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j4pe

886 karma · joined September 14, 2010

https://bonner.jp/
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j4pe··on Show HN: Strimpack – roll your own livestreaming portal, chat, subs, and forum
I would definitely read that post. I've had bad times in the past with video codecs.
j4pe··on Show HN: Strimpack – roll your own livestreaming portal, chat, subs, and forum
Wow, this is incredibly useful. I'd love to include an option for a self-hosted stream. I looked into setting up a streaming service as well, but decided to just release it with an iframe for the time being.

Thanks for sharing.

j4pe··on Show HN: Strimpack – roll your own livestreaming portal, chat, subs, and forum
I agree, one-click deploy would be the next step. Hadn't seen helm, I was debating between k8s and rancher.

If possible I'd like to avoid an opinionated hosting service like Google Cloud Launcher or AWS ECS, but I recognize that it's probably necessary. The only open source one-click deploy I've seen is a church service[1], but the author of that project accomplished it by with a separate app that provisions the necessary DO droplets via API and presenting the credentials to the user.

1: https://github.com/churchio/onebody

j4pe··on Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger App
I had to roll my own chat system recently because the open source solutions out there were surprisingly insufficient - nothing seems to support websockets. Looking forward to the French contributions to the ecosystem!

For instance: at the moment Matrix server implementations expect clients like Riot to long-poll for JSON about each room/chat they're connected to. Alternatives like Prosody's XMPP server implementation dropped websocket support in favor of BOSH years ago.

I wonder why this is - maybe there's just less developer interest since chat has gone mobile, and mobile devices break ws connections so frequently? But it's obvious that chat clients like FB messenger, whatsapp, slack, etc are establishing ws connections.

Strange.

j4pe··on A new blockchain cypherpunk media project
Looks rad. Can't wait to see what the narrative looks like!
j4pe··on Volunteers needed to teach web dev in NYC and Bay Area
Thanks for the info! Much appreciated.
j4pe··on Volunteers needed to teach web dev in NYC and Bay Area
Seems promising! I've been looking for opportunities like this. More information would be helpful, specifically:

* What does the time commitment look like? My work won't allow me to spend two full school days out of the office every week, but I can probably get away with teaching in the morning and starting late.

* What are your curriculum resources? Teaching scratch/pygame is a different story from trying to ram a CS101-style course into high schoolers' brains.

j4pe··on Master React Native Animations
As a RN user, I'd be interested in actually seeing a piece of the content before laying down $100 for it. Maybe it's super simple stuff I already know. Maybe it's full of really useful techniques that I'll get tons of value out of. Maybe it's old and the breakneck pace of RN has left it behind. I wouldn't be able to know from reading this site.

Also interesting to see this disappear off the front page within an hour with 45 points. Seeing that many upvotes with only one comment here, from the author, makes me think it probably got flagged for shenanigans.

j4pe··on ActivityPub: a federated social web standard
I really like the idea of a social web standard.

This seems like a very constricting protocol, though: the one-to-one correspondence between a user and a server means I need to individually post my activity to the "inbox" of everyone who wants to read it (or they poll my "outbox" - I'm not sure). Not a recipe for an efficient system. It's called ActivityPub, so this was clearly a design decision to meet the goal of being decentralized.

But I probably wouldn't implement this standard in a project unless I modified it a bit so that many clients could share a server.

j4pe··on AngelList acquires Product Hunt
Tone's a perfectly valid word when talking about a fuzzy line between insightful and inflammatory. Some people on e.g. Twitter might complain that justified bans were for mere "tone", but it'd be, what, a compositional fallacy(?) to toss out every argument that uses the word.

Regardless, I see what you mean with the state-changing here. It uses this topic as fodder to rekindle an ongoing internet fight. Something to be avoided. Fair enough.

