Esperanto Technologies to develop energy-efficient chips on RISC-V - <AUTHOR> http://www.embedded-computing.com/news/esperanto-technologies-to-develop-energy-efficient-ai-chips-on-risc-v-architecture <comment><USER2> "Unstealths": announces that it plans to develop...

<comment><USER3> Right, this seems to be an announcement of a possible forthcoming announcement. A more substantive story would be a better fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing is that it doesn't matter how many cores you have if they cannot communicate with each other, memory, and IO with performance and relative ease of programmability. Supporting this many cores requires a network-on-chip which adds latency and complexity to all operations where a core must access resources outside of itself.

There is no way that these things could achieve reasonable throughput without a particularly convinient workload and very low level programming. Systolic matrix multiplication on a array of cores connected in a toroidal network-on- chip for example (see Adaptive's chips).

There is no way that this thing has cache coherency. If your lucky it might have some hardware mailbox/mutex/semaphore to help keep all the cores in sync.

Really if you want this many ALUs gang them together into a vector machine like a GPU!

Anyway, all just speculation; there's no substantiative details on the announcement or their site.

Not that I don't want to see new and interesting things in computer hardware; I do! I just think that iterating away on the RISC is not the way to make leaps and bounds.

<comment><USER5> I thought there was a breakthrough a while ago about syncing cores with low latency?

<comment><USER6> Message passing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my head, CPU's have few cores (1-16) but those cores are very highly optimized and have lots of specialized hardware in them. In comparison, GPU's have many cores (thousands) that are comparatively dumber, but that's fine because we use GPU's when we want to run lots of simple operations in parallel, like image processing, etc.

With that in mind, where does this chip fit into the current space? Is it meant to replace both? It contains their two different kinds of cores, which I'm assuming are similar to the complex cores we have in CPU's and the simple cores we have in GPU's. Does this mean that if chips like this are used in the future, we wouldn't have separate processing units?

Also, how does one use an SoC like this? What are its inputs and outputs? How do I access those? Do I need specialized hardware? Can I plug it into my existing desktop? Do they expect a new system to be built around this, or is it a drop in replacement for a part in an existing system?

<comment><USER8> And in the same vein, does this encroach on some use cases for FPGA?

<comment><USER9> Surely even with parallel programming being notoriously hard to get right it's most probably easier than FPGA programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article makes it clear they are unveiling/announcing their plan/intent to develop this chip design. Follow the links to their website and it feels like they are so far from "ready" it hurts.

TLDR: They are just getting PR for their not yet developed hardware designs, and they haven't even explained who will be buying them.

<comment><USER11> We used to use the term "Vaporware"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dave Ditzel is no slouch. I'll be interested in seeing how this goes.

<comment><USER13> Yup: CRISP, Sparc, low power x86 (Transmeta) and now high performance RISC-V. Business decisions (such as Lucent dropping out of the processor market or IBM killing its bulk CMOS fab) have kept his technical achievements from getting the commercial success they deserve. I hope things go better this time.</comment></comment>


Are We Losing the Grand Canyon? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/09/grand-canyon-development-hiking-national-parks/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20160824ngm-losinggrandcanyon&utm_campaign=Content&sf34266282=1 <comment><USER2> Just read this in the print magazine (which I highly recommend--it's still a beautiful experience).

The TL;DR is that there are private or Native American properties that abut the Grand Canyon National Park, where development is much less restricted. The three examples from the article are:

\- A Native American tribe permits unlimited helicopter flights into the canyon from their reservation, causing constant noise.

\- Another Native American tribe is seeking to build a tram (wire gondola, like a ski lift) from their property on the edge of the Canyon down to the confluence of the Little Colorado, and build a mini-mall down there on the river's edge--which is currently totally wild and unchanged.

\- Uranium mining and commercial tourism development could over-draw or pollute the aquifers that feed springs and seeps that water vegetation within the Canyon.

Mentioned only briefly in the story is the tremendous development that has _already_ been permitted or committed by the National Park Service itself. The "village" at the lip of the Grand Canyon is a maze of paved roads, schlocky tourist trap gift shops and restaurants, paths, and hotels--even a train station! In this way we have already lost a significant portion of the Canyon.

The National Park Service has the mission to preserve the parks for future generations. In many parks they have instead developed--or permitted others to develop--the most scenic areas with concrete, asphalt, buildings, cars, and parking lots. Yosemite Valley is Exhibit A.

Then, having damaged the natural landscape, they use the "preserve" mission to _further_ develop things--having installed a path, they then pave it to prevent erosion. Having installed a wood building that ages, they then replace with a concrete and steel building. Having intalled a road, they enlarge the parking lots. Etc.</comment>


Autism and gender imbalance in tech - <AUTHOR> http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2017/07/is-gender-inequality-in-technology-good.html <comment><USER2> Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism.

FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over- represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.

Anecdotally, I've convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio/chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn't considered before was b/c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother's room for them to "share") and there weren't any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching).

So I guess I'm still firmly in the "Its a pipeline problem" camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.

<comment><USER3> While the autism imbalance may play a factor, I 100% believe it is mostly marketing driving the gender gap. Early on computers were marketed to men, because they were tools which were a "man thing". And now still video games are predominately marketed towards males, and I would be shocked if there isn't a strong correlation between interest in video games and computers in general. So if I understand correctly, I am with you, its a pipeline problem due to historical factors which are rapidly fading.

<comment><USER2> That makes a lot of sense from my perspective as well.

Playing video games and having the desire to make my own was a huge factor for me getting into tech personally. I had a subscription to "Nintendo Power" magazine, and I still remember reading an article in there about a programming school called "Digipen", and just being enthralled by the concept of going there and building my own games.

In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't have the patience to stick with game development. My career is probably better off for it. My real gateway into a tech career was when I got put into a Cisco networking class by accident. I learned there that Linux live-boot usbs were excellent for getting around permissions restrictions on school computers. I also learned that the school firewall could be bypassed by using IPs instead of hostnames. I never looked back from there.

<comment><USER4> Like your friends, I started out focusing on the sciences before switching to CS. But now that I think about it, if someone had told me that trick for bypassing the school firewall I would probably have landed on CS much sooner hahaha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _But the big statistic is that autism in all of its forms is around four times more common in males than females. In other words the genetic components have a biologically sex-based component._

Does this account for the fact that women tend to be underdiagnosed? I have read that female autistics are very often a) not diagnosed and b) pressured to learn social skills anyway simply because they are girls.

PS: I am a girl. I could spot the bottom figure in the top, though it took me a few seconds. I have an unusually strong math background for a girl (perhaps especially a girl my age). I think it is ridiculous this is a test for autism. Why on earth is this is a test for autism?

I am pretty darn sure I am not autistic. My ex husband and both our sons probably all are and I taught all of them a lot of the social skills they have. My ex husband once told me that he was good at the technical aspects of his job, but his ability to manage people once he was promoted to that level in the military was largely rooted in what he learned from being married to me.

<comment><USER6> Took me a few seconds too, but I didn't think to rationalize it as "though it took me a few seconds", I thought "wow gee I got it in only a few seconds".

<comment><USER5> Assuming you are male, that may be the real sex difference: Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything, they apologize for not being "good enough" even when they perform as well as the guys and then if they are excellent, no one believes them.

(I think this is literally true, but it is intended as sort of humorous observation so maybe imagine there is a winky here and interpret that to mean "look, this is an injoke of sorts!")

<comment><USER7> "Girls aren't supposed to be good at anything"

I don't think anyone at all is claiming that. At most people are claiming that girls are better at verbal and emotional skills, while boys are better at visio-spatial things.

<comment><USER8> Of course no one is going to claim that and expect to be taken seriously. But as a fellow girl, in my years socializing in groups I have certainly experienced this sentiment. There seems to a tacit agreement that girls that are good at something traditionally male-dominated, like programming or math, are an exception to the rule. In other words, there is a rebuttable presumption of mediocrity in these areas. If you excel at them, good on you, you must be a true whiz to do so in spite of your gender.

<comment><USER7> "good at something traditionally male-dominated"

Yeah but that's different, I was replying to someone saying that the general opinion was that girls are not good at anything at all. That is simply not true, almost nobody believes that.

<comment><USER8> I interpreted Mz's comment as a somewhat facetious internal monologue I myself am all too familiar with. I agree with you, most people don't believe that, but it is nonetheless a belief that some women internalize after years of the socialization I described above. Yes it's not true that we're not good at anything, but there are subtle and pervasive forces at work in groups that cause women to believe this about themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a false dichotomy, and derailing from the conversations about women in tech. Even the most generous estimates of autism prevalence put it at 1-3% of children -- you could hire every man _and_ woman with autism and it would have an entirely negligible effect on gender diversity in the tech workforce at large.

