible using a couple of third-party Shopify Apps and merchants have already been doing this for years. All I see is PR being created to drive stock price?

</comment><comment><USER26> This expands what merchants can do with the Shopify platform. Both Facebook and Walmart are channels for Shopify merchants to post their merchandise. Amazon has been one for a while. There are a lot more in their app store - [https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales- channels](https://apps.shopify.com/collections/sales-channels)

</comment><comment><USER27> If well executed, Facebook Shops has the potential to crush both Shopify and Amazon. FB Marketplace already has 800 million monthly users, more than Amazon and eBay combined.

<comment><USER28> It's really Instagram right? I want to say something like 95% of small shops selling under Shopify market under Instagram. It's just that Facebook never took e-commerce seriously enough. If they spent _some_ capital in more useful endeavors oppose to Zuckerberg's flavor of the year projects such as Libra, FB would be as big as AMZN. They have all the infrastructure already in place to pull it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Crazy time to be in e-commerce!!

</comment><comment><USER30> O great, yet another site that'll be filled with fake reviews, shitty support and the like.</comment>


Facebook's Mobile Platform Monetization Equation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/25/facebook-sdk-ios-6/

<comment><USER2> I don't see the connection to Wall Street <and Wall Street definitely won't see it>. This isn't about monetization, but is more about breadth of context. Really, is there a single change in how they monetize in this SDK release - looks to me like it still depends on the same old mobile ads, albeit with more and more attributes to target off of.

And the title is just annoying.</comment>


Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer <comment><USER2> I think he raises a very important point regarding the enormous risk of WMF being purchased by the current generation of tech-giants. I don't think there is any reason to believe that new management of Wikipedia by a company such as Google, Facebook or Amazon would be the least bit benevolent. The implications that Wikipedia being co-opted would have on freedom of information on the internet would be immense. I don't think that this is idle scare-mongering. Of course, there is already a risk of misinformation being propagated on Wikipedia by bad actors, I don't think that there is a very big gap to jump before we lose control over the online record completely.

<comment><USER3> As a 501(c)(3), it would be illegal for the Wikimedia Foundation to be purchased by any of the tech-giants -- or any other for-profit company, for that matter. In addition, all the content is under freely available licenses.

The most realistic but still bleak scenario I can think of is Wikipedia becoming infested with ads. Anything more extreme, we'd see a fork become popular.

<comment><USER4> And what would sustain the fork? Every time there's talk about the potential to fork a popular web product like Facebook or other social media all that happens is the hobbyists and activists move to it while the mainstream userbase carries on.

<comment><USER5> Besides, nobody can find the fork anyway. Google banishes such clones to SEO purgatory immediately, from which you are basically guaranteed to never return (especially as a pure clone).

That has been true for a decade now, since the days of Stack Exchange complaining about the clones riding their CC licensed content to easy Google ranking. You can put up a perfect clone of Wikipedia, you'll get nearly zero traffic despite having millions of pages of high quality content.

<comment><USER6> It's true that if you create a perfect fork that search engines will punish you and not even display the results, but that's not to say you can't change that. If the edit-base of a wiki moves with the fork (and this is essential), you can continue to create new content that search engines will index. If you also go back and make tweaks to existing pages, you won't get penalised. It's not a quick process, nor is it simple, but it's possible for a fork can survive, grow and even move above the original.

<comment><USER7> If Google et all detect too much cloned content on a domain, its essentially rank banned forever, for any pages whatsoever.

Having a few different pages isn't going to help.

<comment><USER8> Banned until manual override, so banned until you are substantial to either the community at large or the tech community.

<comment><USER7> See [https://marc.info](https://marc.info) , its by far the best mailing list archive, popular in open source communities but it absolutely never appears on Google because it has the same content as massively SEOed crap mailing list archives like Nabble. Google has definitely manually unbanned it a few times but it seems to expire after a while.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but AFAIK all these archives have nothing to do with their primary source, so while we might all prefer no ads there is no objective way to say marc.info is the authorative source over ad ridden sources.

With Wikipedia or stack overflow, I think whoever gets the majority of participants going forward and keeps activity high could start claiming authority in an objective enough sense, and engaged participants are more mindful of organization ethics than random searchers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's another view of the WMF's runaway spending: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#/media/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg)

I don't donate to the WMF because they don't need my money, but I wish they just kept Wikipedia running and made small incremental changes over time for scaling/keeping up to date/adding helpful features. I would of course donate if Wikipedia were at risk of failing (not that it would be that hard to rehost and rebuild it), and they know that and exploit everyone who doesn't realize how rich they are with the annoying begging.

As they say: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". If you keep giving a nonprofit money, it will keep growing, even if it has more than enough it needs for its earlier charter.

<comment><USER10> But for how many years can Wikipedia run on that much money? IMO not having a large endowment which comfortably lasts a decade is irresponsible for the kind of resource Wikipedia presents to the world.

<comment><USER11> I have heard just the opposite: that having a decade-length endowment is generally a sign of hording by the non-profit, and unlikely to be contributing to the mission. What scenario is there where Wikipedia is still providing value and fulfilling its mission but can't raise funds for a decade?

