What services would the perfect government provide? - <AUTHOR> Lots of hackers are libertarians, because there is a lot of logic behind the free market. But I think it's a terrible idea to let the free market handle absolutely everything, as advocated by some libertarians. Free education is a great thing that society offers even if the system isn't perfect. The free market has completely failed with healthcare in the USA. We need police and fire protection. I'm glad that every road isn't a toll road.<p>Imagine an economically very free society with an average taxrate of 25%. What services should this government provide for free or subsidize? <comment><USER4> An interesting point on healthcare: can you name the major turning point from the days of old when doctors made house calls to today? It is the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, which permanently distorted the entire health care market. The government is very much involved with our health care system, and the result is growing trouble in health care. Adding more regulation will make it worse - history makes this point quite clearly.

I think government should provide our National Defense, the Justice System, and Police.

<comment><USER5> I would guess it was due to the previous difficulty of transferring injured people when today it is easily done with ambulance/automobile/helicoptor. Also, back then I imagine people would be far more reluctant to see a doctor so the serious cases only that would possibly prevent people from going in.

Plus, a doctor can't do X-Rays at your house or use his fancy gear.

<comment><USER6> There were plenty of automobiles around in 1965. I think they even had helicopters way back then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought Hackers News was _not_ supposed to turn into Reddit.

<comment><AUTHOR> It hasn't, yet. How do you propose we make it work?

<comment><USER8> It's a hard problem. One of Hacker News's greatest strengths is that no one can downvote submissions. That will result in every story getting a fair chance at the front page (no bury brigades). However, any general topic that people find sufficiently interesting will get upvoted. And -technically-, stuff like this isn't offtopic. We're hackers, and we find it interesting. But this thread isn't really hacker related.

The only counterbalance to this right now is admins killing topics. Doing that after a story has generated a lively discussion like this one might cause users to revolt.

<comment><USER9> It's easy to get a big response about any topic people feel strongly about. I don't think there's anything hard about killing this thread. I really wish I could. Purely political and religious threads must be banned or this site will quickly begin to suck. These topics are simply too divisive. They will pollute the entire site.

Who cares about a "user revolt"? This site has a focus and that's what makes it great. Those people can discuss this stuff a million other places. There's only one place for hacker news.

<comment><USER8> Users have rights. If the community decides something they've done is bad, they can't get mad. If one person in the sky that they can't see decides they've done something bad, oh boy will they get mad. And they'll take anyone attached to that thread with them. You thought there was a lot of drama when it came to public attention that editors edit titles? Just wait until they start killing topics that have generated 30+ comments. And any drama that comes from that (topics like "omg goodbye 2 u hackr news i are leaving") can't be killed otherwise it would look like blatant censorship and would make even more people mad.

A counterbalance to this sort of thing that works is a community action, not an admin action.

A one way to implement the community action is to add downarrows. But when someone downvotes a story, the story karma is unaffected. It's only when the story has more downvotes than upvotes that the editors get the option to kill that topic. So that way, the community has decided something is offtopic, but the editor still uses his good judgment about killing a story. I don't see how users could get upset under that sort of arrangement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Works for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe the government should provide the following services:

1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."

2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.

The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.

3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.

<comment><USER11> > Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point.

What's the incentive for them to provide more, particularly since fiber lines usually cut across constituent boundaries, yet don't cut far enough to make a majority in Congress?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what you mean by 'provide more'. The entire idea behind the government owning the infrastructure and not the services that run on them is to stimulate fair competition between private enterprises. I wouldn't really want the government to do more than provide a usable signal to my jack.

Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.

I live in Alberta and up until a few years ago the telecom was owned and operated by the provincial government. It dropped copper to every house. I don't see why fiber would be any different. Some provinces still run their own telecoms.

<comment><USER11> Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a _fast_ signal, and one that gets faster over time.

One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.

In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.

<comment><USER12> > I don't just want a usable signal, I want a _fast_ signal, and one that gets > faster over time.

But shouldn't the _government_ only be concerned with providing a _usable_ signal? If you want a _fast_ signal, then leave that to private enterprise. You can pay them for a faster connection, and they can pay the government to upgrade the infrastructure in a particular area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never been Libertarian nor a believer in the Free Market. I don't think I really grasp the core concepts, though, because as I'm reading through Wealth of Nations (among other things) I find the laissez-faire attitude is incredibly naive.

Real markets are filled with things like marketing, fraud (two points, I would argue, along the same continuum) and consumers who are not going to do what's best for themselves.

My own view is that the government should provide a decent life - <USER2> paying for meals and shelter if need be - for _every single person._ I'm at a school where I'd rather not be, taking classes I'd prefer not to, because I will need a degree to get a job. If I knew that the government (or rich relatives, for that matter, although unfortunately I have none) would support me if I were to fail at entrepreneurship, I'd drop out tomorrow.

Basically, the government should guarantee that it'll keep all people at a basic level of human decency. This would allow all citizens to take risks, which is essential in innovation.

Oh, and the government should handle most things that private insurance companies do nowadays. The way I see it, people shouldn't have the choice to not pay for some things. If we were to give people the option of not buying health insurance, it would make us a very cruel and cold society to stand by as the unfortunate souls who chose not to get insurance die of an expensive, treatable diseases. The cultural cost to society is far too high.

Edit: Word choice, among -> along

</comment><comment><USER14> Biometric identity management.

You need a single namespace for human beings, which is cryptographically protected so that the only entity which can link a person's reputation to their biometric profile is a court of law. When there can only be one of something - and there are good reasons for not federating biometrics databases - then it makes sense for the government to offer that service, rather than private enterprise.

On top of this, build a contract infrastructure - a set of technical standards for digitally signed contracts - this could be free market, but the standards body should again be unitary, so that contract standards are singular. Hence, the standards body is quasi-governmental.

This is infrastructure which is essential to commerce, but - because of the namespace issues - it cannot be entirely provided by the free market, which would naturally tend to fragment the namespace. You can see an entire parallel chain of development with DNS.

Power grid: do not offer, do not want. <http://smallisprofitable.org>

Similar approaches for water supply and sewage treatment: set standards for those offering the services, sue those who fall below those standards, leave it to the market. This stuff used to be unitary-provider 200 years ago, which is why govt. still does it now, but technology has moved on.

I have a couple of not-read-for-prime-time papers on the concept I've been working on for disaster relief called "State In A Box" that I can pass along if you are interested: email@example.com <http://hexayurt.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Police, courts and defense, with defense also including the 'most important' vaccinations for all who enter, whether through ports or by birth. Some reasonable upper bounds on the destructiveness of weaponry and toxins sold over the counter are likely also necessary, even for purchasers who haven't per se 'done anything wrong'.

There also need to be some regulation of how individuals use 'commons' like air, water, electromagnetic and sonic spectra etc., as well as land use rules, to avoid one person land locking others, parking their mile long yacht alongside Golden Gate Bridge, blocking bay entry, and such.

Some minimum levels of diplomacy, aimed at providing Americans, both individuals and organizations, 'fair and reasonable' treatment abroad would be nice, as well, especially if backed by military muscle.

I'm sure there is more, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was gonna post a comment similar to this one on Reddit, but I didn't think it'd be appreciated. I think I'll manage to piss off both the Austrian school mises.org Libertarians and the I-always-get-screwed-by-corporations Liberals.

Free markets work when they transmit information with each transaction. When a factory owner raises his prices to cover rising costs, he's encapsulating information about _everything_ that's happened further up the value chain. When a shopkeeper lowers the price he's willing to pay, he's encapsulating information about consumer demand and everything downstream in the value chain. If a new means of production becomes available that's more efficient than the old one, there's a profit opportunity available for the aspiring entrepreneur. And everybody has an incentive to pass on correct information, because otherwise it's their own bank account that will suffer. This appears to be the _only_ way to organize an economy efficiently.

