gooderlooking

With this line of thinking, nothing was ever an invention. The first tools were just an iteration over banging things with rocks.

Viable electric cars, light bulbs connected to wifi, Raspberry Pi, robots that run like cheetahs, quad copters, quantum computers...

But saying "I'm sure there might be a few but..." indicates your disposition will be critical of an objective response. You're probably going to argue that IoT light bulbs are just lightbulbs + wifi. But Edison didn't invent copper wire or glass, and nobody questions whether the lightbulb was an invention.

It's the same argument that no thoughts are unique, they are just derivative of prior thoughts. But the conclusion is hasty and incomplete. It's easy to deconstruct ideas (and inventions), a posteriori, into a collection of parts that existed prior. But the combination of those parts is what constitutes uniqueness.

"Just because I know how to write PHP doesn't mean I understand these vulnerabilities at all."

Ouch.

You need to know a lot more than PHP to make your toaster talk to your dishwasher. And I'm pretty certain it's not the Maytag Man who's going to make it happen.

The concern over securing mesh networks is real, but the argument in the article is terrible.

Try watching a Cosmos marathon. The hyperbolic introductions are inspiring until you watch them back to back.

Ever hear of someone missing a meeting because it was scheduled for 2:00EST and they thought it was 2:00PST? Ever see an email from an employer, or hear the news reminding you to change your clock this weekend? It's not a programming problem, programmers are just more keenly aware of it.

And it's not really a "problem" at all. Just an idiosyncrasy. Like imperial units.

It's rare that you have transatlantic meetings, but you fly abroad so often that you can't keep track of when the shops open? (your phone could compensate for that). Do you also flip the fuck out when you fly to Australia and it's goddamn Summer in January?

It's only confusing because it's different from what you've been doing your entire life. The solution (hypothetically, as this will never happen in our lifetime) is a different paradigm. You could say, "I'll get that to you by COB Wednesday", and it's understood by custom that "Wednesday" means "the workday that began on Wednesday". But more likely is that you'd say, "it'll be on your desk by 06:00 on the fourth." Speech patterns would adjust.

If you want to propose a solution to the problem, why not have everyone adopt UTC? Every programmer who has ever dealt with time deltas will give you a big hug.

Good thing you posted, otherwise people would have read the article thinking it was brand new and downloaded an app they already had.

I use Path (mostly) for pictures of my kids. Path is invite/opt-in which makes it easy to share with only the family and friends who are interested.

I don't want everyone on Facebook seeing my family photos any more than they want to be flooded with updates from a doting father.

You too can be like Zuckerberg, by becoming employee #336 at a company rebranded in 2009 as a startup!

Yep, that's what I meant by "accessible" too. But with Hamachi, there's a central service for client authentication. With freelan, peers authenticate directly via signed crts.

It's similar in that it's peer-to-peer, but doesn't require an auth/directory server to establish connections. If any known peer is accessible, the two can authenticate directly.

With freelan, once the client has established a connection with any other known and accessible freelan client, a direct client-client connection can be made to anyone on the network, even if they are behind a NAT/firewall. I believe it's through a combination of tun/tap, UDP-punching, and proxying, but don't know for certain.

OpenVPN establishes a site-to-site or point-to-site VPN, but routing to the client still goes through the gateway server.

Freelan still requires a known "supernode" to broker the initial connection, but after that, they can either communicate directly or through peers.

I'd be very interested to check it out if it lands on GitHub. I don't think I'd be much of a contributor up front, I'm still getting my head around all the acronyms tossed around VPN networking, but I have a hobby project for which I've been researching how to build something like this.

The kickstarter video mentions using audio io to reduce cost. Using USB would require a microcontroller and the usb interface. The microphone jack is used for scanning, so as long as your device has 16 bit audio out, I'm assuming you could print just fine.

And yes, I am going to get one just so I can see how Pink Floyd compares to Daft Punk when printed.

Looks like you can opt-out of the relay service. From the very bottom of the article:

Traffic Relay ... You can opt out of this, but it could result in peers not being able to network with each other.

I'll get excited about stickers and a store when there's an API to back up the years of content I'm generating in Path. I'll even use the store to pay for access to the API.

Sent a support request over the weekend asking directly, hope they've just been too busy with the release to respond.