On top of that, if you take ten people with autism spectrum disorder, not all of them will end up getting jobs at Google and SAP. And of the ones that do, the women with autism have to deal with both the barriers introduced by their autism _and_ the barriers of sexist treatment from their peers.

<comment><USER10> 1\. _" Even the most generous estimates of autism prevalence put it at 1-3% of children -- you could hire every man and woman with autism and it would have an entirely negligible effect on gender diversity in the tech workforce at large."_

You need to check your math here; on the order of 1% of the US population works in software development.

2\. It's called the "autism spectrum" because it's a _spectrum,_ not a binary. People can share some autistic traits without their rising to the level of a diagnosable disorder. If a person is described as nerdy, introverted and eccentric, they probably are further along on the autistic spectrum than most, while not necessarily having full-blown autism.

<comment><USER11> > It's called the "autism spectrum" because it's a spectrum, not a binary. > People can share some autistic traits without their rising to the level of a > diagnosable disorder. If a person is described as nerdy, introverted and > eccentric, they probably are further along on the autistic spectrum than > most, while not necessarily having full-blown autism.

I thought it was called a spectrum because of the variation in severity and symptoms among people _with_ diagnosable autistic disorders. As I understood it, if you don't have such a disorder, you're not on the spectrum.

<comment><USER12> The disorders do not cleanly cleave away from non-autistic. It really can be a judgement call at times.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. But that's not, as I understand it, why it's called a spectrum. It's called a spectrum because it covers conditions as different as Asperger syndrome (which often isn't diagnosed until adulthood, and may never get diagnosed at all) and childhood disintegrative disorder, where the onset of symptoms is so sudden and dramatic that the child themselves may notice and ask what is happening to them.

Being "nerdy, introverted and eccentric" doesn't necessarily mean you are on the spectrum. It may do: you may have an ASD, diagnosed or undiagnosed. But it may just mean you are nerdy, introverted or eccentric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why so many discussions about this in the context of engineering / software jump to the idea that diversity is just have 50:50 of characteristic X and characteristic Y. Or why everyone makes assertions about what we know to be a very important and divisive issue without first stating what our own understanding of the words we are using actually is.

I think I have a very different idea of what equality and diversity means to this person (or that soon to be ex-googler), so I'd like the opportunity to talk about it with them, reach the same page of understanding, then talk some more.

In my view, it isn't as simple as 50:50 men and women in the room. It's about removing all barriers to that being a possibility that we can. Specifically, making sure we all have the same equality of opportunity, burdens of expectation and freedom of expression. Recognising some groups lack one or more of those things is a good start. Recognising some groups (deliberately or accidentally) monopolize those things to the detriment of others is a better start.

I guess people will bend further to justify the status quo than they will to better it.

<comment><USER14> Why do people jump to 50/50? Because that seems to be the goal of people pushing diversity: desirable fields like software should reflect the population at large [1]. I think the assumption that 50/50 is desirable is wrong, too. So far I haven't heard of any compelling reason that genders are equal in all jobs - only the opposite (in both directions - some jobs have way more women). In fact, how do these folks even know 50/50 is fair to women? What if it turns out that women are actually better at software engineering, and the ratio should be 2:1 in favour of women? How are they determining these numbers? Or are they just making them up?

He's also challenging the point that identity=diversity. Getting a man and a woman that were born in the same area, had similar wealth growing up, went to the same schools, have same "political" views, etc. is not nearly as diverse as getting two men from different parts of the country with different political views, differ in wealth, etc.

None of this should detract from trying to eliminate bias. Blind reviewing sounds great, for instance - perhaps they should do that for the first pass where it's feasible to hide the candidate's details. Or provide transcripts of phone interviews then have people rate them and see how biased things are. There's ways to do research on this issue, but it seems that even suggesting there might be differences is a way to provoke "outrage".

1: I see less outrage about low female representation in mining and hunting, for instance, or people demanding dentists stop employing so many females as dental assistants.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly, there is also no outrage that men die on the job twelve times more frequently than women, nor that they're underrepresented in higher education. Note that men are overwhelmingly more likely to be homeless, commit suicide, be victims of almost every kind of violence (women are slightly more likely to be victims of sexism violence, but men also underreport, so who knows?), die a decade younger, receive far fewer social services, etc. But hey, as long as tech companies are 50/50, the gender problems are solved.

<comment><USER16> All good points. Too bad it's not trendy to fight for those things at the moment. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > What this implies is that to expect a 50:50 outcome is hopelessly utopian.

And why exactly do we need a 50:50 ratio of women to men in IT? I don't care who writes my code as long as it does what I want it to do.

<comment><USER18> A friend of mine makes a great point about this:

Regardless of the reasons for the differential, tech has so much impact on society - think about the cultural impact of video games just as one vector - it is meaningfully problematic if a non representative slice of society creates almost all of it.

<comment><USER19> > it is meaningfully problematic if a non representative slice of society > creates almost all of it

this can take you down some socially controversial paths. if you apply the same judgements to other identity groups who dominate other extremely influential sectors, you are going to run into serious trouble.

<comment><USER14> You mean like mentioning that Facebook and Google are owned/led by minorities? Or?

<comment><USER20> Antisemites complaining about how Jews control Hollywood, the banking system, have 22% of nobel prizes while only being 0.2% of world population etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FWIW, the diagram wasn't intended to be a TEST to determine if one is autistic. It was a test to indicate one's inclination for noticing certain detail.

Indeed, as another comment states, girls have historically been under diagnosed with autism, for a variety of reasons. (That's not to say males aren't more likely to have the condition.)

Simply put, employers need to do a better job of ensuring that those with talents (some female, some autistic, some minority, etc.)-- who are under represented in IT, are given fair opportunity to put their talents to use. I wouldn't get too caught up in worrying about how giving opportunities to one group takes away from another. We're all on the same team. It's not too different from how Affirmative Action (which I support) has its place in society.

Also, I was confused by the constellation bit. The spectrum descriptor is quite apt and just as generally accepted in the community as the idea that it's genetic in basis...well, unless you're an anti-vax kook. I've only heard the term constellation in the sense of describing the various symptoms. (As the adage goes, if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism...no two are alike.) I'm actually in the middle of reading Steve Silberman's Neurotribes, which I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to know more about autism.

(Contrary to what the article says, Sasha Baron-Cohen (of Borat fame) is the cousin, not brother, of famed autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen.)

\- Guy w/ Asperger's

<comment><USER22> > We're all on the same team.

I don't think this will go over well for as long as we're in a highly competitive society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> While autism spectrum traits are correlated with STEM ([http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd- ster...](http://crastina.se/autistic-traits-science-and-the-nerd- stereotype/)), I don't think it explains shortage of women in programming (there isn't in biology or medicine; these departments are places with many nerdy girls).

1\. Not all engineers or scientists are even remotely autistic (think: Richard Feynman).

2\. There are some big suggestions that women are underdiagnosed with Asperger Syndrome / High-Functioning Autism (due causing less problems for others, and their socialization giving them at least "passable" social skills).

</comment><comment><USER24> > _Try to spot the bottom figure within the coloured diagram._

So if I spot it then what does it tell me about the spectrum?

<comment><USER25> And what if I can't find it, yet I know that I'm in that spectrum?

<comment><USER26> Know that a simplistic test is not good enough to diagnose such a complex area of neuroscience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting assumptions that always seem to be present:

\- autism is good for fields related to technology;

\- other differences are not as good for fields related to technology;

\- fields related to technology are the most valuable.

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Why are there so few women in IT?_

...

> _This is because they are good at localised skills, especially attention to > detail. This is very useful in lab work, coding and IT._

IT is not the entirety of tech by any means. And if we're going to make large stereotypes, a bulk of IT work is about empathizing with users at least as much as attention to detail.

Coding is not the entirety of tech, either. Knowing what to code is more important than knowing how to code it. It may not have been, decades ago, but a significant amount of the code that people need has already been written and the challenge is to find it and deploy it / integrate the library / fork the open-source project / etc. An engineer that prefers to write code for the sake of writing code is generally not productive for the business (and probably counterproductive, by generating what will soon be _legacy_ code).

I'm not sure what "lab work" means here but I've never seen that term applied to software engineering.

Also, autism is not the only way to be detail-oriented. The article is trying to claim that there's gender imbalance in autism, and autistic people are detail-oriented, and detail-oriented people are good at IT, and therefore there should be gender imbalance in IT. This is simply fallacious and illogical.

Autistic people are not your shield.

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I supposed to see the shape or not? If I take the shapes separately yeah I can tell the shape exists, but my mind can't really "see" a 3D object there.

