We're talking about two totally different programming paradigms here. The end product might be the same but it's more of a question about how you arrive there.
With JQuery you're signing up for manual DOM manipulation. It's a challenge to scale that for what's now considered table-stakes for web apps.
It's totally separate from the topic of efficiency gains or code reviews, but the idea of 100% pairing would take most of the enjoyment out of programming for me. Working in isolation (for the most part) to solve a hard problem and drive it to completion is incredibly satisfying. A lot of that goes away when you're working side by side.
You're never in "the zone" if you're pair programming.
As a team we all still believed that we could accomplish big things together. On top of that, we didn't want to let each other down.
Like Brian pointed out, the culture was established at the beginning. Folks were recruited on how well they would gel and adopt a core set of values in addition to pure talent.
Perhaps. Although even the experts don't fully understand ADHD.
Most people don't know where they fall on the ADHD spectrum. Maybe that's one of the reasons why there's such a mixed opinion on whether caffeine is good or bad when it comes to focusing.
ADHD is often resolved paradoxically with stimulants. For me, caffeine is a natural alternative to ADHD medication. A small amount of coffee, twice a day, allows me to focus intensely.
Folks with ADHD aside...optimizing caffeine intake seems to be the key to avoiding the nasty side-effects.
"Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979. According to The Wall Street Journal, he hand-wrote the code while serving nights in the Alameda County Jail, then entered the code later into a computer."
re #2...where do you see the music being sourced from? Allowing listens on shared music via user uploads would be a legal nightmare and the major APIs only provide 30 second clips.
What if your product is Foursquare or Twitter? There are obvious business models down the road but only until you achieve massive adoption.
I think the question to potential users is "Would you use this everyday?". This is more important than going to Starbucks and asking if they would pay to promote within the service (it's a no-brainer).
Desperation? I can understand not applying because you're morally apposed to pron or something, but if you look past the video content it's actually a pretty interesting gig for web hackers.
millions of page views, tons of data and metrics to track... damn, it has more interesting problems than most startups.
I know that Apple pushed WebObjects to the back burner when they acquired NeXT in the mid 90s but I'm not sure why it would be bad for them to buy 280 North today.
With JQuery you're signing up for manual DOM manipulation. It's a challenge to scale that for what's now considered table-stakes for web apps.