Changes to "key" parts of Windows 8 are coming - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/07/windows_8_u_turn/

<comment><USER2> Nowhere does it say Windows Blue will include the Start button. It's purely speculation based on this:

"In a separate interview with Mary-Jo Foley, Reller said simply that Blue would "address customer feedback" Microsoft has received on Windows 8 and Windows RT."

A poor article with a sensationalist headline against MS: great for HN!

Edit: at the time of this comment, the submission title was "Microsoft: All RIGHT, you can have your Start button back"

<comment><USER3> It is a Register uk tongue in cheek article title, it isn't meant to be sensationalist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Microsoft is pointing the finger on everything but the actual product. The bigger issue is the poor usability of the product and the benefit of this product is poorly understood by both consumers and microsoft. What's interesting is the Windows 8 overall concept is pretty much the same as a year before Windows 8 was released. You had the metro interface, the desktop app, the lack of a start button... How could they not figure out solution to these issues after having ALL THAT TIME.

"Reller reportedly admitted that Microsoft hadn't done enough to close the knowledge gap by training staff in outlets selling Windows 8 machines or by educating customers in the run-up to last October's launch."

"There also seems to be a hint Microsoft recognizes it slipped up by not doing enough to persuade PC makers to build hardware actually capable of using Metro's UI, which is largely irrelevant on machines lacking touch screens."

<comment><USER5> >. You had the metro interface, the desktop app, the lack of a start button... How could they not figure out solution to these issues after having ALL THAT TIME.

I don't get why people are so upset that the start button is gone. To launch a program I just hit the windows key and start typing the name. This is exactly what I did on windows 7 (though I never used it as my primary OS). The things that show up on the screen are somewhat different, but the result is identical.

As a longtime Alfred user on the mac, the winkey+typing method feels quite natural and works well.

<comment><USER6> The workflow change resulting from the removal of the Start menu is very real, but there are other issues as well. When I opened some System menu, I could only Alt-Tab out of it, there was no visible option to close it. It turns out that you can Alt+F4 to close, but this occurred to me after continuously using WinKey -> Desktop -> Window that I want. The removal of Aero is also questionable -- the Square UI looks terrible in comparison, and I'm left to wonder why they wouldn't leave it as a choice.

<comment><USER7> The lack of shadows behind windows is what bugs me the most. My eyes get lost in a sea of square garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not by any means a MS Hater but here's my vent:

Windows 8 is represents the worst of Microsoft - new products/features for the sake of "new". Every tech enthusiast relative I have has been very excited to get a win 8 computer and then has had the exact same reaction to the new OS - "how do I use this"? Why does MS feel the need to re-do a UI, which wasn't broken and force all it's users (many of whom aren't tech enthusiasts to learn something new). Please, just stick with Win 7 and improve it's actual components. E.g. the builtin search isn't as good as spotlight on my Mac. So fix search, but please leave the start button unchanged because it's not bad.

<comment><USER9> You're half right -- it does represent the worst of Microsoft, but not because of new-for-the-sake-of-new. It represents the worst of Microsoft because it's entirely designed around _what Microsoft needs_ rather than what the _user_ needs.

Windows 8 is the way it is because of two things Microsoft needs:

\- Microsoft needs to be relevant in the world of tablets; and

\- Microsoft needs the market for traditional PCs to not evaporate.

So they built a product that is focused entirely on reconciling these two needs -- a product that tries, awkwardly, to serve the needs of both kinds of devices. A product that tries to make Windows relevant to tablets while at the same time not making tablets _so_ awesome that people stop buying traditional PCs for them.

The result leaves users cold, because _it wasn't designed for them._ It was designed to meet Microsoft's corporate strategy imperatives rather than to solve a problem actual users have.

It's the worst of Microsoft because of this classic BigCo thinking -- the thinking that the problems products need to solve are the ones that are worried about in the BigCo's executive suite, rather than those the customers are worrying about out there in the world. It's inward-looking product design, which rarely works.

<comment><USER8> Your point is well taken. But, from a user perspective, it's simply unsolicited change with non-obvious benefit.

<comment><USER10> From a user perspective, it's exactly what people have been asking for when they started buying iPads to replace their desktops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just the amount of effort required to put the computer to sleep... ugh.

The instructions are:

1) (Sometimes) when you hover in a corner a menu will popup or press WIN + C.

2) Click settings (in the midst of 4(?) other options)

3) Click the power button.

4) Click the desired state.

Way too many paths in that state diagram for a typical user. For the common tasks, I expect to make two-three transitions with limited, unambiguous, options. Some of my workflow has transitioned to passing four to five states (usually in Metro at this point), back to desktop, to Chrome to locate help, back to the beginning of the state diagram to perform my original task.

<comment><USER12> Why don't you just close the lid or press the power button on the computer?

<http://i.imgur.com/allxzAQ.png>

The reason this stuff is buried in a 2nd-level menu is that you're not supposed to need it. It's power-user stuff. Normal users are expected to either close the lid or press the power button, as they do on every other type of computer-y device now (phones, tablets, ereaders, etc). Software power buttons were a UX mistake this OS is correcting.

<comment><USER11> I was using my wife's experience as content. I have a different perception of how to attack problems. She knows there is a power button 'somewhere' in the desktop environment. She knows clicking the mouse twice turns on the computer. However, luckily, clicking the mouse twice does not turn off the computer. Our power button is not easily accessible or recognized from the restart button (case design issue).

On your edit, I believe 'power-user' is a strong term. It was only a decade ago when pressing my power button could mean corrupting documents. These ideas stick.

Locking the computer when I walk away at work is common work. Leaving an unlocked computer at a financial institution is a dangerous scenario. These are Excel wizards, data entry, and so on who might be baffled by the premise of anything that is not Excel or Word.

Hitting the power button is not as intuitive as closing a laptop lid. The power button is considered dangerous except for turning on the computer by most normal users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now, if Microsoft could bring back ClearType so the fonts don't look all borked up on normal PC screens anymore...

There has been a lot of strange things happening over at Redmond lately.

</comment><comment><USER14> I still remember the developer preview that still had the start menu, which reminds me of this (see responses by Brandon Live in particular): [http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1081755-do-you-like-or- hat...](http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1081755-do-you-like-or-hate- windows-8/page__st__435)

</comment><comment><USER15> too late.

<comment><USER16> Too late? Windows 8 already sold 100 million licenses despite the slowdown in PC sales because of tablets, on par with Windows 7 at release.

Meanwhile, Google does not release Chromebook numbers and web share stats show sales are much worse than even WindowsRT, yet we don't seem to hear how ChromeOS is a total failure.

<comment><USER17> While Windows 8 total sales might be on-par with Windows 7 sales, the total number of _devices_ is not. This essentially suggests a decline in overall (total) market share for Windows.

<comment><USER18> "While Windows 8 total sales might be on-par with Windows 7 sales, the total number of devices is not. This essentially suggests a decline in overall (total) market share for Windows."

Or a shift away from desktop PCs, perhaps?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Poorly Made in China: Why So Many Chinese Products are Born to be Bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13642306

<comment><USER2> When I was a kid, Japanese products were visibly cheap and poorly made. American products were also poorly made, but not quite so bad as the Japanese. The quality gap was relatively easy to overcome. The American electronics manufacturers were not very innovative. When Sony came out with transistor pocket radios, American radios were still table top vacuum tube boxes. When the Japanese captured the TV market with integrated circuits, Zenith was advertising the benefits of hand soldered components. Ampex invented the VCR, but couldnt produce the recording heads needed for the home. The Japanese got their reputation by concentrating in quality on a few key industries. By 1984 HP was refusing American made memory chips, because they were so inferior. That triggered a restructuring of industry that powered the economy for the next 20 years.

Interestingly enough, the Japanese had a similar structure to the Chinese with large companies and lots of subcontractors. However, their motivation was to have the subcontractor absorb employment fluctuations and cost squeezes, not to hide violations of quality standards.

<comment><USER3> William Deming is the reason the Japanese had high quality electronics. American's wouldn't listen to him, the Japanese needed him desperately. Today the Japanese love that man.

(While the Americans weren't listening to Deming, Harvard Biz Profs even went as far as to predict that Deming/Japan's love for quality would not be sustainable and its competitive advantage would erode. It turns out they were right, the Koreans are the example of this.)

<comment><USER4> I don't think I've ever heard of him referred to as William Deming (it took me a second to recognize who you were talking about). I've always heard Edwards Deming or W. Edwards Deming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article struck me as rather superficial. Though quality fade and IP are big problems, I fail to see how the problems are different from early Japanese or American industry.

Having lived in China for a year (Beijing and elsewhere), I can state two things: They are getting better, very quickly and they are starting to clamp down on environmental, health and compensation issues. It takes time, China started to really develop in the mid 90s, so it has only been 15 years or so. It takes time to develop environmental, health, workers compensation and IP regulations.

Even once you have the regulations in place, it takes years to make the business community aware and respectful of them. Many (if not most) of the factory bosses are former peasants or lower class people who have little to no education. They are just trying to build a small company. That does not excuse the gross abuses of power, but it does explain them.