Free markets _fail_ when transactions conceal information. For example, many subprime loans were made to people who had no conceivable way of paying them off, but mortgage brokers had every incentive to hide that information from the hedge funds who bought them, and didn't have to shoulder the risk of default themselves. Health-care patients have no way of knowing whether a particular procedure is medically necessary and no incentive to find out, because the insurance company pays for it. Microsoft customers had no way of knowing whether Windows is the best OS, because there were no alternatives (well, except Apple and Linux...pretend this is 1997 or so).

There's also the issue of transaction costs - it costs nearly as much money to collect tolls as it does to just build the damn highway, so the "information" that the customer sees is heavily distorted by the process of having to collect that information.

So, based on this, I can derive some general principles for the role of government:

1.) It should provide the institutional framework necessary for the market to function at all, eg. contract laws and defense.

2.) It should rectify the "lemon problem", where sellers conceal vital information from buyers or vice-versa, eg. consumer protection laws, implied warranties, truth-in-advertising laws, full disclosure on mortgages, SEC regulation, etc.

3.) It should prevent companies from leveraging a monopoly to enter a market.

4.) It should rectify externalities, where a firm takes something of value to others but doesn't pay for it, usually because it's too difficult to arrange a transaction. The classic example is pollution.

5.) It should provide goods and services where the transaction cost of attempting to measure and restrict usage is greater than the actual value of the service. Markets will never develop in these areas otherwise. A good example would be roads.

Some concrete examples, which'll probably seem kinda out-there:

To start, I wouldn't have any taxes at all. Instead, the government owns all land, and raises revenue by auctioning off leases on land, natural resources, and pollution credits. These leases would be tradable, subdividable securities, and would be subject to normal SEC prohibitions on disclosure and insider trading. If you wanted to construct a skyscraper that you expect to last 50 years, you'd buy a 50-year lease on the land. If you ended up selling it after 20, you could sell the lease on the open market, but the land itself would revert back to the government after another 30 years. The government can also buy the lease back by paying market rates.

This helps the externality problem, because every time the voters want to prevent something like a polluting factory, they have the legal ability to, but they also have a precise dollar figure for how much it'll cost, in economic terms. If people don't want oil companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they can simply block the lease on drilling rights, but it will cost them a few billion dollars. Then they can decide whether the economic value to oil companies is worth more than the government services they will receive from it.

As for spending itself - roads are an obvious one, because the transaction costs of tolls are hellish. Defense is another one - I don't think we need to spend quite so much as we do, but we do need a strong military.

I would _not_ provide free education, other than the basic literacy and civic requirements necessary for democracy to function. You tend to get what you pay for. Free education not only leads to bureacratic, uncaring schoolboards, but it also leads to freeriding, uncaring schoolchildren.

Instead, I'd create rigorous public evaluations of all schools - <USER3> necessarily tests (which generally reflect the politicians' biases more than actually useful information), but statistics about where graduates end up, satisfaction levels, evaluations from past students, etc. Then let people choose - and spend their own money - on schools. Since people shouldn't be denied education based on what their parents do, there should be loans available - but through the private sector, not public.

Also, education has a problem in that it takes years for it to pay off, and market conditions can change dramatically between when you enter and when you exit. To insure against this, I'd create a tradable derivative called "salary futures" (again through the private sector). This is not insurance on _your_ salary (that would have a huge moral hazard problem), but rather a promise to pay the change in the difference between the average salaries of two professions. These can be bundled into funds if necessary, to diversify across the whole economy. So if you want to become an engineer but find that salaries have gone way down by the time you graduate, your salary future will kick in with the difference for X number of years, and then you can decide whether to stick with it or retrain as a lawyer.

Health care is tricky because nobody wants to die, and if life really is priceless, then people should be willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid dying. Markets aren't meant to deal with infinities. I'd need to think about this; I suppose if I actually came up with a workable solution I'd be rich and famous and wouldn't be posting it on a glorified message board. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ideas, but I still think that having no real free education will end up destroying the lives of a large number of poor kids.

An unwed mother has a six year old boy that is only a burden to her. She doesn't care about her son's future so she's not going to spend her hard earned money on sending him to school. He goes to the free schools for the two years it takes to learn how to read.

What happens next? The mother isn't going to take out a loan to pay for her son's education. Does this eight year old have to decide if he wants to take out loans to keep going to school? I don't think many economically oppressed eight year olds would make the right decision.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking that free education would extend up through 7th/8th grade, more for political reasons than for economic reasons. An educated citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy. Without it the whole system risks collapse.

But primary school should teach things necessary to evaluate the claims of others, not to prepare you for the working world, however. Reading, writing, and rithmetic are obvious ones. But instead of branching off into algebra/biology/geology/etc, I think they should teach probability & statistics, economics and finance, the scientific method in general (with the emphasis on the process, not on the findings), and a lot of history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Besides a lot of the safety stuff you mentioned, health care for orphans and subsidized college education based off of merit and inability to pay (combined with a co-op, if the education is expensive), not disadvantagedness. I have always been surprised not only by libertarians not talking about this type of stuff, but how mainstream anti-libertarian arguments don't focus on these glaring issues.

</comment><comment><USER17> How about the service of giving back 4/5ths of that 25% and providing the same services the government did when tax rates where in that range? (courts, policy, legislation and defensive military)

</comment><comment><USER18> A death penalty for off-topic open threads?

Intellectual property rights preventing reuse of famous three-letter logins by people without those initials?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe in the death penalty or intellectual property rights. Thanks anyways.

<comment><USER19> I think this is by far the funniest comment/response that I have seen on news.yc to date.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Virtual Reality, where you can do and have anything and everything you want, thus obviating real-world conflicts and mediating.

</comment><comment><USER21> First of all, there isn't much of a free market in health care. There is much regulation, and the current model of requiring corporations give their employees health insurance is flawed. Contrarywise, prices have fallen in cosmetic surgery, the only medical field mostly left to the free market.

(And where did you get the entire that free education means government education? There have been free schools in America since before there was a country called "America.")

Second of all, an economically free society would likely have taxes nowhere near 25%. That's higher than Hong Kong's income tax today, and much higher than America's income tax when income tax was legalized.

I've decided that the bare minimum of government that must be had are the courts (and the power to enforce their rulings). A libertarian society will be highly dependent on contracts; society could not function if you knew a powerful client could refuse to pay and ignore court rulings. I have trouble visualizing a fair, for-profit court system. If competing court systems exist, then how is the court system for a case chosen? Presumably, it would be spelled out in the contract, which gives a perpetual advantage to the vendor. Of course, the buyer could ignore the summons, but said court could force him to arrive and would then rule that it was justified doing so (as it was).

Everything that is not a court can belong to the free market, but that does not mean should. For example, you could purchase the privilege to drive on one company's network of roads, but, barring some major advances in scanning technology and some means of stopping trespassers, the need to enforce that only paid cars use the road would be extraordinarily cumbersome. The best private road system I could see would be to have a monopoly on roads in every region; road companies could then make deals with neighbors for interregional traffic and coerce developments into requiring residents to pay the road company, at the risk of having the road company block access to the development. However, I'm not sure I can trust a private monopoly more than a government monopoly.

Law enforcement is also a good candidate for government control; however, private police forces are not out of the question. There would probably be less overhead to hire police to protect an area rather than individuals, so police might not necessarily turn a blind eye to a homeless man getting mugged (not to mention that said criminal should be caught for the same reason Animal Control kills animals becoming accustomed to attacking humans). However, a system where every five feet is patrolled by a police force with different opinions of what an arrestable offense is is hardly ideal.

Fire protection, another commonly cited candidate for government control, could actually work pretty well privately. A computer can easily check whether a certain building is protected, and the benefits of competition will result. However, one problem is that a fire on an unprotected building endangers adjacent buildings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Free education doesn't have to mean government education. A system of vouchers or subsidies could work. I'm not familiar with America's historical free schools. Were they charities?

The 25% number is completely arbitrary. I picked a number that is lower than what I pay today and gives the government a whole lot to play with. There's a good chance we'd be better off with a sales tax or transaction tax instead of an income tax, but it's not important for deciding what services the government should provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why are you glad that every road isn't a toll road? You are imagining that would cost you more, I think. But if you pay X dollars of taxes towards the roads every year, and otherwise would pay Y dollars in tolls, why assume X<Y? In general the free market does things more cheaply/efficiently -- why wouldn't that be true of roads too?

