ploggingdev

Like someone else suggested, this is likely a case of automated flagging by fraud detection systems, but it does not excuse such terrible communication on Patreon's part.

I have been following the recent Patreon backlash with interest, which I think was triggered by Patreon banning a youtuber who goes by Sargon of Akkad for using the phrase "white [n-word]" in a youtube video. Sam Harris, who was one of the highest earning people n Patreon, closed his patreon account and explained why he did so [0]. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin (popular internet personalities who spoke out against Patreon's trust and safety policies) are planning on launching an alternative [1] to Patreon that is more pro free speech. It would be interesting to see if they manage to build a free speech alternative since the problem usually is that the worst elements on the internet flock to it before regular people and the site/service will be labeled a hub for nazis/white supremacists and no bank/financial institution will want to do business with such a service. It also sounds like companies such as Stripe and Paypal can do little even if they wanted to support a free speech alternative to Patreon, since that would cause issues with their payment networks.

I am interested in learning a little about how the financial infrastructure works (banks, payment processors, regulations), who decides what types of service should not be allowed even if it's legal and what it would take to build a free speech alternative to Patreon, so if there are some good resources that you know about, please share them in the comments.

[0] https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctw...

[1] https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/10772442911251742...

Perfect timing. I just started reading up about phaser since I was looking into building a html/js powered browser based gaming site, something like miniclip.com.

I am a complete beginner and I want to build a simple game to simulate trading bitcoin. Let's call the main character Wojak (since it's the most popular meme for bitcoin trading related discussions). Here's the idea : Wojak got into Bitcoin early and made a nice little fortune and now stays at home trading bitcoin on exchanges. I want the setting to be a house with furniture, a door, a window and a computer. Maybe something slightly better than this : http://img.phone.baidu.com/public/uploads/store_4/d/7/6/d769...

I will be using historical bitcoin price data to simulate a very simple exchange the user can trade against. Here are my questions for anyone who has built a game using phaser :

* Is phaser suitable for what I plan to build?

* can you give me an overview of what sort of time and effort building a game like this will involve?

* How do I generate the assets, models of the furniture? What tools are commonly used?

* How do I get audio for the background music and some simple effects for the scenes? Any good resources for this? Maybe there are apps that can help with this?

* Any good tutorials to get me up to scratch in understanding how browser based games work from a developers point of view?

* Any good resources and communities that might be helpful for what I have in mind?

I started looking into phaser and building browser based games a couple of hours ago, so apologies if the questions and my thinking are all over the place.

No mention about the privacy implications of having every transaction tracked? We're already at a point where pretty much every transaction is tracked and a cashless society makes being tracked a requirement to function in society. Is privacy even a topic of discussion with governments looking to go cashless?

I still try and pay with cash wherever possible, but many offline/physical stores often require a phone number or email address to complete a transaction, so privacy goes out of the window even when using cash.

Can you give us a mini review of the system76 laptop that you have? How's the build quality, battery life, after sales support etc.

None so far it seems according to the people in the chat : https://www.hackerschat.net/

There is also a chat here : https://www.hackerschat.net/

Yes, they send out an email. 10pm PT, so around 14 hours remaining.

Come join the chat room for yc w2019 applicants while you wait : https://www.hackerschat.net/

Around 14 hours remaining. Come join the chat room for YC W2019 applicants while you wait : https://www.hackerschat.net/

> Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills

Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using?

What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on projects that you find interesting?

Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and forum posts on IH. Good luck!

Hi HN, developer here. Here's a quick rundown of the idea behind the site :

- Like reddit, there are topics (subreddits)

- each subreddit has a chat room and a forum

- code is open source (warning : it's a little rough) [0]

- there is currently no support for community moderation, but when I build the moderation features, I plan to make the moderation logs public

- I plan to explore ways to prevent abuse of mod status : have some of sort of community re-approval of mod status every n months, so any mod that the community feels is not operating in good faith/too harsh etc can be removed.