There needs to be a certain "societal" education on these issues, it took a hundred years in the west, and the environmental (sustainability) mouvement, started in the 1950s is only mainstream since 2006ish. Oh and don't forget, China is 3 times bigger than the US and 10 times bigger than Japan.

See this other NYT article from 2005 on the topic:

[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DD1239F...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E2DD1239F93AA35752C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1)

<comment><USER6> Many good points, but I have a few quibbles. While I agree that things are getting better, I'm increasingly mistrustful of the "progress" being made on the regulatory front. There's a lot of new rules on the books, but I don't see a lot of real change occurring.

Good regulation requires independent monitoring and enforcement, and right now there's neither. The majority of large businesses have at least some level of government involvement and control, and many are outright state-owned. Moreover, the level of corruption is pretty staggering, to the point where being a government official is currently the best (and often the only) path to real wealth and power. Quality control and product safety are remarkably difficult in that kind of environment.

Hopefully you're right, and solving these things will just take time. However, I don't think we have the option of sanguinely standing by and waiting for things to get better. Consumers and business clients need to demand better quality, the Chinese public needs to demand a more transparent and honest government, and those demands have to be made constantly and consistently. That's the only way change is going to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So they went into details about how, exactly, "paying poorly gets you poor goods" works. We all know this, but perhaps not all of us understood the intricacies of

1) Quality Fade

2) 3rd party testing companies

3) cultural differences such as whistle blowing, information sharing and available "official"

</comment><comment><USER8> great explanation of the "quality fade" phenomenon

</comment><comment><USER9> Good article, but all problem description, no solutions.

I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China.

<comment><USER10> _Good article, but all problem description, no solutions._

That's true of this article, and often of Economist articles generally; this isn't necessarily a negative though, because it provided an enlightening insight into circumstances that weren't necessarily obvious beforehand (to me anyway.)

 _I'd like to understand what drove the Japanese and American industries to turn around, and how much of that is applicable to China._

I get the impression that the business models of America, Japan and China are quite different; I don't think the US or Japan started out like China and then changed, on the contrary I think they set out in different circumstances and therefore with different aims.

I get the impression China is attempting to compete almost solely on cost, which wasn't the case of the US (innovation) or Japan (a combination of cost/quality and innovation.)

<comment><USER11> China may be very different from Japan in terms of culture and industrial history, but I'm not so sure China's current industrial evolution is that different from the US.

If you read books about the US's industrial revolution (both modern ones and ones written during the era), I'm sure you can find a lot of parallels with modern China (even with issues such as IP - Charles Dickens was angry seeing bootleg copies of his books in the US)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Japan and China have become world leaders in manufacturing sector by IMPORTING American products (for eg a Ford car) to their countries and EXPORTING back the same to USA by incrementally remodeling,renaming and re-engineering it. And they were exporting these products back to America at a reduced price.</comment>


How to count to 1023 on two hands (short video) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SMmc9gQmHQ <comment><USER2> I remember coming up with this in 9th grade or so. I then figured out a way to count up to 99,999 on two hands.

Consider that a finger has a top, middle, and bottom, as well as a left side, center, and right side. This gives 9 different position on the finger.

Use one hand (arbitrarily, the right) as the pointing hand, and the other hand (the left) as the 'tablet' hand.

If the right pinky finger is on the right side of the left pinky finger, at the bottom, then it indicates 1.

If it is on the right side of the left pinky finger, in the middle of the side, then it indicates 2. The top right side indicates 3.

The bottom middle (pointing directly to the bottom of the pinky) is 4, etc.

Not touching = 0.

This gives 10 positions per finger pair, or 5^10 values.</comment>


Inside the Linux boot process (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-linuxboot/ <comment><USER2> This is very old, for a more recent version [https://github.com/0xAX/linux- insides](https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides)

<comment><USER3> One of my favorite guides on anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I appreciate the article is from 2006, but it would be nice to see a similar write up for recent EFI-based machines and maybe other architectures, as well.

<comment><USER5> I just did a lot of reading about EFI to get my system booting again, so I'll write a bit about it. Cunningham's law and all that.

On system startup, the CPU begins executing from the EFI ROM - a few-megabyte chip on the motherboard somewhere. The EFI is essentially a simple (won't say _small_ ) OS: it can enumerate devices and partitions, mount filesystems, draw graphics, and connect to the internet (shudder). It provides APIs for these capabilities to the loaded EFI executables. EFIs are either 32-bit or 64-bit so its boot code must switch from real mode at some point.

After handling whatever system initialization, the EFI looks through the connected disks in the order configured by the user, searching for an EFI system partition. This partition is FAT32 and has a special GPT partition attribute to mark it. These partitions are usually 100-500MB and are usually the first partition on the disk. If found, the EFI mounts this partition.

At this point, the boot process depends on the value of various EFI variables, which you can inspect with the `efivar` command on linux. These instruct the EFI bootloader to load various EFI executables, which are PE-format but otherwise fairly normal. First it will load any drivers specified by the `Driver####` and `DriverOrder` variables, which could be used to enable the EFI bootloader to load from e.g. a RAID controller or a BTRFS partition. I haven't seen this used in practice, however. Next it will run an executable specified by a `Boot####` variable, depending on the `BootNext` or `BootOrder` variables or a user-selection at the EFI boot menu. These EFI applications are stored in vendor-specific directories of the EFI system partition like `/EFI/Fedora/shimx64.efi`. These applications are usually either an EFI shim which executes a traditional bootloader, or a traditional bootloader compiled as an EFI application. EFI could also be used to directly boot a kernel, such as linux compiled with EFISTUB enabled.

If the EFI isn't able to boot any of the registered entries, it will usually run the EFI Shell (if installed) or try to run whatever is at `/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi`.

<comment><USER6> You made an incorrect assumption about real mode.

* [https://superuser.com/a/345333/38062](https://superuser.com/a/345333/38062)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How difficult would it be to register the dependencies of the boot process, and only run the full boot process when those dependencies have been touched, using a generated and quickly loadable binary image otherwise?

<comment><USER8> I think most of the boot process is initializing hardware, so I don't see how you avoid it.

<comment><USER7> How come recovering from hibernation is much faster then?

My (perhaps overly simple) conclusion is that the boot process is doing stuff it doesn't need to do.

<comment><USER9> The boot process does hardware detection and configuration, while resuming from hibernate basically involves nothing more than writing the last-saved configuration back to the hardware. It's relying on the assumption that the hardware hasn't changed since it was last hibernated.

<comment><USER7> > It's relying on the assumption that the hardware hasn't changed since it was > last hibernated.

Which is also true in 99% of cases when I boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm sorry but the article has very little to do with the actual boot process of modern distributions.

<comment><USER11> I run modern distributions and it describes at a high level the way my dual boot (and modern) laptop works. Not everyone uses EFI and systemd or Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The comments on that article look like they've been mangled at some point in the past!

<comment><USER13> It's like bash gone wild, look at one of the links they actually work

http:\/\/tldp.org\/HOWTO\/Bootdisk-HOWTO\

Edit: I'm using Firefox

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> article is from 2006

<comment><USER15> ...and references the good old Reiser file system.

<comment><USER16> Reiser jokes always kill

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> (2006)

<comment><USER18> Title clearly says that, no?

<comment><USER4> It didn't when it was posted, probably a helpful moderator fixed it.</comment></comment></comment>


Natural sorting - <AUTHOR> http://www.davekoelle.com/alphanum.html

<comment><USER2> [http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Sort- Naturally-1.02/lib/Sort/...](http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Sort- Naturally-1.02/lib/Sort/Naturally.pm)

Available since 2001.

</comment><comment><USER3> There is a nice "oneliner" in Ruby for that, created by Piers Cawley: <http://j.mp/anfTlJ>

And for python there is a nice Article on CodingHorror: <http://j.mp/aCxlI3> Hope it's useful :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there an easy way to get 'ls' to use this ordering?

<comment><USER5>
      ls -v

<comment><USER4> Huh, so it seems! Has that been there forever, or was it added semi-recently in response to things like this post?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Available in GNU userland as `sort -V`.

</comment><comment><USER6> Excellent post. It's focused, unbiased, simple, covers a useful problem and includes source.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should sell this to microsoft for millions.

<comment><USER8> Is it a sarcasm?

It seems that Microsoft's StrCmpLogicalW() has exactly desired behavior. Besides it is trivial to implement:

      def natural_key(key):
          """See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001018.html

          >>> L = 'a01 a9 b1 b10 b9'.split()
          >>> L.sort(key=natural_key)
          >>> ' '.join(L)
          'a01 a9 b1 b9 b10'
          """
          return [int(chunk) if chunk.isdigit() else chunk
                  for chunk in re.split(r'(\d+)', key)]</comment></comment>


Prototyping, Mockup, and Wireframing Tools for iPhone App Development - <AUTHOR> http://iphoneized.com/2009/11/21-prototyping-mockup-wireframing-tools-iphone-app-development/ It's far from being the definitive list, but it's definitely a good place to start if you are creating an iPhone app mockup. <comment><USER2> What about Interface Builder? It's free, and your prototypes just become the UI.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to not end up with a generic and dull UI with IB?</comment></comment>


The Death of the Urdu Script  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90 <comment><USER3> So I skimmed the article once, then read it again.

