The Slack Logger - <AUTHOR> http://bkucukguzel.me/blog/the-slack-logger/

<comment><USER2> This might work at low traffic levels, but there are better ways. In our internal error catcher, we've seen deploys that caused 20,000+ errors in under a minute. Even when we used similar techniques to mail ourselves errors on a low traffic site, it was important to introduce dead time, not alerting again for (say) 5 mins after the first alert so as not to flood our inbox.

A useful technique btw is to use a ring buffer to collect debug logging, and when an error occurs dump this buffer into the message along with the stacktrace. It gives you more context when you're not logging debug to disk, and is fast. (see eg [http://www.exampler.com/writing/ring- buffer.pdf](http://www.exampler.com/writing/ring-buffer.pdf), [https://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/log4...](https://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/log4j/net/SMTPAppender.html))

Services like [https://www.pagerduty.com/](https://www.pagerduty.com/) can contact you on more channels when problems happen, and also deal with dead time etc not /re/ alerting you constantly. The Slack mobile client would have got every one of those messages as a push.

Pagerduty won't help with aggregating/exploring stacktraces though, for that, there's eg [https://airbrake.io](https://airbrake.io) or for mobile apps, [https://try.crashlytics.com/](https://try.crashlytics.com/).

Finally there's also [http://www.splunk.com/](http://www.splunk.com/) for aggregating logs; you can build some quite complex queries from it and do alerting on the results (not quite as fancy as pagerduty, but functional).

There are many other tools in this space, worth looking around to see if there's any SaaS you can use or crib ideas from.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you a lot for you comment. I am going to check this tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice write up. I'm curious, have you found any advantage to using Slack for this kind of logging as opposed to, say, HipChat or any other messaging app?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have just used Slack for this purpose and it has been very effective. I don't know about HipChat but Slack makes sure that you got the message by delivering Desktop/Push notifications emails etc.</comment></comment>


How TV Logos Were Made Before Computers (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90125752/the-ingenious-way-tv-logos-were-made-before-computers <comment><USER2> Not television but the 1936-46 Universal Pictures one was especially pleasing and impressive to me.

[https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y](https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y)

Recreated in 1972 for "The Sting" which at the time was a film made as a bit of a nostalgia trip. [https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o](https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o)

</comment><comment><USER3> Heh. I just found 40 minutes of BBC's hot air balloon idents. [https://youtu.be/tdKbtvaSskA](https://youtu.be/tdKbtvaSskA) I love the internet.

<comment> 867-5309 I speed read that as "incidents" and and after brief viewing and realisation am both disappointed and relieved

<comment><USER4> I speed read that other word as "baboon" and had the same feelings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music.

It would make a great screen saver, at least!

<comment><USER5> If you're excited by live physical effects, they still exist: in theatre! Well, maybe not this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> By the way despite all the great "AI" promise of lisp machines, flying logos were the big market for Symbolics. Sad but true.

I love the creativity of these old techniques. It's seems how absurdly amateur much of old TV was, but these logos show how much professionalism and technical creativity there was as well.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if people realize, but "Copy" and "Paste" and "Cut" aren't just metaphors. There used to be entire jobs dedicated to people manually doing this with scissors, glue, tape, etc. to save time for senior execs who couldn't spend the time to rewrite their documents. And by that, I mean... the typewriters were pretty unforgiving of any typo, although the the IBM Selectix did have a key with whiteout ink, which was nice... imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline...

<comment><USER8> Also with newspaper production after photo typesetting came in but pre- Pagemaker, etc. Columns of copy were output and they were glued onto layout pages. Length was adjusted by cutting the copy at some point--hence, inverted pyramid style and mistakes were corrected by outputting new copy which was pasted over the old copy.

<comment><USER9> Not glue. Hot wax. You can put down and pull up hot wax easily. Basically you have photo blue grid layout boards. Photo type setting, border tape and various photographic techniques. Mask mode in Photoshop is red because of rubylith which was a red film you would cut around a photograph and since red light does not expose B&W film, one could make the background white. All the layout just had to last long enough to expose the negative to which was then used to make the off-set printing plate.

I grew up in a graphic arts photography studio in the pre-computer graphic arts days. My father had an 1942 ATF camera, which was about 14 feet long and you were the "mechanism" in the darkroom placing the film on a vacuum board, exposing the film and running it through a processor for positive film or the usual three trays for negative film. The camera was originally made for WWII to enlarge surveillance photographs and had very little lens distortion.

Photo typesetting was expensive. Many times the way to fix spelling errors was to copy the type setting on to positive film then find the missing letters and with hot wax and an exacto knife, fix the error. I think it was cost of photo type setting that pushed graphic artists to get a mac and an early laser printer. Photo type setting was vastly better quality, but we would have the graphic artist print all their type out at 200% then reduce that down to 50% with the stat camera to get the resolution up.

As a teenager, it was always a rite of passage, especially with the girls, that you got your forearm hot waxed. Fun times...

<comment><USER10> We used to use a rubber and solvent based glue called cow gum. Good, because it was re-positionable and didn't mark the paper. Bad because after a couple of hours the solvent would get you high and give you a cracking headache.

My dad is a graphic designer who spent quite a bit of his career working pre- computer. One story he told was of a colleague who seemed to always make his columns of typeset text perfectly fit The space available. Turned out he'd just fold anything extra underneath, not caring that the last bits were missing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another joyful detail is how the ident bounces around in the frame. This is because the ident was recorded on film and the film jumps around on the sprockets.

This you would not notice in the cinema or on a CRT TV in a darkened room but is quite apparent in a YouTube video.

In latter years when the ident would be put onto videotape for playback the bouncing on the sprockets would still be there as a result of the telecine process.

This did not come to an immediate end with the introduction of proper tools from the likes of Quantel. Some broadcasters were quite small, regional and proud of their long-standing analog idents. The whole channel would have to be rebranded and, as part of that exercise, the proper hardware added to do modern idents.

<comment><USER4> I recently used AfterEffects motion tracking, plus some blurring and glowing effects on a text overlay, to reproduce the jiggling of the telecine process of an old film recently digitized to video, and match the titles and credits at the beginning and end of the original film:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI)

I'm in the progress of researching and writing an article about the subject of this video (light pen driven pie menus on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display, in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University), which I'll submit to HN when it's ready some time soon I hope.

Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471.

[https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20...](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20approach%20to%20man- machine%20communication.pdf)

[https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html)

Check out Munching Squares on the same kind of hardware currently running at the Living Computer Museum, with an AM radio so the computer can play its own music synchronized with the graphics:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv- Svwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc)

Here's the fucking manual!

[http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_Programming_Manual.pdf)

(Be sure to order all the luxury add-on options for your 340 Precision Incremental Vector Graphics CRT Display, including the 342 Symbol Generator for drawing text along with your vector graphics, the 370 High Speed Light Pen for pointing at said text and graphics, and definitely the Type 347 Subroutine Option -- a big fan cooled cabinet with a powerful hardware subroutine accelerator that is super useful! Otherwise you have to simulate subroutines in software, which sucks.)

[http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types](http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types)

<comment><USER12> The AM music is unsurprisingly similar to bytebeat. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o)

<comment><USER4> Wow cool, that's like a daemon spawn between Munching Squares, Stephen Anthony Malinowski's Music Animation Machine, and the Obfuscated C Contest!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's one of these things where age shows: If you're old enough, you just know this (at least:I do, and I think it's because I am).

</comment><comment><USER14> Another thing worth mentioning is Scanimate which was an analog video animation system used in the late 70s/early 80s to create a lot of the flying/metallic logo effects that were common on TV at the time. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA)

<comment><USER15> Quantel was another company producing digital hardware specifically for TV effects: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ma_jeU50rY&t=5m32s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ma_jeU50rY&t=5m32s)

My favourite part is 14:30 onwards.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I visited BBC Shepard's bush in the eighties and saw the mechanical globe. It was very cool. In a hokey, home made ah-haaa kind of way.

<comment><USER4> Max Headroom is a real model trying to look like a computer model in the eighties.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a neighbor who was a veteran from this era. Did some of the MTV stuff, some eighties news globes. Once I found the sculpture that this is based on just lying around in the hallway: [https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit- in/...](https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit- in/600x781/filters:strip_icc\(\):format\(jpeg\):mode_rgb\(\):quality\(90\)/discogs- images/R-13130539-1549221247-8899.mpo.jpg)

He was always asking me for some help with getting into digital 3D, but was hung up on building a server farm for rendering first. I could never convince him that he should take the time to learn Blender or Autodesk first and worry about hardware later...

