Glassmap's founders get clear about online privacy - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/03/18/glassmaps-founders-get-clear-about-online-privacy/

<comment><USER2> This is an incredibly astute take on privacy. I particularly like the "Right amount of privacy" paragraph -- the concise explanation of a the user's requirement for a continuum of options that adapt to personal situations is something I'd love to see done right.</comment>


Investigation into Death of Actor Robin Williams [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.marinsheriff.org/uploads/854.pdf

<comment><USER2> I don't usually get my pop culture breaking news from HN but wow. Sucks to hear.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cached copy: [http://web.archive.org/web/20140811231534/http://www.marinsh...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140811231534/http://www.marinsheriff.org/uploads/854.pdf)</comment>


The Game of Distributed Systems Programming. Which Level Are You? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.incubaid.com/2012/03/28/the-game-of-distributed-systems-programming-which-level-are-you/ <comment><USER2> This is a very nice classification. It does ring true in my experience, although I would put a few more levels between level 3 and level 4. Very few people are anywhere near level 4.

Your level 3 makes a few "level 2 mistakes". For example, time outs are evil, since they force a decision to be made at the wrong level of the system. Protocol stacks shouldn't use time outs. Rather, they should pass the request to stop or continue waiting to the right level of the system (which can go all the way up to the application level and even to the user level!). Unfortunately, the most-used protocol stacks either don't implement this or it's not exposed to the application programmer. And so we still have a long way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 'timeout' as referred to in the list of possible actions ('schedule a timeout') refers to the timeout mechanism used to implement master election in Arakoon, our product on which some of the experience in the article is based, where we attempt to be at level 3 in the rewrite we're currently working on.

When this action is evaluated (in the impure part of the system), an action will be scheduled with the threading system for execution sometime later, at which point some new message will be sent through the machinery, just like any other message received from another node on the network.

It's not about timeouts on message transmission or anything alike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Im pretty certain that the 'final' level that he talks about doesn't make use of timeouts, but stream monitors that raise temp fault, perm failure and okay flags.

he makes no mention of streams nor of the concept of a port which (in oz) is used to corden of nondeterminism.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean channels, like in CSP (what Go does), are unfit for distributed envs because they are synchronous?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would CSP be 'synchronous'? There's a difference between how things appear (API) and how the implementation works: it's certainly possible to have an API which looks synchronous, yet everything is async at runtime. Think about Haskell's do-notation with GHC's IO manager, the Erlang approach, something like Gevent/Greenlets in Python,...

<comment><USER4> Because, AFAIK, CSP is defined by synchronous message passing:

\- CSP message-passing fundamentally involves a rendezvous between the processes involved in sending and receiving the message, i.e. the sender cannot transmit a message until the receiver is ready to accept it.

\- Programs in the original CSP were written as a parallel composition of a fixed number of sequential processes communicating with each other strictly through synchronous message-passing.

\- The PAT process language extends CSP with support for ..., asynchronous message passing, ...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proces...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes)

GHC's IO, Erlang, and Gevent are not implementations of CSP. Go is, though, which makes me wonder if Go is not a good tool to implement distribution in if they added inter-vm channels.</comment></comment></comment>


Awesome Google Colab and 30+ example notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/firmai/awesome-google-colab <comment><USER2> Lists don't make for such great discussion, because they end up being about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, which is always something generic. Generic discussions aren't as interesting because there's rarely anything new to say about them. It's better to pick the most interesting item on the list and submit that.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20denominator%20list&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Your proving your point by sending a list? Reword your argument then I will give it another look.

<comment><USER2> Alas, my point was not to add to discussion, but to deliver HN standards. Repetition helps with that. Also, the links help people to know that the issue is a common one and they aren't being singled out personally.

If it helps at all, moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read. Here's another link: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22moderation%20comments%22%20tedious&sort=byDate&type=comment)</comment></comment></comment>


NowPublic news site buys Guy Kawasaki's Truemors website - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080710130330.p1rpxko5&show_article=1

<comment><USER2> I wonder which was a bigger factor in this acquisition, the merits of the business or the fame of the founder.

