Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers - <AUTHOR> https://www.hellobonsai.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, one of the Bonsai co-founders here.

We're former freelancers who realized there's way more to freelancing than good design, development, photography etc.

Freelancing is a business and many freelancers lack the interest / skills to create effective contracts, manage cash flow properly, etc.

Our first two products are contracts & payments. We had a Stanford lawyer who writes novels on the side draft solid, plain English contract templates. We built a simple, helpful mad-libs style workflow to create the contracts. And finally, we have invoices that can be automatically generated and sent from those contracts.

Our initial users are getting paid about two weeks faster than they were before Bonsai.

Would love to hear what you guys think and answer any questions you have about Bonsai or the freelancing business in general.

Edit: Also, in TC: [http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/bonsai-wants-to-be-the- free...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/bonsai-wants-to-be-the-freelancers- best-friend/)

<comment><USER2> This looks interesting for me, thanks for sharing!

Question: what is your end-of-life plan in the event of acquisition or business shut down?

<comment><USER3> It depends. When are you expecting to go out of business?

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just annoyed by what you're insinuating. Dude. This is not a life altering business proposition. If your business is torpedoed because you suddenly forgot how to cut and paste, you've got other problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The app itself looks really nice, but I'm unconvinced this will be useful in practice. The number of times our company has sent a contract and had it accepted without revisions is literally 0, and I see no way to customize the terms of the agreement beyond the pre-filled fields.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: if this is intended to be a tool for generating, signing, and managing contracts there must be more flexibility in actually drafting the contract language. If it's supposed to be a tool for invoicing clients, I see no way to actually invoice for contracts provided by a third-party.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a big release this week to add flexibility, but the contracts definitely aren't for everyone.

If you're a decent sized agency working with larger clients, it probably won't be flexible enough. We try to cover the 80/20 cases and provide some flexibility, but we need to maintain some standardization for the ease of creation, integration with invoices, etc.

<comment><USER5> I talked to your support team about this. The contract, as a base, is good, but there are some clients that just need to change the language or other fields that are NOT editable from your interface. And that's the only reason I'm not using Bonsai.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we definitely understand the need for more flexibility. In about 1 week there will be many more options to edit.

The big reason we didn't do that sooner is that we didn't want the average user to think they had to really get into the details and tweak it, because the template is made to just work well in most cases. But have definitely seen the need for more flexibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I'm reading the pricing copy correctly, the contracts themselves are free and invoicing service charges $1 per invoice.

Is it possible to be profitable (in a successful startup sense, not casual/bootstrapped/side project sense) at that low level? Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see a lot of room for revenue growth here. I'd figure that the average freelancer as a handful of contracts a year so you're looking at $10-20/year per customer.

I'm not saying the idea itself isn't good. Anybody that's freelanced or done corporate invoicing knows the annoyingness of " _We 'll pay you within 30 days of deciding to pay you_"[1]. Solving that problem would benefit a lot of freelancers. I just don't see this being a sustainable solution in the form that's being presented.

[1]: Quote is shamelessly stolen from a patio11 comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076590](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076590)

 _Edited to add link to quoted comment_

<comment><USER7> Remember that the main model of Silicon Valley is selling stories to VC's about how things will be profitable later or grow enough to be acquired on potential/userbase. They're not usually that concerned with profits upfront.

However, a service that's easy to automate can be maintained at low costs while scaling easily. I'd probably still charge a small, montly or yearly fee for contracts with a free trial. Just to cover operating costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the concept, but what exactly about this makes it "13 days faster" or gives me "3x fewer late payments" ? Is this result just for non-enterprise contracts? People new to freelancing? I don't understand how you can make that claim, and it really rubs me the wrong way that you aren't clear about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm having trouble figuring out if this is a product that would benefit me. I'm a contractor / freelancer. When I take on a client, I receive a PSA with statement of work, and typically get paid on a Net 30 terms with Bill.com, mailed check, or direct deposit (however the client wants to pay me) managed with something like Quickbooks I'm guessing. The contracts are all very similar. Cash flow is definitely tricky because Net 30 is a pain. And invoicing is pretty easy. I use On The Job, create my pdf invoice, and send that to accounts payable on the first of the month.

      - Is this product for a certain type of contractor? Size client?
      - How does the flow work using your product?
      - Is my use outside of the norm of your typical customers?
      - What is different about your contracts that make them 'bulletproof'?

</comment><comment><USER10> If you support 2checkout I would be able to use it in Bolivia, and many other latinamerica developers will also be able too.

Hiring freelancer for most international clients is more appealing if they are from other countries than USA, Canada an UK, for several reasons: like price, diversity, time availability, work culture etc.

... I'm sensing that someone will say that hiring freelancers from USA(or the first world country of your choice) has more advantages. The fact is that most of the long lasting freelance market is outside USA

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, definitely looking to expand international support for contracts and especially payments. That's one of our largest themes in feature requests right now.

Thanks for mentioning 2checkout, hadn't heard of them before. We've been looking into [https://www.adyen.com](https://www.adyen.com) for international payments.

<comment><USER10> Good thing about 2checkout is that it has already permeate the freelance culture, at least in south america.

Sadly I can't even use Bitcoins safely in Bolivia as it's legally baned here

Most south americans freelancers use either: Payoneer, Skrill, Wire Transfers, or 2checkout. Though 2checkout is more popular for ecommerce and small/medium startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like this idea, and would probably use it. I only seem to be able to select "United States" (and subsequently choose a state) in the contract, though. Are there any plans to open it up to other countries? I see you can already choose GBP as a payment currency, for example, but not choose the UK as my location.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do support US, UK, Canada, and Australia for contracts. About 20% of our users are Brits.

On step 1 of the contract creation process, what happens when you click 'United States'? Also, what browser are you using?

<comment><USER11> Oops, thanks. I must've missed that when I created my example contract so it got left as the United States, and then I couldn't change anything in the contract except the state.

I just created a new example contract using the United Kingdom in the first step, and all seems fine. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome, I'm looking into becoming a freelancer next year and will definitely try bonsai. Thanks and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Lots of our users are new freelancers or are making the transition from part to full time freelance.

We try to put together resources for them specifically, like a tool to visualize what they should charge: [https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates](https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates)

<comment><USER13> are those rates based off contracts in Bonsai?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, sample size of a few thousand signed contracts

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks really good, thanks for sharing.

Created a sample contract, nice and easy.

Are the contracts the same for US and UK? I've only created a sample UK one, but notice that you use the US spelling for 'license' as opposed to 'licence'.

Is there an option to export archived contracts?

Anyways, I'll likely be using this. Good luck with it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Siiiick!

Any chance you'll handle tax remittances? Contractor taxes (esp) in Canada are kind of a quagmire.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet but it's been very heavily requested. Definitely looking into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Have you built NDA, I Assignment, etc into these contracts?

Lots of people use Upwork for contracting, but would still like to send a contract with the right legal wording that they can sign.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, the contracts include confidentiality and IP assignment.

We also see alot of users bringing projects to us from Upwork et al.

<comment><USER16> Could you talk about why I would choose you over using Upwork's default contract form? Or are you saying that people would move their project entirely to you?

Because there is valuable deterrence in using Upwork's rating system versus doing it myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just completed my first contract/charge via @bonsai, I'm in love to say the least. Makes creating a contract and getting clients setup for billing a snap

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems neat, commenting for later in case I decide to start taking up more freelance again.

</comment><comment><USER19> bulletproof + free = ?

what happens when the contract is contested? and what if you lose?

<comment><USER10> I was thinking the same then I look at their page footer.

> Bonsai is not a law firm, does not provide legal services or advice, and > does not provide or participate in legal representation.

So basically they are providing just the tool, you are still legally responsible and you have to represent yourself

<comment><USER20> so the product they assume zero responsibility is the headline for their company?

<comment><USER10> No, is on the footer

(obviously a bad pun joke)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The story barely reported by Indian media - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44280188 <comment><USER2> We'll get there - it's getting harder and harder to distinguish ads and stories. "Around the web" panels specialize in creating just this confusion.

</comment><comment><USER3> They made a mistake by releasing all the stings together. They should have released a few first so other players can pounce upon in a hurry to tweet. That would have atleast got the discussion started.

Infact "Economic Times" (part of Times Group, who's CEO was in the sting) did happen to write about it and later deleted it.</comment>


Doomsday Clock says it's almost the end of the world as we know it - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/24/world/doomsday-clock-2019/index.html <comment><USER2> Basically nuclear war and global warming will kill us all.

Because governments do too little to reduce carbon emissions to 0.

Well, That's nice.</comment>


Before you call an Uber or a Lyft, you'll want to know about 'Vomit Fraud' - <AUTHOR> https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/investigations/before-you-call-an-uber-or-a-lyft-youll-want-to-know-about-vomit-fraud <comment><USER2> Generally, I feel as though Uber and Lyft improved the taxi landscape most places; however, it's really easy to see degradation in service as they're trying to become profitable.

