grn

It looks really great! So bad it isn't available in Poland. Does anyone know when they will expand to other countries?

Personally I have the impression that many web programmers, especially those who has never worked with anything other than the web, are ignorant of the existence of other branches of programming.

In many aspects programming for the web is simpler. For example the quality requirements for a microwave oven firmware are much higher. You can't easily deploy a hotfix to production after shipping 100k units. I have a feeling that most of complexity in web programming is incidental. It's a result of how poorly the web is designed as a platform. Of course it's very successful commercially but from a technical standpoint it isn't good.

john_b, could you give an advice how to get into aerospace industry? It always seemed very challenging and I'd love to have a chance to work there.

I once led a scraping proxy project that required users to be registered in order to access it. When someone unauthorised tried to use it 402 was returned with a message body giving a bank account number that was a concatenation of consecutive prime numbers. I wonder whether I made someone rich by accident.

There's also VimFx which is also actively developed.

Many of my friends, technical and non-technical, do prefer tracking precisely for this reason. They find it more convenient that the search engine knows their preferences, location, etc.

You're right that it doesn't go into detail but it's short and provides high-level overview of the most important features. It's much easier to learn the basic of something from a book and then find the details in the manual than working with the manual only.

But if someone expects to gain deep, expert level knowledge of how OpenSSH works then he'll be disappointed. What expert-level books can you recomment?

I can recommend Mastering SSH - it's a nice, short read.

http://www.amazon.com/SSH-Mastery-OpenSSH-PuTTY-Tunnels-eboo...

I'm using Kindle (+ Readability) + printouts. I really like books but they have two disadvantages: they are a little bit more expensive (but that's not the rule) and, what's more important, they occupy space on a shelf. I have a small collection of about 60 books and have no more space available.

When I find an interesting article that I'd like to read I add it to Readability. If the article requires more mental effort to understand, or when I want to have a deeper understanding of the presented topic, I print it on A4 paper, one-sided. The back side of each sheet is for my notes. Because I'm not trying to formulate the Fermat Last Theorem the margins are too narrow. ;-)

I think that Kindle is a good choice for tech books, but you may have trouble reading code or complicated diagrams. It all depends on the type of books you intend to read.

I recommend a mixed approach: Kindle + printouts + books. Discover your own preferences for medium for reading about a particular subject.

That's very true and I think that it's related to the topic of Rich Hickey's talk Simple Made Easy [1].

Maybe what we need is to study the economics of software and come up with a system in which market outcome is promotion of good libraries. I think that the social/economic dynamics of software development play a huge role in building a successful product, both free and commercial. Has anyone studied the subject in greater detail?

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

> A little difficult to do when part of what made the Mozilla Foundation what it is is supporting equality.

Could you elaborate? I'm really not aware of the internals of the company.

Personally I don't know what to think when organizations mix their core business (e.g. making a web browser) and politics (e.g. support for free speech). I'd like to see politics and business as separate as possible. What do you think?

See also http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2014/03/21/independent-decisio...

I must admit that I never saw that much value in ipython. Of course I understand that you can create a nice notebook with embedded plots, etc. but apart from that what does ipython give me? How does it compare to Vim + Jedi (autocompletion) + QuickRun (running the script with a single key)?

You can also download Virtual Box VMs with different versions of IE http://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads. Indispensable when developing on Linux!

Why did they remove the menu at all? If removing it was such a bad idea then it would have come out in user research.

But you can still mark the buttons with colors so your users will make less mistakes. I think that the two issues are orthogonal.

I plan to learn Clojure this year. What online resources and books can you recommend for learning the language and the tooling?

A related blog post - http://socialtriggers.com/annoying-popups/

I know a PHP programmer who makes about 6.5k EUR / month as a contractor but that's my only data point.

I'm considering moving to Berlin and working there as a contractor so I'd love to see some more data. Keep in mind that the overhead of an employee is huge (I bet it's over 100%) so a contract may be much better financially.

What other development-related weekly newsletters can you recommend? Currently I'm subscribed to:

Hacker NewLetter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Status Code - http://statuscode.org/

Pycoders Weekly - http://pycoders.com/

Ruby Weekly - http://rubyweekly.com/

Python Weekly - http://www.pythonweekly.com/

JavaScript Weekly - http://javascriptweekly.com/

Coder Weekly - http://www.coderweekly.com/

HTML 5 Weekly - http://html5weekly.com/

JavaScript Weekly - http://javascriptweekly.com/

Are there other newsletters worth subscribing to?

Changelog:

    NEW Web Audio support (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/songs-of-diridum-pushing-the-web-audio-api-to-its-limits/)
    NEW The find bar is no longer shared between tabs
    CHANGED If away from Firefox for months, you now will be offered the option to reset it to its default state while preserving your essential information
    CHANGED Resetting Firefox no longer clears your browsing session
    DEVELOPER CSS3 background-attachment:local support to control background scrolling
    DEVELOPER Many new ES6 functions implemented
    HTML5 iframe document content can now be specified inline
    FIXED Blank or missing page thumbnails when opening a new tab
    FIXED Security fixes (https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html)

The ES6 features are:

    new ES6 math functions
    Map#forEach and Set#forEach
    Array.of
    Number.parseInt and Number.parseFloat

Debian sid on my desktop, stable on my laptop. I'm thinking about switching to Arch though.

When it comes to the software I use:

- window manager - i3

- editor - vim

- terminal emulator - urxvt

- web browser - Firefox

- e-mail client - Thunderbird

- suckless tools

- office suite - LibreOffice

I learned about the index funds from a great book I'll Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Despite terrible title it's quite nice and recommends investing in index funds heavily. I live in Poland where, unfortunately, this segment of the market is highly underdeveloped. I have no more than three funds to choose out of which only one is accessible for a small investor wanting to save for the future. I can't wait for other funds to enter the market!

As far as I know the early ICs were much less reliable than circuits made from discrete components. It's the improvement made by private companies like Fairchild and others that made them practical. There's really a long path from invention to its practical application and the world benefited much from the improvements made by companies.

On the other hand scientific research is an example of a positive externality. According to economic theory the market underproduces this kind of goods. There are numerous measures to correct this including patents and public funding of science. We shouldn't dismiss the private companies nor public funding as both parts have positive contributions to science and are necessary for the science to operate effectively.

From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome.

Good point! Interestingly I managed to work without it somehow. I just checked that C-g C-g works as cancel when those binding are present.

I can also recommend the 29A magazine and z0mbie's website - http://z0mbie.host.sk/.

I prefer to use inputrc instead of aliases. Put the following into your .inputrc

    "\C-gs": "git status -sb "

Then, for example, after pressing Ctrl-g, s "git status -sb " will appear in your prompt. Much more readable than lots of two or three letter aliases. You can see the complete list of my shortcuts on my GitHub - https://github.com/grn/dotfiles/blob/master/inputrc

I upgrade my hardware once in a few years. For the last 3 years I've been using Core 2 Duo E7200 + 1GB RAM + 500 GB HDD. Before that I'd been working on Pentium 200 MMX + 64 MB RAM + 20 GB HDD for around 8 years. Before that I had Amiga 600 + 20 MB HDD. There's an adage saying: develop on old hardware and you'll get a free profiler. ;-)

Do Germans really associate that phrase mostly with Hitler? I find it quite surprising because despite not being German (nor German-speaking) I know that this phrase comes from the first verse of the Deutschlandlied.