New service cleans up whiteboard pics with an email - <AUTHOR> http://snapclean.me/

<comment><USER2> I really like this trend of Posterous-inspired web apps that don't require setting up an account, just emailing into a public email address. It's what changed my mind from "eh, looks nice, might try it later when it's more robust" to "oh why not, let me email something in and see what happens".

And now the demo of your web app generates a mailing list of potential future customers along the way. Smart.

</comment><comment><USER3> (in the FAQ)

      [Q:] It does funny stuff to my other pictures (not drawings).
      [A:] Yes, yes it does. :)

This could open the door to _worlds_ of fun with people who try to push the boundaries... like... I dunno, send back a picture of a garden gnome in a bikini if there's no solid background.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really great idea, but most advanced whiteboard cleanup software includes perspective correction and things like that.. As far as I can tell this just is a color-scale modifier and sharpener.

However the idea behind the service, whiteboard cleanup via email, is pretty sound. I would love to have this with features that allow me to send the pic along with list of 'end product' recipients.

Need some https secured site as well for sensitive whiteboard snaps.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, and yes, the mvp was basic pic cleanup via email. Things like user accounts and on-line storage are on the plan.

As far as forwarding, how would you like that to work? Configure on the site? Put them in the Subject line? To keep down on spam I'd have to require an account for that kind of feature.

Thanks for trying it out.

Kyle

<comment><USER6> Both :) I'd love the option to pass configuration through the subject or message body, but configuring defaults in an account would save typing them in every time. Options like automatic crop, deskew, and perspective correction would be essential.

I'm not sure what libs you're using for image processing, but OpenCV has a lot of this type of functionality.

<http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great idea. I uploaded a test photo and the results were very good.

The only observable problem was some image artifacting where the original showed reflections of overhead fluorescent lights.

Here is my before and after for comparison:

Before: <http://i.imgur.com/YjWqB.jpg> After: <http://i.imgur.com/Bi7pS.jpg>

<comment><USER8> The links you posted don't work for me. I get a 404.

<comment><USER7> Changed to imgur links; try now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It worked pretty well, although it did produce some noise with my image. However that's probably to be expected with a service like this. Nevertheless, it made the picture much more readable.

Here are the before and after photos: [http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz](http://imgur.com/wPgl8&G80Lz)

I agree with some of the comments. The noise around the edge of the whiteboard can be distracting. OCR would be a nice touch if you can get it to work as well.

Another thing that could be useful is automatic cropping so that the picture contains more content and less empty space. Maybe have an option to divide the picture into individual photos if there's enough whitespace? That way you could have separate photos for separate diagrams.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just tried it on an image where the whiteboard was poorly cropped -- lots of junk around the edges of the pic. The drawing itself was cleaned pretty well, but the extra stuff was distractingly multi-colored.

It would be nice if it could detect the edges of the whiteboard and crop. As Goosey mentioned, perspective correction would be nice as well.

Love the idea as an email service, and look forward to seeing what comes next.

</comment><comment><USER11> Since it's targeted specifically to blackboard drawings/diagrams, maybe it would be possible to vectorize the output

</comment><comment><USER5> My apologies to someone, a pic didn't make it back: firstname.lastname@example.com had a permanent delivery failure. No idea how to contact them...hope they were here and see this.

<comment><USER12> that's me! forwarded an old whiteboard pic just to try it out, and didn't notice the reply-to was an old work address that apparently no longer exists. thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A friendly request: if anyone is willing to share their before / after I'd love to see them (including any suggestions / requests you have for tweaking), and I'd like to put them up as a gallery, with your permission of course.

Thanks for all of this great feedback!

</comment><comment><USER13> It fails miserably on my chalkboard photo test (it doesn't claim to support chalkboard, but it seems like it should - it probably doesn't take much to determine the background is all dark and run the appropriate scripts)

Your 4 step instructions have doodle@, but the actual mailto: is for wb@. It's a minor thing, but you should be consistent.

Cool idea. I think you could run pretty far with a posterous style lazy signup and more options (like the dropbox idea, some storage, etc.) Maybe support group emails, so dev@ when sent from my email address returns a response to a certain 5 people.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, right now the algorithm subtracts out smooth areas, leaving sharply defined areas mostly alone. I could look into handling blackboard drawings if there is enough interest. Good point about the consistency with the email, I'll have to make them the same. Thanks for the feedback and the ideas, thanks!

<comment><USER13> My source (chalkboard) image wasn't great (dark, low contrast), but I got better results from the service by doing an "invert" before sending it on.

<comment><USER5> Awesome! Would you be willing to share a chalkboard pic? I don't have access to one...thanks for the invert tip!

<comment><USER13> You know this already, but I sent them to your email as in your HN profile.

I have no idea how important blackboard is - probably less so for the business world, but plenty of students use/encounter them.

If it's easy to work out a algorithm that cleans up the blackboard but harder to work out detecting the blackboard, your idea of two email addresses (doodle/wb@, and blackboard/bb@) would probably be a good solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be neat to consider other types of images you could "clean up" or alter for people - sort of like a Posterous-meets-Photoshop app. An obvious example that comes to mind would be to remove red eye from pictures. I know a lot of photo editing apps can do this already, but just think how much easier it would be for most people to just send an email and get a cleaned up version back. Boom, done.

Don't know how feasible this is, and you've got a lot of room to grow in your current segment already, but would be neat to see where else this could be applied to!

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the suggestions. I had thought of a couple of things: simple 90/-90 rotations, removing red eye was one of them - I have to figure out an automated way of doing that. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tried it out. We actually have these funky glass "whiteboards" and it still came out pretty well. A slightly higher resolution output would be nice. Handwriting is hard to read without zooming in a couple of times.

Other than that, I agree with some of the suggestions below. Cleaning up the display is probably 90% of what I want, so this is great. One note- I entered some text in the subject line; it would be nice if this got preserved somewhere to make searching my email easier.

<comment><USER5> Glad to know it worked on glass whiteboards - would you be willing to share a pic? I like the idea of preserving the subject line - make it easier to organize the photos when they come back (my camera doesn't let me give them meaningful names). Great idea! Thanks for trying it out.

<comment><USER15> <http://www.pixelcop.org/~chetan/pics/snapclean/wb1.jpg> (resized orig)

<http://www.pixelcop.org/~chetan/pics/snapclean/wb2.jpg> (snapclean)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice and simple. Good job.

You probably know this, there's <http://www.scanr.com/> that tackles a similar problem.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the link! Looks like it's more advanced than what I'm doing at the moment...

Thanks,

Kyle

<comment><USER17> Yes, scanR may be more sophisticated in their image processing technology, but their system is just not as easy to use (the last time I checked it out).

My suggestion to you is to keep running with your idea of making your service dead simple to use. I love the idea of just sending it to an email address -- reminds me of posterous, but for image processing.

<comment><USER13> Yes, like Posterous has shown, simple can win you converts even if it's lacking functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know it's just a GIMP script but I was pretty impressed at how well the returned image was.

My only advice is to make the instructions clearer. It's quite a simple idea "send a whiteboard photo to XYZ, get a clean version back" but I had to go to a second page, scroll down quite a bit, then click a few other pages to find out exactly what happens when I send a photo. I might be dimmer than the average customer though.

<comment><USER19> Ahh... that's the nice thing.

Customers don't need to know how easy (or hard) something is... some classmates of mine are now enjoying a trip to South Africa (to see the World Cup alongside head coach Óscar Tabárez) thanks to some clever marketing... they made a video indexing software (the indexing is totally manual) and marketed it as a solution for soccer trainers.

The actual code was much easier than our own project, but it was visually nice and it was brilliantly marketed. I'm probably going to blog about this if some of you are interested :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why does it resale the image?

I sent a 640x411 image and got back a 800x514

Also an area of solid black turned into cyan and magenta. (The image I tried was <http://i42.tinypic.com/169lppj.jpg> \- and yes I know it's not a whiteboard, but it looks like one.)

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I'm rescaling the image right now to roughly 800x600 to keep down on the memory usage of the process. Based on what I'm seeing today I think I can raise the maximum picture size and not rescale if it's within that size. Thanks for giving it a try.

<comment><USER21> The last time I did something like this, I made a point to never scale _upwards_ to the target size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It would be nice to treat the response as a reply (preserve subject, etc.) so that Gmail can do threading properly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a before and after test, looks like it needs some tuning for images that are not as low contrast

<http://sprng.me/154k6>

p.s. that's a springpad link, awesome to just share those stuff from your phone

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the example. Looks like something could be tweaked to do better on that kind of picture. Would you be willing to let me use that as an example for trying to improve the algorithm? Thanks again for trying the service.

<comment><USER23> by all means, use it

<comment><USER5> Thanks, and I hate to be a bother, but would you mind sending me an email as such? firstname.lastname@example.com Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a great idea!

