The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/14/the-worlds-oldest-computer-is-still-revealing-its-secrets/ <comment><USER2> Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? [http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1](http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1)

<comment><USER3> Here is a zip file with the relevant issue

[http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest- Volume7-Issue1-T...](http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest- Volume7-Issue1-The_Inscriptions_on_the_Antikythera_Device.zip)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a great BBC documentary on this from a couple of years ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q124C7W0WYA)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for that link! I saw it a while ago and didn't realize it was on youtube.

slightly offtopic: Does anyone else think that unless a History based TV Documentary is made by the BBC (or at least a presenter with an english accent) it will almost devoid of credibility?

<comment><USER6> Why? It's not text book and scientific material but it's definitely good enough for the general population.

<comment><USER5> ah, it was just a generalisation on my part. I'm a bit jaded after trying to watch US history documentaries (especially the history channel, or should i say the hitler channel) only to see that the producers felt some need to insert drama into it. Actors? with dialog? representing long-dead people for who there are no records of what might have been said? these are bad signs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a replica of the device made out of Legos

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me, or does the "photo" of a diver wearing an Exosuit not really look like a real photo?

[https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp- apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_960w/2010-2019/Wires/Images/2014-10-09/Bloomberg/04438819.jpg&w=1484)

<comment><USER9> I'd agree that it probably is a real photo, but you're right. It even looks like a digital painting - not just a 3D render.

I wonder if the designers picked colors and surfaces that maximize visibility and sharpness underwater for safety reasons.

<comment> Trill-I-Am How do colors and materials that lend themselves well to photography make the suit more safe?

<comment><USER9> Heightened visibility of the suit in emergency situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nobody designs such a thing as a first project. There must have been many predecessors, showing a progression in complexity.

<comment><USER11> There may have been, but itchy hands combined with accessibility means that any more accessible replicas are likely to have been smelted down for other things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much.

"He was The Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University from 1960 until his death in 1983. He was the first to record a complete lecture series on History of Science which could serve as a foundation for studies around the world... His entire 1976 lecture series 'Neolithic to Now' is now available on-line and for free at [http://derekdesollaprice.org/"](http://derekdesollaprice.org/")

[Ignore the site design--the material is amazing.]

<comment><USER13> > Derek de Solla Price is an interesting character. 50+ years ago while > stacking and organizing scientific journals by year, he noticed the stacks > grew in height in a logarithmic curve. From there, so much.

I'm afraid I don't understand, especially not the last sentence. Could you explain?

<comment><USER12> In 1951!

"The number of scientific papers published each year may be taken as a rough indication of the activity displayed in any general or specialised fleld of research... The growth factor of the exponential portions is such as to double the amount of literature every ten or eleven years in both the general and specialised cases."

[http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemea...](http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/price/pricequantitativemeasures1951.pdf)

This is 15 years before Moore's Law and he's predicting the growth of science and citation relationships. His books basically lay out PageRank and network effects.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. That has much more sense than "grew in height in a logarithmic curve."

<comment><USER12> More detail but less beauty. I'll take a second whack at it. Ignore the details, consider the premise. The university library was under renovation. He wound up in charge of safekeeping a pile of journals. So he stacked them neatly by year and decade:

      - The 1900s Physics Journals: 1" tall
      - The 1910s stack: 2" tall
      - The 1920s stack: 4" tall
      - The 1930s stack: 8" tall ...

I'm reminded of Feynman's tale of the Bell Labs scientists who had a view of suspension bridge construction. Marked the progress week by week on the glass, watching the cable slowly fall into parabolic shape.

<comment><USER15> This contradicts the earlier description of "growing in a logarithmic curve" \-- it's an exponential curve. A logarithmic curve would look like this:

        - The 1900s stack: 1" tall
        - The 1910s stack: 2" tall
        - The 1930s stack: 3" tall
        - The 1970s stack: 4" tall
        - The 2050s stack: 5" tall ...

<comment><USER12> "Ignore the details, consider the premise." :) Have an upvote and go read the guy's Wiki article.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price)

<comment><USER14> The "logarihmic" premise was false from the start, that's why the people (I too) couldn't understand what you initially wrote.

<comment><USER12> If you stack books horizontally on shelves by year it would form the textbook exponential curve. If you stack them vertically on the floor it makes the textbook log curve. It's a visual metaphor. Apparently not a very good one.

[http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithme...](http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithmetic/Primes/Log_Exp_inverts.jpg)

[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACU...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACUE/suc684kYcxE/s1600/logvsexpon.png)

EDIT: Wow, this is still ongoing? You can mount a hockey stick horizontally or vertically on a wall, guys. Think about it.

<comment><USER16> > If you stack books horizontally on shelves by year it would form the > textbook exponential curve. If you stack them vertically on the floor it > makes the textbook log curve.

It seems to me you have that exactly backwards:

If you stack books horizontally on shelves, which each shelf corresponding to a same-size range of years (e.g., a shelf per decade), with earlier periods on lower shelves, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook _logarithmic_ curve.

If you stack books vertically on the floor in similar periods with earlier periods on the left, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook _exponential_ curve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the article says that researches found a description of this analog computer of antiquity. This makes it the first manual page in history (however the description does not quite tell you how to use this mechanism - even more similarities to man pages)

other links: The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project : The [http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/](http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/)

tweets by the diver team: [https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw](https://twitter.com/antikytheradive?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

a BBC documentary on the subject : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXjUqLMgxM)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's strange to me that all of the knowledge it took to make a device with this kind of precision was lost for 1400 some odd years. What the hell happened?

<comment><USER19> Time happened, and all civilization is perilously fragile.

Don't be so surprised. For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either.

<comment><USER20> > For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either.

What do you mean?

<comment><USER19> Quite literally, NASA couldn't rebuild the Apollo engines after the program was shut down: we lost the plans and the technology to do that. It had to all be reverse-engineered.

The point is: technology doesn't last any longer than the people who produced it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The sad thing about this machine is its uselessness. It only had value as an amusement, or to religious people. Many inventions have been lost and reinvented because the earlier incarnations were not in a useful form.

Perhaps if it was contrived instead to be a mundane adding machine, it might have found use among merchants, tax collectors, and bankers, and hence been duplicated in large numbers, and would not have been lost technology.

<comment><USER21> I'm just going to go ahead and disagree. Having an accurate calendar provides much more than just 'amusement', and is in fact an important part of an organized society.

<comment><USER10> For our society, yes, for theirs, I have a hard time agreeing.

For example, if you don't know what the current date is, the device will be useless to you. And if you know what the current date is, knowing how many days to the next eclipse is useful for - what?

If the device were generally useful, many more of them would be made, as well as similar devices, and we'd have found more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What would the world be like if these ancient scientists and engineers persisted and their science and craft carried on and developed further? Instead, the period that followed gave rise to belief systems that still give us problems today. How very sad.

<comment><USER23> Do we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.

<comment><USER24> Was it lost? Or did those who _could_ build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so?

The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built.

But do we know how long it took to build?

If it was built in a short time frame, then yeah, the maker probably used techniques that were lost not too long afterward, and not rediscovered until maybe the 14th century.

