jdavid

For everyone who is a backer and has met Alex personally, please vouch for his passion on Kickstarter. Doing it here does not help.

I don't consider Alex the most experienced dev, but I do think he is one of the most passionate people I have met. He tries for the stars and often times falls short, but so did the Wright Brothers, Tesla, and Edison.

Even the best of startups fail. I think the rate is like 1 in 100 that succede. I hardly think we should hold kickstarter projects to a higher standard.

I have contributed over a thousand dollars to Kickstarter projects, and I don't consider any of those dollars, purchases. I consider them donations. Some projects will succede while others fail.

Don't let the legal system make an example of this.

Prosper is still a great company, but legal quagmires made it much less than it's original vision. I'd hate to overly regulate kickstarter.

you could sort by zipcode.

more similar zipcodes should be closer together.

javascript can have a lot of indents with all of the closures, so ... in those cases I might set the indent spacing to 2.

I still think that it's just common good manners to keep code to 80 chars, those languages should work better to not be so verbose.

I have a column usually set to 80 chars, or sometimes 100, and I manually make sure that it's not much longer than that unless it would hurt code readability to make a new line.

I try to have two windows open on my MacBook Pro 80-100 chars per line allows me to do that, most of the time.

It is a pet peeve of mine when developers try to fit as much on one line of code as possible. There are tools to compile code, you as a developer should try to make your code as human readable as possible, that is unless you like being the only one to maintain your code.

San Francisco, CA - Addvocate

http://addvocate.com

"Employees should be your strongest Addvocates. We build tools that make it easy for teams and groups to tell large collaborative social media stories. Employee's matter. :)"

    - Python/ MongoDB
    - iOS & Android
    - Javascript( HTML5, Firefox Addons, Chrome Ext.)

We are a friendly bunch, and we are looking for highly skilled and friendly people to work with. Many of us left the Midwest 4 years ago to make a great product and company here in SF, after diverging into various roles and companies we have gotten the gang back together, so to speak. Our CEO had one successful exit, and is an ex. Salesforce Director. Other members have worked/ written core libraries for Twitter & MySpace, and have worked for Kabam, inboxQ and Microsoft. We are still building the core team.

If you are looking to get in on the ground floor of a fast passed Enterprise Social Media team, this is the team to join. We have fun projects ranging from mobile, big data, analytic, machine learning and large Javascript Apps. We are trying to ship weekly, while maintaining the quality needed for an enterprise app. We want to bring the best of the consumer web to the Enterprise.

Tell us what you have worked on and what you would love to work on. Many of us go to conferences and hackathons to prototype new ideas. Some are related to our core business and sometimes they are just created for fun.

If you are a smart, ambitious developer, who likes to ship code, we would like to meet you.

Cheers,

Here's to many great hacking sessions to come.

Justin http://twitter.com/@jdavid

The Great Filter is physics.

I heard recently that if the earth was 3 times larger, the most advanced chemical rocket would not have the energy density to leave the atmosphere.

Scientists now know that with out a Jupiter, the asteroid belt might not form in such a way to deliver 'water' and protect us from large comets roaming the galaxy.

Even now it may not be possible to leave our solar system without a significantly different understanding of physics. Voyager is just no leaving our solar system, and it will take decades for it to actually leave the effect of our sun. Today if we launched a craft it probably would get just about as far as Voyager in just about the same amount of time, but maybe our power source could power a more efficient version for a decade longer, getting us just a bit further than voyager will, but still no where near Alpha Centauri.

For us to explore the depths of space, it would need to be much easier and cheaper than it is today.

For it to even be plausible a DIY Scientist as you suggest would need to create energy density so powerful, it would be hard to imagine a world where that sort of thing is not regulated.

For us to study sub atomic physics, we have a structure that is 20 miles in length, this is not the research of... a DIY community.

Today we argue about Iran getting enriched plutonium for nuclear research, when some think they want to build a bomb and others think they want to build a power plant. I really can't imagine a neighbor of mine being able to ... take that step without raising some alarms.

Your mad scientist would have to be on a far off island/ comet/ moonbase with all of the resources and man power required without interference from others, but still have access to raw materials.