<comment><USER3> What's hilarious is that the site got the majority of its traffic from popurls.com. So without Guy's "fame" and popurls the site would have fizzled long ago (i.e. not made it based on its own merits). Now it gets acquired and really demonstrates the importance of connections.

<comment><USER4> This is how Guy has described Truemors to me:

"Truemors has evolved a lot. It was wide open, and we found that only a handful of people sent in quality stuff. Now anyone can post, but we hold for approval those from people we don't know. There is a group of people who have accounts who can post directly. We actually pay those people."

Guy's new site, <http://alltop.com/> has a similar concept to Popurls: hand- selected feeds shown in boxes, with mousovers for headline descriptions but the site having multiple subdomains for each of the topics it features. Its's described as "an online magazine rack of popular topics such as politics, science, fashion, celebrities, Macintosh, etc."

Guy's obviously seen the power of Popurls in helping Truemors. One thing he's done with Alltop is emailed the bloggers whose feeds he places on the site, who then to promote Alltop to their readers.

Other sites similar to Alltop.com, and therefore Popurls are:

<http://smashingfeeds.com/>

<http://www.eufeeds.eu/>

Basically, Alltop appears like a set of Netvibes universes, but customized for the mass-market and promoted more heavily.

<http://eco.netvibes.com/universes>

<comment><USER5> I heard Guy talk about the origin of alltop last week. He said that he heard about popurls, and how the guy was making money and doing nothing. He was so blown away by this that he called the guy and arranged lunch. Over lunch, he said "So are you going to make popurls for hockey? And wine? And so on?" and the guy said "no." So he said, "Okay, then I'm going to."

<comment><USER4> It would't be hard to copy Alltop or Popurls. And when I say copy, I mean compete. A quality developer could do a better job, I'm sure. A bit like how <http://bit.ly> has evolved <http://tinyurl.com>. There's a lot of power in being able to choose which feeds get listed.

\- collect stats and create a recommendation engine.

\- run a click tracker and have a switch to display only popular links of day/week/month.

\- create a plugin or bookmarklet to quicly add a feed to any particular user- created category on the site.

\- also combine feeds, something not done on either of the aforementioned sites and then offer RSS. Sponsor ads could be spliced sparsely.

\- commenting

Like DMOZ, each new category could be managed by a volunteer who'd be able to place their feed in the category as payback.

Alltop and Popurls are acquisition targets: create a better site now and ride on their popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is every page on truemors.com supposed to show a boring press release? What did the site have on it before this?

</comment><comment><USER7> Who sells a site and then issues a press release about themselves, Guy Kawasaki that's who

<comment><USER8> Everyone should, don't be afraid to boast about your business successes. I know we have been taught to be modest, but press releases are an acceptable format and wide reaching vehicle to building up your personal brand.

If you're not proud enough to talk about your business achievements, why should anyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clearly bought for the publicity and VC cash potential. I bet the price tag is sub 50K.

</comment><comment><USER10> Truemors.com redirects to nowpublic.com and crashes firefox

(winXP, firefox 3)

</comment><comment><USER11> Has to be for sub 1mm. I forgot about truemors and was surprised it's still up!

</comment><comment><USER12> alltop is good, but the problem is it messes up with lots of feeds.. so finally its difficult to get good contents out of it.. i still love smashingfeeds.com as it has limited quality blogs.</comment>


Online community best practices: Reward your top users - <AUTHOR> http://briancray.com/2009/07/31/online-community-best-practices-reward-top-users/ Discussed the 90-9-1 rule of social communities and how to reward that remarkable 1%. <comment><USER2> Yelp is a great example of how to reward users.

They have multiple metrics for most prolific, from complements , to reviews, to friends to followers. There is yelp elite status which allows users to filter for just elite reviews and elites get invited to special elite events.

Related are what I call achievement systems or interesting thing is ways to keep your most prolific users entertained. Usually cosmetic rewards (a different symbol, a larger number) for jumping through hoops.