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Re: "I have heard just the opposite: that having a decade-length endowment is generally a sign of hording by the non-profit, and unlikely to be contributing to the mission."

That's only true of charities where there is no natural limit on how much they can spend. If you are feeding orphans you can always do more until every orphan is fed. The WMF isn't like that, They have one job; keep Wikipedia and the sister projects like Wictionary online. That doesn't require ever- increasing spending other than to cover actual increases in hosting expenses and essential employees.

Imagine a future Wikipedia that is 100% funded by the endowment, which will always be there even if nobody donates, and which has no fundraising banners, just a small "donate" link. I think that is a goal worth pursuing.

<comment><USER13> There is no such exemption.

As evidence I point to _Boys Town_ , a philanthropy that quite literally exists to take care of orphans. It amassed a large fortune that exceeded anything justifiable by their core mission. In the 1970s, a tip from Warren Buffett on this won _The Omaha Sun_ (which he owned at the time) a Pulitzer for reporting on the resulting scandal. (He was also an investor in _The Washington Post_ which won a Pulitzer in the same year for reporting on Watergate.)

See [https://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-mission- drift-b...](https://www.philanthropydaily.com/nonprofits-mission-drift-boys- town-omaha/) for verification. And evidence suggesting that that particular charity has continued down the same path.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer". See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans.

A better charity to compare with Wikipedia would be the the Washington Monument Restoration Project.

See [https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm](https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc72.htm)

Once the Washington Monument is completely restored you can't spend any more money restoring the Washington Monument. If donations keep coming in, you shouldn't spend them on giving executives of the charity free ski vacations (yes, the WMF actually did that) You should instead build up an endowment that is eventually big enough that the interest covers all Washington Monument maintenance forever. Then and only then should you tell donors "look, we don't need any more money for restoring the Washington Monument. If you give us a donation we will use it for other things, starting with restoring the Lincoln Memorial".

<comment><USER13> _Your reference to boys town missed the point. Boys town didn 't run out of orphans to spend money on. They simply failed to spend a large amount of it on orphans._

Do you have a source for that?

My understanding is that boys town did run out of orphans who met their requirements. There simply aren't enough orphans in the USA with no family to take care of them who slip through the cracks of the adoption system.

But that fact didn't slow their appeals for more money.

That said, my understanding is based on my memories of a book that I don't presently have a copy of.

<comment><USER12> Ah. I had no idea that they ran out of orphans. If they did, then it would be a perfect analogy. Boys town takes care of all the orphans that it is their mission to take care of, keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. The Wikimedia Foundation does everything needed to put an encyclopedia -- the thing that it is their mission to take care of -- keeps collecting donations and spending on other stuff. Thanks for the great analogy, and I apologize for misunderstanding and assuming that there would always be plenty more orphans to take care of.

I am going to think about this, do some research, and see if I can turn it into an essay on Wikipedia about collecting money after the job is done. Thanks!

Didn't the march of dimes also keep taking in donations after polio was eradicated?

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wikimedia is contributing a lot of time and resources to other Open/Commons projects as well, at least in Germany: Open Education, Open Science, Open Glam, Open Access, Open Government etc. They also invest in advocacy (lobbying for more Open Culture, Open Access etc), which is an important voice in the political process, since most grassroots initiatives can not sustain this kind of work for a long time. I don't see the expenses as necessary for the upkeep of Wikipedia alone, but as an investment to keep the ecosystem of Open Source/Open Access alive and growing, which benefits Wikipedia as well. While I think it is important to question the distribution of Wikimedia support for projects in the Commons (they probably could do more funding, e.g. a prototype fund) , having a strong institution to foster digital participation and Open Society is vital.

<comment><USER15> Never heard of these Open * efforts, besides open science maybe - are they supporting one of the free-access research publishing platforms?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who has edited since 2007 (pseudoanonymously, about 13k edits), I appreciate the continued investments that Wikipedia has made into various initiatives, most importantly technology. It's not cheap or easy to stay on top of technical trends (e.g., upgrading to PHP 7) while shipping feature improvements. For example, I use Visual Editor ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor)) all the time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am all for transparency in spending, but I don't support the author's suggested guidelines for spending. Sticking to inflation-and page-view adjusted growth in spending is a terrible requirement. It ties the hands of the company to do any sort of innovation. I donate pretty regularly, and I am happy that wikipedia is doing more with my money than to just keep the site running.

<comment><USER18> Can you name one thing that the foundation did with your money? This might be a trick question, so be careful to not confuse things that Wikipedia does without your money with things Wikimedia does with your money.

<comment><USER19> IIRC they started a web search engine project that went nowhere.

<comment><USER20> You remember incorrectly. It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

I do not believe that the above "It was a plan from a past Executive Director that never even started" claim is accurate. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-17/Special_report#knowledgeengine)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/Special_report#knowledgeengine)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-02-10/In_focus#knowledgeengine)

Key quotes:

"In May 2015, Risker observed that a team called 'Search and Discovery' was 'extraordinarily well-staffed with a disproportionate number of engineers at the same time as other areas seem to be wanting for them'."

"We also know at some point it was an ambitious project to create a brand new search engine as an alternative to Google."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Click-bait redirects here.

