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pheeney

43 karma · joined February 25, 2016

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pheeney··on Show HN: Lirik (Lyrics Syncing Tool)
Is the code open source anywhere?
pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
I don't know what Amazon will do now or at any point in the future if I were to do a charge-back or any else they don't agree with. I imagine they could easily link my accounts together. Payee names, IPs, logging out of one account into the next in the same session. Any other meta data like phone, search history, etc. It sounds like a reach right now but the fact is there is no way to know what they do and its the unknown that causes a problem.

I am well aware of the need to diversify. It is something I am actively working towards but there is no path from here to there overnight.

I still partly agree with your consumer stand point. Even if you rule out the business aspect Amazon is pretty entrenched in may ways from purely a consumer standpoint. If I personally don't care what happens to my account, what about my family? Will their kindles stop working, prime video, audible, whole foods, etc? They share some of the prime benefits so they would be affected as well.

pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
Nope. The latest seller reviews has 80 other people that also received fake tracking in the last 30 days. Amazon's response is that they asked the seller to prove they shipped it or refunded me. That was 2 weeks ago and apparently Amazon is still "investigating". You would think a quick check of the tracking, look at recent seller reviews, lack of response from the seller would be an open and shut case. Apparently the seller is smarter than we all thought and knows something about this process with Amazon and the effort to get our money back. Can't imagine they don't up with something in the end.
pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
And to top it off theres no support channel or humans in the process to "appeal" their decision. The only luck you have is being semi-famous enough to get your experience in the headlines before an exec lets you back in.
pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
Exactly. I am an amazon affiliate and use other amazon services as my business. The bridge has been burned for me as a consumer to continue shopping with them personally or with my business, but it's too risky to upset the beast if that somehow triggers an impact to my livelihood on the other end. I would love nothing more than to phase Amazon out of my life along with Google but that is increasingly difficult to do.

How many processes are in place at Amazon to fight chargebacks? How do we know it won't trigger anything? How do I know they won't retroactively make a decision months or years later? Thats the risk I can't take.

pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
Its ironic as well because the customer service agents kept saying if this was an Amazon purchase they would have refunded me. Kept reassuring me that this wouldn't have been an issue if you purchased with us, we would have taken care of this. But I kept telling them this still IS Amazon. They just deflected like it has nothing to do with them.
pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
That is what I am really concerned with. Some automatic process that will ban me if I try and fight their system. The only way out is to make enough noise on social media that someone in corporate makes a policy exception.
pheeney··on Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
I am currently caught up in an amazon scam. The third party seller listed items, put in fake shipping, item never arrived. It's been over a month and I am still fighting amazon to get my money back. They have an "A to Z guarantee" which doesn't work, at least not in my case.

The seller didn't even need to sell counterfeit items without running off with my money. Amazon customer support has no idea what to do since the third party is supposed to refund me.

pheeney··on Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers
So meta haha. How much have you needed in production? According to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/... they say its counterproductive to use less then 8 GB but maybe you have seen different results?
pheeney··on Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers
Doesn't elastic search require a decent size server just to run with no data? Curious about the costs of running elastic search for a small number of documents compared to the low cost of running django. For example the frontend could be static and hosted on S3 for pennies while elastic search seems to recommend at least 8 GB of ram which would be $40/mo on some lost cost VPS providers. Pretty big price difference for a smaller site with a small record set that wants a fast search experience.
pheeney··on Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers
What was interesting to me is the search ID, https://www.serverhunter.com/?search=157-857-0B2 for example. Each change results in a new search ID. If you toggle the same option on and off, the search ID is different every time. I originally thought it was a way to reference a unique combination of the facets but it seems to create a new search session for each query.
pheeney··on Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers
Is there a TLDR version to tide me over in the meantime?
pheeney··on Show HN: Server Hunter – Easily browse over 11,000 VPS and Dedicated Servers
Is there a tech writeup on how the site was built? What software is behind the faceted search?

The site and search experience is fast and I'd love to learn more about how it was built.

pheeney··on Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses
They are still open source right? Or does having a commercial version invalidate what they have open sourced?
pheeney··on Announcing Caddy Commercial Licenses
> Let's face it: They realized their product was popular, took advantage of tons of interest and documentation/blogs/hype in the community, then decided to charge for binary distribution. It's a bit of a burn.

Or another way of looking at it: Open source has to be subsidized (either through free time or commercial backing) in order to continue to contribute to open source. The amount of time and effort to maintain a popular open source product is insane. They are creating a business model to continue to subsidize their open source contributions. Whats the alternative? Burnout and stagnation which would just result in forks and fracturing of the community if they are lucky.

pheeney··on Dear JavaScript
thejameskyle replied on reddit for anyone interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5gmjdx/dear_jav...

---

I have been on the receiving end of Kyle's outrage and I too feel the need to speak out that he has acted in direct opposition to what he is now promoting. I was a new contributor to lerna, no previous interactions with Kyle or babel, and have experienced some of the following:

> My first PR was continuously rejected because he "did not understand my use case". I elaborated several times in great detail. Other project maintainers eventually chimed in that it was a good idea and should be accepted. Kyle continued to keep the issue closed and ignored all contact, including from other maintainers he works with, even to this day.