I see the writer is here. I just want to say I understand your sentiment, but your title and content are filled with some annoying misinformation and discrepancies.

First of all, Nastaliq is not "the Urdu script". If you even skimmed Wikipedia, you would notice that the script does come oringinally from Arabic (where it is used, but more to your point, sadly not as much in print media, at least from my experience in the GCC) and was later well loved by the Persians, and later different portions of the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, and beyond). To call it Urdu script, just because it is popular, and to insinuate that it Naksh is the default script of Arabic (it is not the preferred one, by the way) is a huge stretch.

Another point: Naksh was invented by a Persian, but who grew up his whole life in Arab Baghdad and was an Abbasid court vizier in modern-day Iraq. He did not spend time in Iran (then Fars, as it is known today in Arabic), until he was a tax collector there after growing up in Iraq, and only for a period. He might have been ethnically Persian, but to call Naksh script Persian because of the guys family background is far-fetched, especially if you know how loose the cultural boundaries between Abbasid Iran-Iraq were (they were part of the empire and people, goods, and ideas freely flowed between them). It is a derivative of Kufic script, and has strong ties to the religious intellectual history of Iraq (Basra and Kufa were the seat of a massive amount of religious scholarship and still prominent beliefs in Islam; scripts and art were an awesome by-product).

Sorry for the rant, but I know this is probably not your field. As I guy who spent a lot of time studying Arabic and Arab and/or Islamichistory, I get very annoyed at the misinformation peddled by people about Arabic history and culture. I do not mean to be so blunt, but I hear people rattle off misinformation like this often, and it irritates me.

<comment><USER4> You are correct about the history. Unfortunately the Abbasid empire came to an end in 1258 AD and Urdu wasn't even around then.

I take your point that naskh has been wide-spread. And it is true that it is even in the Indian sub-continent. Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places are adjacet. That doesn't mean that those people didn't historically play around with scripts. They did.

However, my piece is entirely about what is going on today. Sure you can find Ottoman era signs in Egypt and the Levant that display Arabic in nastasliq (my readers sent me plenty such pictures), but by and large Arabic today is written in naskh and almost never in nastaliq. Take a look at some of the fonts that the Omani government is playing around with. They are not nastaliq. This is the political aspect I briefly touched upon in the article. I hope you will get a chance to look into the Arabization aspects of the political debates raging in that part of the world. I make brief mention of it by bringing up the fight over "Khuda Hafiz" or "Allah Hafiz."

Meanwhile, the past two or three generations of Urdu readers and writers grew up associating nastaliq and Urdu almost exclusively with each other (thus the jarring effect associated with having to read Urdu in something else). I have plenty of emails testifying to this from people from my parents generation and some people of mine.

In short, no one is really talking about ancient Arab history here, as fascinating as that would be.

<comment><USER5> > Sindhi, for example, is a naskh based language. Punjabi, which my parents > spoke, on the other hand, prefers nastaliq, and regionally the two places > are adjacet.

Saying that Sindhi is Naskh based language while Punjabi is Nastaleeq based language is like saying English is Arial based language while French is Times New Roman based.

<comment><USER6> This is rather confusing. IIRC both Arial and Times New Roman let you express all 26 alphabets. Now if Naskh has Nastaleeq have differing number of characters, is this a mere font issue or is there something more fundamental differing between the two?

<comment><USER7> restalis, FYI you have been hellbanned, so no one can read your posts unless they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

<comment><USER8> I think it's because I've touched political matters in a post a while ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5166069)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is Ali Eteraz. Thank you for recognizing this piece. It was a lot of fun to write. I've actually been to a Ycombinator event. Twice I think. A couple of your alumnus managed to talk me into downloading stuff or getting on email lists that, well, I didn't always use (though they did seem promising!). I am a writer based in the Bay Area and I really enjoy getting to learn about interesting technological developments and human stories within that. So definitely hit me up whenever you're congregating or plotting something interesting. My website is alieteraz.com or I am at @eteraz or FB.

Ali Eteraz

ps - I later got to meet Michael K. at the Unicode conference in Santa Clara, along with the Microsoft Windows team. The Windows Phone people, who I also really wanted to talk to because this is a mobile problem too, did not want to talk to me because they had a new phone coming out.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is another problem with fonts. Popular fonts used on the internet only have information about the joining of the 28 Arabic characters. When the extra characters in Urdu are typed they don't join with the other characters in the word. eg. I will type the first line of the couplet here. Note how the third,fourth and seventh word are broken up. اور باذار سے لے آے اگر ٹوٹ گیا

I have written about some other issues with the Urdu language over here. [http://upgoerurdu.nfshost.com/technical.html](http://upgoerurdu.nfshost.com/technical.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Unsurprising to see a link to Michael Kaplan in there. His blog was taken down due to what sounds like a dispute over patents with his boss. See this twitter conversation between Spolsky and him: [https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/447024470256283648).

\--

"It has been made officially clear to me that [my] Blog ... is for all intents and purposes _dead_."

Well, I blogged about a patent and included art, so my former manager took the Blog down with extreme prejudice.

\--

Blog is now archived at [http://www.siao2.com/](http://www.siao2.com/) and has much more information on localisation.

<comment><USER11> Wat? I thought the whole _point_ of patents is to make information public, because competitors are simply not _allowed_ to use the information without payment anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Utility had defeated tradition.

Is that supposed to be self-evidently bad?

<comment><USER13> Sadly popular opinion seems to be that languages and other traditions must be preserved because, well, we can't lose them. It's certainly good to preserve them in museums so people can use them for research, etc. But there's little or no actual need for more than one language in the world, let along more than one writing system for the same language!

People don't mourn the loss of codepage 437. For many people that's a big part of their growing up. But now it's not in common use and the world is better for it. We don't see people trying to slow the adoption of UTF8 because it's making the world one big dull homogenous borg that's unable to express box drawings.

Nowadays, there's quiet revolution going on in the form of many small dialects disappearing. That's wonderful. It's giving millions the opportunities that come with being able to communicate with more other people by sharing common language. We should be celebrating the massive advantages that keep growing each time another obscure script or dialect becomes nobody's native language.

<comment><USER14> I detest this view. Typical navel gazing, utility-uber-alles (at least for things that "I" am not interested in) programmer who is more concerned with some kind of compatibility (of course using IT examples) than anything else.

Even if we only strictly consider languages themselves, what if some people find pleasure in them? You can't say that what they enjoy doing is wrong with some argument for its utility - because the use and consumption of that language is a utility in itself. Neither can you confine them to these "museums" since they might want to use it outside of the halls of dusty books. Then, so much for "one and only one language".

Now, considering not just the language but culture. Languages are so incredibly context dependent and vague that I think they are deeply intertwined with culture. Outside of whatever you can laboriously define and enshrine in some book to stuff in a museum, there are incredible nuances that can be hard to appreciate if one is not involved with it, through things like social interaction and the written word. If you lose or discard the language of some culture, then you might also lose an appreciation for a lot of subtleties and ways of thinking. Words and expressions that might seemingly translate easily may have nuances that only an active speaker of the language can appreciate.

Thirdly. Consider if we with one magical button could make everyone in the world speak one language, say English. Now we are all on the same page! Then fast forward a few units of time - are we still speaking the same language? Probably, but we might have developed distinct dialects in different corners of the world. Why? Because every society and culture practising the language "evolved", namely added new expressions, words, phrases. Even pronunciation (accents). Why didn't the language simply evolve in the same way, worldwide? Of course because of the fact that the world is made up of a lot of different places and cultures. All of these cultures affect each other, but it's like a web of intermingling sharing. There is, largely, not a single, dominating culture, and so there is no central "authority" on how the language is going to evolve naturally. But you _need_ a single "reference" point for this language to evolve in a uniform way, and avoid a lot of dialects! So if the goal is to have a single language, and a single dialect, your only bet is cultural imperialism. But culture is just a silly thing that just gets in the way, right? Better just stuff them in a museum and adopt a single, standardized culture. It's so efficient!

Given enough time, these dialects might turn into their own languages (let's say that languages are now distinguished by not being mutually intelligible with each other). Then you're back to the same problem, basically. Well, it's a lot better since all of these languages are closely related. And maybe these languages would never really become their own languages, since there is sufficient inter-cultural, global communication to avoid any significant divergence. But to eventually have no dialecs, no linguistic misunderstandings? Something's gotta give, namely everyone has to adopt the same culture and pallet of beliefs and values. But I guess that kind of robotic efficiency would be a Utopia for you.

<comment><USER13> Why preserve culture? You answer still comes down to "because we can't lose it". The other side of the coin is it's being done at the expense of forcing all minority language speakers to be economically disadvantaged. Great news if you're an American, not so great if you're a Nepalese. I have to disagree with you there. You haven't shown any reason why a member of a minority culture should be excluded from most of society and prevented from even learning modern knowledge, reading literature, or even understanding the ways of thinking of most of the world.

