usbfingers

How do you know that's not a part of the joke?

The cool part about using Alpine as a minimalist desktop is you can run the entire system from RAM - assuming you're running in diskless mode.

I've showed people my Alpine desktop setup _on their own laptop_ by booting from a USB. After booting, I unplug the USB, continue running the distro, and then restarting their machine as if nothing ever happened. Lots of cool factor driving motivation there, but I agree it's not as easy to use nor maintainable for most people.

Also if your workstation dies, just toggle BIOS settings - if needed - and boot on another machine. No swapping / migrating drives required. Works amazingly if you're used to running on crap / dated hardware.

I assume financially this would probably not be feasible or sustainable everywhere but I really wish malls could lean further into theme parks rather than shopping hubs

Most of them are half way there with movie theaters, arcades, etc. I recently went to one with an attached Medieval Times.

I'm curious how much filling in laser tag, rock climbing, and other in person only activities would generate turnout.

Not intended on initially being what you're looking for, but contributors and those interested often discuss privacy implications of developing software in the Off Topic chat for privacy focused project I've created.

https://matrix.to/#/#syphon-offtopic:matrix.org

Let me know if you find or create a group like this, would be happy to join!

this is an excellent point

Sort of tangent, but the fact that Block Protocol is also managing the distribution of the resulting UI components, unlike Solid which encouraged people to consume the data independently through an API, makes it more accessible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30105910

At its heart, it is very similar.

Comment above does a good job at describing the distinction. It's more than just re-usable HTML/CSS/JS, that's just how they're making it accessible to others. There are entities associated with the HTML/CSS/JS mapped alongside the component, which is the core benefit here.

https://blockprotocol.org/spec for more info on how they're mapping data as entities

Many have tried - very recently - and seemingly stalled or failed at creating something like this with wide adoption, most notably Tim Berners-Lee with the SOLID protocol

https://solidproject.org/

https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol

The roadblock is always getting major tech companies to accept it as a valid means of accessing user data.

The amount of times I've heard about SOLID on NPR or other popular mainstream newscasts only to garner little to no support is astounding. Definitely take note where others have seemingly failed here because it's an uphill battle.

Syphon (https://syphon.org) landed Multiaccount support several months back, though it still lacks many other features.

https://www.noom.com/#/survey/basicHealthGoal

https://www.lemonade.com/onboarding/1

So many signups now involve taking a small survey that will sort you into a some cohort. Lots of times, this is required prior to even entering an email or password. Making this process easy, or having a template with predefined dynamic questions and answer flows (even if they're fake and meant to be changed) would be super helpful and solve a whole engineering effort in one fell swoop.

Tried the demo and got stuck at the Stripe payment step and hit the error "Provided API Key is wrong".

That said, this is a desperately needed product for small teams. Was considering building something like this as a SaaS for the last couple years. A small team I was apart of spent multiple sprints mulling over onboarding tweaks for our users involving all these components.

If it's not already a feature or being worked on, please consider making template Q&A flows that can plop users in a bucket. It's often asked for right before or after signup and is a relatively big lift to keep building over and over.

Looks great and good luck!

Note, some of that is a requirement by the Matrix protocol and is out of clients control. It's ultimately up to the server to configure different password requirements.

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/latest#notes-on-p...

Clients SHOULD enforce that the password provided is suitably complex. The password SHOULD include a lower-case letter, an upper-case letter, a number and a symbol and be at a minimum 8 characters in length. Servers MAY reject weak passwords with an error code M_WEAK_PASSWORD.

Very glad there's other clients supporting this. Thanks for the heads up!

I was under the impression some of the desktop clients had it in the form of swapping CLI flags on start, but it seems to support switching under the settings menu in the latest release. Much like email, many people will have more than one user they'd like to swap between so very glad to see other clients adding this feature with user friendly UX.

Fluffychat is mentioned a lot here as a good UI/UX alternative to Element. Just wanted to bring up another that I'm working on called Syphon. It's not at the stage where it can compete with Fluffychat in terms of spec parity or maturity, but I think it's worth discussing as an effort.

https://syphon.org

https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

Like I said, it's still very much in Alpha and needs quite a bit of work, but the UX flows and design have been well received by others. Though there is an opinionated default UX and design paradigm, there is a focus is to make everything customizable and the theming options are growing over every release.

The goal is to eventually find a sweet spot between Discord and Signal and bridge the gap to Matrix between those communities.

I have a demanding day job and other obligations that keep me busy, but I spend nearly all my free time and every vacation in the last year working on this project. We're constantly looking for other contributors and there's several other ways to help including donations. Feel free to join the official room for updates to track progress and please feel free to reach out with feedback!

https://matrix.to/#/#syphon:matrix.org

Additionally, I just merged Multi-account support this week and it will be in the next release. Not sure of any other Matrix client that has this feature, so there's some unique features that we're focusing on to set it apart.

I'm almost more excited because of the proxy network affect this will have on microkernel popularization and alternatives like Dahlia OS (https://dahliaos.io/) that are looking to be independent distros of Fuchsia.

