almost

Why would it be harder?

That's a remarkably clear explanation. I learnt something new, thank you very much for that!

Wow, that's really slick! Any plans to license the software for use in other products? It would make a great addition to some help desk software...

It's just people enjoying themselves, it's fun to work on crazy projects (at least for some people). Don't worry about it :)

Why is that a bad thing?

Not quite the midlands but in Brighton I've done this and know people who do it regularly. A kind of middle ground is a co-working space, these are sort of like offices that are available for freelancer user, you sign up for a anything from a couple of days a month to full time then you just show up with your laptop. I find it a really great way of working, being independent but still having lots of others around who also create stuff.

<plug>The co-working space I work from in Brighton, The Skiff, is expanding. Anyone from around Brighton in the UK interested in co-working should definitely check it out: http://theskiff.org </plug>

Yes, but I'd far rather work with/for someone I met through Hacker News (probably, in general, I did actually find a great guy through oDesk). I've found some great work through these HN posts before.

Definitely for seeking work those sites do tend to be mostly a race to the bottom, you wouldn't believe the silly small amounts some people bid for projects (and how often they get chosen based on that).

One of the great things about Hacker News is that long, and well thought out, comments are encouraged.

I don't think the comment was overly long for the story it contained. And I really enjoyed reading it, I'm sure I'm not alone.

Very often performance isn't the most important metric though. For me it's usually about what's the easiest to set up and administer.

I have done this with Facebook as part of a prank on a friend, its not hard to do!

Why the assumption that "GoogleBot" is a single thing? Of course we know that google has a headless browser running, we see it's output in the instant previews, but I'm sure they still do plenty of standard crawling (and probably some half way partial JS execution and/heuristics too).

Wow, that brings back some happy memories. Writing Eliza style chat bots on my Mac SE in Hypercard was a lot of fun :)

Fun fact: the best selling game Myst was developed in Hypercard!

That was the idea with XHTML and it didn't really work so great. People aren't very good at creating valid XHTML or tools that create valid XHTML. Pity though, it would have made a lot of things easier.

That makes sense, I'm sure it is hard to optimize closures and untyped code. However, if you remove those you no longer have JavaScript so it is incorrect to say that you have made Javascript fast, you've just created a different language and made that fast. Of course if it plays nicely with Javascript that's cool, but please say that!

> Just don't use closures :)

So very much not Javascript then

Just remember "use bcrypt" and you should be fine. There is almost certainly a library for it for your language.

Are you finding Evil to be an improvement over Vimpulse at the moment? I tried Evil and it seemed to do some weird things with the point...

Currently running Emacs with Vimpulse. Best of both worlds or crazy franken-editor? I've not decided yet :)

Loads of cool new things, but not many changes in the areas that a introductory book would cover I think. Or am I wrong?

Looks very cool. But what is a "cloud cluster"? It's evidently not a cluster in the cloud as it's a bit of physical hardware they are using. I guess it could be a cluster that could be used as part of a cloud, but then isn't that the same as saying it's a "cluster"?

Oh come on, your originally comment was a nasty little dig at someone for writing up their experiences and a suggestion that they don't count because they're "just a college student". You made that comment from a new account so you either are new here (in which case, what's with the complaining about the discussion going down hill?) or you where not prepared to stand behind your comment so used a throw-away account.

I have no idea why you consider the Indian internet rail booking system a subject above criticism, it just seems bizarre.

If you don't see the relevance of articles like this tgen you're probably in the wrong place. Sorry.

Awful is still awful :) And from that description it is a truly awful system. And saying "if your so great why don't you fix it yourself" is a really stupid response to criticism. Why be so defensive about a bad system, YOU didn't write it, right?

Why the hate? Its an interesting read. Thinking about and discussing awful systems like this can help in figuribg out how to better make non-awful systems.

And why exactly is it relavant that he is a college student?

Sounds like a good idea. I know emacs flymake mode can be set up to underline problems detected by jshint. Personally I like to have the tests and jshint run by a hotkey so I can happily move the code through invalid states (towards a valid goal) without being constantly complained at :)

Have you had any luck getting it to handle modern JavaScript style? Whenever I've tried js2-mode it really hasn't liked jQuery style nested anonymous functions.

> I would posit here that nothing I could do in best practice (manual front-end testing, unit testing, error handling, etc.) would have caught the offending line.

jshint would have caught it. You need to run jshint on your code or you will get silly errors like this. Simple.

Wow, how horrendously awful must GoodData's services be to require language like that in their TOS and actions like this?

What do you mean by "server side programming"? That's a pretty wide net to cast. Do you really think that Go is the ideal language for every bit of code that doesn't happen to run on a client of some sort?

There's a lot of server side programming for which Go probably wouldn't be the ideal language. Room for more than 2 languages in the world I think :)