Big companies that use patents as a revenue stream (MSFT, IBM, etc.) typically bide their time and bring a patent lawsuit once a new company is established and there is blood to drain. It's the threat of such a lawsuit in the future that can negatively impact investment in a startup, as the right collection of patents could conceivably capture much of the economic surplus of a new venture. Alternatively, a big company might use the threat of a patent lawsuit, now or in the future, to push a young company to agree to an early acquisition.

The pledge doesn't seem to have much impact on these scenarios, even if a big company were to follow it rigorously.

Most of us, I believe, would prefer to see companies make a stronger commitment: "No first use of software patents" [period]. Google hasn't made this pledge, but to the best of my knowledge, they've acted in this way so far. It does seem in line with "don't be evil."

That said, I think I see what PG is going for here. He wants companies to make a pledge that, at a minimum, allows a new product or service to be tested on the market. That way, if it gathers traction, it will attract investment despite the threat of patents, and the new company will be able to mount a reasonable defense.

Perhaps more importantly, though, by allowing the product to succeed first, even in a modest way, it makes the offensive use of patents worse PR for the big company. Killing a successful product with patents is no longer an abstract issue. It takes away from customers and the market something very real.

I will quote myself from [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855835 ] here for another solution, one that actually can _easily_ go through government (except for the intense lobbying against it by whoever enjoys the current patent regime); you can read there for some discussion if it is interesting. Quoth myself (with minor editing):

Intellectual "Property Tax". Have everyone declare the value of their intellectual "property" (patents, copyrights, trademarks) - each and every item, for that year, on their tax return, and have them pay 1% of the value as "IP tax", per year.

Clarification: you can set a different value every year. The value may drop to zero because a competitor's patent solves the problem better; or it may go up because it becomes essential to something that becomes commonplace.

That amount is what one pays for a compulsory license or if successfully sued, and up to 3 times that for willful infringement, per year -- and no more. (But of course, a patent owner can always negotiate a lower payment, as is done with music recordings that have compulsory license agreements)

All of a sudden, everyone has an incentive to state a reasonable value for their patent. Copyright catalogs that are not being published (old music recordings, old books, old movies) would be assigned 0 value by copyright holder, to avoid tax - which means anyone can freely make a copy. If they believe -- at the end of the year -- that someone is making a profit at their expense, they can set the value as high as they want at the end of that year, pay the tax, and sue the profiteer.

Simple, elegant, and coffer filling.

edit: put missing link

edit: added clarification about setting value each year anew.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence companies with fewer than 25 employees are getting sued unless there's something left unspoken here.

I think it would be more constructive to begin the discussion of what patent reform should resemble so that companies and individuals can show support for it. Some kind of software patent working group that can put forward a vision that everyone can get behind. If enough people and companies come to support a way of thinking then it will slowly affect current behavior and ultimately shape the legal framework of the future.

Even if it was a problem that companies smaller than 25 were being sued for patent infringement, I'm not sure the legal litmus test should be how many employees are at the company.

A court might well hold a company to such a pledge, on a theory of "equitable estoppel." This type of defense to an infringement charge is always highly fact-specific; here's an example of a case in which the defense succeeded:

A patent owner accused a manufacturer of eyeglass frames---which it had previously sued for infringement---of infringing other patents. After back-and-forth correspondence---in which the manufacturer denied infringement---the patent owner went silent for three years. In the meantime, the eyeglass manufacturer expanded its marketing efforts for the products in question.

The trial court held that the manufacturer was not liable for infringement, on grounds that the patent owner's actions, in view of all the circumstances, had misled the manufacturer into thinking it would not be sued. The appeals court found no error in this holding [1]; it explained that:

"In the context of patent infringement, the three elements of equitable estoppel that must be established are:

(1) the patentee, through misleading conduct, led the alleged infringer to reasonably believe that the patentee did not intend to enforce its patent against the infringer;

(2) the alleged infringer relied on that conduct; and

(3) due to its reliance, the alleged infringer would be materially prejudiced if the patentee were permitted to proceed with its charge of infringement."

[1] Aspex Eyewear, Inc. v. Clariti Eyewear, Inc., 605 F. 3d 1305 (Fed. Cir. 2010) (affirming summary judgment in favor of accused infringer), http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/...

Paul, there is a major oversight here. The site http://thepatentpledge.org/ doesn't even have a contact form. Also, you may want to make the links nofollow.

PG: Red Hat, a multibillion dollar business, already has a working patent pledge - they won't use patents except defensively against people who attack them first. Copy that and use it.

"A clumsy parasite may occasionally kill the host, but that's not its goal"

This came up in a previous discussion on HN where I made essentially the same point. As someone pointed out in response, a parasite can get away with killing off the host as long as there's somewhere else to go next. In fact, a parasite could wipe out an entire species as long as it can make the jump to something more resilient.

it was just a short aside, but here's a link the the thread...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760148

Start a non-profit coalition with the following rules:

(1) All patent disputes between members will be resolved by binding arbitration. The arbiters are a panel of domain experts (not lawyers!). There is no presumption that an issued patent is valid.

(2) If a member of the coalition is sued by a non-member, the other members of the coalition make their entire portfolios available for a defensive countersuit. When a member's patent is used to defend another member, the former is compensated by the latter on terms set by arbitration.

(3) There is no restriction on using one's own patents to sue non-members.

It would also be stated policy, at least in the areas of software and business model patents, that the arbiters would be directed to apply a very high standard of obviousness, so that most issued patents would be of little use in an arbitrated dispute.

Could such a thing work? No voluntary system can address the patent troll problem, as trolls have nothing to gain by joining it. But for practicing entities, it seems to me that membership in such a coalition could be beneficial, by reducing the likely number and expense of patent disputes.

Does anyone have stats on who is doing the most damage to early companies? Given the press, it's easy to think that trolls are the biggest offenders by an order of magnitude. Is there data that suggests otherwise?

Since good programmers are a scarce resource if enough of us took this pledge it could really start having an effect.

For quantities you can count (windows, money, people...), the word is "fewer." For quantities you can't, the word is "less"

The pledge should read: No first use of software patents against companies with fewer than 25 people.

---

These companies have agreed to be the first to publicly renounce aggressive use of software patents on small companies. Please join them!

A Thinking Ape,
Airbnb,
Bump,
CarWoo,
DailyBooth,
Disqus,
DotCloud,
Greplin,
Hipmunk,
Justin.tv,
Loopt,
Songkick,
Stripe,
Weebly,
Wepay

----

I think the whole YC gang is going to promote this aggressively, which means a strong network effect. Remains to been seen what happens outside this network.

PG's solution, while elegant and functional for individuals, will fail for corporations.

We have a spirit-of-the-law in America with regards to being a citizen: you pay taxes and receive benefits of living here. Corporate persons are, one would imagine, also party to this spirit of the law, yet they not only ignore the spirit, they find ways around the tax laws on a regular basis.

Even if companies were forced to comply with this by law, they'd just find away around it. Sub-25 person shell companies making up large corporations. Who knows.

The fundamental problem is the same as with the rest of corporate personhood: we have given corporations the rights of individuals but they lack the implicit ethics and social peer pressures which result in moral behavior.

One where software engineers pledge not to participate in formal patent creation. Because ultimately, all of the software patents out there were 'authored' by a software engineer. You have to have the person that actually invented the new implementation on the document.

Sure, your employment contract says that any IP you create on your employer's dime is owned by your employer. And so, sure, they could go out and pursue a patent for some new implementation that you invent. But you can stand up and say no, that you won't participate in the 'patentization' of your work (ie the formal, legal work to obtain the patent).

And without your involvement, it would likely fail. It certainly makes a statement internally and externally, at least.

How does this work? Well, you can make that commitment - in writing and verbally - when you join a company. Or you could simply state as much, formerly, in an email to your boss and superiors tonight when you get home.

With the software engineering talent market what it is anyone but a dope-shit code monkey has the leverage to dictate terms.

This problem needs to be fixed at its root, with a different law.

The S. Ct. already had their big chance in Bilski to dial back software patentability, and they blew it. Our only hope is Congress. (/me shudders hopelessly)

And to anyone suggesting we abolish patents completely: they increase societal utility in many sectors, most notably pharmaceuticals.

[1] lawyers and trolls.

I see 2 problems currently.

1. Microsoft suing Android makers, and other similar examples, where large companies burn billions of dollars of our economy over something pointless.

2. Patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures and their shell companies suing startups.

How does this solve either of these problems? Who really needs this?

In the software industry, patents are unnecessary. Because whatever is patented, even if it is not obvious WHEN patented, it (or a variant of it that falls under the patent) nevertheless becomes OBVIOUS to lots of people a mere 3-4 years later. Therefore, we can easily explain how a 20-year monopoly has wound up HURTING the industry rather than helping it. Companies implement an invention WITHOUT rummaging through new patents that come out every year. It is obvious that most of the stuff implemented in the software industry was arrived at in a different way. Non-practicing entities can sue those who actually implemented the invention 3-4 years later. Meanwhile, those who implemented it, get hit with a suit.

Therefore, patents have now become a tax on innovation.

I repeat: the inventions were not obvious AT THE TIME THEY WERE PATENTED. And, those who ultimately implemented them DID NOT READ THE PATENTS in order to get the idea for the invention. Therefore the system is not serving its purpose.

Patents are an exchange between the inventor and the public. The inventor discloses how an invention works, and in return gets a monopoly for 20 years so that no one else can implement it.

In open source, the IMPLEMENTOR not only discloses a theoretical thing but actually builds it AND releases all the inner workings of it, AND others can build on top of it. So we get the upside with no monopoly. Why do we need the latter, then, if so much innovation happens without it?

I'm no lawyer - I have to ask the logical question - does publicly stating this pledge bust any opportunity to double back (i.e. it is more legally binding than just a pledge?)

I would propose to eliminate software patents, or limit their time frame to 2 years. The industry moves way too fast and 17 years is way too long. I know pg wrote that "if you are against software patents, you are against patents", but consider this: the 17 years are completely out of proportion to how quickly the software industry moves. And the pace at which they are submitted is simply too great for the patent office to do anything appropriate in most cases. When we apply the patent trade-off to it, you get a negative result, not a positive one.

The patent trade-off is essentially that the company discloses their "secret" invention to the public, in exchange for a 17 year MONOPOLY (enforced by the government) on so much as implementing this invention in any context.

In software, innovations such as "in-app purchases" or "one-click buying" may not be obvious in 1997, but a couple years later they become "incremental improvements" that are pretty obvious to everyone. In fact, OPENNESS (open source, especially on the web with HTML, CSS and Javascript) has been the biggest driver of innovation, and not patents. Clearly, there are other motivations besides having a monopoly, and those motivations don't need the patent system at all. In contrast, they are being stifled by the patent system.

No one read the lodsys patent in order to "invent" in-app purchases. They were just bloody obvious to implement when the time came. Almost any experienced practitioner in the art would have said it was obvious when they were introduced. Then Lodsys came out of the shadows and demanded money.

My point is that the very purpose of patents is being undermined. It is supposed to promote innovation, by letting companies feel safe disclosing their "trade secrets" and "secret inventions". In reality, though, these inventions are extremely obvious to everyone when they are introduced a couple years later, and all software patents accomplish is the downside of the compromise: namely, a patent troll (a company that never implements anything, but just files patents) actually comes out and leeches money from those who DO implement the innovation.

That makes innovation more expensive, and patents become like a tax on those who actually IMPLEMENT ideas -- which we all know is much more important than merely HAVING them. For up to 17 years anyone implementing this will have to pay, and is the industry better off? Not at all. It moves so fast, that in a couple years, what was patented by a troll becomes the next obvious step. Software patents for 17 years are not benefiting society.

This is not abuse. This is the purpose of a patent. It gives you the ability to be as shitty as you want and still be the only gig in town. Society says "wow you're terrible, but thanks for letting us all know how you did it!"

Patents are largely a problem of companies buying government. But what about the people?

You can require members of the trust to invest in the trust at level relative to market cap. Breaking the trust results in loss of the assets/cash invested. The trust can also fund a defense pool/lobbying budget to protect the interests of the trust. Namely that members outside of the trust cannot successfully litigate on patents the trust hase agreed are frivolous.

edit: obviously transparency, open membership and some high profile members are useful for such a plan.

It would be more interesting if someone with the necessary legal muscle could design an effective and legal "IP shelter" from the U.S. patent system . The structure would be some series of foreign companies/organizations that could claim immunity for internet products as they would be 'foreign' and therefore not infringing. There are obviously many legal and tax issues that make this difficult (PCT, not viable for physical products, etc). However, if it could be designed and then templatized, much like Series funding documents have become, then it would allow any startup, but especially ones that attempt to tackle traditionally hostile industries (MAFIAA), to exist in a 'safe haven' away from the utter nonsense that US intellectual property has become.

Even if it creates some $X burden on startups, I am sure that most startups would be willing to pay this expense if it takes the risk of an Armageddon-like legal suit out of their startup picture. It would also be a forcing function on the US legislature due to loss of prestige and possibly revenue (imagine if the next Google incorporates in Canada and only a subsidiary works in California due to patent concerns).

I applaud that move.

http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000214.htm

And, I think the intent would be served equally well by getting rid of the restriction to software patents.

[1] Although the small entity rules define a small company as a maximum of 500 employees, rather than 25.

Since this pledge would only address this issue of secondary importance, which seems a lot less salient to the public, I can't imagine it getting off the ground.

We need to change the whole system. Obtaining a patent should be a simple thing as buying a domain name
or product in the online store. Now, placing an order, we practically give it to the blind -
we do not know if already issued a patent for the same invention or is it the same invention is filed by someone.
We do not know this and therefore has a great chance that in six months we will
letter of refusal and then we just lose time. This is I'm think about. And, IP and Patents is a strongly related to my startup,
I'm will apply to YC W12.

2. There's a presupposition that small companies are somehow better then large companies. I can say that a company like Lodysys is likely under 25 people. You don't want to put yourself in a position where you have agreed not to be agressive with any company based on their size. Many of the Inc. 500 are under 25 people.

I'd rather see a simpler pledge.

> We will use our patens defensively, not offensively.
> (Optionally)
> We will license our patents only to others who will use them defensively.

"Look, you pack of fucking navel-gazing fucktards. Put down the fucking guns, agree to pool your resources to buy sufficient hookers and Caribbean vacations for Congresscritters to have the existing patent system tossed out the door. We get it that you all sort of started out accruing vast numbers of patents, some good, some bad, some absolutely fucking moronic, in no small part to fend off attacks from each other and from evil little patent trolls, but look at how it's complicating your lives. You couldn't roll out a steaming turd without someone somewhere trying to claim you infringed on a patent they own.

Apple, you're now one of the biggest companies around. If anyone can afford the required number of prostitutes, golf club memberships, or whatever it is those corrupted evil bastards in Congress have an appetite for. Google, come on, you could help out here, same with Samsung. Then you can, you know, compete on the quality of your products, rather than trying to stuff newspaper down each others throats in what can only be described as the bonfire of the idiots."

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/facebook-and-the-500-...

I'm not aware of any measurement method that any moderately smart rules lawyer (aka anyone who's played more than 5 hours of a strategy video game or pen and paper RPG) couldn't figure out a way around.

It's the companies that would make the pledge and break it or not even make the pledge at all that are the problem. Beyond a little peer/public pressure, this pledge does very little to address those companies.

My main concern is that the knowledge of a small company possibly infringing on IP (regardless of whether you feel patents exist or not) greatly disrupts the acquisition options by a larger company, as they would devalue the smaller company based on expected patent licensing/legal attacks.

