Meanwhile I cannot turn my living room LED lights on or off because I control them through discord. I guess that's what I get for relying on a messaging service to control my lights.
voidfunc 447 days ago [-]
Whyyyyyy?
natpalmer1776 447 days ago [-]
Someone's gotta put the hacker in Hacker News
retrodaredevil 447 days ago [-]
I have individually addressable LEDs, so I created a domain specific language (DSL) to control the LEDs, meaning controlling the pattern of the LEDs is best done by sending a message to it.
Honestly the DSL really isn't that great. I've been meaning to redesign it using something like ANTLR rather than the mess that I made a few years ago.
I do eventually want to have a local-first way to send messages to the program, but creating that isn't worth my time at the moment.
kurtoid 447 days ago [-]
Discord bots are dirt simple to make, so it's not that crazy
voidfunc 447 days ago [-]
This doesn't answer the question tho. Utterly ridiculous.
Kiro 447 days ago [-]
I find your lack of hacker mentality much more ridiculous.
hoten 447 days ago [-]
Typically hacking gains you more control over things - seems fair to question if ceding control over the lights in your home to an external service is within the spirit of "hacking". Maybe "rube goldberging".
dijksterhuis 447 days ago [-]
> Typically hacking gains you more control over things
only according to the more modern definition of “hacking”
the earlier version of the term referred to people who write novel, interesting or clever software for the love of the craft.
i think using discord as a free message queue (see spivak’s comment in the thread) is pretty damn clever actually.
i kinda want to build something with it now.
giancarlostoro 447 days ago [-]
Discord works just fine most of the time, its not that big of a deal. I assume they can still turn off their lights any which other way.
ilrwbwrkhv 447 days ago [-]
Telegram bots are simpler and has never ever failed me. Much more reliable.
Spivak 447 days ago [-]
It's a completely free, both in message volume and queue size, highly available hosted 1-1 and 1-n topic based message queue with automatic sharding, excellent performance, and high-quality prebuilt libraries. It has built-in notification support to all platforms and a basic UI toolkit that is easy to use.
The fact that it's also a chat thing is honestly secondary to the foundational tech.
fschuett 437 days ago [-]
I use Discord for notifications when someone starts a "Chat with customer support" chat on my site. I tried various "chat button" solutions, but I ended up writing the chat system myself because no solution was really tailored to my task (esp. custom file type uploads and Google Ads integration, so I know which ad started a chat). I need to react 24/7 to new customers, so I needed a tool to ping me with notifications on my phone. The chat messages are still saved in the company database, but I send a link with the Chat ID to Discord, so that someone can instantly login to the admin panel and reply to the customer.
Using Discord, all I had to do was to create a new, empty company server, copy the webhook URL and then POST to the URL and boom I get a ping notification with the Chat ID on my phone (or I can @ a colleague to distribute the customer support for different timezones).
It's not a very "orthodox" solution, but it certainly sucks less than the alternatives (plus it's free).
KronisLV 447 days ago [-]
> It's a completely free, both in message volume and queue size, highly available hosted 1-1 and 1-n topic based message queue with automatic sharding, excellent performance, and high-quality prebuilt libraries. It has built-in notification support to all platforms and a basic UI toolkit that is easy to use.
"Thanks, I'll base my next enterprise project on Discord as the message queue of choice."
Hah, what an amusing way to look at things, thanks for that.
None of this is meant to ridicule anyone. If using Discord for home automation works, great, have fun at it, feels like a cool way to have a hacker mindset (not to discount the arguments that suggest that there are also other alternatives).
I still think that describing a popular chat platform as a highly available message queue is funny though, because that's a very unconventional way of looking at things.
tourist2d 447 days ago [-]
[dead]
RadiozRadioz 447 days ago [-]
These characteristics are common in chat applications. XMPP realised this and has native Pub/Sub support in the protocol, in addition to messages https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html
paulddraper 447 days ago [-]
Are you serious?
golergka 447 days ago [-]
That's a serious part of Midjourney business strategy. Hard to imagine how much money did they save on the frontend.
throwaway71271 447 days ago [-]
or how much money they lost on missed business
reissbaker 447 days ago [-]
You don't have opportunity cost of missed business, if the alternative is that you don't exist. If it allows you to launch faster, you aren't losing business by not having every feature; you're gaining business that you would've lost by not launching sooner. You can always build the extra features later.
