Launch HN: Axdraft (YC W19) - Legal documents for startups in minutes - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! We are Yuriy and Oleg, founders of Axdraft (https://business.axdraft.com/en/business). Axdraft offers free legal documents for startups.
We have built Axdraft, because we believe that sometimes founders don't need 20-page ironclad contract, 2 weeks of negotiations and detailed explanation of all risks. On early stages you just want to have a good, balanced agreement fast to move the deal forward while it's hot. The biggest difficulty here is that lawyers push us to perceive contracts as unique and, therefore, not possible to automate. Usually, by saying unique, they mean that there are 20-50 possible variations of a clause in the contract.
We are a team of brothers, who combine legal and tech expertise, Yuriy was a lawyer for almost 8 years at one of top law firms in Europe and when he started noticing that even the most complex legal transactions have many patterns, he reached out to his brother Oleg, who at that time was Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com in Amsterdam.
We teamed up to try to figure out and automate most common variations and allow any young startup, as ourselves to draft a document, which they need now. We spoke to about 100 founders and came up with a list of top-6 contracts startups use, including: (1) NDA; (2) Pilot agreement; (3) Services agreement; (4) SaaS agreement; (5) SAFE; and (6) Employee onboarding. We are already working on Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Founders Agreement and LoI, which are top-4 documents requested by users. We will be more than happy to add other documents upon your request.
Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar solutions are:
1.     we focus on startups, which makes the content more tailored; 2.     we offer documents for free, because I see little value in the legal document itself. The main value of a lawyer, in our view, is in counseling, sharing the liability and providing you assurances; 3.     we offer plain English description of the implications for each choice you are offered when drafting a document; 4.     to use Axdraft you don't have to register, because we want to create flawless and super-fast experience for founders to create legal documents; 5.     we are happy to customize documents of registered users with their logos, company details and some custom language upon request.
We intend to monetize Axdraft by giving an option for startups to submit any document drafted with Axdraft or a document they received from third party for approval or review by a lawyer for a small fixed fee, which would still be much more affordable than engaging a law firm.
Currently, we offer founder to founder review, which is not a legal review at all, but more a business advice from a fellow founder, who is eager to share his experience with similar contracts.
We estimate the market for this product to be less than 1 bln USD at the moment, but we expect it to grow as the number of startups founded each year increases and as we expand into a larger 7 bln USD market of small businesses (under 20 employees) in the US.
We are really excited to hear your feedback about Axdraft. Please try it out at https://business.axdraft.com (registration is not required) and let us know what you think. <comment><USER2> Just tried it out to make a Privacy Policy. Pretty neat! Only took a couple minutes to answer the questions.

One point of feedback: What you gave me was a Word Doc. I know Word Docs are the bread and butter of the legal profession, but I want to use this privacy policy on a website. That means I'll have to convert it to HTML, which means either getting really ugly HTML after I ask word to save it out, or having to copy/paste it and then reformat it.

It would be great if you could output a more convertible format, like LaTeX or Markdown.

<comment><USER3> Or just an HTML page with no styling, which can be copied/pasted into Word to preserve formatting, or saved directly.

<comment><USER4> Just have multiple "save as" options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi guys,

This is an interesting product! I generated a sample document to see what it looked like and I was impressed by both the simplicity of the document generation process and the quality of the output. I also think it is great that there is no signup, email, or any other gatekeeper preventing me from using the service.

I frequently find myself involved in early stage projects where these sort of legal documents would be very handy. I would love to see the document types that you're already working on, as well as perhaps a freelance / work for hire Letter of Agreement, as many startups begin by putting food on the table consulting.

A few things about the service:

1\. What license, if any, are these documents generated under? I know sites like contractology let you use the docs for free but require attribution, or they can be used without attribution for a small fee.

2\. Other than official legal review, do you plan to monetize any aspect of the service, such as the customization offered in the fifth point in the "main differences" section? Why or why not?

3\. Where are your market size estimates coming from? Is the market that you are measuring the total amount that startups spend per year on legal expenses, or is it something else?

4\. I was confused by some of the wording during the signup process "No I Makes sense, if pilot is very simple," for example, was an option.

Regarding the fourth point, I have some experience working with European companies to improve the fluency of their website's English business and technical writing. My email is in my profile if you are interested in learning more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for such a detailed feedback. This is extremely valuable and we will definitely reach out to you separately!

On each of your questions:

1\. We don't impose any license terms. It's free to use and share for everyone. The reason being that we want people to share the news and get the benefit of AXDRAFT instead of thinking twice not to violate some kind of restrictions.

2\. We don't intend to monetize on personalization for now, but eventually we want to become a first point of contact for all startup legal work and this will become our source of revenue. We choose not to charge for personalization, because we want users to clearly feel the value between finding a free template on Google or using other services.

3\. Market size comes from the number of startups and small businesses and the assumption that we will get around 100USD of fees per startup per month.

4\. We will fix it and will hope for your help for this.

<comment><USER6> Yuriy, this looks useful and I'll take a look at these for my own startup, but one point of clarification that you guys might want to double check with a lawyer: not having a license does not mean that anyone can use it, it means that _no one_ can use it. Licenses aren't restrictions, they are grants. Without a grant, no one is allowed to do anything with them by default.

You very likely need a license so your customers aren't (technically) in violation. CC0 license is a straightforward one for these kind of situations, might be worth checking out.

Per usual: not a lawyer, certainly not your lawyer, please double check with an attorney.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will check this and clarify this from the legal perspective. Our attitude is, as I described: everyone can use it. We focus now on getting the best documents, we will definitely have no claims and we will clarify this from the legal point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The difficulty with this sort of thing, in my experience, is that once you do need to hire a lawyer to review this sort of agreement, it turns out to be a lot more expensive in the long run than just hiring them and using their forms to begin with. They know their own language backward and forward so it takes them very little time to make a standard change to their standard form. Looking at an entirely new (to them) agreement, they have to analyze it from scratch.

If there were truly industry-standard forms that all attorneys were familiar with for these standard agreements, that difficulty wouldn't arise. That's how the residential real estate market in the US works, for example — standard forms for all sorts of situations approved by the real estate associations. It's sort of like how an open source infrastructure product will eventually become the cheapest thing to use because everyone already knows how it works.

Do you have a goal/roadmap for making your agreements the industry standard?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this feedback. We are aware of this problem. We have faced it few times. This is why we will allow our users to connect with our network of lawyers, who are very well familiar with our language. Moreover they will be able to easily compare the document they receive from users with AXDRAFT template, so we expect the fee to be significantly less, compared to what you would usually expect from a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm going through the MSA one now:

>Customer I In this case customer will be Company, and you are the one providing services (Contractor). Choose wisely

I think there are some typos here and I'm not sure why I need to choose this option wisely.

Going through the questions, it looks like you are using "I" as a separator which is confusing.

>Do you want to include interest on late payments?

I think a discount for on time payments is better than charging interest. Interest makes it seem like the customer can delay payment if they feel like it.

>Should Contractor be able to remedy deficiencies in Services, if Company (you) does not accept them?

In question 1 the customer was the company and I was the contractor, but now they're swapped.

It sneaks in some terms I wouldn't agree to:

>all Work Product and other materials provided by or on behalf of Contractor will not contain any viruses, "Trojan horses" or other harmful code;

>Contractor would cause Company irreparable harm for which Company has no adequate remedies at law. Accordingly, Company is entitled to specific performance or injunctive relief for any such breach.

>require Contractor to pay the adjustment of $ Type in amount of reduction in fee, in case Contractor fails to comply with quality requirements for Services in USD I example: 500.

>keep copies of all books and records relating to Services during the term of this agreement and for three years thereafter. Company may upon reasonable notice and during normal business hours examine and make copies of all books and records relating to Services

When looking at the preview document I expected that at minimum I would be able to click on the green text and edit it. Ideally, I should be able to edit the whole document.

Sorry to say that I don't think I would use the service. It's a bit sloppy in places which isn't reassuring when generating legal documents. I don't think what it spat out was something that I would want to use. It seemed to be tilted in favor of the client where I'd rather send something in my favor/neutral and have them redline it if need be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this feedback. This is really valuable. I believe the confusion started on the first question. After you choose it, you become a contractor in the agreement, not a customer, so many provisions are against you. We will probably delete this option to avoid confusion. We will also improve wordings and use of symbols to improve trustworthiness.

Regarding the editing, you should have received a final Word document with 100% ability to edit it. Preview is just to get a general sense of the document.

Regarding the discount on payments, thank you for the suggestion. We will add this option and we have specifically created a "suggestion" button on the website.

Thank you again for your feedback. It is very valuable! We will fix everything and let you know (if you want to).

<comment><USER8> >Thank you for this feedback. This is really valuable. I believe the confusion started on the first question. After you choose it, you become a contractor in the agreement, not a customer, so many provisions are against you. We will probably delete this option to avoid confusion. We will also improve wordings and use of symbols to improve trustworthiness.

This has left me even more confused. If I'm the contractor why would I want an agreement with many provisions against me? In that scenario I would want a contract neutral to in my favor. Something that will get me past my client's legal team while protecting me as much as possible.

