it's worth reading up on what react-native is. it isn't "write once deploy anywhere," but rather "learn once, write anywhere." in essence it allows us to enjoy the fairly transformative one way state driven view paradigm (think functional) to write apps. that is the magical part of it - the one language multiple platforms aspect is a tertiary consideration in my opinion. the pleasure comes from an environment where code changes are almost immediately visable without a lengthy compile/run step, and the pure joy of having views that depend purely on state input without the mess of side effects.

someday everyone will realize that one-way data binding is beautiful and that functional paradigms can save hours/days/weeks of testing and messiness. react-native is just bringing that beauty to the dev process now. i've done obj-c/swift xcode, and maybe i'm not good at it, but it ends up not being easy to read, and not fun waiting every time i want to test something for it to compile and run.

under the hood react-native does something very clever, it isn't a hack or ugly, but rather quite lovely. you get the pleasure of seeing your components and data flow as a tree, a tree that only updates nodes as necessary when state changes, and where each component is a fully fledged native component with all the functionality and speed of the native component. want a UIScrollView? sure `<ScrollView></ScrollView>`. data is passed through easily and it is all very easy to reason about. that is the goal right? code that is easy to read and makes sense.

What you describe though are good software practises in general, not exclusive to react. I don’t blame you for thinking this though, because I hear this a lot, it’s not just you.

I’ve been building in react for a year after working in iOS and Android. Something like a tree structure capturing all of the view components is available right out of Xcode. Another example: time saved compiling is mitigated by time spent debugging, trying to find the source of exceptions etc is a mystery box and a huge time suck.

What I think is happening is that most Javascript and react developers have spent time only in one domain. So they make a lot of assumptions that all of these advantages of react are exclusive to the paradigm and platform, when that’s not true at all.

We won against the Soviet Union? Maybe he should revisit some history. If anything, our constant embargoes during the cold war only made the Soviet Union last longer. As soon as both sides started trading more freely, that was the fall of the Soviet Union, largely due to Gorbachev in either case. We had stupid foreign policies then, and we still have stupid foreign policies. He refers to the greatness of NASA back in the day, does he not know that is a government funded liberal program that his party would like to shut down? Does he not know how to use the internet to educate himself before giving a speech to millions?

"We won against the Soviet Union?"

The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the United States of America does.

So, yeah, most people would call that winning.

We did nothing to "win". Most people would require there to be some action to get the credit.

"We did nothing to "win"."

Oh, I think the Cold War certainly counts as something. It's a dead certainty that, without U.S. nuclear force and somewhere around half a million U.S. troops in Europe, the Soviet Union would have eaten Western Europe as thoroughly as it ate Eastern Europe. Also, as I type, I'm within a few miles of three former nuclear missile sites. Those didn't magically appear by themselves, dude. How does that count as "nothing"?

I also think that (contrary to your claim that increased trade brought the downfall) if the U.S. hadn't sold the Soviet Union vast amounts of grain beginning in the 1970s, the fall of the USSR would have been much faster, and much, much uglier. Nonetheless, I'm glad that didn't happen. Millions in the U.S.S.R. would have starved to death.

It's actually addictive, I can't wait to get more reps to invest! Couple comments: seems like you need an invite your friends functionality, I want to invite them all so I can invest in them (jokes I just want them to invest in me :-). Might also be nice to allow some content to be embedded, just a large image or a youtube embed in the content section. Nothing too extensive just a highlighted content box or something.

I too was originally confused by the "Refrigerator Repairs" sign! :-)

I've been working on a model for a bookstore for a couple of years. The key is attracting people to the space. Repeatedly. And once you have them there offer rewards for reading and buying books. If I'm in your bookstore drinking a delicious coffee and munching on a stuffed croissant and you offer a discount on the very book I've been meaning to read for a while, I'll buy it.

The space is filled with books, smells amazing (that sacred dusty book smell mixed with bakery and coffee smells), has comfy seating, games to play, plenty of plugs (charge for electricity rather than wifi), free fresh baked cookies(on the spot wafflecookies) with any purchase of a book (cannot be purchased separately!). There are various intellectual events, reading marathons, contests, and talks that attract interesting people. It's a space you want to be in, to bring your friends to, and you keep spending money there.

It's more than just a bookstore or a cafe or a co-working space though. It's a place that promotes books and reading, connecting people intellectually. A "membership" offers various rewards but also frictionlessly offers reading suggestions and also communal reading/commenting. Not necessarily a reading club... If you are proud of the books you've read and/or have an interesting opinion/interpretation or have questions, a common discussion space/online/app interaction space helps make this easy and comfortable for any level of socializing.

I and two of my close friends (we're all CS people) have been looking for opportunities to try our ideas out, and to learn about others' experiences. Looks like you've had a great response here but if you're still looking for ideas / a group of people with a lot of energy and ideas, let me know, I'm always in the area at some cafe or another! :-)

So many negative reactions, I'm surprised. But then I've been surprised by how narrow a band "normalcy" really is before.

I lived in a van for a summer. I have a story, but I don't think it involves mental illness or laziness or wasting my life. I was working fulltime as a sysadmin at an Ivey League school and taking classes fulltime there at the same time. Yes, that meant I slept very little and had no "free time", whatever that is. One spring I was moving out of an apt I had rented with some friends for the school year and I had another apt set up for fall, but hadn't set up anything for the summer. My parents unmarked white utility van fit my bed perfectly and I decided to just not move my bed out and live in the van for the summer. I had a place to shower at work, I decorated the inside of the van, and it became home. I wasn't a creep, I wasn't homeless, my parents lived 45 minutes away so I had a fallback if it didn't work out, I had a place to shower, I had a job.