The other day I canceled a Lyft because the driver was taking too long. He came up and started screaming at us, swearing at us for canceling. I reported the issue to Lyft as a safety issue: they gave no indication they dealt with the driver: just a $5 coupon and an apology.

I recently wrote on here about the terribly unaccountable process of reporting cabs via TLC in New York. Uber and Lyft are quickly realizing that same level of unaccountability as they realize the reality of scaling such a business. I wonder within this frame whether the improvements to taxi service we've seen with Uber were just temporary: disappearing as they scale and become profitable.

<comment><USER3> How did the driver know where to find you after you cancelled, or what you looked like?

<comment><USER2> We were standing by the curb waiting for another car, he just continued to our location after I canceled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a similar experience with a rideshare service. My driver drove near me, but then pulled into a nearby neighborhood to pick me up. In retrospect, he was probably trying to get me to cancel the ride for the fee. After the ride, he claimed I damaged in internals of his door(?). They slapped me with a $100 charge and refused to dispute it. It took a lot of escalation with Lyft in order to get the $100 charge refunded. The experience has definitely made me more weary of using rideshare services.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is totally unsurprising given an uber driver in manhattan told me he does a clean up charge at the end of every shift, because... he basically feels like with "pool", it's victimless.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is just fearmongering, seeing as these occurrences are pretty rare.

In fact, Uber is aware of the fee being potentially unfair / a scam so they already expect you to contest it.

The last sentence of [https://help.uber.com/riders/article/i-was-charged-a- cleanin...](https://help.uber.com/riders/article/i-was-charged-a-cleaning- fee?nodeId=bac13fdc-f4a3-4780-9955-4f32f076a81a) reads

"If you were charged a cleaning fee you feel is inaccurate or unfair, please let us know here."

The title of this article is very sensationalized. What does the author want? Removing the driver's ability to charge for cleanup fees is not reasonable. Sounds like letting them charge but allowing the rider to contest it is the right compromise. Perhaps asking drivers to upload a photo evidence of the incident would be a nice extra, but it's not like we're going to stop using ridesharing apps because this weird edge case might potentially hypothetically happen to us one day

<comment><USER7> Good luck disputing such a thing, having been a victim of the scam it is _really_ difficult. On the flip side, with my short stint as a driver for Lyft (6 months ish) you wouldn't believe the attitude that a lot of drivers have, and this is a common thing around my parts (Broward, FL). Drivers literally brag to each other about it, it's kind of sickening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess it's not surprising that at some point less ethical drivers would start to do this. (And of course the rideshare services very poor rates for their drivers probably pushes more people to behave unethically to make working for Uber, Lyft, etc. more economically sustainable for them).

I guess the logical response is for Uber & Lyft to lean towards believing the customer in these situations, not the driver. Which is going to understandably anger a bunch of drivers who are left holding the bag when passengers legitimately make a mess of their vehicles. And the logical response to _that_ is for all these drivers to get cameras in their cars filming the interiors so they can prove it. I guess outward facing dash cams are already pretty common in areas where accident fraud is common, so maybe that's (unfortunately) the likely end-state here.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've made it a point to ask my drivers (usually Lyft) in every ride, "How's driving going?" and "Been driving for long?"

As a result, I've heard drivers lament about actual vomit and other weird problems. From my (much) experience as a rider, all of the vomit stories have been very legit sounding. (Of course, if there were fraud they probably wouldn't mention it)

Surprisingly, one of the things mentioned most often is passengers still trying to _drink_ in the car. Like they will open new containers discreetly or conspicuously, at times even against warnings from the driver.

In one story, they charged the passenger for cleaning not because they threw up, but instead because the opened beer cases they brought in to the car had leaking beer cans so now the whole car smells like beer.

</comment><comment><USER10> I always wanted to drive a Honda Element for Uber... one with hydraulics... pick up people from the bars, and "expedite" their vomiting. The element is designed to be hosed out, so 5 min of cleaning, and you're back on the road.

</comment><comment><USER11> Had more trouble with their food delivery service where the driver marks the food as delivered when its not.</comment>


How do you sue / torpedo your ex-employer's IP after you have left a startup? - <AUTHOR> I am responsible for an important SKU for my ex-employer.
I had the original idea, made the demo. My employer filed the patent, did NOT include my name as inventor and then made moves to fire me by giving me an impossibly tough project.
By achieving this tough project, I made another piece of IP for my firm.
My ex-firm is
1. Filing patents by reading emails of the engineers.
2. None of the engineers are aware that the firm is filing for IP. let alone inventorship or equity. 3. Firm is also making grounds for ex-employee litigation - i.e they will sue their employees if any of them starts a firm doing the same thing as them.
4. CEO is also making recordings of employees, taking legal admissions on WhatsApp and surreptitiously making old employees sign new employment contracts.
Having done them so much of a favour , now I am doing another favour to them by keeping quiet about the bullshit that I have detected as happening in the firm.
Most of the employees and engineers are long standing and have made large contributions.
I don't want any payout / equity - but I am pissed off enough to torpedo / oppose their patents which are not granted yet.
N.B: The CEO is related to me - :) <comment><USER4> Most employment contracts state that what you make during work time belongs to them. Read what you signed then get a lawyer.

Any retribution will be illegal and may find yourself in hot water.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was on a consultant contract as a manager. Retribution - no - <USER2> obtaining a patent.

[https://www.bananaip.com/ip-news-center/patent-opposition- sy...](https://www.bananaip.com/ip-news-center/patent-opposition-system-in- india-pre-grant-post-grant-oppositions/)

Pre-grant opposition can be made on the grounds listed under section 25(1) (a) to (k) of the Patent Amendment Act, 2005:

        Wrongfully obtaining the invention
        anticipation by prior publication
        anticipation by prior date, Prior claiming in India
        Prior public knowledge or public use in India
        Obviousness and lack of inventive step
        non patentable subject matter
        insufficiency of description of the invention
        non-disclosure of information as per the requirement or providing materially false information by an applicant
        Patent application not filed within 12 months of filing the first application in a convention country
        nondisclosure/ wrong mention of source of biological material
        Invention anticipated with regard to traditional knowledge of any community, anywhere in the world.

<comment><USER4> Then you need to look over your contract. Often contractors also have no IP rights. You do have a copy of the contract you signed right? What does it say?

Also taking the law into your own hands is not good advice no matter how aggrieved you feel. Seek actual legal advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did they promised you something and didn't deliver?

OR

You think you deserve to get something from someone else and didn't get what you wanted?

These are two different things. If it is latter - move on and succeed elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Latter.

<comment><USER6> Well you got paid for your 8 hours, didn't you? There, welcome to being an employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Publish an anonymous blog detailing everything and then send the details out to all the news sources you can find?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can oppose the patent at the patent office and document all the bullshit in the filing. Then anyone who looks at the IP will also see the bullshit involved in the process and walk away from the IP

<comment><AUTHOR> This dude that runs the firm is my uncle too. Documenting the Bullshit has the following implications - 1\. The rest of the employees know what the fuck is going on 2\. The investors knowing what is going on 3\. The patent office seeing what the hell is going on and fucking up all their IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Before anything else: lawyer up

</comment><comment><USER9> What about competitors ? If this is important enough for a patent filing, there may be competitors to your ex-firm interested in your skills and expertise. Have you considered that angle ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can create a firm of my own to do the same work. But I feel I can funded better in the field of Lithium Ion batteries, so I think I should probably file IP of my old patents, and then sell them Or, I should sue my older firm for equity / money / IP and then put the winnings in my new firm.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Country - <USER3>

<comment><USER10> good luck. your forgetting companies can destroy you.

If you have one great idea, you'll generate more.. keep moving on. Or you'll spend 1000's to get nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> They can do ex-employee litigation which means that they can sue me for doing the same thing outside of the place of work.</comment></comment></comment>


The Epic Fail of the Tech Elites - <AUTHOR> http://bryanappleyard.com/the-epic-fail-of-the-tech-elites/ <comment><USER2> "internet began as a collective enterprise, entirely created by public money — the defence establishment in America and assorted individual"

My three years as a soldier in the US Army taught me that the U.S. defense establishment is more like Ayn Rand - right-wing, brutally elitist, and certainly not friendly to altruism - than the commenter would have us believe.

So maybe the Internet's founding assumption - as a decentralized communications system - isn't so out of step with what Google and others have done, or contemplate doing, with it.

<comment><USER3> What are all those soldiers risking their lives for?

A few considerations:

1) The Internet's first phase was funded with other people's money, fellow American citizens.

2) Later phases were in large part built by people who wanted to benefit society; they gave away their work for free, and facilitated future innovators by making it open source. How much of the tech industry's fortunes are built on those foundations? Think through all the technology stacks.