I am just not sure we will find other worlds in humanity's lifetime.

We may be able to colonize mars and a few other large bodies in our solar system, but leaving it is a different story.

As the Internet we need to do two things, one start getting our sorry little asses in congress to stop this stuff where it starts.

Two, build better technology that is not such an easy target. If individual keys were required to decrypt messages, then it's hard to take the data without your permission because cryptography prevents that.

This might be a good enough reason to switch off of email, especially email like gmail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Goals_and_objec...

Curiosity has 8 core objectives, it's probably related to one or two of theses:

  Biological
    (1) Determine the nature and inventory of organic
        carbon compounds

    (2) Investigate the chemical building blocks of life
        (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
        phosphorus, and sulfur)

    (3) Identify features that may represent the effects
        of biological processes (biosignatures)

  Geological and geochemical
    (4) Investigate the chemical, isotopic, and 
        mineralogical composition of the Martian surface
        and near-surface geological materials

    (5) Interpret the processes that have formed and
        modified rocks and soils

  Planetary process
    (6) Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) 
        Martian atmospheric evolution processes

    (7) Determine present state, distribution, and
        cycling of water and carbon dioxide

  Surface radiation
    (8) Characterize the broad spectrum of surface 
        radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic
        radiation, solar proton events and 
        secondary neutrons

We have heard some reports on (8), but other objectives seem like they might take a while. Plus the rover is not in the richest part of the ... theoretical river delta so I would suspect that NASA would hold their tongue on confirming (2) and or (3) until they are deeper into the mission, but (4) still seems likely, unless (2) and (3) are plentiful at this point.

To SUM it up I hope we found evidence of one of the following.

  - Evidence of Oceans on Mars
  - Nitrogen in the soil, needed for plants to grow on mars
  - Amino Acids
  - Fossils

It could be something that is a play on words, 'Earth Shattering' could mean volcanic activity

I also wonder if they are finding rare minerals or metals.

It could also have to do with Isotope ratios, as much of our history currently depends on Carbon Dating and other Radioactive Isotope decay rates. Different Atmospheric conditions could have different isotope ratios, this would be a pretty big shake up and it does not necessarily require the rover to find a specific chemical or a complex thing like DNA or organism remnants.

My mind would be blown, if NASA found one of the following.

  - living plants
  - living microbes
  - manufactured materials not of human/ earth origin.
  - tons of precious metals.

I think this could be solved with a simple like/dislike button for notifications.

If that type of notification is unwanted you could, dislike it and it would suppress notifications of that type for ... x days. If you do it enough, it would disable it. If enough of the apps notifications are disliked then the apps notification privileges get suspended all together.

I think this guy makes an interesting point about performance, related issues stemming from using Delete. However, maybe the proper advice would be to Google and other folks who optimize javascripts execution to improve the handling of Delete, because is a necessary feature of frameworks.

Like with so much on the web, with great power comes great responsibility. However, that is not super reassuring.

Most of the time I have seen sites do this so that the link is clear and easy to read for the user, while adding utm_campaign codes and other junk that the user does not care about.

However I am sure some sites use this behavior to .... trick users.

So we need to ask ourselves which is the greater good?

There might be a UX solution here, in how those links are shown, and maybe there should be some rules about HTTPS links in pages. Maybe users could set a setting that if the link is changed on click, that maybe, it would not automatically go to the site, but would prompt the user, or at least inform them on the landing page with some form of notification.

the graphs show that latency has not been affected, which is also odd.

Congrats on launching Dan. ;-)

I love this. Companies should develop great employees not hire them. It breads loyalty and honor.

If you don't wait for the DOM to load, it really can make it hard to alter parts of it, and it can cause odd problems that are hard to debug because it creates timing inconsistencies.

I'd much rather see a small DOM, so the ready event can fire quickly than do something like this.

For an extension I wrote which adds interface elements to the Facebook timeline, I needed a custom solution to monitor when parts of the dom were changing, since facebook implements infinite scroll. In this case I couldn't use mutation even if I wanted to because of the scoping of chrome extensions.

