Ask HN: Is there a service for 'renting' devs time to help program? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
Sometimes I get stuck on a development problem or just want to ask someone. Sometimes, asking on stackoverflow and forums are not enough especially if you have to debug through the problem and show where the crash happens. However, someone experienced might point it out in an hour or two. Is there a service where I can pay a developer by the hour and remotely work out the issue?
If not, do you think that there is a market for a service like that?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I don't think there's a service like that, but let's attempt to talk through who could potentially use it to figure out if there's a market.

1) Would a developer who is part of a workforce in a company where there are other developers use this? Chances are, probably not - he has coworkers whom he could ask to help him work through a problem. This is more efficient than hiring outside help - his coworkers probably understand the codebase and the problem domain much better than he does.

2) Would a student developer in a school use this for his schoolwork? Chances are, probably not. Schools usually have tutors, and the instructor is usually available. Also, students are usually low on money to pay for services like this.

3) It sounds like you are what I call a "lone-wolf developer". You consult for projects as your main source of income for companies that don't have on-staff technical talent (otherwise you'd ask them), or are a single founder working on your own project (or, if you have cofounders they are completely non- technical). You would definitely use this service. How many people are there like this?

The reason why your post caught my eye is because I often find myself in the "mentor" role that you are describing, and have often wondered that question myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Yuri,

Yea I see your points but couldn't the same points be made for elance and yet they exists. I don't know the financials but I am using elance right now because coding this thing takes too long for my taste and I want to move on to the next thing.

With that said, elance may be used by someone who has no development skills whatsoever so it will have a bigger market, no doubt.

But, I can see a service like this to go beyond development, it could be about marketing, strategy, SEO, etc...

PS: Would you be willing to mentor me ;)

<comment><USER2> No, elance is something else - people on elance are not good for a quick, off- the-cuff 1 hour conversation. With elance there's a definite project start date and a definite project end date, and a deliverable that is either delivered or not. There's a large market for outsourcing this kind of long- term or even medium-term development - there's a very basic distinction between hiring someone else to fully do it during their own time vs. you doing something yourself and having someone educate you and walk you through it. After all, you can always reject the work someone did on elance, because the payment is per-project. In a mentoring situation, you can't really say "well, our conversation wasn't helpful", unless the mentor spent the whole conversation talking about something completely irrelevant - the act of mentoring is a little more amorphous.

What you are actually talking about is something along the lines of what lawyers do: you purchase a set amount of hours upfront (a retainer), and then you reach out to them with specific problems as they arise, until you use up all the time you've purchased. Sure, there might be a market for all kinds of professionals to sell their future services for retainers.

With regards to me mentoring you: sure, e-mail me, we can chat more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think such a service would be great. Last night in the middle of a very long coding session I got stuck on getting a particular SQL query working right for a couple of hours. I got a little help and some hints in #mysql on freenode, but I eventually needed to work it out myself. When I come across an issue like this that blocks progress on the project I'm working on, I'd love to have a service where I can drop some cash on getting help from an expert when I need to find a solution quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think there is a niche market, yes. Just like there is a market for a paid twitter (app.net), there could be a market for paid for stackoverflow (just not something like experts-exchange).

I would call this "CTO for rent" or "tech lead by the hour"

note that there are many consulting companies that do exactly this, the thing is that they charge 100-200$ an hour.

I'm sure that in elance you can find someone willing to help for a nice reasonable fee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea. Thanks for the consultant insight. It is weird how elance developers are getting paid much less by per hour than consultants.

I would assume they are both thinking of not just a few hours gig but a project where they can bill 20+ hours.

<comment><USER2> Do you account for the differences between living/business costs where most elance developers live vs. where most consulting companies operate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I posted this a while ago asking a similar question <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500567>

I considered it micro-consulting. The responses listed <http://anyfu.com> and <http://clarity.fm>

</comment><comment><USER6> There is a site called www.glgroup.com where you can do initial consulting with the individual for free just to know them but if you want specifics then you have to hire them using various options available.</comment>


Reaction Engines brings us a step closer to Mach5 commercial air travel - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestar.com/news/the_world_daily/2014/08/uk_project_brings_us_a_step_closer_to_ultra_high_speed_air_travel___along_with_simpler_satellite_deployment.html <comment><USER2> We're not going to have Mach 5 commercial air travel for the same reason we don't have Mach 2 or 3 commercial air travel. The economics just don't work.

That reason is much more boring than the technical obstacles, which are formidable, fun to try to solve, and kind of beside the point. In that sense, this problem resembles a lot of software engineering.

But just to keep this comment from being too depressing, here's one technical gripe: consider that liquid hydrogen is an extremely bulky fuel, even if you don't include the necessary insulation. Notice how nearly the entire volume of the satellite launcher in the diagram consists of hydrogen tank. There's not a lot of room in there for passenger lounges and drink trolleys.

<comment><USER3> > The economics just don't work.

Given that you don't know how much this will cost to operate, you can't possibly know that, right?

At some point, i think i read a claim that an airliner based on this technology would be able to supply Europe - Australasia trips for about the same price as a business class ticket on a conventional airliner on that route. Passengers currently buy a fair few of those tickets; some might choose to do the trip in two hours instead of twenty-four in exchange for a smaller seat and the loss of a couple of meals.

<comment><USER4> Is there really a tremendous amount of demand on the Australia / Europe segment? If London/NYC wasn't viable for the Concorde (probably the most popular international airline segment), I can't imagine the demand being higher on routes to Sydney.

If the fixed costs of a flight are high, it will likely be even more expensive than the Concorde on trans-Atlantic routes.

<comment><USER5> Concorde reportedly made BA about £750M.

I'm not sure whether that figure takes into account the development costs - but the reason that it was retired was due to Airbus withdrawing support.

[http://www.concordesst.com/retire/faq_r.html](http://www.concordesst.com/retire/faq_r.html)

<comment><USER2> The CEO of Airbus said in the Financial Times that "The costs of operating Concorde, and in particular maintenance and support, have become such that operations are unrealistic for any operator."

