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Yes we did. It's amazing what teenagers were accomplishing at the time. Full product release life cycles, done after school and homework.

A few memories:

1) I had a 2400 baud modem, and then upgraded to an external 14.4K US Robotics Courier. They were $1000 at the time but USR offered it at $500 in return for advertising their brand. Someone on my BBS paid that fee in exchange for higher access.

2) I'd trade snippets of source code with other BBS authors. We'd exchange the code to implement one feature for another.

3) There were a few beta testers, distributors, and artists.

It's what started my interest in building and releasing software, for sure.

Ah, FidoNET. Two things about Mastodon are what got me thinking about BBSs.

1) Administrators running their own instance that they can customize and have local conversations on, and

2) FidoNET, where instances relay messages to each other across a network.

I had worked on a similar network at the time which used Frontdoor in front of the BBS to call other boards and relay the messages (and receive calls from boards), but was never a part of the FidoNET network myself.

Haha - also "I was too scared of my parents" .. me too. There was not as much darkness as the skull images suggest, but trying to look 3l33t was /<-rad and all. RemoteAccess ("RA") was a nice software, I used that myself for a short time.

I remember that I had a strict limit of $13 a month that I was allowed to spend on long distance phone calls. I paid the bill myself, but my mother could not understand wasting more than $13 (I think it was originally $10, and I negotiated up to $13) a month on calling BBSs. I kept a hand-written log of how many minutes I spent in each area code and the price to call that area code so that I would not go over.

Ok, yes, I suppose I was a bit liberal with those rules.

It's something that I made but it is now impossible to play with because dialup BBSs have gone extinct. By converting the ANSI images to PNGs, I tried to show what it would have been like to play with in its time.

I removed 'Show HN' from title.

I know. It was on a computer that burned down in a fire. So, it's very much gone.

Both that and the message archives from the bbs itself would have been a treasure trove of nostalgia.

I didn't see one point that was specific to web developers, or is that a dig on web-based software?

The pitfalls of over-abstraction, trying to be more generic than necessary, more "clever" than the business requirements, etc are platform agnostic.

My coworker just bought this and loves it. https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate

The examples are PHP-based and there is an active Slack channel supporting the book.

A list of email addresses "which can be matched to signed-in users" - it is not clear if the list will have to be gmail addresses matching the logged in users? I'd assume so, unless Google is maintaining links between people's google email addresses and other addresses they might use (eg. multiple email boxes being used on the same phone)to make a match, which is also plausible.

Yes, this. Processing fraudulent cards can result in a costly sum of chargebacks for the seller, and a fake email address is a very strong indicator that the person is a fraudster. Other services like Maxmind minFraud consider the email address and many other attributes when ranking the likelihood that the order is coming from a fraudster. It doesn't mean that you have to disallow the order from being saved (or whatever), just that you might want to flag it for manual review before processing the CC to capture payment.

Ah, nice! :) The Github did mention that there was a handful of hidden features.

Well done! My train-obsessed 3 year old would approve of the stamp toolbar defaulting to a train.

A button to download the canvas as a png or jpg would be nice for saving and sharing special creations.

The page you linked to has a bold headline, "One Click Intergation With Your Email" -- Integration is misspelled.

I recently spent some time playing with Mesos, Marathon (the web ui + api for scheduling long-running jobs / services) and Chronos (the web ui + api for scheduling cron / batch jobs).

I did this on my Macbook, using Virtualbox, Vagrant, and this:

https://github.com/mesosphere/playa-mesos

^ I started with that, and then installed Chronos with apt-get in addition.

Specifically, for launching Docker containers, this was useful:

https://docs.mesosphere.com/tutorials/launch-docker-containe...

I didn't try Aurora but it seems it'd be an alternative to Marathon + Chronos (Mesos calls all of these "frameworks").

Agreed.

Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there much more if I could do it on my phone.

I haven't checked it out in awhile, but the last time I did, I also remember not being able to find the Logout functionality.

"I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating.

I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.

I remember daydreaming about how one day "running a BBS" would become mainstream. It just seemed to make sense that a day would come when almost every entity (person, business, etc) would have their own BBS, as they do a voice phone number. The WWW is not far from that.

It really was a special time. Some early 90s BBS-related memories for me:

* Getting my own phone number so that I could run a BBS.

* Buying an external US Robotics modem at a 50% discount in return for advertising for them on my BBS.

* Getting a donation to pay for that from a member of my BBS.

* Not being very good at ANSI art, but spending lots of time in TheDraw, and joining an "art group" anyway.

* Trading BBS source codes and feature snippets with local developers and late nights hacking on the C code of my BBS.

* Switching to the OS/2 operating system and introducing a multi-node feature; so that I could login to my BBS at the same time as members.

* Getting cassette tapes for a lot of music I had not heard before from local BBSers.

* Tracking my time in a notebook for my "LD calls" .. so that I would not go over my "budget" for calling Long Distance.

Good times.

It'd be nice if there was a demo on the site to play with. Or, at least some screenshots to see what it looks like.

Maybe there is something after signing in, but I didn't want to sign in with Github or Google, and so I moved on.

Edit: Oh, there is, but I didn't notice them. Those light gray caption bubbles on the homepage.

Removing check-ins was a strange move, given that it was what made Foursquare Foursquare. Personally, I didn't want to install Swarm in the same way that I didn't want to install Facebook Messenger. I had the same feeling of not trusting the reasoning behind splitting the functionality into two apps, and in Foursquare's case - Foursquare no longer did what I had bought into, and I was already in the habit of using Yelp for looking up reviews, so I stopped using it.

