drgath

Yup, exactly. I've been at Y! for almost 4 years and when I started I was absolutely a workaholic, but over the last 3 years I've transitioned into having a much healthier (and happier) balance. You can certainly work as much as want at Yahoo, but I don't think too many feel forced to.

Thanks for the FYI. I'd consider swapping the order and list the offline method first, since that's the more common approach people take (I'd hope), and it's easier to grok at a glance.

"Pre-process" isn't quite accurate. To me that implies processing before serving, but it appears JSX is processed in the browser by a transpiler weighing in at 300k (uncompressed). http://fb.me/JSXTransformer-0.3.0.js

> What would anybody be buying? The brand?

And a viable competitor to YouTube's new paid subscription service. UGC was the big thing in video since YouTube launched, but the real revenue generator could be paid subscriptions, and that market is wide-open. Hulu doesn't -have- to be big studios.

> At this point in time, Yahoo does not have the public perception that they are a cool company to work for, especially for engineers.

That's the thing, it's all public perception and not based in reality. I've worked at Y! for ~4 years (software engineer) and love it. As Marissa has publicly stated, Y! is the world's largest startup, so there's a ridiculous amount of opportunity to work on fun and challenging problems.

Flickr has an estimated 87 million users [1], and Instagram has 100 million. Note sure what your definition of "second rate" is (quality or quantity?) but Flickr is much better quality than Instagram, especially after the recent update. Regarding email, Outlook, GMail, and Y! Mail are pretty much all tied at 290'ish million users worldwide, but Y! owns the top spot in the US [3]. Most of Y!'s media properties are #1 in their respective areas as well (News, Sports, OMG, etc).

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/20/4121574/flickr-chief-marku...

[2] http://instagram.com/press/#

[3] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57543177-93/gmail-edges-hot...

> Go to any online community related to investing

Such as blogs dedicated to investing, like 247wallst.com, analyzing data from comScore? Here's another investment blog discussing which one is "better" (see comments), http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/08/yahoo-finance-vs-google...

Do all the day traders in the Y! Finance message boards qualify as a "online community related to investing"? Do you think they prefer Google Finance? Probably not.

Here's a relevant Quora discussion, "Why did Google Finance never overtake Yahoo! Finance?" http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Google-Finance-never-overtake-Y...

I'm not saying Google Finance doesn't have value, I'm just saying the burden of proof is against you since everything out there points to the opposite of your statement.

I'll close with this NYT article that argues Yahoo dominates Google in Finance products, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/business/23digi.html?_r=0

I'm sorry, but that's a load of pretentious BS. Y! Finance has all the same data and has 15x the traffic of Google Finance, for good reason. Source: http://247wallst.com/2012/04/24/will-google-dump-google-fina...

> after Yahoo attacked them with patents last year

While that statement is true, worth noting that the Y! CEO who did attack Facebook was fired shortly after and one of Marissa's first moves was to make amends with Facebook.

Flickr is dead? Not quite. There's a Flickr press event in NYC happening later this afternoon (5 EST), so expect some announcements. Live stream @ http://screen.yahoo.com/yahoo-event-155000760.html

54 million people die each year (150k / day)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate

> The iOS app, which is one of said attempts, is outright awful

It has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating in iTunes.

> The performance is substantially different. The dispatch table is ~75% slower (in chrome).

Of course those are, they're doing very different things in that test case. Your first case is just returning a value, and the second is executing a function to return a value. Here's a better comparison, http://jsperf.com/switchvsdispatchtable/2

There's nothing inherently slow about dispatch tables, it all about how you implement them. As someone else mentioned, the OP should be using bind to reduce the # of function calls instead of executing a function which executes a function.

By calling it an investment, you misunderstand the purpose of Kickstarter.

> I don't remember the knee-jerk response to the Oklahoma City bombing.

nor the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which may almost mirror this in terms of venue, injuries, & deaths. But, I think the fear is that we're now in a post-9/11 world where knee-jerk reactions are far more common.

> Yahoo already isn’t at the top of any “most desirable places to work” list.

Yahoo ranked #8 on this list. http://www.businessinsider.com/best-employers-in-america-201...

I think a combination of something like TinyXHR (https://gist.github.com/shimondoodkin/4706967) and querySelectorAll would suffice for many simple use-cases on modern browsers.

Just create the AMA on http://reddit.com/r/hackernews and link to it from here. It keeps Reddit over on Reddit, but still provides interesting content for HN to link to.

With free.

> If your listener depends on knowing the state of the triggering code, it is a sign your events are too granular.

