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lindner

237 karma · joined April 6, 2011

I make the internet better.

More at https://1500wordmtu.com/

- machine readable stuff below -

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/lindner; my proof: https://keybase.io/lindner/sigs/Syik9hOQR46EQ_k-5VBBTi0yvilo_HNcwenNfd2PyHE ]

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lindner··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2025)

  Location: Burbank, California USA (Los Angeles Metro)
  Remote: Open to hybrid, in-office, remote
  Willing to relocate: High bar
  Technologies: See https://www.linkedin.com/in/plindner/details/skills/ for full list.  Golang, Typescript, Node,  Java, Python, Pandas, Cloud, Databases, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Technical Leadership, Strategy, System Dynamics, Software Development Lifecycle, Agile/SCRUM/XP, Open Source, Roadmaps, Protocols, API Design, System Architecture, Decentralization, Blockchain (non crypto), Privacy Engineering, Mentoring, and much much more.
  Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/plindner
  Email: lindner@inuus.com
  Github: https://github.com/lindner
Hi! Xoogler, Internet OG and energetic leader ready to jump into my next role. Whether it's a complex code base, team culture, or developer ecosystems I'm ready to take it on and launch with precision and speed!

Some highlights:

  - Hands-on software engineering leader with a deep understanding of systems, from high-level architecture to low-level implementation. 
  - Proven ability to design and deliver elegant solutions to complex problems.
  - Skilled in building and shipping high-volume services, pipelines, mobile apps, and ML models. 
  - Collaborative leader with experience in mentoring engineers and fostering strong teams. 
  - Dedicated and passionate about cultivating thriving developer communities and open-source projects.
lindner··on The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Confirmed! I was a big metalhead \m/ and was responsible for all the Unix-y things and spent a lot of time maintaining the community.

Other hostnames we had from bands and SciFi

huskerdu / nirvana / supernova / arcwelder

hafnhaf (big bonus points if you can figure this one out, lol!)

ashpool / tessier / joeboy / countzero

lindner··on The women who coined the expression 'surfing the internet' (2019)
It's interesting that this article didn't mention Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota. Jean Amour Polly would have definitely known about it, as back then the Gopher Team was all about creating Digital Libraries.

And Mark McCahill was a ardent Windsurfer, which resulted in this shirt, designed by his partner Wendy Jedeckila, way back in 1991!

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10274778...

lindner··on Gophie – modern gopher client for Windows, Mac, Linux
And here I am just waiting for the revival of Hyper-G :-D

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220349551_The_Hyper...

lindner··on Ask HN: How does one go about bringing a hardware product to market?
Also read about the saga of creating the Keyboardio 01:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyboardio/the-model-01...

They went through hell to get it manufactured. Shady companies, the whole nine yards!

lindner··on OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities
Wrong answer.. This effort does not scale. You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in.

GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion.

lindner··on OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities
One thing that someone might consider is working with Data Portability laws to allow for export of user contributed data to corporate map platforms.

I'd like to add my Google Maps contributions to OSM

I'm a Level 7 local guide there and was an active user of MapMaker back in the day..

lindner··on OpenSocial Specification
hi5 (RIP) was originally a dating site and Pivoted to a Social Network.

Most profiles fake? I can say for sure that's not true. I maintained Postgres/Memcache/Graph DBs and the write load was real.

That said hi5 did engage in address book scraping and other dark patterns that you'd rather not see these days.

Fun fact: hi5 had a featured photos/profiles section based on popularity. Folks that ended up there deleted their account by 5x or more due to the unwanted attention their 'popular' photos garnered....

lindner··on OpenSocial Specification
So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.

Some little known facts about OpenSocial

- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.

- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.

- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...

- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.

Fun times...

lindner··on Solid State: Minnesota's High-Tech History
This is a lot of history crammed into an hour. Goes from the early code-breaking work and the development of Drum Memory at Engineering Research Associates.

ERA merged with Sperry/Univac/Remington and then begat Control Data, Cray, Unisys and many others.

Also tune in for some history of the Oregon Trail by Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) and how that ties into the rise of Internet Gopher.

Oh and disclaimer: former Gopher Dude here.

lindner··on Spotify Form F-1
Still early days -- only 2300 artists on 296 labels so far; but growing. It fits somewhere between Soundcloud, Bandcamp and Spotify.

https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/

lindner··on Spotify Form F-1
Bandcamp is good if you know what you want and they do pay out really, really well.

If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model.

Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free.

Still ramping up but I'm excited about their prospects.

lindner··on The Californian Ideology (1995)
If you want some more depth to the Californian Ideology critique consider watching the Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

Hypernormalisation also covers some of the same ideas and is more recent.

https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation

lindner··on Patreon’s new service fee spurs concern that creators will lose patrons
No one has mentioned https://liberapay.com/ ?