The figures don't look anything like growth rate of cancer, they look like growth rate of a toenail.. 10-15% a year.

Then the author claims that "spending is growing at an ever-increasing rate" like cancer. But it is not. Draw a trend-line over the spending graph, and you'll see that the growth rate is actually damn linear (and well aligned with revenue growth).

Rest of the article is reasons why spending should be reduced. Well maybe it shouldn't. As long as there is revenue growth, maybe it is better to invest the revenue on better tools. When revenue growth stops, you've got the better tools you invested in, and can then reduce spending by not building further new tools.

<comment><USER22> If that was the case then every company/startup that fails to raise another round would survive on the "better tools" they developed with their previous funding rounds.

But as we know, they die or sell instead.

<comment><USER21> Sorry, but that is a broken analogy. Wikipedia's revenue model and cost structure is nothing like startup's.

<comment><USER22> I agree it's not a perfect analogy, Wikipedia's model is even worse. Startups generate revenue as well. Wikipedia is nearly fully dependant on funding.

<comment><USER23> Wikipedia cannot "sell" their product, that's antithetical to it's purpose and mission. Doctors without Borders is not a failure because they rely on donations for disaster relief rather then profiting from it.

<comment><USER22> No one called Wikipedia or Doctors without Borders a failure. The article states that relying on donations is risky by nature, let alone when increasing expenses every year.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, do you think there is no way donations may decline leaving Wikipedia in trouble with hundreds of people on it's pay roll?

<comment><USER23> The risk is that WMF decides, as the article presents, to sell off rather than downsize if donation revenue drops. Wikipedia itself can be sustained on 1% of the donation revenue the foundation is getting each year, so the only threat to Wikipedia is the foundation itself, not that there won't be enough money to keep it maintained, independent, and unmonetized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone who has contributed regularly to Wikipedia over the years, I stopped recently due to another cancer that Wikipedia has, called 'Philip Cross.' Supposedly an individual, he has made roughly 150,000 edits since 2013 without taking a single day off.

Anybody who is not aware of 'Philip Cross' can read about 'him' here:

[https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross](https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross)

[https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the- philip-c...](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross- affair/)

[https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the- philip-c...](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-cross- msm-promotion-operation-part-3/)

"According to Craig Murray, whose Wikipedia page has been repeated edited by Cross remarked that "the purpose of the "Philip Cross" operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. "Philip Cross" also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel."

Wikipedia management, all the way up to Jimmy Wales are well aware of 'Philip Cross' and yet 'he' continues to operate freely as an editor. Despite the basic usefulness of Wikipedia for non-controversial topics, I decided that I cannot and will not support an organization that allows this kind of astroturfing.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

First off, the above comment is an example of hijacking; using a discussion about one thing to try to get attention for something else. You see this a lot with Abortion, Gun control, and US presidential politics. I am not saying that those aren't important topics, but do they really need to be inserted into a discussion about how much money Wikipedia is spending?

I would strongly encourage the person trying to hijack this discussion to start a new discussion

I would strongly encourage all HN readers to not give the poster the attention he wants and to downvote any comments that are not about WMF finances

I also would strongly encourage all HN readers to not respond to this sort of thing and to stay on topic.

For those who are interested, here is what Wikipedia has done about this situation:

Per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive240#Philip_Cross)

Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from post-1978 British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter. This sanction supersedes the community sanction applied in May 2018.

Passed 11 to 0 at 18:34, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Amended by motion at 20:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia's relevant policy states:

"The purpose of a topic ban is to forbid editors from making edits related to a certain topic area where their contributions have been disruptive, but to allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia. Unless clearly and unambiguously specified otherwise, a topic ban covers all pages (not only articles) broadly related to the topic, as well as the parts of other pages that are related to the topic, as encapsulated in the phrase 'broadly construed.'"

If anyone thinks Wikipedia should do more, they should bring it up at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests) \-- not on hacker news.

Again, I encourage all HN readers to not respond to hijacking attempts.

<comment><USER24> Extremely relevant to Wikipedia's finances, since my framing was why I am not contributing to Wikipedia anymore. People deserve to know what they are funding.

Also not helping your cause, you had to try to negate my argument with a false assertion: Philip Cross HAS NOT, in fact, been been banned, and just last month made 49 edits to James LeMesurier's page (clearly a post 1978 British political figure):

[https://archive.ph/2019.11.14-204004/https://en.wikipedia.or...](https://archive.ph/2019.11.14-204004/https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Le_Mesurier&offset=&limit=500&action=history)

Although you may not agree, this is holistically part and parcel of Wikipedia's ongoing funding saga. Plenty of people have tried to appeal to Wikipedia about this, so it is disingenuous to state that option while dismissing the topic here. We are on HN, not Wikipedia, so one man's 'hijacking' is another person's 'information.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005,but > the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated? I can't think of any other scenario besides Wikipedia where this would be expected to be true.

<comment><USER26> > Why would the number of pages and hosting costs be linearly correlated?

How _would_ one expect them to be correlated?

As an aside, a friend of mine relaunched an ecommerce site in March. Wordpress + WooCommerce, stripped of fluff.

