Show HN: Lekh Diagram, sketch recognition diagramming app for ipad - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lekh-diagram/id576124115

<comment><USER2> Very nicely done! But I wish you could have watched over my shoulder as I bumbled around at the UI. Since I bought the export function and therefore own you as a developer to execute my every whim delivered as free updates until eternity ends[1]…

• If you can attach text to a bezier connection, I couldn't make it happen. I want this. Code faster, sleep less.[2]

• I kept trying to move objects a little bit without the double pump of first selecting. This makes tiny fly dropping lines which have to be undone or deleted. I think a short, brief gesture from the center of an object might be safely interpreted as a drag. You must already be deciding if it is a connection or a line. What's one more logic branch?[3]

• I'd like to select several objects of a class and have the option to "make same shape" in order to tidy up. Say, grab 3 rectangles and make them the same dimensions. Easy context menu item, but you have to figure out how to select 3 arbitrary rectangles first. Perhaps in select mode a brief touch adds or removes from the set of selected objects?

• For reshaping rectangles and ovals, I think a horizontal or vertical pinch should change just that dimension, diagonal can still resize preserving aspect ratio. This gives a natural way to change aspect ratio without all the mode-i- ness of the vertex.

• I find myself wanting to connect more than 4 things to a rectangle, I want them to come in at right angles to a side, but not overlap their lines on the way in. That will take a day of thinking to imagine a solution to rendering that. Having them spaced pleasingly, near the center of the side, in an order to minimize crossovers would be lovely. Good luck.

• I keep making fly specks on my drawing by touching the surface. I want that not to happen, but I suppose I might eventually want to make a tiny line too. Please resolve my ambiguous actions like an oracle. I expect this to be done so well I never realize you are doing it.

• Xcode-esque snap to other stuff on the page would be nice, particularly snapping to "things I am connected to" would help keep those horizontal and vertical lines tidy.

• I think adding "shake to undo" would be nice. That undo button is so far up in the corner, it feels like a context switch to me to go hit it, while a shake is just part of my flow. How strange is that?

Well that should keep you busy until December 1st. I'll get back to you with my next set of demands then.

EOM

[1] I kid, But I don't get to be the "user" end of these very often and I'm going all out.

[2] The Omni Group NSBezierPath extensions might be helpful here, they have a getPositionForPoint: method that tells how far along the path a point is, and a corresponding getPointForPosition: so you could glue the text to a relative position along the curve. They also have hit testing for NSBezierPath, but you already crossed that bridge. [https://github.com/omnigroup/OmniGroup/blob/master/Framework...](https://github.com/omnigroup/OmniGroup/blob/master/Frameworks/OmniAppKit/OpenStepExtensions.subproj/NSBezierPath- OAExtensions.h) [4]

[3] Plus a time machine so you can draw the feedback as a line or drag without knowing if it is going to be short or brief. Your problem. Not mine.

[4] You realize if you give me this I am going to come back and ask for the ability to drag the text along the bezier curve, right? Best plan for that from the start.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for such wonderful comment. This is just 1st version release. I had to cut many things to get the v1 out. There are lot of scope for improvement. Releasing the v1 and getting feedback like yours will make sure that I will be doing right set of features from now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rajeevk - please please create a version of this app that is modified into a virtual whiteboard so that two or more people can update the same plan at the same time. I have engineers spread over multiple offices and find it hard to do meetings that should be whiteboard sessions if everyone was in the same office. Meeting rooms could then have a couple of ipads with styluses for my guys to use. This is an app I would buy in a heartbeat!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jimparkins for liking the app and suggesting the new idea.

The real time collaboration using this app is a killer idea. This was suggested by many people sometime ago (in pre launch demo). But honestly, this feature will take some time to implement.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is youtube demo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvPLRRt79uo>

For more info: <http://www.avabodh.com/lekh>

</comment><comment><USER4> Rajeevk, this is absolutely fantastic, great job!

But… why don't you support DOT as an export type? It would be so unbelievably awesome for me to prototype in Lekh and then finess with DOT.

Anyway congratulations on the release!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks darrhiggs..

I was not aware of DOT format. Just now goggled and found the wiki page of DOT. Looks interesting. Probably in next release/update I will add DOT support.

<comment><USER4> Brilliant!

Let me know if I can help you in any way.

Edit: spelling

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you please send me your contact detail on email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> App Store marketing suggestion: say what makes you distinct as near as possible to the beginning of the description text.

Which here I think means, get your sketch-recognition feature as near to the beginning of your description as possible. Only the first sentence or two show up in the web and desktop-iTunes store (don't have ipad with me now), until you hit "...More" to expand the description.

Maybe replace "with extreme ease" with something along the lines of "simply by sketching shapes with your finger".

You could also use the first screenshot slot to show a nice illustration of the UI procedure. For example, a photo montage of a finger sketching a freehand shape, and then that shape re-rendered by your app.

The icon too, could be used for some rendering of the freehand concept.

Maybe I'm missing what makes Lekh distinct, but if it's this, show it off as much as possible -- don't bury it in text!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks mike_h for valuable marketing suggestion. This is my first app, so there many mistakes here and there.. Will address these with next update

<comment><USER5> Just some stuff to consider. I wasn't thinking of them as "mistakes"; that's up to you. Congrats on the nice work and feedback session!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instaviz does the same thing, but yours is free, and your execution is better, great job...

<sarcasm>Cue to patetent lawyers in 3...2...</sarcasm>

<comment><AUTHOR> Free to download and draw diagram. You have to purchase export feature (In App Purchase) to export diagram in various formats.

And regarding the instaviz, this very restrictive. It does not allow you to rearrange the shape the way you want.

<comment><USER7> Instaviz author here. This is actually intentional, Instaviz is really optimized for quickly sketching out ideas and thoughts and not having to worry about layout. I'm planning a 2.0 version which will allow some reorganization of the nodes within a layout.

Kudos to you for figuring out shape recognition. It took me a long while to get my head around it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks pixelglow for taking a look at the Lekh Diagram. For me, writing the shape recognizer did not take much time. But designing/thinking the overall app usability took much more time.

<comment><USER7> It looks like your shape recognition is handled differently from Instaviz. Yours is more oriented toward general purpose drawing, whereas Instaviz is more tuned toward recognizing specific shapes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the Lekh Diagram first recognizes a general shape which is matching to user's drawing then uses various heuristics to convert it to regular shapes like rectangle, parallelogram etc. There is setting that switches of most of second step (regularizing shapes). In the Misc->Settings, there is "regularize shape" switch

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very good!

What I miss is a "snap to grid" feature.

Some comments:

\- dragging object feels slow on iPad 3

\- the line and text options give too much choices, maybe you could have an advanced toggle to enable fine-grained parameters, and a default with simpler options (like just 5-10 colors, no transparency and no line width)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Sanp to grid is a important feature. This will come in future release. Also there is plan to review whole of the UI for making it more simpler. Some of the future release will address all of your comments

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rajeevk, great job!! Things I'm looking forward to: \- snap to grid \- object grouping

Your app needs a bit more polish, and your icon could do with a bit more work, but for a first version its fantastic.

Your app has replaced grafio as my goto diagramming tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> grafio is a close competitor to Lekh Diagram. Shape recognition and customization of shapes are much better in Lekh Diagram. What Lekh Diagram lacks (if you compare with grafio) is aesthetically good looking GUI. Apart from that the grafio recently added toolbox for flowchart shapes which is currently not in Lekh Diagram. But many of those toolbox shapes (like arrow) are easily recognized by Lekh Diagram.

<comment><USER9> As much as a good looking GUI would be nice, please don't do it at the expense of speed/performance and please don't over do it. There is something to be said for a clean simple, but polished look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is something very pleasurable about drawing flow charts like this. It hits a sweet spot between actual drawing and presentation programs/lucid chart. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER11> Do you take into consideration the direction of the strokes? I can't seem to get it to recognize anything but a rectangle. Lefty here, hence the direction query.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, there is no consideration of direction. I am not sure what's going wrong. I have tested all shapes in all directions. You have to draw a shape close to whatever shape you want to be recognized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to be able to export images as an SVG file. That way, this could be used for creating simple assets to integrate into a site design or wireframe.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can export to SVG. These are formats that you can export to: JPG, PNG (transparent background), SVG, PDF and Lekh format. Diagram exported in lekh format can be opened by Lekh Diagram app.

