Refusing administrative minutiae - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3081-refusing-administrative-minutiae

<comment><USER2> Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me. I'm not suggesting we bring back secretaries.

There's surely an opportunity here for a start-up with an AI background to analyze what I'm doing at any moment in time and ...

(a) track what I'm doing

(b) help me (intelligently, not clippy)

(c) schedule my time

(d) suggest improvements (it's time for your run!)

This would have to be private software under my control, but if I give you that, you are free to look at everything I do (type, view), use the webcam to see what I'm doing, even follow my cellphone around.

<comment><USER3> _Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me_

Women were not able to avail of all the job opportunities they are now, so their labour was cheap. Now they have better job prospects.

<comment><USER4> Nah, I'd say it has more to do with MS Office eliminating the need for typists in 1990 and companies replacing the personnel cost with a smaller licensing cost.

I have a secretary. She is an awesome resource that helps my whole team get more done. Typically, they are folks with humanities degrees who don't want to teach. Where I am, they tend to last about 3-4 years, than transition to project management type roles. They excel there, because after a couple of years tracking down stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of naïvety in this post. Expense tracking sucks, but there are IRS regulations that both employees (contractors included) and businesses must follow.

<http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc511.html>

<comment><USER6> You have quite a bit of latitude in how high ceremony your expense tracking needs to be, though. "CC hotel / travel expenses to our standard address, put everything on the company card" is likely adequate, as long as there's a contemporaneous record of business travel. Many places keep that as a formal log book, but since the IRS is pretty much ambivalent about the exact form of your records as long as they capture the important stuff, a Google Calendar entry with "Bob speaking at $FOO_CONF in Boston 3/14" probably suffices. In the event of an audit, you'll be asked to provide supporting documentation (again, wide latitude) of a small sampling of those expenses, because they have no more desire to read five thousand pages of records than you do to write them. If you're unable to provide those records, but don't strike the examiner as actively malicious, they'll say "Alright, there's two ways I can do this. My book says we think you have about $X of legit deductions for this category, which is $Y less than you're claiming. Pay $Y plus our below market interest rate for making an honest mistake. Otherwise, you and I get to do things line by line, and I'm going to suddenly get _very_ picky. Which would you prefer?"

There's also a certain element of "In the vanishingly unlikely event the IRS audited us, disallowed _every_ expense our employees charged in the year, and then charged taxes on those plus the standard penalty interest, that wouldn't cost us enough for us to even notice it."

<comment><USER7> Spoken like someone who hasn't undergone an IRS audit.

While I agree with David for the most part, his cavalier attitude of "Well, if we get audited it will be cheaper than the cost of tracking shit" is naive. Once he goes through an IRS audit, where they turn everything upside down and consume hundreds and hundreds of hours of time then he might change his attitude of the cost of an IRS audit. They are not nearly as cheap or insignificant as he makes it out to be.

<comment><USER8> That depends, my aunt was audited and ended-up with close to a million dollar refund. Here attitude had long been, paying a little extra in taxes is worth not keeping track of every expense. When your actually making real money tracking every lunch has a minimal ROI.

PS: She did still took many large deductions and had reasonable records, she just played it safe when submitting her taxes.

<comment><USER4> Good point, but if you're too cool to keep receipts, you're probably being a cowboy in other areas of business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience with these minutiae, there is usually additional hidden overhead. Not only do I have a client that requires time recorded daily in 15-minute increments, but they are locked into a system (Deltek) that is incompatible with Google Chrome, forcing ~1/3 of users to switch browsers for this already annoying task. And users must enter login information twice -- once to login to the portal, another for the timekeeping system. And it's been that way for over two years.

There is an opportunity here for those who can break into the consciousness of enterprise Accounting people.

<comment><USER10> I've integrated enterprise and mid-size accounting systems over the past 15 years. I also have had to run a small consulting shop answering this issue. I think I have something that really works well, but I didn't think anyone else needed it.

I'd like to talk to you more about what you think a solution should look like (I've built, torn down and rebuilt solutions for this space). Mind getting in touch by email?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. I'm tempted to want to take this post with a grain of salt.

I systemize and automate businesses for a living. With software. Since the mid 90's.

Why a grain of salt?

TIME IS YOUR ONLY PRODUCT AND ASSET. In a consulting business, that's how it is. Why ignore your asset and only product. That's it. Time is finite and it seems to be the major missed point in this article.

A CONSULTING BUSINESS IS NOT A SOFTWARE PRODUCT BUSINESS. The cost to scale a software business is negligible, compared to consulting where you grow relative to the number and quality of people you can find.

I'll say it again, the amount of time you have to sell is relative to the people you have, and how efficient/good they are, and how efficient your management overhead is to leave people free to bill hours.

EVERY BUSINESS IS NOW A SOFTWARE BUSINESS. It doesn't matter what industry they're in. Either they get it, and get with it, or they're gone in 10 years when someone's eating their lunch with little to no effort thanks to a great systemized + automated software system. In many ways, software is the next industrial revolution.

CONSULTING'S HOURLY BREAKDOWN IS DIFFERENT THAN PRODUCTS.

Every consulting dollar is generally cut into 3 parts: \- get the work \- do the work \- manage the work

At a $100/hr rate, you see it's not so pretty when it's more than one or two people.

What does this formula have to do with how you price a software product? I do both and know the difference. :)

CONSULTING PROFITABILITY IS IN SYSTEMIZING AND AUTOMATING, LIKE ANY BUSINESS. Manage each area the best it can be (via enough, but not too much systemization and automate the sh*t out of everything) and you can get a 60-70% profit rate.