<comment><USER29> The 3D shape is there

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So... what is the proposal? Every time I read one of this articles about gender in IT I feel that I didn't get to anything new.

This guy tell us that it is because companies look for certain profiles more common in men. Ok, cool, I'm totally fine with it, but I don't think that will be appealing to all this people that is talking about discrimination against women.

<comment><USER31> > True diversity may be the recognition of the fact that all of us are not > equal.

The proposal is that we recognize this fact, and realize that the mindset in which there must always be "the proposal," to fix "the problem," is misguided. Particularly when you have ideals like diversity, and equality which, the author argues, are at odds with one another. The rest of the essay is an argument that the two are, indeed, at odds with one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The funny thing is that programming has become more male-dominated as it has become more social. Programmers once worked alone, in their own offices, coding quietly with occasional references to manuals. Now programmers are expected to work on laptops alongside other workers, constantly interact with others both on line and off line, and be active on at least LinkedIn, GitHub, and Slack.

We're missing something here.

</comment><comment><USER33> So, autism diagnosis is based on whether or not you can parse an optical illusion? What kind of over-diagnosis fad-medicine quackery is this? When did personality types become diseases? Sure, there are some people with real mental illness who need help to function in society, but I think it's actively harmful to slap a pathology on someone who's not as sociable as others in a moderate way.

</comment><comment><USER34> "This was followed by an altogether different talk by Professor Simon Baron- Cohen (yes – brother of)"

No he isn't. They're cousins, not brothers.

</comment><comment><USER35> Tip for the diagram in the article: Look for just one of the shapes that comprises the bottom figure in the top figure, and you've found it. The front face is the easiest to spot.

<comment><USER36> That's how I found it too, and that suggests to me that this is more of a test of problem-solving heuristics than of perception at the neurological level. Someone who has solved a lot of math problems in geometry would seem to have a distinct advantage in finding that hidden shape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Programming is about people not code. Great software helps people and communities. Knowing how to write code is a tiny part of the job.

<comment><USER38> Saying programming isn't about code is ... insane? Maybe you can be a programming manager without knowing how to code, kind of? You'll likely be a bad one.

This is the kind of thing you say after you've been coding for such a long time that you've forgotten how challenging it is to learn to code for most people. Sure, once coding is not the main challenge, you move onto new challenges like coordination, collaboration etc. But if you can't code, then you aren't a programmer.

More concretely: Managing communities and collaboration is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a programmer. Coding is necessary to be a programmer.

<comment><USER37> I agree. Don't misunderstand me, all great artist know how to use a paintbrush. Very few will tell you it's all about the paintbrush. Focussing on people who know how to sling code is like focusing on the carpenters who have great hammering skills. Knowing how to code great is necessary but not sufficient to make great software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> 90% of graduates from law schools and medical schools are also men, so it's safe to assume there are some fundamental biological sex differences at work here. Oh wait, it's not 1970 anymore, and law and med grads are half women nowadays. Golly humans evolve quickly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well, at least he gave equal time to both of the viewpoints.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why share this? It's minimal-effort baiting; a few paragraphs of vague opinions and a "once you see it..." gimmick to boot. Not a good start to an important conversation.

<comment><USER42> The hackernews re-titling of the article is pretty horrendous too. The title is "Is gender inequality in technology a good thing?" is considerably more controversial than "autism and gender imbalance in tech"</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know what to do with a failed external hard drive? - <AUTHOR>

Sorry if this is not an appropriate place to ask this question but I'm a little desperate. My external hard drive died and it has a bunch of important files and documents. I searched around online and a couple of places recommend freezing it. I tried that - it didn't work. There seem to be numerous services that will take the failed disk and copy the data to a new drive but, inexplicably, they charge upwards of a thousand dollars for a seemingly basic service. I don't have that kind of money.<p>Does anyone know if there's a kit that you can buy to fix it yourself? <comment><USER2> _but, inexplicably, they charge upwards of a thousand dollars for a seemingly basic service_

If it were actually inexplicable, someone would have started a business to do it for much less. The fact that no one has (or has, but failed to stay in business) indicates that it's probably an expensive and high risk business.

What is the problem exactly? This makes a big difference in how you go about getting data off of it.

Does it not spin up? Maybe this will help: [http://web.archive.org/web/20080207080550/http://www.deadhar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080207080550/http://www.deadharddrive.com/)

Does it spin up but have lots of errors? Try mounting read only from a Linux live CD and use dd with the noerror option (this tells it to keep going even if there are errors) to mirror the contents to a new hard disk (same size or larger). I've used this technique many times over the years, and usually gotten most of the data restored.

Freezing is a method of nearly last resort, IMHO. After freezing comes "take the platters out and put them in a whole new, but otherwise identical, drive". This one is entirely last resort (and assumes you don't plan to use one of those expensive services, since this _will_ be the last thing you ever do with this drive), and assumes your data is worth the cost of a hard disk to be thrown away at the end. I don't actually know if you can even get the platters out of modern disks, but I've done it in the olden days...maybe 10 years ago...and was able to recover _some_ data, but nowhere near most. The disk gets eaten up with errors within a few hours of spinning up after using this technique.

The expensive services presumably have clean room conditions for performing the last technique without the resulting destruction of the drive. They also probably have variable speed enclosures to allow slow reads of data (I'm guessing, but if I were building tools to operate such a business, that's the kind of thing I would be working on).

And, of course, the _best_ way to fix a broken hard disk is to replace it and restore from recent backups.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, I don't know if it spins up or not. I'll tell you what it sounds like though. It sounds like a helicopter when the pilot turns on the engine and it starts revving up - for maybe half a second - then a loud Click! like a camera shutter - and then it starts to wind up again for another half second followed another Click!

Don't know if that's a good description really but it's the best I can do. I'm really not a hardware guy. My guess is that this description indicates it does not spin up but hopefully you can tell me?

You're probably right about it being an expensive business. Another reason I don't want to hand over my drive is: Who are these people? And how do I really know what they are going to do with my private data?

Did you say "recent backups"? Ha. That's funny.

<comment><USER2> _To be honest, I don't know if it spins up or not. I'll tell you what it sounds like though. It sounds like a helicopter when the pilot turns on the engine and it starts revving up - for maybe half a second - then a loud Click!_

Yeah, I've heard that sound. It's usually followed immediately by a "CLUNK" as I toss the disk in the trash.

If the disk shows up in the BIOS disk scan, or when Linux detects the disks, you might still be able to get some data off of it with dd. That'd be my first plan, if I were in your shoes.

If that doesn't work, you might have some luck with the logic assembly replacement idea. If it's the controller circuitry that's out of whack, it might be fixed by a new board. If the motor or head are actually sticking and unable to do their job, it's a more dramatic situation. And, I'm not sure what the mechanics of such things look like these days. This might be one of those situations where putting the platters in another identical drive is the only option.

 _Did you say "recent backups"? Ha. That's funny._

Yes. You'll learn. Someday. The cost of not learning is infrequent, but can be very, very, high.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. Yes, it does show up in the BIOS scan. Maybe there's hope for the software option. I'll save your hardware-related tips for later since I'm more or less incompetent when it comes to the non-virtual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could try taking it out of it's housing and using another housing. But that is only worth trying if it's a failure of the electronics, not of the drive itself.

Since you mention downthreaed that's it's making click+grind noises... It sounds like it's dead.

Freezing a drive of any vintage more recent than Y2k is less than useful. Older drives were built to looser tolerances and thermal shrink could actually move the drive head off the platter. More recent drives aren't going to be dealt w/ that way, and freezing the drive can cause condensation in places you don't want condensation.

Unless your data is worth considerably more than $10k, don't bother with drive recovery services since you will in all probability be wasting your money.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an important possibility to know about. I assumed that if I was willing to spend enough, that there might be a solution. So it's good to know that that is not necessarily true. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/weekend_project_har...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/weekend_project_hard_driv_1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I really hope not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> if spinrite can't fix it, you'll probably have to spend a fortune to get the data off of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I tried a piece of software last week - can't remember the name - but I just heard the disk clicking repeatedly while the software was trying to access the disk - it didn't get anywhere, so I didn't think a pure software solution would work. But I will take a look at Spinrite - I hadn't heard of it. Maybe it works better than the one I tried already, although I'm skeptical. I have a hunch that what I really need is some kind of hardware solution along the lines of whatever they use at these commercial services for copying a failed disk. But I'm expecting such a device to cost an arm and a leg.</comment></comment>


In the Balance - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/ <comment><USER2> For context, Scott originally wrote this in response to a post on his tumblr. The original poster literally titled their post "fuck balance" and complained about how you shouldn't seek balance, but instead "for good for win".