Perhaps if you do this frequently enough your moderation tools can append the parent link + explanation to the comment body and save yourself some work - but then I guess that'd technically be editing user comments : )

j4pe··on AngelList acquires Product Hunt
I'm not happy with your detaching this comment. Thanks for noting that you did it, and why, but other inflammatory comments in this thread have been tempered by well-reasoned child responses. That's reasonable dialogue.

Detaching an on-topic comment for taking the wrong tone doesn't feel like fair discussion.

j4pe··on Show HN: GUN Starter App Boilerplate – An Easy Open Source Firebase Replacement
Wow, this looks really promising. I went with Firebase when it became too obnoxious to manage websocket concurrency. I didn't even know about gun.

I appreciate that the starter app doesn't try to make decisions for me about what I'm using clientside. Can you think of any reasons it wouldn't play nice with react-native?

j4pe··on Ask HN: What machine will you use next for development?
Didn't know they produced a developer edition. What languages do you work with? Are you mostly .NET?
j4pe··on Laid off (2008)
This is terrible advice. I've lived the digital nomad life the author describes and worked in the areas he names [1], and his recommendation of Bangkok's Khao San Rd as a nice place to relax is alarming enough to cast doubt on everything else he says.

Or perhaps he's just really into prostitutes.

Regardless, there's a kernel of good advice here: take the opportunity to do something crazy, something outside the norm when laid off. Write, build, draw, compete, whatever it is you love that your job prevented you from doing all the time. It'll be far more rewarding during and after your unemployment than drinking cheap beers in foreign cafes for six months.

1: http://j4p3.com/the-digital-nomad

j4pe··on Ruby Web Dev The Other Way
Excited to see this piece - an ambitious guide to developing with Plain Old Ruby and associated tools!

I ended up disappointed. The piece reads in a very partisan manner, makes questionable declamations of common Ruby tools & patterns, and throws in a lot of obnoxious asides about how bad other programmers are.

Examples: "RoR is a good starting point for a young developer." Its usage encompasses just a tad more than that. "MVC is not an architecture." Just factually untrue.

That said, the lower portions of the guide have some good content and the list items describing popular gems are helpful.

j4pe··on Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live
I rarely want to like a product more than I want to like Stockfighter, because of both the people involved and the underlying concept.

But there are a million other things I want to sink time into improving. Music, my Starcraft MMR, boxing. To finish a day hacking and coding, come home, and - for months, if I want good results - do more hacking and coding feels like an exhausting prospect. Even if the scenario is fun, it feels contrived.

I'm not presenting any solutions. Maybe I'm just not the target market, because I don't have the desire right now to code all day and then code some more. But I wonder how big that target market is?

j4pe··on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL
Not In My Country

--------------------

http://beta.notinmycountry.org/

It's a tool for organizations to fight corruption their community. Our main deterrents are rating/ranking of public officials (think teachers & tax collectors), responsibly controlled crowdsourcing of corruption reports, and campaign pages to raise money and awareness to litigate a case or assist victims.

Currently active in Uganda, talking with organizations in Ukraine, Kenya, Nigeria, and Liberia and with major global anticorruption organizations.

If you're reading this and you know about network security and/or I2P & onion server provisioning, leave a comment, I could use your help.

j4pe··on YC Fellowship
Hi, Matt and Kat. Cool to see the focus on helping more people start companies - I had written off an article bouncing around over the weekend alleging that rich families are the key to entrepreneurship [1]. Maybe it is true, but with enough YC fellowships it doesn't have to be.

Question: my organization is a nonprofit co-op. I know YC recently started accepting nonprofits - what's your opinion on them for YC fellowships?

--

1: http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-...

j4pe··on Investment Thesis for a University Incubator
What's the level of demand for spots in the incubator? It seems that a university-specific community would be small enough that optimizing for just one of the factors mentioned (teams, for instance) is enough to winnow the applicant pool to a reasonable size, if applied stringently enough. It's only when you get up to a YC level of demand where you need additional judgement criteria.

