Mechanical Turk Stations for the Urban Poor - <AUTHOR> http://chrismaury.com/post/18320761977/mechanical-turk-stations-for-the-urban-poor <comment><USER3> I've been sitting here for 10 minutes or so trying to find the right way to critique not just the article, but also the tone of the discussions here. I think the best thing that I can say is that this experiment flies in the face of everything that pg, Steve Blank and the other leaders of Lean Startup methodology are teaching.

If the customer here is a member of the "urban poor" (or what some commenters have decided to call "bums"), then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform menial tasks for spare change? Would this solve real problems for them on a daily basis? What happens when it's cold and snowy out? How many of them know how to use a computer, or read?

Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office, thinking that she knows what her customers want from her company's web site without ever asking them. Before you start throwing out solutions to urban poverty, you might want to at least talk to one or two of the people whose problems you are trying to solve.

<comment><USER4> > _... then I'd suggest that we start with some customer research. Do the > jobless urban poor want to stand at a terminal in the street and perform > menial tasks for spare change?_

In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work. To the question of what poor people would want to do, the answer is very often "who cares what they want, they're poor!" It's not this blatant -- often it's couched in statements like the ones you see here that assume that people have chosen poverty -- but that's the basic sentiment.

> _Buying into this concept as a way to solve urban poverty is no different > than some Marketing VP sitting in her 50th floor corner office..._

Well, this is at least consistent. If you think that people have merely chosen to be poor, then you simply need to persuade them to make a different choice.

If one acknowledges that they don't know much about the lives of poor people, they should do what they would with any other domain where they lack experience -- find a domain expert. IMO, the best way to start would be to find those members of the urban poor demographic who have the intelligence and the motivation, but not the skills, to solve their own problems. Then, you can help them solve _those_ problems.

<comment><USER5> _In SV it's very popular to assume that people are poor because they don't want to work._

This is more or less true. Go look up labor force participation rates of the poor - most poor adults don't have a job, and aren't looking for one.

<comment><USER6> Why do you think that looking is the same as wanting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OMG! You guys! Aside from a few, most comments here are discussing how to actually do this efficiently. I think this might be forgivable as I assume many of you are quite young, but are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work?

Again, I'd like to attribute the responses to the commenters' young age, and I trust your good intentions, but hackers, engineers and all entrepreneurs should really learn something about work-relations, social policy and ethics.

<comment><USER8> _are you really suggesting exploiting poor populations for menial work w/o social benefits, without dignity, suggesting they walk into some booth, put in a few hours of work without even the physical presence of co-workers and bosses that can appreciate their work?_

I'll go with "yes". Doing productive work, earning money, and gaining basic computer experience would be much better for everyone involved than panhandling on the street.

In equally loaded terms, why would you deny poor people an opportunity to improve their lives?

<comment><USER7> Because this won't improve their lives one bit. It will turn them into drones working for the rich without dignity or respect. Not every transaction that is marginally beneficial to both sides is movement towards a global optimum. On the contrary, arguments like this, talking about improvement is simple "gradient descent". Instead of throwing the poor an insulting bone, using their desperation to gain beneficial work w/o treating them with dignity (benefits, appreciation), I suggest turning the bright minds of Silicon Valley for some true disruptive thinking.

Think about this: is this suggestion going to provide the poor with true social mobility? Is this something our society can be proud of - poor people working for machines, as machines and getting paid by machines? Or is this another way to maximize profit by forsaking gainful, respectful employment, that can be somehow justified by "well, they'll be slightly better off?"

Why not suggest a mechanism by which tech companies can truly offer the poor a hand that will last for generations and create a better society, one we can be truly proud of, even if it's at the cost of loss of some short-term profit? An investment in society's future, if you like. Surely this is something that will be beneficial for everyone in the long run.

<comment><USER8> _Because this won't improve their lives one bit._

Proof by assertion is not terribly convincing.

 _Not every transaction that is marginally beneficial to both sides is movement towards a global optimum_

"Marginal" is more than zero bits.

 _Think about this: is this suggestion going to provide the poor with true social mobility?_

I could easily see that happening.

 _Is this something our society can be proud of - poor people working for machines, as machines and getting paid by machines?_

Even in those ridiculous terms (applicable to many white collar jobs), yes, compared to common alternatives like panhandling or selling drugs.

 _Why not suggest a mechanism by which tech companies can truly offer the poor a hand that will last for generations and create a better society_

Go for it. In the meantime, stop standing in the way of people who are trying to improve things because you don't think they're improving them enough.

<comment><USER7> I don't consider actively exploiting the poor as "not improving their lives enough". Neither do I consider marginal benefit a positive if it comes at the cost of exploitation. Thirdly, I don't see anyone moving from selling drugs to doing menial mechanical turk work. Lastly - I'm not standing in anyone's way. By all means - go and try to turn America's poor into Silicon Valley's drones rather than invest in their future. In China's sweatshops I can at least be fairly certain that the workers are greeted with a "hello" in the morning. Perhaps someone is even concerned if they don't show up for work. If you want to build hi-tech services on the backs of people who don't get even that - <USER2> ahead. I'll be marveling at the this new turn hi-tech capitalism is taking, while sitting in my armchair sipping tea and reading Charles Dickens.

<comment><USER9> It's frustrating debating with one who employs such rhetoric:

1\. "I don't consider actively exploiting the poor as "not improving their lives enough"." and "Neither do I consider marginal benefit a positive if it comes at the cost of exploitation."

You've framed the debate as "exploiting the poor" and "exploitation" yet do not give any reason for this other than an implicit claim that sub-minimum wage is exploitation. Let's say the minimum wage is $X/hr and this project allows these people to earn $(X - 0.01)/hr. Is that still exploitation? Why do you assume just because something MIGHT not be minimum wage that it's exploitation? Minimum wage and exploitation are only slightly correlated subjects.

All the original author is suggesting is to OFFER people jobs at a rate that the economy identifies as a sustainable employment opportunity. Kids selling gum at school might earn below minimum wage but it's their choice and their life to do. Nobody is FORCING anybody to take those jobs, therefore this is not exploitation and your dramatic and emotionally overloaded choice of words really does not help you make your point. You need to take a moment to define exploitation and I think in doing so you will see your argument is flawed.

2\. "I don't see anyone moving from selling drugs to doing menial mechanical turk work" OK but that's your opinion and minimum wage laws block verifying what the reality of the situation is.

3\. "By all means - go and try to turn America's poor into Silicon Valley's drones rather than invest in their future"

Why do you constantly resort to such emotive, overloaded language? There's no conspiracy here; nobody is trying to "turn" anybody into anything. What people ARE saying is "Hey here's a way some people can make some money, maybe some will find it acceptable" and people like you are saying "No I refuse to let anybody explore this possibility because I'm uncomfortable with a society where people are earning less than I think they should because of my beliefs about what people should earn, and I believe that my beliefs override freewill".

Notice that your argument, as far as I can tell after filtering out the emotion, is pretty much all about your beliefs about work and society, and has nothing to do with (a) the actual state of the economy at a given point in time or (b) the actual people out there who might benefit from the proposed arrangement.

<comment><USER7> The reason I employ "emotional rhetoric" is because most people here have employed unemotional or "rational" rhetoric. This isn't statistics. This isn't an optimization problem. What I'm trying to do is to show that when you deal with actual people, people who have so far gotten the short end of the stick at everything, people with desires, people capable of feeling pain - you must at least consider an "emotional" approach.

And I don't need to win an argument here - I've already won. The simple fact is that people earning below average (or, rather, below median) in America are worse off than almost anywhere else in the western world. And that's the majority of the population. I was simply expressing my amazement that a certain world outlook - which I'm not even trying to argue 'cause this is not the place - that has traditionally been common among certain American social groups, has taken hold of SV entrepreneurs. I find this surprising because Northern California has had, for a long time, much sympathy for the counter- culture movement and to ideas of social justice. I also find it interesting that it seems like this approach is expressed here not because of some deeply held beliefs, some ideological values, but simply because of a technical, mathematical way of looking at the world. I was amazed and saddened at the dehumanization expressed here.

Now, I wasn't trying to change anyone's mind on politics, but just in case someone was expressing his views simply because he's grown accustomed to looking at the world through equations and algorithms, I was hoping maybe my words could jar him out of his technical sleep. Saying "Hey here's a way some people can make some money, maybe some will find it acceptable" without considering whether or not the idea is ethical, whether or not it is humane, seems so... callous. Of course someone will find it acceptable - like I said someplace else, someone will find it acceptable to sell his own organs for money; someone will agree to go into slavery so that he'll have something to eat - but that doesn't make it right. And I'm not even saying you should take my definitions for right and wrong. Use your own. __But the first question you should ask yourself is "is this right?" and not, "will this work?" __

(All of this is not to say that I cede the "rational" argument, or agree that unregulated free-market capitalism has actual economic merit - I don't. It's just more important for me to address the lack of ethical thinking, or the precedence of economic thinking to it rather than argue economics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "found that you can make about $7/ hour."