<comment><USER13> I don't suppose you could add Visio format?

<comment><AUTHOR> Have not investigated yet that if it is possible to export to Microsoft's propriety formats. Anyway this is in plan to investigate, if possible visio formats will be added to future release.

<comment><USER7> If you want to export to Visio, export to VDX which is the Visio Document XML format. IIRC it's documented on the Microsoft site, and I even wrote a VXD exporter for the Graphviz open source project which I then used for Instaviz. While developing your own exporter, you can use the free Microsoft Visio Reader to examine your output to see if it conforms.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool.. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great job!

Q1: What algorithm do you use to recognize the closest shape?

Q2: Which shapes are the most difficult to recognize?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not understand your Q1 for Q2: Identifying sequence of lines vs identifying bezier curve was toughest problem for me.

<comment><USER14> Q1: What algorithm do you use to identify the nearest shape? How do you know the user intends to draw a square, or a curve or a rectangle?

<comment><AUTHOR> When user completes a stroke (touch up), then I take the path drawn by user, then divide the path such that each small sub path is very close to a line. Then I have combination of lines, Suppose I have four lines, then possibilities are that it can be a quadrilateral or circle, (if the end of last line is close to the start of the first line), then I use variance to determine which shape closely fits to the drawn stroke.

Once I know if this is quadrilateral, then uses various heuristics to find out if it is close to a rectangle or parallelogram etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Your screenshots don't have to be literal screenshots. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything special about your app. Its main feature is un- advertised!

I would suggest some sort of transitional photo. Show the sloppy drawing fading into the crisp flowchart. Maybe a little text on the image. "Draw flow charts in seconds!".

<comment><USER16> I second this. Use some of the frawing diagrams from the help view to show how shapes are created (I'd show at least a box and an arrow on one screenshot). It will also reduce first-use frustration trying to create shapes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for good feedback, will address them with next update

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Installed and very interested. Every once in a while I get the desire to diagram on my iPad. I don't do it often because I haven't found the right tool yet, so hopefully this is it. I like what I see and look forward to future updates.

</comment><comment><USER17> Downloading now, but I'd change the description of the in-app purchase so people can read it on the app store; it currently truncates. Instead of 'Feature to enable export' just say 'Export diagrams'. Looking forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very awesome.

You may want to consider making the dash/color/fill tappable, instead of relying on the tiny disclosure button. It would definitely speed up access to those features.

edit: It feels a little naked without pinch-zoom.

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! How do I create edges that connect to the node itself? Like the state diagram you show in the screenshots?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could not get you exactly asked. Here is a youtube demo of how to connect shapes: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKT_NqHM6Zk>

I guess you asked connecting to itself.. right?

for that draw a independent bezier curve. You can easily move and modify the bezier curve by moving it's control points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any plan on android version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that is in plan, but it will take some time. Development not started yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was going to use Grafio, but this is a much better alternative!

</comment><comment><USER22> Can you copy-paste a shape?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can duplicate a shape. This is equivalent to copy-paste in the same diagram. copy-paste shape across diagrams feature is currently not there.</comment></comment>


SecondMarket to launch first New York-based Bitcoin exchange - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/25/secondmarket-bitcoin-exchange/?iid=HP_LN

<comment><AUTHOR> The new company will receive from SecondMarket:

* Digital currency asset management. This includes Bitcoin Investment Trust, the first-ever U.S. investment vehicle dedicated exclusively to Bitcoin. It sort of acts like a currency ETF, and was launched last fall.

* Trading desk: SecondMarket has an 11-person Bitcoin trading team that originally was just a market-maker, but now is on both sides after Mt. Gox began disintegrating.

* $$: SecondMarket will contribute approximately $20 million in cash and Bitcoin assets toward the new company.</comment>


Healthcare CEOs again lead the way in pay - <AUTHOR> https://www.modernhealthcare.com/finance/healthcare-ceos-again-lead-way-pay <comment><USER2> Of course, it's an industry so regulated by the government that it's very profitable for the few.</comment>


Microsoft Announces Nano Server - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2015/04/08/microsoft-announces-nano-server-for-modern-apps-and-cloud.aspx <comment><USER2> Microsoft has a real hole in their stack in my opinion...

So on Linux you have SSH (for shell) and X11 Forwarding/VNC for GUI remoting. On Windows you have RDP for GUI and nothing for remote shell.

Now, I know what you're going to say, "WMI" but WMI was never designed for use over the internet. You have to forward two fixed ports and a dynamic range (shudder). Plus it isn't security hardened either by design or through fire.

VPN you say? In theory yes. But the reality on the ground is that for most SMBs they're still using RDP or SSH directly to manage Windows/Linux servers, and if Windows wants to compete (and they are dropping RDP) they need to have an "answer" to SSH.

Essentially they need to take whatever WMI is, wrap it into a secure protocol, and bind it to just a single port, then harden the heck out of whatever process directly runs on that port (before you hit the WMI interface itself).

Or alternatively write an SSH server (literally), and after login redirect input to a Powershell process. Nobody would complain about that (plus free SFTP support!).

PS - I'm totally going to get attacked by "VPN purists" here. But really everyone knows that SSH and RDP is extremely common for SMBs/private individuals. Let's quit pretending that it is not and support the client that actually exists, not the client you wished existed.

<comment><USER3> SSH access to PowerShell would be a game changer IMHO for Microsoft. Also, have you seen this? [http://www.powershellserver.com/download/](http://www.powershellserver.com/download/)

<comment><USER4> I don't know if it exists the other way around or not, but it would be really nice if Windows had a built in SSH client as well. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a client's Windows Server machine and needed to remote into a Linux server, but neither I nor they had access to download Putty.

<comment><USER5> Agreed... I generally wind up with git extensions everywhere which includes most of the gnu tools including ssh. The only down side is that ssh via windows command shell, even in conemu doesn't do ansi/drawing properly... never really investigated as I just try to avoid it all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My real concern is that figuring out so many things without the GUI is currently a real PITA. Like trying to make IIS act as a reverse proxy. It's a huge pain, and most of the docs are telling you to click various things. Compared to setting up nginx, ouch. Compounding things is the fact that MS took a cover-our-ass policy to installing things, so even after installing IIS, you've gotta go explicitly install "dynamic" compression as an extra. Then to really make it work, there's a file buried in system32 you've gotta edit, because you can't configure those settings by default at a site level. Overall, it's just way more complicated.

I know they're working on it, and PS is a great shell overall, even if it is missing a lot of simple tools by default.

But MS is way late to the party. OpenVZ was in heavy use what, a decade ago? And MS did nothing to respond, really. But hey, maybe they'll pull it off. I don't have a fundamental objection to Windows.

<comment><USER7> Windows has always been super-visual. For many tasks there isn't even a CLI way to do it short of editing the registry.

<comment><USER8> The registry is not very discoverable. However, once you discovered, a lot of customization can be had from running as little as a single registry script.

As a trivial example, remapping caps-lock to something sane was easier on the last few windows releases I tried (just run a registry script) than on any of the 'nixes I used in the same time period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They call it Nano, I call it a server.

Happy to see Microsoft is evolving. Let's hope it will be for everyone's best.

<comment><USER10> > Let's hope it will be for everyone's best.

Anything making MS better cannot be for everyone's best: they have a de facto monopoly, and of the most dangerous kind.

That's why despite all the bad that can be said against Google and Android, at the very least they had enough weigth (and talent, and luck) to push MS out of mobile. Which was the greatest news for our industry since Internet.

Also, I do not agree with Paul Graham ([http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)): sadly, MS is not dead yet. It cannot be dead for real with 9x% of install on PCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if the implementation turns out to be lacking, the goal is good:

> As customers adopt modern applications and next-generation cloud > technologies, they need an OS that delivers speed, agility and lower > resource consumption.

I know the kneejerk reply to this is, "Yeah, Linux!", but I can think of at least 2 Windows-based applications in my company which would benefit from this. And in general, yay competition.

</comment><comment><USER12> 92 % fewer security bulletins and 80% fewer reboots. One can hope that's not just promise.

<comment><USER13> _80% fewer reboots_

Still many times more frequent than w/Linux. The 2008 R2 development system we have needs to be rebooted every two weeks, on average, due to Windows Updates that require a reboot. Updates come in almost every day for CentOS and I only need to reboot once ever couple of months for new kernels.