- there's currently a single chat room for each topic, but I plan to add support for mod created chat rooms

- the forum uses a dumbed down HN like sorting algorithm [1]

- I also plan to build an api for bots and maybe host them myself on aws lambda since expecting users to host their own bots might be too much to ask. Since no other major site seems to host users' bots, it might encourage users to build creative bots and not worry about hosting fees. All bots will be opt in, so users have to explicitly subscribe to bots to view the messages in the chat and forum.

This was actually one of my abandoned side projects that I decided to try and bring back to life. You can read a little about the 1st version and the fun experience with 4chan trolls here [2].

A little about the plans to grow the site :

- I'm thinking about focusing on cryptocurrency communities to start with, since they might appreciate the open mod logs + accessible chat and forum accessed through a web browser.

- SEO traffic seems to be picking up slowly, 30-50 hits per day and 3-4 signups, but I'll need to learn more about SEO to try and increase SEO traffic. Any tips?

Would love to hear your thoughts on my sideproject.

[0] https://github.com/ploggingdev/hackerschat

[1] https://github.com/ploggingdev/hackerschat/blob/master/maina...

[2] https://www.ploggingdev.com/2018/01/the-strange-launch-of-ha...

Scroll to the bottom and click on "More", both your comments are visible there. When a thread has too many comments, it gets split into multiple pages.

> How does YC feel about companies who don’t want to raise VC after the program?

Very interesting answer to this question. How does this work in practice? If a company decides against raising VC, what happens to YC's 7% stake? Profit sharing? Does the company buy back the 7%? Or does YC only see returns when there's a liquidity event?

Zapier was mentioned as an example of such a company. It raised a seed round and then decided against raising further rounds. In this case, how do the VCs see returns?

> now it's a floating bar at the bottom when reading comments that for some reason I can't get rid of despite the x button

The x button works for me, but when I load an other page it reappears. So reddit wants me to dismiss the floating bar for every page I visit on the site.

I'm curious to learn about the thinking behind building out such dark patterns. Have the reddit employees tried using the site on mobile while logged out for extended periods of time? If the answer is yes, I would love to know how they justify building out such a feature. Is there pressure to grow the app installs metric? It sometimes feels like reddit is losing touch with the community.

There's another variation of the popup where the button to install the app is huge and the link to proceed to the mobile site is tiny. It's also pretty easy to accidentally click on the button to download the app. Here's an image : https://i.imgur.com/rSS8HoI.png

Slightly OT. I was wondering what happens to Github's policy on employees' side projects post acquisition. Links : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13142327

I'm interested to learn why they chose to switch to Gnome instead of KDE plasma. What was the thinking behind it? Why wasn't the community involved in the decision? Gnome has the backing of Redhat and is the default DE on Fedora, so Canonical backing an alternative would have been desirable.

I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices. Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously. Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try : kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.

Tangent : what happens to the whois guard if I want to transfer a domain between providers (eg- namecheap to google)? I've heard that during the transfer the whois guard has to be disabled. This means that services such as Domain Tools will log the whois data. Is this true? If so, is there any way to transfer a domain between providers while keeping contact details out of the public whois database?

What happened to the bitfinexed guy, he's gone silent on social media?

Nice idea. The biggest hurdle with starting a community site is getting the initial users and maintaining a level of activity that keeps bringing back users to the site. If activity slows down a little, you will find that traffic decreases proportionally. How do you plan to solve the chicken and egg problem? After the initial launch, what's the plan to get your site in front of potential users?

I am working on a somewhat related idea : a site like reddit, but which also has a chat room for each subreddit/topic + public moderation logs among other features. I launched with only the chat rooms part of it and I faced the issues mentioned above, so I'm interested in hearing about your approach. Good luck!

I'm just a reddit user, I don't work for the company.

Steve Huffman was asked about the reason for the redesign and he said that it was necessary since users who visit reddit for the first time are completely lost and one of the reasons for this was the design. They hope the new design will make reddit more approachable for new users.