</comment><comment><USER18> This website is so bad. I scrolled too much and the address has been changed. Now when I'm trying to share it to others I get the wrong URL . Then I refreshed and I found myself in a different article without a way to get back to the one I read.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux In the 1981 BBC TV series of the _' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'_, the animated sequences simulated the look of a computer display but weren't actually computer generated. They were drawn on sheets of acetate as traditional 2D animators had done for decades.

The animation is one of the most memorable aspects of the TV series and, despite being almost 40 years old, still holds up really well:

[https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127](https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127)

</comment><comment><USER19> DVNO, four capital letters, printed in gold, cuz details make the girls sweat, even more, while they're shaking their belt, no need to ask my name to figure out how cool I am

</comment><comment><USER20> I just bought a mid century accordion a few days ago, and the amount of chords it can do with one button is incredible, not to mention the number of instruments it can emulate (9 on one side, 5 on the other). As a primarily digital artist, I am embarrassed to say how easy it is to forget the analog precursors of our modern tools.

<comment><USER21> In nuclear engineering, we use computational fluid dynamics programs and fancy neutronics codes to model reactor concepts. I was reading some history recently and found that back in the nuclear heyday they just used plastic cutouts and flowed special fluids that defracted light differently when under tension to design components.

They also used electrically conductive paper and cut it out into odd shapes and applied a voltage since resistance is an analog of both neutron diffusion and heat transfer.

Wild.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Search for Scanimate on YT, that's the name of the machine used to produce most TV logos in the 70s and early 80s, it's an analog synth for graphics basically.

</comment><comment><USER23> Scenes created for star wars (19xx) are also quite fascinating.

<comment><USER24> You're aware that "(19xx)" also includes Episode I, right? :)

<comment><USER17> That goes for Phantom Menace as well. The heads in some of the shots of the pod race stadium were painted q-tips, and they couldn't digitally get the waterfalls in Naboo to look right, so they poured table salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most astounding thing there is how the entire page errors out of existence if I rotate my phone.</comment>


Cloudflare to offer free SSL? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/478357966970552320 <comment><USER2> I remember at the start of the year they were saying they would probably roll out free SSL this year. We are less than half-way through the year.</comment>


How to sell your idea, such that people listen - <AUTHOR> https://dare2compete.com/bites/how-to-sell-your-idea-so-people-listen/ <comment><USER2> Don't click</comment>


3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM

<comment><USER2> Once again, the graphics folks get the coolest demos. Pretty impressive :)

</comment><comment><USER3> It reminds me of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad.</comment>


Bad bloggers copy, great bloggers steal - <AUTHOR> http://inter-sections.net/2008/08/26/bad-bloggers-copy-great-bloggers-steal

<comment><USER2> Wait, wait, wasn't there a post with the same title but "design" instead of "blogging" a week ago?

<comment><USER3> Yes, and it was just as poorly worded then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hm... after reading this article I will get myself a book by Borges. I've already forgot when I read a book last time except manuals and tutorials...

</comment><comment><USER5> Great article</comment>


OpenHW Group Announces Core-V Chassis SoC Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.openhwgroup.org/news/2019/12/10/openhw-group-announces-core-v-chassis-soc-project-and-issues-industry-call-for-participation/ <comment><USER2> Why both a 64-bit core and a 32-bit core in the SOC?

<comment><USER3> (guessing...)

It's a non profit consortium. If you look at the list of members, you can guess that some are more interested in 32bit MCU type applications, some in 64bit CPU. So this keeps both camps happy.

Edit: Read it again, and it mentions NXP i.MX. The i.MX7 SOC has the same setup...64bit + 32bit core on the chip. The idea is run Linux on the 64bit chip, and a RTOS on the 32bit. So the 32bit cpu could do real time stuff, like signal processing, while the main chip has a more dev friendly OS for integration, administration, etc.</comment></comment>


Rider 2019.1 Has Arrived - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2019/04/30/rider-2019-1-arrived/ <comment><AUTHOR> Highlights:

1\. WinForms designer: Yep, WinForms isn't going anywhere! The lack of a WinForms designer was keeping a lot of devs on Visual Studio - I reckon this might give them the push to Rider

2\. Edit & continue: I've been using this in the EAP version for a while now, and it's _fantastic_. I seems to work so much better than in Visual Studio

3\. Unit test coverage and continuous testing for .NET Core comes to Linux and macOS

4\. Improved Xamarin support: JetBrains Xamarin SDK lets you develop Xamarin on Windows/macOS without Visual Studio

5\. Initial C# 8.0 support: async streams and the like

6\. IL viewer: I won't use this often, but it can be useful when doing micro- optimisations

7\. Cross-platform performance profiling for Mono and Mono Unity: unfortunately still not for .NET Core :(

8\. IIS Express support for ASP.NET Core apps: this is another one that was keeping devs on Visual Studio

9\. Improved theming: this is great! Before you could only easily theme _parts_ of the UI - so you'd have a nice dark theme, for example, but the solution explorer and dialogs would still be light!

Overall, some great editions to JetBrains' very credible Visual Studio competitor.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you track/solicit/manage customer bug reports? - <AUTHOR>

Having released a desktop app (www.getjotbot.com) we've been getting some bug reports from users.  One  person asked if we were planning on having a formal bug reporting system (other than E-mailing us directly).
I've used assorted bug trackers for dev work, but none of them strike me as suitable for the typical end-user of a product.
Any ideas on how to best manage bugs reports/suggestions/whatever from  customers? <comment><USER2> Maybe something like <http://uservoice.com> or <http://getsatisfaction.com> will suit what you need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. These look pretty good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At the moment I'm just keeping tarsnap bug reports (very few) and suggestions (lots) in a "TODO" file -- but I'm thinking about putting up some sort of public bug/suggestion tracker soon. I'm not sure which system I'll use yet -- probably whichever I can get installed the easiest, given that my requirements (being the only tarsnap developer) are pretty minimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking I want something that users can use to see what's already been reported, and what's being done about it, and to (maybe) allow discussion about the app.</comment></comment>


LaTeX Search - <AUTHOR> http://latexsearch.com/

<comment><USER2> I think this is an appropriate companion to anything you would want write up in LaTex but can't remember what it's called: <http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html>

<comment><USER3> Detexify is also available as an android app. Much easier to draw on a touchscreen than with a mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Woo. I wrote the backend for this. See the comments on reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/bu580/springers_new_la...](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/bu580/springers_new_latex_search_for_finding/)</comment>


Using requestIdleCallback - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/08/27/using-requestidlecallback <comment><USER2> This looks useful as an opt-in performance feature.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean developer opt in, or user opt-in?</comment></comment>


Tim Berners-Lee just gave us an opening to stop DRM in Web standards - <AUTHOR> https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/tim_bernerslee_just_gave_us_opening_stop_drm_web_standards <comment><USER2> Everyone who is ignorant towards the standard DRM in web browsers does not see the forest behind the trees.

It does not stop with movies or music.

If DRM is deeply integrated into the web then everything will get affected by it. Already today some publisher go to great lengths to try to disturb people from copying simple text and images. It will get only worse.

Currently the openness of the web has been very beneficial to the people willing to make an effort to learn the web technologies. I think that this has opened the field for many talented people. You can just inspect the page and try to learn how it is made by reverse engineering it. This will go away and you will get the inaccessible binary blob instead.

<comment><USER3> "some publisher go to great lengths to try to disturb people from copying simple text and images"

Genuine question: why is this a problem if the publisher doesn't want a third party to use their work without their permission, or at all? I ask as an amateur photographer who doesn't want people to use their images without permission, especially for commercial gain. I choose to license my work as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, but that doesn't mean others will necessarily honour my wishes. How can this be policed on a network as vast as the Internet? I get why DRM is almost assuredly not be the answer, but what are the other options (excluding CC licensing)? My issue here is that we make a lot of noise as to _why_ DRM is bad, but the other solutions that I've seen are as bad, or offer little real protection to the content creator.

<comment><USER4> The answer is that it's _technologically_ impossible to prevent third parties from using your work if you publish it. DRM _doesn 't_ solve this problem, but claims to do so. As a result, genuine users suffer from DRM.

<comment><USER3> "DRM doesn't solve this problem"

Again, no wish to goad, but _why_?

<comment><USER4> Because there is always a way to extract the "protected" work. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole).

If you're a photographer, I can always make a screenshot, or record the video from my HDMI/DVI cable to the monitor or take a very precise photo of my screen, and I WILL get the photo from your website or app.