Can't wait for the no-reboot kernel patches planned for a future Linux kernel.

<comment><USER2> > The 2008 R2 development system we have needs to be rebooted every two weeks, > on average, due to Windows Updates that require a reboot.

Uhh they literally don't release updates that often, so you'll have to explain that one to us...

> Updates come in almost every day for CentOS and I only need to reboot once > ever couple of months for new kernels.

Windows doesn't support hotpatching, Linux does, it really is as simple as that. Linux has more people working on it than the Windows kernel does, and is just a more advanced kernel in general at this point.

But for what Microsoft has to work with Windows Server is darn stable and requires very few restarts in my experience (approx. 4/year in my experience with 2008 and 2008 R2).

<comment><USER14> > Windows doesn't support hotpatching, Linux does, it really is as simple as > that. Linux has more people working on it than the Windows kernel does, and > is just a more advanced kernel in general at this point.

Actually, hotpatching is easier on Linux because it has a technically inferior virtual memory subsystem to Windows.

The Windows kernel is technically superior in numerous areas: virtual memory, thread synchronization primitives, and I/O (specifically, overlapped I/O), just to name a few.

<comment><USER15> Where's the best place to get details on the internals of the Windows kernel regarding things like that?

<comment><USER16> @trentnelson Don't forget I/O Completion Ports (IOCP) :)

<comment><USER14> Good grief how did I not even mention them! They are literally my favorite thing ever. I've got like, 30 slides on them here: [https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed- the-...](https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and- exploited-all-cores?slide=47)

;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the use-case for this? Modern Linux distros have all the tooling, libraries, utilities already - is the idea to use this for hosting .Net stuff?

<comment><USER18> Running stuff that requires Windows.

<comment><USER17> Well obviously - this just seems to be creeping into the space where Linux is an incumbent anyway and I can't see anyone who's running common OSS stacks wanting to use this in favor of Linux based platforms.

<comment><USER19> If you have servers that need to run Windows, even if they can't run on Nano, you can have fat Windows Server boxes and Nano boxes and configure them using the same tools, rather than having a mixed Windows/Linux shop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm interested in what the licensing will be like, compared to "larger" editions.

<comment><USER21> I hope it will cost a lot less. Might interesting for the C# people to use non-Azure clouds more if the costs are more inline with Linux based systems.

<comment><USER2> With MVC moving to a Linux compatible infrastructure in the next version, it may be too little too late, and C# people might just use Linux for real.

Literally the only C# "thing" which won't run on Linux is Visual Studio itself. Heck we might even see a Linux Powershell version here in the next few years.

<comment><USER22> Not quite, WPF and winforms are still out in the cold along with some other things.

But for sever-side code, .net core + asp.net will get the job done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If Microsoft would break out the old Interix ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix)) code and throw it on here I'd be ecstatic. (Interix was pretty great, back in the day. I think MSFT made a mistake deprecating it. A lot of FLOSS tools built on Interix just fine, back in the '99 timeframe, and if it hadn't been put out to pasture it could have definitely served as a sell into the POSIX world.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I've set up cygwin with an OpenSSH server on Windows before (to run remote MinGW compiles). Echoing Bill Gates, "In a weak sense, it [NT] is a form of Unix."

That doesn't really cover remote management, though.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm guessing this is going to be very similar to what Microsoft has in mind for the Raspberry-Pi?

<comment><USER26> I think it leans more toward CoreOS and Kubernetes.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I believe their RPi version is a lightweight consumer-facing version of Windows 8, not intended for use as a server.

<comment><USER28> No, there's a lot of confusion from bad messaging with the Pi 2 and Windows 10 announcement. By all reports Win 10 on the Pi 2 is a system to run services that have no GUI, desktop, or other UI.

<comment><USER22> Is that actually true? MS has demoed Windows IoT with a UI on minimal devices already. Both ARM and x86. I don't know if the dragonboard 410c is in a different class than the pi2 however.

Take a look on Don Box's presentation at WinHEC from last month. Device talk stats about ~40 mins, device demo starts at ~44 mins.

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/WinHEC/2015/Developing- for-t...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/WinHEC/2015/Developing-for-the- Windows-10-Device-Platform)

<comment><USER28> See Ben from the Raspberry Pi foundation's response here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8983801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8983801) Sadly there really hasn't been any update or good info on what Win 10 on the Pi 2 will be yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A new shell-only Microsoft operating system in 2015 makes me happy for reasons I can't identify.

</comment><comment><USER30> The main question is pricing. If it will be cheap or free (who knows?), it will be an option for hosting micro-services on myriad of VPSes. A probably a resurrection of interest for ASP.NET framework.

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh. Microsoft reimplemented Unix, at last. Congratulations :-)

<comment><USER32> Umm... Haven't you ever heard of Xenix?

<comment><USER31> Yes. Xenix was not a reimplementation, but a port.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename](https://github.com/andres- erbsen/dename) uses a less flexible federated consensus to build a namecoin- like system without proof of work (or stake, or anything).

<comment><USER34> I think you're on the wrong thread, maybe you're looking for this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341687)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Have they embraced and extended?

I can't tell from a quick read.

</comment><comment><USER36>
        --92 percent fewer critical bulletins
        --80 percent fewer reboots

Compared to what a barebones Linux install (Say... a Docker instance)?

I can easily shut off a service in Linux. And I can turn it on. The only reboot needed is for the Kernel itself, and that is soon changing.

What I'm reading here is that MS is most of the way there to Linux.

<comment> mkr-hn net start [service name]

net stop [service name]

<comment><USER37> Actually I tend to use sc start/stop for that, but .. should be the same.

Important utilities:

\- findstr ('grep') \- sc (control services) \- taskkill (kill/control processes) \- netsh (everything network) \- wevtutil (windows event log)

<comment> mkr-hn I figure there's probably a reason Microsoft uses net for this on their help page.

<comment><USER38> The difference is in synchronicity. Using SC START on the help page should properly be followed by SC QUERY in order to check that the service started. NET START won't return until the service starts, errors, or times out.

> "SC sends the control to the service and then returns to the command prompt. > This typically results in SC START returning the service in a state of > START_PENDING. NET START will wait for the service it is starting to come to > a fully started state before it returns control at the command prompt."

From [http://cbfive.com/command-line-service-management-net-v- sc/](http://cbfive.com/command-line-service-management-net-v-sc/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> From this announcement:

[http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/08/microsoft- unveils...](http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/08/microsoft-unveils-new- container-technologies-for-the-next-generation-cloud)

I read:

> Nano Server provides just the components you need – nothing else

And that's exactly what I do not trust MS with.

With a well documented history of backdoor ridden bloat ware products it is not quite the company that I accept any non-opensource release to have "just what I need and nothing else".

Though I must admit that the opensource train they are riding lately allows me to look at them them from a very new perspective. But still, MS if you are listening: if it is not opensource, I do not trust you!

<comment><USER36> That's fine. Then this release (and frankly, any MS product) is not for you.

But some enterprises use MS software, and this is a much needed option.

ObVote: I downvoted your complaint imaginary internet points has no bearing on the discussion at hand.

<comment><USER39> > Then this release (and frankly, any MS product) is not for you.

I've certainly re-considered dotNet after it got open sourced recently! It (finally) seemed like a reasonable proposition -- as I explain in my post BTW.

But indeed, Windows, and especially Windows-closed-source-on-a-server, is not my cup of tea. And I don't understand how it could be anyone's tea.

> But some enterprises use MS software

Sure, and this is a start-up forum. :)

Anyway, I upvoted your post for taking the trouble to explain your downvote. Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft is super friendly to startups. I can't say details, but they've given us a ton of support. BizSpark Plus ($5K a month free Azure for a year) is great. They've also got marketing help available.

While Azure is overpriced compared to Google Cloud (and maybe compared to AWS - dunno cause AWS pricing is convoluted), having them comp it is really nice. Azure is also a lot more full service than Google's stuff, if you need more than IaaS.

<comment><USER40> Just curious--I thought all three platforms were committed to essentially matching each other's prices. Has that not been true in your experience? Or is it something specific that's driving up your perceived price of Azure versus the other options?

<comment><USER6> No, that's trivially untrue, just go try the pricing calculators.