This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.

<comment><USER14> > Why preserve culture? You answer still comes down to "because we can't lose > it".

Why have cultures? Because it increases the diversity of thought and ideas. This diversity in turn can inspire each other and create new impulses, ideas, ways of thinking. This diversity is severely limited - and in turn how much it can influence and inspire other cultures - if they simply disappear. It's like taking all the work and time it took, for perhaps thousands of years, to create that culture, and simply destroying it.

Another reason is that I think that it's a shame for majority, dominant cultures to simply swallow up minority cultures. If the people of that minority culture want to preserve it, I think they should stand a chance.

Lastly, I think it's a worthy end onto itself. This is the end-road of socratic reasoning. Would you say that it is frivolous to just say "because it is worthy in itself"? Well, this is how all arguments end up, anyway. Just like your argument might end up with the assumption that "convenience and less struggle to communicate is worthy in itself". But then I can say, "a little struggle and inconvenience in communication is part of the fun! We should preserve our differences for that reason".

> The other side of the coin is it's being done at the expense of forcing all > minority language speakers to be economically disadvantaged. Great news if > you're an American, not so great if you're a Nepalese. I have to disagree > with you there. You haven't shown any reason why a member of a minority > culture should be excluded from most of society and prevented from even > learning modern knowledge, reading literature, or even understanding the > ways of thinking of most of the world.

Nonsense. Do you know how many people speak two, three and so on languages? How many people who speak a minority language in some country, also speak some majority language? The same goes for speaking a native, minority, or whatever language, and speaking English (or perhaps French or Portuguese etc., depending on where they are in the world).

I have to emphasize that I would never condone _forcing_ people to practice and learn a language. It should be by their own volition. If they don't want to practice it, then that is of course entirely up to them. Just as I wouldn't force them or encourage them to give up their language (and perhaps in turn also their culture) in favour of some international standard language.

> This is why I favor storing languages in museums, rather than burdening > millions of innocent people with the job they didn't even sign up for.

Is that so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> its an interesting read and I acknowledge the intent to keep the traditional and authentic writing system for Urdu.

I have a few thoughts on this though. One would be the legibility. Of course I cannot judge legibility of writing systems I do not like, but it seems that nastaliq would be hardly readable on a lot of mobile devices and I wonder how difficult learning the ornate script is. I am talking about alphabetization here.

Next thing is: I am learning turkish and turkish is written in the roman alphabet. As far as I know, it was written in a arabic/persian script before which was then reformed to use the latin alphabet. As far as I can tell this is today really uncontroversial and using the latin alphabet is actually the more suitable alphabet for turkish and its rich vowel system that is really important for grammar and meaning. Again I cannot really say anything for Urdu, but knowing it is not arabic but afaik a language of the indo-european family I wonder if there are more reasons to use the lating alphabet than just availability of nataliq fonts and rendering engines.

As a side note I would add a few observations relating to the cultural/heritage aspects. In Germany, the "Fraktur" was used widely even at the beginning of the 20th century (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur) ). Some authors, like Hermann Hesse refused that Antiqua fonts would be used for their writings until publishers convinced them that their works could just not be read by young folks. In a way, a lot of people argued against using non-gothic fonts, but in the end antiqua became quite standard. Nowadays we use the lating alphabet (and most people are not concious about that there ever was a switch).

<comment><USER16> A note about Fraktur: Even though the wiki article states that the main reason for its downfall was the Nazis forbidding it themselves, as a native German speaker I quite strongly feel it to be associated with Nazi culture - <USER2> immediately renders it impossible to use in any context, since you want to be as far from that as you can. Allergic reaction to anything resembling Nazi symbolism is quite strong in German speaking culture, even in Switzerland where it never took hold. So it seems to me that postmodernist culture is most responsible for the sudden downfall of that scripture.

<comment><USER17> I associate Fraktur with Karl May :-) (He died 1912, so he predated the Nazis.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if Apple and Android make a nastaliq font part of the directory of fonts that go into their devices from the get go, there wouldn't be a problem.

Such fonts have already been designed. The issue now is to find Android and iOS developers who can make them default in the operating systems.

When I talked to Microsoft they said that on the smaller devices every last bit of memory was precious so they didn't want to stick extra megabytes or however big a font is. I think that Apple's cheapening out is worse than Android's, because at least Android offers the entire Urdu alphabet (though in naskh). Apple doesn't even offer the Urdu alphabet, requiring Urdu users to have to make do with 12 less letters.

<comment><USER18> I don't think it is just a matter of adding a font, with 12 additional letter for urdu. The actual layout algorithm has to change (how characters are laid out, their size, how beginning of one connects to ending of another, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Meanwhile, in the free software world...

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM0...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ySTZaXP5XKFg0OpmHZM00v5b17GSr3ojnzJekl4U8qI/view#slide=id.g177a94b_0_60)

[https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/...](https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz/blob/master/test/shaping/texts/in- tree/shaper-arabic/script-arabic/language-urdu/crulp/ligatures/README)

(Harfbuzz is the default text layout engine for Linux GUI frameworks: Qt, GTK, etc)

<comment><USER9> This talk at Google by Roozbeh Pournader is very good at laying out the issues with bidirectional language issues in software. This is a non-trivial problem and is rarely ever solved correctly.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEzYefrqo4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEzYefrqo4)

<comment><USER3> And not so ironically, Behdad Esfahbod, one of the original developers of HarfBuzz, works for Google now, according to his blurb on Github.

[https://github.com/behdad](https://github.com/behdad)

I actually emailed him a few times before I discovered mlterm to read Arabic and other RTL fonts in a terminal (you might ask why: file names and I use mutt for email). Very nice guy, and I am very appreciative of this library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That was an amazing article, and a great insight into middle eastern scripts in the digital world.

It doesn't look like it'll get out of the new queue, but I wanted to thank OP for sharing it anyway.

<comment><USER21> Pro tip: Mughul India is not the Middle East, and neither is Pakistan or Iran.

There are arabic derived scripts at least as far east as China and the Philippines ( _jawi_ ), but describing them as Middle Eastern is plain wrong - just as you would not describe Balinese or Cambodian as Indus Valley.

<comment><USER20> The article talks about two arabic scripts. Saying "Middle eastern" is more inclusive than saying "arabic" and while it does not include pakistan, it does almost reach it. Kind of like when we talk about Europe and increase the reach a bit more. Or when you say "the United States" when you really mean north america (a much worse offender since you talk about a country). This was my logic when writing it.

I'm not a history expert. I would love a history lesson but you seem like a very poor teacher, "picking" on people who just try to be nice. I did not know this article was going to be on the frontpage as I said in my original comment - I caught it at 2 points. Had I known my comment was going to go through a seven-way review by a wide variety of experts, I'd have just said "non-latin scripts" to be on the safe side. (/s)

Sorry for the rant - People correcting each others _where correction does not at all matter_ bothers me to no end. It feels like a sneaky and thoroughly annoying way of flashing your "I know THINGS!" credentials.

<comment><USER21> You seem to be admitting mistake, complaining about being corrected, and dismissing the process all at once. But I'm sure you learned something :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sad. I remember as a kid, growing up in Kashmir, I took special pride in my Urdu calligraphy skills. Writing each sentence was like an art project.

</comment><comment><USER4> BTW. I published this piece in fall of last year. Long before it came on Hacker News, it had been passed around the Pakistani and Indian Twittersphere, and no one there was saying that we should let tech companies off the hook for not offering a) the full alphabet and b) the right script. It was, actually, the Pakistanis and Indians that made this article what it was. When I wrote it, I honestly thought I was just some eccentric who was annoyed for very personal reasons. Even as we speak the piece is being retweeted by professors and students at LUMS, in Lahore, and universities in Islamabad.

What's even more interesting is that as a result of writing this piece my own favoritism towards nastaliq actually LESSENED. But by the time my thinking evolved, the nastaliq purists had made the piece their own.

</comment><comment><USER23> The article is great, but I don't think it adequately captures one of the difficulties with this problem, and that is the very high minimum number of characters that must be designed for an Urdu font. I think it is an order of magnitude higher than many would guess it at first.

<comment><USER24> The Wikipedia article on Nastaliq puts the number at around 20,000.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasta%CA%BFl%C4%ABq_script)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article was making rounds in my social feed about a year ago. Disturbed by the extremely weak and some absolutely flawed arguments, I wrote a note: [https://www.facebook.com/sharjeelqureshi/posts/1015180699836...](https://www.facebook.com/sharjeelqureshi/posts/10151806998363551)

</comment><comment><USER3> And for the Arch Linux peopkle, have a Nastaliq font if you need it (or want it).