Scott's post is a parable, and I also think the good kind of snark, even if the post itself is a bit unsatisfying. Maybe that is the point.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't take any good vs bad discourse seriously anymore. There isn't any such thing as balance, not over universe-spanning timelines anyway.

<comment><USER4> I honestly don't know what you're trying to convey. Yes, due to the inevitable heat death of the universe, nothing anyone does ever will matter at all.

What the hell is your point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure what point to take from this, other than to be reminded of the imprecision and conceptual vagueness of the terminology he uses ("order", "balance", etc.)

<comment><USER6> My takeaway: Don't listen to demons.

There is a touch of inconsistency in destroying the artifact and it dictating things to come for the next thousand years anyway, but I like that it did get destroyed on the basis that it was demon possessed.

Wisdom.</comment></comment>


Weblog.sh – hosted blogging from the command-line - <AUTHOR> https://weblog.sh/ <comment><USER2> Another service using pathetic password hashing:

[https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh/blob/master/lib/ssh/exec...](https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh/blob/master/lib/ssh/exec.js#L231)

          else if(command[0] === 'password') {

            if(args.length===0) {
              stream.write('→ You need to specify a password.\n\r');
              stream.end();
              return;
            }

            var hash = require('sha256');
            var payload = args;
            var salt = schemas.randomString(32);

            userMeta.user.hash = hash(payload + salt);
            userMeta.user.salt = salt;
            userMeta.user.token = schemas.randomString(64);

            stream.write('… Saving new password'+LB);
            userMeta.user.save(function(err, saved){
              if(err){
                stream.write('→ Password update failed.'+LB);
              }

              var response = [];
              response.push("→ password for "+saved.username+" updated"+LB);

              stream.write(response.join(LB));
              stream.exit(0);
              stream.end();

            });

          }

<comment><USER3> "pathetic" is a bit harsh. Yes, one should be using b/scrypt nowadays but at least he's using salt and sha256 it's not md5. It could be better, but it could also be much worse.

<comment><USER4> sha256 is not "better" than MD5 for password hashing; they're both incredibly fast to brute force and both not meant for password hashing. bcrypt/scrypt, configured correctly, are _much_ slower and _much_ more secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OSX user; registered as myself.

First impressions are not good.

• scp very slow; doesn't work

• vim scp:// doesn't work

• emacs tramp[1] definitely doesn't work (scpx says invalid command; ssh, scp and sftp methods say "EDITOR SOON")

I noticed you're using ssh2js[2], but not using its built-in features for getting the public key from the client.

I think this would make a much better experience than asking for a password (that you don't echo, don't confirm, and annoyingly don't reset the terminal state afterwards).

I also think you should look at getting the sftp subsystem working as it is simpler and much more reliable than scp.

I hope you fix these things because I'd like to try it again.

[1]: [http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode)

[2]: [https://github.com/mscdex/ssh2](https://github.com/mscdex/ssh2)

<comment><USER6> You might want to raise issues for these: [https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh](https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh)

I don't know why they don't like to that from the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >At the time of writing we are spending around $15 a month to keep the service up. If 75 people donated 5 cents a week, we'd be sustainable. - 27/10/15

And yet I'm pessimistic it'll get that funding. I just don't know if it's possible to make money writing software like this.

<comment><USER7> It would probably make more sense, and be more likely to get 15 people to donate $10 a year (as a one-time donation, with a new 15 people donating $10 the next).

I'm also rather pessimistic about "making money" like this.

You'd have to sell a service for that to make any kind of sense. Target a minimum of, say, 10$ user/year, or user/month (yes, those are two wildly different prices, and two somewhat different level of "perceived value" you'd need to provide).

Micropayments only make sense at massive scale - and you won't have that starting out. If you cant build up to 10.000 users paying 10/year, you could probably sustain a developer. Just make sure that doesn't generate work for 30 support staff. But "breaking even" (we won't have to stop because we're burning money on hosting) is different from "making money".

It's probably a good idea to one, or the other. Not something in the middle.

Major caveat: I've only thought about pricing models, never found the opportunity to try them out in practice.

<comment><USER6> Watch what happens over the next few months to PushBullet - they've learnt the hard way that pricing is serious business. They had a base of users who were used to a free product, then they tried to bring in a $40/year plan with no middle ground.

[https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing- pushbulle...](https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbullet- pro/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/PushBullet/comments/3t5ogz/introduc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PushBullet/comments/3t5ogz/introducing_pushbullet_pro/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tried it out. I keep `scp`ing a file, or editing it using `vim scp`, but on browsing or publishing, I get an "Article does not exist".

<comment><USER9> Me too. I love the idea though - I'll be back and donating if it improves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice idea, I love it!

If you want a similar solution, but self-hosted, here's another commandline blogging system contained in a single bash script: [https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog](https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog)

<comment><USER11> This can be self hosted, not very nice to plug yourself like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be neat to have different layouts to choose from (maybe similar to jekyll with a "layout: xyz" parameter).

Besides that i really like the idea. Reminds me a little of the old-style BBS communities. Even though i understand that people need to make money, a project like this would gain much more from being open source. It would give more people the possibility to run a service like this and everyone would profit from further developments.

But that's up to you, and i'm absolutely fine with people making money from webservices! :)

<comment><USER13> This is open source, I have no idea what you're talking about: [https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh](https://github.com/hmngwy/weblog.sh)

<comment><USER12> Oh, my mistake. Even better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really like the concept. Hopefully you can work out the issues raised by others, can't wait to see where this goes. Consider your current costs covered.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, impressed by the platform. Posted the first draft from mobile, and it's totally insane. One thing, the name sunsed is a bit messy to start with.

<comment><USER16> You just made my day! Thanks!! :) Yes, you are right the name SunSed is a tricky name to start with specially for the sake of SEO. I also hope one day autocorrect systems do not change SunSed to SunSet. By the way, it stands for: SUN Shines Every Day. At least it's 6 letters and almost easy to remember.

<comment><USER13> Why are you replying to comments about the link, not directed at you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And there isn't a password reset option or password confirmation. Hope you typed it right!

<comment><USER18> Password is there just to let you upload certificate, hopefully you will not use it

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I haven't tested it yet but this looks great! I was kind of looking for something like this.

I'll give it a try in a week or so. Hopefully the problems will be fixed.

IMO the only thing missing is the ability to tag your entries. Maybe the site could parse a markdown tag entry in the file. Something like:

# _tags_ #

programming

c++

network

</comment><comment><USER20> I think it'd be responsible to recommend generating a new key pair specifically for this platform. Disregarding that, I think this is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is similar to tilde, which is awesome idea. It should have some community aspect to be succesful.

<comment><USER21> Can you elaborate more about tilde? Is there a webpage?

<comment><USER22> [http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/), but they have a waitlist right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who has spent the past two years and planning to spend at least the next 5 years creating the best Blogging platform (SunSed.com) I have to admit this idea is simple, refreshing and brilliant! I had a similar idea called textBlock killed it in favor of SunSed. +1 for this project!

<comment><USER23> Signed up to try your site out. When I create my first blog, there's a typo, just so you know:

> Choose your new bolg's template

<comment><USER16> Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How to provide a key? Sorry I am noob please help.!

<comment><USER11> probably ssh-copy-id (I didn't test this though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is really awesome! I love it.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is totally going to pollute the search of the term "web logs"

<comment><USER27> The term blog is derived from the concatenation of "web log".

<comment><USER26> yes, and "blog" is a distinct term from "web log".</comment></comment></comment>


A curated list of open source applications built with Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sqreen/awesome-nodejs-projects <comment><USER2> Great to see node.js getting some attention. Wondering why there are no similar lists already in place?

<comment><USER3> Are you serious or just kidding?

<comment><USER4> I almost did a coffee spit when I read their comment. Fortunately I was able to contain it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm baffled. A random list that links to a few most-starred node app got 50+ upvotes in 2 hours on HN and is currently No.1. First commit 3 days ago. I fail to see how it's awesome.

Anyone enlighten me?

<comment><USER6> It feels like this and the numerous other "awesome" lists which claim to be curated, are curated in only the most trivial sense: perhaps someone looked to see if each new entry in some plausible way is in the right general category of thing, i.e. is not a random unrelated link. For example, this one looks like a list of open source applications that could be found or were submitted so far for inclusion.

I don't see any evidence on this one or any other of any genuine curation, which would be characterized by saying "no" to some of the possible candidates.

Unfortunately the words awesome and curation have so little meaning among lists of programming-related things, that it would probably be a waste of time for someone to actually do that, and would possibly generate hard feelings from whatever projects end up in the "no" pile.

"No" is hard.