There is plenty of evidence that DRM doesn't stop copying: millions of torrents ripped from crunchyroll/hulu/netflix/Blu-Rays, all of those have some sort of DRM, all of them were circumvented. There are people who think that DRM is not _designed_ to stop copying, but it's designed to control how legitimate users consume your product (see: DVD ads).

Edit: Please don't assume that this is the _only_ argument I have, it's just the most obvious argument from the top of my head. There are plenty of people who explain the negative sides of DRM and reasons it doesn't solve the problem you described. They do it in a very eloquent way with rigorous arguments, and I don't believe that I _need_ to repeat those arguments. I'd like you to listen to Cory Doctorow: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. It's an iteresting discussion that needs to be had. As I said, I often see things along the lines of 'It's just bad, m'kay' without any reason. Your explanation is reasoned and cogent. Again, Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As others have pointed out, this amounts to nothing. At worst there'll be no standard, at best there'll be a standard not under W3C control.

That being said, Netflix was a big pusher for EME, as far as I know not because they wanted it, but because the studios they license from demand DRM. Yet, they seem to have lost most of their "movie studio" catalogue and are now focusing on originals.

Netflix guys, what about allowing us to see the originals even if we don't have a CDM installed? That would kill DRM/EME faster than hollow FSF & EFF victories. FSF/EFF guys, doesn't this sound like a more promising campaign to you?

<comment><USER6> > At worst there'll be no standard, at best there'll be a standard not under > W3C control

Wrong way around. From the anti-DRM POV, the best case is no standard, since that likely turns DRM web content platforms into an ugly battleground where multiple competing proprietary companies use horrendous tactics to fight over user share and platform dominance. All sorts of third party browser plugins will be needed, with the resulting mess of upgrades and incompatibilities and platform dependencies, and the whole world just ends up hating the whole mess and goes back to the free internet. Think in terms of Flash vs Silverlight vs Java applets all being superceded by the considerably less awful HTML5.

The point is to make DRM-afflicted content into as bad a product as possible. Having a standard for DRM is only a good thing if those against it have already admitted defeat.

The worry is if the content providers get together and make a standard outside of the W3C, and DRM content becomes a usable product without any consortium input.

<comment><USER7> If W3C doesn't make progress in the way that the browser makers want, they'll just go around them. This isn't a possibility - it's happened before with WHATWG. The W3C exists to serve the browser and content makers who want this.

<comment><USER8> That's the part I think a lot of people forget: Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also DRM vendors. There is no nefarious third party needed to put DRM into most of the browsers people use, and Mozilla doesn't have anywhere enough market-share to do more than slow that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > DRM's dark history — from the Sony rootkit malware to draconian anti- > circumvention laws — demonstrates that integrating it into Web standards > would be nothing but bad for Web users.

This is where I get scared. What if DRM does not become a web standard? What is the alternative that companies will want to use instead?

That is for me the only reason why standardization might potentially be a good thing. Not because DRM is good, but because the alternative might be worse.

Everything in the past has been broken anyway. From CSS to AACS to HDCP[1]. I was hoping Firefox (and perhaps Chromium, but Google would probably not be so kind as to open source that part of the code) would have the DRM code built in so that we can spoof the whole thing with simple modifications. Better than having to reverse engineer Sony malware.

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

<comment><USER10> If you standardize it, you legitimize it.

The most important difference between Sony malware and an open-source crypto library is not that the former is more difficult to reverse-engineer. It is that the former is _illegal_ to reverse-engineer, at least in some parts of the world. This is what gives content owners the illusion that their DRM protects them. They are not looking for bulletproof technical protection. Social and legal high ground is good enough for them and their propaganda machine.

If DRM becomes standardized, it becomes much harder for the rest of us to make a convincing argument that this crap is not what the web was meant to be. The next thing you know, users of DRM-free browsers will be shown error pages telling them upgrade to a more standards-compliant alternative.

<comment><USER11> > If you standardize it, you legitimize it.

Your post pretty much nails the importance of opposing this in a few words. The (not) standardization of DRM is first and foremost a very strong political move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> EDIT: I'm not trying to bag on them, I just think they need to work on their messaging if they want to be effective:

That website seems about as in touch with people not of the same mindset as the back pages of norml's website (once you got past the parts written by a pr person). It's got a rotating banner to "cancel netflix" which links to a 2013 post about how netflix will make you use only certain browsers. Makes the site either seem disused... or "tinfoil" as I think most consumers love netflix.

(note I only used norml as an example because their site used to (and may still be) well articulated argument on the front which quickly devolves into what many people would see as weakly argued reasons for letting me get high. it's why, in any movement, you put your articulate people out front even if they're not the real driver).

</comment><comment><USER13> "Defective by Design"

Sounds like pretty much everything that's manufactured these days...

<comment><USER9> Dishonest by design I'd say. Many many vendors do not provide security updates[1], lock down their platform physically[2] and digitally[3], do not provide customer service[4], or make things that are intended to break before you may expect. There is 2-year warranty for electronics in the EU, but good luck suing some big American corp for your 1 year 11 month old device.

[1] IoT & Android comes to mind.

[2] Funny new screws in every iPhone come to mind, but of course there are a thousand product categories where the same happens.

[3] DRM in any kind of way. I would personally count all closed source software in this category, but as a software engineer who might like to tweak a feature in the source, I have a different perspective on what "locked down software" means.

[4] Google for any product, Microsoft for Windows, and many other such companies. Either they have a big fortune to not care about the couple of customers that run into trouble (e.g. Google), or they think it's not their responsibility since they don't sell directly to customers (Microsoft).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this just an arms race that they can never win? Regardless of source, encryption, format, etc. If a frame of a movie eventually makes it to my video card's buffer, I can get at it, right? There is no end-to-end encryption from source into my brain.

I can only see this just being a colossal inconvenience for users, developers, and many many innocent applications.

<comment><USER15> The end game would be decrypting it in the display device (better have a movie conglomerate approved video card and display device so everything supports the drm!) + one of the many solutions lately that can cause recording devices to (voluntarily at the device level, not at the user level) turn off.

Then of course you just use a non-broken recording device and record it but it'd be potentially very hard to get a purely digital signal out of a system like that (unless they mess it up, which they will).

And in the end pirates will continue getting to it an alternative way or cracking the drm and as you say, users are the ones inconvenienced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vote with your money. Don't buy Apple or Google devices, don't pay for Netflix or similar DRM streaming systems, don't buy Kindle books, don't buy Steam games. Buy unlocked media only, and don't forget to create some of your own.

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't ever buy content I will own with DRM, but if you think you'll ever see streaming without DRM you're crazy. Personally I've done my fair share of pirating for various reasons, and I think streaming services are the ONLY reasonable use case for DRM. You aren't actually purchasing content.

<comment><USER16> Streaming without DRM comes pre-installed on TVs here in China, and there are many torrent-based solutions as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think DRM is anti culture. Human history has been about sharing. We are a product of the whole. Cultural wealth has been passed down hundreds of years. Now the story tellers and singers do not want you to repeat their stuff, which put in perspective is not a very cultural thing to do.

And the only reason they can do this is because interests can congregate and technology can be abused but it seems morally and ethically questionable. You are not stealing anything, you are watching or listening to a product of our culture. You do not take anything away from anyone.

Its just a small period of 70 years before the internet when mass media and content creators could colloborate to 'manufacture trends', hits and disproportionate wealth.

Before that artists went broke and risked everything just to get their stuff published and out to readers and viewers. Obviously this is not how it should be but the whole 'jetset star lifestyle' may not always be possible simply because you are an artist.

The problem is now that kind of 'trend manufacturing' is much harder to pull off. But the entire industry from studios to artists have got throughly spoilt, got used to those disproportionate returns and are now throwing all their toys out of the pram.

Artists create but the rest of the world is also busy creating stuff. Engineers, industrial designers, scientists, programmers, eveyone is creating stuff. Can anyone just be 'entitled' to extraordinary wealth just because they create. Maybe its their cost structures, business models and expectations that need to change.

DRM is just a tantrum backed by money, its rent seeking of the worst kind and our democractic institutions and systems are so compromised by special interests they will continue to get their way.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's a bit disheartening. Instead of having a basic standard to start with, we will now have none.

The issue that FSF and others appears to have is with the Content Decryption Module which is a binary blob at the moment. Standardising/opening up the CDM spec could have been done afterwards.

If the W3C were a bit sneakier they could have played a bait-and-switch game on the content providers and push for a standard/opensource CDM at some point. Why couldn't there be an open-source CDM?

