Live data from Hacker News

Diaspora Developer Release

joindiaspora.com

161–170 of 202 posts

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#161
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't familiar with "The Mythical Man Month", you should probably acquaint yourself with it.

In my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better.…

Why you didn't take a third partner?

I think a designer=that-can-code or a developer-that-can-design make things happen faster.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#162
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only took me 10 or 12 minutes to get it set up and running, but I already had a mongod running on my laptop and all 5 popular rubies installed with rvm (with most gems already installed). Still, follow the readme file, and it is fairly easy.

I abandoned it at the point I was going to have to globally install specific versions of stuff from source. There might be ways to avoid that but as a ruby n00b I don't know them.

Use RVM. http://rvm.beginrescueend.com

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they're just releasing the source code, not taking new users for "the" Diaspora or sharing access to any kind of central database of users. It's just a ruby web app you can download and run locally (or on a web server if you're that dumb...), right? And in that case, how is this any worse than the hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floa…

Well, there's at least one glaring security issue that should be obvious to any Rails developer.

Did you remember to bring enough knowledge to share with the rest of the class? What glaring issue are you referring to?

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#164
post #4

It looks surprisingly advanced, from a screenshot perspective - more than I admit I would have given them credit for. Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?

"Is there additional insight into what "aspects" are, though? It confuses me - will it confuse an ordinary user?"

This is a pet peeve of mine, using extremely generic words to describe an important part of what you are working on. "Object Oriented Programming" got away with it, but that is aimed squarely at developers. I don't think you want words like "aspect" in front of actual users.

I've noticed this a lot in academic research, also. I lost track of how many different ways I saw the word "feature" overloaded in different fields.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#165
post #109
post #15

It seems to be AGPL licensed. I'm wondering how that will affect adoption.

I think that since the community funded this project that the code should have a more liberal license so that the community can do what they want with it. The project also depends on MongoDB, which is also AGPL licensed, which raises the question of if paid hosting of a diaspora instance is 'commercial' and if it requires a MongoDB license from 10gen, I would think that it does. They should BSD/MIT license their own…

What problem would a paid diaspora host have in releasing the source code of diaspora itself.

AFAIK AGPL does not stop anyone from making money. It just stops taking others work as the base and building closed enhancements on top of it.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#166
post #158
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story is Tesla visiting Henry Ford to fix some electric motors he had on his production line. The amount of the bill was $10,010. Ford called him up later to ask why ten thousand and ten, when Tesla quipped the famous quote ($10 for the chalk, $10,000 because I knew where to put it).

Ah cool - I had just googled for the origin, and only found a story on a "business jokes" web site (they used 50000$). Didn't know it has a real origin.

Always check Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With such cheap VPSes, do people still use shared hosting nowadays?

I paid $9/yr. for my WordPress shared hosting. Unfortunately that plan is going away this year. VPSes seem to start at $20/mo. I'll probably move my blog to wordpress.com hosting and then try a combination of Heroku and Amazon EC2 micros for my app prototyping.

You can get a vps at intovps.com for $10 a month, I'm not affiliated with them in anyway just a happy customer

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#168
If you're building something you expect people to be able to install themselves, surely your #1 priority would be to not build dependencies that regular hosting can't provide.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my perspective I was leaning more toward having funding for a designer (I assume they paid 10k for http://luxr.posterous.com/ or got it free). I am not a designer, but since we have not hired one, I am the one doing the designing and ending up spending more time then I should and hating what I come up with. I am also the main engineer on our project so thats time I could be putting to making code/features better.…

Why you didn't take a third partner? I think a designer=that-can-code or a developer-that-can-design make things happen faster.

I would love to have a third partner. But finding a designers/developers who love MMOs and live in Los Angeles proved to be kind of hard.

Re: Diaspora Developer Release

#170
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is this any worse than ... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say. This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to t…

Thanks for the response. I agree that a security page is a good, even necessary idea, it just doesn't strike me as a pressing emergency for them at the moment.

They're currently getting coverage on the Guardian, BBC, etc, and will get it on the New York Times within 24 hours. That is about to create an emergency for them, because being the secure, privacy-aware alternative to Facebook gives people some expectations as to how the software will work. Many of those expectations match the designed behavior. None match the software as actually implemented.

They just did a media launch and they're in for their earliest users getting burned in a very painful, public manner. If this isn't an emergency, what does an emergency look like?

Post reply on HN