nopal

That's a very interesting idea, Simon, and one that didn't even cross my mind.

I've since moved on to a new project. If anyone wants to talk about taking over the site, shoot me a message at bretwalker /at/ Google's email. It's Django and has some branding and a domain: http://static.nyquistrate.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/certcia...

I made a site that checked for SSL cert expirations and misconfigurations, but I couldn't acquire any customers. I still think there's a business there somewhere, although maybe it really only sells as part of another product.

Edit: If anyone wants a script to check their certificates, here you go: https://gist.github.com/bretwalker/5420652. You'll just need to add in some sort of notification logic, especially for expirations, since they need to happen before a problem arises.

As a non-designer, I'd love if one of these sites would tell me how to use these colors on a web page.

Here's a recent tweet from a friend:

> My thoughts on what I believe is a bad article on HN: “URLs are for people, not computers”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5499730 http://www.not-implemented.com/urls-are-for-people-not-compu...

URLs are a way of life. Of course the ideal solution is a semantic hyperlink, but people don't share hyperlinks, they share URLs, and they don't always take the time to type out a nice description like the above tweet contains.

> I would argue this is not true. Take Amazon for example. Converting "Panasonic-KX-TG7743S-Bluetooth-Cordless-Answering" to a product in the database is a nightmare I don't want to deal with. Computers work better with surrogate identifiers that are short, and they're easier to generate.

I don't think computers care one way or the other, and it's not hard to generate a key like that at all. In your example, you'd simply have brand + model + short description. In most other cases, you'd simply take the title of content that was submitted. It's a very common solution to this problem [1]. The idea is that a short description is part of the item in the database. It's not some sort of complicated lookup that acts like a keyword search.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#slu...

But people often need to parse URLs before they provide them to their computers (via click or keyboard), and I think that's the point.

The issue is that URLs are often the only piece of information users receive, and it's why we've conditioned users to expect meaningful URLs.

From our standpoint, it's not too hard to make URLs more meaningful, even with user-generated content. Plenty of sites incorporate the title of submitted content into the URLs, and it's even easier when creating content for oneself.

Would you prefer a link to http://www.example/about or a link to http://www.example.com/?id=123. Which are you able to understand before clicking it? Which are you more likely to click?

I'm with you on the live tiles and default apps.

As for live tiles, again I think it's Apple optimizing for understanding. If they allow apps to have widgets, they risk users unknowingly eating up bandwidth and battery. I could see them starting with their apps and then opening up some sort of new API for these types of apps.

I'm an iOS user, and I don't much exposure to Android, but I wonder -- is iOS really stale?

Apple's added a lot in the past few years while keeping the core design consistent. I'm sure they could have done more in this time period, but my personal feeling is that they don't want to confuse users with some of the more advanced things that can be done on other devices.

They want their devices to be useable by everyone, and even now, some things are confusing to novice users (folders, notification center). They are being conservative in their design, but it seems deliberate, and I wonder how that translates to the masses -- usable or out-of-date?

This seems like spam, but I'll leave it to someone with more domain experience to flag, if so.

If this appeals to you, you owe it to yourself to check out Northwestern's Knight scholarship program: http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/knight/default.aspx

You can get a master's of journalism from one of the nation's best journalism schools at a greatly reduced price.

It's 404ing.

This is the sort of over-critical analysis that is too prevalent on HN.

There's a counterargument to any decision, and it seems like you're trying to find ways to disparage something you don't like.

I'm not sure any value was added beyond stating the obvious limitations (read: design decisions).

The original post is inaccurate. It is possible to share an iTunes (App Store) account without sharing an iCloud account.

It's possible to use an account that's set up for both iCloud and iTunes for iTunes-only stuff on the kids' devices. The account should just not be used to sign into iCloud on those devices.

Purchased.

Another benefit of the App Store is convenience. I don't have to type all of my info into yet another place. Can you get stats on how many people abandon the FastSpring form?

One feature request: resize preview images. My test png wasn't resized for the thumbnail and took a couple of seconds to load.

Looks very nice. I don't know why I personally need it yet, but I think I'm going to buy it!

One question -- why didn't you use the App Store? Was your decision technical, financial or both? I really appreciate the convenience of the App Store, especially for updates.

Perfect, thanks!

Looks nice, but the page (or blog post) really needs to list which email clients are supported.

Hmm.. good point. Just registered TweetPlayback.com. I'll start redirecting tomorrow after DNS has propagated. Thanks for the head's up!

I definitely see the value in what you're saying, particularly for exploratory searches, although it doesn't fit my original use case (Dark Side + Wizard of Oz).

Maybe two modes would be useful?

Feel free to fork: https://github.com/bretwalker/twitterplayback

I get your point.

As you said, this is for fun. It's certainly not a business or something I'm going to take much further, so the long-tem viability of Twitter's platform doesn't matter that much to me.

That said, it is where the people are, and I haven't found anything that let's me feel the pulse of the global online community as well. As I said, I think Twitter's a blast during a big live event, and that's why I built this.

Clickable: http://www.twitterplayback.com

Replay of movie commentary: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=from%3Aaimeemann+OR+from%3...

Tonight's TV: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=dancing%20stars

Social media contest: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23GOU100

Sports: http://www.twitterplayback.com/?q=%23iubb

The page is (hastily) written using JavaScript, so feel free to take a peek. There's a lot more that can be added to this -- most notably, date ranges, but I think it's pretty fun right now. Oh, and the maximum number of results Twitter will let me have per query is 1500, so keep that in mind.

I wasn't necessarily talking about diffing on the web. I was actually talking about a diffing service.

I've seen lots of diffing programs and they all seem to have varying levels of success. I think there's an opportunity for a company to become the gold standard for diffing and to offer their diffing engine via a service that can be integrated into apps (web and desktop).

I bet there are lots of app developers who would like to have a robust diffing engine in their apps, but don't have the time or expertise to build one themselves.

EDIT: I see that you're the author. Have you thought about putting your diffing engine behind a web service?

Is there a diffing as service startup?

If someone nailed the execution and supported lots of types of content, I'm sure there'd be a market.

I'd be interested to see an iOS developer's perspective on when they're going to start requiring iOS 6. From a user's perspective, I don't see any features that are going to encourage devs to drop iOS 6 compatibility (eg. ARC; background support).

It's big these types of features and functionality that are going to determine the usefulness and longetivity of iOS 5.

More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4546039

It's working again: http://www.apple.com/library/test/success.html

I would have thought they'd have a fallback on a different network.

I'm not sure how to get VLC to work with the browser, but Apple's using an HTML5 video tag that embeds this url: http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/129opiygabsdvibsdfobsd....

If you open that in VLC, it plays fine.

Here's the relevant HTML:

<video id="movie" class=" video" src="http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/129opiygabsdvibsdfobsd... x-webkit-airplay="allow" autohref="true" width="848" height="480" jsonurl="/apple-events/scripts/ac_media_jsons/september_2012_event.json" expectingmoviejson="true" spec="" style="width: 848px; height: 480px; "></video>

Here is a list of clients that support HTTP Live Streaming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming#Clients

Interestingly, I don't see the option to downvote posts, only comments (I have 758 karma).

I like it. I think it gives a nice sense of layering of content and accentuates the photos.

I agree. But I hate the crappy abstraction that is Web Forms. It throws so much garbage on top of the HTTP request-response cycle, and so many developers are content to remain ignorant of what's going on underneath or how the Web actually works.