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf- nastaliq/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-nastaliq/)

</comment><comment><USER25> In the 1960s, the Government of Pakistan tried to make naskh common in order to facilitate mechanization of printing. In order to do so, naskh was introduced in schools so that children get used to it from an early age. Some books started appearing in naskh. The daily newspaper Nawa-i-waqt started printing its second page in naskh. It was very unfortunate for Urdu that these efforts failed. The reason was simple. Instead of requiring that the textbooks be typeset in naskh, they continued to be handwritten, albeit in naskh-like script. Gradually after a few years that naskh started resembling nasta'aliq more and more and eventually all traces of naskh disappeared. This, to mind, was the greatest setback suffered by the Urdu language printing.

Let me explain why I call it the greatest setback. Urdu books and newspapers were written by hand and then lithographed. The process was slow, mistakes were plentiful, dots above and below letters were misplaced, letters such as daal and waaw were indistinct from each other, and many times the printing was illegible. Please try to read a book produced by that method, and then compare it to the same book typeset in naskh; you will note the difference. I have a copy of Divan-e-Hafiz published in nasta'aliq in the subcontinent, and another copy in naskh published in Iran. The difference in the clarity of text in the two is phenomenal.

This abortive attempt in 1960s to switch to naskh had nothing to do with religion or Arabization. Ayub Khan, in whose time the effort started, can hardly be accused of religion-inspired initiatives. It was simply to promote mechanized printing. If anything, later the religion-enthusiast Zia-ul-Haq did nothing to popularize naskh. Ironically, computer has saved nasta'aliq, since software is now commonly available which is now universally used to compose material for printing. But naskh is still clearer to read, and in my opinion it is not too late to give it another try, and use naskh, while reserving nasta'aliq for calligraphy. Undoubtedly nasta'aliq is elegant and no script can match its beauty.

</comment><comment><USER26> For Hindi speakers who don't read Nastaliq, the sign on the wall is hilarious. Transliterated to Devanagari, it reads:

हाय मैं मर गई ऐन्ना (इतना) टेस्टी बर्गर

</comment><comment><USER27> @alieteraz - your comments below have been extremely informative and though urdu occupies the collective conscious of all Indians through bollywood (90% of melancholic melodies are invariably in urdu), we have never given the script much thought.

I think you fought admirably with Apple, Twitter and Microsoft for getting Urdu fonts included ... but that is the wrong battleground.

The arena for you is simply the browser and mobile . All you need to do is get Nastaliq scripts adopted into Google Webfonts (free for anybody to use in their webapps) and into Android (installing a font through a Launcher theme is incredibly easy [1]. Do NOT try getting it included in the Android base)

do you think you can get together a Kickstarter to fund a nastaliq font, good enough to be usable ? and then try getting them into webfonts and android themes ?

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pete.app.apext...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pete.app.apexthemes.font.chokycooky&hl=en) and [http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-launcher- fonts](http://appcrawlr.com/android-apps/best-apps-launcher-fonts)

</comment><comment><USER28> For web development, perhaps you could create a simple system that detects if the user's device supports nastaliq. If not convert, it to naskh or Romanized Urdu (not sure which is preferred). As for dealing with all the data already written in naskh and Romanized Urdu, this is a bit more complicated because I am guessing there is not a one to one match between naskh and nastaliq (naskh has less letters), and Romanized Urdu and nastaliq. You would probably need to collect some data and use some machine learning techniques. If it is not too big you could use a client-side Javascript program, otherwise something like a Chrome extension or an API. There are similar things done for Arabic to handle various forms of Romanized Arabic (user does not have access to an Arabic keyboard) and Non-Modern Standard Arabic Dialects: [http://www.yamli.com/](http://www.yamli.com/)

<comment><USER9> Data is stored as Unicode (except some really old desktop app formats that were written before Unicode). Naskh and Nastaliq are font styles, used when the system displays the data. The solution is simply that good Nastaliq fonts be created and then used on websites where Urdu is being used. Since Urdu fonts can be much larger in size than Roman fonts (the fonts have to specify joining behavior between all possible combination of characters), delivering over the web is not really viable. Fonts have to be native to all the OSes in existence, so that websites can use them.

(I don't think Roman Urdu is ever used for anything serious.)

<comment><USER28> The author of the article mentions that Naskh does not contain all the letters that Nastaliq has, so if someone types an Urdu text in Naskh it would not have the same underlying Unicode if they had typed it in Nastaliq. Correct me if this is wrong.

My assumption is that not all OSes will adopt Nastaliq simultaneously. So assume that the website is storing data in complete coding for Nastaliq and they want to send it to a device that cannot render Nastaliq so the Unicode should be converted so it is properly renderable in Naskh.

The other half is just to make one's Urdu language web experience completely in Nastaliq. Even unimportant stuff written in Roman Urdu and then converted to Nastaliq might help promote the use of Nastaliq.

<comment><USER24> Yes, that's wrong. The author was talking about that fact that Urdu has more letters than standard _Arabic_ , mostly additional diacritics etc, which makes entering it with an Arabic keypad/keyboard painful.

Both Naskh and Nastaliq can be encoded using the Arabic block in Unicode, it's just that Nastaliq's vertically stacking nature makes it difficult to deal with in computer systems that expect clean rows of text.

<comment><USER28> Ok, I went back over and I did misread that part of the article. The problem is not as complicated as I thought, but that vertical stacking is definitely a challenging problem to handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A big reason nastaliq is not widely available on our screens is because rendering it correctly requires 'context sensitive shape substitution'[1]. Simple substitution of one character for another is not enough.

I've spent a couple of hours looking at how to render my own text, perhaps using something like [http://typeface.neocracy.org/](http://typeface.neocracy.org/), but my day to day work is so far from text layout, rendering, client side javascript that it would be (too) large an undertaking.

[1] [http://ww.cle.org.pk/Publication/papers/2006/context_sensiti...](http://ww.cle.org.pk/Publication/papers/2006/context_sensitive_shape_substitution.pdf) [PDF]

</comment><comment><USER29> This feels like unusual timing. I am presently reading 'A Suitable Boy' by Vikram Seth. One of the main characters is sent into virtual exile where he learns how to read and write Urdu. Until now I don't think I'd heard of it.

My own opinion is that we should preserve history, remember it, but not morn it. We are programmers! How many writing styles and languages have we seen die to make way for something better (or worse?). This is a natural survival of the fittest cycle that effects writing styles, languages, civilisations and everything else. I have Japanese friends who read even less Kanji than I do. I see that writing style dying out over the next 50 years also.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't like how the article opens with the premise of a people struggling their whole lives to master writing in a particular style only to have their expression oppressed, then proceeds to talk about font rendering..

Generally though, I'm not really sure how I feel about trying to get people to care about something so precious in general. One one hand it's a shame to lose culture. On the other the internet/technology has its own culture and is it really lost in the age of 5c per GB storage?

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems like something analogous has happened with European scripts. There were huge changes in how characters were presented between different styles of handwriting, engraving, printing presses, and finally everything the computer world has brought us.

It just seems like the author has an extreme emotional attachment to a typeface.

<comment><USER18> I don't know about the author's state of mind, but generally speaking, this is not just a matter of preference. For those of us who grew up reading Nastaliq, other type faces such as naksh are fairly difficult to read 'fluently.' Imagine if all books, newspapers websites were hand written by someone with poor handwriting. It would actually slow down your reading speed. Reading is such a natural thing we do on a daily basis that we notice even small things which cause us to slow down.

btw, I use 'bad handwriting' simply as a way to explain the effect of different writing style on reading, naksh is not good or bad -- it is just different from what Urdu readers are used to.

Also, nastaliq isn't just different because its letters are formed differently (there being a one-to-one correspondence between different typefaces). Nastaliq letters are laid out in a context sensitive manner where a letter can take on a fairly large number of shapes, depending on where in the word it is (and which letter it is next to). My earlier post links to a paper which describes how Nataliq rendering requires context sensitive shapes. Basically randomly capitalize letters in everything you read online. Eventually you will get used to it, but that doesn't mean it won't be annoying for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That's not the only way in which Urdu is "dying" \- due to colonization, basically all modern words are in English.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nastaliq is lovely to look at.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone ready to work with me on creating a Nastaliq webfont?

</comment><comment><USER35> >Utility had defeated tradition.

There is hope for humanity yet!

</comment><comment><USER36> you need to come up with more details and authentic details because some stuff you mentioned it utter crap.</comment>


GitHub discontinues building gems - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/515-gem-building-is-defunct

<comment><USER2> Glad to see GitHub get some focus. As a paying customer, I think they've let their free users degrade the service for those that finance the site.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that exactly the danger of running on a freemium business model?

Everything goes according to plan, you establish a new market, lots of free customers get introduced to your product and love it and you skim off the cream that want power or enterprise features as your paying customers. What stops a new competitor from swooping in and saying they have something very similar, they aren't going to be spending anything supporting free customers, and with presumably lower costs, charging their customers less? With complete focus on paying customers, they might provide a better product too.

<comment><USER4> I'll venture a guess you've never heard of the git hosts that only offer private plans. Allowing people to post public code for free is fundamental to our business model and a major reason why we're successful.

