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I disagree. I've come to this point of view via self awareness of when I've failed this test. You can understand how others might make this mistake quite easily.

But I also think the employer's behavior here fails your own test. There's no expression of learning that a poor choice was made, just expression of plausible deniability.

In some sense, me calling my perspective out as I see it, is a hope that it does affect such change.
The title is unfortunately ambiguous. I think I said I was surprised it took so long for JavaScript to take off as a language for serious Web work rather than it being surprising full stop.
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Agreed. One of the best comments I've seen on HN yet.
I "fix" this by hiding boring people. It's asymmetrical, but opaquely.
As the title is ambiguous, my surprise is at how long it took for JavaScript to gain the stature and position it has now, not in it actually making that rise.
It's universal because it's the only language that runs in the browser, not on its merits though. That alone made it big and ubiquitous. If Python had been picked as the scripting language for the web, or even Lua or Ruby, they would be the "universal" languages.
I noticed the other day that Ubuntu's Unity also does this. It's a very nice feature.
Thanks for contributing your friends' experience learning programming.

I am a programmer-in-learning too, and when I first signed up for CodeYear, I really enjoyed going through the first few sections and was amazed I was going that fast. Then I stopped for a few weeks because things got busy, and when I returned I found that nothing had stuck. So I had to go skim through the beginning tutorials again and got a little bit farther. Now it's been a couple of weeks, and I remember nothing. So, I conclude, it's not really working as well as I thought it was.

I am coming at this with knowledge of VBA, so I am guessing the helpful thing would be to find the comparable code in Java, then attempt to fill in the missing blanks and begin building up to the more difficult concepts from there. But I have no clue how to do that.
There's a theory that languages hitch a ride on platforms that do something useful, as a way of "scripting" (customizing or configuring) that platform. The obvious one for Javascript is the browser, but we can see others: C for unix; perl and PHP for the server-side; ruby for rails; objective-C for iOS; C#/VB for Windows/Office and so on. Though not all languages seem to fit this, e.g. Java.

I think it's actually an instance of the simple idea that products are only adopted when they meet a need - an "application" of that product. Hence the term "killer app" for a new technology. Platforms are often products that are needed in themselves; therefore, anything that improves them a bit, expanding their capabilities and usefulness, is also needed. It seems quite common that a language, in itself, doesn't meet a particular need; similar to the idea that code, in itself, doesn't solve problems; and pure mathematics, in itself, isn't of practical use. All these need to be applied to a problem. (Of course, some people do adopt all these despite their "uselessness" - it's just that this is a tiny minority).

In addition, people need to know about it (you can't adopt a compelling solution to your urgent problem if you've never heard of it). A successful platform helps here too - its scripting language is right there, installed, ready to use
even before you need it.

In the case of Java, it seems to be have been useful in itself, because it was safer and easier to use than C and C++; it rode the rise of "OOP"; had a reassuring industry backer (Sun) and complete toolchain, libraries, support; and was heavily promoted by Sun. At that time, python, ruby and javascript were slow (because of slow hardware and lack of optimization) and C# didn't exist.

BTW: A blog/essay introduced the term "scripting language" to describe C (which is striking because C is not one, by the usual definition), but I've not been able to find it since.

So people bend over backwards to make javascript workable, improving it, adding libraries, finding the good parts, writing front-ends for it, writing back-ends for it, because it is the scripting language of the browser. If you do all that, is it still javascript? Yes, in that it uses the adoption channel of javascript, and maintains compatibility with javascript as an interface. So Javascript is no longer a thing, but a conduit - a platform customized by other scripting languages.
Both approaches have value. I value Facebook's closed nature, as it gives me a place to communicate with close friends and family. I live across the country from most of my family, but I see their photos and keep up with them all the time, it's great.

Also, on G+, I have to put people in a circle if I want to broadcast to them (and not to the entire world), right? So I'm still following people I might not want to be following using the asymmetric approach.

The stuff I post on my blog is a totally different kind of communication, and I'm happy to do it outside the context of social networking.
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The point of the third rule is to alert their investors that they're making sure that any people who leave will not be part of the process to hire their replacements.
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Is there any reason the fashion industry couldn't use this to produce, say, a coat with teeth for buttons? I would totally wear that, especially to my D&D game.
>If we didn't collect and teach knowledge we've gained from the past then an adult wouldn't be too much better off than a child.