>Regarding the editing, you should have received a final Word document with 100% ability to edit it. Preview is just to get a general sense of the document.

Ah, I stopped at the preview point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again for the feedback. We will split this document into two separate agreements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on launching! On this:

> Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar > solutions are: 1. we focus on startups, which makes the content more > tailored

We (Clerky) are exclusively focused on startups. We started Clerky specifically because there was no online service that was suitable for startups. Not sure if you meant for that first point to only apply to LegalZoom or RocketLawyer, but I wanted to clarify that.

Good luck with everything!

<comment><USER10> I don't think this is the right forum/thread to point it out but Clerky defaults to 10,000,000 shares while incorporating and this was a big mistake for us (and for most startups) down the lane as Delaware has higher taxes if the company has more than 5,000 shares (regardless of the share value).

We lost nearly a month's revenue paying off taxes and filing legal amendments.

Also you guys handed over my account to CSC as agent and we weren't even aware of it.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you might have gotten some bad advice from elsewhere – most new startups with 10 million authorized shares pay a DE franchise tax that is very close to the minimum (around $400). There are two different ways to calculate franchise tax for DE - the "authorized shares" method and the "assumed par value" method. The letter DE sends out uses the former to estimate your franchise tax, which is usually some huge amount. But when you go to pay your franchise tax, you can just use the "assumed par value" method and pay what is typically a very small amount. I'll shoot you an email on this as well!

<comment><USER10> The minimum can be $150 if your shares are less than 5000. If the difference between $400 and $150 is inconsequential then yes it doesn't matter.

The advice was from Delaware government customer service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Small design feedback: the I character you use to divide text in-line looks strange to me. I've actually never seen I used like that before. Perhaps you want to consider using | instead of I? Here's an example of the difference: [https://i.imgur.com/NRiERLN.png](https://i.imgur.com/NRiERLN.png) (top is |, bottom is what you have now).

This seems like a useful service, although I'm curious what the business model is here. Is it entirely based on the "Request review by lawyers" button at the end? Do you think that the market of people who are willing to pay for lawyers but not pay for lawyers to draft documents is large enough? (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the angle here)

<comment><USER12> I also was very confused by the pipe, which renders exactly like an uppercase I for me. [EDIT: oh wait.. it is an I? either way...] Replacing with a hyphen or colon would be a quick fix. Additionally consider bolding the main text and/or greying the subtext.

On a positive note, I really like the way prior answers appear below the current question on the survey!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a much needed alternative to the others. Are there any plans to bring this to the EU?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the question. Yes, we plan to go to EU later (London and Berlin being a priority due to high number of startups), but for now we start with Silicon Valley, since the majority of startups are here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey guys, this is awesome! To help with SaaS sales agreement for my own company, I started builiding a tool just like yours this past weekend. I am glad I did not invest a lot of time into it :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Happy to hear that! We will be happy to personalize your documents, if you want to. Just email me at email@example.com or reach out via feedback button in the software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea. I just tried it out and had a couple of issues.

I wanted to see what a privacy policy would look like. I don't collect any user information but I was required to select at least one type of data that I collect.

Similarly, I accept payments but not via any of the listed payment processors, but I was required to select at least one of the payment processors.

I think both of these could be solved if you removed the requirement to select at least one option.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the problem with payment processors already. With the data it's a bit tricky, since almost every website collect some kind of data, so you probably don't need a Privacy Policy if you don't collect any data. Please let me know what you think about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was just thinking about how I could get an MSA done without spending thousands of dollars. I would be happy to pay for this. You should charge me something!

</comment><comment><USER17> Guys congrats, will absolutely use this. As you grow, it would be great if you could also handle the more complicated aspects of priced-equity rounds. In the meanwhile, I think a lot of people would benefit from the advisory agreement and the vesting agreement for employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. Advisory and vesting agreements are already on our road map. We hope to launch them after Demo Day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> An interesting idea. In my experience it's investors, not founders, who are often the source of complexity in startup agreements. I've found that angel investors or investors without a huge amount of experience with common practice in the YC/SV world struggle with concepts like SAFEs and convertible notes — even if they're otherwise sophisticated investors. And those types of investors are often the only ones ready to bet money on very early stage startups.

All that's to say: don't neglect the educational aspect of what you're selling. Make it easy for founders to explain how your documents works, and make it easy for investors to trust the documents you've prepared.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great feedback! I have never considered this aspect before. I think it makes sense to start some kind of blog on the website to explain legal matters in plain words, which startups can share with investors.

Another point to this is that we focus mainly on contracts, which startups use in their operational activity. I think this part is underserved most severely.

We have SAFE, because it is commonly requested by founders, but I think that Clerky does better job on corporate for now, since they have Board Consent+SAFE+signing+storage.

<comment><USER19> I would be significantly interested in something to help explain legal terms as someone with little experience with business, finance, or law. I'm interested to see how this turns out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We will work on that and will keep you posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is quite great! I used other free services for quick privacy policies before and they were quite bad.

I would love to see a Terms and Conditions template alongside the Privacy Policy one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Working on it. Hope to release it later this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this just for U.S.?

<comment><AUTHOR> The documents are governed by US law, so they are useful, if you have a US company or some clients in the US. At the same time, documents, like Privacy Policy are pretty international, so if you are building a SaaS business or an app, you can definitely rely on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome! How would it work for SaaS companies from other countries. For E.g. we are from India. So would these still be valid documents?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment! It would work if you have a US company or are selling to US customers, but, unfortunately, we don't have documents for India yet. We may expand into this market later, but for now we are focusing on US. You can also benefit from the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy we will launch soon, since they are pretty international.

<comment><USER22> We don't have a US company. But yes, we are selling to US customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was looking for a similar service few months ago. The startup world needs this. Will be using you guys soon

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bookmarking for future use, definitely a much needed service for many startups.

<comment><USER25> Thank you! We appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will there be documents in Spanish or other languages soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning this, but for now we focus in English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Works good and well polished site. Bookmarked.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> i thought yc funded something like this back in 2011/12 called clerky.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is true. Clerky operates in the same space, but currently they use different model (pay per document, essentially). We take a different approach and offer legal documents for free, but want to use this to become the first point of contact for startup legal work. We will monetize by offering tailor- made automation of contract workflow and follow-up legal advice on operational legal matters (like a virtual general counsel for startups).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Guys, I love this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! Feel free to reach out to me anytime at firstname.lastname@example.com if there is something you want us to improve.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SaaS Profile – Find software for your need - <AUTHOR> https://saasprofile.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Everyone,

I made SaaS Profile to easily find relevant software for my need. This is an early release as I'm planning to add more software, tags and needs. Your feedbacks are greatly appreciated.</comment>


A Son's Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/ <comment><USER2> It's a very understandable desire to want the return of your parents, but I find myself empathizing with the father. It sucks to lose your life, it's got to be even worse to lose your death</comment>


What lies beneath: our love affair with living underwater - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/08/what-lies-beneath-our-love-affair-with-living-underwater <comment><USER2> I blame Jules Verne entirely.

"The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. "

And a childhood spent with the most gorgeously illustrated children's book on a clock maker that lived in Atlantis - a book I've never been able to find since :/</comment>


Amazon on Cloud Player: we don't need no stinkin' licenses - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2011/03/amazon-on-cloud-player-we-dont-need-no-stinkin-licenses.ars

<comment><USER2> I like the license part, bear with me.

I grew up with the vynil lp, which definitely was a product. You went to the record store and bought an actual physical product, 30 cms of diameter with a play time of usually 20 minutes per side. I could play it, lend it to a friend, gift it to somebody. The product was independent of location or device; devices playing LP's where standardized.

The RIAA was actually founded to standardize the equalization curve (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization>) for the playback of music and not as a money grubbing -, mob like -, thuggish organization suing teenagers and dead people.

Then came the CD. Still a product. With different specifications and playback devices then the LP, but still interchangeable, playable everywhere and in every country. Definitely a product, which you bought, owned, could lend, gift, use as a coaster, whatever. It was yours to own.

Then suddenly the product turned into a license. CD's where no more actual CD's, but some crippled data container, to prevent copyying, _licensed_ to you for use. Possibly the licensed product contained some dreckware, which wrecked havoc on your computer and was stealthily installed without your knowledge or consent (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit>).

When you download a song (legally) nowadays you only license it. Ideally the copyright owners would like to charge you on a per country basis.

Going to Amsterdam for the weekend? That's an euro, sir, since your song is only licensed for Germany.

I'm aware that we're not there, that the licenses are in fact more open now as when Apple started to offer music downloads. But I'm pretty certain that this would not be the case if the music industry had their say (see 3 Euro ringtone downloads).

Where the hypocricy comes in that a license would imply that you only pay once.You pay for the right to use a song. Reality however, and I leave that as an excercise to the reader, looks very, very different.

I close my rant with the link to this interesting essay by Steve Albini (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_albini>) :

<http://www.negativland.com/albini.html>

<comment><USER3> Are you German? I don't know who would say "an euro" unless you pronounce it oi-ro.