The reason BA booked a profit is because of massive de facto government subsidies for Concorde, for reasons of national prestige.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The trick is, and it is a trick, to "instantly cool the air". Think about that for a moment. Generally the way most 'air breathing' engines work is that they take air, heat it (which expands it (thanks Boyle!)) and toss it backwards which imparts a forced in the forward direction (thanks Newton!). The difference in temperature between the inlet and exhaust temperature of a jet engine is a component of its efficiency. (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine#Energy_efficiency](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine#Energy_efficiency) for some math :-)

But basically if you're suddenly cooling air it gets smaller, which creates a lower pressure, and was used effectively in steam pumps to create the vacuum needed to lift water out of mines.

So the Reaction Engines concept takes really hot air that is compressed because it is being pushed out of the way by the air frame, then super cools it which causes it to become much smaller, and then dumps that into the engine. Which then heats it up again and pushed out.

If I understand the theory correctly, it takes heat from the air, removes it and puts it into liquid hydrogen (which then becomes vaporous(sp?) hydrogen) and then burns that hydrogen with residual oxygen to put the heat back into the air plus what ever is extra from the hydrogen. What bugs me about it is that it seems to double count the energy in the air rather than single count it. But I'm interested in seeing one of their machines in action. If someone knows whether or not there is a violation of thermodynamics in there I'd like to understand that.

That said a mach 5 vehicle with a range of 12,000 miles and a payload capacity of 15 tons has much more interesting uses than carrying passengers I think. Would make a heck of a cruise missile.

<comment><USER7> >That said a mach 5 vehicle with a range of 12,000 miles and a payload capacity of 15 tons has much more interesting uses than carrying passengers I think. Would make a heck of a cruise missile.

yes and no. No - early detected and easily destroyed even by previous generation of anti-missile systems. This is basically why Valkyrie and the likes were scrambled 50 years ago. Yes - quick deployment against countries still not having any meaningful anti-missile defense :)

Also, quick jumps above 60mi (space international border) would probably allow to legally fly modern day U-2 style missions over some relatively narrow territories like over Crimea, Cuba, North Korea, etc...

<comment><USER8> The working hypothesis at the moment is that that type of suborbital hypersonic aircraft is what's being built by the US at Area 51 these days. Certainly the focus of public research funding has had that theme to it.

<comment><USER7> well, judging by nobody hearing the sonic booms - somebody living in CA would definitely hear it when it would be going into Pacific, i think X-15 and Branson are the closest takes on it (both being almost the same actually, and military can realistically use such approach today, though no country has reported such flyovers and considering that it can be easily spotted if used...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In a previous post (a little over a year ago) about the same engine I posted a link to a video with a Q&A with Elon Musk where he was a bit pessimistic about the idea.

I'm not a rocket scientist so I wouldn't know the first thing about it, but if anyone is interested in his (then) opinion it's after 48m55s in the video here: [http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211](http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211)

<comment><USER8> Elon Musk isn't the expert in this area. Practically no one except Reaction Engine employees and some guys at Area 51 are - in the entire world. It's certainly not an easy thing to do, but since they actually do seem to have the heat exchanger figured out then that's kind of a big deal.

Burying the lead is the whole commercial air travel angle though. What they're building is a fully reusable, cheap to operate SSTO to low earth orbit.

<comment> bjelkeman-again ESA did a review of Skylon and the Sabre engine and said "...the SKYLON vehicle can be realised given today's current technology and successful engine development."

[http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html](http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/space_skylon.html)

Of course, there needs to be a successful engine development project. Which needs another billion or two to complete according to the CEO/MD of Reaction Engine. (He was a bit more specific than that when I heard him say it, but it is in the ballpark.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> the thermodynamic economics of ram/scram jets at the Mach5+ speeds is almost killed compare to the rocket engines by the fact that oxygen is only 20% of the incoming air, while the whole incoming air needs to be processed through the engine, ie. compressed/(may be cooled interstage)/heated/expelled. Various unavoidable losses on this 80% (nitrogen) of the incoming air eat deeply into end-result efficiency of such engine when compared to a rocket engine.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds a little odd. I'm not really an expert on this area or anything, but it sounds plausible that if they are able to cool the incoming air stream to that temperature, then they might be able to make the speeds they're claiming. But I have to wonder, not only how they made a heat exchanger capable of cooling the incoming air that fast, but what are they doing with those megawatts of heat that they're taking out of the air? They claimed air temperatures coming out of the heat exchanger of -150, so where are they getting a cooling fluid colder than that to do exchange with?

<comment><USER2> The incredibly huge tank of liquid hydrogen not pictured in the diagram. The same one that makes the idea completely unfeasible for commercial transport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm assuming this can't be used for flying over land due to sonic boom?

<comment><USER12> Depends which land and — most likely — depends who builds it.

It's not like the US forbid overland supersonic flight for their military planes (and overland commercial supersonic flight was only banned as the US's sole SST program was cancelled)

<comment><USER13> During 54 years of living in 5 different metropolitan areas of the U.S., I've never heard a sonic boom. (I know what one sounds like because they were frequent during a vacation I took in West Germany a long time ago.)

The Blue Angels, for example, are not authorized to exceed the speed of sound: [http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/show/faq.aspx](http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/show/faq.aspx)

<comment><USER14> I lived near colorado springs in the early 80s, as a child, and I can remember on two occasions being (figuratively) knocked out of bed by a sonic boom.

Presumably from the Air Force Academy. Only happened those two times the entire time we lived there - presumably someone got in trouble for it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So they can cool the engine, but what about the heat on the rest of the plane?

<comment><USER16> That's not the problem. The problem is that hot inlet air means that once you burn your fuel, the air post combustion stage is then too hot and melts things.

<comment><USER2> It's a huge problem, unless you don't mind a flying oven. In the SR-71, the crew had to wear special cooling suits (presumably these will be available in first class).

<comment><USER16> What I mean is that from a material standpoint, the engine turbine temperature tends to be the design limiting factor.

Yes, there's going to be hot spots on leading edges due to stagnation for example, but you're not burning fuel there to intentionally jack the temperature up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the video is 2 years old

</comment><comment><USER18> I've read about this before, and I do think it sounds pretty neat, but a small part of me hopes it doesn't work for putting satellites into space, only because the technology doesn't help us land on other planets.

<comment><USER19> I disagree. Familiarity with microgravity and the vacuum of space in orbit will make developments in interstellar travel that much cheaper.

<comment><USER2> I think we're pretty familiar with vacuum at this point. The obstacle to practical interstellar travel is 99.99999% propulsion, which you don't learn a lot about by endlessly falling in a circle.