<comment><USER7> I always wonder what gives authors of these curated lists the authority to be curators? Are they like, experts in the specific domain? What is the curation process? It's difficult to take them seriously unless these questions are answered.

<comment><USER8> Actually we needed such a list and we asked people about it, with close to zero answers: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12786982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12786982)

After looking arround for a while, we decided to make what we found public.

<comment><USER9> so "curated" in this instance is short for "Here's what I found"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent a bit more time on the content of this list. But if that's what you like to believe, I'd rather not take it away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Node.js is the biggest meme in the history of webdev and maybe in the history of the software industry.

<comment><USER11> It pays well for a meme.

<comment><USER12> pyramid schemes, prostitution, drug trafficking are all things that pay well if you're smart enough to get away with it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Node.js deserves its buzz. I worked in very serious business in java and since I have switch to node and js clients, things are so weirdly easy and powerfull. Keep upvote, the world need to know!!

</comment><comment><USER14> Someone now please make a list of applications built with PHP and Ruby on Rails.

<comment><USER15> FWIW, GitHub/GitLab might serve as good examples for RoR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never seen that Open MCT project before. I wonder how similar this is the applications they actually have in place presently.</comment>


AT&T gets $6.5B contract to build US-wide public safety network - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-gets-6-5-billion-to-build-us-wide-public-safety-network/ <comment><USER2> So basically they're building a second internet / wireless communication network, which only the government has access to?

Well this way in case of unrest I guess they can temporarily shut down the internet and other communication networks completely and yet still be connected to each other.

<comment><USER3> This isnt that, for 6b dollars, you're unlikely to cover more than a handful of major metros, figure its 250k for a greenfield site, 100k for a co-located one, plus associated core network costs, for a national network you'd be looking at more like 100b+.

Beyond that, most communications between the field and dispatch is narrowband, not wideband, and this is unlikely to change in the near future - if you think the police agencies are relying on public internet access now to do mission critical dispatch, you'd be wrong.

<comment><USER4> The cynic inside me wants to say that this "$6.5B" is destined to inflate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" FirstNet will provide 20MHz of high-value, telecommunications spectrum and success-based payments of $6.5 billion over the next five years to support the network buildout"_

I only had to read that 4 times to figure it out. Let's call it a relatively well-written government press release.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is probably a dumb question, but if they usually share the same network, isn't there some way to give emergency responders priority?

I hope I'm not fear mongering, but I can't say I'm looking forward to the potential influx of IoT devices. As I understand it, many IoT devices appear to be highly vulnerable to hacking. Vendor lock-in and flimsy security requirements don't sound like a good mix.

<comment><USER7> Yes! the little-known 710-NCS-GETS phone number. It's the only phone number in the 710 area code.

If you dial that number and then enter in your special 12 digit security code, you can make an outbound call to any other number.

All the telephone switches in the US are required to treat calls to the 710 area code as priority, at the expense of dropping any existing traffic that it needs to drop.

The end result is even overloaded exchanges can be used by first responders with the proper security codes. "GETS is designed to provide a 90% call completion rate when call volume is eight times normal capacity."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Emergency_Telecommunications_Service)

<comment><USER8> That's a different implementation from DoD's classic AUTOVON system, which used phones with the "missing" four DTMF tones to assign priority. "Flash Override" was pretty much restricted to National Command Authority (the President and Joint Chiefs) and would allegedly clear entire trunk lines to ensure call completion.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that it's the US-wide one; there are local and regional safety systems, too, which are heavily bid up by folks including Motorola.

Here in Seattle ever few years we approve another quarter billion dollar emergency network project. If our local cost is a quarter billion, $6.5B for a country-wide network seems like a deal in this day and age.

(Article - [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/eastside/levy- passe...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/eastside/levy-passes-to- upgrade-emergency-radio-network/))

<comment><USER10> This is not typical public safety trunked radio stuff that Motorola usually does.

This is basically a special LTE band (14 - 760mhz down, 790mhz up). Standard LTE tech using one of the lower frequency bands for better range and penetration but lower speed. Also the public safety modems in device will go up to 1 watt transmit instead of just 300 milliwatts of your typical LTE device.

Most public safety agencies in US already using cell networks heavily for their in vehicle laptop / dispatch systems having contracts with Verizon or ATT this will just give them a dedicated band the public isn't using so it should stay up better even when the rest of the cell system is hammered due to a unexpected event. Probably includes dedicated backhaul bandwidth from the towers and static ip's for devices etc.

Interesting note you can get a legal LTE booster that goes to 1 watt transmit to match FirstNet transmit power.

Cradlepoint already has a FirstNet modem, thier routers are used in public safety vehicles already along with Sierra Wireless and Pepwave: [https://cradlepoint.com/content/whats-new/band-14-module- pub...](https://cradlepoint.com/content/whats-new/band-14-module-public- safety-firstnet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The spectrum for this has been set aside for a while; it's just not used until now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how AT&T lobbied over the other companies to win the contract.

<comment><USER13> I would assume they were the lowest bidder.

<comment><USER14> Or paid the right people the most in campaign contributions.

<comment><USER11> There's a reason procurement decisions like this are delegated to career civil servants - they have much fewer valid excuses to be socializing with vendors.

Corruption in this context usually instead takes the form of job offers post- retirement; and that's usually most common in military procurement, where early retirement from public service is the norm.

<comment><USER15> >There's a reason procurement decisions like this are delegated to career civil servants - they have much fewer valid excuses to be socializing with vendors.

This is simply false. Regular Capture and the revolving door are rampant at telecommunications companies

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How much more would it cost extra to set out a duplicate network?

</comment><comment><USER17> 6.5 bil to cover the entire nation sounds low. I think the price will end up being more. I wonder who will responsible for overages.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure just using existing ATT cell network with new dedicated LTE band and prioritization on backhaul to internet.

<comment><USER18> That's what I'm thinking too. They are probably going to feature a couple of notable big-press dig hole events and show some equipment, but in the end this is a set of code changes and specialized devices that will emit a new code that gets special priority. Total cost to AT&T: a few million. We all paid taxes for that..

<comment><USER19> > Total cost to AT&T: a few million

More like a few billion. A few million dollars is nothing in telecom. They've almost certainly already spent at least that much just to bid on the project. The upgrades will include things like structural re-enforcement of towers, increased battery / generator capacity, security enhancements, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the theoretical max throughput of 20MHz of spectrum?

<comment><USER21> Depends on the power they push signal through vs. the noise: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem)

<comment><USER22> Not to mention effects of distance...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The US is a genocidal state and has been one since it began. Any technologists working for the state are complicit in genocide.

<comment><USER24> As an EMT who may some day use this, I respectfully disagree. This network is for first responders, not some arm of the military. This sort of system will be used to respond to terrorist attacks, not support them. It will literally be used to save lives.</comment></comment>


Alcohol health researchers have exaggerated the risks of drinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/alcohol-health-research-risks-expert-advice-drinking-consumption-a8508491.html <comment><AUTHOR> So, this article makes some good points (media is terrible at reporting risks, especially when the base rate of risk is small) but misses the main points of the research: People think that drinking small amounts is actively good for you, and that's not true. And people think they're drinking small amounts, when they're not.

Many people think they are drinking low or moderate amounts, when they're actually drinking significantly more.

He also gets the units wrong.

> In 2016, the government cut the levels of recommended alcohol for men and > women to no more than 14 units per week, that's six pints of average > strength beer or seven glasses of wine.

One uk pint if 568 ml. Average strength beer in UK is 5%. .568 * 5 * 6 is 18 units.

If you drink a small pub measure of wine (175 ml) at 12% ABV and you have 7 glasses you'll be at just over 14 units.

But most people drink more than this. That's either because their wine is stronger, (eg .175 * 13 * 7 = 16 units) or because their glasses are bigger (250 ml * 12 * 7 = 21 units) or both (.250 * 13 * 7 = 22 units).

When I've mentioned 250 ml glass sizes in the past people ahve said that's a ridiculous size. Here's one menu offering small (175 ml) and large (250 ml) sizes. They have to, by law, offer a 125 ml size too, but that's a hidden option.

<comment><USER2> Not just the media though, the researchers need better communication in addition to better understanding of risks. What the author pontied out in regards to the public disregarding expert advice is absolutely true. Framing your results like this does no one any good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i love how the first comment of the article is the guy who made a study and explains why. waste of an article as usual, the writer is a TL;DR kind of guy.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand...

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/heart-disease- alco...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/heart-disease-alcohol- drinking-moderate-risk-uk-study-a8501726.html)

 _Regular moderate drinking may lower heart disease risk, study finds

\- People with unstable drinking patterns more likely to suffer from coronary illness, scientists say_

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's wrong, and has been widely debunked.