<comment><USER3> I haven't, though I haven't had the need for one either. But if they exist and they're decent, you don't think I would find them if I researched for a git host?

I don't argue with you that freemium works in the short and probably medium term, and it's great advertising. You have a great service going, and I think in your case, you build a lot of good will among developers hosting public code for free. But in the long run, in the general case, and assuming no network effects, I think there's a way to undercut such business models by focusing 100% on the paying customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's really a bummer... I loved being able to fork a ruby lib, make some changes and have the gem available for any servers I used...

I also think that they should have given advance notice. Cutting features that I (as a paying customer) rely on without notice and then telling one week later that they won't bother to bring it back is not a good way to keep my trust.

<comment><USER6> _That's really a bummer... I loved being able to fork a ruby lib, make some changes and have the gem available for any servers I used..._

You still can. See: <http://litanyagainstfear.com/blog/2009/10/09/on-gem- forking/>

<comment><USER5> Yes of course, but I like having the fact that it's done automatically on push... And I don't really like having to go back through my projects to change the gem dependencies...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I liked this feature, but I think it makes sense for them to remove it. To me it highlights the fact the Github has grown way beyond just hosting Ruby projects.

I'm currently in Rio for the Lua Workshop and many people here have said they'll be moving their projects from CVS or SVN over to Git and Github. I am guessing that within a few months Github will be the defacto standard place to host Lua projects just like it is for Ruby. Hopefully they have at least 50 megabytes of free space to accommodate all of us. ;-)

<comment><USER8> "I liked this feature, but I think it makes sense for them to remove it. To me it highlights the fact the Github has grown way beyond just hosting Ruby projects."

Then another option would have been to do the same thing for non-Ruby projects. Integrate with CPAN; build eggs (or whatever it is that Python uses); create Cabal packages.

<comment><USER4> That was the conclusion we came to: either do them all or none of them.

The problem is with the amount of time we spent working on, maintaining, and fielding support requests for rubygems, the last thing we wanted to do was multiply that work supporting additional systems.

This decision wasn't made lightly, but the service and support will be better off with it gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand that in the end this is for the greater good, but shutting it down just because you can't be bothered to fix a few things is just ridiculous. At least offer gem building while you still support gems.github.com so people have time to migrate.

<comment><USER10> they are supporting gems.github.com for 1 year, see article

<comment><USER9> I know, I'm saying they should support the actual gem building as long as they are supporting gems.github.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely there is some way they can find to make this work without too much trouble, or at least integrate seamlessly with someone who wants to. Just about every howto article out there that uses custom gems uses the <username>-<gemname> format which tells you its coming from GitHub. As a paying customer, this is something I would very much like to support!

<comment><USER12> just use rip, it builds gems from git repositories..

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Too bad. We never got CPAN indexing (as promised) either.

<comment><USER4> I don't recall anyone promising that, but I apologize if you feel mislead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Damn I really liked this feature, most of my gems are installed from github ;( I wasn't quite clear what this means now, gemcutter is handling it? or Are we supposed to move back to ruby forge?

<comment><USER6> Just use Gemcutter. It's really easy. Take your existing Github project, build the gem, then _gem push_ it to Gemcutter (assuming you have the Gemcutter gem installed). It's _that_ easy.

If your Github project is a fork, then edit the gemspec and prepend your Github username to the gem name.. then build and push. Problems all solved :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Booville.</comment>


Show HN: Later.fm, a 'Listen Later' button for the web - <AUTHOR> https://later.fm <comment><AUTHOR> Eoin, the maker of Later.fm here.

Later.fm is a simple tool for saving music on the web, and listening to it later.

Think of it as a 'Listen Later' button for the web. Use it to save music on sites like Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube and Bandcamp, listen to it later, and share it with friends.

This is a side project, built to scratch a personal itch. I love finding new music on the web, and I wanted a tool to help me queue new music for later.</comment>


Elon Musk's Boring Co. Begins Big Dig to LAX - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/12/elon-musk-just-posted-a-bunch-of-pictures-of-his-tunnel-and-boring-equipment.html <comment><USER2> What is the law regarding who you can dig under?</comment>


Ocaml / functional programming abuses - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/vjeux/cc2c4f83a6b60d69b79057b6ef651b56 <comment><USER2> Nothing new on this, experienced programmers know the performance implications of data structures (ie, lists are generally bad regardless of the language/paradigm) and most complains about language itself can be read as "I'm not used to this way of writing code". Which is fine, but it is an opinion not exactly a fact or a piece of knowledge.

OCaml itself is not a new language and they are probably not going to break compatibility to fix minor syntactic issues now - even the new ppx system was introduced in a way to not interfere with the current syntax. TBH I find it a very minor annoyance compared to all other more things the language has to offer.</comment>


"Flattening the Curve" is a deadly delusion - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727 <comment><USER2> This article goes horribly wrong very quickly:

> _They mean to tell you that we can get away without severe lockdowns as we > are currently observing them in China and Italy._

No, they don't. They mean to tell you that we need to slow the spread of the infection as much as possible, by whatever means we can sustain. That includes the potential of lockdowns.

We individuals can only do so much. What we must do is wash our hands, practise social distancing, wash our hands, interact with as few people as possible, wash our hands, and only go out if essential.

This graphic is telling people why they have to do this, it's not saying that to do so is enough to avoid lockdowns.

Much of the rest of the article is right, but that part is seriously wrong.

It concludes with:

> _Flattening the curve is not an option for the United States, for the UK or > Germany. Don't tell your friends to flatten the curve. Let's start > containment._

That's just bizarre. Containment _is_ part of flattening the curve, and the other measures that we personally can implement is also part of flattening the curve. Everything we do to slow and hinder the spread will help. Total containment is not possible, all we can do is slow the spread, and that is flattening the curve!

So wash your hands, go out as little as possible, interact with as few people as possible, and do your bit to help flatten the curve.

<comment><USER3> [https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/1*FoIElQyKudIShpnBHckC5A.pn...](https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/1*FoIElQyKudIShpnBHckC5A.png)

Would you like to refute or respond to this plot?

> Containment is part of flattening the curve

But "flattening the curve" means allowing exponential growth and waiting for most people to become infected. That would be a catastrophe, so no, containment is not a part of flattening the curve, and FTC is a wholly inadequate goal.

<comment><USER2> > _Would you like to refute or respond to this plot?_

"Flattening the Curve" is not and cannot be the entire story. It's a process to reduce the stress on the health services, but what seems clear from all the numbers is that the health services _will_ be overwhelmed, we're just trying to reduce the number of concomitant deaths.

> _But "flattening the curve" means allowing exponential growth ..._

The cumulative number of cases will, barring exceptional intervention, be a logistic function, and the number of cases "in progress" will more-or-less be the derivative. And for a logistic function the first part is more-or-less an exponential.

So whether you "Flatten the Curve" or not, the first phase is always effectively exponential, and since containment is now effectively impossible, it's inevitable that most people (they're suggesting 80%) of people will eventually have been infected.

The way to reduce the catastrophe is to make the rate of infection as low as possible, thus stretching the logistic function and thereby reducing the maximum of the derivative.

That's my understanding.

<comment><USER3> The health services will be overwhelmed if all we do is tell people to wash their hands. You are content with ~1,000,000 dead Americans, I am not.

<comment><USER2> There's something here you're really not understanding, and I don't know if it's because you're not reading carefully enough, or I'm not being clear enough.

I'm not saying that all we do is tell people to wash their hands. Flattening the Curve is not just telling people to wash their hands.

It's also saying self-isolate, where possible don't travel, where possible don't go out at all, when it's necessary to go out, stay a minimum of 2 metres away from people whenever you can.

Flattening the Curve is not about "Just wash your hands and we'll be fine", it's about making as many contributions in as many ways as possible to slowing the rate of infection.

I'm genuinely astonished if you think "Flatten the Curve" just means "Wash your hands".

And when I run the numbers, it looks to me like the US health services are going to be overwhelmed regardless, the point is to do every little thing possible to reduce the amount. That's what Flattening the Curve means.

<comment><USER4> And the article, which is maybe the thing you aren't understanding ;P, is saying that _merely_ reducing the speed by social distancing--which most people, maybe not you but then that is your misunderstanding of the background concept being talked about being here, think is going to be sufficient to not overwhelm hospitals, and that life will be able to return to normal soon--is not going to be sufficient to get the peak of that curve under that line... which again, is what the vast majority of people talking about "flattening the curve" are meaning: if this data were correct (which is not your argument, so let's assume it is) and you showed them the chart of the curve being flattened requiring a decade for the cute little infographic to work, I think the vast majority of people sharing those graphs would have a dawning realization that something even more drastic than _mere_ social distancing is required, such as active tracing and containment, which no one in the US even seems to be contemplating attempting (source: I am a local government official who gets to peek behind the curtains a bit of the regional government above me, and I am absolutely horrified). You really just seem to have an awkward model of what people clearly are thinking when they say "flatten the curve" and share those little graphs, and are using it to cause a massive equivocation battle to undermine the thesis of an article that is effectively saying "we need to be allocating some effort towards active measures and not assume passive ones will be 100% sufficient"; trying to assert this article is telling people _not_ to self isolate is such an on purpose misread it is painful :/. (Now, are the numbers in this article correct? Dunno. Or is it just too late to bother and we are all doomed? Dunno. But again: not your arguments.)

