StackVM Demo Video #2: User login system, chat and sharing of virtual machines. | Hacker News Reader

StackVM Demo Video #2: User login system, chat and sharing of virtual machines.

catonmat.net

53 pointspkrumins14 comments

Argh! At the end of the video, he says "if you wish to try an early demo of stackvm, just visit stackvm.com", but there's no demo available -- the website says "In a few months, we'll start rolling out a free private demo. Sign up below and we'll send you an invite code when we're ready to launch."

I suppose the statement in the video technically correct. :-)

Oops, I wanted to say "If you wish to try an early demo of stackvm in a few months, visit stackvm.com to sign up." :)

Oh well. I'm only griping because it looks really neat, and I want to try it out. How come you don't want people playing with the current stackvm? Is it because you're going to add a lot of features, and you expect people to be disappointed by the current feature set, because it's not currently stable, or because of something completely different?

It's because we don't have that much hardware.

But you can try to get it running on your own. If you pull my current 'chat' stackvm branch [1], it's the one we used in the 2nd demo. You'd need qemu, node.js and a few node.js libraries.

[1] http://github.com/pkrumins/stackvm/commit/162bca6eba35db815f...

Very cool. Thanks!

Not at all! The reason we haven't rolled out our demo yet is because hosting virtual machines takes a lot of server power to do. All of our code is up on github, so anybody can give it a spin for themselves, provided they can get it all running.

http://github.com/substack/stackvm

http://github.com/pkrumins/stackvm

Personally I don't find these new features as exciting as the first ones. It is very much possible that I miss some use cases so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I think all interface elements could done in plain HTML, a "YouTube for virtual machines" with create, embed, and simple controls would be both useful and understandable. I find the chat and drag/drop a bit of a duplicated effort and it is anyway orthogonal to the main functionality.

With all that, best of luck with your next iterations and looking forward to trying it out.

Replies by paragraph:

1: These are pretty important features. Suppose you want to share a VM with your collegue and ask him for help. So you invite him to StackVM and share a VM with him.

2: It's all plain HTML already. Not sure what you mean.

3: Thank you!

Ok, it is not obvious from the video but it seemed that the chat functionality is built into your system and it seems like some JavaScript-based GUI similar to Meebo. It might be easier to let people copy/paste and send a link to each other via whatever chat they are already using. Implementing a chat system seems like a distraction here. Again, I can only speculate about the actual system, so maybe there's no point for me to suggest features until I can actually try out a first version.

Oh, it actually is JavaScript.

But I still don't understand why it should be plain HTML?

I already understood your service last time. Now just give me those damn machines :)

Soon!

Pretty cool stuff, pretty bad video.

Bad video. :(

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