They make a big deal about being the same price on _storage_ and bandwidth. We talked to MS and determined that even after discounts for committing to Azure, the VMs themselves are 50% more than on Google. Without a commit, the price is 200% of Google's.

And even on storage, Azure isn't competitive, even if the price is the same. Their SSD options that are available now are laughable. (A temp SSD drive that erases _on reboot_ \- mostly useless.) Their currently-in-preview SSD option is ... awkward and just plain weird. You have to use special VM instance types, then create special storage accounts, then select from 3 presets in terms of space/perf. Azure actually suggests software striping them together to get more perf.

Google's SSD offering is straightfoward and just works and is quite fast. Want more perf? Just get a bigger disk and they scale up the IOPS, no problem, no fuss, no special VM or anything needed.

I'm sort of an MS fanboy, and I really dislike and distrust Google. But after using GCE a little bit, wow, for IaaS I wouldn't ever choose anything else. Everything seems just simpler, easier, cheaper, faster. (Machines boot super quick, the portal is simple/fast, and they have an SSH client in browser as a kicker.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Excited delirium', used by police to justify brutality, is junk science - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chokehold-police-excited-delirium/2020/07/17/fe907ec8-c6bc-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html <comment><USER2> Excited delirium is a very well-known and documented phenomenon, primarily in individuals that are on excessive doses of stimulants: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium#Cause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium#Cause)

However, nothing about its existence implies anything about police brutality. For some reason the article thinks it needs to deny the existence of something that obviously exists in order to argue against police brutality. This is a strange logical fallacy to commit, because you can easily argue brutality is bad regardless of what substances an individual is on.

Responding to child comments, it's possible that this condition is not unique enough to require its own name and label. But in that case, one can simply refer to the effects of doses of the given stimulants themselves, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine#Adverse_effect...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine#Adverse_effects).

Please note I'm not making any claim that brutality is okay or ever justified, just that there obviously does exist strong psychological and physical conditions that occur when an individual is on doses of very strong stimulants.

<comment><USER3> From the Wikipedia article you linked: "The condition is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association or the World Health Organization." It's under the section titled "Controversy_related_to_policing_techniques".[1]

Just because something is well-known and documented doesn't mean it's recognized as a medical or psychological condition. Sometimes it can be that medicine hasn't caught up, and sometimes it's BS.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium#Controversy_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium#Controversy_related_to_policing_techniques)

<comment><USER4> It is curious that the section you identified was added June 17th, 2020.

<comment><USER5> That... doesn't appear to be true. It's Wikipedia, the whole history is available. Heres the page as of early/mid April: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Excited_delirium&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Excited_delirium&oldid=950321179), which as far back as I've bothered to go, and the cited paragraph is still there.

<comment><USER6> in addition, here is the link for covering all changes on June 17, which shows that the section is question was not created or renamed on June 17, though it was substantially modified on that day : [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Excited_delirium&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Excited_delirium&type=revision&diff=964425739&oldid=961849649)

I don't know why it being substantially modified on that day would be important. Is there some significance to that date that I'm unaware of, other than it being "1 month ago today"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I heard someone claim that Excited Delirium idea is being spread by Axon (Taser company) lobbyists as a way of justifying the deaths of victims of improper taser use.

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=762231...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7622314)

"But according to civil-liberties groups and legal filings, Taser may have financial reasons to support — and even encourage — the use of the excited delirium diagnosis.

Take the case of Frederick Williams. On a grainy video, Williams is screaming, 'Don't kill me! I have a family to support. I've calmed down!" as several officers carry him into the Gwinnett County Detention Center in a suburb of Atlanta. One officer takes out his Taser and fires it directly onto Williams' chest.

The officer yells, "Relax! Stop resisting!" But the shock keeps jerking Williams' chest upward. As several officers hold Williams down, he is stunned six more times. A few minutes later, the officers realize Williams is not breathing. Williams died a few hours later.

Williams' family is now suing the county and Taser International. The company has made it clear in proceedings so far that it intends to argue Williams died of excited delirium — not because of the Taser or excessive force. The medical examiner could not determine the exact cause of death."

<comment><USER8> Also, tasers regularly kill people with no underlying health conditions, typically the autopsy will say "heart issue due to drug use" or something along those lines. Whenever there's a taser involved death, Axon has a "response team" which works with police to ensure "correct" death classification.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taser-deaths- insight/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taser-deaths-insight/as- death-toll-keeps-rising-u-s-communities-start-rethinking-taser-use- idUSKCN1PT0YT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One time when I lived in Hawaii, I had snuck into an apartment's hot tub with a girl. When leaving, I saw this massive tree of a Hawaiian man, and I'm 6'3", so this guy was huge. This man was screaming and hitting his wife, who was trying to run away. I yelled out to distract him so she could get away. Before I could even comprehend it, he had run across the street and was right in front of me. I was a very well trained martial artist at the time and I was scared for my life, this guy was clearly high or crazy. I jumped on a ledge where he couldn't reach me, and he ran off after the wife. I pounded on people's doors until the cops came and saw them try to talk him down. Three cops tased him before he went down, but then he pulled them out, stood up, and punched the window out of a nearby jeep. He was eventually subdued. A cop later told me that this was fairly common in that area, because of PCP use. I'm amazed this guy came out of it alive because of how easily he shrugged off tasers.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you want to say someone's toe hurts because they stubbed it, you can refer to it as " _stubbed toe pain_ ". Even if " _stubbed toe pain_ " isn't an official diagnosis in some health organizations, that doesn't mean it's junk science.

I don't get why the article's attacking the term _" excited delirium_" in the first place, though. I mean, do the authors think that the correctness of police-brutality hinges on whether or not there's such a thing as " _excited delirium_ "? Do the authors think that, if there's such a thing as " _excited delirium_ ", it'd justify police-brutality?

<comment><USER11> The question isn't whether the authors think that, it's whether the police think that. If you thought a suspect had superhuman strength and was impervious to pain, wouldn't you use more lethal means to control them?

<comment><USER10> Did you read the article as critiquing the belief that some suspects have superhuman strength and imperviousness to pain?

I mean, I Google'd " _drug-induced strength_ ". Among the first few hits were [this video][1] and [this article][2], which seem like reasonable evidence of those two symptoms existing together.

The article's logic was disjointed, but I read it as primarily focusing on terminology. If it was instead an argument against the existence of those symptoms, that'd be a tad confusing given stuff like the YouTube video.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV6FnGeYUOE&t=24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV6FnGeYUOE&t=24)

[2]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/06/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2015/06/16/the-new-drug-that-causes-users-to-rip-off-their-clothes-and- attack-with-super-human-strength/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Science doesn't have a great explanation for everything, but that doesn't make it junk science.

Suffice to say it's not uncommon for people to die suddenly when they encounter stressful situations, even not related to police interactions. I remember reading about a case where a person fell through the ice on a lake, the water never going over his head. He was pulled out immediately, but died of cardiac arrest. What happened? Not unusual to label it vasovagal syncope that resulted in sudden death. Is it a great explanation? No, but it's the best we have.

Similar to excited delirium, we have folks who exhibit similar symptoms and some of them die. Do we know exactly why? Not always, but it doesn't make "excites delirium" junk science.

Not excusing police brutality at all, but it shouldn't be surprising some of these sudden deaths happen in police interactions too, especially when you've got drugs involved and/or mental illness.

<comment><USER13> > Science doesn't have a great explanation for everything, but that doesn't > make it junk science.

The issue here is that some people (the police) are applying this idea _as if it was a great explanation_. That's what makes it junk science.

<comment><USER12> No doubt cops use excessive for in some cases and blame it on excited delirium.

I guess my point is - it's probably true in some cases.

<comment><USER13> Indeed. But "probably true in some cases" is sorta a giant red flag for "junk science". Real medicine uses higher standards before basing policy on a model like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't call it junk science. I am not a scientist but I do know of times I've gotten so emotional (and really, pick an emotion here) that I've lost myself. IMO there is a breakpoint for most people when we either get too depressed, or too manic, to fully appreciate and control our behavior. With the fight or flight response kicking in, I think we can find ample evidence of people under extreme stress or duress just...losing themselves and going on autopilot.

<comment><USER14> The philosophy of this is interesting. As we start to understand more about genetics and psychology, we'll probably be able to more closely pinpoint why people do what they do. But that doesn't mean people shouldn't be held accountable. (Affluenza)[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza)] may be a real "condition"? that impacts people, but even if we eventually discover the genetic and neurological reasons behind it, it still shouldn't excuse behavior.