It would be interesting to see this combined with a project management system. I imagine being able to snap your whiteboard, have the image cleaned, and placed right onto a project wiki, in one move (similar to Posterous, perhaps).

<comment><USER5> Thanks! That's an interesting idea - I know some wikis (like Confluence) can receive emails...I'll put that onto the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The email feature is great though a file uploader on the main page wouldn't be missed. ;)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the suggestion. That is definitely doable, and added to the backlog. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Need more description on the first page. Maybe the 4 easy steps from the other page?

<comment><USER5> I had it like that at one point and thought it required too much scrolling to see the flow...it was also suggested that I make the '4 simple instructions' into a pretty big button saying 'Get Started Now'.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> this is awesome! i was brainstorming about how to do something like this a few weeks ago when one of my fellow students brogth his digital slr in instead of taking notes..

we started as a group of about 20 or so comp sci students, taking joint notes in google wave for 2 semesters now.. it works great except if there are alot of diagrams.. and ascii diagrams just take too long and dont do the original justice. so we started adding pictures..

i am excited to have a tool to clean them up now =)

ps anyone else doing this joint notes thing? if not you should try it.. it works wonders for studying for tests

</comment><comment><USER28> Without complicating the service at all, I would love to see Dropbox integration. We use Dropbox for all of our shared files and being able to go from: Whiteboard->Email to Service->Dropbox immediately would be amazing.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the idea, I know dropbox has an api. Added to the list, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> potentially off-topic, but i'm SO glad that the title of this post wasn't "Check out our new start-up: cleaning up whiteboard pics via email!!!" the pitch is honest and straight-forward, and not overselling. excellent work

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't use this without knowing how long you'll store whatever I send you.

<comment><USER5> I'll have to add that to the terms and the faq - I'm using google apps to handle the email. The app issues a delete immediately after processing. Right now I'm clearing out the trash folder (edit: sorry the sent folder) in the google account about every day or so.

What kind of assurances would you like? If I implement accounts, would you be comfortable with storage? Would you want to be able to choose on a per-picture basis?

Thanks for taking a look.

Kyle

<comment><USER30> Personally, I'd prefer an option to have it delete immediately after it's been processed, even if that's not the default.

Lots of idea's get thrown up on whiteboards where I work, but the boss man is a little paranoid. In order to become a regular user I would need to know that nothing I email over is being kept.

I understand the insecurities of email in general, but there's a difference between available for the duration of the email transmission and available for days after the email has been sent.

Thanks for being responsive.

<comment><USER31> I once worked in the information security group at a large insurance company, and they prohibited their employees from using, e.g., AltaVista Babelfish, lest they mistakenly release confidential information via the translation tool. Instead, they wanted employees to use a local desktop-based translation tool.

For all of the security measures that can be taken with sending data to web applications, "never sending it at all" is very secure indeed, and in some arenas, the inconvenience may be worth it.

<comment><USER5> Just curious - do you know if they'd buy a desktop version of something like this? If they did previously? Thanks for sharing about these kinds of users.

<comment><USER31> I no longer work with them, so I can only surmise. I never saw anyone using a tool like this, but it's a big company with many offices, and individual groups may well have bought their own local tools that weren't provided at the enterprise level. Would they buy a desktop version? If employees found it useful, I don't see why not.

They almost certainly would not use the web version, unless they could run it 100% internally on their intranet.

<comment><USER32> In my experience, most companies that have rigid security/compliance policies against using simple web services like babelfish, google translate, etc. also have rigid purchasing departments that make it almost impossible to sell them a simple, inexpensive desktop app. They only buy "enterprise solutions" from "approved vendors". Now admittedly there can be a lot of money selling those "enterprise soutions", but it's hardly a low barrier to entry game. IMHO unless the OP wants to get into the business of selling labyrinthian "enterprise" software, he should probably just ignore companies who have compliance policies that would prevent them using simple online services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do you have any thoughts on a future revenue model? Maybe build out some kind of add-on "pro" features?

<comment><USER33> Aside from selling corporate whiteboard-secrets? (I kid, I kid...)

<comment><USER5> Will definitely _not_ be doing that, but I should add reassurance to the faq/terms/privacy so people know what's what.

<comment><USER34> Yes. Your current simple privacy policy ("We will not share your email address with anyone.") is nice, but it doesn't address the privacy of users' content (i.e. the images they send you).

I don't doubt that you intend to do the right thing, but still, I was honestly a bit wigged out to not see any mention of the privacy of my data in the privacy policy.

<comment><USER5> Policy updated (ianal though), does it work for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm surprised Evernote doesn't handle this - or does it? Maybe they'd like to buy the technology.

<comment><USER30> Evernote does parse the text out of photos of my home whiteboard.

<comment><USER35> but does it "enhance" the photo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Are you planning on making a simple API or is email to be considered as the API?

<comment><USER5> I hadn't considered an API - what do you have in mind? An HTTP post & response? What would you use it for? I just hadn't thought of this since the graphics libraries and routines are readily available. An API seems to cut out any possible ad opportunities - is an api something you'd be willing to pay to use? Thanks for the idea.

<comment><USER36> An HTTP post & response could be an option. It would just open the possibility for other services to integrate with yours, there making it more flexible and open to a larger audience. A freemium approach could then be a possibility (where one starts paying after a certain amount of daily API usage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is it actually just imagemagick and a procmail script?

PS: If you've got one of those old fashioned iPhings, check out JotNot which does this sort of thing on the phone.

</comment><comment><USER38> Could it be abused by spammers?

</comment><comment><USER39> Getting any traction yet?

</comment><comment><USER40> Alternative: Learn to use Inkscape.</comment>


The Mast Brothers - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/13664547

<comment><AUTHOR> "They began their voyage in their apartment, using a homemade machine to process cacao beans. Over time they cultivated their creation, sourcing beans from family farms in Madagascar, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador. Each bar is handmade with incredible reverence for the process and history of chocolate. They are bound in ornamental papers and golden foil like a collection of rare books. Each bar offers its own story of flavors, and no two are exactly alike."</comment>


How much are you willing to pay for a full check-up of your health - <AUTHOR> Hi!
My name is Sergey, I am the founder of a startup "Gas Analytics". Our team invented the newest instrument based on diode laser spectroscopy. According to your exhalation, the AI of our device will be able to determine diseases such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, gastritis and many others. Now we are collecting information on how much an ordinary person in USA is willing to spend time and money on a full medical examination.
Thanks in advance for your time! <comment><USER2> That's hard to answer without knowing how much disease coverage you actually have. A test that reliably detected cancers early would be worth quite a bit to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gastrointestinal upset,Anemia,respiratory tract infection,asthma,rhinitis,digestive cancer,sepsis,renal failure,lung cancer,acute myocardial infarction,heart failure,Breast cancer schizophrenia,diabetes,gastritis. The number of investigated diseases will be increased during R&D

<comment><USER3> If the cancer screening catches it early enough to do some good, that has value. But don't everyone already know if they have an upset stomach, heart failure, etc.? I don't see the value in an app telling me I a) have gas or b) I'm dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just depends on how reliable your results are.

<comment><AUTHOR> accuracy is 90 percent

<comment><USER5> That feels too low to me to be practically useful. I would guess declaring all your patients to be healthy already gets you there for many, if not most, conditions you mention in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20752782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20752782).

It also seems to imply that you will have many false positives, where people will unnecessarily get stressed while waiting for follow-up tests or even receive treatments they don't need.

<comment><AUTHOR> it must be taken into account that there will be no blood sampling, and a preliminary diagnosis will be made on one exhalation. And the price of the analysis will be quite low. Do you really consider it a bad result that today, 9 out of 10 people will be able to know exactly about the presence of cancer by taking 5 minutes of their time?

<comment><USER5> As I said, one likely can do better in one second, by telling everyone they're healthy.

If five out of a hundred people have a disease, you even can get 90% accuracy by declaring those five healthy and five others unhealthy.

Accuracy is fairly meaningless for this kind of thing. What sensitivity and specificity ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity)) will these tests have?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> $30</comment>


From bush to bike - bamboo bicycles - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8125274.stm

<comment><USER2> Really great idea. I can see there being some demand for these. I wonder if they could carry the idea over to other parts on the bike. I know the loads on the front fork make it tough to build out of anything but metal, but using hemp for the seat cover, and possibly using tires made from recycled rubber could carry the idea a bit further.</comment>


Apache Open Office 4.1.3 released - <AUTHOR> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO+4.1.3+Release+Notes <comment><AUTHOR> It's been almost a year since 4.1.2 was released.</comment>


Show HN: PitchIt - Present slides to anyone from any device - <AUTHOR> https://pitchit.io/ <comment><USER2> So I like this idea a lot. And honestly, there's definitely space for it if it's executed well, as long as the web interface is VERY slick, and management is auto-save to the cloud (it has to beat Google Drive in aesthetic and Microsoft in the cloud).

I think the thing I'm having trouble with, quite honestly, is the marketing site itself.