But what if it were built over a much longer time frame? It could have been someone's lifetime project. Then simple techniques might work. For instance, if you need a piece of metal shaped to very tight tolerances, just get it close and then use a hand file to very slowly make it what you need.

If this were the case, I can easily imagine that plenty of people between the time it was made and the 14th century knew how to build one, but simply were not interested enough to make building it their life's work.

<comment><USER22> Science is never lost, only suppressed.

<comment><USER25> The history of scurvy is pretty interesting: [http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured- th...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure- was-lost)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


SaveAllTheTime: Git Commit Helper for Visual Studio - <AUTHOR> http://xpaulbettsx.github.io/SaveAllTheTime/

<comment><USER2> Not wanting to be harsh in any way, but being pragmatic:

The Visual Studio Tools for Git extension automatically saves the files when I commit.

This website really doesn't sell me on the benefits over VSTG. Having something tell me that I've made lots and changes and that it might be a good idea to commit them sounds like a crutch for someone not planning their changes.</comment>


Twitpic blocking archive team from backing up pictures - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523160196672409600 <comment><USER2> I used to be the CTO of Twitpic (I left about 2 years ago).

It sucks to see your work crash into the ground like this.

Just so it's clear, there's just Noah (and his parents) that are left running the company.

<comment><USER3> Did you notice the people trying to contact Noah Everett?

<comment><USER2> Yes and he won't reply to me either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seeing as they're shutting down the company/service in a week, they're probably out of cash. While it sucks for your customers, that's what happens when you run out of money. It sucks for everyone. I'm guessing they were floating the company on personal funds in hopes the acquisition would go through, but it did not - so now they're doing everything they can to stop this turning into a personal financial bloodbath from the bandwidth costs spiral due to everyone rushing to get their photos before the shutdown.

Just an ugly situation for everyone.

<comment><USER5> Here's a solution: [https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562](https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562)

Dustin Curtis: "Can anyone put me in touch with the founder of Twitpic?(I'll pay to backup all of the photos, and even host them. Ridiculous situation.)"

<comment><USER6> This Noah guy (the founder) is really hard to get in contact with. If anyone can make an firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For context, before archive team was blocked Jason Scott commented on Facebook:

"Archive Team has 900 IPs aimed at Twitpic. We're grabbing 100 pictures a second."

He subsequently corrected this figure to 42,000 photos per hour, which works out to about 11/sec.

Later he adds:

"In some cases, twitpic (before removing all the image access) was banning entire ISPs to stop archive team backing it up."

<comment><USER8> In fairness, the archive team is attempting to download 120TB of data.. which is going to cost Twitpic about $15K in outgoing data charges from Amazon.

Maybe they just don't have $15K to pay for this. (and that's not counting all of the users who are also downloading their data)

<comment><USER9> I have absolutely no doubt that people would be willing to donate to cover the archival costs, especially if that donation was overseen by the archive team. Options like this can only be explored if there is a conversation.

<comment> k-mcgrady Yes but you have that conversation before you start archiving. If I started racking up $1000's of dollars in server fees while going bust I'd shut off the archive team too. Ask and offer to pay first.

<comment><USER10> They did.

<comment> k-mcgrady Source?

<comment><USER10> Oh good grief, really? Every thread, including this one, has been full of links. Here's one I have at my fingertips: [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/507595291634040832](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/507595291634040832)

People have been trying to talk to him since the day the announcement was made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Important to the situation is also that, as of ~24hours ago, the users themselves couldn't download their own pictures: [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/522837349676236801](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/522837349676236801)

Edit: While at the same time twitpic had no announcement on the frontpage and users were still uploading: [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/522835537543974913](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/522835537543974913)

<comment><USER12> And that's still the case. Twitpic's "download" link (from current the front page) is handing out 503s, and has been all day:

[http://twitpic.com/account/settings](http://twitpic.com/account/settings)

I wish I could say this will be a good lesson in not trusting startups with personal data, but it won't be.

<comment><USER13> Part of it is that almost every service you interact with on the internet is a "startup". It's not reasonable to expect everybody and their (literal) grandmother to know who's got an investor-friendly P/E.

<comment><USER14> You are really in a bubble. I can't think of any start-ups's I regularly interact with. Now older companies that might or might not be profitable sure, but 'start up's' almost by definition don't support large chunks of the worlds population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "you let the visual component of arguably the greatest communication shift/revolution in the 21st century be under the whim of one idiot". 800 million pictures, just gone. For example [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523160725158903808](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523160725158903808)

<comment><USER16> Assuming ~120TB [1], that would cost ~$1300 in AWS Export charges, plus whatever the drives cost. Just sent a tweet to Noah offering to cover all AWS export/drive costs to export the archive.

[1] [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523162867789758464](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523162867789758464)

<comment><USER17> Yes. This was discussed at length with the Twitpic founder. He said something to the effect of: "don't worry, I'm working on a deal, trust me. But stop downloading the pics"

<comment><USER16> Was this in the last 48 hours? I'm hanging out in #quitpic as rumbles if that's a better place to discuss.

<comment><USER15> No, about a month ago. [http://www.itworld.com/article/2834923/twitpic-really- is-shu...](http://www.itworld.com/article/2834923/twitpic-really-is-shutting- down-after-a-failed-acquisition.html) After the first time they said they were shutting down, they said they made a deal and would stay open. Now they're closing again.

<comment><USER16> Hence why I made the offer ~30 minutes ago :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This whole thing reads weird. From shutting down, to acquisition, to shutting down again and seemingly blocking exports.

However, as this is the internet, until news breaks otherwise I will continue to believe that Hanlon's razor applies here...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

<comment><USER19> Either way, I wonder if the twitpic guys fully understand the damage they may be doing to their personal reputations. Do they expect to be able to run a web service in the future? Because if the current situation persists, no one will ever trust them again.

<comment><USER20> If we're being honest, the vast majority of their users don't know who was behind Twitpic. The HN crowd is probably a lot more likely to know/care than your typical Twitpic user.

They'll probably be able to start new things without most people noticing. And they probably know this.

<comment><USER21> Well, yeah, but it's the HN crowd that they will likely want to work with/hire from, so reputation is actually important.

<comment><USER22> Well, a few things. First off, a lot of people on here probably understand that when you don't have money to pay for bandwidth, banning people who use a lot of it might be reasonable. It's not like you have a whole lot of other options. Passing around the hat isn't likely to work, and if they could get additional funding, they already would have.

Second, even if people didn't understand that, the HN crowd is a tiny slice of the good hackers out there. Most of the best people I know do not read it, or even actively disdain it. "Cesspit" and the like are a terms I have heard in person or on newsgroups used to describe the comments section here.

Third, I'll bet most HN people don't even know the names of Twitpic's founders. I don't. I wouldn't be able to identify whether another company, down the line, was founded by them.

Lastly, I doubt most HN people are so principled that a year or two from now they would turn down an otherwise compelling job offer because the founders of the company were once associated with banning Archive Team's IPs. It's mildly annoying at worst.

