cmars232

Same here. Though I much prefer the Star-Trek-like, simple voice interface to interacting with a smartphone.

There should be more voice apps like GOOG 411, not less.

Smartphone integration for typing is a great idea for a set top. XBMC needs this!

Disappointed, because it's the protocol that counts, and they should be refining and promoting that over any particular implementation. Especially a toy Ruby implementation. Ruby is ok for server-centric deployment, but not so great for desktop/mobile deployments.

I wanted to see a p2p, NAT traversing, auto-discovering, auto-federating mesh of a social network.

At its core, the real value in something like Diaspora is its protocols. If you disagree with the license, or the language they chose, why not make your own implementation from scratch that can federate with it.

If it survives, I might do this... I think their approach is fine for rolling out a private enterprise FB or creating an alternative hosting solution, but I'd like to see an even more decentralized solution. Ruby isn't a good choice of language for mobile, or native compiled "IJW out of the box" deployable solutions.

I'd like to see Microsoft reach out and genuinely contribute to more open source projects, Microsoft has great technologies, lots of smart people, a few pockets of progressive change, but overall, I feel like everything Microsoft gives away or open sources is still part of a grand strategy geared towards locking us all into Microsoft Windows OS and expensive products.

As an open source developer, this was a major factor in shifting my focus from .NET to Java and Python. Even though I still miss real generics :)

Lock-in is a major turn off, and we can smell it. In the long run, I know from experience that open platforms will eventually win, and my expertise there can be more valuable than some certification in a captive technology. Because otherwise in order to sell my services as a developer, I'd have to sell your stuff. I see what you did there... but this may not be best for my customer. No thanks...

Instead why not sell products that we want to use and pay for, that is so customizable and modular that it is simply a better technical choice? Stop trying to trap us!

And please start using the same OSS licenses everyone else is using. Even if it's not the intention, your special MS OSS licenses make us suspicious of your motives. First think that comes to mind when I see a special MS license is "uh-oh, is this another 'shared source'?".

In my experience as a father, I'd tend to agree. There is less reason to search if you're primarily using the web for the games and interactive flash that is typically geared towards kids, but there's no reason we can't create more opportunities for kids to search. I'll give an example.

My younger son recently got into pokemon, and he's now doing more self-directed searches on Bulbapedia to learn about stats & strategies. Since this is something I can't help him with, he's learning how to search on his own.

Searching for pokemon stats, game cheats and walkthroughs sounds trivial but learning how to play with search, sort through the false positives, invalid file sizes, fake sites, etc., these skills carry over.

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at http://challenge.gov/ has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

Resilient communities are a good hedge against globalization.

Best case, resilient communities can mitigate the harmful effects of globalization, improve local quality of life and dampen the magnifying network effects (whether financial, political, or natural). They can provide a "monkeysphere" that members can care about and be held accountable to, an excellent alternative to all the divisive, useless rhetoric and posturing in the MSM.

Worst case, they're the ones still eating and recovering ground after the the zombies/terrorists/enemy paratroopers/global pandemic/massive earthquakes strike.

Could he could sell them to another shareholder?

Ah, I see what you mean. I guess I was impressed that my game state was perfectly restored... current letter times, score, and ability to add to my prior words.

XBMC Live should have VDPAU. See http://a8t8.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2518DD508BB713E8!804.en...

The sad thing is, it probably would have fit nicely in a free DropBox account, or up on Google Docs.

It crashed while I was playing, and then it came back, and remembered my game when it came back!

Here's another way to think about it: if you had a pile of cash in the low five figures, would you re-invest it to speculate on that $100M acquisition? Or would you take it and pursue other opportunities?

If the tax implications are ok, can you borrow funds to cover the discounted stock purchase price, sell the stock, pay back the cost basis, keep the profits and don't look back?

Typeclasses are a fine substitute for polymorphism in behavior (methods). But does Haskell throw out the baby with the bath water? Haskell seems to lack an ability to express a taxonomy of data models. Records are not even close to a substitute.

Why can't Haskell make it easier to express data structures? Something "turtles all the way down" introspective, like a MOF (meta-object facility, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-Object_Facility) would be nice.

Some software companies I know are quite unable to measure results, let alone effort.

I recently got an ASRock ION-330 for this purpose. XBMC on Linux with VDPAU drivers plays 1080p beautifully.

If .NET does catch on as a result, I wonder if Oracle would attack IKVM (http://www.ikvm.net/) as well.

I agree with Schmidt that our privacy is our own responsibility. That's why I am switching my search engine to DuckDuckGo and whitelisting JS and cookies in my browser to the bare minimum.

Thanks Eric!

Is this going to be open-source?

I'm not at a startup (anymore... we got bought), but we're using Groovy for unit/functional testing.

It's a nice compromise when you want something that cuts through boilerplate with metaprogramming/duck typing but can keep tight interop with Java where you need it... and you need a quick learning curve for Java devs.

That said, stack traces are horrible, debugging in Eclipse is difficult to impossible depending on how "dynamic" you get, there's no interactive debugger like pdb.set_trace() (that I know of) and the flexibility of the syntax can get out of hand quick. Great for limited use, like making mini-languages and glue for testing. Wouldn't want to support a large application written in it.

How about a chatroom?

It does seem like a false dichotomy. Sure, it's just fiction, but doesn't Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" illustrate how fiercely independent space colonists could work together to survive and even thrive?

TANSTAAFL != Anarchy

Why doesn't Haskell support objects? Seems like that would be quite useful. They don't need to be mutable or anything. They could be like records, that scale.

DONT require a sign in just to browse. I'm not going to sign up just to see if there's anything in there worthwhile.

Seems to me stronger user accounts could be bolted onto an existing DVCS quite easily. The hard part would be working out the PKI, but adding digital signatures to commit objects would be easy.

PKI probably would need to be pluggable to meet the variety of project needs out there. I'd imagine enterprise projects would use a corporate CA, some small startups or open source might be comfortable with a quick-start "ring-of-trust" distributed scheme, etc. Github and other hosting providers could offer CA services. Interesting way to prove code ownership in any case.

Flagged. It was funny on Failblog and Reddit. I come to HN for something different.

Completely agree. No small wonder parents who feel obligated to negotiate every little thing with their children are so burned out. Kids need nurturing and honest attention, but they'll turn into little controlling tyrants if you let them.

Aftermarket modding of femtocells will be very interesting. Load these up with asterisk, connect to a voip gateway, mesh network them together across a neighborhood or city.

I like some of the concepts behind Tonido, but ultimately it remains just another closed platform. As an open protocol, specification or platform, it could enable some interesting distributed applications.

It's been awhile since I've looked at Tonido, but this seemed to be the case last I checked.