On the flipside, if this can garner public pressure against the trolls-- and perhaps some real action in changing the laws, I think the world would be a better place.

Keep it up Y Combinator!

The problem is, the ones doing the suing (like blackboard which PG mentioned in a comment elsewhere) are the weaker companies with a lot to lose (as mentioned in "Are Software Patents Evil") who probably aren't attracting the best people to work for them anyway.

Here is why. Well let's say Microsoft marks its name into the current patent pledge because it's so green to be in the patent pledge even in its current form.

So now, it is the same as always, Microsoft will not be able to pursue ANY company which SEEMS to be a STARTUP at a given time from the point of view of the mass. Do you understand? Microsoft can't say: “Hey! Are you dumb? This company has 26 people so I can sue them. Don't troll me fools!” Hello the greenness… That's too late! The goal is to be green, nobody care about the strict truth. I think even a hype company with 500 people can be safe with the current patent pledge.

And probably it may even overtake the patent framework. It may be almost a "don't sue a startup" pledge.:d

You would, however, see Facebook sue startups for using the word "book" in their website name.

I wonder though if we could make the whole thing more effective by also adding an underlying threat to the pledge:

That any company, patent pledging or not, who violates the <25 rule will have their talent actively recruited away by those companies that have pledged.

I think until we see Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Apple on that list it wont be worth much.... and if we do see Apple on that list, would be believe them? and would they care if we didn't believe them?

Also, patent trolls that create patents for ideas they have, and are completely incapable of executing.

Software patents are crap.

Even if the road to a software patent-free world is a long one I think it's better to pursue that than compromise this way.

What if a company hires its 26th employee? Is that an invitation to litigate?

I commend Paul Graham on at least trying to contribute his ideas but I think we need to think more on this.

I get 'narrower' but what does 'but open source' mean here?

1. Escalating embarrassment of like.com could have soured their potential acquisitions and forced them to settle.
2. If lawyers hear about your problem, they might help you. If you had the ability to reach every lawyer, professor and law student in the country, you would find someone. (Maybe not someone great, but someone who can at least avoid a default judgment and keep you in the game for another couple of years, and possibly emerge victorious.)

n.b. You do not need, or, probably, want, a patent attorney to litigate a patent case. Patent attorneys do tedious stuff with the PTO, courtroom litigators convince judges and juries. Nor do you need a lawyer from your city or state. You could have some kid fresh out of law school in Alabama dialing in to Northern District of California judicial teleconferences and filing your motions electronically.

-- Former patent litigator who would have liked to help, if he'd heard about this

http://www.politicususa.com/en/att-democracy

My guess is that Boehner will announce a bill to "defund" it shortly. That seems to be their favorite way to control the executive currently.

As a very happy T-Mobile customer, I nearly punched my monitor when I saw the announcement that it was going to be consumed by the Death Star. I did not have faith that the justice department had the cajoles or the honesty to actually try and stop it. I still have little faith that the government will be able to stop it, given that Congress has dropped all pretense of being anything other than available to the highest bidder.

Exactly what AT&T will need to do I'm not sure. AT&T will probably be forced to sell any T-Mobile operations that overlap with AT&T's existing service just like in the Verizon-Alltel merger a couple years ago. Presumably this will be to small regional carriers so choice is preserved for people in those areas. AT&T will probably need to agree to some kind of consumer price protection at the very least to keep AT&T prices at current levels or lower for a number of years and protect existing T-Mobile customer contracts. AT&T might also have to sell or spin off its TV and home internet operations. The issue of ridiculous text messaging fees might come up, but nothing will be done about them.

Question: What can we do to support the government's efforts? Write our congressmen? Write the DoJ?

I don't get it, I thought this would happen if the deal went through. What is this $7 bn package in the event that the deal is blocked?

So now we know where Saddam Hussein's publicity man went.

So why are AT&T and their investment bankers pushing so hard for this deal? There is certainly an agency cost - the execs at AT&T want to do a deal and run a bigger company, and their lawyers and bankers want the deal to go ahead so they van get paid. However T-Mobile has to spend money on lawyers and bankers as well, and so some of that breakup fee will be used to pay them, as well as T-Mobile itself.

AT&T were banking on a compliant DOJ, and to be fair over the last decade there was very little push-back from any of the regulators. Since the GFC we would hope that they look over business dealing a bit more firmly, and this seems to be the case.

PBS have a very good article (video) on the topic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XquULysO1E

In Australia, NZ and the UK there is a Commerce Commission or Monopoles Regulator that can just say no to deals like this. It's sad that the DOJ has to do so via an expensive lawsuit. Your taxes at work.

Founders I've interviewed told me that the acquisition process plays head games with them and their people -- especially if it falls apart.

We'll see if they hold to it, or is just a sham only to be dropped after promises and payouts.

Need to switch to Verizon.

When T-mobile came to the US, I was under the (perhaps incorrect) impression that they licensed their towers from AT&T (then Cingular). But my impression is that they, by now, have their own towers which will extend AT&T's network. Surely folks realize that mergers are badly needed in the wireless industry - that they are the solution to many of most onerous problems with wireless service today - and that artificially dividing infrastructure, as the FCC did, is tremendously wasteful.

Thought someway somehow, ATT will get it's merger. They'll just spread more cash around.

Like TARP. Republican voted it down (for show). 4 days later they vote it up. At a cost of like $700 billion.

Business should be allowed to screw over customers as they see fit, customers can and must be allowed to walk away. And I can still walk away to join Sprint/Verizon.

Yes, neither of these companies may be offering me the best deal possible, but unless they are colluding, the government should not be involved.

The part of this that resonates with me isn't the mathematics. The math isn't very relevant because there's a really large unknown: the eventual value of the company. One percent could be a lot of money, or it could be nothing. There's also the matter of dilution: is he protected against dilution from investor and employee stock grants over the next N years? I would guess not. His 1% could be 0.2% or less by the time an exit happens.

What is obvious is the emotional undercurrent to this very common anti-pattern. It sounds like he's not a real co-founder, he's "just a coder". They seem to be trying to sell him on a rotten deal because they think it's just such a privilege to work on their golden idea that they don't need to compensate properly. He's going to bust his ass to make the code work, for a salary half of his market rate, and in return he gets a tiny sliver of the company that gives him no real control, on a 4-year vesting cycle. I'm sorry, but these two guys are not (after 4 years, after he's done some real work) worth 79 times what he is just because they had the connections to raise money.

Prospective employees tend to view equity grants in a pre-employment context, when a 1% share seems extremely generous because the employee hasn't done anything yet. But that's what vesting's for! Vesting allows companies to compensate based on future contributions, with the knowledge that if the employee quits or is fired before the 4-year period is up, they won't have to pay for all 4 years of work.

At the least, if still thinks it's an "exciting" opportunity worth pursuing, he should recognize that he probably can't value the company better than the market, that we are in frothy times, and that the equity is worth more to an investor than to him (different risk profiles). So the value of 1% (post-money) of a $2.5 million company is $25,000 at most. That's $6,250 per year, far less than what he's giving up.

The first employee of a startup is not necessarily getting screwed. If that employee gets appropriate respect for his skill set, and reasonable compensation for the risks inherent in a startup, then it's a fair trade. A lot of people go into startups as early employees knowing the risks and upsides and that's fine.

What he should do if he actually wants to work on the startup: First, he needs to value his contribution to the company over the next 4 years appropriately and put a number on his "sweat equity". Let's say his market salary is $100,000 and he's being paid $50,000. Now add to his base salary: benefits (15% for health insurance, 401k matching), job-loss risk (25%, since typical severance offers are 1/4 tenure at current salary), career risk and opportunity cost (15%), and overage hours (30%, assuming a 50-55 hour work week). That's $185,000 per year. Take that, less the $50,000 he's making, and his sweat equity is $135,000 per year. Over 4 years, that's $540,000. The company's valuation is $2.5 million, "pre" to his contributions. He should be getting about 16% of the company, assuming he remains for 4 years. This number seems high, but if he's there after 4 years he will have been there almost as long as the founders, so it's about right.

First action: he needs to ask for 20% and settle for no less than 12%. If they say, "but you haven't done anything yet", he should point out that the equity grant is subject to vesting and that he won't get anything if he doesn't do any work.

Second action: he needs to demand the right to listen in on investor and client meetings. Otherwise, the other two founders will hold all the power in the organization because they, and they alone, hold that special knowledge of what investors want. If they think he's "just a coder", they'll show it by saying (in effect) that no, he's not "good enough" to be in the investor meetings.

The most likely outcome of his making these two demands is that they'll tell him to get lost. If that's the outcome, it's also the best outcome because it means the startup's a tarpit.

Next door, there are another three guys, eating ramen, etc etc.

Now, it seems to me like the three guys behind Door #1 are very similar to the three guys behind Door #2. However, in one case they're all co-founders, and in one case they are two co-founders and a first employee. Those are very, very different statuses for the third guy. The third co-founder gets mentioned in press hits about the company. The third co-founder can call himself a co-founder, a status of value in an industry (and society) which is sometimes obsessed with status. The third co-founder cannot get excised from the cap table without that being mentioned as a subplot in the eventual movie.

The first employee will not usually get mentioned. The first employee gets no social status of particular esteem. The first employee will not have a seat at the table -- literally or figuratively -- when the eventual disposition of the first employee's equity is decided. The first employee's equity stake is approximately 1/6 to 1/40th (or less!) of what the third co-founder's was. Well, theoretically. 0.5% is 1/40th of 20% in engineering math, not in investor math, because investors can change the laws of mathematics retroactively. 0.5% of millions of dollars is sometimes nothing at all. (This is one of the least obvious and most important things I have learned from HN.)

If you're good enough to be a first employee, you're probably epsilon away from being good enough to be a third co-founder. There may be good reasons to prefer being an employee... but think darn hard before you make that decision.

• Employee given 1%

• Two additional funding rounds at 30% dillution each bring that to 0.49%

• In a $30 million exit the employee will get $147,000

• Probability of an exit at $30m of 10% (somewhat generous, but let's assume that the company has already raised an angel round and that's being used as a filter)

• So the adjusted value, including probability of failure, of those options is just $14,700

You can adjust the math to fit the startup at hand, but it's generally a reasonable formula for evaluating the value of options vs. salary. In general if you want to join a startup as a first employee you should either push for a larger slice, a near-industry-standard salary or do it for the experience (say, if you're interested in starting a startup of your own down the line).

I'd expect a startup that was only able to raise money at $2m pre to be giving the first employee way more than 1%. How much more depends on how good he is (a factor that's not even considered in this article). Someone as good as the founders could reasonably expect 15%.

"Taking a pay cut that is more than the market value of your equity stake? You are probably getting screwed."

Years of effort . . . startup bought . . . eventually wound up with 17 shares of Oracle.

I'm not bitter. It was a fun ride, I learned a lot, and after an initial pay cut (when I first joined, and funding was tight) I got paid a decent salary.

I was once in this exact position. I was the first employee and over the next few years a bunch of senior managers came in and each got 5-10x the stock I'd gotten.

When the whole thing got old, I looked around and saw that I didn't have much upside potential (especially since there had been dilution), my salary was below market, and I left.

What was incredible looking back is that something similar happened with a truly key engineer... someone who was recruited out of a university because he had more or less built the text mining library the company was using by himself. A product line rested on his shoulders, so he had a ton of responsibility, but when things got rough he didn't have enough reason to stick around.

Added: The point is, there are good times and bad times in startups. In the good times you should look around and decide who you really need to stick around in the bad times and give out stock accordingly.

I was fortunate enough to be an early engineer at LinkedIn after I graduated college. I was one of the first few engineers hired. I'm not an amazing company picker, and I barely knew what a startup was at the time -- I just got lucky because I knew one of the cofounders.

I received a decent option grant (especially for a kid just out of college!) and stayed at the company for two years. My options got diluted approximately 50% during the various funding rounds. Right now, LinkedIn is a top 20 website in the world, and there's a consensus that its current stock price is "very optimistic". My net worth on paper ends up being a couple of million. Needless to say, I'm thrilled. However, I also want to point out that there are only twenty "top 20 websites", and most of them aren't going to change anytime soon. So if you're one of the first few engineers at one of the 10-20 companies that's going to go from nothing to huge in the next 5-10 years, then you can view a few million -- perhaps 10-20 million -- as being the best that you can expect. And there are literally a few dozen, or maybe 100 people that will get this kind of success every decade. There is little skill involved here. It's all about getting lucky.

Furthermore, people forget that it takes time for value to build. It might take you 4 years to get most of your stock options and decide you want a more stable job or a change of scenery, but it might take another 10 years for your company to go public or get sold. You're giving up a big chunk of your 20s for the potential of a few million in your mid-late 30s -- but you could probably save close to that much anyway with good spending habits and better paying jobs.

So if you want to be an early employee at a start-up, it's an awesome experience. But you should do it because you love it, because you're passionate about the product, or because you cherish the learning opportunity. You shouldn't do it because you think it will make you a gazillionaire.

(just to be clear, I did love my time at LinkedIn -- I made some great friends, learned a ton, understood that startups are the kind of places that I like to work at, etc. I'm really happy I was there, and would be even if the company hadn't become a big success)

1. Route from employee #1 to v. senior position (with commensurately higher salary) is shorter* irrespective of whether the employee stays with the startup or moves on. (*Shorter than if the employee was working as a small cog elsewhere), and thus there is a fairly strong "jam tomorrow" argument that can be made.

2. Route from employee #1 to owning your own funded startup is again shorter. As employee #1, if you do a good job, then you'll be considered a de facto founder, and thus will have that to add to your pitch when it is your turn to try and raise $500k.

A third factor is that money is not everything. Working for a startup can be awesome, and might give you a whole range of professional and life experiences that you would not get when sucking down at your $100k pa teat.

There's so many things in life where party A gets away with soaking party B because B didn't perform some simple arithmetic.

Sure, you can go work at ________ (big company paying fresh developers $120k+), but you're going to be pigeonholed into working on a small aspect of the product/company.

If you join a promising small startup, you're going to learn about all aspects of business, startups, selling, marketing, fundraising, etc. These skills will be extremely helpful to you throughout the rest of your career, especially if you plan to start your own company someday.

Investors bring contacts from their immediate and extended network, sometimes a strong brand (think SV Angel/ YC), mentorship, experts in the given field, and media attention.

Co-Founder:
- Starts the compamy, has the idea/initial impl
- Takes risk, may work for a while with zero salary, investing personal time for nothing.
- May wind up getting ZERO (total) for the investment.
- Company does not get paid, co-found does not get paid.
- Big potential payout
- Health benefits? Post funding, or from other job while building startup.

Investor:
- Puts money into company.
- May lose everything, that money is just going to the founders for some food and servers or something of that nature.
- Payout depends on investment size. However lets say compared to co-founder, small payout.
- Minimal invested personal effort compared to co-founder.
- Invested time assisting the company and connecting the company to personal contacts to help it grow.
- Provides advice when needed (hopefully)

First Coder:
- Gets paid less than average coder
- Gets potential payout less than investor
- Gets paid or laid off. There is no in-between. May agree to not get paid this month and instead get paid later in hopes of assisting the business during a tough month.
- Has to be pretty close to the business since it's so volatile, so will see the lay-off coming.
- Probably coming in with benefits provided to employee.

As you can see risks/benefits are quite different for everyone. So its not just "you are getting screwed".

I think that getting a very small % is actually practical depending on how far along the company is. The question is about how much risk is being taken, and how much is being contributed.
A smart co-founder will see the contribution of a very valuable employee and offer more % to that employee especially if they are so critical to the company. Its not about employee #1 its about the fact that during the early phases, each individual person has the ability to make big things for the company, and they should be rewarded for those big things. Keeping life static is quite boring and no incentive. Yet having incentives for employees transforming the business early on is quite good.