As someone who turks occasionally, you can't consistently make $7 an hour unless you have some skill that you could probably use on the job marketplace. $3-$4 is more like it.

<comment><USER11> I can confirm that. The article he cites to support the claim (from 2009) indicates the author made $4 off a 350-500 word article, and $3 for a product review. Based on my experience, those went for about $1.50 and $0.50 as of about a year ago.

$3/hr on Turk is pretty good, and you need some education and diligence to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mechanical Turk takes up to 30 days to approve payment for any task, so instant payment is out of the question.

Having a terminal where someone can sit for hours on end being the same place as a cash dispenser isn't the best idea. The users would probably be better off breaking into it. They need to be separated.

Perhaps a better solution would be to start a sweat shop full of terminals where the sweatshop owner pays them on approved tasks, after taking a cut.

<comment><USER6> These exist in China and India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like how everyone's discussing the right and wrong of it, weather it would work or not. A true entreprenuer would ignore all that and just try it anyway. We can talk about this till the world ends but at the end of the day, people much smarter than us have made predictions in all sorts of industries and been outsmarted by 2 guys in a garage who tried something crazy that should not have worked.

I say go for it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I will do him one better. How about he opens a storefront with locked down machines that do nothing but mechanical Turk and rents them out for 1 an hour. Maybe wow gold farming .

Anyone have an concerns about the ethics of this? On one had 6 net is better than 0, on the other hand it is fairly predatory.

<comment><USER6> Why lock them down? Why not just rent computers for $1/hr, like at a cyber cafe? That is a solved problem.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking in terms of the hair salon model. Chairs are paid for by the stylists but they can only do hair, not give tattoos or just use thier chair to sit back and drink beer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I suspect panhandlers make more than $7/hour, so for them to stop panhandling and start using a mechanical turk station would be a pay cut.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is very similar to what Samasource (<http://samasource.org/>) does except in a different demographic of poverty (in third world countries). The general idea is that in many places, such as refugee camps, no one has any money and there really aren't any jobs to act as segues to help people rise up out of poverty, if you build computer clusters in these areas, they can do mechanical turk style work, make a lot more money than they could otherwise and be supervised such that quality can be more controlled than a bunch of random people on the internet. Unfortunately they run on a different proprietary alternative to Mechanical Turk (presumably with some tweaks to fit their model).

</comment><comment><USER17> This won't work, the wage rates on Mechanical Turk for unskilled, low motivated users are too low. I previously worked for a microfinance bank in the Philippines where we employed staff at a little over the minimum wage there which was $5 per day. While we were getting ready for a new product launch I had some staff we couldn't use yet, and seeing they all had computers and internet connection ran a small experiment on Mechanical Turk. They averaged $5-10 per day in income so I stopped it after a month.

There were several problems: 1\. Many of the more valuable task required you to meet certain 'skill' levels which these staff didn't 2\. Motivation was a huge problem as spending hours per day clicking on images with people or editing text you don't understand was very dull 3\. We had problems with internet bandwidth being too slow to allow running through tasks rapidly

It was a pity this experiment failed as it would have been a great way to scale up and create income opportunities for some very destitute people.

</comment><comment><USER18> For better or worse, you're likely to get better results to your work requests by putting these same devices in chosen offshore locations; you're arbitraging median-skill median-lifestyle foreigners in lower cost of living areas versus lower-quartile lifestyle and limited-skill Americans.

Globalization is not friendly to the homeless and mentally ill. This proposal may buoy up some folks who have fallen through the cracks, but there are a number of other social safety nets (a la worker retraining) that offer that same sort of chance to those down on their luck but still able to turn around from a bad situation or bad break.

If you are not able to read coherently or quickly - this doesn't necessarily mean uneducated, it could simply be crippling dyslexia - this doesn't help you. And if you are suffering from drug addiction or mental illness or even poor lifestyle choices, this may be significantly less advantageous and doable than panhandling.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a non-starter for several reasons, mostly relating to spam.

First, you can't just give people cash. They will immediately turn to spamming, and you'll get crap data. You need to do statistics, comparing turks to other turks, and only pay the ones who don't spam. It's highly likely you can't do this in realtime.

Second, you need to track the identity of your turks. If worker X is known not to be a spammer, then you want to assign work to X preferentially. Similarly, if worker Y is a known spammer, you want to refuse him work.

Third, most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?

<comment><USER19> "most poor people are not working and are not looking for work. Only 30% or so of poor adults are in the labor force at all. Why would they decide to start working at a mechanical turk station when they seem to have little desire to work anyplace else?"

just because somebody is not looking for a structured job, doesn't mean they won't do tasks for money. think about the homeless guy who wanders around with his shopping cart collecting discarded cans all day. the only social issue i see with a turk kiosk is that it would essentially be a "do things in exchange for drugs" terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's been done (though instead of money, candy and instead of the urban poor, UC Berkeley CS students):

[http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper-...](http://hci.berkeley.edu/cs260-fall10/images/b/ba/FinalPaper- HeimerlTrinh.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> That is actually brilliant! I was thinking about something similar, how maybe a poor country could create jobs for its citizens online (and they'd be happy with much less than $7/hour). But this is actually a great idea for poor people in any country...

<comment><USER22> I'm surprised that there isn't better translation to "minority" languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I suggest you find out how much someone makes pan-handling per hour. You may be shocked ...

</comment><comment><USER24> This would be a great kickstarter project. You may want to modify it though so the station just prints a check or some other instrument other than cash or you will end up with a lot of broken Mechanical Turk Stations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, broken machines or people getting mugged right after cashing out are both concerns. But the people who would benefit most from something like this would be least likely to have a bank account.

<comment><USER25> Tons of businesses cash checks without a bank account. Another concern is kiosk hacking: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSu8z3vrfcY>

<comment><USER26> The kiosks actually coming up missing would be a bigger concern than hacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Half-baked adaptations:

Combine with a Vegas pokie/slot machine. Complete menial hits in exchange for a few more cents to play.

Or combine with vending machines. You want that can of Coke? Pay by categorising 30-40 photos quickly.

</comment><comment><USER28> Be good if Amazon themselves got behind something like this, by providing the banking and payment infrastructure. They already issue credit cards, they could instead issue debit cards and directly pay into those. Would eliminate the need for a cash machine on the terminal, although the absurd ATM fees in the US might make it less viable I guess. I assume there are no charges for using debit cards for small transactions in the US (I live in the UK)?

</comment><comment><USER29> This sounds like the type of idea that Thiel would be into. I applaud your creativity and these discussions regarding minimum wage are surprisingly pertinent.

</comment><comment><USER30> What if the person doing the Turking was submitting crap data? It seems like you'd have to wait at least a couple days in order for the data to be validated.

<comment><USER31> Other platforms built on turk, such as crowdflower, have systems in place to assess accuracy. Another turk worker checks the quality of the work, or 3 workers do a task, and the best, as judged by a different set of workers, is given a bonus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can see one advantage to this, is that the poor don't have any computer skills, and this may give them basic familiarity with using websites. Although I imagine there would have to be a trainer present at all times to help when they get stuck.

A more beneficial concept for the poor is microlending, helping the poor in third-world countries start their own businesses.

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem with a "solution" like this is same as the problem that the minium wage presents: it is insufficient to live on, and less than the value of social services benefits.

If you want to magically improve the plight of the poor, make cheap housing available in urban areas without a qualification process (ie. Section 8, public housing)

<comment><USER6> Wall Street tried that, by destroying the real estate market.

<comment><USER33> Wall St gave people with no money the ability to buy stuff that they cannot afford. I'm talking about a $300/mo apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about paywithatweet repurposed so you pay for digital goods with some Turking? Categorise 50 images and get your favourite local band's latest MP3. $1.90 to the band, $0.10 to the intermediary as their cut.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure people who work for $1/hr don't want to spend it on mp3s.

<comment><USER27> I'm not talking about the less fortunate here, but adapting the Turk idea to something else half-baked.

I could categorise 50 images in 2-3 minutes. It'd take me 1-2 minutes to get out my wallet, get the right credit card and enter the info if I were to pay manually.

I ran the idea past two employees (neither homeless...) who both seemed to think they'd consider a quick spot of Turking in exchange for a digital good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believe that captchabot and services alike have already successfully implemented this idea.

</comment><comment><USER35> _For all the success that micro-lending has had in India and other countries, we haven't really seen those benefits in American Urban areas._

I thought the USA had "micro-lending", but they were called "payday loans"?

<comment><USER36> Payday lenders have a significantly higher interest rate - on the order of 500-2000% of the principle per year. The purpose of it is to put the screws on people who aren't able to get loans elsewhere.

Micro lending has more of a humanitarian goal - most organizations tend to lend at reasonable rates (3-15%/year).

<comment><USER6> Those organizations lend to local "bankers" who lend out at higher rates to customers.

Payday shops charge reasonable fees per loan, the same fees that all vendors and governments charge for you hanging on to money they want from you. The problem is that payday loan customers get trapped into taking excessive numbers of loans, multiplying fees.