I've had similar experiences where I "lose control" because I'm angry, or excited, or "emotional", but I think it's my responsibility to work to make that better. I don't know what this means in terms of consequences, but I know it shouldn't mean letting cops off the hook for brutality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It also works in practice almost half the time in states that allow the defense to reduce a conviction from murder to manslaughter, and not only for police, cause juries are made up of humans.

</comment><comment><USER16> Might save everyone some time with a generic template:

________, used by police to justify ________, is junk science.

</comment><comment><USER17> Shame on the University of Miami, which has peddled this cop-acquitting bullshit for years.</comment>


Show HN: Am I late to the game? Just launched my C++ app for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.graphicalnetworkmonitor.com/

<comment><USER2> Use an installer, sign your executable, and sign your installer! The user needs to know who you are if they are going to let your program spy on their traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I was just looking into this this morning - who do you recommend I use for code signing?

<comment><USER2> We use GlobalSign and I have no complaints. But that's not really a recommendation -- there may be cheaper options available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome</comment>


Can I Stiff Uncle Sam? - <AUTHOR> http://finangle.com/can-i-stiff-uncle-sam/ <comment><USER2> >> If you were Bob, what would you do?

A self-made millionaire who probably stuck assets in a tax-avoidance investment only to have it ruled taxable later on. So now he owes a half- million. Wow, as a middle-class taxpayer who owns ( _cough_ rents, because property tax) a home I really feel for him. Pay the damn tax, Bob.</comment>


Boston Dynamics' Atlas Robot Tested Outside [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrjAa1SgjQ <comment><USER2> So what letter are they now? B? D? R?</comment>


GitHub Style Guide - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/styleguide/templates/2.0

<comment><AUTHOR> The backstory is I followed the link in the comments after looking at the source on one of Github's 404 pages ([https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfhjagksdfhjkgasdjhfgkajhsgdfhj...](https://github.com/asdfasdfasdfhjagksdfhjkgasdjhfgkajhsgdfhjagsdfhjgajhsdfg)). The comment read:

      Hello future GitHubber! I bet you're here to remove those nasty inline styles,
      DRY up these templates and make 'em nice and re-usable, right?

      Please, don't. https://github.com/styleguide/templates/2.0</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't common text editors support printing? - <AUTHOR> I'm new to the Mac, and I've started looking for a text editor. It turns out that you can't print from several major ones, including SublimeText, Atom and Bracket.<p>I don't print very often, but when I need to, I need to. What is going on here? Why would these packages omit something so basic? <comment><USER2> I'm using Sublime Text for 5+ years. Only after your post I realize there's no File->Print feature, never needed it or just copy&pasted text into another editor like OpenOffice.

In [https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/printing-from- sublime/281](https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/printing-from-sublime/281) I see there's a export-to-HTML plugin as work-around one can install. [https://github.com/facelessuser/ExportHtml](https://github.com/facelessuser/ExportHtml)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well...because usually these text editors are used for code not printable documents. And you really won't like the look of a printed "plain" text (i.e. not formatted doc/odt/pdf).

You can try to print any file from the terminal with `lpr filename` which will literary print all characters in a file (a doc/odt contains a lot of "non- desired" stuff) unless the `CUPS` daemon is aware of a certain file format (yours should "know" how to print a pdf correctly)</comment>


Show HN: MobileMyForm, Turn Your Paper Forms into a Native Mobile App - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilemyform.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We built this new service using our PushForms platform for people who want a hands off approach.

MobileMyForm turns your paper forms into a native mobile app. Just send us a copy of your form or describe the data you need collected, you can add additional fields like photos, barcode scanning, GPS location to your forms unlike paper. Within 3 days your App will be completed.</comment>


Blendle ditches pay-per-article service - m-app https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/06/dutch-news-aggregate-website-blendle-ditches-pay-per-article-service/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think a 10 euro subscription service is a lazy business model, only one worse is everything based on ad revenue. I loved the fact that you could buy articles instead of getting another subscription.

I tried to buy an article last year, I'm not 100% sure why, but I never succeed in reading the article that I wanted to read. I just wanted to pay like 10 euro's until i needed to pay the next 10. But they were already forcing you into a monthly subscription model.

Now they are just the dutch version of apple news, seems like a terrible spot to be in.

I didn't try the audio stuff yet, that might be interesting. I enjoyed the audio stuff from Audm, but I thought it was expensive to get a subscription. Also to much competition in the podcast space.

I think [https://thecorrespondent.com/](https://thecorrespondent.com/) is doing a better job at changing the world. It's clearer what you get for your money, and you actually feel like your supporting journalism. Not sure if I feel the same way about Blendle.

That said, i know some people who use it, but mostly because their jobs requires them to be up to date with most newspapers.

<comment><USER2> The problem with pay-per-article model is that every article you want to read is a separate purchase decision ("do I want to pay for this thing or not?". In order to make 10EUR from one user, they need to decide to buy 40 separate articles and that means deciding 40 times whether to pay for content. Maybe a subscription model based on credits would be better? For 10EUR/m you get 40 credits that you spend on articles, for 20EUR/m you get 100 credits etc. Similar to Audible, maybe that would work?

<comment><USER3> I used Blendle regularly for a while, and noticed that their painless refund option really mitigated this "decision stress" for me. There were a few articles that just turned out to be garbage click-bait, so at the end of the article I could simply click "refund me", and immediately get refunded for that article. It didn't happen that frequently, but knowing it was an option made the decision to buy seem less final.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious what exactly didn't work out. Maybe it was just the friction of signing up to read a single article? In that case, maybe what would've helped is sending the article anonymously via MMS and use carrier billing? Like 1990s ring tone downloads, though I'm not sure this model would even work today because Google's Stagefreight bug (or was it on purpose to close another channel not benefitting Google?) made telcos block MMSs. But then again, Blendle switching to a subscription model would indicate otherwise.

<comment><USER5> How would MMS help unless you read Blendle on a smartphone? Hardly anybody uses MMS in the Netherlands in any case (Blendle is Dutch).

<comment><USER4> I was assuming most people read news on a smartphone. You do have those in NL, don't you ;) As to nobody using MMS, my point was that we've been "educated" (brainwashed) to use HTTP for everything, when MMS and carrier billing actually used to be a decent and widely accepted alternative for distributing digital media with a natural micropayment mechanism. Though Telcos are greedy af and take a hefty markup for carrier billing (I know since I've worked for them), the regulatory framework around Telcos and 3/4/5G in the EU at least takes care of monopolies.

<comment><USER5> People read news on whichever device they're using at the moment. MMS would mean you're stuck with content on just your smartphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It was worth a try but I hated the model. I want to pay a Netflix/Spotify ballpark figure per month and be able read all newspapers. Until then I am very happy to pay the €5 a month I currently pay for one good paper (way less than the rate they show on their site btw)

<comment><USER7> Yeah. I'll happily pay £15-£20 for access to all newspapers. I'm not going to pay any one newspaper for a subscription, because I don't read that many articles from any individual paper.

<comment><USER6> That's it, exactly. I wouldn't read an American paper too often but I'd like to have the option when there's a big American story. Ditto Australia or even foreign language papers. I'm never going to take out a sub to them but this way they'd make a little from me sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been following them for as long as they've existed. Their business model with per article payments never made sense to me. And those 100K articles that they sold is a clear indication that this is not working. That's not users but articles sold for something like 25 cents. 25K in revenue in other words. That's nothing and they ve been citing the same number for years.

60K subscriptions is not nothing but of course not a lot of revenue either; though 600K/month does sound it should be able to sustain a small company and if you can grow that it can actually turn into substantial revenue. Of course, like with Spotify, a lot would flow directly to the publishers.

Blendle has always danced around the one thing they can't deliver which is a subscription service that offers access to all/most relevant news articles currently locked behind paywalls of the few surviving news papers that struggle to make money this way (most of them are failing or just getting by).

The likes of the New York times seem to be doing ok-ish because they are big enough to still be able to produce quality news and have a large number of subscribers. Most of the rest has given up on the notion entirely by either focusing on dwindling paper sales, or ad driven news on web sites, or like the Guardian calling for donations. It's a race to the bottom.

