"I got email from a bunch of physicists at MIT saying, "Hey, I saw your relativist baseball scenario, and I simulated it out on our machine, and I've got some corrections for you." And I thought that was just the coolest thing. It showed there were some effects that I hadn't even thought about. I'm probably going to do a follow-up at some point using all the material they sent me."
God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.
> ... many fans had identified numerous engineering problems in the Ringworld as described in the novel. A major problem being that the Ringworld, being a rigid structure, was not actually in orbit around the star it encircled and would eventually drift, resulting in the entire structure colliding with its sun and disintegrating.
> "I'm not a huge fan of some of the infinite scrolling things that are happening now. I think it's really annoying to want to read partway through, and then you navigate away, and can't get back."
Yep; could not agree more. One solution to this problem could be adding some pagination information to the window.location while you scroll, like the list item you're currently looking, but that creates a new problem: if you go Back that'll just bring you to the previous list item, instead of the previous webpage; not very predictable IMO.
Thanks for the tip; i've only worked with the hash and hashchange event before. It seems the window.history object has quite a lot of goodies for this kind of manipulation :D
Do you happen to know then why popular sites like Facebook aren't using this approach to preserve infinite list position when going back? There probably is some big disadvantage i'm not seeing.
For one, widespread support for that feature is relatively recent -- in fact, it's slated for the next version of IE.
For another thing, it's a bit more complicated to implement (you need to have a valid URL for every little piece of every page on your site) for not a lot of benefit that most people would notice. In fact, if you don't do them really well, it might confuse people when their bookmarks don't take them to the start of the page. They're sort of the awkward middle child between permalinks to an index and permalinks to posts, and even if they were there people wouldn't want them as often as the other two. This would probably put it in the "Maybe get to this later" pile.
Well, the inconsistencies between browsers is quite a good point if it would cause inconsistencies in user experience.
I'd like to point out, however, that FB already does some kind of similar trick with the URL hash when browsing photos: if you open someone's photo, it'll open in a modal dialog where you can navigate to other photos and this in-page navigation _will_ change the URL hash. If you go to that modified URL directly (or refresh the page) FB will show a different page (inside the person's "album") with that photo.
I'd reason that, for FB, a photo is more of a tangible thing than an item in your infinite stream, thus it deserves separate URLs when browsing the them.
replaceState still works for changing the hash-code without updating the history list, so you can stay on the same 'page'. You can then read the hash-code using browsers like IE, just not create new ones. I used this as a quick hack to get permalinks on http://ares.aylett.co.uk/xkcd/ -- when you move (on at least FF and Chrome, but not IE), the hash-code updates, and at least FF, Chrome and IE can decode the hash-code on page load.
Not to say that I don't agree with your conclusions about infinite scroll -- I'd much prefer sensible pagination.
what chc said plus load times, it would take like 6x longer to load such a web page and as chc points out most of the time you don't really care, now if there was a way to say, take me back to that state or just take me to the top... that might be interesting but that's way too complicated for the average user. (Maybe a FB+ addition)
About the load times, the could be minimized. If you go back to item #235 of your stream, FB could avoid sending you all the 234 preceding items.
Also, yes, i agree in that it could be perceived as a strange behaviour, but to me the current behaviour is also quite strange: if i'm scrolling down the FB stream, triggering a couple of stream sudden enlargements, then go somewhere else on that tab, and then go back to the FB stream, the browser will remember my last scroll position on that page and will try to scroll down to where i was, unfortunately that position does not exists when the page is loaded so it ends up scrolling to a seemingly random point in the middle of the stream (actually it's the bottom of the stream when the page loads, but that triggers a stream-append and then it's not the bottom anymore), not where i was before nor at the start of it (at least this happens in Firefox).
It's interesting to me the awareness Munroe has about creativity, inspiration, and working environment. He sees that some things are purely distractions (E.G. Reddit, cleaning the bathroom floor) while no distraction (E.G. a room with blank walls) is detrimental to his creative process.
Wonderful talk about where good ideas comes from says basically the same thing - where different minds meet (HN, Reddit etc.) there creativity happens.
I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time. It's immensely fun and I really appreciate y'all's support.
The important lesson here is that some business models absolutely do work for the particular person. I have no idea what number of pageviews you would need to support a full-time t-shirt selling business. I imagine the conversion rate is frighteningly low. But it really is true that you can make a business out of any sufficiently highly-trafficked website with a sticky audience. But you have to match the costs with the revenues.
Randall is a great guy with lots of really nice stuff. That said there is an absolute glut of xkcd stuff on HN compared to other sites that get mentioned here. xkcd links handily outnumber even wikipedia. One of the HN originated memes is the obligatory xkcd link.
God, that is just gold. Randall really has a gift -- he speaks to our imaginations so much that he can count on geeks around the world to participate in conversation with whatever he dreams up. Here's to hoping that we will get to see many more years of his creativity.