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natural219

2,315 karma · joined May 30, 2010

Decentralization wonk. Seeking alternatives to Twitter/Facebook.

http://decentralize.tech

submissionscomments
natural219··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
Hey, sounds great. How do I contact you?
natural219··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2025)
Location: Kansas City, MO, USA -- but 100% enthusiastic about relocation

Remote: Sure, but hybrid/in-office roles are fine

Willing to relocate: Yes!

Technologies: React, Typescript, Ruby/Rails, Node.js/express -- any modern web application framework is easily within my wheelhouse, especially in the LLM era.

Resume: https://cjohnson.io/assets/files/resume.pdf

Email: chris@cjohnson.io

natural219··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
Hey. Love this posting man. I sent in an application :)
natural219··on Hacker News for Gamedev
"A glorified subreddit for HN readers..."

At some point, I wonder if `dang` would support this? It seems like a good idea. For more topic-specific higher volume news items.

natural219··on Pixelfed Hit 500K Users
This is incredible.

119 million posts, x ~10MB per picture,

is like 1,200 petabytes? 1.2 exabytes?

Am I missing something here... this seems very impressive.

natural219··on Show HN: Map of YC Startups
Wow. This is amazing. Extremely practical to use, I'm glad I checked H.N. yesterday.
natural219··on Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?
Horribly, lol. I think 6-7 out of 10? I have no idea what these classifications mean though.
natural219··on Open source AI is the path forward
AI moderators too would be an enormous boon if they could get that right.
natural219··on Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness
Funny. I just tried to post my yearly attempt to communicate with people on Reddit, which got taken down immediately by the auto-moderator.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1c0nuy6/it_is_impos...

It's infinitely sad that there's no place to just connect with people on the internet anymore. My post got 6 comments and a DM within the first minute, before the post got taken down. These people could have been new friends.

I've been through this cycle so many times I have long given up on trying to post on the internet. Logging on to find people and share thoughts only to be met with this massive wall of context and janitorial standards. I gave up like five years ago.

This is to say that the whole debate between "social media causes anxiety" and our landscape of social media causes anxiety makes this debate way too coarse. Getting on the internet between 2005-2012 felt happy, free, and was just a wellspring of community and connection. Post-2013 it's been a nightmarish hellscape on every platform.

natural219··on HATEOAS: Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State
I mean, you kinda answered the question there yourself. The whole REST paradigm (spearheaded by the Ruby on Rails community) was strongly influenced and modeled after the HATEOAS paper and ideas. There's some talks and papers about it but I'd have to dig them up, but basically the working reference implementation that shaped the web for years is here: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html
natural219··on New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
I don't think anyone is trying to fork Dwarf Fortress and sell it on a different platform.

Actually, even if they did, they would likely have proved the market to the founders earlier; maybe lighting a fire under their feet to monetize quicker. The current renaissance of DF via the Steam release could have happened five years earlier -- inspiring five more years' worth of other business-focused indie developers...

You catch the drift. I like the OP's system hah.

natural219··on USGS estimates at least 45% of U.S. tap water contain forever chemicals
Incredible map of PFAS hotspots in the article -- very notable applying the "is this just a population map?" test, specifically look at the West coast in comparison to the rest of the country. It seems dramatically lower out west.
natural219··on AI Canon
Seems like a good list, I enjoyed the comic explainer of stable diffusion and learned a thing. Thank you to the authors and a16z for publishing this :).
natural219··on AI Canon
That's the point lol. Hacker news guidelines clearly state... sigh whatever
natural219··on JPMorgan Chase and Co tracks employees to dystopian extents
Bridgewater famously had pretty obscene levels of tracking and monitoring and were open about it, lauding it as part of their company culture. This seems like the same type of thing.
natural219··on Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
If people think that 100%-fake papers, with completely made up data and process are bad... wait until people learn how bad 30%-fake papers are, with real cherry-picked data and absurd levels of p-hacking :p
natural219··on After 20 Years as a Prosecutor in Illinois, I Quit
I believe he is referencing the passage of a major, controversial Illinois state bill that passed just five months ago, eliminating cash bail among a host of other enforcement restrictions against known criminals. So we wouldn't see any solid empirical data from this policy for the next 1-2 years at minimum.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/illinois-un-safe-t-act

