progrium

yes! there is a ticket for this in github

it only works with http right now, actually

Ah, memories.

Yeah, if you wanted to make the effort. Ease of use was definitely the primary metric being optimized here. Perhaps it's not as important to have a short, speakable URL; in which case it could be a SHA1 hash or something. Maybe URL shorteners can play the above role if needed. What do you think?

Correct, but I'd also like to point out the self-taught freelancers, small web dev shops, and/or hobbyist hackers that like to build things in a way that's comfortable for them. I wrote that in that way ("we're all starting to see") because it's something I've noticed in the real world (even here in the Valley) that is not necessarily common knowledge yet.

I completely understand. Unfortunately, I'm too busy building cool shit to market it like crazy. I look for clever ways to market, like getting my company to promote it or including it in presentations.

I know it's human nature to like prettier things, I'm just surprised when localtunnel was posted on Hacker News originally, it did not get as much attention as showoff.io and it does the EXACT same thing. I guess I'm disappointed in the community for that?

Sorry to bring up NIH so willy-nilly. Ultimately, you guys did an inspiring job and from what I can tell of implementation you did it even more elegantly than I did.

The whole simultaneous invention thing is really interesting to me. It was covered in two great books, What Technology Wants and Where Good Ideas Come From. Both seem to imply that the more utility something has in the "adjacent possible", the more likely it will be invented by many people in roughly the same time period. This actually quite frustrates me about technology! What's worse is that this phenomenon will only increase over time. And because it's about utility (never mind the illusion of unique "UX" of products now), there is little room for expression or creating something unique to you that matters.

I guess I can't blame you for philosophical differences. Personally, I do a lot of research before investing my time in building something. Not only do I try to avoid NIH, but I prefer investing my time in clever and useful things not done before -- I tend to think I'm good at producing novel things. I suppose others doing something similar a year later and getting more attention comes with the territory.

Now... open source vs commercial, that's a whole different discussion (although probably not what you'd expect).

You're both right. However, if I didn't complain as much, my project probably wouldn't have doubled in GitHub watches. ;)

It's great to have the idea validated, especially since mine and showoff.io's user experience are nearly identical. And this will force me to make a pretty homepage and add features.

So now that I've complained, I don't think I can complain much more.

I care about my work and it being used and contributed to if people are interested in it. I don't care about money, which is why it's open source and run as a free service. My code is MIT and I would love it if people took my code and made a pay-for service like this with it... but instead, they (to be fair, probably unknowingly) duplicate effort and obscure my work.

If a fancy website is all I need, I guess that's what I'll be doing this weekend. And I guess SSL and CNAME support...

Check out localtunnel which is open source and does the same thing: https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel

I feel that localtunnel was also executed quite well, is free and open source, and has been around for a while now: https://github.com/progrium/localtunnel

Where are my buckets of money? Oh yeah, I don't care.

This guy is not a Programming, Motherfucker: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355448

lol, webhooks

As one of the founders of Hacker Dojo, I'd like to say: well put.

Although I'd like to make clear the majority of our funding comes from member dues, which is not unlike most hackerspaces.

I bet in 1997 people were asking the same about Apple.

Aren't SHDH lightning talks exactly that though?

A friend regarding Hacker Dojo not being mentioned:

  well, he hasn't visited it.... ever, right? heh
  i mean, i guess you can't blame him
  it's a really long way from yc to the dojo

[Google Maps has it at 5 minutes away walking distance]

Define "slightly-more-corporate".

Um, but that's just seeing the Bay Area. Sure, that's worthwhile, but what about that makes it the Silicon Valley? The mountains, the houses, the downtowns -- those have very little to do with what Silicon Valley is.

I'm surprised SuperHappyDevHouse and Hacker Dojo were not mentioned. Many people, including local press, describe both as microcosms of Silicon Valley culture.

If you want to see Silicon Valley, sure, go to Palo Alto and drive 280... but if you want to experience what Silicon Valley is about, you should go to a SuperHappyDevHouse or visit Hacker Dojo.

Considering that Twilio is purely a platform company (even more so than Amazon Web Services, since they primarily have an online store to run), this seems very unlikely if not entirely impossible.

ReverseHTTP is just a spec and not a very popular one. Localtunnel is based on SSH tunneling which has been around longer than ReverseHTTP, especially for this particular purpose. And while Hookout is a great tool, I'm not sure why it was made specific to Ruby Rack...

Especially good for debugging webhooks, such as with PubSubHubbub.

You need what I got.

Notify.io has had webhooks and so much more. But yes, yay webhooks.

I agree with all these points. Some of them are out of practicality since it's not fulltime.

Btw, telephone means actually calling you via telephony, not mobile. However, an iPhone client is planned.

Obviously marketing something like this is hard. Notifo starts with a niche so it's easy. We did too: desktop notifications. But hey hey, we also do a lot more.

Anyway, we are a lot more badass, address some problems Notifo doesn't, but we just don't have a mobile client yet. Womp womp. We'll see who can be the better platform though...

The idea is to delegate responsibility of paying for infrastructure resources (SMS) from the developer to the user. At $5/mo for 160 messages, that's roughly what you would be pay using Twilio directly at 3 cents a message. The unused texts do count as profit, but most of my other services are free so I'm hoping this might help support them.

Both good points. We're on it.

Yeah, that was one of the original sets I wanted it to support, but I think they were missing some important ones.