HN user
Lawyer for Founders
www.khanna.law
One political party created the free IRS Direct File program, a popular new technology that allowed anyone to file their taxes directly with the IRS. The other political party dismantled IRS Direct File immediately upon taking power.
Imho, the fact that you can probably guess which party is which is some evidence that the cliche that both parties are the same isn't really true anymore.
I do this, more or less, for my small law firm. Employee and client information are stored in Recfiles and accessed with GNU Recutils. Adding or changing is a pull request, and all sorts of GitHub actions run. Works pretty well!
To please Trump, Instacart fired my pregnant wife Lisa in a cowardly and cruel way because she dared to run for office as a Democrat. Instacart's leadership will try to obfuscate what happened, but Lisa has the truth on her side. I am so proud of her for fighting back.
a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
I get it, your perspective is totally fair. Part of the reason Democrats care only about donors (the Israel lobby is one of those donors) is because of the influence of money in politics, which is a direct result of Citizens United. If they don't care about their donors, they lose. The incentives are pretty straightforward.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
Isn't it a property of infinity? If pi goes on infinitely without repeating itself, every possible combination of numbers appears somewhere in pi.
It's sort of like the idea that if the universe is infinitely big and mass and energy are randomly distributed throughout the universe, then an exact copy of you on an exact copy of Earth is out there somewhere.
This property of infinity has always fascinated me, so I'm very curious for where the logical fallacy might be.
This is a really hard problem, and kudos to you for trying to tackle it. Time tracking narratives can be so different from practice area to practice area and also as a function of the size of the firm.
Often, it also comes down to the idiosyncrasies of the client and their org structure! I wonder if part of the solution will include using the actual invoices sent to a client to train how future invoices to that client should be prepared.
Good luck to you!
I've spent a lot of time looking into this for non-profits I am involved in. Currently, I use Mailgun's Mailing List feature which is pretty good, but has a few warts and doesn't really seem to be in active development.
But I have half a mind to develop a Django-based system specifically for non-profit member management, build a postgres view on top of the Django tables and and have a postfix mail server reference that postgres view for mailing list delivery. I would use Mailgun or another SMTP relay to minimize deliverability issues.
Me! I started my solo, startup law practice almost by accident via a Hacker News comment years ago. It's now my primary source of income.
It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.
I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!
I needed this for expensing receipts that come via email. I created an API for it where you POST the email to an endpoint and get back a PDF.
Email me and I’ll give you access for free.
My law practice [0] started as a side project from an errant Hacker News comment years ago, and now it’s my primary source of income.
At the time I was an in house lawyer, and then a software engineer, and things just kind of snowballed from there.
Notes: A notes git repo that contains mostly Markdown files, which I write via Obsidian.md.
Action items: Github issues on that notes repo. I wrote some custom code that lets me snooze actions via Github labels and sets up certain tasks to appear automatically on a recurring schedule (e.g., replace the air filter in my house every 90 days).
This works really well for me, but sadly it is bad for collaborating on projects with less technical folks such as my wife.
In most states in the United States, if someone dies without a will and without anyone ascertainable in the line of intestate succession, the assets of the decedent escheat to the state.
So, if the person lived in California when they passed, California would own the intellectual property associated with the voice. Why or whether the State of California would ever enforce or even seek to perfect those rights is a different matter.
This would be a sea change in Virginia politics, which are dominated by Dominion Energy, the local regulated utility.
I've always felt it that it was wrong for a regulated utility to have so much influence in the Commonwealth. If I'm reading the article correctly, at least now their profits will reduce to the extent they are directly lobbying or donating, providing some counterpressure on their outsized influence.
None of this is legal advice, but I'm a student of negotiable instruments like checks and the history they have in our system of law and finance.
Checks are negotiable instruments governed by UCC Article 3, which has been adopted in all or nearly all states in the US. The drawer of a check, in this case Paypal, is normally liable for when an impostor presents the check or when their employees forge indorsements in the name of the payee. The thinking is that the drawer is best positioned to protect against that kind of fraud.
Depending on your state, you can probably take them to small claims court over this on the theory of a fraudulently indorsed instrument. You might also have a claim for breach of contract for failure to return the balance on the account, although you'd need to show how their failure to give you your money breaches a contract or statute, and that might be hard to do without a lawyer. The claim for fraudulent indorsement of the check is probably cleaner and less fact intensive.
Small claims is really accessible to non-lawyers, and PayPal probably won't even show up. You could get a default judgment and then, if you really wanted to, execute that judgment against their bank, which you can probably see from the copy of the cancelled check.
Again, none of this is legal advice! It's going to be time consuming and maybe not worth $270 but if you have the time and will, I'd say go for it.
Is it democratic to tell these women that they’re wrong, and to impose a scheme of gender balancing that overrides their individual voting preferences?
No, and I would not presume to do so. I am only expressing my view that, over time, these preferences would counterbalance each other in a way that results in a distribution in our institutions that broadly reflects the demographics of society.
You mom has a preference for male elected officials. But maybe my dad has a preference for female elected officials. My comment isn't intended to reflect negatively or positively on any of that, I hope you see. It's only a theory about population-level preferences as applied to our public institutions.