<comment><USER4> What do you say in the US/UK? (I am German)

I only know the rule to say "an" if a word starts with a,e,i,o or u, so why not Euro?

<comment><USER3> Because Euro is pronounced you-ro, and the rule for using "an" is if the word starts with a vowel _sound_ ("you" is not a vowel sound). I'm Greek, so we say Ev-ro, but we have no "an" :P

<comment><USER4> Thanks - it's new to me that "you" is not a vowel sound. Isn't it pronounced exactly like "u", which is a vowel? So generally never use "an" if a word starts with "u"?

<comment><USER5> It's the 'y' sound that pronouncing 'u' like 'you' causes.

Your rule is too general though.

A uniform. An understanding.

(note that the u in understanding doesn't have a y sound to start it)

<comment><USER4> That makes sense, thanks!

<comment><USER6> Just to make things more complicated, in the U.K. and certain parts of the U.S., you will often here people say things like an historic, because they tend to drop the "h" sound when they pronounce historic; it sounds fine when pronounced that way. If you pronounce the "h" in historic, it sounds awful to say anything but a historic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When they launched this product, it didn't even cross my mind that it would run afoul of anything. People are doing what they want with the data that they own.

<comment><USER8> My guess is everyone involved, on every end, is aware of this. Certain people just want a cut of _everything_ , and will try any argument they can.

<comment><USER9> ...in particular people from industries that were once more profitable than they are currently. There is nothing like decreasing revenues and companies going to the wall to make people get greedy.

<comment><USER10> Well, either you find new revenues or (a) people's salaries stagnate or (b) fewer people receive salaries.

<comment><USER9> Well, you have to admit that the perceived option (c) "sue some people to make them pay you more for doing the same" would look appealing.... If short- sighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess lawsuits have become the record industry's core business, rather than selling music.

<comment><USER12> Wow, that's a really profound statement for me. Mind blown, thanks to you, dear sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fallout, or lack there-of, from this will be interesting to watch. Any legal battles fought over this will certainly further shape precedent as more and more of our digital media moves to personal online storage and streaming.

(Not to mention that I'd love to see Amazon and the Record Corps duke it out over this!)

</comment><comment><USER14> The funny part is this will likely help album sales, but I'm sure the record companies will rush to cut down the money tree Amazon just planted for them before it grows too big.

<comment><USER15> It's already helped album sales a little. I bought 5 albums browsing through Amazon MP3 this morning after seeing the announcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait, so use of partial downloads (say reading from a stream buffer) is legally different than the same use of a full download? (If my connection is fast enough for the second song to _fully_ buffer before the first one finishes playing, does this change anything, since the player is now reading from effectively a "full download"?)

</comment><comment><USER17> _Only then did Amazon allegedly begin to address licensing issues before going ahead with the launches—licenses or not. "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," the anonymous exec said._

If I recall correctly, Apple announced the new name change to iOS, launched iOS4, and then made the deal to license the name with Cisco after the cat was out of the bag

[http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios...](http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco_and_apple_agreement_on_ios_trademark/)

<comment><USER18> I believe it was the same deal with at least "iPhone", which was also Cisco- owned at time of announcement. Maybe one other, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think Amazon and Apple should just start their own record label, save a fortune by cutting out the sleazy middle-men and give artists a much bigger % cut from albums to attract hoards of artists. Why wouldn't it work?

<comment><USER20> Apple is probably barred from doing this due to the issues with Apple Records.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer>

<comment><USER19> Ah yeah forgot about that. Maybe they should buy Apple Records :) Clear up all sorts of confusion in the process

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone remember MP3.com (specifically my.mp3.com) from about 10 years ago? The lawsuits eventually shut that useful and efficient service down.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought about this when reports of Google music started to appear and the way Amazon sees it is completely my point of view. If it is my content that I upload to that service, then it really isn't Amazon's duty to care about licensing deals. The analogy to an external harddrive mentioned in the article explains this very well. You could even go one step further and replace the external harddrive with your own webspace to make that analogy even more similar to Amazon's service: Imagine you upload your music to your own webspace to be able to listen to it wherever you are. Not very practical, but there's no way one could argue that there have to be any additional fees involved. This shouldn't even be news.

So when Google has to negotiate with record labels this tells me that users apparently don't simply have upload their media collection. There have to be more features, similar to former lala.com maybe. Otherwise Google shouldn't even feel the need to contact any record labels. After their music is bought it's none of their business anymore. At least that's my opinion.

<comment><USER23> Uploading your music to Dropbox would be a good example. As far as I know nothing stops me doing that, and it achieves a fairly similar functionality to the proposed Amazon service. Dropbox even use Amazon's servers to store their data (I believe).

<comment><USER24> There is actually a (minor) difference. Amazon really is streaming the MP3s, while if you play one from Dropbox it downloads and plays and plays (technically it could be played while downloading, but this is actually uncommon).

There are slight technical differences - in streaming MP3s there is metadata embedded inside the files - see, for eg the second part of [http://nicklothian.com/blog/2009/03/18/random- mp3-metadata-c...](http://nicklothian.com/blog/2009/03/18/random-mp3-metadata- code/)

Exactly why this would make a difference for licencing purposes I'm not sure, but I would note that there is a special "streaming" licence.

<comment><USER25> The Dropbox client for iPhone also "streams" MP3s, as far as I can tell. (Streaming as in playing while downloading)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Step 1: Threaten Amazon to try to extort license fees.

Step 2: Spread FUD in the press to scare users away from Amazon.

Step 3: Get a judge to compel Amazon to disclose user identities and their MP3 watermarks.

<comment><USER27> Step 4: Amazon drops all your CDs from their web shop

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am really excited for an actual lawsuit but I'm afraid Amazon will just settle out of court.

Comparing it to a hard drive may actually work in court but trying to explain the server optimizing code that grabs copies of the exact same song locally on the server rather than re-upload 30 million copies of the same Ke$ha track would be tough.

Still. I'd love to see this in court. I'm going to go buy some Amazon MP3 albums now to support the service.

<comment><USER29> Amazon probably does treat all copies separately in order to maintain the distinction of a personal backup service and not a music broadcasting service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If the music industry goes after them for this, they apparently completely missed the boat on pogoplug and the service they offer.

I stream movies/music and view files remotely via an external drive hooked up to my pogoplug server at home. Supposing I moved it to a friend's place in following the 3-2-1 rule of backing up, would I then need a license to play my songs?

<comment><USER31> They only care about trends that threaten to go mainstream. Why do the leave usenet alone for instance?

<comment><USER30> Or they only worry about trends that have a forerunner with deep pockets. Suing amazon is probably much more appetizing then suing pogoplug...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did no once else even consider that there would be a problem with this? I figured it was just access of my data that I upload to a server and that only I can access. I already do the same with MediaTomb, but I didn´t know it would make a world of difference to move to a third party instead of my own private server.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think Amazon is right. This is just another form of "backup" for the user. I hope that they win the stare down.

</comment><comment><USER34> slightly OT, but anyone know why lossless formats aren't available yet?

I'd assume it would be a good deferentiator from the ITune Store, Also, given that they are now charging for storage space, it would seem to align itself with this model too.

<comment><USER27> _why lossless formats aren't available yet?_

The general public doesn't care

<comment><USER35> Judging by the amount of "pirated" lossless downloads available I don't think that's entirely true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Um, so if Amazon doesn't think they need a license to stream _my_ music to _me_ , how come I can upload music, but not listen to it if I'm outside the US?

<comment><USER37> Their interpretation is of American law, and so doesn't apply to you. They probably want to keep the legal complexity down to a minimum for now since they'll already probably have a battle on their hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> _applause_

Well done Amazon

</comment><comment><USER39> Apple should follow suit.</comment>


If My Classmates Are Going to Cheat on an Online Exam, Why Can't I? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/magazine/if-my-classmates-are-going-to-cheat-on-an-online-exam-why-cant-i.html <comment><AUTHOR> _"But everyone else is doing it!"

You won't be surprised that the Ethicist takes a dim view of this argument._

<comment><USER2> What about the Moralist?

<comment><AUTHOR> _chacun à son goût_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a true problem, unless it is open book? Possibly the prof wants the writers to draw on online resources, notes etc - more or less a way to administer assigned work?</comment>


Computer Age Statistical Inference: Algorithms, Evidence and Data Science - <AUTHOR> https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI/index.html <comment><USER2> Tangential: for anyone reading the PDF,

      pdfcrop --verbose --margins "20 30 20 30" --bbox "110 180 440 740" casi.pdf

trims the over-large margins without clipping any content.

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man1/pdfcrop....](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man1/pdfcrop.1.html)

<comment><USER3> For these parameters, the latest pdfcrop (v0.4b) dies with the following errors:

Error! Bounding Box borders imply page width of zero. Error! Bounding Box borders imply page height of zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who know, How does this book differ from Foundations of Data Science by Blum/Hopcroft/Kannan _?