And yet apes aren't able to do even that.
There's a trend of moving away from native apps to JavaScript driven ones. For example, the Financial Times' recent move: http://paidcontent.org/2012/05/01/web-journey-complete-ft-sw...
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I generally don't bother supporting anything lower than IE8. If you want to use my app and are using an old version of IE just download chrome, it's free, otherwise don't use the app. I have used only Linux for about the last five years but i do test in IE using VirtualBox and the free VHD's provided by Microsoft(thanks guys).

I don't mind using the VM approach but the thing that annoys me is the massive size of the VHD files. My Ubuntu install is only about 3GB but each windows VM is around 16GB - 16GB!!! Considering I need a separate VM for every version of IE I want to test and I am using 128GB SSD's in my laptop and Desktop most of my disk space is taken up with having VM's to test IE.

That being said I think it's worth supporting newer versions of IE but I always display a message to users recommending they get a better browser, I think the more people we can get away from using IE the better because while IE10 might be ok now i just don't trust MS ability to update it in the future and i worry that in 10 years we'll all be bitching about IE10 the way we bitch about IE6 now because millions of users will still be running out of date browsers because of the poor update path for IE.
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Consider this: Child is born in Germany and all the family members across the world see the picture 10 minutes after he is cleaned up by the nurses. Add other family events and you are in touch with everyone.

The fact that it is somewhat closed is a major plus for me, I do not want them indexed by Google /Bing and held forever
I'm also a non-technical founder, and I've got to say that you can't underestimate passion. Having a technical co-founder that believes in the project and works well with you adds that extra magic to the equation. As is always the case it's about team, team, team and it is difficult to find an outsourcer that will do anything more than exactly what is asked of them (if you are lucky). Sure it can be done, but having someone to question you, and predict problems before they arise is paramount.

Also as others have mentioned, it is tough to be agile with a continent and language barrier between you and the tech side of your company.
Consider that in the browser, JavaScript is (with a few minor exceptions) the closest to a universal scripting runtime/VM that we can get. Targeting the browser, therefore, requires compiling down to JavaScript. So JavaScript (the language) and CoffeeScript can both be awesome in the way that Scala and Clojure have their different niches on the JVM.
This is a great article Michael. I admire such openness and transparency. A very inspiring and thought provoking read. Many thanks for making this available.
Really interesting in a geeky kind of way (to which I can relate completely), but practically speaking though - home automation has been around for a long time, and it didn't really go farther than thermostats, motion sensors + lights and security systems (that still need a hook up to the monitoring services to be useful). I remember tinkering with X.10 almost 10 years ago. Nothing much has changed, it's still engineers designing for engineers. Admittedly I haven't closely looked at the scene for a couple of years, but I researched the subject back then and remember seeing no home automation system that was designed with a notion of usability in mind. Lots of options - sure, plenty of buttons - you bet, perhaps a hierarchical menu with the depth of Cameron's dive - oh, that's a deluxe version :) It seemed that whoever designed those systems didn't actually use any of them.

(Not to hijack the thread)

There shouldn't be a remote, an existing iPhone should suffice. It should know which room I am in, and it should have relevant options based on that. Default to the electrical/heat/blinds and show all outlets and sockets. Allow to switch to other rooms, ideally in form of a floor plan. Make the remote work when I am not at home.

Sell this as a kit of sockets, pass-through junctions, wall switches and a small form-factor controller box. Put it all on WiFi, and give me an iPhone app to control the box. Make it easy to pair the box with devices (show a list of available devices and let me claim them). Allow hooking up the box to the Internet service for out-of-house access (charge me for that too, that's a fair deal).

Finally, put an effort into designing the UI and all visible physical parts. Not to be Nest-slick, but designed nonetheless. [1] is an example of what is not designed, but engineered. Feel the difference. Go to Europe to get inspired, if needs be.

Basically build a system only if you actually have a personal need for it, and not because you have a handful of assorted sensors. And "they will come" :)

--

[1] http://www.lutron.com/Products/StandAloneControls/Dimmers-Sw...
The fact that you mention a court might review such a situation, strongly suggests it is in fact somewhat ambiguous.
As facile as it sounds, companies generally become large by growing. If you're making money it's natural to hire more workers to increase your profits, even if that means you're making less money per worker. As your workforce gets bigger there's not enough to do on your core product, so you start to branch out... and before you know it you're where Cisco is today. "economies of scale" - aka cost synergies - only really become a reason for enlarging companies if you're talking about mergers between mature companies, long past the point where they were really economically productive.