3) Much of the society, civilization and economy on which their business dreams depend is the work of people who strove to improve our world without seeking payment for it. The laws, the norms, the schools that educate their employees, the economy that provides paying customers, the roads, the Golden Gate Bridge, the parks, the security, the liberty, the science, the philosophy, the political leaders, the healthcare, the stability, etc. etc.

Anyone who says they are self-made and therefore owes nothing to others or to society is either not very smart or not thinking (or insincere).

EDIT: Added first line, a more direct response

<comment><USER2> Good points. I will do my best to answer. Generally, almost everyone involved in your points was compensated to do something, even if it wasn't the work that became the Internet stack, or if compensation was not their primary goal.

My point was actually rather minor - that the military does not function as a top-to-bottom altruistic organization. You went meta and made some good points about society in general. Please indulge my meta trip because I think it might illustrate why Google et al have the "successionist" impulses of which they have been accused.

A principle of justice we seem to accept nowadays without too much question is that one shouldn't have to be bound to an accident of birth - e.g. Racial discrimation. Then why should someone be bound to the accident of being born American? A plausible argument there is that the success of something such as Google might be impossible for a non-American company.

Neither argument seems eminently provable, but maybe more important questions might be whether one can choose to whom one might share the fruits of one's labors and how much one should share.

For example, the Christian Church had a nominal demand of 10%. Certainly that was a lower limit but at least it was publicly known. Modern society doesn't seem to care for such clarity - as best I can determine, the cut seems to be "as much as we want", which is probably a harsh interpretation, given the complexities of our political and fiscal systems.

A way to rephrase the who question is - "assuming I have to share my fruits with others, why must it be with the country of my birth? Why can't I pick someone else? Why can't I pick myself?" This isn't an argument from left field, it's not too far from the position of the USA c. 1776, though the Declaration seemed to dwell on the injustices of the British Empire more than on the right to choose one's master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot of ranting, but very little substance. Save yourself the trouble from reading it.

It reminds me a bit of an anti-Atlas Shrugged

</comment><comment><USER5> The author is swimming upstream.

I fully expect there to be an "Dutch East India company" 2.0 by 2050.

Economic producers have always been political leaders, but they were always able to be restrained by the state. Now with a globalized economy there is nothing stopping a large enough company from hopping states - especially ones with less wealth than the company. There has not been a company as large as "Standard Oil" since true globalization has become the norm. Once there is, all bets are off.

Apple for example could easily purchase any number of defense contractors/arms manufacturers around the world and compete with basically any but the nuclear nation states in terms of defense - and probably handily beat all in the "cyber" domain.

Don't even get me started on when robotic ground forces become capable of holding territory (not speaking of AGI/AI).

<comment><USER6> I would argue that in the western world, especially the US, corporate power and the deep state are intertwined for their mutual benefit. Separation as radical as you describe is unlikely due to the force each exerts over the other.

In other words, no way would the US government let Apple play nation state or otherwise shift the bulk of its loyalty elsewhere.

That said, the notion of Elysium-style humanoid robots resolving modern regional conflicts on behalf of Apple is an appealing one. No longer would violent extremists have to suffer the indignity of being put down by conventional means. Instead, they would have the priviledge of being destroyed by the pinnacle of sleek, elegant industrial design.

As far as AGI, if done properly it may resolve such things peacefully. Sadly, that would mean no robotic Apple armies.

<comment><USER5> _I would argue that in the western world, especially the US, corporate power and the deep state are intertwined for their mutual benefit._

That's true until it isn't. qed

It also assumes the company is a U.S. company - implicit in my statement I concede - not necessarily the case.

I can see a situation in which the company and the USG have different interests, but the company has enough power that there is little the USG could do to it without massive loss in legitimacy.

For example, what if Exxon (403B cap) bought Lockheed Martin (64BN)? The USG can't do shit without either and together no government could take it on. That would be by far the largest company in the world and would have the resources to raise whatever kind of military it chose with the requisite manufacturing and logistics imbedded.

I don't see that particular chain of events, because it would probably not be in the long term interest of either but there is likely a scenario in which it makes sense.

<comment><USER6> > _For example, what if Exxon (403B cap) bought Lockheed Martin (64BN)? The > USG can 't do shit without either and together no government could take it > on._

A large percentage of Lockheed Martin employees hold high-level security clearances. This effectively cements their loyalty to USG and by extension the company's as well.

My point was that, barring some sort of stereotypical dystopian scenario where large conglomerates literally _are_ the state, governments will, at least in a foreign policy sense, continue to serve as a legitimate front for corporate interests, and a vessel through which corporate power is channeled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What exactly is the author's point? It just reads like a collection of gripes about tech companies. And besides that, I don't see any evidence that Google is building a "Bay View" stateless walled city.

<comment><USER8> I think he was talking about this: [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/11/google- hi...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/11/google-hits-pause- on-bayview.html?page=all)

Unsure of current status though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Also, unlike Silicon Valley, the Stasi was regulated."

<comment><USER2> By whom? One could argue they had the DDR's elite in their pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a review of what sounds like a hysterically paranoid book. Elon Musk plans to build a secessionist "clever colony" on Mars to escape the heavy hand of the government? 3-D printing will never happen because of the "Bond villains" who run the internet? Also, apparently hardly anyone in SV reads but if they do, it's Ayn Rand for sure.

How does stuff like this even get published? It's just loony.

<comment><USER10> People can publish whatever they want (with very few exceptions) on the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sour grapes. Could be titled "People with money decide how to spend it, and I'm sad to be left out"

<comment><USER12> _" People with money decide how to spend it..."_

Since when is it not valid to analyze how people with money spend it? History teaches us that we should look out for the moment when the powers that be in any social order stop investing in the social order and become mostly extractive.

The desire of elites to separate themselves from the masses is a general symptom of systemic failure. (Not that I'm against libertarianism -- I believe they are correct about being judged as individuals -- but if your answer is semantically equivalent to, "because no one's let libertarianism prevail yet," then I'm going to reply, "evidence?")

<comment><USER13> Oh come on now. You can't just cut a sentence in half then analyze just that part. Especially when the entire comment was only 2 sentences.

Not to mention that it is very much debatable if any actual analysis was performed for this article. Admittedly I bailed after the 4th or 5th paragraph of entirely unsubstantiated rambling, but I digress.

<comment><USER12> _You can 't just cut a sentence in half then analyze just that part._

No one's analyzing anything here, and no one needs to have for the purpose of my statement. The apparent assertion that I'm countering is that there's no point to "complaining" about how rich people spend their money: this is demonstrably false. There's a ton of examples both historically and in the current world. Whether or not there is any analysis in the comment, the op, or the book being referenced is peripheral to the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The internet is indeed not the answer, 42 is.</comment>


Ask HN: Best practices for keeping cloud server secure? (linux) - <AUTHOR>

I'm able to take a basic linux distro (stable Ubuntu Server) and install everything I need to get my web apps up and running. (Django, Rails, PHP etc...) But after all of that I would appreciate some advice on security.
Here is my current checklist: 1. Change the root password assigned to me 2. Add admin user so I don't have to log in as root 3. Change ssh port to something random I make up and require SSH Key 4. Set up iptables to block nearly everything except (80, my ssh port, and maybe a couple of others depending on requirements)
What now? How do I keep the server up to date? I really don't want to have to read the ubuntu-security-announce mailing list daily I just want to build web apps. <comment><USER2> Focus on your site/content and its security (SQL injection, XSS, secure password storage, spam prevention, etc).

There have been no remote-root sploits in Linux/ssh/apache in a long freaking time. If you get owned, it's probably due to your code, not some widely used open source component.

</comment><comment><USER3> > How do I keep the server up to date?

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade</comment>


Bitcoin: A flawed currency with a useful application for the Eurozone (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/02/15/bitcoin-a-flawed-currency-blueprint-with-a-potentially-useful-application-for-the-eurozone/ <comment><USER2> For those who don't know, the author is now Greece's Finance Minister.

<comment><USER3> And was previously employed to monitor the economy of EVE.

<comment><USER4> Yannis Varoufakis consulted Valve regarding micro-transactions, but had nothing to do with EVE online.

EVE Online's economist was Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson [https://twitter.com/ccp_dreyjog](https://twitter.com/ccp_dreyjog) and really did wonders with the economy, you should watch some of his presentations on the state of EVE online's economy. He was doing several pieces for their EVE FanFest.

<comment><USER3> I sot corrected, thank you. I will watch some of the presentations.

<comment><USER5> Since two hours have not yet passed, you could delete the original, mistaken, comment.

<comment><USER3> It would ruin the discussion though. And mistakes are fine if you learn from them a d I learned something here today.

I'm not afraid of making or admitting to my mistakes. I'm afraid of not learning from them.