They seem to deal with this problem by letting you fund a donation account and then disburse funds on a periodic basis. This is also similar to donor advised funds so I'm not sure why Patreon is doing this when other alternatives are available.

lindner··on How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
First install ipfs

then run:

  ipfs pin add QmZxWEBJBVkGDGaKdYPQUXX4KC5TCWbvuR4iYZrTML8XCR
and wait for a large amount of data to be pulled in....
lindner··on The world in which IPv6 was a good design
I thought this was what HIP was supposed to provide?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Identity_Protocol

Anyone know what's going on with those protocols?

lindner··on If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture?
I'm hoping that labels and musicians wise up and move to a coop model.

I'm liking what I'm seeing so far on http://resonate.is and am hopeful that those lessons will finally be learned.

lindner··on EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products
Speed Queen is making a go of it. Slogan is "Built Better to Last Longer."

https://speedqueen.com/

When my Frigidaire washer finally dies that's what I'm getting. I already injured myself replacing the pump once. And now that I've seen the cheap plastic parts used I don't have confidence it's going to last.

lindner··on How SSH got port number 22
For the record Gopher used port 150 for some time until we got a warning from Joyce that we had to change it.

Registering MIME types was also easy:

https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/msw...

lindner··on Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
Everyone should be using Matrix. Not just open source developers.

It's near feature parity with Slack and it's also one of the best IRC clients around. I used to run ERC in a tmux session just so I could stay connected and not lose messages. No more.

lindner··on A self-driving Uber ran a red light last December, contrary to company claims
Even though this was clearly a red light being run, it was this AI's first offense, so we should just give it a warning and a stern talking-to....
lindner··on LessPass: sync-less open source password manager
This looks a lot like https://getvau.lt/
lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
Regarding cuts, yes. We had to do with less year-over-year. From Hasselmo's 1991 State of the U address:

> """We lost at least $25 million to inflation, and $16 million through a base cut this year. In addition to a potential $25 million loss to inflation next year again, the Governor's vetoes of IT and systemwide special appropriations cut another $23 million in funding -- for which we are aggressively seeking full restoration."""

The mainframe teams had a harder time of things. For Microcomputers we were lucky - our hardware costs decreased and we had a deal with the University Bookstore to support their computer hardware sales.

That stuff was still expensive. Here's some educational pricing for a workstation with substantial education discount in 1994.

                                        list          discount   
  IBM model 25T                         $8495         $5400.00
         80Mhz upgrade                  $1500         $ 953.50
         64MB upgrade                   $             $2912.00
         2GB disk upgrade               $             $1463.00
                                                       -------
                                                      10728.50
lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
We liked Hyper-G because it had a bi-directional link model and the Harmony browser was able to render VRML.

Maybe 2016 will be the year VR takes off (again)

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
This is so true. You have to remember that finances were really tight at this time. The University budget was getting cut left and right throughout the history of Gopher's evolution. At one point there were plans to outsource everyone to the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute.

Of course in hindsight obtaining grants or forming a partnership with a non-profit org or an academic department might have been a better choice, especially for all the professional services requests.

edit: Also you have to remember that computing was a LOT more expensive then. I have old quotes for SparcStations and RS/6000s that were in the $20-40k range, even with an educational discount.. The Mac IIci's were not cheap either ~$5k when loaded up with RAM.

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
Wasn't familiar with this so I skimmed the IEEE paper:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7...

Interesting that it references the Legion OS work that Greg Lindahl spoke about at the Summit:

http://legion.virginia.edu/

At first glance Globe feels like a low-level solution for the problem. Mapping objects to binaries via a broker and all that.

The web we have today solved much of the issues in other ways. Anycast DNS and CDNs allow for content distribution. Storing state in cookies allows for Operational transform and other eventually consistent techniques.

Thanks for the reference and connecting a few dots!

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
In hindsight it was a stupid limiting move. Yes, we did get the Gopher T-shirt on MTV and a number of companies did end up paying. I was even loaned out for a few weeks to Schlumberger to assist with putting Gopher servers on Oil Platforms.

But it was optimizing for a local maxima. The damage was done, the community was broken.

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
The recent Decentralized Web Summit touched on a number of alternates:

http://www.decentralizedweb.net/

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) was discussed quite a bit. NameCoin was the most popular DNS replacement. ZeroNet was a really interesting project that does all of the above.

http://ipfs.io/ http://namecoin.info/ http://zeronet.io/

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
Not sure what dmd is implying here. But I will say that the committee was looking at using either X.500 or CSO protocols instead. Thus it would rely on a centralized authority and a publishing model that would not allow for individuals to run their own servers.

Also remember that this was the old internet where we didn't have NAT or really any firewalling. Most of the University of Minnesota's class B was open to the world at the time. In fact I used to send email directly to my workstation instead of the central mail host to avoid delays..

lindner··on The Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol
Lots of photos and quotes from the original Gopher team on this long form article.
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