<comment><USER20> > Why couldn't there be an open-source CDM?

You could have an "open source" implementation. But you couldn't have an effective free software implementation, because it wouldn't be possible for it to be an effective DRM measure. If you have free software DRM, what stops a user from removing the DRM components (hint: nothing)?

<comment><USER21> Nothing will EVER stop it. DRM is a scam, nothing more, nothing less. As long as human beings have access to the data that they are (legally) allowed to have access to, unencrypted data will exist and will be pirated.

Steam solved the DRM issue eons ago: become the best place to get something, and people will flock to you to get it.

<comment><USER20> > Nothing will EVER stop it. DRM is a scam, nothing more, nothing less.

I'm very anti-DRM. My point to GP was that there's no point wishing for a free software DRM implementation -- because there's no way the people orchestrating the DRM conspiracy would allow for someone to remove their precious cashcow^Wdigital restrictions.

> As long as human beings have access to the data that they are (legally) > allowed to have access to, unencrypted data will exist and will be pirated.

Yes, this is true. But I really wish we would solve the actual problem: corporations thinking that DRM is actually a benefit to anyone.

> Steam solved the DRM issue eons ago: become the best place to get something, > and people will flock to you to get it.

Steam has DRM (the games are tied to Steam IIRC so if your account ever gets deleted you're fucked), so I don't know what you mean by "solved the DRM issue".

<comment><USER22> DRM is optional on steam. The publisher has to decide to use it. The DRM is also trivially breakable.

<comment><USER20> Do you have any stats on how many publishers use the DRM? I get the feeling that the numbers are quite high for AAA games. Also, the DRM being "trivially breakable" doesn't actually help anyone -- if you buy a game then break the DRM you're implicitly signalling that DRM is good to publishers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There seems to be lots of confusion of what EME is because people bring up images, text and games. First of all, EME is targeted to video and, to less extent, music streaming. Streaming video content to web browsers is, currently, a mess. There are many DRM schemes and each does its own crazy shit to try and make it work on everyone's browser. It's also expensive. So expensive that only big companies will target big platforms.

Also, EME doesn't affect only web browsers, it also affects SmartTVs which are limited to a few DRM products.

What EME and CENC try to achieve is to add simplicity to this process and for open source products to be able to compete with closed source ones. Even small DRM products are moving on this direction because it's impossible for them to target all platforms. On this regard, even an open source DRM scheme could be achieved and compete.

DRM, EME and CENC will happen, and this only hurts open source products like Linux and Firefox. But it will happen.

</comment><comment><USER24> Pardon my cynicism but there is no stopping this. Money talks, money is power, activists lack both the power and organisation of large corporations.

I foresee a near future where only a few in society will be able to use the internet safely. There will be subcultures, small segregated pockets of people who refuse the big corporate alternatives on the internet.

We're already seeing this today, think about it. I'm speaking from a Swedish perspective but when piracy on the www was relatively new in the 90s you'd go to "your guy" with the CD-burners and they would give you the movie, game, software you needed.

Only a few people knew enough to keep up with the trends, the BBS, the FTP sites and the newsgroups. Though there was little to none legal problems there were instead technical problems to piracy.

Then we had the piracy golden age, from about 98 to 2015, or today even. When everyone and their grandmother pirated. It was so easy, and torrents made it even easier.

But now the biggest ISP in Sweden has started handing over personal information of their subscribers to foreign companies who are sending monetary demands to the customers if their IP is found on trackers. So instead of being taken to court, just pay the money right?

That's just the start, it will only get worse because corporations have all the power.

But let's look at another example less sinister than piracy. Let's look at simple tracking and web security. Even there you have to be relatively computer savvy to keep up with the new tools, Adblock is out, uBlock is in, Noscript author is under fire, alternatives are often hosted on github.

See what I mean? Safe web browsing is being restricted to a few people savvy enough, or interested enough, to keep up with that scene.

So already, today we're seeing what the future holds for the internet. Any privacy conscious, safe browsing will be pushed to minority subcultures using different platforms, tools and networks than the rest of the population.

The internet will be just another TV or Radio, with indie broadcasters fighting to remain free in a vast sea of big corporations.

We'll most definitely always have open source browsers but the question is how well these browsers will support the new DRM internet that I foresee in our futures.

So pardon my cynicism when I see no positive outcome for DRM on the web. I see instead a majority of content under DRM protection, some of it being copied by a small minority in society and spread through other smaller networks of people who refuse the mainstream web standards.

How this is achieved is just a technicality. It is inevitable because there's money in it and as long as there's money in it corporations will pour money into lobbying to change the rules in their favor.

<comment><USER25> I kind of have a pet theory on this: We need to take away the money aspect from here. We've started entering a post-scarcity society, but our economic models don't account for that. It's free to distribute media, but our economic model demands that we have a paid gateway. I don't know how to solve this, but I do think that we'd be better off once we get it fixed.

<comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_copyright)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm just not so sure the EME is so horrible. If companies want to deliver their content encrypted then they will do so.

</comment><comment><USER28> The politics of desire always make for fascinating attempts at rationalization

</comment><comment><USER29> Unfortunately, it's peoples very nature to avoid paying for things if they don't have to. Whereas I don't support the wholesale DRMing of everything, I do support the Content Creators right to be remunerated for their work.

Without DRM, people will steal stuff without regard for the creators survival. This was seen most visible in the Pop Music industry. Piracy was so rife, that indie musicians were considered too big a risk for the labels, who turned to low-risk-low-cost 'music factory' style churning out of the same low quality pap that the popular charts is now peppered with.

If we don't protect artists (by this I mean, musicians, game designers, visual artists, program makers etc.) from the people trying to steal from them, there will be no quality content going forward, and the only form of entertainment will come from the mega-corps trying to peddle their wares in the guise of ad- laden media.

So, in my view, a standard cross-platform secure DRM model for the web is required. If you want to consume it, you should be prepared to pay for it.

<comment><USER30> > So, in my view, a standard cross-platform secure DRM model for the web is > required. If you want to consume it, you should be prepared to pay for it.

These are completely orthogonal to one another. People pay for content when they can get a good service at a fair price. For the longest time it was _much_ easier to torrent movies and shows than to try and navigate through the cesspool of TV scheduling, ads, etc. Netflix fixed that and now people pay for content. The same happened with music. DRM solves nothing as it only takes one determined person to break it and then everyone else gets a great experience. Meanwhile all your paying customers have to suffer through a poor experience thanks to DRM. It's self-defeating.

<comment><USER29> > Meanwhile all your paying customers have to suffer through a poor experience > thanks to DRM.

No, that's all thanks to rubbish DRM. You are confusing the concept of DRM with the implementation. Good DRM should be seamless and no-different (to the end user) to non-DRM content - it's this area that is failing, and why the current failure to settle on a good DRM standard is resulting in so many badly implemented proprietary systems.

<comment><USER30> >Good DRM should be seamless and no-different (to the end user) to non-DRM content

There is no such thing. DRM tries to do something that's fundamentally impossible. It wants to allow you to view content while at the same time not allow you to copy it but that's a distinction that only exists in intent not technically. It's also impossible in practice since at best it could aim to be as good as not existing at all but since it's not made of magic pixie dust but is actual hardware and software it will both fail open and fail closed. The fail open cases will be used to get the content out of it. The fail closed ones will frustrate users who just want to be able to view their content who will then grab the illegal copies and will soon figure out that they are paying for an inferior experience.

<comment><USER29> I kinda agree there. If you can see it - it can be copied.

Maybe the best counter to DRM is for people to be more honest :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Tour of the Acme Editor - <AUTHOR> http://research.swtch.com/acme <comment><USER2> Very neat. It seems to me the really interesting bit here is the ability to add execution meaning to arbitrary bits of text. Can anyone who uses Acme comment on whether or not that is primarily what gives Acme its power? Is there something else key to it that isn't shown cleanly in the video?

Interestingly, I also see Light Table as an "Integrating" Development Environment - something that utilizes all the amazing tools out there and strings them together into a very fluid workflow. I think we need to decouple the raw functionality of dev tools from the experience of their use, since it seems to me the latter is infinitely configurable and far too subjective to get "right" in all cases.

<comment><USER3> It's definitely the ability to parse expressions like "<file>:<lineno>" and open files at the right position, it essentially makes it integrated with many many unix tools without actually having to write any integration code.

The ease of piping the selection through an external program is a close second.

However I do not use it.

What's funny about acme is that it's a perfect metaphor for the entire plan9: it shows you how striving for a simple, beautiful design can create new, great solutions to old problems.