<comment><USER23> If someone thinks hacker news is a cesspit of comments on the internet, then I can only imagine that someone hasn't really spent any time on the internet. It's not always sunshine and happiness here, but HN is definitely among the top sites in terms of comment quality, especially considering the broad variety of topics covered here. You really only end up with better quality comments by going to sites that only cater to special interest communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This feels like a hostage situation again. The last time they said they were going away they also prevented people from downloading their images. I'm having a hard time understanding that (granted S3 'out' bandwidth costs money but still.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I saw this and thought "eh, that doesn't bother me, I already used the 'export your photos' thing." So I went to my TwitPic settings page, clicked the link, and downloaded a 14MB zip file.

The only thing is, it's empty. I don't know how you get a 14MB zip file that's empty, but Windows is telling me it's empty. That's not cool.

<comment><USER26> Advice on your issue from #quitpic:

14:23 <REDACTED> you have to enable the "show hidden folders" in windows, under their view options

14:24 <REDACTED> each version of windows is slightly different but it is usually press alt, select tools, folder options, view, and the radio next to show hidden files and folders and then ok

14:24 <REDACTED> then you close and reopen the zip file

14:30 <REDACTED> oh, and sometimes the first download is corrupt.

14:30 <REDACTED> I've had to help too many people at work with this problem plus a person or two on this channel

<comment><USER25> Thanks, but that doesn't appear to be the problem with my file. I tried to extract the files, and then Windows tells me that the archive is invalid.

<comment><USER27> >14:30 <REDACTED> oh, and sometimes the first download is corrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Major headache for Twicsy! We now have to delete about a billion pictures from our index. Which isn't trivial... such a shame. We reached out to him several times over the past few weeks to see if we could arrange something, but he never responded.

<comment><USER15> Do you have a cache of comments or photos from Twitpic? Could you stop by #quitpic on efnet and say hi? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Remember, any cloud service you use may shut down and delete all your data tomorrow, whether through bankruptcy, acqui-shutdown, accident, or vandalism. If it's a free service you will have no comeback. If it's a paid service you probably won't have a comeback either.

<comment><USER30> Free service yes, but if you're paying for SaaS and rely on it for your business you should really get a source code escrow agreement in place. That will allow you to get the necessary components from the provider in case they go belly-up or such.

Of course hosting the application is a whole different thing, but hey, at least you got all your data available.

<comment><USER29> Has anyone successfully done the escrow thing? That would also only be available to the very largest customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It was a free service right? Whatever happened to easy come, easy go? The indignation around this is alien to me.

<comment><USER32> It's more about having a moral obligation to history. Twitpic has been a home for hundreds of millions of images for a good chunk of a decade during which the most monumental shifts in communication and expression have occurred. Unique and irreplaceable moments have been captured in this place. To turn around and delete it all just because you didn't get the trademark application you wanted (and apparently can't be bothered to just think of a new name instead) is nothing other than an unprecedented act of wanton, petulant vandalism against history.

It would be like the world's biggest art gallery turning around and saying 'Oh, sorry, they won't let us call our gallery McDonalds, so we're shutting down and burning all your pictures. After all, easy come, easy go.'

<comment><USER7> Okay, but we keep getting burned by these irreplaceable droves of stuff going offline (see GeoCities), and all our indignation doesn't bring them back.

At some point we have to learn this lesson for good, and stop trusting random entities to be good stewards of things we find meaningful.

<comment><USER13> "We" aren't the problem. The problem is that startups need non-technical users to use their stuff. People who aren't qualified to, nor remotely interested in, managing a tech stack simply are not going to care about how random that entity is. You can't make them care. It falls to awesome people like Jason and the rest of Archive Team to keep that sort of historical record for posterity. Because it's important. Trying to thwart them, as Noah Everett is doing, is just straight-up not good.

<comment><USER33> The Internet Archive should archive stuff _before_ a company enters financial hardship and can longer afford the outgoing bandwidth costs to have their entire dataset replicated online. It makes sense to block those attempts.

It strikes me that a similar fate would most likely have occurred if Everett was hit by a bus and his bank accounts eventually ran dry.

We should identify historically significant single points-of-failure and make archives _before_ the failures occur, insofar as is possible.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but it's important to note that I'm not talking about blocking the scrapers. I'm talking about "we're willing to pay for an S3 export, Amazon will mail out a bunch of hard drives." Everett has steadfastly avoided contacting Archive Team or anyone else who wants to do this and I can't think of an ethically not-icky reason for that.

<comment><USER33> The not-icky reason is that he doesn't want to. He's not under any obligation to do it. Maybe we'd _like_ it if he did this, but I don't think it's fair to assume bad or even just "ethically icky" motives.

If all of twitpic's data is exported or copied elsewhere, he can no longer effectively profit off of it. We don't know that his intention is to just nuke the data and be done, he may be trying to salvage what he can monetarily (and the "we're getting acquired, just kidding" thing is probably good evidence that something like this is going on behind the scenes). I don't think there's anything wrong with this either. It's his service, and if his motive was profit, it makes perfect sense to shop the data around instead of just accepting a total loss. There's no reason twitpic should have to be run for altruistic purposes.

Maybe dcurtis et al would have better luck getting a response if instead of saying "We'll cover the bandwidth costs", they said "We'll buy the data from you at a price commensurate with the years of effort and upkeep you've invested into an apparently massively important historical archive". I don't think it's fair to pretend like Noah Everett is obligated to sell his archive for the cost of bandwidth.

In any case, at this point he's made it clear that he wants to wash his hands of the project in one way or another. It's his personal project and he is and should be free to do that. This is the worst possible time to try to do a bulk archive.

I understand that we can't see into the future and can't always predict when something like this is going to go down, but I'd think we can probably improve our heuristics so that something as seemingly significant as twitpic can't just vanish into the ether next time.

<comment><USER13> _> The not-icky reason is that he doesn't want to._

Eight hundred million photos and all their comments. That's historical record. That's _our_ historical record. No one jerk gets to destroy all of that. The "hurr, well, don't use it" is completely bonkers--I don't use it, but _my_ history is on there, too. It's a record I didn't put there but matters to me as a citizen and as a member of society. Destroying a major part of the historical record for _everybody_ is indefensibly shitty, full-stop, you don't get to say "well it's mine" when it's _not_.

It's ours. Twitpic was allowed to profit by holding onto it awhile. Now it's time to do the right thing.

<comment><USER33> It is his. This is what happens in an ethereal format like the internet, and it's something we'll have to adapt to -- in the history of mass publication, one wasn't able to just destroy all copies of a thing with the push of a button. Books and pamphlets could be hunted down, but almost always some would survive, because you can't remotely change the contents of the paper. In the digital age, you _can_. If there's a lesson to take from this, it's the dangers of the non-permanence of the web; we should be looking at solutions that can mitigate that danger. But I don't blame Everett at all for not just giving away his company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills, and I don't believe he should be shamed into doing so.

If I were him, I'd probably be contacting Sotheby's or another auctioneer that specializes in high-value goods and seeing about selling off the dataset to the highest bidder. Then these fellows can put their money where their mouth is and show us just how important the preservation of that data is.

