Hacker News: alalonde

New comment by alalonde in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

alalonde — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:49:33 +0000

Was Frederic Laloux's work (Reinventing Organizations) an inspiration at all in your journey exploring these topics? Seems like very similar territory, albeit from a different perspective.

New comment by alalonde in "Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser"

alalonde — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 15:46:43 +0000

Nice! Reminds me of the ooo-wow early LLM days where those little explain-Regexps one-off sites were popping up everywhere. Seems inevitable that the LLMs will slurp up this functionality natively as well

New comment by alalonde in "Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized"

alalonde — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 22:58:43 +0000

Reminds me of those "birthday challenges" I see a lot of here in the mountain west: e.g. climb 25 pitches on your 25th birthday, run 28 miles on your 28th, etc. Gets a lot harder (or more contrived) as you get older!

Convergence, the OSS real-time collaboration framework, offers offline support

alalonde — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 19:16:36 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/convergencelabs/convergence-project/milestone/2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037570

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by alalonde in "Open source collaborative text editors"

alalonde — Tue, 07 May 2019 18:06:58 +0000

From my limited exploration and talk with Justin over at http://www.kinematicsoup.com, the requirement for low latency combined with a lot of large binary data requires different approaches.

New comment by alalonde in "Open source collaborative text editors"

alalonde — Tue, 07 May 2019 17:56:23 +0000

If you scroll down a bit there are a few examples, including jsfiddle: https://togetherjs.com/

Essentially, they are doing OT on the DOM.

New comment by alalonde in "Open source collaborative text editors"

alalonde — Tue, 07 May 2019 17:46:42 +0000

There has been a proliferation of realtime collaboration within code editors because the underlying data model (a string!) is so simple. As you mentioned, you would need to define a sufficient protocol encapsulating the common functionality between code editors along with defining which aspects would be shared and broadcasted vs kept private (e.g. an independent vs "follow" mode).

The data model could easily be defined in Convergence. Implementation-wise, the primary limitation would be that at the moment we only offer a javascript/typescript client. I haven't explored the VSCode base but I know it was written in TS and provided as a "native app". We do have an example of Convergence running in node.js (NWJS).

New comment by alalonde in "Open source collaborative text editors"

alalonde — Tue, 07 May 2019 05:19:09 +0000

You can currently already do good-enough-for-most DOM-level synchronization using any editor, of which we have a few examples. A lot of the examples of RTC out there (apps using TogetherJS for instance) are doing this already. For rich text, we'd like to be able to provide 100% support for a particular editor's capabilities, which necessitates a deeper, custom data model.

One of our value propositions is a unified backend for dealing with any JSON data (and eventually beyond), avoiding binding server-side code to a particular choice of UI component.

New comment by alalonde in "Open source collaborative text editors"

alalonde — Tue, 07 May 2019 04:23:06 +0000

Indeed, the space is growing quickly. I run a company that provides a backend for real-time collaboration, so we necessarily stay on top of what's out there. There's a reason the server-side tech tends be paid: it is extraordinarily difficult to provide guaranteed eventual consistency of data at low latency. The CKEditor guys (and us, for that matter) have put YEARS of development effort into their solutions.

We're working on both offline mode and a generic rich-text data model with support for the major editors.

If anyone's interested, I'd happily do some Q and A here.

Ask HN: What are your favorite/dreaded Real-Time collaborative apps?

alalonde — Fri, 03 May 2019 17:30:55 +0000

I run a company focused on real-time collaborative software: https://convergence.io

As a means to improve the status quo, we're looking for some really great (and really awful) examples of multi-user co-editing software. In our opinion, there are a whole lot of poor examples out there: totally broken undo/redo, not knowing what other people are doing, etc etc.

Some common examples to get you started: Google Docs, Figma, Invision Studio

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19820382

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Solving the generator functions of human existential risks

alalonde — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 03:42:15 +0000

Article URL: https://futurethinkers.org/daniel-schmachtenberger-generator-functions/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17563800

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by alalonde in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)"

alalonde — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 15:40:12 +0000

Convergence Labs | Mid-level Frontend React Developer | Salt Lake City, UT or REMOTE | Contract | $7-9K / month

Convergence Labs is the creator of Convergence, the world's first API designed from the ground up for collaborative co-editing. We do consulting work as well and recently landed an extremely interesting and ambitious project that is a perfect fit for our product. You would be our first hire and work directly with the founders.