<comment><USER5> > And the article (...) is saying that merely reducing the speed by social > distancing--which most people (...) think is going to be sufficient to not > overwhelm hospitals, and that life will be able to return to normal soon--is > not going to be sufficient to get the peak of that curve under that line...

Sorry but you're either oblivious to the concept of are making an effort to not understand it. Flattening the curve is not a panacea. Flattening a curve is a last resort approach to mitigate a logistics problem. It's patently obvious to everyone who is aware of the concept that it's highly unlikely that demand for intensive care due to covid infections will steadily remain under the service saturation levels. That's a laudable goal, but unrealistic.

What you are failing to understand is that the end goal of flattening the curve is that lowering the peak demand by distributing it throughout time will enable better resource utilization with less scarcity. The goal is that instead of experiencing a sharp increase of, say, 15% of the total population requiring intensive care concentrated in a 2 or 3 week timespan, you slow down the spread of the disease so that the nation's healthcare system can serve a larger portion of the population, thus avoiding unnecessary deaths due to lack of medical care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understood this to mean flattening the curve is important, but not enough. Containment is the most critical intervention, but also the one that requires effective government intervention (South Korea).

<comment><USER5> > I understood this to mean flattening the curve is important, but not enough. > Containment is the most critical intervention

Containment is enforced to flatten the curve. That's the whole point. It's not an either/or thing. And the whole point of flattening the curve is to avoid saturating healthcare services with an exponential increase in demand concentrated in a span of a couple of weeks. The article is crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The point he makes is valid and critically important. If it were titled "heard immunity is a dangerous delusion" then the "well actually" crowd here wouldn't be up in arms.

<comment><USER7> The title should have been "Flattening the Curve is not enough!!!".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author lists his own credentials, which do not include any medical field, and certainly not not epidemiology.

Author: you are part of the problem. We don't need more articles written by non-experts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Strawman arguments. JFC.

<comment><USER9> Like seriously some people think they fucking know everything b/c they know a lot about one thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Agree with other commenters... this article is criminally stupid.

Author... Stop writing articles in an effort to appease your ego. You are contributing to the problem.

I have a PhD in chemical engineering and worked in biotechnology off and on for several years: aseptic filling, clean room design, microbiology contamination mitigation, bio-processing design) and I come from a family with a lot of medical doctors. Even though I have a fairly good grasp of our situation, you won't see me writing any articles about the pandemic because I'm not an expert.

Among many errors in the article, you can't blindly apply statistics from China or other parts of the world. It is a question of "data sample size" relative to the "actual population"; as a statistician, the Author should know that. The sample size, relative to population, is very small and highly skewed (mostly testing people who are sick). The question is: how many people came in contact with the virus vs. how many people got sick vs. how many people got really sick? This we don't know... China would have needed to randomly test a large percentage of the otherwise healthy population in Wuhan to figure this out BUT both PCR and immune antibody tests would need to be used (to my knowledge, these didn't exist in bulk a month ago)... and then there is difficult to know uncertainties in the percentage of false positives and false negatives.

As an extreme example, what if 3-5 million people in Wuhan had contacted the virus but only a small portion (~100-300k) became ill enough to seek medical care and get tested and about 3-4k died? That would complete change the statistics around the severity of the virus. Given the contagious nature of the virus and delay between community transmission starting and 'the recognition that there was a problem", the virus was almost certainly more widespread in Wuhan than a mere 100-300k people.... the question is 'how widespread'. We don't know the answer. But the more widespread it was, the less severe the severity/mortality rate would look.

Also, any comparison of statistical sample sets between countries should take into consideration other factors not included in the sample set: population density, severity of air pollution, percentage of people who smoke and how much, and other factors which negatively contribute to respiratory and immune system health (e.g. low-level heavy metal poisoning?, vitamin deficiencies?, etc.)</comment>


Ask HN: TC Competitor? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
  I noticed a post recently about a TC competitor, and well I've been planning to work on a startup focused blog as well, mainly because TC covers mainstream news and bigger companies. I would like to focus on startups solely, but since there are some already out there, and the one mentioned in the other post, I have been trying to think of a twist. I wanted to get some feedback and see if you guys would be interested.
I had been wanting to do this mainly to improve my writing (since Im knee deep in this daily anyways) but its clear it will benefit a lot of others. Some topics I've considered, maybe include lean methods in each post, so you can see how successful startups have applied real learning techniques to improve their products, or for some of the cool startups out there (think, hipmunk, mint, mixpanel, forrst etc.) do an interview to discuss their basic stack and tech journey. I think it'd be a gem. In any case, if I start another TC alernative, are there any startups that would appreciate something more focused on niche startup topics, or startup news? I would love to hear from startups. I've started writing about a few cool startups already and would love to hear from more.
any thoughts are appreciated and as always feel free to get in touch. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to get a little insight into what HN wants from a new startup blog, I have already started writing a few posts and am a big believer i just diving in, but wanted to see what your thoughts and what you guys are looking for in a startup blog.

Is there anything besides the typical startup review you would find useful? Maybe the community. I read facebook is putting out a 3rd party commenting system and thought it would be great to have a quora style accountability in the comments. What do you guys think? Any ideas, feedback on a startup blog is welcome, and I'll definitely get it going asap. I already have the wordpress up and a few posts.

</comment><comment><USER2> Just go for it. Just write the content, don't worry about anything else. If people like it, they'll like it. Nobody can like your content, if you haven't made it.

<comment><USER3> I agree, just create it and start writing. You will discover your angle though feedback as the site grows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great idea. You could call it "Startup News".

<comment><USER5> I am not sure whether it was deliberate but "Hacker News" was originally called "Startup News".

<comment><USER6> So the name's free now? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Link?</comment>


Ask HN: Trying to launch, having trouble with sales / marketing. - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, we're a bootstrapped startup trying to improve hotels' concierge-to-guest communications by giving the hotels tools to recommend local points of interest via the (mobile) web. We're hoping that replacing awkward paper maps will save time and improve the guest's engagement with the hotel.
We've had the product working for a few months following a pilot and codevelopment period with a 150-room hotel, but we're having trouble actually securing sales.
WHAT WE'VE TRIED:
Our sales process boils down to stopping in at hotels in our area, obtaining contact information for the appropriate decision-maker, then following up with emails and cold calling.
In general, this process has been excruciatingly slow. One prospect involved first contact in the spring, an enthusiastic first meeting and demo with the hotel manager mid-summer, and a great meeting with the general manager in the fall.
The fall meeting ended with an oral agreement on pricing, a request to send over the paperwork, and a final hurdle: demo to the front desk staff.  If the response is generally positive, the contract gets signed. We're still trying to schedule that demo.
We had a similar experience that went all the way to regional management for approval, but was denied on the false belief that we duplicated functionality of in-lobby kiosks. The hotel's management pushed back on our behalf, but ultimately decided that they needed to honor the ownership's wishes.
WHAT WE'RE TRYING:
We've just put up a video on the website, so we can better inform prospects quickly before going through the hassle of scheduling introductory meetings. We're hoping to use this to be able to reach a wider, non-geographically-constrained audience more quickly.
QUESTIONS:
1. In many cases, it's taking us months to get to "no," or half a year to get to "probably." Should we change how we're approaching clients?
2. Should we be advertising yet, and in what media? Trade magazines?
3. Right now we individually negotiate prices with clients. Should we change how we handle that? Possibly publish a fixed price on our website?
4. What sucks about our website and/or demo video?
Our site is at http://naviedge.com
Thank you! Erydo & Callahad <comment><USER2> Have you considered trying a bottom-up approach instead of top-down?

A manager/general manager at a hotel is concerned with things like meeting occupancy goals, the catastrophic plumbing issue on the 12th floor, and making sure the ballroom is setup properly for the regional high-school guidance counselor conference.

My point is, if they've never been a concierge (likely not), they don't feel their pain. Instead, go to the concierges directly and solve their pain in a trial. If they love/want the product and it makes customers happier, they'll help you make the introduction and the sale should be easier.

Incidentally, concierges are naturally social and connected people–so it should be very easy to get in front of them. Just make sure you don't bother them at their peak times (I've learned this lesson with restaurants). If you drop in a concierge desk between 12 and 5pm, you should be able to have a meaningful conversation.

As for the video, it's well made but a bit vague. I'd like to see a little more detail on the screens or a slightly better workflow breakdown (people and arrows and such).

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> I agree with this. The concierge is the guy who will be promoting your software and using it. If you show him how it will make his life easier, he will use it and get guests using it. You might want to approach them directly.

<comment><USER4> This is actually the approach we started off with, and still pursue to a limited extent. (See earlier comment—we're moving away as much as possible from individual hotels and trying to pursue hotel groups).