If you're a woman over the age of 50 and you drink maybe two to four glasses of red wine per week you'll get some heart health benefits, but no-one else does.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does URL Droplet work? - <AUTHOR>

http://urldroplet.com <comment><USER2> Wget/curl the page you give, curl login to dropbox, curl upload the page and the credentials from the login.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does Dropbox let you run these commands?

<comment><USER3> The user has to log in with Dropbox. The web app can then use Dropbox API (<https://www.dropbox.com/developers>). (Edit: capitalization)</comment></comment></comment>


CEO Cost Amicus $500k - <AUTHOR> https://www.teampay.co/blog/how-amicus-lost-500000/ <comment><USER2> Payroll tax withholding problems are the scary story adult founders tell younger founders to keep them up at night. Every group of operator friends I have has a collection of stories about this. Get an accountant before you hire your first W2 employee, and use a payroll service.

Just the idea of trying to operate as a director/partner at a startup without an accountant gives me the willies. It's mindboggling to think people actually wing it past the point where they're making payroll.

<comment><USER3> Always always always use a payroll provider. If possible (size permitting) use a PEO (JustWorks, TriNet, etc) to take care of payroll taxes and state/local unemployment registration/withholding etc. (especially if you are distributed and you have folks in many states). Getting this wrong can destroy your company, and PEOs are super cheap by comparison!

<comment><USER4> Absolutely agree with this. They have software that accurately takes care of so many fine details and at such a reasonable per-employee price point that you would have to be nuts not to use one as a small company. In fact it makes me believe Bannon just didn't give it much thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to build on a common HN adage:

1) Don't roll your own crypto;

2) Don't maintain your own SMTP server; and..

3) Don't do your own payroll.

There are LOTS of things you can try to do yourself as an entrepreneur (some are easier than others), but I think this is a handy list. It boils down to risk vs. cost. The cost of outsourcing the three of these is relatively small -- the cost of screwing any one of them up is massive.

<comment><USER6> 2) Unless you are an ISP, in which case you might use office365 or similar for company email, but you absolutely need to know _how_ to properly do your own SMTPd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People here are quite harsh on Seth Bannon.

He is a prolific poster on HN, whose comments and articles often have pretty good insights.

Yet every time I read about his history, I just ask, why? So many of his choices and risks seem so reckless. Is he truly foolish? Or are we the beneficiaries of hindsight, of stress free decision making, ungrounded in the day-to-day reality of running Amicus?

I think the latter is closer to the truth. Meeting him in real life, I realized he was just as sharp in person as on paper. (Also very good at Catan. Damn you Seth.)

And talking with Seth was one of the conversations that helped me to get started on my business, which should break $200K in sales this year.

From what I know about his current startup investments, I think the headlines will be a lot kinder to him in the years to come.

Seth has ample ambition, and when someone with ambition finds an opportunity they want, but lack the credentials for, they'll fight for it regardless. Seth's mistake was thinking others were the same.

<comment><USER8> Thanks so much for the empathetic and kind comments. And I'm so happy to hear I played a small part in your business! I'd love to hear more.

For those that don't know, as a first time founder and CEO I made a large number of mistakes I wish I hadn't. In retrospect, they seem bone headed but none of it was clear at the time. I wrote about those mistakes so others might avoid making them [1]. Unfortunately that blog post has been turned into a couple takedown pieces at my expense. Such is life.

1: [http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never- make](http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never-make)

<comment><USER9> Don't worry about it man, everyone fucks up.

I'm on startup #8 and I've learned something at all the prior jobs and startups to do and not to do.

Experience is sometimes learned the hard way, being a hardheaded person myself, this is my preferred course :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you are an employee of a startup, please make sure to check on ssa.gov to make sure they are receiving your payroll taxes. Because if the startup isn't paying them, and they go bust, this will reduce your social security income at retirement time.

I don't know if there is a way to get up to date info, but you can at least catch it after year end. And if you do find a dependency, bringing it up early to your employer could end up saving them too.

<comment><USER11> Second this - I had this happen to me, although the founder was lying to me saying he was paying them - after we discovered he was a shithead, I reported him to the DA and 4 years later (last friday) he plead guilty to 2 felonies and has to pay us all back.

I wish i had been more careful to start with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> >According to Bannon, Amicus's back taxes, interest and penalties, and legal fees cost the company over $500,000.

Ok, so how much of that was just back taxes? They would have had to pay those anyway, so you can't really count those the same as a penalty.

$500,000 - (back taxes) = actual losses due to negligence.

Now compare the actual losses to the salary for a CFO. If the CFO cost more than the losses, Amicus still came out ahead.

I am not advocating for negligence, but you should always look for point of view bias in articles like this.

<comment><USER13> Indeed, I couldn't help but think the title was clickbait, once I read that part of the article.

The charts toward the start suggest the penalty maximums are 15% + 25% (the article mentions a 100% penalty which was avoided).

That would make 500k 140% of the back taxes, which means the penalties are only $143k.

Crunchbase shows the first funding in Feb 2012. The accountant started in 2014. That's under $72k/year.

"Lack of CFO costs Amicus $72k/year" wouldn't be much of a headline, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like just a rehash of Seth's own blog post: [http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never- make](http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never-make)

</comment><comment><USER15> Ah this brings back memories. I'm honestly blown away that Amicus only had 3.2M in funding. They consistently got a ton of press (they had at least 2 stories in Techcrunch in 2012 and I remember Seth doing a photoshoot in the General Assembly office). It was also one of a few companies I saw self- combust out of GA, at least this one has become a public cautionary tale ala Knight Capital. Hopefully Topper is doing well

</comment><comment><USER16> "Bannon pretty much ran the company single-handedly".

I am not following: if he was the only person running the company, how did payroll taxes get so large ? Was it for his own pay? The article neglects what the taxes are for which would have been helpful.

<comment> compiler-guy By "running the company" the article means, the company's management. There were many more employees.

<comment><USER16> Thanks. Including the principal amount for these taxes + number of payroll entities would have been nice - I am trying to get a sense of the relative proportions of these employment taxes vs actual pay.

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#United_States)

The article is just content marketing, sensationalizing a mistake made by an extremely small, early stage startup as a marketing ploy to lead you to the conclusion you should buy this company's software to avoid a similar fate. So not surprising it's light on details. For what it's worth, startups at that stage almost never have a CFO nor any admin/accounting staff. That said, obviously it was a mistake and they should have paid their payroll taxes. But the sentiment in this piece is crafted solely to lead the reader to the conclusion that they should pay for this company's software.

<comment><USER18> Content marketing is content and marketing, not just marketing, and in this case the content is a good warning to others. Yes, they are trying to sell their product, but they are making a good point, and they aren't shoving their product in your faces. I think you are being hard on them for no good reason.

<comment><USER17> Startups are hard and early stages are _always_ messy. If the piece was journalistically motivated I'd feel differently, but as a marketing post I don't love the vibe. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER19> Yeah sorry I disagree.

I really don't think it's possible for there to be too many articles telling startup founders not to fuck up payroll withholding. It's that important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's not clear how much of that is penalties and how much was the original amount unknowingly owed. The CEO didn't really cost the company the original amount, he just was unaware of it (and may have made different choices if aware)

</comment><comment><USER21> Just a friendly reminder that payroll tax is not inherently hard, though US payroll tax may be.

Down here in New Zealand, for instance, it's quite reasonable to manage payroll for a smallish company yourself. There are some services/tools which people seem to like too.

In the case of an employee without student loans nor child support payments: once a month, the employer submits some information and pays tax to IRD, usually online. Inputs are the employee's gross income, their IRD number, and the contribution rate to their KiwiSaver (retirement plan). Outputs are effectively four numbers: pay the employee $A, send the IRD $B, and then the company needs to record two other amounts which relate to KiwiSaver. Manually dealing with the last two bits may even be obsolete - there's a new process available now, but I haven't switched to it yet.

This online calculator shows most of the work required [https://www.ird.govt.nz/calculators/keyword/kiwisaver/calcul...](https://www.ird.govt.nz/calculators/keyword/kiwisaver/calculator- paye.html)

Income tax is also quite easy from the employee's perspective: decide how much to contribute to KiwiSaver (usually when you start the job), do your work, and receive your pay. There's no annual tax return to file for most people, as the right amount of money shows up in the right places.

</comment><comment><USER22> Was it normal in 2012 to not use a payroll company? This has become a non- issue due to companies like Gusto or Justworks.

<comment><USER23> ADP has been around since 1949 [1] and handles even single-employee businesses. It's far more of a value when you scale to 10+ as I recall, but even their one person pricing is far cheaper than this IRS debacle here. Don't forget that if you're a California-based startup, you likely have to file with the state agencies, too -- and that system is so byzantine it'll make you relish the time spent with the IRS forms.