Some examples:

-World of Warcraft (larger number for doing random tasks like killing 10 bunnies within 1 second)

-Call of Duty (you level up from 1-55 in the game, but at 55 you can choose to reset your level to 1 for a different symbol that allows other users to know you are hardcore and have reset your level up to x times)

-FullTilt Poker (rewards for completing a number of random tasks like folding two pair on the flop)

-Kongregate.com is a great example (you earn achievements for playing games)

Creating ways for your most prolific users to show to others that this is "their house" is a great way to keep them coming back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Awesome examples! I wish I had your ideas during the writing of this article! Thanks so much for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This can be a double edged sword, though. You don't want to reward your top users in a way that alienates your news users.

That is, you don't want to accidentally create a class system where top users are given enviable privileges that new users feel like they can't attain. When that happens, you end up exacerbating the 99/9/1 problem even more by making it very hard for most new users to get into your community.

As an example, I've been a moderator at a number of forums over the past 15 years or so, and at a few we've rewarded people with special privileges based on the number of posts -- such as images in their signature, special badges under their avatar, additional private message space. Some of those rewards are hidden (like PM space), but some are very visual (like special badges) and had the effect of creating a class system in the community. People will special badges were seen by new users as special and their contributions were assumed to be more important -- even though that wasn't the case. Eventually, the divide was so great and it was so hard for new users to catch up that we ended up with just a small number of active users -- those who had been with us a long time and already had a high post count.

(I'm not talking about any forum community in particular, but have seen this happen on more than a couple.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points Catone. How the heck does one prevent that from happening while rewarding top users? Hmmm... Food for thought!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a TED talk about this which was very insightful. I was unable to find it, anyone remember what I'm talking about? He talked a lot about Flickr in particular.

<comment><USER5> For a better discussion of those topics, you can watch this talk at Startup2Startup [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2VzGpVwHY&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2VzGpVwHY&feature=channel_page)

She did a great job of explaining how to apply gaming tactics to social networking. Which is exactly what this thread is about.</comment></comment>


William Richards on the Transformative Potential of Psychedelics - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/503/from-here-to-eternity <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, every little bit helps.</comment>


AWS (S3, EC2, etc) Reduces Bandwidth Prices (incl. bulk bandwidth discounts) - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 <comment><USER2> While the bandwidth has gone up, they now charge a price per request to their servers. They said this is a decrease in cost for 70% of their customers.

<comment><USER3> But it's an increase for guys who were basically using S3 to serve as a way to get their web pages to come up snappier by having S3 serve their many requests for small incidental images. Reddit, for example. They were nickel and diming S3 (well, really $0.00001 and $0.000005-ing), of course totally within the terms of the service, to Amazon's chagrin. Even with the new charges though, it's a great deal for that kind of hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just started using s3 for a video site I'm launching next week and it's awesome. So far it has cost me pennies (literally)!</comment>


Reviving Sandstorm - <AUTHOR> https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm <comment><USER3> Back in 2017 wildcard https certificates were expensive which made self- hosting Sandstorm trickier.

Now Letsencrypt support free wildcards so perhaps it'll be easier for Sandstorm to get momentum.

Sandstorm uses a new hostname for every session [https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#...](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/wildcard/#why- a-new-hostname-for-every-session-rather-than-for-every-document)

<comment><USER4> At the time sandcats took some of that burden off, so you could still self- host without having to wrangle with the cert stuff yourself:

[https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/](https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/administering/sandcats/)

...but yeah, now that let's encrypt does wildcards it'll be easier to do it on your own domain. I'd like to see sandstorm have some nice integration for this in the future.

(sandcats still works of course, and is still a good option to get started if you don't want to mess with DNS and certs right off the bat).

<comment><USER5> The (free) sandcats domain/service didn't die with the paid service/business? I had just assumed it had.. if it's still around and still free that's very cool.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I have no plans to shutdown sandcats. I do have plans to rewrite the server side to use Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare Workers* in order to make it easier and cheaper to operate, but even with the current implementation it's no big deal to keep running.

* I'm also the tech lead of Cloudflare Workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thumbsup for sandstorm - my conpany is extensivly using it with a small team and external clients.

For those who dont know what it is:

Single Sing On with an App Store. Better explained:

You create one account and then can create/edit/share/copy projects of completely unrelated software . So lets say you create a gitlab installation, 3 etherpad projects, 5 wekan (trello clone) boards and then share them with your team/client/family by just adding their email adresses - awesome tool!