That isn't practical debugging. If I'm debugging an event that was fired and I don't know why, or the payload doesn't match my expectations, it would be very useful to inspect the state of the triggering function and see where things went wrong.

> "We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it."

That to me implies it's been in the works for longer than Cook has been in charge.

A maybe more importantly, a smaller iPad is needed to break into certain businesses who could use something bigger than an iPod, but portable than an iPad. For example, wait staff at a restaurant. iPods are too small, and an iPad is too big. Something in between is just the right size. I've also seen some cabs/shuttles using small Android tablets for GPS & dispatch. Here, the ideal size for something mounted is is between an iPad and an iPod. I could go on and on with ideas.

It takes half a second to block, and how often do you actually have to block people? I block maybe 1 or 2 / week.

I'm @derek on Twitter, so I have the same issue. If App.net ever got popular, these names would have the exact same issue. So, that's not a compelling reason to switch.

Some of the complaints in this post are valid, but most have nothing to do with the language itself. It's just a lack of understanding tools and technologies the JavaScript ecosystem offers. I'm a contributor to YUI, so I of course have a bias, but you could replace the examples below with things that are available for other libraries.

> Ever try to use different JavaScript tools with conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.

That's what is great about YUI, where you have most tools you need to build whatever you like (50+ components), and they're all tested and guaranteed to work together every release. http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/

> How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.

No it doesn't. YUI's modular system is completely centered around the concept of CDN combo-loading. It's dead-simple.

> Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said.

"HTML5" isn't a magic bullet that automatically makes everything awesome. You still have to design apps correctly. The author didn't elaborate on any specifics of why it "sucked", so I don't have much to go on to counter. JS would seem to perform quite well for anything FB needs to do in a Web app (display text, pictures, links), so any issues were likely just bad design.

> How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it, but it sure sounds like fun.

It's actually pretty simple (and dare I say fun?). I've written hundreds of test cases. There are plenty of JS testing frameworks out there, including Y.Test (written by Nicholas Zakas, http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/test/) which can be used for YUI and non-YUI applications.

YUI itself has 6,300+ unit tests covering everything from core modules to website examples, and every single one of them pass 24/7 (or is fixed immediately).

> My biggest problem with JavaScript is code security. If I make some awesome product, there is no way to protect my code. How can we expect game makers to write apps in 100% JavaScript and HTML5 if they can't protect their intellectual property?

Is this arguing security, or IP protection? There's a reason why every proprietary plugin/runtime for the Web ultimately falls to the open competitor. A 50-line JS widget can easily be "stolen", but how much was it worth to begin with? View-source (IMO) is one of the best features of the Web, because it enables the Web to progress and evolve at a pace otherwise impossible. "Awesome products" have been made by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, countless startups, and I don't think source-code visibility has harmed them in any significant way.

In conclusion, if I read this post 10 years ago, the author would have a solid case. But tens of thousands of developers have helped create an incredibly supportive ecosystem that provide just about every tool you need, just open your mind a little bit. JavaScript absolutely does not suck.

Spammy @mentions is what blocking is for. Also, you don't get @mention notifications if you don't follow them (see settings. may or may not be enabled by default).

You can only DM people where you both follow each other.

Right, but none of that has any effect on your own tweet stream (unless you follow spammers).

If you are talking about searching, the only way search is valuable is if a service gains critical mass, and the only way that happens is if the barrier to entry is low enough that enough users join the service, which will include spammers.

> I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it.

I'm curious... Considering your version of Twitter only consists of who you follow, why do you believe it would be better if those same people were elsewhere?

Where is the guarantee that developers will -never- get screwed by App.net? Especially since the barrier to entry is $100? The DIP is a nice addition that will help those with solid ideas out of the gate, but they are still greatly restricting the developer pool by a pay-to-play model. Along with that, I still have seen no compelling reason to pay $5/month to be a member of a social network where there are sub-20k users who (I assume?) barely use the service.

App.net is just capitalizing on those annoyed with Facebook/Twitter developer policies. Great for their bank account and a really smart idea, but I still don't see value for anyone else. As someone else once said, "App.net is a social network for people who have $50 to show-off that they have $50 to blow." That's not a party I feel compelled to attend.

I'm open to a convincing argument though.

Yup. And in order for there to be flowing water on Mars, conditions had to be much much warmer on the red planet in the past. Warm enough to support Earth-like life.

If life came to Earth aboard a comet (as opposed to developing here), it most likely arrived on Mars as well. In that case, the early solar system was probably teeming with life (seeds), and in that case, it could be very common elsewhere.