<comment><USER8> And the obstacle to propulsion is the inability to lift large payloads cheaply enough into orbit to start with.

The problem is we can't build big things in LEO. At the moment its that our entire LEO-access infrastructure is woefully underdeveloped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nitpick about the title[0], but it's a kind of thing that really irks me. It's "Reaction Engines", not "Reaction engines". It's a _proper name_ of a private limited company, not a class of engines.

[0] - at the time of writing this, the title was: "Reaction engines bring us a step closer to Mach5 commercial air travel".

<comment><USER21> Based on the grammar following "Reaction engines," it's clear that the OP simply thought the new engine was actually called a "reaction engine"

(I'm sure the author would not write "Google bring us closer to autonomous cars")

<comment><USER22> The Star is a British paper: UK usage would be Reaction Engines bring, and yes the author _would_ write "Google bring...".</comment></comment></comment>


What is 5D chess? - <AUTHOR> https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-on-earth-is-5d-chess <comment><USER2> I bought this game a few weeks ago with a friend and we jumped in without any prior knowledge about the game or how it worked. After about 3 hours we were finally starting to understand the basic principles and I have to say wow, it's an absolute blast to play. Many hours in now we've finally begun developing our own strategies and it's absolutely insane. I have to say that 5D Chess is one of the most creative and innovative games that I've played in recent memory and I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER3> What is your opinion on how into the chess one needs to be to get a similar kind of experience out of the 5D chess? Asking as a casual hobby player.

<comment><USER4> I'd say you need to be comfortable with how the rules of chess work, but you don't need to be a chess player. The time travel rules even out the playing field for amateurs who play against actual chess players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 'From my experience playing a few games on it against decently strong opponents has been that at high levels it becomes "Chess, but it's much much easier to checkmate, and 2~3 times a game some time travel shenanigans happen."

The main reason for that is time traveling and dimension hoping come at a tempo disadvantage. When you create a new timeline, you make 1 move, but give your opponent 2 moves. You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their turn in the past.

Any time travel or dimension hops need to be worth twice as much, minimum, as a normal move to even consider making them.

It does have more depth than normal chess, but it's not infinity deep. I still love it. My biggest concern with high level chess matches is that many, many games end in draws. It feels like it's impossible to a draw a gam e in 5D chess' [0]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hxqo6d/how_to_play_5d_chess_with_multiverse_time_travel/fz8nnqh/)

<comment><USER6> > You used your turn in the present, and created a new board where it's their > turn in the past.

Doesn't it depend on the piece you use? Knights and Bishops seems to be able to move on the board and move back in time at the same time.

<comment><USER7> Pieces have the same movement rules as normal chess. A knight for instance moves 3 spaces along one axis, and 1 space along another axis. If you time travel you're essentially sacrificing one of those spatial moves for a temporal move. For example 2 spaces back in time and 1 forward. So while it's not entirely giving up a move it's fairly close, especially for pieces that only move along a single axis at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always thought a cool chess variant would be quantum chess where you can move a piece to more than one square and assign a probability to each position. Your opponent could do the same. But I never worked out how it could work from there.

<comment><USER9> A players mental representation of the game is already that (and you use this mental representation to predict future outcomes).

If you add probabilistic moves, the optimal way to play would be to give each alternative move the same weight (ie probability) that you think it will win you the game. You would pull this probability out of your mental representation.

Something like, "I think this is the best move, but this one is really good too so I will do it as well".

So I guess it could be fun to be able to try out all the moves you think are good in this way. But then an easier way to achieve this is to just play the game normally and go back to an interesting previous position once you have won.

But maybe a set of rules that will allow you to still win the game 'in retrospect' after all the 'best' moves were played by going through all the alternative superpositions as well.

So basically just play normally, but when you doubt what move is best, you make a superposition (and assign probabilities), which means you will be going back to this position later.

The winner would be the one who won most often, with each win weighed by the probability of that outcome (calculated based on the assigned probabilities along the game).

Sounds like fun.

<comment><USER8> Yes exactly what I was thinking, it is as if you mentally picture and weight each move, but what if you could actually represent that somehow and play out all the variations of a game like a multiverse. Sometimes when I play against a computer I will try different things by trying something then going back using undo, but then I wonder, wait maybe the other fork would have worked out, etc. This way you could have many versions going at once. I have look at source of various open chess engines and they do something similar, the idea is what if there were a way, maybe with shading of the pieces or some other way of representing the super positions of each possibility. The UI would be interesting challenge.

<comment> em-bee for the UI, how about duplicating the board? each game starts with one board. at each split point the active board is duplicated and you can play each. at the end you could draw a tree to show all the decision points and the end positions.

for extra fun if one board gets to a position that another board already had, the tree could be merged again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. When I read "5d chess" I thought it would be a game where each dimension is represented by a different chessboard giving you a different view of the game. So for example, in the first dimension, the white king is in 1a and a black rook is in 2b, whereas in the second dimension the white king is still in 1a but the rook is in 1b, thus threatening the king. So everytime you make a move in one board, the piece you moved moves on all boards, but in a different, but relative, position. So the point of the game would be to make a move in one board that crated an advantage on another board- if a piece is captured in any board, it's captured on all boards and if a mate is threatened in any board it's threatened on all boards (and yeah, that's totally cribbed off the kernel trick in SVMs: map a lower-dimensional space onto a higher dimensional space to find a separating hyperplane that doesn't exist in the lower dimensional space). I guess that would get very hard to play very quickly though, certainly for a full game on an 8 × 8 board, but it could perhaps be played in end games like KRK or simplified chesses like hexapawn etc.

Btw, for anyone who likes time travel paradoxes, do watch Dark. It's up there with Primer, but does your head in more because of how many characters there are.

</comment><comment><USER11> The video at the end reminded me of "Imagining the 10th dimension" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_GQqUg6Ts)

So is this basically visualizing the tree of possibilities from any board configuration, overlaid on itself at nodes where different sequences of moves can result in the same board configuration, allowing you to "jump" to a different "timeline" through the 5th dimension?

<comment><USER12> Oh my gosh, I _hate_ that "10th dimension" video _so freaking much_. It has done nothing but spread confusion and false understanding across the internet.

