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Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
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Search - "open graph"
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Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)53 -
The story of Netscape and Internet Explorer really proves the irony of fate! And how life will come back to bite you.
Back in the 90's you had to pay for browsers like Netscape (it was called a navigator but same thing) but after Microsoft released IE for free with your windows copy in 2002 it crushed Netscape and nobody used it anymore (the graph below).
But! Netscape wouldn't give up and before the company died after it made legal accusations against Microsoft and Bill Gates and made them pay for that they did, but Netscape was too far gone and already were falling apart they decided to make a self detonation (I guess that's what they thought being in that tight corner) and they released the code as open source which would later get taken by Mozilla and be the code base for Firefox.
Now look at how much better Firefox is and how nobody uses the shitty IE!
Kind of reminds me of the scene from watchmen where Rorshack was in prison and said the best sentence in the movie "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here WITH ME!"17 -
I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.3 -
So recently my open source project took off and got trending on GitHub (680 starts and 225 forks). This was the first time a project of mine really gained some traction and invested more of my time and weekends to maintain this project - I wrote comprehensive docs, contributing guidelines and reviewed PRs and made sure I commented on every single one of them. Sure, it isn't easy to review 50 PRs a day after coming home from work but the excitement of seeing this project becoming trending fueled me.
First 2 weeks it was good. I would come home from work and have dinner and sit down to maintain the project. Whenever contributors would be stuck, I would help them and write comments on each PR.
But the problem started since last week. People just really want to see their contribution activity graph get populated and hence they would make stupid PRs and literally no one followed contributing guidelines - I mentioned in that that the code should adhere to Pep8 styling but no one gave a shit. Each day I would spend reviewing PR with crappy formatted code and no sign of Pep8, and even some will just file PR and add a fucking docstring to every function or add paragraph of comments. Also, the PR quality was bad with unsquashed commits amounting to 10 or 20 or even sometimes 50.
I wrote the contributing guidelines doc and in that I mentioned every source that contributors could find helpful like how to squash commits, how to file a PR and Pep8 and not to write useless comments. Seriously people, grow up!6 -
After three weeks looking for decent pdf parser that will handle all documents I gathered for my project I decided to write my own.
All those I tried end up with more then 10% not correctly parsed pdfs or require to much coding.
I was sceptic so I waited another week debating if it’s good idea to do it and I said yes.
Spent 16 hours straight coding pdf document extraction library and command line tool based on pdf.js
Fuck, now when I open pdf I see opcodes instead of text.
Got two more hours until client planning meeting and then I go to sleep for a while.
Time to start testing this more deeply as I have about 60k ~ 20GB pdf documents to parse and then I need to build some dependency graph out of its text.
At least it’s more funny then making boring REST API for money.4 -
This might not resonate with many ranters here... but FUCK Taylor Otwell & Graham Campbell.
Like, not on a personal level. Maybe they're great to drink a beer with. But as framework devs... fuck everything about them.
Laravel seems so nice, it takes away many annoyances of developing in PHP. Collections are the array object you've always needed. The route bindings, middlewares, request validation objects, it's all sweet.
But eventually your company serves a few million customers, you run into specific performance problems or missing features on a deeper level. You open the issue tracker... and see a few hundred issues about the problems you are encountering, they already exist.
Some just have a short paragraph with a request for a feature, some complete PRs with tests in the style of the framework. All of them closed.
Reasons?
"We don't think anyone will ever need this"
"This seems complicated, you can just do <super non-DRY hacky code>"
FUCK YOU WITH YOUR TODO APP SNIPPETS AND USER-POST-ARTICLE EXAMPLES. I'M NOT BUILDING THE NEXT WORDPRESS. I'M DEALING WITH THE REALITY OF GRAPH DATABASE CLUSTERS, COMPLEX AUDITING LOGS AND A GAZILLION QUERIES PER SECOND.
Sigh... the problem with all these "simple" and "elegant" languages & frameworks is that they don't fucking scale.
Not because the language, server or framework intrinsically can't do it, but because the maintainers are stuck thinking in terms of their retarded non-realistic example apps.