<comment><USER5> Kudos; that's an admirable attitude. In cases like this specific one, in which the original comment contained exactly one false proposition, and the immediate contradicting reply is easy to understand on its own, I have decided (and have seen others also decide) to just delete it so that no one is confused. (Like possibly 'Havoc in the sibling comment.) If there were something wrong with deletion then HN wouldn't have it. YMMV!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I can't say with certainty whether mild and predictable deflation is bad for the economy, I don't think that these standard arguments that are used are sufficiently persuasive.

1) It is clear that a deflationary spiral, defined as possessing the characteristics of being unexpected, not written into contracts or loans, and relatively severe (double digits) while accelerating is bad. The great depression makes this clear. We can also see it in the current Greek situation. However, runaway inflation is equally bad, as we can see from post WW1 Germany, and modern day Venezuela and Argentina. Is it the fact that the change in the buying power of money is large and unexpected, or is it the sign of the inflation percentage that is bad?

2) Under the current debt based money system, the negative effects of inflation fall primarily on the poor. The wealthy purchase government bonds, which protect them inflation. They also have bank accounts, or finance debt either directly or indirectly. This means that instead of inflation falling on the populace evenly, it falls doubly on the poor.

3) Under a constant money supply system that eschews debt, the rich must seek out investment that actually increases productivity, rather than doing parasitic zero-sum investments (such as bond purchases and loan giving) that merely transfer value from one person to another. This would tend to grow the economy faster.

4) Under a constant money supply (like Bitcoin in a few years), wages and prices would tend fall by however much the economy was growing (2% - 3% a year), but the raises that people give out for seniority would tend to overwhelm the wage issues.

<comment><USER7> Great depression was caused not by deflation, but by previously unleashed inflation (as in "inflated money supply"). Collapse of the bubble is a logical consequence of any bubble. Alternative - ever-increasing inflation was experimented in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe and few other places. Hard money (Bitcoin or physical scarce collectibles) prevents people from inflating money supply, thus preventing global bubbles and thus preventing subsequent depressions.

Of course, local stock-specific bubbles can still exist, but they are always subject for arbitrage and voluntary exits. Global money bubble is more destructive because use of a certain money is enforced by laws and therefore people cannot easily exit or switch to alternative.

<comment><USER8> If deflation didn't cause unemployment and the great depression, why did the collapse of the bubble lead to unemployment and the great depression?

Hard money prevents the Fed from changing the inflation rate but it doesn't prevent random and severe changes in inflation and deflation.

From 2010 to 2013 bitcoin had a deflation rate of 96%. Which is insane any normal economy would turn Mad Max if it had that type of deflation. If I had received a loan for my house for 100k in 2010 I would have had to repay $1.5 BILLION in 2013.

Then from 2013 to 2014 it had an inflation rate 353%. If inflation leads to bubbles and we all used bitcoin this inflation would led to the mother of all bubbles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This proposal has nothing to do with Bitcoin, though. This FT-coin is a currency (parallel to the Euro) issued by a central authority, just as any other fiat currency.

This is completely different from Bitcoin, whose value arises from the cost of mining (hardware purchase, power, maintenance, and time spent), and people's willingness to exchange that for other currencies and/or goods.

<comment><USER10> _whose value arises from the cost of mining (hardware purchase, power, maintenance, and time spent)_

This is not true, and represents a fundamental misunderstanding.

The value of bitcoin arises _solely_ from the demand for it. The cost of mining is driven by the value of bitcoin, not the other way around - if demand for bitcoin were to collapse, the price would drop, and all rational miners whose current operating costs exceed the new price would stop mining. This would result in the next blocks being mined very slowly, and would eventually result in the mining difficulty dropping, bringing the cost of mining back into line with the market price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Along with, [http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the- dangero...](http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-dangerous- fantasy-of-apolitical-money/)

I'd ask him one question: how is the idea of regulated, political and centralized money working out for you?

<comment><USER12> > I'd ask him one question: how is the idea of regulated, political and > centralized money working out for you?

That's kind of a straw man, because the Euro is all of the burdens of a centralized fiat currency while lacking almost all of the benefits (or at least the ones most relevant to Greece's current situation).

Having a unified monetary policy among countries with incredibly fragmented and disparate fiscal policies is a recipe for disaster. Even in the US, fiscal policies are relatively unified at the federal level and states are prohibited from backing their own debt the way nation-states (like the US federal government and Eurozone countries) can.

And on that note, look at the USD. It's the strongest fiat currency in the world and the preferred medium of exchange worldwide, even despite all of the outstanding issues with the US economy and the state of the US national debt. Clearly a centralized, fiat currency can be powerful if you don't set it up for failure from day one (as the Euro was).

<comment><USER13> > even despite all of the outstanding issues with the US economy

There's a difference between a temporary setback and problems with the fundamentals. This is the case in the private sector and it is the case with sovereign entities, and the people who keep buying US Bonds obviously understand this.

> and the state of the US national debt.

Debt is only a problem if you can't service it. This is doubly true with sovereign debt, where servicing debt provides people a safe place to invest their money.

None of what I said is controversial among people who understand economies. The fact people whine and moan about the USA's debt is a function of how easy it is to score cheap political points by taking advantage of the ignorant.

<comment><USER12> > Debt is only a problem if you can't service it. This is doubly true with > sovereign debt, where servicing debt provides people a safe place to invest > their money.

> None of what I said is controversial among people who understand economies.

I have a degree in economics, so yes, I understand how sovereign debt works. The point is that even if the market never loses faith in the US's ability to pay back its existing debt, if it stops being the most trustworthy source of newly-issued debt, the US loses a great deal of power.

<comment><USER14> Interesting notion, the global bully with the big weapons owing you (a nation) a "debt". Which is made by you giving them your money in exchange for IOUs. And you keep rolling it over. Sounds more like tribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is actually nothing to do with Bitcoin - it's about using blockchain technology to issue what is effectively government debt in crypto-currency form - i.e. what Overstock have done.

<comment><USER16> But if it's government-issued, why not use a centralized server manage the ledger? Since the government is going to be capable of producing as much currency as it wants, at will, there's no reason to have a blockchain.

<comment><USER15> A blockchain could be a lot quicker and cheaper to set up and get running than a centralised system.

<comment><USER17> It's way easier to have a centralized system than decentralized one. Bitcoin in it' current form can handle around 7 transactions per seconds, and scaling it upwards is costly. 7 transcations per seconds is laughably small number. Your smartphone using LTE connection could serve 7 transcations per seconds as trusted centralized server.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure where you're getting the 7 TPS number. Satoshidice alone is responsible for more than that. It's trivial for anyone to send hundreds of transactions per second if you're willing to pay the miner fees.

<comment><USER17> "Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. "

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> He agrees that there are a lot of goods and services that are getting cheaper. But then he says that they only are getting cheaper because the buyer spends more time informing himself and not just because time passes by. This is wrong. There are widespread deflationary effects in current economies.

<comment><USER20> There are widespread deflationary effects in _some segments_ of current economies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This post is from February 2014 !

</comment><comment><USER22> Bitcoin is disinflationary, not deflationary currency.

<comment><USER23> What's the difference exactly?

<comment><USER18> Bitcoin are not destroyed except by accident, it's just that the creation of new bitcoins will eventually taper off to zero. Deflation will only occur if demand continues to rise, which is likely but not guaranteed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> as if greece was a-ok when it had the drachma. exposes the underlying problem that the greek economy in itself is pretty useless, hence all the drama right now is focused on financial shenanigans.

the EU expansion to the east broke greece's neck. a well educated, motivated workforce entered the EU, but smartly like Poland did not join the Euro. Amazing growth in Poland throughout the crisis of the last 7-8 years, catastrophe in Greece.

See comments from Lithuania's prime minister and others who are getting fed up with Greece.

Interestingely enough this fits Samuel P. Huntington's predictions of the Clash of Cultures. He had Greece as part of the orthodox area, separated from catholic/protestant Europe which spanned from UK to Poland. He got a lot of shit for his theories at the time, was quite prescient in hindsight.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yet another "deflation is bad hence bitcoin is bad" post, except due to the rate of mining Bitcoin has been highly inflationary if anything.

See this graph [http://i.imgur.com/vRsIMvt.png](http://i.imgur.com/vRsIMvt.png)

edit: Oh I see now who the author is :D well euros or bitcoins the way Greece is going inlation or deflation will be the least of their worries....

<comment><USER26> Inflation without specifier means rise in the price level. If you mean monetary inflation, call it monetary inflation.

Bitcoin is deflationary (as negative inflation) in the first sense and this is the deflation yanisv is talking about.

<comment><USER27> Bitcoin has not in fact been deflationary, according to the graph. Maybe it will be in the future.

<comment><USER28> You're confusing monetary deflation with price (value) deflation.

Yes, BTC is monetarily inflating, but

1) It's all baked in. We know exactly how much BTC is generated and will be generated and when it will stop.