Also, isn't is a bit ridiculous to call government schooling a success? It's failing in a wide variety of practical ways quite apart from any philosophical objection to the government deciding which ideas our kids are supposed to learn.

<comment><USER11> Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.

<comment><USER6> Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used.

You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.

<comment><USER11> Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example:

Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - <http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk>. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will _reduce_ driving efficiency.

Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get _less_ efficient production.

<comment><USER6> You seem to be asserting that consumers are not better off with the airlines deregulated. Although I hate air travel and everyone likes to complain about it, I don't think you can argue that, as government has been removed from airline regulation, air travel has become vastly more cheaper and available to more people and that it is possible to reach many more locations by plane.

Similarly for another high fixed cost industry which you cite - telecommunications.

Free markets might not solve everything, but they're almost always better than the alternatives. As examples of the alternatives, consider the postal service, government-run schools, Medicare and welfare.

<comment><AUTHOR> The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?

<comment><USER6> It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.

<comment><AUTHOR> I doubt it. Fossil fuel based flying cars are even more unsustainable than our current cars...

<comment><USER6> You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, it is certainly true that things would be different in a better way if our government would spend a sizable portion of the taxbase on energy research instead of wasting it an utterly insane manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A perfect government would only concern itself with monitoring currency and prisons.</comment>


Dozens of States Sue 20 Drug Companies for Price Fixing and Obstruction - <AUTHOR> https://splinternews.com/dozens-of-states-sue-20-drug-companies-for-price-fixing-1834696054 <comment><USER2> Good.

Higher-ups like to see the profits go up, but it's hard to quantify the actual people who suffer (and die) because their medicine is now too expensive to afford.

Instead of saying "oh, they should be saving their money", an ACTUAL objective fact needs to be raised that they are price-gouging their product. Of course, we all complain and argue but nothing happens because it's these people who dictate the price are in power (of their company, and they pay lobbists who enact laws to keep these plans in-place).

It's only when lawsuits like these come out that the people can actually see the negative impact all these people are suffering from because "they just wanted to make profits go up 5% for the shareholders". I just hope these executives realize this fact and our government makes necessary drugs price- fixed (the drugs that aren't mandatory could be in this type of market, that's fine with me).</comment>


Steve Jobs: "Because I Can" - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070906_002891.html

<comment><USER2> There is simply no way Jobs decided on the $100 gift certificate a day or two after the keynote announcing the price cut.

Considering all the planning that goes into all public presentations by Jobs, that is not plausible.

Cringely is spot on here.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author makes some good points (Jobs is a tool for snubbing the interview, the price cut was well planned, and the reasoning behind the price cut, etc)... But, I think he's off the mark on some things:

"In the mind of Steve Jobs the entire incident had no downside, none at all, which is yet another reason why he is not like you or me." "So Apple still comes out $75 million ahead, which is important to Steve Jobs."

Jobs is a CEO. Making money for the company and the company's stakeholders is what he does. Its his job, if you will. So yes, coming out ahead is important to Jobs... and every other competent CEO.

And as for the Gates comment, "He has to know he can never win"... Define 'win'. The way I see it, Apple is indeed winning... they're just not playing the same game as Microsoft anymore.

<comment><USER4> Well, you've got to take the Gates quote in context. This was about two years after Michael Dell said that he'd shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders. Back then you'd have needed some serious crystal ball mojo to see forward to the Apple of today.

<comment><USER3> Definitely. I'm not bashing Gates for saying it. In the context he was dead on. But the author of the article seems to still push it as truth. Could just be my perception though, because he doesn't explicitly say it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Holy crap... Exactly how badly am I supposed to feel for people who had no issue shelling out $500 or $600 on a version one product? The way the tech press is pissing and moaning, you'd think Steve Jobs had just robbed money from UNICEF.

Of my friends who own iPhones, I haven't heard any of them complaining. They just _had_ to go out and spend top dollar for the latest shiny gadget as soon as it became available. They've done it before, and they'll do it again. As such, none of them were surprised to see a big price drop.

</comment><comment><USER6> This whole thing is stupid. They set the price. In the product they sold, they made no guarantee that the price wasn't going to drop--lack of a future price drop _wasn't_ part of the product. If anything, the main 'intangible' in this product was 'smugness'.

So, they set the price, and people bought it. End of story. They didn't force anyone to. If someone thought it was worth $600 when, as Cringely says, the 'real' price was the current price, then _you_ made the mistake.

<comment><USER7> > they made no guarantee that the price wasn't going to drop

Interestingly, they do guarantee that if the price drops within 14 days of you buying the product then you can pay the lower price.

[http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html#...](http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/salespolicies.html#topic-15)

As the return period is 14 days too, this is probably to stop people returning the product just to get a new one at the lower price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of bad relationship advice - you have to abuse your customers a little in order for them to appreciate you better in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER9> Didn't you all see the price drop coming? Maybe a $200 drop was a little unexpected, but I fully thought apple would come out with a new, better, and shinier iPhone months after the initial release when they announced it. Marketing-wise, its hard to claim that the price drop is a bad business move since they are still beating projections.

</comment><comment><USER10> The key here is to learn from the master.

<comment><USER11> I've been doing the splits on chairs and having coconuts dropped on my abs from increasing heights but I still can't catch tiny koi fish while I'm blindfolded. When do we learn the Art of Flipping Off Your Customers?</comment></comment>


How to persuade corporate IT into making your next computer upgrade an Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusspiritus.com/2011/01/24/how-to-persuade-corporate-it-into-making-your-next-computer-upgrade-an-apple/ <comment><USER2> _"How to persuade corporate IT into making your next computer upgrade an Apple"_ \- I don't see this question answered in the post...?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a bit mangled when I posted it earlier, and still needs some fine tuning, appreciate the feedback. WP repeated and cut out a section on Publishing, but here's the gist:

I highly doubt that one uniform operating system will dominate enterprise computer networks in the coming decade the way windows has done so historically. Linux and other unix variants (BSD) are ubiquitous for web development platforms. Mac OS X is the developer and design operating system of choice among many talented professionals. Often times windows support will come later (or never) compared to _nix alternatives. A strong advantage of compiling source and scripting tools on Mac OS X, is that the transition from OS X to other unix systems is usually simpler than from Windows to any flavor of_ nix or vice versa (with cygwin/mingw).

This year I'm up for a replacement for my desktop system at work and after completing the conversion to Apple last year at home, I decided it would also server as the ideal setup at work as well. I transitioned my home desktop from Ubuntu 10.04 to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and really enjoy the polished interface, system stability, and ease of installations for development and practical home software (Homebrew helped). My recent experiences with Apple personal computers makes them far and away the best personal computers I've ever had the pleasure of using for a variety of applications (development, design, gaming, web browsing, and reading).

<comment><USER2> My experience of corporate IT is that "X is better than Y" is a long way down their list of priorities.

An IT department in a large organisation will typically customise the OS heavily, meaning that upgrading the OS (such as from XP to Vista or Win7) happens rarely, and switching platforms is unheard of (I've seen this once, when switching from Unix workstations to cheap NT4 boxes).

What I think is more likely is the use of Linux or OS X machines to remotely connect to Windows desktops or Windows virtual servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll keep that in mind for a decision this week. Worst case, I can keep on using the old xp box, and look for smaller or slightly looser organizations that don't mind me using a Mac for work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Nightmod – Make live-moddable games in Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oakes/Nightmod

<comment><USER2> I have enjoyed working with Nightmod so far. Thank you for taking the time to create it. I think that this will be a fun tool to brainstorm gameplay ideas quickly. So far I've successfully used it as a kind of REPL for a larger game project.

</comment><comment><USER3> Needs a demo video.</comment>


Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?print=true

<comment><USER2> Man, don't do the print version, they deserve their little bit of ad revenue. Here's the non-print version:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall- stre...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in- jail-20110216)

<comment><USER3> I don't mind the ads, it's just annoying that there's so many pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember being surprised to learn that you can file criminal charges against corporations. Reason being: you can throw Wall Street executives in jail, sure, but you can't _literally_ put, say, Lehman Brothers, in jail.

