kwamenum86

"I can envision a time when full page refreshes are the exception and that isn't a bad thing."

Agreed. Different clients should get different views. I don't think we're that far off from having to support the js-light "web crawler" view, although we already have the tools to make this really easy.

If you render the initial view on the client you still get indexability. Twitter actually still uses the old version of their site for this purpose.

"All the pages can be rendered on both the client side via JavaScript as well as the server. How this work I cannot tell you"

There are plenty of templating engines that have been ported to Javascript. Mustache is the first example that comes to mind: http://mustache.github.com/

Once you have the templating engine the rest of the logic is pretty easy to build.

Rendering web apps entirely on the client in general is pretty awesome although there are two problems: 1) the push state API is not supported in all browsers yet, which forces you to resort the fragment identifier + onhashchange to approximate the same functionality. And of course the fragment identifier only affords you a fraction of the same luxuries as the push state API. And of course onhashchange is not supported in older browsers. 2) When you fall back to the fragment identifier rendering on the client is actually a little bit slower. The fragment identifier is not sent to the server meaning the javascript has to be loaded in the browser before anything at all is rendered. Does this lead to several seconds of delay? No. But it is noticeable. At least with push state you have the option of rendering the initial content on the server and all subsequent requests on the client without increasing complexity too much, assuming you have a good templating solution in place.

But yes I agree. Modern Web Apps are Here :)

buggy but cool

Comes off as a marketing trojan horse...

This is, at the very least, and opportunity for arbitrage.

"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."

Running your code through JSLint (or something similar) would have been helpful here. Performing this check before committing code is considered a best practice and it's really easy to setup a pre-commit hook in most version control systems. JSLint has a Node.js mode. It would have said something like "variable used before being defined". http://www.jslint.com/

Really sweet hack

His interview was underwhelming but a couple years he spent a lot of time (at least half an hour) in the hallway afterward talking to a handful of attendees (~8), which is pretty awesome.

I think one lesson of the Dropbox story is that you can build a company around a feature of minimal product if you have a savvy team and crisp execution.

Is this something that you find compelling? Does sharing sound intrinsically valuable to you? Do we need a social network just for sounds? I don't get it.

Is it me or is a social network just for sound obviously a bad idea?

Far from conclusive evidence here. And my intuition says something different to me. A controlled experiment would involve showing the mobile UI on the desktop and vice versa. You might also want to control for things like page load time (native mobile apps are often snappier)

Clever logo but butt ugly.

Git can be a beast conceptually speaking if you don't learn it the right way. This was undoubtedly a bug but the author's story surfaced some suboptimal git habits.

What's difficult about long polling? It's a solved problem. There's an abundance of battle-tested frameworks available and it's a proven technique. Also, Facebook already has the infrastructure in place - they have the expertise in-house. But even if this were a startup writing the feature from scratch it would only be slightly more complex than an async request.

web sockets or, in most browsers, long polling. long polling is easy to implement and they must already have the infrastructure built out since they have chat...silly Facebook.

[edit] just took a closer look at the network activity. this really is the worst way to implement this feature. polling several times a second, sending back a bloated response, and updating much more of the DOM than necessary. this is just terribly hacky. probably done very quickly at the last minute though.

Thank you for pointing out the elephant.

Interesting article and definitely a good read. But I find it interesting that it has broken the top 20 most upvoted articles of all time on HN and is threatening the top 10. This probably has to do with f8 and whatever amount of "upvote inflation" that may be taking place as a result of more users being on HN (6 of the top 10 all-time most upvoted links are from this year. Only one in the top 20 comes before 2010). Timing is everything I guess.

1 1638 Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple [2011-08-24]

2 1324 Boot a linux kernel right inside your browser. [2011-05-17]

3 1262 Introducing Word Lens [2010-12-17]

4 1232 Today you, tomorrow me [2010-12-14]

5 1196 Google Buys Motorola For $12.5 Billion [2011-08-15]

6 1129 A new approach to China [2010-01-12]

7 1100 Ooops. [2011-06-16]

8 1083 So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar… [2010-09-21]

9 1004 Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight [2011-07-29]

10 994 Twitter Bootstrap [2011-08-19]

11 940 Thoughts on Flash [2010-04-29]

12 929 Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned [2011-07-27]

13 906 Chosen: A javascript plug-in that makes long select boxes user-friendly. [2011-07-22]

14 859 I was once a Facebook fool [2011-09-23]

15 856 Osama bin Laden Is Dead [2011-05-02]

16 850 I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count [2011-04-28]

17 832 How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory) [2009-06-03]

18 827 Bored People Quit [2011-07-12]

19 822 33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto [2011-07-21]

20 808 A lesson on the importance of encouraging your children with their projects [2011-07-13]

I think timeline addresses some common needs and desires- personal reflection, recording your experiences, bonding over shared experiences. The profile and news feed have always seemed tailored to a certain type of content- what's happened recently. But it never really seemed important and the profile doesn't help you know someone. It feels like timeline lowers the virtual barrier between participants in online communication and lets them express themselves in a meaningful way. It feels like a departure from frivolity.

Of course, I have only seen the pitch at f8 but I haven't used the product yet so right now I think exactly what Facebook wants me to think :)

I don't agree with everything the author says but I think I agree with the sentiment. I think frictionless sharing is a departure from how people express themselves in real life. During real world interactions we present our carefully tailored selves to the rest of the world. We don't tell everyone everything we are doing for a reason.

One positive with reducing friction is that it might be easier to find common ground with someone. But overall im not sure I like it- social grooming is a good thing

I've heard a lot of people on HN call Facebook a toy, which at some point was probably a fair criticism. This is the first thing I've seen from Facebook in a long time that truly feels like important and worthwhile work.

They have do be doing something with those books. If not then they should be.

printed, sold, shipped to this company, scanned, and then resold

They're not scanning your books for a dollar. They're letting you pay them to give them books. Then they resell them at some discount. Speculation...but that's what I would do.

Border people who quit are weak-minded.

Cool. Reminds me of python frozen binaries.

"And where does the "huge security hole" come from"

eval'ing a response from a third party essentially runs their code in your context. JSON.parse does not.

Everything you listed actually has nothing to do with Javascript as a language. These are new frameworks for the and clientside APIs, not language features.

Yeah I feel like you can't have true instant search without autocomplete. Lots of people don't realize that the reason Google's instant search is effective is that they can tell what you are going to type before you finish typing it. Autocomplete would be huge.

You guys can probably do a pretty effective version right now but I imagine data about what people are searching for allows you to create a better autocomplete feature. And that data only comes with time.