A few notes of opinion, but do remember this is purely opinion.

1\. Is it PitchIt, or Markido PitchIt? The first one works. The second one is confusing. 2\. The landing homepage top area feels cramped to me. Additionally, there are three different typefaces, four counting weights, that are fighting for my attention. 3\. May want to lose the blue shadow on the play button. 4\. The stock photos are a bit distracting, and resultingly aren't as effective as if you were to provide simple screenshots, or even a simple infographic. 5\. The large crossed out circle (cancel sign?) feels fairly negative, and is one of the first things I see on two separate pages. 6\. Overall, the design seems to harken back to a Windows 98 aesthetic for some reason. And, that may actually be totally fine.

I certainly don't intend to provide negativity, only honest feedback and response. And, as a post-disclaimer, I am fairly sure I am not a part of the target market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those comments. Agree with your points on the aesthetics and the need for simplicity of the product. We also agree with your points on the marketing side. Getting the site up sooner to get feedback like this helps a lot.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for taking the comments well! It's always a tossup how those come across.

<comment><AUTHOR> Comments like yours is why we posted the site here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Brian, one of the co-founders. We built an internal app to help us show our PowerPoint slides remotely while trying to sell our business app. After consecutive calls where clients only asked about what presentation software we were using and if it was for sale, PitchIt was born.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate trying to locate a slide projector and fumbling for the controller. It looks like PitchIt solves the problem with a more impromptu style presentation. I like it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Yes, I know what you mean -- projectors are always a pain. You're right, in small groups you can just use PitchIt, no need for a projector and for bigger groups like at an event you can use PitchIt so that the poor people sitting at the back of the room could still have a perfect unobstructed view of the slides on their mobiles.</comment></comment>


Easy Python CLI with Click - <AUTHOR> http://www.codingwithricky.com/2019/08/18/easy-python-cli-with-click/ <comment><USER2> The thing that bugs me about click is that now your python script has a python dependency that you have to install every time you need to run the script. This is fine sometimes, but a lot of the time I want a script that will be usable with minimal setup, which is why I always use argparse, which is in the standard library, and gets the job done despite its quirky API.

<comment><USER3> This is more of a packaging problem. There are various ways to package python code with it's dependencies into a single executable.

In any case, comparing a stdlib library to a 3rd party one is a bit apples to oranges. Most people first decide whether or not they want to use pypi packages, and then start evaluating which ones are appropriate.

<comment><USER2> sure, if you're building a CLI to do management commands for an application that already has dependency management in place, that's all fine

but if you just have some basic script to scrape some logs or zip up files, its nice to have it be self contained

<comment><USER4> if it's a simple basic script, i wouldn't even go through the pain of using argparse. i would just manually check sys.argv.

<comment><USER5> You ALWAYS need a CLI framework at least for generating help automatically, otherwise I hate you when I want to use your frugal tool and I have to look into it to find out how it works.

<comment><USER6> In which case you would be using click. If I have any expectation that someone else is going to use my script I give it a REAME.md, a requirements.txt, a setup.py and I use click. It literally takes about 30's to do and you now have a cli interface indistinguishable from any other cli on your system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite library for this is docopt[0], which parses the docstring at the top of your script. It's a lot easier for people reading your code to see the usage up front rather than scrolling to the bottom and finding your main() and reading the argparse calls:

      #!/usr/bin/env python3
      """
      Usage: ./myscript.py <arg> [<optionalarg>]
      """
      from docopt import docopt

      if __name__ == '__main__':
          args = docopt(__doc__)
          print(args['<arg>'], args['<optionalarg>'] or 'foo')

[0]: [https://github.com/docopt/docopt](https://github.com/docopt/docopt)

<comment><USER8> For really, really basic things docopt is good. But you tend to re-invent the wheel when you need to do something other than the basic parsing it supports. The click docs have a good section[1] on this:

> On top of that docopt is restricted to basic parsing. It does not handle > argument dispatching and callback invocation or types. This means there is a > lot of code that needs to be written in addition to the basic help page to > handle the parsing results.

1\. [http://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/why/#why-not- docopt-...](http://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/why/#why-not-docopt-etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've only ever found click to be a waste of time compared to just using argparse. The extra concision you get from decorator syntax just doesn't matter and you introduce another dependency and need to go into the relatively poor click documentation (especially if you end up with a longterm dependency on old versions of click). Just not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure why click is often recommended. I've used argh for years and find it easier:

      def hello(name):
          return "hello {}".format(name)

      def ping():
          return "pong"

      if __name__ == "__main__":
          import argh
          parser = argh.ArghParser()
          parser.add_commands([hello, ping])
          parser.dispatch()

<comment><USER11> If people in your organization tend to write Flask apps, then you might find click in standalone scrips as well.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why Flask is often recommended either. It seems to me that it's somewhere between Bottle and Django, playing the strange role of a not-so- lightweight, not-so-unopiniated framework. But I should probably reserve this rant for another thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have 3 live projects using click. I like it.

Caveat: Click's docs were out of date and had open bugs for what feels like years until it finally updated to 7. version 6 was "unstable" [https://github.com/pallets/click/issues/503](https://github.com/pallets/click/issues/503). Hopefully it's over now.

Good things:

\- More concise than standard library argparse

\- Testing via CliRunner ([http://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/testing/](http://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x/testing/)), example: [https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/v1.5.3/tests/test_...](https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/v1.5.3/tests/test_cli.py)

Feel free to study / copy from mine if you like (license MIT):

\- [https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/](https://cihai-cli.git-pull.com/): [https://github.com/cihai/cihai- cli/blob/v0.5.0/cihai_cli/cli...](https://github.com/cihai/cihai- cli/blob/v0.5.0/cihai_cli/cli.py)

\- [https://tmuxp.git-pull.com/](https://tmuxp.git-pull.com/): [https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/v1.5.3/tmuxp/cli.p...](https://github.com/tmux- python/tmuxp/blob/v1.5.3/tmuxp/cli.py)

\- [https://vcspull-git-pull.com/](https://vcspull-git-pull.com/): [https://github.com/vcs- python/vcspull/blob/v1.2.0/vcspull/cl...](https://github.com/vcs- python/vcspull/blob/v1.2.0/vcspull/cli.py)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this do anything that the builtin argparse library [https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html](https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html) doesn't? Seems it just turns it into decorator syntax.

<comment><USER14> It really comes handy IMHO when you have a lot of commands with nesting and context to share. I've used it on a CLI tool with many sub-commands implemented in imported modules and it made things really easy while I don't think argpase would have "scaled" without becoming a mess.

Plus it comes with some useful utilities you might need in a cli to show a progressbar, display color, open test in a pager/an editor etc.

The official doc is really nice and gives it more justice than this blog post: [https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x](https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/7.x).

<comment><USER13> Ah - makes a lot more sense when they describe Git, with its nested interfaces and argument parsers (and reused logic therein) as a motivating example!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those of you using argparse I recommend looking at configargparse. A drop in replacement which adds environment variable support (similar to click) and config file support

</comment><comment><USER16> I've used Fire[0] for a few projects and have been meaning to give Click a try, but I'm not sure I like the syntax after reading through the article (holy moly decorators). Seems unwieldy to me, but does anyone have experience with both?

[0] [https://github.com/google/python-fire](https://github.com/google/python- fire)

<comment><USER17> Based on the examples in the article, explicitly writing a line for each CLI option seems like excessive boilerplate and verbosity that Fire manages to sidestep completely. To me, this is the principal point of using a Python library to create CLIs. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER18> Fire works with bare args, automatically supports _\--arg=value_ for constructor's arguments and provides more features like tracing and bash completion generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Click unfortunately doesn't pass the smell test of a non-awkward implementation of 'sudo'. It gets some partial credit because an implementation is _possible_ but only because you can subclass the click.Command object and change the parsing behavior arbitrarily.

So many of these parsing libraries seem to forget that any positional parameter can stop options parsing not just '\--' and that that parameter might appear arbitrarily deep in subcommands.

This is not only needed for commands like sudo and ssh but BSD style CLIs as well which all OSX users are probably intimately familiar and annoyed with.

<comment><USER20> Which Python library fills this requirement well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Click and argparse end up with a lot of boilerplate. `defopt` ([https://defopt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://defopt.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)) reduces it to almost nothing (granted only in Python 3), is only a single file and even turns your function docstring into command help text.

With every other tool I've tried, I end up writing a python API and a CLI and documenting it twice.

Defopt eliminates that almost completely (but with *args still allows for elegant interfaces)

</comment><comment><USER22> The decorators aren't the main thing, you dont need to use them. The overall interface is just so much better than argparse. It's way more featureful.

</comment><comment><USER23> i'm sorry but this is not how decorators are supposed to be used. I also doubt that click does decorators correctly too. I couldn't get them working on a instance method for example. Just stick to the standard library on this. A dependency is not worth it here.