I think I'll go back to my cave and write some Haskell or Rust to calm down.2 -
Talking about the Open Graph protocol (http://ogp.me/)
Why the fuck does the Facebook Object Debugger tell me that my image in the og:image meta tag could not be loaded when I put a HTTPS link in there, but when there is a HTTP link with a permanent redirect to the HTTPS link it can load the fucking image.2 -
Unreal engine adventures part 3:
Code compiles. Everything is fine. Close engine and open it up again since I'm coding a anim graph node and it does not update it unless you restart it.
Unreal crashes...
...
Why the f. Like even if one node is buggy than glag it red and stop execution of it. Why does the entire engine decide not to start instead? That's utter bullshit! And all this because of an array out of bounds? Really? And this thing is supposed to be professional? Come on...6 -
Working on a project, got stuck, thought to call it a night but nooo. Fucking brain decided to come up with a solution 0.0000001 ms right after I shut my eyes. Now I am way too tired to open my laptop back again and I am forced to use Facebook Graph API on my cellphone. FML
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Chinese remainder theorem
So the idea is that a partial or zero knowledge proof is used for not just encryption but also for a sort of distributed ledger or proof-of-membership, in addition to being used to add new members where additional layers of distributive proofs are at it, so that rollbacks can be performed on a network to remove members or revoke content.
Data is NOT automatically distributed throughout a network, rather sharing is the equivalent of replicating and syncing data to your instance.
Therefore if you don't like something on a network or think it's a liability (hate speech for the left, violent content for the right for example), the degree to which it is not shared is the degree to which it is censored.
By automatically not showing images posted by people you're subscribed to or following, infiltrators or state level actors who post things like calls to terrorism or csam to open platforms in order to justify shutting down platforms they don't control, are cut off at the knees. Their may also be a case for tools built on AI that automatically determine if something like a thumbnail should be censored or give the user an NSFW warning before clicking a link that may appear innocuous but is actually malicious.
Server nodes may be virtual in that they are merely a graph of people connected in a group by each person in the group having a piece of a shared key.
Because Chinese remainder theorem only requires a subset of all the info in the original key it also Acts as a voting mechanism to decide whether a piece of content is allowed to be synced to an entire group or remain permanently.
Data that hasn't been verified yet may go into a case for a given cluster of users who are mutually subscribed or following in a small world graph, but at the same time it doesn't get shared out of that subgraph in may expire if enough users don't hit a like button or a retain button or a share or "verify" button.
The algorithm here then is no algorithm at all but merely the natural association process between people and their likes and dislikes directly affecting the outcome of what they see via that process of association to begin with.
We can even go so far as to dog food content that's already been synced to a graph into evolutions of the existing key such that the retention of new generations of key, dependent on the previous key, also act as a store of the data that's been synced to the members of the node.
Therefore remember that continually post content that doesn't get verified slowly falls out of the node such that eventually their content becomes merely temporary in the cases or index of the node members, driving index and node subgraph membership in an organic and natural process based purely on affiliation and identification.
Here I've sort of butchered the idea of the Chinese remainder theorem in shoehorned it into the idea of zero knowledge proofs but you can see where I'm going with this if you squint at the idea mentally and look at it at just the right angle.
The big idea was to remove the influence of centralized algorithms to begin with, and implement mechanisms such that third-party organizations that exist to discredit or shut down small platforms are hindered by the design of the platform itself.
I think if you look over the ideas here you'll see that's what the general design thrust achieves or could achieve if implemented into a platform.
The addition of indexes in a node or "server" or "room" (being a set of users mutually subscribed to a particular tag or topic or each other), where the index is an index of text audio videos and other media including user posts that are available on the given node, in the index being titled but blind links (no pictures/media, or media verified as safe through an automatic tool) would also be useful.12 -
A module for molecules, which take an OPEN API definition and creates a restful API and graph definitions.
So all the proxy database stuff on a rest API can be done easily inside a microservices architecture.3 -
Hey guys I need help.
There was a video or gif posted here in which there was tool running with in Chrome or some browser where the guy first open a web page with adblock disable and then with enable. The tool show the links in pages present in tree like graph. And with adblock enable the graphs was smaller. I want to know the name of particular tool
Sorry, I don't know how to describe it, but it's driving me crazy now. I already searched all Chrome inbuilt urls.2 -
Omg why are social cards so hard to debug? Did no one think of such obscure techniques as local debugging? And why doesn't Twitter show me the error message? It's the same code for fuck sake! It works with one article but not with another. There MUST be some very exact problem with one of my images, but Twitter just doesn't fucking give me a proper log.1