If it were just presented as a fun exploration of what 10 dimensions _could_ be, for fictional purposes, it would be... OKish, I guess. But choosing "10" specifically makes people erroneously think that this is what string theory is about, which is completely wrong.

Additionally, it falls into the trap of assuming that curvature requires a higher dimension to curve in, and that nontrivial connectivity inherently requires such curvature, both of which are false and hard enough to explain to people who have not been explicitly taught wrongly already.

And on top of all of that, it perpetuates the faulty idea that "the" 5th dimension, or "the" 10th dimension are sensible concepts, by presenting its particular choice of dimensions to discuss and its particular choice of ordering of those dimensions as fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From all the descriptions, this is actually 4D, no?

Normal chess is 2 dimensions, plus you have time dimension (3D), plus you have parallel timelines - that always go just one dimension

So it's 4D and not 5D?

edit: yeah it's actually "just" 4D, from the explainer here

[https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh](https://imgur.com/a/XyRJmuh)

<comment><USER14> It depends in real life you always have a 3D chess board (+ time dimension) and in some chess UIs you have the option to get a 3D board rendered, like in chessbase [https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/frit...](https://de.chessbase.com/Portals/All/2017/_eng/products/fritz16-18b-3dboard.jpg)

<comment><USER15> But you actually only play the game in two dimensions, because the pieces cannot move up or down. Normal chess is a game happening on a 2D plane whether or not the representation of the board and pieces is 2D or 3D.

<comment><USER14> No, because that again depends on the representation. You can store the information of moves and chess position in 1D. As for example, two players can play a game of chess just by exchanging moves via morse code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great, now I can suck at chess in 3 more dimensions.

<comment><USER17> Just wait till somebody invents 5d Go

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do you know if you have won? Or is it about avoiding checkmate in all possible timelines for all possible time travelling moves?

<comment><USER19> I'd think the same way you know you won regular chess. You capture the opponent's king. Checkmate is just an acknowledgement that the current player has no way of avoiding their opponent from taking their king on the next move.

<comment><USER20> So checkmate in any one timeline counts? You couldn't do all timelines.

<comment><USER21> I suppose you would have to avoid the king escaping to another timeline?

<comment><USER22> You do , which is why it ends up being easier to attack kings in the past. Because you can't change the past, only create new timelines, attacking a king from any previous board state means that the attacking piece must be captured.

<comment><USER23> does this means that attacking the starting king position will always put the king in check of the very first board? but, he can't really escape that

<comment><USER4> Yes, but it's not that easy. Pieces still make threats according to their movement rules, whether through time or space.

For example, if your king moves from its square and an enemy rook attacks its starting position (rooks can move any number of squares in any one direction), then it's mate unless you can take the rook. However, if in the intervening time, another piece lands on the same spot, then it will block subsequent rook checks through time on that square.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It looks amazing, and I really want to play it, but however I count I only end up with 4 dimensions. A chess board is 2D, time back-and-forth is 3D, and going up/down across universes is 4D. What's the 5th? Are they counting real- life-time as the 5th? In which case normal chess is 3D, which seems like an abuse of terms.

<comment><USER25> It's only 4D. I believe they called it 5D chess because they didn't want people to interpret this as 3D chess + time. If I recall correctly, the tutorial mentions at some point that the 5th dimension is "unused".

<comment><USER26> It would have been nice if 4D only ever meant four spatial dimensions, and then we'd have (3+1)D for three spatial dimensions and a time dimension. (And (2+2)D for two spatial and two time dimensions :-))

<comment><USER27> 2+2=4D could be for _position_ and _momentum_ in two dimensions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We skipped right over the opportunity for non-integer fractal dimensional chess! In all seriousness, this looks super interesting. I'd love to see some live gameplay of it.

<comment><USER29> Arguably, that's what this is. The bifurcating timelines are better thought of as n-dimensional space. Describing the location of a piece requires a description of the bifurcations, which won't be a fixed number of numbers but will go up as the game progresses. Integer dimensions don't really cover this.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, great point, the dimensionality of the game increases as it progresses. I can't tell from the article, is there a bound on the number of parallel board timelines that can run simultaneously? Theoretically, without a bound, the dimensionality could increase indefinitely (there could be non-terminating paths that loop between the same game states enabling an arbitrary number of bifurcations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Would be interesting to see something like this with poker. There are some interesting, high variance games becoming increasingly popular and this would certainly be a cool wrinkle: "6 card high low Omaha with time travel".

</comment><comment><USER31> 3d chess is another popular variant: [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- dimensional_chess](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess)

Lot of games you could spin up in this manner. I wonder if we are going to do that for all the board games with tried and old strategies. HN has any suggestions on what those board games should be?

Game on steam: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/)

There is a discord linked in the game help menu where people are discussing lot of things including how to create a bot.

For the lazy: [https://discord.gg/8kQhp6](https://discord.gg/8kQhp6)

Edit: removed mobile url.

<comment><USER32> > _3d chess is another popular variant:_ [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- > dimensional_chess](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess)

I was crazy enough as a high-schooler to actually build (with the help of my father) a 3D chess "board". It was mostly plywood, with eight 8x8 boards stacked vertically. I had previously gotten a "3D" chess board which was just three 8x8 boards. They weren't making Star Trek tri-dimensional chess sets back then.

With the 8x8x8 3D board, movement rules for 2D chess have a "natural" expansion to 3D, with only a few corner cases. White player's non-pawn pieces start out on the bottom board, with the pawns on the next board up.

In practice, it was hard to visualize how the game was going in general. We were constantly standing up and crouching to see. Only one of my friends wanted to play, and he only lasted about half a game. :-(

With the failure to interest my friends, I had intended to write my own chess program to play it. I had started out with the 2D version, and was then intending to expand it later. The original was written in BASIC... and that did not go too well.

<comment><USER33> I imagine it'd be quite hard to trap your opponent with an extra dimension to escape in. Perhaps the board should be smaller to compensate. Regular (2d) Connect 4 is played on a 6x7 board. But 3d Connect 4 is played on a 4x4x4 board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Happy to see this finally getting some traction on HN. I finally finished all of the puzzles a couple of days ago and I'm confident I'm going to file this one under the same file as Go: Fun to play, but even better to watch more skilled players analyze.

</comment><comment><USER35> I desperately want to go hang out on a forum where people are building AI bots to play this game.