2) The demand for BTC is growing, so we don't see the price collapsing exponentially.

<comment><USER29> The problem with bitcoin is inevitably the monetary base starts contracting irreversibly whenever coin generation is eclipsed by lost wallets.

It is actually a great place to store value, buy BTC, and over time there is just less BTC so BTC becomes more valuable.

Its not good for a daily currency to run an economy on. Something like dogecoin would do that better, albeit even doge is kinda doing it wrong because they just linearly increase the monetary base by 5 billion a year forever.

<comment><USER28> How is that a problem? Somebody loses his wallet, my money is worth a bit more. That's awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And now for something completely different: dracmacoin !! :O

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd be a little worried if my countries finance minister starts posting about bitcoin...

Nothing against BT...but sheesh.

</comment><comment><USER32> Should be marked (2014), Yanis Varoufakis is a little busy at the moment to be blogging about bitcoin.

<comment><USER33> Busy? Yes

Blogging? Yes

[http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/03/imf-backs-ever-so- pecul...](http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/03/imf-backs-ever-so-peculiarly- the-syriza-governments-debt-assessment/)

<comment><USER34> Damn good post too.

<comment><USER35> Throughout this whole mess, Varoufakis is one of the very few who bothers to talk about the specifics of what's being negotiated and what the consequences are.

From everyone else, it's mostly been a lot of childish accusations, vague threats, moralizing, and pointless rhetoric. To the extent that the vast majority of the German public, for example, don't have the slightest clue what the Greek government is even asking for.

<comment><USER36> S. Keen believes he dwarfs everybody in the EU/ECB/IMF: [http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/02/05/talking- about-...](http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/02/05/talking-about-yanis- on-the-bbc/)

After listening to statements and interviews by Lagarde, Dijsselbloom, Juncker, Draghi and Scheuble speaking, I don't think that's a compliment. It's easy very easy to dwarf them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Saying deflation is the cause of a bad economy is like saying a wet head causes rain.

Chain of causation is: money printing used to buy debt -> underpricing of debt risk -> unsustainable debt funded malinvestment -> debt collapse -> deflation as effective money supply shrinks

The irony is that they use fear of deflation to justify the very act that causes the malinvestment and debt collapse.

</comment><comment><USER38> Bitcoin has its biggest potential these days. E.g. [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/03/us-eurozone- greece...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/03/us-eurozone-greece- bitcoin-idUSKCN0PD1B420150703) However, Coinbase is not accessible for greeks. So, I would count it as huge lost opportunity.

<comment><USER3> To be fair it would not help Greeks now as they cannot access Euros with which to buy BTC. It would have helped them if they could have had access 3 weeks ago, before capital controls were enacted.

However I would be surprised if Spanish, Irish and Portuguese citizens are not looking at the Greek situation and wondering if they need to take some action. Coinbase, circle etc need to target these markets before they experience capital controls.

<comment> k-mcgrady Not sure about Spain and Portugal but I was under the impression Ireland was in the middle of a good recovery.

<comment><USER39> They still have a noticeable 109% debt-to-GDP ratio, which means quite a bit of debt to service. At crisis peak, their public spending was 66% of GDP (now 40%). At the first hint of recession, they will be in trouble.

You would be forgiven for thinking there are more troubled countries that could be targeted by speculation. Italy has a 130% debt-to-GDP ratio, is still basically in recession, and has 50% public spending to GDP. Spain is approaching 100% debt, 44% public spending, and it looks like it's getting worse. Then there is Portugal, Cyprus and so on. However, if Greece goes in full default, the Euro will likely get battered and all these positions will potentially unravel, including the Irish one.

<comment><USER40> > Spain is approaching 100% debt, 44% public spending, and it looks like it's > getting worse.

It is. Spain is scheduled to elect the local Syriza equivalent in November.

<comment><USER41> Morally bankrupt traditional parties and over 20% unemployment would do that to anybody.

Spain lacks a cultural framework that would make the population want market based reforms, as there is so little trust in institutions, employers and employees. Its labor market is not bad because it's impossible to find productive Spaniards, but because productivity, both at the employee and the firm level, is punished.

Podemos is coming, and it's not going to be good for the country. But the alternatives are pretty bleak. Fortunately for Spaniards, a Greece-like catastrophe in Spain would be the death knell of the Eurozone, so the troika will probably bend to Podemos demands, as far as spending goes, as long as some market reforms are done along with said spending. Spain's one way out of this mess is growth.

<comment><USER42> >Spain lacks a cultural framework that would make the population want market based reforms

I'm no expert on Spanish matters, but didn't they elect their current government, which advocated market based reforms, right in the middle of the crisis??</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Latest thinking in best type of Corp and what State? - <AUTHOR>

I've always heard if you're getting funding, then Delaware C corp is the way to go. If no funding and small, then LLC at a state level (IRS doesn't recognized LLC correct? So to them, its a sole proprietor). Best states laws/advantages seem to by Wyoming, Nevada, and Delaware - and from some reading in that order. Opinions/facts please? <comment><USER2> Here is a lively discussion tied to a post I had made about why Delaware is not necessarily the best state in which to incorporate your startup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674469>. If you follow the thread, you will see various contributions from HN members discussing the pros and cons of incorporating in various states. I'm sure much more can be added here, but this should be a good start for your assessment.

</comment><comment><USER3> my opinion is that it just doesn't matter. When you get big to actually benefit from those advantages, you can always reorganize in the state of your choice</comment>


How online video domain whitelist/blacklist work? - <AUTHOR>

At many video providers (vimeo plus /iframe embed) you can whitelist/blacklist domains where videos are allowed to play. How does it work? <comment><AUTHOR> After a long search i found this [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4314635/how-do-vimeo- yout...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4314635/how-do-vimeo-youtube-etc- get-referrer-url-in-their-iframes) . Looks like the only way.</comment>


Ask HN: How to communicate professionally to software clients - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an app with some non-technical people and I noticed that I find it really hard to keep people in the loop of what you've been doing. I want people to understand what I'm working on and why it's taking a certain amount of time, what the result is and most importantly, generating a sense of understanding when things break or don't work as perfect as they expected.
It seems really easy to do with design (just show some screens, explain them, iterate on them, repeat) but the most simple tasks can be hard and the most difficult ones can be simple when programming, and I haven't yet figured out a way to tackle that.
How do you deal with this? <comment><USER2> Easy, so I just finished working on a website for a client of mine. Your main problems are 1)Trust if the they trust you they know you'll deliver. 2) Deadlines, if they don't trust you give them deadlines and go to town. Once you start delivering you'll be square.

I'd also like to say, don't over-complicate the process. Did they ask for deadlines? Do they even want you to explain? Don't try to teach them everything, your job is to get your clients to forget about their problem and solve it, not trammel them with concern.

</comment><comment><USER3> Early on in development, I like to draw a diagram of the components of my application and verbally explain the data flows using it. The interaction of components is natural for most people to understand, and when things break, or you need to implement new features, you can refer back to the diagram so they understand a bit more easily.

It's also a professional way to establish a common way to describe the components of the application</comment>


Deluxe Paint III (1989) - jarek-foksa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO7JURHm_jk

<comment><AUTHOR> I grew up with this (actually have the box next to me!), PageStream for DTP, and Scala for video titling. I was utterly flabbergasted when I discovered DOS and mouseless PCs (back when we still called them IBM compatibles).

Ah, nostalgia.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just had to add - [http://i.imgur.com/vipChuH.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/vipChuH.jpg)

3 disks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Accordive - Customer Context in your Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.accordive.com <comment><USER2> 1) I really loved the design. Its really clean and "heavenly".

2)Are you really gonna take money from people helping you in private beta ? I mean its good to give 50% off but these will be your first customers and will help you shape the product. I can understand you might have done this after a lot of thought, but you still owe these people for every criticize they make.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback!

We only charge you one time, then never again until a month after it leaves beta. This just locks you in at the discounted price and doesn't charge you again until the 2nd month out of beta. I'll make this clearer on the site.

As far as why we are taking money, we already started a private beta and are looking to get feedback from paying customers. As incredibly useful as our private beta users have been, they aren't paying so it is hard to determine what things they ask for are things they would pay for and what are just neat things they want. With paying users it is a little clearer that they would pay for feature x, because they are already paying to use the service.

<comment><USER2> I got my answer. I really like your way of thinking. People creating a "paid only" product in future will love this. Do write a blog post on this strategy and your experience with it. And All the best!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I am the creator of Accordive. I just wanted to note that we have users in private beta right now, and opted to openly tell everyone the signups were for a public beta, thus the discounted price.

While we considered not telling users this until after they signed up (many services have done this in the past) it ultimately seemed like a shady thing to do and I would rather be open with my users than trick them.