_[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book%20June%2014,%202017pdf.pd...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book%20June%2014,%202017pdf.pdf) ?

<comment><USER5> After looking through the Contents of both:

CASI looks very cutting edge, but also covers the origins of the use of computers for statistical methods. So this covers how computers can and have been used to do statistics.

FoDS looks like a very thorough data science book. Less of a "then VS now" book and more of a collection of what you need as a data scientist.

In CASI, I like the chapter on FDR, a very important topic not found in FoDS (?!). FDR is critical for correcting for multiple testing, seems essential for data science but maybe the authors consider it cutting edge and not foundational. However, the wavelet chapter in FoDS makes me happy, a very useful topic for series data.

Both great books, thanks for the links!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Statistician/data scientist here. This is one of my favorite texts in the area. It frames and groups methods historical rather than mathematically. I've found it both a valuable teaching tool and an interesting read on its own. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another amazing book from Hastie/Efron. The ISLR book was my first foray into ML and landed me my current job. Will be sure to devour this one as well!

<comment><USER8> Could you tell me how exactly did you land (and what it is) your current job, and from what previous possition did you come from?

<comment><USER7> Currently a Data Scientist for an MBB consulting firm. Came from a quant role (as a Project Manager) from an Ibank. Everything I do in my current role is pretty much straight from ISLR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you approach a publisher with the free PDF model? Is it something they're generally open to? (e.g. you have a corpus of work on a website that you want to turn into a book)

</comment><comment><USER10> How much math must one know to be able to read this book? Is this an introductory book?

<comment><USER11> It assumes you know a fair bit. McElreath's _Statistical Rethinking_ is a better introduction: [http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical- rethinking/](http://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/)

<comment><USER12> I don't think statistical rethinking is a good book for general statistic at all.

It's more a good book for introduction bayesian statistic. And it's super math/stat lite.

If you really want to stick with Bayesian Statistic and need a comprehendsive stat for a foundation a better book would be: Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by John K. Kruschke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> direct link to pdf, [https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/CASI_files/PDF/casi.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome! I love the recent trend of making these books freely available.

<comment><USER15> This is good too: [http://genomicsclass.github.io/book/](http://genomicsclass.github.io/book/) also at [https://leanpub.com/dataanalysisforthelifesciences](https://leanpub.com/dataanalysisforthelifesciences)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Efron is the creator of bootstrap.

Hastie iirc is one of the two responsible for LASSO, Ridge, and I think elasticnet.

<comment><USER16> Not ridge, that was popularised by Hoerl and Kennard (1970). However, the method of augmenting the diagonals of the X'X matrix (ridge regression) was studied by Tikhonov in the early 40's as a method for solving ill-posed problems.

I believe Hastie has done lots of work on LASSO/L_1 norm related regularization methods and algorithms though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can really recommend this book. It's an enjoyable read and is very pragmatic. A useful reference for practitioners.

<comment><USER18> I've read ISL and ESL. ISL is a practical introduction to concepts, and ESL goes deeper into the algorithms.

This books seems like a historical survey of how things came to be, rather than a practical guide. I believe this is not a book for practitioners, but for someone who is looking to advance the field (researchers, Ph.D. students).

As someone who was in academia in 12 years, I think it is immensely valuable to have a survey like this because too often new researchers don't have a clear idea what has been tried before and why they failed or succeeded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now let's hope that we can start using these methods more in science instead of e.g. p-values.

<comment><USER15> Effect size _in addition to_ p-value, not instead of...

<comment><USER20> No there are bayesian replacements for p values as well: [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/replacing-...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/replacing- p-values-with-bayes-factors-a-miracle-cure-for-the-replicability-crisis-in- psychological-science/)</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding uncertainty: Visualising probabilities - <AUTHOR> https://plus.maths.org/content/understanding-uncertainty-visualising-probabilities <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this stuff, I can highly recommend "Picturing the Uncertain World" by Howard Wainer: [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152677/pi...](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152677/picturing- the-uncertain-world)

<comment><USER3> I thought that book was great, it's on my must-have-ready-access shelf. As an overview of the perils of misunderstanding statistical uncertainty and how it manifests it's second to none. HOWEVER in spite of the title the actual advice regarding visual presentation is pretty thin on the ground and some of the charts used in the book are not really as good as they should be. I'd love a new edition where the charts matched up to the quality of the text.

<comment><USER2> Yup, I felt similarly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For up to date work, see the MU Collective [0]: "We are a cross-institution research lab working at the intersection of information visualization and uncertainty communication. Our mission is to improve both experts' and lay people's abilities to reason about data through visual representations that align with how people think. Topics we like include sampling-oriented uncertainty visualizations, interactive visualization for thinking about priors, multiple views, and Bayesian statistics.

MU Collective is directed by Jessica Hullman (Northwestern University) and Matt Kay (University of Michigan)"

Hullman is also usefully active on twitter [1]. There's lots going on in this area.

The posted article links through to "Understanding Uncertainty", [2], which has a mission of improving the public's understanding of uncertainty but appears to be a lapsed project. One member of the project team is David Spiegelhalter, who is still writing. His book "The Art of Statistics" is an excellent book on the craft of inference.

[0] [https://mucollective.northwestern.edu/](https://mucollective.northwestern.edu/) [1] [https://twitter.com/JessicaHullman](https://twitter.com/JessicaHullman) [2] [https://understandinguncertainty.org/](https://understandinguncertainty.org/)</comment>


Machine Learning - The Complete Guide [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=download&collection_id=dd29862de67a3cac&writer=rl&return_to=Book%3AMachine+Learning+-+The+Complete+Guide

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also get other versions of the book here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Machine_Learning_- _The_Com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Machine_Learning_- _The_Complete_Guide)</comment>


Show HN: FlowState: Collaborative Real-Time Fluid Art - <AUTHOR> http://flowstate.revoltlabs.co <comment><AUTHOR> FlowState is a mesmerizing fluid simulation in your browser. Play alone or with friends—everyone sees and interacts with the same canvas. Great for socially-distant virtual hangouts. LED wall too! FlowState uses webgl for fluid simulation, convergence.io for real-time collaboration, and openpixelcontrol / FadeCandy for LED output. Demo video: [https://youtu.be/BRUZXglnGHg](https://youtu.be/BRUZXglnGHg)</comment>


Scientists Have Mathematical Proof That It's Impossible to Stop Ageing - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/cancer-versus-aging-cells-eternal-youth-mathematical-impossibility <comment><USER2> The paper is available at [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/10/25/1618854114) I'm not sure I can follow the math, but as presented in the article posted, the explanation doesn't really persuade me. They seem to explain it as a conflict of two opposing factors, some cells slowing down and losing function vs. others accelerating and proliferating eventually becoming a Cancer, so defending against one necessarily promotes the other. Then again there are other multi-cellular organisms that live longer than us [1] which should serve as evidence that there are ways to live that much longer

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-37047168](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37047168)

</comment><comment><USER3> Remember this is mathematicians speaking and they work to a different mind set to the rest of us. If you managed to extend human lifespans to 10,000 years of high quality living they would immediately declare victory. Anything less than an infinite lifetime means they win!</comment>


What are the good books to learn CSS? - <AUTHOR>

What would be a good book to learn CSS (specifically CSS3)? Comparable to learning JavaScript from "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" <comment><USER2> i want it</comment>


Show HN: yt – distraction-free YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://yt.dudzik.co <comment><USER2> Wow, this is nice!

It's very hard for me to resist watching too much youtube, so I'll probably start to use this.

I wish the video player wasn't as large as the whole screen so that controls are partially covered by the scroll bar(on chrome) and you basically cannot zoom out, it's a bit frustrating.

Other than that, thank you for doing this!

<comment><AUTHOR> > I wish the video player wasn't as large as the whole screen so that controls > are partially covered by the scroll bar(on chrome) and you basically cannot > zoom out, it's a bit frustrating.

I've made the video player fill the webpage so I that resizing the window would resize the video as well. I want to emulate the feeling of using i3[0] on my mac.

My use case isn't yours though. So I've added the ability to set your own video player size :)

0: [https://i3wm.org](https://i3wm.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh, I wished for such thing for so long! No distractions and clean, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER4> I love it! Thanks!</comment>


Why Did Crowd Flee Shanghai Subway After Foreigner Fainted? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/09/01/344033379/why-did-crowd-flee-shanghai-subway-after-foreigner-fainted <comment><USER3> Notwithstanding the hypotheses offered in the article such as scams and supposedly "sharp divides" between tight-knit kinship communities vs. stranger divisions, the Bystander Effect[1] probably was the biggest initial culprit.

The article tries to explain this in a round about way in the first few paragraphs.

[1] [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

<comment><USER4> I can see the bystander effect leading to inactivity, but not to desperate flight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We do stuff like this too.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

<comment><USER6> True. I helped a homeless man that was passed out in his wheelchair with an open wound from his forehead, and with his trousers down.

It looked like someone had hit him in the head, and I couldn't get through to him, and he smelled of alcohol. I didn't know the reason for why he was unconscious was it the head trauma or the alcohol?