His hosting plan costs him $3/month, including tax.

He told me his site took just over $60k in revenue in the first 6 weeks.

<comment><USER27> I assume the operative word for him was 'linearly' not 'correlated'. But cost/pageview is _sublinearly_ correlated, so spending growth should be even slower than a linear projection.

<comment><USER25> I just wanted to point out that the article mentions the number of pages, not pageviews, which is part of the reason why I find that statement so bizarre.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

This is the first time I have seen any comment saying that I should have listed page views instead of pages. I hadn't given it much thought until you brought it up, but I don't see any reason which I shouldn't remove the pages statistic and replace it with page views. I do want to make the essay as accurate as I can, and criticisms/suggestions are a big help in doing that. (you never see the flaws in your own writing).

Can anyone think of a downside to me changing it to pageviews?

<comment><USER28> Sure - I would argue that bandwith costs are only a tiny fraction, and the real cost is in stewarding all the existing content(page numbers) - e.g. more servers = more admins, older content/tools need maintenance, etc.

I think what is happening here is that the server costs argument is weak as a first argument. Maybe x33 expenditure is high, but I know WP has grown, and it's hard to quantify how that growth translates into expenditure - it's easy to imagine higher reliability, more accessibility, more need for maintenance of established products and so on as WP matures. If I happen to like WP and am willing to give them benefit of the doubt, why wouldn't I trust that their engineering team knows what they're doing? You haven't established your credibility as an SRE(or enough facts) to really shake that initial goodwill.

Once I view your initial argument as shaky, I am naturally more inclined to view the rest of your arguments skeptically(or just outright ignore them).

From an outsider POV, your two strong arguments are: \- I want to donate to just WP because I don't care about the rest; As the non-WP fraction of expenses grows, there will be a tipping point where the "waste" will erode my willingness to donate \- Even though there are growing development costs, WP tools have stagnated, core problems aren't addressed, new features aren't being used(another signal of "waste")

I think if you lead your essay with those arguments, the server costs argument would be better received. It's much easier to comprehend "Out of $1 I donate, only $0.50 goes to WP", and as an experienced WP user you speak from a position of authority on the second point. From there, it's easier to convince me that WP is _also_ being wasteful in server costs.

In general though, I think you need more evidence put forward to really convince an outsider that WP is wasteful - more comparisons of overall spending vs just-WP spending, more examples of development stalling or going in the wrong direction. The essay may be convincing to an insider who already is aware of the problems, but from an outside perspective it's light on evidence.

<comment><USER29> Yes, calling out concrete examples of waste would make it a lot easier to understand if this is about actual mismanagement or about a different ideology were priorities are / how narrow the mission is supposed to be.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

Calling out concrete examples of waste also has a downside. It usually results in the discussion going off into the weeds about whether individual expenditures are justified. There are many people who focus on individual examples of waste. I chose to focus on the big picture -- overall spending growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well,

I'm not seeing any problems. The Annual Report is available here: [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual- report/fin...](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual- report/financials-leadership/)

<comment><USER31> From my perspective:

\- What is the $7 million for "Professional service expenses"? That's 8% of the budget and I've got no clue what it might have been spent on. Salaries, travel expenses and depreciation is already accounted for.

\- What is the $7 million for "Other operating expenses"? Again 8% of the budget in "other" that doesn't include something that is depreciated and doesn't include travel?

\- What is the $2.7 million for "In kind service expenses"? To me that sounds like internal "funny money" where you are paying for one service with another service you perform. But how are they calculating the loss and what account is that money actually coming from?

I worry that millions of dollars are being spent on consultants who are essentially just pocketing donations.

Also, I'd really like to see the operating costs broken down because it's impossible to see what's going on here. You've got $3 million in depreciation, but what is that paying for? Desks, computers, telephones? Do they pay rent, or do they own a building?

The thing that's frustrating is that there may be nothing at all wrong. For example, I can see $38 million for salaries and wages, with 300 employees. But where are the other expenses? Is that the "other expenses" section? If so, how hard would it be to break down that cost for me so that I can understand what the money is being used for?

While I disagree with the approach the author of the page is taking, I completely agree that their financial statements are as clear as mud. If this was a company I was thinking of investing in, I would give it a really wide berth based on the terrible financial reporting. As a non-profit operating on public donations they should be doing a much better job.

<comment><USER32> The latter two of your questions are answered in [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports/Financial/Audits/2017-2018_-_frequently_asked_questions#Terms_and_Definitions) .

>"In-kind service revenue" includes goods and services that the Wikimedia Foundation would normally pay for, but have been donated to us at no charge, such as bandwidth and hosting services and pro-bono legal services. Further detail is available in ...

> "Other operating expenses" include expenses for facilities such as rent and > office and non-office supplies, insurance, annual staff meeting, recruiting, > staff development, property taxes and Wikidata project funding.

You can find a more detailed audit report at [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf)

<comment><USER31> Thanks for that. I was scratching my head at the "in-kind service revenue". For others that were likewise confused, there is a line item on _both_ sides: it's income _and_ expenses and cancels out. So that makes sense.