<comment><USER13> This celebration of plutocracy gone wild is one of the more disgusting things I've read on Hacker News, and that's saying a lot. His corporation _only exists_ through our societal forebearance. He has an obligation to the society that gave him the legal structure and protections thereof. Part of that is not deleting history just because he's in a snit.

<comment><USER33> a. He's not necessarily deleting it.

b. If it's worth so much, people should be willing to pay a fair price for it. The implication that he should let it all go for a payment to Amazon is, frankly, insulting, and I'm sure you'd be singing a different tune if it was your own startup that you were trying to liquidate.

c. Talk is cheap. It's easy to try to shame someone into letting you take their intellectual property. It's not plutocracy, it's just business.

d. Getting a lot of users doesn't require your company to convert into a charity. I am 100% sure that Noah Everett has a price, and I'm sure if people _actually_ valued the Twitpic corpus he'd be able to get it.

e. All uses of Twitpic were voluntary and done with the implicit acknowledgement that the images and comments may go away one day. If someone was not OK with this, they should've saved their data, and many probably did. Blocking the Internet Archive from devaluing the dataset is not bad, wrong, or ethically icky in any way. The larger ethical crime lies at the feet of the people trying to convince Everett that he doesn't deserve fair compensation for curating this historically significant dataset.

f. If no one is willing to pay the money to preserve the dataset, it's obviously not as culturally significant as you believe it is. There's plenty of money out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I just opened the archiveWarrior and it's downloading from twitpic.

Help them: [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior)

<comment><USER35> It's only downloading comments and metadata, not the images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> In their defense, it's entirely possible that they simply don't have the capacity to handle the large volume of requests...

</comment><comment><USER37> Given these points:

\- The whole shutdown / acquisition / shutdown saga \- Tepid response wrt getting compensated to export data

Someone's still holding out hope for an injection of capital. Because once the export happens and the data is gone, the value is entirely lost.

I wouldn't bank on getting any traction on paid exports until the last possible second.

</comment><comment><USER38> I dunno what the hell these people's problem is. Nothing about their actions makes any sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER39> Every time I read about Twitpic closing I remember this...

[http://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah- everett/](http://mixergy.com/interviews/twitpic-noah-everett/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Come on, wasn't twitpic free? What why should they keep paying for hosting if the business went under?

<comment><USER15> Paying for hosting? They were making money from ads they put next to our pictures. They were using our content to drive traffic to their site. Without the user's photos, the site is worthless. They should have been paying users a cut of advertising revenue like YouTube does. "Free" means they're pocketing the profit for themselves.

<comment><USER41> This is absurd. They were providing a service that users deemed valuable, and users gave them access to the content (and the ability to monetize that content) in exchange for their service. You don't actually believe Facebook should pay you for using their free service do you?

<comment><USER15> This isn't about money. People have offered to cover the costs of a backup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If they are on S3, would they be willing to take money to do a data export?

<comment><USER19> Thus far the Twitpic guys haven't been very open or cooperative with the archive team guys.

[https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523162680400830464](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523162680400830464)

<comment><USER16> I sent a tweet to Noah offering to covert all costs of an export. We'll see what happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe they're having issues fulfilling individual users requests, so blocked the archive team to help reduce stress?

I can't imagine they'll want to spin up new machines, so it makes sense to throttle/limit/block.

Not sure I'd immediately jump to malice here.

<comment><USER44> No, like, right now images hosted on Twitpic are _completely_ inaccessible. You can't view them at all.

<comment><USER43> That doesn't mean this isn't an effort to reduce stress on the user collection download system.

I'm not saying that it _isn 't_ malicious. I just don't think it's wise to jump to that conclusion straight away.

<comment><USER45> Name the next plausible explanation and how likely you think it is relative to 'save money, screw your data'. I think you'll have takers on a bet at those odds, given what you just said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I don't understand why they wouldn't just put the pictures up on BitTorrent?

<comment><USER47> That's a LOT of data. 100s of TBs.

Good luck.

<comment><USER46> Doesn't the torrent protocol lend itself to huge amounts of data? Plus, you can select which files to download in the protocol.

<comment><USER23> I reckon the feature that is missing is not the ability to pick and choose, but instead to automatically assign people trying to help preserve something to one chunk, with the idea of getting full coverage of the entire data set.

If there are 100 pieces, and 500 people, you want each piece to be held by 5 people for 5x redundancy. And, if nodes leave the swarm, the system automatically rebalances which nodes are maintaining a particular piece of the dataset.

The only solution being worked on out there that does this is IPFS

[https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs](https://github.com/jbenet/ipfs) [https://github.com/jbenet/node-ipfs](https://github.com/jbenet/node-ipfs) [https://github.com/jbenet/go-ipfs](https://github.com/jbenet/go-ipfs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This whole thing is a fiasco. But maybe if it wasn't Twitpic wouldn't get as much exposure.

My bet is that this is just a giant media whoring play. If you want to save the company data then you have to be transparent and ASK for help. If it is going to cost $15K someone might very well step up. But if you are tightlipped then people will assume the worst.

</comment><comment><USER49> I might be unfamiliar with how the archive team operates but shouldn't this have been ongoing over the years rather than all at once now?

<comment><USER35> The Archive Team only backs things up when there is a risk of them being gone.

They cannot do it any other way - the Internet Archive does not have infinite resources to host things, and they need to prioritize. 120TB is not an easy thing to host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What's the big deal about these pictures? It's not the first time a major service has shut down. I am assuming historically important images have been saved and hosted elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> The pictures, yes, but not the conversation about them.

<comment><USER50> Why are those conversations important?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Should we now have this expectation for any free github project that's popular?

<comment><USER51> I guess the hypocrisy and entitlements will continue....</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the odds that a startup succeed in third world countries? - <AUTHOR> Startups are really hard to start ,let alone making them succeed. However,in developing countries like Kenya,where most people are poor ,developers always find it hard to get started and show their ideas to the world.Some cant even afford basic tools like good laptops,ethical boundaries and corruption also play a role in giving incentives to budding programmes with no contacts of middle or established members of the society.The so called local investors also bite huge 'chunks' of the pitching candidate.What do you guys think,is it possible to change africa with startups the same way their goovernments puts it on their papers? <comment> ape-box For many social, and economical reasons i believe a local startup will have more chances to become successful than a western one, but that seems obvious ...

If you are thinking/planning a system or efforts to encourage and support the growth of local startups, be aware that if that system will be truly made with capitalistic goals instead of economical development it will ruin and eat up everything making the country in worst state than before, and it will make the good minds flee the country, and that's history, past and modern ...

<comment><AUTHOR> We have many issues that the government [i] has tried to change but failed .[ii]hasnt seen as necessary to change.For instance,teachers are poorly paid ,health care systems are bad leave a lone roads.Education systems are the worst::sort of business for the upper class with average privileged students getting best courses in universities at the expense of poor and needy students who have outperformed them in national exams ..how can we solve these issues using startups?