The issue we've run into is that it takes a lot of time to percolate up to someone who can rubber-stamp it, so we're now trying to work top-down in the hopes of more quickly validating the sale.

It's been nice to have that existing internal advocacy when we meet with higher managers, but the times that I've met them first, it hasn't really changed the conversations.

Most of the managers we've talked to think pretty well in terms of concierges and front desk interactions—and they're concerned with the higher-level business ideas of guest retention and being able to offer and advertise new types of services and things like that.

EDIT: Clarified my wording.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We've also posted this to Reddit [0].

Any input is really appreciated. We've worked hard to get where we are, and are very proud of the product. We'd love to make it a successful one. Thanks!

[0] [http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/oe3ig/trying_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/oe3ig/trying_to_launch_our_startup_having_trouble_with/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I can give you one quick suggestion: try and get into conferences, expos and meetups of hospitality industries. From what I gather, you need to expose your product to shot callers as quickly as possible.

As an added bonus, if any such conference is set up in a hotel, you can ask the hotel to set up a complimentary demo of your service. Now, you've exposed your product to a hotel as well as the attendees.

Don't be disheartened if you don't get results immediately. Success of a startup depends on networking. If you dont get any clients out of a conference, make sure you network and connect with them later.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the advice! You're absolutely right.

We did a lot of research before jumping into this: interviewed with a lot of hotels, did our codevelopment, etc. But in ramping up to "let's get something solid that we can sell", we psychologically transitioned into a software development mode rather than a business development one; and now we're trying to reorient ourselves as we transition back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are my two cents:

The website:

\- Do you refer a lot of people there? If so why, not include a brochure or more detailed information? People like to obtain as much info as possible before contacting a company. Perhaps include a package that a concierge could present to the GM.

\- Call to actions: The video is good, but why is your CTA buried below the fold? In my opinion your logo is a little massive. Perhaps a small redesign could help improve your visitors conversions. Also, since you are an "online tool" I would really focus on the design side of things (yes, we live in a superficial world ;).

Paid promotion:

\- Have you considered doing paid search? Do you have a budget for it? If so, let me know (my email address is my username at gmail.com)

\- I would be more than happy to volunteer couple hours to help answer any questions you might have or help you set up a Adwords and Adcenter account. About me: I work full time in paid search at a digital agency.

Other marketing opportunities:

\- As mentioned from others, I would also highly recommend going to trade fairs.

\- Do you offer a free trial? What is the main barrier to entry you are seeing? Is it because your product is "unproven"? Perhaps getting more "smaller" hotels has its advantages (VS going after large chains) given that large chains may be reluctant to "take a risk" - if you know what I mean.

\- Have you considered Las Vegas hotels? They have been know to innovate with new technologies - such as Klout and so on... perhaps there are some opportunities there.

\- Have you tried having a Concierge Committee? Basically have a bunch of prospective users use your product for free - in exchange they give you two things: Feedback and you can say X hotels are already using your product.

Good luck with everything!

</comment><comment><USER7> have you tried to actually contact the head office for the specific hotel chains? for example, instead of going to a local Hilton and talking to general manager, why not try to get a meeting with someone at the Hilton's head office? i'm not sure how the hotel industry works, but i was under the impression that heado ffice sets certain policies and standards. so if you speak with someone there and they like your idea, they may agree to do a pilot run in one or two hotels and collect some feedback. if the feedback is good then they'll push it across all hotels.

on a side note, is it just me or is logo on the main page a bit pixelated on the top of the letters?

<comment><USER4> You're right that Hilton in particular is very centrally controlled. Other large franchises have more flexibility. (Starwood is a bit more flexible, for example).

One of the reasons we've been reluctant to go straight for the top is that, as a new startup, we don't have a lot of credibility yet. We think the odds of one of the headquarters giving the go-ahead at this point is low enough that it would be a distraction to focus on them. There's also the situation, down the road, that a corporate decision-maker recalls us as "We already decided not to use their software. Don't remember why." making it hard to move upward organically.

Those fears could be _entirely_ unfounded, though.

We are slowly accumulating some references to get us in touch with those corporate-level people, though. Once we have those personal referrals, we'll have a better shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi guys,

I was very much into your vid until it came to the process for the concierge to input all the details.

Have you considered a kiosk approach?

An auto concierge running your software? Saves the concierge ALL his time as the guests can do all their own inputting etc - seems like it would be more attractive to hotels. Most all of them have enough space to put a neat stylish kiosk in their lobby - also introduces the cool tech bit for the hotel :)

They're not too expensive and you could start with one or two units, revenue by straight rental of the terminal. Trials free for x months etc...

Hope thats not too off the wall Mat

</comment><comment><USER3> Who are the people paying you money? Not their names, but in general, where does your revenue come from? Maybe you're asking for money from the wrong people.

<comment><USER4> The business model is to license the software to hotels. More specifically, whoever has the final say within the hotels varies _wildly_ between properties.

In some places, it's the Front Desk Manager; others, marketing; some places defer all of these decisions to their IT Director; and others it's the GM. Some of the franchises require approval from their regional headquarters while others have a lot of autonomy.

At any given hotel, approval may in the worst case have to come from up to three companies: the ownership, the management company, and the franchise corporate.

We're now speaking with hotel management companies (more than individual hotels) as a way to hopefully expedite that decision-making process.

<comment><USER3> Here's how I see the problem and how I would solve it:

I think you're trying to make money from the wrong people. I think you need to make money from the local businesses.

See, the concierge isn't making any money off your app, at least not in a measurable way. The person using the app thinks the app is helpful, not the concierge. If a tourist tips the concierge, the concierge thinks its him doing a great job, not your app. The hotel isn't making money either, at least not in a measurable way, because the connection between someone having a great time at a restaurant and re-booking a room is very weak. The tourist may attribute the great time they had to:(pick one) the restaurant; the city; the occasion; the person with them; the concierge; and finally, maybe, the hotel. In fact, I'd wager the hotel gets little benefit, the concierge will get the tips.

So your software is really just a drag on a hotel's expenses. Something they don't need. You're barking up the wrong tree when you ask for money from them.

How would I solve this? Well, I would give it to free to the hotels. If it helps them save money and time with their staff, they'll use it. I would also involve the concierge immediately. In fact, I would give them _incentives_ to use your software. You probably can't afford to pay them, but you can afford to put in a tip reminder. In fact, maybe the hotel staff puts in the date of the traveler's stay and at the end, it automatically send them a text message asking them to tip the staff. You'd get waaaayyy more traction doing this with staff. In fact, I'd wager staff would love you if you really worked on this feature. It would be instant traction.

Edit: I would also work out ways to approach staff without needing the involvement of hotel management. Maybe the staff can add their names to the app and the customer can pick them out a list (and hopefully tip them). Staff could then use a website to do everything they need. Staff would do this without consulting management or getting permission, or might only need permission from their front desk manager. I would cut out upper management entirely if you can see a way to do it. Let local management and staff see all the benefits.

I'd then go out and sell ad space to the businesses. Or get a commission on each booking coming from you app. Local businesses are the ones who will pay to get a hold of tourists walking around. I'd go after restaurants, tour guides, trip operators, fishing guides, you name it. They can offer coupons, all sorts of things through your app.

I know this is a major expansion of time and resources to put this into action, but I don't see asking hotels for money as a viable revenue source. If you did get traction, someone will eventually come along and offer it for free using the method I outline above and take over your market.

I would suggest concentrating on all the hotels and local businesses in one city first rather than worldwide or country wide. Get it working and get revenue coming in. Then go from there..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you offer it to them for free on a trial basis to get them using it and see how it works? If the service is beneficial they won't want to lose it.</comment>


Hey HN people, I built this to track my book readings - <AUTHOR> https://candlapp.com <comment><USER2> I hope you will succeed but frankly I don't see mass adoption of yet another subscription app for something that can be replicated on paper or any note app (of course it won't be as good, but it will be free).

I'd pay 5 bucks once for an Android app that does what your app is doing, but not every month (these costs add up, I have to choose what's superfluous and what's not).

Just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spell check your website. Rookie mistake.</comment>


YouTube Ordered to Give Complete User Logs [usernames, IPs, and videos] to Viacom - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/YouTube+Ordered+to+Give+Complete+User+Logs+to+Viacom/article12265.htm

<comment><USER2> Love the cat pic lol</comment>


Ursula K. Le Guin has died - <AUTHOR> https://locusmag.com/2018/01/ursula-k-le-guin-1929-2018/ <comment><USER2> [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k- le...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin- acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html?referer=)

</comment><comment><USER3> R.I.P. Ursula, Left Hand of Darkness was one of my go to books for convincing literature snobs that SF was a legitimate genre.

</comment><comment><USER4> poor site is suffering HN! wrath. mirror: [http://archive.is/y5BI1](http://archive.is/y5BI1)

<comment><USER5> That one has a pop-up in it, unfortunately, and it looks likes the article isn't as substantive as the NYT obituary. Normally we'd prefer the niche source but in this case it's probably best to merge the thread into [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16218439).</comment></comment>