Wish you could...

<comment><USER5> Funny how a corporation is treated as an entity (like a human) by the government, except with superhuman privileges like not putting a corp in jail. If you haven't watched _The Corporation_ , and this article interested you, I would get a copy immediately or find it on Netflix.</comment></comment>


Griffin Intros iPhone Controlled HELO TC Helicopter - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/griffin_intros_iphone_controlled_helo_tc_helicopter/ <comment><USER2> OK, this little helicopter looks crazy cool!</comment>


China weather "magic" conjures blue sky for parade - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-42835120091001

<comment><USER2> I seriously hope these chemicals underwent extensive testing and audits to ensure that there wouldn't be harmful side-effects. Casually spraying chemical coctails into the atmosphere is a good way to get everyone killed.

<comment><USER3> "It's the PAX...."

but seriously, I know China is trying to preen here but what I see is that the reason why everyone else can't do the same thing is that in most other countries, the other constituencies that might have an interest in how the weather is manipulated actually have some sort of say, and in the event that the weather is manipulated, someone would have some sort of responsibility for it.

I consider these features, not bugs. YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those of you who haven't been to China, the skies are _always_ overcast.

<comment><USER5> I have been to Shanghai. It was sunny.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely right . . . sunny in Ningbo too.

China is a huge place, some parts have rain, some sunny, occasionally some parts get hit by a typhoon.

<comment><USER4> I was in changchun, shanghai, and kunshan. There was always a thick haze blotting out the sun. This was in the summer though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They do this every City Day in Moscow for some years already.

This year it failed for some reason, tho.

They also did that at MAKS this year.

<comment><USER8> maybe they are a bit more careful after bag with cement failed to pulverize in 2008: [http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSHAR758445...](http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSHAR75844520080617?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews)

<comment><USER7> Oops. Didn't know that.

<comment><USER8> via Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cyberpunk web design made easy, really easy - <AUTHOR> http://augmented-ui.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Normally making designs like this on the web is really tedious and a bit challenging. You'd have to do things like add a new element to the dom, rotate it 45deg, position it perfectly, draw just one border and make the background match what's outside the box to cover up the square border underneath the main element. (and that's just one corner of one element)

For example: [https://i.imgur.com/yY66cdv.png](https://i.imgur.com/yY66cdv.png) and [https://i.imgur.com/A2Pyeur.png](https://i.imgur.com/A2Pyeur.png) on Cyberpunk 2077's website this is roughly how they do it.

I set out to fix that with augmented-ui.

All you have to do now (after including the CSS file (no js or images, etc)) is this: <button augmented-ui="bl-clip exe">...

From there, there's a bunch of options that are _just CSS_. (and there are several other options, not just a simple corner clip!) You can set the size of the clip, change the border on the element to anything, including images and gradients (which is nearly impossible when done the traditional way). You can give it a background inset a distance from the border, leaving a transparent gap (so it'll work over any background at all) and much more!

Here are the docs on the border: [http://augmented-ui.com/docs/#--aug-border- bg](http://augmented-ui.com/docs/#--aug-border-bg) (click show in codepen if you want to play with it, jsfiddle's post feature is currently down)

I made all this possible with the polygon feature of clip-path so full-support reaches over 91% of global web users. Check out the CSS behind it all here if you want to see CSS being used as a programming language: [https://unpkg.com/augmented-ui/augmented.css](https://unpkg.com/augmented- ui/augmented.css)

Aaaand this is all free to use in any project! Check it out on NPM, I'd really really love to see what you make with it: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/augmented- ui](https://www.npmjs.com/package/augmented-ui)

Happy to answer questions! <3 Get augmented! ;)

<comment><USER3> thank you so much for this. I'm currently organizing a Cyberpunk LARP, and I'm sure augmented-ui will be very useful!

<comment><USER4> If it's in the SF bay area, I'd totally play in a cyberpunk larp

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool, great job!

I'm thinking about integrating this in edex-ui ( [https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui](https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) ), here's how it looks like so far, redesigning pop-ups: [https://imgur.com/a/4oABPAT](https://imgur.com/a/4oABPAT)

I use viewport units (vh, vw) in my CSS to ensure everything scales to different screens/resolutions; so far augmented-ui seems to handle that very well.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh my gosh man this is so cool I legit almost teared up a bit. It looks awesome even without it but I cannot wait to see where you land using augmented-ui.

This is the first time I've got to see someone use it for a big project ^__^

I bookmarked it, will keep an eye on it!

Thank you!!

<comment><USER5> Hehe, thanks.

I don't think I'll change much things but augmented-ui styles on some elements here and there should give the UI a nice facelift.

I'll make sure to credit you for that really cool package.

<comment><USER6> you two literally made my day and my entire week. like i became legit happy when i saw both of your UIs. have a great one :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did the Deus Ex series influence your design choices? I remember after playing Human Revolution, I was doing graphic design for a fitness supplement company, and I went on a sort of dystopian/tech UI tangent that fit really well with the product line. It was fun.

That text effect is super cool, as is the whole project, nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> I started trying to figure out different ways to do this because I was watching a 12 hour playthrough of Deus Ex Human Revolution on youtube. Took about 5 days until I realized I could do everything I wanted with clip-path.

Really hope we get a sequel to Mankind Divided some August, too many loose ends!

Thank you! :D

<comment><USER8> I really hope we get a sequel to Deus Ex some day.

<comment><USER9> Just in case you're not aware (maybe you are making a joke?) the series consists of six games: Deus Ex (2000), Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), Deus Ex: The Fall (2013), Deus Ex Go (2016) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016). The original from 2000 is one of the most beloved games in the genre.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I guess jokes don't always work in this format on the Internet.

If I remember correctly, Invisible War was so bad that the entire team was fired. I've played the original several times. It's a classic. I wouldn't regard any of the supposed sequels as sequels. I played IW once. It was hot garbage.

I haven't tried HR and beyond, but from gameplay videos it doesn't look as though they've captured the spirit of the original.

<comment><USER9> HR is worth a play. Not quite the same thing as the original, but good in its own right.

<comment><USER7> It's nothing like Invisible War either. I would consider Invisible War a bad sequel, while I would consider Human Revolution a spiritual succesor. Neither game is like the original but Human Revolution/Mankind Divided are great games in their own right (ignoring that Mankind Divided was cut short)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love it although my cyberpunk distopia dreams do not include Arial/Helvetica, not even in the closing credits. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohh you give me too much credit. I'm not much of a designer. That's all the generic

      font-family: sans-serif;

lol

<comment><USER11> Try this font: [https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/orbitron](https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/orbitron)

<comment><USER5> [deleted]

<comment><USER12> It costs $125 per weight, with a limit of 12500 page views per month. For all weights and up to 1 million page views a month, it costs $10k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks really cool, but it spikes my browser's (Firefox and Chromium on Ubuntu 19.04) CPU usage whenever it's active. Not even scrolling, just visible.

Reiterating though, this is really cool!

<comment><USER14> On a side note, I've been forced to install The Great Suspender[0] extension because so many non-active tabs will simply take over CPU usage in Chrome.

When a single tab spikes my laptop's power usage from 14.9W to 35W+ there is something terribly wrong with the design.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR>
      When a single tab spikes my laptop's power usage from 14.9W to 35W+ there is something terribly wrong with the design.

The animations are using WebAssembly which runs directly on CPU and results in tons of dom updates every frame. The biggest current actual flaw in it is that it doesn't shut off or pause when it's out of frame so all js animations on that page run constantly. It's on the todo list

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really cool! It's interesting that you call it "cyberpunk," though. With a few exceptions, it seems like generic sci-fi to me; it wouldn't be out of place on Star Trek, I think.

If you asked me to imagine "cyberpunk web design," I would probably say HTML 1.0 with green-on-black text. Cyberpunk as a visual aesthetic is usually rooted in the dark future as seen from the '80s, all CRTs and chunky cables and Japan Inc.

