zemaj

I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.

Sorry, I didn't realise it wasn't ok to delete and repost. Won't happen again!

Would love any feedback! Support for PayPal & Help Scout is coming soon.

We currently support Stripe, Braintree, WePay and Zendesk. PayPal & Help Scout are in the works! We've got several paying customers onboard already through organic channels :)

It would be great if the daily email included the amount being sent to today's charity. It would be a nice feeling to see this number go up over time.

Disclosure; I'm ManageFlitter's Co-Founder/CTO

Twitter recently stopped apps from offering any kind of bulk management services for Twitter accounts. We completely support Twitter trying to stop spam, but this action does nothing of the kind. Here's my full thoughts; http://blog.manageflitter.com/twitter-drowning-spam-why-thei...

Anyway the point of this service us just to point out how ridiculous the restrictions are. We will really be delivering it, however - the economics work. We're just finalising how we'll prove it's real people, most likely with a live stream going at all times.

We use Braintree, but it's a payment gateway in Australia not a full stack solution. You still need to provide your own merchant and account and deal with the endless hassles that come with it. Merchant accounts are really the hard part of accepting money in Australia at this point.

That's very nifty, thanks! Subtle, yet gets the point across.

Plenty of interesting ways that kind of bar could be included in a site.

That's great advice, thanks! Hadn't thought about how it improves the ability of the vast majority of developers to get up to speed with handling edge cases. That's a really good point. Perhaps I'll start with thin wrappers and progressively add deeper bindings to get the best of both worlds.

This is a great post. I'm currently building an API that's really inspired by Stripe's API. I'm trying to mimic a lot of these elements, from the easy authentication through to the really useful error messages.

One of the things I'm not so sure about is the local bindings for each language. I'm tempted to just use off-the-shelf HTTP clients or a very thin wrapper in each language and write code snippets based on them. I'm not sure I see the value in writing full client bindings - I've often found it harder to use in many cases when I use these 'opinionated' bindings in the past. You often end up with a choice of entirely following the libraries views on error handling or digging around and breaking upgrades by modifying these libraries directly. I've always preferred much thinner wrappers that have no knowledge of the underlying API calls. Would love more opinions!

I used to use Fusion on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro and found it pretty much unusable as it was so slow. However I recently installed Parallels on my Rentina MacBook and I've been amazed at the difference. It can run 3 different OSs at once on top of OsX with barely a performance hit. It makes debugging in IE finally practical. Probably the single biggest benefit for me for upgrading my MacBook.

I think it's a great idea that will fail in this implementation.

The first barrier in social networks is people - getting enough people on your network to incentivize others to follow. Is the fact that app.net paid enough to draw people away from Twitter & Facebook? As a developer, perhaps, but as a user, I really doubt it.

A much better sales pitch would be just "you own your data". Give users amazing import/export tools from the get go. Allow third parties to fork your system and allow seamless user migration. Build a protocol, not a service.

With a business hat on, I also worry about the single silo of data in app.net. Say it does become successful, then they're a monopoly again. How can we be sure they'll fairly charge for their API usage when they realise how much it costs to hosts that much real time data? Can we be sure they won't change the playing field again?

Besides all that, I don't get why he wants $500,000 up front. If he wants to "align our financial incentives with members & developers", I would have thought he'd charge a set fee to allow revenue to scale with usage.

Also the language on the site is just so damn confusing. They have lots of ideas jammed in together. Most of the discussion about the idea has been people trying to figure out what they're on about. They need to figure out a sales pitch people can understand and stick to it.

Anyway, lots of huge holes in this implementation IMO. I doubt it'll even get funded.

I would use this tool & have backed it.

It looks like it runs very similarly to our current server management systems, but the web UI is a huge plus.

I agree that open sourcing it to run on your own infrastructure would be a big benefit - people tend to be a bit protective of where they put their root ssh keys :)

Well my point wasn't about what it feels like, but the way the reaction was handled.

I would never send an email that said "You fucking changed my CSS". It happens ALL the time to developers. In fact refactoring, telling each other what you think is wrong in the code and how to fix it is a core part of team software development. Nothing is ever perfect. You can't be that protective of any part of your product.

Eh, I think your co-founder has the wrong attitude here. I edit the copy all the time my co-founder writes. Sometimes I tell him, sometimes I just deploy if I'm in the middle of pushing something out. Building startups is all about iteration. One person sees something from one point of view, the next sees it from another. As each person adds their improvements you get a much better final product - you wouldn't be changing it if you didn't see something wrong with it.

By the same token, I totally accept when the things I've spent hours pouring over get thrown out the door. We recently had a design review where someone said one of the elements I put hours into looked like a 3 year old had drawn it (they didn't know it was done by me, they thought it was outsourced). It was the kind of style I was going for, but that reaction made me realise it totally wasn't suitable for the site. I was a little hurt of-course, made a joke about it and brushed it off. We now have a completely new version of this page that's way better than my original vision.

Wrong response: “You fucking trimmed my copy.” “I don’t want to get mad but I sat there for FIVE HOURS crafting that yesterday, there’s a reason for every word.”

Right response: “I see you changed my copy. What improvements were you trying to make? I felt point x,y,z were important and you left them out. If you were trying to make it shorter, here's a shorter version that includes the more important points.“

I've been working on this one for a while. Did a design myself, then shot it over to 99designs for improvement, then iterated again on the best version to get where we are now.