<comment><USER37> With all due respect, payday shops do not charge "reasonable" fees, unless your definition of reasonable includes amounts higher than 100% APR.

It should be noted that ordinarily vendors and governments do have reasonable late fees(certainly much less than one from payday shop). I do not remember paying more than 24% when I run late on some Accounts Payable when I run my shop at the turn of the millennium. Maybe it is now normal for vendors to ask for 100+% when a 30day net invoice runs late, who knows?

It is when a vendor is about to deny service completely(ie pay $50 to reconnect electric utility), then a payday loan becomes a relatively reasonable option.

There are a multitude of factors which go behind the rates(I am bundling in all of the fees into catch all rate) that payday shops charge:

* Likelihood of borrower to repay * Ability of borrower to do simple math * Human psychology (goes with the simple math to calculate rate from fees) * Demand from borrowers

Overall, payday shops charge more than regular lending institutions because they should(higher risk and some expenses). They also raise their effective rate beyond their "should rate" because they can.

Their customers are not comparison shopping between 240% APR and 300% APR. I would argue that it should be made easier for their customers to do so, but that is another discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage.

Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread.

Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage.

It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility.

One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.

<comment><USER39> Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements.

Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum.

In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive enough to justify a higher wage. An employer will pick a mix other adaptations rather than simply 'the same number of employees at a higher cost' once the wage floor is enforced. (These might include shorter opening hours, more automation, a few higher-paid workers replacing many lower-paid workers, longer waiting lines, less customer service, less attention to cleaning/inventory, and outsourcing work to other lower-cost entities or countries.)

These dynamic adaptations leave a few people bumped up to the higher minimum, but more left completely unemployed, idle and dependent on other social assistance. They're not building work habits or a work history that would put them on the path to much higher wages.

Even if we wanted, as a society, to ensure a certain minimum wage, why would we make the responsibility for paying it fall solely on those particular companies and industries that can best utilize inexperienced and low-skilled labor? Their manufacturing and simple services fill a important role, in the goods they provide and the meaningful productive work they offer those without other skills. By making them and them alone face this costly extra non-market constraint on hiring, they become disadvantaged and shrink, relative to other sectors and overseas competitors.

It would be like deciding "every low-income family requires a computer", but rather than buying it out of common public funds, making it a legal requirement for just the domestic computer industry to provide free computers, out of their own revenues. Would that properly value the exact thing you want to happen – more computer production – or impair it by making it less profitable than other uses of the same talent/capital? The same goes with employment opportunities for the low-skilled. The minimum wage has been thinning such domestic opportunities out, for decades, rather than expanding them. Intended to reduce income disparities, it's increasing them.

<comment><USER40> _Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements._

This is in fact their purpose. Minimum wage laws destroy low-paying jobs by making them illegal, preventing the least competitive members of our society from having the hours and days of their lives "mined" by an employer for negligible compensation.

That having these laws "reduces welfare" is, I believe, a conclusion not supported by fact.

A living example can be found in urban Brazil. By failing to outlaw and enforce certain minima (building codes, wages), large Brazilian cities have created vast marginal neighborhoods that no one wants to live in.

Based just on the example of _favelas_ alone, I would argue that having laws to guarantee minimum wages is one thing a government can do immediately to protect the weaker members of a society.

I think you have not addressed another important duty of governments: to provide a reasonably rigorous educational launchpad so that the less fortunate need not always remain so.

<comment><USER5> I've never been to Brazil, so I won't comment. But I live in India, so I'll discuss the situation here. The GDP/capita here is $3k/year, adjusted for purchasing power.

Pass all the laws you want, there is simply not enough wealth (i.e., not enough material and skilled labor) for everyone to live in a house that meets building codes. No matter what you redistribute (note: India has very low inequality [1]) or demand from people, you can't squeeze water from a stone.

[1] Nominal inequality is low, but inequality of living conditions is high. This is the exact opposite of the US, where the rich have a PS3 and an XBox, and the poor are stuck with only a PS2.

<comment><USER41> Over 70% of indians live in rural areas. Many of these people live completely outside of the monetary economy. Counting these people in the GDP statistics skews the whole thing. Yet many of these people live just fine by farming, but do not need to use money, or use very little of it. To me it seems that when making GDP statistics, it would be wise to count in only people in urban areas, participating in the labor market. Of course this would look quite bad from the point of view of neoliberalist economists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This resonates a lot with Henry Ford's innovations of conveyor belt assembly lines. Ford found out how to humans into an early form of robot, and once technology caught up these jobs inevitably were replaced with actual robots. Even if this Turk Station idea works, how long will it be until AI replaces any need for Mechanical Turk? About 10 years I'm guessing?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Compan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line#Ford_Motor_Company_.281908-1915.29)

<comment><USER43> Henry Ford also thought it was important that his workers be able to purchase the product that they are making in order to drive the economy. Turking isn't even going to feed you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a great idea. It would really work if it supplements the welfare checks; it would get people into the mindset of working. Let me explain.

Right now, if you're a bum, you make a decent amount of money panhandling + scamming the government ("disability", etc.); let's call this "freeloading". The problem is: the amount of money you can make freeloading is close to minimum wage (if you include everything). So there isn't much incentive to take up work; freeloading may not pay as much, but you get total freedom, no schedules, no boss, etc. After some time, you just become so used to that lifestyle that it's impossible to come back into the working mainstream.

A system like this can be a great way for people to, on their own schedule, supplement their freeloading income. Over time, they'd get used to the concept of effort and reward, and maybe consider taking up real work?

On another note: I think minimum wage should be much higher; say, $20/hour. This may not sound like a good idea, but think about it: it should be high enough that a freeloader has serious economic incentive to get off his ass and look for work! Another way to look at it is: I would much rather pay more for something, and have that extra money directly go to a worker's pocket; than route the money circuitously through government taxes, bureaucracy, non- profits, etc. to that person on welfare.

Edit: the above are just ideas. If you disagree with them, say something instead of hitting the down arrow.

<comment><USER35> _scamming the government ("disability", etc.)_

You know that there are loads of actual poor disabled people? Not everyone on social welfare is a leech on society. Have some compassion.

<comment><USER45> GP didn't assert there weren't poor disabled people; merely that if you are a [sc. non-disabled] poor person it is possible to scam the government into paying you disability benefits.</comment></comment></comment>


ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com website auction now live - <AUTHOR> https://flippa.com/3783970-20-000-in-sales-and-2-5-million-visits-in-4-days-hugely-popular-viral-site

<comment><USER2> This should deserve more coverage here. It's interesting how in 4 days it went from PH to Flippa and might generate hundred of thousand of dollars for the guy. I don't know if he's sending out the orders, and I don't know why he's selling so early.

</comment><comment><USER3> i guess that site have gotten the fastest possible time, from going active to being put on auction</comment>


Announcing SCXIB: Use Interface Builder to design SproutCore web applications - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/robiculous/scxib

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the authors. This is different from Cappuccino's nib2cib because SCXIB writes the actual SproutCore JavaScript code that drives the UI.

<comment><USER2> It's rather amusing the SproutCore community used to trash talk Cappuccino's nib2cib, and now they have their own version.

There are benefits to serializing the object graph vs generating code, namely that it's easier to open and edit using a tool like Atlas (and Greenhouse, or whatever SproutCore's version is called).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is very exciting. Following on GitHub & anxiously waiting for the demo video to finish converting.

However, doesn't this go slightly against Jolley's idea[1] that the tools should be free and available to everyone (including Linux and Windows users)? I understand this is not the de-facto tool for SproutCore development, but do you think that making an Interface Builder clone with SproutCore itself is a viable option? It would have a lovely meta-feel to it, like the Rubinius Ruby interpreter being written mostly in Ruby.

Neways, kudos for releasing the project. I'm going to try it later when I get home.

[1] [http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/756343010/the-next- revolutio...](http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/756343010/the-next-revolution)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are now two ways to design SproutCore applications: Greenhouse and now SCXIB. Greenhouse is exactly what you described--an entirely SproutCore-based interface builder[1]. We created SCXIB to give developers more choice.

[1] [http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/535950751/introducing- greenh...](http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/535950751/introducing-greenhouse)

<comment><USER3> Thanks :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Terminal based Amateur Radio logging in Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/km6thj/hamlog <comment><AUTHOR> Haskell library to maintain a Ham Radio contact log, including getting information from some radios via CAT. Includes a nice text-only user program.</comment>


Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders #3, This Thursday (7/30) at Shake Shack, 6PM - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/events/home/au8spqqzj3 <comment><USER2> The hackers and founders meetups have been great. They consistently bring 30-60 people. I have made a ton of great connections and met some really interesting people. Its worth checking out if you haven't been! See everyone Thurs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more!

I wonder if we can break a record with this week's event, maybe 70? Come on NYC!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On a related note, the first Sun, Sand and Startups meetup in Barcelona is tomorrow night. Come and join if you are in the area!