natural219··on FUTO – An independent software lab and grant fund
You'll be happy to know that they've partnered with Louis Rossmann and are offering free repair workshops in Austin: https://futo.org/workshops/
natural219··on The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
This is completely irrelevant to the article and response
natural219··on The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
I've had a good heuristic in my life of simply writing off people that go on lengthy, cuss-filled rants about how bad something is without soberly explaining the technical components, offering alternatives, etc. This author seems no different.
natural219··on Large-scale study reveals autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten
Thanks for sharing. This is an intriguing article and I'm very impressed with the depth of research, site design, and logical debate quality of the several paragraphs I've read (so far). I've been looking for great takedowns of the anti-PUFA advice (I love fatty fish and omega 3s!) so looking forward to reading the rest.

It's worth noting that this site appears to be the same type of "extreme diet camp" that the author pokes fun at. He appears to be a vegan (https://twitter.com/TheNutrivore) and advocate for pro-vegan views. Overall he seems to have the same epistemology MO as, eg., Ray Peat -- a cranky obsessive lay-person who primarily blogs at length for topics that interest him. I picked another article off his site at random and his own biases become quite apparent (https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-systematic-appraisal-of...).

The above preamble has no bearing on the PUFA question! I personally love cranky obsessive bloggers and genuinely look forward to reading more from this site. Open and honest debate, ftw.

natural219··on Nostr – Decentralized social network
I had the chance to speak to some Nostr devs this weekend. My impression (like other mentions below) is that it seems less like a social network than it does a messaging protocol.

As with all tech protocols, there's potential for more sophisticated things to be built on top of them, but I didn't get a clear sense that Nostr people are interested or serious about product engineering to make this a "Twitter killer" or some other popular buzzword.

There was an interesting discussion on how to limit spam in distributed networks, the primordial problem of any social web endeavor. The two poles seem to be relying on "financial incentives" vs "identity gatekeeping". For those that believe in the power of the free market to regulate tricky social problems, I think Nostr has a lot of promise.

natural219··on Don’t record your social life on an append-only social network (2022)
Is there a logical way to interpret this other than "don't use the internet"?
natural219··on Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?
I bought a Sceptre a few years ago for this reason. Best TV I’ve owned, no smart features, great price and picture quality.
natural219··on First Impressions of Bluesky's Brand New iOS App
Jay Graber has been a respected leader in the decentralization scene since at least like 2017, alongside other core members. I trust them.
natural219··on Ask HN: Is there a TV on the market without “Smart TV” features?
Second this. I bought a 65" Sceptre TV a year or two ago for this exact reason, it works great, picture quality is awesome, and it was less than $600-700 IIRC. I plug in a chromecast for netflix etc but it's nice to know I can unplug it any time and just use HDMI if I want to.
natural219··on Snap launches its first drone
I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.
natural219··on EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web
I 100% get that, and fwiw I'm fully supportive of any scheme that eventually works out to fund traditional app development.

I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world.

I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their money where their mouth is to translate the windfall from the Filecoin IPO into projects that make more sense to my traditional webapp brain, like the latest Matrix. So genuine kudos to everyone involved, I'm happy that this model exists and the ecosystem does eventually deliver in some cases.

natural219··on EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web
You absolutely don't need some crypto-based financial scheme to run decentralized web applications. Just some kind of open standard & a set of motivations and incentives to keep the system running and improving.

American ideas of decentralization tend to make the root assumption that financial incentives are the only thing that drive human motivation, so almost every decentralization project gets "blockchained" eventually, at which point progress on the core standards or applications gets halted because the attention, focus, and energy shifts to figuring out the myriad, predictable problems with adding "operate a global financial system" to your JIRA tickets.

I don't really know any way out of this bottleneck for Americans; they're simply too obsessed with complicated financial schemes to make clear progress on usable dApps.

I have slightly more hope for Europeans; if you notice the Matrix project has been chugging along for years, with millions of users, and is poised to actually compete with big tech products via traditional funding and company operation, like normal people.

natural219··on Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon
The fact that people buy into any of these excuses (Russian manipulation, Covid misinformation) as anything but an excuse to shut down competition and consolidate control is utterly beyond me.

Read literally a single history book, people.

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