Did Facebook become successfully because they went cheap with hiring VP of engineering early in their game? (answer not: they recruited the top)

Yes, you can get lucky and build a successful company by hiring people which are fresh from college for less than market and dream about being rich.

The point is the following: DONT HIRE BAD DEVELOPERS.

Unfortunately, good developers are good in math and they were around so they will not go with salary cut + questionable equity stake. Yes you can get lucky but there are so many other unknowns when you run a business and you should limit unknowns to the minimum.

1st company: acquired
2nd: ipo
3rd: bankrupt
4th: acquired

Net value of all option shares : 0

Meaning, in toto, my strike price x shares is almost exactly what they ended up being worth. The net present value of an option is the strike price. Even the private options market is pretty efficient. Whereas a lottery ticket might have a net present value of only 60%, so these are pretty good lottery tickets. But that is essentially all they are.

I've lately met people tryng to get onto the boat as if all we worked for was air. If I take someone more in for more than a good salary he/she better be a unshaped diamond.

Of course, the article mentions 50% of normal salary for 1% - that is just so stupid. The people who wants to signed up on that cannot be unshaped diamonds.

It is hard to find employees/co-founders that (a) have the right skills, (b) the right interests, (c) the right industry knowledge/contacts, and (d) are in the same place in their life to make the same amount of commitments.

And even when you do you find such people, it is hard to give them 10% equity in the beginning and then tell them that they are under-performing, and only deserves 2.5% equity.

Now, I agree, that the definition of under-performing is very different for a startup compared to a more established company. I have also found people are willing to accept when they are under-performing, but contracts and equity that is given is harder to change.

However, I would love to have the right cofounder, and even share the equivalent equity with him if he can take over half my burden.

Perhaps the answer is to find people with a very good fit, start them with low equity (~1%), and tell them how they can get more equity. And then doubling equity multiple times as they are able to rise to a founder level responsibility.

There are some solutions, but they are not trivial. The employee actually buys a convertible debt in the company on the similar terms as angel investor and can cash out on later rounds.

1% may or may not be less. We definitely need deeper analysis here.

As to stock, I prefer shares to options from both sides of the transaction.

Finally, FASB 123 doesn't cover contractors or other non-employees - worth keeping in mind.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for...

The investor with 50k in hand now vs the 100K per year employee willing to work for 50k. The Investor wins. With the 50K the start up can hire the 100k per year employee for 50k. If thing do not work out you can fire them and hire another one.

The money is less risky giving it a higher value, plus its all upfront which has already been discussed.

The number of people ready to invest $500k, for whom this is "a small part of his capital," is about 1/1000th of the number of people who will enjoy working and learning in a small, exciting company, and having more input into the product, regardless of total potential for financial gain. So, the value of $500k in cash from an accredited investor is already worth more than the time investment of the average employee, for whom there are replacements lining up. [Edit] This is to say nothing of the additional value that an investor adds.

Even if that were not the case, and this were strictly a math exercise, the investor is putting in $500k NOW. You're putting in $50k spread out over the next 365 days, during which a solid company's valuation may go up by ten fold. Right now, your $50k is worth 1% of the company. But you're not putting in $50k NOW. You're putting in $0 NOW. You're putting in $136 tomorrow, and $136 the next day. Good luck making an early stage investment in an exciting startup for $136. I have never seen early stage stock available on lay away.

Ask the secretaries at Microsoft or Google if they got ripped off. This is a joke.

In 2009, I remember reading a resignation later by a guy who made his "F* you money" betting for a housing collapse. He blasted the big banks, ivy leaguers, and old boys network.

I bought complex derivatives (SRS, SKF) but lost betting against the market.

I read http://calculatedriskblog.com for a while and educated myself about the macro factors in the markets.

Through "calculated risk", I learned of Jim the Realtor http://www.bubbleinfo.com/ who videos (vacant) casualties of the housing collapse. Seeing it made it real for me.

Over time, I've realized that the further from reality that decisions are being made, the more likely we are to make destructive decisions.

When soldiers kill people with drone aircraft in video game-like conditions, it removes the reality from something that would be extremely traumatizing when done with bare hands.

In our wonderfully complex world, we sow complexity, and reap disaster. Im not sure what the answer is, but there is something terribly wrong when destruction is more profitable than creation.

</shameless-plug>

  91363785902248291467082481888195

11..22 would be to search for all integers between 11 and 22.

The effect is that the search is too broad. The problem is more likely to be that the range search is a mapreduce that performs a search for each item in the range.

You can imagine why that's a bad idea, and some aggressive timeouts are probably what stop it from going too far.

Plus the numbers in the range of the OP search are likely to fall in the ranges of sensitive numbers, credit cards being the most sensitive... which are likely to be explicitly blocked.

It was around the time that johnny's google hacking page became popular, iirc. (http://www.hackersforcharity.org/ghdb/)

Also remember how you used to be able to search for anything up to the 1000th item (10 pages of 100 results). Not anymore for a long time now. Google sucks it all in but won't share and play nice with others.

Why not allow such searches unless a bot is detected (too many pages too quickly, etc.)

This does look like a string that could very much be generated by some poorly coded webbapp. An incorrect usage of a floating point number can easily generate such output. If it occurs on a critical part of an application it could very well been used as a dork. Just an hypothesis though.

Back in 2005 google tricks were at their peak. Many hackers experimented with search phrases in order to retrieve interesting/valuable/uncommon/dangerous?/sensitive info from the web. "index of/ .mp3" "apache server at port" being the absolute classic.

More and more people started to jump in the bandwagon, webmasters gradually became more aware of this, and google too. The natural reaction was google honeypot.

http://ghh.sourceforge.net/

But it wasn't too long until google started to remove such features. These days one can hardly search for symbols on google. They the old tricks, most of them will not work, google simply ignores the details and returns a list of results based on the actual words contained in the query. It's becoming a QA machine. That's one of the reasons I switched to duckduckgo.

For a proper reading on the subject check ou the vast website of the, now deceased, great hacker Fravia:
http://www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later.

  1111111..11111111111111111111111
  11111111..1111111111111111111111
  111111..111111 // minimum case

Pretty similar URL format eh?

Asshole consultant inside of me kept nodding early on: "You just don't get it, Sebastian! Charge more!"

You see, there's a very sad truth consultants learn early on: it doesn't matter how much you know that can help somebody. All that matters is how much influence you can have.

The reason some consultants charge ten times what others do for the same information? It's not that they are ten times as smart; it's that they don't want to waste their life giving great advice to people who aren't going to value it. If you walk in the door at 10K per day, bet your bottom dollar people are going to listen to you. And that means you can help. Walk in the same door for free, just to help out a friend? Your advice, by definition, is worthless. You'd be lucky getting them to accept just a tiny piece of advice.

But then I got to the key of the piece: when you do finally "get it", it changes your relationship with "normal" folks.

I think Sebastian's being a bit over-dramatic here, but I firmly agree. There is something very crazy about making money from thin air. Especially how it's done today, with some keystrokes and a bunch of virtual magic. At least in the old days if you met a millionaire he could take you down to his factory or something. Maybe told you about all the hard work he's done.

Nowadays the same type of guy made much more money that than that and there's not even an office. For most people, it just doesn't compute. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that to most people, there's something just wrong about making money the way it's made today on the net. Something shady. If you're lucky you get the "odd weirdo" label. If you're unlucky you attract attention from people you would rather not.

Because of that, I think I'm giving up on the $40Mil dream. I'm happy just to make enough to free up my time to work on things I love doing. I'll let the other guys be the really extreme weirdos. :)

Short side story: I sold a piece of land a year or so ago. It wasn't much, but it was in the tens of thousands of dollars. The guy who bought it paid cash. He was a contractor. Over the past decade he had been saving here and there, scrimping up enough in cash to make his dream come true. He kept it all in hundred-dollar bills in a large ziplock bag. It wouldn't have been my choice but it worked for him.

As he paid me, he told me he had gotten stopped for a bad taillight by the police a few months back. Once they saw his money that he had been saving, he had a hell of a time convincing them he wasn't a drug dealer. While I understand that carrying large amounts of cash is suspicious, to hear him tell it the police went far beyond suspicious and started thinking there was definitely something wrong going on. You see, to those small-town cops, you just don't carry that amount of money around. Somebody who looked like that should not have the amount of money like this. Just having the money was an indication of something really bad, even if it could all be explained.

He almost lost all of it.

You can only stand out so much -- the forces of society will gently (or not so gently) pull you back into line. You either have to conform or move to some place where the definition of "normal" is different.

I know very successful people who are miserable, stressed-out workaholics. And I know very successful people who could have been one of the people strolling around Sebastian when he was writing this post. I know people who run startups from their home office and take their kids to school in the morning. Hell, look at Sebastian's own situation: he apparently has enough time to sit and pontificate for a couple hours on a train platform in Japan, in the middle of the day. He can't be working THAT hard :) Maybe what he's trying to say is that you can't have the idyllic suburban family life if you want to float around the world living off of random consulting gigs? But there are probably quite a few very successful people here on HN that live relatively idyllic family lives in cities and suburbs all over the world.

I think the idea of feeling isolated for being very ambitious is true, but I would caution Sebastian and others against the idea that you have to sacrifice your connection to a community, your face-to-face relationships, your health, and your overall happiness on the alter of amassing $40m for an amorphous purpose like being able to build a shrine with 5% of your wealth or less. You certainly can sacrifice all those things, but most people will never amass $40m no matter what they sacrifice. Better to find something (and someone) that you love, work hard at it, and enjoy life. Yes, you should take chances, yes you should push yourself and be ambitious. But this is the only life you get; don't squander it living a life you don't enjoy because you're hoping for the big payoff down the road. It probably won't come.

Also, being a bit of a skeptic and contrarian, perhaps some of these people had other good reasons to say no to his plans. Without knowing their point of view, more about his proposals, and other particulars, maybe their inaction was sensible.

As someone who has also floated around a lot, even through Japan, it's an interesting lifestyle but sort of the opposite of how to get rich.

My vote for the most important bug is as follows.

It looks as though human brains were architected to think in two modes: "near" mode and "far" mode. The reason for this is that early human tribes had important rules that directly impacted survival and reproduction (for example, "don't take more than your share of the food", "don't sleep with another man's wife"). It was critical for us to tell others that we were going to uphold these rules or we would get kicked out of the tribe. At the same, time our genetic fitness would increase massively if we could find a way to covertly break those rules while still upholding them verbally (more food and more descendents for successful rule breakers).

The upshot of this is that even if something looks good when processed using far mode it's not necessarily easy to translate it into near mode where it actually gets done.

In my view, this is an explanatory factor for procrastination as well. For example, the popular Google Chrome extension Chrome Nanny (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gpdgmmdbbbchchonpf...) requires the user to enter 64 random alphanumeric characters before visiting a distracting site--which moves the idea of visiting this site from near mode (where it might actually happen) to far mode (where it won't).

For more on near and far modes you can read http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/near-far-summary.html. Note that novel tasks and desirable risky acts are both associated with far mode.

Meanwhile I will upvote this article and bookmark it.

I like to think about his main point of "people won't understand you" a little differently. Humans were originally pack animals, and it shows. You are nothing without your pack, but together the pack is strong. Modern life isn't nearly so simplistic, but we still have our packs, albeit a little more nuanced. The place we work. The neighborhood we live in. Our family. Our friends (who are probably drawn from work, neighborhood, and family).

Doing what Sebastian does seems to be a lonely path. You get to be the alpha, but only of a pack of one. I get this feeling when seeing a lot of executives interviewed - men and women who are supposedly at the helm of enormous packs, but in practice seem a lot more alone than one might imagine.

I wish I could remember who said this; I think it was M. Scott Peck, but I can't find the reference: we are attached to our own mental model of ourselves. So attached that we will fight to maintain that model even if it's useless or actively harmful.

An example: have you ever noticed that if someone's depressed, complimenting them doesn't work? Have you noticed that you yourself feel awkward when others compliment you? That might seem obvious, but only because you've absorbed it through repeated exposure. Think about it: why in the world would someone saying good things about you feel uncomfortable? Shouldn't it be basically the best thing you can get?

The answer is that when you're thinking "I'm average looking at best" and someone says "you're beautiful!" it's like someone just tried to rip your left brain from your right. How can you possibly reconcile these two things? You have to either destroy your own sense of self or reject the person's compliment.

I suspect that in this case what looks like fear that the world will misunderstand you is actually fear that you misunderstand yourself. Jumping head-first into a crazy idea isn't just changing what you do; it's changing who you are, and that's goddamn terrifying.

Think about his friend, the one who's big goal is financial independence. It's his primary first-order objective, and he's being shown a plan to pursue it. He's not afraid to pursue it because he thinks it's going to cause him to be less understood (at least one of his friends, Sebastian, will probably relate to him more). He just flinches at the thought of really going after what he wants.

The million dollar question is the right one: why do people get anxious and self-sabotage when a path to success is put in front of them?

Unfortunately I think the answer is that most people have a lot of psychological conflicts around being happy/getting what they want. Why this happens is probably some complicated mixture of neurology of and pain acquired in childhood, and how to fix the problem is one of the central aims of psychology and psychiatry. The behavior Sebastian describes in his friend is a great example of one's ability to function being impaired by his psychology.

Hopefully we'll get even better at fixing these sort of problems, but in the mean time, hopefully more people will understand that these problems aren't inherent to living life, that there's no sad tradeoff to going after the life you want, and thus be comfortable seeking treatment. You don't have to be crazy to pursue psychological help, you just have to notice that your feelings sometimes get in the way of you functioning the way you want to.

And like that, the fear was gone. I'm now one month into my project, and I'm crushing it. Never been happier.

But the more you do, the further away you get from being understood, from the joys of normal life, from being understood by your neighbors and backing each other up and living together harmoniously.

I cried for the first time in three years when I realized it.

The million dollar question… why don't people take the large opportunities in front of them? Why don't they allow their dreams to become realities?

Become it means you won't be understood. And we need to be understood, fundamentally, it's so important to us.

Wow.

Reading from beginning to end, I found the last paragraph powerfully moving. (Skipping to the end won't work - that last short para builds on everything before.)

"It's like everyone fantasizes about… whatever… but once their fantasies start to become reality, they piss their pants and self-sabotage."

If you help someone achieve a goal, they will owe you some of their success, lessening their own merit.

On the opposite, as this story shows, the intrinsic motivation can make you do stuff that you thought impossible: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/04/moving-boat.html

So maybe to help people achieve their dream, you have to tell them that it can't be done, that it's impossible.

This would be a truly altruistic way to help people, since you can't claim any part of their success in that case. All they will tell you will be "I told you it can be done!".

Sebastian is suggesting x10 higher wages for his clients. This is a financial breakthrough in the life of the client. It creates enormous amount of stress. The stress pushes you back, for a less stressful zone.

I say this because I was there, and I'm sure I'll be there again. I see this differently than the OP. I don't think that people don't understand you, especially when they are smart. The simple fact of thinking of it generate stress and they hide from hard/stressful situation.

Reading the OP I was actually a bit put off by what seems like vague braggadocio, but then I turned it around on myself - maybe that's me suffering from the same illusion as a mask for my own jealousy?

Ouch. I know he's just day-dreaming there, and his point is that she is a "normal" person. But why define her success in terms of being a "wife for someone"? She could -already- be an incredibly successful, independent person living life on her own terms, making her own rules.

And for all we know, she may be just as alienated from normalcy as the author. Sorry to nitpick but this hit home for me.

What type of work does he do* and where can I meet/read more people like him?

