bxr

>3. I can't copy/paste from my paper books either, at least not in any way that's not also available to kindle owners.

You mean I can chop the spine off of my kindle and run it through that massive scanning/OCRing beast like I did with textbooks? Awesome!

At the same time though, if you host it yourself you can switch out the backend or interface whenever you want with no inconvenience to users unless going in to or out of a locked-in system like google.

Hosting is cheap, and someone running a "weekend hacker" group probably already has all the hosting worries taken care of for other projects. Besides, running things is fun.

What does it really matter if android ships a XMPP library? Is the barrier to entry to use a 3rd party library seriously that high?

Sure it would be nice if it came standard, but the impression I get from many of these posts is that the believe the sky is falling and XMPP is impossible without google shipping a library.

>Well, the number of engineers that can actually patch something, in say, the JVM, are rather limited. So I'm not sure open source is nearly as big a deal as it's made out to be, as far as patching goes.

Rather limited? Thats just not a good excuse where I'm coming from. If I need a bug fixed, it doesn't matter I don't know jack about the JVM today, if the cheapest way for me to fix the bug is to jump in myself, I'm going to become a member of that very limited group that can patch the JVM.

It would be nice if we were developing in an environment that we could throw our hands up and walk away, but in the project I'm working on, we've already had to dig very deep into opensource components of our stack to fix their bugs that would have blocked us from shipping.

>It may come as a shock to some people...

Outside of your strawmen, I don't think you're shocking anybody.

You might be able to find a SIP provider that is cheaper, I used to use one here in the states that was about $5/month.

>True, but I don't think that's a concern for most people.

But that is the kind of thinking that lead to the whole issue with Dropbox in the first place. Its deceptively "secure" to any user who can't analyze the implementation implications themselves.

Its Tim Berners-Lee, of course he has a w3 email address. And yes, that is the real one.

We can tell that you posted this comment within a minute of creating your HN account and would appreciate it if you were up-front about your connections to Lanyrd.

Apple does make good products, and for that reason I willingly sacrifice the ability to use the product in all the different ways I can their competitor's. I understand that the cost of a polished UI/UX is making some things impossible. However, there are things outside of the use cases they design for that would be "hard", but great for advanced users. Instead of just leaving them in the hard, warranty-voiding "you're on your own" territory like other vendors. they have a tendency to go the extra mile to make them impossible.

Even they, who actually have a real reason to police names, allow the same first and last name when there is a different middle initial.

>100MB of 3G data a month

Thats less than a workday's worth of use at a desktop computer. And you're telling me that's the limit for a device that relies so heavily on the cloud?

I've never done this kind of programming around GC, is manual memory management in a garbage collected language any better than manual memory management in a language without GC?

>I'm not so sure there are applications which simply cannot tolerate garbage collection.

From your post, it sounds like "tolerating garbage collection" is the same as making sure it never ever happens. The application clearly doesn't tolerate GC, the programmer tolerates the language enough to bend over backwards to avoid one of its central features.

Is this the syncing we saw demoed at I/O last year? That got me excited, but I haven't heard anything more about it.

If hope this is good enough that I can re-retire my ipod. I brought it back out after I discovered listening to music on my android was too much of a bother.

Fair enough. I've always seen my robots.txt files as a friendly way of saying "you probably don't need to worry about this stuff" to crawlers. That's not your use case, and I'm happy to have my "Disallowed" content to be crawled, I expect poorly written bots to do so anyway. If I actually want to prevent browsing/crawling of something, I wont ask politely I'm just going to throw up 403s.

>several of the group’s sites had been hacked in a coup d’etat by an administrator who decided that he didn’t like the leaderless command structure that AnonOps Network Admins use.

Thats poor planning. A coup doesn't work within an structure where the only authority is whoever you feel like going along with today. Then again anonymous is a train-wreck happening again and again powered only by internet drama, so I can't say I'm surprised.

This article has no facts to support that assertion, and serves to support the argument that there is a bubble.

Anyone know if there is a website like this for the US?

It sounds like you're looking for the Freenet project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

>why doesn't Facebook have tech in place that stop apps when their post frequency to walls gets out of hand

Because Facebook is an advertizing platform. Apps can send as much garbage as they want and you can just ban the app from from your feed.

Thanks, I completely missed that list. I'm going to try and find a friend with one of those so I can play around with this a bit.

Seems like a neat idea for a search engine, but I tried with photos from 6 different cameras and none of them stored the serial number in exif. I wonder how many models this is actually useful for.

Its also worth it to decide if you need user email addresses at all, chances are you don't. For most services the only function of having the email address is to spam the user. Yes, there are password resets but you don't have to force it on them, let the user decide if they want to make that fallback available to them.

Having the newsletter unchecked by default is effectively the same as not having a newsletter.

Personally, I think "don't have a newsletter" is a great idea (it reduces UI cutter too), but people want to send newsletters and the only way to make sending a newsletter worth the time spent to prepare it is by making it opt-out not opt-in.

edit: I'm not saying I support this, just that a newsletter is never done in the users' interest but as an advertizement. It might make for good UX for the user for it to be unchecked, but thats kind of the point, the entire concept of the newsletter relies on bad UX to gain subscribers.

>Again, with COICA it seems that censorship is not really seen as a major roadblock for prominent politicians.

In the US we just shuffle the actual act of the censorship to the private sector. Add in some cognitive dissonance to that layer of indirection and you can happily proclaim that your government doesn't censor.

The whole process stinks, the reasonable thing to do is just give the Hudson trademark to Kawaguchi. Oracle won't do that because they want to be in control of the winning project, and they know that without the now-Jenkins community the Hudson project is going to quickly become irrelevant.

Moving to the EF is too little, too late, and I don't think the Jenkins community is going to bite. They already dealt with the pains of switching to a new name and anyone who needs Java CI and isn't completely blind will find Jenkins just fine. Remember Ethereal? Yeah me neither.

They've probably never _used_ Lua's tables.

So, basically now your business model relies on on users blindly clicking OK to everything when installing/firstrun of an app? Just like they've been conditioned to do from years of desktop software? Not much of an improvement.

>Your human relationships should not be treated as if you were a spy behind enemy lines. If you think this is an appropriate framework with which to reason about your human relationships, you are doing something /very wrong/.

I agree with you on this, but I think (or at least hope) the author's intended message was a bit different. If someone is going to be operating like a spy in the sense that they're lying to everyone around you to manipulate them into having the desired interaction with them, it is at best incredibly dishonest. I think the analogy the author used is a bit over the top, because where being a spy is about lying and using social interaction as the means to achieve your own ends, in the case of learning to be social, being social is its own end. If you scale back the analogy I think the takeaway is more along the lines of "you're out of place, fake it until you make it".

The blog post, overall completely misses the target and really is about becoming a "functional anti-social" rather than actually learning to be social. I don't think of this as a malicious article, its just written by someone who doesn't have the understanding necessary to give advice yet. Back when I forced myself to stop being an introvert I was often conflicted by the fact I felt like I was lying about who I was when I was just was biting my tongue or making an effort to talk to someone. The author seems to be of the mind that everything other than blurting out exactly what you're thinking is at the same level of acceptability, so you might as well run with it.

This article is all about the problems with Facebook's process, but the thing I found most telling wasn't mentioned. Facebook issued a statement to ReadWriteWeb before contacting Ars as to why their page was taken down or restoring it. They prioritized saving face above dealing with the effected.

The problem isn't process, the process is a symptom of not caring about their users.