Or maybe the USC community is just huge?

j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
You're right : )
j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
Had a similar conversation with the guy who runs Raizlabs, and an original member of Pivotal, over the last few weeks. I definitely concede that there's a reason the market looks the way it does, and that it's not economically feasible to run a consultancy on gigs below a certain threshold, whether you're shelling out for Aeron chairs and massages or no.

We do call it a consultancy, and some clients certainly come in that centralized way, but it's also a resource for freelancers. Freelancers already have their own dealflow. We want to enable them to do more my offloading to folks they trust, not make them into de facto employees of some management team. That team is as small as it can be to keep things running, and in addition to hourly rates it's supported by the same commission that any job referrer would get for bringing in jobs.

For example, management right now consists mostly of me. Most of my income comes from coding on projects. But if a new job comes in through 'official' co-op channels managed by me, and I spend time screening & onboarding the client, I bill the co-op for that time.

With no office, no fulltime employees, and nobody who doesn't have billable hours, there's not a lot of overhead to worry about. The trick is keeping client experience and quality high while doing that, which isn't too terribly hard when you only have experienced, successful freelancers on board.

j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
Definitely not just privilege. The remote thing doesn't work unless somebody really, really good is doing the alchemy of transforming the client/user's intentions into architecture & design.
j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
Me too! At the moment it's an LLC run according to co-op rules through my PayPal account. Obviously this won't scale : )
j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
I'd been looking at things from the developer side of the table so long, I wanted to explore the problem that people who need contractors face.

Good point re: risk/reward. Guess I just decided to use a founder as my example and then ran with it. But I agree - clients paying you with revenue (or at least investment) are preferable.

j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
Who says we want to be a startup? We want management costs to be as low as possible. The trust network should be a free resource to make freelancing better for everybody, the co-op just houses it.

We're only looking for devs at the moment for the same reason everybody else is - we've got way, way more work than we can handle!

All surplus value to the creators of value : )

j4pe··on The co-op consultancy
Whoa!

For some context, I've spent the last ~2 years doing the digital nomad freelancing lifestyle, and it seemed a) unfair and b) like a really great market opportunity that so many senior 20x-type devs in different parts of the world are stuck outsourcing on crummy gigs while geographically privileged junior (and senior) devs pull down crazy-high rates. The market's not really solving the problem, everybody just seems to operate an outsourcing pipeline and vacuum value out.

I moved back to the States a while ago and got in touch with some friends to set this up - unqualified.io

Obviously it's still very early days : )

j4pe··on Startup advice, briefly
It it contradictory to recommend that a founder a) prefer making something a small number love to making something a large number like but also b) obsess over growth? I took these to be valid for different stages - first a), then b).

Obviously this is all very insightful and has been discussed before as these ideas were developed. Nice to have the 20k ft view in one place.

j4pe··on Ask HN: What up with these startup salaries?
Interesting story. I had a similar one, but I was traveling while I did contract work and ended up meeting an array of these overseas guys. The best contract devs rarely end up in the outsourcing factories that would be hired by companies like your client; they're independent. Some friends and I set up a co-op last year; I bring in a lot of US work on commission.
j4pe··on US Links North Korea to Sony Hacking
Noticing incentive structure common to a government can be helpful in making judgements like that, but I'd wager that anthropomorphizing an organization with >20k employees as a single persona would do more harm than good to my predictive ability. I was asking more in a technical sense - are these comments coming from somebody with no knowledge of network security, or from an expert? Regardless, we now have much more information.
j4pe··on US Links North Korea to Sony Hacking
I meant that the probability of losing a civil suit, in the event that the threatened disaster occurred, was high enough to impose heavy cost on showing the film. Criminal liability would of course fall to the perpetrator.

In retrospect, I was wrong - it was the theater chains who would be exposing to themselves to that risk, so they (very logically) cancelled their showings. As a result Sony was forced to pull the film's theater release.

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