dreyfiz

The most depressing kind of response is "if you change the names, the point still stands". I already got the point being made, and I was worried about it when I first heard about the Iranian hackers in late March. The point isn’t what’s offensive. Grabbing my attention with a racist caricature to make your point? That’s the problem. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the name. It was a complete caricature of a dishonest immigrant to the West from my part of the world, with a name, a job, relatives who are also scammy disreputable people, and a crafty scheme. It was the whole racist package with batteries included.

Thanks for your sisyphean efforts in explaining to this unsympathetic audience why sexing up your bug report with racist caricatures is simply not cool, jessedhillon.

"Lighten up, will ya? Why can’t we all enjoy a little racist caricature?"

Everyone deserves a presumption of respect and dignity. I don’t make bigoted caricatures at the expense of others just to make some point about trust and certificates, and I don’t expect other people to enjoy and defend it when someone is ignorant enough to resort to racist caricature.

It’s the whole Ruby sexism debate all over again, I guess.

link for Ruby sexism debate reference: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/04/gender-and-sex-...

From an Arab-American: I found it racist and offensive.

Anyone who says "Achmed" is probably saying something racist, because "Achmed" isn’t even an Arabic name. "Ahmad" is.

Maybe someone will see this late comment:

Do The Work, by Steven Pressfield, is free on Amazon for Kindle (you could read it on your computer or smartphone, too) for now, so grab it! His War of Art changed my life. Understanding the nature of Resistance is incredibly important.

http://www.amazon.com/Do-the-Work-ebook/dp/B004PGO25O

I’ve heard a little about it, but is there any documentation anywhere about this new asset pipelining system in 3.1? You seem well-informed about it.

His "War Of Art" changed my life.

No.

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Twitter&btnG=Search+Pate...

Although they did make Loren Brichter patent "pull to refresh":

http://www.google.com/patents?q=Loren+Brichter&btnG=Sear...

Also, please don’t be "I could clone that in a weekend" guy. Everyone hates that guy.

http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/07/01/one-which-i-call-out-ha...

You could make a piece of crap implementing Twitter’s models and create/read/update/delete in a weekend. Or really, in under an hour with Rails scaffolding. Congratulations, you have now proved that you can guess the schema from using an app. You don’t have a product, or even one tenth of a product.

First-past-the-post has nothing to do with Twitter’s success; polish and thought and sweating the details has everything to do with it.

Price of everything, value of nothing.

Please make a recording available more widely afterwards, for those of us who can't attend. I'd pay the same amount you're suggesting as an in-person donation for this, if it comes to that.

What percentage of your earnings would you not consider theft?

The fact that cheapskates will complain is no reason not to do it.

Hmm, it looks like you're right—it's just a legend. Thanks, I stand corrected.

No "thievery" was involved, he licensed it in exchange for access to pre-IPO Apple stock.

You want Backbone as part of your Rails app to clean up your Javascript and make it easier to do hard things…it’s meant for apps that let the user do significant client-side state manipulation.

The alternative to “5 components instead of 3” isn’t “just 3”. It’s “3 well-understood components on the server, and a bunch of jQuery/prototype spaghetti on the client that I really wish was better-organized and easier to extend.” If this describes your app, you might do well to look at Backbone.

Part of what makes Backbone hard to learn from a lot of the tutorials that have been posted is that the authors aren’t experienced at it enough to be opinionated, which makes me feel lost. jamesjyu’s tutorial is opinionated about some matters of taste, which is confidence-inspiring.

Backbone itself isn’t all that opinionated: it just offers a bunch of legos to put together however you wish, feeling free to ignore many of the pieces. So it’s easy to feel adrift trying to learn how to use it confidently.

This is the best walkthrough for learning Backbone.js that’s been posted to Hacker News yet. (In that I actually feel empowered to go use Backbone to create something, now that I’ve read it). Thanks for posting!

Good to see Talking Points Memo join the ranks of journalistic outlets that are open-sourcing their useful in-house stuff.

Simplicity is a feature. "Can do more" sometimes means "can't do anything because it's too complicated".

I don't doubt that she said this, but I can't find the quote by Googling, and I would love to see it for myself, in context. Can you provide a link? Thanks!

It's okay to make things that aren't intended to become popular or to take over their niche commercially. Haiku's makers loved BeOS and are just remaking it. It's very charming and human.

Thank you for CoffeeScript (changed my life!), and a very Merry Christmas to you!

Whoah-when did this "Collections" feature sneak into iBooks? Very nice. I made a "Cocoa" collection and stuck them all in it.

The concept of "node.js cloud hosting platform" is already conveyed by the company name, domain name, and logo, so the tagline should say something else—that's why I compared it to Heroku. Heroku's name and domain don't tell you what you're getting, and yet their tagline doesn't just describe itself, it also characterizes itself. It's not just a "ruby platform". It's "rock-solid". They're not just offering to handle your deployment and scaling. They're saying you can deploy and scale "with confidence".

Your writing takes all the sex out of it-that doesn't give me a lot of confidence in your product. Heroku's copy is balls to the wall, yours is putting me to sleep. I'll give you a critique based on my own prejudices, for whatever it's worth:

Typos: "severs"; "your" should be "you're". Also, you have your own capitalization scheme for "Node.js Camp", perhaps for emphasis? "Meet up" is two words, not one.

Tone/confidence: Heroku's top billing is "rock-solid ruby platform". Yours is "a node.js cloud hosting platform". Heroku characterizes itself reassuringly as well as describing itself mechanically. "node.js cloud hosting platform" is a dead fish of a phrase.

"COMING SOON!" When-ish? Why shouldn't I just bounce off your page?

"Provision servers; build node.js apps; deploy!" Deathly boring copy. You can always tell when someone isn't smiling with their whole face, and the exclamation mark at the end is a fake smile. Compare the confidence of Sinatra's copy to the vague, insincerely jaunty feel of yours ("put this in your pipe/and smoke it". http://www.sinatrarb.com/

What is "provision servers"? Is it like dynos or EC2 instances? I don't understand what your technology is, and whether you're building a truly rich app platform like Heroku or just a thin layer of UI on top of EC2. Heroku really sells me on how cool their engineering is. Do you not talk about it because you have nothing cool to talk about? If you do, you should really start talking about what you're building.

"We provide simple, scalable, and powerful node.js hosting for node.js developers in the cloud." A vague, limp snoozefest.

"Developers should focus on hacking cool node.js applications, let us handle hosting, deployment, and scaling." This is insincere and it reads wrong. You sound like you're out of touch, trying to appeal to the cool kids with stilted language.

"Dedicated Cloud Servers": so is this actually an application platform? It doesn't sound like it.

"Git + SVN Integration": your target market probably isn't using svn.

Tch. Sorry you feel that way. I like his stuff.

This is a great tool! Measuring your Tweet load in Scoble units is brilliant. I'm unfollowing my top 4. I can't bear to unfollow #5, @gapingvoid at 150 tweets/week. After that, the next 4 are going, and #10 @mike_ftw gets to stay with his 82 tweets. Not bad at all, I feel like this is really going to help me focus on the neglected long tail of people I follow who don't tweet 20+ times a day.

God, I know.

Yikes. I use Moniker too, and this hasn't ever happened to me. I thought they were better than that.

Thanks to all three of you for the answers-I didn't realize AppEngine's pricing model unbundled warmed-up app instances resident in RAM from CPU time and bandwidth, which makes their offering not directly comparable to Heroku.