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We've been working on an alternative infrastructure and saves up to 80% on transcoding & delivery costmore affordable solution at Livepeer Studio (https://livepeer.studio/).

It uses un-utilized infrastructure around the world and incentivizes independent network operators to join the network (kind of like a 2-sided marketplace for video-specific compute).

Please sign up for a free account and check it out! We'd love to get your feedback


The underlying technology of Web3 (distributed consensus building) is quite different from that of p2p (networking and information sharing).

While some of the criticisms of web3 are true, most of them are situations caused by the early phase we are in. Moxie's post surfaces the need for better decentralized infrastructure. The hyper financialization (everything is monetized) is caused by lack of identity solution and limited blockspace in L1 chains. These things are being built now, and will come online in the next few years. Transaction fees will become cheaper, applications will be more decentralized.

The core innovation is digital scarcity and crypto-enabled data ownership. For the first time in history, we can represent value without a middle-man. This completely changes the power dynamic of platforms vs. users, and makes value creation digital-native. Web3 has an opportunity to address some of the biggest problems with today's internet services like surveillance capitalism and censorship.


Yeah the bandwidth tax on the cloud makes some use cases impossible.

What do you do instead? We use Ansible to bootstrap k3s. It works, but we have to build a lot more stuff related to monitoring, alerting, routing, etc.


Kubespray on bare metal in a leased data centre with a dedicated link [1]

1. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/janet


Livepeer is hiring for a full stack video engineer.

Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming network, and provides a live streaming service that's more reliable and scalable, with over 10x cost savings.

Check out the product at livepeer.com by signing up for a free account.

If you are interested, please apply at: https://livepeer.com/jobs/full-stack-video-engineer


Hi wmf - I work on Livepeer, happy to clarify on some of the skepticism here.

Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you by taking away your stake). If no one cheats, no one gets punished. Since the cheater doesn't know how many people are monitoring the results, their best strategy is to be honest.


Hey ericxtang. I've met your boy Phillip a few times (that's how I found out about LivePeer) - solid guy. Very good ambassador for your project and all that it can mean for the world.


Very true. Engineers like that are extremely rare, and usually have serious golden handcuffs. However, there are a lot more people with similar mindset but limited programming experience. With the right culture, those are the usually the people who can make a big different at a startup.


I've heard Google has a special process, unfortunately even if they make it public, it would only help startups in a very limited scope. The hiring requires are different, especially when it comes to a lot of the "soft skills".


top 5% is a very relative description. There is no hard measure, and everyone have a different standard on what they are "measuring in their head". Our perceptions are extremely biased by our own experiences. 90% of the time I really have to get to know the candidate before making any decisions. Of course the biggest constraint is available qualified candidates at the time. That's why hiring is so hard, and people who are really good at it tend to be veterans who have been in the industry for a long time.


What about things like Titanium or RubyMotion? They compile to native and allow you to have a "unified" code base.


I'm not sure about RubyMotion, but I can speak to Titanium as we use it to build our TripLingo language learning apps.

Appcelerator Titanium does not compile down to anything - rather it bridges a JavaScript runtime to the native layer: either iOS or Android. It's not as fast as coding in ObjC or Android Java, but we see performance which is very close to that of native and have the entire underlying native SDK available for use.


(I wrote the original article.)

These frameworks typically just allow you to wrap native methods with JavaScript... so you're not really writing to a single cross-platform code base. Morever, if you can build your app entirely in the HTML/JS/CSS side of things, you're golden... as soon as you start to bridge between the Native and JS layers, things get messy (and often very slow).


What? You make no sense. In your original article you advocate going native for now and eschewing Web tech. Now you say that "you're golden" if you use Web tech? Then you top it off by saying bridging down to native is slow.....

Are you just talking out of your ass? Have you actually built an application using Ansca Corona, Ruby Motion, or Appcelerator Titanium? Have you built a published native and Phonegap app to the Android or iOS store? Well, I have done all of these - and I even speak about it at conferences[1][2]. I can safely say you have no idea what you're talking about or you are pushing a hidden agenda.

[1] http://lanyrd.com/2012/lone-star-symposium-austin/stbht/ [2] http://lanyrd.com/2012/uberconf/stcdt/


Could you please either link to a copy of your talk, or some material? Or alternatively (if possible), just give the 3 sentence version of your talk? I'm just about to decide what to system to build a new project on, and I'm interested in your opinion.


...or go watch this video. It's a pretty decent (and balanced) overview of the dev options out there: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Cross-Platform-Mobile


i'd be happy to google hangout with you to help ya'll. ping me on twitter at 'prpatel'


These technologies live in a very narrow space:

1. If you are delivering information that wants to be accessed everywhere, write a Web app

2. If your users want the richest interactive experience, write platform-specific apps

3. For everything else, use proprietary multi-platform app SDKs.

What is "everything else?"


I've captured a lot of my thoughts about this here: http://www.erictang.org/process/2012/02/16/brainstorming/


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