> My second interaction with Kyle was one of the most highly requested features for lerna (nested directory support). I championed the issue and over the course of a year I attempted to get direction on which path would be accepted to submit a PR. It was ignored, so after a year, I mentioned I wrote some custom scripts and used another project to fill in the gaps. This seemed to immediately set off Kyle and he immediately locked the issue.

> I opened a new issue since the original idea was accepted by Kyle and figured we could start fresh with a new discussion to avoid what led to him closing it in the first place. It was immediately Locked as well.

> I reached out to Kyle on twitter to understand why everything I posted is immediately locked. No response.

> I reached out on Discord to other staff members. Was also ignored. Eventually Kyle communicated with me on Discord with a very illuminating conversion. He didn't like the amount of github notifications he received so instead of unsubscribing he decided to lock all my threads. He provided several other reasons but essentially resorted to bullying tactics and said I should find another community.

> I opened a Code of Conduct investigation because he was actively suppressing all my communication. He abused his power on more than one occasion and the public conversations we had were very aggressive on his part. He was found to be at fault during the investigation by Sebastian. Sebastian said his attempts to talk to Kyle were dismissed. No other maintainers responded to the incident that were listed on the code of conduct. They said nothing can be done about it, so essentially suck it up, even though they mentioned the steps that will be taken in the Code of Conduct. It was a complete joke and they should not have this document live. The only outcome from this was Kyle re-opened the original github issue he suppressed.

> Other babel community members reached out and said they saw the chat and said sorry, it sucks, and they wish there was something they could do. It's nice to know there are people out there who recognize this toxic behavior from project maintainers.

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The whole experience was very upsetting. I will never contribute or participate with anything involving Kyle. No other maintainers and staff that work with Kyle, held Kyle accountable. At no point has Kyle held himself accountable. I was no one to Kyle, and a potentially new contributor. If I had this experience, I wonder how many others did as well. I am sure his message sounds good but if he doesn't practice what he preaches, then what is all of this for? I hope he has changed.

pheeney··on The awkward journey towards less back end
The website and twitter account appear offline. Is there more information about the technology somewhere?
pheeney··on Unbundling Pokémon Go for Android
Does anyone know of any good resources to learn more about reverse engineering apps: Books, Blogs, Online Learning Courses, etc?
pheeney··on Refraction – JS library to make modules independent, testable and re-usable
> But anyway, y'all, if class A depends on class B, formalize the interface between the two (throw an error when expectations aren't met) and then inject the instance!

Do you have a simple example of this for something like https://mbasso.github.io/refraction/docs/basics/Publishing.h... in react? Would you hard code in the dependencies if you have "multiple" modules that respond to "onUserLogin" "event".

pheeney··on Refraction – JS library to make modules independent, testable and re-usable
Would it be possible to write some pseudocode on how you converted some of your code? I am trying to avoid some "magic" as well but not certain how to handle some of these dependencies.
pheeney··on Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System
That is very interesting. I am guessing this is a closed source application? Did you do something along the lines of CQRS (Command, Query part) or just write directly the event source? At what point did appending to log file stop working which caused the switch to the cloud (or was that for unrelated reasons)?

I am also hoping it will become more popular as the pros seem to vastly outweigh the cons. But I think you are right about the framework. From my research it seems to be medium to large enterprises that would typically be best suited to using and developing something like kafka, and those enterprises typically would not open source their applications. So I definitely think a framework from a company who is using it as scale would be huge.

Until then, I suppose I will keep reading up and learning all I can and figure out how to implement this on a much smaller scale.

pheeney··on Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System
My current thought process is you use a relational db like postgres with json support to go from hobby / early startup to traction where you would need to start being concerned with scaling. At that point you switch to kafka or related hosted tools.

As far the data you put into the stream, I would think it could be everything if you treated all data as immutable even admin actions? Only thing that seems up in the air is transactions.

That is as far as I got though. I don't work with a company that has that kind of scale to use this, but I'd like to start working with it.

pheeney··on Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System
That is actually the post that got me into event sourcing / streams. As far as user analytic type events go this makes complete sense to me. What I haven't been able to discern is whether its useful to use this architecture on a much much smaller scale for things that may not be user events.

I love the thought of throwing everything into a stream and populating the read models, analytics, search index, etc with the data. However, for example if you had a CMS / ecom for a smaller organization, should the admin actions also be events? If you have an event source db, they would have to be, and you get all the benefits outlined from the article.

At what point do you decide what to put in the stream and what to build without? Are there events that should never be in a stream? Those are the questions I have been researching but I haven't found a lot of resources or discussions around making these decisions.

pheeney··on Spotify's Kafka-Based Event Delivery System
I wish they went more in-depth into the particular events. They seem to imply the events are user actions, which I took to mean user played this song, user viewed this playlist, and other analytics.

However do they, or would you, use a system like Kafka as an event source instead of the db. So you would also capture events like user added this song to their playlist that would get persisted to the event source db and then eventually a view model instead of directly to a relational db. It doesn't sound like they do that due to the delays, but I can't find a lot of real usage blog posts about how much to put into something like kafka.

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