This would be an excellent position for a smart and ambitious FE developer with a couple years of React experience. You'd be working directly with three industry veterans on a potentially transformative collaborative consumer-facing application. We are small and flexible, so just about everything is negotiable: 1099/W2, rate/salary, working from home, hours, equity, whatever.

Further information and contact information here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xcvi1yxLOml66TrCPLYHCCSo...

New comment by alalonde in "Code together in real time with Teletype for Atom"

alalonde — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 05:46:45 +0000

We actually implemented exactly this in our demo: https://demo.convergence.io/code-editor/

Even as the author, I think web-based IDEs have pretty limited utility, but it is a great showcase for the power of our API. We (my co-founder and I) built this in about 10 days.

New comment by alalonde in "CKEditor 5: New approach to rich text editing on the web"

alalonde — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 13:37:20 +0000

There are a few codebases you can poke around in, notably ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb/tree/master/examples).

This article had some visibility on HN a couple weeks ago, perhaps it is what you are looking for: http://digitalfreepen.com/2017/10/06/simple-real-time-collab...

The fact that that article needs 10 plus pages to describe one of the simplest use cases belies the unfortunate underlying truth: OT (and realtime co-editing) is intractably difficult for all but the most constrained data models. Which is a pity because it is undeniably cool, and why we built Convergence (https://convergencelabs.com) -- general-purpose realtime collaboration.

New comment by alalonde in "A Simple Approach to Building a Real-Time Collaborative Text Editor"

alalonde — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 05:48:15 +0000

Yup, I just wrote an article [1] about just this. Simultaneous co-editing doesn't work unless the UX includes the appropriate cues to avoid this sort of thing. There are astoundingly few good examples of good (much less great!) real-time coediting UXes. This is the primary reason why we added first-class support for these cues so that it's not so damn hard!

[1] https://convergencelabs.com/blog/2017/09/what-makes-for-a-gr...

New comment by alalonde in "A Simple Approach to Building a Real-Time Collaborative Text Editor"

alalonde — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 05:43:06 +0000

Very cool to see this on the front page. I would agree that for the use case of plain text, yes, the problem has been solved, but for just about anything more complicated it quickly becomes intractable. Rich Text, for example, is extremely difficult to get right (ask the ckeditor guys!)

For those wanting real-time collaboration functionality in their apps but don't have the intellectual curiosity (or time!) to learn the ins and outs, we [1] built a general-purpose API for folks to add real-time collaboration to their web apps. Think Firebase but designed from the ground up for simultaneous editing and with additional first-class support for common UX needs such as shared cursors and selections. We agree that the web is moving in this direction and are excited to see what gets built!

[1]convergencelabs.com

New comment by alalonde in "Show HN: Vecta.io - Team diagramming with an advanced SVG editor"

alalonde — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 05:12:53 +0000

Thank you for the technical details. Probably a bit late for you guys, but we offer a BaaS tailor-made for this sort of product. For instance you could add multiple mouse tracking and selection awareness in a matter of hours with our APIs. Check out our diagram demo for a taste: https://convergencelabs.com/demos/

New comment by alalonde in "Show HN: Construct 3 – Make games in the browser"

alalonde — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 21:58:54 +0000

Congratulations on what looks like a very impressive piece of software. Do you guys have any plans to add collaborative features to Construct? Where, say, students in a remote classroom could work on the same game together?

Show HN: Convergence: The first turn-key API for realtime collaboration apps

alalonde — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 14:13:47 +0000

Article URL: https://convergencelabs.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939886

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by alalonde in "More than one million people will work from coworking spaces in 2017"

alalonde — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 16:23:29 +0000

It's $225 a month for a reserved desk which is essentially a less closed-off cubicle with a lockable file cabinet. This was comparable to other coworking locations in my city (Salt Lake).