<http://www.sunsandandstartups.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Ooh the shake shack - when I was last in NYC I had to wait like 2 hours in line for a burger there, but it was worth it

</comment><comment><USER5> Definitely going to try to make this one - first time. I am have randomly met some fellow HN contributors, but never actually gone to a meetup.

</comment><comment><USER6> I may try to make it to this meetup since I'll be leaving the city in 2 weeks.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great, i'm flying into town tonight. i'm going to try and make this.

</comment><comment><USER8> I always miss HN meetups, since they always seem to coincide with digital DUMBO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not come to this week's event for a different change of scenery and people?

<comment><USER8> would love to, but we are on the panel this month and giving away a few prizes via our Rolladeck application</comment></comment></comment>


Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener? (chart) - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/29/is-goo-gl-really-the-fastest-url-shortener-chart/

<comment><USER2> Great read. I feel bad for the Is.gd people. They might've had the most unfortunately timed outage from an extremely rare ISP issue that will never happen again and will forever be labeled as the service that's "not 100% available". Just pretty darn close.

<comment><USER3> They were marked as 99.99% available, that's nothing to feel bad about. "Both Bit.ly and Goo.gl delivered perfect availability, and Is.gd came awfully close."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wish they'd included <http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/> \- a URL shortener for the rest of us..

<comment><USER5> If anyone wants to place a link to the above comment on twitter, feel free to use this shortened URL:

<http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/mwf54>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now I know why is.gd feels so fast; it is...for Europe.

</comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr: yes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why <http://goo.gl> DNS pointing to NS1.GOOGLE.COM instead of 22.214.171.124/188.8.131.52?

</comment><comment><USER9> I switched to Goo.gl for the time-being, but I like Bit.ly's ability to easily copy URLs quickly.

</comment><comment><USER10> API please

<comment><USER11> <http://blog.abrah.am/2010/10/googls-shorten-api.html></comment></comment>


Pushing AWS Lambda and API Gateway to the Ragged Edge with Python - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/ewdurbin/chalice-github-auth <comment><USER2> Wow. This just solved a problem I've been wrestling with for a couple of months.

"I have a silly app that nobody should be able to access but me" is a surprisingly hard nut to crack in a serverless world, as things stand today.</comment>


Comparison Of Nvidia and AMD Graphics Cards On SteamOS For Steam Linux Gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=steamos-22-gpus&num=1 <comment><AUTHOR> ... and here is part 2 for 4K resolutions: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=4k-brew-a...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=4k-brew- amdnv&num=1)

</comment><comment><USER2> Would be nice to indicate in the title that the article is about AMD's proprietary drivers, rather than the free software drivers in Mesa.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would do - but cannot edit the title anymore, sorry.

<comment><USER3> I was about to add "proprietary" to the title for you, but this post should probably use the original article title, since it is neither misleading nor linkbait. That's in the HN guidelines.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

(Submitted title was "AMD's graphic drivers still suck under Linux".)</comment></comment></comment>


Thread about doing your business in space - <AUTHOR> https://threader.app/thread/1152277166996017152 <comment><USER2> I did not expect it to be about _that_ kind of business.</comment>


The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki (1997) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxtYXJpb3Rlcm9zYWxlc3xneDo2ZDdkOWRjNWM5NjIxYzQ2 <comment><USER2> Interesting timing, there's a new Bourbaki volume coming out in a few weeks, the first one in decades: Topologie Algébrique, Chapitre 1 à 4.

<comment><USER3> [http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Un-nouveau- Bourbaki.html](http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Un-nouveau-Bourbaki.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > in accordance with mandatory "retirement" at age fifty.

I've never understood the obsession that a lot of mathematicians seem to have with age restrictions (e.g., the Fields medal).

<comment><USER5> Mathematicians, and I am one, are obsessed by and seek to exploit seemingly arbitrary yet otherwise convenient numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first time I heard of Bourbaki, no one knew who the members were. They were quite anonymous.

You couldn't claim it on your list of published works and anyone who cites Bourbaki is citing the group, not you individually. The tremendous energy that they put into an anonymous work seems contrary to the publish-or-perish mindset in academia of today.</comment>


Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued - <AUTHOR> http://markmanson.net/dreams

<comment><USER2> Amazing. Thank you for posting.</comment>


We just launched a new invoicing web app for under 10K. Check it out: Ballpark - <AUTHOR> http://getballpark.com/ <comment><USER2> I don't know how much of that $10k was for web design but however much it was it was money well spent.

Interesting choices in the pricing plans. I'm not sure I like using SSL as a differentiator -- I know it is quite common these days for many web apps, but particularly with invoicing you're putting third party (client of client) financial information out on an open wire because somebody was too cheap to pick the $50 a month plan.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, SSL costs in total $30 a year, for all customers. No company should be reckless with customer information, regardless of the tier they purchase.

Only charge for things that actually cost you time or money, otherwise your customers will feel ripped off.

<comment><USER2> _Only charge for things that actually cost you time or money_

I can't agree with that. I charge money for software, which is free at the margin. My customers don't feel ripped off about it, because their time is not.

The worry with SSL is the security implication (particularly for people who had no option to say "Please treat my data as non-sensitive! I totally don't mind!"), not the fact that the code is making an arbitrary distinction between user classes despite the cost to the company being the same for all users (essentially nothing at the margin).

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I guess I didn't say that right.

I meant that you shouldn't charge for things that customers have the perception of being free to you. People don't seem to like that. A customer will think "Oh, more invoices if I pay X dollars more!" and that's tangible. Those are physical invoices stored somewhere.

But when you try to charge for something stupid like the ability to change colors or something, that seems to make people angry. I've done user testing with payment tiers, and whenever someone asks "Why does this cost more? That's stupid" they immediately have a bad taste in their mouth about the product. And that's a first impression before they have even started to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First thing that hit me was "wow great design." I actually am looking for a designer for my next project. Could I contact you/metalabs about it?

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: I'm the author of <http://www.roninapp.com> (also an invoicing app)

The designer for ballpark is definitely top-notch - the folks over at metalabs are good at what they do. Keeping invoicing sexy is something that is hard to do (but we're trying our best as well!)

Congrats on the launch - I'm sure the folks over at FreshBooks (who are the obvious market leaders) are taking notice at all these invoicing/time-tracking apps hitting the market (cashboard, invoicemachine, letsfreckle, among others). It certainly speaks for how far we've come in Rapid Development and how accessible good UX/design has become.

<comment><USER6> Ronin looks cool! We're glad to have some solid competition, and FreshBooks could really use some.

<comment><USER7> Hey Andrew, Lu,

We do take notice. It's good to see a lot of other apps come into the market with different ideas and approaches. It's definitely no good to end up in a market of one.

P.S. Andrew, it's too bad we didn't hook up when I was out in Victoria last summer. Are you coming to Toronto any time soon, by any chance?

Lu, similarly, I was just in SFO in January but I didn't reach out. My bad. Next time I'm down, shall we have a beer?

\-- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks

<comment><USER8> I'm so impressed by that whole conversation between competitors. I'm speechless. Best of luck to all of you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record, this was going to be the title but it didn't fit:

"The small company I work with, Metalab, has just launched a new estimating and invoicing web app for under 10k with no VC. It's called Ballpark, check it out."

Thanks for the comments on the design, all of the credit for that goes to the main Metalab guy, Andrew Wilkinson, see more here <http://www.metalabdesign.com>

<comment><USER9> amazing portfolio site. Any suggestions on best way to learn your style of design/javascript?

<comment><USER10> i really like their style too. it looks like they use mootools and jquery for most of the javascript effects, and as far as the look goes... you could play around with PNGs, bevels, gradients, and strokes to get a similar style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately more attention has been drawn to the design of your site than its functionality.

While the design is great and you have all the reason to be proud of it, the long term success of your business will tie mostly, if not all, to the functionality rather than design.

<comment><USER12> As someone with a site with mediocre design, first impressions mean a lot.

I read a lot into a design. It tells me how professional the people I'm dealing with are. It tells me if they're enterprise droids or if they're working with small customers too.

We'll be either doing a new one ourselves or paying for one soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is Andrew from MetaLab. I just wanted to say thanks for all the compliments on the design. I hope that you guys will take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

Quoted from cominatchu: "The 'under 10k' price tag is misleading because it does not include the opportunity cost of the web designers time. In other words, one has to calculate (the hours spent by Metalab web designers * their normal hourly rate) and add this to 10k to arrive at a more accurate cost for building this site."

Yes, we really did build it for less than $10k. Our key expenses were: Rails development (1 developer a few hours a week), a SliceHost server, and some custom icons we hired out. We're planning to break it down in more detail on our blog in the next little while, but I'd like to debunk this a bit here. You're absolutely right about the cost being higher if you consider what it would normally cost at a full consulting rate, but I feel like that's kind of fallacious logic:

If you learnt how to woodwork, built a bookshelf, then told your friends that it cost you $15 (the price of the wood and a couple of screws), they aren't going to argue that the true cost was $500 (the hours spent learning woodworking or a carpenter's rate).

