Demos, the great God of demonstrations and examples. He preferred to teach other Gods, as opposed to humans. Usually he could be found skulking nearby or with API, the God of documentation.
Conf, the lesser known God of configurations and setups. He made sure that everything was well defined in a single place in a concise format, such as acceleration due to gravity, etc.
> POP, SMTP and IMAP would seem contrary the whole idea of a public stream of email communication
I disagree. I believe it would create for easier access to a public stream of email communication, in particular to the person who sent the email. Sure, there's an easy way to get a notification when one gets an email, but how about replying to it? If one could reply to the email from the notification email (and see the contents of the email), that would be going towards a better solution (in my opinion). But even better would be POP, SMTP, and IMAP support, for the easiest way of getting emails, checking them, sending them, replying to them, etc.
POP, SMTP, and IMAP would not remove the web access and the public viewing of all emails, it would extend what has already been created.
Putting the code up on, say, GitHub would also help with stopping people from doing malicious things to the site, because people aren't always mean and villainous, they can be nice as well and help out. One of the benefits is people fixing your code for you!
If you're worried that somebody will do something malicious... what is there that one could maliciously do? As long as you don't have, for example, credit cards on there, not much to steal then.
Perhaps somebody is malicious enough to decide to take down your website for their perverse pleasure, in that case anybody can have their own, local copy of the library in case the internet-facing one goes down.
EDIT: What I meant and managed to completely fail to convey well in the first paragraph is that by obscuring the code, the vulnerabilities that you're afraid of people finding don't go away. And people can find them nonetheless. By opening the code, other people can fix vulnerabilities, etc. But keeping this paragraph in mind, to relate it to the others, seeing as how your library still exists, nobody seems to have bothered to try to destroy the library in the first place using their own means, so what difference will putting the source up make? :)
tl;dr: Security by obscurity? For shame. Put the source on GitHub! There's nothing to lose, and everything to gain. :)
Interestingly enough my father and I do this for a couple of hours straight about once a week.
One of the few differences is that the story is usually finished within said few hours, and a new one begins next week, unless it's considered interesting enough or needs a continuation.
I believe that it's a wonderful idea to do this in general. It exercises creativity and thinking, et cetera, and it's fun to do. :)
True, however, in defense of the writer perhaps the writer was trying to balance out the story, because throughout most of the story above her backstory was pretty much "it's her fault". To balance it out a bit, in the middle the writer inserted a "hey, maybe she did really have a reason for her reaction" before returning to "nope, not really-ish".
At least, that's how I felt when I read the article.
But you do make a valid point, his background isn't really brought forth, although slightly it is but not much at all. However, I feel that saying something along the lines of "Hank grew up in Sometown, Somestate, Someplace, and had a loving mother and father, etc etc etc..." would feel out of place in such an article... I'm only guessing Hank's backstory and do not claim to actually know it.
tl;dr & in conclusion: Perhaps it's the writer trying to balance things out? :/
In my opinion, her upbringing and life have everything to do with this. If it were not for how she was brought up and how she was treated during her life, she may or may not have done what she did. The only reason is not to try to engineer some sympathy, but there are other possible reasons as well.
If her backstory was a backstory full of mental illness, would you respond differently to what had happened?
Now, I'm not trying to say that racism or stereotypes are good, because they aren't. However, people's past are what shape people and can help others understand people's viewpoints.
Even because of her backstory, however, I find that pretty much everybody (except the reporter, who didn't participate too much) overreacted. In general, though, I find that many of Adria's thought processes were flawed, but that's not relevant to this reply (at least, I don't think so).
I still stand by what I say that "first impressions are important". Perhaps they are less emphasized in public software, however, they still count for quite a lot (as is seen by reading the comments). Technically, your first impression was of the idea that it was trying to convey rather than the application itself that was linked to. To others, it was the application and not the idea.
I guess when I did say "it doesn't work" that was a bit judgemental, sorry. I meant that it was incomplete, or at least unintuitive and/or cluttered to use. In the version that was given to everybody to try out, that is.
First impressions may be unreliable, but it's how the world works, most of the time, and unfortunately changing human nature is quite difficult (although I haven't really tried :P).
If you see a car with a small knob for a steering wheel, you'll find that it is more difficult to use. And even though the engine of the car might be a radical improvement, this still doesn't mean that it can be used, mainly due to the pesky knob instead of a steering wheel. Obviously, after a while of using a knob to steer, you can get used to it, but that initial lack of usability means that many people decide that it's not worth the trouble.
Same with the website. You go to a website to use it. Sure, the idea behind the website may be wonderful and innovative, but if the access to it is unusable, then the innovation behind it all is for naught. When implemented well, the innovation is both shown in the explanation of it, and in the interface itself.
Everybody is dismissing it after 20 seconds because it doesn't work. The idea may be good, but the implementation is what is being shown to public. If it were the idea that were being shared, then it would be a link to, for example, a blog post or source code.
Finally, the reason that we're not trying to "learn something about how it works" is because it doesn't work, at least not yet. Which is why we are complaining.