vishnu_ks

Hey, Zulip offers our Standard plan[1] for free for communities like yours. There is no restriction on message history. Plus the unique threading model of Zulip makes it easier to run communities[2]. If you folks are interested feel free to create an organisation in zulipchat.com and mail us at support@zulipchat.com for activating Zulip standard. We support exporting the data from Slack as well :)

[1] https://zulipchat.com/plans/

[2] https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/

I think they should at least do some A/B testing on whether including a .deb package increases the downloads or upgrades significantly to justify the time and cost.

hmm. I upgrade my VSCode pretty much all the time they do a release because they provide a .deb file. Installing the upgrade is as simple as double-clicking on the file. I am sure pretty much all the users of Ubuntu and Debian are capable of doing a Firefox upgrade if they really wanted to. But no harm in making it easier.

I don't understand why Firefox doesn't include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can't Firefox do that as well?

The main reason why we moved to CircleCI was due to the rising test flakes and outages in TravisCI. Also, TravisCI comes with a lot of crap pre-installed which can be a pain sometimes. With CircleCI you can provide your own custom Docker image for running the build. If the build fails there is even an option to SSH into the build to debug. This issue has a lot of details on what it takes to migrate an open source project from Travis CI to CircleCI if you are interested. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/7748

So the reason why Zulip doesn't use React for the web app is that there was no React(at least not available for public) when Zulip started out in 2012. The Javascript frameworks which did exist in 2012 no longer exists or is not used by anyone anymore. Zulip still uses jQuery with some internal abstractions. The reason why Zulip decided to use React Native for mobile app was probably it was much easier to have a single codebase than maintaining a different codebase for Android and iOS. Same reason for using Electron for Desktop app. That said we have been talking about the possibility of using a Javascript framework for Zulip web app for a while now but we have not found a good enough reason to make the switch yet. See the following link for more details https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/6-frontend/topic/vue.2...

They seem to have reuploaded the video in YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc

YouTube link for folks who are having buffering issues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYam1GqtoLY

Even though the website seems to have a history of plagiarism I don't think they named the website after HN. By going through their about us section it looks like they started the website in 2010 as a cybersecurity and hacking news platform. The Hacker News is kind of a no-brainer name for this kind of website. Also THN seems to be an Indian website. I think HN was not at all popular outside the Silicon Valley in 2010. So no reason for them to name the website after HN that had an extremely small and passionate userbase. There is a good chance that they may not have even known about HN when they started THN. The name defintely has confused a lot of people though. Even Elon Musk seems to be following THN over HN in Twitter :)

A lot has to be accounted for his brain which is quite different from ours

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14503404

Probably this might help you understand why Alex does this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14503404

The implementation is neat. But I honestly don't get the point of this site. The shortened URL is of the form http://t.bdaily.club/34fe6.

When you open http://t.bdaily.club/34fe6 the server redirects you to a file in IPFS which has a javascript script tag to redirect further to the actual URL.

My question?

* What's the point of this service when you can directly redirect to the actual URL instead of redirecting to the IPFS file?

* Users can also alternatively share the IPFS file directly (eg https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmfFs8v6hXK258ov9bXGuqzUVsJ...). But the problem is IPFS URL/hash is bigger than the urls itself in most cases. I think the point of URL shortner is to have a small URL. This is more like a URL enlarger service.

* Most importantly someone has to seed the IPFS files so that the links keep working. What's the incentive for the website owners to seed the files for free? There is no guarentee that the URLs will work if someone open it after a month or year.

> The problem with centralised URL shorteners is that the site can shut down for any reason.

Yeah. The same problem is with IPFS as well. Someone has to seed the content of files in IPFS. If no one is seeding, the file will not be available. I don't honestly think anyone else is going to seed the URL files other than the people who run this site. If this site goes down everything does down as well.

> It doesn’t make money, it isn’t important to the maintainer, there’s a db failure etc.

If this site doesn't make money it's not important for the maintainer of this site to seed the files as well :)

Reminds me of the site Mahalo.com which used to pay users for posting answers. Anyone heard of them lately?

