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bcton Bitcoin is dead. Long live bitcoin.

> If everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in gold, you could still sell any gold you had for an amount based on its utility.

The worth of that guarantee depends on what that amount is. If the utility-based price is 1% of the price I paid for the gold, then I'm still ruined; it might as well be 0%.

bcton Expanded HTTP Method Support

That has all the disadvantages of using POST for everything, with the added disadvantage of requiring developers to read more documentation. Are there any advantages?

bcton The Bitcoin Bubble and a Bad Hypothesis

That comment is a reference to another post on the front page of Crooked Timber right now: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/17/annals-of-the-gold-stand...

bcton Secure Your REST API

I've written Atom Publishing Protocol servers that use it. It's not badly-suited for non-browser tasks (although yes, SSL and Basic is much simpler - if you don't mind paying for the certificate). It's unusual, but it's pretty unusual to use it (or Basic) for web browsers these days, too.

bcton Secure Your REST API

I'm pretty sure he means RFC 2617 Digest authentication. There's nothing browser-specific about it.

bcton Setting up Sublime Text 2

    git diff --ignore-space-at-eol

bcton Hoodie: very fast web app development

No.

bcton Firefox 23 will block non-SSL content on SSL pages by default

What kind of "stuff"?

bcton How I Explained REST to My Wife (2004)

"The web" isn't exactly a well-defined concept. There's a school of thought in which anything with a URI is part of the web.

bcton Canadian government introduces ACTA compliance bill

That's the point: the pressure was only effective because they were put forth by minority governments. Majority governments have a much freer hand.

bcton Canadian government introduces ACTA compliance bill

The last 2 copyright reform bills (that I'm aware of - one circa 2008 and one circa 2012?) were both put forth by minority governments.

bcton XMPP and Jabber

libjingle has been around for years; Wikipedia says December 2005.

(It doesn't matter, but I also raised an eyebrow and started looking for the date on the blog entry when I read that sentence.)

bcton Unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API

> But what about if it was necessary to have one command that changed the state of more than one resource?

Then you need to have another resource that encompasses the aspects that need to be changed. Sometimes resources have to be somewhat abstract.

> since certain aspects of the API (like honk horn) are unfit for REST, does it make sense to have the other parts of the API in REST?

If the application benefits from the constraints that REST provides then why wouldn't it make sense? It's still one API, "honk" and "flash" don't need to be walled off from the other elements of the API in any way.

bcton Unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API

Exactly. (except you would probably want to PUT the state instead of POST, since it's an idempotent operation)

You would GET the lock to see if it's locked, GET the battery to read its charging state.

You could PUT to the battery (or to some more abstract, finer-grained resources) to set the charge mode and turn charging on and off. The HVAC and thermostat would work the same way.

The only tricky stuff is "flash lights" and "honk horn"; they're inherently commands, so you might as well implement them in the RPC style that Tesla has used. They can't benefit from anything REST has to offer anyways.

bcton XMPP and Jabber

XMPP's XML overhead isn't as large as you might think; it compresses well, and streaming XML parsers can be pretty fast.

XML's extensibility is one of the reasons that XMPP has so many XEPs. A JSON-based protocol would need a central registry or some kind of namespaces to achieve the same thing.

bcton Unofficial documentation of the Tesla Model S REST API

What "conceptual mashing" is required? Your resources are things like locks, batteries and thermostats. It seems pretty straightforward to me.

bcton Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

That selects for trivial pattern-matching ability, not the ability to evaluate arguments.

Engaging in productive discourse is not associated with knowing the names of fallacies.

bcton We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists

I'm sympathetic to the thesis, but this is a really poor article.

Read Christoper Lasch instead.

bcton A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark

It is. The two joined dots just east of the mountains are Edmonton and Calgary.

bcton Introducing Graph Search

There are many differences between that scenario and the equivalent on Facebook. Two critical ones:

- the interaction is of a short, definite length. I will probably never see you again if I don't want to.

- the number of real-life encounters I can have in a day are limited by my location in space and time. it's fun to have that happen once a day; I imagine the joy wears off when it's happening 30 times.

bcton Getting hyper about hypermedia APIs

Here's one opinion on that: http://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/10/29/NO_OPTIONS

bcton Getting hyper about hypermedia APIs

> Hypermedia hype has always struck me as parallel to the "semantic web" nonsense from the late 90s.

That's funny, because DHH's proud ignorance about hypermedia strikes me as parallel to the usual proud ignorance about the semantic web.

Your first 2 paragraphs don't actually say anything, they just signal your allegiances.

bcton Getting hyper about hypermedia APIs

His questions about discoverability seem to assume that people are suggesting not writing any documentation at all.

"The idea that you can write one client to access multiple different APIs" is a straw man.

The connection he's making between HAL and WS-* is ridiculous.

bcton Hypermedia APIs on Rails

You lept to a conclusion here:

> I think the original idea behind discoverability was that you could have a “RESTful client” that could in theory work with any REST service that implemented discoverability.

Your analysis of that conclusion makes sense (a generic API browser is not very useful), but why did you think that's "the original idea behind discoverability"?

The BitNative article you link to gives the reason that is usually cited for using hypermedia:

> This allows the API to be highly evolvable because it avoids creating a coupling between the client and the server.

Even more important IMO is that it makes it easier for the many different parties to serve the same API.

bcton Google Requires Proof of Google+ Activity to Attend SFPD's Bike Theft Workshop

Some of your examples are very different from the case of "literally".

"Awful" isn't a reversal of meaning, it's a narrowing of meaning.

> Bolt - run away or secure in place

These are homynyms, not divergent meanings. A crossbow bolt is fast, a door bolt is secure.

> Cleave - cut or join

These appear to have converged from the separate Old English verbs "cleofan" and "clifian": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...

(Interestingly, "literally" has been misused to mean its opposite since at least the 1680s: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=literally&allow... . We've held off the "it means just what I choose it to mean" hordes so far, why give up now?)

bcton DuckDuckGo Terminal Emulator

All surfraw seems to do is generate the URL for the search and opens it in a browser. Disappointing :(

bcton Linux Has Not Won, Microsoft is as Dangerous as Ever, Fie on Secure Boot

Nobody thinks that Linux has won the desktop, but we did think that it had won the right to exist. For a while it looked like Microsoft had put its anticompetitive practices aside.

bcton Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs

> evil and perverse and all that is wrong with the world

That is never the implication of that standard comment.

bcton Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs

bcoates left an excellent comment here that has been marked dead for no reason that I can see.

bcton Do not track is dying

> nothing in the info it gave back looked especially unusual.

It doesn't have to be unusual, it just has to vary slightly from machine to machine. It's the specific combination of those slight variations that's unusual.