<comment><USER36> according to searchableguy, that's happening right here: [https://discord.gg/8kQhp6](https://discord.gg/8kQhp6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd love to see a chess variant where you could move pieces upside down to the bottom side of the board and make moves and pop back up onto the surface at strategic points. Lurker chess.

<comment><USER31> Shogi?

[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This looks amazing! Although I wouldn't be surprised if this was a forced first-player win.

<comment><USER39> Perhaps at an expert level, but given theory debt of even normal chess I hardly see how this could be an issue at very expert level but that's not for some years (assuming it gets a community but it clearly has a good start). It actually looks really fun, hopefully there isn't a way to cheese-win as white, but barring that it looks really fun and creative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> When I was learning about puzzle game making, one of the rules was people don't like puzzles. They like puzzles but not the feeling like they're doing one.

This is kind of the opposite. So it really competes with Fall Guys then...

<comment><USER22> Outer Wilds does the whole "puzzle game without feeling like one" better than any other game I know.

<comment><USER41> God that game is SO GOOD. It gave me a lot of "I finished a puzzle" feeling without having to do any hard puzzles for a lot of it, until the point where I had to take a thing from the Hourglass Twins to another part of the system without fucking it up, with suddenly higher stakes. I stopped playing it for like a week when I knew that was what I had to do, because I had to be in the right mood...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I watched the video at the end three times and still couldn't figure it out.

<comment><USER31> Try [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMEiBu4M1c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Would love to see some GM stream this. Go Nakamura :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Blackjack version, "Hit me.... ok stay"

</comment><comment><USER45> 90 comments and no Putin joke yet?

</comment><comment><USER46> Now I can "checkmate, bitches!" in another timeline... This is tremendous

<comment> dane-pgp I think that's called "Nothing personnel, kid".

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you- nothing-...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/teleports-behind-you-nothing- personal-kid)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Lichess[1] is a popular site to play chess online for free. They offer different chess variants to play against other people. Would be great if 5D chess was one of the variants to play online.

[1] [https://lichess.org/](https://lichess.org/)</comment>


Kubernetes 1.19 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.19.md <comment><USER2> Reminder it's time to get off 1.16 now. Only 3 versions (current-2) are supported upstream.

[https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/version-skew- policy...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/version-skew-policy/)

<comment><USER3> Tell that to Google. Their "regular" (recommended) release channel in their managed Kubernetes Engine product _regular_ ly falls off the back of the supported range, while their "rapid" channel barely stays within it.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to see those two teams eat lunch together

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ingress going GA and the support cycle bumping up from 9 months to 12 are my fav two things in this one.

Of course it'll probably be another few months (if not six) before we see this in gke/eks.

<comment><USER6> Ingress going GA seems big. I just read through the release notes but didnt see as much about Ingress Controllers. I always found it strange that Ingress Controllers are external components provided by the CSPs or 3rd parties (if you are going multi-cloud support as I am).

Looking at NGINX, Kong, Traefik, and the loose change of community-contributed extensions to NGINX, Kong, Traefik, I always wonder why it isn't just part of the core. Anyone know if that is the eventual plan? If so, what happens to the small companies building solutions, do their products just become 2nd class citizens?

<comment><USER7> I think the problem is that HTTP reverse proxies do so much, it's hard to specify what Kubernetes should do and what you should get an external solution to do. (Personally I am appalled at how org-wide SSO works right now, and almost started my own company to sell an open-source solution to the problem. But... I don't know how to start a company and then there was a pandemic. Someone else will sell you a not-as-good solution for mega-bucks.)

In my opinion, people are always going to want their special thing; compatibility with their legacy nginx.conf, support for HTTP/3, whatever. Kubernetes can never satisfy people with those requirements. For that reason, I think people need to agree on a service discovery protocol, a route discovery protocol, and then hook those into their frontend proxy of choice. For example, I never really liked Ingress (lots of unspecified landmines, like what order rules are evaluated in when matching a request to a route), and so just run Envoy inside Kubernetes. Envoy is then fed a static route table and a valid TLS certificate, and handles all traffic in an explicit and easy to debug way. I wrote something to glue Envoy's service discovery to Kubernetes so my static config file contains less boilerplate ([https://github.com/jrockway/ekglue](https://github.com/jrockway/ekglue)), and it's served me well. (I need to write something to add route table entries to DNS, though. I currently do that by editing my DNS records in a web interface, which is tedious and uninteresting.)

With that in mind, what people should really be focusing on is standardizing xDS (Envoy's config language basically), and hooking it into their container orchestration framework and web server of choice. Then you can run Nginx on Openshift or Apache on ECS and everyone is using the same tools to do the very boring gruntwork of figuring out what your backends are called, and what syntax you use to say "send all requests that match example.com/foobar to a backend my container orchestration framework calls foo-bar-v2". I am sure it will sort itself out eventually -- xDS has a lot of momentum in things that aren't Envoy (notably gRPC), so this could all be a solved problem outside of Kubernetes soon enough.

<comment><USER8> I generally agree, and would add though that the Service API work that is forming the basis of ingress v2 will help a lot here as well.

(I do think that xDS is a non trivial interface to learn and standardize on though and is probably overkill for most.)

<comment><USER7> I think a too-complex API is better than a too-simple API. If the underlying infrastructure is too simple, then people have proprietary workarounds to get the features they need (see Kubernetes Ingress and all the vendor-specific annotations). If the underlying infrastructure is too complex... then implementation is harder, but at least you can do what you need. Someone else can smooth it over and give you a simplified version, if the subset you need is the same subset they needed.

This is always a spectrum, of course, and xDS is probably missing crucial features... but at least if it becomes somewhat widely used, there will be an incentive to add the missing features.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Child's Puzzle Has Helped Unlock the Secrets of Magnetism - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-childs-puzzle-has-helped-unlock-the-secrets-of-magnetism-20190124/ <comment><USER2> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18991101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18991101)

<comment><USER3> Not really. That story never gained traction and has zero comments.

<comment><USER4> Both postings point to the same story, it's by definition a duplicate submission

<comment><USER5> HN explicitly allows some duplicates for stories that didn't have traction, and linking to an empty discussion is pointless.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Kaiwa, a Modern Open-Source XMPP Web Client - <AUTHOR> http://getkaiwa.com <comment><USER3> In my opinion, it doesn't matter if it looks like Slack. What matters is that I can deploy it on an existing infrastructure and still have control over the service instead of handing over control to a third-party.