For anyone who plans to set this up on a site that gets moderate traffic, here's an example Raven config that helps weed out exceptions caused by 3rd party scripts and browser extensions:

https://gist.github.com/impressiver/5092952

I initially set up Raven without this ignore list, and we drowned in exceptions caused by shoddy browser plugins and userscripts. On the flipside, sifting through those logs did help to explain a few unreproducible support tickets.

Hope someone finds this of use!

Hearing a few convert stories over the past few months, I'm getting the impression that Google is evolving at a steady pace and is now at par with the revolution that iOS created when it first debuted. Seems like Android is going to continue to improve while iOS gets stuck in a rut.

I've been considering a switch to Android for my next upgrade, which I never thought would happen. The Android platform has reached a point where it's at least as compelling as iOS, though probably more for technically minded users. I've got increasing nerd envy over some features in Android that iOS will probably never see, or if it does it won't be for quite a while.

Has anyone here regretted making the jump from iOS to Android?

Maybe I'm the only one who missed the memo, but in case anyone else is wondering what a hash is doing in JS:

"When writing (in text, not in JavaScript) about properties on specific prototypes, you may use the JavaScript notation, foo.prototype.bar. However, this shorter (non-JavaScript) notation is often used instead: foo#bar. Basically, the hash (#) stands for .prototype. — fancy huh?"

http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-prototype-notation

On my iPad and the idle visuals look great, but it doesn't get past "loading" (no audio) and I can't click the github link.

I'll have to check it out on my computer when I go back inside.

Oops, you're right - replied too quickly. It's the plugins site that is in flux, not the API. And I linked the wrong post, which is still irrelevant: http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-j...

I'm going to delete my original post shortly :)

Web 1.0 was not as beautiful as you remember. Most websites had blinking text, bordered tables, under-construction icons and pictures of cats. Around 1998 people started to realize there was more power than just serverside includes and hypertext links to other URLs (they weren't URIs yet).

The problem was, people had to use creative thinking and a bit of duct tape to make it all work. There were battles over valid code vs "whatever, it works", and eventually everyone just sort of accepted that standards won't keep up with innovation. That's about where we are today (browsers are getting better at supporting draft-level innovations, which is a hell of an indication of what they think of this stuff).

Page loads are wasteful, often reloading and redrawing 90% of the same content just so you can see page 2, and the whole window flashes and spins until its done.

Anchors are used for compatibility, and when used correctly, are done so for the very handy fact that the server doesn't need to care about what comes after the "hashbang".

Yes, bad error handling is bad. But, do you remember spending 20 min filling out a form only to have the next page after submit show an error, "sorry, the server could not handle your request", and hitting the back button showed a nice blank form? That's why we do it differently today.

Pagination is a terrible UI. "<< < 1 2 3 ... 7,600 > >>" is not only useless unless you want the first or last page, it also takes multiple reload and redraws to get anywhere in between (try getting to page 3,475, or even trying to comprehend what is on that page by the time you get there).

Client-heavy apps are actually embracing the beauty of hypertext; they don't require you to download and install new mobile apps, because they work in the browser you already have.

I think you're romanticizing the simple web and damning web applications based on the assumption that they are all poorly developed. The relevant argument I see is that web application developers should pay more attention to the non-developer, end user experience.

I think we're making good progress with "awfulness.js" sites.

This seems a bit like asking to "pay what you want for a free sample."

I understand that it's not intentional, but when Radiohead and other world-famous recording artists are offering "pay what you like" for entire albums, and most book stores (online or B&M) will let you read at least a few pages to get you hooked, offering a "pay what you want for one chapter" feels like you're trying too hard to game consumers, and they'll see right through it.

There is no risk in this scheme, you're not tugging on the honor or ethic strings of individuals because you are not leaving yourself exposed. And when the book price is $5, within impulse purchase range for many, you're wasting people's time by asking them to get their wallet out for a sample.

Offer the entire book as "pay what you like" and it becomes interesting, or give away the first chapter, but paying for a teaser isn't going to make waves.

IntelliJ Idea Ultimate is by far my favorite Java IDE. The community version (free version) is still good and updates are frequent, but you don't get as much of the "I" in IDE.

Eclipse is free and has a huge user base, lots of plugins, and people even build full applications on top of the open platform.