<comment> ape-box Well that look like a lot of opportunities ;)

People when pressed and in survival mode, will bring out brightness and genius to overcome issues, given all the troubles it will be really slow process, but when someone will raise and do something good, pride will come out, sense of community will bring people together, and this will help the project be successful, maybe not facebook successful (but it could be, i believe times are still too young now), but enough to live and make a difference.

In America, and Europe, people have it easy, so it's also easy to start a company and do something, people don't really know what means hard work and fight for surviving, so in the end most of the startups seen as successful fail; while in other less fortunate countries (in Europe too) people have it hard, so when a company is able to survive it will be way stronger, and even if it don't make the same money of the failed american company, it is successful as the people working in it will be able to live, and make a difference for someone in need.

Anyway to stay on the original question: i don't know what have said the government, and i can't really say much about as i'm pretty ignorant about Kenya and Africa in general, and besides i've never been there. But i know people, and i've seen in many occasions the brightness and will needed to succeed, those people simply didn't knew their capabilities and where still locked in the mindset of being nobody and so untitled to make a difference not only for themselves but for everyone.

I would like to continue this dialog ...</comment></comment></comment>


The proper SOPA blackout - <AUTHOR>

I think it is silly for reddit, google, FB etc to go dark on the 18th to protest SOPA.
Instead, they should all block any and all sites, supporters and supporting media of SOPA.
Drop all traffic from CNN, EA, Sony etc.. that support SOPA.
Why drop valid inet traffic when you can show all the idiots who support SOPA where their traffic really comes from. Plus it should be a week not a day. <comment><USER2> good idea but need some type of IP blacklist

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not both?</comment>


A Way to Build the Pipeline for IT Pros: Hire Teachers As Interns - <AUTHOR> http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/A-Way-to-Build-the-Pipeline-for-IT-Pros-Hire-Teachers-As-Interns/ba-p/1292

<comment><USER2> This is good stuff! The other day when I was writing a game that involved a small physics engine, I ended up having to retouch up on the friction, and a lot of basic physics concepts. Having the knowledge of where to apply the things you learn is just as important as learning the concepts themselves. Education is a tool, and the mindset of "STEM" is to learn how to utilize these tools in tangible ways.</comment>


Show HN: Buy Partial Real Estate with Credit Card - <AUTHOR> Founder of AlphaCap [1] here, we built a simple tool that allows anyone to buy real estate and immediately start receiving monthly rental income. We encountered a problem in the form of an endless wall of paperwork when trying to buy real estate for investment purposes. Real estate industry is still pretty outdated, there are still real estate agents who charge 3% to represent the seller and another 3% to represent the buyer, there are technology platforms like Redfin that are trying to tackle that particular challenge by charging 1% and hiring a salaried employee to represent the buyer/seller. However, buying a percentage ownership in a property still remains a difficult problem. We strive to build a platform to connect interested buyers/investors with each other to raise enough capital to purchase a property together. This way if a property is a great investment, but you don't have enough money to cover the full purchase price you can use our platform to buy a percentage of that property and allow others to invest in the remaining equity. You will then receive your share of the rental income + appreciation on your equity ownership over time. I want to thank everyone in advance for providing feedback and looking forward to hearing your thoughts and any concerns.<p>[1] https://alphacap.ai <comment><USER2> Some questions on a quick read:

* your T&C omits the name of the jurisdiction it's claiming the prevailing law in:

        ...in accordance with and subject to, prevailing law of . Any use...

* what ownership structure do you use for holding these properties? Who specifically holds the deed? Your FAQ mentions "we don't necessarily own the properties" in response to a question about Landa

* what are the requirements for investors? Generally you either have to do a LOT of SEC disclosure, or only allow "accredited investors" with specific net worth.

* what credit card processor are you using? In my experience, "investments" are on a lot of processors' Prohibited Product Lists due to the above disclosure issue

* the answer to the last question in your FAQ about "what happens if the place doesn't rent" is non-responsive; sure you're going to TRY to rent the property, but what happens if you can't?

</comment><comment><USER3> I would suggest re-working your website. There are sections that are hidden due to color choices. It took me awhile to realize that there was even a login button on the page. Also, I'm confused on what the map of the US with various colors is for, it is just there.

I think it is irresponsible of you not to disclose the risk involved in this to potential users. You even make comments such as:

"How likely is it for the property to appreciate over time?

While appreciation it is not guaranteed but there is a high likelihood that real estate appreciates over time assuming a minimum investment duration of 5 years."

There are a lot of factors that go into whether or not a property will appreciate over time and you don't list any of those or give any sort of details. You are letting people pick their own property in areas that you, presumably, have no knowledge of market conditions but yet you are saying that it is highly likely that people will gain appreciation in their property.

In the FAQ you also state:

"Would you say this is similar to Landa?

The difference is we allow individual users to invest together in a property, we don't necessarily own the properties instead we facilitate the investment process."

What conditions do you own the properties? What part of the investment process do you facilitate? On your landing page you state:

" Invest With Others

AlphaCap allows anyone to buy equity in any real estate property that is on sale, once 100% of the purchase price is funded we purchase the property on your behalf and manage the property and start sending you monthly rental income. "

It says you purchase the property on the customer's behalf but who is the property registered to? Is it your company until all the money is repaid? Is it all of the people investing in the property?

You also state in your FAQ as one of the benefits:

" Best part is you can use other people's money as leverage to buy much more property, and if the deal makes sense at the time of purchase/deal analysis, you won't be over-leveraged and will stand to make money, with multiple exits as options."

First off, I find this irresponsible by suggesting people take on large amount of risk while not even mentioning the amount of risk that they could be taking on. And what does it mean: "if the deal makes sense at the time of purchase"? Make sense to who? Speaking of risk, there is not a single spot on your landing page or your FAQ that even has the word "risk".

Lower in your FAQ you state:

"What happens in case of a massive destruction by the tenant?

There is insurance on the property and there is deposit required for tenants. As part of the management process we also vet tenants before they move in. For any damages we will deduct the cost from the tenant's deposit."

So are you also a property management company? If so, are people who buy partial real estate through your site bound to use you as the property management company or could they go and pick another management company if they want.

"What happens is a property is bought, but you can't rent it? Who pays the bill of the empty place?

Typically we have a vacancy rate of less 10%, we do our best to rent the property as quickly as possible to the most qualified tenant."

You don't even answer the question. Who is responsible? What does "as quickly as possible" mean in this situation? To me, it sounds like you would drop below market rates to fill a vacancy.

Something that isn't covered in your FAQ is maintenance. Who is in charge of that? If a plumber is needed do I have to pay for that?

I realize I may be coming off as harsh or abrasive and for that I'm truly sorry but as your site stands it seems to be made to take advantage of those with minimal real estate knowledge hoping to invest their money. You don't have mention how you make money, you don't mention that there is risk and it seems like you contradict yourself in many areas on the site.</comment>


Ask HN: What convinced you to take your job offer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I needed a job. I had just graduated, my degree (ocean engineering) was not a huge market; but, the offer was in the city I wanted to live. This was also in 1984. There was one IBM PC in a closet and two Wang word processors that used 8-inch floppies. After two years, my focus was on IT. I don't regret the choice at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Helplessness. I have many projects to work upon but have no money in bank. Have not enough money to get a company registered and charge money from the clients so had to accept the job offer.