<comment><USER8> Was somewhat disappointed it wasn't a 2020 version of the Darude song, but this is nice as well.

<comment><USER9> "Single Sing On" sounds very close to what you want.

<comment><USER10> It has some of the best orchestration out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope we never stop trying to find a solution to what just _has_ to happen some day: everyone should have their own server.

If I make an app, I can safely assume that the user has a bank account, an e-mail address, etc. What would happen to the app economy if we could also assume that the user had a server? Imagine all the apps that would be made possible if the app makers didn't have to pay for and scale a back-end service!

Sandstorm.io, [https://solidproject.org](https://solidproject.org) by Tim Berners-Lee, many people have tried, hopefully someone will succeed.

<comment><USER12> _> If I make an app, I can safely assume that the user has a bank account_

Sure, but that doesn't mean you assume that the user _operates their own bank._ They have some third party they trust to hold their money for them. There are risks to that, but in practice it turns out those risks are much less grave than the risks associated with everybody holding their life savings under their mattress.

This is why I've always been skeptical of the "everyone should have their own server" vision: servers require _administration_ , administration requires technical skills that most people will never have, and even lots of those that do have them aren't necessarily skilled _enough_ to be able to keep them reliable and secure. For all those people, having some professionals at a third party deal with that stuff will yield better results than DIY will. There are risks here too, but it'll probably be easier to mitigate them via regulation than it would be to teach everyone in the world to speak Unix.

(The one way out of this trap would be if we could come up with some kind of server that _did not_ require administration -- that had guaranteed 100% uptime, that never required security updates, that scaled automatically to meet any level of demand, that didn't have physical parts that wear out over time, etc. It's telling that the closest thing we have to that today is less a server and more something like AWS, which... requires trusting a third party.)

<comment><USER4> The key thing is the user has somewhere they can actually _run your app_ ; it doesn't necessarily have to be their own box, it could be one provided by a friend or a hosting provider. That said:

> The one way out of this trap would be if we could come up with some kind of > server that did not require administration

To a large extent this is actually a goal of sandstorm.

I'd contest some of your requirements though: /Nobody/ has 100% uptime, even AWS. And most individuals are not in a position where an outage is going to cost them millions. It might suck, but people trudge through worse problems with their PCs; no reason a personal server ought to be different. So I think the bar is a bit lower than you suggest; I think it's possible to get a server to the point where it can be "administered" by someone who's capable of "administering" a laptop.

We're obviously not there yet; you still need to set up a Linux box before installing Sandstorm itself, and we don't really have a great Story wrt backups yet. But Sandstorm itself is already mostly fire-and-forget; it auto- updates itself, our security track record is rock solid, and I can't remember the last time I had to do anything that felt like sysadmin work for my Sandstorm box. There are a couple things I think still need to happen:

1\. We need an automatic backups & recovery story.

2\. We can't require the user to install Linux first; we'd need a "sandstorm distro" so folks can do the whole business together. The OS should be hardened by default and self-update with Sandstorm, as well as integrate with the admin panel for scheduling reboots.

3\. Ideally, there'd be hardware you could buy that's just already running the sandstorm distro.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I loved sandstorm and used it extensively a few years ago; it was amazing to single-click install instances of apps like; "Wekan", "Dokuwiki", "Wordpress".

The reason I stopped using it was development... It was amazingly hard and confusing to develop a "hello world" application for Sandstorm.

Sandstorm had a great GUI and workflow for users, but it seemed like new developers on the platform were ignored... which reduced the growth of the platform and eventually killing it

Glad to see it's being revived though and maybe I'm smart enough to make my own Sandstorm-Compatible app now!

<comment><USER14> We are definitely very interested in improving app development and new contributor onboarding with Sandstorm. If you do revisit it and hit difficulties, please reach out on IRC or the mailing list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just installed it. I've been wanting to play with Sandstorm for a while for two reasons: 1) seemed like a lot of people were excited about it and 2) I could not figure out what it was.

Regarding 2) I wondered: was this the "new heroku." Or, better than zeit? Or better than docker?

I still don't know.