If a founder who was an incredible programmer paid himself $1,000/month during the early months of his startup, would you say that his time really cost the company $15,000 (what he would have charged at a consulting rate)?

The point isn't that someone with no technical skills can do this for 10k (after all, this is Hacker News, and I assume most of you are highly skilled in the field), we're just pointing out that we managed to create a business by pulling a few extra hours a week over 6 months. We didn't have to quit our day jobs, move to the valley, or build a board of advisors - we just went ahead and built it. This isn't to say that it's an especially complex app or that it is some sort of technical feat, just that a little bit of money went a long way.

I don't think taking funding is always bad or anything, especially small seed funding like YC. Sometimes advantageous ideas need money to make them happen. The point is that most of you already have many of the skills required to build things, so funding really shouldn't be a barrier to entry. If your idea requires more money than you have, boil it down to the bare minimum and build it within your budget. We could easily have decided that we wanted to build the best invoicing app ever, figured out that invoicing was a 1.3 kagillion dollar industry, secured some funding, built up the stakes, then gone crazy with features. We could have convinced ourselves that we needed to close down our consulting business, hire a full-time Rails developer, and move in together. Instead we took a simple idea that we felt wasn't being done right, boiled it down to its core, then built it when we had the time.

</comment><comment><USER13> You should have the pricing plans oriented to the top instead of the bottom. Because I want to look at "estimates" and look over to the other pricing plans to compare; with your format, the "estimate" is at a different eye level.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an excellent point, we will fix this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The UI is great, love the simplicity, but I really don't want to use Paypal for anything. Freshbooks mails me a check or hooks up to any payment gateway I want to use, meaning I don't shell out for Paypal's fees. I'm also not seeing what this is doing that Freshbooks is not, other then having a nicer UI.

<comment><USER6> I think the key differentiation is the fact that Ballpark is built for teams. This might not resonate with freelancers (who might just use it because it works well and looks pretty), but, in most small businesses, more than one person is usually involved in the process. For example, we run a design firm (www.metalabdesign.com), and while I don't personally send out estimates or invoices, I can easily keep track of incoming payments via the dashboard, give sign off and comment, see what the numbers for the month were, etc.

Regarding PayPal: Nobody is required to use PayPal - it's totally optional. We're definitely planning on looking into offering payment gateway solutions, but at this point we are focused on polishing the core functionality and adding some really cool new features that will help differentiate us from the pack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I saw the site a few days ago when @mike9r talked about it on Twitter and I am impressed with it.

I have tried Blinksale and FreshBooks (who I guess are your two most obvious competitors) and neither of those really worked out for me, so I am anxious to give Ballpark beyond clicking around a bit. I am constantly looking for something that is only as powerful as I need and fits nicely into my work flow.

My favorite feature is definitely the "news feed" that shows comments / payments / etc. - that is a great way to visualize what has gone on with the project.

And yes, great design :)

</comment><comment><USER16> The "under 10k" price tag is misleading because it does not include the opportunity cost of the web designers time. In other words, one has to calculate (the hours spent by Metalab web designers * their normal hourly rate) and add this to 10k to arrive at a more accurate cost for building this site.

</comment><comment><USER17> On the signup page, what percentage of people do you think undferstand the symbol for "infinity"?

Would recommend using the word "unlimited" instead.

Pretty nitpicky, though-- outstanding work and is serving a need that all businesses have. I'm more bullish on this startup than 99% of the startups that are introduced here.

</comment><comment><USER9> whats the breakdown of that $10K?

<comment><USER18> Also, how long did it take from idea to implementation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The site looks absolutely amazing. Tried a free account for now, and I like the overall feel.

One thing I'd love to see: Implement autosave of invoice drafts, or at least a JavaScript popup whenever I try to navigate away from an unsaved form.

</comment><comment><USER20> I see some similarities to 37signals' layout design...

<comment><USER21> That's because they share the same graphic designer.. look at the portfolio.

<comment><USER22> Uh, 37signals use to be a design firm while they were building their startup. They design inhouse, only some sort of companion app for 37signals was designed by that graphic designer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice demo video!

One nit-picky detail, at 2:57, the VO says the Dashboard will "show how much money we received this month, last month, and last year, in addition to all the money you expect to receive in the coming weeks" The video shows 'received year to date', not what was received last year.

Probably not worth re-recording the VO (it sounds professionally done), and re-encoding, but I figured you should know :)

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill I like it, however I think you should allow more invoices to be sent at the lower level of the plans. Maybe just focus on the per-user limitations, and make the estimates generation more generous. Also everything should be over SSL - better for you and better for your customers, since if there is a data breach by the user they will still blame you.

</comment><comment><USER24> The metalabdesign guys are amazing!! I'm assuming you got the design for less than $10k? If so I need to contact those people!!

</comment><comment><USER25> I love it! I'm inspired. There are so many problems out there to be solved with Web applications, and money to be made.

</comment><comment><USER26> In the pricing plan page, the titles of each plan are a bit hard to read as they are black on a dark blue background.

</comment><comment><USER27> I was discussing building an internal payment management system over lunch today. Do you have an API that we could use instead?

As others have said, kudos on the design.

</comment><comment><USER28> You should really consider free membership with less features.

<comment><USER6> We actually do have a free plan. If you look on the plans page, it's in the blue bar "Or, sign up for our free personal plan".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am curious what program you created the screencast in?

<comment><USER6> We used a really great app called ScreenFlow for the Mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great concept, great design, great execution.

How much is "ballpark.com"?

</comment><comment><USER31> None of the buttons or links worked on my iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER32> wow it's great! It seems also to have many features.

But I don't have much work online to go for it :)

\-- Not accepting PayPal is a bad point --</comment>


Show HN: I made a 7 minute workout iOS port - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zodester/sevmin

<comment><USER2> i had this very idea the other day, nice to see someone beat me to it.

Forked, I'd love to help. Noticed a few minor bugs... for instance, it skips jumping jacks at the beginning. I like this , well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that one this morning when I went to use the app lol. I took note in the issues on github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> THanks man!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out!!</comment></comment>


SEO for expiring pages - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I have a q regarding SEO
I have a free classifieds websites, with categories/ads. Each ad is active for 30 days and then is marked as expired. How should I handle this better from SEO point of view?
1. Display the ad and put a message that this ad is expired? 2. Make a 301 redirect to category the ad belongs to 3. Make a 301 redirect to index page? 4. Other ideas? <comment><USER2> What volume of pages are we talking about?

At below-mass-scales, I would encourage you to keep the page content roughly similar to what it is, mark expired pages as expired, and maybe put a modal window with "This ad is expired. See related ads or post your own ad." or something on top of the old content, with an option for people to close that and see the archived content.

At mass scales (more than "thousands" of pages), I'd suggest either a) doing the above but also no-indexing those pages or b) 301 them to the category page. The rationale for this is that you don't want to get hit by Panda for having lots and lots of not-so-much-value pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I have thousands of pages. And I would want to remove them permanently as I don't want to give users non-value pages.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And any idea how to handle best duplicate content (since is a free classifieds website, these ads are across all internet)?</comment>


They want you to be a couch potato - <AUTHOR> http://audiosearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/they-want-you-to-be-couch-potato.html

<comment><USER2> Next time, please submit a link directly to the TED talk.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html)

The short blurb in that blog post violates the same principle that governs why you can't both submit a link and comment on it at the same time. Basically, the reason HN doesn't permit text and a link is so the submitter doesn't get to have his commentary privileged at the top, instead of being subjected to up voting and down voting by the community.

From the HN Guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

If that is your blog post, submit your link like so: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3490994>

... and then add your comment to the thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would suggest that your strict attention to the rules is rather at odds with your description of yourself as "Hyperthymic Iconoclastic". Perhaps this description is more apt: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_retentiveness>

<comment><USER2> [1] <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons></comment></comment></comment>


24in60.com: The last 24 hours in 60-second, unbiased news bites. - <AUTHOR> http://www.24in60.com/

<comment><USER2> The bias in (the non-opinion portions of) major papers like the NYT and WSJ is in what they choose to cover, their depth of coverage, their subtle manipulation of headlines to set the tone of their information, and so on. There is no such thing as selecting what news to report without inherently imbuing it with your bias as to what news is worth knowing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, once you say "unbiased" it already is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best version of this concept is The Week magazine in my opinion (see <http://theweek.com/>, though I the print version is really higher quality than the site). It includes all the major stories of the week with references and then covers all the columnists and editorials from both sides of the aisle and from around the world. For me, it is the perfect balance of brevity and comprehensiveness without feeling superficial.

AFAIK, it started in the UK and was "ported" to a US edition a few of years ago.

It is pretty easy to read in an hour or so and fills in all the gaps I missed from my sporadic news reading the previous week.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Much political fanfare was on display at a congressional Finance Committee".... That would be political bias sir, please either don't editorialize, don't publish, or don't claim unbiased.

