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Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

horizon.pics

51–60 of 221 posts

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Supported file types can, such as MP4. Other video formats are not currently supported for streaming (can still be uploaded for download) due to browser restrictions and compute considerations. For supported video types, Horizon is optimized in the sense that it recognizes videos and allows viewers to stream it in chunks for seamless watching.

Why not have the user's machine do the encoding into whatever format is cheapest/easiest for you to support? Could even divide user payloads into chunks and p2p it, bittorrent style. No compute needed, beyond a tracking server that can be very cheap to run

Transcoding client-side still has considerations:

- What if the user's hardware is not performant?

- Transcoding is intensive, so their machine will become slow

- Even wasm based ffmpeg will not be as efficient and has its own issues

- Takes a very long time

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long?…

These are good questions to ask. Right now, the monetization strategy is profitable. If an image does go viral, which has happened before on popular Reddit posts that hit the front page, the infrastructure should be able to handle it for a while, and it should not be costly.

you should protect yourself from free plans going viral and costing you more than you'd like with rate limiting rules of some kind.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#54
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for upgrading! And sorry that you ran into some speed bumps. 1. Good catch. Will improve on this. 2. I'm not sure what could be causing this. My account with thousands of uploads loads in less than one second. 3. Thumbnails are not supported due to compute and processing considerations, but will investigate this. 4. Good catch. 5. Compression can be compute intensive, but will investigate this further. 6. Will…

Re: 7 I think in the end all the videos did upload successfully, but the client UI stopped reporting progress at some point. A couple more suggestions: - Would like a select-all button instead of clicking videos 1 by 1 - An option to switch from grid view to list view could be useful - Home UI shows 25 items per page but the grid has 3 columns so the last row is never full - which makes it seem like there are no furt…

I've added a new redundant check that will ensure all chunks are uploaded before marking the large upload as finished. Hopefully this resolves the issue you were facing. If not, please do send me an email at the address listed at https://horizon.pics/help.

As for those files that failed but still show up in the dashboard, it means they're stored incomplete, and as such, will be automatically purged in 24 hours. I will work on hiding them in the dashboard.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#55
post #53

"Full-stack engineer" is usually a job title or career, I find it weird to introduce oneself as a "17-year-old full-stack engineer". Is it just me? You certainly have the skills but can one be an amateur professional?

I do have a job as a software engineer in the professional world. I do both professional work and amateur side project work. Did I miss something?

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#58
post #55
post #53

"Full-stack engineer" is usually a job title or career, I find it weird to introduce oneself as a "17-year-old full-stack engineer". Is it just me? You certainly have the skills but can one be an amateur professional?

I do have a job as a software engineer in the professional world. I do both professional work and amateur side project work. Did I miss something?

Nevermind then! I assumed 17 was too young to have a full-time high-skill job, if I assumed wrong then apologies.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#59
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a real option. You'll eventually get banned or forced to pay for an enterprise plan if you try to use Cloudflare's CDN for an image hosting site where the origin is outside of Cloudflare. They require you to use R2 or Cloudflare Images. From their terms: (emphasis mine) > Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that yo…

Good catch. Forgot about this terms of service clause.

Are you not using R2 for storage?

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#60
Just wanted to applaud you — I'm over twice your age and would not be able to create something like this.

Can I ask when you started programming/building things? Was it a natural interest or did you receive encouragement from someone in your life?

Wishing Horizon all the best, excited to use it!

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