Better still would be to call up any random bookkeeper from the local area. Payroll is ridiculously easy for those who know how to do it and is well within the competency of even a bad bookkeeper.

Just remember to always sign all the checks, no matter how small, and look at the bank statements every month. It'll take maybe 20 minutes a week and saves so much hassle and money later.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is just plain incompetence, up and down the line.

Any idiot can google this stuff and find out exactly what he needs to do within an hour.

<comment><USER25> Honestly I wouldn't downplay complexity of this stuff. Anyone can Google one item, but there are hundreds of items you need to stay on top of. Missing one could mean a massive liability.

The takeaway should be that if it is not your forte, outsource to an expert or spend a lot of time on it to make sure you get it right.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, you don't know what you don't know. You are going to miss something if it isn't your main focus and you are not experienced. Outsourcing this stuff is cheap, you just plain gotta do it at that level.

<comment><USER26> If you have employees, "payroll taxes" are such an obvious concern that nobody can possibly claim ignorance. And there are a zillion startups out there that will automate payroll for you - it really makes no sense to DIY it.

I'm going with incompetence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not hard to find people who could fill the CFO role early on, but it can be hard to decide whom to trust.

<comment><USER28> Thing is you don't necessarily need a CFO early on. What you do need, though, is an accountant. Even ignoring possible financial penalties, the cost is low enough that it is likely a net financial positive. A founder unfamiliar w/ accounting will spend longer trying to accomplish the same tasks, and is wasting time that could more productively be spent elsewhere.

How did nobody balance the books at all in 3 years? He states: "... I thought, Bank of America's payroll system automatically withholds payroll taxes every month, it's all automated. But it wasn't. There was a single "submit tax" button in a separate part of the Bank of America website that had to be clicked to actually pay the taxes."[0]

Any even semi-competent bookkeper would have noticed this.

[0] [http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never- make](http://sethbannon.com/mistakes-you-should-never-make)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unfortunately it seems their security certificate also lapsed 8 days ago - [https://amicushq.com/](https://amicushq.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER30> Thank god for Justworks and Gusto</comment>


Your Next Girlfriend Could Be a Stock Photo - <AUTHOR> http://olifro.st/blog/gettygirlfriend/ <comment><USER2> Here's the context - this guy does these jokes a lot and has been featured on here before:

[http://olifro.st/](http://olifro.st/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if HN worthy but it was definitely a funny read that made me laugh.

It reminded me of someone I knew that created a fake Facebook girlfriend to make it seem as if he was dating someone and went as far as having fake public conversation on each other's walls.

It's also sad because it reminds me of men like those in Japan that live with life-size woman dolls to replace the void of lonelinesss.

<comment><USER4> That's old news. New news is Japan's holographic spouse from Gatebox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I clicked hoping for some context but didn't find any. Can someone explain?

<comment><USER6> Guys it's definitely just a joke!

<comment><USER7> I don't know, I'm hearing a lot of buzz with angel investors about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't tell if this is a poorly executed joke or it's serious.

To be honest I think it's a bit of both.

</comment><comment><USER9> I took Violet.jpg, please no one else take her, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER10> 1\. Why stop at one? A virtual harem avoids the compounding drama of having multiple partners right?

2\. I really want to see GettyImages search strings from people who came from that page.

3\. A friend has a stock photo of a beautiful golden on his phone just for flirting. He says it works, and usually admits the ruse as part of the pickup.

4\. Plenty of online 'models' offer this service, as kind of a virtual GFE. So as much as the author may be taking the piss, many are quite sincere.

5\. Hire a photog for your irl SO. It gives you both great photos, and they love it.</comment>


Further commodification of the hiring practice – cash for successful interviews - <AUTHOR> Interviewing.io is a company built around offering anonymous interview services, which could turn into further (non-anonymous) interviews & job offers with tech companies. Many such companies offer referral bonuses if you refer somebody to the platform that then is hired. They are now offering a $50 referral bonus each time somebody you refers passes an interview . This seems like an outrageous escalation of the commodification of the interviewing and hiring process. What to do you think?
The referral is limited to referrals for "senior engineers based in North America" - I assume because this is a more desirable and smaller population than the new college grads that mostly populate these platforms. Have we seen this kind of differentiation elsewhere?
This information was sent to current members of the platform but there is no associated press release for the public. <comment><AUTHOR> Since I might as well try and take advantage of this while I can, if any of you are senior engineers based in North America, here is my own referral link: [https://iio.sh/r/otIS](https://iio.sh/r/otIS). I'm new to the community - read the guidelines but if this goes against some unspoken rule I will graciously remove it!</comment>


HackMyResume is a dev-friendly, local-only Swiss Army knife for resumes and CVs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hacksalot/HackMyResume <comment><USER2> Why all the criticism this is a great tool, it might not fit your needs, but it is a great tool none the less. He did a great job building it and its useful to some, and its open source and people can tweak it for there own use cases.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was all set to roll my eyes about another json/markdown/whatever resume tool, but just seeing the console screenshot[0] made me rethink that.

[0] [https://github.com/hacksalot/HackMyResume/blob/master/assets...](https://github.com/hacksalot/HackMyResume/blob/master/assets/resume- bouqet.png)

<comment><USER4> What is it that caught your attention? The merging?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was semi-hoping, that "résumé validation" would validate it against things like expected buzzword frequency, HR stopwords and so on. The _important_ things, you know.

<comment><USER6> Hi! HMR author here. This is the exact use case for HackMyResume (and FluentCV Desktop), you hit the nail on the head. But we're just in v1.x and before doing stuff like keyword density analysis, StackOverflow tag awareness, GitHub integrations, other fun stuff, the basic generative workflow needed to be solid and we're also trying to stay compatible with JSON Resume ([http://jsonresume.org/](http://jsonresume.org/)) 0.0.0 ahead of the 1.0.0 drop -- the current schema doesn't support (formally) the level of detail you'd want for that kind of analysis, which is one of the reasons why FRESH/FRESCA exists ([https://github.com/fluentdesk/FRESCA](https://github.com/fluentdesk/FRESCA)). Stay tuned though, there's a lot of tooling around this already esp. in FluentCV Desktop (= charts and graphs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is just another YAML-to-TEX-to-PDF Resume generator I created a while ago: [https://github.com/QuteBits/resume_42](https://github.com/QuteBits/resume_42)

Even back then there were plenty of Resume generators. What still haunts these tools is a too complex environment setup and unappealing template designs.

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't find an example of a generated résumé or themes.

<comment><USER9> Yup, I wanted to check a few PDF outputs. Shame.

<comment><USER10> I'd like to see a PDF, too, although I put an HTML example above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems to do a great job for what it claims to do, but I don't really understand the need for such a tool.

How often do you update your CV that you need an automated tool to do it? And why would you need it in 10 different formats?

<comment><USER12> If your job is the type where you're on the same team/project for years on end doing basically more of the same thing from month to month, then I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily see the value in this kind of tool.

I update mine once every 2-4 months or so, whenever I complete a project, earn a certification, take a course or work (professionally) with a new technology.

Having 10 different formats does sound a bit like overkill, but I don't think that is a reason that the OP would want to ignore or exclude any that users would find useful. Personally, I keep about 3-4 (linkedin, .doc, .pdf, .htm).

<comment><USER6> Just wanted to second this. It really depends on your velocity -- 6 month consulting gigs or 5+ year stints with a single company. After five or so years of short-term consulting for example you're looking at 20+ entries for work history alone, not counting mentionable side projects, service, other items. And you're a tech candidate so it's got to be keyword-optimized. Recruiter X wants it in MS Word, employer Y wants it in their proprietary ATS, employer Z you have direct access to the devs and can use the LaTeX "secret handshake". Then the anonymized HTML version for your blog, etc. So you get this explosion of formats and, if you edit each format manually, a quick resume update can take all day. Let alone a redesign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I just a cranky curmudgeon if I think that the most clear, elegant, and easy-to-read resume format is still Michael DeCorte's 1989 LaTeX template?

<comment><USER14> Context please. :)

<comment><USER13> This is the OP sample: [http://please.hackmyresume.com/jane/resume](http://please.hackmyresume.com/jane/resume)

It's certainly a step up from a docx but just not that great of a template based on the criteria I named.

It seems to me the template itself is the most important differentiating characteristic of a product like the OP. I understand it accepts custom templates, but that one above is the only sample I found.

Here's my own old-school resume with the DeCorte template: [http://static.coshx.com/kopley_resume.pdf](http://static.coshx.com/kopley_resume.pdf)

<comment><USER15> That's nice. I've been using LaTeX's moderncv template for years and I was looking for a change, specially because in moderncv, the dates are on the left side and when you input a range (say, september 2010 - january 2011) it ends up all cramped.