So, I hope they succeed but I'm pessimistic about their chances. This doesn't sound like a winning formula.

<comment><USER9> The article didn't say that they sold 100000 articles, but that they have 100000 users that payed for individual articles. We don't know how many articles those users bought on average, but probably much more than one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Blendle didn't succeed in getting the major national newspapers on board, because providing access to all content would make them a publisher competing directly with each newspaper's own subscriptions.

If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper, you can see why Blendle would be way too cheap to sustain as a publishing partner; especially with a monthly flat fee.

As a reader, I would love to pay what I am paying now for one newspaper to gain access to more newspapers — particularly worldwide (Volkskrant, NRC, German FAZ, some Belgian ones, some American ones, some British (although The Guardian is already accessible — I donate a small sum yearly for their efforts)).

I wouldn't necessarily read more, but a more varied selection of articles. A flat fee is a requirement though.

<comment><USER10> > If you consider the price of a full subscription to a quality newspaper

Newspaper subscription prices are extremely inflated when you compare what they would've earning from ads (and they were happy with ads until blockers came around).

If they actually priced the subscriptions for the same amount ads would bring them from an average reader (excluding ad blockers) they would be much more affordable.

Sadly, just like the movie industry, the publishers are being greedy and shot themselves in the foot.

<comment><USER11> Guardian's annual contribution starts at €0.96 per week [1]. Greedy? If anything, that's too cheap.

[1] [https://support.theguardian.com/eu/contribute](https://support.theguardian.com/eu/contribute)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I'd like is unlimited access to my main newspaper, plus a fairly high but limited number of articles in all other newspapers and magazines (say 100 articles per month, spread over all other publications), maybe with the possibility to carry over unused credits for a few months. A digital subscription to my current newspaper is almost 30 EUR a month. I think this should be doable for the same price, assuming that people who read other papers will occasionally read something from my paper, and money is distributed according to popularity (apart from a base payment to one's main paper). It should be possible to get newspapers to cooperate to do this, possibly through something like Blendle.

</comment><comment><USER13> A successful Blendle gives the reader independence and absolves the user of getting intimate with all the digital sales strategies at publishers. Pocket does not position itself as distributor, so I welcome Blendle as broker. They offer fulltext export to Pocket. The web based reading experience of Blendle is also solid. Though I like pay-per-article, publishers and Blendle themselves seem to disagree on its profitability.

</comment><comment><USER14> As I've found out; people _say_ they want to pay per article for content, but they much prefer free in reality.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was surprised, when I tried Blendle, that there wasn't an easy way to jump from a free article on a newspaper's website to the paid version on Blendle.

Instead, if I followed a free or paywalled link on HN, I had to copy the title and search on blendle's website. Not the most frictionless way to make authors get paid.

<comment><USER13> publishers probably wouldn't like this feature. There's a dated small js bookmarklet effort ([http://ronkeizer.github.io/blendle- bookmarklet/](http://ronkeizer.github.io/blendle-bookmarklet/)) that apparently still works for the given WSJ example link. Though for my own favourite newspapers there's no identifiable conversion scheme. Blendle maps by the issues date and article page position to the url, while the newspapers cms has arbitrary article ids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From now on you'll have to pay 10eur a month to access a small selection of old papers (i.e. not today's) and some magazines. Too much for too little, I feel.

<comment> m-app AFAICT, you can still read today's news, but the major difference being not being able anymore to browse through magazines and newspapers, but their team and algorithms determining what will be highlighted. I feel this is a major step back on an Internet that is already redacted enough on multiple feeds/timelines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> People don't like microtransactions. Deciding if each article is worth a quarter is a bad user experience.

<comment><USER18> The concept of micro transactions isn't the problem imo. The lack of automation is.

If there was a browser plugin that automatically paid up to x$ if an authorized website asks for it, but never more than y$ per month that would be a good compromise between subscription model and single article purchases. There would be the initial authorization, but after that no further interactions. The news website, instead of displaying a paywall, could talk to the plugin to facilitate the payment.

As long as you'd be fine of loosing up to y$ in case of a bug/hack/whatever this should work fine. If publishers were to increase prices they had to fear to cross the yolo-line of x$ and the user being explicitly asked for consent, that should keep them in check too.

<comment><USER14> You're going to persuade millions of people to install a browser extension so they can pay for content? You have the incentives backwards...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Too bad, I liked the service. I have some credit for reading articles and I wonder how they will handle that.

</comment><comment><USER20> This discussion already started about a week ago in The Netherlands

For dutch speakers [https://tweakers.net/nieuws/153570/blendle-stopt-met- verkoop...](https://tweakers.net/nieuws/153570/blendle-stopt-met-verkoop- losse-artikelen.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Honestly I believe people, in general, just don't care about what the read online.

The reality is that either you believe at everything you read online or you understand that the world is so complex that it is too difficult to explain it in few capitols.

The reasonable middle ground of in deep reportages is disappearing because too complex anyway to be discussed with the "general public".

I wonder if it is possible to make people want to subscribe to in-deep articles with advertis, something in the line of: "The informed executive reads Blendle" (or something along the line) so that people who don't read Blendle are automatically considered morons or uniformed.

Is more a marketing stunt but it may be interested.

</comment><comment><USER22> I tried signing up for Blendle, but they rejected my email address for failing validation. I contacted their customer service, but their response was incredibly poor.

<comment><USER23> Do you mind elaborating on what made it poor? I was waiting for them to open in Italy, so I never had any real chance of interacting with them, so I'm curious about what the experience would have been like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Will this apply to the English service too? That has never had a subscription option to my knowledge</comment>


I am ready to learn a new code set. Whats the best language to learn right now? - <AUTHOR>

I want to learn a new code, and have heard lots about Ruby, Python, and Perl, but I want to be sure before I begin my endeavor. Familiar with HTML, XHTML, some Perl. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> What do you want to build?

Ruby or Python is good. Just pick one. Flip a coin. Or do what I did: I picked the one that _Why's book was about, and that proved to be a very amusing way to choose:

<http://poignantguide.net/ruby/>

(See also: <http://hacketyhack.net/> and <http://shoooes.net/> .)

Also good, but for different things: Scheme (as learned from SICP), C, Objective C, Java (so that you'll know what everyone else is complaining about).

</comment><comment><USER3> Mechanical_fish asked the right question: What do you want to build? Once you know what you can get passionate about, figure out what people commonly use to build apps in that arena.

Some suggestions:

Rich media websites? Flash/Actionscript

"Desktop-class" web apps? Cappucino or SproutCore

Business web apps? Java or C#, SQL

Aiming to work at a startup? Rails/Ruby or PHP, SQL

Desktop apps? Objective-C or .NET, SQL

Looking to expand your mind? Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, or OCaml

Hardware or Operating Systems? C, C++

Hope that helps. This is by no means a complete (or even totally accurate) list, so others please jump in.

<comment><USER4> I use Rails, but would add Django/Python to the "startup" list

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to be slightly contrarian and suggest two languages that are widely considered boring and old hat.

All too many developers think they know what there is to know about both of them, and most of them are wrong.

These are languages that will be useful to you in any shop in the industry; in fact you've probably had occasion to use them both already.

SQL and Javascript. You may think you know them already. But they both reward in-depth study.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is no "being sure" before you start learning, because in order to determine what you like, you first have to _learn_ your options. It's better to just pick something and start than to forever wait for the "right" thing.

Personally, I made a choice between learning Ruby and Python based mostly on emotion: I found most Python code samples more aesthetically pleasing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm learning Python/Django right now (coming from a strong Java and Perl background, plus a mish-mash of other stuff)

Liking it a lot, plus have already written an app and deployed it in the GAE, which is pretty cool in itself

</comment><comment><USER8> Try Prolog. It'll at first please you and later either make you a code genius or drive you insane. But the ride is fun!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to all for your suggestions.</comment>


They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-gpa-then-they-saw-your-tweets.html

<comment><USER2> Everyone should have the right to say whatever they want on the internet. That's protected by the 1st amendment.

That being said, if you're going to be a jerk and generally demonstrate that you're not the kind of person a university would like to admit to their ranks, that's your own damn fault.</comment>


Jeff Bezos doesn't like the idea of 'work-life balance' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/09/what-jeff-bezos-does-instead-of-work-life-balance.html <comment><USER2> Nitpicking over the definition of "balance" and "harmony". The general concept remains the same.