</comment><comment><USER6> So rephrased, unsourced content edited anonymously? No thanks.

<comment><USER7> Looks like a blogger figured out the Google news alerts "email me" feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > unbiased

Ain't so such thing.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, you can't even decide _what_ to report without imposing some level of bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Definitely needs sources! I'd love to read more about the cases (and do the biasing myself).

</comment><comment><USER11> Could use some topic tags to cross-reference the material covered, so you can see a particular topic evolve over time.

Plus the site is just too anonymous. Perhaps that's on purpose, to underscore the 'unbiased' angle, but it's a little eerie not seeing any name on it.

</comment><comment><USER12> The feed isn't even full text.

<comment><USER13> For me, this fact was more disappointing than the citation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> aka thedailybeast without pictures.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, I too am interested in finding out the source of the material along with the claim of it being unbiased. I'm pretty sure that reporting news without bias is impossible.</comment>


The Fair Source License - <AUTHOR> http://Fair.io <comment><AUTHOR> > Any individual user can view, download, execute, and modify the code free of > charge. Up to a certain number of users from an organization can use the > code for free, too. After an organization hits that user limit, it will > start paying a licensing fee determined by the software publisher.</comment>


Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/epilepsy

<comment><USER2> What a horrible thing to do. If you know someone with epilepsy it would be worth spending the time to take them through how to disable gif and flash animations in their browser.

I had a quick look at found there are a few extensions related to this -- does anyone have any experience with them and/or recommendations?

It seems like the type of thing for which there should be an "enable on demand" plugin that requires the user to specifically ask the browser to animate anything on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow that article is old. Anyway... here is a video of the attack: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwwDutZgQrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwwDutZgQrQ)

<comment><USER4> To give context, this likely appeared today because it was mentioned yesterday in an essay by Kathy Sierra on specific types of real life damage that trolls do to other people. Other examples were doxxing and swatting.</comment></comment>


My Underground Warfare Wish List - <AUTHOR> https://mwi.usma.edu/underground-warfare-wish-list/ <comment><USER2> As a wish list and an idea-sparking exploration, this is quite interesting. I would add some sort of return-path and side-passage marking system, perhaps with paint or ink that is only visible in some combinations of illumination and goggles, that is more resistant to being cut or redirected than IR cord or rope.

Batteries and LED bulbs have come a long way in the last 30 years, and the community of civilian cavers would be a good source for suggestions about durable equipment. Ask people in Huntsville, AL - the home of an Army base, rocket scientists, karst topography, and the NSS <[https://caves.org>](https://caves.org>).

<comment><USER3> With AR you wouldn't even need a physical marking, the system could keep track of where everyone's been and show breadcrumbs in everyone else's display/goggles/whatever.

(Of course this assumes some kind of connectivity between the headsets of the various members of the fire team, which could itself be vulnerable in various ways. Painting the walls does have the virtue of simplicity, which counts for a lot in these scenarios.)

<comment><USER4> you'd need to measure against something, since you probably won't have GPS and dead reckoning probably work very long

<comment><USER5> Inertial guidance on a cellphone was written up last year. It's clearly a work in progress, but it's a good start. HN link to it is here [0].

I'd bet that if this continues (and I presume the military would want to ensure it continues if only for redundancy purposes), that we'll have accurate inertial guidance on our phones in a decade.

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19203494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19203494)

<comment><USER4> the thing about dead reckoning is that anything less then perfect tends to have degraded usefulness after a while unless supplemented with some outside data to reference again.

Now thing about a soldier underground who might be subjected to explosions nearby, shooting, being shot at, having to dive for cover and these are all things that are going to screw up any inertial guidance system which is why the suggestions of paint or something make a whole lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author talks about the importance of tunnel warfare.

About halfway between Dallas and Austin is Ft. Hood, the Army's largest base. After WWII, so only a few years after it had been set up in the first place, the Army dynamited a series of caves in the very sparse western section of the base to carve out a massive underground structure for nuclear weapons.

The Army doesn't use / maintain nuclear weapons anymore, but the bunker has been repurposed into a basically one-of-a-kind underground training environment. Units from all over the world train there. Pretty cool stuff.

[https://www.chron.com/news/houston- texas/texas/article/Littl...](https://www.chron.com/news/houston- texas/texas/article/Little-known-underground-Texas-nuclear-bunker-5252582.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like a lot of power reqs, and therefore a lot of AA/AAA batteries. For many of the more tech-forward piece of equip the Army produces, there is a heavy dependency on batteries to the tune of 10xAAA for ~2hrs of consistent use, for example. That sort of burn rate turns into massive, massive, MASSIVE battery requirements for even 24 hr operations. There simply is not enough ruck space.

That's all to say, these ideas sound great. But the odds that the Army has a combat-loaded Soldier + ruck try to carry whatever comes out of this before fielding it all to the force are rather low. Or, solve power source first.

<comment><USER8> What's a 'ruck'? The US term for a pack carried on your back?

They keep suggesting ideas like a single battery pack and a power distribution system integrated into your vest. But I think that'll end up very much like '14 competing standards... now 15 competing standards.' You already have systems needing AA, AAA, and CR123A. You can never balance how many you need as well so you're wasting and running out of AAA when you have tons of AA still left.

I also feel terrible when I get back from just a couple of days on the ground and have to recycle (no idea how they recycle them, let's be pessimistic and calling it really throwing away) a KG or more of batteries.

<comment><USER9> A rucksack is a backpack. The term has become more common in civilian use but was primarily from military use. According to Wikipedia it's from German, not sure how it entered the US/UK military lingo.

<comment><USER8> Ah - I had heard the term 'rucking' now I think about it.

> not sure how it entered the US/UK military lingo

'Ruck' is definitely not UK military lingo! Talking about a 'rucksack' sounds extremely civilian to my British ears.

The UK military term is 'bergen' or 'daysack' or something smaller.

<comment><USER9> Wikipedia claims UK military uses the term, I added that only from there. It's definitely common in US military lingo and the military-wannabes (see the many civilians or law enforcement who buy GoRuck rucksacks and attend Go Ruck events). I probably should've limited my comment to US-only, but went with what Wikipedia said and added it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I CANNOT believe this list does not include automapping via AR or other means.

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure one of the biggest needs. I did link to the DARPA project working on that now. I just didn't add it to my list because it is being worked on so aggressively.

<comment><USER11> Nearly everything on your list already exists and much is in limited use by the military already.

I think you missed the biggest item you missed is good hearing protection and sound suppression. In enclosed spaces all the normal issues with loud noises (i.e. guns and explosives) are massively magnified. In fact, it would be terrible to bring a dog much less a canary into this environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Several of these ideas could be combined into a remote controlled robot that can go in front of soldiers and around corners while keeping an eye in every direction. If it encounters an enemy combatant the operator could deploy some of the blinding light/sound nonlethals directly on the robot before the soldiers move in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Half of these seem poorly thought out, and this seems poorly written for someone of that position. For instance, #3 blinding lights, is easily mitigated by #2 non-ambient/thermal vision. #4, sound weapons are going to effect everyone in the tunnel, so offense is limited. #10 foam grenades, are less effective for concealment, and ineffective as cover, most outgas toxic and flamable vocs. Existing procedure of collapsing tunnel has neither downside and accomplished with existing, legacy, and improvised tech. I won't even touch on headlamps, and insisting on an _actual_ live canary.

<comment><USER14> > For instance, #3 blinding lights, is easily mitigated by #2 non- > ambient/thermal vision.

No, because you need to use your susceptible-to-blinding eyes to use the thermal-vision system. Also, of course, the fact that I have blinding & thermal-vision systems doesn't mean that my foe does.

> #4, sound weapons are going to effect everyone in the tunnel, so offense is > limited.

That's true in general of acoustic weapons. Presumably if they can be made directional above-ground they might be made directional below-ground — or they could be treated as acoustic 'grenades,' in that they are deployed prior to ingress.

> #10 foam grenades, are less effective for concealment, and ineffective as > cover, most outgas toxic and flamable vocs. Existing procedure of collapsing > tunnel has neither downside and accomplished with existing, legacy, and > improvised tech.

A small amount of slightly-carcinogenic gas beats getting shot. Sealing off a tunnel connected to the one I'm in seems far preferable to collapsing it and possibly my own. It also could make rescuing civilians who've taken shelter in the tunnel system more possible.

> I won't even touch on headlamps, and insisting on an actual live canary.

I'd trust an actual live animal a lot more than I would some lowest-bidder system.

<comment><USER15> Foam grenade would be small, how much foam could such a grenade conceivable deliver? Probably not enough to do anything.

<comment><USER16> To fill a door with foam you would need at least 20 liters of ABfoam liquid, not an impossible concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IR reflective rope / tag-line seems novel enough. Also seems like a ballistic foam "munition" could also likely work.

Some of these ideas are half-baked but interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER18> Tear gas and the like would likely work better as well without moving air to clear them.