I'm not suggesting anything normative, just describing what an equitable society might look like and why an all-black Senate for some period would not be unrepresentative when representation is aggregated over years and not just seats or states.
[W]hy isn’t it appropriate for a white majority district to prefer a white person to represent them?
I am not saying anything is not appropriate. I think my main point didn't get through.
The core of what I'm saying is that when looking at representation in a public institution, it's useful to take into account the history of that institution and how it has been constituted _over time_ rather than just in the present.
I've long felt that our public institutions should roughly reflect the racial and gender makeup of the country. But sometimes I think about what it would mean if we had, say, all the members of a public institution like the Senate be black or women or another historically underrepresented community.
Looked at in a snapshot in time, it would be unrepresentative. After all, there are plenty of men and plenty of white people in this country. But are we trying to make the number of seats in an institution representative? Or are we trying to make the number of seat-years representative, i.e., integrate over the dimension of time as well as seats.
When you consider the temporal dimension, even a fully black Senate or all-woman Senate would be still fall far short of offering those demographics fair representation when optimizing for seat-years. It would take at least 50 years or so of domination by those demographics before things start to even out.
Personally, I find this framing helpful when considering what it means for public institutions to be representative, and why I am supportive of efforts to make it more so.
One of the tough things about a party-controlled, self-hosted e-signature is that it becomes easier to repudiate because a party to the contract has custody of the platform.
The non-custodial party can claim they never signed, and when the custodial party produces evidence of IP address and timestamp, the non-custodial party may have a credible argument that they are faked and the person asserting those authenticated details has the motive and means to fake them.
That argument is much harder to assert with something like DocuSign because it is unlikely DocuSign would put their business on the line to fake someone's signature.
I'm not saying repudiation based on custody of the e-signature platform is a winning argument, but it's something to consider before self-hosting if you are going to use the platform to sign your own contracts.
I've drafted many severance clauses in my career to avoid the common law default of "the contract stands or falls together." They are put there by lawyers, usually for good reason when you have two represented parties negotiating at arms length. I am not suggesting doing away with that.
But when terms are imposed on someone who is never represented by counsel when accepting them, I cannot see even a theoretical reason to not void them, especially when another part of the contract is struck down for unconscionability.
I stand behind my proposal, but I'll re-frame it: severance clauses should be unenforceable against an unrepresented party when any part of the contract was struck down on the grounds of unconscionability.
This policy, which I promise I have considered in some detail over the last decade, would go a long way to making contracts between parties of uneven bargaining power more fair overall.
I think a good middle ground solution would be to prohibit “severance” clauses as a matter of public policy in Terms of Service.
Severance clauses say that if any part of the terms are struck down for any reason, the rest of the agreement stays in effect.
By banning severance clauses, companies would be forced to provide reasonable terms. Because if they put anything unconscionable anywhere in the agreement, the entire agreement will be struck down on the grounds of unconscionability.
Three things!
1. Computer programming, although I was very young. I learned by checking out a book on BASIC from my public library in the '90s. Thankfully, my parents noticed and sent me to computer camp after that.
2. Parliamentary procedure. I learned through active participation in student government when I was in college. There really is no other way to learn it well without being a part of an assembly that uses (and often misuses) it.
3. More recently, accounting, bookkeeping, and basic federal income taxation to support my parents' small business. I learned through books I purchased. One was called "Bookkeeping made easy" and another was something like "Accounting in 100 pages or less". Tax I learned through this book published under the name JK Lasser that goes into detail on taxation. I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read the JK Lasser book to escape from my graduate school studies... which should tell you something about how much I enjoyed grad school.
I haven't published anything in a couple years, but I plan for that to change!
That's true, and PHP certainly has ease of deployment over Django. I generally deploy Django applications on services like Heroku or Render, but it can get expensive since you can't really re-use instances for multiple applications like you could with a VPS and multiple PHP applications.
But, at least to me, ease of deployment is less of a concern once it's going. And since I stick to one hosting provider and only have a handful of applications I maintain, its not something that crosses my mind until I spin up a new Django application which happens only rarely.
I use htmx, and I have a good amount of experience in the JS world. The main issue with JS frameworks like React is that it's painful to integrate into things like Django-rendered templates. It can definitely be done, but the tooling just isn't there yet, although it's way ahead of where it was even 5 years ago.
You can go the SPA route and use something like Django Rest Framework with React, but then you need to build API endpoints for basic plumbing like authentication that often doesn't warrant an API. And you lose the use of a lot of the batteries-included features of frameworks like Django.
If there were an ergonomic way to integrate React components into specific areas of the DOM tree rendered by Django templates and a sensible way to pass information into props from Django, I'd love to use a mature framework like React over things like htmx.
I read The Messy Middle and thought like the chapter titles were phenomenal, but felt everything in the actual chapters was fluff. Maybe I'll give it another try!
I was obviously very wrong. I've never had an HN comment age so poorly, so fast.
Personally, I don't think there's a real problem unless everyone panics.
Banks are well-regulated and stable and have been for decades. That said, my investors & cofounder have both expressed gratitude that our startup banks with Mercury and not SVB.
I'm seeing 500s when accessing any repo while logged in.
I do this. Reach out to me at the email in the profile. My normal rate is $495 an hour, and I wouldn’t expect this to take more than an hour or two.