The detailed audit report indicates that rent is about $1.5 million. The rest is essentially computer purchases.

I'd still like to see a better explanation of the professional services. But it definitely makes more sense.

<comment><USER33> I suspect that the majority of of professional services spending is on accountants and lawyers. The Independent Audit report itself likely costs a 6-figure sum. Depending on how much accounting is done in-house vs outsourced, some of it might also fall into professional services.

The bulk of it is likely going to lawyers. A lot of the in-kind donations fall into the same bucket:

> In-kind service revenue and expenses recorded in the statements of > activities consist of contributed legal services. The amounts of specialized > contributed legal services as revenue and expenses are $2,748,512 and > $156,191 for the years ended June 30, 2018 and 2017, respectively. The value > of contributed internet hosting services for the years ended June 30, 2018 > and 2017 are $32,722 and $58,390, respectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > There has been zero actual effort by the WMF to increase transparency on > spending.

Oof. Aside from compute costs, what could justify a more than 100% increase in expenses from 2012 to the present? The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at least from my basic user perspective).

<comment><USER35> > The platform has barely changed in terms of functionality in that time (at > least from my basic user perspective)

I'm curious, it sounds like you're a casual Wikipedia user so - how do you have any idea if this is true? What about editor features, community, moderation, administrative improvements?

This kind of attitude frustrates me - it's the sort of attitude that kills nonprofit fundraising efforts unless they are for show in a way that laypeople can understand. Surely you can see how inefficient it would be to run a non profit if everything they spent money on had to be highly visible?

<comment><USER36> Frankly, if a nonprofit can't justify to laypeople why they should have money, they shouldn't have money.

My money is limited, the causes which can benefit from it are not. It seems to me the height of self-absorption that an organisation should expect donations over the many other worthwhile causes without justifying the benefit that money would bring.

Changes to editor tools and processes don't cut it. All of those exist in service of improving Wikipedia as a resource. If I can't see those changes as an end-user, I question whether any of them really mattered. Is a fantastic new user-friendly diagnostic machine justified in a hospital if treatment rates don't go up?

<comment><USER37> Wikipedia's edits rates have been increasing very rapidly. Tools like those must exist in order to vet them and ensure that Wikipedia remains a trustworthy source. Its hard to see the benefits (nor am I sure how to ensure it shows) as the expectation is Wikipedia is always correct, but without them, the misinformation in Wikipedia would be much greater.

<comment><USER36> Between 2004 and 2018, monthly edits grew from 500k to 40M, an 80x growth. [1]

In the same period, expenses have grown from 25k to 80M, a 3200x growth. [TFA]

[1] [https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all- projects/contributing/e...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all- projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|all|~total|monthly)

<comment><USER38> Not claiming to know more than you about this but your point assumes that the changing cost of maintaining the project at scale has some proportional relationship to the number of edits.

As it has attracted global attention and ever more significant influence on people worldwide, Wikipedia's threats are likely more varied and insidious than they were in 2004. The cost of offsetting these threats may not relate to the volume of edits.

<comment><USER36> I certainly don't claim any domain knowledge, but the growth in expenses is so vast that I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not, by the way, suggesting that a 3200x growth in expenses is inherently unjustifiable, just that it should in fact be justified.

<comment><USER38> Yes, agreed that it should be justified in the open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ugh, so is this was they've been doing with our donations, building some massive behemoth that burns $100M a year on who-knows-what?

Their financial statements say very little about what they're doing with it, but it is an exorbitant amount of money to keep a website running, even one the size of Wikipedia.

Other threads state that they're funding all sorts of side-hustles with the money. If so, that is fraudulent, since when they do fundraising campaigns, they claim to be raising funds for _Wikipedia_. Really slimy of them to then go and spend it on something else.

</comment><comment><USER40> So in summary Wikipedia is a responsibly run nonprofit that spends slightly less than it takes in while providing a valuable service to millions (or billions) of users?

<comment><USER41> The summary is that the Wikimedia Foundation asks for and spends increasingly large amounts of money in donations mostly on things that are unrelated to Wikipedia. The writer seems to want the Foundation to use the money instead to build up an endowment (like universities do) so that Wikipedia is not eternally reliant on donations to survive. He also suggests that Wikipedia itself is fairly well-run, but the Foundation is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it?

Honestly, I always felt that these kind of conparisons are insensitive, and doubling down on it like the linked article does doesn't help.

<comment><USER43> It doesn't even make sense with the data being presented.

> _After we burn through our reserves, it seems likely that the next step for > the WMF will be going into debt to support continued runaway spending_

Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year.

As a grad student I made a total $1,300 per month, but ten years later I'm spending that on just housing costs. So what?

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Re: "Um, the graph shows that the reserves are increasing every year. Money in exceeds money out year after year."

You missed the first part of what I wrote in my essay:

"Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase. It could be a scandal (real or perceived). It could be the WMF taking a political position that offends many donors. Or it could be a recession, leaving people with less money to give. It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve. Whatever the reason is, it WILL happen. It would be naïve to think that the WMF, which up to this point has never seriously considered any sort of spending limits, will suddenly discover fiscal prudence when the revenues start to decline. It is far more likely that the WMF will not react to a drop in donations by decreasing spending, but instead will ramp up fund-raising efforts while burning through our reserves and our endowment."