Growth seems to be the measure of success, both for investors and entrepreneurs, so I don't see this stopping any time soon. But imagine a world where, once companies got to the 20-50 person stage, they started paying dividends rather than expanding. There are probably other limiting factors, but if everyone was working in such a company and they were as successful as they are now, productivity would skyrocket.
I doubt that. What you perceive as passion, I perceived as whiny. Whiny as in how a 4 year old REALLY wants a toy when his parents won't buy it for him. Is a child throwing a tantrum passionate about that toy? Is that a good thing?

Will this potential employee throw a fit when we don't use the libraries he wants? Probably not (like I would assume of most professionals), but this new found infamy would make me as a recruiting company think twice.

I think the situation could and should have been resolved in private. I know there are more clarifying emails, but we don't get to see them. If I were considering hiring this guy, I would be much more comfortable if I could see all of the emails with each side clearly stating their case, and then the developer's calm and rational ultimatum to go to the public. Even then, I would (as a potential employer) be even more comforted if the post itself had a calm and rational voice. (I believe the voice is mixed at best.)

I base my claim that this could have been resolved in private on the fact that Miso resolved everything so quickly. If the case and ultimatum were clearly communicated, Miso would have been prepared for the negative PR by releasing their version of events. Instead, the company payed up not even 12 hours after the story is published. This leads me to believe that communication was poor between the parties.
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Dude, were you arsed to see what Ars offers for their $5/month? Because IN GIANT BOLD TYPE, they offer -- and I'm quoting -- "Ad free, premier page layouts."

http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

So, to summarize:

(1) You don't want to "reward" sites that have a business model reliant on ads

(2) you want their content anyway

(3) when they offer you a trade: pay us $5 and we won't show you ads, you ignore them

Conclusion: you're a cheap dick.
JavaScript is a strange beast. The semantics of the language are, in my opinion, awesome and awful in different ways. Awesome: prototypes, first-class functions, dynamic function scope (not sure if there's a proper name for this), jQuery. Awful: the this keyword is confusing (but powerful once you learn it), type coercion, the API.

The standard API is the reason that people care about "the good parts" of JavaScript. jQuery is so popular is because it allows you to turn away from the document.getElementById sort of operation (ugly code) and turn it into $("#id").filter().each().etc().

People don't like JavaScript because of what it is, but what it can be. There are so many examples to choose from: jQuery (DOM API, data requests, standard library "extensions"), jPlayer (multimedia), Node.js (server, native API), Mustache (templating), Meteor (dynamic MVC). I am by no means an expert, but I can appreciate that JavaScript has turned into a serious language. JavaScript is not the holy grail of web programming languages, and I am sure that something greater will succeed it, but for now there is a lot we can do with it.
Getting an SMS if one of my doors opened during the day might be nice.

Drop in on light switches would be huge... But how do you manage drop in? If the consumer has to actually replace the switch with a "smart" switch, that's DOA (requires wiring, messing with the breaker box, etc).
> Getting an SMS if one of my doors opened during the day might be nice.

And what will you do in response? :)

> that's DOA

I don't know what DOA is, but replacing a light switch is the same whether it comes from the Home Depot or from a home automation start-up.
I've been node'n it up a bit myself lately. The language is easy to write, pretty easy to get things done, and server-side node provides a lot of great libraries.

That said, the development ecosystem around Javascript is very immature. To really write decent amounts of server-side JS as a team, people often employ linters and other things to sanity check their code. Debugging? Mostly printf's (or equivalent). Scoping rules can also be pretty annoying.

It is useful for getting things done, but it generally isn't my first choice (at least server side).
There are couple of inaccuracies in this article:

First, I only had 200 applicants, and they were all a result of this post about 6 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267133

Second, the article seems to give me and dev bootcamp all the credit. In truth, the spring cohort was a collection of some INCREDIBLY motivated people. I had all these ideas about how I was going to keep people motivated, and by day 3 it was clear that I wouldn't need any of them. Instead, I started worrying about how I can get them to go home and get some sleep every now and then.

I am committed to making any and all of our numbers public. Ask me anything and you'll get the straight facts (as long as it doesn't violate any of my students' privacy).
> The CEO of Miso is an unethical egotistical person who doesn't even have the self-awareness to admit to his knee-jerk abuse of power

Unless you have information not available in the original post or reply, you're making that judgement off of a severely limited set of (largely one-sided) data.
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> the document.getElementById sort of operation which looks like it was designed in 10 days (all due respect to Brandon Eich)

document.getElementById() isn't part of JavaScript but part of the DOM Level 2 spec that came out years after JS.

