snisarenko

Fair point. I wasn't sure what LEO stands for (I guess low earth orbit satellites). Wireless competition is tough as well, because you have to purchase spectrum from the gov't.

Maybe not all wireless technologies ??? I am not an expert on wireless.

Still wired internet has advantages over the other technologies (stability and latency), so I am merely suggesting an effective way to compete on wired internet can help significantly (its path of least resistance from a technology standpoint, but not from a political standpoint)

I disagree. Local loop un-bundling does not solve the problem. You are still back to the same situation. A single pipe can only handle so many providers, thus limit local competition to 2 or 3 providers. So either all will collude, or the one with the deeper pockets will under-price the other ones until they go out of business. (sure you can add more "regulation", but this just throwing duct tape on a broken system)

Local infrastructure will always be a winner takes all economic game. So its pointless to play it. (side-note: Elon Musk's Starlink might change the economic game)

The only way for people to "vote with their wallets" on local communication infrastructure, is BEFORE the winner "settles in", not AFTER.

A bid system, allows 100's of companies to compete to set the price for 2-3 years. Rather than 2-3 companies competing to set the price for perpetuity. It also creates an incentive to produce quality service, because they will be competing for another contract in 2 to 3 years (i.e. they have 2-3 years to demonstrate they are a competent provider).

Creating traditional competition in local infrastructure is difficult if not impossible for several reasons

- Last mile sections of the city will always have winner takes most (customers) situation, making the lines built by the other providers redundant and wasteful

- There are only so many communication lines you can put on poles, and underground, before the people start complaining about ugliness, and never ending construction.

I think a good approach for local communication infrastructure is ownership by community/local-goverment and private contract bidding on construction, maintanance and support

- Companies bid on building new infrastructure,

- Companies bid on running & maintaining existing infrastructure (usually a 2-3 year bid contract that sets fixed rate for all customers for 2-3 years). At the end of each contract a new bid goes out, but the same company can "win" the bid

- People in the community vote on the bids. The POLITICIANS don't get to pick the winning bid

They commenter isn't saying you should pick a job just because of money. But you should also avoid a job that is taking advantage of you, by giving you absolute crap compensation, by "selling" you ISO's as something valuable, when in most cases it isn't because of the constraints.

We all want to work on things that are cool, but we also have bills to pay, and retirement to prepare for.

Hey man. Thank you for publishing this article, and doing actual journalism (researching the actual data, and giving people opportunity to respond). I've been recommending lambda school to my friends, only based on their marketing. I may stop doing that now.

This is very generous, to donate your time like this. Just wanted to say you are doing a very good thing.

I am building a few aggregators if you want to explore the fediverse without registering first.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

I've mentioned my similar thoughts in another comment on hackernews but will repeat them here.

I think ActivityPub & federation looks like promising due to cost of cloud hosting going down every year. Thus allowing self-hosting to become easy and affordable for a lot of people.

However there are other trends that need to continue for federation to succeed.

- Continued competition in cloud hosting market not just in US, but globally

- Automation & simplification of monitoring, upgrades, and security patching

- Reducing the complexity of the federation software. Mastodon and Pixelfed are great, but I feel like the feature creep can make them difficult to maintain while self-hosting. Less software complexity = less upgrades, less package dependencies, less security issues

I think the issue is more nuanced than you think. I understand where you are coming from.

BUT

By your own logic, hackernews should be treated as a publisher, and not a platform.

Hackenews is a forum where the moderators restrict discussion to specific topics to keep discussion high quality. But I consider them a platform and not a publisher.

Or for example a car discussion forum, bans anyone who wants to discuss airplanes. Again, I would still consider them a platform and not a publisher.

Hey man, I didn't mean no offense. I don't disagree, I respect people who want privacy. It just seems like you are a person who takes their privacy "extra" seriously, and I just wasn't sure if it was a joke or not (most people on the internet have an email address). There is nothing wrong with people who go the next level of privacy, just don't encounter them very often so kudos to you on that front.

I understand your frustration from a privacy perspective. But I did not create mastodon. You may want to submit an issue on mastodon's github to ask for a non-email registration setting, and make your case why its important for privacy.

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

But I also want to say that you are an outlier of the average user on the internet (most of whom have an e-mail address). I am sure that the guy who created mastodon, didn't add e-mail in the registration out of spite for privacy. He was following a common patter for registrations that works for 95% of people on the internet.

Going back to the discussion of creating anonymous email address. I didn't know that proton mail requires phone number (haven't used it before, just heard good things about it). I did not realize the state of email registrations across the web (haven't had create a new email account in a while). Your last option would be to just use those throw away email services, that generate a random email address, and let you receive some emails on that address.

Here is an example: https://temp-mail.org/

Ok .... I am doing my best here, and assuming this is a comment in good faith, and not a troll post (following HN guidelines and all).

So, you are trying to join a federated social network. But, you feel that providing an email (literally the first federated social network on the internet) is a burden ? And you feel this is a burden because you don't want to give up a phone number to get an email account.

I believe protonmail has a free tier, and doesn't ask for a phone number:

https://protonmail.com/signup

And you can also pay for the premium tier with bitcoin.

https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/paying-with-bi...