That said, we are allowing signups into the public beta pretty slowly because we like to work with each user individually to help them get setup and running. This is slow at first but it makes the experience much better and we learn a lot along the way.

</comment><comment><USER3> We had a lot of users emailing about the beta price so we decided to adjust the pricing to $5 for unlimited beta access.

Would any of you prefer an integration with Sales Force, Zendesk, Desk.com, or Helpscout more than a Gmail integration?

We are looking to expand out of Gmail eventually, so if you would use one of the existing CRM tools and would like Accordive for it please let us know by email - email@example.com

<comment><USER4> You need to do Zendesk, Desk, etc.. That's where this type of integration is really useful. Very few customer service orgs use gmail directly to assist customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not constructive comment, but this is a great idea! What languages/frameworks do you provide libraries for?

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

We only support javascript at the moment. Most of the data gets updated with the user on your site, so this was the logical first client since any backend would work with it.

We plan to roll out support for Ruby, Python, PHP, and likely some plugins/addons (think wordpress, magento, shopify, and etsy) shortly. We will likely preference the plugins/addons at first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks pretty well-designed! Although I will add that you can achieve similar functionality if you code a Raplet[1] for Rapportive. (and it's free)

[1] [http://code.rapportive.com/raplet- docs/](http://code.rapportive.com/raplet-docs/)

<comment><USER3> Hey, I am the creator of Accordive. Thanks for the feedback!

I have looked at the Raplets a bit but I wanted to make something that was a little easier to setup and would allow for further customization in the future.

Think automatic labels for your customers on the Enterprise plan, or a quick way to find all past emails from the user who wrote the email you are currently viewing.

I know a lot of this can be achieved in Gmail through filters, searches, etc, but I am aspiring for something a little more immediate and non-tech friendly. So far our private beta users have loved it and most of them are not insanely technical.

<comment><USER6> Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's MUCH farther you can go with this idea than you can get with Raplets. And certainly there's no way non-technical users can develop Raplets. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In reading this I am not sure if it is specific to web services or could be used for any business with customer service needs.

Is it basically a light CRM that is built to work with Gmail?

</comment><comment><USER8> Can I pay you to never put my data into Google/Gmail, if I'm the customer of your customer?

<comment><USER3> It is never IN Google/Gmail. It is loaded via a chrome extension and injected in after Gmail loads.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for clarifying that; I mistakenly believed that it was.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How best to model a government programmatically? - <AUTHOR> So I've been looking lately at the functioning of government and how it's basically just a bunch of rules (laws) with some state (time, elected officials, votes).  I'm wondering if there's precedent for modelling systems like this programmatically?
For an example of the desired functionality, let's say you're an interested citizen who wishes to gain more insight into a proposed law - the model I'm talking about would take the current state of your government and provide you with the possibilities for that law to pass.
I understand this is a difficult problem and involves a fair bit of ambiguity (indeed there would be many outcomes from a model which would be 'let the courts decide') but as a starting point I'm interested in what people might suggest could be an interesting place to start;  Prolog?  Smart contracts?
Much obliged for any insight. <comment><USER2> I've long thought 'government' was a fascinating topic for computers to tackle, but first I think you need to answer what it is you want to model: 1) the process of government (politicians and politics) or 2) the outcome of government -- the regulation of business and civil activity and international concordances.

I think the US gov't (and many military contractors) have long attempted option 1. The modeling of adversary nations or individuals and anticipation of their behavior using scenarios and war games has been around long before computers. But the number of unknown variables and the unknown state of those that _are_ known has greatly limited the practical value of such efforts, IMHO. Even predicting the binary outcome of presidential elections has shown the weaknesses inherent in endeavors like this.

But how about option 2; could you model the analytical and decision processes that regulate a society toward 'homeostasis'? Probably, though I suspect adjusting the weights to wisely balance the interests, values, and civil rights in corporations, persons, and countries is likely to prove tricky. But could a lot of government's existing processes be effectively modeled by computer or even automated? Absolutely yes, IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) was definitely the one I was going for - essentially in a bid to show how certain outcomes can / can't occur given the current state and laws of a government.

ie: if you want to pass a tax cut, you need to do x, y and z, though this is dependent on the current state of the budget, etc etc (this is actually happening now in US Congress).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could look at Democracy 3 [0] for inspiration, its a game that tries to model a democratic country from the point of view of a candidate.

[0] [http://positech.co.uk/democracy3/](http://positech.co.uk/democracy3/)

<comment><USER4> The issue here is that in that game the player is a despot, passing laws with no oversight and no voting

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've thought about this one for a while and I keep coming back to modelling actors with a set of behaviours that influences/triggers other behaviours and variable changes (which can then influence other behaviours and variables).

This way a government becomes a set of actors whose behaviours include creation of policy, of which are intended to influence the behaviours of all actors in the governing nation, another set of actors of which the serving government is a proper subset.

Much like democracy 3, recommended below, it'd form one or more graphs, depending on how far one takes it.

My main idea was to simulate an economy independent of current economic models but then simulating government is an integral part of that project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great call, and I'm checking out Democracy now. At its heart, I'm attempting to reason about modelling a set of defined laws in some kind of programmatic model (ie: if it was the US, it would be 'a bill needs 217 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate, unless it's eligible for filibuster, where it then needs 60 votes, etc etc). Appreciate your thoughtful feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The law comes about from many years of precedent based on various ambiguous circumstances, eg it's a bit of a 'bottom up' thing, i'm not sure if a 'top down' approach like this would work for day-to-day laws. Maybe it'd be better for things that don't change much, eg a constitution. Fun thought experiment though!

</comment><comment><USER7> Very broad question but related: this blog [0] discusses how a modelling product was used to simulate the internet backbone. If your aim is real-time reaction modelling of actors, this could theoretically be implemented using such a system.

They have an open beta [1], although building a comprehensive system like that described above seems a very significant task even to a large engineering team.

[0] [https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we- simul...](https://improbable.io/2016/03/24/what-we-found-when-we-simulated- the-backbone-of-the-entire-internet-on-spatialos)

[1] [https://spatialos.improbable.io/get- spatialos](https://spatialos.improbable.io/get-spatialos)

(Disclaimer: I have interviewed with and accepted an offer by Improbable)

<comment><AUTHOR> this is great - and I am actually a customer of Telstra and experienced the outage they describe in the article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot recommend enough a paper called "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice" (1972) by Cohen, March, and Olsen. Maybe the best thing I was assigned to read during my whole PhD. The authors propose that decisions are made by random co-occurrences of problems looking for solutions, solutions looking for problems, and people looking for opportunities to make decisions (not exactly in those terms). The authors even did a little computer simulation, which might prove enlightening (or distressing) given your objective. Link: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2392088](http://www.jstor.org/stable/2392088)

Thanks for reminding me of this.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting to me. I am thinking loud here. The first thing for me would be to understand from a top level the different departments/ministries have a set of function and they are required to communicate between them to accomplish certain task. So before I could make anything programmatically I could at some level try to model it mathematically. I believe these are processes which ought to communicate, could we think of these as modeled by pi-calculus ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0-calculus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0-calculus))

I am not sure I am even close enough to what your are asking, but thats my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is exactly the kind of thing I'm going for - effectively modelling the legal relationship between different areas of government and how they achieve intended goals / the permitted ways to achieve outcomes. I'll check out pi- calculus now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Your question is too general, and you'd have realized it if you built a toy model. You need to think about what your goals are with the model. If it's to build a replica government in code, then make a start and have at it, no special tech is needed. Just start encoding your data (eg. {"Jaywalking Fee" : "100.00"} into files your model can parse.

Prolog isn't the right tool here, there are no complex dependency chains to reason through, it's not really right for modelling uncertainty, which you will have to accept until you start caring about what parts of the model will need to be high fidelity.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's impossible to program what is inherently broken unless of course your software was full of glitches and had as many bugs in it as our governments. You can of course debug, but the glitches are impossible to predict, and thus program.

If you were to remove all elected officials from the equation, then programming becomes a much more straightforward task and could be done following due process. In an ideal world passing laws/policies would be a matter of logic, where the benefit of citizens and planet are the primary objectives. However, given the interests and persuasions of individual players, and the influences of third parties, even the deepest of phycological and analytical appraisal tools would come up short when trying to predict the decisions of any given policymaker.

Maybe that's the way to tackle this, remove the protagonists and concentrate on the system. Once you have a schema of the system, you could attempt to integrate the variables. Good luck with the latter.

IMO, I would start again. Determine where the power is now, and think about where it should be. How the decisions are made now and how they could be made better with your system.

You may already know about it but if not, this might give you some inspiration: [https://www.globalchallenges.org/en](https://www.globalchallenges.org/en)

In essence, there is a 5m prize pool for someone/team to come up with a UN 2.0. One that works. That would entail fixing governments for any kind of UN to work effectively.