<comment><USER8> Decorators can be used in any way you want. This is actually an absolutely fine use of decorators to add metadata/annotations to a given function.

Critiques of any library are great, but you need to expand on vague points: "I also doubt that click does decorators correctly too", or how you would ever expect them (or even want them??) to work on an instance method. It might be that you're misunderstanding the library and how it should be used rather than it being not worth using.

I find it absolutely perfect for a lot of situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I use click for [https://github.com/rcarmo/piku](https://github.com/rcarmo/piku) (in fact it's the only dependency) and often wish something like it was part of the standard library...

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is a fairly detailed overview in the form of slides what is Click and what it can do: [https://slides.com/kissgyorgy/deck-10#/](https://slides.com/kissgyorgy/deck-10#/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I wish python had something similar to OCaml's Cmdliner[0]

[0] [https://erratique.ch/software/cmdliner/doc/Cmdliner](https://erratique.ch/software/cmdliner/doc/Cmdliner)</comment>


Wappalyzer uncovers the technologies used on websites - <AUTHOR> http://wappalyzer.com/

<comment><USER2> That silly counter at the bottom using a fixed formula to count up a random statistic for no reason:

[http://wappalyzer.com/sites/default/themes/wappalyzer/js/cou...](http://wappalyzer.com/sites/default/themes/wappalyzer/js/counter.js)

Can anybody explain the point of that thing? I'm assuming they do not query sites one by one continuously either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related: [http://builtwith.com/](http://builtwith.com/)

Online lookup tool which does not require Chrome or Firefox.

<comment><USER4> But does have an extension available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some of the data here is a little suspect. Example "programming languages":

[http://wappalyzer.com/categories/programming- languages](http://wappalyzer.com/categories/programming-languages)

It says 90% of the web uses PHP, 8% Java and 2 % other.

<comment><USER6> I suspect it just looks at extensions. .php and .jsp are easy to spot, as is the PHP HTTP header, RoR's utf8 tick is harder, and node.js apps and such are probably impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> More accurately: "Identify software used on a website which identifies itself openly somehow". iWeb isn't the most popular editor, but perhaps is the most popular to advertise itself in generated pages.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to see a search engine that crawls the source code of sites, so you could find great implementations of frameworks and plugins.

<comment><USER8> [https://meanpath.com](https://meanpath.com) crawls the source and server headers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I prefer Chrome Sniffer.

<comment><USER10> My only gripe is I have to look over its markup in pages I'm inspecting, but that's only when developing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel my browser is 'nude' without Wappalyzer. It does an excellent job of showing the icon for 'this is yet another Wordpress site', 'Drupal', '.net' and 'Magento' (amongst lots of others). This snippet of information is very useful to know if you are wondering 'how did they do that!' when you come across a very good site.

It is also useful for showing what javascript frameworks are in use (although this isn't as at a glance as the main CMS tool).

Beyond those two pieces of information I have no real need to use or fault Wappalyzer. It is simply brilliant.

Slightly off-topic, however, _the_ favourite Chrome extension has to be Hover Zoom: [http://hoverzoom.net/](http://hoverzoom.net/) \- I find a computer/browser really lacking if it does not have that on it!</comment>


Personalized voting-based comments ordering - <AUTHOR> It's a simple idea that says: comments of authors you upvoted in past appear closer to the top. What does HN think? <comment><USER2> are you talking about building this?</comment>


Enterprise Sales for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/05/enterprise-sales-for-hackers/ <comment><USER2> You lost me here:

 _you can consider the typical "coin operated" sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker._

The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:

 _The "coin operated idiots" mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It's why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.

But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you "slot onto" your organization when you need to...

Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, "I know you're excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That's not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?" They'll ask the hard questions._

[1] [http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s- bring-...](http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-sales- into-the-leadership-team/)

<comment><USER3> That's an uncharitable reading.

I do a lot of sales now, and I've watched a lot of enterprise salespeople do their work.

As in any other human endeavor, some of them are phenomenal. I routinely sat in on one friend's sales meetings and calls. After being raised watching Gil, the hapless salesman from the Simpsons, this was like watching Billy Joel play the piano or Roger Federer play tennis. It was obvious he was a master craftsman. He was so expert at getting people to act in their own best interest, while making it look pleasant and effortless, it was - seriously - beautiful to watch.

Other salespeople... not so much. I've seen them too. They don't have the intellectual horsepower, they don't prepare, they... I mean, frankly there are a million reasons they're mediocre. Their mediocrity is overdetermined.

I think that's all the author meant by coin-operated salesperson or "script kiddie" salesperson: a mediocre one.

<comment><USER4> It's the Sales equivalent of the copy/paste programmer.

<comment><USER5> And/or one who is paid "by the line" or "by delivery speed" and sacrifices everything else to those metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If any of you are a hacker trying to learn enterprise sales, a few years ago I wrote a few lessons learned at my first startup here:

[http://brandonb.cc/enterprise-sales-tips-for- hackers](http://brandonb.cc/enterprise-sales-tips-for-hackers)

Mostly orthogonal to the OP, but there are a few overlapping points.

<comment><USER7> This is far better advice than the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A book that helped me get into enterprise selling is SPIN selling by Neil Rackham. [http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil- Rackham/dp/156511420...](http://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil- Rackham/dp/1565114205)

Based on research into the field of sales.

In summary one of the key differences for enterprise sales is that it's a long process with many people involved.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great article, Ryan. You characterize large enterprise sales as being on the order of "$1M+ deals"[1]. This seems a bit high for a startup with a newish product, but it's certainly achievable.

Do you have any insights into how startups can achieve $1M+ in annual contract value (ACV)? What differentiates their product and pricing strategy from a startup that sells software for say $100K a year?

[1]: [http://themacro.com/articles/2016/05/enterprise-sales-for- ha...](http://themacro.com/articles/2016/05/enterprise-sales-for-hackers/#e3)

<comment><USER10> The product(s) are mostly differentiated by the enterprise salesperson being able to convince the company they will generate a much larger multiple of $1M in revenue or cost savings for the enterprise, and from being able to convince them that any competitive alternative in the 100K price bracket won't yield comparable results.

The ways that can work are quite varied: it could be very expensive software that's necessary to control a certain business process, or a standard app that is going to make small (but by an enterprise salesperson, quantifiable) improvements to the productivity of 40,000 staff, or something that's sold with metered usage that the enterprise wants to use a _lot_.

But ultimately to sell at that scale you're almost certainly using "value based pricing" where you start by trying to identify how much the enterprise customer will make/save from your product compared with their next best option, and negotiate down from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _> Usually the more complex the system, the more satisfaction the hacker feels when he or she pwns it._

Equating "selling" to "pwning" is not a good way to think about any kind of sales. Talking about "hacking" a customer suggests that they are somehow inferior and that the goal is to somehow beat or triumph over them, to trick them or exploit a vulnerability. No company should think of their potential customers in that way.

<comment><USER11> In fact, you should guard for the opposite; I've seen plenty of clients trying to "hack" their software providers by exploiting unclear contract clauses, minor slip-ups, communication problems, etc. A decent sale might turn into loss if you're not careful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One more important thing you need to know about the enterprise you're selling into: what spending approval levels does the champion and his/her management chain have? Often they'll have discretion over anything under 10K, and will have to seek higher approval for larger sums. This is one of the factors that has driven SaaS monthly charges as opposed to traditional perpetual licenses with six or seven figure tags.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pretty good write up. The author glosses over the finance part at their own peril. I'm noticing enterprises with longer and longer payment terms.. As in they mandate their vendors provide net-90, which seems insane to me. It used to be net-60, and even that seemed odd. So be prepared to be flexible to close that sale.

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure this is about controlling quarterly results for public companies. They play around with numbers a lot to make estimates. They can push payables out to the next quarter with net 90.

<comment><USER15> The payment terms would not affect the income statement, as the invoice would be recognised in the same period regardless.

<comment><USER16> I was under the impression that it's more about budget and the ability to better predict/balance incoming and outgoing funds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The point about finance is interesting and probably the one I thought about the least. I think I'll think about it like NFL contracts in the future (front or back loading contracts might be good for their "salary cap" aka budget).

</comment><comment><USER18> Brilliant article. Agree to every bit. This is kind of enterprise sales 101 of point solutions. However if you talk about infratstructure solutions (say mBaaS, etc) - things Become far more complex as many a times you may not have any business end point as your champion.