I made it clear that Wikipedia is not in trouble at the present time. But there is a real possibility that there are bad times ahead, and we should prepare for them now.

<comment><USER43> I think you're reasoning about this backwards. They don't worry about setting harder spending limits _because_ the revenue continues to increase. If the revenue cut back, you call it "naive" to suppose that they could put 2 and 2 together and cut spending. So they should be fiscally conservative and think of the future when they expect themselves to be... profligate and short- sighted? Why?

You started this page in 2017. The revenue has continued to increase at as steady a pace as expenses. And an argument along the exact same lines as yours could have been made in 2009 or 2010 or 2011. Actually, your argument has gotten weaker -- expenses used to be higher than the previous fiscal year's revenue, but in recent years the growth has been much flatter.

There's no compelling reason to think that _now_ is the time to act to make sure that it's not too late to act at some vague future point in time. Sure, something can't grow forever. Granted. But are we at 127 grains of rice or 131,071? How can you tell?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Like many successful foundations the Wikimedia Foundation has been taken over by empire builders. These types expand non-core mandates to justify increased headcount and gain clout & self-importance.

The tech requirements of Wikipedia are straightforward. The content comes from volunteers. The software development could be handled via a community development process like Debian's.

</comment><comment><USER45> Putting all the arguments aside, I had no idea Wikipedia was so far in the black. The donation begging had me thinking they were desperately clinging to life. I don't like that. From now on my annual Wikipedia donation will be going to the Internet Archive.

<comment><USER46> The Internet Archive is also a profoundly worthwhile charity. But those of us with a little understanding of the space would be remiss to not point out that this article is dishonest and you're falling for it. It isn't uncommon for nonprofits (and Wikipedia is not only a nonprofit but is functionally _infrastructure_ at this point; its survival is important beyond its own self- perpetuation) to try to build up an endowment in order to survive lean times. This is normal. You're falling for an okeydoke. Please don't.

<comment><USER47> If their actual goal was to build up an endowment to survive lean times, their spending profile would be quite different.

That may be an ancillary goal of theirs, but it's demonstrably not close to the primary one (in a revealed preference sense).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I do like his idea of building up investments and running wikipedia off of ROI instead of begging for donations every year. Why is it that WMF hasn't done that yet?

<comment><USER16> It has been raising an endowment for several years: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Endowment)

You can donate at [https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Landi...](https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LandingPage)

<comment><USER49> I would like to see the Gates Foundation and co start investing in more media endowments like this.

<comment><USER50> Seems like a terrible investment for the Gates foundation. It is highly visible and has ample public funding. Additionally, it appears that it has no budget control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Looking at what they claim to be working on, maybe the money is just being spent on stuff that americans don't see.

The last few years, the annual plans seem focussed on making Wikipedia relevant in India, South America, and the Middle East.

When I was at EE school, the chip manufacturers gave the school devboards students go to know their stuff. Matlab was cheap too.

I suspect Wikimedia is funding a bunch of journalism and research training in these countries, so that every highschool kid gets pointed to wikipedia at school.

<comment><USER52> If they are as a charity collecting money ostensibly needing it for their online encyclopedia they should disclose all this explicitly with dollar amounts.

<comment><USER51> Yes, unless there is a vital reason why not, I think charities should have to disclose spending to quite a high resolution.

It seems the most recent business plan and accounts are less detailed than in previous years. This is a backwards step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> If I remember correctly, the person that wrote this had quite the axe to grind about Wikipedia and her/his major criticisms of it were actually what nonprofits look to shoot for. Wikipedia has genuine issues, but not anything this person says has much merit.

<comment><USER54> This feels like a very empty response; it doesn't point out any specific problem with the author's facts or reasoning. The basic argument is that, ten years ago, Wikipedia ran a very similar service at a much lower cost, so the current organization is therefore spending money ineffectively. You can say you disagree with that, but why? It makes sense to me.

<comment><USER55> But Wikipedia is no where near the same service it was in 2012. Dozens (if not hundreds) of features, increased traffic demands and higher availability, it seems obvious that the platform would have to grow.

<comment><USER56> The point is that while views have increased by 10x over the past 15 years, expenses have increased by 1250x. That leaves a 125x increase in per-user spending that does not appear to be reflected in commensurate increases in user value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> When you subsidize something you get more of it. Don't donate to WMF. If it crashes and burns it is trivial for anyone else to host the existing material with <10 employees and <100k year hosting costs.

<comment><USER12> But who would pay the 137,201 active editors? Oh, wait, they are all unpaid volunteers.

OK, who would pay the 1,149 administrators? Oh wait, they are all unpaid volunteers too.

OK, who would pay the developers? Oh, wait, the software was originally created by unpaid volunteers and it works well enough that having three developers evaluating bug fixes submitted by volunteers would be enough. There are plenty of Linux distributions and open-source projects that get by on one or two developers.

What about the 924,632,645 edits, 49,122,961 pages of all kinds and 5,978,255 articles? Oh wait, those are free to copy over along with the software that runs the encyclopedia.