<comment><USER4> I for one welcome slack competitors, self-hostable, open sources ones especially.

<comment><USER5> Check out [http://sdelements.github.io/lets- chat/](http://sdelements.github.io/lets-chat/)

<comment><USER6> Let's chat is really neat, I've played with it a lot but I have to say that the combination of not supporting OTR & The fact that it relies on MongoDB put me off using it in production to replace our existing chat server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The very first sentence irks me: "[…] for the only standardized chat protocol [XMPP]"

Haven't they heard about IRC (RFCs 1459, 2810–2813)?

<comment><USER8> There's also [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org) ; though it's not going down the RFC route (at the moment at least).

</blatant self-promotion>

There seems to be this general assumption at the moment that a) XMPP is the only open chat protocol about and b) its dead, so everyone decides that the only logical course of action is to write and use custom proprietary protocol. This, of course, massively sucks from a UX perspective where I end up having 100s of identities and apps and logins that I use (semi-)regularly to not just chat with people, but also comment on articles, discuss things on mailing lists etc.

<comment><USER9> (Long time lurker, only a reader till now) I've been looking for something like matrix for quite some time now (albeit probably in the wrong direction) and it seems like a really cool project. I've been wanting to build a chat application on top of a chat protocol like that for ages! Its a big boost to finally get started. Thanks!

Edit: whoops, I had commented once before, it was just so long ago that I forgot about it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No mention of OTR. :-( When your client is a Web app on a trusted server (i.e. OTR key on the server), you could avoid multi-client issues by having only that on XMPP client that you connect to from multiple browsers.

<comment><USER6> Came here to say just this. I've been looking for a replacement for our Openfire server for some time now, but there just hasn't been anything that's quite there yet.

<comment><USER11> Why are you looking to move away from Openfire? I used it years ago and liked it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note that the same team also offer a Trello clone and an Evernote clone. Draw your own conclusions.

[http://digicoop.io/products](http://digicoop.io/products)

<comment><USER13> They built a kanban board and a collaborative notes application. There is nothing wrong about that.

Quite the contrary: Project and knowledge management or so important that you should not have just one (and additionally closed-source) application for that.

It's good to have competitors who focus on different workflows (Evernote was not built to be collaborative, Trello does not offer other display modes such as cards and a basic calendar).

I would not complain if they created another CRM as simple as Highrise or an open source helpdesk that could replace Zendesk (I really like helpful.io for this, btw).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The UI feels like a 1 to 1 copy of the Slack client, or is Slacks UI so common now copying it is just using the Chat-UI standard?

<comment><USER15> What's so original about the Slack ui? It's channels on the left and conversation on the right. A lot of irc clients look this way.

<comment><USER16> Sure but this is a clone down to the details. Tell me one IRC client that looks like Slack in the same way.

<comment><USER17> mirc with users on right, channels on left, chat in middle

centre is basically a copy of hipchat...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There has been a deluge of web chats lately (which is a good thing).

Has anyone tried Let's Talk, Shout, Echoplex, and/or Kaiwa in practice and have some experiences to share? Stability, searchability, general functionality?

</comment><comment> juliendsv-mbm Great to see open source apps promoting open protocols - made me sad to see FB and Google moving away from it

</comment><comment><USER19> If you disabled or drastically resized the avatars and put the usernames not in a separate line, the window could hold a lot more content for single-line conversations like that.

<comment><USER20> Maybe open a pull request? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> screen + ssh + irssi (+ bitlbee, if you need xmpp) > any web based solution. Why? Because I can see it on my phone and on my laptop, and it's as lightweight and simple as a `ssh -t irssi.myDomain.foo screen -DD -R` and I'm all caught up.

This is, ofc, my $0.02. Stuck in the old way of doing things, I guess.

Still pretty cool, particularly the deploy on DO.

<comment><USER22> Except for being almost unusable on smartphones (or barely usable on devices with qwerty keyboards), and bitlbee's arcane syntax for joining MUC chatrooms, this is the exact setup I am using.

<comment><USER23> I don't have any trouble at all using Colloquy on iOS and connecting back to my bouncer. It's about as seamless as you could expect all things considered.

<comment><USER24> Does your bouncer let you view the full scrollback from multiple clients, without having to keep them constantly connected (and preferably without lagging out one's mobile client when it connects and the bouncer deluges it with old messages)?

There are a few different solutions for this out there, especially clients that run some custom protocol between the GUI and the bouncer, like Quassel and Smuxi - but I've tried both, and each both (a) has poor mobile support and (b) once you get used to it, turns out to just suck in general. (These opinions are a few years out of date, though.)

Thankfully I don't actually care much about mobile support: I don't use IRC for time-sensitive discussions, and for recreational purposes, trying to participate in a real-time conversation where everyone can type several times faster than you is, IMO, a pain; I'm faster at typing on iOS than I used to be, but it's still just not comparable to a real keyboard. Better to save the chatting for when I have one. But I find ssh+screen an unacceptable solution: partly because of issues with notifications (i.e. out of the box, there are none) and copy+paste, though both can be fixed in theory, but mainly because of the latency. When the letters I type don't appear for 100ms or more, it really trips me up and I make a lot more typos. I could find a server with less latency at home, but that wouldn't help when traveling, especially on an unreliable connection - even though there is no fundamental reason chat should be latency sensitive in the slightest. Tried mosh (ssh + prediction) as a compromise for a while, and it works better, but it has some issues and doesn't fully hide the latency.

These days I'm using Glowing Bear, the web-based remote for weechat (that uses yet another custom protocol). Latency's gone, and like other web-based clients it has the neat feature of embedding YouTube videos and images, so I'm finally pretty satisfied with my IRC setup. (And I can be paranoid about security and run it on localhost rather than using their website directly.) But there are disadvantages: Glowing Bear is somewhat feature poor, it (again like other web-based clients) is relatively slow to render, and there is no native iOS weechat remote. (Guess I could still use weechat as a regular bouncer, or perhaps try Glowing Bear from mobile Safari...)

