You know what's cool about Siri? Apple now has a vested interest in improving natural language processing artificial intelligence as fast as it can. I don't think there's ever been a commercial interest in that type of technology at this scale before. And they probably have more cash to throw at this kind of stuff than any other company on the planet. I will be extremely interested to see where this develops in the coming years. You can imagine upcoming WWDC events unveiling amazing new Siri developments.
Services like Ixoth may end up being able to develop into much more useful products in the future, once they don't have to rely on hacks like SMS responses.
UK here. PayPal Website Payments Pro via Recurly. I rolled my own PayPal solution previously but bugs messing with recurring payments is way too much of a problem to work through if you can avoid it. Better to leave it to the experts.
People are used to logging into PayPal in order to send money or pay for purchases, so I would think that associating PayPal with a website login is going to be hard for a lot of people to feel comfortable with, particularly because people are so used to the PayPal logo being used with actual purchase buttons. As developers we can try to explain the difference, but ultimately I think that PayPal logo has a pre-existing connotation in most people's minds and I think that will work against them as an OpenID provider.
Sometimes it seems to me like many people are betting the farm on getting funded without already being in the coveted position of having prior successes which will (mostly) guarantee them their funding. I tend to think it's best to operate as though you're not going to get funded. Build/bootstrap a sustainable business (i.e. build something useful that people want and charge money for it), make it successful and leverage that to build a bigger idea. If along the way you get to accelerate the process through funding, fantastic, but without it, you've still built something successful and can then fund your own next idea, or potentially use your success as proof of the fact that you're a lower risk when it comes to funding.
Luxury! In my time, my father would wake me up by cutting me in half, then I'd have to walk forty miles uphill through a blizzard to get to my computer and then I'd have to electrocute myself to turn it on and I'd interface with it using an abacus and punch cards!
I generally like to think that icon use should be handled as part of the CSS, as it's a design element and not part of the document semantics. Putting it in the markup means that if the design is updated, the markup is still stuck with the old icon, which means it's more work to update the site.
"Levelling up" as a developer doesn't rest on checking off a bunch of points on somebody else's list (though many of those points may still be relevant to you on your journey), but rather a combination of a constant need for self-improvement and critical self-analysis, combined with a massive genuine passion for the field of programming, irrespective of which areas your interests lean toward. If you are never satisfied that you have "made it" and you are regularly not only getting excited by new ideas and new possibilities in this field, but also putting a lot of time into exploring your skills and constantly trying to improve them, there is very little chance that you're not going to massively improve as time goes on.
About the only ads I find offensive these days are (a) ads that play sound without it being initiated by the user, (b) ads that get in the way of the content and (c) the Kontera-style double underline in-text ads that have an annoying habit of popping up when you accidentally move your mouse to the wrong location. Webmasters who use that particular advertising method, I think, are displaying a blatant lack of respect for their readers.
Apart from those, regular ads don't bother me at all. I particularly don't understand people who feel that tracking is bad, when all it results in is a more targeted set of ads. If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer ads for topics I'm interested in. Tracking for the purpose of ad targeting is a good thing.
A simple solution I think would be to change the "Spam" button to instead read "I didn't sign up for this". That would be much less open to interpretation based on the user's own personl definition of "spam".
There is nothing wrong with reading sites like Hacker News. Just do it when you need a break. i.e after you've done a whole lot of work. I'm on the couch writing this on my iPad after coming off a 10 hour coding session. Code first, hacker news second.
Agreed, but plain old DDOS against PayPal seems like a great way to get PayPal to upgrade their DDOS defensive measures and not a great way to get them to change their policies. Companies change their policies when their customers become educated about them and the company starts to lose business and look bad in the media as a result.
In this case, Anonymous will achieve making PayPal's website even slower for a while. If they lose customers it'll be for the wrong reasons. Anonymous needs to find a way to educate the public about a company's wrongdoings, not just disrupt the company's service while not making sure everyone knows exactly why that company's service has been disrupted. They seem to have this misguided idea that DDOS = public education and corporate humiliation. That's what I find shortsighted.
Causing problems for PayPal's service is shortsighted and has a lot of collateral damage. For many small business owners, PayPal is the only viable way to take global payments online. There are a few other payment providers, but their fees are usually much higher than PayPal's, or their payment schedules and API integration are severely limited in comparison. With PayPal I can charge a customer and have the money in my account within a couple of days, plus feel safe that most fraud is going to be stopped at the door.
Check out Jint, Jurassic and IronJS; all 3 are JavaScript implementations on the .Net framework. Jurassic compiles to CLR, Jint is interpreted and IronJS runs on the DLR.
Any economics experts around? What would hypothetically happen if all countries lifted all immigration laws and allowed people to come and go wherever they liked?
I'm just saying that in life there are so many hours in each day and we tend to gravitate towards not just what we enjoy, but what we are more competent at (and thus more confident and comfortable with), which means whatever interest gains early traction is likely to take over at the expense of the other interests we may have otherwise focussed on.
Sounds reasonable, but what about the fact that there are a great many more pursuits in life that one might enjoy, but simply hasn't had enough time to investigate, or simply has not yet been exposed to sufficiently to recognise the enjoyment that comes from pursuing it?
IE9 renders nice and quickly but in contrast to their claims of speed, I've found their DOM manipulation to significantly underperform in contrast to the other browsers. Firefox 4 and Chrome 10+ are able to create and insert large numbers of new elements at the same time significantly faster than IE9, while IE9 stutters and lags under the same conditions.
Wow, what a great service - it's nice to see that there are other .Net devs out there in the startup world building cool stuff. I'll be using this for my next site!