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Re:Ask HN: Rate my startup (video) by wesley on Thursday November 13, 2008 @05:39AM (#362936)
Very nice, but can you skip the first step? You have to send "ping" first?

If I use a service multiple times, I would already know what input the app needed. For example, "Weather NY".

Re:Ask HN: Rate my startup (video) by wesley on Thursday November 13, 2008 @05:42AM (#362939)
And I guess it would also be nice to have just 1 single bot in jabber.

[email protected] .. instead of having 10 bots for 10 different things.. (would clutter things up pretty fast)

Just send an identifier to the bot when you first ping it to tell it what app you want to access.

Re:Ask HN: Rate my startup (video) by cte on Thursday November 13, 2008 @05:55AM (#362951)
Definitely agree. And its really easy to do so because you control the code. I actually have a bot that just executes whatever function name I give it, and I have a bot that runs arbitrary system commands on my server, which is kind of like having an IM terminal (_not_ recommended for security purposes :))
Re:Ask HN: Rate my startup (video) by cte on Thursday November 13, 2008 @05:47AM (#362945)
If your first line of code is 'x = prompt', there is no ping needed to invoke the application. I should have touched on that in the video because it ends up being a very bad user experience if it requires a ping to start your app.