</comment><comment><USER19> You need to figure out where to partner with others as well.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good skills to learn as back ender during quaranteene? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would advise you to enlarge your education in agriculture space especially growing potato species. It will be helpful and relaxing at the same time. Fresh air is good for your health as well alongside with physical exercises.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spelling! :D

(scnr)</comment>


Ask HN: How do I protect my start-up from law suits? (USA) - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone,
I've been tossing around a couple of ideas for side businesses that I could try out while holding on to my day job, and then see where they go from there.  I'm turning over the ideas of selling herbal supplements (not a la Tim Ferriss, I swear), and/or selling consulting services as a patient advocate.
I understand that 95% of a start-up is just getting off your butt and doing it, but I find that I stall when I think about possible legal issues.  What if someone with a severe ragweed allergy goes into anaphylactic shock over chamomile contamination?  What if somebody gets the idea that I should pay their $100,000 chemotherapy debt because the health insurance company won't, despite my best efforts?
Incorporating sounds like putting the cart ahead of the horse, but I don't want to put my personal assets at too much risk unnecessarily.
What steps would you suggest to shield my business and my family from liability? <comment><USER2> Incorporate.

Seriously :) You basically detailed one of the primary reasons why folks incorporate. Not quite following your analysis of how that is "putting the cart ahead of the house"...

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you are to pay lawyers to figure out what disclaimers you must make, etc, if you are in this kind of business, otherwise is just gambling.</comment>


Show HN: More Like This Bookmarklet - <AUTHOR> http://nagrgtr.com/morelikethis

<comment><USER3> I've noticed many product pages these days do some "scroll enhancements" through javascript. This page seems to do that as well. It's very annoying!

The page doesn't really explain what the bookmarklet does, only how I install it. I'd like to know what it does first :)

<comment><AUTHOR> When you drag&drop this bookmarklet to your bookmarks, nothing happens. The magic happens afterwards when you are visiting a site outside of nagrgtr: Inside the bookmark is a little javascript script that reads the URL you are just visiting and sends it to:

[http://nagrgtr.com/morelikethis/URL](http://nagrgtr.com/morelikethis/URL)

thats it. Have a look at the href behind the link, its really simple as that.

Greetings from Austria

edit: The page has no scroll enhancement to my knowledge. Where do you see that, or on which device do you look at the page so I can reconstruct the problem on my end? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> It does have scroll enhancement. It scrolls faster and keeps scrolling for a while after I've stopped scrolling, "easing out". I think this line is the culprit:

        <script data-rocketsrc="/static/js/nicescroll.js" type="text/rocketscript"></script>

<comment><AUTHOR> my bad, removed it. Thanks for pointing me to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, that little service came out of a larger project of mine, but I thought it could be useful to everyone.

Unlike other sites, where you can search for something, the index here is based on crawling all and everything that is posted on HN, a lot of Reddits and many many more sites. So not only based on a headline or something, the comparison is really based on content behind the links.

Happy to hear your opinion.

Wish you all a great new year and good luck in 2015!

Tom

<comment> 97-109-107 Interesting stuff, best of luck to you as well.

I imagine this is not in the intentions of your service as it is now, but I'm wondering if you could share some knowledge on the matter given your expertise.

If you had access to a sizeable amount of links that a group of people read what sort of bite-sized knowledge could one extract about the interests/problems/expertise of the said group? Do you believe such results would be meaningful at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions!

Well... I'm wondering that myself a little bit too.

I'm thinking of what you can do by feeding this information to machine learning algorithms :) But you will definitely see more of that soon... To give you a few buzzwords: machine learning, clustering, nlp, sentiment analysis etc. in a scalable realtime infrastructure. Basically throwing all of that into a huge data-bowl, turning on the mixer to 11 and wait and see.

Also thinking to make my PhD based on such a project, who knows :)

I just know: it must be easy to use and I must like to use it, it has to solve my own problems, or else it ends like so many other projects out there - <USER2> guess you know what I mean.

Imagine you had access to this information, what would you want to see? Which problem would it solve? Would you eventually pay for it? How often would you use it? To how many friends would you recommend it? etc... :)

Best Tom

<comment> 97-109-107 Thanks for your answer. The buzzwords I know, but I don't have the know-how yet :). I exactly know what you mean with the project-interest match.

Not even sure if I'm pursuing anything in the general area. I'm more trying to figure out the latter part 'Which problem would it solve? Would you eventually pay for it? How often would you use it?' because I believe it could be the backbone of a project I'm working on.

Would you be up for a chat? I don't mean to hire or exploit you, but I think there might be some overlap between what you like doing and what I'm planning to do - not sure if I can call it consulting, but perhaps I could offer something in return. I believe you can see my contact details in my profile page if you're up for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> here is mine: thomas @ [the domain in the brackets on the top]

wwwas.it sounds interesting. Wondering if you could connect to skype and facebook chat somehow and make my links searchable :) .

Send me some info where I can reach you via skype or any other chat please.

Thanks, Tom

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice bookmarklet! I have one quick suggestion. The font size and color on the results page make it very hard to read. Please increase size and switch from grey and light blue to black and darker blue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

yeah, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated, as I'm definitely no web- designer. I will do that together with a pagination and will roll that out hopefully next week. As the holidays are over and I have a normal day-job and a family next to it (or vice-versa), I try to keep working on the core as much as I can and keep the design as simple as possible.

I am personally a friend of infinite page scrolling, but it seems that not everyone likes it. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks.

<comment> 97-109-107 I'm usually againts inifite scrolling, but I think it won't hurt in the results page as it is something that you visit once, get what you want and leave.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Need Feedback, Mobile App for Augmented Reality Vouchers - <AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News, Im thinking about an idea for a mobile application and I wanted your advice. Here is what is does: You can collect and share a Voucher or Coupon, that is positioned in front of a Retail Store. The Design is in 3D in an Augmented Reality Interface, like in PokemonGo. A fun way to get people in offline Stores with Gamification.
What do you think? Is it feasible? Would you use a App like this?
Many Thanks CB <comment><USER2> Why not build a website were you can upload a 3d item with a skin and place it on a map. Then use your phone to see the item. and a map on the phone for how to get to the item. kind of become the twilio of augmented reality. At that point all the heavy lifting is done and you can work on fifty ideas as well as sell the api to others.

<comment><USER2> or go try talking to 20 local business person to person and see how hard selling local advertising is.</comment></comment>


Stop using so many divs An intro to semantic HTML - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/kenbellows/stop-using-so-many-divs-an-intro-to-semantic-html-3i9i <comment><USER2> As a backend developer that occasionally needs to add a nice looking front-end I can say that the biggest source of divs comes from the bootstrap templates I use in my projects. Not sure why the semantic syntax is not more popular among these template creators.</comment>


Nokia N9 - <AUTHOR> http://swipe.nokia.com/

<comment><USER3> Beautiful hardware design, innovative user experience (borrows good stuff from Windows Phone and webOS), lots of popular built-in apps, outstanding camera, but...

...built on MeeGo, the operating system Nokia dumped for Windows. It's sad to see that Nokia's last MeeGo hurrah is on a flagship device that may never see a major update in its future.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm pretty sure they'll reconsider the final strategy if this device is successful. At least it seems to get pretty much positive attention right now.

<comment><USER4> It would take Nokia two years to steer back on MeeGo, two years they can't afford; it's not going to happen. Look how long it's taking them to get a Windows Phone model out, after steering in January and committing all resources they still have...

It's a shame, without the useless Intel deal this phone could probably have hit the market last summer and could actually have had a real shot at changing things. Now it's dead in the water. After wasting my time for months on the N900, I'm not going to touch again a dead platform.

<comment><USER5> But the Meego phone is coming out _before_ any WP7 phone.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but the product teams have long moved on by now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even when Microsoft debuted WP7, my feeling was that UI prettiness was "where the puck is" and not "where it's going". In 2011, a phone with a pretty touchscreen UI and a bunch of basic apps is more "where the puck _was_ ". Even if we assume the software runs as smoothly in the demonstrations (a level of trust that Nokia's last few flagships have not warranted), there's little that would impress an iPhone 3GS user 2 years ago.

A pretty phone does not put you in the game anymore. It's staggering how behind this is compared to the competition, who have advanced tablet ecosystems, deeply integrated video-calling and messaging, deep cloud services, massive application libraries, extensive content (magazines and books), powerful video/photo/audio editing...

</comment><comment><USER7> This is painful to watch. Lesson learned: if you're dumping your platform to move to another, make sure there are devices built on the new platform available the day after the announcement.

Bye, Nokia, it was great knowing you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nokia have also made a limited edition N950 for developers [1]. The interesting differences are:

N950 is physically larger and is made out of aluminum, whereas N9 has a polycarbonate unibody. N950 has a physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The N9 is a touchscreen-only device. N950 has a different physical camera module than N9.

I love the phisical keyboard on my current phone and wish Nokia released the N950 as a consumer device.

[1] [http://www.developer.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3744886f...](http://www.developer.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/3744886f-69c1-4544-8ad3-72b352b4a832/Nokia_N950_OneClickFlashers_Release_Notes.html)

<comment><USER9> This sounds great. How can I get one?