However, what I underestimated was how much people freak out if you're doing something even slightly outside of their concept of normal. I had found a great parking spot pretty near work, in a corner under some trees, however, within a week a construction worker called Safety and Security and reported a suspicious van (he was driving a jacked up mufflerless pickup truck with a rifle in the back -- who's the suspicious one?). 6am one morning, I was jolted awake by the loudest scariest banging noise I've ever heard, it felt like someone was punching me in the heart. A security guard was knocking on the sides of the van trying to see if someone was inside. I was too groggy/freaked to just stay put behind my curtains and tinted windows, I got out. He told me I can't sleep on college property, recorded my license plate and said they would be watching me.

I can't describe the lack of feeling of safety that having a locked door and a wall, specifically something thick that muffles knocking gives. I then tried parking on the streets discretely but had a hard time sleeping because I kept waiting for the cops to come knocking. I started parking a few miles away at a Walmart -- what a weird experience that was. RV's would come in and set up in a circle in the middle of the lot (I stayed on the outskirts). Every night around 2am some locals would come by and drive in circles around the RVers and throw bottles at them while yelling and squealing tires. No peace of mind there. I started parking at the local truck stop, no locals there, but now I had to worry about a sleepy truck driver backing into me in the middle of the night. Breakfast at the 24hr diner there was delicious though.

I started reading some forums about van living and found an article about how people who are forced to live in a car or van temporarily often find themselves pushed further into the fringes. I was doing this by choice, but I couldn't imagine someone who thought they could just live out of their car for a few weeks until their first paycheck from their new job could cover first/last/security deposit in a new city, only to be constantly hassled to move and then fired when someone at work found out. The numbers were troubling, something like 80% of people who temporarily attempt to live out of their cars end up actually homeless, jobless and carless.

Eventually some people renting an apt nearby and had a free parking spot let me park there. OP mentions loneliness. I didn't necessarily feel lonely, I was busy and had stuff to do, and I still had friends. But I definitely felt something, that people thought I was troubled, or needed help, or that something was wrong. And maybe they didn't really, but I realized that I myself was starting to avoid social contact. I would wake up early and sneak into work to take a shower before other people came in so they wouldn't notice, even though my boss knew I was living in a van and didn't care -- I wasn't going to lose my job if anybody found out.

When it came time to move out of the van, it was with mixed feelings. It as getting colder at night, and I would sleep better, but I had gotten used to it and now whenever I borrow my parents van to move something I feel nostalgic for that time when it was my home.

What I learned was that society does not take kindly to seemingly slight deviations from normal. The movie "Wendy and Lucy" came out a bit later and reminded me strongly of that outward push that society initiates on people who appear as "outliers". Certainly, it makes sense for the health of the system, but I was surprised by how tight the tolerances are.

Great story, and an interesting perspective.

I don't necessarily agree with some of the judgements you are making about how society treated you. You were acting strange and should not be surprised that people were concerned about you. There are also good social reasons why society doesn't make it easy for people to live in their cars. Safety, cleanliness, property rights, collection of taxes, etc.

You say "society does not take kindly to seemingly slight deviations from normal". I don't think your experiment that summer was a slight deviation. What you did was two standard deviations away from normal. If only 0.1% of society would ever do what you did voluntarily, that by definition makes it abnormal.

That's doesn't make it bad or wrong. Just not normal.

Yeah, I didn't mean for my comments about society to necessarily be a complaint, more that I was surprised by how strong that outward push was. Sure I expected people to be weirded out, but what I didn't expect was for how alienating that felt. Actually, what I didn't expect was that something that was comfortable and an adventure would generate not a pulling in force but a pushing out. It wasn't, 'are you ok can we help', or, 'whats your story', it was 'wtf get out of here'. It just made me think about all those times that we all/I avoid or get weirded out by people that are different. And how that very action of being weirded out can make them weirder.

"What I learned was that society does not take kindly to seemingly slight deviations from normal."

That's because it isn't efficient for society and people to not jump to conclusions. Nobody is going to take the time to see that your situation is really different then the creep that is living in a van parked outside a school for a different reason.

We hear plenty of stories of how Bill Gates and Jobs didn't shower and of course we know that they ended up fine. But we don't have any data to compare on people that followed the same strategy and didn't end up in a good place because society jumped to it's natural conclusions about people who eschew all social graces.

The land of the free. Where you loose your job if someone finds out you live in a van.

My sentiments exactly! A few weeks ago I spilled an iced latte on my air's keyboard and had to let it dry for a week. Shit. But Apple has a 14 day no questions asked return policy. Excellent! I bought a new air -- installed dropbox, app store xcode, homebrew, ran a script to symlink my dot files / documents etc to dropbox, and done. 30 minutes later I'm back up and running as if nothing had happened. A week later I powered on my caffeinated laptop (works fine after its delicious iced latte bath - not a single sticky key even) and returned my free apple rental. Thank you dropbox, and apple.

That would have been much quicker with Time Machine (been there, done that).

i like it, but needs the ability to preface/comment on the posts, as well as picking up/aggregating comments from other share sources. also being able to search. i like the presentation style though.

I think being able to community add to the API docs would be very helpful.

For beginners http://dcsobral.blogspot.com/2011/12/using-scala-api-documen... may be helpful in learning how to navigate the docs buuut what really helps are examples especially with scala's sometimes long and hard to parse type signatures.

In general I think a site for language docs where people can add comments/examples/content would be extremely useful. Like the php docs but for all languages in the same place. I never use php but comment-able docs are a win.

APIdock (http://apidock.com/) already has the “commentable multi-project documentation” infrastructure in place, though it only has the Ruby language and two Ruby libraries on it right now.