So hopefully that gets you out of a pickle where you want to have an email while maximizing privacy.

I am a bit confused by your question. I only ask for email if you want to be notified about a launch, or provide feedback. Both of those use-cases are difficult without a point of contact.

Hey guys. If you just recently discovered the fediverse, and feel the friction of exploring it. I am working on a couple of aggregators for mastodon, pixelfed, and maybe eventually peertube.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

This is pretty great! This tool lies in the sweet spot between no-code and low-code. Gonna be trying it out for my next project.

See my comment above. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22315742

Sure. I've glossed over the fact that this is a legal stunt. But you can read my comment from the perspective of a devil's advocate arguing against them in court.

Their argument in front of a court boils down to - "counting from 1 to 68 billion is creative effort worthy of copyright". My counter argument is that its not. And that its obviously so.

I am not saying copyright law is great in it's current state. I am sure the LETTER OF THE LAW is ambiguous and ever changing for the worse (see Disney). And I am sure THE INTERPRETATION OF THE LAW has been arbitrary in a lot of court cases.

BUT, if you believe in THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW - that a person can reap financial benefits for a certain period of time if they have produced something "uniquely creative".

Then you should agree that this legal stunt doesn't contribute much of anything to the legal debate.

As other commenters have pointed out, this is gimmicky, shallow and clickbaity. All that they did was count from 1 to 68 billion.

Any piece of digital data can be converted to a number, and if we apply their argument then you can be "creative" by just counting numbers.

But we all know that's not true. Once the search space becomes that big, you can't actually "enjoy" any of these melodies. Because you can't listen to all of them in your lifetime, the ones that you WILL hear are going to be awful 99.999 percent of the time.

Hence, the "creative" process is navigating this search space, and figuring out which melodies are catchy. Better yet, trying to figure out how or why our brain decides to like or not like a melody.

I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver (development and web browsing) for 2 years on a Dell XPS Laptop. I have not run into any critical issues. It's been pretty stable, and "just works", and has regular updates. And running docker is pretty easy.

I think you have less issues with linux if you pick the right hardware. Dell XPS laptops and thinkpad laptops I think have the best reputation for being stable at running linux.

I dual boot my laptop with windows 10. Last time I booted into Windows, my CPU, RAM, and Network were all maxed out (probably some update, & virus checking crap). I couldn't even use the computer. I don't think I can ever go back to windows for daily use. I use a separate windows laptop for gaming.

Documentation!

I am willing to go out on a limb and say that as much as 25% of software engineering time worldwide is wasted due to poor documentation.

It's an asymmetric problem too. If someone benevolently funds a team of engineers for a couple of months to write great docs (with detailed examples) for top 500 libraries, frameworks, APIs. They could increase global productivity of software engineers by %25 percent.

If you want to take mastodon for a spin without having to register, or browse through instances, I built a simple aggregator:

https://mastodonia.club

I think its too early to tell if it will be sustainable economically.

I believe it will be sustainable, due to cloud hosting costs going down every year. If the trend continues federation/self-hosting might become the default way to operate software services (even non-social stuff). However, another trend that needs to continue is automation of monitoring and security updates.

In the meantime, if you want to take the fediverse for a spin. I am working on a few aggregator projects to help you explore the fediverse with minimal friction.

https://mastodonia.club

https://pixelfed.club

If you want to explore mastodon content without browsing through 100's of instances (and without registering for one), I built a simple aggregator

https://mastodonia.club

I am planning to add more features if people find it useful.

Also If you have hard time figuring out which mastodon instance to join, I am working on a mastodon aggregator, to help you browse through the content without registering.

https://mastodonia.club

That's a fair point. I am definitely not trying to anger the fediverse community. I just want to make it more discoverable. I was assuming since mastodon instances have public apis, and public "explore" feeds, creating an aggregator was no different than creating a mastodon instance with a different ui. I am also being pretty respectful in terms of how frequently I ping the api. I also include contact information the user-agent that hits the api. I would respect any instances request to stop aggregating.

Also this tool is linked directly in the mastodon documentation https://mastovue.glitch.me/

Hey, I am working on a mastodon aggregator, which can help with exploring instances and figuring out which one to join. It should be launching soon!

https://mastodonia.club

I stand corrected. Looks like there is a low-code tool db:

https://www.g2.com/categories/low-code-development-platforms...

They also have a no-code tools db

https://www.g2.com/categories/no-code-development-platforms

You can find a good database of no-code tools and tutorials at:

https://www.makerpad.co

There is no good database for "low-code" tools. I've collected a whole bunch of "low-code" tools in my notes. So I am planning of creating a database for "low-code" tools (a complement to makerpad). You can follow me on twitter @anton_codes to find out when it launches.

Here are few from my notes:

https://www.8base.com/

https://hasura.io/

https://www.jexia.com/en/

https://www.netlify.com/products/functions/

https://locklock.io/

https://remaketheweb.com/

I am currently trying out logdna. Their charting is underwhelming.

I built: https://www.emailmynotes.com/

Its a simple hack, and a niche use case. But I enjoyed building it.