I have found when senior management frowns at the start of any phrase beginning with "work life..." what they are actually objecting to is the concept that employees have priorities other than those of the company [1].

The really cynical version of this is that leaders like Bezos object to employees who realize that their goals in life will be satisfied not in the workplace but outside of it, and this will not make Bezos any more insanely wealthy.

\---

[1] I experienced one manager who stated plainly "The CEO hates the phrase work life balance" because it gets in the way of his lack of planning. This same manager burned out within a year, and spend the next six months on the couch no longer interested in the corporate or startup rat race.</comment>


Did the Suits win the Internet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/did-the-suits-win-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Tangential at best, but in 1998 or so I was working at a large company with a small, nimble Internet team. We had a website before most companies had heard of the Internet, we had Usenet feeds, a class A network...

One day the team was invited to lunch, where we were informed that our efforts were appreciated but it was time for the adults to take over. Marketing was stepping in to manage everything properly.

Our consolation prize? A motivational screen saver. I long thought that, if they had at least been clueful enough to give us Doom or something on those CDs, maybe the team wouldn't have felt quite so humiliated.

<comment><USER3> Oh god so much cringe. If you don't mind me asking, what company was this?

<comment><USER2> I'd rather not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Geeks vs Suit narrative feels totally bogus to me these days. Both are equally trapped in a consumer culture that they can't escape.

The senseless consumption machine assimilates everyone.

Until iPhone 86 and Star Wars 123 can't get made cause there are no resources left, Geeks and Suit will continue to serve the machine.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. I could live off the average Hacker News user's annual salary for like 15 years. Even if I still lived in the US I would work one or two years, spend 10k / year on living expenses (I have done it before) and take the remainder of my salary to a country with low cost of living and live exactly as I do now -- no car or moto, no big house or fancy apartment, no phone, etc. Is all that stuff really worth years and years of total freedom? I wouldn't change anything about how I live now even if I were a millionaire.

<comment><USER6> Do you blog about your experiences anywhere? I'd like to read more. (Totally serious request in case it comes off as otherwise.)

<comment><USER5> I have thought about it before but haven't ever. I am happy to give you a few more details though.

I am able to spend so little because I live in a very central area of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. My apartment is a spacious 80$ / month concrete box, around 5m x 16m with tall ceilings, natural ventilation, and a balcony facing out into a long alley. Around 100m away is one of the largest markets in the city, and so there is tons and tons of cheap, healthy food in walking distance (e.g. a kilo of mangoes for 0.25$ when in season). The really notable aspect of living here is the sheer population density -- I've estimated that in a 100m radius around me, in dense rows of five story apartments [1], there are probably over 5000 people living together relatively harmoniously. Being somewhat of a shut-in, this is really great for me as every day I see and chat with many neighbors, local vendors, and other familiar faces. I also live within walking distance of the absolutely awesome Olympic Stadium [2] and go there most days to sprint and lift weights with the Cambodian national track team (choosing cheap or free hobbies is pretty key to this lifestyle I suppose). Most everything else that I love doing involves computers, so other than a few laptops, speakers, a guitar, a nice table and chair, a mattress on the floor, etc. I don't really own much.

That's not to say there are not difficult moments here. Even though I personally am not struggling financially, it's hard to totally escape the effects of poverty when you are immersed in it. A few years back, for example, a teenage boy killed himself in this neighborhood by jumping from a 5th story balcony, and knowing the backstory I don't think he would have done it if he had the money to escape from his home life. Seeing other people struggle is tough, but of course not nearly as tough as being in that situation yourself.

[1] [http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/...](http://68.media.tumblr.com/23e3cc103960ec568bdc1a0086e71901/tumblr_ms9t8gMXjn1sglye1o1_1280.jpg) (a view looking out from the balcony of my first apartment here)

[2] [http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/...](http://68.media.tumblr.com/8aa2bce1ccc7a248a3e2e74a3ef6b57b/tumblr_ms84g6u8e11sglye1o4_1280.jpg) (this is from 4 years ago, days after I arrived, now there is a new field and track!)

<comment><USER6> How do you deal with any sense of emotional distance from the people around you? If you make a good living but the people around you don't, at some level, you must find yourself unable to identify with their struggles and happinesses.

<comment><USER5> That's a good question. When I first moved here, like a lot of Westerners I imagined that I would not really be able to relate to many poorer Khmer people because of how enormously different our backgrounds are. While it is true that most older and some younger Khmer people have a story of unimaginable hardship, I would say that a lot of Westerners here (especially those that never actually meet Khmer people or learn the language) have this tendency to think of local people in a way that is too focused on their plight, to the point that it prevents them from recognizing their mutual commonality. It's also important to note that even in my relatively poorer neighborhood, most people are not desperately struggling like you might see in charity advertisements and that sort of thing (but probably do lack a safety net).

So while I am extremely sympathetic to and cognizant of how hard many Khmer people work for their living, most of what I see day to day is happy families and people laughing and doing things that are just very normal, for lack of a better word. It's something that I always want to remain aware of, but at the same time it's not what I want to be focused on all the time when I am meeting people.

I hope that makes sense. To put it another way, I can't identify with their struggle but regarding happiness, I feel that once our basic needs are met that we're all pretty much the same. I guess that's why I don't feel an emotional distance between myself and the people I meet here, most of the time. I also feel really, really compelled to use the skills that I have to make some money in a reasonably ethical way and more or less give it away to the many friends and acquaintances I have here.

<comment><USER6> Did the realization that once basic needs are met, we all have a lot in common take a while to come? Did you try to fit your Cambodian neighbors into a narrative that you recognized before accepting them as they are?

Sorry for such personal questions. I just returned to India from the US and at some level, I feel I'm trying to live a US lifestyle in India.

<comment><USER5> Initially I would not have admitted to anyone or even realized that I was putting people into a 'narrative' but then I think as I noticed other foreigners engaging in that type of thought pattern, I also noticed it to a lesser degree in myself. What helped me get over it was learning the language and really getting to know a few people closely. When you can laugh about the same things, see your own insecurities and fears in someone else, hear their stories about falling in love, and all of those other very fundamental human emotions, for me that really broke down any artificial distance that I had created in my mind.

I definitely don't think that because I've superficially lived in the same location for 4 years that somehow my experience is now anything like that of my neighbors, but I do believe now more than ever that despite our totally disparate backgrounds, there is still so much commonality between people all over the world. And of course like anywhere people come in all types, ranging from charming, funny, rude, shy, nerdy, mentally ill, etc. and everything in between.

Where in India can I ask? I visited India almost ten years ago now, and I have good memories of Rajasthan, Delhi (except for the crazy pollution!), Mumbai, and especially some smaller cities in Dehradun. The level of poverty in India seemed much more dire than in Cambodia, though I don't know if that's borne out statistically or not -- just my impression. Still, I would love to go back and now I suppose the flight would not be nearly so long.

<comment><USER6> I live close (relatively) to Calcutta in the state of Jharkhand. It's far from the glamor of a tourist city in rajasthan.

Poverty is still an issue and it may well be worse than Cambodia. The (dis)advantage India has is that economic growth happens organically here. In the 3 weeks I've been back, women entrepreneurs have given me pamphlets for their at-home beauty treatment visits to hand over to my mother. If this were more organized, some VC somewhere would have converted this into a chain of stylists making home visits.

Anyway, thanks for the conversation. My personal goal is to see people/myself as they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have so many questions. If anyone can help me out, I'd appreciate it.

Has "the architecture of the web" really changed away from "peer to peer" towards - what - centralized or top-down? In what respect?

Is the existence of Netflix and Facebook a threat to 1990s style Geekdom? Don't these modes of approach exist side-by-side?

"the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment"

Setting "mass entertainment" aside for a moment, it seems to me there are larger industries catering to other needs than the 90s ever dreamed: scientific inquiry, literacy, accessibility, communication, environmental protection, disaster awareness and relief, poverty alleviation, among others have all risen because of the internet. Those, and mass entertainment too, have all been driven by the interests and focus of Geeks, as I see it.

Am I wrong? Did I misunderstand something?

<comment><USER8> Totally agree. It's always super amusing to me when people argue that we need to get rid of e.g. Facebook because it's stifling creativity. The problem isn't Facebook, it's the fact that average people want to be (or feel they need to be, which sums to the same thing) on the biggest platform.