This is a great look, regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> mmmmm yeahhh, not gonna argue that, I think you're probably right on all points. haha

The reason I made it though is because of my love of the Cyberpunk genre specifically. Deus Ex, Tron Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, and so many more shows, games, and movies are where I draw inspiration from.

They always feature this style as if it was easy to do, just wanted to give back and help bring that to reality.

Thank you!

edit: also, augmentations/augs by that name, I think, are specifically cyberpunk. Augs as an idea fits very well as an analogy for both how this works under the hood and how it's used on the surface. Soooo it's more specifically Cyberpunk than generic sci-fi in that regard, imo. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it fascinating that the "spliced" screen animation, an phenomenon unique to CRT screens, still persists as a cyberpunk trope. No doubt it's because cyberpunk imagery has its origins in the 70s/80s when all we had is analog screens. I think it will continue to be one of those weird anachronisms future generations won't know why it exists unless you do some deep digging (or were around for its origins).

<comment><USER15> Yeah, totally. I was thinking about that in my other comment. ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20928597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20928597)) Cyberpunk as a visual aesthetic is rooted in the '80s.

It's funny watching the flamewars on r/cyberpunk about what does and doesn't count as "cyberpunk." Some people hate it when real-world images pop up there. They can't get their heads around the fact that cyberpunk isn't strictly sci- fi anymore; we've been living in it for at least 20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yup this is a nice take - sometimes these libraries can be a bit cumbersome, but the syntax is simple - similar to bootstrap.

I think the big thing is the design - this looks straight out of Mass Effect or something - really clean, and feels fully transformed - like you're not even looking at the web we already see everyday.

If I do anything futuristic based I'll definitely be using this. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks fun, happy to see a great usage of CSS custom properties, but a little baffled and let down that it seems to use invalid HTML attributes :/

When writing HTML you can invent any custom attribute you want so long as it begins with `data-` [0], and in JavaScript there's even a special dataset interface that makes working with these custom data-* attributes simple and easy [1].

This could be improved without changing any of the design at all - just by updating it to not rely on writing invalid HTML.

0: [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#embedding-custom-non- visible-d...](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#embedding-custom-non-visible-data- with-the-data-*-attributes)

1: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/dataset)

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave this a lot of thought. I used to be a stickler for valid markup. augmented-ui had a data- prefix as an option up to right before initial release.

Here are my reasons for not including it (yet):

1) data- isn't a great fit for it. It's not specifically data, it is visible, and I didn't want to clutter the dataset property for people using it with database output

2) invalid attributes are used everywhere, constantly. Even google.com uses them a few times. (this is the reason I'm not a stickler for it any more - <USER2> you get to the point where you're using js frameworks to build scalable web apps, chances are you're going to use invalid attributes in every single viewmodel file, or your coworkers will)

3) "data-" adds 5 extra characters to clutter and type on every single element and each selector in the main project css file. People who use augmented-ui are likely to use it on many many elements, and it adds up fast when you're building something big.

4) The only likely reason an invalid attribute might break is if the spec expands to use that exact same attribute. In the unlikely event that "augmented-ui" becomes a standard attribute, I will happily write the (grunt or w/e) script to patch every file in a project since this is very very easy to detect with regular expressions. (I've written large scale migration scripts and dozens of code parsers for work AND for fun)

5) I didn't want to split the userbase, especially at launch, with different options that can't be interchangeable. (interchangeability comes at a cost of exponentially large selectors in the fallback css because of Edge - the 5 layers of fallback support for Edge becomes over 30 selectors with just 2 different options) In the future I will have a dist folder that has a safely minified option at least. I may also have data- prefixed versions as a mutually exclusive option in the dist folder at that time if there is demand for it.

6) The first few commits were using class names instead of the attribute but even that was annoying to use because the class names were prefixed to avoid stepping on toes and the class list got way too cluttered. The "augmented-ui" attribute saved typing characters, looked cleaner, and _felt_ cooler to use. (subjective, I know)

I understand and respect if you choose not to use it because of wanting valid attribute markup. Hopefully though this at least gives you perspective into my reasons and careful considerations that ultimately lead me to choose not to include it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome project, I want to build something to try it out! A few comments:

\- very high resource usage (animation meter and my system monitor confirms high CPU usage)

\- hovering over examples lines of code and displaying a description is very cool

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'd love to see what you do with it!

\- The looping animations are from a JS animation library that I wrote so that means lots of dom updates every animation frame, which is expensive. Also, the animation lib uses WebAssembly which runs directly on CPU. Aaand they don't shut off or pause when they're out of frame (haven't got to that yet)

\- Awesome, thank you! Hoped it would be helpful :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is hilarious, and I love it. It makes me really, really nostalgic.

<comment><AUTHOR> hahaha awesome

I was making this "ad" for it over the weekend and got a pretty good laugh from it too. Especially at the "Wow!" text on the right haha: [https://i.imgur.com/vbdEOXo.png](https://i.imgur.com/vbdEOXo.png)

<comment><USER20> All you need to do is fill it with ads, then it will be really cyberpunk!

Although I heard recently that might be against NPM's TOS...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the CSS and HTML example code, you can mouse over each line to get an explanation of what it does. Nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does the augmented-ui property have to live inline on the html tag, itself? ... or is there are way to define the whole exe process within the CSS class without having to inline the augmented-ui property in the HTML?

<comment><AUTHOR> It has to live on dom element.

BUT

I wrote a separate plugin that does exactly what you're thinking: [https://github.com/propjockey/aug-attr- spliced.js](https://github.com/propjockey/aug-attr-spliced.js)

It allows you to specify

      .mydiv { --augmented-ui: tl-clip exe; }

in the CSS file and it will automatically apply the dom element attribute to whatever matches the CSS selector. The plugin needs work and optimizing and is my current priority, but the basics are there and it's functioning!

<comment><USER22> Hmmm... This doesn't work with external stylesheets due to browser security.

<comment><USER22> Preprocessing the external CSS and generating static jQuery snippets like the following, works for my use case, though:

$('section > .outer > .inner').attr('augmented-ui', "bl-clip r-clip-y br-round br-inset-clean exe");

<comment><AUTHOR> ...probably pretty important since bigger sites would likely use CSS files from a CDN.

I'll make sure to mention and test around that, it hadn't crossed my mind yet.

Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazing, I've always loved the design but have been a little intimidated by how intricate it can be to implement, so this looks awesomely easy!!

Also, wondering; how does this use custom css properties without using javascript?

<comment><USER18> CSS custom properties don't need JavaScript to work - they're a platform feature. You can read them and interact with them from JavaScript just like any other CSS property, but just like any other CSS property it can be used 100% independently from any JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Really nice! I'll definitely be having a play. Do you think this could be incorporated easily into jekyll/hugo sites?

Although, this cyberpunk at least, tends to stick to TUI's ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is really cool and elegant. I feel like I should start a project to use it somewhere. In fact, I'm running a Shadowrun game. Might come in handy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazing - I didn't even realize that I needed this in my life until now - I'm absolutely going to build my own site using this one!

</comment><comment><USER27> Cool, I tried to make a UI some time ago, with interlocked boxes that had depth [0], and it was a real hassle to get everything lined up properly with the borders. So much I didn't bother getting it done as it was only for a fun workshop. Could this be done with this css?

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/oA6Cslw.png](https://i.imgur.com/oA6Cslw.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> wow that is remarkably similar to the ui I sketched out of an idea I had a couple years ago.

But yep, that would be fairly easy to do with augmented-ui. The only "tricks" would be the parts that extend out would just be layered ontop of the orange clip instead of being a child element. The orange clip wouldn't actually need to have a hole. Where there is a hole visible though, you can just draw a piece with the same color as the background so it looks like a hole.