But at the same time it will also kill the adoption of the product completely: acme doesn't support any keybindings (doesn't fit the desing), no syntax highlighting (not the editor's job to parse code), nothing but bitmapped fonts (implementing externally defined standards is a chore), tags file support (doesn't fit the design), incremental search (doesn't fit the design), horizontal scrolling (makes it complicated to use the same editor control for the tags too), configuring the color scheme (no), weird non-standard behaviour of up and down keys (we just like it better this way)...

Bringing any of this up to a 9fan will also be a great metaphor for the friendliness of the community.

<comment><USER4> I won't argue any of your points but one. You can use whatever system fonts you like on OS X. Here's some Comic Sans for you: <http://swtch.com/~rsc/hackernews.png>

<comment><USER5> A hint on how to achieve that would be greatly appreciated.

I tried starting Acme as follows, but no joy:

9 acme -F '/Library/Fonts/Comic Sans MS.ttf'

ADDED. After googling site:swtch.com, I tried the following two invocations, but still no joy:

9 acme −F /mnt/font/Monaco/13a/font

9 acme −F /usr/local/plan9/mnt/font/Monaco/13a/font

\-- which is not so surprising as neither /mnt nor /usr/local/plan9/mnt exist.

ADDED. Actually, cannot get the -F flag to Acme to do anything. E.g., $PLAN9/font/luc/latin1CW.18.font exists, but Acme started with "acme -F $PLAN9/font/luc/latin1CW.18.font" uses the same font as Acme started with "acme".

<comment><USER6> -F changes the fixed width font. You want -f.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Am now able to choose among the fonts supplied by the plan9port tarball.

Still would like to be able to choose a OS X system font, though.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, my original reply with the screenshot included a command line, but it got lost in the internet tubes, and when I reposted the reply I forgot the command line.

acme -f /mnt/font/ComicSansMS/16a/font is how I made the screenshot. Run fontsrv -p . to get a list of the fonts you can use.

<comment><USER5> A final question, Russ: are you the primary author of fontsrv?

<comment><USER7> Not sure if russ is still reading this thread, but AFAIK, yes, he, or one of the many secret rsc clones is the primary author of fontsrv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Acme was also Dennis Ritchie's editor of choice, there is a picture of him and his working environment here:

<http://acme.cat-v.org>

Also wish Russ had shown acme in a full screen setup, one of the most awesome things about acme is how well it manages having tons of windows, and you don't get a real feeling for it without seeing it done in a real full screen large environment.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it annoying to program without syntax highlight? Or is it just some false rumor I've heard that acme doesn't have that feature... it looks a lot like wmii. I have to try it though, emacs and vim really sucks, too bloated for my taste, I'm still not that hardcore that I use ed for programming so I'm searching for an simple, minimal and correct alternative to emacs and vim....

<comment><USER4> For a number of years in the mid-1990s I switched between Borland's IDE when using DOS and vi (not vim) and later sam when using Unix. The fact that one world had highlighting and the other didn't have it had no effect on my productivity, at least not one in favor of highlighting. It never occurred to me that I should miss it on Unix or that it was annoying not to have it. They were just different tools that did different things.

I know lots of people have strong feelings about this highlighting or that, but honestly, just try going without it for a week or two. I bet you'll find it is not that big a deal after all.

<comment><USER8> Okey, thanks. I'll try it. If I feel that it ain't really for me I think I'll just write my own editor. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The <$basename> ':' syntax for inner reference is great. As the OP describes it, hypertext for files.

With per format program, possibly implicitely called based on extension, it could be extended to structural reference.

/foo/bar.c:function[2]/statement[3] would call an ANSI C parser and return the substream enclosing the :/expr/ passed.

<comment><USER10> That's how the plumber works: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/plumb>

<comment><USER9> I was thinking of something at the os level, like the namespaces for windows.

<comment><USER11> The plumber is effectively at the OS level. It's a userspace program, but it provides it services to the whole system at once. It's a global service that handles all plumbing between all programs. (Think "Android Intents". It's not too far off, conceptually.). Running, for example,

        plumb path/to/file.c:123

will send the file to whatever editor instance is set up to handle C files, and move the dot to line 123, from wherever it is invoked, be it the command line, the

        plumb bar.jpg

will open bar.jpg in whatever image viewer is appropriate. More or less, you can think of the plumber as a system level "take this text and do an appropriate action with it" service, where you can set up whatever rules you want to do the plumbing.

I don't think there's a good reason for this to live inside the OS, instead of simply running as a service. I don't think there's any extra functionality or elegance that would buy you.

<comment><USER9> Right, I just meant something as global as the windows namespaces (I don't know how it is designed, kernel module for vfs or userspace)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Conceptually I love Acme, but the three-button mouse thing has turned out to be a real problem for me. I don't think I can work without a scroll mouse, and I've never found a mouse that has both three real buttons and a scroll wheel. Can anybody recommend one?

<comment><USER13> I think the Evoluent mouse gets recommended by Acme users.

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

[http://www.amazon.com/Evoluent-Vertical-Mouse-Right- Handed/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Evoluent-Vertical-Mouse-Right- Handed/dp/B00427TAIK)

<http://russ.cox.usesthis.com> \-- `rsc`, do you still use this setup?

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's still my mouse of choice. On a Mac you need a 3rd-party tool like 'USB Overdrive' to remap the buttons correctly. On Linux you can use xmodmap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really tried to use it but the disrupted work flow caused by the necessity for pixel perfect mouse aiming was headache inducing.

<comment><USER15> How can this be? In the example he managed to click on things to run commands by just clicking on the word, instead of selecting the entire line perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the point in an all-text user interface if you still use the mouse?

<comment><USER17> Simply because text is entered via the keyboard does not mean that the keyboard is the only way to _manipulate_ text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface_

Sounds a little like Oberon. I wonder how many people have used both.

<comment><USER7> If you read the acme[1] paper you will see Rob Pike explicitly acknowledges the influence of Oberon.

This can be seen even more clearly in Acme's more direrect predecessor: help[2]

[1]: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/>

[2]: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/help/>

<comment><USER18> Thank you. I didn't know there was a direct influence. It's intriguing, because the two cultures share a similar design style: "aggressive use of a small number of abstractions" as Ken Thompson put it. I like that design style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great screencast. I tried to read through the Acme guide before but never quite got the gist of it. This reminds me of the Starcraft interface in that if you have excellent mouse twitch reflexes it seems you can more easily induce a sense of flow (whether you're productive or not is a different matter; see APM spam[1]).

Definitely not an environment to work in if you have cats/kids that like to fiddle with your mouse when you're in the kitchen or taking a bio-break.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actions_per_minute>

</comment><comment><USER20> I fiddled with acme a few times over the years, but never got around using it for a real project (I _did_ use sam for quite a while about 10 years ago). I'd like to see the "advanced" version of this screencast, i.e. someone doing a small programming project with it, coding, debugging etc.

And preferable _not_ a C/Go unix CLI/server, where you probably have decent cooling and can stay within acme all the time. The trivial blog web app example would be interesting, maybe in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python etc., so that it's easier to compare this with IDEs or vim/emacs.

</comment><comment><USER21> From the looks of it, _everyone_ on HN is currently downloading Plan 9 from User Space. It's a 51MB download and the download speed is currently 3-4kB/sec!

<comment><USER17> Quoth Russ Cox:

The swtch.com machine has a fairly slow connection. Better ways to get it: \- hg clone <https://code.google.com/p/plan9port> plan9 \- <http://am.lcs.mit.edu/~rsc/plan9port.tgz> I changed the link on the home page to point to that tgz instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> ok, looks interesting. i still like my vim though as the editor part.

so to summarize, we'd need an editable terminal, like the one acme provides and a plumber that works with that termal, put it all in a tiling wm, and we're there, right?

in my opinion, in a way, the behavior is already very similar to what everyone with tiling wms trys to achieve. but maybe i'm missing something crucial

</comment><comment><USER23> It would be really neat to integrate the plumber into one's usual development environment, be it vim or emacs or whatever. I'd like to do this with vim, but I thought I'd ask first: Does anyone here already do this (with plan 9 from user space)? Any hang-ups I should be prepared for?

<comment><USER24> All you need is some sort of remote control for your tool -- for example, a way to open a file in an existing emacs instance. plumb is just a command like any other that provides global ipc between all your programs,

        plumb "path/too/foo.c"

runs the argument string through the gauntlet of plumbing rules. It's up to you to edit the plumbing rules to send the file to your editor.