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer"

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235)

</comment><comment><USER58> (2017)? It seems the original article dates to 2016, but was updated for 2017 and 2018. (The trend holds, which is why it's on HN frontpage today.)

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm a bit astonished how here on HackerNews there are articles all day about how sophisticated and surprisingly complicated and convoluted stuff like hosting, IT security, people management, scaling, updating etc is and yet it is somehow ultra suspicious that a page with massive growth had to _change in a non-lineary way_ over the course of two decades with rapidly changing culture...

Wow employing 300 people to keep up with a massively more popular internet on much more differentiated devices in times of information platforms manipulating national elections is not _exactly_ 300 times as expensive as employing one dude to do odd jobs around the house?! Must be mismanagement!!

Wow administrating a site which went from changing slowly to changing at inhumane pace and serving those pages with media formats which did not even existed at the beginning to a growing global population does not just include changing a checkbox on hostgator?! Must be scammers in their IT!!

I realize this comes off as very salty - I actually don't have much stake in this personally but I despise the pseudo intellectual criticism here in this otherwise very down-to-earth community.

PS: Comparing things to cancer is the Hitler-comparison of biology.

<comment><USER60> Page views have doubled since 2008, and decreased since 2015. This can't be about hosting.

[https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombine...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thought exercise: if the Wikimedia Foundation collapsed today and we had to build a new version of Wikipedia without their assistance, how much would it cost?

Data dumps of Wikipedia's databases, and the MediaWiki software itself are all Freely and publicly available[1], so none of that would have to be rebuilt; we'd only have to create a new organizational and operational infrastructure.

[1]: [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/)

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm sure WMF does some good stuff, but I'm sure the average donator just thinks they're donating to keep Wikipedia alive and online and has no idea about all of the extra stuff WMF does (and therefore needs money to fund). I'm not necessarily saying WMF's stuff isn't worth funding, but it really seems like they're tricking people into paying for it under the guise of keeping Wikipedia running.

</comment><comment><USER63> @elect_engineer: Well, as many here already pointed out, I do not see here cancer grows. The 16,000,000,000 page views per month is something really huge.

For some perspective, I run servers for a commercial company, and with such traffic, we would pay about $7,000,000 per year. But of course, we run on the latest and overprovisioned hardware for best performance and safety, and in reputable, but a very expensive company. In this scenario, $2M for hosting such a big infrastructure globally is not looking too bad. I assume that they need a lot of sysadmins to manage such big infrastructure (maybe 500-600 servers?), and those needs to be paid well. I won't be surprised that this would be much over $10M per year. Maybe this data is available somewhere, those are only my pure estimates.

Anyway, with revenue of $100M and $20M of excess every year, dramatic mails and notices I get from MediaWiki and Wales itself, how bad Wikipedia needs my donation, looks now a little disgusting for me...

</comment><comment><USER64> How to avoid the fundraising banners on Wikipedia:

Dismissing them by clicking the X works only momentarily. Here is how to keep them gone.

You have to have an account and be logged in. Go to Special:Preferences, click on the "Gadgets" tab, then tick the box next to the statement "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner."

</comment><comment><USER12> Hello. I am the author of the "Wikipedia has cancer" essay on Wikipedia. After I finish writing this I I will confirm this with a post to [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Mac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Guy_Macon#\[\[WP:CANCER\])] on Hacker news I read HN pretty much every day, even though I don't post very often.

I will be happy to discuss any aspect of my essay on Wikipedia, and I would especially be interested in correcting any errors that may have crept in.

<comment><USER65> What is the cancer exactly? I have a hard time buying that spending by itself is a cancer. Ignoring all the opinion commentary and looking at only the numbers in your essay, they seem to demonstrate exactly the opposite of your conclusion. The numbers are showing support and net assets are larger and growing faster than spending. Isn't that the definition of a healthy business? Spending increases are roughly linear for a decade, perhaps even slowing slightly based on your plot, but Wikipedia usage and value has grown as it becomes a global resource.

This just my take on it from a distance, I don't know the ins and outs of the foundation or the web site, but all the commentary in your essay seems to obsess hyperbolically on separating the absolute spending numbers from any context. I'm failing to see evidence of an actual problem based on what you wrote.

In a general sense, I can completely agree with the abstract idea that spending should have transparency and a budget, that's always a good idea.

Wikipedia seems to me like it's still dramatically overperforming given its expenditures, that its value currently outweighs its costs, when you compare it to healthy for-profit websites of the same size & usage. Could all the increased spending be a symptom of the fact that Wikipedia 10 years ago was undervalued and managing by miracles to survive on a shoestring, and now that it's enormous the costs are correcting to where they should be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This actually looks like a healthy, growing organization. You want your revenue to exceed expenses and have a bit of a nest egg to give you buffer for an uncertain future.