Feedback, suggestions for improvement are very welcome :)

Short answer - no.

There's a lot of people over-reacting to this situation. If you read Twitter's blog post its clear that they're following up on enforcing the API "Rules of the Road" they've had for over a year. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-e...

Section !.5. clearly lays out the rules clients must follow "Your Service may be an application or client that provides major components of a Twitter-like end user experience (a "Client"). An example of a Client is a downloadable application that displays user timelines and allows users to create and search for tweets. If so, certain additional terms apply, including:"

These rules are actually pretty generous and plainly lay out their expectations for third party applications. It's unclear what led to Tweets being removed from LinkedIn, my guess would be that Twitter attempted to enforce their branding rules, LinkedIn declined and instead said they would remove the Tweets from being displayed entirely. It doesn't sound like Twitter just cut off access to LinkedIn or came up with new restrictions they haven't already been publishing (and compelling 3rd parties to comply with) for a long time.

Any business must deal with existential threats, be it from competitors, regulation or bad investments. Building a business on top of an API is just another potential risk, you need to decide if they company in question is a safe enough bet to play on, just like you have to decide the same thing for all other risks.

That seems pretty reasonable to me for a professional freelance design from scratch like that. I normally expect individual pages to cost in the range of $1k from scratch.

Wow, reading someone's heart rate from a video.

Imagine that plugged into Google Glass. Overlay someone's heart rate next to their face while you're talking to them!

Whenever you authenticate an app in Facebook that can post to your feed, there is a drop down that lets you choose who can see your activity with the app. I always choose "just me" because of actions of apps like this. It's become the norm not the exception to auto share.

Facebook should add a clause to their ToS saying apps must actively ask for permission before posting. Twitter has done this and while there are a few bad smaller players, on the whole you don't see most apps using these spammy techniques.

I love the transparency. You definitely get the feeling Rand would be an amazing person to work with.

I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons of new customers.

If anyone from hacker news is looking to spend some time in Australia & work for a great startup, we're hiring: http://89n.com/content/careers We're all setup to sponsor people and get you through the visa/immigration process :)

Just shoot an email to jobs@89n.com and mention you're from HN!

Has anyone else had a better experience with the Google+ API? It really worries me that this means that no businesses can be built on top of the G+ API. Less developer investment means less options for users. Data becomes less open.

I think that the tech "gold rush" is still in it's early stages. It's still hard to convince investors in Aus that new ideas are worth betting on, so copy-cats with proven markets are currently leading the way.

However, on the ground here I don't just see the big guys. There a plenty of smaller bootstrapped companies that are genuinely innovative. I went to a startup expo at one of the uni's here last month and was completely blown away by the innovation of many of the smaller companies. If I had the money there's plenty I would be betting on.

"Just wait" is what I would say.

I have the exact same problem. Paid, but no ebook. Sent an email an hour ago but haven't heard back :(

Unfortunately this happens more than you might think and other Australian companies seem to have a similar approach to dealing with security findings. Many years ago I found a huge hole in a large company's Australian website that allowed me to download their entire database of customer records including addresses and plain text passwords, by a similar method of just changing url parameters. This was millions of consumer records from a -big- international brand.

Instead of warning the public, that their records may have been compromised, they focused on me. I was immediately slapped with legal threats via phone, email and mail. They took my original email apart, saying that by modifying the url and downloading the database I had illegally obtained this data, I could be prosecuted under xyz law etc... They ended it by saying that if I ever spoke about it publicly I would be taken to court.

Needless to say I attempted to take my issue directly to several Australian newspapers. I talked to a couple, but none wrote a story. I don't understand why - this was 7 years ago, perhaps they didn't understand the issue. I spoke to a lawyer who told me that there was nothing I could do. They'd given me a way out so I should just take it and try to forget what happened. In the end I convinced myself that perhaps I was in the wrong. No one would listen to me. At the time I was a lot younger and had less resources. I would of course not deal with it the same way now. However, I'm not interesting in digging up the past - the proof is long gone, but the lesson stays the same.

There should be a government body to whom security breaches like these can be reported. Companies can not be trusted to police themselves when it comes to private data.

I don't see any problems with this. The devs also have to balance the weight of breaking current applications using their existing url parsing. It also doesn't seem an unreasonable argument that users should expect node to carry on existing conventions from js in browsers. I'd make the same choice.

UI would be a bit friendlier if; 1) The changes were more responsive. The delay is too long when scrolling and hovering over an element - should be around 100ms or so. If it takes time to load the content, show some visual signal (loading... or similar) that state has changed. 2) You could mouse over and click on each of the items.

Thanks! We've got a fairly mature spidering architecture, so we're just using that to scrape the posts at scale. It's possible Google will block us, but we're pretty careful to rate limit and load balance across IPs. Plus, you know Google's business is built on scraping :) They don't seem to mind other apps that do it, so I figure we're moderately safe. Once there's an API, we'll use that.

We check every 5 mins if you post frequently, progressively slowing out at around once every 20 mins currently. If traffic builds up we'll slow it down to max at around 1 hour.

We just released this. I've wanted it ever since I started using Plus, so hopefully some of you will find it useful too :)

I spent quite a bit of time getting the sharing correct - sharing Google+'s various data types is surprisingly hard to get right and make sure links go where you would expect them to.

Feedback welcome.