Before I lost my hard drive, I had some udev rules setup that used the plumber to post notifications to a 9term window on my desktop when a USB drive was mounted. It's really dead simple, really makes you wonder about the proliferation of complex messaging systems like dbus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like that Acme has such a radically different paradigm from vi, but I can't imagine that pixel-dependent mouse interactions could ever beat vi for text manipulation. (It takes me a maximum of about 4 keystrokes to get anywhere I want in a vi buffer.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Russ do you prepend plan9port/bin to PATH when using acme as a way to prefer tools which do not make use of escape sequences for coloring term output? Or do you disable color in tools like mercurial?

<comment><USER4> No, but I do export TERM=dumb and then complain to authors of programs that still emit escape sequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Evergreen is an Acme-inspired editor with a similar philosophy:

<http://software.jessies.org/evergreen/>

</comment><comment><USER28> some editable shell interaction in <http://xiki.org/> & <http://ipython.org/>

</comment><comment><USER26> How do you indent with spaces instead of tabs?

<comment><USER17> Execute the command "Indent on" to turn auto-indent on for the current window. Acme will then automatically insert the same indentation as the previous line for every new line you make. I just tested, it works with tabs and spaces. (But don't use spaces :-)

<comment><USER26> Thanks I'll try that. Am I able to make acme source that from a personal customization script on startup?

<comment><USER17> No, we don't support startup scripts in Acme (you could implement it of course, the code is simple), but you can use the "Dump" command to take a snapshot of your current Acme layout. I'm not sure if that will preserve the status of Indent, but it may at least help you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can acme run without a graphics layer (e.g. X11) beyond VGA?

Why does it need more than VGA text if it entirely text-based?

<comment><USER4> > Can acme run without a graphics layer (e.g. X11) beyond VGA?

It would not be hard to make the underlying graphics code work on top of linuxfb. I think a patch for that might be floating around.

> Why does it need more than VGA text if it entirely text-based?

Did you really watch the video? You can see that while acme is entirely about editing text, the UI itself is graphical.

<comment><USER17> Russ, you probably remember that Aki did a linuxfb version of drawterm for Tiny Horrible Xen; I'd bet the changes could be adapted to Plan 9 Port without too much trouble, really the Linux framebuffer is pretty simple.

<comment><USER13> I would be incredibly interested in a version of Acme that would not require X windows. Hell, I'd even pay for it.

(I currently run emacs on arch linux with no x)

<comment><USER17> If you install Plan 9 Ports, check out /usr/local/plan9/src/cmd/devdraw. Russ can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's the only place the graphical programs interface with X. You'll need to find the places where devdraw is using X, and replace them with framebuffer code.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Identifying the DNS server used to fulfill an HTTP request (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://5f5.org/ruminations/dns-debugging-over-http.html <comment><USER2> This is old and may well be no longer functional: posted on January, 14 2013.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems that this no longer works:

      $ dig +trace webutils.flourishworks.com
      ...
      ...
      webutils.flourishworks.com. 300	IN	NS	 misc.firebase.com.
      couldn't get address for 'misc.firebase.com': not found
      dig: couldn't get address for 'misc.firebase.com': no more

</comment><comment><USER4>
        ; <<>> DiG 9.11.2-P1 <<>> webutils.flourishworks.com
        ;; global options: +cmd
        ;; Got answer:
        ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 41479
        ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1</comment>


Health Care Is a Business, Not a Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-23/health-care-is-a-business-not-a-right <comment><USER2> "People need a lot of things. You'll die without food long before you'll die without health care, and yet few people say we need to "take the profit motive out of farming"."

"Why is health care Special"

I tell you why healthcare is special. You cannot buy healthcare at the cost of food. I can buy ramen noodles and survive for cheap. Sure it is not the best but I won't frikin die. But If I get cancer and cannot afford a 100k Bill (yes, I know a family member who got that bill) , I will die. See ?

Again, people are talking about making Healthcare a right in America is mostly due to the fact that it is too expensive and difficult to deal with. If that was not the case and healthcare becomes as cheap as food, I bet people will stop the whole "healthcare is a right" movement. I would.

EDIT: Read this fun fact [0]. The average cost of health insurance is $17,500 PER FAMILY . Now this means that you may get covered for diseases such as Cancer but that does not mean you won't get a huge bill even after insurance. Now imagine you had no insurance and you get cancer. Compare this to average cost of food [1] for a family of 4

[0] [http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-insurance- premium...](http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-insurance- premiums.aspx)

[1] [http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/CostofFoodFeb20...](http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/CostofFoodFeb2015.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Try to eat ramen noodles for the rest of your life and see how your health goes. Most health issues today are directly related to diet. However, processed food and snacks are much cheaper (ramen noodles) than healthy alternatives. McDonald's is a lot cheaper than going to the store and cooking a meal. So no, food is not cheaper when you try to compare it against healthcare.

<comment><USER4> I hear this argument continuously, but it does not convince me. You imply that McDonalds is bad. Why is it so? Mostly because it's very calorie dense, not because it's actually bad for you. In that respect, McD does its job very well, too well even, but it's not the food itself that is bad, its over consumption.

How bad are ramen for you anyway? Consuming it as a large part of your diet, within your caloric intake and getting the rest of your needed vitamins from different sources (fruits, supplements even), would you get sick with time? Why are certain foods labeled as "bad" automatically? t seems this gets repeated Ad nauseam but most always, the accusation is unsubstantiated.

<comment><USER3> Are you trying the imply that eating a double bacon cheeseburger with a coke and fries is healthy for you?? I do agree with you on consumption, but when was the last time you heard of someone having health issues because they over ate on fresh fruits and vegetables? In my comment I was more referring to farm fresh compared to the highly processed food that is much cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The conclusion of the article is a bit ridiculous. tl;dr healthcare isn't a right because we can only spend a finite amount.

Yeah, ok, but that dismisses priority entirely. Scarcity is still in play, so you treat the immediate needs first. I think we do have capacity in the healthcare system to do it that way. The author of the article basically bucketed a sprained ankle and a stroke in the same category, and concluded, nope, we don't have enough money to treat all that cancer, heart attack, stroke and scrapes and bruises equally, so it can't be a right. I guess, but who's really arguing for the right to get an ace bandage _right now_? Just because we have to prioritize access doesn't mean healthcare can't be a right. Today we prioritize by medical need and by who can pay. Single payer means everyone can pay, so prioritize by medical need. The right can be subject to objective need.

<comment><USER6> I agree the author makes the wrong inferences from the situation, but her points _do_ often go overlooked in the debate: people make a big deal about "omg, someone died because they couldn't afford [more] health care", even though this will _always_ be true, in every system, even the best ones -- you can't save everyone.

(Similarly, the rhetoric around "death panels" was toxic made this insight harder to accept.)

<comment><USER7> I've had the opposite experience. When talking about the problems of the US health care system compared to national health systems, the number one thing I hear is that ours is much more expensive and achieves worse results. One of the primary motivations behind people who want to nationalize health care is to reduce costs. Everyone is thinking about costs.

The comparison to food is misleading. With food, there's an aligned interest. People go to the store and buy your product. If they aren't satisfied, they buy something else. With health care, most people have few choices. They get whatever plan is assigned by their employer or whatever they can afford within their limited market, often one or two possibilities. Then they go to the hospital, often the only one in the area, which in most cases won't tell them how much it will cost to be treated.

There's no free market, no choice, no aligned interests. The interests of the insurance companies are aligned against them. People are paid to deny as many claims as possible. It often takes years of legal battles to get anything paid out, even when it's legitimate.

Because even preventative care is unpredictably expensive, most people wait to be treated until the problem is most expensive to treat.

<comment><USER6> >I've had the opposite experience. When talking about the problems of the US health care system compared to national health systems, the number one thing I hear is that ours is much more expensive and achieves worse results. One of the primary motivations behind people who want to nationalize health care is to reduce costs. Everyone is thinking about costs.

Yes, you can reduce costs and get more per dollar invested; it's still a fallacy to believe that one system will eliminate the problem of people dying because someone refuses to throw further resources at them.

<comment><USER7> Basically, the article is a strawman fallacy. It paints national health care supporters as people who think, as you said, that health care as a human right would mean that everybody gets treated no matter how expensive. Nobody thinks that. The goal is to reduce the amount of people who are sick and dying as much as possible. We have data on that in the form of the performance of various systems and their impact on health.

The US is still the world's economic superpower, but it's health care system is rated below Dominica and Costa Rica.