<comment><USER19> I believe the use of tear gas in combat is prohibited under Geneva Conventions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Creating your own tunnels and safe spaces sounds like Minecraft. Maybe they should adapt Minecraft for training the mindset.

</comment><comment><USER21> Love to fantasize about even more war toys which will of course only be used to "spread democracy" etc etc and obviously will never make their way into the hands of racist domestic police forces to use on activists once they're on sale as military surplus. Very legal and very cool.

<comment><USER22> Well, I'm not sure why you're bringing up their legality. Are you talking about the Geneva Conventions? with respect to the blinding lights?

<comment><USER23> He is ironically quoting the POTUS: [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/very- legal-and-very-cool](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/very-legal-and-very-cool)

<comment><USER22> Well, please, don't do that, or assume bad faith, it's counter-guidelines.

On the actual topic at hand, even assuming this technology finds its way into the hands of police forces (racism or not), what's the use case? People hiding in sewers and drainage pipes? Natural cave systems? Underground mall networks in urban environments? The item with the most potential for invasion of privacy in the article is the ground-penetrating radar (when pointed sideways at houses), but that has already been around for a few years, and there is both literature and case law on police using radar in that capacity.

<comment><USER21> It'll be used to clear homeless out of underground / tight urban spaces just for starters</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: DNN – A decentralized news network, built on the blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://dnn.media <comment><USER2> > can never be hacked into

Please don't say things like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can point to instances where the Ethereum blockchain has been compromised, we will entertain the idea of altering the wording.

<comment><USER3> [https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the- dao/](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/the-dao/)

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/11/01/security-alert- solidity...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/11/01/security-alert-solidity- variables-can-overwritten-storage/)

You're assuming (1) perfection in the EVM and in your bytecode compiler (2) that mathematics protects you, when the real threat model is economic: The DAO fork happened because the whales were in danger of losing money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was waiting for someone to link the DAO here. Yes, I completely get faulty EVM code (Solidity code) and bad economic models can lead to forks and all kind of other issues. However, our claim that DNN "can't be hacked" relates solely to the immutability of the blockchain. There has yet to be any substantiated claims that the blockchain itself is faulty, at least enough to serve as the demise of Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. "Can't be hacked" in the context of DNN, means articles published cannot be modified. Secondly, since we are on the topic of the DAO, at the end of the day, the failure of DAO had more to do with horribly written smart contract code and less to do with the blockchain itself.

If you don't believe me, read it from Vitalik Buterin himself: [https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re- dao-...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao- vulnerability/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA - <AUTHOR> http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/11/23/0642238/Intel-Launches-Atom-CPU-With-Integrated-FPGA

<comment><USER2> This is quite interesting. I wonder how capable the platform will be. The article doesn't have many details, unfortunately.

Several years ago I was looking for a chip we could use in a set-top box design. We wanted low-power high-performance H.264 decoding. We talked to a very interesting company — Stretch Inc. (<http://stretchinc.com/>), they've been developing something similar for many years now. They basically have a CPU with a tightly-integrated FPGA within.

Problem is, the devil is in the details. While FPGAs can theoretically provide impressive acceleration, what ends up mattering is whether you can get them data to process fast enough, what the latencies are, what the interfaces are, and how much easily-accessible memory you have on the FPGA die. That's for the easier algorithms which are mostly CPU-bound.

For memory-bound algorithms what really matters is the DMA engine. That is something Intel never got right, which is why you see Texas Instruments DSPs in most embedded applications. If you want to have predictable high-throughput data processing, you need to be in control of your caches. That means a multichannel DMA engine that lets you schedule reads ahead of time and precisely control what is in your L1/L2 at any given time. The ubiquitous n-way set associative caches are great for general-purpose code, but end up being wildly unpredictable for DSP-type stuff.

Another factor with FPGAs is how quickly they can be reconfigured — how quickly can you switch the code inside? Can you use the FPGA for several parts of your data pipeline, or does the reconfiguration take so long that it becomes impractical to switch?

So, I will be very interested in what the details are — but for the moment color me skeptical. It took Stretch many years to get to a well-designed architecture and even that wasn't right for all purposes. And Intel isn't known for experience with DSPs, which really matters here.

Note I didn't even mention compiler support, OS support and how the FPGA is actually to be programmed. I consider those to be secondary to actual hardware performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Really_ nice. Some things are _much_ faster to do in hardware, and this makes it really easy.

That said, why not link to [http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches- fpga-equipp...](http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/11/22/intel-launches-fpga- equipped-atom/) instead of slashdot?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have, it was pre-caffeine manoeuvre; mea culpa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related/competing: Xilinx's "Extensible Processing Platform", a SoC with dual Cortex-A9 cores + various hard-IP peripherals + FPGA fabric ([http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing- platform...](http://www.xilinx.com/technology/roadmap/processing- platform.htm)).

I'm interested to see where these chips go.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm completely in love with FPGAs and the possibilities that they bring. But, they bring a number of problems with them.

Because the core designs used are generally protected as intellectual property, all of the problems commerce currently has in relation to IP protection, are duplicated in this area of hardware design.

It seems that in the new coming digital age, ideas really are the main currency - and at the moment I can't really understand how things are going to pan out economically. Our traditional economic models (with scarcity driving price upwards) don't seem to sit well with IP (where abundance is unlimited).

I can only imagine that these IP problems will become more complex as time goes by - even more new IP markets are going to be formed in the near future, as rapid-prototyping and 3D printing become more commonplace.

<comment><USER3> > even more new IP markets are going to be formed in the near future

Well, we'll have either that, or rampant piracy...

<comment><USER5> .. or (more optimistically) cultural and economic change that lets IP exchange hands freely without cost :)

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's what I said. ;-)

Seriously, though, if you're an American or citizen of a Western country, you should be careful what you wish for. The fact that the Western world still owns pretty much all IP is a huge economic advantage, as long as everyone honors it. And the so-called "knowledge economy" only works if knowledge can actually be said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does any one know the specs of the FPGA? How many LUTS/block rams?

I think its exciting that Intel has started to pay attention to FPGAs, and hopefully with mass production, this FPGA+CPU chip will be priced cheaply--- that may yet be the biggest contribution here.

<comment><USER7> I'm also curious as to how this will interact with system memory and IO. Not many details, but I can't help but be insanely excited -- this opens up so many possibilities in terms of crypto... not to mention the demoscene!

Edit: Just got the product brief. Some more info on the FPGA:

> Features transceiver speeds up to 3.125 Gbps, high-speed LVDS with SERDES at > up to 840 Mbps, support for DDR3, DDR2, DDR SDRAM, QDR II, and QDR II+ SRAM > memory interfacing, up to four general-purpose PLLs, 312 18 x 18 multipliers > and more than 60,000 logic elements and 350 user I/O pins. Each of the high- > speed transceiver channels have a clock data recovery (CDR) feature, and > support for multiple I/O standards such as 3.3-V LVTTL/3.3-V LVCMOS, single- > ended SSTL/HSTL and differential SSTL/HSTL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So this is how Intel is going to go after the embedded space without having to offer embeddable CPUs. ARM has done very well because people like cell phone manufacturers can take an ARM attach some specialized cellphone DSP logic, and put it in a cellphone as one space-saving package. Since Intel was never going to allow something like this it was a big factor holding them back, but with an FPGA that third parties can put their specialized cellphone or whatever stuff in Intel will be able to get into this game at only a minor disadvantage.

<comment><USER9> For high-volume, low-margin embedded applications (like cellphones) FPGAs are not cost-effective. They also don't offer the circuit density or the power- savings of custom chips.

<comment><USER10> I was going to say the same thing. The price is already too high. At $60-$100 I think it is already too pricey if they are aiming for the same embedded market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> space-monkey Altera (and probably others) has been shipping ARM + FPGA SoCs for years: <http://www.altera.com/products/devices/arm/arm-index.html>

Interestingly, Altera has basically end-of-lifed that approach in favor of their NIOS II soft CPU. Atom is definitely a bit higher end than NIOS.

</comment><comment><USER11> Would this also mean new C programming libraries for the FPGA?

<comment><USER12> I too am wondering about how the FPGA will be accessed from software. I can only assume that there's a built-in DMA interface, and that only one process can grab the FPGA at a time.

<comment><USER5> Why would it need to be accessed from software? There's probably a strong likelihood that hardware manufacturers will configure the FPGA in the factory, and the end-user will end up oblivious to the fact it's even there.

<comment><USER13> Thats the more likely scenario, but also the much less interesting one, since, at least for me, the possibility of runtime reconfigurable hardware is what makes me like this.

<comment><USER5> Working with FPGA's isn't the black-art that I thought it was.

<http://www.fpga4fun.com/> is a nice site with stuff that novices can have a go at creating.