After spending several minutes trying loudly to wake the man, several people joined me. This was at a particular busy place, so lots of people have walked by him.

I called for an ambulance because I couldn't wake him up, and it took them 30 minutes to arrive, and when they finally arrived I had managed to wake him up from his boozy dreams, and he resisted help (It's free in Denmark!), and the ambulance personnel was angry with me for calling an ambulance for one that didn't want help :-( But I am glad that he woke up, and was able to talk and could travel with his wheelchair.

<comment><USER7> I once summoned the police in Nagoya under similar circumstances.

A gentleman had passed out with half of his body on the sidewalk and half in a busy street, around 7 PM in a very well-trafficked portion of Nagoya. If he had been there for more than five minutes, dozens of people had already passed him, and surely one of them had... was presumably the calculation that everyone had made. I made the same calculation, got twenty feet away, and then had a strong feeling of "God requires you to do better than that", so I walked to the local koban (police popup box) and explained that someone had passed out in the street. They hadn't heard of it, and after asking a few questions which were transparently designed to elicit whether he was homeless or a productive member of society, we walked twenty minutes over to find him still in the road.

The cops succeeded in rousing him, ascertained that his normal address was a park across town, and told him to go to it rather than sleeping in the street. They also made him apologize to me, because quote "Onii-san [+] here is clearly exhausted after a long day of work but nonetheless went out of his way to summon the police because he was worried about you. You should apologize for having caused him distress."

The cops then noticed there was a bar next door and called the proprietor out. They asked if he had noticed the man collapsed outside his establishment. The proprietor said "Yeah. I had assumed he was sleeping it off." At this point one of the officers went _positively volcanic_. He proceeded to throw a loud tirade about the general decline of Japanese society and the particularized lack of moral fiber of the bar owner, who would not life a finger for his countryman while quote even the Brazilian endquote knew it was clearly necessary.

[+] Literally "elder brother", figuratively a roughly appropriate non-specific address for a young man.

<comment><USER8> > _the bar owner, who would not life a finger for his countryman while quote > even the Brazilian endquote knew it was clearly necessary_

Echoes of the Parable of the Good Samaritan .... [1]

[1] [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010:25-37](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010:25-37)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm from India and here too most bystanders choose to not get involved when someone on the road needs their help, for fear that they'll get entangled in a "police case". But I doubt we're anywhere near as extreme as this!

For instance had this happened in, say, the Delhi metro or Mumbai local trains, I'll bet there'd be enough good samaritans to help the person. And there'd certainly be no stampede to escape from the vicinity of the fainted man!

</comment><comment><USER10> The comments in the article point out that this is not special to Chinese society with specific examples that happen in America. And one in the article points out that fainting people are indeed being helped. I can't tell if this is a regular occurrence or just hype.

Perhaps, like in Russia where every car is equipped with a dashcam to avoid scams, everyone should be equipped with a chestcam. ;-)

They also mention anxiety with recent terrorist attacks and Ebola, so that may be a larger factor.

<comment><USER11> >The comments in the article point out that this is not special to Chinese society with specific examples that happen in America

Of course they do. It's an iron-clad rule of the internet that if you ever mention anything that happens in a foreign country, the first comment will be about how the same thing happens in America (or else complaining that the same thing doesn't happen in America).

<comment><USER12> A countries citizens concerned with what happens their own country? Shocking!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of a scene from Bad Grandpa where Johnny Knoxville (dressed as an old man) gets his penis stuck in a vending machine at a gas station and cries for help. The hidden camera records many people either ignoring, laughing or taking pics with their cellphone cameras.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a great award-winning short film (11 minutes) about this, based on a true story, Bus 44[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK4TUP0VKLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK4TUP0VKLY)

<comment><USER14> Really great one.. Thanks for posting!

I misread your comment and read bus 22 first, but saw the movie and read the chinese characters bus 44 in the title screen. Thought that was weird - <USER2> sure if I am learning English or Chinese anymore these days... haha..

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Good Samaritans law, which is enacted in varying forms across Europe and North America seems to be making it's way into Chinese provinces, Shenzhen being the first this year.

</comment><comment><USER16> In the US, unfortunately my first reaction when seeing something out of the ordinary is to wonder if I'm being setup for a YouTube prank video (or a scam, or robbed)

</comment><comment><USER10> With social media, internet and cameras everywhere it seems the bar has been set very high for how a society responds to an emergency. If a cam records even a slight delay in a victim getting help then there will be hell to pay from the Internet. Everyone be on your toes! The Internet is watching and judging!</comment>


The search for the perfect startup - <AUTHOR> http://meetthefounders.com/meet-eddy-lu-and-daishin-sugano-founders-of-g

<comment><USER2> Hey this was a very entertaining writeup by misstatiana. I liked sort of running around with these guys from finance on Wall Street to China to cream puff franchises to YC. I got the sense that Eddy and Daishin are two guys who know how to have fun and kick butt at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER3> The grubwithus guys strike me as being a little crazy in all the right ways. I have a feeling they're going to go very far.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always wanted to be like these guys, living with nothing but a laptop and a mission haha! This has been my dream since high school, it's really inspiring to see that it's not as crazy as I thought it was.

</comment><comment><USER5> "We left everything behind to do startups, because that is what we wanted to do more than anything. It doesn't feel like we are making a sacrifice." - amen!</comment>


Show HN: Curated Newsletter of Show HNs - <AUTHOR> http://www.weekendupdate.me/

<comment><USER2> I'm waiting for the 'Show HN: Curated Newsletter of "Curated Show HN Newsletters"'

joke aside, I remember seeing quite a few of these recently

<comment><USER3> Really? I haven't seen any. Do you have any links, or any search words?

(I'm putting together a list of HN stuff - extensions, addons, userscripts, userstyles, etc, and this would be handy.)

<comment><USER2> The one I was thinking about when I wrote this was <http://sideshowhq.com/> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5372680>

If you are looking for an easy way to get HN data, the people who maintain the search mechanism have an API: <https://www.hnsearch.com/api> (and <https://github.com/priestc/hnpercentile> is an example service that leverages the API)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I also include a lot of "Show HN" posts in Hacker Newsletter as well: <http://hackernewsletter.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> You should open source a browser extension that allows your subscribers who are browsing <http://news.ycombinator.com> to vote on which stories should make the next edition of the newsletter. This way, you will ensure that your content stays appealing to your readership over the course of time.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish there were more examples on the site -- I hate giving my email if I don't see the product first (outside of a single screen shot.) I like seeing what was given in the last few newsletters before I decide.

I'm subscribed to so many curated HN newsletters so far, they are all starting to look the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're finalizing the first newsletter so we'll have an archive on the site shortly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is asking roles just a part of gauging the community or does it have an affect on what types of ShowHNs are curated for that user? I'd consider myself both a designer and a hacker, but would prefer to see more design and front-end oriented ShowHNs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a gauge for now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic.

This might be the first newsletter I have ever actually opted-in to.

</comment><comment><USER9> This kinda stuff is really cool, I always wish I could come up with something like this and give back to HN.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks awesome! I would like the ability to choose both Hacker and Designer though. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds awesome. Based on what I've seen so far, good job.

</comment><comment><USER12> maybe off topic, not sure.. Any news about this guy on HN who paid $$$ for a few projects to boostrap them ?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to get this as an RSS feed.

</comment><comment><USER14> how is it curated exactly and on what measures? (out of curiosity, not conspiracy)

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries, thanks for asking. It's currently just an MVP so it's manually curated and based on popularity rankings. Expect your first email soon!

<comment><USER14> btw, in case you want easier browsing for selection, there is this <http://www.hnshowcase.com>

consider maybe also interesting askhns</comment></comment></comment>


The New York Public Library's release of 180,000 copyright-free images - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/587894/the-most-fascinating-images-from-the-new-york-public-librarys-release-of-180000-copyright-free-materials/ <comment><AUTHOR> All the high-res images are here: [http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/](http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/)

And here's the same kind of thing from the British Library: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/) (try searching "maps")

<comment><USER2> A random search led me to this in the British Library: [http://access.bl.uk/item/pdf/lsidyv38630f87](http://access.bl.uk/item/pdf/lsidyv38630f87)

Really, uh, interesting how times have changed. (And I'm really curious what the "Black Man" on Page 9 refers to.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of these collections are really amazing -- These old clothing getups - [http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/collection- of...](http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/collection-of-the- dresses-of-different-nations-antient-sic-and-modern#/?tab=about)

And the maps, wew, great stuff.</comment>


Oh Shit, Git? - <AUTHOR> https://ohshitgit.com/ <comment><USER2> Needs an entry for git submodules issues where the answer is to light the computer on fire and find a new profession.

<comment><USER3> I learned a long time ago never to invade Russia in winter and never to use git submodules.

Git doesn't compose.

<comment><USER4> I think if git submodules were architectured differently, they could have been a really interesting solution for package management. In fact my last place of work uses a layer on top of submodules as part of their internal package manager. I think they could be really special but unfortunately are now sort of relegated to history.