<comment><AUTHOR> So this is moreso codifying the current rules and regulations of our existing government - and the whole point is to _show_ the loopholes and issues with current laws. To start with you could just codify the Constitution and work out from there. So to extend - how would you programmatically model the Constitution? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Government is a set of laws federal, state and local, nothing is the same. Also a policy is local to the area.

When you get into information that also varies, for one reason or another governments use different systems computer and otherwise. A lot of government collaboration is working out how these similar but dissimilar systems will operate. What works for say Los Angeles certainly doesn't work for San Andreas and visa versa, and it gets even weirder if you cross state lines.

A respectable goal is to work up universal data interchange standards, not set systems, but say a "record" of a law should contain minimally certain information in certain text standards, etc. This leaves the municipalities to still work with their preferred systems but when doing cross-government business everyone know what data to expect minimally.

The downside of this is sometimes some entities are bad players and vote for bad data rules (i.e. the ever dwindling census detail) which benefit them in one way or another.

</comment><comment> this-that Could this be related?

System Dynamics

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

<comment><USER13> I was going to suggest system dynamics as it especially well suited for complex domains, and for simulating the results of policy changes.

Tools like Vensim and IThink are currently (commercially) available, and there are some open source tools that can do this. I think Berkeley Madonna is one, but I'm not entirely sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are you looking to model the System and its projected and/or perceived outcomes (such as using the field of Systems Theory)? or looking at how those laws/rules/policies are implemented in the bureaucracy?

If you have a proposed law, the law is generally (or at least supposed to be) a framework, and the bureaucracy chooses how to interpret and implement that framework.

If you want to model the bureaucracy (its inputs, outputs, efficiency, etc), take a look at BPM tools like Camunda, or JBOSS. Have done some of this related to local governments ([https://github.com/StephenOTT/Gov-BPMN-Sub- Process-Departmen...](https://github.com/StephenOTT/Gov-BPMN-Sub-Process- Departmental-Ownership)).

If you want to model the System (a modelled version of the impacts of the laws and how they could impact the other parts of 'society'), then take a look at Systems Theory and related apps. Mesa looks like a good starter tool for this.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been thinking about literate programming for government policy / laws. Composing law documents using python notebook/R markdown. This could allow citizen's to more easily draft, assess or monitor new laws. Or build services around the 'API' of the law. Having the wording and entities semantically defined in code would probably help move towards modelling you are interested in. Here's my blog about it [http://fozy81.github.io/2016/02/25/r-markdown- for-policy-doc...](http://fozy81.github.io/2016/02/25/r-markdown-for-policy- documents.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> There are macro-economic models ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroeconomic_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroeconomic_model)) that include such things as taxation structure, effect of child benefits on how long parents work, effect of taxation on consumption, effect of export/import restrictions, etc.

AFAIK, some of those models are fairly accurate, but not at the level that physics models are. They also do not include all quantities citizens are interested in, such as pollution levels or effects on commute times, and even if they do, they likely don't do it at small scales (a model may predict that commute times will go down on average if policy P is enacted, but that may not be uniformly across the country)

</comment><comment><USER17> Conway's game of life

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious what people here think of Agent Based Modelling.

<comment><USER19> Definitely the way to go. Currently looking at Mesa ([https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa/](https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa/)) as a way of modelling an economy (which will include government as an actor - and a form of every other main actor as well).

I've got a project open here: [https://github.com/NeilW/maytrix](https://github.com/NeilW/maytrix) which sort of gives an indication of where I'd like to go.

Open to any and all collaborations to get it moving.

<comment><AUTHOR> NICE

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps one can start by building a "SimGovernment", a simulation with the major features/structures representing those in real life.

</comment><comment><USER21> Governments operate and constrain social systems, so to simulate government it would be necessary to simulate social systems.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are you l</comment>


The Island of Color Blindness - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34346428 <comment><USER2> the color blindness tests are rather pleasant to look at.

[http://cdn2.doutissima.com.br/content/uploads/2014/12/teste-...](http://cdn2.doutissima.com.br/content/uploads/2014/12/teste- de-daltonismo_2.jpg)

There's an app called percolate which operated on a similar principle.

[http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/40334/generat...](http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/40334/generating- visually-pleasing-circle-packs)

and here

[http://www.percolatorapp.com/](http://www.percolatorapp.com/)</comment>


Ask HN: Any suggestions for incorporating in the UK? - <AUTHOR> Could you recommend a service for company formation in the UK? Could you recommend a company offering a registered office service in the UK? Do you have any suggestions regarding hiring an accountant for a web application UK startup? The company will be incorporated in the UK, but I am not a UK resident and the development will also be done offshore. <comment><USER2> To be honest with you it's a doddle and you can't really go wrong. There's only one relevant kind of company - a private limited company. Forming the company takes about ten minutes and the formation should be confirmed by Companies House within four hours.

You don't necessarily need an accountant. You can do all of your tax returns online and you can use your annual CT600 tax return as your return for Companies House. The annual return is just a few pages and can be completed by anyone who can read the explanatory notes. Hiring staff is only marginally more complex and HMRC provide a suite of software to help you manage payroll, income tax and national insurance. The only real gotcha is remembering to register for VAT if your sales within the EU exceed £73,000 in any 12-month period - at that point you may wish to consult an accountant to get your VAT accounting straight, as mistakes with VAT can get expensive quickly.

As a web app startup your tax affairs are likely to be as simple as they get and I'd suggest contacting your local HMRC office for advice - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how helpful they are and how straightforward tax is for small companies. They run regular training days at local tax offices for new companies and employers which are well worth attending even if you plan on using an accountant.

<comment><USER3> Accountants do other things beyond filing paperwork for example they can tell you from experience what HMRC allows to filed in terms of expenses, tax optimizations such as using Flat Rate VAT, etc.

They can also provide references which can expedite things like opening bank accounts or getting travel visas.

IMO Unless you really can't afford it, paying the £1000/year for an accountant so you have one less set of things to worry about as a startup founder is really worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since April 6th you've been able to incorporate directly online with Companies House at: [https://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/9e98c6d412c60b928876bc14d4...](https://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/9e98c6d412c60b928876bc14d4bbee2f/runpage?page=welcome)

<comment><USER5> That link doesn't work, this the right right one: [https://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/govlink?xgovk3w=bl1000&...](https://ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk/govlink?xgovk3w=bl1000&xgovf0p=|xgovs9k=coho|xgovr3h=winc|xgovc8h=1000|xgovk3w=bl1000|&xgovd2v=en&xgovj6d=452734a110d6d1a1d0893be4ee96cab3ffde1a4c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've used <http://www.companyformations247.co.uk/> to open the company.

They offer cashback if you later open a business bank account with Barclays, so the company formation is actually free (you can even get back ~£30 back on top if you pick the cheapest formation plan).

As for accountants I've been using <http://www.crunch.co.uk/>

For £70 a month they give you:

* web-based accounting software

* dedicated account manager

* dedicated accountant

* sort out your taxes at end of tax year

* registered office service

* extras like help you with personal taxes for extra fee

Highly recommend both companies.

<comment><USER3> I've used Crunch before and while I'm happy with their service, they don't have an api so you'll need to record sales manually. Depending on the nature and pricing of your webapp this might not be do-able.

<comment><USER6> They recently added a bank reconciliation feature. You can upload a CSV statement from your bank which, sort of, automates it (still needs some manual input).

Unfortunately CSV statements from my bank (Barclays) aren't compatible with their importer. Hopefully they'll add support for more statement formats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why spend money when you don't have to? Go direct to the relevant UK authority at <http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/>, read the guidance notes carefully and incorporate away. Pay special attention to your articles of association as they're akin to a constitution for your business. Also, you'll need a registered office in the UK that documents can be delivered to.

Experience: UK resident who set his own Limited company up

</comment><comment><USER8> I use companiesmadesimple.com They handle registered office service as well. I'm in a similar situation (just incorporated). The next step should be to open a bank account or make it dormant. I haven't figured out this step though, mind to keep in touch?

<comment><AUTHOR> companiesmadesimple.com was one of the options I was looking into. Let's keep in touch.

<comment><USER8> I don't have your email address :) (mine is in my profile) I've figured out that you can get a bank account as non-resident as long as you have a credit card/bank statement and a valid ID. You still need to go to the UK though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you intend to seek investment (seed, angel, vc, ...), either through Y Combinator or otherwise, you should read the following:

<http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html>

Getting your incorporation wrong can be a deal killer.