After installing it, I went to the marketplace and looked at the set of apps. Looks like there is button to quickly install piwik (alternative to Google Analytics). It worked really well. There is a spreadsheet app. A git server.

But, I can do basically the same thing by going to the marketplace in Google Cloud Compute and choosing GitLab, or Wordpress, or whatever.

Sandstorm looks ugly. I know that does not mean it is better or worse, but GCE certainly looks more professional when I install one of their marketplace apps.

So, what am I missing about Sandstorm? If I choose apps like GitLab or Wordpress where there is a documented and easy way to migrate my data so that I can easily move off GCE and over to another provider. Then I feel that my lock-in risk is mitigated, but is there something else that Sandstorm gives me here that I'm missing?

<comment><USER16> > But, I can do basically the same thing ... what am I missing about > Sandstorm?

The big difference, in my mind, is that each app is integrated with a permissions/capabilities model and strongly sandboxed by individual instance or document. Sandstorm itself handles logins, and handles capabilities to access documents; then e.g. there's no way that Etherpad can accidentally leak your doc to someone else unless you've granted a Sandstorm-level permission to that person.

It sort of flips from the "walled-garden app" model, where the app is the boundary and individual docs and users are within the app, to the traditional "computer with filesystem" model, where the user login and the file with permissions are system-level concepts. (Except instead of "file", they call it a grain, and it's a separate instance of Etherpad or Gogs or whatever.) That's also what makes this more than just Docker containers -- deeper integration into the app.

That also gives you flexibility to have a bunch of different instances of a single app, and IIRC, they have functionality to import/export those instances in a well-defined format from one host to another.

At least, that's what I remember from playing with it 4 years ago. In any case, I got the impression that the model was much more secure, and flexible, than just "install Gogs on vanilla Linux".

<comment><USER15> This is such a great comment. Tying together all the different login systems and making it work with a bunch of different systems behind those authentication systems is such a pain in the ass. Maybe Sandstorm tried to promote that as the key benefit at some point and it didn't resonate, but their site right now says "Sandstorm is an open source platform for self- hosting web apps" which does not differentiate it at all.

If I knew that I could create a private walled garden with a bunch of disparate apps that are all connected, that I would have been excited about. That's hard work they did, and it is a shame they don't promote that up front. I'm confused who they think they are talking to, since "open source apps" would only appeal to developer/sys-admin people anyway.

<comment><USER6> I mean, that is described on the front page, under "How is it different?"

Communicating everything that any potential user might want to know in a single sentence turns out to be really hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I went to Cloudron for my selfhosted needs. It works great. But years before I was using Sandstorm, and it was always rock solid. Would love to come back to Sandstorm in the future!

It would be very important to describe and make it much easier for the community to ship self hosted Sandstorm packages.

</comment><comment><USER18> If the failure of Sandstorm has shown one thing, it's that people will not maintain forks of software if the layer you're integrating with is too complex.

I'd much prefer if Sandstorm just shipped with an IdP and contributed OIDC implementations to downstream projects.

<comment><USER14> We've definitely had varying levels of success with this. Sometimes an app has a switch or two for being on Sandstorm and a .sandstorm directory in their repo, and you can more or less "vagrant-spk pack" it and it's good to go. One of the things we're interested in with vagrant-spk updates is ensuring the flow to update old apps is a lot smoother.

Others have a fair bit more difficulty, but I think it comes down to market share: If a lot of their users are on Sandstorm, they're going to care about maintaining a Sandstorm package. If the Sandstorm project isn't as widely used, people aren't going to be that excited to do all the extra work for packaging.

Wekan has Sandstorm packages as part of the release pipeline: Every single release is submitted to the Sandstorm app market, actually. But Wekan is both considered a core app for Sandstorm, and has been available on Sandstorm since it's very early days as a project, so the group of users using Wekan on Sandstorm has always been pretty healthy.

<comment><USER18> It's a bit like providing a snap.

I know exactly one non-cannonical project that maintains a reliable out of the box experience for snaps, Nextcloud. And that's because they use and package it themselves.

Yet I'm never quite sure if I'm about to shoot myself in the foot installing any other snap.

