technel's comments

technel | 11 years ago | on: Make pull requests easier

You seem to have plenty of screenshots, but I don't find them to be particularly informative. After reading through the page and glancing at all of the images, here's what I take away: it's a tool that allows you to enter a pull request URL and display a side-by-side diff.

The side-by-side diff feature is buried at the bottom, and the whole page seems to imply that there are other features within somewhere, but I can't figure out what they would be (I would love to see screenshots of them!).

technel | 12 years ago | on: Real-time applications and will Django adapt?

I don't see the value proposition of making (most) web apps/sites real-time. Sure, it makes sense for a chat app or a stock ticker, but blogging? A news site? E-commerce?

Maybe it's important that eBay is "real time" in the last 5 minutes of an auction, but the rest of the time, the vast majority of the content is relatively static. A seller might update the description of a listing a couple times over a two week auction, for example. And while it sounds great to immediately update my search results when a new listing goes live, in reality, I already have 40 pages of results to look through, and that listing that just went live 5 seconds ago probably isn't much more relevant than any of the others I'm sifting through.

I'm not opposed to client-heavy apps where it makes sense. When done well, it can create a really responsive user experience. Gmail is great at this; I have no desire for it to be "real time" -- not any more than it already is.

Do we really believe that one day cnn.com will be "real-time", with article updates and errata popping up inline as we read?

technel | 13 years ago | on: Mathematics at Google

I agree with your statement, but I'm confused by the story in the link... I haven't come across a message board that doesn't use rel="nofollow" in a few years (that NYT article is from 2010). How would these negative reviews bolster his PageRank?

technel | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Mixest, my summer project that crawls the web for new indie music

I ran a vaguely similar music discovery service called Albumcorner earlier this year. I got in touch with the guy who did Mixest -- seemed like a really great guy. I got the impression that he wasn't going to relaunch after the attack on the server, though, so it's great to hear he passed the baton. And it looks better than ever, Michelle, nice work!

technel | 13 years ago | on: Principles For Successful Web Apps by Fred Wilson

I agree that the slide/video sync was handy, but I had a problem: about half way through the video, I put the computer in sleep mode. When I resumed, the video played for a while, but it hung where buffering had ended previously, and it refused to load forward any further. I tried clicking ahead, but it still wouldn't load. So I refreshed and clicked to the spot I was it. It instantly started playing, but the slide viewer was stuck on the first slide the whole rest of the time.

technel | 13 years ago | on: Facebook forces all users over to Facebook.com e-mail addresses

If you compose an email to multiple @facebook.com addresses, I'm sure Facebook will limit the actual number of recipients in the same way that they do when you send messages through the Facebook message interface, so it's really no different.

With 3rd party spam, the advantage Facebook has here is Zuck's "social graph" -- they can pretty easily tell what the relationship of the sender is in relation to the recipient (and thus how relevant the message is, what the sender's reputation is, etc). It'd be interesting to see how these connections are made when the sender's email address is not associated with a Facebook account, though.

technel | 13 years ago | on: It's Playtime - Light Table Playground released

If anyone is going to update their software manually, surely it's going to be HN/code editor users (I know I do). And anyway, it's a preview release that people won't be using as their main editor anyway. Install, play around, uninstall.

technel | 13 years ago | on: Apple Quietly Pulls Claims of Virus Immunity

It's pretty clear that the next Microsoft v. Apple war is being waged in the tablet market (the show is over for cellphones -- Apple won). Traditionally Microsoft hasn't done well at competing with Apple on their own turf (mobile, mp3 players, etc), but it'll be interesting to see what the Microsoft Surface means for all of this.

technel | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: A better way to track fitness goals (my nights and weekend project)

Does the video only showcase features that are new to 1.1? Presumably most people going to your website already do not have the app, right?

Also, I'd love to see something a little more visual (I skipped the video because I was listening to music) like static screenshots, icons for the features, and a larger call to action at the bottom (at first glance I couldn't find where you actually talked about how to get the app).

technel | 13 years ago | on: Who's the Boss? There Isn't One

It's inspiring that a company has the courage to let a franchise rest when it has artistically run its course (you need only to look to Hollywood for infinite counter-examples to this -- see http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/10/-worst-sequ... ). The fact that Valve can still be successful, even without pressuring their employees to develop more "sure thing" games (read: sequels) is pretty awesome if you ask me (I say this as a long-time HL fan).

technel | 13 years ago | on: Cool URIs don't change.

Convention is for URLs to be all lowercase, which IMO aids in readability and certainly makes them easier to type (imagine giving a URL to a friend over the phone -- remember this is 1999).

technel | 13 years ago | on: Cool URIs don't change.

I had a number of revelations through rereading this classic article:

First, holy crap, I hadn't been to http://www.w3.org/ in a long time, and it looks like they've actually made it to the 21st century!

Second, perhaps cool URIs don't change, but it seems like http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html is kind of an unfortunate URI. What's "Provider"? Why are "Provider" and "Style" uppercase? And what's wrong with 301 redirecting (don't break old URIs, but still restructure them as your website matures and you realize a better organizational hierarchy)?

Third and perhaps most importantly, this all seems like a pretty awesome problem to have! How many websites survive more than a few years? (Geocities doesn't count.)

technel | 14 years ago | on: Why free software has poor usability, and how to improve it

I agree that traditionally the OSS community is not very welcoming to designers. I'd be interested in creating a website that engages designers and provides a platform for them to propose visual updates to existing free software. Is anyone else interested in this? Email me!
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