Hacker News: bklyn11201

New comment by bklyn11201 in "We replaced Zendesk"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:20:40 +0000

Isn't this a perfect case for why SAAS stocks have been puking all year?

I certainly don't think Zendesk's core business is threatened here, and I have no desire to replace Zendesk with a custom solution. But Zendesk's ability to upcharge, sell adjacent products, and pass on cost increases is hugely threatened. If PE was planning on a decade of consistent cost increases and more land, that dream seems materially threatened!

New comment by bklyn11201 in "We replaced Zendesk"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:17:46 +0000

Sure, in the case of private equity rollups in HVAC and electric and plumbing you often get higher rates but professionalized systems including real contracts, phone answering, emailed invoices, real quotes, real terms, enforceable warranties. Many who have trusted vendors may view this as degradation because of the cost increase but for others (a new homeowner with a job), the professionalization is a positive.

For software like Zendesk that was already thoroughly professionalized, I agree, it's hard to think of positive attributes to a PE buyout!

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

bklyn11201 — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:06:44 +0000

Same. I knew exactly one student reprimanded for plagiarism in four years. The idea of cheating on a test was absurd.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

bklyn11201 — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:07:55 +0000

When the IT department is also the developer of the software, instructors will demand their feature be included in the software: they need a gradebook column that counts as extra credit, missing work, a dropped score, and 40% of the final grade simultaneously, but only for students who email after midnight during finals week.

IT department will then build the feature as instructors are high-status and IT is low-status, and they aim to please. The software will collect hundreds of these over time. The institution will accumulate more developers, QA, a11y testers, PMs, instructional design consultants, and more PMs to deal with the instructors. The institution will then move to SAAS solution where the instructor is forced to join Canvas Jira and submit their feature request. A product manager at Canvas will then post to Jira and say thanks for your feature request, we will consider it. Game over.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "United 777-200 fleet faces an uncertain future after Dulles engine failure"

bklyn11201 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:14:45 +0000

Europe will financialize everything just slower and with more regulation. Branded credit cards are coming. See Brussels Airlines and Mastercard

A well optimized domestic USA airline makes money from credit cards, points, trip insurance, upsells, and segments the consumer into a dozen bins based on what they’re willing to spend for a couple more inches of leg room.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Pikaday: A friendly guide to front-end date pickers"

bklyn11201 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:00:04 +0000

What is the simple explanation for the terrible support by Firefox and Safari? I figured this was relatively low-hanging fruit, widely used, a big boost for performance (date pickers often load 100s of locales and translations), and a giant move towards sanity for web app developers.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "SAML Shield: Drop-in protection that works for any stack"

bklyn11201 — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:18:43 +0000

Any opinions you can share re opensaml for Java?

New comment by bklyn11201 in "How to Catch a Wily Poacher in a Sting: A Thermal Robotic Deer"

bklyn11201 — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:52:58 +0000

This is very sensible. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any states incentivizing demand. I suppose you could argue that license fees have not gone up at the CPI rate, so this is a discount of sorts. There are small attempts at encouraging kids to signup, but it's surprising how little dynamic control (doe tags, lotteries, etc) there is especially as most states have made the license process fully electronic.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 01 May 2025 14:34:05 +0000

I would love to hear from a Vanguard employee on their tech challenges, e.g., why is the client web interface significantly worse than competitors? Or is it purposeful? E.g., slow down, trade less?!

New comment by bklyn11201 in "The Difference Between Municipal Fire Trucks and Airport Fire Trucks"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 20:00:50 +0000

Do you think the custom-build approach predominant in the U.S. (where engines are designed to specific local needs) is a key factor behind the steep price hikes and lengthy lead times, as opposed to the more standardized, off-the-shelf models that seem common in Europe? Do you support the custom-build approach?

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows"

bklyn11201 — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 19:57:53 +0000

Music playing on Youtube in Chrome, Airpods in, the desktop and the sandbox/demo just don't work.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Gemini 2.5"

bklyn11201 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:07:23 +0000

Most of us care only about coding performance, and Sonnet 3.5 has been such a giant winner that we don't get too excited about the latest model from Google.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Google to buy Wiz for $32B"

bklyn11201 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:23:42 +0000

Ultimately they are buying the shares of all existing shareholders. Wiz tells Google who the shareholders are after all triggers of options to shares are resolved. Then Google wires each shareholder after the signatures are complete. No money should go into Wiz bank account. 10-25% of the cash is held back to make sure the company and key employees fulfill promises made as part of the transaction.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "iText PDF Library turns 25"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:29:21 +0000

The classname "lowagie" will live forever in the memory of Java developers, but we've all abandoned itext for the fork:

  https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF

New comment by bklyn11201 in "World-First Starlink Service on Boeing 777 Launched by Qatar Airways"

bklyn11201 — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:10:40 +0000

Doubling bandwidth available to an airplane is awesome of course, but it seems like people are expecting a giant step here and not a simple doubling. It will be most noticeable in decreased latency so much better for phone calls and Zoom meetings. But the use case of 1/3 of passengers streaming video to their personal terminal seems already solved with existing satellite providers.

"Starlink delivers up to 40-220 Mbps download speed to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable internet at the same time. With latency less than 99 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities."

From https://www.starlink.com/support/article/da6ca363-da23-c9dc-...

"SpaceX has revealed the official details of its Starlink satellite internet service for aviation, and it promises to deliver speeds of up to 350 Mbps for each airplane.... If Starlink Aviation can truly deliver on SpaceX's promises, that would make it a lot faster than other satellite options that only offer speeds of up to 100 Mbps per plane at most."

https://www.engadget.com/spacex-starlink-aviation-350-mbps-i...

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Tengine: Open-source web server, originated by Taobao, based on Nginx"

bklyn11201 — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:09:52 +0000

I agree that the Caddy team should hide all of the config adapters, the powerful JSON configs, and just focus on Caddyfile. I was extremely skeptical that I could convert 100+ Nginx Plus configs over to Caddyfile, but it was worth it. I moved 10k lines of Nginx config down to 1000 lines of Caddyfile. It is a big change, no question, but I've spent so much time on Nginx, Nginx Plus, Tengine, new forks, and moving away is the only sensible answer I could land on.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Tengine: Open-source web server, originated by Taobao, based on Nginx"

bklyn11201 — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 21:42:08 +0000

I'm more impressed these days with the pace, activity, and helpful support from the Caddy development team: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Berkshire Cuts Apple Stake by Almost Half in Selling Spree"

bklyn11201 — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 16:56:32 +0000

"Our favorite holding period is forever."

New comment by bklyn11201 in "First look at the upcoming Starlink Mini"

bklyn11201 — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:07:46 +0000

Everyone hates their ISP.

What are your current expectations around price and bandwidth as the Starlink service becomes more popular in your area?

If you have the opportunity to have a fibre or copper connection directly to your unit, it seems like a crazy decision to consider Starlink.

New comment by bklyn11201 in "Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S."

bklyn11201 — Thu, 16 May 2024 15:22:47 +0000

What do you think would happen to the venture-capital-funded tech ecosystem and the resulting tech salaries if this were to happen?