<comment><USER5> Is there anything wrong with the submodule architecture itself? My impression is that the data model is fine, but the interface for manipulating them is confusing even by git's standards.

<comment><USER6> Your impression is correct: They are functionally identical to svn externals that pin to a revision, but require an odd set of commands to update, instead of just being batched in like how "svn up" includes externals.

I've never had a problem with them and don't understand why so many do.

<comment><USER7> I won't suggest others are referring to the same issues necessarily, but try switching between branches(/commits) when you have submodules. Let alone rebasing etc... they simply don't "just work". You always get some odd vestige of a submodule hanging somewhere that ends up causing problems, either in the index or the .gitmodules or somewhere in .git/ or whatever. Hell, the fact that there are so many places where git submodules are recorded itself has caused me so many headaches.

<comment><USER8> The most fun is had when a submodule was introduced to replace what was previously an ordinary directory, then you try bisecting across that commit. Qemu's git repo has at least one of these (the slirp/ submodule/directory) which I curse every time I need to bisect something.

<comment><USER6> Hm, this sounds like a good example of something I never encountered just by chance. Be it svn externals or git submodules, I never string them around the codebase - I put them in a subdirectory that's just for that purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong but these all seem to fix problems that exist in a local clone only. And that's where none of my "oh shit" moments happen.

All of my oh shit moments are two flavours: I have pushed to remote, or I have pushed to remote and force pushes are disallowed.

I want a list of as graceful solutions as possible for those scenarios. And certainly they can be real-world solutions like "this cannot be undone in a desirable way so here's an approach to handle the commit(s) necessary to fix the problem.

This also brings up a question I didn't realize I had: are people using git without frequently pushing to remote? I feel like having a remote backup of my work in progress is the killer feature. I can't imagine doing any amount of work and not backing it up.

<comment><USER10> > are people using git without frequently pushing to remote? I feel like > having a remote backup of my work in progress is the killer feature.

I use git without a remote pretty often. When doing personal projects or exploratory work, the problem is either so trivial that I don't care about backup, or already backed up using something like Nextcloud/Syncthing. But having the commit history allows me to easily look at old code, revert changes, and make big structural changes without having to back up the entire project folder in case I end up disliking the new structure.

I guess you're just not working on many things at a scale where version control is useful but setting up an online repo doesn't seem worth the time.

<comment><USER11> > I guess you're just not working on many things at a scale where version > control is useful but setting up an online repo doesn't seem worth the time.

It is literally a couple of clicks to set up a private repo on github. For me, either the problem is too small to set up git, or it is big enough to spend half a minute to create a github repo.

<comment><USER12> Pro tip: you can set up a remote repo on any Unix machine with SSH access:

       ssh machine "mkdir x; git init x"
       git clone machine:x

If you have something sensetive or just want to avoid github/gitlab for some other reason, an empty remote container with SSH access works just as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If y'all think git is hard, wait 'til you hear about computer algorithms!

Git isn't hard, it _might_ be complex, but how it works and how to use it is simple as far as applications and/or processes go.

I find myself constantly trying to dispel the idea that git is too difficult to understand in depth. The problem has always come down to the missing attempt to understand the issue, over trying to ^c, ^v a solution.

Seriously, if you think git is hard: don't ask for it to be easier, ask instead to be stronger. (Or in this case smarter, something you surprisingly have control over)

<comment><USER14> It's not that it's hard or complex, it's that I really don't care about it and am not at all interested in learning. It's a weak attitude, I know, but I just can't help it.

So like most other developers, I go about my day totally not understanding git at all and when something weird happens, I talk to that co-worker know understands get (there's always at least one such psychopath on each dev team in existence) and ask him to fix it. He invariably talks about how easy and elegant git is and then finally gets around to giving me a couple commands with non-sensical names and options that fix the problem.

I don't care, and I'm okay not caring. Not learning git might even give me extra time to learn about these magical computer algorithms I've heard so much about.

<comment><USER13> > there's always at least one such psychopath on each dev team in existence

I'm that psycopath :D

> I don't care, and I'm okay not caring. Not learning git might even give me > extra time to learn about these magical computer algorithms I've heard so > much about.

I'm fine with this actually. If you don't care, and don't want to. That's actually totally fine. I _personally_ will look at you a bit strange. But when it comes down to it. You should only care about what you want to. But please, for my continued (admittedly borderline) sanity. Don't try to convince others that it's too hard to learn, and/or that they shouldn't try. I want to work with people who are curious, people who want to learn how cool things work. But there's a trend in software engineering, that parts of it are too hard, and that it's a waste of time to learn them. That's a scary thought to me; imagine the next generation of software devs, all convinced that they can't understand something, or that it would be a waste of their time to try?

<comment><USER14> I see it like learning a build system: ultimately a pointless piece of trivia that isn't very interesting or worthwhile. This is in contrast to math or CS, which is generalizable and timeless.

But you're right, we should all understand this stuff. And if it wasn't for that one magic coworker (you're really taking one for the team), I probably would.

<comment><USER15> Git is a little bit different. It is a really good implementation of the 'history is immutable' philosophy of programming.

Learning the implementation details and reading the mystifying documentation to learn what something is called can be a bit wasteful but understanding the git model is very worthwhile. It is interesting to see how it handles the pragmatic issues of fixing the situation up when the history becomes snarled.

Learning git will make some not insignificant number of people better at concurrent programming. Most build systems don't do that..

<comment><USER16> It's not that good. For one, rebase mutates history. Also the ui is confusing and inconsistent even if the data model is pure and beautiful.

<comment><USER17> Rebase does not mutate. It creates new commits and updates the rebased branch to point at them. The original commits still exist (even if no other branch points at them).

Git commits are never mutated. They are referred to by a hash of their content after all.

<comment><USER3> Rebase sure _seems_ like it mutates.

What's the UI for getting at those old commits? Is it possible to get a _true_ chronological log from them? Do they stay around forever or do they get garbage collected eventually?

<comment><USER18> Good:

      git log --all --graph --oneline --reflog

Better:

      git config --global alias.lg "log --date=format-local:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' --pretty=format:'%cd %<(20,trunc)%an %C(auto)%h%Creset%C(auto)%d%Creset %s'"

      git lg --all --graph --reflog

> Is it possible to get a true chronological log from them?

The output of git log with --graph is not chronological, because it does a topological traversal of the commit graph.

> Do they stay around forever or do they get garbage collected eventually?

They get garbage collected eventually. As a rule you should not assume dangling commits are safe. If you need to keep one, assign a trivial branch name to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If curious see also

2019 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19906972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19906972)

2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951825)

2016 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459755)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've almost been exclusively using the GitHub Desktop client as my primary Git Tool and I'm much more comfortable with git now and helping people out. Merge conflicts were super scary, but with VS code markers, it's a breeze. The desktop tool also makes sure to fetch origin first. If my commit is incorrect, I just use the "revert" button and it lets me fix things. There are a few things like renames and branch deletes that I use the shell for, but I'm happy and more confident in using git since the desktop tool is effective. One thing I hate is the pesky .DS_Store on Mac. No matter how many times I ignore it, it just wants to be a part of my commit.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like you already committed it before adding it to the gitignore. Here's a fix:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13541615/how-to- remove-f...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13541615/how-to-remove-files- that-are-listed-in-the-gitignore-but-still-on-the-repositor#13541721)

...but this shouldn't be a problem with a good git client such as Fork (git- fork.com) or SourceTree. They show you the changed files and let you select which ones to commit.

I would never commit anything without at least skimming the changes first.

<comment><USER20> In the GitHub client - if you point it to a folder and say "add repo from existing folder" it automatically makes an "init commit". So you don't get a chance.

I'll keep an eye on it next time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Prior comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459755), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951825)

</comment><comment><USER23> > Git documentation has this chicken and egg problem where you can't search > for how to get yourself out of a mess, unless you already know the name of > the thing you need to know about in order to fix your problem.

This is exactly why I have been running "git diff HEAD" instead of "git diff --staging" to diff my changes that have already been added to staging. I didn't even know that flag was a thing. I really wish there was some sort of an auto complete that could go from me describing the problem to the thing suggesting commands. Oh well, until then thanks for this!

<comment><USER24> Note that the two commands are not in general equivalent. Try `git add some- modified-file`, then change some line of the working file just "added". `git diff HEAD` will show the new change, whereas `git diff --staging` will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I LOVE how they have a non-swearing version at dangitgit.com :D

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks, that last entry gave me a good chuckle. I wasn't aware of the -—no- edit flag when performing an amend. Learned something new.

<comment><USER27> Huh. Neither was I. I've been using -C HEAD which has the same affect (reusing the commit from the branch head) but --no-edit makes it more obvious what's going on...sort of. It's still not clear _what_ isn't being edited.

<comment><USER13> What are the options for what could be the target? Or I guess in this case, what isn't the target.

<comment><USER27> Do you mean the target of the editing? It could also be the commit author or committee perhaps. Maybe the message is the only logical choice, but for long flags, I think more explicit is still better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good tips, not a page I would use at work on account of the title.