<comment><USER3> The UK doesn't have a huge mess of incorporation law like the US. For pretty much any startup the correct company type is a limited company.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the answers.</comment>


Ask HN: how to spend two weeks in SF effectively? - <AUTHOR>

A startup is flying me in from Europe to Palo Alto for an on-site job interview, and I've asked to postpone my return flight in order to use the opportunity to look around (I've never been to the West Coast before). So, now I have two weeks (25 Feb to 8 Mar) to spend in California. What would you suggest I should do to make the best use of my time?
I plan to do some local tourism of course, visit LA (is it worth it?), etc., but I want to spend as much time as possible in the famed local enterpreneur community. I'd love to attend any local enterpreneur events that will let me in, and just to meet and talk to people. Could you recommend any events or meetups that I could attend?
I would also much appreciate any general suggestions (where to stay if cash is somewhat limited, how to get around, etc.). Thanks! <comment><USER2> [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-unusual-fun-things-to- do-...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-unusual-fun-things-to-do-in-San- Francisco) [http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-fun-and-free- activities-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-fun-and-free-activities- to-enjoy-in-San-Francisco) [http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-ways-to-spend- two-weeks-i...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-ways-to-spend-two-weeks-in- SF)

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/w/page/25437/FrontPage>

<http://www.hackersandfounders.com/>

<http://grubwith.us/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the kind of info I was looking for. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out <http://startupdigest.com/> to see some of the events happening around here during your trip.</comment>


Even Facebook can't get their SSL setup right - <AUTHOR> https://www.wormly.com/test_ssl/h/www.facebook.com/i/220.127.116.11/p/443

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically on the edge server we hit in that particular test (188.8.131.52), they haven't installed their intermediate certificate chain.

Allowing insecure re-negotiation isn't too crash hot, either.

<comment><USER2> AFAICT, the tool is broken WRT renegotiation detection.

~% openssl s_client -connect 184.108.40.206:443 2>/dev/null < /dev/null | grep Reneg

Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported

<comment><USER2> Missing certs in the chain are fixed, BTW. Thanks for pointing it out.

We tracked down a bug in config autogeneration, and are going to add paranoia to monitor for it in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is this why I always get SSL warnings from embedded FB widgets on my iPad?

Also, FB is not exactly the gold standard for.. um.. things working.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's nothing wrong with that. Your testing tool just doesn't have DigiCert installed as a trusted cert.

Use this instead: <http://www.ssllabs.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Great tool, been looking for one of these since tlsreports stopped working.</comment>


From Karma to Mocha, with a taste of jsdom - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/podio-engineering-blog/from-karma-to-mocha-with-a-taste-of-jsdom-c9c703a06b21 <comment><USER2> I used to use Karma / Mocha... Now I advocate that people use Tape.

There's a great article [0] about tape, which I'd suggest giving a read!

If you want to run your tests on all the browsers, you can use zuul [1], which is also dead simple to use!

[0] [https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-i-use-tape- instead-o...](https://medium.com/javascript-scene/why-i-use-tape-instead-of- mocha-so-should-you-6aa105d8eaf4)

[1] [https://github.com/defunctzombie/zuul](https://github.com/defunctzombie/zuul)

<comment><USER3> tape is a good pick, thanks!

i've been using mocha, just b/c it's the most popular, and tho it's not bad, i dislike that even in programmatic[.] usage, one generally doesn't import tests as a "module" object. somehow it just doesn't jibe w/ notions of code reuse, even if it hasn't become much of a problem in practice. anyway, i got curious about how to do this, started reading the source, and at a cursory glance, it looked like reading in tests as files was baked in pretty deep.

[.][https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/wiki/Using-mocha- programmat...](https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/wiki/Using-mocha- programmatically)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Karma and Mocha don't do the same thing, so this comparison is weird.

Karma is a test runner. Use Karma to launch and run your tests in real browser instances. There is no better tool available for doing this.

Mocha is used to actually create your test suite. It's great at describing how your tests should run, with stuff like before/afterEach, it.only, describe.skip, etc. Use Mocha to describe which tests you want to run and how they should run.

You can easily load Mocha onto the page in your karma config using the karma- mocha plugin. Then, one line in your karma config and you're done. [https://github.com/rackt/react- router/blob/53623216560e34fbe...](https://github.com/rackt/react- router/blob/53623216560e34fbee02a99d926b5c69f163db35/karma.conf.js#L79)

As for file watching (also part of the OP) your bundler should be doing that. Use karma-webpack (or whatever tool you're using to create your bundle).

Finally- probably the best thing about Karma is its wide support in the community. You can find a Karma plugin for just about any other tool you might want to use, including launchers for hosted browser environments like Sauce Labs and BrowserStack.

<comment><USER5> As you can see from the article, this is not truly a comparison between Karma and Mocha, but I wanted the title to be intentionally provocative, to sparkle some discussion around the topic :)

We use test-automation for real browser testing but prefer to rely on quick and functional unit-testing, thus the choice to go with jsdom.

Regarding the community, you're right, there's a `karma-something` for every need. However, mocha is pretty popular too, and getting momentum by the day. Also the fact that it simply runs on Node makes it quite easy to obtain what you want without extra plugins (e.g. coverage).

<comment><USER6> "wanted the title to be intentionally provocative"

Click bait adds no value to the discussion.

There's no either/or when it comes to karma/mocha. As the commenters above mentioned, it's best to use both. Mocha for quick unit testing, karma for in- browser testing.

In-browser testing can be automated to run on a wide range of browsers and platforms using integration tools such as Browser Stack.

By faking the DOM, you remove nerf the greatest advantage of client-side integration testing. Checking functionality under realistic circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that the majority of the benefit was replacing a browser instance (PhantomJS launched via Karma) with a virtual-DOM (jsdom).

Karma shines when you're running integration/e2e tests against _real_ browsers, especially IE.

<comment><USER5> Integration tests are better handled on CI by test-automation tools like NightwatchJS or Capybara, imo.

Using Karma and Phantom for unit-testing it's just overhead to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It feels like there's a little bit of comparison mismatch here - I would equate Jasmine to Mocha, as they're both test frameworks, whereas Karma is a test runner. Mocha comes with a test runner OOTB, but you can also run Mocha tests with Karma.

One of the things I like about Karma is the ability to run the test suite in a number of browsers. We run our suite in Firefox, Chrome and PhantomJS as part of the CI setup.

I wonder if it wouldn't have been possible to set up a complementary test runner which allowed your Jasmine tests to be run with jsdom? That would give you the speed increase, but without needing to port, and would have allowed you to still leverage Karma when needed.

However, a good read and the Karma bootup time is certainly a pain point I've felt!

<comment><USER5> Of course the comparison between Karma and Mocha is weird, that's why the entire Karma/Jasmine/Phantom combo and Mocha/jsdom is mentioned. There's one piece missing in the Mocha/jsdom combo actually, the assertion library, and we use `unexpected` for that purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for the good read, very enlightening. But, I thought the choice of React as an example was interesting since it already provides test utilities. Any specific reason you aren't using these or were they just omitted for simplifying a blog post?

[https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/test- utils.html](https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/test-utils.html)

<comment><USER10> Test Utils with Shallow Rendering support were only added into react in 0.13, so perhaps these methods pre-date that? Test-Utils render into document require jsdom or similar to render into.

It's easy to say "But 0.13 was _ages_ ago", but in reality it was only released back in March, which may seem like an eternity to Hacker News, but in the real world isn't long at all, and not necessarily long enough for businesses to change their working practices if they already have other methods working well for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> jsdom is great, I have nothing but respect and admiration for its developers. But ultimately, it's not a very good representation of how browser implementations of the DOM really behave, and it's quite lax about letting you do things that won't work in browsers. So often your tests just end up testing that your code works in jsdom. Phantomjs has its own issues but is at least based on a real browser engine.

There are some nice tools that allow you to pipe JS to them for execution. For jsdom, there's jsdom-eval, and for phantom there's ghostface.

Lastly, I don't think there's much point casting about for the exact right assertion library or test harness framework. The important thing is the environment your tests run in, and how your tests are written of course. It doesn't matter if you're calling `assert(realValue, expectedValue)` or `expect(realValue).toBe(expectedValue)`, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you tried Prova ([http://github.com/azer/prova](http://github.com/azer/prova)) ?

</comment><comment><USER13> We're in jasmine2.0 + karma land. would love to transition to jasmine-node (2.0 support?) + jsdom. Has anyone successfully done this yet?</comment>


Animal Cruelty Is the Price We Pay for Cheap Meat - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/belly-beast-meat-factory-farms-animal-activists?src=longreads <comment><USER2> No, it's the price that the slave animals pay for us.

I am not a vegan nor vegitarian, however I personally think we as species passed the border of decency long time ago with this.

I do eat less meat nowadays and certainly none from supermarkets and other cheap sources.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I stopped eating mammals 20+ yrs ago due to this, am down ~50% on dairy, have a local egg guy where I can see the hens running freely at least, try to get cage free poultry and only occasionally, and go light and as eco as I can on fish. Also fair trade chocolate only now (slavery). It's far from perfect, but I feel like I have a tasty and healthful diet, and I'm willing to pay some more for it despite being a cheapo.</comment></comment>