One can only hope that some Big Media cos will look at this and say: "Wait a minute... So, if we make our content easily accessible, people won't pirate it much. Maybe we can compete with free, after all!"

Hashbangs for state representation are just a tool, which can be used to make things better or worse for the users.

Where content is the main purpose ("websites"), they are overkill at best.

They can be useful though in functionality-first applications ("apps"), where the interface can be costly to build (too slow if you reload the whole "page" on each state change). Ideally, the app differentiates between fundamental states, represented in URLs, and transient states, represented in hashbangs.

Anyway, this is good news for Twitter, if they are really going through with it.

I believe the best implementation of this patten comes from the trance.fm website. Trance.fm gets that people come to listen to their online radio, so avoiding a page refresh is priority #1. It's very quick and responsive, too. You can listen to the music as a non-member, become a member and rate the song you're listening to, all without the music stopping. I believe it makes for a really good experience.

You are right. The concept is not new, but it seems to have reached a point where more and more people "get it" and are starting to apply it to many aspects of our lives.

What is truly amazing is that his approach makes so much sense, you'd think there were a lot more angels like him out there. On the other hand, it does take a lot of passion and effort, so I guess that explains it.

The way I understand down voting, it is meant to help clean up the conversation by marginalizing useless posts. For the most part, it looks like it is used correctly for that purpose. However, I have noticed a few down voted posts that were expressing an on-topic point of view, in a civilized manner. And that does feel like mob-rule censorship.

The "seeing the haterz" proposal would only be introducing another form of censorship.

The "cost for down voting" idea, on the other hand, makes sense and has been proven. It does give some disproportionate power to users that have high karma (their perceived sacrifice cost of one point is lower), but I see that as a meritocracy (they should be the most valuable contributors to the community to earn all that karma).

> If you can't say something nice...just don't comment.

That's great advice, both online and face-to-face. Well, probably "useful" rather than "nice", and say it respectfully; e.g. when debating an idea, arguing your position may not be seen as nice...

It is all so true that what you say can come back to haunt you. It is the responsibility that comes with the freedom (of speech, in this case). You cannot have one without the other, but while it is important to understand and accept the responsibility, you shouldn't let it frighten you into giving away your freedom.

Also, success is not necessarily correlated with happiness. Success is more about getting what you wanted, while happiness is more about wanting what you've got.

This would be a more accurate review that the OP :)

Another big takeaway for me was that you cannot have a healthy relationship with your money until you stop working for the money. Work for passion, curiosity, experience, whatever satisfies your mind, and you will start seeing the bigger opportunities for profit; the ones that can free you from the rat race of selling away your life (time & effort) in the hope of improving it.

In experimental tasks, parallelizing does not provide the same gain in success probability as accelerating the process of prototyping.

Building prototypes in parallel does not provide the benefit of a feedback loop, as the iterative process does.

Let's say you have a 10% probability of success on the first attempt, which improves by 40% after each experiment (to 14%, 19.6%...), and you have resources for 5 attempts. The chance of getting at least one successful solution is: parallel ~ 40.95%; iterative ~ 72.19%

Giving it away for free, even for a limited time, can make future sales an uphill battle, not to mention ticking off the clients who already paid for it in the "sell first" phase.

Giving something away for free should work, as long as it is valuable and related to the product. I think that was the case in the example given, though it is not immediately clear.