BTW, do you have the base style for that uploaded somewhere?

<comment><USER16> That is one of the most famous LaTeX resume templates, so there's a lot of examples of it online.

Here's one: [https://github.com/elizabrock/LaTeX- Resume](https://github.com/elizabrock/LaTeX-Resume)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing that I really wanted to do for hiring is to be able to put resumes on top of each other in a tool and slice and dice over time periods to see how a person's career has evolved be it in terms of companies they worked for, skills they picked up etc. Does anyone else feel the same need? Storing the resumes in a queryable format is a good first step towards my dream :)

<comment><USER18> Why? For fun, or because it helps you make a good hiring decision?

<comment><USER17> It would really save me time in understanding who to talk to first. Would it impact the final decision? No. But it would certainly help me prioritize candidates. It is really time consuming to go through 120 resumes to see who you want to talk to first (especially when you also have a day job of delivering software).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really cool! Folks interested in this might also be interested in a new project I just launched--a free minimalist résumé builder focused on developers and designers: [https://makerslate.io](https://makerslate.io)

Exporting to various formats is high on my list of todos. I'll definitely be looking closely at how it's implemented here.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would love for there to be a formalized CV standard to avoid having to reenter the info on your resume into a job application.

<comment><USER21> There's more than one. If you can solve parsing CVs/resumes in to standardised formats reliably, you'll get bought by an ATS for a trazillion dollars.

<comment><USER22> Even if one is able to build a rock solid format for CVs/resumes that is queryable, including i18n support, there is still the issue of adoption which is the hard part.

You'll need early adoption by large employers such as big tech companies to governments for it to have potential to reach critical mass and make you become an acquisition target by Applicant Tracking System vendors.

<comment><USER21> The formats exist already, and the ATSs use them: cf HRXML.

The problem - poorly solved by Burning Glass, Daxtra, TextKernel, Sovren et al is converting documents applicants pass in to those formats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would be great to see LinkedIn API input, in case people want to interact with [insult here] that see your LinkedIn, but 'want you to send them a CV'.

<comment><USER3> You'd need an interface more robust than the console and json at that point, right? In order to select which aspects of your LI profile are appropriate for which level? But I agree it's probably a good next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I use word clouds [http://mcclanahoochie.com/blog/portfolio/word-cloud- resume-h...](http://mcclanahoochie.com/blog/portfolio/word-cloud-resume-hack/)

</comment><comment><USER25> It's a command line version of Smarty Resume ([http://www.smartyresume.com/](http://www.smartyresume.com/)). Smarty is better but only has a PDF export.

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out JSON Resume too: [https://jsonresume.org/](https://jsonresume.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> but...if I already have my CV in LaTeX why would I need it in this?

<comment><USER28> My resume is in LaTeX and I love it and its easy to edit and it looks beautiful... but some jobs (and I'm not kidding here) will _only_ accept resumes in an MS Word .doc format. I can't tell you how much butchering I had to to do get my resume in Word to look close to how nice it looks as a PDF.

<comment><USER29> I'd be tempted to make an image of the PDF and insert it into a Word document so it fills the page, but that would probably have broken their workflow (Word's inline comments, perhaps) and dropped me straight into the reject pile.

<comment><USER28> From what I can tell, their general "workflow" is to shove the Word document into a parser that grabs your name, address, experience, education, etc. and puts it into a searchable format so that can filter on certain keywords. The reason they need to Word doc is because it's the only format their parser accepts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> is there any repository with the FluentCV Desktop?

</comment><comment><USER31> You use the work hack but I do not think you know what it means.</comment>


Onboarding is more important than hiring - <AUTHOR> https://medium.nobl.io/onboarding-is-more-important-than-hiring-d09c9c7890c0 <comment><USER2> Controversial, but the piece, and truth is, there's definitely some merit to this position. The difficulty is in creating onboarding experiences that also account for the uniqueness of humans. Creating a replicatable process for introducing new hires to a company based on who they are, not on procedural flow steps unified for company benifit. That's the real work to be done.</comment>


Lyme Disease Is Baffling, Even to Experts - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/life-with-lyme/594736/ <comment><USER2> The issue is that a large majority believe it to be the result of gov research done on biological weapons spread via tick carriers during the Cold War. If it actually is the case of a biological exp gone out of control then I would think that a lot of deep seated interests would want to keep it hush hush. There is a recent freedom of info act submitted to determine if the gov knew anything.</comment>


The Althttpd Webserver - <AUTHOR> https://sqlite.org/docsrc/doc/trunk/misc/althttpd.md <comment><AUTHOR> I came across a reference to Althttpd while reading through some of the Fossil [0] documentation. I'm always amazed at how robust and simple SQLite and its related technologies are.

From the page:

> As of 2018, the althttpd instance for sqlite.org answers about 500,000 HTTP > requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 50GB of content > per day (about 4.6 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average > on this machine normally stays around 0.1 or 0.2. About 19% of the HTTP > requests are CGI to various Fossil source-code repositories.

[0] [http://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](http://fossil- scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)</comment>


Can tiny homes solve the housing crisis? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/09/21/can-tiny-homes-solve-the-housing-crisis/

<comment><USER2> _Oxford would be an interesting place to trial this sort of approach – it is one of the most expensive places to rent in the UK with an average rent of £891 a month and has about 6,000 people on the council's housing waiting list and 165 more in temporary accommodation. The average house price in the city is £343,461._

Come to Vancouver and you'll really see what happens when a housing bubble exists. We are currently suffering from a house price to income ratio of about 11:1 (second only to Hong Kong, on a global scale). Consider that the US housing market blew up at about 5.3:1. Thankfully, the housing market in Vancouver is starting to crash as well, but we're only at the beginning of the cycle.

As for the small homes movement, I doubt that this truly gets people into the property market. I venture to guess that this pigeon-holes (no pun intended) people into forever living in a tiny home with no room to grow.</comment>


Chrome's "White Flash" Problem (on new page loads) - <AUTHOR> "Dark Reader" chrome extension has dramatically reduced my eyes stress on the web. If you don't know about it, go see it now: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh
It gives you instant dark themes for every website. AFAIK it doesn't rely on custom users CSS like Stylish does, but it applies some CSS color inversion techniques that automatically produces incredibly good results for ANY website.
But I'm now a victim of those damn white flashes between every new page loads on Chrome. Actually I noticed these white flashes long before using this extension, as I think many of you did, but since you normally alternate between natively clear and dark-themed websites, this was somewhat more bearable (no white flash if next pages has a white background).
Is there a solution to this? <comment><USER2> Chromium team fixed this issue by showing theme background color by default. So you should install some dark theme, e.g. this one [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/material- incognito...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/material-incognito- dark-t/ahifcnpnjgbadkjdhagpfjfkmlapfoel)

Also if you download Chrome Canary and launch it with --force-dark-mode flag, you will get early access to built-in dark mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! I installed it in regular Chrome and no more white flashes! Don't know why I did not think about themes... :\

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: dark theme does not completely remove the flash but it makes it last so short that it doesn't really affect me. Happy enough for now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First thing I thought was simply modifying Chrome default CSS but this is no longer possible as "custom.css" in profile folder was removed in newer versions.

On the Chromium front, someone forked and fixed it at [https://github.com/hbtlabs/chromium-white-flash- fix](https://github.com/hbtlabs/chromium-white-flash-fix) but Chromium never merged it because, quoting the repository:

\---

What is the chromium team doing about this issue?

Issue has been logged multiple times since [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373) Most recent progress is [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=470669](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=470669)

The issue has been broken down since they are attempting an algorithmic fix [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21798](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21798)

Algorithmic fix: determining what's the background color of the current page or theme page then applying it during rendering instead of choosing white by default.

\---

And what about Chrome? From the same repository:

\---

Why doesn't the Chrome team merge this?

Because it replaces the white by black and most websites have a white background and most people don't use a dark theme. Hence, the white flash is a non issue for the majority of users. Also, the webkit fix changes the background of chrome:// pages to black

\---

I also found multiple StackExchange questions on this with many answers providing obsoleted solutions and others which rely on very inelegant hacks, like using desktop automation software to interact in the browser in a really invasive ways.

[https://superuser.com/questions/580228/prevent-white- screen-...](https://superuser.com/questions/580228/prevent-white-screen- before-loading-page-in-chromium)

I suspect that after "Dark Reader" there will be so many users getting terribly annoyed by this issue and a solution must be found. So with this post I'd just like to raise some attention on this: if your eyes are being hurt by white flashes too, please upvote this post.. We know many Google employees like to hang out around here. :)</comment>