Dysiode

Based on my own experience I would suggest that you can sleep fine in an uncomfortable situation until you're in a light enough sleep that you'll wake up.

The rested feeling is simply not waking up in the middle of a deep sleep cycle when your body is flooded with melatonin. Alarms simply don't way us up optimally. They blare at us with no regard for how deep we're sleeping.

I don't think either extreme, sleeping uncomfortably or fighting with an alarm, is the answer. There's an interesting alarm app on Android phones that will ring quietly x amount of time before the real alarm is set to ring to see if you're more awake then. I'd like to see more attempts at hybridization like that.

While the article makes very strong points, it fails to address that Diaspora wasn't seeking attention and merely had attention thrust upon it. Since everyone else seems to be following suit, I'll throw out my two cents worth as well :)

Diaspora needs to be exactly what they said it will be. To do that they need to Ignore Everybody (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350292) and stick to their original timeline :)

Lets also not forget that they've actually got some code. That's better than some bloggers seem to realize.

It's interesting that you mention fan-fiction. I imagine the reason people overlook forking" fiction stems from the fact you're consuming the story, remixing it and spitting out something new. On the other hand, forking code is more like tacking on a paragraph here or there.

Also, while you did touch on the hacker culture I think that's the most important factor. As hackers we're practically born to tinker. When we tinker with hardware ,say a remote controlled car, no one confronts us and asks "Hey, man, why are you tinkering with that car?" More often than not you'll get people saying "Hey, that's really cool!"

Furthmore, it's easier to take a get tangible changes from tinkering with a program than with a piece of literature. You can't miss the impact of gravity on gameplay in a game like HATETRIS but very few people will pick up on the significance of a new piece of text in the middle of a novel.

I really like how jsankey put it when he said "If you put something out there, you should be flattered that people take enough interest to tinker with it."

If you embed a readability button you could adjust it to capture those metrics for you.

That's why Hulu is wonderful! Sure half the time the shows are on a week delay, but you get through that week of no TV and then you've got it for one week longer at the end of the season :)

Why can't we all compromise and make our IDE's fold functionality collapse/expand one-liners to block format instead of hiding all the attributes?

The specs say in Germany they're going to soft-launch it in July and publicly launch in August this year.

The Django engine would be the simplest to use with App Engine by far given that it's native.

If you're interested in baby steps I would (and did) start with Django and migrate to Jinja2 (it's a simple migration, Jinja2 is almost syntactically identical to the Django engine). In my experience Django takes no effort to make immediate use of but has several weird quirks that drove me away from it into the loving arms of Jinja2. On the other hand Jinja2 takes a little more effort to setup (and is slower, unless you pre-compile and cache your templates which is an extra step to worry about).

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Google Talk. For a while I suffered through the tangled mess that was using jabber transports to connect to other protocols because it was so minimalistic and slick. I'd love to see Pidgin or Psi reimagine Google Talk's UI while keeping the extensibility of the backend.

Also, you might be interested in a free game by the name of Skyrates (http://www.skyrates.net). It's not really an MMO, but it was made for people with not much free-time in mind so it doesn't favor people sinking a lot of time into it.