I FIND IT HARD TO CONFUSE CONSULTING AND PRODUCT BUSINESSES. With this article, for a consulting business that switched to a product business and then look back and talk about consulting, it all seems a little confusing to me.

WHY? While smaller businesses might be able to get away with a mindset of "it's not important" for a little while, growth unfortunately makes this a "cost of doing business" to manage the "bottom line".

WHAT? Just like we systemize and automate our software products to do everything, administrative minutiae too, can and should be systemized and automated.

HOW? Connect a business' preferred project management tool to billing and accounting systems automatically. This is what I do. I manage several projects with a few hours of time a month that I get paid for dozens of hours of work via my developers. My system is honed and works.

ME: I don't die to track every second, but you better believe I have to track my billing unit, the hour, or fixed price.

There is truth to the idea, though that having to track every second or micromanage means you have the wrong person. You do, however, need some checks and balances to keep things moving on their own for everyone's piece of the pie, and a big part of that is "are we on schedule".

TRICKS: I'm constantly working on my systemization and automation. It will never end, or be perfect because there's always new tools and technologies and processes becoming possible.

Forwarding your receipts to one address, PDF printing all purchases, and writing a quick web app that downloads credit card statements and asks you to link them up to whatever (whether it's the book keeper or not) isn't stoneage thinking. It can be simplified, and should be.

THE ONLY TRUTH I KNOW IN BUSINESS: We still have these business problems. They're not a technology problem, but technology can help.

THOSE MAGICAL PEOPLE WHO SIGN THE CHEQUES. Consulting issues of tracking time are another. Not all customers are comfortable with flat rate. It's easy to puff our chest once we have a practice up and running, but the reality is pricing in consulting is one of the toughest things to get a handle on relative to the place(s) you work, and for the type of work you do.

Finding a middle ground with new clients (seeing if the client is more comfortable with per hour vs fixed fee) is far more important. I always suggest doing a small fixed fee project to build trust in the beginning and make sure both sides are happy. After that being comfortable enough to say "I think I can save you money hourly" is fine. Or not.</comment>


REST Tutorial - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have started using Amazon S3 for a web application I have been developing. I recently discovered a PHP class (s3.class.php) that helps store, retrieve and delete files on S3.
However, the class does not work well in a few cases. Therefore I thought I'll learn REST so that I can create my own PHP class for interacting with S3 servers.
Does anyone know of a good introduction/tutorial for REST with php examples? I found a good tutorial but it was based on Ruby.
Thanks <comment><USER2> may I make a diffrent suggestion. instead of S3 why not use something better. I don't know much about s3 but there is a much better standard of webdav. we among some other implementors have developed the server side. for client side there are many options too and if you want to do it in php this would be good class <http://freshmeat.net/projects/class_webdav_client/>

</comment><comment><USER3> hm. restful is a way of doing things, not really something that you can read a tutorial on how to do step-by-step.

rails tutorials are tutorial form because you're implementing rest through a predefined framework.

the wikipedia article on it has good info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restful></comment>


Ack 2.0 has been released - <AUTHOR> http://petdance.com/2013/04/ack-2-0-has-been-released/

<comment><USER2> Previously posted (different URL, but same exact announcement by Andy Lester):

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5577986></comment>


Simple query parameter to blank pages with Facebook comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.darknerd.co.uk/fun-with-facebook/

<comment><USER3> This is working as designed. The author of the article didn't fully investigate why he was getting users with the fragment and if he alters his code, will negatively affect page performance on his page.

In order to do cross domain communication, Facebook iframes the current page with the fragment. When Facebook's javascript library in the iframe detects the parameter, it blanks the page to reduce the render time that it takes for the iframe to complete so that it can generate the cross domain communication channel faster.

Originally, Facebook had developers upload a file to act as the cross domain script but became a problem for some people who couldn't do this so for the most part. This is still doable, but most people don't read the documentation clearly and Facebook doesn't want to complicate it's message of a simple install( [http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB....](http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.init/) ).

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=60571>

<http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=9777#c66>

So, the problem is framebusting code not playing well with iframes. ;-)

<comment><USER3> Facebook doesn't want people to enable cross domain authentications/spoofing. If Facebook enabled their plugins to work inside iframes external to the Facebook environment, it'd be easy to maliciously authenticate users to give data to a fourth party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how they discovered this, and whether this is truly a problem - <USER2> would someone come into a site with that hanging on their url?

<comment><USER6> I found out about this issue when a few users complained. It turns out google was indexing the pages, so sometimes those types of URLs would appear on a search page.

The simplest way to combat it is to have google ignore that parameter in google webmaster tools. Then it won't ever get indexed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at it through Chrome, it triggers a bunch of JS errors in the Facebook javascript plugin.

<comment><USER3> It's generating the errors because it's not detecting a parent container (cross domain iframe communication).</comment></comment>


Facebook removed a fact-check on anti-abortion video after Ted Cruz complained - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.nl/facebook-removes-anti-abortion-factcheck-after-senators-complain-2019-9/ <comment><USER2> I'm seeing a couple of comments on here to the effect of, "what did you expect when you started asking companies to screen/moderate content?"

This is not a good example of screening being impossible to do, or being too subjective to nail down. Facebook moderated the video on largely neutral terms; not asserting that abortion was right or wrong, just that the claims the video made were scientifically false. It should be the type of fact-check that Republicans can get behind: objective and verifiable.

This specific story isn't that Facebook can't fact-check, it's that ultimately Facebook is willing to define neutrality based on what Lawmakers are complaining about at the moment. It is specifically Facebook's commitment to "neutrality" in this case that makes it easy for biased groups to manipulate the platform.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea that increased calls for global moderation may have unintended side effects, and on average I tend to disagree with people who conflate neutral tools with complicity. But this particular story is definitely evidence in the opposite direction -- that Facebook is not opinionated _enough_ , and that a commitment to avoiding even the appearance of bias can lead companies to make ineffective, gutless moderation decisions.