There's also a sister site (<http://www.knjn.com/>) where you get hold of inexpensive FPGAs for tinkering with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope this also means that we might see programmable datapath processors in switches/routers in the near future! That would be way awesome.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can foresee SSL offloading, if it can pump through 10mbps of plain->SSL</comment>


I know the solution, but it's illegal - <AUTHOR> http://hackertourism.com/i-know-the-solution-but-its-illegal

<comment><USER2> The suggestion in the article (instant-financing for online purchases, like with auto-sales) will simply not work, for one reason: the majority of purchases are not capital investments (as for example a car or a home), and therefore quickly depreciate in value beyond the level at which a finance agency can recoup costs in a repossession.

Until you fix the problem of defaulting, finance will be an expensive proposition for unknown borrowers, too expensive for most non-asset purchases.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't credit cards have this same problem? It seems like most online purchases are already instant-financed through credit cards, though credit approval is done in advance. Credit cards are unsecured and the whole system is largely based on the probability of the cardholder defaulting given their payment history. I don't see how this is different.

<comment><USER2> Depends on your perspective. The vendor is covered by the credit card company, and gets paid, so doesn't need to know anything about the borrower.

The credit card company doesn't want the borrower to default, so they do a certain amount of checking before pre-approving the card to minimize that possibility across their customers (and charge a premium across the board to ensure they're covered even if some defaulters get through).

That's what I meant when I said "finance will be an expensive proposition for unknown borrowers"; they're not unknown (to the financer, i.e. the credit card company) if they have a credit card account.

<comment><USER3> Nobody extends credit to "unknown borrowers". That's exactly why credit scores exist, which map 1-to-1 with the probability that a borrower will default prior to some horizon. This is a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He says there's no US financing. Wrong. <https://www.billmelater.com>

<comment><USER5> Bill Me Later is owned by PayPal so it's not exactly poised to be a disruptor.

<comment><USER6> Well, it was poised to be a disrupter so PayPal bought it...

[http://profy.com/2008/10/06/ebay-acquires-bill-me-later- to-m...](http://profy.com/2008/10/06/ebay-acquires-bill-me-later-to-merge- with-paypal/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, we need another way for Americans to painlessly shop their way into ruin.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hey Pete - Alex from FinanceIt here (<http://www.financeit.ca>); thanks for the mention in your article! We actually do solve most of the problems you outlined in your article. Our current focus is on improving existing point of sale financing systems for retailers - however we've developed an API (<https://www.financeit.ca/api/v1/index.html>) so any developer can offer instant approval financing online. I would love to connect anyone whose interested with our API people. Message me at acommons at communitylend.com

</comment><comment><USER9> There is another fundamental reason industries would want to prevent this. Competition is an anathema to capitalists. And citing Uber is hilarious considering they are also disrupting the lives of not just the industry, but their very own drivers. It is no wonder their drivers are protesting at their headquarters.

Abuse is another way companies like Uber increase "competition".

So I wonder what kind of abuse instant financing would entail among strangers.

</comment><comment><USER10> "In exchange, they would agree to give up some percentage of their gross profit on the transaction."

Sounds just like a commission. If the problem is "marketplace founders are stumped when it comes to capturing any of that value for themselves", then the existing answers include commissions and referral fees. Setting up instant financing in order to have something to take a cut of may be a solution in search of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there other solutions to this "matchmaker" problem? I've been thinking about a start to match advertisers to local newsletters but I'm not sure what my business model would be?

</comment><comment><USER12> I am completely lost as to what this solves that credit cards don't already. Things like Bill-Me-Later are fairly niche products.

<comment><USER13> It might be useful to people with bad credit scores.

<comment><USER14> How would that work? How/why would you extend credit/financing to people with bad credit. BillMeLater is subject to credit approval.

This could be disastrous and a recipe for bankruptcy if not managed properly. My biggest concern with this software is what type of person is likely to finance a $100 purchase from NewEgg, certainly not someone with good credit I would hope. I only use BillMeLater because it's interest free so, however minimal, I get 6 months of interest I wouldn't have normally gotten if I had paid immediately. This doesn't sound like what the OP wants to do.

That said, I'd never NOT purchase because of a lack of BillMeLater or similar services so it's not like adding this feature would give you access to new customers.

What the OP proposes is basically a credit card company, it's not really disruptive. Neither was BillMeLater.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have only skimmed, but ripple.com might be highly relevant here.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple SQL Reporting Tools for Windows - <AUTHOR> This sounds lazy...but please bear with me – are there any simple reporting tools available that will run on Windows that can talk to SQL Server? Sounds easy, I should be spoilt for choice eh?
I'm a grizzled IT veteran – I know all about relational database design, implementation, covering indexes, query plans, query optimisation, window functions – you name it, I've likely done it.
I just want a simple lightweight reporting tool (emphasis on the simple) that I can enter a SQL query into, and the query will run against a live data source (comparatively tiny data volumes by modern standards), and the results can be displayed either as a table, or as a chart.
That's it – I would have expected this to be a solved problem by now; back when I was a young 'lad, there were products like Crystal Reports, COGNOS, and so on, that could do this easily, and indeed, that level of simplicity is all I'm looking for now. I'm running a small startup and simply want to grab some basic reports, live, from our database – exporting these to PDF etc would be nice, but not required, screen-only is fine.
I've wasted a complete day looking for simple reporting tools, but nobody seems to do them anymore. I don't want enterprise data connectors, embedded web servers, anything browser-based, scheduled reports, auto-emailing, pre-arranged sales-based conference calls, proprietary query languages, monthly subscriptions and so forth.
The closest I got today was linking tables from SQL Server into MS Access on O365, which almost did what I want, but adding new tables, and refreshing column lists is a frustrating pain. I tried Excel via "Get Data" – but it's not really "for" this, and I don't want to keep having to refresh data.
I feel like I want nano, but everyone only sells emacs :-)   Many thanks in advance for any suggestions you can make. <comment><USER2> Some more options for creating reports could be PowerBI ([https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=584...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=58494)) or Tableau ([https://www.tableau.com](https://www.tableau.com))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment - I tried PowerBI but it seems to want to use its own language; I've noticed it has a DirectQuery mode, but from what I've read, that disables a lot of functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SQL Server Reporting Services (It is free but big)? MS Access Pass Trough Querys + Reports? Power BI Desktop in DirectQuery mode? Jupyter Notebooks?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thansk for your suggestions. I've used SSRS in the past, and yes, it'll do what I want, but it's browser based and isn't a simple lightweight PC-based product.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple API for validating bank routing numbers - <AUTHOR> http://bankdata.io

<comment><USER2> Is this legal? The fed provides this data for free ([http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/download.cfm](http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/download.cfm)) and also says, "The information contained in the directory may not be sold, relicensed, or otherwise used for commercial gain." Am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> I am also interested about this. I hope someone with enough legal background chimes in here.

Could the company claim that they are providing a service of programmatic access to that data? I mean there is added value here, so I don't see anything particularly wrong here, ethically speaking.

<comment><USER4> Well if they're charging for the service which uses data which says "The information contained in the directory may not be sold, relicensed, or otherwise used for commercial gain", it's hard to argue that they're NOT doing just that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Incorrect account numbers will be much more of a problem than ABA numbers, as there is no way to validate them and they vary from 5 digits to 16ish. Treat the account number like a password and have the payee enter it twice.

As far as bankdata.io I suggest if you want to keep your site, make it free. Accuity (owned by Fed) is the only entity that is authorized to sell the data (ask me how I know).

The routing number data is published daily @ [http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/download.cfm](http://www.fededirectory.frb.org/download.cfm) . Be sure to use the "FedACH Participant RDFIs with commercial receipt volume" link. The first link is FedWire, that's not ACH routing numbers.

The list contains previous ABA numbers in case the billed parties bank changes their ABA (this happened to me last year when my bank changed it name). It can be very useful for recurring billing scenarios .

Also, you can catch most ABA issues with a MOD10 LUHN check, rather than a DB lookup.

My last word of advice... Checks can bounce for 30+ days after the transaction. Be prepared to handle this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I've worked with Accuity before. They've very proud of their data, and charge an arm and a leg for it. We work with a group that maintains this data independently of the published fed directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this MVP? I find it odd that people would pay for access to an API which is just a front for a flat file.. Why not throw it in a local DB and call it directly? Are you adding more features or something?

</comment><comment><USER6> This works too, don't need an API for that: [https://gist.github.com/utkarsh2012/7b49dc06462007752d30](https://gist.github.com/utkarsh2012/7b49dc06462007752d30)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting startup. However I am a bit worried because their site does not have an SSL certificate. Also there really is no about us on their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site DOES have an SSL cert ([https://bankdata.io](https://bankdata.io)). It doesn't force you over to https until you're on a page that actually requires it (signup, login, the API).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got 'This site is currently not available...' when accessing the site.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a visual roadmap for software projects? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm a consultant working with a non-technical client. I'd like to show to them a visualization of what it takes to create a moderately complex web application, so they have a better understanding of the scope ahead.<p>A roadmap like this one: https://roadmap.sh/frontend (designed to show what it takes to become a front-end developer) but for more general software projects would be great! Any ideas if there's something online already for this? <comment><USER2> UML process diagram?</comment>