Flash still powers Youtube for most users, Silverlight for Netflix and Unity's plugin is required for most 3D games on Chrome's Marketplace (not sure where else to look for successful HTML5 games).
Folders, drag and drop feeds between them, the caching of entries Google did, and the Android app was ok, and it didn't install some browser crushing plugin to work, it was a website.
There are actually several other casual gaming startups in Hamburg e.g. Bigpoint GmbH which followed a more American model of growing as fast as possible and selling out early, so I don't think it's a German/European thing necessarily. Given one of Jimdo's competitors Wix is IPOing this year after an enormous marketing spend, it doesn't seem industry niche-specific either. (Disclosure: I work at Jimdo, feel free to ask me anything)
The author claims that C has "an order of magnitude more expressiveness" than assembly with no basis for the statement, but ok. He then throws all the "compile-to-JS" languages together even specifically mentioning Sibilant which has macros.
If there is another 10x expressivity gain to be had by adding any language feature then surely macros are it.
"It's been a year since we've filed for bankruptcy and we're still there." - I work in a company that strives to follow such a model, and it honestly struggles to achieve the kind of efficiency most companies take for granted. I dearly hope it doesn't lead to that end, but from what I can see it's a distinct possibility.
That's the most common pattern indeed. Note they tried to find a vision by themselves without an "official" leader. They were unfortunatly unable to find one apparently.
However, I believe a kind of implicit vision has emerged which is simply to make sustainable such a place. Put another way, people who are attracked by this implicit vision (such as the author of the article) are still with them, and the others have probably left because this was not a vision they were inspired by.
One can outsource leadership in a variety of ways. A highly cohesive and capable group can do consulting projects and self-organize around the project, for example.
It is perfectly acceptable to design a library with a simplified, restricted interface that covers the majority of use cases, but not all. e.g. requests vs urllib2 For me, that's a win for common sense. I have never even considered streaming JSON.
The lack of streaming support should be a clue that the OP needs to look at whether what he's attempting is even sensible or could be better served by a different transport protocol with built in streaming support.
"An implementation may set limits on the size of texts that it accepts. " - How does that "support" streaming?
My argument is that most people don't need it most of the time (I can't prove this). It's also NOT a protocol designed for streaming. As regards API design, it's a matter of taste but my preference and that of many others who use python, as we can see with the popularity of requests, Flask, is that an API should be designed for simplicity for the common use cases rather than for absolute completeness.
I'm not saying don't expose a low-level API full of BufferedReaders, JSONParserCursors, but don't force it on me to parse a tiny JSON document of known length.
The protocol can support streaming very well. How easy it is or if it's possible at all is an implementation issue.
With the Go standard library's json implementation, for example, you can decode JSON streams very easily: http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#example_Decoder
There are so many reasons not to do this. The potential site reliability risk of relying on someone else's free CDN (page not loading/loading slowly) far outweighs the slight benefit of CDN acceleration.
When you CloudFront/Akamai your content, you have some sort of SLA, but don't complain when Google pull shared library hosting as they have many other free services.
While I don't know if it's actually deserving of the title "implausible nonsense", I think its important to remember that stupid is as stupid does, and same goes for smart. Someone isn't smart because they have the trappings of intelligence, its because they did something smart.
"its because they did something smart"
So intelligence == 'achievement'? That makes no sense.
As for nonsense, ok I'll retract that, it is an interesting but highly implausible topic that gets a large amount of discussion relative to it's likelihood. It's actually just another way of phrasing "Does God exist?" If there was a computer (God) simulating this universe and controlling it, then it'd require a host universe for itself to exist, and it's complexity has to be greater than what it is simulating. Therefore it is less likely, and not by an insignificant amount.
I guess its true that you can't just equate intelligence with achievement. In my own life, I think I've increasingly used achievement where I used to use intelligence to gauge how 'smart' someone is. That comment was also trying to get at the annoyingly pervasive belief people seem to have that you must be smart because you are a mathematician, say. As an example, novices might think someone is good at basketball based on how they look on the court- but you wouldn't say someone is good unless they actually had a big positive effect on how often their team won. In general, I guess when I say smart, I mean "good" in some abstract sense.