<comment><USER3> > This specific story isn't that Facebook can't fact-check, it's that > ultimately Facebook is willing to define neutrality based on what Lawmakers > are complaining about at the moment.

No, for me it's that what constitutes "neutrality" shifts with the powers that be, and in this case it shifted quickly; because abortion is an issue that facebook doesn't care about, it was willing to go with a scientific consensus, but when a politically powerful person insisted that the scientific consensus wasn't "neutral" it abandoned it.

We're watching the process of moderation in real time, not watching the corruption of a process that has never existed: of neutrality creation that is entirely independent of power. The solution isn't that Facebook isn't cleaving the the standards you hold to be objective _enough._ That's just kicking the can down the road. Get enough power to dominate Ted Cruz, and you can get him to delete the video yourself.

edit: I'm not against Facebook moderating their platform, but they should have all of the editorial responsibilities and liabilities that come with that. Which, instead of this process happening informally, puts it into the justice system where standards can be publicly agreed upon.

<comment><USER2> > I'm not against Facebook moderating their platform, but they should have all > of the editorial responsibilities and liabilities that come with that.

I read the first part of your post as an argument that the actual definition of neutrality is prone to bias and corruption, and that politicians can't be trusted to define what is and isn't neutral.

Given that reading, I don't understand how adding legal liability would help keep Ted Cruz from subverting moderation efforts or redefining what neutrality means. Wouldn't that just give him more ammo to throw at Facebook when he claims that they need to to adhere to a constantly changing standard?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This video is absurd. The headline on the video "Abortion is never medically necessary", but then goes on to state that "removal of an ectopic pregnancy" doesn't count because it's not an abortion. Umm, OK. She's really just defined all of the "medically necessary abortions" as not abortions.

<comment><USER5> This comment has it correct; she defines abortion in a specific way (a common practice in documents / research papers / etc), and then makes a claim using this specific definition. The definition is left out of the headline, understandably and predictably, leaving a flamewar about a straw man.

<comment><USER6> This does not sound like a good-faith definition of terms. It's a no-true- scottsman instead, which is _not_ a common practice, or at least not a reputable one.

<comment><USER7> i don't think the act of defining a term for later usage in an argument can be described as "no true scotsman", which is typically a mid-argument dismissal of a counterexample that contests a generalization.

to be such they would have had to (for example) been in the midst of debating the topic, and said something like "but a _real_ abortion..." where their operating definition of "abortion" was effectively changed.

<comment><USER8> The term for this is a "stipulative definition." [1] It's only a fallacy if one does not clarify that one is using a stipulative definition instead of a more common one.

1\. [https://www.thoughtco.com/stipulative- definition-1692143](https://www.thoughtco.com/stipulative-definition-1692143)

<comment><USER9> Even if one is clear about the definition in use, it's the fallacy of equivocation if it is used to counter an argument using a different definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Letting people share medical information and pay to promote it seems like a never ending recipe for problems. I'm sure someone at FB has done the math on just blocking all this content.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it just me or does putting FACT CHECK above an article immediately make anyone else _not_ want to click on that article?

<comment><USER12> Same here, just makes me think who has connections to get themselves declared fact checker. Can you imagine how awesome it must be to have major media outlets coo about how whatever you the fact checker says should not be questioned?

<comment><USER13> This comment is a dog whistle.

Why are HN moderators allowing this account to post comments on this forum?

Here is a previous comment on this account:

>tBut the progressive revolution has entirely skipped over the struggles of non-Jewish whites merely because of their skin color.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20972062)

and another one:

>Let's just be honest here, the only people experiencing fall-out from the Epstein case are not Je-yank

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20918028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20918028)

It is very very concerning that HN moderators police tone but not substance and allows accounts like this one to proliferate conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER14> You say that, yet it didn't concern you enough to let us know about it? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

The idea that if you see something unmoderated, it must mean that the moderators secretly agree with it, is a non sequitur. What's actually happening is that we only see a portion of what gets posted to HN, and we can't moderate what we don't see. That's why the site guidelines ask you to flag bad comments and, in egregious cases, to email email@example.com. Fortunately, another user chose to follow the site guidelines and did so.

Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003570) for more.

<comment><USER13> >The idea that if you see something unmoderated, it must mean that the moderators secretly agree with it, is a monster of a non sequitur.

Yes. That's what happens when you provide a self-publishing system. You agree to that contract whether you want to or not.

And it's not just this comment. It happens all the time.

>That's why the site guidelines ask you to flag bad comments

I literally cannot do that. Surely you know that.

>Fortunately, another user chose to follow the site guidelines and did so.

You don't think it's a problem that only one other user decided to _email_ you a problem. Doesn't that indicate a problem with the site culture?

I'm one person, a consumer of this site. Not a moderator. I called attention to it using the one capability given to me on this site. Saying "that's not good enough" is extremely asinine when I literally am not able to do anything else on the site.

<comment><USER14> It's trivial to get enough karma to flag posts on HN. We keep the threshold low on purpose so that anyone who wants to use HN as intended can easily cross it. The reason you haven't is not because we're somehow excluding you. It's because your many accounts consistently break the site guidelines, causing your posts to get downvoted.

But you can always email us, as anyone can. The fact that you didn't shows that you're not truly concerned about keeping HN free of the abuse you're complaining about. Rather, you're using other people's abusive comments as an excuse to post abusive comments of your own, smearing the community—who don't support the dreck that shows up here, just like it shows up everywhere on the public internet—and trying to undermine it. When you imply that moderators somehow support the dreck, I don't believe you're doing so in good faith. Anyone who's been around HN as long as you have knows that's false. Rather, the name for what you're doing is poisoning the well. That is another form of trolling.

Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with? This site is for people who sincerely want to use it as intended, and the intended use is laid out clearly at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): intellectual curiosity and kind, thoughtful discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am not from US so can someone explain why the antiabortion thing seem rise in this last year? Is there some elections and some party is trying to gain votes or some social media trend?

My question is about the timing(why now?) and not on "who is the good/bad guy" here.

<comment><USER16> It's not just now? Anti-abortion has been a huge part of the Republican platform for a very long time, maybe at least the 60's? At least since Roe v Wade (1973). The reason is that there's a large swath of voters who only seem to care about abortion abolition, and will vote for anyone who pushes it, no matter what.

<comment><USER15> I mean it is a popular subject here on HN and I seen some articles on BBC this year, as I said I am not from US and this "anti-abortion laws" remind me of the communist regime here in Romania, so I was a bit shocked to see this topic debates in US (it was not visible for US outside) .

<comment><USER17> Evangeticals and other anti-abortion religious groups are also one of the groups that are consistently politically involved via voting, being kept informed, campaigning, etc. In a nation with very low voter turnout, the few demographics that vote significantly more get a disproportionate influence on the direction of government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Part of the issue with fact checkers is how charitably they are interpreting the words. For example:

Weather Reporter: The sun will rise at 6 AM Tomorrow

Fact Checker: False. The language talking about sun rise is implying that the sun rotates around the earth, and that has been known to astronomers to be false for centuries.

In her video, Lila Rose is saying that abortion as defined as intentionally killing the fetus is not medically necessary.

From the captions on the video: "Now, you could perhaps do an early delivery if she's experiencing or she has a very severe condition that you need to deliver that baby early, but in that situation you don't go in with a needle or forceps to destroy that baby before birth. You give that baby a fighting chance, and that is not an abortion."

She is saying that the baby may die as a consequence of early delivery, but the goal is early delivery, not the destruction of the baby.

Fact check says "Certain medical conditions such as placenta previa and HELLP syndrome can make abortion a necessary medical procedure in order to prevent the mother's death."

My guess that Lila's response would be that that it is the early delivery that is saving the mother's life, not the abortion. The mother's life would still be saved if the baby survives through appropriate medical care.

I don't know if Lila is Catholic, but a lot of her reasoning seems to fall under the "Principle of Double Effect."

[http://sites.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/doubleeffect.html](http://sites.saintmarys.edu/~incandel/doubleeffect.html)

"Classical formulations of the principle of double effect require that four conditions be met if the action in question is to be morally permissible: first, that the action contemplated be in itself either morally good or morally indifferent; second, that the bad result not be directly intended; third, that the good result not be a direct causal result of the bad result; and fourth, that the good result be "proportionate to" the bad result. Supporters of the principle argue that, in situations of "double effect" where all these conditions are met, the action under consideration is morally permissible despite the bad result."

The argument is that doing a delivery with intention to save the mother's life is good, even if it has the consequence that the fetus dies, since the death of the fetus was not the intention, and thus would not be called an abortion, since the fetal death was a secondary effect and not the primary intended effect.

The issue with the fact check is that the fact-checkers were so eager to label something they disagreed with as false, that they did not appreciate the nuance.

<comment><USER19> And among "other medical conditions" would sit ectopic pregnancy, which not only you cannot deliver, you cannot even allow it to get to 12 weeks or the mother could die, so no attempt at delivery would make sense. How much medical case history would need to be in a fact-checking judgement to be accepted as fact?

<comment><USER18> [https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/09/abortion-ectopic- pregna...](https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/09/abortion-ectopic-pregnancy- politicians-confuse-medical-terms.html)

Many people including ob-gyns do not consider surgery for an ectopic pregnancy an abortion.

<comment><USER20> You found an anti abortion doctor to agree with you. Moving the goalposts because of your beliefs. Stop trying to make definitions up when facts disagree with your political opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> ASK HN: We really need a politics tab at the top of hackernews. Can we make that happen?

<comment><USER22> I can get behind a tech-only tab which hides political/non-technological posts. Watching American software developers/computer scientists making unsubstantiated grand claims on foreign political matters or mathematics/economics proves to be bad for my blood pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's unfortunate that big tech is essentially acting as a "morality arbiter" in such cases -- perhaps we need not only a separation of church and state, but also of tech and state.

<comment><USER24> if you want a social network where you can say whatever you want without interference go use gab or 4chan. it's facebook's choice whether or not they want to do this.

edit: "whatever you want" supposed to be figure of speech, seemingly this must be pointed out.

<comment><USER25> You mean 8chan? I don't know about gab but you can not say whatever you want on 4chan...

<comment><USER26> 8chan was still down since Cloudfare cancelled it last I checked. "Big tech"s reach extends beyond the mega platforms onto smaller independent sites too.

Few sites are totally unmoderated either, I doubt gab is totally unmoderated either. They all take down spam, illegal stuff, and harassing/abusive people afaik. If not I dont see how their communities would last very long.

<comment><USER20> Gab is a far right platform that moderates away anything left of Rush Limbaugh. They were upset that Reddit banned some really terrible and often times illegal acts from their platform. So they moved to their own platform. Their community is very open to fringe talk, hate speech as a form of free speech, and doxxing. A link for reference but far from the only instance.

[https://news.yahoo.com/federal-judge-sentence-far- extremist-...](https://news.yahoo.com/federal-judge-sentence-far- extremist-050623746.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Too much centralized cnotrol.