The only good thing I found in my job was the possibilities of polishing my skills as an entrepreneur and learn about current trends in B2B marketing.

</comment><comment><USER4> They were willing to sponsor my visa.

</comment><comment><USER5> Location and work/life balance.</comment>


Re: Origin of the U+nnnn notation - <AUTHOR> http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m11/0060.html <comment><USER2> Brilliant. It had genuinely never occurred to me that it might be anything more than an abbreviation for 'Unicode'.</comment>


I run an ad-supported site. Ad-removal software doesn't scare me. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2010/06/10/meet-a-web-publisher-whos-okay-with-safaris-new-ad-removal-feature-me/

<comment><USER2> _the most potent tool that publishers have to defeat ad blocking will always be using advertising in a manner that readers find useful [..] Consumers get a new way to read stuff, and creators are forced to integrate ads into their sites in a manner that the majority of their readers can live with._

That's a utopian view. In reality, it's a lot easier to sell out and run payola posts, put paid links in your content, and use inline advertising in a subtle enough way that people still keep reading ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> > WordPress.com will be back in a minute!

what scares me is using someone elses computers to do my computering and those computers blowing up.</comment>


Ask HN: Burnt out, can I take a sabatical? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN'ers,
I'm a mobile developer, with solid backend skills. I've been working since past 12 years and have never taken a break. I'm now feeling the classic burnout, and my health and productivity is tanking. All the spare time I've, goes into managing my kids chores, and working overtime fixing broken builds/ code issues at the startup I'm working at. I would love to take 3 months break, as I feel that's best in this situation.
I live in Berlin, DE and is it possible to take a sabbatical/break due to burnout? Will the JobCenter support such endeavor? Do German companies support sabbaticals and is there any legal provision that could help me here?
Any help is sincerely appreciated.
--
Best Regards/Veile Grüße A Burnt Out Developer. <comment><USER2> Hey there. Sorry to read about your situation, I hope I can help you a little bit since I'm German. Sabbaticals are not uncommon in Germany any more, but are at will of your employer. Essentially it is just an unpaid leave and a promise that you'll still have your job. Small companies, like your employer, which is a startup, will probably not have enough people to easily compensate while your gone and have a harder time to find a replacement for just the time in which your away. Especially because you working overtime already, they seem to have a too much work for too less people. A Freelancer would be easier to get, but they are much more expensive than regular employees.

But in general it depends on the company, whether they see employees are resources or as the engine running the company. If you talk to your boss, that might give you an idea whether unpaid leave is an option. And he might also recognize that the workload is too high.

There are no legal provisions for sabbaticals. Also the job center will not immediately pay an unemployment benefit if you choose to quit for your personal reasons. At least you'll not get any pay for the first three (?) months. If and what pay you'll receive afterwards depends on if you are eligible and how much contribution you have paid in the past.

There is another option: Talk to a doctor. Potential burn out is a serious topic and any good doctor should recognize the signs and prevent anything worse. You're health care provider might also be able to help you there, most likely they sponsor yoga sessions. But calling their help line for medical advise is certainly worth it. Doctors might be able to put you on sick leave, but most likey just a few days until you have serious symptoms.

A side note: Be aware that any treatment you receive might affect your rating for occupational disablement insurances. If you don't have one (which you should as long as you're healthy!), and you choose to get one any time within the next five years, then they'll request all diagnosis from all doctors you have been seeing. Any illness / reason for which you have been seeing a doctor will most likely be excluded from the insurance. Some psychotherapists unfortunately tend to write stuff (some standard clauses) into your file which is not true (ie. anxiety disorder because you can't sleep), but makes them get more money from the health care provider. Thus if you don't have an occupational disablement insurance and choose to visit a psychotherapist, make sure you know what diagnosis they are noting down.

Hope this helps! Best of luck!</comment>


Ask HN: Successful project to predict stock market - <AUTHOR> Has anyone been able to successfully create a project that s/he runs on the side to predict stock prices? If so, what tech and what data did you use? And if not, could you share some of the learnings? <comment><USER2> I do it to trade options successfully. I use technical analysis and it's definitely possible. It's not a side project, it's my income.

I only use PHP although the cool thing now is Python and has built in libraries. I don't need near instant execution and I started a long long time ago so rewriting everything is not something I want to undertake.

I use minute based data with all sorts of different indicators based on the stock, it's market, and competitors.

It's not something I think you can do as a side project as you have to refine it each day, I think if you aren't spending 8 hours a day looking at charts it will be hard to adapt/evolve.

Current stance is the market is bullish. I was bullish in December also.

</comment><comment><USER3> Long back I tried something similar, but not successful. Here it is in my Github: <[https://github.com/gkiranp/trading- stat>](https://github.com/gkiranp/trading-stat>) The idea behind this project was to fetch information from twitter like social media sources and provide "popularity" info (not exactly stock price prediction) about stock of interest.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sure they have. They used monkeys and a dart board.

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-hedge-fund-geniuses- go...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-hedge-fund-geniuses-got-beaten- by-monkeys-again-2015-06-25)</comment>


The benefits of having startup in silicon valley instead in any other area? - <AUTHOR>

Is it worth it to pay high rent, bills and all that just to be in silicon valley? I really don't get the importance of being physically there. Please prove me wrong. <comment><USER2> #1 Talent. Plain and simple, having access to a deep and wide pool of various types of engineering talent is the primary reason for locating in or near the silicon valley. There are not only lots of very high quality universities in the bay area, but we also regularly steal the best and brightest engineers from all over the world whenever possible. If you plan to scale, you will need to hire, and the more skilled and talented your employees are, the better off your company will be.

#2 Personal Connections. Anyone with a clue could scrape together the $20K USD investment offered by YC, but no one can match the connections (and insight) you'd gain from being a YC funded company. YC just happens to be an excellent example, but it's certainly not the only avenue for acquiring connections.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's something to do with the atmosphere and being around such a large group of like minded individuals. But then, I've never been to America let alone silicon valley so, that's purely my take on it as an outsider looking in.

</comment><comment><USER4> i think the presence of a bubbling community of like minded people is a plus. You are exposed to more talents when you want to hire, there is more accessibility of funds. Oh, the press is going to talk about you.. whatelse? nothing

<comment><USER5> Where are all these likeminded individuals? Are there places other than meetups to find them?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my point. Everybody is talking about like-minded individuals and community, but where do you get to interact with them? Only one benefit I can think of is the exposure of talents, but then again you can find talents everywhere. All in all IMO, having startup in silicon valley is highly overrated.

<comment><USER5> Nice to see someone has my line of thinking. I'm sure we're not alone. It's probably just not trendy to talk about the valley the way we have.

I like it here, a lot, but I find it very hard to find people who actually have the same product building interests. Plenty of people who like the same tools (RoR, iOS, JS, etc) but much more difficult to find people who are as passionate about X and Y as you are.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The best, highest-rated products on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://toppppp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a side project that displays the 100 best, highest rated products on Amazon.com.