<comment><USER6> So was I just imagining all the people repeating the line that 'no one should die because they can't afford health care'? Or do you not see how that condition also exists in all the countries that do it right?

>The US is still the world's economic superpower, but it's health care system is rated below Dominica and Costa Rica.

What is this replying to? What did I say that contradicted this or suggested otherwise, or merited a re-run of "everything wrong with health care in the US" as if I disagreed? I was addressing a specific fallacy, not somehow claiming that everything the US is wine and roses.

<comment><USER7> That low ranking is related to the first thing you're saying. It's what drives advocates of national health care, not the idea that nobody will die.

When people are talking about deaths of people who can't afford health care, they're talking about people who don't have the resources to ever get care, the people who don't catch things in the early stages when they're easily treatable and find out too late that their condition has become terminal. The point of national health care isn't to eliminate all treatable deaths no matter how expensive, it's to improve care and accessibility so that it's in a place that aligns with the resources society could reasonably support. When we look at much poorer nations being able to provide much better care, we see that there's a problem that needs to be addressed. That's what people are talking about, not eliminating all deaths.

<comment><USER6> Those are all great, subtle distinctions to make. They're also completely different arguments from, and not at all conveyed by "lol poor people die from lacking health care in the US but not Europe".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But it's not a business, not in its current implementation. Right now it's a implicit government protected monopoly for lots and lots of things. Case in point: EpiPens which are in the news today. When the government makes it hard to develop alternatives but doesn't pay for the monopoly it creates, it's neither a business nor a right. It's a disaster yet that's where we find ourselves today.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/upshot/the-epipen-a- case-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/upshot/the-epipen-a-case-study- in-health-care-system-dysfunction.html?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER9> The article does raise an interesting point in that most people don't necessarily see food as an inalienable right that people shouldn't need to pay for.

But to counter that point our government has set up a system of farm subsidies and management to ensure affordable food is available to pretty much anyone... and even those who don't have the money get food stamps.

Seems like the government tries to do the same thing with the health sector, yet it still costs more than most people can reasonably afford. It seems like there are clear market pressures and competition in food production that drives the price down to a minimum. That does not seem to be the case with health care.

<comment><USER10> I thought that was an interesting point as well. I'm having trouble coming up w/ full argument but one point is that there's huge differences btwn food and healthcare.

When you only have $20 to spend on food for the week, you don't need to go to the government for help. You can cook and eat rice and beans all week. That's what I did in college.

The difference w/ healthcare is there's no rice and beans of cancer treatment or ER visits. People aren't regularly given a decision between death and going to a fancy restaurant.

<comment><USER11> It's pretty easy to institute the life changes needed for you to go from not having enough food to survive on a daily basis to having enough to survive.

You can't go from not having enough to treat cancer to having enough to treat cancer easily or ever in many cases. This is like saying FEMA should be a for profit institution. Getting cancer is no different than having a tornado level your home. No amount of picking yourself up by the bootstraps will get you back on track. This is why we have a social safety net. Healthcare is no different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is absolutely spot on.

Health care is not a right, neither is education, food, or access to the internet.

These are all things that people at some point or another have claimed as "inalienable human rights".

There is always a cost benefit analysis here. Should we perform this extremely expensive treatment to give somebody a few days in agonizing pain, or maybe save a few dozen other people with a simple, straightforward procedure?

The painful part is realizing that no matter what, people with more resources (money or otherwise) will have better (and longer) lives on average then people without resources. There is no way to legislate that away. See Venezuela for an example of that.

<comment><USER13> > Should we perform this extremely expensive treatment to give somebody a few > days in agonizing pain, or maybe save a few dozen other people with a > simple, straightforward procedure?

Does the current system in the US evaluate that?

We could also go back to feudalism, people accross history and the world have gained rights against the wealthy minority, and I think healthcare for everyone should be something US citizens fight for now.

(It's a bit of a marxist reading of history, but in this case it works)

<comment><USER12> Did you read the article at all? Evaluating the cost/benefit analysis is completely toxic and forbidden completely.

The NHS does that and denies it, and the last election they tried to call Obamacare "death boards".

We are in fuedalism right now, we just don't recognize our lords as explicitly.

And you can't "fight for healthcare for everybody". Healthcare is a scarce resource, and not everybody gets it. It's the nature of scare resources. If you have to provide healthcare to all, something else will get cut. Education? Food subsidies? Housing stipends? You pick your poison and don't think that we can just produce things out of thin air.

And the two marxist societies in the world are suffering. (DPRK and Venezuela) They've only been able to make everyone equally miserable, except for those in the ruling party.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 'Right' is probably too strong a word.

Does a person have the 'Right' to be rescued from a car accident that would surely kill them without help when it is in other people's power to do so?

No. BUT at some point I think it is fair to expect certain behavior from others living in civilized society.

A Right? Probably not. But Reasonable Expectation doesn't have the same punch as a slogan.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I think it's a little damaging to use that word.

If it requires someone else to provide it - it's NOT a right because that would infringe on another's rights. It's that simple.

It may be the right thing to do to provide it inexpensively, however.

At the same time - so many people don't exercise, eat crap, get obese and diabetes or other preventable diseases and then overload the system with expenses. I'm not sure how you solve this issue.

<comment><USER14> Me neither, not completely anyway. But there are dozens of things I think might help.

-Make medical debt non-dischargeable if you incur it without insurance. (Encourage everyone to make an accurate accounting of the risk they are putting on themselves and the system without insurance).

-Require price lists of common procedures and tests from providers. (Competition on price).

-Close the medicaid gap.

-Publish insurance standards and require providers to accept all insurance that meet those standards. (This would allow smaller players into the insurance market spurring competition -- it would also be very difficult to pull off -- perhaps tie it to providers that get federal money in some way).

-Incentivise staying healthy by giving rebates for good health.

-Incentivise not using health care by giving rebates for not using it over some period of time.

-Incentivise shopping around by giving rebates based on finding providers/treatments/prescriptions that are below the average. Penalize those that are above some threshold by dinging future rebates.

And on and on. I don't think there is one solution. I think we need to try a bunch of things and keep what works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Despite any implementation problems, I don't believe that someone should have a worse chance of keeping their life in the face of disease just because they are not as wealthy. That alone means that society is considering some people's lives more important than others, which is not a society that I would like to live in.

<comment><USER17> >That alone means that society is considering some people's lives more important than others

No it doesn't. Healthcare does not happen through some fictitious consensus of "society". It happens through individuals interacting one with one another and forming a natural order. To claim that healthcare is a "right" ultimately means healthcare providers are slaves.

<comment><USER18> "To claim that healthcare is a "right" ultimately means healthcare providers are slaves."

So teachers are slaves? As are judges? etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Health care should probably not be a right, but universal heathcare has a lot to recommend it from a social and economic policy perspective. For example, people who can't afford to see a doctor will eventually end up in the ER, at enormous cost that can't be recouped, and that could likely have been prevented. Also, having a maximally large healthy working population is something that has a direct economic impact

</comment><comment><USER20> There are no free markets where price transparency doesn't exist. Even surgeons can't predict what prices will be for a procedure.

Healthcare, because of the complexity of understanding how the body works, is a natural local monopoly.

Are you going to shop around for a better deal on a quadruple bypass when you already trust your surgeon? How would you know if the cheaper surgeon was as good?

Healthcare insurance suffers from the classic agency problem and has no incentive to keep costs low over the long term because they take ~7% off the top for a pass through transaction.

</comment><comment><USER21> The current problem is the pricing is completely non-transparent hence consumers cannot choose based upon price. No one knows what anything costs until a bill arrives much, much later. In addition, it is extremely opaque how the numbers on the bill are arrived at.

<comment><USER22> That's not the only problem. For example, another problem is that consumers cannot choose based upon price because they are frequently in an emergency situation. Another is that they can't choose based upon price because they are locked into a health insurance plan which negotiates reasonable prices only with preferred providers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > You'll die without food long before you'll die without health care, and yet > few people say we need to "take the profit motive out of farming"

Yes, and the reason few people say that -- even while people _do_ argue for regulation to limit certain commercial practices in farming that they view as harmful to food availability, affordability, and/or quality -- is because you don't see monopolies on basic foodstuffs in the developed world being used to drive prices on foods that people rely on so high that many people, _even with the safety net provided by government_ , can't afford essential foodstuffs in a first-world nation like the US.

That is, because, problematic as it is, the combination of private for-profit business and government regulation operating in food markets is working adequately well, such that people are less likely than is the case for healthcare in the US to perceive that the model under which it is provided is broken, inadequate for the needs of society, and essential to fundamentally reform.