I think you missed the point. Alex Honnold didn't woke up one day morning and decided to climb El Cap in the afternoon. He has been preparing for the climb for almost 7 years. He memorized each and every step he would make during the climb. He even abandoned his first solo attempt because the conditions didn't seem to be right. It was never a do or die situation. He wore the same set of clothes throughout the practice sessions and the climb. Everything was done to minimize the risk. For me Alex Honnold's solo is an example of what a Human can achieve with the right amount of practice and preparation.

Alex Hannold's Ted Talk on how he free soloed El Cap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iM6M_7wBMc

Another favorite one of mine was Jimmy Chin talking about how they shot Free Solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq_vvnxZ6I0

If you enjoy this article you will find the Zulip project's commit guidelines interesting as well :)

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/version-...

I had no idea about this. Thanks! For anyone, curious here are the countries you can travel with a US visa.

https://www.visatraveler.com/blog/travel-20-countries-visa-f...

Imagine the things that are waiting in the Universe to be discovered.

I think plenty of people knows Slack has threads. Threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations. Once you get used to the threading model of Zulip its hard to tolerate threading model like Slack which is really inefficient and time wasting.

> So it sounds like Zulip's approach is separate, isolated "organizations", like slack, just hosted on the same server.

Correct. But Zulip does allow to import settings, profile picture etc from an existing account during signup if the email remains the same.

Yeah. But this is not yet another social network isn't? Very few people would be willing to pay $5 a month compared to the number of people using Facebook or Twitter. Moderating this website is definitely a doable task.

You can reference years old messages.

For example https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/3-backend/topic/Vagran...

Yeah. But threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations.

https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/

I would also like to know. I initially thought it was katacode.

It is also the advantage of webtorrent. All a person need to seed a file in webtorrent is open a browser window. You can't rely on users of your application to start an IPFS server and seed the files.

If you want to seed a file for long term you can use the webtorrent-cli or webtorrent app as well.

So for keeping something in ipfs you need to have a server running ipfs seeding the files. You can use ipfs.js but it still needs to connect to an IPFS server. Webtorrent don't require any server running. All you need is the webtorrent.js file. That said you can still use a third party service like Infura for putting files in IPFS without running your own server. But Infura discards the file after seeding it for like 2 weeks. So you are not in total control of the file. In webtorrent you don't need any third party service. All you need is a browser with the webtorrent.js file. At the same time it is reccomended to run a STUN server to increase the reach of the files seeded by your webtorrent application. If you are creating a webtorrent application without a STUN server chances are that a lot of people would not be able to connect to it. I think IPFS on the other hand don't have this issue. Once a file is uploaded and is seeded by atleast one server it should be accessible to everyone else. (I am not 100% sure about this though). So choose wisely.

You should checkout Zulip https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/

Disclaimer: I am a full time contributor at Zulip.

In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for maximum rewards. The more reputed a platform becomes the more power does it have. So it's totally upto the people who runs the journal to change the rules one day if they decided to make more money. They can easily change the license of the new papers that are waiting for review and the authors would still have to publish in the journal because of it's reputation. They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors that they don't like. On the other hand this can't be done for an application for example running in Ethereum. Once a smart contracts is deployed there is no way to modify it.

The other argument is modifying the text. I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has been modified or not.

StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the incentive mechanism. Also none of the users gets a portion of the money that they helped them to make. I am not sure whether this is the greatest example. One can easily write a smart contract that will facilitate the transfer of money from writers to reviewers without the need of any central server. The amount of money the reviewer gets would be a function of their reputation. So it would be in the best interest of the reviewer to produce high quality work and high quality reviews. A far as the storage is concerned one can make use of Ethereum or a general purpose blockchain for building this. You would have to pay for the storage(reviews, ratings etc) only once and the nodes in the network would make sure that its their for ever. The research papers can be stored in IPFS due to their large size. The files can be seeded by anyone. If the research paper is popular it would be always available. If it is not popular the author or the university can still seed it as its in their best interest. I don't think it matters much where the PDF file is stored. It can be in a central server run by University as well. So this is not a big issue.

Does that makes any sense? Feel free to correct me as well :)