a_band

Like it or not private companies currently have a monopoly on the communication infrastructure of our planet. There is no "public option" for AWS. If they have a monopoly (which Apple and Google clearly have on the app store), then it comes with specific obligations to not discriminate and a requirement to provide services to everyone equally. That's the price you pay for banning competition from the market.

If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.

The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.

Absolutely, we all know that Twitter and Facebook have been far greater vehicles for the political unrest that's been growing for the last four years. Parler is a convenient scapegoat.

> You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?

Or you could toil until you can write clearly in your own distinct voice. It's harder but it's more rewarding. Why let an app have all the fun?

I've had a similar experience with Jonathan. He's one of the most founder-friendly people in the VC industry.

Europe's speech laws are pretty terrible. It's one big advantage of living in the US: speech has serious legal protection.

Further context as to why the editors of the intercept seem to have been acting in an unprecedentedly partisan way here, from Greenwald:

"...under my contract, and the practice of The Intercept over the last seven years, none of my articles is edited unless it presents the possibility of legal liability or complex original reporting, and not one of my articles in the last fifteen years — published with dozens of major media outlets around the world — has ever been retracted or even had appended to it a serious correction."

His article hasn't been published. Unless they've somehow got access to it, there's no way to verify it.

Amazing the amount of people who are essentially reacting with "Greenwald was spreading foxnews disinfo" without even having read his article.

"Misinformation" now seems to mean anything that threatens partisan objectives. Given Greewald's track record, I would give him a long leash.

Absolutely! The notion that the only successful web business can be billion dollar unicorns is nuts. More small web businesses!

This made me so happy. Thank you for doing it!

Who wants this? People who ask themselves, "Y'know, if I only had an ERP system to manage my refrigerator and batteries"? This seems very poorly conceived.

Is this unexpected? All the headlines make it sound like there's some sort of scandal.

I wrote a post about this recently: https://dev.to/levinunnink/how-to-pick-the-right-tech-stack-...

I'm pretty sold on JAMStack + Serverless + AWS. It's the most affordable way to iterate, adapt and scale for a solo dev.

"As for the world outside of MIT’s PR materials, it appears much the same as it was in 1969—just with faster computers and uglier cars."

I this sentiment is actually right, especially when you realize that Thiel has made it clear that he isn't all that impressed with the advances of the last 30 years. We've seen innovation in software but not many breakthroughs in physics and atoms. For example, the predictions of the 50s and 60s about how we would live (flying cars, greater health, space travel, cleaner, futuristic cities) seemed to hope for those breakthroughs. The reality of where innovation happened is much more depressing: pocket computers, information superabundance, and porn.

For example: there has yet to be a breakthrough in the last 50 years that could even come close the impact of antibiotics and nobody has set foot on the moon in five decades. But if you told someone that in the late 60s, I think they wouldn't believe it.

Love that they think banning most vehicles from a main traffic artery is going to reduce congestion. Classic SF urban planning move.

Parcel is one of my favorite open-source projects. Love to see it getting some attention here.

Nice! The documentation looks thorough and I appreciate how you've designed the module. Great example of what a good NPM module should look like. :-)

This looks pretty awesome, Boris and Crispin! I know this is a space with a lot of movement right now. How do you compare to a service like Tupal?

Nice work, TekWizely! This looks looks like a well thought out little tool with a good niche.

Try coming to California...

I guarantee that a computer didn't write this clickbait BBC headline. :-)

This looks like an amazing resource. Security and Privacy is intimidating for engineers and the resources and training are currently hoarded by massive enterprises. Really excited to see stuff like this become widely available.

> If you need a little bit of money to grow your business modestly, you can raise a lot of money from SoftBank to grow your business crazily, and then put most of it in the bank and use a little bit of it to grow modestly instead. SoftBank will be disappointed with the modest growth, and you can say “sorry it didn’t work out” and then buy them out at a lower valuation with the money you have left over from not growing your business crazily. Free (modest) growth capital!

It's interesting how much SoftBank has screwed themselves with their strategy lately in such high profile ways. I wonder if this is unique to SoftBank or if there's other big VCs that are experiencing similar problems and flying under the radar.

Who funded Evernote in and out of the unicorn club?

What would such a declaration do? Religious speech should be protected as much as any other speech.

> Maybe I'm being naïve here, but isn't it kind of crazy to raise 3.5M in funds for a business that has no plan but to be acquired by someone else?

Not exactly. A lot of startups can function as R&D for larger tech companies: Big tech companies have lots of money but aren't great at innovation. They might spend 10s of millions of dollars just to get a lesser quality version of what they could own if they just bought the best startup in the space. This is why companies with $0.00 revenue get acquired all the time. It's a simple calculation: will it be cheaper to buy or build this tech? For many companies it's cheaper to buy.

That being said, Chicisimo is in a very tough situation. The problem with their strategy is:

1. They have to be acquired or they'll go out of business. This is a terrible negotiating position to start from. There is no walk away power. If I was an interested buyer, why wouldn't I offer an insultingly low price? How does $100k to cover legal costs and a nice signing bonus to your employees sound? Do you have a better option?

2. They need a buyer who needs their experimental technology. This is what's called a "strategic acquisition". And they are almost impossible to engineer from the startup's position. The chances of a finding company with a lot of cash with an exec who wants experimental tech enough to spend a decent amount of money on it are almost certainly zero. If they haven't attracted the attention of a buyer by now, it's unlikely that they'll become more attractive now that they're about to fail.

Having been in this situation myself, it is so helpful to have some revenue to fall back on. That way you can demonstrate that the business is worth something.

I wish them the best of luck. Hopefully they pull something out here but the chances are low.

> So why not just say the actual acquisition number?

Usually buyers don't want this information going public. Likely it was part of the deal terms. My guess is that what Josh said is as much as he's allowed to disclose per terms of the deal.

Congratulations, Josh! This is a huge success for a six month project. Based on my experience with acquisitions, that was a very fair offer that you got.

"Thousands flock"...