JS was first seen in Netscape 2.0 in 1995 whereas DOM level 1 was specified in 1998 but didn't in fact yet contain document.getElementById. That one was added in DOM Level 2 in 2000, so five years after JS.

As such it was not designed by Brendan Eich, nor was it created in 10 days.

No. This is the work of a committee that was heavily influenced by the way Java does it which is understandable because when DOM1 came out it looked like Java is going to be the be all end all of Computer languages.

The "library" that comes with JS is really small (methods on String, RegEx, Date and Array). Everything else we owe to the W3C which has created an API that was all but made for the language it was going to be used from most of the time.

(edit: I got my dates and dom levels mixed up - fixed)
> Simply put, when your computer turns on, the wireless radio sends out probe requests. These requests say "Is such-and-such wireless network around?"

Wait, really? This is news to me. Is this to handle the case where the router isn't set to broadcast its SSID? Does it happen across all devices and OSes? (i.e. is NetworkManager doing it on my Linux computer?)
We haven't really looked too deeply into existing research in this area, so I'm not sure how our approach compares. We'd still be very interested if you've got any suggestions for material to check out.

One difference between our program and other general purpose quantization algorithms is that we wanted to optimise for logo designs and images with flat shapes and colors (as opposed to photos with millions of colors).

We also wanted to get something working quickly so that we could get onto some large scale color analysis stuff (which we'll hopefully be writing about soon). There's definitely room for improvement in the color extraction process.
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Pretty awesome podcast interview with Jason Cohen.

Jason writes a really popular startup blog (30k subscribers), successful entrepreneur and founder of WP Engine. He has some great views on startups and blogging.

The initial interview starts with talking about Jason's blogging and experience on getting featured on Hacker News!
For you.. nup.
Thanks Jared.

While we're at it, if anybody can't come to SF for dev bootcamp, and/or can't afford it, I highly recommend Jared's http://www.bloc.io/
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Thanks! Felt good to write it.

One concern that I have is that the Miso CEO (and people like him) will take away the wrong lesson, along the lines of "be careful what you say to employees in email". But the real lesson is that you should keep your promises, and if you have a moment of weakness and try to reneg on a promise, don't be proud: admit the mistake and keep the promise. People make mistakes, even twenty-something CEOs of tech startups (shocking, I know).
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"Of course, 2/3 of 10k is still > 0."

Depends on the language.
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It's not visas, Americans only need those for a handful of countries and an American passport is #5 for visa-free entries worldwide, ahead of even Switzerland and Canada. [1]

The problem is that getting the visa is 1) expensive ($137 when I got mine five years ago) and 2) time-consuming. Standing in the post office for hours sucks and even finding out which post office will accept your application is difficult. I had to drive to three different post offices because I got bad information over the phone. The whole process took me about two weeks. Getting my French visa, which was the purpose of my passport, took less time.

So for your average family of four, [4x$137 + time] isn't worth it just for a more interesting beach than Waikiki or Miami. Not saying I agree with that logic but I think that's how a lot of Americans view it. There's enough to see domestically that it's not worth the added expense for a lot of people.

I'm not one of them—I only started travelling internationally two years ago and I've filled five pages of my passport and will have another seven stamps and a long-stay visa in there by August. That, however, is not a normal travel pattern for most Americans.

[1] https://www.henleyglobal.com/citizenship/visa-restrictions/

(Whether or not Americans know how few countries require visas is another issue)
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I'm just curious, what problems have you faced with SCSS?
It is a trade-off, on that I agree with you and I do understand that checked exceptions do tend to propagate implementation-level details up where that might be undesirable. I also agree that in green-field situations it can be awkward figuring out what to do with an IOException that you suspect will not exist in a few hours.

The problem as I see it is that if you advocate the alleged consensus that checked exceptions are evil then you are taking the position that there is no trade-off. Checked-exception lovers like myself acknowledge this grey area and the design challenges it presents. That is a big part of why I believe that a Java with checked exceptions is more "reality-based" than one without them, it recognizes the challenge and gives an API designer the tools to do the right thing. I want to have that hammer in my tool chest instead of banging on things with the back of my hatchet.
He influences others with his (IMHO poisonous ideology). For some bizarre reason, some people listen to his mad rhetoric. That's why others dislike him.

IMHO, he hurts several things. He hurts free software, and he hurts the software industry as a whole.