<comment><USER19> At some point there's going be some form of court system(s) evolve out of this, or else case law is going to lay down some rough guidelines for companies like Facebook that are going to have to operate their own internal courts. I could imagine a court overturning a decision by an internal company court on censorship, for example. Maybe it's already happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm so glad big tech screens videos for the correct political viewpoint. Nobody could have predicted events like this.

<comment><USER29> They screened videos to ensure the facts pertaining to a medical procedure were correct. The fact check itself had nothing to do with politics.

<comment><USER30> > It had nothing to do with politics.

Surely you can see that this is impossible. There is no component of a video like this which has "nothing to do with politics."

<comment><USER29> No, it's not. Please re-read my post. I said that _" the fact check itself"_ is not political. I did not defend the political bias of the video itself.

You would also do well to actually read the article, especially the screenshot of the fact-check. You'll notice that the fact-check, per my post, simply addresses the facts of the issue and does not make a single political statement.

Edit: You also modified my statement when quoting me, making it more ambiguous than I had written it. Please be sure to quote people accurately in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The embedded video in the article is logical in its assertions and therefore doesn't leave room for argument (obligatory replies to this comment aside).

Unfortunately, logical arguments in an emotionally charged topic are usually heard as inflammatory, as many logical married individuals can attest. So this political tug-of-war response should come as no surprise.</comment>


Solar Power Explosion in Spain: 3.1 Gigawatts Installed in 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/solar-power-spain-3-gigawatts-2008.php

<comment><USER2> Now if only we can figure out a way to make Spain travel at 88 miles per hour...</comment>


Ask HN: Where's All the Entrepreneurship / Bootstrapping Content? - <AUTHOR> I've noticed that HN seems to have seen a drop-off in the amount of entrepreneurship content these days. At the same time, bootstrappers.io seems to mostly be dead or at least quiet. And /r/entrepreneur has the usual Reddit problems of being 99% beginner questions, as far as I can see.<p>Is there another place the entrepreneurship crowd-curated content can be found? I don't think the volume of content has dropped off, but it doesn't seem to be bubbling up on the link aggregators I'm aware of.<p>(My working definition of "Entrepreneurship content": stuff aimed at bootstrapped or otherwise sub-$1m MRR companies, talking business strategy, tactics, everything from developing product ideas to marketing. ) <comment><USER2> It's here, usually in the form of blog posts. If you want more of that content on the front page, I would suggest spending some time in `/newest` and up- voting those type of submissions. That's all you can do; the rest is up to everyone else, but you can't just read the front page and complain that the stuff you want to read isn't there without spending time up-voting new submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do indeed spend time in /new upvoting - seems like a decent thing to do.

However, that's not a great technique for finding valuable content, in my experience - the signal-to-noise ratio is rather biased in favour of the noise :)

Hence asking for advice. It wasn't meant as a complaint: if the groupmind of HN has decided it doesn't love entrepreneurship content, that's fine. But given there are a lot of other entrepreneurs on HN, I figured that one or more of them would know if entrepreneur-central had moved!

<comment><USER2> Fair enough, I didn't mean to be condescending. I think you might like /r/startups more than the entrepreneur sub. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


The IA Client – The Swiss Army Knife of Internet Archive - <AUTHOR> http://blog.archive.org/2019/06/05/the-ia-client-the-swiss-army-knife-of-internet-archive/ <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a convenient way to search web pages on the Internet Archive, you may also use my browser extension for viewing archived and cached versions of web pages, it supports 15 data sources, and page archiving is also planned.

[https://github.com/dessant/view-page- archive](https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive)

<comment><USER3> Great idea! And a good way to solve a repetitive task I run into often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was a little disappointed with the IA app. It works fairly well for the most part, but it seems to lag behind in features for the site

I wanted to download all of the Computer Chronicles. Both for viewing offline and to have my own "set" of files. I even re-encoded them to HEVC (from MPEG-2) and put them up here [https://intelminer.com/torrents/TV%20SHOWS/Computer%20Chroni...](https://intelminer.com/torrents/TV%20SHOWS/Computer%20Chronicles/)

Getting them from the Archive through was an exercise in frustration. IA offers (and heavily recommends) using the torrent download option to ease on bandwidth cost

Unfortunately for what ever reason, there's no way to pull down the .torrent files using this method.

In the end I had to simply pull the MPEG-2 videos down one by one over the course of several months (due to speed limiting on IA's end)

<comment><USER5> I just tried this in bash:

for each in `ia search collection:computerchronicles --itemlist`; do ia download $each --glob=*.torrent; done

I have myself a directory of torrents.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad it works now. At the time it didn't seem to list .torrent as a valid option though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a tutorial or introduction to the Internet Archive? There's a giant mass of fascinating stuff, but I've always had a hard time getting a handle on it.

<comment><USER5> I'm working on one, but there isn't one as such, no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> now just need to be able to access it like traversing the "real" internet with a time travel button

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a decent client, but be aware that you might want to increase the file descriptor limit, the client at the moment doesn't properly close files from my experience in using it to upload a fairly large folder structure.

A simple `ulimit -n` with the raised descriptor limit should take care of it.

<comment><USER9> I think this should fix that:

[https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/commit/1ac200cbbbe...](https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/commit/1ac200cbbbe3bb039b50ffc1181798e3471281cc)

This change will be in the next release, v1.8.5.

<comment><USER8> Ah, that is good to see then!

(sorry it took me a bit to respond, I'm not on HN all that often.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Meta: is "The Swiss Army Knife of $Something" the new "$Something for humans" ? I really hate these phrases as they technically can be put in front of almost anything and stay semi-accurate, but not give any additional information, besides being marketing-speak

<comment><USER11> It is not new :-)

> "Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" \- > [https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html/](https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html/) > > > Doug Sheppard, 2000-10-16

(Earliest quote I could find in three minutes.)