I get that SV is probably profanity-friendly, but a lot of us work in more reserved environments.

<comment><USER29> That's what [https://dangitgit.com/en](https://dangitgit.com/en) is for :)

<comment><USER30> really clever

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A little bit off topic, but I hear a Pijul release is coming some time within the next week (its been a year since the last one). I've never really understood Git and always hoped for something else to come along, at least as an alternative.

<comment><USER32> Looks interesting but the name may be blocking it from becoming more popular

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I prefer [https://github.com/k88hudson/git-flight- rules](https://github.com/k88hudson/git-flight-rules) which is more complete and doesn't use unnecessary swearing.

</comment><comment><USER34> Imho, just start using one of the desktop clients. I really like GitKraken but I've heard good things about tower too. Cannot emphasize how easy GitKraken has made my life when I eventually get into these scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER35> > git revert [saved hash]

I see a future article forming:

"The Power of Unix Pipes Except for The Zillions of Times Per Day Developers Awkwardly Drag a Mouse Over a Human Unreadable String Just to Make Trivial Git Commands Work"

<comment><USER25> laughing in zsh completions. Not defending the git interface, but it is seriously bliss.

See [https://asciinema.org/a/LcarSXE90npusIczkIRdrzJLx](https://asciinema.org/a/LcarSXE90npusIczkIRdrzJLx)

<comment><USER36> wow!

how do I do this for custom cli apps?

<comment><USER25> If you mean generate completion entries for you own tool, my answer will be 'I am not that kind of a guru ;D'. Go lookup creating zsh completions

If you mean the interface with tabs, I am just using zsh-grml config (config file you download for those who don't care for a zsh plugin manger) (I believe very similar behavior is available in bash)

Then, I just look up zsh completion for $TOOL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think there's an comic book version of this for sale from the same people.

[https://gumroad.com/l/oh-shit-git](https://gumroad.com/l/oh-shit-git)

</comment><comment><USER38> Love this, definitely needs part 2 and 3 for rebasing and so forth.

<comment><USER25> Not a rescue guide, but a very nice and animated hands-on tutorial: [https://learngitbranching.js.org/](https://learngitbranching.js.org/)

</comment></comment><comment> jeppesen-io Just me, but git rebase -i is my go-to tool when I make a mistake

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm almost done reading Pro Git. I thought there was a good chance it'd be useless, but it was actually useful even after using Git for six years.

</comment><comment><USER40> A+ my go-to git reference. I don't work with git in my day job mostly, but when I do I end up here at least once a month.

</comment><comment><USER41> I was today days old when I learned about 'git reflog'. I may have to play with that sometime soon.

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh shit I accidentally force pushed my local master branch to origin.

<comment><USER43> Well, if you're already force-pushed it once, you might as well force-push the right commit (from reflog, if necessary) back to it again.

<comment><USER42> Only works if you've recently fetched origin, otherwise it'll be a challenge sorting out what the previous HEAD was.

<comment><USER44> \--force-with-lease is almost always the flag you ought to use instead.

"\--force-with-lease alone, without specifying the details, will protect all remote refs that are going to be updated by requiring their current value to be the same as the remote-tracking branch we have for them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Bitkeeper was better. Larry McVoy is a hero.

</comment><comment><USER30> that is some really useful shit right there. thanks for sharing</comment>


Information Theory for Machine Learning [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mtomassoli/papers/blob/master/inftheory.pdf <comment><USER2> As a learning exercise/fun project for the author, I think this is ok.

But for any serious study, I fail to see what this offers over the completely free, very readable, more carefully written, and more thorough "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms" by David MacKay: [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itila/book.html](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itila/book.html).

As an example of the problems with the pdf in its current stage, Theorem 2 (asymptotic source coding) includes the term "negligible loss" without even defining what "loss" means in source coding. Lossless and lossy coding are very different things, all the preceding stuff is really discussing the lossless coding problem. Pedagogically, these need decoupling.

<comment><USER3> RIP David and thanks for the great book...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bookmark comment; ignore.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you (marketers) find freelance gigs? - <AUTHOR>

After seeing the same post for freelance programmers, I'm curious where marketers go to find freelance gigs?<p>The post this is referencing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4710470 <comment><USER2> Good question, nedwin

Background: I'm a freelance marketer (soon to be) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My experience has been that freelance gigs for marketers come from 3 different sources:

1\. Personal / Professional Referrals 2\. Direct Outreach to Businesses 3\. Craigslist / elance / community sites

## 1 — Referrals

Referrals are the best way to get a client / gig because someone is vouching for your experience. I generate referrals by asking clients if they know of other business owners for have a need for {skillset}.

## 2 — Direct Outreach

I wrote about this as a comment here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4655212>).

In short — manufacture interested customers by defining the types of companies you want to work with, making a list of companies that fit that criteria, identifying who is in charge of the department you want to work with, and set up an informational interview to learn about the company.

## 3 — Craigslist / Aggregate Sites

These sites suck. When a job reaches these sites, it's generally because the employer went through options (1) and (2) and couldn't find someone capable. These jobs have been picked over.

That said, I have some success browsing craigslist, seeing businesses that have listed an open position / a gig and emailing them.

I like looking at businesses that post in the 'services' section (not advertising a need for a marketer) and then contacting them to learn about their business and offer my skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much success are you getting from direct outreach?

Curious as to what sort of work you're doing as well...

<comment><USER2> I haven't done direct outreach for a few months. I'm moving to Honolulu next week and will be restarting direct outreach in November.

Back of the envelope / from memory? Leads (meetings) with ~1/10 contacts and projects from ~1/3 meetings.

I do Wordpress development, online advertising, search engine optimization, and social media work. It sounds like I might fall into both of your markets — marketers who need a solution for wordpress development / tweaks and wordpress developers looking for projects.

If you're interested in chatting, shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Freelance marketing is a much different beast than freelance programmers. That's because, unlike programmers, most people think they can do marketing, without any experience or training. The same cannot be said for programming.

Those that are wise enough to acknowledge that they're not an expert marketer tend to bring the job in-house. Marketing is much more hands on with the business end and I believe people feel more comfortable having someone there day in and day out.

With that said, there are places like elance, RFPDB, and Craigslist where marketers can find work. However I've found that personal recommendations are the best way to go (I know this is obvious).

My experience has proven that these sites are extremely ineffective. People ask for the world at very low pay. Like the many different programming languages, there are many different disciplines of marketing. I'm not sure if programmers are expected to know every language, but many people looking for freelance marketing help expect someone to have expertise in all forms of marketing (i.e. SEO, Social, PPC, Media, Content, Email, etc). Not impossible, but not common.

I'm sure paragraph 3 was all you were looking for, but I thought I'd add in some color to the answer :) Hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was really asking more out of curiosity in contrast to the freelance programmer question.

I think there are a lot of similarities between freelance programming and freelance marketing though there seem to be more cowboys in marketing, perhaps.

Thanks for food for thought!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to be a freelance graphic & web designer and writer. I found most of my gigs on Fiverr (<http://fiverr.com/>) and posting to my Twitter & Facebook followers.

You could also try creating a website and optimising it so it shows well in the search results for your specified field.</comment>


American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-excess--a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html

<comment><USER3> I got about 6 grafs in and stopped being able to deal with the obvious parallels to Liar's Poker --- "I wasn't really one of them", "I'm an English major", "training was a big frat party", "I got put on derivatives with the big swinging dicks"...

... do I really need a third-rate rehash of Michael Lewis, when every financial journalist out there has repeatedly pointed out how well Liar's Poker holds up for the current debacle? Happy to hear I'm wrong.

<comment><USER4> I read the first few paragraphs, and I thought the exact same!! It reminded me of _Liar's Poker_ right away.

 _"the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite - the baddest of the bad- asses."_

Sounds like a bunch of baloney to me. I never heard of traders being categorized as "derivatives traders" and "non-derivatives traders". There are tons of derivatives contracts out there, and no one knows how to trade all of them proficiently. What I have heard is traders being categorized as "equity derivatives traders", "fixed-income traders", "commodities traders", etc. I once worked at a hedge fund for an equity futures trader. He loved to bash bankers more than anything else... but he also bashed other traders, especially FX and metals traders, who he considered sub-human morons...

Last but not least, I have never heard of an English major trading derivatives. Never. English majors do corporate finance, not derivatives...

<comment><USER5> FX traders _are_ sub-human morons.[1] Pick up any book about FX trading - it's all pseudo-math voodoo nonsense. They know it, too. Whereas derivatives traders at IBs and hedge funds are math PhDs from Princeton, FX traders are at best college dropouts and at worst former felons.

[1] former roommate was FX trader, coming from a background in bartending and ski lift operation. Last time I saw him he was renting bicycles to tourists.

<comment><USER4> What about FX futures traders? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some aspects of this that don't ring true and make me wonder if the story has been liberally embellished for the target audience. Most clearly, the upper upper class in the US does not get fat -- that's for unwashed plebes like doctors and bankers -- but Europeans _do_ connect obesity with consumerism with capitalism. My gut feeling is that this is a sharp, ambitious guy trying to sell a book that is more "authentic" than honest. Pretty much the opposite of what he pretends to be.

