HN Explorer

18 comments

[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread
foz
I don't see the value in this service since markup conversion is built in to so many free libraries and services. What is the use case for this and who needs such as service?
richo
+1 I wasn't aware that parsing markdown was "Expensive"

Kramdown does it in pure ruby, and stupid fast as far as I can tell, and that's single threaded with the GIL.

sinzone
There was a typo. The pricing has been updated.
richo
I meant expensive computationally.
[dead] nijiko
It's not the calls that are expensive, it's storage, caching, and the architecture that is expensive.
sinzone
Of course, but that is part of the debate build vs buy. For every cloud API there is almost always an OSS that does the same thing.

But you'll have to maintain it, scale it, etc..that's the beauty of cloud APIs. You buy, and leave the boring part to others.

killercup
It's like http://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/ but also for textile and money?
[dead] nijiko
Hello, owner here, somewhat, but we plan to expand it further than just markdown and textile in the future. We just launched so if you have feedback let us know. It's good to know that people are confused by what the point of this is so we can better align our vision and work out the kinks.

Thank you for taking a look and your comment.

digeridoo
1.5 cents for a simple function call?
sinzone
Hi, the pricing has been updated. There was a typo:

$0.0149 per extra

The caching system and DB are the main costs

kablamo
The interesting part to me is they are selling their service via mashape.com which is new to me. Its a neat marketplace for "cloud APIs". Some of the APIs are free or freemium. Here is a list of the most popular APIs:

  - Facial recognition API
  - Yahoo weather API
  - Multilingual sentiment analysis of text
  - IP utils
  - Barcode / QR code generator
  - DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info
  - Bitly url shortner
  - Whois
https://www.mashape.com/explore/All?page=1&filter=popula...
ruswick
It's an incredibly expensive (1.5 cent per call) solution to what appears to be a non-issue. There are a myriad of open-source Markdown parsers, most of which are incredibly fast and easy to implement. What is the issue being solved, and why does it warrant such a high price?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
newobj
huh? this is like selling a strtok web service. i must not be understanding the target audience or intended use case -- what is it?
languagehacker
C'mon, guys. Lightweight markup languages are hard. That's why there's the word "weight" in their name. It's obviously better to send data like this through the cloud, because it's going to be really, really, really expensive for your application servers to compute the markup transformation. Sending data to the cloud is totally free, and relying on remote services is way, way easier than hosting a library. Way easier. Someone has to implement the API for that vendor library. Them shits is hard.

Let's not forget that for every second you wait on this spectacular deal, you're literally bleeding money. While you deliberate, thousands upon thousands of customers lose their shit over the fact that your site doesn't have support for textile. They're rage-quitting your site, and their shopping cart was full. Did you hear that? Boom, you just lost a sale because you don't have Markdown on your site. You could have Markdown on your site. Just sign up now, before you miss out.

fusiongyro
If you buy this, you're automatically demoted from programmer to "computer guy."
apathetic
Way too early for an April fool's joke.