<comment><USER5> I chose the phrasing because I deemed it accurate for the situation. This script has multiple functions and does a number of distinct things well depending on how it is invoked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My org has been using the client and python library for a couple of years to interact with IA. It's a fantastic tool -- Jake Johnson's a superhero in my book!

</comment><comment><USER13> Last time I checked, you could only give the download subcommand one option at a time, so I wrote this shell script:

        #!/usr/bin/env zsh

        for i in "$@"
        do
             ia download $(basename $i)
        done</comment>


I made this book game - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gallery/QZato <comment><USER2> I like the idea and the illustrations are really nice.

How is it with replayability? What about the lifetime - will it still be playable in x years (books can last some decades, websites usually don't).</comment>


Accuracy takes power: a 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator?daysago=580 <comment><USER2> Other discussions:

1 year ago: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3987660](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3987660)

2 years ago: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864531](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864531)

<comment><USER3> Interesting the comment from the first link link (590 days ago, before PS4/Xbox One had been announced): (source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3988628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3988628))

> What worries me is if future generations will be able to enjoy the games of > today. Will it ever be feasible to emulate a PS3 to the level demanded here? > Will my grandchildren in 50 years be able to play GTA 6 on a PS4 emulator? > Processing power does not appear to scale to allow this, and there will > barely by any of today's consoles still alive by then (also, I doubt 2060s > television sets will have HDMI input).

My response would be the trend towards more PC-like architectures (more traditional x86 systems vs something like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_\(microprocessor\))) and the fact it's already easy to build a similarly priced ($400-$500) PC with superior performance already (historically rare at release than the new set of consoles) may mean it's easier to accurately run these games in future than a Nintendo 64 or SNES. On the other hand, the original Xbox (circa 2000) was a traditional x86 system running an only _slightly_ modified Windows with DirectX that as far as I know isn't emulated well.

I think the search for accuracy will probably be achieved in the coming decades by producing accurate and cheap clone hardware "dongles" to offload processing and interfacing them to a computer via some future fast bus.

<comment><USER4> As for the Xbox, I think a lot just falls onto documentation. It's clearly technically possible - Xbox backwards compatibility on the 360 was achieved with software emulation.

<comment><USER5> Not only is it possible, it's been done: [http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/](http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/)

It runs a few commercial games, but probably not all that well. I wonder why not a lot of people bothered to contribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the obsession with accuracy is actually a bad thing. The author glosses over it, but many games are improved by having slightly higher clock speeds. Game breaking bugs are usually only a problem on lower end games where the devs were doing something hacky.

Personally I always found it frustrating when new versions of MAME would make games unplayably slow on my system in the name of accuracy.

The really important question is are we trying to preserve the games or the hardware? If we're trying to preserve the games than fast emulation with special case hacks for games that need them seems like the way to go. There were a limited number of games released for each system so accurate emulation is just a waste of time.

<comment><USER7> It's very true that a bit of extra horsepower in the right place can make a game better than the original, even if it's something as simple as a boosted framerate.

But I don't think accuracy is a waste of time. Accuracy can even be the easier method if you have proper specifications for the chips, with the difficulty moving into optimization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It has always seemed to me that the reason accurate multi-chip emulation is slow has to do with trying to serialize an effectively parallel computation—a bit like why symbolic AI never got off the ground.

Wouldn't a better approach to this problem involve some sort of FPGA expansion card (or OpenCL code to get the GPU to mimic one) programmed at runtime, for each game, with the traces of the original chips composing it?

<comment><USER9> I agree.

I believe OpenCL is the way to go. I did a very simple Sega Genesis emulator and basically what you do is control with a very slow CPU a very fast hardware that does very simple things like drawing tiles.

You control the tile with something like a pointer with the CPU but it is draw by hardware. Same with sound.

It is not hard to do, it just takes time.

<comment><USER9> PS: For those interested, programming in OpenCL-OpenGL is way harder, painful and slower(in developer time) than in the CPU.

In particular, you extract all the performance in OpenCL from knowing how to manage memory. We talk about orders of magnitude difference(100x-200x times faster).

This memory management is hell for anybody trained with garbage collectors, Object oriented constructors and so on. It is way harder than pure c and the feedback loop is way longer(unless you invest a lot in hardware).

<comment><USER8> In this case, I don't think the emulator would be "programmed" in OpenCL; instead, what would be programmed in OpenCL would be a generalized cellular- automata-style FPGA "emulator." (This would be deep magic, but it would only need to be done once.)

Then you'd "flash" the trace of the chips you want emulated to this virtual FPGA, just as if you were deploying it to a real one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. The mentioned emulator (bsnes) appears to have source code in the Ubuntu repositories, so I'm going to try taking a look at it.

On an unrelated note, does anyone here have a sense of how useful semi- specialized hardware could be for emulators. Obviously emulating a specific system in hardware is easy (at least in principle). However, would it be possible to create hardware specialized for emulators in general. This would probably be multi-core devices that could synchronize between cores at a configurable rate. The obvious downside to any hardware approach is that if the assumptions are wrong, it is likely far more difficult to patch the problem with sacrificing most of the benefits hardware gives you.

</comment><comment><USER11> FYI: this project is now called Higan [http://byuu.org/higan/](http://byuu.org/higan/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Many commenters (in this and the two previous threads for the same link) have already suggested an FPGA solution for accurate and high performing emulation.

