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jiggity

That's awesome! Is the player for consumers? A white-labelled player?
Good to have you back! It's the same guy :)
Ahh you mean like pushstate into the addressbar. That's a great idea. One of the issues has been losing the streams you were watching upon refresh
Hey everyone, I got fed up with having to juggle around multiple tabs each with a different stream and manually muting them. I spent the past 2 months working on a website that hopefully solves this problem.

This was my first foray into React. After having been developing on Ruby / Node on Heroku, making a pure frontend static app was refreshing.

Here are some of the features:

- Very, very fast. A lot happening under the hood with video to make the swaps near instant. I had to play around with GPU acceleration and CSS transforms to manipulate the streams.

- Load three streams simultaneously, when you swap out the primary stream, the other two streams are muted automatically.

- A powerful compact stream browser accessible to your left. I've tried to make it so you can scan a whole lot of streams at once to pick out the most interesting ones.

- Auto-refreshing stream list. Hopefully you won't even notice it reloading. It's always kept up to date to minimize any offline streamers and catch your favorite streamers coming online.

- Drag and drop streams into screens, click on screens to promote them to the primary. A lot of small miscellaneous things that hopefully make Teevox more intuitive.

- Auto bandwidth optimization, when you select a very high quality stream (ex: Source), instead of switching all three to high quality, it'll only do it for the primary stream. When you swap out for another primary stream, it will seamlessly transition into the proper quality.

The best part was the static HTML portion that allows it to load almost instantly without any preprocessing necessary. Let me know what you think!

That's interesting! Is it the feeling of a more fluid conversational flow?
You're right, having a more closed group with people you personally know would be interesting. There's something special about knowing what people you care about are doing at the moment

Made the fix for the link! Let me know if you run across other issues

It uses memcache for everything. It exports out state data to a static file on a cdn

This was an experiment in seeing how far I could get without using a traditional database

Lapface was my weekend hack designed to give the feeling of working with other people. It takes a low resolution webcam shot every 3 seconds of you working. I made the image with slow fps to relieve you of the pressure that usually comes with broadcasting

It feels nice to have people working alongside you. I've had it described as a virtual coffeeshop where you see people in the ambient background

Let me know what you think!

Re:Steve Jobs Introduces the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch on Thursday September 11, 2014 @09:24PM (#8306161)
Thanks for your kind words. It took me a long while before hitting that submit button. It's that moment when you're unsure if what you've written is any good.
Re: on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @11:16AM (#5134737)
Hi all! It started off as a 1 day project and then I ended up getting carried away.

A few features:

- Smart pre-caching to minimize load time.

- Collect interesting vines. Right now, it just dumps it into local storage.

- Duplicates elimination.

- Categories that act like channels for rough curation.

I think the most interesting part about Vine is that you get a huge amount of short-form content with high variance in quality. This is very similar to 9GAG where enjoying a single piece of media is quick and there is a large corpus out there. This means you build an effective curation mechanism, you get a lot of value. In either case, let me know what you think!

Find me on twitter at @jiggityk. I will also be hanging out in the Olark chat on the site.

Re:Ask HN, on startup naming. We need some input on Saturday August 25, 2012 @02:02AM (#4431245)
love the name! nice mnemonic too. triggers recall right when you're looking for contact.
Re:YC Demo Day Bingo Welcome the newest YC batch on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @04:05PM (#4414507)
Definitely agreed. Correlated with being the best batch yet!
Re:Hey Makr.io, don't let the haters get you down. on Thursday August 16, 2012 @05:15PM (#4393691)
Ahh, good point! Take a look at: https://makr.io/latest This was the original page I was taken to when I was first introduced to makr.

I guess what drew me was that everybody on that page was in a synchronous experience. You make a composition, everybody will be instantly exposed to it. It's like everyone takes a turn being at the top of HN with the fluidity of Twitter.

Re:Hey Makr.io, don't let the haters get you down. on Thursday August 16, 2012 @04:44PM (#4393564)
I think the founders should make this page their front page: https://makr.io/latest

It's like a live discussion that's going on through pictures. Because of the fact that there is only one new image in focus at a time, there's an active flow that you know everybody else on the site is looking at synchronously.

When you submit a new image and caption combination, you know that 100+ or however many people currently on makr.io will see it immediately. That gives you pretty good odds that you'll get hearts or comments based on what you made. The instant rush you get when one of your creative babies hits it big is incredible.

Re:Hey Makr.io, don't let the haters get you down. on Thursday August 16, 2012 @04:30PM (#4393502)
Yes, that's the idea. If we choose to be lax and rely solely on our "intuition", all we will see are fragments of pieces that look familiar. We can't help but to compare these components to contemporary examples.

When World of Warcraft first came out, there was so much outcry because it was simply "Everquest dumbed down". Players had taken the component that looked familiar in WoW - the grind - and compared it unfavorably simply because that was the only available metric. In reality, the focus of the design was placed elsewhere entirely and the game itself caused a paradigm shift for grinding to be regarded as negative.

For us as intelligent thinkers to willfully ignore this fundamental problem of introducing something new with familiar components and dive down into a circle of hate would constitute being a hater.

I usually like figuring out future plans while riding the caltrain to minimize wasting high-opportunity-cost-time on such things like logistics. Thanks for bringing it to mobile! The fact that it's gorgeous is just icing.
Re:Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999 on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @08:36PM (#4389249)
The answer has been simple for me: start on Android. The ability to push new fixes to live within a few minutes is a godsend. There is still the overhead of getting people to update the app after the download, but this can be easily remedied by in-app notification for a one-touch update experience.