Since the facebook implementation does a lot of work to render infinite scroll quickly i needed something fast, and lightweight. for this i choose a pattern that locates new dom elements on an interval, appends a class, and then triggers a new event, which then looks for that class ( which is indexed by the browser ) and then does a foreach on each of those new elements only.

I found setting the interval to 100ms was a good fit on facebook, as it's generally the amount of time that a user will take to notice a change. I could have set it lower, to 50ms, 20ms, or even lower, but i found that it caused too much blocking. in many cases the DOM and javascript both need access to the threads and if you have intervals running on too small of an interval, like 5 seconds in this library you are likely going to block the dom from rendering quickly. also, it's unlikely that the browser will actually fire something at 5ms precision.

if you are going to follow a pattern like this i would advise you to use something in the 25ms+ range for your interval and also make sure that your interval script does not cause an invalidation on your browser elements. on a second async call you can then safely alter each element which should assure that you don't have any blocking behaviors.

but the products were more innovative.

Apple held back calling last year the iPhone 4S, the 5 because it wasn't good enough to bare the name, but this time there are hardly any core feature upgrades, and you get pulled further away from good google services.

the iphone 5 is more about flashy hardware and dumping google than it is about wowing customers.

the iphone 4s had a focusing lens, siri and was twice as fast as the iphone4.

this phone really doesn't wow me at all.

The Amazon Kindle HD press conference was more exciting.

Kindle x-ray is an amazing feature, and the front lit display is really an achievement.

I guess apple doesn't have the same fire to innovate that it used to. This might be proof that Patents don't spur innovation.

We kinda just went through this where I work.

I don't like the foosball and the nerf guns and all of the other distractions, sure it's fun but it's hard to keep a train of thought sometimes.

Honestly I'd rather the company take us out for a picnic or have us all hang out at the amusement park. I would rather mentally know that work is for work, and play is for outside of work. Or for the group of us to go make something physical with habitat for humanity.

At home, computers are not allowed in the bedroom for simular but different reasons. Studies show that once a couple invites a TV or computer into the bedroom, well parts of the relationship suffer.

At the end of the day I won't be building trust with my coworkers over foosball, nurf guns or video games. But if we do something outside of work, well that might be a different story.

In the end I think this is the result of young founders trying to keep the work place like college. For some of us College is a chapter long closed on life and we have other things that are more current in our lives.

One of my friends who owns a company has set it as a perk to do company wide vacations three or four times a year. I think this is awesome. When I worked at Unity, they would try to get every employee to Unite no mater where it was in the world. There were plenty of times to bond over that experience and I think it goes further to my point.

Here is the problem with the job market in SF Tech.

As a developer we get plenty of emails, and when we finally go through the work of finding a good job we probably put more on the table than most business dev people do. We are asked to work late when the project was miss planned or miss communicated to customers, when the thing breaks for some random reason, we are there to fix it. So at some point we feel like it's a part of us.

On the flipside while companies are trying to recruit they don't want to talk about the details of the app and what they really need done because they don't want to scare you off. So you go through this dance, and it kinda starts like this.

Some recruiter sees in their linkedin network that a job posts. If they are whiley they might find the job listing on a particular site. They don't have any relationship with the company or with you but they want to broker the deal and get %25 of your yearly salary so they are willing to work for it. All the while the recruiter is trying to get information out of both sides without a contract and with out all of the information. They don't know how much the job will offer until they have a few good candidates to show, and to start a dialog with the company. On the other side of the table they are trying to figure out what it will take for you to leave what you are doing so they ask weird questions that have hardly anything to do with what you care about, but are solely related to things they understand.

Once you get far enough along in that dance, you'll go for an onsite where the interviewer is either an engineer or a hiring manager. In SF, no one has any time, so the interviewee is just not that important until they are actually hired. This is the first thing I look for.

  Does the hiring company actually care about me?

In many cases you are just someone else to interview. Some companies like to interview a whole lot of people and then select the best. This is a long drawn out process and usually involves some metrics on the back end. Positions that are open longer are more likely to hire.