Here you go: [https://jsfiddle.net/3tx4ve59/](https://jsfiddle.net/3tx4ve59/)

<comment><USER27> Really cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very cool. I want to use this somewhere soon. Just have to free up time to work on passion projects. : )

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm making a browser based game and I'll definitely use this. Thanks James, looks awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> heck yeah! Awesome. ^^ Link me when it's ready? @James0x57 on twitter, reddit, github, etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's odd to call IE 11 "ancient". It was last updated 28 days ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's more odd to defend IE 11 though.

:P

Calling ancient is a half-joke meant to purport that augmented-ui is from the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just have to make my new startup website:) looks awesome.

</comment><comment><USER32> Gonna try this out for one of my side projects, thank you

</comment><comment><USER33> That is great. Love how smooth it looks.

</comment><comment><USER34> Really nice ! Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment> your-nanny on ff mobile site"s scroll seriously lagged. nice visual appeal though

</comment><comment><USER35> This looks nice!

</comment><comment><USER36> is this a new design trend? i m liking it

</comment><comment><USER37> Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER38> Very cool.</comment>


Show HN: Perl-based server-management tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/guide/

<comment><USER2> Have you seen 'The First Thing Tak Did'? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUCrnR06oKc> This talk by Matt S. Trout a while back discussed using Perl to control/configure machines in a way that the destination machines need nothing other than ssh and the perl binary, all the dependencies and code required are on demand loaded over the initial ssh connection. I would love to see this type of thing in a server-management tool.

<comment><USER3> I didn't get the design quite right with that.

My subsequent <http://p3rl.org/Object::Remote> module makes a much better job of encapsulating just that part of the work.

(and, yes, I wrote it for server introspection and management code to go on top)

There was another talk called Distributed Daemon Discovery I gave about a codebase called System::Introspector that the sponsoring client loves but we still haven't got round to packaging and releasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Other than being written in Perl, does anyone know what differentiates slaughther from the other projects out there?

Haven't used any of them, but my guess would be:

      - It's less advanced, but also less complex and easier to understand
      - It's younger so it's less "set in it's ways" and could take another direction
      - A fresh take on some things (?)
      - Fewer users probably means less pre-made "recipes" etc.

Does this sound about right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Reasonably good summary.

I'd say the transport-flexibility is a fresh-take, the supplied primitives are directly inspired by CFEngine 2.x, so in terms of complexity available to get things done it is good enough.

The lack of pre-made recipes is probably a killer right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually tripped over this a couple of days ago after getting frustrated with puppet's rubyness (I hate ruby with a passion). Looks rather nice. Will try it out next time I do any debian kit provisioning.

Perhaps it's just I'm getting old and set in my ways, but I still find perl very useful on a daily basis.

I was forced by employer to learn powershell recently and it made me appreciate perl a lot more as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of Puppet, though I've used it a little recently and I've been a regular CFEngine (2.x) user for the past few years.

I hope it is useful, but if you get stuck or have suggestions/comments feel free to mail me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Puppet definitely has its own pains, but I feel like I'd quickly reach a block trying to use this tool, and end up either writing more outside of Slaughter than in it or just forking it outright. I think these are the killer Puppet features for me:

      * Ability to define resources and their dependencies declaratively
      * Facter and its API, the ability to add custom facts that get deployed with my modules
      * TLS encryption and certificate management for client communications
      * Reporting/metrics for each run
      * Exported resources

EDIT: Forgot to mention the various REST APIs

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree entirely, as the author one of the goals was to be "serverless". That means there is no handling for TLS/certs - it is delegated to the transports.

(So you can get security by using SSL-protected git repository which allows the SSL to prevent MITM attacks, and git itself to avoid corruption.)

The metrics and exported things are almost certainly never going to get done, but having custom facts on a per-host basis is something that is minimally available right now, and will probably be expanded in the future.

The declarative notion is interesting but down that path lies madness - as an implementor - I don't want to go down the DSL route which makes procedural style definitions the simplest option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome work... What are your impressions of rex?

Slaughter occupies a different part of the ecosystem (specifically that slaughter has policies) but do you see possible incorporation of rex into what you have here?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think, after a bit of a google, that you're referring to this:

* <https://github.com/krimdomu/Rex>

I've not sure there's too much overlap, as my initial understanding makes me think that rex carries out scripts over SSH, in a similar fashion to fabric.

I assume that slaughter will be scheduled and will revert changes made manually, for example, it looks like rex will just do its magic at the single point in time you run the script(s).

I'll dig deeper to see if I've misunderstood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Superfluous question, perhaps.

What licence are you releasing it on? I read Zed Shaw's essays (rants?) on GPL a while ago. Given that your tool occupies the Server space (as did his) I recommend a read^H^H^H^H butchers (keeping with the spirit of things) ;-)

<http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Either the Perl artistic license, or the GPL.

I figure the license doesn't matter too much, so long as I see feedback & patches - as I do - the real utility is the policies you write to control your servers, and I don't expect those to be distributed often. Although mine are, FWIW:

<https://github.com/skx/slaughter-policies/>

<comment><USER8> Okay.

> I figure the license doesn't matter too much

Read Zed's essay ;-) If nothing else, it reinforces _"street cred"_ :-)

>> the real utility is the policies you write to control your servers

+1 for that point.... especially in the context of the discussions in the recent thread on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316093> (@robomartin's comments in the beginning)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> perl, templates, and rsync - here is my earlier solution for server configuration management & installation tool: <http://www.jlsync.com/> and <https://github.com/jlsync/jlsync>

And there is a bonus version in ruby: <https://github.com/jlsync/jlsync/blob/master/jlsync.rb>

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting.

80% of server automation can be solved by "copy master file and restart the service that uses it". I don't see anything obvious about restarting services in jlsync, but the copying seems well thought out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I understand this correctly, it is more of an initial server setup tool, much like FAI, and less of a management engine along the lines of Puppet, Chef, or Cfengine?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will let you write policies which are applied each time it runs. If you schedule it to run hourly it will do the same kind of work as puppet/cfengine/chef would do - providing you write the appropriate policies.

For my own hosts it does _everything_, from installing packages, applying security updates, and tweaking configuration files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> what is the reason behind inconsistencies like !PackageInstalled => InstallPackage but AppendIfMissing? Why not InstallIfMissing? Or !LinePresent => AddLine?

i don't care about the language you use but if your API/DSL is so inconsistent even in such a brief example i fear any large installation will be a maintenance hell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Several of the primitives were directly inspired by CFEngine 2.x, these include "AppendIfMissing" and "CommentLinesMatching". On that basis the names were kept to ease migration(s).

I choose to believe the current additional primitives make sense as-is, so there inconsistency isn't so glaring. Whether that is true of course is a matter of familiarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is it called Slaughter? Seems not as inviting.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the time the project was envisaged the name was chosen because it sorta- rhymed with the word "auto" - as in "automation".

(It helps if you have a Scottish accent.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the fact that it's "Perl based" relevant? Perl is not a "hot technology" these days, so I'm not sure I'd use that as part of your advertising. If it does the job well, that's what counts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perl has traditionally been a sysadmin-glue language, so I think it is worth mentioning in that context.

Sure it might not be the new-shiny, but it still works, and thanks to CPAN there is a hell of a lot of Perl code out there, neatly packaged and available for use.

<comment><USER14> The mentions of Perl do seem pretty heavy-handed. I'm a Perl developer in the sysadmin space, too (working on Webmin, Virtualmin, and Cloudmin), and I think it's awesome to see new tools being written in Perl. And, I agree that Perl is still the best tool for the job for many sysadmin tasks. But, you probably don't need to mention it 20 times (yes, it's mentioned 20 times; a half dozen times in just the first few sentences) on one page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll update the documentation to be less .. heavy-handed.

Thanks for the comment.

<comment><USER3> The tone you're probably aiming for is "well, it's a sysadmin tool, obviously I wrote it in Perl" :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"for the lolz": 4chan is hacking the attention economy  - <AUTHOR> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/06/12/for-the-lolz-4chan-is-hacking-the-attention-economy.html <comment><USER2> Here is the comment I submitted to the article on Danah Boyd's blog:

 _I disagree that 4chan is a community of hackers for one simple reason: to me a hacker is someone who gets things done. 4chan and other sites that focus on memes are attention diverters, full of people who jump from one lol to the next.

