nbashaw

I love Firebase! http://scratchpad.io wouldn't have been possible without it, and the team is super responsive to support requests.

They buy your bitcoins immediately with their own funds, then when your money clears 5 days later they get reimbursed by you.

Looks like it's back up

still down for me

Good catch - title updated accordingly

Sorry for the weird query string (?down=yes), but HN already had a amazon.com submission

Quick nitpick: HAML is not a pre-processor for HTML, it is a templating language.

This should totally be named "Grapevine"

That's the point - just because the other party is anonymous doesn't mean they deserve less empathy. Of course, we're biased to the more vivid human character, but it's just a bias. Let's try and correct it with reason.

That's just background-position: fixed; The background in this page scrolls but austin powers is position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0;

This is awesome. I'm using http://ace.ajax.org/ right now in production and it's a huge heavyweight pain (but still the best thing out there). If only this had syntax highlighting i'd switch in an instant.

Because it creates value, whether or not you approve or understand it. Fun and entertainment are what most people spend most of their time seeking. Simple as that.

I'm curious about this too...

It's actually simpler than you think - just use a lot of absolute positioning. Inspect the source code of grooveshark and gmail to see how they do it.

I should have followed that sentence up with "but engineers are shifting towards the back-end as designers increasingly take their place on the front-end".

Just because a problem is technically challenging doesn't mean it's overall a more important or harder problem than one that only requires basic CRUD functionality. Airbnb is a great counter-example.

It's easy to find examples of novices in any field - to me what's more interesting is looking at what the experts are doing. The folks I'm thinking of are both excellent visual designers and excellent backbone hackers. This is what's new and interesting to me.

More interesting to whom? CRUD apps are still capable of creating massive value for users by solving overlooked problems. It's a big deal that designers can now build them without the help of any professional engineers.

Touché :)

Ha, good point. Although I think what's happening is slightly more important than "specialized subset of designers and engineers share skill-base". I don't think engineers are changing as much or as quickly as web designers are. Bootstrap works for internal tools but if you want to make something consumer-facing it doesn't even come close to being adequate.

And here it is on Maxgif (my personal favorite gif viewing service) http://maxgif.com/99i

✔ Gif http://i.imgflip.com/dk9r.gif

Awesome stuff! I've been using segment.io for about a week on a side project and can say for sure it's the easiest way to add plugins to your site

I want to see what the generated HTML looks like

I think people want to see what the generated HYML looks like

Very true, also probably less stressful. When I was a student I couldn't really afford it though. The nice thing about doing freelance is you make money! haha

Awesome! I'm glad you got something out of it. If you ever want to chat about strategies email me! nbashaw [at] gmail

> "...nothing will turn you off faster to learning than a client who yells or berates you for your lack of experience"

I never got berated, because I made it clear up front that I was a beginner and that I was charging a very small fee. It motivated me to make something that was worth it. I'm confident that most people have the ability to make something good enough to justify a $100 fee, it's just that they don't have a reason to try hard enough.

> "The problem with fear that I've found, is that it only pushes you to slightly outrun that fear..."

This is a great point - in fact, when I was first starting out I was often ready to be done with projects. They were stressful! But they taught me skills that I don't think I'd have learned otherwise, that I could have more casual, curiosity-driven fun with later. I doubt anyone would put themselves in a stressful situation like that unless they had some genuine curiosity. It didn't permanently scar me. It just was an accelerator, like taking off the training wheels. Stressful and scary but a necessary push forward to learn faster and stretch myself.

> "The minute someone offers some sort of compensation for work, the dynamic of the relationship changes"

That's the point. If you're doing something for free as a helper then there's no consequence for saying "hey sorry i haven't gotten around to the website yet, i've been really busy...". More often than not, that's exactly what we'll end up doing, because learning a foreign language makes our brain hurt.

> "What people need, instead, is to bring back our child sense of curiosity."

I'm really glad you are able to make that work, but I'm positive that curiosity is not as reliable as fear.

That's a cool idea! I had a lot of luck with student organizations since I was a college student. I also built a site for a book my professor was writing, a board game that a friend was launching, and a professional parent psychologist. There's tons of small business out there that have little to no web presence but feel bad about not having something better up. They're more than willing to pay a learner $100 to give it a shot at creating something better.