I understand peoples concern about a walled garden situation here, but I'd argue to only become worried if Fuchsia suddenly stopped being committed to openly and someone needed to maintain a fork. The working code for both the microkernel and the OS is all open source.

Agreed, very good news though I'm left with the same question. It doesn't inspire that much confidence, but the recent embrace of Flutter from Canonical leaves me hopeful even if Google did drop from active lang / framework development, it wouldn't be left to dry.

  Location: Atlanta, GA (Soon Tampa, FL)
  Remote: Only
  Willing to relocate: Only after 16 months (for the right company)
  Technologies: Flutter, React/React Native, Vue, Node/Apollo/GraphQL, PostgresQL
  Résumé/CV: https://ere.io/resume.pdf
  Email: hackernews @ ere.io

I'm a senior full stack software engineer that's filled many roles. At SmartPath (YC S16), I built their mobile app from scratch using React Native, GraphQL, Node and Postgres. Additionally, I took the lead as architect on all tech related products, including a custom CRM and multiple client facing apps.

During my free-time, I created an open source matrix client called Syphon (https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon). I value privacy and freedom in software, and hope to find a company where these ideals will apply. I could best help an early-stage team building out their MVP or reworking existing products to best adapt to a new product direction. I have a passion for affecting positive change and crafting delightful user experiences regardless of the tech stack used.

If the product is anything like the pwnagotchi, many could use this as an alternative to research intercepting / cracking local wifi.

My understanding may be a bit dated, but unauthorized access of any network in the US is a crime. There's exceptions in other countries, but with the potential passive nature of the device, it seems terrifying that you could keep this in a backpack, leave it on when passing a major corp office in the city that cracks their wifi, and get charged with something serious.

Go easy on me if I'm over thinking this or if I've got it all wrong here. I haven't looked into this since around 2013ish, after reading laws regarding hacking non-wifi 2.4ghz radio waves used in drones and RC scared me out of going any further. Also asked a professor who told me basically it's not worth the trouble to even get approval for research.

I'd love to buy one of these, but I can't get over the potential legal repercussions of running one, especially within ones own home.

In college, I was terrified of even attempting to research drone hacking due to the federal restrictions on tampering with radio signals, especially those outside the range for Wifi 2.4gz. They even still applied to researchers with approval, from what I understood, and it was just considered a gray area.

Can someone please explain how others are so accepting of the risk? Am I missing something? Sorry if it has been addressed and I'm just late to the game.

While I think the core focus of Beeper as a cross platform messenger is great, the bigger positive here in my opinion is a matrix client with good UX and design.

The user experience portrayed here is much more in line with what is required to get people less technical on one decentralized/federated network, such as matrix.

I’m currently working towards the same effort, in a very different stage of development, in that regard with https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon.

Props to Eric, Tulir, and the team for making such a good looking client!

There is currently a snackbar in the login for errors. Just signed out and typed in a wrong password to make sure I didn't break anything. However, I am on version 0.0.19. If you downloaded the app from F-Droid, you're on the first public build. I'm still trying to get another update out from the initial release.

I've added a new ticket linking back to this comment and I'll look into the issue. I have several people using Syphon with their own homeservers successfully so I'm thinking the problem has to do with a silent error that's unrelated. Thanks for the feedback though and feel free to respond in the github issue itself.

I've addressed these problems you listed in version 0.0.19 but getting updates to the F-Droid store is a very slow process. The next F-Droid release will have auto updates enabled with the F-Droid team, so those and future issues should be fixed relatively quick from that platform.

Regardless, thanks for trying it out.

Edit: feel free to post issues like this directly to the project in github if you decide to try it out again

it's next on the list after group E2EE is stable along with key import/exports

If you dislike the new name, branding, or user experience, instead of arguing over why or why not it is a good decision, I'd encourage you to get yourself involved and be that change.

Before the rebrand, or even any talk user experience and design from Element (Riot), I didn't want to wait and started working on a privacy centric matrix client that focused on branding and user experience. I managed to get E2EE working by myself within a month using the Matrix provided encryption library.

https://syphon.org

https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

For the record, I don't think Element is a bad name. Regardless of the name itself, this is a massive leap forward for their branding. The user experience seems to have been cleaned up dramatically in the new versions of their iOS and Android apps.

I've built a not for profit multi-platform capable matrix chat client that is now in open alpha called Syphon (https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon) to largely address the issue of proprietary chat clients.

Private, secure communication (with a decent brand and ui) should be accessible to everyone by now. Signal does a great job of filling the void for now but if they fail or are blocked by a country or community, the application interface itself is not a protocol to which people could easily pivot to the “gmail” of Signal.

I’m hoping that Riot’s upcoming rebrand will mark the start of this transition. We needed centralized efforts to spread usage of matrix, or even a similarly accessible protocol, but make it easy for those to create or maintain their own connection to that network. If all else fails, I guess we’ll have Syphon.

a good reason to support decentralized or federated protocols, like matrix, for communication.