jdormit

Anyone at Google want to make an anonymous account and confirm/deny? :)

Stuff like this really disgusts me, if it's true. The saddest part is that non-technical consumers will never care about walled gardens or the gradual centralization of the internet - because the truth is, the more centralized we get the more convenient everything becomes.

I hear this a lot, and I still don't really get it - git is already decentralized! And not just federated, but truly decentralized where everyone has their own copy of the data. An issue tracker built on top of the git protocol, where issues/PRs/whatever arbitrary other rich text content you want lives inside the .git directory alongside the source code would be much more in the spirit of git. And you could build a pretty modern web interface on top of that!

Why not Matrix? A federated chat protocol to go with a federated social media protocol.

Great presentation! I didn't know about izip or ChainMap.

Who says your git repo has to be public? Use a GitHub private repo, host the repo yourself behind SSH on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet, use the free private repos that come with Gitlab.com... securing git repositories is a solved problem.

That would be so cool!

Interesting take, but it misses the fundamental point of the stack metaphor: each layer has to depend on the existence of the previous layer. An operating system can't exist without hardware to run on; an application can't exist outside the context of an operating system. The author seems to think that any system with multiple components can be called a "stack" - at that point, you truly have reduced the term to a buzzword.

Is there a good extension for postgresql that turns it into a graph database?

I have a few old laptops lying around, still in fine condition but pretty out of date. Can I give them to your organization? How would I get them to you?

Damn seriously? I know you're not looking for unsolicited relationship advice, but that's a bit of a red flag...

Your first job out of college can potentially define the trajectory of the rest of your career. If you're not pressed for time and/or cash, reject the sketchy offer and move on.

Also, are you really going to be happy working for a company whose business seems nasty to you? Even if you are "just doing the development part", some part of you will always be aware that you don't like the work you are supporting, and in my experience nothing is more motivation-sapping.

Note that although this proposal is couched in the language of "browser vendors" and "web platform features", this is posted by a Google employee and the "incomplete prototype" that is under development is in Chromium.

From the "why would developers opt-in to this" section:

> In recent years, many web platform features have become gated on TLS opt-in [0]. We can imagine browser vendors taking a similar stance with regards to new features and NSM: only sites which demonstrate that they are willing to prioritize user experience might continue to be able to request certain permissions (e.g., Push Notifications) or access upcoming features.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/04/geolocatio...

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, TLS was unequivocably good for the internet, and I think in general encouraging sites to be less resource-intensive is also good for the internet. On the other hand, a lot of this proposal smacks of "meet these limits or Google won't bring traffic to your site with Chrome and search", which they've already shown a history of doing with AMP pages getting prioritized search results. That really makes me mad, and it's scary that one company has amassed so much power over the web they can basically dictate how sites should be built and served. That fundamentally undermines the principles of the free and open web.

I don't know, the tone of the article wasn't actually super favorable towards WeWork. The author outright mocked their founder pretty consistently throughout the piece. The vibe I got was more, "WeWorks are nice to work at but they are not as revolutionary as they think they are".

I honestly don't understand complaints like this. When you post something on the internet (on a service that has a documented, public API!) anyone can see it, by definition. Twitter isn't your local pub - it's a public forum visited by millions of people daily. If you don't want those people reading and reacting to the things you write, don't write them on Twitter!

And yeah, brands aren't people. But guess what? Brands are made out of people, and those people have just as much a right to be on Twitter as you do!

There are lots of forms of electronic communication that are non-public. If you don't want people reading what you say, use those.

/rant

This is actually a bad example. "The Loop" is a concrete concept within WordPress: it's a global loop (shared across scripts) that represents the portion of the request processing spent looping through the posts that need to get rendered to the page. There are a number of WordPress API calls that only make sense when called from "in the loop", since they rely on global variables that get set in each iteration. Whether or not this is actually a good request handling model is much more debatable, but the comments in your example are meant to communicate that any code which needs to be called from The Loop should get called between them.

In this context, it means that content from this service is shared with other servers. This is different from decentralized - in a decentralized network, every client communicates directly with other clients, whereas in a federated network, clients communicate with central servers but the servers can interoperate . Email is a good example of a federated network - mail clients communicate with centralized mail servers, but mail servers can send messages to other mail servers. To extend that analogy, when you write an article on Write.as your browser sends that data to the Write.as server, but the server federates that data to various other servers - Mastodon instances, Pleroma instances, etc. This is what enables Mastodon et. al users to like, follow, and share content posted to Write.as.

I am so tired of the "Millennials are lazy and make bad decisions" narrative. You can't make blanket statements about an entire generation. Please stop.

Yeah, it is kind of click-baity. Honestly, I wanted this to spread so I gave it a provocative name. And here it is on the front page of HN...

I won't be offended if the mods change the title of the submission though, I realize that's the sort of thing that rubs people here the wrong way.

PeerTube is actually built with ActivityPub ;)

Thanks! Yeah, I haven't looked into any sort of performance optimizations. Better late than never, I suppose.

To be honest, the main difference is that the public is getting slightly more disillusioned with centralized social media. Mastodon (an ActivityPub-compliant Twitter clone) has gotten a huge influx of new users in recent months due to a bunch of PR missteps by Twitter.

I will admit that the post was intentionally hyperbolic, though. AP doesn't have nearly the adoption threshold it would need to be a serious contender in the social media space. I'm hoping that through articles like these we can spread the word and drive adoption.

But yeah, this has been tried before and didn't really take off. I think the fundamental problem is that it's just way more lucrative to have a centralized social network than a decentralized/federated one. But as I alluded in the post, I think there is a way to build a profitable business on ActivityPub, and that's what it's going to take to make AP mainstream.

Seems to be doing okay now :fingerscrossed:. For those who don't want to bother with a long loading time, or if the site goes down again, here's the article as a gist: https://gist.github.com/jdormit/7df2a0518347c24d759a79d62304...

Haha, didn't expect my blog to ever get to the front page of HN and my $5/month DO droplet couldn't keep up. I resized it and now I'm putting Cloudflare in front of it, so hopefully it will stay up now.

Just so you know, you have a name collision with a popular ClojureScript SPA library, re-frame: https://github.com/Day8/re-frame

Thank you!

Isn't that a solved problem? Email and password to sign up, everything else after they've bought.

So this is a list of "harmful things" and "less harmful alternatives", with no explanation given as to how each tech has been classified. To take a random example, why is man less harmful than info?

I am writing an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will let you federate with Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. If you're interested, I'll be posting updates at @jdormit@mastodon.technology.

Is "dull" a technical term or does it literally just mean boring here?