I can kinda see where they are going with this. Although I would probably never use it (I very rarely send a letter by regular mail), I can think of some use cases where I could use it. My great grandma doesn't use email. I don't think she even has a computer. Every time her or my great grandpa would send me something it would come with at least a page of a letter just telling me about how they were doing. I also never seem to have any stamps. So in lieu of going out getting stamps and writing something on paper, and buying getting envelopes, I could just send an email. I mean if it is rare occasion why not? It's going to cost me like $20 for the stamps, maybe $10 for the envelopes. Thats just to send one letter. Now if I sent letters all the time the investment of stamps and letters would be worth it, but because the next time I am going to send one again will be months, years, whatever, I will probably lose the envelopes, the postage will be raised and I will need more stamps, and my grandma will never get a letter.
This is a really great quote:
"Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad. "
Most of these are insane. Ignore OSS, Apple, and Vitrual servers? I'm sorry but "it doesn't run quicken multi user mode" is not a reason for me to not buy anything Apple. Right now I'm using an open source browser, running on an open source operating system. The software that serves our webpages is open source, as is the MTA, email client, editor, IRC client, and instant messaging client. Virtual servers make sense now in a lot of cases.
Aqua looks nicer than any windows manager has to offer. I run Ubuntu for my work desktop, and Debian for servers, but at home I have a macbook and a mac mini running 10.5. Before that I had a powerbook for 4 years. They are all awesome machines. I didn't have to spend time tweaking config settings to try to get the sound card working, or deal with updating and breaking everything. On OS X I've never had to fix something after an update, and sound always works. I'm not dissing any linux distros, but they are truly for hackers that want to spend time tweaking on things getting them to work and dealing with problems. OS X allows me to get more work done because I'm not dealing with those hassles yet I still have vim/emacs/whatever other unix app I want to install. The only complaint I have is that the packaging doesn't seem to be as good as Debian/FreeBSD/Gentoo. Maybe this has changed in the last couple years, but Macports and fink never really worked out all that well for me.
This is weird I was just looking into this yesterday and seemed to miss them releasing the API.
The other options I was looking at was
A.) doing it ourselves.
B.) using libgmailer or some other OS API
C.) using octazen.com.
The octazen approach seems to take the least amount of time, which is important in this situation. The problem I was having with the octazen demo is that it was breaking on gmail accounts. When I asked their tech support what was going on they seemed to not know about the issue and asked me to try again. I bet it doesn't work because google changed their calls when they released the API. Now we at least have another option if we decide to go with A or hack up B or C.
At home working on startup/contract work:
Macbook running OS X 10.5.whatever the latest, vim, sometimes emacs or aquamacs if I'm messing around with scheme.
Could you explain why you would use django over the others? Does pylons have too much magic? I've never used django and am curious if you have used the other frameworks.
I probably will never use the poll feature again, or if so very very very rarely. This was actually a question I asked myself a couple times these past couple weeks whenever I saw a post that made me think "why am I seeing this on HN". Combined with the new feature that I wanted to try out to see how it worked it made sense to make a poll. Now I've done it and the novelty is over.
Added. This makes some sense. I often find that on reddit some stories that are actually interesting get downvoted to oblivion for no apparent reason and yet at a later time are up voted to the front page with a similar headline. I'm sure there are other cases where it would bring up other problems.
Mine is self-hosted using wordpress.It works, but I am always tempted to write my own just because I want more control over the app. The templates that use widgets are nice and wordpress has a lot of nice plugins, but it just isn't the same. I used blogger a couple years ago and didn't like it much. That being said I would have to agree with andr that if it was not a personal blog and my startups blog I would host it elsewhere. You want someplace where you have some sort of communication with your users about what is going on in the event of the site going down. Oh I also have a tumblr account but don't really use it for blogging. I just wanted to check out the features. For the most part it is pretty cool and I could see where a really nice microblogging solution could be built off of something similar.
This is exactly my opinion too. There are so many communities that are internet link dumps that offer a ton of crap content. That was great when I had a ton of time to sit and browse through it all. But I'm growing up and trying be become a better programmer, trying to start some projects that take off, and in general no matter if I'm working at my day job or on my startup at home, trying to keep a good solid work ethic. When I need a break or I'm bored I browse HN and not only find things that interest me, but find things that help me work towards my goals.
I think a lot of us came from reddit and stayed here BECAUSE we don't want those posts. Very rarely do I ever check the reddit front page anymore. I mostly stick to proggramming.reddit. Hacker news IMO should be edited to keep it going down the reddit road. Not to bash on reddit, if I want to see stupid pictures or read or post politic news thats where I go, but HN filters out a lot of noise. I'm thankful for that.
The way I've used this is saving my python repl process. Sometimes when I'm just hacking stuff out I will define things in the repl without writing out to a file. But then if you kill your process or it dies or you move to another server you lose anything that you defined. With this I can save my repl state and restart it later, move it to another box, and make pancakes.
I'm pretty much in the same boat as far as lisp and scheme. I've been reading The Little Schemer and The Scheme Programming language. Both have been really clear books and I've learned a lot from them both that I use at my day job programming PHP/javascript.
Yeah, I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday about how I would be somewhat upset that the price had dropped so much in such a short period of time. I mean there is risk involved with being the first customers of any product, but even understanding those risks you don't expect such a sharp price drop. This is really cool that they not only realize this, but respond as well.
I believe in my submission I had put the authors name at the end, and it has now been moved to the front of the title. Either that or I'm just really tired.