gbadman

You are right in your interpretation of what I meant.

I think the lane split is the better example of the prisoner's dilemma. As others have mentioned that in the two-lane merge situation the global optimum is the selfish approach.

I'm in Montreal. We have a serious traffic problem during morning and evening rush hours. In fact, TomTom has put our city at #4 in North America for worst traffic and it seems #1 for both morning and evening traffic peaks [1].

Two places that I can think of this being brutal are taking Decarie Blvd exit from Decarie North and taking the 20W exit off of the 13S. I'm sure that are some other pretty good examples out there.

1: http://www.tomtom.com/lib/doc/congestionindex/2012-1003-TomT...

I've always felt that driving in traffic is a sort of prisoner's dilemma.

Consider a two-lane highway that splits into two directions, a very popular direction and an unpopular direction. Inevitably, we will see a group of people who will wait to the last second to cut into the popular lane. These late-comers cause two problems: 1) people to hit the brakes who get cut off in the popular lane, and 2) people to hit the brakes in the unpopular lane who are forced to slow down to allow the selfish drivers to merge.

When I take the generous approach and wait in line, I hate people who cut in. On the other hand, I find myself clever for cutting in at the last second and saving time when I take that approach. I'm still not sure which approach is 'right'. All I know is that the latter will increase overall delays while doing the former will have little to no impact on overall delays but a major impact on my own.

Traffic is a pretty interesting subject.

In other words, the best UI is AI.

Seems that I can't reply to the child of my sibling comment so I'm replying here.

ACE is quite ridiculously powerful. On its primary implementation (http://c9.io), it supports multiple cursors with concurrent editing.

I've been able to use ShareJS to get concurrent editing working (see: http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=preview&s=HN4933608) but haven't had a chance to display visual cursors for all simultaneous users. I was thinking that I could get that working using Firebase.

OT (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation) is one of the technology solutions to the problem that you've solved through a locking mechanism.

Not sure what server architecture you're using, but in Node.js there is a pretty amazing package that integrates with ACE called ShareJS (http://sharejs.org/).

Have you experimented with synchronizing cursors at all?

Nicely done on Scratchpad. The interface seems to be the right combination of simple and intuitive. It would be great to see the source code as many others have said.

I'm particularly curious as to how you've done the collaborative bit given that you don't have explicit control over the order of operations of edits.

Have you tried Plunker (http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=streamer)? DEMO: http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=preview&s=HN4933608

Just so happen to have a solution for you: http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=streamer

DEMO: http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=preview&s=HN4933608

How did you accomplish the real-time text editing? Is there any OT engine that you hacked into Firebase?

It seems like the Gist component of the API is either having a hard time or no longer works with JSONP.

I'm also having an issue with Plunker as legacy templates are pulled from Gist and are currently broken.

Also, since we're talking about Gist, you can get your gists into Plunker very easily:

http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:1136236?p=preview is a snippet by the unbelievable Mike Bostock pulled directly from Gist.

http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:<gist id>

As many have already said, Github just keeps delivering quality, well-conceived and well-integrated updates. I hope they keep coming.

Now for my shameless plug:

If you use Gist as a means to share web-related snippets, you might be amazed by the Plunker editor (http://plnkr.co/edit/). It was inspired by Gist, but will let you actually 'run' your code (and will do some other cool stuff like real-time collaboration, previewing and linting). This tool has become quite popular in the AngularJS community and I hope to see more groups get on board in the future!

Great stuff, I think this will take over from jQuery.noty for me.

Demo in editable form: http://plnkr.co/edit/8uJcHy?p=preview

This is a radical change from how we might have imagined Steve Jobs dealing with this situation.

I can imagine a scenario in which Steve spins the maps snafu so that the customers end up apologizing to him.

"In Steve Job's Apple, the customer is always wrong."

Creator of Plunker here. Big thanks to the Nodejitsu and Mongolab folks whose services are strong enough to compensate for my crappy code being hit by a Hackernews assault.

Similar feature has been on Plunker (http://plnkr.co/edit/?p=streamer) for a while now though, perhaps, with less polish.

Plunker has existed for a while now: http://plnkr.co and has its own little micro community. The editor (with real-time collaboration too) is at http://plnkr.co/edit/

Hi MrDOS, thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it yesterday.

Hi atlassic, you are right on that point. Perhaps I have poorly articulated my request.

Plunker is different from those sites in one key respect (and several other smaller ways):

Each plunk is run as a first class web citizen

This means that XHR requests against files within the same plunk just work. Anything that would work as if the files were statically hosted on github pages would also work on this, making it an excellent and non-artificial testing ground for web snippets.

Yep, as your typical weekend hacker I was completely oblivious to the real torrent that is the HN front page.

The awesome guys at http://www.nodejitsu.com/ are helping me weather the storm. Alas it seems to be my backend code that just isn't cutting it!

Would love for some helpful hackers to point me in the right direction (https://github.com/filearts/plunker).

Source: https://github.com/filearts/plunker

Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/plunker

I'm looking for constructive feedback on what can make this a go-to replacement for awesome sites like jsFiddle.net and jsbin.com

Link to play with it: http://plnkr.co/edit/UFLKBx

Hint: Hit the eye icon on the right for live preview.

Looking at Angular in more detail makes me want to port Plunker over. It would be a neat test of the framework since I find myself hitting some tricky areas in Backbone.js and in others wishing for a more prescriptive harness.

You can play around with it on Plunker. Check out http://plunker.no.de/edit/JVl3Jx?live=preview for an example.

I didn't write the example, but did make Plunker.

Hello woodall, you can add a file by clicking the plus button in the bottom left of the screen. If that button doesn't appear for you, then that's a whole other issue. Please let me know. Similarly, the minus button removes files. Double-clicking a filename lets you rename it.

Edit: Just noticed how unintuitive the position of the +/- buttons are. I'll see what I can do for Plunker 2.0

Clunky?! I'm only surprised that you say that because one of my goals was to try and keep the ui out of the way. I'm still trying to think of a way to have all the necessary elements while staying minimal.

Do you prefer its look when the 'responsive' styles kick in?

Gratuitous self-promotion will follow

I made a website with some of the same goals in mind that takes it quite a bit further than this. That being said, I can't even come close to pretending its less than 56 lines of code.

Check out: http://plunker.no.de

Some neat features:

* Live collaboration using 'streams'

* Plunks run as first-class web citizens letting AJAX and company work out of the box

* Syntax hilighting using ajax.org's amazing ace editor

* jsHint

* Live compilation/rendering of coffee-script/markdown and I forget what else

The full source of the running app is at: https://github.com/ggoodman/stsh

Also a ground-up rewrite on http://plnkr.co has its code on: https://github.com/filearts/plunker