jasongullickson

Hang on let me pause my Creative Labs Nomad and finish this call on my Palm Treo so I can respond to your comment; oh wait...

Just because something is first doesn't mean it is best. Limor took something cool and made it awesome, and you can be sure that in a generation or two someone else will take her work further.

I grew up hacking on Heathkits and reading Forrest Mimms books and just as Mimms did for me as a child, Adafruit's products turn a new generation on to the fun, creativity and power locked up in understanding electronics.

The fact of the matter is that DIY electronics was fading out by the 1990's in no small part due to the ever tightening noose of proprietary technology and planned obsolecense in consumer electronics. In this environment, Adafruit was able to make soldering sexy and fabrication fashionable; how could anyone find fault in that?

Ah that makes more sense.

"...a scientist whose brain is uploaded into a supercomputer' while trying to create the first ever sentient computer"

It's hardly creating sentience if you're just installing an existing intelligence on another piece of hardware...just sayin'....

We'll be taking this for a spin. I've been pushing for an API-driven site for awhile but the case for that model was cinched when we started adding non-web clients to our system.

A leaned-out Rails is a nice compliment to other bolt-on API options and fat GUI-based API builders. Personally I prefer to start with something even simpler, but the facts are you can cover more ground faster (and potentially safer) with something like this vs. building your HTTP stack from scratch.

The Hypermedia stuff is most exciting to me, as hand-rolling that is a hard-sell for many teams (if you have a system of any significant richness).

You've got a crack team of Rails devs and a deadline?

"What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8..."

What's wrong with everyone using the same web browser? After all, that's exactly what the HTML standard is for, right?

I'd replace my Droid RAZR with one of these in a heartbeat...

They are getting better (although what's up with that hinge? Blech!). Still not as cute or clever as it's ancestor tho: http://litl.com/

Shouldda used a RepRap...

After reading this I just had to check just to see if we had a copy of 52nd Street, yep - https://www.murfie.com/albums/billy-joel-52nd-street--2

This pops up in front of me every couple years and I always get something new out of it each time.

You lost me at "changes everything".

What do you propose as an alternative that addresses the deficiencies you identify here?

According to commentor Josef Prusa the Replicator 2 is not open source.

I was just about to say that! Very smart to target the developer audience by focusing on how they will interact with the product (also brave).

It was an attempt at humor (notice the sideways winky-face, an electronic communication method of conveying levity - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon)

Shouldn't you be working on bringing the site back up instead of reading HN? ;)

what is a "real computer"?

Check out the Wanted section:

http://tindie.com/wanted/

(I've already suggested adding a "bounty" field :)

This looks very interesting; thanks for the link!

Yeah I'm just evaluating options, if nothing else it would be excellent to have the equivalent of a "donut spare" on private hardware that we could throw on when events like this occur (although having done plenty of "self-hosted" sites during the first boom, I'm always running the numbers for either option).

This is what I was thinking of (I think):

http://cloudfoundry.org/

Seems like someone posted a link to a project that made self-hosting a previously Heroku hosted site simple, but I can't find it now...

...would be cool if there was a Linux package (or distro) that you could boot-up and then just change your git remote to and have your app up-and-running on your own hardware.

Citation please.

This is simply a precautionary tale; if you don't mind being treated this way, by all means continue using Square.

I didn't, and I was unable to resolve the situation by working with Square, so I shared my experience, warts and all, with others in the hope that others can learn from my experience.

Could I have been more eloquent and professional? Certainly. But this is something I was dealing with in my "spare" time, (and for the record, as donated time and a favor to a nonprofit). If this was a business venture it would have been handled much differently, but I don't think Square is exclusively for serious business use (at least that's not what I get from their marketing).

So please feel free to criticize my actions; had I ran across a similar story myself before I found myself in this situation, it might have turned out better, so I feel it is worth taking a few shots if it helps someone else down the road.

Keep on hackin'

Jason

Larry didn't say he didn't want to live anymore, just not on this planet.

Sounds like a good day to go fishing.

Perhaps, however when calls like this are noted additional scrutiny of the application could be applied to ensure they are not abused (such as using a proxy in the way described by the parent).

There are other actions allowed by the SDK that seem to have little non-nefarious use, such as the ability to hide the fact that an application is transmitting and receiving data (the network "spinner" can be disabled by the application); as others have mentioned it's interesting which API calls require authorization from the user while others do not.

Pulling contact data requires API calls that can be detected in the compiled binary (this is one way that Apple detects calls to unpublished API's).

That said, it's humorous how a blatant abuse of trust such as this gets through unscathed but god help you if you try to access the iPod library the wrong way!

I've noticed a simular thing in the open hardware area, especially 3D printing. I don't know if it's something unique to G+, or just that there's more early-adopter-types using it, but since I started using it a year or so ago I've been introduced to many interesting folks in the 3D printing space and had fantastically productive and focused conversations.