I wonder if memristors[1] would be able to enable an even more powerful way; just download the model for the chip to emulate and have the memristors configure themselves accordingly.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor)

</comment><comment><USER13> I love this article! The extremes are very interesting. I think this is the edge case of a continuum of preservation practices. I reference the author in my article on software preservation, offering other examples of different approaches and efforts: [http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1709237...](http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17092372)

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a Sega Genesis emulator, blastem, whose premise is that that even when extreme accuracy is the primary goal, it can still be done efficiently.

[http://rhope.retrodev.com/files/blastem.html](http://rhope.retrodev.com/files/blastem.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmm I wonder how much speed it would require to emulate an Amiga then

<comment><USER16> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_(emulator)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_\(emulator\))</comment></comment>


Judge in Xbox-modding case berates prosecution and puts trial on hold - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/xbox-judge-riled/

<comment><USER2> Discussion on the Arstechnica post on the same <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960161></comment>


SXSW Film Review: 'Take Your Pills' - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/take-your-pills-review-sxsw-1202728519/ <comment><USER2> #itakemypillsbecause would like a word with the reviewer</comment>


Amazon removed device encryption from Fire OS 5 because no one was using it - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/amazon-removed-device-encryption-from-fire-os-5-because-no-one-was-using-it/ <comment><USER2> Encryption is generally a good thing, but I'll confess I don't understand why this one matters: I would expect that the list of books you've purchased is already just a subpoena away, so why is it a problem that they could also find out what you've been reading by seizing your e-reader? It seems like that would be the hard way of going about an investigation.</comment>


Show HN: Little tool to find prospect's email address - <AUTHOR> http://thrust.io/mail

<comment><USER2> I would use a tool like this as our product does need hustling tools.

I used my own email id(plus a few more) and my actual email wasn't in search results. Looks like they just do standard string combinations.

Our aim is to source publicly available information and build a profile of a prospect for use by our clients. Maybe I am missing something and if I could see an explanation of their process that would engender more trust in their results.

Back to writing my own data mining tools..

</comment><comment><USER3> Cute, I assume it start SMTP sessions with different cobinations and checks if the server does not return an error after corresponding RCPT TO. It will not work with "catch-all" servers. Hint for inproovement - so far it does not find emails with numbers like email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> "We cannot determine whether the email exists or not because the email service has a catch-all address." So, if you don't want to be found if someone uses that tool, then make sure you set up a catch-all address ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> You Da Man!

I am particularly good at debugging, and I greatly enjoy it, but it is quite uncommon that I am offered purely debugging jobs.

I've had the idea of scouting around for well-financed programs that totally suck, then contacting their publishers to offer my service of fixing their broken code.

I haven't had any bites yet. Your service is very encouraging to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> This tool is amazing! I think it works kind of like this: it splits firstname and lastname, tests for a response code on some random combination like "firstletterOfFirstName + last name" on a service like this [http://verify- email.org/](http://verify-email.org/) very clever !!

<comment><USER7> Hi, you said on my chatbot ACUMAN that you would be willing to help, and that you made a similar service at age 17. BTW I'm 14 years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its very very similar to this tool that I use to find journalists email ID's. [https://www.voilanorbert.com/](https://www.voilanorbert.com/)

But mostly email addresses this tool predicts are not true.

</comment><comment><USER9> Without giving too much away, how does this work and / or how reliable is it?

I was actually looking around for <famous VC>'s email and it produced one for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> If it produces an email it is pretty accurate. It checks various possibilities, and returns the valid ones. If only one is returned you can be pretty sure it is a valid email. You can use the social links to see if the email is associated to a facebook / twitter account.

It does check that the domain is not "catch-all", or that it doesn't simply ignore our queries.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it returned exactly one email that's likely (in my opinion) to be correct. That's really cool. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> =/ It produced inaccurate results for myself and a few coworkers/friends. (both public domains like gmail/yahoo and corporate emails)

</comment><comment><USER11> Aaaand my little catch-all mailbox and receive-rule renders this tool useless. Most excellent, less spam for me :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. Bookmarked!

</comment><comment><USER12> "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." oh dear :(

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for downtime. Currently resizing server.</comment>


Analyse Asia 65: Tableau in Asia with JY Pook - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/10/10/episode-65-tableau-in-asia-with-jy-pook/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sitting in the Tableau Asia Pacific headquarters, we interviewed JY Pook, the vice president, Asia Pacific for Tableau, a NYSE listed data analytics software company. We start from JY's early career in data to his current role in Tableau. In the conversation, we discussed Tableau's footprint in Asia, and how Tableau has helped companies such as Hotel Quickly and Metro (a retailer in Asia) to extract insights from their data quickly and translate them into effective business outcomes. Finally, JY Pook offered his observations and advice on best practices in the data analytics space.</comment>


How does a GPU shader core work? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://aras-p.info/texts/files/2018Academy%20-%20GPU.pdf <comment><USER2> Also have a look at [https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through- the-...](https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics- pipeline-2011-index/) where all the stages of the GPU pipeline are explained very well

</comment><comment><USER3> is the video available?

<comment><USER4> No, it wasn't recorded. And I was talking in Lithuanian, which wouldn't have been very useful :)

<comment> david-gpu Thank you for making this presentation. It was really well done.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Code for Fun Outside of Work - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/08/02/coding-for-fun/ <comment><USER2> I, too, was doing Project Euler problems for a while, but eventually I realized that with the same amount of work I could be making things I actually want to use. My Project Euler solutions were conceptually on a shelf, sitting unused. It didn't feel too good.