He strikes me as a kind of mentor...something which I find is lacking in the IT industry. Mentors don't always need to be the smartest person in the room, they just need to have experience and patience to see the things that you are blind to.

* He says he's a strategist, but that's awfully vague.

Sometimes people just want a simple life. Making a lot of money or working less hours does not mean your life will be better or more enjoyable.

I am curious. Does the fear of not fitting in outweigh the benefits of financial freedom?

I dont know the answer to this question since I have never been in that situation, so I thought I would ask.

This guy is clearly so full of it on so many levels. All hat, no cattle.

A prolix.

Douchebag.

Technically, one could argue that they already violate existing laws, but incidents like these will make absolutely sure that these practices will be explicitly outlawed very soon.

It keeps surprising me how companies like Facebook and Google seem to be oblivious to the way privacy is perceived elsewhere, and are actively provoking stricter legislation than would be the case if they showed some respect. There is absolutely no question about these tracking practices being perceived as ethically unacceptable in many countries, so why provoke both negative publicity and legislation that is likely to handicap less intrusive solutions as well?

It's standard that widget publishers require to use their widget "as is". That's basically what Facebook is saying. Not only do you not know what any custom modifications will necessarily do but it's a completely valid argument that you want a consistent user experience with your widget.

As for user tracking, this is basically an inevitable byproduct of Facebook hosting the widget, a situation I'm sure they're not unhappy about, but this really isn't a big deal in the context of how the Web works.

The story here (IMHO) is trust. Most pages have a Google Analytics tracking script on them. Do you trust Google? I do (disclaimer: I work for Google). Protecting user data and privacy are key priorities here. It's why Google+ has relatively simple privacy controls and allows you to export your data at any time.

Do you trust Facebook? I don't. Then again, there aren't many companies I do trust. But Facebook's track record seems to be to befuddle the user and trick or opt them into sharing things wider than they understand or want.

    ||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
    ||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
    ||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
    ||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

  If it hadn't occurred to you yet that Facebook cares far
  more about the "Like" buttons that you don't click than
  about the ones that you do -- there you go.

Besides, this solution with the two clicks is very clever, and privacy friendly. In addition, it speeds up page loading. It speaks for itself that the only measure Facebook has is trying to sue with a very broadly formulated policy, which I doubt applies in this case anyways:

  if such use could confuse users into thinking that the
  reference is to Facebook features or functionality.

Firstly, what if they just don't want to confuse users? I see people confused all the time of when you need to click and when you need to double-click, every time I see someone using the computer �" I'm sure I do this myself, too. What does allowing someone to introduce uncertainty as to what's required here do, especially when their click-through buttons look just like Facebook's normal ones on other sites? I'd say it'd just confuse people. I don't have an issue with Facebook doing that, I'd actually rather have them enforce, this, so you know what is going on when you see a standard Like button.

(As a few other comments have noted, just replacing the button with a custom-styled one would solve this issue. It'd also solve user confusion, since it no longer appears to be Facebook requiring a double click.)

So, maybe they're not just after destroying privacy, after all? Maybe?

(I don't work for Facebook, or even know anyone who does. I just like to try and see both sides of something like this.)

I'm never clicking a facebook like button again until I can turn off user website tracking.

But that was my half-thought-through answer. Of course they're perfectly able to track me even without being logged in.[0] So the real answer is I need to be sure I'm not loading cross-site img and iframes... My Omniweb install I'd already configured to do that, but setting up proper privacy countermeasures on my Firefox install just jumped way up the priority list.

[0] http://panopticlick.eff.org/

The default setting ought to be that connections to 3rd party sites are done in incognito mode. This would disallow tracking by looking up the referer and sites like Facebook couldn't also tell who's login cookies the browser is storing. You could then whitelist connections on a per-site basis.

My point is that to make such widgets illegal, widgets that service three consenting parties, is completely retarded.

https://github.com/hayeah/FaceOff

The world is not some cute friendly little place. It is equally as barbarous today as it was in the dark ages. The TVs have convinced everyone otherwise it seems. Evil people are using machines to take over the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9RiRfMYVlQ&feature=chann...

When using the browser that is logged in, I get 15 "+1"s for google like-like button. however, when using the other browser that's not logged in, I get 0 "+1"s.

Can anyone explain?

Actually, I had other problems with them, and what they did is just plainly banned my application and blocked my website from using facebook API.

There, problem solved.

If your startup isn't social and free, it isn't hip. If you don't have a Facebook page and seven shades of "Like" buttons, you are destroying your business. Just stop.

Stop putting that social media flare (crap) on your website. Your users don't care, because sharing a link is not an unsolved problem.

First, they are a SOCIAL network, this data helps them figure out the engagement level with different brands that participate on the Facebook social platform. Second, in this case, the use of 2-click solution creates a disconnect with the expected behavior of the Facebook Like widget which means users going across different sites will not know whether they need to make one or two clicks to enable a "Like". Third, when you don't use the Facebook Like widget, you don't get any insight into your connections with your social graph unless you click on the Like button which defeats the purpose of being able to see that "4 of your friends like this".

There are real privacy concerns that we should consider but I'm tired of reading EU Privacy office statements that show a lack of understanding of how the web works and without regard to the impact to the monetization ecosystem which is the lifeblood of many web publishers. What bothers me more is that there's a lack of consideration that there are legitimate reasons a certain level of data is collected in order to make the web more social.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is resigning as editor of the popular technology blog, and will run a $20 million venture-capital fund backed by TechCrunch-owner AOL Inc. and several venture-capital firms.

Mr. Arrington "will run the fund and will continue to write for TechCrunch, but will have no editorial oversight," said an AOL spokesman. Erick Schonfeld, who has served as co-editor in New York, will become interim editor while AOL searches for a replacement for Mr. Arrington, the spokesman said. AOL purchased the site last year.

Mr. Arrington's new fund, called CrunchFund, closed Thursday with $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter. AOL leads the limited-partner group, which includes a long roster of venture firms that kicked in $1 million each: Austin Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Several individuals contributed money, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; general partners at Benchmark Capital; angel investors Ron Conway and Kevin Rose; and Yuri Milner of Russian firm DST Global.

It isn't immediately clear what is the fate of AOL's venture-capital arm, AOL Ventures, which has made recent seed investments in start-ups such as spam-defense company Impermium and price-tracking service Shopobot.

Mr. Arrington's partner in the fund is Patrick Gallagher, who has been a partner at VantagePoint Capital Partners since 2008.

Mr. Arrington wasn't immediately available for comment. He posted a message on Twitter after news of the fund broke: "slow news day."

Mr. Arrington, a former lawyer who is known to be well connected in Silicon Valley, started TechCrunch in 2005. The site built up a following for its coverage of young tech companies.

Long an angel investor himself, Mr. Arrington announced on TechCrunch in 2009 that he would stop making investments in start-ups due to a perceived conflict as both publisher and investor. It's "a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility," he wrote at the time.

But in April this year, after AOL acquired TechCrunch, Mr. Arrington announced he was investing in start-ups again, while also becoming a limited partner in venture funds Benchmark Capital and SoftTechVC.

Mr. Arrington has often said that transparency and full disclosure keep things above-board when his blog writes about companies he has some financial stake in.

I've got a draft article I was writing for my blog arguing that Arrington should resign because his conflicts of interest make his role as editor of TC untenable.

Among other reasons I was arguing that Arrington has to disclaim his investment in any article about a competing firm, however since his investment in SV Angels he's now invested in a number of firms which are in stealth mode, which means in practical terms that it's impossible for him to meet his obligations.

So even if the fund had a different name, and Arrington doesn't work for AOL directly, there is still a conflict of interest. As Paul Carr said in his article, are TC journalists likely to write a really negative piece on a CrunchFund company knowing that Tim Armstrong ultimately runs both?

Would the Wall Street Journal or the New Times start an investment fund and invest in the exact companies they are reporting on? IMHO they would not, as they realise their core business's need for independence.

If AOL want to follow through on their strategy "AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media." they need to realise that they are a media business and so need to follow the same rules basic rules for good journalism as every one else in their industry.

IMHO this is a very poor decision by Armstrong. For another glamorous dabble in the VC world where he will probably make about 10% ($2M) per annum, he could be betting the entire AOL business.

Not much upside and a whooooole lotta downside = bad trade.

So we begin another journey. I fully intend to stay with AOL for a very, very long time. And the entire team has big incentives to stay on board for at least three years.

However, I rather hope Michael's "dream" comes true instead: http://peterc.org/blog/2011/381-michael-arringtons-dreams-of... ;-)

http://www.whenwillmichaelquit.com/

Companies have a fiscal responsibility to deliver as much money as possible to their shareholders, do they not? So if AOL is giving Arrington a few million dollars, that's money AOL shareholders are not seeing; it's only justifiable if AOL thinks Arrington will use the money to outperform the market (otherwise just invest in the market or return to shareholders) or there will be some friends-with-benefits deal worth millions to make up for Arrington's lack of edge. Neither one seems all that likely.

He can be polarizing, but his journalism and analysis have always seemed spot on to me.

From this, it sounds like Jenkins is automatically picking up new topic branches, running the tests, and reporting on the results. Any suggestions on how to set something like this up? In my (very limited) experience with Hudson/Jenkins, this sounds like it wouldn't be possible without manually setting up a project for each branch.

I think the most important thing to note from either method, though, is not to develop on master/trunk. Have a separate branch, or further branches off an entire "develop" branch. The tip of master should always be a stable build.

    hubot deploy github/ghost-down to production

There have been some articles recently on the downsides of feature branching that my experience agrees with (http://continuousdelivery.com/2011/07/on-dvcs-continuous-int...). I'm curious if the GitHub people have hit the same issues.

So if 2 people are working on the same feature, they're probably working off the same named branch.

Are there any race conditions with merging to master? I'm assuming that only one head is allowed in master, correct? So that before a pull request is accepted and merged into master, the latest master must first be merged into the feature branch and have CI run all tests successfully on it before the pull request can go. Does GitHub stop you from merging into master if someone else just merged into master and you're about to create a new head?

Then you have to merge the latest master into your feature branch, run CI on it again and then merge to master after CI is successful (assuming someone else didn't beat you to merging to master again).

(I've got a lot more experience with Mercurial than Git so my mental model could be a little off)

"For teams that have to do formal releases on a longer term interval (a few weeks to a few months between releases), and be able to do hot-fixes and maintenance branches and other things that arise from shipping so infrequently, git-flow makes sense and I would highly advocate it's use.

For teams that have set up a culture of shipping, who push to production every day, who are constantly testing and deploying, I would advocate picking something simpler like GitHub Flow."

So if you fall in the second category, this is a read for you.

In the weeks before a new site is launched, we work to our own feature branches and merge into master when a feature is complete. In the run up to the site launch, when there's just CSS tweaks and the odd bug fix, people start working on directly master and deploying straight to staging servers.

When a site has been launched we normally keep working just on master, though occasionally creating feature branches for bigger changes.

This seems to work well for us as our DVCS needs change over time. I'd be interested to hear how other web agencies manage the different stages of developing clients' websites.

How do they manage deployment to staging? At my company we typically deploy topic branches directly to staging, but we have fewer developers and slower pace. If multiple people need to deploy topic branches we set up an ephemeral staging branch that merges the multiple topic branches together, but I can imagine that getting super hairy on a team the size of GitHub's.

Do they just mostly deploy directly to production, thus severely minimizing staging contention?

Anyone know of ideas for doing code reviews for the whole pull request, commit, or a single line like GitHub? This is probably the most beneficial part for us.

For example, you can serve a dynamic map of Washington DC on a website using TileStream and TileMap, but if you wanted to also view Fairfax, VA or Baltimore, MD, you're out of luck unless the tileset includes those tiles. With Google Maps, you always have access to all the tiles.

That's not to say that TileMill isn't a great product. The choice to use CSS is brilliant. Plus they're based in Washington DC, where I'm currently living! Nice to see tech outside of the Bay Area, NYC and Boston.

[1] http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2010/05/add-touch-of...

[2] http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...

[3] http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-great-s...

    apt-add-repository ppa:developmentseed/mapbox
    apt-add-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
    apt-get update
    apt-get install tilemill

I use and enjoy GitHub, so this definitely isn't a personal gripe, I'd just like to see the competition in that space heat up a bit, and there'd be bonus points if we could simultaneously promote a completely open platform.

btw stevejobs uploaded Windows 8 source code in 2009! Bill, you might want to give Steve a call. ;)

On the other hand, he might very well spark some interesting things just by committing small stubs of his ideas.

TL/DR: I've never used GTK before, I know my code sucks, but my little divelog program is better than anything else I could find, and if someone wants to fix my code they are welcome to do so.

I put binaries up at http://patraulea.com/diveclog/diveclog-win32-110904.zip

Here's how I think blogging should work:

1. Visit a web app where you create your blog post, add pictures, use your rich text editor, that sort of thing.

2. Click the "Publish" button, which generates static HTML and runs any other processing like tag generation or pngcrush.

3. Your static HTML gets pushed out to some server that does the hosting for you. It could even be one of those really cheap shared hosting providers.

If you really want comments, let someone like Disqus or Intense Debate handle it. Pretty much any dynamic feature you need can be outsourced.

    1. Use caching.
    2. Use Nginx.
    3. Use PHP-FPM.

* Whenever anything is updated the entire cache is invalidated and each item needs to be fetched again. This means you'll have some page loads being slow and others being fast. If you have a very dynamic website you will hardly ever even see a cached version.

* You can't cache things forever, primarily because when anything is updated the entire version namespace is invalidated. This means that if you have a site that isn't updated at all in a long time then the cache is still invalidated by the TTL and has to be updated. Of course, if you decide to cache forever and the version namespace is incremented then...

* You never know when your cache is full. Since the method of updating the cache isn't to invalidate keys but rather to just fill it with new keys, you will have a lot of stale data. This data will eventually have to get evicted from the cache. This means you don't reliably know when you need to upgrade your cache memory.

All that said. Version namespacing your cache is better than not caching at all and it's usually also better than having a lot of stale data as active keys. If you want to do proper cache invalidation in case you have a highly dynamic site then it's still possible, but it requires a lot more work, there's a reason for this famous quote: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

This is purely speculation, but I would be interested to see if there is any actual research to back it up.

I suppose if the guest in this instance is not swapping very often, then this is fairly irrelevant, but the article didn't mention anything about swap.

[Edit: This is 100 qps. It's a lot for a blog, but is not an unreasonable load by any means.]

We were recently paying a small fortune for hosting one of our websites. It was bumping up against memory limits even after a serious code rework and aggressive caching. Instead of upgrading we decided to test a new config using Nginx.

Now we run three sites, one fairly popular, on a 512Mb Linode with Nginx, APC, FPM, Varnish and a CDN, and it can take an amazing amount of load. Varnish needs memory, but without Varnish we could run this setup on a box a fraction of the size.

This plan costs $19/month! I still can't believe we're paying so little.

Instead of focussing just on the server though, and like the TumbleDry article somewhat suggests, HTTP cache is probably the best place to start in terms of performance. Varnish, CDNs, etc all rely on intelligent HTTP caching. And if you do it right, you don't need to worry (too often) about cache invalidation.

What I'm really looking forward to is making use of ESI in Symfony2 and Varnish. That will mean setting different cache headers for portions of pages, which will further reduce the need to manually invalidate cache.

For now though, I'm loving Nginx + FPM + APC.

- Movable type

- Drupal + boost

- Wordpress + SuperCache

- Jekyll or other static website generators

Better if Nginx is serving those static files, LAMP can be behind creating the static files.

I used that way with Drupal+boost for a lot of time and worked.