<comment><USER8> Not easily. It looks like there's only 250 and you have to apply on a developer program: <http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=3597>

<comment><USER9> It looks like it's a standardized dev kit. And the 250 number is for community developers. "Nokia Developer has more units for partners, champions and professional developers in general - but they are not on sale. "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The video featuring Nokia's SVP of design really fascinates me. He introduces the idea of using touch swipes as something really revolutionary, that "changes our perception of how we use technology". I'm sure it really would have been revolutionary, four years ago. Before Windows Phone 7, before Android, before WebOS and before iPhone.

Of course, it's just a marketing video. But the idea of using touch swipes to navigate around your smartphone is not even a little bit revolutionary in 2011. It's not new, fresh, remarkable or special in any way. It kind of makes Nokia look like they were born yesterday; enamored and fascinated with what they think is "new" technology.

I'm left wondering if what we're seeing in this marketing video is not what Nokia wants us to think about their new product, but how much of a dinosaur Nokia really is.

<comment><USER11> "This changes everything. Again."

Come on, Steve Jobs spouts this kind of hyperbole at every single product launch.

<comment><USER12> True. FaceTime was touted as a big innovation, when my classmates used video phones back in 2003. I also went to university with a deaf and mute girl who used it to communicate with her friends in sign language.

The video cinematography was a bit too Apple-inspired for my taste, though, but at least it looked professional. Not used to seeing that, at least from competitors.

<comment><USER10> I'm not talking about the hyperbole itself, I'm talking about how they're hyping something everybody else thinks of as common already.

FaceTime would have been kind of like that if everybody had been making video phone calls every day since four years ago. Most people had never made a single video phone call, most people still haven't.

Using touch swipes on their phone though, everybody has, every day, for years. Outside of Nokia, that is.

<comment><USER13> I disagree. What Nokia is solving here is true buttonless navigation. No one else is using swiping in that way. However everyone _is_ trying to go buttonless. Android has done it in the easiest way, replacing hardware with software buttons and calling them not-buttons. It has been rumored that iOS will go buttonless too, but who knows how. WebOS is the only that has kind of done this. You can navigate WebOS without buttons but it still has a "button" in the gesture area that most people use anyways. Swipe is the first time someone has been able to make the OS buttonless in a way that doesn't feel tacked on. Calling that revolutionary is hyperbole, but it is an important UI development for where we are inevitably going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nokia produces another slick computer-animated video showing how fast, responsive, and stable their phones are.

Doesn't anyone remember this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU>

<comment><USER15> Here's a hands on:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSZssHGR-Qg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The video on that page was very amusing.

They ripped the style of the Apple product videos so perfectly (all the way down to an "every once in a while" opening) that it felt like a parody.

I was almost expecting a "One more thing..." in the end.

<comment><USER17> When in rome... :)

<comment><USER17> Edit:

Seems there are at least 2 people who find pithy comments not worthy here so let me expand upon the point in a more verbose way to please them:

If you're Nokia you have zero chance at capturing imaginations with your products the way Apple does. There is no novel approach their corporate marketing team can come up with that will rival the winning formula Apple has produced. Apple's marketing today is probably better suited to the market than even the Think Different campaign in 1984.

Moreover, Apple has made their bones by contrasting themselves against beige corporate culture. Nokia is very beige.

Apple has framed the debate on their terms. So Nokia can choose to flail around in a mediocre attempt to find a different marketing strategy that works.... Or they can copy the unrivaled, unrelenting market leader. They are trying to produce a cool, trendy, powerful little smartphone. Why not embrace the Apple formula as best as you can. You're playing on their turf, so try to present yourself the way they do.

Or, in other words, when in Rome do as the Romans do.

<comment><USER18> First of all, I dont think the analogy is apt. Also, your claim that Apple seems to be setting terms is not true at all. Android has captured a big market share and from what I read last time it was more than Apple.

I also think that if you can come up with a phone that adds 'significantly' more value than an existing phone, it will automatically capture attention. You dont need imitate the current players in the market.

There have been many examples in the past ( for eg: Google search Vs Yahoo search ).

But I do think that Nokia phone is really pretty, with pretty good UI features showcased. But I am not sure if it has the necessary qualities to make users switch from an existing iphone or android phone. I dont know if it adds "significantly" move value!

Of course switching between search engines is a lot easier than switching between phones, so that is also an important factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fairly convincingly nice and elegant UI. It clearly owes a lot to iPhone and iOS, although that is not to suggest that it improves on iOS, and certainly not on iOS 5, although the maps do look good.

The history feature looks like a privacy nightmare. One swipe away, and someone who borrows your phone for even a moment can immediately see everything you've been up to. Where is the empathy for the user? BTW if I let someone borrow my phone, that means I have already unlocked it for them, but it doesn't mean I want them to have one-swipe access to everything.

As an aside, next time they should consider having a more likable and less arrogant-looking person do the talking, and without (apparent) overdubbing. It came off as slightly creepy.

I'd love to play with one, but I don't expect it to make any dent in iPhone. I am curious what other cool features it has that didn't make it into the video... since it's Nokia, we can expect a lot, so they do have my attention at least temporarily.

<comment><USER20> So you'd basically want Nokia to make UI harder to use just because of those rare cases when someone borrows his phone to the person he/she doesn't trust?

<comment><USER21> That's a very loaded sentence. "Make the UI harder to use" and "rare cases" and "he/she doesn't trust".

Trust isn't binary.

He doesn't want "instant everything reveal" when someone (a friend? work colleague?) uses his phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's video for the lazy. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfE3B6L-Otw>

Looks to be pretty incredible HW and UI paired with Linux goodness.

Better intro showing main features live: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LffDQHp5E0>

</comment><comment><USER22> I really don't like the idea of putting all of "my social events" into one unified screen. I actually do read all of my friend's facebook messages (and I do add only actual friends). I think I read about 50% of the tweets of people I follow.

Adding both timelines into 1 view would make me miss a lot of "important" things

<comment><USER17> Yeha there's gotta be some easy way to see multiple views (preferably within 2 _easy_ taps). I can't have SMS notifications lost behind 200 tweets and check- ins and wall posts from 2nd cousins looking for magic potions so they can raise alpaca's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Engadget added hands on videos if you want to see a real device in action.

<http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/21/nokia-n9-first-hands-on/>

The UI appears to be extremely smooth. There's also a demo of transitioning audio from phone to external speaker using NFC.

<comment><USER24> This is not relevant to the OP at all, but I don't see any way to do private messages in Hacker News, so... A while ago you commented on one of my essays and I didn't respond: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2479738>

I've expanded [http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance...](http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance#cookie- prices-and-inflation) to hopefully answer your wheat question.

As for your point about building character - I didn't see much of that in my sister when I was selling boxes with her or in her troop, I don't know how one would measure this one way or the other, and I don't think I actually criticized the cookie-selling practice at all, since the focus was on the price and whether money was being wasted by the organization. (Likewise, I don't follow your point about advertising. Walmart isn't exactly raking in all its profits and underselling Girl Scouts by auctioning off the advertising space on the sides of its cookie boxes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most interesting part is the actual phone function isn't mentioned a single time in the whole video.

<comment><USER26> Why would they waste time showing the phone do what all phones do? I'm pretty sure everyone assumes it can make calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It looks beautiful and I like the more rounded icons a lot. But I wonder why the hell is Nokia launching a non-winmo device? People will not find apps for it and give it bad reviews and Nokia will end up getting even more negative publicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's plenty of apps for it because they're Qt-based like Symbian and most apps need just retargeting. <http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/MeeGo/>

<comment><USER4> Because there are so many Qt-based apps for Symbian already, right? Oh, wait...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wouldn't it be difficult to find apps for MeeGo? Compared to iOS, Android or even Symbian for that matter?

</comment><comment><USER29> Nokia's CTO, Rich Green, on Meego back in February after Nokia announced the shift to WP7:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISjb9E5A2ls>

That is, this will be their one and only Meego phone, and they want to "get feedback [for] inclusion in their [WP7 phones]".

This looks like a great phone and OS, and I would actually buy it if Nokia were going to support it.

But they just don't get it, do they?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would they put so much effort in it if they are not planning support for it?

<comment><USER4> You don't know Nokia's SOP very much, do you ? :)

Their production processes are all about cranking out slightly-different versions of the same hardware/software combinations, as fast as possible, and market them as "new". Post-release upgrades are basically non-existent, even when bugs and problems are huge -- this was made very clear by the N97, but careful observers knew it from well before then. This phone won't have variations, the platform is commercially dead, so they'll just push it out of the door and forget about it.

Add to this that the Maemo/Meego line has historically been seen as "experimental" (i.e. by the time a device shipped, development had long moved on and backward-compatibility had been broken), even more so now that WP7 is the name of the game for Nokia, and you can see how little they'll care for this phone once they have your cash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I know how they have been doing things. However, things like this <http://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/> shows that they have done a bit of effort on this one. I don't believe they'll gain anything from cutting the support when they have come this far and actually delivered something which has selling potential in future too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I suppose this will be MeeGo's flagship device? Honestly, I don't know if the mobile OS market has room for another...