And really, it's boring to do a cultural expose of Wall Street financiers at this late date. It's already been done to death. _It was already done to death twenty years ago._ We know how people act when they get that kind of godlike money. They important part is how they get it and what the effects are for the rest of us. The interesting thing _now_ is that there's a crowd of powerful, connected, and ambitious people figuring out what to do next. Kinda scary, eh?

<comment><USER7> This guy was working for UBS. The same UBS that hired Phil Gramm as their Vice Chair.

This wasn't some multi-national corporation stuck with working with Phil Gramm in order to make a killing in some scheme. UBS went out and actively sought that idiot, and gave him a position of responsibility and leadership.

I have little doubt any multi-national that went out and sought Phil Gramm to lead them was also taking all this decadence to entirely new levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I've not read Liars Poker but I'm a little surprised by the comments. I thought the author of this article really had some intense and interesting points about the humanity of it all. Eating outrageously wasteful meals then putting into motion the loss of jobs the next day. I think it's an interesting if not sad window into a strange world.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - I never knew about the physical effect of the financial industry on people. Yeah, okay, it was pretty obvious that they were drinking thousand- dollar bottles of wine and ordering steaks that rival my daily (or weekly?) salary... but I never knew about the rampant waste. It's pretty disgusting to say the least.

You can see this from day one, really. Freshman year in college, while the engineering, arts, and science majors were running around soccer fields doing team-building activities... the commerce majors were getting drunk aboard a lavish yacht on loan from an alum. Go figure, I suppose this starts pretty early.

A close friend of mine was a commerce major... he transferred out after a year to pursue math - he couldn't take the ridiculous egos (and he's a cocky bastard to boot) and the "eye on the money, fuck the plebes, we're better" mentality that his peers seemed to have.

I was pursued by Morgan Stanley and Barclay's for a while for a college internship - I decided to go elsewhere, but even for technical roles, and even before I was offered a job, they were boozing us up and booking expensive restaurants and clubs in town. Glad I stayed out and did a meaningful job instead.

<comment><USER10> Where did you go to school? At most places, business majors are people who would be economics majors if they scored half a standard deviation higher on standardized tests.

<comment><USER9> The school in question is UBC up in Canada - I didn't personally go there, but being where I grew up, I heard plenty of "yeaaaaah free boooooze!" from my peers who went into commerce, and "screw the preppy commerce guys" from everyone else.

I got the impression there that "commerce" was the end-all-be-all, and that econ majors are the people who actually _study this business thing_ (as opposed to be awesome, network, and be awesomer, and get drunk).

<comment><USER10> I don't know. Just looking at average salaries, it seems that the econ guys can either afford to drink more, or afford to drink better. Yeaaaaaaaaaaah enough booze to reach the point of negative marginal utility!

And from the resumes I've seen, a business degree will leave open some pretty uninspiring opportunities. Usually low-end stuff -- assistants with titles other than 'assistant'. Perhaps in Canada, it's different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> puzzle-out "Gradually, I was descending into the strange social isolation of my colleagues. I spent less and less time with normal people and more time with people from the bank." I enjoyed this article, because it suggests that, for all their occupation of what they thought to be 'the real world', bankers were living as bubble-like an existence as a fourteenth-century monk.

<comment><USER4> Dude, this guy was a trader. Don't insult him by calling him a "banker"!! Traders and bankers are entirely different beasts...

<comment><USER7> Under the system in place since the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, traders and bankers were supposed to be entirely different beasts.

The Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 1999 repealed a big chunk of the Glass Steagall Act, commercial and investment banks were allowed to consolidate.

Since 1999, bankers and traders have been the same thing. That why the entire financial system just came down on our heads. There was no separation these different entities. No firewall between the speculators and the life savings of retirees.

<comment><USER4> That is quite true, but that is not what I meant.

I can't speak for everyone who works in the financial services industry, but when I was in London working at a hedge fund, the word _banker_ denoted someone who did corporate finance (e.g., M&A, IPO's, etc), not someone who works at a bank. All the traders I have met in my life loathed investment bankers, so calling them _bankers_ is the surest way to infuriate them.

Like you said, in the old days, banks did not do trading. Back then, everyone who worked at a bank worked in banking indeed. These days, banks do everything. In fact, a few years ago Goldman Sachs was generating most of its revenue via trading, not via investment banking deals. Therefore, denoting someone who works at a bank by _banker_ is saying absolutely nothing because the guy could be a banker... or a trader, a broker, a quant, etc etc etc.

What I meant when I wrote that traders and bankers are entirely different beasts is that their cultures are totally different, though they might work in the same bank. Traders like to think they're much smarter than bankers, they work less hours, they don't work during the weekends because the market is closed, they cultivate a culture of aggressiveness, and they can be quite rude. Bankers on the other hand have to schmooze clients, obey more social norms, work 90-100 hours per week, put facetime to impress their bosses, and stare at Excel tables until their eyes bleed..,

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." - <USER2> Neumann

</comment><comment><USER12> To be fair to the Americans, this isn't isolated to the USA.

</comment><comment><USER13> I sympathise with all the human emotion in the article but can't help being disappointed by the superficiality. Throughout the article I kept expecting a good analysis of the situation, of the systemic biases that led to this, and all I got was that it was the 'propaganda smokescreen of The Market' to blame. What does that even mean? I can see why everyone finds venting at the faceless Market as personified by the inhuman Bankers and Traders but nobody looks deeper to give any serious responses other than 'more regulation'. So, once we have established that people in position of power become inhuman guardians of their priviledge, our solution is to defer to other people in positions of power? Seriously? I think we can't afford to be this uncreative.

</comment><comment><USER14> >"I'd spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning."

This feels like bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's all supposed to be about this corrosive environment but I mostly saw a slightly neurotic artsy type who couldn't keep his shit together. It's not like somebody put a gun to his head and made him eat like a pig and drink to excess.

<comment><USER6> Ah, but living a happy, healthy life implies moral endorsement of the society you live in. Right?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: New laptop buying and configuration tips? (for Multi-OS, security, etc.) - <AUTHOR> I'm replacing my primary day-to-day laptop and am wondering if there's a consensus about the best setup strategies.
Traditionally, with my initial unboxingings, I'd split up the bard drive and install the most compatible Linux distro for dual-boot use, but it sounds like the cool kids are using VM configurations instead.  I'm well-versed in dual-boot setups clear back to early versions of Red Hat and SuSE (more recently, K/ubuntu) but am unfamiliar with VM products and configurations.
For example, do VM users run VM under Windows or under Linux?   If the latter, what distros?  Any compatibility issues to watch for in advance?  Friendliness to encryption?  etc.
Here are some past HN threads and submitted resources I HAVE found thus far:
https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-development-environment-in-windows-with-vmware
https://medium.com/@valeryan/experimenting-with-windows-subsystem-for-linux-and-web-development-85180b90382f Windows Subsystem for Linux and Web Development (Laravel)
http://www.productchart.com/   (useful tool but limited population of makes/models)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13555310  Linux performance tips for laptops
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13088755  developing on a Linux VM on Windows
Thanks for any tips. <comment><USER2> > "the bard drive"

I wonder where one finds singing hard drives ? ;-)

Sorry I don't have much to add to the discussion, I don't like to work in a VM and don't even own a laptop.

Maybe you could try Qubes if your laptop is supported.</comment>


Fiat Chrysler will pay Tesla to dodge billions in emissions fines - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300393/tesla-fiat-chrysler-credits-european-union-emissions-fines <comment><USER2> It's sad that one of the most fundamental revenue streams for Musk's companies have been government subsidies. I really thought we were past that by now.

<comment><USER3> Can't fault him for that as most US companies seems to get tax rebates and other sort of dubious tax payer funded incentives at federal and state level.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is required for a Danish citizen to work in the US for 6 months? - <AUTHOR> I have a friend from Denmark. He wants to come and work here as a software engineer in the US later this year, as a sort of intern, starting August or September, until his next university semester in February. I don't know a lot about this subject, but my first inclination was to explain to him that he can't work here without getting a company here to sponsor an H-1B visa for him. Firstly, is that true, or is there another way? Secondly, do you know of any companies that sponsor such pieces, or if there is an online resource for finding such companies? <comment><USER2> Generally, anyone can come visit for up to 6 months in a row. To legally be employed, you need a work visa of some sort. For a short term gig, in the old days, a letter from the employer was sufficient. I was on flying back from Canada with a man doing just as recently as ten years ago. I would search for the different types of work visas. On the other side of the cost spectrum, there are entire businesses based around sorting these sorts of things out. You could search for an immigration consultant.</comment>


No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes on the Flying Car - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/flying-car-technology.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Given how dangerous people already are driving their 1 tonne+ killing machines on wheels, giving wide spread access to flying cars is far from a thrilling prospect.

<comment><USER3> An even more exciting way to risk death than commuting via motorcycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Company site: [https://kittyhawk.aero/](https://kittyhawk.aero/)</comment>