Midjourney avoided having to make a frontend at first, meaning they launched faster. Once they got product/market fit, they built a web frontend, which is now better than the Discord interface. Seems like a pretty smart strategy, that worked well, for a completely bootstrapped company that never raised VC.
dijksterhuis 447 days ago [-]
not the parent, but yeah. they’ve basically described the system of discord there.
chat stuff is just one possible use case for the system.
like, when i read the root comment i was a bit like “huhhh?” but reading Spivak’s comment it now makes total sense.
also to add —
* discord gives you easy topic queue debugging. just login yourself and read the queue entries.
* something like 2000 character text content per message
* RBAC for topic queue access
* can probably turn it into a pub/sub topic queue system if you start adding webhooks and bots.
stavros 447 days ago [-]
Let's try to send a few hundred messages per second over it, a task any queue should be able to perform easily, and see how well it performs!
LelouBil 447 days ago [-]
I mean, huge bots are doing just that.
Your own non-approved bot might get rate-limited hard though.
paulddraper 446 days ago [-]
This is just such a terrible idea. You really don't need to defend it.
You'll get rate limited in two seconds, for no upside.
dijksterhuis 446 days ago [-]
if i walk in and out of a room 100 times in a day, that is an average of 0.001157 messages per second required to turn lights on/off.
i highly doubt i’ll be rate limited for that.
were not talking an enterprise use case here. not every problem is faceboook scale.
also, discord is free to use and has very thorough documentation, on top of all the things previously mentioned. so there’s definitely upsides to it.
Der_Einzige 447 days ago [-]
At the exact moment that I needed to look at some code that a buddy of me sent to me via discord PM, no less!
Frustrating!
altairprime 447 days ago [-]
Happily, voice chat worked fine!
Rendered at 10:40:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Honestly the DSL really isn't that great. I've been meaning to redesign it using something like ANTLR rather than the mess that I made a few years ago.
I do eventually want to have a local-first way to send messages to the program, but creating that isn't worth my time at the moment.
only according to the more modern definition of “hacking”
the earlier version of the term referred to people who write novel, interesting or clever software for the love of the craft.
i think using discord as a free message queue (see spivak’s comment in the thread) is pretty damn clever actually.
i kinda want to build something with it now.
The fact that it's also a chat thing is honestly secondary to the foundational tech.
Using Discord, all I had to do was to create a new, empty company server, copy the webhook URL and then POST to the URL and boom I get a ping notification with the Chat ID on my phone (or I can @ a colleague to distribute the customer support for different timezones).
It's not a very "orthodox" solution, but it certainly sucks less than the alternatives (plus it's free).
"Thanks, I'll base my next enterprise project on Discord as the message queue of choice."
Hah, what an amusing way to look at things, thanks for that.
None of this is meant to ridicule anyone. If using Discord for home automation works, great, have fun at it, feels like a cool way to have a hacker mindset (not to discount the arguments that suggest that there are also other alternatives).
I still think that describing a popular chat platform as a highly available message queue is funny though, because that's a very unconventional way of looking at things.
Midjourney avoided having to make a frontend at first, meaning they launched faster. Once they got product/market fit, they built a web frontend, which is now better than the Discord interface. Seems like a pretty smart strategy, that worked well, for a completely bootstrapped company that never raised VC.
chat stuff is just one possible use case for the system.
like, when i read the root comment i was a bit like “huhhh?” but reading Spivak’s comment it now makes total sense.
also to add —
* discord gives you easy topic queue debugging. just login yourself and read the queue entries.
* something like 2000 character text content per message
* RBAC for topic queue access
* can probably turn it into a pub/sub topic queue system if you start adding webhooks and bots.
Your own non-approved bot might get rate-limited hard though.
You'll get rate limited in two seconds, for no upside.
i highly doubt i’ll be rate limited for that.
were not talking an enterprise use case here. not every problem is faceboook scale.
also, discord is free to use and has very thorough documentation, on top of all the things previously mentioned. so there’s definitely upsides to it.
Frustrating!