saikat

I'm so incredibly happy for these guys. Deciding to use Cappuccino has been one of the best technical decisions I've ever made. It's an incredibly fun and impressive framework. But what really made using Cappuccino so rewarding was interacting with Ross, Francisco and Tom. The 280North guys have consistently gone out of their way to help me out, and it's very obvious that they are incredibly talented developers. They have also managed to create a great and very active community in a very short period of time, and are just very nice, great people. They deserve this like none other. Congrats guys and looking forward to where you go from here!

Don't be too worried. I'm pretty sure they are still going to work on Cappuccino, and the community is still very active and helpful.

UTF8 seems to be the default encoding. I think he had just forgotten to update the docs for .write:

http://github.com/ry/node/commit/7fc794a8ec55bd9d137c4888404...

Guam has more cables going into it than all of Australia or Africa.

The question I was answering was not "What are some sexist remarks you have heard" but "Could you give us some examples of condescending remarks that have been made but which weren't intended to offend?" It's great if these kinds of comments don't bother you (I'm not a woman developer), but I know it would annoy me if every hacker meetup I went to, people had a greater tendency to dismiss things that I was saying partly because I was a woman, even if they didn't realize they were doing it.

One example - at a "nerd" event a couple weeks ago, one of the speakers said something to the effect of "it's really great to see all of you and your girlfriends at this event." Usually it's small assumptions like this. Another thing I've noticed, though without specific examples, is that people seem to assume girls at a hacker meetup aren't coders or will tend to give more attention to guys when discussions get technical. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.

Looks promising. Has anyone done benchmarks on Canvas performance in Firefox 4?

Even worse is when you know before you start that you are probably going to spend 2 days chasing dead ends because you don't know the problem space yet and need to try a bunch of different things. Battling procrastination in this situation takes a ton of will power.

Maybe or maybe not - my point is just that this is one way you get tools with good interfaces, and it is less likely that you will take this path when you are a large company.

On your point #2 - it is true that enterprise software tends to be complex, but this problem is compounded by the fact that enterprises are unwilling to approach building/buying solutions to complex problems with a conquer and divide approach. In the consumer/small business world, small, lightweight tools that solve one problem well(think Redis for databases, Etherpad for collaborative editing, etc.) are easier to make good interfaces for.

When it comes to buying software, big companies don't like choosing small, well-designed tools that they can put together to solve a problem because the decision-making process of choosing technology is expensive and time consuming when you are risk averse. At a large financial institution that I used to work at, we spent months going through different third-party offerings of a new data platform. Everyone hates doing it, and it cost a ton of money in developer time (plus some companies actually charge you to do a lengthy demo). So people just tend to gravitate towards the products that are bloated with features and will solve all our problems at once, and we all know what kind of UX these kinds of products will offer.

280North at least develops all their technology in-house (and it's only 3 hackers). I bet most of their costs are living expenses for the founders.

Yeah, according to the metric used by this article, I've been bootstrapping my startup for under $1k over the past 8 months. And I don't find what I'm doing to be all that incredible.

It's a neighborhood in San Francisco - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco .

Neil Fraser made a comment about his approach and why it introduces complications here - http://www.web2media.net/laktek/2010/05/25/real-time-collabo... . I'm glad he clarified =).

For another middleware solution that's been around for more than a year, is modeled after Rack and WSGI, and follows the JSGI specification (which I believe is part of the CommonJS spec), be sure to check out tlrobinson's Jack - http://github.com/tlrobinson/jack . You can use Jack with Node by using node-jsgi (http://github.com/kriszyp/jsgi-node).

Not sure if anyone else saw this clip on the Rachel Maddow show, but it was interesting. Seems like the last time something this massive happened (in much shallower water), the same techniques were tried (and failed) and finally, relief wells were the solution - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

Like many others, I'm also in the early stages of love with redis. It works for so many cases, and is so simple to setup that I see myself just dropping it in everywhere. But my favorite feature of Redis when I was starting out was probably antirez himself. He is extremely helpful and a great open source project leader. The documentation (especially the tutorial-like wiki articles) is great, antirez helps out tons of people on the mailing list and in IRC, and his rate of output is incredible (I believe RC1's original release date actually got moved up, and he hit the new date right on the nose). Gives me a lot of confidence that this awesome project is here to stay.

We're working on a couple of features right now - collaboration is currently on my plate. You can check out what we're working on at forums.gomockingbird.com . I also made a couple of tech blog posts about the stuff I'm learning while implementing real-time collaboration at the tech blog (techblog.gomockingbird.com) if you are interested.

Not to its target audience, no =).

That's great, but you are aiming very broadly. The vast majority of people won't know or care what was your aim and what was the side-effect. You are responding to censorship by Comedy Central caused by a subset of Muslims by doing something that offends many Muslims. My point was - if you are already broadening the people you intend to attack for the cause of defending freedom of speech, why limit it to only some that are innocent? You may not be aiming for every Muslim, but that's like me blowing up a building and claiming I was only aiming for one guy in the building that we can all agree was a bad guy.

So why decide to insult one giant group of people who didn't threaten anyone (all the Muslims that didn't send out death threats) instead of another (all the Christians that didn't send out death threats)?

To be fair, there is also no legal protection for "protecting free speech" in a general sense. The first amendment only prevents the GOVERNMENT from limiting your free speech. Companies limit free speech all the time (think NDA), and they are often within their rights. Maybe this is a technicality, but many on this thread would do well to know it.

The problem here is that the "escalation" is not against the people threatening lives. It's a blind escalation in the dumbest sense - just making the antagonistic act affect more people instead of the few guilty people more acutely.

Though without the s, tartups.com has some pretty bad connotations.

People get offended by things whether you like it or not. It's extreme to make death threats, but it's also extreme and fairly despicable to go out of your way to offend an entire group of people simply because a subset of those people are acting extremely. If someone punches me in the face for making lewd comments about his mother, is it constructive to then go around making lewd comments about anyone's mother who thinks that these comments are offensive? I think the organizers of this event are free to do what they want, but it's still a pretty tasteless thing to do. And if people take this as a reflection on all atheists, it DOES make us all look bad.

"It was like doing a startup, but less stressful."

How was it like a startup?

The thing about not constantly being able to send patches - I'll need to think about it again, but I thought I came up with a reason for why it didn't work in a general case.

And I didn't just mean saving a copy of the document on the server - you need to do this for most collab. algos. The differential synchronization algorithm requires saving a copy of the document _per client_ on the server.

Otherwise - sounds cool - you should definitely try to implement this and see how it goes.

How is your approach different from http://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/ ? You said you aren't doing any diffs - so are you just creating a patch per user action (like typing the character "a" is actually represented as a patch for insertion of a at position 0?). I looked at using differential synchronization at some point, but it has even higher latency/way more memory usage than OT approaches (the server needs to have a full copy of the document per client). You can't constantly be diffing and sending patches using the synch-diff approach - rather you have synchronization cycles that happen every few seconds.

For people interested in the approaches to real-time collab, I made a summary writeup of what I researched a while back - http://techblog.gomockingbird.com/using-real-time-collaborat... . Still hoping to actually dive into all the algorithms later, but there is definitely a lot out there, just mostly in the form of academic papers.

I remember reading a comment a while back (I think on HN) about some running joke in one of his books about a cat (or maybe it was a dog?) and how _why had actually created this whole blog to keep the joke running outside of his book. It was hilarious and impressive, but I can't find it - anyone know what I'm referring to?