<comment><USER23> No, nothing I use supports synchronizing scroll buffers beyond ZNC's behavior of dumping the scroll buffer to whichever client is connected (Colloquy on iOS, Textual on OSX). I've not found the dumping behavior to be that terrible, but I don't frequent very popular channels so it's generally not pumping out thousands of lines every time I open the app. For the most part that doesn't inconvenience me, I can respond to any pings or queries as necessary and catch up on conversation. If I need to review anything outside of ZNCs buffers it's a super quick task to just go and read the logs from disk. The main critical feature is not losing private messages and pings when moving between client, which ZNC achieves without fail.

Like for you IRC isn't anything beyond recreational for me, so quirks in the workflow are just fine to work around. If it was my primary method of communication I'd be looking into improving it I suspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A slight tangent, are there public XMPP servers?

Are there open source projects that use XMPP for their public channels?

I'm a little dismayed by how many Slack accounts I'm acquiring.

<comment><USER26> DuckDuckGo offers a great public XMPP service - [https://duck.co/blog/xmpp- services-at-duckduckgo](https://duck.co/blog/xmpp-services-at-duckduckgo)

<comment><USER27> Well snap. I just wonder what happens when some TLA comes knocking...

<comment><USER28> You can use OTR or GPG on top of XMPP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am glad projects like these are being worked on. Desktop XMPP programs are terrible. I have had a hard time hosting my own chat service for friends,family and work because the clients never work together for file transfers.

I just wish these were easier ''FOR ME'' to install on FreeBSD.

<comment><USER30> There doesn't seem to be much in the way of install instructions for anything, except the digital ocean automated installer, which also sets up a prosody server.

<comment><USER31> Seems like they have some instructions here[0], which is linked from [http://getkaiwa.com/deploy](http://getkaiwa.com/deploy)

[0] [https://github.com/digicoop/kaiwa- server/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/digicoop/kaiwa- server/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER30> Ah interesting, I didnt see that, I didn't consult that page much because it seemed to be solely focused on the Digital Ocean stuff

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What prevents me from adopting XMPP for my team is the lack of push notifications to my phone. I don't want to have an app constantly maintain a connection and slowly drain my battery.

<comment><USER33> Push has been formally specified very recently in XEP-0357 ([https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0357.html)), now is the time for implementors to show what they have !

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's not hard to get a UI like Slack's. The actual chat window is just like what IM clients have used for decades. One side has the contact and chat room (channel) list combined instead of in a separate window. Like in IRC instead of XMPP and other chat systems. Put the settings and away management in a header or footer and you've got slack.

It's not like it's revolutionary. They put two and two together in the only reasonable manner for a single-page application.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm curious how E2E encryption (OTR e.g.) could be implemented with a client like this (preferably without having the keys leaked all over the place), it's the only interesting feature I miss from a quick glance.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately, this won't improve your security. The client code comes from the server, so you need to trust it anyway. While it is possible to implement OTR or PGP in the client, the server admin could poison the implementation code and leak your private keys.

<comment><USER35> > The client code comes from the server, so you need to trust it anyway.

Sure, but we have TLS for that. E2E is still needed to cover everything else (e.g., I trust the server _now_ , but I don't want to have plain-text logs on it in case the feds seize it).

<comment><USER22> OTR also breaks Message Archive Management (MAM) and Carbons - the two features making multi-client operation any useful, and highlighted in the article. And with MAM, there actually are plain-text logs of your conversations on the server.

The call is still open on end-to-end encryption over XMPP when multiple devices (or more than two parties) are involved.

<comment><USER36> The issues you list (message archive being plain text, key management when multiple recipients are involved, maybe even transparently) don't seem to be XMPP specific.

Is there any chat system out there with end-to-end crypto and reasonable support for multiple devices?

<comment><USER22> As funny as it sounds: iMessage. The only crypto-related problem with iMessage's encryption is that Apple controls the key servers. -- [http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/apple-explains-exactly- how-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/apple-explains-exactly-how-secure- imessage-really-is/)

Besides, it is not available for non-Apple devices.

TextSecure/Signal has a robust crypto system, and they are working on multi- device support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm planning on setting this up for myself later today but a few questions before I do that:

\- Will this stay connected to my account and the history will be there if I close the tab / browser / computer in the meantime?

\- Is it possible to replace certain strings with images? This is not at all an important feature but just something I got used over the years. (Example: :string: replaced with image.png and displayed inline. That's possible with Adium but I'd really like to replace Adium)

Thanks!

<comment><USER38> On the homepage they mention they use Message Carbons, so your history should be retained, yes:

      Using Message Carbons (XEP-0280) all of your active conversations will be synced to your Kaiwa client.

Don't know about the second question as I haven't looked at the source, but it doesn't seem all too hard to implement even if its not there.

<comment><USER39> I don't think that applies. Unless I misunderstood the GP.

I understood the question as "will I be able to receive messages while the tab isn't open" (offline messages) and "will I be able to read my history on a different device later on" (MAM). Carbons serve a different purpose and sync connected clients (i.e. you chat on your desktop, but your phone receives the same messages as a carbon copy to stay in sync).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think this is great. If there were more people pushing clients like this, not only will it push the guys who already make money off of it, but we can do a better job coming up with new communication ideas as a whole.

I'm ONLY using Hangouts because they don't allow group messaging in any other client. I'd like to see that change!

</comment><comment><USER41> Excellent work.

Is there a reason why you chose Prosody over MongooseIM or ejabberd?

<comment><USER42> Thank you. We chose Prosody because it supports the XEP we needed and it was originally used by Otalk from which we forked.

<comment><USER35> Relatedly, why are you recommending only Pidgin, and not Gajim? Gajim covers a lot more XEPs than Pidgin (e.g. editing sent message).

<comment><AUTHOR> We have updated the page to recommend Gajim instead. It is a better choice indeed.

<comment><USER43> Also Conversations doesnt allow for customer server IP address so it's unusable for me. Yaxim does which is why I will have to stay with it. Custom IP server addresses are important if you have DNS/NAT complications within your internal network compared to outside.

<comment><USER35> Can you use SRV records for this? Or is that unsupported too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've been working with XMPP and a number of XMPP daemons. A couple years later I'm not a fan.

<comment><USER45> If you have tried Prosody and have any feedback on it, I'm all ears (or drop us an email at developers (at) prosody.im).

I love to receive feedback (of any kind), as it's the only way we know what we're doing right and wrong!