In contrast a hacker is someone who is willing to focus time and attention on one thing until he excels in it. The 4chan mindset is not a long term, viable one, because the lulz distract from any real good that can be done. Sure you can pick through the porn, rubbish, and hate in 4chan and come up with examples of great things being done, but if you look at real hackers, such as the internet entrepreneurs that are creating web startups at <http://news.ycombinator.com> you see many great things being created with little rubbish, not a few great things mixed into volumes of lulz.

I don't look to 4chan to create long term internet change. They are great for creating laughs, but the next Facebook, the next Twitter, the next great internet technology will not arise from them. It will arise from true hackers who still hack in the traditional sense, by writing code and coming up with innovative technological ideas._

<comment><USER3> You could say: _a 4channer is someone who is willing to focus time and attention on getting lulz until he excels at it_. (See: Time 100 poll.)

Sure, the lulz is a distraction from doing real good, but so was phreaking. It turns out that the skills used in both lulz-getting and phreaking can be used for good as well as evil. (See: Project Chanology, Dusty the cat.)

They're not hackers in the same sense that many of us are. But that wasn't how the term was used in the article, so big deal.

<comment><USER2> Project Chanology is pretty much a failure. Sure they got together and did some funny things, but scientology is still around. Dusty the cat was nice, but as I said, that is just one small thing amid tons of rubbish.

To say that 4chan is a way to do good is like saying that rolling dice is a good way to get the answer to an addition problem. Sure, you will occasionally get a good answer, but it would be much better to use a decent technique to get good results consistently.

I think 4chan gets too much credit for the few good things they do. They are like an application of the monkeys pounding away on typewriters theory. Eventually those monkeys might produce a few interesting words, but most of it is just going to be a mess. Likewise, 4chan may occasionally produce some good results, but in my mind any good they do is far outweighed by the bad.

Clearly, the term hacker is broad and holds connotations that vary from person to person. Personally, though, I don't view 4chan as a community of true hackers, just a community of clowns that occasionally does some good, but a lot of bad as well.

<comment><USER4> Project Chanology wasn't a failure if you look at it on a "how many people know what Scientology really is" level. The "raids" were widely reported, at least at first, and really pushed some of the info into the minds of the general populace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Social Engineering has a long history in 80s and 90s hacker culture. Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulson utilized some sort of social disruption in nearly all of their hacks, skills cultivated from when they were younger and more abrasive.

To further back up the thesis, Kevin Mitnick, grew up as a Ham in the midst of the amateur radio boom. Before the big days of phreaking kids would do the exact 'for the lulz' routine, disrupting and confusing a system full of weaknesses to probe and abuse.

<comment><USER6> And before Ham kids would run around town and wreak havoc, either at the local bar, shop, or stall. Why? Because kids are curious and "do it for the lulz".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Once you understand 4chan, you don't want to analyze it. I'm convinced that anyone who posts an analysis regarding 4chan does not have enough experience to accurately analyze 4chan.

The author makes a couple good points, but I think her writing would be better served by not tying in 4chan as some sort of example.

<comment><USER8> _Once you understand 4chan, you don't want to analyze it._

Only those who don't understand 4chan say that.

<comment><USER9> I heard true Scotsmen truly understand 4chan.

<comment><USER10> Only Irishmen bring up true Scotsmen all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A quick correction: all articles that I've seen mentioning "4chan" actually mean "/b/."

Sure, the board is huge and by far the most famous, but it's not even responsible for the majority of the site traffic. There are dozens of different boards and, with very few exceptions, they are mostly sane.

I bet the people who write those articles don't even know about the literature and science boards that are just like any other forum, but without the user names. But I guess that cooking, animals and fitness don't bring enough pageviews to be mentioned.

<comment><USER12> Y'know, I wasn't aware that there was a science section on 4chan, so I decided to check it out. At this very moment the front page of it is:

1\. Someone comparing black people to chimpanzees

2\. "Hey /sci/, in the future, will we be able to use stemcells and nanobots to turn into IRL furries?!" with a picture of a furry

3\. Something about how we should get more science funding by convincing everybody that an immensely fuckable race of space babes lives at Alpha Centauri

4\. "I am thinking of growing a beard. Will it improve my science?"

5\. An atheists-vs-Christians flamewar (or an attempt to start one, I don't know whether any Christians actually showed up)

And so forth. I wouldn't say "mostly sane". On the other hand you could probably call it _relatively_ sane.

<comment><USER13> The hentai forums tend to stay on topic.

<comment><USER12> I'm going to file that under "stuff that I'll take your word for"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First, it's "for teh lulz". Second, it's not 4chan but ebaumsworld. Third, tits or gtfo, Danah.

<comment><USER15> She actually says at the bottom that she spelled it 'lolz' because she prefers it that way.

Trolling is an art.

<comment><USER16> illustrated: <http://moronail.net/img/1286_moot_trolling_is_a_art>

<comment><USER15> This is actually why I've reverted to saying "is an," because then people go "oh, no, you messed it up."

And then I smile with that face.

It gets too deeply recursive too quickly. Trolls trolling trolls who troll trolls.

<comment><USER17> It's trolls all the way down.

<comment><USER8> You've just confirmed all of my worst fears about the true nature of human beings. Time to move on to psychopathy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy._

The very term "attention economy" is a key bit of awareness. There has always been an Attention Economy or Attention Ecosystem. It's central to culture and politics. It's central to media. It's especially important to the web. It's fundamental to human dominance mechanisms and decision making.

I think there's more than just marketing here. I think this is more like a cultural movement, with a network of personal relationships, an ideology, and differing levels of involvement.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh for goodness' sake _move on_!

I'm struggling to think of _any_ capitalist adventure that won't go against the ire of 4chan. Which is great 'n' all, but one should know one's target audience.

Target appropriately and you will succeed. Fix someone's problem, and you'll get money for it. Even 4chan users' money... I hope.

<comment><USER19> Incidentally, I've been trying to advertise on 4chan and they will not return my emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Media is already late to the game. Guaranteed there is already a replacement for 4chan of which we've never heard but is spewing memetic galaxies like a dorky black hole.

<comment><USER20> It's called Reddit. Where the bacon have you been, man? Everybody knows that bacon narwhal narwhal bacon bacon goes great with Guile.

<comment><USER4> Reddit seems to act as a filter between /b/ and the SA forums <http://forums.somethingawful.com/>. Much of the bullshit and extreme racism/gore/child porn/other distasteful content is skimmed over, and the true amusing gems are pulled into the (more) mainstream reddit/digg worlds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Still trying to work out if "at the tale end" is a dumb typo or an incredibly subtle pun.

</comment><comment><USER22> I probably biased against 'MS researcher', and phrases like 'I grew up in a community of hackers', but... =)

4chan is, in the first place, the strong illusion of a crowd of young, non- serious people. It is totally different from any other community, where mostly mediocre and quite selfish people are trying to show up, praise themselves and impress others (read: facebook), where social exhibitionism and friend- counting flourishes.

4chan, with its anonymity, is definitely a time-wasting, the main activity of any young generation. =) And of course, it is also a slot machine, with several positive feedback loops, especially if you're admire and love 'freshness' and youth.

btw, its sub-culture and slang are self-evident, not a rocket science. It is just a cyber community of nonconformist youths, along with a bunch of various freaks. You may find something like that in any city's outskirts. =)

</comment><comment><USER23> I liked the quote on the lower left-hand side of her post the best. Since still relevant to web culture, reprinting here:

"Facebook is so endlessly social and inclusive it sometimes reminds me of one of those mega-nightclubs from the late '80s (Palladium, the Limelight, etc.), only without the music, the alcohol, the drugs, the lights, the sweat, or — it must be said — the people."