I don't think it's too unreasonable to assume that if you hit product/market fit on Android, you probably hit it for iOS. Launch MVP on Android -> get first 1k guinea pigs -> pivot, iterate, pivot, iterate -> achieve product / market fit -> spend 3 months creating a beautiful iOS app.

Got it fixed! Sorry about the downtime. Culprit was a 80 gb log file. -.-
Spent the last 4 hours hacking out a way to integrate UStream!

    1,2,3 - Cycle through PiP screens

    TAB - Show/Hide PiP screens
    
    LEFT, RIGHT - Volume Change
    
    C - Show/Hide Chat
For everyone who's coming to Teevox for the first time, Teevox is an integrated stream viewer that has focused on gaming streams (think Starcraft and League of Legends tournaments) gathered from our very own Twitch.tv and Own3d.tv.

Let me know if you come across any bugs / new features you might want! I can be reached at jiggity - at - gmail.com

Re:The Power of Photos on Saturday July 07, 2012 @04:31PM (#4212633)
Roman here has stumbled upon a very powerful force in products. Emotions are the reason why we get up in the morning. It's what gives life color and variety and meaning. It's the reason why we have friends, why some of us might enjoy work, why we prefer to live "life" instead of lying in bed, waiting to die.

What Roman refers to in his photos is the fact that they are an incredibly efficient vehicle of emotions. In a small 480x320px package, you can reminisce about your unrequited crush, your first child just hours old, or your passed-away parents showing you how to use a computer. In that sudden surge, you take a sharp breath, close your eyes as your head begins to spin. You have just experienced a more-significant-than-average moment in life.

I would go as far as to say emotions is the primary metric of life. The "best" times of your life are when you are feeling a surge of emotions, indelibly marking it on your brain as a memorable time. The other times when you don't feel anything tend to fade away until its nothing but a bland grayness when you try to recall that period in time. To maximize life is to maximize the memories you can remember. You maximize the memories you can remember by experiencing more emotions.

Everyone wants to live meaningful, memorable lives. This is a primal need.

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If emotions give life value, what if we can inject more into ourselves? Somehow we "cheat" the system and get more emotions than what is naturally due to us. This exists. We know this technique as "going to the movies." The reason why people pay $12 to watch a 2-hour long movie is because of the emotion stimulation that we yearn and crave for. It represents a very dense serving of love, humor, coolness, loneliness, accomplishment, disappointment, schadenfreude that leaves reality that much more bland and gray.

But wait, you might argue. I'm a diciplined software engineer. I'm objective, diligent, and focused. I don't have any time to waste with sissy emotions. I'd argue that if anything, as engineers, we're even more addicted to emotions than anyone else. We chase after the pure bliss that comes from building something ourselves with our own hands. That emotion is so powerful that it overtakes what normal people regard as "fun" -- movies, fiction books, computer games.

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So, what does this mean for our startups? It means that for people who get it, it offers a powerful design mechanism that makes products that give primal value. If you have an effective mechanism to trigger emotions, you have built something of value that people desperately desire.

This applies to any sort of startup -- not just social network / photo apps. Add a narrative to the workflow; make your user feel things. Let them feel a heightened sense of accomplishment. Let them laugh because of an industry inside joke you included. Letting your users feel more things while they use your product is the surest way to beat your competition. More emotions mean more perceived value. More perceived value means more profit.

You are grossly underestimating the effort it takes to find an interesting problem and then find an interesting solution.

Think of it in terms of Legos. Parse is an automatically sorted tray of Lego pieces for you to use. No more prickling your hand for 3 minutes while you search for that one piece -- no boilerplate.

You take a gymnasium filled with a 1000 7-year-olds and hold a contest to see who builds the coolest stuff. No amount of tools is going to help the poor kids who can't think of interesting things to build. On the other hand, one particularly ambitious venturist decides to build a 5-foot-tall T-Rex out of Legos. Parse rapidly accelerates the build process by providing the stuff he needs right when he needs it.

If anything, I foresee an increase in price in the future as we see more apps that provide more value in more sectors. App profit is not a zero sum game. The profit derived will be directly proportional to the value derived.

[TLDR] - The limiting reagent to successful apps is good problems and good solutions. Good tools merely speed up development once you have figured those two things out.

This is very cool stuff guys.

If you had a way to somehow save the chat entries that happened at a particular cursor location, you have a way to capture the exact line of thinking / rationalization that went behind it. This would go way beyond arbitrary line comments while keeping your code clean. It follows that the more controversial / complicated segments of code will have more chat exchange between the developers. If a new developer were to be brought in to modify the code, it brings a very human element towards understanding what exactly the code does and why it was written that way.

I remember being brought into a 100K+ codebase as an intern and simply being overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to learn the structure and why it was written the way it was written. If the codebase also came with chat logs, it would've been an invaluable asset for me to pore over.

If I were you guys, I would make this into a full service that provides the automatic coding narrative. For any company that starts using this system, the value of such information will skyrocket over time.

Re:Ask HN: How can I be competitive? on Friday July 06, 2012 @10:49AM (#4207955)
That's excellent! It certainly had me going, "That's pretty cool." I was checking the arduino docs and it looks like it has a ton of support for connecting the board to the Internet -- even being able to host its own webserver / connect with Twitter / run a Telnet client.

If your goal is to learn further web development, try including a net component as a more central piece of your product vision. It's your way of hacking your brain such that you'll have to, want to learn that stuff to achieve your cool project.

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