History has shown, more than once, that when the systems of delivering food _are_ perceived to be as broken as the US system of delivering healthcare is now perceived to be, people _do_ clamor -- often violently -- for change.

</comment><comment><USER24> "People need a lot of things. You'll die without food long before you'll die without health care, and yet few people say we need to "take the profit motive out of farming"."

I'll say this too when I get a $65,000 bill at the grocery store.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure I buy the reciprocal-altruism argument, but the article's thesis seems ineluctably true, however unsavory.

</comment><comment><USER26> From the UN Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 25.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

[http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/inde...](http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> When you have a NHS you are agreeing on a single standard of care as a nation. The problem that the author illustrates is that it is difficult to have an honest dollars and cents conversation about what that standard of care should be. It certainly can't be 'whatever is necessary at any cost' without bankrupting the program. Where the dollars do get spent will be determined by political expediency rather than individual choice. As with most government programs the incentives will be with what's popular rather than what is effective. Politicians will get elected to put more money towards $cause of the day$.

Also consider the moral hazard involved with national healthcare combined with our two party system and electoral process. Who would be surprised if Iowa and New Hampshire end up with more hospitals per capita than other states? What if CA and NY end up with a lions share of the healthcare dollars? What if they don't?

IMHO, the right way to run a NHS for the US would look very different than the UK's NHS. Perhaps something similar to a minimum wage. I.E. A federal minimum standard of care that is uncomfortably low, with state and private coverage able to build on top of that as determined at a local level. But we have to be able to look at something like a "death panel" and say 'yes of course that would be necessary'. Until we can have honest conversations about varying standards of care, we won't see meaningful healthcare reform in the US.

</comment><comment><USER28> The question the article is asking isn't matched by the headline, or the conclusion. The points raised in the article come down to this idea - if we, as a society, want to make sure everyone has access to health care, then we need to decide how to handle the limited resources available. That's true whether you think of health care as a right or not.

</comment><comment><USER29> The government pays farmers to burn their crops, as to destroy competition and raise prices. The government, with the ACA, taxes insurance companies great amounts and uses that money to pay for the government care; the quality of the company's care goes down, then.

</comment><comment><USER30> That's not an either-or situation. Health care, food, clothing and shelter are rights and businesses.

The rights are _positive_ rights, in other words they must be provided, and cost resources to provide. (In contrast to negative rights like freedom of expression, where it costs resources to take the right away from you)

As positive rights (aka obligations), they must be rationed. Welfare et al provides enough money to pay for basic food & shelter but not for caviar and mansions. The article is a very reasonable discussion of why it's harder to ration health care, but the conclusion (and title) doesn't necessarily follow.

<comment><USER31> This idea of "positive" rights is a dangerous, illiberal notion. Who incurred an obligation to provide healthcare to others? The answer is no one -- not individually or collectively.

Healthcare is a service, like any other service performed by human beings in society with one another. If it isn't performed as charity, then it is performed when the parties involved strike a deal. The alternative is that one person's "positive right" is another's positive slavery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Human Rights Declaration: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."

...and Health Care is how one stays alive, therefore health care should be a right.

<comment><USER33> If I truly have such an _absolute_ right to life, then the State should expend infinite resources in order to attempt to keep me alive forever. No expense should ever be spared.

<comment><USER34> That is the state of things:

[http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90611&page=1](http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90611&page=1)

[http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-03-01/news/960301023...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-03-01/news/9603010235_1_liver- transplant-organ-transplant-mitchell-rupe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know everyone's busy re-iterate the usual health care talking points, but I this part interesting: McArdle says that she went on to a British talk show to talk about NHS and Obamacare, and the host and opponent both refused to deny that NICE does what it actually does: a CBA on treatments and recommends for/against them to the NHS.

(Obama tried to set up IPAB to do the same thing.)

<comment><USER35> Does she say what the host and opponent claimed NICE do instead of cost benefit?

<comment><USER6> I couldn't find a mention of it. Here's the part:

>>...Britain had achieved cost-effective treatment for everyone, at the cost of some people missing very expensive treatments that might help them. I was rather congratulating myself on this answer, because NICE is beloved of health wonks everywhere; Obamacare's Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is an attempt to sort of replicate it. Pointing out something the British health system can do that the American system can't, and doing so in dryly factual tones, seemed like a good way to endear myself to the British audience.

>>The other guest, a British health official, interrupted to basically accuse me of lying; the British health system, he said, did no such thing.

>>Now I reiterate: I had not called NICE a death panel, or said that it was bad; I had simply described what NICE does, which is keep the NHS from blowing its budget on very expensive treatments that deliver relatively little value per pound spent. You can read NICE describing what NICE does on its website; the description is not significantly different from the one I gave. Being told that this was flat out wrong was surreal. Things got even more surreal when I began again to explain what NICE does, thinking that perhaps I had been unclear, and the host interrupted me and said something like "As you know, that's false."

<comment><USER35> How frustrating.

That person was clearly true. It's a deeply unpopular idea over here though, even though very few meds are recommended against on pure cost grounds.

<comment><USER6> But that should validate the difficult politics of health care -- even in a country that gets it (mostly) right, it's because everyone has incorrect beliefs about what it actually does and how it actually controls costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article strikes me as tone-deaf.

> People need a lot of things. You'll die without food long before you'll die > without health care, and yet few people say we need to "take the profit > motive out of farming". (...) Why is health care special?

Why is healthcare special? Because juicing someone's wallet when they are down on their luck is one of the worst things you can do.

Yes, healthcare is not cheap. And the resources we have to pay for it are finite. We don't understand everything, and ultimately we will all lose the battle to death.

So why do we fight? Because we want to live. And most of us want to see those whom they love live too.

The money argument is especially bad though, because in terms of outcomes (whether you measure longevity, or not dying of preventable diseases, or not getting more messed up during treatment), the US scores pretty bad. Yet we spend the most of any country (per GDP)[1]. Other countries such as the UK, France or Germany spend less, do contain costs and have better outcomes.

What making it a business does is reduce overall efficiency. If the major actors have the ability to take advantage of the final customer's weakness while maintaining a fiduciary responsability to generate profits, then money that is spent for the purpose of getting well gets diverted into pure profits.

Exhibit A: drugs. In France drug companies negotiate a market price with the payor (government). They are still able to turn a profit in that market alone. Not a huge one but decent. They then take the same drug, patent it in the US and sell it for 4x to 6x the price. Keep in mind the R&D was already paid for. So that is pure profit (minus marketing and regulatory compliance costs).

[1] [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?year_high...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?year_high_desc=true)

</comment><comment><USER37> It'd be nice if we were in a place where the main ideas in this article, providing the health care people can afford and no more, were somewhat applicable. Unfortunately people in the US literally cannot afford any health care of any kind, aside from over-the-counter items like Band-Aids and cough syrup and those kinds of items won't get you very far. Forgetting this, or leaving it out of the article entirely as the author of this article does, is dangerous and misleading.

It seems obvious but the article forgets to mention that since health care is so expensive and no one can afford it, everyone buys health insurance. Even health insurance has become expensive to the point that no one can afford it, people need a larger organization to help purchase this insurance on their behalf (like their employer or now, the government). Now we've reached the point were even that has become too expensive. The guy in the cube next to me broke his hand skate boarding and is spending almost 1/10th of his salary on covering the cost and he's employed.

For sure, the history of health insurance and health care in the US is complicated and it's not as straightforward. But that is where things are today: unless you are wealthy or work for a wealthy company, health care is the kind of expense that can balloon out of control, despite purchasing insurance. In my opinion, that is what people object so vigorously to: spending money on health insurance (and a lot of it) and still having to miss car and mortgage payments so that they can give more money to doctors and pharmacies and hospitals to keep their spouse or children or themselves alive. You can choose to skimp on food, few of us would choose to willingly lose a loved one because "we can't afford it."

If I had to choose what should be made non-profit, my first choice would be insurance companies. By definition, for-profit companies would like to make more profit every year. There's a clearly unhealthy co-dependency between insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. Fixing it all in one swoop is probably impossible, but one way to make health insurance non- profit is to make it government run. We can't seem to get that done, so now the government is trying to join workplaces in helping people to buy insurance. It's the simplest and probably the only legal solution so that's the one that is being pursued in the US. We'll see how it goes.</comment>


Show HN: "Save as PDF" for password protected sites (handles dynamic HTML) - <AUTHOR>

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</comment><comment><USER3> while the styling goes out of the window, my regular system print-to-pdf works with all of the dynamic content, images and form values.

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