\-- Lucinda Rosenfeld</comment>


Intel Edison: A Desktop From 1998 In An SD Card - <AUTHOR> http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-yourself/edison.html

<comment><USER2> surprising that this went unnoticed</comment>


The next billion programmers (won't use Git) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/the-next-billion-programmers-wont-use-git-5e8b0ea57886#.fqsem48i8 <comment><USER2> On the subject of git: complex does not mean broken. You're expected to learn the tools you use. And I'm not sure what the author of this post envisions for the future, but I don't see marketers, analysts and designers pushing up small bits of code; meaning, I don't see the future being a world full of people who all know how to code. That's just not realistic.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the other hand, most programmers don't use git even now.

Most people who programm don't know they do it. They use Excel and company and none of them uses Git.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Git is horribly broken, and thus so is Github

Wat</comment>


Ask HN: Would you like to play a game? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to figure out an encoding scheme for a set of game codes. Example codes are below: ATTK-21BU-F1QI
AINY-X1CG-Y1RZ
A61X-F1AL-S1S3
ALW6-M1D7-41K1
AJNE-V1WQ-C136
ADQX-J16S-S1CQ
AYR2-J1RA-Z1NJ
AQNB-6127-B12G
AXME-V1EU-41MK
ACE4-31SC-617S
AHT8-H1Q6-E1VS
AVTT-Y1ZR-D1N7
A9XG-G1PG-S1D1
AX6T-713S-M1TI
AY5N-A12B-11IY
AT6W-F1VT-H1MN
AW5S-G1XA-41HJ
AKXC-81NL-I1C2
AAZ7-R1BF-F1FH
AW6E-T1RH-H16C
AQYP-F13T-H14B
ABIA-41JK-Y1AS
AERU-B1TV-61ZR
A844-Z1H3-91BH
A861-416A-L1UG
AEIH-V1DP-61LC
ALS8-61UG-41JA
My first guess was that it was a base 36 encoded integer. But I cannot seem to generate the next in the sequence by adding 1 (or 100 or 1000) to the base10 equivalent, so I assume this is more complex. Maybe part of this code is a check digit or check sum (Luhn mod N maybe)?
I'd love to figure this out. Does anyone recognize this kind of encoding scheme offhand?
The only thing I noted was that the first letter always starts with A! <comment><USER2> I wrote a similar scheme for UEFA and Euro stickers in 2008. If they use the same scheme, it's a simple numeric sequence encoded via a PRP.

So basically we took numbers from, say 1000 to 3000 as "valid" codes, used a modified implementation of RSA to encrypt them to numbers in a specifically sized domain and then base-30 encoding them, to exclude pairs of hard to distinguish digits and numbers (5 and S, 1 and I, 0 and O).

To validate the codes, the code needs to decrypt the number and verify that the value is within our allowed range (in this example, 1000 to 3000).

This is relatively safe if the domain is big enough that random guessing has a very low probability of hitting a valid code. On the other hand, the domain needs to me small enough that the codes can be easily typed, typically 12 digits is way more than we would have done.

<comment><AUTHOR> By PRP do you mean "Pseudo Random Permutation"?

Would you be able to outline some psuedo code to explain your answer?

I tried out the codes from this rather spammy page on the FIFA stickers app ([http://en.stickeralbum.fifa.com/](http://en.stickeralbum.fifa.com/)), and they always seem to work, so it appears that the person that put it together has either figured out the algorithm, or knows what it was to start with!

<comment><USER2> Yes, pseudo-random permutation.

The basic algorithm goes like this. To generate the codes

        generate_codes(range valid_range)

          for(i in valid_range)
            encoded = RSA.Encode(key, i)
            code = base32.Encode(encoded)
            print code

and then, to verify a code

        verify(string code, range valid_range)

          encoded = base32.Decode(code)
          value = RSA.Decode(key, encoded)

          return valid_range.contains(value)

where of course RSA is an implementation of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_\(cryptosystem\)) and base32 refers to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32).

On top of that, we needed codes to be of a specified maximum length and with a specified alphabet. Thus, instead of base32 we used a different base with different letters, but the same algorithm. To fix the length of the codes, we needed the output of RSA encode to be less than a specific value. In RSA this can be controlled by choosing the modulus part of the key.

There are more subtleties to this, but the gist is there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. Very interesting.

I assume that without the RSA key I cannot generate these codes myself then, even if I was to guess at the range?

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's the idea :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thus, if a similar scheme is being used for the FIFA stickers, the person that put this together ([http://fifapaninicode7.appspot.com/](http://fifapaninicode7.appspot.com/)) must know the RSA key!

<comment><USER3> Did you check that these codes work and are not just a ruse?

<comment><AUTHOR> They do work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From eyeballing, pattern is always: Axxx-x1xx-x1xx

</comment><comment><USER5> It's not base 36 since there are only 34 distinct characters here (there's the entire alphabet and digits except for 0 and O).

What is this from?

Some game codes actually consists of a memory address and data to write into that address so you wouldn't expect there to be a simple sequence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to figure out how these FIFA online sticker codes have been generated: Warning Ads! Disable JavaScript.

[http://fifapaninicode7.appspot.com/](http://fifapaninicode7.appspot.com/)

I was trying to figure out how they cracked it. Was harder than I thought. Thought I'd ask the brains on HN! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's some code I was mucking around with:

[https://dotnetfiddle.net/lSHie4](https://dotnetfiddle.net/lSHie4)

A couple of things caught my interest so far as possibles:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Securities_Identi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Securities_Identification_Number)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36#Uses_in_practice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_36#Uses_in_practice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about Global Thermonuclear War?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wondered if anyone would get the reference :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given "ALS8-61UG-41JA" is separated into blocks by "-" the second character of block #2 ("-61UG-") and block #3 ("41JA") is always "1" in the examples you posted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are these codes generated from a binary which you have access to? You might have an easier time reverse-engineering it, if your local laws allows to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the source of these codes, check out my answer here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8113746)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are these codes in any particular order?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. Just generated at random. See my answer above for the source of those codes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Authoritative Fukushima Radiation Measurements? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone actually measured the atmospheric radiation levels in the surrounding areas of Fukushima, particularly over the ocean? Perhaps this is not practical to measure, but I keep reading about "alleged" releases and bullshit "worst-case" scenarios. Articles like "Workers continuing in spite of Soaring Radiation Levels," cite no sources. <comment><USER2> It's surprising that this event has been so badly misreported by the general media. I've read so much BS, e.g. "boric acid is a fire retardant", that I've been quite put off following the event in the press.

Wikipedia has been cited by New Scientist and some members on HN as one of the few factually correct resources on the unfolding story.

Here are some numbers with sources: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Radi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Radioactive_contamination)</comment>


Writing Elegant Clojure Code Using Higher-Order Functions - <AUTHOR> http://christophermaier.name/2011/07/07/writing-elegant-clojure-code-using-higher-order-functions.html <comment><USER2> My favorite example of brevity through higher order functions is:

        (defn flatten [x] (apply concat x))

It flattens one-level of nested lists ( like [[1 2] [3 4]] -> [1 2 3 4]) and even works when x is an infinite generated sequence. On the other hand brevity is not always clarity so HOF tricks should be treated with caution.

<comment><USER3> This is a nice function but

1) This only works if everything is really a seq so [[1 2][3 4] 5] does not work 2) the name is not optimal

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A rambling side note:

If you come from a javascript background, you will have a leg up on most people in terms of learning clojure. You get used to inlining functions pretty regularly.

What I am encountering as I chew through Programming Clojure though is that I had no idea what I could have been doing in javascript all this time. I would look at C and laugh about how they have to define an extra function for event handling. It just seemed so verbose.

Looking back at the javascript I wrote/write, I really wish I had understood what I could have been doing with functions, mappings, and apply. I didn't/don't write javascript: it's just C with some in-lined functions.

Moral of the story: Inhale the Zen of Crockford(<http://javascript.crockford.com/>) and exhale the suck of W3 schools.

<comment><USER5> Please don't call them inlined functions. That has a very precise and very different meaning in common usage, so you're likely to confuse a lot of people.

<comment><USER6> And to clarify, grandparent probably wants the terms 'first class function', 'anonymous function' or 'lambda' (depending on the specific usage.)</comment></comment></comment>