All of the products have close to 5 stars, and enough reviews to make the rating significant (usually over 50). Each product also has a very short summary of its Amazon reviews.

The information was gathered by manually going through hundreds of Amazon pages and filtering out all the noise and all the products with too few reviews, removing products that are too similar (no need for two sets of steak knives), and making various judgment calls like choosing a product that's 0.1 stars lower because it's $150 cheaper. Then, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Amazon reviews in order to write a short summary of why each product is awesome.

I've been running some ads on Reddit and it's gotten a great reception so far. Would love to hear what everyone here thinks.</comment>


Spanish media just shot themselves in the foot – or maybe in the head - <AUTHOR> http://cfenollosa.com/blog/spanish-media-just-shot-themselves-in-the-foot----or-maybe-in-the-head.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it interesting from an EU perspective, since the Spanish media and government are following the path started by France a year ago [1] and more countries could jump on the bandwagon

[1]: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/07/us-europe- google-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/07/us-europe-google- idUSBRE9160ZM20130207)</comment>


'Indian' or 'Native American'? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ <comment><USER2> Having lived on several reservations myself, I can confirm. Indians' first preference is to be called by their clan or tribe. When those are not known, Indian is the preferred term.

<comment><USER3> Note also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Indian_Nations_Univers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Indian_Nations_University)</comment></comment>


Autodidacticism - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism <comment><USER2> > Autodidacticism is sometimes a complement of modern education.

As a kid, I pretty much ate books, and I had the good fortune to have several teachers that would just let me quietly read on my own in class while they lectured.

Not everyone has that temperament and ability, but it'd be useful to look at not just the mechanics of learning, but also how to get kids to _want_ to learn. Paraphrasing, don't just teach kids how to multiply--teach to dream of what they can do with math.

<comment><USER3> I was given several options. In some classes, I would be allowed to read fiction or otherwise zone out, but in other classes, I would simply be handed harder and harder versions of the material. I was handed 6th grade math workbooks in 3rd grade, and I was rewarded for good spelling with longer and harder word lists. I think that increasing the challenge, and not just catering to boredom, is an important part of the public-education part of handling the precocious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to think i was one, but I'm not sure learning from pre recorded material online counts now. I miss being in class

</comment><comment><USER5> Can someone summarize this article for me?

<comment><USER6> It would be an exercise in autodidacticism to do so yourself.

<comment><USER5> That's the joke...

<comment><USER6> Looks like I'm stupid :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Canadian Shield DNS Service from CIRA - <AUTHOR> https://www.cira.ca/cybersecurity-services/canadian-shield <comment><USER2> CIRA (the .ca registration authority) has been having a bit of a scope creep problem. This is a good example of that. If you want a Canadian domain suffix you pretty much ending up subsidizing the interests of the current bunch who have taken over the board for the organization.</comment>


Humans Deep-Sea Fishing 42,000 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/gone-fishing-42000-years-ago-20111125-1nxkn.html

<comment><USER2> I heard from Laura Cunningham's talk on 10,000 years of California ecology that there were once Tuna in San Francisco Bay. If so perhaps these fish could be caught on land?

[http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/oct/17/ten-millennia- calif...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/oct/17/ten-millennia-california- ecology/)

<comment><USER2> Have discussed a bit with the author. It seems there is still some question but someone who knows fish would have to weigh in:

Not an expert by any means, but I recall a talk by Laura Cunningham on historical California ecology that spoke of the existence of Tuna in the San Francisco bay.

The talk is available here, if you're a member.

[http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/oct/17/ten-millennia- calif...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/oct/17/ten-millennia-california- ecology/)

Susan O'Connor: * Hi Danielle, Yes I think that you are correct and immature tuna do come into shallower water but they are still difficult to catch as they are very fast moving so cannot usually be caught on a baited hook thrown offshore. Best Sue *

Danielle:

Hmm tricky. Are the bones you've found mostly adult? I don't have access to the paper... would you mind forwarding it?

Susan: _The tuna we have are mostly between about 50 and 70 cm in length so may be immatures that come close to shore. I'm not an expert but I have been advised that the tuna would not be able to be caught on the single piece circular baited jabbing hooks that I have in the site. I can't access the library from Japan so can't send you a pdf. Best Sue_

Danielle:

Hmm, okay, thanks.

Really interesting find and evidence!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this really confirm deep-sea fishing? Could have just been a combination of tuna/etc straying to shallower waters and those crossing straits stockpiling food? Or does deep-sea fishing include surface fishing in deeper waters? At first glance to me, it would be more about deep trawling or long lines.

<comment><USER4> Deep sea fish such as tuna are often found schooling in surface waters (just google tuna surfacing and you find some good videos) in deep water areas.

With two boats, a strong net and a good knowledge of your local winds, it would probably be rather easy to net a tuna and use a land-bound wind to haul a good sized tuna to shallow waters where it could be hauled ashore by manpower.

Given that arrow heads pre-date this 'fishing date' then tools would have been available. It isn't hard to assume that people who can make arrow heads could make a harpoon head (essentially a big arrow head that can have a line tied through it and was often unattached to the spear portion - as you wouldn't want the wooden pole pulling the harpoon out).

My guess would be that if they were using wooden harpoons or stone/bone, they wouldn't likely be left unused. A harpoon would be kept with the fishing equipment, not with the cooking utensils, and with a line attached you'd make sure they were out and ready for the next day rather than leave them in.

I often don't get the logic of the researchers here in that they always seem surprised no tools were found. I'm sorry, but I work in construction and you don't find me leaving my hammer and drill laying around in my kitchen and making new ones instead of using my perfectly good ones.

<comment><USER5> Fishing harpoons are dated from as early as 80k years ago from what is now in Zaire:

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

"With two boats, a strong net and a good knowledge of your local winds, it would probably be rather easy to net a tuna and use a land-bound wind to haul a good sized tuna to shallow waters where it could be hauled ashore by manpower."

That seems unlikely. More likely they speared the sorts of fish they could carry in whatever sized craft they had (if any). From what I gather the bones are from smaller tuna.

<comment><USER4> So essentially all the new evidence this has given us is that they sailed into deeper waters, which isn't especially a talented skill. If you can canoe in shallow water, you're going to be able to canoe in deep water on a calm day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Abstract of the Science article on the recent archaeological find in East Timor:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6059/1117.abstract?sid...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6059/1117.abstract?sid=63b76f8c-0fbb-473d-ae9d-15c882cbc16a)

</comment><comment><USER6> "She said the first people who arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago must have had boats because they had to cross hundreds of kilometres of deep ocean channels to get here from south-east Asia."

As far as I know, this is debatable.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahul_Shelf>

May have been 60KM of ocean or may not have been: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_Australia>

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see someone crossing a mere 60km of ocean using anything but boat (or anything flying).

<comment><USER4> Uh, Petar Stoychev swam the English channel (32km) in less than 7 hours. In 1875 Matthew Webb made the crossing in under 22 hours (5 hours attributed to fighting the tides) and getting a jellyfish sting along the way.