<comment><USER44> OK, you have my attention. I having been working with ejabberd and openfire. I'll take a look at prosody. If I have time I'll get back to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there a good mobile client to use with a xmpp serveR?

<comment><USER22> Besides of the ones referenced in the article, there is also ChatSecure [0] for Android and iOS (with a strong focus on security) and Xabber [1] and yaxim [2] for Android (I am the maintainer of yaxim).

[0] [https://chatsecure.org/](https://chatsecure.org/)

[1] [http://www.xabber.org/](http://www.xabber.org/)

[2] [https://yaxim.org/](https://yaxim.org/)

<comment><USER47> I've been using Monal <[http://monal.im/>](http://monal.im/>) on iOS - <USER2> UX, supports groupchat, doesn't put a "proxy" between you and your server, etc.

<comment><USER48> Coming from the patron saint of XMPP, that some recommendation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow! Nostalgia.

If I remember correctly, "Kaiwa", was the codename for the first Macromedia's Flashcom Server (before Adobe's acquisition).

Flashcom Server at that time made it possible to run 2+ ways multi-threaded communication (audio/video) via the Flash Player (2003-ish).

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there any chance we will see webhooks in a future release? (ie. slack integration)

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working on integrating Hubot first and we'll look into webhooks after.

<comment><USER51> Will you plan to integrate with Atlassian services like jira, stash, confluence?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Great Work! This is exactly what I was looking for to deploy on my work, We are still stick on IBM chat, and this will blow people out of Water.

</comment><comment><USER53> The click to deploy on Digital Ocean is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER54> Looks just like Slack.

<comment><USER55> Some people would say that's a good thing. I think the more important point is that it's 100% under the control of the organization or users who deploy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Any plans of making LDAP optional? I am already running a prosody server and have no use for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> LDAP is already optional. You can remove the "ldap" section from the config file and just launch the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> As a freelancer today i need to use a plethora of different messaging apps like skype, hangouts, slack, hipchat, irc + a couple of others for private messaging like iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram. It is really becoming somewhat annoying.

</comment><comment><USER58> Now you need to open-source amazing iOS and Android apps too :) Good job, looks great.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does it use WebSocket?

<comment><USER42> yes it does with stanza.io ([https://github.com/otalk/stanza.io](https://github.com/otalk/stanza.io))

<comment><USER59> Great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > "Combined with Prosody, one of the best XMPP server out there, Kaiwa..."

I think that should say "servers" plural.

</comment><comment><USER61> very exciting.

need to try it out to see how extensible it is.

</comment><comment><USER62> Can I chat with Google Talk users from this?

<comment><AUTHOR> You will first need an XMPP account but then you can add GTalk users to your roster and chat with them.

<comment><USER22> GTalk has broken federation for Hangouts users, and they failed to enable s2s encryption, which is mandatory since February: [https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.t...](https://github.com/stpeter/manifesto/blob/master/manifesto.txt)

<comment><USER47> Actually we (most of the XMPP network) switched over to mandatory encryption last May and IMHO it's been pretty successful so far. Google is welcome to join the party anytime! :-)

<comment><USER63> Sounds a lot like Google's behavior on GTalk amounts to 'embrace, extend, extinguish'... except that they failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The deploy to DO ain't working.

</comment><comment><USER64> Good work .

</comment><comment><USER65> This looks great - I'd like to give it a try. Does it work with ejabberd?

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't tried but it should work with any server that supports WebSockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> >modern ... XMPP ...

lolnope</comment>


Ask HN: Do you blog about professional AND personal topics? - <AUTHOR>

I'm guessing quite a lot of people here have a blog where they write about topics related to their profession e.g marketing, development etc
Do any of you also use the same blog to write about personal topics?  For example hobbies or events you have been too that are not related to your work?  I'm thinking about doing this but do you think its acceptable?
In my opinion its okay to have a mixture of both.  I find it quite refreshing to get an insight into people's personal lives too. <comment><USER2> I do this, but I'm not writing with an audience in mind; blogging is first and foremost a way to organize my own thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd find it a bit weird. It depends how much crossover there is.

</comment><comment><USER4> honestly, as someone who enjoys reading blogs, I do like reading what the blogger is passionate about

<comment><USER5> I don't. Actually, I am talking about twitter here, which it is not the same. I follow some recomended UX experts with the only reason to learn more about UX - learn about good posts, good tools, good books, good events on the theme. When one of them tweet something personal is a little annoying to me.

I know anyone have the right to tweet anything, but with this "experts" there is a implicit commitment of a professional relationship between she and her followers. If you want to blog hoping for a big audience, expecting to create your own brand, be a reference on your field, than I think it should be only professional stuff. But if it is not the case and if you are completely clear about it for first arrivers on your blog description, than of course it is ok.</comment></comment>


UPDATE: Apple Admits To Inflating Signal Strength In IPhones  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100702-706192.html

<comment><USER2> To those who will only read the headline: The "Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4" says "...we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong."

This headline reads like they were inflating on purpose.

<comment><USER3> It's difficult to question Apple's honesty here without it becoming an ad hominem attack, but it's difficult for any reasonable person to imagine that somehow throughout the last three years of having a product in market, with a carrier who is notorious for dropped calls, the whole signal-strength-to-bars algorithm hasn't come under some scrutiny. I mean, the first question you ask someone when they complain of dropped calls is: "how many bars did you have when the call dropped?" It's difficult enough to get accurate information from users without feeding them erroneous information.

I don't think it's as clear cut as Steve Jobs instructing his teams to pump signal strength reporting, but if they were given a selection of algorithms to choose from, and they chose the one that reported "more favorable" results, then that's on them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Canary deployments on Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/davidgf/serverless-plugin-canary-deployments <comment><USER2> Great plugin! I would like to see it as part of the core of the framework for the AWS provider as pointed by some here [https://github.com/serverless/serverless/issues/4595](https://github.com/serverless/serverless/issues/4595).

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this plugin!!</comment>


Promo: The easiest way to create marketing videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/promo <comment><USER2> cool stuff, have been looking for some facebook video ads generator.</comment>


The same folks who brought you Mighty Morphin Power Rangers want to fund your digital media startup. - <AUTHOR> http://newteevee.com/2008/03/10/go-go-power-vcs-saban-to-fund-digital/

<comment><USER2> They have money...wonder if they have a clue.</comment>