HN user

imaginator

1,256 karma

buddycloud, swimmer, runner and rock climber.

http://buddycloud.com

http://hnofficehours.com/profile/imaginator/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/imaginator; my proof: https://keybase.io/imaginator/sigs/hp36ieowx69csLUrythU7oDdfmDfXQ1xfRXEzm1LYK0 ]

Posts32
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idlewords.com 3y ago

California to New York burritto tunnel

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4pts2
github.com 4y ago

Physical Bitcoin Attacks on Individuals

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36pts11
www.detritus.org 9y ago

Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter

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189pts84
twitter.com 10y ago

Big companies desperate for blockchain without Bitcoin is exactly like 1994

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i.imgur.com 10y ago

Inside a Saturn V rocket (image)

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firstlook.org 11y ago

The great SIM heist

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trello.com 11y ago

Android job posting at Trello Inc

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buddycloud.com 12y ago

Sunday project: 10 minutes to build a chat app with Buddycloud

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erlangcentral.org 12y ago

The C10M problem – how WhatsApp scales to millions of connections

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www.nytimes.com 12y ago

German politician meets with Snowden in Moscow

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blog.buddycloud.com 12y ago

Scaling Buddycloud with Fanout.io

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14pts0
apps.opendatacity.de 13y ago

Awesome WiFi visualisation from re:publica

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www.sigcon.com 13y ago

Ethernet over barbed wire

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9pts0
www.youtube.com 13y ago

Sony releases new "motiongraph" app on the Google Play Store

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4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

ShowHN: buddycloud, a distributed social network

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73pts38
mobilesociety.typepad.com 13y ago

Olympic committee banning 3G-Wifi Access points at venues

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2pts2
www.businessinsider.com 14y ago

Elon Musk's Hyperloop tunnel - reinventing transport

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2pts0
submarine-cable-map-2012.telegeography.com 14y ago

2012 Submarine Cable Map

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www.potaroo.net 14y ago

Carriage vs Content (and the Internet before Google)

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www.theregister.co.uk 14y ago

All Apple stores could close for 30 days in Italy over warranty case

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47pts33
blog.buddycloud.com 14y ago

$RANDOM-USER testing. 50c/test.

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buddycloud.com 14y ago

New buddycloud server (coffeescript+node) for distributed social networking

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4pts0
buddycloud.com 15y ago

"Give me the 100 most recent messages" / syncing channel posts in buddycloud

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buddycloud.com 15y ago

The API is Dead. Long Live the Protocol.

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buddycloud.com 15y ago

Buddycloud's node.js server just released

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news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Hacker News Munich Meetup

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buddycloud.com 15y ago

Keeping your social networking secret

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buddycloud.com 15y ago

Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit.

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11pts24
buddycloud.com 15y ago

We are in the AOL days of social networking

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122pts62
27c3.iphoneblog.de 15y ago

Chaos Computer Club Congress starts today. Livestreams.

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66pts18

Zimbabwe has entered the room. Also had a central bank before the last round of hyperinflation/reset. One could argue that the lack of a central bank is a feature. What other differences would would you imagine distinguish bitcoin from central bank currencies?

I went down the rabbit hole of trying to work out what this is. In involves new coins and ICOs. I'll stick with Matrix and Signal.

"Session is enabled by services provided through the Loki blockchain network. The Loki cryptocurrency is a fundamental part of these services, providing an anonymous way to transfer value between people. A lightweight wallet integrated into the Session app, using keys derived from the users existing keypair, could allow users to quickly and privately transfer value inside Session."

What a horrible article. This article starts with the assumption American=Good/Foreign=Bad. Complete with a scaremongering title.

"repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English."

Because developing countries are worse at this? Jets are designed to be maintained. It's systematic work. "Take this cowling off. Unscrew that, check this. Replace that." It's not like they are making hard drives. Oh wait. Developing countries already do that.

"But the F.A.A. no longer has the money or the manpower to do this." Wait... That sounds like the gist of the article. "FAA underfunded and unable to check check maintenance facilities"

Vanity Fair carries on with some more scaremongering:

"There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check."

I usually like reading Vanity Fair articles. But this one got my "It's not American" xenophobia hackles up.

shameless-plug: We've been building the federated/anti-yet-another-silo version of this/Slack. Instanced interconnect kinda like usenet did and email does for 30-odd years now.

Our emphasis on being a tool for developers to add federated communication to their app (vs being another silo like Slack). The UX isn't nearly as polished, but it does federate with other servers using the XMPP network (e.g a conversation earlier today http://imgur.com/UL34KSF).

A developer started working on a slack-like UX and we threw up at http://buddycloud.org (https://github.com/buddycloud/buddycloud-angular-app if anyone wants to help).