</comment><comment><USER67> I usually check ratings for a charity by reviewing it on Charity Navigator (which is itself a 501 (c) (3) and in need of donations as well). The rating for the Wikimedia Foundation happens to be really good: [https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...](https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11212)

I use Wikipedia for reference on various topics on a daily basis and I know my kids do it at school as well. Hence, I donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the approximate cost of my yearly Netflix subscription as they provide huge amounts of valuable information without any ads and to everyone without paywalls. There aren't very many free services on the web that run without ads.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

Charity Navigator is a fine organization, but they do have the flaw of having to take the charities word on what the core mission is. If the WMF says they need 350 employees -- or 350,000 employees -- to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that flying people to exotic locations for Wikimania meetings is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it. If the WMF says that building a search engine to compete with Google is needed to accomplish the core mission, Charity Navigator takes their word for it.

My position is that Wikipedia was accomplishing that core mission just fine in 2008. I was an active editor in 2008 and I did not notice any pressing needs that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that justifies us spending 23 three times as much money to do essentially the same job? I could see spending 5 times more, but 23?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> In 2019, with a budget of 100+M, if the WMF was really devoted to keeping wikipedia sustainably online, it would have found a way to store it in a P2P fashion.

</comment><comment><USER69> There's no need for Wikipedia to be a centralized entity. I do not want to send checks to some foundation. I want to run a node.

</comment><comment><USER70> Whit what's just happening with the .org sale, anything can happen, even a sell-off of wikipedia is on the table I guess...

</comment><comment><USER71> > In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language > editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest > website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks, > Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened > chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San > Fransisco.

No neat charts showing trends on these numbers? I'd want to see that comparison, at a bare minimum, before sounding alarms.

</comment><comment><USER72> The fact that wikipedia, the world encyclopedia, is centrally hosted is itself a problem. Wikipedia should be censorship resistant, borderless, distributed and resilient to disasters, similar to Bitcoin. So far it's none of those things, so it doesn't deserve my money. If I could contribute by hosting articles on my computer I would be more than happy to offer up a few gigs of harddrive space in exchange for access to the world knowledge bank

<comment><USER73> You can [https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable- wikipedia/](https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

<comment><USER72> Oh wow, this is awesome! Also looks like there is an active proposal for decentralizing wikipedia[1]. But IPFS seems to more or less offer a decent solution.

1\. [https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wik...](https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Distributed_Wikipedia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> It's a symptom of the centralized nature of the web. To serve everybody, you need a boatload of servers.

I recall hearing about this cool free editable encyclopedia in the early 2000's, but I could never get a single page to completely load. It was unusably slow. It's nice to think Wikipedia only needs $50K a year in operating expenses, but you can't reasonably develop and host a top-10 website on that.

<comment><USER75> The hosting expenses associated with the Wikimedia foundation are, according to their financial report [0], 2.3 million USD. Hosting their servers is actually their smallest expense item, other than "Special event expense, net". As a comparison, they spend 52.1 million on salaries, wages, awards, and grants.

I'd disagree with your statement that they could not reasonably develop and host a top-10 website with the amount of money that they're raising, and if they needed to, they could significantly cut down on expenses and still keep everything running.

[0] [https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual- report/fin...](https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual- report/financials-leadership/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FUser%3AGuy_Macon%2FWikipedia_has_Cancer)

</comment><comment><USER77> they are a tech giantt already. There's no difference

</comment><comment><USER78> Isn't this always the case with open source / "free" platforms? Loads of volunteers put the effort in, while someone somewhere has enormous financial benefits off of it?

</comment><comment><USER79> Guy Macros: Okay, good. What do you suggest doing now?

<comment><USER58> The article says that.

> If we want to avoid disaster, we need to start shrinking the cancer now, > before it is too late. We should make spending transparent, publish a > detailed account of what the money is being spent on and answer any > reasonable questions asking for more details. We should limit spending > increases to no more than inflation plus some percentage (adjusted for any > increases in page views), build up our endowment, and structure the > endowment so that the WMF cannot legally dip into the principal when times > get bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I honestly don't mind a world without Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER81> Year-over-year, "revenue" and "profitability", or at least the not-for-profit version thereof, have been increasing for Wikipedia.

Every company in the world is trying to be in that exact situation.

Economics is not biology. Stasis is very hard to maintain. Typically, a business is either growing, or it is declining. Our current problems tend to revolve around companies that are too big to fail, not companies that are too big to succeed.

I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.

<comment><USER82> >I would be much more concerned if Wikipedia's revenue and expenditures were flat over the past decade.

Why? The thing of value in wikipedia is the encyclopedia that was Built off of FREE LABOR by VOLUNTEERS. The increases in spending seem to be going to white collar office jobs that aren't actually necessary for The Wiki to exist and thrive. All wiki needs is servers. It shouldn't need to grow.

Wiki isn't a capitalist entity. It doesn't need to play by the rules of capital. And that it _is_ mirroring the pattern of capitalist companies is tremendously worrying for the future of the project.

<comment><USER12> Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer)

I think you hit the nail on the head. For a charity that is trying to feed starving children, they can always use more money as long as there are any starving children left. Same with most charities. But if a charity exists to but an encyclopedia on the web, they don't need to keep increasing their spending other than what is needed to cover any increases in the cost of running the servers plus a reasonable amount for support staff.

Related: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Frequently_asked_questions#Why_will_it_require_up_to_US$2.5_million_to_develop_a_movement_strategy)?</comment></comment></comment>