Note: This is a variation of a previous comment I made, but a variation nonetheless. Sorry to belabor the point.

http://blitz.io/

> Internal Server Error

I suppose it's somewhat natural, given the way the market works, but it seems our tools for consumption are advancing at a significantly greater rate than our tools for production.

I guess the opposing side is the Web. Amazon seems to be shaping up to be solidly on the side of the centralized authority-type cathedral builders, while the Web and Web technologies are more bazaar-like. It seems more and more like Google is the only powerful singular force whose incentives align with the Web instead of with more centralized production hubs.

I played with a Nook a few weeks ago, and almost bought one. $249 is nearly an impulse purchase price point. But, I already had a netbook, a Kindle, a laptop, a Nexus One (which broke a few days ago, to be replaced by a Sensation), a desktop, and a DS, so I talked myself out of it.

One of the big reasons is because I wouldn't be able to get rid of my existing Kindle. The Kindle has a killer feature, which I can't replicate: International 3G Internet for free. It's a piss poor excuse for a web browser, but when I'm out of the country, I can google "wifi hotspot city-name" and find a place to connect my netbook or laptop and get some work done. This is a miracle for someone that travels as much as I do.

The battery life is also spectacular. Since I travel in a motorhome, and sometimes go days without plugging in, the ability to read books without having to think about charging my ebook reader is awesome.

So, the two really awesome things about the current Kindle that I have, are not present in the Android Kindle. Also, the fact that they've forked Android hard makes me more than a little hesitant to consider it. My new phone is only a slight divergence from standard Android, and I find it annoying as hell...I'll probably be rooting it and putting a more standard Android on it when I have more free time. The notion of a total fork without a standard Market and all the Google apps (Maps is my lifeline when travelling), and possibly without some of the other apps I rely on, is just crazy. It's hard to imagine such a thing not sucking.

In short, it sounds like I'll be better served by a Nook, should I decide to buy a little ebook/tablet. At least it is readily converted to a standard Android device. Or, maybe I'll just wait out the next round of tablets...or, maybe I'll just not buy a tablet. I still have yet to figure out what I'd use one for. They seem to be highly focused consumption devices, and I do enough consumption as it is.

I can see why Amazon has gone down this path, but I do wonder if it's the right thing, rather than doing everyone's favorite/most hated carrier-specific bolt-ons instead. I also hope that Amazon doesn't give up on color e-ink, because reading on a Kindle is so much nicer.

Overall, the UI of this Kindle felt very responsive. You can flick through the carousel seamlessly. This is something Amazon has apparently been working on quite a bit, I'm told. And they continue to.

If Amazon gets this right, they're a long way towards recreating the iPad UX. In fact, this entire article suggests that the Kindle tablet will be the first widely adopted non-iPad tablet. In addition to the above:

1. The interface sounds great. I am a humongous fan of the Kindle Cloud Reader and iOS interfaces, and I believe they're designed very well. Users can expect a well-designed tablet from Amazon.

2. Users can draw from a central source for their content. Amazon will provide all the movies, music, and books you need--something every other Android tablet has lacked so far. Mainstream users will appreciate the centralized content provision, especially from a company as respected as Amazon.

3. Cutting the Android Market solves a lot of potential issues: no spyware, no OS incompatibilities, no apps with large hardware requirements. Everything in the Amazon Appstore will work on this Kindle (I expect it to be a requirement for admission).

This tablet sounds very...Apple-like. A very closed ecosystem with access to interesting content and a curated app store. I would buy it if I was shopping for a tablet.

(1) $250 with free Prime? Buying one for sure, maybe two.

(2) No camera? Ugg. At least a front facing camera for Skype pls, I'll pay extra.

(3) November, meh I was hoping late September.

(4) Eclair fork? That has to be wrong lots of optimizations made in Froyo which has been available for over a year.

(5) Maybe this provided some additional incentive for Google to withhold Honeycomb source?

(6) MG Siegler continues to break character and occasionally commit actual journalism. Would love to see this trend continue.

a $250 7" tablet with a top class browser is a hugely compelling product all by itself.

Putting a skin on Android and not shipping it with Google apps is NOT a fork. Even if you want to consider it one in a technical definition, it's not a significant one. It's as much a fork of Android as CyanogenMod is. (CM does not come with Google Apps, though they can be added after-the-fact).

This is disappointing. The Kindle 2 (the model I had) did one thing, and one thing phenomenally well. I don't want my kindle to be a Swiss army knife.

If the forked-OS stuff is true, this feels like a bad move by Amazon.

10 hour battery life, not going to fit in at the beach, nor the less safe parts of the city? Nah, I'll go for the current Kindle instead thanks :)

- free 3G (yes, free), to buy amazon books

- black and white E-Ink which is much closer to paper than colour displays.

- much lighter and slimmer (241grams; 8.5oz)

- long battery life (2 months - about x60 longer than a tablet), though this probably overshoots the need. i.e. they'd be better off using a smaller battery (or even AA batteries).

I'm so impressed with the Kindle because it resists trying to be the best at everything, but instead makes comprises that optimize it for its purpose. Whereas the Android tablet described here is much worse on all fronts and half-hearted as Android: neither fish nor fowl.

Free Prime memebership (for life?) is interesting. Amazon has a big content catalog, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense for them to go this alone and not be forced to use Google's shit app store.

Overall, I think they'll have trouble differentiating between them and the iPad and them and the nook Color, and it doesn't seem like they've really brought anything new to the table.

MG goes on to say it is smooth and responsive. And I think many Apps are going to be incompatible with anything less than Android 2.2. Given this I would think Amazon will want to have at least 2.2 on there.

Would be kinda sad if they ran 1.6 on it in 2011!

[Edit] May be it is 2.1 - AWS SDK for Android Requires Android 2.1 (API Level 7) or higher. Oh well may be they will keep it up to date!

I like to read books and I was a theoretical fan of e-ink readers, but I never owned one. My younger brother, on the other hand, was against them: "why buy the device that only reads books?" On a recent trip to the countryside he borrowed a (PocketBook 301 plus) reader from a friend and put it in the tent's pocket together with a phone, iPod and other such stuff. In the morning, he found that the screen failed because it had a tiny crack. Maybe someone accidentally kicked it or something, but modern phones, iPod and such withstand abuse rather well, and this thing broke after one night - it even was in its own leather case that covers the screen! Googling revealed that cracking screen is a common issue.

I start to suspect that those e-ink screen are a flawed technology as they are. There might be a reason Sony makes their readers with a metallic case, but do they last even then?

Looks like this will validate that. Now, if only webOS could chime in and make this an interesting battle. That would be special.

1. First come tablets

2. Then tablets gets a stand (so you dont have to hold them all the time)

3. Then tablets gets a keyboard (so you can type quickly)

4. Then tablets gets a mouse like device (so you dont have to touch the screen while on the stand)

5. Then they run (your favorite distro of) linux

6. Then they become keyboard-less more portable laptops

7. Then we call them notebooks

1) easily flashable with an actual Android ROM (a la Nook/cyanogen)

2) got a 3G data connection, similar to the current 3G kindle

If both are true, it's a really compelling device.

However, it's not going to win in the way people expect it to; I think it'll bring a lot of people into the post-PC tablet world and introduce a cheap tablet to a lot of people, but it's not going to revolutionize anything major and won't be able to do anything the iPad and/or TouchPad can't do.

1. 47% of the top 1,000 web sites include google-analytics.com

2. 69% include a remotely loaded web analytics solution

3. 97% load something remotely

If you can attack any of these you get access to a very large number of web sites and can inject arbitrary code. Clearly forging the SSL certificate for SSL loaded remote JavaScript is one way in, another is an attack on the DNS of non-securely loaded remote JavaScript.

At the time techcrunch.com loaded 18 different JavaScript elements remotely. Attacking one would allow a complete site takeover using JavaScript. And those 18 elements could easily have been loading other elements so that attack could have been done through a third-party.

A quick survey in the UK shows that the banks HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland all load third-party JavaScript on the secure page used for online banking login. Barclays look like they are not, but in fact the domain they are using for one piece of JavaScript is a CNAME for a third-party.

Then, the only resource loaded form Google's servers is http://ssl.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif, and that's just loaded via a new Image(), so even if you MITM that resource request, it doesn't execute as a script or anything similar.

Diginotar haven't (AFAIK) released even a partial list of affected domains, other than admitting that there were quite a lot of them.

You have to weigh up the pros and cons I agree. However, do you need that like button which works by including javascript from facebook.com, or can you live without it? Even better, can you do something alternative which allows you to have a like button, but without including third party script?

Moxie Marlinspike pointed out that it was his script 'sslsniff' that the hackers downloaded to carry out the attack. They didn't even change IPs from the one they used to download 'sslsniff' to the one used in the attack. The lesson: this could have been carried out by a script kiddie.

The head of security companies implying that hacking attacks must be caused by a state actor, simply because they don't understand the attack, creates a frightful prospect for the future of world security. Take these claims with a grain of salt. So long for 'sophisticated state actors'.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA

I don't understand - if you are uncomfortable loading the GA javascript into your pages when users are using https to visit your site, why are you ok with loading the GA JS when visitors are using http?

Or is it implied in here that the analytics is used on http only pages because the sensitive pages on your site are https only? In other words, you are only using GA on non-sensitive portions of your site?

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/deleting-diginotar-ca-ce...

but I think they just pushed new minor versions with them removed anyway.

As per my understanding the browser simply trusts all certificates issued by a trusted issuing authority, so how would you revoke a single certificate?

So sure if they could reroute the request to their servers evil things could be done. But they can NOT. Or am i missing something ?

This is not an anonymous argument. If you were sitting next to me, I'd be, right now, arguing that you should not publish this article because it will only cause harm overall.

What's next? "Why terrorists are stupid and what they should do to cause maximum damage"? How will you feel when the Iranian government does implement your kind suggestion?

This guy is not necessary a troll, of course this is just speculation, but if a project he was working on for a few years got cancelled, I could pretty well understand his frustration, even if the decision to cancel turned out valid in the end from a business point of view. I don't think it is valid to stick labels on people (both on the "troll" and on Steve Jobs) without knowing the whole story.

Should you develop web, desktop, or mobile apps for your next startup? Watch the video. Find a problem, then pick the technology stack that provides the best solution and experience for your customers.

I know one of the early engineers who wrote the low-level software for that device. He was one of the more arrogant engineers I've known and basically dismissed the iPad because it didn't have enough "power." When he showed me the Kno tablet, I said "I couldn't even fit that thing in my backpack, let alone on any desk. You're never going to sell this thing to people." He insisted that power was more important.

And it turns out he was wrong because he was thinking like an engineer. Kno scrapped that idea and decided to build exclusively for the iPad. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/kno-bails-hardware-30-milli.... Good on them.

And for what it's worth, the market seems to have proven Steve right. Nowadays, we can see some of Apple's competitors resorting to "different" in an attempt to gain traction. Doesn't seem to be working for them, either.

This is a lesson Microsoft needs and has never really learned, neither under Gates nor Ballmer. The bizarre approach in Windows 8 that has all kinds of UI doing the same thing with no clarity around development platform sounds exactly like what Jobs talks about with people going in 18 different directions.

This is such a common idea in business strategy that I have a hard time believing that most large companies don't, at least at the top, understand it. However, it also seems like a principal that is very hard to stay focused on as a product or service flows down throughout the company. There has to be a very good reason why this strategy flows through Apple's veins, yet gets lost in the mix of many of its competitors.

What a great insight, it's really striking a chord with me right now.

Here's to one of the greatest capitalist visionaries of our lifetime though. In jean patches no less.

I will read through the App Engine docs every day or so to figure out what cool thing I can make out of the APIs provided. Maybe I should forget that and just think to myself 'what would I want to use?'.

It also underscores the importance of being able to translate tech "pieces" into compelling products. I'm an app developer. When reading documentation for the latest release of iOS or Lion SDKs, and seeing all of the new APIs, I feel like a kid with a brand-new box of Legos. The challenge (and art) is in combining these technologies to build something actually catchy.

I believe the (inaudible) part is "embodied in OpenDoc".

I consider it an interesting and spot-on question with, in fact, a very nice answer, too.

Someone who can't deal with questions like that probably should never dream of becoming CEO of any company at all.

People who go their own way may well become leaders, simply because to go your own way you have to be decisive, and most people are indecisive, and in times of uncertainty they will look to people who are decisive to take the lead.

But that doesn't mean that the qualities listed are leadership qualities. I'd say that the ability to understand and empathise with people, to figure out what they want, the ability to motivate others to do their best, the ability to communicate convincingly, and the ability to make decisions under pressure - all those are way more important than the ones listed in the quote.

Of the list of leadership qualities:

> courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly

I'd argue that only the last one is really a requirement for leadership. All the others make for a better leader, but they are not requirements.

If you aren't leading people, you aren't a leader. It's right in the name. If you're going your own direction, alone, you're a pioneer. But not a leader.

When I started playing with computers in elementary and middle school, it helped me put aside some of the trivial things that were important to my peer group at the time, like wearing the right brands or being seen with the right people. Technology was about making a better world, sharpening useful skills, and attacking hard problems that used to be impossible to solve.

The connection between people that technology has brought over the last couple decades is awesome for a great many reasons. I doubt I need to defend that point.

The biggest downside though, for me, is the invasion of the messiness of the social world into the idealism of the tech world. It bothers me when I go to an event that is ostensibly a "hackathon" or some similarly maker-oriented affair, and the mood is not unlike high school, or hollywood, or a nightclub. Many of the people there are paying acute attention to signals of status from others, and working on sending the right signals of status themselves.

It is my impression that motivations like elevating one's social status, and fear of missing out, are the primary things bringing most people into the world of technology today.

Improving the world, solving hard problems, and making things seem to be lower on the list. I'm sure communities focusing on these things are still thriving, but they seem to be getting harder to find, because the status seekers can be pretty good at adopting the lingo of the idealists.

I look at what people had created and in between the thoughts of "this is cool", "this is boring", and "why didn't anyone think of this before?", there's a sense of inspiration that someone has created something and people are using it now. (I also get something similar to NIH, but I've learned through the years to mostly ignore that.)

I get a lot of joy in using software to allow people to do something new, something better than they had done before, or just to make their everyday life a little bit easier.

Just because lots more folks know about valuations and are connected does not mean that they are not building stuff.

This holier than thou post by Caterina actually just sounds like nostalgic rambling.

Let's get excited and make things.

This line, from the perspective she delivers it, is almost criminal. Most of us are nerds and have no problem building stuff. We do have a problem making money off it so kudos if we are building a little less and figuring out more about how to make money by charging or flipping(Caterina should know about this?)

As someone starting down the entrepreneurial path I have found that it's easy to get caught up reading the countless startup news sources, scouring endless books on how to succeed or attending the large number of conferences pitched at people like me. All have their merit in moderation but, particularly as someone who has decided to bootstrap my current startup, I find I get the most done and feel the best about what I'm doing when I focus on what my startup is building and how we're building it, rather than getting caught up in "all that noise".

In writing it down here it seems pretty obvious that focusing on what you're building should be the priority but it can be surprisingly easy to lose focus.

I don't think they get it. The landscape has changed and I'm not going back.

I don't have cable. I don't have satelite. I don't have an antenna for broadcast TV. I have the Internet serving content to my TV via my Xbox, and I use it to watch Netflix.

If your content isn't available on Netflix. I'm not consuming your content. Period.