<comment><USER31> Flagship and Swan Song at the same time.

I don't know how they expect developers to make apps for a platform that they've publicly stated is only going to have this one phone released for.

I hope I'm wrong though, I still have an irrational fondness for Nokia hardware and the N-series (I bought and regretted every Maemo device they sold).

<comment><AUTHOR> They have finally unified the Qt-platform for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo so it shouldn't be a problem. They also announced today that Qt will be extending to S40. Look at the new developer site <http://www.developer.nokia.com/>

<comment><USER5> Weren't they looking to give QT to someone else to continue the support for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not. It's part of their main strategy. I think they moved some legacy business Qt licensees or related stuff to some other company.

<comment><USER4> Part of what ? They've already announced Qt won't run on WP7.

They've basically offloaded everything-but-developers to Digia [1]; and I bet Digia will have a big say in what the remaining Qt developers in Nokia will get to work on.

Qt might be part of their low-end strategy on S40, for big-numbers / low- profit emerging markets. Considering how iPhones are now immensely popular even in places like Cuba and how low-cost Android devices are getting ready to hit those markets, I bet that strategy will soon need revising as well...

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt- licensing-...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/07/nokia-sells-qt-licensing- and-services-business-to-digia/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Symbian will live at least to 2016. Who knows what happens during that time. They also announced that S40 will have Qt apps. They have been pretty clear about Qt's future I think. I don't know the details of the Digia deal, but I'm pretty sure Nokia can do whatever they want.

Nokia's new developer site shows pretty clearly their main focuses <http://www.developer.nokia.com/>

They won't put all bets on WP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know how open this device is? It runs MeeGo but can I do a "sudo apt-get install bash4" like I can on my N900?

The specs look pretty good but as a flagship device from Nokia, I was hoping for an HDMI port, MicroSD card slot and FM transmitter.

<comment><USER32> and then suddenly the phone is twice as thick and has a lower battery life.

When I look at this phone I think of the famous quote by Antoine de Saint- Exupry:

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Good work Nokia for not designing a phone by committee.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They introduced a family of NFC paired accessories too, [http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/06/21/nokia-steps-it- up-...](http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/06/21/nokia-steps-it-up-a-gear- with-new-accessories/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I really hope this supports ATT bands for 3G!! I've been pulling my hair out because the N900 (an awesome phone that I had the pleasure to develop for in Python + Qt at $work) only supports EDGE on ATT. I will miss the physical keyboard but I think a real (read: not resistive) touchscreen will work OK.

edit: It does indeed support ATT 3G bands (850 and 1900 MHz): [http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/11/nokia-n9-hits-the-fcc- pac...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/11/nokia-n9-hits-the-fcc-packs-more- bands-than-a-rubber-tree/)

<comment><USER34> On the bright side, AT&T doesn't classify the N900 as a smartphone, so they don't require a smartphone data plan. :) Hopefully they'll continue to apply the same logic to the N9: "Does it run iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, or Symbian? If no, then it isn't a smartphone."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nokia N9 indeed great device, I classify this device in three ways: Nokia N9 - Design, Social and Interaction

Design - Unibody Design , and no Home Button/s , Curved Shape Glass, Three colors

Social - Facebook , Twitter's OS level binding , creates a wonderful Social Experience without any efforts. Skype , Facebook chat available in built with Operating System

Interaction - Swipe gesture to access whole phone. Three states of phone Event Notifications, Applications and Current Application states maintained wonderfully

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how the swipe task switching gesture interacts with games and other apps that involve swiping? I have it enabled with Dolphin (browser) and it's always a bit hit and miss whether the swipe gets picked up by the browser or as a gesture. I'm sure they can do it better than Dolphin, but still - <USER2> need it to be perfect, I think.

I love the design though - distinctive. Quite promising if they can make similarly bold designs for their phones running WP7.

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks a lot like an iPod Nano. <http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/>

<comment><USER38> I thought this too. And then realised that if Apple were heading down the "iPhone Nano" path, a design like this would suit that device really well (albeit a little smaller). Super thin, iPod nano-like, curved screen, vibrant colour options. I wonder if any toes have been stepped on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looking at this I have to wonder why nokia ever ditched maemo. This looks awesome.

<comment><USER40> Because managament was abviously stupid. The N900 was already a fine product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone have experience with getting hardware from their developer program? I'd like to own and develop for the next-gen MeeGo device and I hear the N950 (N9 dev device) has a physical keyboard which I would love.

</comment><comment><USER41> Phonescoop says N9 Brings MeeGo to Life!

<http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=8360>

</comment><comment><USER42> Something tragic about watching the live twitter feed on their own product launch page mostly criticise this phone and MeeGo. I suppose censoring it would send a worse message.

</comment><comment><USER43> Looks cute, it's like the what would come out mixing an iPod Nano 2nd gen and an iPhone. And it's unibody ;)

<comment><USER44> Yeah, and it's a great competitor against the iPhone 3GS ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Given the circumstances I think they did a beautiful job with this first release. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER46> "All it takes is a swipe". Interesting choice of tagline.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm not sure if I buy this whole "swiping" is the most important feature. Did you guys watch the video with the SVP of design talking? He talks about how swiping eliminates the need for a home key (jab at Apple), and how later you can swip to show all your active apps "making for the best multitasking experience" (another jab at Apple)... I wasn't convinced.

<comment><USER17> Neither was I. But I _was_ intrigued. And interested. Which I suppose is the point of pre-launch marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That's actually really nice.

I may even part with my faithful Nokia 6303 for one of these.

</comment><comment><USER49> How think is it I wonder? Nokia has this strange inclination towards producing phones that are 25% thicker than they should be to be comfortable.

<comment><USER50> Going by Engadget, a bit thinner than the iPhone 4 supposedly.

<comment><USER51> 30% difference

N9 - 12.1 mm [1]

iPhone4 - 9.3 mm [2]

[1] [http://europe.nokia.com/find- products/devices/nokia-n9/speci...](http://europe.nokia.com/find- products/devices/nokia-n9/specifications)

[2] <http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html>

<comment><USER52> N9: 7.6-12.1 mm

iP4: 9.3-9.3 mm

<comment><USER51> if you measure iP4 depth at Power button, it will be even less (~3 mm?). Makes about same sense as 7.6mm for N9.

<comment><USER52> Apple specifies Macbook Air thickness like this [1], so I think it should be fair game for the N9.

[1] <http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html>

<comment><USER51> I thought that the OP meant actual device thickness, not the marketing tricks employed by Apple or Nokia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I guess Jobs was wrong when it came to Nokia they were 4 years behind not 3. My first response was wow someone put an ugly cover on their iPhone, then I saw the Nokia logo and started to laugh. At least MS had the balls to try something other than a cheap UI knockoff.

<comment><USER54> I don't know why you've been down voted to oblivion, but have an up vote. :)

This thing is not even close to Android or WP7, let alone iOS. Swiping is a feature now? Really? The basis of every phone since 2007 is a great new feature?

Sigh. :)

<comment><USER55> Perhaps there's more to it. One of OSX Lion's main features is "full screen mode". Hilarious when seen on its own, but potentially unique (we'll see).

<comment><USER56> "Full Screen Mode" is not really about full screen. It is an attempt to simplify the concept of virtual desktops, making it more intuitable to ordinary humans, while also putting applications or tasks into a linear arrangement so that they may be navigated more easily with multitouch gestures (task switching).

<comment><USER55> Yes exactly -- yet it's called "full screen mode". Exactly my point, thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This move by Nokia has stunned the Smart Phone makers, Apple , Android and RIM, its wonderful in Design, Social and Interaction.

But there is something more required for any smart phone's success story. On that front Nokia has failed everytime they have launched exclusive devices. 'CARRIERS'.

Yeah for every success story of Smart Phone, phone carriers play larger role. But Nokia always had problem in revenue sharing with Phone Carriers. So in USA and Canada where the larger mass of Mobile phone users who actually afford/buy these costly and smart devices never played with Nokia Devices.

Where in India and China, lot of local providers offer cheaper mobile phones with lot of functionalities.

I see carriers major role in success story of Nokia N9, selling unlocked phones are not preferable for customer.

Another major challenge it may face is convincing small/medium developers to start building apps for their platform.

<comment><USER4> Nokia has had problems with NORTH-AMERICAN carriers. Everywhere else, they get along with carriers much better than, say, Apple, and this was one of the reasons for their demise. One of Jobs' great moves was to explicitly stick two fingers up at carriers and sell something CUSTOMERS wanted; Nokia was so busy making telcos happy, they started thinking customers are just a stupid herd who can be made to buy any sort of crap.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Detoxify – Kicking out a bad habit? Track it with this - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I made Detoxify, right now it's just a simple addiction tracker, but I'd like to build it out to focus primarily on another goal: addiction replacement.
I was addicted to video games for basically my whole life, and I found that willpower alone is not enough to fully quit - you need to track it and you need to replace it.
So in the future I'd like Detoxify to be able to give you something back in a big way - if you spend 8 hours a day on video games, imagine if you could begin a 'detox' and then have the app issue you replacements for those hours. 8 hours of video games becomes 2 hours of Lego sent to your house, plus 2 hours of books, plus 4 hours of kayaking.
If that sounds like something you'd like to support the development cycle of, please pick up a trial.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/detoxify/id1438276133?ls=1&m... <comment><USER2> Did you base the habit-building in the app around any particular methodology or research? Or, is it just any replacement is good replacement?