Once you get past the personality screen then they give you a technical task/ interview. Some companies ask tough computer science questions that have long been lost by people who actually do the work. Others ask tech gotchas that you would normally look up on google if you were stuck. And some actually get you to work on something related to the actual position you are interviewing for.

Now once you get through all of that, now they need to close you. At this point they need to work a number. Back in the old days companies would work out a number and then do something nice just to make you feel really welcome. In SV this is much less so the case. Many people are very analytical and hardly have social skills so it becomes all about the numbers.

At this point as an engineer you would like to know how well the company is doing, but you can't quite ask the hard questions without seeming skeptical as this might affect your offer. On the flip side the company making the offer wants to get you as affordably as they can and they don't want you to take some other offer.

At the end of the day, the offering company will make an offer and put a time limit on it. ( as for some reason why they would rather have you make a brash decision about the next 3 years of your life, i don't get ) And then you look at the numbers and you either counter or don't. Many companies out here have been hard pressed to negotiate for the following reasons.

  * the cap table is already set
  * the salary is fair, and we are a startup and that's what we can offer
  * we don't offer bonuses

It's odd, because they are willing to pay a recruiter $20,000 to find you, but they don't want to actually give a little extra to the engineering staff.

Some companies wont even accept resumes from recruiters, but then you are missing out on all of the talent that get's talked into submitting a resume and has not had the time to search on their own.

I just wish companies talked more about the real issues and were more open and honest about things. I think that if you start with honesty, and expect honesty you have a much better chance of getting it back from your future employee and confident.

I forgot to mention that each of these dances might take an engineer 10-20 hours per company to full evaluate them. It's not a small amount of work to interview.

Thank you for the sincere reply. I would love to learn more of your efforts. I am a chrome extension developer and I have several extensions that I work on. I would like to know under what terms Facebook would add an app to such a list and what it sees as acceptable use.

I'm excited we get to demo here at #socialhack in 15 min. at heroku.

I was reading http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/, when I realized that people might still have interesting ways to store data on a printed page. One example might be to hide a secret message within plain sight, this is the art of Steganography, and I was curious if anyone had tried encoding data in this way. With a guetenburg press this would have been really hard to created, but with today's laser and injet printers it shouldn't be that hard to encode such a message.

Ligatures are the special widths and lines that fonts use to make it easier to read a block of text. For example, non-fixed width fonts are kinda a way of doing this, but this might go deeper than that.

with hash tags and with twitter search it might be. even pinterest is having trouble with intent. At 10 million users it's also likely you have KPIs vs. some sites at 1million might not have anything more sophisticated than unique IPs/ logged in users.

The problems in this space are based on attention ( time on site/ interactions), interest (consumer segmentation/focus), and intent (willingness to make a purchase).

The problem of most ad based apps is that they trade attention for interest and purchase intent. The problem with facebook is that it's so good at getting your attention that you rarely visit facebook with the interest or intent of buying something.

The core difference of google and facebook is that when you go to facebook, you are engaged with your friends and are in a lean back mindset, while with google you are actively pursuing interest in something.

I think VCs should actually come up with standard KPIs around interest and intent than saying lame things like X number of users is worth $y amount. It would be much smarter to say things like, a user with a KPI of K is worth $Z this year, and $Q over a lifetime.

A Dropbox, and Apple user looks much different than a Facebook user.

It would be interesting to combine this information with boxofficemojo and adjust the distribution of colors based on box office revenue assuming that box office revenue correlates to mindshare, you would have a closer map to what people 'thought' a movie poster would look like in that year.

well you need the expansion of air, but maybe there is another way using magnetism or electrostatic or something, but maybe he is just referring to how the props are mechanically turned.

Global ajax events: ( are being removed )

    Events such as ajaxStart fired by $.ajax 
    can currently be attached to any element–even
    to elements that are not in a document at all!
    This creates an inefficient special case, 
    so we will eventually remove that ability 
    and fire ajax events only on document.

I need to look into this. If you are using jQuery outside of a standard browser environment this might be problematic.

The problem with Facebook isn't about what a user's worth to the company, it's what the company is willing to do to make a user worth $100 or $1000.

pinterest was profitable before the court case that made it more difficult to use skimlinks.