They took over $162 million in funding, and I'd bet that a lot of people had a lot of ideas on how to turn things around monetization-wise. They had to try something, but this pivot seemed pretty detached from understanding their users.

It looks to me like it was missing in the source markdown file? I submitted a pull request on Github.

Clever name, Peter. :)

Btw, I noticed a missing "c" in the "url -X POST" example on this page of your docs:

http://autocompeter.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/#bulk-uplo...

I agree, being able to use your favorite local IDE to load and edit remote files can be very convenient.

On OSX, I use Panic Transmit's "Mount as Disk" feature. I've also heard good things about a product called WebDrive for this use case.

I don't know the reasoning behind the decision to not use Whoops by default, but I considered the beautiful and informative error pages to be a nice trait of Laravel that I will miss. It is also a feature that almost anyone who has used Laravel has come in contact with, so I am sure that it will be widely missed. I remember a non-developer coworker who was using Laravel 4.x for the first time commenting on how it was one of their favorite features.

Adding it back should be trivial http://mattstauffer.co/blog/bringing-whoops-back-to-laravel-...

I usually add the Raven PHP client [https://github.com/getsentry/raven-php] to report errors to Sentry when starting a new project and will likely do the same with Whoops by default.

It's a bit unique to each situation, but a few topics that come to mind immediately:

* Profile & measure to narrow down where time is being spent

* Memoize repeated function calls

* Cache data that doesn't frequently change

* Minify web assets

* Gzip compress web output (a la mod_deflate)

* Load balance

* Shard

* Strategic database indexing

* Asynchronous workers when beneficial

* Use the correct data structures

* Minimize Disk I/O

^ I suppose the last few are architecture-related more so than code.

These topics are mostly specific to web, but, here is a "curated list of Web Performance Optimization"

https://github.com/davidsonfellipe/awesome-wpo

Since nobody has quoted Donald Knuth yet (and this quote sometimes gets bent to fit situations that it shouldn't):

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil"

The web page is beautiful.

It might help to emphasize where this sits between installing Docker images from the repo, and using something like Webuzo or Softaculous to install popular web apps.

There are a lot of broad generalizations and some misinformation here.

I am curious what you consider to be the open web stack and why you think that Angular is not "compatible" with them. In my mind, it includes things like Linux, Apache, possibly Nginx, MySQL, languages that begin with a "P" and some other letters, etc. None of these remotely have incompatibilities with Angular. You want to sprinkle in some jQuery with Angular on the front-end? That's fine too, if you want.

As for moving off of Angular causing a world of pain, the same could be hypothesized as likely if moving from any set of patterns to a new set of patterns. I would not discredit it for providing a set of patterns, it is a framework and that is the point. Also, as for learning Angular versus learning JavaScript -- the same goes for most frameworks. You can learn the framework, and you can also learn the underlying, lower-level details that implement the framework. The two are not the same.

Doesn't work with Bootstrap? What? Sure it does. You can use any CSS classes you like, and as for the Javascript components, although not necessary there are even these native directives from the AngularJS team to make things easier:

http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/

I am not going to touch your last statement. :)

Maybe not exactly the same?

The Docker technology was a by-product of the dotCloud product, which spun-off to create the company Docker, Inc to focus on Docker. Docker Inc sold dotCloud to the Berlin-based company cloudControl.

This appears to be a facelift coming from the new leadership.

Also, www.dotcloud.com references next.dotcloud.com with this language:

"Take the new and improved dotCloud PaaS on Google Compute Engine for a test-drive."

Their old FAQ said that containers were pushed to AWS East, so it looks looks like this is one thing that has changed. Actually, yes, here are some details on the move from AWS to Google Compute Engine:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/12/dotcloud-pro...

That workaround didn't work for me.

Auth from either / or /logout both come back with:

"Twitter is currently down for maintenance. We expect to be back shortly. For more information, check out Twitter Status. Thanks for your patience!"

I first noticed this when the mobile app (Android) notified me of an auth error.

Still no word on http://status.twitter.com/

Neat. Did you have a real use-case for this, or just fun? I'm curious, what dependencies does it have that would make setup difficult?

In the Yelp example, I was confused for a second by the variable name of 'pizza' when doing a Yelp search on seafood. Renaming that would make the example more clear. :)

What does the browser-view show? I didn't try, but if the code traverses multiple locations, is it a screenshot of the last step?

I was just talking about the potential reinvigoration of Detroit this morning, because of this NYT article from yesterday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/arts/galapagos-art-space-w...

This is a really unique, innovative venue for the arts that has been operating in Brooklyn for almost 20 years. A long time for a venue to exist in NY, and a testament to their founder.

They are headed to Detroit because of how high rent has become. If Galapagos can recreate what they had done in NY, it's a real win for the area that they are moving into.

Yes, kind of. I just recently wanted this and found https://github.com/skyjia/repogen

It's written in Go and outputs markdown, which you could convert to html. I just made a repo of the output. I've starred a lot of repos and one long list makes it easier for me to search and browse them.

I was about the say the same. I installed Google's Keep just this week.

Also, a former coworker of mine works at Keep.com, so that also came to mind.

I guess it's a popular name. His web site does say "Keep – a new, free iOS app" so perhaps it will not be confusing within the scope of Apple's app store and there is no intention for an Android release.

That all said, it looks very nice from the screenshots and I was able to understand the utility being provided from the description. Congrats on the release.