n8agrin

Supposedly Nest is on Apple's blacklist. My source says any Apple employee caught even talking to a Nest employee is immediately fired. I can't verify whether or not this is true, but if it is, interesting that Apple feels that threatened.

There is so much bombastic talk in this post. This has to be a troll.

Well, you're right and you're wrong. I'll be specific, since you are:

Twitter is sending down the home timeline as HTML. In fact, what most people are looking for when they go to twitter.com is their home timeline so I'm correct, this is what they are doing (at least in new-new-twitter which I think almost everyone now has). You're also correct, when you go to twitter.com/#!/n8agrin you get your timeline in the background which is then replaced with my tweets. However it wasn't always this way. At one point in time, going to twitter.com just downloaded a bunch of javascript and an HTML bootstrap. The whole site was generated by javascript. I know this because I worked on it.

Technically pushState doesn't really have anything to do with the practice of progressive enhancement or making anything "much faster". You can make pure javascript sites very fast, you can make serving straight up HTML very fast, you can progressively enhance HTML without pushState. pushState is really just a way to manipulate the history of a browser, while optionally changing the browser's current url, without a page refresh (read more here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browse...). You can use it to do a lot of things, one of which is to have it serve as one part of a solution for sites that behave like single-page apps without having to resort to the fragment identifier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier), forever vilified as the hashbang.

This is what they do.

Dan doesn't say anything about where the rendering will happen.

Most sites these day (including Facebook, Gmail, etc) have to execute "a huge chuck of js" before displaying the page.

I have been told by some people in the know that they have come up with a system similar to pjax for certain page components, though that may have changed.

One cold dark night in Javascript-land...

A: Hey, remember when coding was fun? When it was an extension of yourself and you got to create things with it? Create things!

B: No. We're not allowed to do anything except what the Good Book deems acceptable.

A: But, but, you get to take this blank slate and carve out of it whatever you can imagine! Pure expression! And remember when you prioritized your coding style for enjoyment?

B: No. Coding is not fun. Coding is about maximum compliance.

A: ... I remember, but sometimes I think the web has forgotten.

A: I mean think about it. We're banished from the 'new' keyword. We can hardly use polyfills or even extend the native prototypes. How I used to love statements like [[1,2],2,3].flatten(), but lo they are forbidden! Having even one prototype extension in your library is a death sentence. No having fun in Javascript-land!

B: True, fun is not allowed.

A: Hey, what's that over there? That gleaming light coming from the back of that house? Is that a party? Hey it's that house that @fat and @mdo built. They're having fun? We should join them!

B: You don't want to go there man. They don't use semicolons.

A: Is that all they're doing? So what, they're not following the Good Book? They're not afraid to do things a bit out of the ordinary? I'm out of here. See you later Javascript-land. B, I'm going to have some fun with those guys.

B: ... prototype extensions?

(Thanks @fat, @mdo & Twitter for Bootstrap, and for giving it away nonetheless. If I ever have a problem minifying your code, I'll fork it and just add the semicolons myself.)

And if your good programming team can't figure out that they might need to edit a coworker's Javascript library to add in missing semicolons in order to cleanly minify their scripts, you have a different (bigger) problem.

I thought Mike was still part of CrunchFund: http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/crunchfund

Regardless, great hustle. Love seeing people willing to stick their neck out.

He's not wrong. I just want to learn more and to have others be able to learn more. Arrogant may be too strong a word, I'll edit that.

Your essay is well written, I agree with the premise of it and you clearly know a bit about biology. But I still think it's important that when we make these general claims of scientific fact we point to the giants whose shoulders we're standing on. Maybe it's just the ex-scientist in me, and if so, apologies. I appreciate you found a cortisol related article to prove your point, and I agree it's an odd choice as the abstract, which I'm assuming is what you read as well, seems to state little other than pleasantries are forgotten when under a chemically induced stress response.

I followed through the entire essay in complete agreement, but I wished the following paragraph had at least a reference pointing to its claim:

The human body’s physical “fight or flight” response evolved to help it evade a dangerous situation, which historically involved extreme physical exertion. The rush of steroids into the bloodstream essentially turns off unnecessary systems, including some higher thinking processes, to aid in escape.

When we make statements like this proclaiming we understand the complex workings of things like human physiology I always have to shake my head. We may be smart, us programmers and designers, but let's not pretend to understand the order and meaning of everything. And if you do understand and you have the means, provide some kind of reference to where the claim originates from so we can all learn more.

* edited because I sounded like a jerk and wanted to make my point clearer

Theories on Jobs' character aside, the Jobs biography is an utter mess. Some sentences feel like they were pulled from a 6th grade book report. It's riddled with obvious statements and reads like it should have been published in People magazine. I realize I'm probably being too harsh, but I wish that I felt like Isaacson had invested into this biography, this once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity, the way Jobs likely invested in developing any of his products.