I'm not sure if there's a golden rule to helping those with addiction; I'm just glad that developers are exploring this arena.</comment>


Jonathan Ive on Industrial Design - <AUTHOR> http://codesketch.com/2010/04/jonathan-ive-on-industrial-design/ <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of his work, but I feel minimalism can easily be taken too far. Does an indicator not need to be visible when it's off? How do you confirm that it is off. Yes, you'll eventually learn where it is by repeated exposure to it when it's on but there will still be some uncertainty even then, especially if you deal with multiple machines.

Personally I _like_ that minimalism and want it in the products I buy, but I'd not go so far as to say it's more usable than a more prosaic alternative where you have a row of cheap indicator leds with little pictograms next to them.

Reminds me of this comic strip too:

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/3/6/>

<comment><USER3> I don't know. This LED has one function: telling you the device is still on when the monitor isn't. That's all it does. It's obvious that the device is on when the monitor is on, so you don't need a LED for that (ThinkPads really do have a frickin' LED for that! As does my cheap Compaq.).

Putting a LED at a visible location and making it invisible as long as it is off seems like a pretty elegant solution to that problem. I don't think it's harder to figure out the sleep light than this whole row of LEDs on my old ThinkPad with their cryptic pictograms or the dazzling array of blinkenlights on my cheap Compaq laptop (complete with equally puzzling pictograms and including LEDs which light up in different colors so you presumably have to learn a whole color code).

Macs in general only opt for LEDs when displaying stuff in the UI is not possible (sleep light and battery indicator for checking battery status when the Mac is off), one exception being that darned caps lock. Spotlight's icon pulses when your HDD is indexed. There are progress bars when stuff is unzipped or copied. Why the need for a HDD activity LED?

That's a bit dishonest of me. There is multitasking, so stuff might be going on in the background, but I do think that in general it's good to strive for a world in which we don't need HDD activity LEDs. I also think we are pretty much there, I, at least, didn't miss it. (Although not knowing why my good old desktop PC didn't respond in 1998 because they decided to leave out the HDD activity light would have been pretty horrible. But that was then :)

<comment><USER4> I've had laptops where the monitor would shut off to save power and having an obvious way to know it is on is very valuable. I do not want to hit thepower button if the machine is on.

In general, dedicated hardware indicators are handy when your screen may have died or otherwise cannot rely on a monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen the documentary and agree that it's a great way to spend an hour or so. What was disturbing though is exposed in the first minute of this video clip. I'm forgetting his name, but the speaker is basically suggesting that the only impactful company in the world actually doing design is Apple. It's disheartening to hear, and in the years since the documentary that point seems to be even more true.

Do you think we'll see a renaissance of design as a differentiator for businesses, or is something so difficult to account for prior to product launch doomed to be discarded by all but a few companies?

<comment><USER6> It's Dieter Rams, and he's been a big inspiration to a lot of designers (including Jonathan Ive). He actually said "only a few companies", and then mentioned Apple.

There are other companies, but few in the computer / consumer electronics business.

I think the key is that most companies treat design as an afterthought, or an expense. It's completely irrelevant to most users, but look at most PC laptops - they have a nice, glossy lid and front bezel. But the bottom cover seems like a minefield of stickers, covers, fan openings and screws. There is no design there. The design job ended with the obvious, visible parts.

Again, completely irrelevant to most users as they will never look at the bottom cover. But it speaks a lot about how these companies think about design - and why Apple is still the only company with a unibody laptop design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Take away quote for me:

"So many of the products we're surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of just how clever the solution was... [a solution should] speak to how you are going to use it, not to the terrible struggles that we as designers and engineers had."

<comment><USER8> Well said. A lot of products I own make me feel this way, and its always refreshing to use some so refined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is from a documentary called Objectified:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241325/>

<comment><USER10> ^ Highly recommended, it's a really good way to spend an hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is amazing how many parallels there are between industrial design and software design. In some way the two disciplines are indistinguishable.

Yet, the software industry culture tends to prefer designers with computer science background/training, rather than "proper" design background.

<comment><USER12> I agree, IVE talks about spending a lot of time designing "fixtures" to hold parts during the various CNC operations. That is completely analogous to spending time creating macros, scripts, development tools, etc. Essentially creating tools that will help create tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Objectified is really great documentary, highly suggested to whoever "make" stuff.

<comment><USER14> The documentary Helvetica was made by the same director, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_%28film%29>. I was impressed that a documentary about fonts could be so engaging.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I've loved both of them so far. I believe there's a third coming too, although I don't know the topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of my favorite designers. Interesting to hear him talking about creating the tools to create the design.

</comment><comment><USER16> The whole documentary and Apple's approach to design can be summed up in this one sentence Ive makes: "..that's quite obsessive isn't it?"</comment>


John Ochsendorf: The architectural rebel who champions ancient engineers - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/ingenious-john-ochsendorf

<comment><USER2> Is it forbidden in America to celebrate islamic architecture? Islamic stone architecture is far advanced over roman, greek or native architecture this guy seems to propagate.

See for example the old stone bridge of Mostar (Stari Most), which had to to be rebuilt after the war, and they could only do it by finding old turkish craftsmen who were still able to build such a bridge, without steel. Modern architects all failed.

<comment><USER3> MIT, where Ochsendorf is a professor, has the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture [1] (Harvard has a sister program [2]).

Stari Most is also a well-known tourist destination. Its destruction occurred during a war the US was involved in and its destruction, rebuilding, and symbolism in the war were widely reported in US media. [3] Today, it's popular on mainstream sites like reddit. [4]

1\. [http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/generalinformation.htm](http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/generalinformation.htm)

2\. [http://agakhan.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do](http://agakhan.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do)

3\. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+%22mostar%2...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nytimes.com+%22mostar%22+%22bridge%22)

4\. [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22mostar%22...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%22mostar%22+%22bridge%22)

<comment><USER2> Great to hear that they have special programs for that. Americans could learn a great deal from them.

Regarding the Stari Most reconstruction effort I can recommend an excellent documentary by Jasmila Žbanić "Builders diary", and there are numerous more TV movies about the technical challenges there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They don't mention concrete except to contrast with modern steel-and-concrete architecture, but in fact concrete was essential to Roman architecture.

Especially Roman vaults and domes were concrete. The Parthenon is still the largest concrete dome without steel reinforcing. My pet theory is that that concrete allowed the Romans to construct giant projects relatively quickly with large, mostly unskilled labor pools.

<comment><USER5> I thought the Pantheon was built of stone. But you are be right, it's called "Roman concrete": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete)

About the article and videos, great that some architects value the old buildings. We have already enough of the Modernism/Bauhaus style full-concrete buildings. Tourists usually come to visit Rome, Vienna, Venice, ... because of the beautiful old buildings. They used (rusty) steel/iron-beams to hold together the Colosseum in Rome, the steel looks very out-of-place. The Pantheon is indeed one of most inspiring buildings and one of the oldest that is still almost completely intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that steel tinker-toys are likely cheaper than big rock piles, even if the steel buildings aren't as safe and won't last a thousand years.

<comment><USER7> I often wonder that when I walk around the city: a lot of the new buildings look so shoddy in their construction - if you buy an apartment, it's probably not something that will get passed down to your kids' kids. In that case, do you own part of the land underneath the building, or... what?

<comment><USER8> If you own a condo or co-op and the building starts to degrade, the owners will vote (via an elected board) whether to make repairs to the building. If they vote to do that, in addition to the apartment, you own your unit's share of the repair bill, which gets passed to you as an assessment. So when you buy the apartment you're buying an obligation to pay for the building's repairs (assuming a majority of the other owners want to keep the building standing as well). If you disagree with everyone else and don't pay the assessment, the other owners (again via the condo board) can put a lien on your property and sell it to cover the amount you owe.

If it got really really bad there's probably a situation in which the owners of the building could vote to have it demolished and rebuilt.

The take away is that in addition to the apartment itself, you're actually buying shares in a legal entity and get certain rights and obligations as a result of that. It's that entity that owns the building and the land underneath. How exactly the entity is structured depends on whether it's setup as a condominium or cooperative.

<comment><USER9> As deet said. A practical example of pitfalls with high-rise condos is where there's a swimming pool inside the condo structure. Every time there is a crack, owners will get a $20,000 or more assessment each to fix it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>