I'm done bending over backwards. I'm done with schedules. I'm done with managing the space on my DVR. I'm done keeping up with new episodes and seasons. I'm done with movie theaters full of loud other people who aren't me, and the litany of other issues that have been discussed to death from overpriced tickets, to concessions, to 3D projector woes and content. I'm done with physical media getting scratched. Hell, I'm even done with sketchy torrent sites, and different scene groups fighting over who gets to release what, and a billion codecs and formats. I'm done with it. I'm done.

So frankly, good bye and good riddance to Starz. Go climb this hill and die upon it. I never liked the fact that their schizophrenic content releases would appear during a timed window, only to disappear from my list later before I actually got a chance to watch it. I grew to avoid movies labeled with the Starz logo, and my heart would sink when a feature would open with one, because I knew the experience was fleeting and I wouldn't be able to enjoy the content later. So I'm done with that too.

The options Starz (and every other premium cable provider) have right now are these:

1. Get that content online, now, in a convenient form that is cost competitive with Netflix and Hulu or at least Amazon Video on Demand.

Or:

2. Stagnate and eventually die, because the subscriber base for pay cable is going to do just that. Only old people are going to have cable in two or three years.

There are no other options. Without Netflix or Hulu, if Starz doesn't have the ability to launch their own effective pay service online, they will never see any of my money (they probably wouldn't anyway; as others have mentioned, Starz videos tended to be ones I avoided due to quality problems). I have never had cable in my life...but I pay to consume premium content online. I have both Netflix and Hulu+ accounts, and I spend an average of $10 a month on movie rentals and purchases at Amazon. I'm a new customer; an entirely new revenue stream. I didn't cancel cable to use Netflix. I used Netflix because it was the only way I was going to watch TV and movies at home. I'm where their growth could come from, and they don't want it.

Fact is, $8/month for Netflix is all I can justify and I justify that largely based on TV reruns than movies. Add in Hulu (not Plus) and that's my limit.

Given all that if I could just get HBO Go without subscribing to cable, I'd gladly fork over maybe even $20/month. As it stands, I can't justify spending >$100/month for the "privilege" so I guess I have to continue relying on, well, other sources.

Reed Hastings replies:

"Because we've licensed so much other great content, Starz content is now down to about 8% of domestic Netflix subscribers' viewing. As we add a huge more content in Q4, we expect Starz content to naturally drift down to 5-6% of domestic viewing in Q1. We are confident we can take the money we had earmarked for Starz renewal next year, and spend it with other content providers to maintain or even improve the Netflix experience."

Re-upping would only antagonize their existing content partners who they also have to renegotiate contracts with. Plus it is probably killing their subscriptions on traditional outlets ("Starz? Oh, no thanks, that's the one I get on Netflix"). At least this way they can turn off the spigot and entice people to subscribe before Netflix is primarily cord-cutters anyway.

As for the way forward, licensing to Netflix is not exactly a forward-looking move -- Starz just a licensing middleman in this arrangement and they know it. They need to control a branded and coherent channel, not be a movie broker.

Starz was valuable because of their mainstream movie content. Despite comments about bittorrent, the major value of Starz on Netflix is about 8-year-old girls being able to watch Tangled on an Xbox 360 (again and again...). It has been huge for rounding out Netflix's pitch as an alternative to rental.

But to hear Reed talk about it, he probably was negotiating with the expectation that they'd be parting ways (how could they fix the Sony thing?) and so Netflix may not have been offering as much as last time anyway. I don't think the negotiations failing caught either side flat-footed.

I think these companies can focus better on their revenue when they're separated. Netflix will have to overpay to get their first big chunk of studio newish-releases, but that's okay. They'll have some different stuff and get creative and I bet we'll like the result.

Starz can figure out how to sell themselves to consumers without chopping themselves up. How? Well, every current Apple TV has 8GB of flash memory and Apple has put an App Store on every other platform they own, so you can see where that's going. And Google has gone double-or-nothing on Google TV for that reason. It sure seems like the Apple TV is the cable box of the future. Is Starz well-positioned to become a subscription service on the Apple TV? Sure. But maybe not if people can go next door to the Netflix app and get Starz movies there too.

Seems like the right thing is happening here. I like where this is going.

He won't be familiar with linear television schedules, or the idea of running home in time for a show. To him, our TV will be the place where he chooses what to watch, when he wants to watch it.

What these stupid studio executives don't understand is their grandchildren will be doing the same thing. Whether they like it or not.

Pirating is not the burning platform here like it was for music. Netflix is not iTunes. Content providers still have the option to make plenty of money through cable and they're going to do just that until that medium becomes completely disrupted and they no longer have that as a lucrative channel. Starz sees Netflix streaming as cannibalizing their cable business, and to a reasonably large extent they're probably right b/c Netflix streaming has gone mainstream. The day will come when cable will no longer support Starz (and others') content and they know it's coming. Until then, sad to say but this is just smart business.

Two weeks ago, my son and I were watching LOTR and had to pause for some travel. When we got back, I was puzzled that I couldn't find a way to get it back on to finish...turns out their contract expired.

How is this OK for a company in this day and age? I'm tired of giving Netflix a pass because the content partners aren't playing fair. I'm sorry, but that's your business model, and now that you put the competition out of business, I need you to perform and not act like a 10 day old startup.

Screw both TV and video. If this is how it's going to be, I'm out. I'll stick to This Week in Startups, 5by5, and my book collection.

Oh wait, their network is pretty much irrelevant to me, I have watched a few of their movies on netflix and I like Torchwood (although parts of this season have sucked) and Spartacus. Other that I honestly couldn't care less and I won't be spending a dime on their second rate premium channel.

When does their deal with Disney and Sony expire? Can't imagine they would go with starz over netflix.

If there was a standard way of getting video from the producer to the consumer then producers could either go through middle-men (like Netflix) or host the videos themselves, and it wouldn't matter at all to the viewer.

I want to sit in front of my TV (or iPad, or laptop), choose some video from the biggest menu in the history of mankind, and watch it. I have no interest in who produced it, or who shipped me the bits. And I shouldn't have to have.

s/subscribe to Netflix/download from bittorrent

The level of disconnect is shocking, however I doubt the Netflix guys are sweating it. No one is going cancel instant content for $8/mo based on Starz backing out.

So, I don't really care if Netflix loses this. I hope it lets them be more aggressive at doing new deals to get movies.

What I do have though is HBO. I pay for it in my cable bill, but they also let me stream 100% of their content using HBO GO. I admit HBO GO has a long way to go and isn't the online video store, but for quality shows to stream it is hard to beat.

This seems like a big blow for netflix; I thought the streaming material was consistently getting better, this will make it worse.

As consumers, we need to wage war against cable companies by not subscribing. Unfortunately, this is difficult to do considering quality sports programming is dominantly viewed via cable and the like.

Offer a web-based, a la carte service. All content is presented just like Netflix in a VOD package. Users sign up for an account and are given the option to pick out which networks they want to receive content from. Any network can be dropped/added whenever the user wants.

Worried about costs? Tier the service out: $29.99 a month gets you 10 networks, $49.99 gets you 20, and so on so forth. No real change to what's taking place now aside from customers being happy and being allowed to access content whenever they want, wherever they want.

Oh, and let's not forget the social layer that would fit beautifully on top of this. Allow users to easily post episodes/networks to Facebook/Twitter/etc. Facilitate a conversation between people watching a show. Each show page has a comments section where fans can discuss what they just watched/are watching.

Just the beginning of ideas for this. If you want to keep discussing (hint: I'd love to), shoot me an email: ryan@getconduit.com.

I think an unintended consequence of this is that Netflix ends up making more money.

How about "Because all Sony films disappeared from Starz, Starz content is now down to about 8% of domestic Netflix subscribers' viewing." That would be more honest

That might create tons of new opportunities network content bundles or al a carte show seasons, and mute the furor over the digital-only switch. For $15/mo. you might be able to get Netflix Streaming + Starz + Breaking Bad.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110901-715069.html

@bittermang : true, going back is painful and networks & cable operators are probably aware of this. But, as wsj puts it - investors of netflix are scared that its expenditure on the content deals will overtake their revenue and with netflix threatening the existence of so many network companies, netflix soon has to create its own content OR devise an extraordinary plan to sustain the network grudges against it.

It will be interesting to see individual networks starting up their own streaming services.

For example, you write S-expressions to files like Hacker News does. This is clever, because the file system has some of the features of a database system, and files and S-expressions are abstractions that already exist. You do have to manage what data is in memory and what data is on disk at any given time, but the complexity and amount of code are low.

The idea that "event sourcing" somehow keeps you from needing a DB is ridiculous. By the time you've defined the event format, and written the software to replay the logs, etc., which if you're smart will be fairly general and modular, congrats, you've just written a database. At best, you keep complexity low, and it's another example of a small custom DB for a case where you don't need a fancy off-the-shelf DB. Maybe it's the perfect solution for your app, but it's still a database.

"Memory images," as a completely separate matter, are an abstraction that saves you some of the work of making a DB. Just as S-expressions can save you from defining a data model format, and files can save you from a custom key-value store, memory images as in Smalltalk could save you from having to deal with persistence. And if your language has transactions built in, maybe that saves you from writing your own transaction system. In general, though, it's very hard to get the DB to disappear, as there is a constellation of features important to data integrity that you need one way or another. It's usually pretty clear that you're using a DB, writing a DB, or using a system that already has a DB built in. If you think there's no DB, there's a high chance you're writing one. Again, that could be fine if you don't need all the features and properties of a robust general-purpose DB.

Funnily enough, in EtherPad's case, we had full versioned history of documents, and did pretty much everything in RAM and application logic -- a pretty good example of what the article is talking about -- and yet we used MySQL as a "dumb" back-end datastore for persistence. Believe me, we tried not to; we spent weeks trying alternatives, and trying to write alternatives. Perhaps if every last aspect of the data model had been event-based, we could have just logged the events to a text file and avoided SQL. More likely, I think, we would use something like Redis now.

While I'm no fan of databases, one obvious advantage is that they provide direct access to the data in a standard way that is decoupled from the specific application code. This makes it easy to perform migrations, backups etc. It also increases one's confidence in the data integrity. Any solution that aims to replace databases altogether must address these concerns. I think that intimately coupling data with the application state, as suggested in the article, does not achieve this.

To the extent that you could actually write your program as a pure function of its past input history �" ideally, one whose only O(N) part (where N was the length of the history) was a fold, so the system could update it incrementally as new events were added �" you could get schema upgrade and decentralization "for free". However, to get schema upgrade and decentralization, your program would need to be able to cope with "impossible" input histories �" e.g. the same blog post getting deleted twice, or someone commenting on a post they weren't authorized to read �" because of changes in the code over the years and because of distribution.

I called this "rumor-oriented programming", because the propagation of past input events among the nodes resembles the propagation of rumors among people: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2004-January...

I wrote a bit more on a possible way of structuring web sites as lazily-computed functions of sets of REST resources, which might or might not be past input events: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-Novembe...

John McCarthy's 1998 proposal, "Elephant", takes the idea of writing your program as a pure function of its input history to real-time transaction processing applications: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html

The most advanced work in writing interactive programs as pure functions of their input history is "functional reactive programming", which unfortunately I don't understand properly. The Fran paper http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/ is a particularly influential, and there's a page on HaskellWiki about FRP: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Progr...

"The key element to a memory image is using event sourcing, which essentially means that every change to the application's state is captured in an event which is logged into a persistent store."

That is a key element of a database. It's called a logical log.

"Furthermore it means that you can rebuild the full application state by replaying these events."

Yup, logical log.

"Using a memory image allows you to get high performance, since everything is being done in-memory with no IO or remote calls to database systems. "

This is _exactly_ what sophisticated old-school databases do. You can have them require to write to the DB on commit, or just to memory, and have a thread take care of IO in the background.

"Databases also provide transactional concurrency as well as persistence, so you have to figure out what you are going to do about concurrency."

Righty-ho.

"Another, rather obvious, limitation is that you have to have more memory than data you need to keep in it. As memory sizes steadily increase, that's becoming much less of a limitation than it used to be."

So why not store your old-school DB in memory?

I can understand the argument that you don't want to lock into a big DB vendor's license path, but the technical arguments here look distinctly weak to me.

Maybe old-fashioned DBs are hipper than people think?

I actually have a couple Clojure apps that rely on a hefty amount of in-memory data to do some computations. Even the cost of pulling the data from Redis would be too expensive. The in-memory data grows very slowly, so it's easy to maintain. Moving faster-growing data in-process would be trickier, but this article makes me want to try.

- Long startup times as the entire image needs to be loaded and prepared.

- It would be hard to distribute the state across multiple nodes

- What happens in case of a crash? How fault tolerant would this be?

- Does this architecture essentially amount to building in a sort-of-kind-of datastore into your already complex application? Without a well-defined well-tested existing code base, is this just re-inventing the wheel for each new project?

- How do you enforce constraints on the data?

- How do transactions work (debit one account, [crash], credit another account?

- How do you allow different components (say web user interface, admin system, reporting system, external data sources) to share this state?

Just curious.

EDIT:

- Isn't this going to lead to you writing code that almost always has side-effects, causing it to be really hard to test? How would you implement this system in Haskell?

Maintenance: I can easily give a 10% raise to everyone with a single SQL statement. Fowler's method requires that I first create an entire infrastructure (transaction processing, ACID properties) in code for this particular application. And it had better be as reliable as the transaction processing available in modern relational databases (so says my boss) or I'll be looking for a new job.

Support: you get to teach the new guy how "Event Sourcing" works for this application A and also applications B, C, ....

That said, I _have_ done this with great success. But the work involved a single application (a minicomputer-based engineering layout system). The ease with which versioning could be included was a selling point.

And don't get me started on reporting or statistics.

Doing this in-memory in java via someAtomicLong.incrementAndGet() sounds appealing.

Compared with a database-backed system, many operations are thousands of times faster. Some things that I was used to thinking of as impossible became easy, and vice versa. Coming to grips with why was very helpful.

If, on the other side, I had to do it all myself, I'd most probably have lost my last hair.

The idea that you can reliably use event sourcing in memory to persist your data is as foreign to me as it is impressive. Is anyone familiar with major applications (web apps, ideally) that use this method for their data persistence?

However, I wouldn't call this "no-DB." Rather, it's "less-db." Ultimately, historical and statistical data needs to be stored and databases are great for that (and for a stats team).

I've always thought that software-transactional memory and persistent distributed heaps would get us there. Unfortunately the nearest things have been Redis and Terracotta plugged into Clojure. It should be:

Insert? new an object.
Delete? dispose an object.
Look up? Hash table.

Solved problems that just require persistence.

Sven Van Caekenberghe (the author of cl-prevalence) and I used this approach to power the back-end/cms of a concert hall back in 2003. A write-up of our experiences can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/svc/RebelWithACause/index.html

The combination of a long-running Lisp image with a remote REPL and the flexibility of the object prevalence made it a very enjoyable software development cycle. It's possibly even more applicable with the current memory prices.

I especially liked the fact that your mind never needs to step out of your object space. No fancy mapping or relationship tables, just query the objects and their relations directly. I guess that's what SmallTalk developers also like about their programming environment.

Database engines are not just for storing - each is basically a "utility knife" of data retrieval - indexing, sorting and filtering are available via (relatively) simple SQL constructs. If your app uses an index right now, ditching the DB will mean re-implementing it manually. It's not hard, but it's extra code.

So basically, the DB engine might still be a necessary "library", at least for data retrieval. A middle-of-the-road take on this is e.g. using an in-memory Sqlite instance to perform indexing, etc - seeding it at run-time to help with data searches, but then still not using it for storing persistent information and discarding the data at the end.

As far as I can see, they seem to be comparable to b+tree indexed key value stores. A key would e.g. be "/home/user/test.txt".
Thanks to the B+Tree "indexation" you can do a prefix scan and list folders (e.g. "ls /home/user/"--> all keys starting with "/home/user/").