Totally agree with the premise that user actions should provide responses instantly, I was building those kinds of responsive UIs 2 years ago. But, I have a problem believing that the future of web applications is based on serializing all ajax requests and duplicating model validation on the client. Come on, this is 2011, this technique isn't new. Let's work on things that will really change the state of the art.

I left Twitter about a month ago and would say this is pretty accurate.

I think you're right about the stability, but that's a better question for William to answer. Wasn't aware of Sup, I've only seen him using Turnsole (https://github.com/wmorgan/turnsole) which apparently is derived from Sup.

You should have a peek at what my former coworker William is doing with Heliotrope. Pretty nice email client that supports threading with incredibly fast searching. It's not exactly what you're looking for and it's still pretty raw, you have to be familiar with the command line, but it has a lot of potential. https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

I think this is great, if only because it shows you don't need to name your startup something that ends in -li, -ly, and -r.

If "conservation" means breeding wild animals in what is essentially captivity so that "rich westerners" can pay lots of money to go around and shoot them for the sake of shooting them, then you're absolutely right, I am going to be offended.

I don't see how vegetarianism even plays a part in this discussion. I'm not a vegetarian, but this offends me. I'm offended by Parson's bravado and his claim that "Of everything I do this is the most rewarding."

Parson kills an animal under the guise of crop protection and to feed a village. Were I watching a local hunt for this elephant to feed their family I would feel that the death was justified. But we're really just watching a rich westerner tramp around in the dark so he can fire a gun.

Is this really the most rewarding thing Parson could think to do for local villagers in Zimbabawe? And even if so, I would expect some more humility from someone who claimed their actions were so noble.

You mean sizzle? As in http://sizzlejs.com/ ?

Faith? Support? I certainly don't have faith in them any more than I have faith in you. I know neither you nor them. How could I have "faith" in an unknown? However, I believe that most of the time people attempt to be good. And given that they are willing to let us see their code (unlike many other institutions) I would argue they are living up to my belief at least for now. So they released an alpha that had security issues? The model of open source validated itself; they received critical feedback and will hopefully act on it. If they do not act on it, so be it, I will not trust them with my information. But I don't believe in cynicism especially cynicism aimed at a self-advertised alpha project.

Does that mean I support them? Very well then, I support them! Go hunt some giants! Change the world! Go make things better while your critics sit on their hands and tell you can't, too afraid to build things themselves!

Don't spread FUD. These guys are at least trying to do something in a market where almost everyone else has assumed Facebook has won. And they built and shipped something. I can't even remember the last time I could claim that 100%. Finalize your opinion when their final release is available.

Sorry to lead with a criticism but the use of the data- attribute in these examples is kind of ugly. I understand their motives, but if you're going to use data- in a "declarative" way, why not just have multiple declarations of the data- attributes? For example: data-bind-value="firstName" data-bind-text="firstName", etc. I'm sure I'm missing something.

That said, this looks like an interesting library and worth playing around with. I'm loving the huge amount of JS framework experimentation going on.

The author claims that businesses often reinvent themselves in order to survive. As I understand it Wesabe _did_ reinvent themselves. I believe they were working closely with banks to have them implement some Wesabe related tools directly for the banks' customers. I didn't work at Wesabe so I may be wrong about this.

Personally, I stopped using Wesabe for the same reasons that DannoHung mentions in his comment. I wasn't getting a good 10,000ft view of what was happening to my money and there were no tools available to help me budget. Shame though because I'm not exactly thrilled about giving Mint/Intuit/Yodell my personal info.

pg linked to it on Twitter yesterday which likely drew a lot of attention. twitter.com/paulg

Two words: student loans.

The most salient point to me was the fact that github was not initially conceived of as a business, but as a tool the founders desired for the betterment of their own day to day. And not only that, but github was quickly adopted in the founders' workplaces at the time, giving them time to focus on it and refine it without giving up an income. Dogfooding is a common theme in startups and it's worth noting that 37signals' Basecamp product was, as I understand it, built with the a very similar purpose. Initially it was a tool for them to help manage their own projects first and something they could charge for second, built under similar conditions where they already had a business designing client websites, providing them an income.

A lot of times I dream up projects I think of as potential startups but often have to ask myself, "Would I actually use this product?" If the answer is ever even a hint of "no" I tend to suspect that I could not dedicate myself to the project wholeheartedly enough to back a business. I wonder if this is a meaningful metric and if dogfooding is really such a powerful motivator.

I think I just found this book online as well: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/

I'm pretty sure Facebook has been cash flow positive for a while. Here's the Techcrunch article about it from nearly a year ago: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-millio...

Also here's a report from Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65H01W20100618

Well, at least you got to quote Monsieur Balzac. Hell of a name.

Would love to see him do something similar for c as well.