almost

Source code is here: https://github.com/l4rp/nodeventure

It's fun to hack on :)

But what about the tension between features (completeness of system? Or ability to reproduce any sound?) and robustness (lack of contradictions? No sounds that would cause its own destruction?)

The analogy seems to fit there, enough to make me smile anyway :)

Does stuff like this make any one else think of "I cannot by played on record player X" from Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach?

Looks really cool! Any way to get it to grab calendar items from the iPhone calendar? Very few of my items are in gcal, I use iCal on the desktop...

All the images are listed here:

http://www.pointerpointer.com/gridPositions.json

There are around 900 of them! I'd have used Amazon's Mechanical Turk...

Very cool effect, I also wasted way to much time playing with it :)

Maybe a name that distinguishes this compiler for CoffeeScript from CoffeeScript-the-language would be better? There may be other CoffeeScript compilers int the future, should they really all have the same name and be numbered? "CoffeeScript 2" (or any whimsical name that contains "CoffeeScript") would be confusing, it implies that it's the second version of the original CoffeeScript compiler, which it isn't.

CoffeeScript relies heavily on the underlying JavaScript semantics (which is one of the main reasons it's so useful: It's Just JavaScript) so other backends would most likely be a lot harder to do than the JS one.

Don't feed the trolls! If a comment is bad enough for me to want to downvote it I certainly don't want to engage the author in conversation. In fact, by downvoting I hope to push the comment further down so there to let the better comments float up and to make it less likely it will start a stupid pointless argument thread, replying would do the oposite usually.

Also, I think that, in general, quoting in comments tends to lead to lower quality comments. It's a lot easier to do a point by point nitpick than the write a proper response to the ideas contained in the parent post.

That's an awesome idea. It would be very cool to have HyperCard or similar as an iOS app. The great thing about HyperCard was that you could just pick it up and start drawing on the cards, then later learn a bit of coding to make it all go.

Libraries are good, so instead of having to learn to implement all those things (or learn how the last guy implemented them) you can just learn the library :)

Search is a very fast method of navigation when your editors search doesn't suck. Watch an experienced emacs or vim user sometime. I can't say much about other systems but I did once spend a day working with only emacsspeak, the audio interface to emacs. With emacsspeak you use the normal emacs movement commands to move by char, word, sentence paragraph etc and it will read out the unit you've moved in, it kind of let's you scan through a document. Also, experienced users have the speech turned up really fast, if you google it you can probably find a recording...

I just wish we had destructing assignment for other types as well. And maybe a proper pattern matching!

Not long ago this was a big new feature being advertised for new phones. "Look! Picture messaging! Isn't that amazing" and already it's so old it's been forgotten. The world moves so fast!

Agreed. It could be written much more clearly in my opinion like this:

    [varname] = [x for x in l if predicate_with_single_truth_value(x)]

When the headline is a question the answer is no. Works every time :)

Seems like good advice! Thanks for the article!

The one bit I don't think is a good idea is: "An alternative is to negotiate a rate for a trial period for a small feature, and tell her you’ll pay the full rate if the project goes well"

Just pay the full rate! Sure, hire for a trial run but don't insult your developer with old "just do this one thing cheap and there will be properly paid work later" line. For a good developer there is properly paid work available NOW, why should she work for you cheap?

I'm unsure what you're trying to say there. Yes, I am aware that it's possible to serve files without exposing your whole file system. Did you think that was something that might be in doubt?

I'm pretty sure I don't want to use a web server by people who think a 5 line demo that gives unrestricted access to the hosts file system is the best way to show off it's capabilities. Sorry, but that's just stupid.

    req.response.sendFile('webroot/' + file);

!!!!

I'll have file='../../secret.txt' thanks

The problem with rejecting mail as spam explicitly rather than silently dropping it into the spam bin is that it makes it really easy to tune spam so that it gets past your filter. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if it's just for a few people, but if something like that was popular there would be people figuring out how to work around it.

You wouldn't actually need to pay the money. You'd just need to make sure it got pre-authorized. Then once you got another legitimate pledges you could withdraw your fake ones (or leave them up but without any money in the accounts, I believe it's fairly common for KS not to be able to collect al the pledges at the end)

10^80 faster at what?

This is pretty important to me too. $50 isn't much at all for something as important as an editor but I don't think I'd consider switching if it wasn't GPL or MIT (or similar).

But of course it's important that they be able to make money too, I wonder how that could work.

Will pledge my $50 later today, I'll probably never switch from Emacs but I do want to see where this goes! Id make it 100 though if they promised to (properly) open source the core and the language plugins. Maybe that could be one of the things promised if they exceed their funding target?

Exactly. That's why it's silly to talk about iPhone as an "idea" that others could have had before. It's a Product, not an Idea.

The iPhone didn't invent any of that. Lots of people, including Microsoft, did in fact build things as close to that as to the iPhone for years before. It's just that they lacked a certain something.

You're correct that for a server side web project the GPL doesn't make you distribute source since you never distribute the binary. For client side javascript stuff though you ARE distributing the result (minified JS or whatever) so you do have to distribute the original source.

Sounds good, and if it's in London even better :) Where do I sign up for updates?

I think it's generally accepted that monkey patching is a Really Bad Idea but sometimes it's the least bad option available.

Know any that don't really really suck?

Given that both 90% figures are just rough general estimates without looking at the data (that is to say "made up") you can't really compare them.

Even if they where both data backed statistics you could imagine that maybe TechCrunch tends to cover preferentially the more interesting and exciting shoot for the moon types of things over the more boring "we're making money now" types which would skew their results.

I don't actually read TechCrunch so of course I have no idea and that's just speculation based on nothing.