Facebook's existence isn't preventing other social networks from taking off, human nature is. Go start your own social network, I guarantee the Facebook police will not kick in your door and shut you down.

<comment><USER9> Nope they'll knock on your door with a fat check.

Seriously though the changes being proposed and enacted in the regulatory environment around social networks mean that there is a danger the real police will kick down your door if you run a moderately successful social network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was > peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business.

But you do need large amounts of capital to move packets all around the globe like magic, so naturally the suits won the Internet.

<comment><USER11> This is true -- I feel like the author has forgotten just how _expensive_ it was to acquire hardware and software back in those days. You could easily blow half a million to a million on gear and licenses for a solution that today we would implement for pennies on the compute hour with open-source software. Even a low-end dev server would set you back north of $25K, to say nothing of other costs, such as provisioning T3s for the office when dialup was still the norm. (And traffic costs for sites of even modest size were a real concern.)

While it was cheap to get into the game at an individual level (a PC, Notepad, and a couple of O'Reilly books sufficed), the costs to stand up a professional, scalable operation with the necessary tools and talent took meaningful CAP/OPEX investment. (Which is why we also were able to institute the less-laudable norm of blowing massive stacks of cash on meaningless toys and parties -- they were a relatively minor line item next to everything else.)

So, yeah, the suits were running stuff from the beginning -- they may have been government, military, academia, or corporate, but _someone_ had to front that cash. While I certainly buy into the belief that platform monopolies and morally-murky business models are of grave concern, I love the fact that a kid can stand up a SaaS business in a weekend on a DO droplet and never have to beg for a seed investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sadly yes.

Now it's up to us hackers to use decentralized algorithms and encryption to take it back. Thankfully, these are fairly understood nowadays.

And when we write this code, ensure it's got a healthy amount of copyleft built-in because multi-national software companies that live off of proprietary are afraid that this will eat their lunch the way Linux and GNU did.

<comment><USER13> TCP/IP centralizes. Why am I stuck with one ISP? Scalable Mesh is the solution. I just GPL'd my project I'm working to build: [https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch](https://GitHub.com/IsoGrid/IsoSwitch)

<comment><USER8> No. TCP/IP can work just fine over multiple ISPs, Google "asymmetric routing". Also, look into cloud load balancers like cloudflare, then realize you can use A records to load balance over more than one of those with multiple different backends. The problem is physical diversity of connection at any one location, not some perceived weakness in TCP/IP.

<comment><USER13> I assert that TCP/IP is actually the cause of "[lack of] physical diversity of connection in any one location".

A second (or third) ISP isn't going to suddenly show up at my house because it doesn't make economic sense. In the same way that two railroad lines don't get built between the same two cities.

A real scalable mesh protocol could change the economic calculation.

<comment><USER14> That are two things that really killed the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet ---NAT and firewalls. Both work to make a true peer-to-peer connection difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those worried about ownership of the internet and its platforms, do check out [https://ioo.coop/](https://ioo.coop/)

> If users owned their own social media, they could set terms of service in > which they keep control over personal data.

I would like to mention it is not about the individual but collective/cooperative ownership of internet platforms. For example, [https://social.coop](https://social.coop)

</comment><comment><USER16> First rule of corporate America is the corpies always win in the long run. (Also we're all dead in the long run)

<comment><USER17> Second rule of corporate America is that new corporations come along all the time to displace them.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix etc. They never existed a few decades ago and are far more influential than companies like Comcast, NBC, Fox etc.

So yes capitalism continues to be the dominant model. But it's not always the same companies in control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As it goes, the literal "suits" are gone, replaced with hoodies, and it's onto another cultural abstraction of revolt. I am quite hopeful in the long term but the prize is beyond the eyes.

Symbolic revolution is the glaring fear of post-capitalist theory, and the past couple decades glorifying Silicon Valley's sneakers-at-the-office antics falls right in line.

</comment><comment><USER19> The distinction between suits and nerds/geeks is blurrier than ever. Think about Zuck, you can probably take a photo of him in a t-shirt, a hoody and a suit on the same day. However, I think there is a pretty big difference between people who feel it's worth learning things for the sake of understanding and those who only work on sellable things. OTOH, there is a little suit in all of us, possibly suppressed. And who knows, maybe there is a little hoody in the suits as well!

</comment><comment><USER17> What a lazy and childish article.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk etc etc. These people and so many others have had significant impacts on the internet we see today and now they are just "suits" ? And why do we need to group people like this ? Many technical people have been responsible for negative elements of the internet which the "suits" fought against. And vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes. The W3C committee just railroaded the DRM spec last week..

</comment><comment><USER21> Make a good life, geeks, You deserve it.

</comment><comment><USER22> The suits always win. Get back to work.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to read this, but the site can't work without javascript, which I have disabled in my browsers, and the source contains nothing but some opaque, obfuscated JS blob.

Does anyone have a link to a plain text version of this article?

<comment><USER24> Why have you disabled javascript?

<comment><USER23> Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?).

When I've talked about this before, some people have asked "what javascript vulnerabilities?" I've answered that question here: [1] More details about how I browse the web here: [2]

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224888)

[2] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15169519)

<comment><USER25> >Mostly to try to avoid javascript vulnerabilities, to limit exposure to ads and tracking, and to have a nice consistent web experience without all the design annoyances of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?).

It is reassuring to know that I am not the only one attempting to avoid as much as possible the "paradigm shift" of Web 2.0/3.0, thanks for the note.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's going on with multiple subreddits suddenly changing into Trump subs? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/i5euav/megathread_whats_going_on_with_multiple/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085840)</comment>


Monoids on Steroids - <AUTHOR> https://bartoszmilewski.com/2017/02/09/monoids-on-steroids/ <comment><USER2> I recently caught Bartosz Milewski on a podcast, and found him surprisingly reasonable. Surprisingly, because he was advancing category theory, which has always looked like the purest gibberish to me. I looked up some of his YouTube videos (I generally detest videos for learning anything) and discovered that they were informative and well-paced. So I'm his newest fan, and I may yet learn category theory.</comment>


Ask HN: How to place Amazon.com orders from code? - <AUTHOR>

How would you go about programmatically buying from Amazon? <comment><USER2> They don't appear to have an API unfortunately, so you'll probably have to emulate a full web browser user, establishing http connection, logging in, taking account of the security tokens you get, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Release app as is even if only for Android? - <AUTHOR>

After several months of hard work, moonlighting in the late hours after a 9-9 schedule (Japanese firm), I've reached a goal I set for app development, which has been done using Parse for backend, AWS for data, and Android for mobile client.
In the near future, 3 months to 1 year, I plan for the following technical developments:
-Swap Parse for a custom backend for cheaper operation (let me know if you have good replacements)
-Develop app for iOS environent (no experience here whatsoever, being in Windowsland)
-Develop webapp for "the web"
-Hit MechanicalTurk (and related services) for content.
Given my current progress, and my target goal of hitting all significant mobile and web environments, what do I do from here?? As a complete noob to startups, I am in a bit of an analysis paralysis. I want to release an MVP, but also don't want to reveal it too soon. I have validated the app concepts to family, friends, and coworkers to very good reception, so I'm not entirely worried it will be a complete flop, but I'm not going to make any claims that it will be a huge hit either. But if the app is a hit ( so I'm biased ), then I feel like releasing it now would be a strategic... something. I see 2 options and their related outcomes:
1. Release for android first.
-Get initial customer feedback for the entire concept.
-If concept fails, then I won't waste time on the idea.
-Earn some money while continue working on the other targets
-Risk of concept taking off, clones overtake me by being better/faster, especially with regards to iOS space, where there is the most money to be made according to popular belief.
2. Continue developing until I hit all target items, then release
-Have app presence on all significant mobile platforms
-If app becomes popular, potential users will not be prevented by lack of choice.
What advice would you have for a poor bootstrapper. Any advice is welcome, I would appreciate any guidance on this. <comment><USER2> We're approaching our $100,000th sale on Android only while I've spent the last year polishing our product and getting it ready for iOS, where we still have not launched.

So I would advocate doing number one. Launch, get feedback, get better, find your market and get paid while you work on the iOS version.

</comment><comment><USER3> Release now. Once it hits customers, you'll get real world feedback that you can feed into your efforts for the ios, web versions.</comment>