Same with Sandstorm. When I ran Mattermost for a bit I was initially shocked how seamless and fast it worked, followed by immediate disappointment that apparently just a handful of versions had been patched and it was lots of major versions behind by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's sounds more like "here are a bunch of new features coming soon" rather than reviving the project.

Will anything significantly change in contribution activity going forward? Are there again some people working full-time on Sandstorm, which is realistically necessary for a project of this size? The announcement doesn't say anything about that.

<comment><USER4> There's some talk of trying to figure out funding stuff, though none of it is super organized yet. I personally set up a GitHub sponsors profile and a couple folks are donating. I could see us getting organized enough to scrounge up money for at least one person but we'll see.

But, even without that, I _do_ think there's a reason to be hopeful that this is more than a momentary stir. The company shut down so suddenly and without really on-boarding new contributors, and I think much of the problem was that of getting over the hump of "all of the people who've worked heavily on this codebase disappeared at once." I think it might not have stalled in the first place if there were a couple folks outside the company who had been doing regular work on the platform. I still feel like our bus factor is a little low wrt to hacking on core, but I'm hopeful that we can get to a point where there's enough shared knowledge that we won't end up in quite that kind of slump again.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, you are probably right. Building up a bigger bus factor, and some momentum are probably more important than going at it again with full swing.

I wish you the best of luck, and really hope that Sandstorm succeeds! Thanks for putting in the effort!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It would be cool to use Sandstorm to host public-facing apps, so content could be browsed without logging in. For example, hosting a public discussion, chat, or wiki with the simplicity of Sandstorm. From what I recall though, Sandstorm security sandboxing makes it difficult/impossible for Sandstorm hosted apps to be visible to the general public. Has this changed? Is my recollection incorrect?

<comment><USER14> You are not incorrect, and that's definitely something we've talked about addressing, because it's a common request. We have a workable flow for publishing static web pages from Sandstorm, but even that requires manually configuring DNS entries somewhere. We've talked a bit about what would be required to get a dynamic grain available at a well-known subdomain.

There's obviously some security cost to doing that, but it's a cost most people would accept in the context of a grain they want to make easily findable to the public.

<comment><USER21> I should add/clarify that if you're talking about dynamic grains (active discussions, wikis, etc, as opposed to mere statically published sites), it is also already possible to share those publicly. They're just at weird looking URLs. Hence the interest in a "well-known subdomain" feature to improve that.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the clarification. Supporting user-friendly domains is really important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have a self hosting project ready in the wings but I don't know how to make it self sustaining or useful (economically to me as I am poor as it is) if I made the source public. It is also not clear to me how to sell it as a closed source application. Please have a look here: [https://wharfie.org/](https://wharfie.org/)

<comment><USER14> The main thing you have to figure out, especially if you want to make money on it, is what it offers that existing solutions don't. A lot of self hosting options exist, and many of them are free and open source.

So why would someone pay for your project? Even a very novel solution like Sandstorm, which six years later has no real equal in the security department, struggled with convincing people to pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just want to say thank you to everyone who's worked on this. I've been a believer since the crowdfunding campaign, and a user since Oasis came to be (RIP).

While there are some warts, and development has been slow for a while, the project is fundamentally sound and still quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER24> The thing that always killed it for me was the utterly bizarre arbitrary federated login requirement in an otherwise self hosted system. It meant it was impossible to use on an intranet, not to mention defeating the self hosted purpose.

<comment><USER14> Besides avoiding having to manage its own authentication system, one important future direction is federation. So ensuring you can associate accounts as being 'the same person' on multiple servers is a significant boon for the future.

As a community, many of our conversations and notes are spread across five or six servers in different people's control. We'd like a better experience for that long term.

Email login is pretty good now though if you don't want to deal with Google or GitHub, and now that LDAP and SAML is available for free, intranet is pretty doable with standard conventions known to most IT departments.

<comment><USER25> Cloudron.io's approach seems far more easier for developers to adopt. Every webapp runs in a Docker container and auth/user management is delegated to a single-sign-on service. But it's not open-source.

Sandstorm explains why they don't use Docker: [https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker- apps](https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps)

But the problem with the ease of adoption remains.