+1 on Freifunk. Setup is super easy:

1) order an Ubiquiti Nanostation LOCO M2 (amazing reach and super sensitive antenna),

2) sign-up with them for a VPN key. This will keep your visitors traffic tunneled through their VPN. IF there is any problem with content infringement, it ends up on their network.

3) Flash the box with their OpenWRT port and install the VPN key.

I setup my box last week and and it's been running well (http://monitor.berlin.freifunk.net/host.php?h=imaginator). Nice to see users dropping on and off. The firmware also includes support for the Freifunk mesh network. I'm looking forward to adding more nodes to the neighbourhood and growing the wifi coverage.

Action shots: http://imgur.com/a/q7nOk (Decided that martini bottle is a better solution than the tripod)

Get started at http://config.berlin.freifunk.net/wizard/routers (disclaimer: not clear if you should/must/can be in Berlin for this to work)

My girlfriend described protocols to me as "it's like everyone agrees to speak the same language and then you can communicate". Which is a great way to describe it.

When you have to agree to API terms / "rules of the road" in Twitter's legalease / or revocable oauth tokens, things stop being a free language.

You have a good point - the different blogging platforms do a good job. And create virtuous ecosystems around their code in the form of theme creators, hosting providers and consultants.

I think Kenton is onto a winner with Sandstorm - it stands half a chance to actually unify different blogging platforms. So while you may use a different blogging tool and comment - you have a unified email-like identity that follows you between tools, nodes and networks.

I don't think that creating systems != capitalism. Indeed companies that helped grow ecosystems (like Netscape) have been hugely successful.

I'm guessing this comes down to deciding to create money today to create a legacy later or to creating projects today that go onto become your legacy later. We each strive for what resonates with us and (hopefully) accept others that make different choices in life.

Facebook's statement: "Trust us. We'll show you ads."

App.net's statement: "Trust us. We'll charge you so you don't have to see ads."

Ello's statement: "Trust us, we won't show you ads."

The statement we deserve is akin to email's promise: you don't have to trust us; competing providers keep the ecosystem honest. (And the service is federated so you can connect with friends on other services)

Ello strikes me as another silo'd service. What happened to the dream of building "big" services that outlast a single company or team? The 30 year lifespan of SMTP+email, the 20 year life of HTTP, the 10 year life of XMPP.

Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.

Wouldn't it be great if we built services where the decision isn't use/don't use, more, my identity follows me to the best service provider (heh, like email!)?

The real statement should be: "you don't have to trust us, this is a protocol: - developers can write services against it, users can choose the developers service they like the best. And when that service goes pop, or the developer moves onto a new project, you are not stranded - just switch providers.

(disclaimer: this stuff makes me angry and we're trying to solve it at Buddycloud Towers)

Agree that it's shortsightedness.

But I think the problem goes much deeper: We keep building one-offs. Twitter - a one-off messaging service. Instagram - a one-off photo sharing app.

This is one of the reasons I started Buddycloud. We'd already built a nice location and social app but eschewed the VC cash to, dare I use the word, pivot, and build a different way of building apps.

Instead of building another one-off social-location-system like Foursquare, we decided it better to build a federated platform that others can then start building on. The federation and run-it-yourself mentality means that our users don't end up in the Twitpic scenario and that there are always other suppliers that will host your pictures in a compatible way. In a way that fosters competition between providers without needing to resort to switching friction cost to keep users.

In the Twitpic case, the buddycloud media server is designed to be a plug-in federated media hosting provider for each domain. Don't like how one provider is dealing with you data? Just switch.

It's not been easy to get this far, but we're starting to see traction from ex-app.net devs who are looking for something a bit more open that they can also run themselves (as a Docker container). And I still believe that the real solutions will be based on federated open systems that form a foundation so that developers can innovate further up the stack.

OTR works great when both parties/clients are online.

I can't see how OTR would work when one client is offline since they need to both be online to do the key exchange dance. Happy to be corrected.

Background: XEPs are the protocol building blocks of XMPP.

The XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) are working hard to make XMPP more mobile friendly. (disclaimer: I'm an XMPP board member).

There are three problems to solve:

1. knowing when to retrieve messages (push notifications)

2. retrieving messages (message archive management)

3. synchronising messages between devices (what this solves)

More background: XMPP is designed around keeping a connection open to the client and pushing through updates and new messages. These assumptions worked well in a desktop environment on a solid TCP connection. But for power, intermittent network, and mobile OS design reason, holding open a socket isn't ideal.

Push notification work because the OS provider (Apple, Google, Mozilla etc.) keep one socket open and then push through important notifications. This keeps the phone's radio from powering up for silly things like "contact came online/went offline" type messages.

A push notification might be "xyz posted ... ". Your phone needs to now come online and synchronise messages that might have been posted on your tablet or desktop client. Hence XEP-0280. It helps resync messages from other clients.

The XSF is also writing up a push notification XEP that makes it easy for mobile apps to use XMPP as a signalling channel and throw out push notification where necessary.