In the case of e.g. ReiserFS they actually use B+Trees.
They have a caching layer managed by the OS. Most of them have journaling which would be the equivalent of a "write ahead log".

Map reduce based "view" generation can easily be done by pipes and utilities like grep. We might be even able to do some sort of simplistic filtering/views/relations using symlinks.

I guess the main difference is that they aren't optimized for this database-like behavior from a performance standpoint and that the network interfaces to them are SMB/AFP/NFS.

What about transaction isolation? How do you keep one transaction from seeing partial results from a concurrent transaction? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of subtle bugs.

And all of the assumptions you need to make for this no-DB approach to be feasible (e.g. fits easily in memory) might hold at the start of the project, but might not remain valid in a few months or years. Then what? You have the wrong architecture and no path to fix it.

And what's the benefit to all of this? It's not like DBMS do disk accesses just for fun. If your database fits easily in memory, a DBMS won't do I/O, either. They do I/O because either the database doesn't fit in memory or there is some better use for the memory (virtual memory doesn't necessarily solve this for you with the no-DB approach; you need to use structures which avoid unnecessary random access, like a DBMS does).

I think it makes more sense to work with the DBMS rather than constantly against it. Try making simple web apps without an ORM. You might be surprised at how simple things become, particularly changing requirements. Schema changes are easy unless you have a lot of data or a lot of varied applications accessing it (and even then, often not as bad as you might think) -- and if either of those things are true, no-DB doesn't look like a solution, either.

Other example vector graphic editors: it replays vector graphics primitive instead of pixel bitmaps.

There are many ways get rid of the problem with getting rid of the database. For example putting all knowledge of the domain in the database via stored procedures, couchapps, and object stores.

http://happstack.com/index.html

why store passwords through SQL when a server application could just use a specific directory containing one file for each user, each file named with the username and containing his password (without any file format, just the password, possibly hashed or encrypted)? the operating system I/O cache should be able to handle that efficiently and the advantage would be the elimination of the dependence on another software, the DBMS.

I am working on a team that is building an in-memory SQL database. It features a custom language that makes it possible to push the time-critical, data-processing parts of the application directly to the database, which allows for the same speed as this no-DB approach. But you don't have to build your own DB and do everything yourself (correct persistence, backup, transactions...)

[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Command-Query-Responsibil...

[2]: http://www.udidahan.com/?blog=true

[3]: http://blog.jonathanoliver.com/

[4]: https://github.com/joliver/EventStore/

Blog post from housekeeper of Mr. Steve about how exacting he is on some occasions and how kind he is on other.

I think Steve Jobs and his contributions to the tech world are extraordinary. I wish him well and hope he lives happily for a long long time. Just as I wish for anyone I know or do not know, that they live happily.

Steve is not a friend of either you or me.
I do not need to know how he was as a neighbor, his driving record, his family life or anything that does not concern his work.
I am not interested in those details of Steve or Salma Hayek or Steve Ballmer.

Can we stop senselessly idolizing people in areas that are not their expertise?

Bonus - we're even closer to several YC startups, I suspect if I shout loudly, the LikeALittle guys can hear it.

Some jerk kid walked up to him and asked if it'd be alright to take a picture with him. Steve dismissed him with such a confidence you wouldn't expect. I think in general a guy like that with such amazing ideas has to have this extremely thick shell to the world, but underneath I'm sure he's an amazing father, husband, and friend. I was really lucky to be there that day, definitely changed my perspective on a few things.

Steve (yes I call him by his first name) live near me. As a neighbour. Just down the street. I have moments where he has acknowledged my existence. He even knows my waspy name.

We need a new big visionary in the higher boardrooms but I don't see any, lately they're all just wall street and more so with time.

He just stood there. Nobody noticed until they started walking back having gotten their treats from the front door.

I was impressed. Impressed because he was not the one handing out the treats, but the one standing behind a doorway, where nobody noticed him.

That favicon source (there are probably others):
http://www.veryicon.com/icons/system/free-business/copy-4.ht...

I'm guessing the author of this article knew that (presumably that's where he got it from) but chose to omit that rather critical point from his post to make it seem more favourable to himself.

Link to original image: http://www.freeiconsweb.com/Icons-show/Freeicons/Copy.png

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, I'm very confused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is another setting for latency:

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/obfGjbIkOTI...

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

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

Someone needs to rethink their architecture.

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

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

How many users were using it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book[1] this article is reviewing discusses learning to exercise your will power through little mini tasks throughout the day (sit up straight, don't curse, don't eat the whole cake, pickup your desk before going to lunch, etc.) as a means of strengthening that skill.

In their studies they found that employing little tasks like that actually made the willpower muscle (let's call it) stronger, leading to more control over your day.

As to "why do I care?" both studies show that people with more willpower generally end up happier with their lives.

This article does make an interesting point that people with ultimate willpower are not markedly happier than people with nominal amounts of it, so you don't necessarily need to train your willpower muscle to the point of entering the willpower olympics, just slightly stronger than you have now (assuming it is weakened) to enjoy a happier life.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human...

It's frighteningly effective. Right now, the last meal I remember was about 20 hours ago, and the last meal before that was another 20-24 ago. My stomach is aching, but it doesn't bother me.

Of course, this is not without problems. It basically means I have to consciously remember to feed myself enough to stay healthy. You could say I am now approaching the problem from the opposite direction.

http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/08/willpower-is-not-a-res...
http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/08/glucose-is-not-willpow...
http://www.epjournal.net/blog/2011/09/willpower-meets-the-co...
http://whatblag.com/2011/08/04/poverty-and-willpower-as-reso...

Really? Indistinguishable? This presumably doesn't invalidate their results, but a lot of people can distinguish the taste very well. This just seems like sloppiness on their part.

For example, keeping a bag of Reese's Pieces, and every consecutive (time period) you go without breaking goal X, you add (# of time periods) pieces of candy to a jar. Then at the end of the day, you cash out your jar.

So, longer periods of self control would result in a larger reward, and a physical/visual representation of your progress so far would help reinforce your motivation to remain on track.

Maybe if using candy, you get to eat half of what you'd put in immediately, and take advantage of the gradually escalating amount of sugar to help reinforce your willpower reserves?

Mostly just brainstorming here. :P

Because delayed gratification is well, delayed, the chemical reinforcements in the brain don't happen (or happen in some other way that is more conscious rather than instantaneous without reflection). So for a child who has not developed the ability to delay gratification it becomes now or never and that mental reward structure can really hurt them later in life.
Thanks for posting.

Which seems surprising to me seeing that Dr. Baumeister is a professor at Florida State. You'd think at least the ability of offensive linemen to stay completely still would have the football program interested in this research.

Well.. it isn't really a hack, but something to remind yourself every fucking time that you're stalling. All you need is enough motivation to do it for 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES!

Thats enough motivation to basically start an activity and forget about everything else in the process, and getting on with it. Just start doing it... FIVE MINUTES!!!

This is the key. For example, instead of having a bunch of New Year's resolutions, come up with one resolution every month. Focus your (finite) willpower on making it into a habit, at which point it won't require willpower anymore. Next month, move onto another habit and do the same thing. You can drastically change your lifestyle in just 1 year by repeating this 12 times.

I haven't read Ulysses but I have read The Odyssey.

It seems like modern journalist, same as modern hackers, are completely unaware, that all those self-help books, starting from Dale Carnegie's and Napoleon Hill's ones are mere compilations and oversimplifications of general western and some times eastern philosophy? But why, not everyone has a degree in Philosophy like the founder of this site. ^_^

The level of submissions and discussions on HN is somewhere below zero, after it became a huge mainstream site. Now being hacker is an ability to praise and admire some celebrities to silently down-vote people whom they can't appreciate or even understand.

Is there any new small community, with at least a little bit above mediocre level? ^_^

As the author says: "I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.".

Does being 'myself' mean I lack willpower and thus just ignore everything and everyone else and focus on myself?

Thing is, in my opinion having good self control wins over being myself (which I think is on the edge of being selfish).

I wonder what you guys think on the question 'being myself' vs 'self-control' ?

Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/) has some good stuff on training willpower (willpower is like D-Day, a huge violent bloody assault which was used to establish fortifications on the ground so that you didn't need to launch a huge violent bloody assault every time you wanted to get things done). Use willpower to build habits that will stay with you even when you have the mental energy of a marketroid.

After I got more comfortable with actually using them for real work (as opposed to "cute toy from CS class"), I started seeing FSMs everywhere I looked in my projects.

For one thing, they make analytics a lot easier to slot into your system. For example, I record the fact of interesting events like e.g. purchases and send it off to KissMetrics or internal analytics stuff for graphing/reporting/auditing/etc. That gets done in my controllers, and it results in a whole lot of duplicative code which I often forget to write. (It's easy to miss that e.g. if I credit somebody manually for a purchase that should count as a purchase, even though it is under admin functions rather than the purchasing pathway. After all, if I forget to write that log code, all that happens is my stats get silently borked.)

This could get fairly easily solved by having the logging code aware of the change in the user's status, which is about three lines if you have a state machine, and won't put the logging logic in 12 different places in your app or cause you to have to pollute the user model with a big ol' case statement of doom. Plus, if you want to log more stuff, you naturally go into the log logic and make it do more things when the right events bubble to it, rather than chasing down a) who "owns" the event or b) where the event happens.

SM have a key quality: they are a compact and unambiguous way for specifying a behavior. If your system's behavior is set in stone, it's worth specifying it as a SM and implementing it as one. This SM is also great to include in a spec, standard, RFC etc. But if the system evolves, small changes can require dramatic reshaping of the machine.

Also, they can lead to very efficient implementations, especially if you don't have the benefits of a serious OS with a fancy scheduler underneath.

In my current position it's entirely expected and reasonable to write some code and then half way through go back and rip parts of it out and turn it into a statemachine. Though generally we produce fairly detailed designs of our SMs first.

They organize complex code, dissect complex set-flag-here-and-test-there spaghetti into a matrix of states and events that can be exhaustively examined and debugged.

Yes you have to organize your code to feed the machine (Vol is hungry! We must feed Vol!) But you have to organize your code somehow, and feeding a state machine can actually be easier to understand that flag-setting. In fact, it makes it absolutely clear what an event is associated with - the machine it feeds.

Procedural logic tends to be brittle - small changes have unintended consequences. Declarative models tend to be more robust and, especially with domain-specific languages, safer for domain experts to manipulate. You can certainly design domain-specific languages for the subset of declarative systems that are state machines.

I've happily used state machines in enterprise projects. One was tracking rates of financial instruments, where they would be in various states of validity (i.e. is it a live offer?). Another was a logistics app, where data would move through various states of being cleansed and approved, or rejected. We built a UI around it. By isolating the state definitions and their transitions, it was easy to validate the program's model with business exprts.

* The code can be harder to understand, even for those accustomed to the model, because of the need to maintain context manually across states and events. Let's face it: having your variables on the stack is awfully convenient, even if there are good reasons not to do things that way.

* Speaking of stacks, the #1 complaint I used to get was that with the FSM stack traces would only go back to the FSM engine with no history of previous transitions. This is why IMO any decent FSM implementation must keep some history itself.

* A related issue is that static code analysis can't follow through the transition table to recognize the actual flows of control. A good FSM-based program must therefore include stub programs (which can be automatically generated) which will invoke actions in expected sequences so that code checkers can find invalid references, leaks, missing unlocks, and son on.

I like FSMs and think they should be used more. Nonetheless, if you gave me a state machine with ad hoc context management, no history and no reasonable way to generate test stubs, I'd barf too. If more people implemented good state machines, more people would recognize their benefits.

The big problem with state machines relates to the number 3 and regards the general concept of "state". Managing state is the challenge of computation! As you add states and transitions, the complexity increases dramatically, exponentially in some cases. This is why novice programmers struggle to manage developing large applications: they depend on global state and side-effects to perform computation rather than creating isolated components (classes, methods/functions)

That is why we use higher level abstractions provided by programming languages. We use state machines unknowingly in our code every time we have a switch or a conditional statement. When we use design patterns such as the GoF state pattern, we are implementing a state machine. When we build closures in functional languages, those can be considered state machines (in an abstract way). It's just that we're doing it in a more intuitive, higher-level way.

What I'm getting at is that computer programs inherently contain state machines. Recall from computer science that a a stored program computer (e.g. Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture) is just a state machine with an unlimited memory. When we deal with more complexity, it's not wise to attempt to model the problem with a state machine. Using the constructs of a high level language are easier to deal with and underneath the hood, the appropriate state machines are being created.

Of course having nicely isolated processes probably helps noticing that you have an ad-hoc state machine on your hands.

[0] http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/fsm.html

Java Secret: Using an enum to build a State machine: http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/2011/06/java-secret-using-en...

If they did, trust me they would use state machines without too much reservation where appropriate. But as it is, the concept is foreign to most and good ones intuit their way into implementing one perhaps (just guessing here).

https://github.com/stephenb/coffee-machine

http://github.com/scalien/scaliendb

Although lately I've been replacing an explicit state variable with a stack containing the current element path, since that's pretty easy to do using modern languages.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009

It's based on Typestate, a really good 1986 paper:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/classic/tse12-typestat...

I hope this idea catches on in other programming languages.

I'd highly recommend using state machines for multi-step forms. It feels very natural and keeps you sane, I believe it should be a best practice.

a) Most I speak to had a Z-rate CS education which scraped a bit of OO design in Java and don't know they really exist.

b) Most languages they cut their first code in are about puking data around from SQL to the web which rarely if ever requires an FSM.

c) Someone thumped them over the head with "Windows Workflow for dummies" which is then assumed to be the answer to all stateful problems.

d) It looks hard so they don't bother.

e) "developers" should not be confused with "computer scientists". It's "builders" versus "engineers".

In a way any web app with a login is also a state machine - there's the logged in state, and the not logged in state.

erlang has a very effective state machine library(behavior). But the downside is that it's erlang. http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/fsm.html

also, fwiw, i think, couroutines are to state-machines as subroutines are to goto. the best tutorial on teh web on this is, imho, by dave-beazley here: http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/index.html

From my experience a state machine is more of a pattern then a real object. Implementing it on the fly is what worked best so far, for me. Of course there is a point where it gets nasty because of complexity. But first that is always the case (complexity IS nasty) and second overcommiting to structure and architecture increases the complexity already in the beginning and might hurt more then it helps. At least fully coding all possible state machine behaviour as the first default task ifor every new project doesn't seem to be a smart thing to do.

I have always found this streamlining at least one change in the couple of months after initial implementation.

Then again, I think they're far more common in the embedded world than elsewhere.

I don't follow this? The core of whichever state machines I write seem to be DFAs, with the alphabet being events causing transitions.

It's possible to build some gorgeous state machine networks with lambda functions and dictionaries.

In object orientated software engineering the State pattern is a pattern for cleanly implementing a state machine* whilst avoiding horrible switch or massive nested if-then statements.

FSM are very common in video games. I've also worked with one in a (very very) big engineering/CAD software when FSM was managing the whole approval/review/audit flow .

It seems there just less common with web dev in general.

I think he is referring mostly to a finite state machine, though. But even then, you have that quite often somehow in your code (think of global boolean variables).

Competition is fierce. Most start out working on their (startup or music) product part-time until the product becomes popular enough that it is a "hit". At that point the entrepreneur may be lucky to end up funded ("signed") which will help their ability to pursue their product full time and spend the marketing dollars to reach a larger audience.

Thankfully it's unlikely the VC/entrepreneur relationship will become as twisted and exploitative as the major music industry's relationship with artists as being funded does not suddenly unlock access to an entire set of verticals inaccessible to unsigned artists. Or does it?