<comment><USER14> Cloudron is definitely easier to build and integrate apps for than Sandstorm. And it is open source now, although automatic updates require a license.

However, Sandstorm's security model is a step beyone what something Docker based can offer.

<comment><USER26> > And it is open source now

I don't think so. Here's their license: [https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/blob/master/LICENSE](https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER14> Oh, that's unfortunate. It looks like they replaced the AGPL with that 11 months ago. It used to be open source!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Glad to see it! I always thought sandstorm was a really cool concept.

</comment><comment><USER28> what is sandstorm?

<comment><USER29> It's not clear to me the extent to which developers should assume people will be coming from HN and have some background on their project for the uninitiated. This post is almost perfectly devoid of any hooks that might give people a hint of what it is, but on the other hand, for a "not dead yet" post, probably the people who will be most excited do in fact know what it is.

<comment><USER30> Given that this article does not exist alone, but rather within the context of the broader website, readily available by means of the ever-present header with links, I believe it is safe to assume that any reasonably intelligent but unknowing user can do the research on their own.

Additionally, as long as the question "WTF IS THIS??" is not forbidden in the HN comments, even those lacking the domain knowledge, or a sufficiently useful description on the site itself or a useful Wikipedia page, I think the extent to assume is fairly low.

That is, I think it's safe to assume the internet, and its users, exist, and that the reader is sufficiently intelligent to make use of the resources available to them, when writing a post to publish online, if it's not intentionally an introductory post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'll admit, I first thought this was about reviving the popularity of Darude's hit song...

</comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea of making self-host web apps simple to non-technical people.

Is it a non-profit organization or an actual company? I didn't find anything about the pricing plan

<comment><USER21> Right now it's just Free Software that you install on your own server. Any pricing involved (for normal users) had only ever been a high storage space account on Oasis, a sort of example server that was run by Kenton, the original creator of Sandstorm. However Oasis is basically shut down now, because really the whole point is self-hosting anyway. (I say "for normal users" only because there was once a business plan involving potentially getting companies to pay for premium services, iirc)

Sandstorm was (maybe technically still is?) a company with a business plan. However that's effectively been disbanded. From 2017: [https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning- to-...](https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-community- roots)

Nowadays it's a community project, still getting security updates from Kenton. Spinning out some sort of non-profit funding situation, probably unaffiliated with the initial company, is plausible. Right now it's all speculative though, which is why you won't see anything about it on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How does Sandstorm compare with Freedombox

[https://freedombox.org/](https://freedombox.org/)

</comment><comment><USER34> If you like Sandstorm, you're going to love [https://holo.host](https://holo.host).

<comment><USER35> At a brief glance, this appears to be a coin-based / blockchain-dweb app ecosystem. Which is _absolutely massively_ different, though a relative handful use-cases overlap (and blockchain apps do indeed cover some of those quite nicely).

</comment></comment><comment> foreign-inc As a naive user, I could never understood what sandstorm really is. Does it run apps locally? How does it work in general?

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow very nice, didn't know about Sandstorm. I'll try it out!

</comment><comment><USER37> so disappointed this was not about Darude

</comment><comment><USER38> Doodoodoodoodoot.

Dut doodoodoodoodoot.

Oops, apparently that's the wrong Sandstorm...

</comment><comment><USER39> I got really excited expecting some javascript implementation of Darude Sandstorm

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't see a purpose to this in an era of Docker. They say their mission is to make it easy to host your own web apps, and provide some security around those apps, but Docker makes this easy as well and also provides a small amount of insulation around containers.

<comment><USER41> I have spend at least 15 hours trying to self host things with docker with little success. Its not nearly as easy as people make it sound. You don't just "docker run ..." and away you go. You have to spend ages reading the manual for each app, creating configuration files for the app you want to host and then mounting them in to the container, then you have to set up a database, reverse proxy, certificate renewal, and then you have to network it all together.

And then half of the time the docker containers you need aren't built for ARM so your RPI home server cant run it without building it all yourself or finding an alternative container that is built. And then docker has no built in update mechanism so you have to constantly manually check that nothing you are using has any updates.

The only time docker actually is simple is when you use one of the "all in one" containers that has everything you need but then it binds to port 80 and 443 and now thats the only app you can run.