I think it comes to down to the growth at all costs mindset of being a VC funded company. Besides the point mentioned above, I think the new design allows them to increase their engagement numbers :

- they heavily push users to install the mobile apps to the point that it's annoying

- the new design lends itself better to native ads

- they started autoplaying videos and gifs on mobile for some users

- when I browse from a desktop without logging in, I noticed that threads now have a "related content" suggestions after the first few comments (I don't remember seeing this previously. Correct me if I'm wrong on this)

- they introduced new profile pages which make the site into more of a social network. Users can now follow other users, post to their own timeline etc.

- they started collecting more user data (for ad targeting) and have reset users' tracking preferences at least twice so far. Related links [0] [1]

Hopefully they start taking user feedback more seriously.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/73259t/reddit_secr...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/87d1sq/psa...

> but two deserve a quick mention. The first is Kubuntu, which for my money is the flavor to beat. If you haven't tried KDE lately, you really should give Kubuntu a go. KDE is no longer the memory hog it once was, and Plasma 5.12 offers an incredibly nice, polished, and smooth experience.

Strongly agree. KDE/plasma continue to make great progress and it's my personal favorite. Looks gorgeous out of the box, is light on memory and the cpu, and offers great customization options. Since it uses a layout similar to Windows 7/10 people coming from the mentioned operating systems feel right at home and it eases the transition to linux (I've installed Kubuntu for a few non-technical people and so far no complaints!). If you're interested in following KDE's progress, check out Nate Graham's blog [0] where he publishes a weekly post going over new features and bug fixes in KDE applications and plasma. Really looking forward to plasma 5.13.

[0] https://pointieststick.wordpress.com/

Not yet. Come join the chat room for YC S18 applicants : https://www.hackerschat.net/

Around 24 hours remaining. Come join the unofficial chat room for yc s18 applicants! Link : https://www.hackerschat.net/

Any good tl;dr on what happened between Ellen Pao and reddit? I didn't follow the story when it was playing out.

> I've been running Linux for 20 years and I'm not willing to put up with these problems on my workstation. It seems like it must be a very small minority that can.

What makes you think everyone faces the same issues as you? Maybe the problem is your specific hardware? I've been running linux based distros as my daily driver for over 10 years and literally never had any of the issues you described. Never had issues with power management, wifi always worked out of the box on all distros I've tried and suspend/resume always worked flawlessly. If you want a laptop that works well under linux, buy a thinkpad or a dell developer edition laptop.

Kubuntu has a backports PPA [0] if you want to use the latest KDE version. I briefly tested it last month and found it to be pretty stable.

[0] https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-12-3-bugfix-updates-availa...

I wish frameworks included 2FA support in the default auth systems. While there are third party packages to add 2FA support, adding support at the framework level would help drive 2FA adoption in a major way.

Question : How would you add 2FA to a django website? Ideally TOTP + yubikey + backup code, but TOTP + backup code is also fine. The website I plan to add 2FA support will be open source and is meant to be self hosted by users, so I want to avoid SaaS solutions. I came across a couple of packages : django-two-factor-auth [0] which is based on django-otp [1]. There's pyotp [2], which will require me to integrate it into the login flow (not a good idea to be writing login flows). If anyone's using the mentioned packages in production, would be interested to hear about your experience.

[0] https://github.com/Bouke/django-two-factor-auth

[1] https://django-otp-official.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[2] https://github.com/pyotp/pyotp

Have there been changes to Stellar to address the topology trust issue that `nullc brought up in the linked thread?

I was watching this youtube video [0] about KDE neon and loved the customizations that the person had made. I tried out a KDE distro in a VM and made the required changes : use an app icon based task manager, set 4 virtual desktops over 2 rows and set the same desktop wallpaper shown in the video [1] and it looks incredible. It's been at least 4 years since I last used KDE and was blown away by how stable and lightweight it has become (I hear it uses less resources than even Gnome). And there's also the infinite customization options and it looks good out of the box.

Now I'm considering switching to Fedora KDE as my daily driver. For people who use Fedora KDE as their daily driver : what's your experience with this distro? Anything that people new to this Fedora spin need to be aware of? Any thoughts on the security track record of Fedora KDE?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-OEl6b9N4

[1] https://i.imgur.com/w439mEw.jpg