On the other hand, on Sunday I wrote a simple mode to upload code to an Arduino from inside Emacs ([https://bitbucket.org/zck/zarduino.el](https://bitbucket.org/zck/zarduino.el)). Now that's fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do agree that projects are the most fun when you're building something useful that you want to use. I sometimes fall into the trap of convincing myself that what I'm building isn't very good though, or that is already exists.

<comment><USER3> I have had similar experiences with my personal projects. I fall into thinking that if they aren't on par with the "state-of-the-art" way of doing things then they aren't worth deep effort/thought.. but I've come to realize that even sub-optimal approaches to a problem can lead to major shifts in perspective and ultimate change the way one considers their approach to a solution.

This also applies to problems which: "already exists" and/or are considered "very hard or near impossible"

P.S. If nothing more, (re-)implementing a solution will always provide a better understanding of the problem at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoy constructing projects spun off Python Playground from No Starch. Unfortunately that book contains "the answers" as part of the book, but sometimes the author gives interesting directions for further exploration (or I simply use his ideas as a starting point for my own projects).

</comment><comment><USER3> My problem with personal projects is returning to them after a few weeks have passed. I typically end up re-coding the entire thing from scratch (by scratch I mean starting from a blank editor and copying/pasting blocks from the old file until I can grasp the mindset I was in when I first wrote it -- this is a very counter-productive process [although sometimes I come across fundamental flaws in my former thought/problem-solving]).</comment>


Vircurex Bitcoin Exchange Compromised - <AUTHOR> http://vircurex.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Text from the site:

 _The systems Vircurex.com and Cryptostocks.com have been taken offline over the weekend

Please do not deposit any further coins to your Vircurex accounts. We must assume that the wallet has been compromised._</comment>


Shrinking the address bar width in browsers - <AUTHOR> http://smotko.si/browser-layouts/

<comment><USER2> Good design doesn't mean "put everything in smaller containers." Chrome uses distinct rows for tabs, addresses, and bookmarks because each field can contain a lot of information.

<comment><USER3> Thats true, but wasting space with a container that's too big and almost never fully used is also questionable. And a lof of information can quickly become to much information so having a lot in bookmarks there doesn't seem practical to me.

I just tried this and it works well so I'm sticking with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [1] shows bookmarkbar only when it's usefull (in new tab or (optionally) when you mouse over the addressbar)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide- bookmark...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide- bookmarksbar/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Better yet, put the stuff that's not related to what's on the tab (like bookmarks) OUTSIDE of the tab. Then I don't have to explicitly hide my bookmarks every time I capture a screenshot of a browser.

<comment><USER6> What happens when you want to navigate to a bookmarked site from the current tab?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Short address bars make it easier to use fake urls. www.google.com.evilsite.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true, but even if you add half a screen of bookmarks you will still get at least 600pixels left for the address bar, more than enough to identify fake sites.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Will there be space? - <AUTHOR> https://will-there-be.space/ <comment><AUTHOR> App I made for fun at uni to predict when a certain area might have spaces to work in. Could be useful in a variety of other situations!

Currently has limited protection against malicious users (although there is a ReCAPTCHA to avoid bots) which makes it quick and easy to update a location 'on the go', but I guess we'll see how that goes. :)

Basically all the places on the website so far are from my university (except for a few 'funny' ones from my friends :P), but feel free to create any more you might find useful.</comment>


Top 5 android/mobile news websites - <AUTHOR> http://www.dalouche.com/wordpress/2010/05/17/top-5-android-news-websites/

<comment><USER2> How the hell do you rank slashoid.org number one? Never heard of it and it clearly has nearly 0 traffic.</comment>


How Hackers Infiltrate Open Source Projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/how-hackers-infiltrate-open-source-projects-/d/d-id/1335072 <comment><USER2> It looks difficult to gain the thrust of the maintainer to be able to merge something under the hood. They show one example. Is there another example or it was an isolate event?</comment>


New Chrome Beta includes Native Client - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/08/building-better-web-apps-with-new.html

<comment><USER2> To me, this seems like a Big Huge Deal, but perhaps there aren't that many use cases for it. Is anyone excited to build something that runs at almost-native speed on a browser?

<comment><USER3> Yes, this could be a huge deal for games development. Especially if they somehow manage to not kill OpenGL before it becomes popular this could enable very cool things indeed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should I dive back into Rails after a long haitus? - <AUTHOR> Background: I've always worked in operations. I dug into RoR years ago, when it was the exciting new technology. I learned Ruby, worked through the rails tutorials, and made a few projects using Rails at that time (mostly for personal and internal use). I learned enough javascript to get by as well.
None of this was ever my core job responsibility. After a while I moved back to Python. I did a few things with Django, before basically being pushed into a pure operations role.
Over the last five years, my career has stagnated. I still do some python scripting for operations-y tasks, but I'm woefully outdated when it comes to the modern web.
My employer has an opening for a rails developer. I know my resume is thin on this front, but I think I have a shot because I'm an internal candidate who is generally well respected based on my other work in the organization. I might be able to convince them to take a chance on me in this role.
Based on reading HN, Rails seems like a bit of a dinosaur now, but then again, so am I, so perhaps we're made for each other? So if you're me, and you want to ramp back up fast (like, in time for a job interview...) what do you do next? What is it that I need to know, right away? <comment><USER2> I'd do the same thing I did to learn Rails 3, 4, etc.:

1\. Read all the guides. This doesn't take as long as it looks. ([http://guides.rubyonrails.org](http://guides.rubyonrails.org))

2\. Make any app.

3\. If you have time, try to experiment with different libraries that do the same thing, try single-page API and server-rendered versions of the same content, etc.</comment>


Loading and running Hunt the Wumpus on Univac 1219B military mainframe - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQCnO9qJxo <comment><AUTHOR> Found via [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus).</comment>