Just a tiny, trivial, aesthetic/grammar change: on http://captainobvio.us/auth/login you say "Login to Captain Obvious". I'd change that to "Log in …".
I've started using Celsius in my everyday life. As an American, it's not the easiest thing to do, but I'm used to that from my use of the 24-hour clock and the metric system (even my car is in km/h). I prefer Celsius because it seems much less arbitrary. (A physicist-friend is trying to get me to switch to Kelvin, but absolute-zero has no implication on whether or not I should wear a coat when I leave my house.)
Fellow developers: please allow me to use the measurement system I choose to use. In my transition, I realized how much we take this stuff for granted and assume everyone does things the way we do it ourselves. It doesn't take much work to give people a toggle b/t Fahrenheit and Celsius, 12/24-hour clock, or English/Metric.
I spent two summers interning at a giant insurance company (no self-installed software was allowed anywhere on the network). In 2008, everyone in the entire company was forced to use IE6. In 2009, they had transitioned to IE7 and developers company-wide were preparing their webapps for a rollout of IE8. Sure, everyone was still on XP, but even the higher-ups had begun to realize how important it was to update the browser.
Handling of special characters could use some improvement. For instance, "Hello" (no quotes) has her in her underwear, but with "<H;>/", she still has pants on. That said, this site is more about the presentation than the algorithmic implementation; I'm sure someone will fork her on GitHub and teach her to keep her clothes on longer.
SDCH looks to be going after a similar problem, but it would cache the templates between browsing sessions rather than just among consecutive pageviews. I'm not sure how well it would work for AJAX-y sites which rely on maintaining Javascript state, though, but potentially you could still use, e.g., localStorage for that purpose.
Another idea could be to include the separator character as part of the attribute (e.g. zone="profile:" or zonechar=":"). I'm not a huge fan of imposing mandatory URL structure, either, but I chose the colon since it is already valid and it's relatively pretty. (/profile:michaelcgorman looks nicer than /profile.php?id=michaelcgorman, at least to me)
Edit: I think I remember seeing something diff-like when working on a custom CalDAV feed a couple of years ago. Though that may have been CalDAV-specific, like a date-range.
All pushState does, AFAIK, is add things to your browsing history; it alone doesn't affect the content you receive. It does, however, make it possible (for recent browsers with JS enabled) to use the back button to navigate through AJAX-ed sites.
I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and given this week's context, I figured I might as well throw it out there. My main questions for HN are: (a) is this a good idea, (b) do you see any big pitfalls I'm overlooking, and (c) how might we get this to happen?
I think he's suggesting a genetic algorithm... Google-style organisms, competing for fewest retried searches, most-different front-page results, etc., that over time merge and split in various ways. Seems pretty similar to some of the tactics Google's already trying to me.
To me, this story was interesting to HN not because Google was commenting, but because Vint Cerf was. When he writes about Internet governance, I listen. The UN forms committees and working groups all the time; I'm not going to sign a petition to one of them unless someone I trust on the matter feels so strongly about it.