Kutral Ramesh at 13 became the youngest person to cross the English Channel, prior to this he crossed the Palk Strait 53km wide at its narrowest. In the same year, he completed a total of 6 channel crossings, the last of which was the Ten Degree Channel, which is an approximate 150km swim.

If a 13 year old can swim 60km of ocean, I guess adults could have certainly made the 60km stretch. Also given that there's been the suggested presence of boats on Crete since about 130,000 years ago... they could have probably just made a dugout boat from one of the many plentiful tropical forests.

<comment><USER7> >> they could have probably just made a dugout boat from one of the many plentiful tropical forests.

For me, that fits the definition of a boat. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firebase's Realtime Database is currently down - <AUTHOR> https://status.firebase.google.com/incident/Realtime%20Database/18058 <comment><USER2> Networking issue in us-central-1c. We're completely down.

</comment><comment><USER3> what the...

<comment><USER3> nvm, we're all good</comment></comment>


Generate Go model from database design - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/duythinht/dbml-go <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.dbml.org](https://www.dbml.org) is awesome, so I have wrote a tool, which parse DBML from both local file or from dbdiagram.io to go struct model.

<comment><USER2> I've never heard of dbml before, seems like its been out for about a year. I'm always interested in managing schemas in a db-agnostic fashion. Seems like overtime everything always devolves into db specific schemas (spatial indexes, new datatypes like JSON, etc). I'll read into this and add it to my list to watch.

Thanks for sharing this and your work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know why people don't do more of this sort of thing. Keeping models aligned between DB/API/UI/whatever else is a laborious and error-prone process. It's a perfect candidate for a DRY solution.

</comment><comment><USER4> What is it with Go's love of code generation? Everything from protocol implementations to database connections seems to generate a large wad of Go code. Is it just to workaround the lack of Generics?

<comment><USER5> I think it's. Usually, compiler generates each concrete implementation for generic. But in go, that's programmer's job. Maybe it's trade off for language's simplicity.

<comment><USER6> This is an opportunity to use a higher-level DRY language to drive the code generator, and treat Go like assembly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey you're using my github.com/dave/jennifer package for the code generation. Glad it's helpful!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an awesome package for generate go code :)</comment></comment>


OccupyCal - Police brutality at UC Berkeley  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovLQ9qyWQ&feature=colike <comment><AUTHOR> I would never normally submit anything political and I have not even been active in the Occupy Movement at all. But I saw this on twitter and couldn't believe it hasn't been covered anywhere else. This is literally happening in Berkeley and one of the school professors was taken to the hospital because of it</comment>


Ask HN: Would you rather work at Google or Amazon +20% pay? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Even if Amazon was paying me 2x the pay, I would choose Google. Amazon is a good company but a "mean" one. I a very "hostile" environment there so unless you find the magical team that is just awesome, I will never again recommend Amazon to anyone. - Personal experience and others.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate you sharing your insight. Would you say the hostile environment you experience is part of the overall culture or does it differ from group to group?</comment></comment>


Apple releases iOS 13.5 to the public with Exposure Notification API, Face ID - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/05/20/ios-13-5-released-features-exposure/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty incredible! I'm excited to see some of the innovative projects that public health agencies build around this. I applaud Google and Apple for collaborating on a single API that opens a new information channel out to the public (billions of devices!) and could imagine a future where real-time contact tracing inspires enough confidence in people/businesses to get things moving again provided the proper precautions are in place. I also hope we don't get over confident because of tools like these and blink first.

Couple of other interesting changes listed in the notes:

Face ID and Passcode

        Simplified unlock process for devices with Face ID when you are wearing a face mask
        Passcode field automatically presented after swiping up from the bottom of the Lock screen when you are wearing a face mask
        Also works when authenticating with the App Store, Apple Books, Apple Pay, iTunes, and other apps that support signing in with Face ID

FaceTime

        Option to control automatic prominence on Group FaceTime calls so video tiles do not change size when a participant speaks

Emergency Services

        Option to automatically share health and other essential information from your Medical ID with emergency services when you place an emergency call (US only)

The first two make my life easier and the third is helpful. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> I wish there was a way to flag comments that have inadvertently tripped code/fixed-font by indenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I were just complaining today about how annoying Face ID is with our masks on. Glad that's getting improved!</comment>


Australia needs to get very serious, very quickly, to counter this move - <AUTHOR> https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/canberra-needs-to-get-very-serious-very-quickly-to-counter-this-move-by-a-master-strategist-20180409-p4z8mj.html <comment><USER2> It's about a Chinese military base in Vanuatu.</comment>


Why prolog is by far the best, most productive, easiest programming languag - <AUTHOR> http://eliminatingwork.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-prolog-is-by-far-best-most.html

<comment><USER2> e.</comment>


The project where literally anything* goes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/illacceptanything/illacceptanything <comment><USER2> * except 8 rules</comment>


SoundCloud has changed their logo in support of LGBT rights - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/

<comment><USER2> I remember when Mozilla was punished for not being PC.

Are there any organized boycotts on the other side of the issue? Or are they too economically weak and unorganized?</comment>


Important fiduciary duty case for major non-controlling holders in Delaware corp - <AUTHOR> http://www.gibsondunn.com/Publications/Pages/TrialCourtGuidanceShareholderFiduciaryDutiesUnderDelawareLaw.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> This might be pretty technical legal stuff for HN but I posted it to alert private equity investors to an important California decision that limits their fiduciary-duty exposure for corporate actions in Delaware corporations.

Bottom line: if you are not a "controlling" shareholder, you can exercise special rights as a shareholder (such as a right to veto a deal) given to you by the terms of your investment without having that action second-guessed as being allegedly inimical to the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders on some theory that you breached fiduciary duties owed to the company (the ruling held that no fiduciary duty is owed in such a case). In other words, when it comes to exercising special rights given to them by a startup in connection with their investment, investors can freely act in their own self-interests without regard to its impact on the company.

This is primarily of interest to angel and VC investors (who might have a direct financial stake in such matters) but also to founders who need to understand that, when special rights are given to investors, they may be freely exercised against what the founders perceive to be theirs and the company's interests (therefore don't give these rights unless you intend to live with the consequences).

<comment><USER2> I think there are some important distinctions, though. One seemingly major factor in this case was that at no point was it "unfair" to the other investors. At each round, all the other investors had the opportunity to participate on a pro rata basis:

      The determinative factor in the entire fairness analysis was that Baker had structured the financing so that every
      shareholder of Wine.com could, if it wanted to, purchase its pro rata share of the offering.  In other words, the
      transaction was not for the "exclusive benefit" of defendants, which under Delaware law is strong evidence of
      fairness.

<comment><USER3> Giving the other investors the opportunity to participate on a pro rata basis isn't per se "fair." The technique can be used to freeze out other shareholders that don't have the liquid capital to participate in the transaction.

<comment><USER4> Legal fairness may bear little relation to what lay people consider fair. For instance as long as you and a large corporation both have lawyers, a court fight between the you is considered "fair" even though the large corporation has substantially more resources and likely has better lawyers.

In this case the standard of fairness to apply is Delaware law. And under Delaware law, that was fair.</comment></comment></comment></comment>