Docker could be used in combination with a sandstorm style tool. The real value in Sandstorm was meant to be that you didn't have to configure everything, you just press "install" and it would be all done for you and kept up to date.

<comment><USER42> I can heartily recommend you something called Dokku, which more or less takes all the pain out of Docker. I had no experience with this, but got fed up of spiraling Heroku costs. Decided to slap Dokku on a €2.50 pcm VPS, runs like a charm. Multiple containers all communicating with one another, staging, production, failover environments, shared storage, all behind multiple SSL- secured domains.

Dokku is single-server only, however. So if you need a Docker swarm, you'll have to do that yourself :)

<comment><USER43> Dokku is great for deploying web services using Docker on a single server, especially if you are familiar with Heroku buildpacks/services and prefer to do everything in the terminal.

Another option is CapRover, which is also free and open source. CapRover is a simple interface for Docker Swarm, Nginx, and Let's Encrypt that is designed for deploying web services. It optionally supports scaling web apps across multiple servers, and also includes a web interface which can be used in place of its CLI, if you prefer to manage the system in the browser.

[https://caprover.com](https://caprover.com)

[https://github.com/caprover/caprover](https://github.com/caprover/caprover)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As a product it was a disaster. What I would do if I was going to turn it into a company:

1) temporarily decrease the # of supported apps.

2) new custom react UI

3) call it project headless. try to discard a ton of code. keep the schemas, fork the services, grpc/capnproto them etc, tear out the good bits of the server sides of these apps. If an app has nothing special in it - discard it.

We all know in the long run this would be the least labor intensive way to execute a project like this. I bet you'd get a huge amount of contributions flowing in too.

<comment><USER14> The community members working on it right now are focused on improving the capabilities of Sandstorm for fellow self-hosting enthusiasts like ourselves. We're not building a company, so our priorities are a little different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Article about dead project which doesn't describe what the project is.

<comment><USER35> Yes. It's _particularly_ reasonable to assume that readers are minimally aware of what they're reading on a "reviving a dead project" blog post IMO - <USER2> would you assume readers have no idea what's being revived? Why would they even be there?

More generally, it's a project-specific news section, it doesn't need to introduce itself in literally every post - check the site instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Concerning the presentation of this article, rather than its contents:

Source Sans Pro 300 is too thin for body text on most platforms. It's tolerable on Apple platforms with high-DPI displays due to their stroke thickening (where they essentially ignore the font author and do their own thing, though you could also argue that it's just a form of gamma control), but on other platforms like Windows it's much too thin, to the point that on many low-DPI monitors it's genuinely painful to read.

Be very careful in general when using light font weights for body text. 400 is a much safer option.

<comment><USER47> I think you're overgeneralising. I have terrible eyes and I'm using low-DPI screen with normal zoom. I had no trouble.</comment></comment>


FounderDating: First Event is on Sep 9th - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/

<comment><USER2> The whole invite only aspect of it makes me want to puke. Way to foster community and help other entrepreneurs meet up with like-minded folks. I'll stick to my hacker meetups tyvm (okay and i do attend tweetups, there really shouldnt be such stigma involved with them.. they're quite fun).

<comment><USER3> I kind of disagree. In a way Startup School is the same thing. I think when you can assure that all the people are really serious about being there (and are also reasonably qualified) it makes for a higher quality event. I would far rather attend Startup2Startup than Lunch 2.0 for example, the quality of the networking is orders of magnitude better.

In the case of looking for people to start a company with I think I would appreciate that the people who are there have been screened by some sort of process.

<comment><USER4> Well for startup school, there's limited seating, and high profile panel speakers. A founder dating session probably won't even attract 30 people if there's no indication of content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's happening in Palo Alto, CA.

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought this actually involved dating other founders....

<comment><USER6> That could very well be the worst relationship possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The 'where' page is empty. Anybody know where this is happening? what city? That might be a key bit of info.

<comment><USER8> The empty 'Where' page is really disappointing, couldn't they have at least borrowed the 'Under Construction' gif from the new Sequoia site?

<comment><USER9> I really miss the days of the animated gif with construction workers</comment></comment></comment>