The songwriter/composer of a song (not a recording of a song, but the actual melody, lyrics) gets a performance royalty each time a song is played in "public" (internet and broadcast radio, in the elevator, at a bar, etc). This is the royalty BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC collect. If the song is recorded and sold by someone, the songwriter gets mechanical royalties for each unit sold. If memory serves me correctly, the compulsory rate right now is 8 cents per unit sold. If the song in any form (recorded, sung by a drunk dude, etc) is used in something like a movie or a TV show, the songwriter gets a synchronization royalty. I've seen sync royalties range from $5,000 to $250,000. Songwriters are usually signed to publishing companies. Publishing companies are mostly owned by record labels themselves (or their parent companies). Publishing companies take a cut of the songwriters' royalties, but not as big as the cut record labels take from recording artists. I've seen rates ranging from 10% to 30%.

On the other hand, the recording artist gets pretty much whatever the record label decides to give them as described in the recording contract. The label will own the song recordings, not the artist. Recording artists (and record labels) do not get any royalties for public performance. Yes, when a song is played on FM radio, the record label doesn't get a penny. The only exception to this is when the song is played on "interactive" services on the Internet. This is the royalty Sound Exchange collects. In those cases, both the songwriter and whoever owns the copyright to the sound recording (the record label) get royalties. The main sources of revenue for the label are from these royalties, and from selling the sound recording in stores and online. They take a large chunk (60-70%) of this and distribute the rest to the song's recording artist, producer, etc.

They didn't mention how long it took them to come with this album, but since the web site says they added a drummer at the end of 2010 and this album was done in April of '11 we will call it 4 months work of three gentlemen best case, and if they really only finished it here at the end of August it would be 9 months. If we use the outside estimate of 9 months, and these guys had 'regular' jobs, lets say they would have earned $60K/year each with benefits, so call it $67.5K/year each for 9 months at an annualized pay of $90K. Note the numbers here are just guesses, I know they are in Europe and may have access to other healthcare options.

So had they worked at this mythical job they would have earned $67.5K * 3 or $203K. They opted instead to spend that time making an album so now, 9 months later instead of $203K in value they have this album with 9 songs on which they own the copyright for the next 75 years. Its an interesting exercise to compare that 'foregone' revenue for the possible future value of the album.

They can make as many copies of this album as they want and sell it for what ever they can get. Now they state that Spotify pays them .003 euros/play, Deezer .006 euros/play. Lets say it averages out to .0045 e/play. To keep everything in dollars, 1 euro => 1.43$ according to google, so .0045 E => 6.4 cents.

The question one can ask is this "Would they have been better off working for 9 months? Or making this album?" We can assume that as soon as they release the album they gave up music forever and went back to a 9-5 job at $60K/yr. (or not but that would be one way to look at it). In financial terms, when does this album they created give them 203K $ of value back?

A 6.4 cents/play That is 3.2M plays. Over the life of the Copyright of 75 years, that is 42K plays per year on average or 115 plays per day. So if they had 115 Spotify/Deezer fans who played one of those nine songs every day, they would earn back exactly as much money as they had 'not made' by not working 9-5. Conversely they would have to sell 29,000 albums on Amazon or 22,500 albums on iTunes to earn back the same amount of money they would have made.

So a couple of things that are also important. First, they don't have to do anything to manufacture copies of the album. And secondly, their time is available to add another album to this 'stream'. (if the financial analysis of making the this one pans out).

What this illustrates is that music is about the long tail, not the up front. If you make back all your investment in making an album in the first year, then your 10 year rate of return will be better than any other investment you could possibly make. What is more you can keep feeding albums into the system at what is your marginal cost of living (eating, thinking, composing, recording). This multiplies your revenue stream going forward.

The record companies used to play an interesting game with musicians, it worked like this:

Give us the 75 year rights to this music and we'll pay you a big chunk of change right now.

Now the criminality was that the record companies created accounting systems which obfuscated additional revenue to the point of not paying the artist anything. However in this world its quite different. If these guys turn into a 'huge success' and sell a million copies of their album on Amazon their are going to make nearly $5M on a $270K investment. In the past they might get $50K in 'upfront royalties' and then never see any of that $5M.

One thing they might do is sell the 'rights' to this album for $203,000. They are revenue neutral at that point and if the album does poorly they are protected from 'losing' money but if it does well they don't stand to gain from that. Risk arbitrage, its what VCs do, it is what music companies do, its what you and I do when we fill up our gas tank at half full rather than wait until the car is empty.

Being a musician is hard work. And early on when you are finding your voice and your fans, its not very profitable (in fact if you don't love doing it you shouldn't because if you die early all you will have to show for it will be memories of creating that music.) However on the flip side, down the road, it can be hugely profitable with little if any additional investment. You develop a following and your numbers get better, no need to go out can cut down additional vinyl trees :-) or schedule another "pressing" of your album.

It is this sea change that musicians need to understand, if you don't 'sign' with a label you are keeping control of your profits and managing the risk yourself. If you do sign with a label you can probably get more money up front but you don't benefit from the upside. Distributors make money on leveraging things like PR where it costs the same to promote 5 different albums at radio stations as it does to promote one. They work to amp the distribution so that they make more money. As a musician/owner you can do that but its not as efficient. The better news for musician is that the long tail money ends up in their pockets if they keep the rights, people underestimate that but it can get to be serious cash.

It will be interesting to follow these guys as they develop to see how it works out.

That being said, it's the best/worst time to be a musical artist - you can distribute yourself online (the biggest music marketplace) and receive a MUCH larger chunk of the revenue than ever before. At the same time, you are only going to sell 24 albums, because it takes a label or label-like organization to sell records, and because of the former point, you are now participating in a marketplace with a selection of products an order of magnitude greater than a decade ago.

For future reference: if you sign-up via CDBaby, there is a one-time fee of $35 (or $55 if they create your bar-code) and you are set-up with iTunes, Amazon, etc, without a yearly fee. Even though Derek's gone it's still a good deal.

Also, you should seriously consider contacting Magnatune. If they like your music you can be on all of those platforms for free. And John Buckman is a very nice guy. Et en plus il parle le français comme toi et moi.

http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/spotify-replaces-piracy...

"The service may do a good job fighting illegal file sharing but it also does a great job of eliminating any motivation to buy an album that you can listen to through the service."

In Europe Spotify's been available for a while. I was in on the beta when their catalog was a lot more restricted, and it was already impressive. With the majors on board, it's hard to see the freight train stopping.

How can one reconcile how wonderful it is for consumers with the payment statements that make us musicians cringe? I think of it as all-you-can-eat iTunes for very little per month; the recent competitors/alternatives pale in comparison.

They deserve a lot of credit for building a workable model that makes iTunes look like a rip off (I hate that software).

But they further dilute the value of recorded music, which is a huge paradigm change for the music industry that will ruin the viability of many musicians.

Perhaps we can re-educate the public to value music again by taking a pledge to pay for it, à la pg-patents? Something tells me this new, 'recorded music ~ free' paradigm is here to stay.

Does anyone have a link / source / info on this?

Why is that? How much do you have to pay Apple, Amazon or Spotify to sell/play your music?

xdissent[1], the author of this package, is a HN user, but he has negative karma because his fourth comment was snarky and got heavily downvoted. Even though he's aware of the ban he clings to this handle and continues to post messages seen by almost no one (he posted twice on this comment page [2,3]). The rest of the messages eversince the incident have been fine (enable "showdead" in the user control pannel if you want to read them).

Since he seems attached to the handle, it would be nice if he could be upvoted back to the positive side so that he can once again participate.

He's got three upvotable posts in history (before the ban). His karma is currently at -32. This means that he needs 11 brave souls to break even. You know what to do :).

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xdissent, comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xdissent

2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955430

3. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955411

.

Edit: 58 minutes later: -10. Thanks to the upvoters.

I was eager to see how the problem had been solved... but apparently Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't have that particular problem, and the IE6 VM (with Windows XP) just says "IE6 support is currently disabled".

That's kind of sad; at least for the light web-development I've done, IE7 and IE8 aren't nearly as fussy and hair-pulling as IE6.

Bad trend in the open-source community. Please don't ask your users to install stuff this way. Not that you can't be trusted, it leads to people dropping their guard.

IE 1.0 to IE 8.0 as standalone versions in a single installer.

Rough VM size estimates:

IE7: 13GB
IE8: 8.4GB
IE9: 13GB
Currently, the script will leave the compressed RAR files in place, which means you're looking at something like 45 freaking GB if you don't prune them manually (in ~/.ievms/vhd/). This wasn't a big deal for me on my company workstation, but kinda sucks on my Macbook Air, so I'll be adding a cleanup option shortly. You probably don't need to keep the compressed files around anyway since we take a snapshot like you mentioned.

Which is basically the only reason I do have an old Windows XP vm on my Mac.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575

W7 trial iso will work without a key, it will just shutdown every 30 minutes which is fine for testing purposes.

IEtester also has debugbar which sometimes is even better than some firefox tools I use.

If you're new to 3.1, the following resources will help you to get started:

Release notes:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/3_1_release_notes.html

Asset pipeline:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html

http://railscasts.com/episodes/279-understanding-the-asset-p...

Any particular reasn to only list DHH under "Authors"? (I assume the plural means more are possible...)

Perhaps a link to http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/ ?

Interestingly DHH is only #2 contrubutor overall, and number 9 this year... (by number of commits; and no, that isn't a perfect measure of contribution)

This means you will want to change your SESSION_KEY variable to expire all sessions, otherwise users that are logged in while you upgrade can get stuck until they clear their cookies. (So I postponed the upgrade to the weekend...)

http://railsapps.github.com/installing-rails-3-1.html

Now that GAE starts charging by instance-hours, however they are calculated, the drive to optimize is significantly reduced: I no longer have to worry about a web app's CPU usage if I have to wait for I/O anyway.

Some will say that's how we, as developers, should allocate our time to improve productivity, but the cloud platform as a whole just becomes a lot more wasteful.

And this change makes GAE much less appealing than AWS. If I'm gonna pay for instance-hours anyway, why not just launch some EC2 instances and kill them when I don't need them anymore? Sure it comes with admin costs, but at least I can migrate to another cloud provider much easier. Judging from the comments on this thread, migrating away from GAE seems very expensive, if possible at all.

"""
The new pricing model charges are based on the number of instances you have running. This is largely dictated by the App Engine Scheduler, but for Python we will not be supporting concurrent requests until Python 2.7 is live. Because of this, and to allow all developers to adjust to concurrent requests, we have reduced the price of all Frontend Instance Hours by 50% until November 20th.
"""

Our app (python runtime) is going from about $9 a month to projected $270 a month, almost entirely due to frontend instance hours. I have to think that once python 2.7 is live and concurrent users != concurrent frontends, this will get waaay more reasonable.

That's obviously not something to be happy about but then again an argument can be made that the introductory free quota that Google gave was very generous.

This might give Go a push - as I understand it Go is the most efficient of the supported languages which should translate into less CPU hours => less money. On the other hand, other than template parsing/substitution, my code doesn't do any CPU intensive tasks. On the other hand, the CPU hrs might count the overall overhead of the platform, which for statically linked Go will be the smallest (both Python and Java have sizable runtimes that need to be initialized at startup - according to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQtLRqqB-Kk, Java runtime is especially bad in that regard (this is towards the end of the talk in the q&a part).

The difference is quite important. In AWS, you can spin up dozens of processes in an instance. In GAE, the instance is the process. If the process is idle waiting for IO, you are still being charged. Spinning up more processes mean more instances running and more are charged.

In that sense, GAE's $0.08 per process-instance-hour is quite expensive compared to AWS's $0.085 per machine-instance-hour. "Single-thread" Python process needs multiple processes to handle multiple web requests which counted as multiple GAE instance-hours while only a single AWS instance-hour.

Seems to me Google is competing in areas it'll never be really good at like social networks instead of using its core competency of running the world's biggest server farm.

GAE: "Almost all applications will be billed more under the new pricing"

Pick one...

The cost of my app is going from $9 per month to $200 per month. This is ridiculous...

My cost is only increasing about 4x, but others in this thread are seeing 20-100x increases. Changes like this impact more than GAE -- this will make me hesitant to use any platform that I can't easily migrate away from.

I guess the problem of really efficient web serving remains unsolved.

With the price increase and very harsh cut down on API free-quotas (plus the absence of long expected SSL on custom domains) GAE no longer seems a good option for me :/

I'm paying around $15 a month. With the new prices I would have to pay $450 a month.

Time to migrate :(

Any recommendations for a python hosting?

If you were building a social network or twitter clone using the techniques they recommend in this talk:
http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/BuildingScalab...

...you could easily pull back a hundred entities each time you pull someone's feed. It'd cost you a buck for every hundred pageviews or so.

You can still use a free instance that is 6.5 hours a day, 1 gig of datastore, 1 gig each of incoming and outgoing bandwidth, etc. Low volume sites should easily be able to stay in the free zone.

Free instances had better have a low loading request time (e.g., for Java apps, use Objectify instead of JPA, etc.).

Assuming I understand the new billing correctly, I can get a paid plan for $9/month + $36/month for one reserved always on instance. I also get 24 hours/day of free on demand front end instances to handle a bit more traffic.

I think that a paid for plan still gets the other free quotas of a free plan and you pay each day for any use over each free limit. Is this right? It looks like you can have 1 always on FE instance, and 1 or 2 on demand FE instances, and a reasonable about of resource use for less than a $100/month.

I'd imagine that the majority of the people on GAE have found that they don't actually need to scale as much as they thought when they signed up to it.

1)Usage based pricing, 2) Infinitely scalable and 3) an SLA

$9/app/month means that it doesn't really make sense for tiny hobby sites any more: it is comparable in cost to a tiny VPS host, and my VPS currently handles 19 domains.

The place where GAE makes most sense is the 'line of business' app that is basically just a set of forms backed by a database. Those kind of apps don't have any complex things going on that are going to require integration with existing code or custom server configuration: both places where the current crop of PaaS offerings risky right now.

Line of business apps currently require lots of manual labour from DBAs and IS, so paying $9/month to run the HR application is going to be a pretty good deal.

That's really too much.

Is the price increase still tenfold, or something more acceptable?

Telling us that Python 2.7 may reduce the cost multiplication factor by a bit just isn't very helpful.

Additionally, it also makes Google look a little bit stupid. We're supposed to accept that a world-leading company in the field of data processing, storage and server farms weren't able to determine ballpark running costs for their selling off their excess machine hours until now? Pfff.

In light of the fact that GAE hasn't exactly been the most stable platform, technical support has been untimely and poor, high priority bugs can stay acknowledged for years, a timeline for SSL support is still non-existant, and full search capabilities are only now impending at some unknown date (and how much will that cost when it finally arrives?), it really does make them look like rank amateurs.

The AWS team must be laughing.

The new free limit for frontends is 24 CPU hours, or 1 instance. I was seeing my frontend time in the 25-30 hour range each day.

This[1] blog post from today says at the end: "[...]and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!"

They just rolled out the new pricing.

[1]: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/08/50-credit-for-ne...

I will be moving my app, if anyone else likes to use a freelancer, please drop me a line: varese4@gmail.com

The essence of your data is saved. Nothing to worry about then..

And regarding the pricing... We'll see.. I'm not sure WHEN exactly it's going to be shifted - does anyone know?

And don't forget to look into what may be able to be done to minimize some of the quota impact. Good design changes may be able to have a noticeable positive effect there.

Have a look at AppScale if you are looking at moving off the platform. That may be a way to get 80% of the way there with less monumental changes.