HN user
Interested in code, education, psychology, products. Co-founder Blissfully.com
http://singularity.vc
JS interop via webcomponents is "the way" (vs ports). Re JSON decoding, agreed, and we cover in the episode: it's a solved/solvable problem that isn't popularized via a nice package...yet. But I think you've zero'd in on the pragmatic pain points; webcomponents is the revelation that was missing in the communication on the migration from 18 to 19, unfortunately.
I'd follow Elm Land https://elm.land/
It's funny, I don't believe Elm itself needs much (if any) modification- the language is in a great spot, as are the core libs. I
f you care about it winning the "language wars", it needs more PR, examples, success stories, and tutorials. Here, I'm happy to have contributed in some way(s).
Speaking on the VC side, some the crunch premise is flawed. The crunch is due to a huge explosion of early stage companies (easier than ever to get seeded, less capital than ever needed to get started) w/o a corresponding explosion of A-level capital.
There is no formula for unicorns, I'd dismiss that outright, and even if we found one, every founder would bend their story to adapt superficially, and the forumla would prove useless.
My #1 theory on why people w/ a somewhat logical strategy/thesis fail to raise? Failure to tell a compelling, coherent story about their opportunity, and failure to come across as a compelling "force of nature" founding team.
I do think the question of price discrimination is a really interesting one. Why hasn't anyone been successful suing for that? Why is Tinder being so obvious about it, do their lawyers no something we don't, or are they just that much more risk tolerant?
Right there w/ you Xorlev; my thoughts: http://singularity.vc/post/105602600755/mixpanels-toothless-...
In summary "Be Brad Pitt" - great advice if you can figure out how to act on it ;-)
Really well done and love the SEO-ness that provides real value for folks! Nice tool
Hopefully some folks have heard of Boundless now, we make free e-textbooks out of open-source / public domain content and are now used by students at half of all universities.
We have a program to help educators quickly get up to speed using our content with minimal effort
Checkout http://app.net if you haven't. FatNest/TweetFavor would likely be useful in that context, I hope it gains traction!
At any rate, developers, developers, developers! :) I love our people :)
I built the similar http://TweetFavor.com, which Twitter promptly shut down once people started using it, post-mortem/rant here: http://restrictionisexpression.com/post/26144987502/im-done-...
Hopefully you don't suffer the same fate, but Twitter's API policies just aren't friendly for fun little projects like these :/
Your opening digression is a bit harsh. We're all experienced web-devs, with the accumulated knowledge of building websites that have reached in excess of several hundred million individuals.
SEO - True. There are many different strategies to deliver solid SEO results using technologies like Spar. You can use headless browsers to pre-render and deliver on-demand rendered content, if you know your URL space completely, you can pre-render all documents. Spar isn't an attempt to solve SEO for you, you may not even care if you are building a phone-gap app, for instance. So does that invalidate the technology?
Accessibility: I'm 100% behind accessibility, and if the compatible tricks don't work... do you still make your site accessible for IE3? No... screen- readers MUST catch up. We can all do what we can to help, but shouldn't engineer for the past, which is an orthogonal concern from accessibile technology choices.
Page-performance - I'll challenge the several orders of magnitude claim, we've seen incredible performance w/ the approach, and best-case you're only talking about first-page speed, even ceding that it becomes a much different story later on... and if you're building an 'app' thats a big difference.
Spar itself requires no knowledge of Ruby, that was one of the design goals. It happens to use Ruby tech under-the-hood, but no user of Spar would ever be exposed to those choices.
Middleman looks great; Spar attempts to help on deployment as well as development. Excited to see folks building/using frameworks like these.
Proxlet never made any attempt to block ads (they didn't even exist when we built it!) That said, it's really no different than a normal 3rd party app which could do the same thing. Again, my beef was the manner in which they shut it down abruptly stranding users.
TweetFavor just supports an existing pattern "hey dude, can you tweet this for me?" And permission had to be given per-tweet request, there was no mass zombification. You'd pledge individual tweets. Once again, no reason as to why it was shut down, and certainly no one used it before making the call.
In order to interact with their API, you need a security token. They revoke the rights on that token, and the API rejects your requests.
No worries, I don't feel berated. These were hobby projects that people found useful, I have a full-time startup that gets the majority of my attention. So yes, making sure I share yet another cautionary tale. If you read Cappy's comment on my blog there's another excellent cautionary tale in there re FB
Again, at the moment, only half the story is being shared. We look forward to publicizing our side once we can!
Hah! Love it :)
I'd love to get into it, and I can say we aren't rewriting their content.
I'd say it's what happens when business models are threatened. In terms of 'obvious' we & our team of lawyers strongly disagree.
Yes, there is some selection bias both ways ;-)
To be fair, the reason you haven't seen anything better is because very few people are able to get traction in the face of deep, deep entrenchment. Have you watched Bret Victor's "Kill Math" video? Imagine if most technical courses had that kind of interactive material. But right now, they won't, because the barriers to entry are artificially high and incumbents aren't innovating.
(I am one of the founders of Boundless)
Believe me, we would love to go into very, very specific detail on exactly what is covered in the complaint, unfortunately talking publicly about details in the suit is taboo/off-limits. Further, our response isn't yet filed, which would provide some of that detail.
But it's telling they chose to pursue litigation instead of any other form of out-reach.
If you don't need the money, take time off. When I left the last startup I co-founded, I decided to set an arbitrary "1 whole year" date, during which time I would explore my own projects, hear about other peoples new ideas, and talk to existing larger startups (Dropbox, etc). But I wouldn't allow myself to commit to anything until about a year was over. It's too easy to be come enamored w/ half-baked ideas, and I wanted to make sure the next one was meaningful and had a high probability of success. Long story short, I learned a ton during that year, turned down some great options, and eventually chose the BEST of all possible options. (Starting a meaningful company w/ killer co-founders, gaining traction, and having a blast)
If you have the chance, give yourself the space! It'll be worth it.
Actually, I'm not condemning computer games at all, though my tone was generally dark (I hadn't had coffee yet). As provocative as my title was, "death" to me just meant that of the body, not the mind, I'm a singulatarian after all, as well as a video game nerd. I'm in favor of art, games, and the inevitable 'death' that comes after they've hit a not-so-distant inflection point.
Fixed; forgot to proof read that paragraph, thanks Tycho. Always up for improvements no matter how small.
Right now, I coded my blog to a different 'fun' color that varies w/ the day of the post. Cooking up a new theme w/ readability improvements, I'll reconsider that color (though do check out http://restrictionisexpression.com for full effect)
How uncultured am I? :) Haven't read/heard of that, but will seek out, thanks!
That's fine, what prompted my post: Talented developer writes me to join company because he likes the opportunity we are going after, but assumed we were ruby. I share our tech stack, and he passes because he is "only looking for Ruby"... and I have so many counterpoints as to why that is a suboptimal career strategy.
I hardly send an email w/o it at this point
Can't wait to share these numbers! Blog post forthcoming in a few weeks.