jcutrell

Couldn't agree more with this.

Effectively, Bret is taking a single page of quotes that are used in a marketing effort in order to frame the conversation in ways that people understand. Zuck's quote, for instance, conceptually maps directly to the open job market for engineers as a perfectly valid reason to learn programming.

It's pretty trite to say, just because Zuck says something about there not being enough engineers to fill the open positions, that he wants you to be a "cog in the wheel". What a horrifically poorly formed argument.

The effort of moving people is one that requires incomplete, idealistic language. That's the ugly truth of marketing. Incomplete doesn't mean dishonest, but it very well may mean "intellectually hollow". And the truth is, the real intellect is in understanding what gets us to where we want to be: a place where we unlock the educational power of learning to program by convincing people to try it.

<reckless> It's like convincing someone to lose weight so they'll look better, when really you're wanting to prevent them from a heart disease. </reckless>

10-20db cut in the lower freqs?

(Depends on what the source of the track is.)

My favorite thing about this article is that it doesn't harp and preach and bang and shove the bandwidth conversation down your throat.

Truly, the bandwidth conversation is relevant mostly to non-motivated or new users. The abandonment issues are real, don't get me wrong, but abandonment really occurs if the user is marginally motivated. If I'm trying to buy something I want or if I'm trying to register for a service I truly want to use, I will wait.

Point in case, I waited not seconds, but weeks, for my Mailbox account.

Note: WordPress (sp)

I'm currently working on a project that employs this concept; we use Rails for the heavy lifting, registration, payments, etc (lots of complex stuff), and we use Wordpress to allow our client to easily create beautiful things.

The truth of the matter is that making a rails app that covers the flexibility that Wordpress allows (including things like Yoast's seo plugin, for instance) is just infeasible in Rails. The newest update to Wordpress is also quite beautiful.

I've been building on Rails and Wordpress for a while now, and have yet to see a full featured solution to flexible content management that equals or surpasses WP. I have yet to see something that makes data transformation and api creation as easy as rails does. (These are gross overstatements, but the point is that the two tools are very different in key ways, and can be used to complement each other if those differences are respected.)

That makes sense.

I think perhaps it's from the opposite perspective that I'm approaching this. Specifically, creating things that require customers/users to give up privacy. The model itself stands in place of a different exchange, and while it's not clean, it does create a trade of some value.

I suppose we could argue that none of us know the value of a dollar, either, but I agree more with you than I do the devils advocate in my head.

For more info on losethos, take a look at http://www.templeos.org/ - this is an OS he apparently wrote without assistance.

I really do love my pet. She's awesome.

But I show my pet pictures to people.

That's the fundamental problem here - the point of Pinterest / Instagram / Facebook is that very few people want to look at one kind of thing, but if they want, they can use search.

There isn't a successful domain-specific search engine; the fundamental nature of Facebook is encyclopedic at this point, similar to a search engine.

The way I have found to really get the most out of my minutes is to trick my brain into processing a new thing.

This really is fundamentally a new way of thinking, but if you do something different every day, you are tripping up the "caching" functions your brain optimizes your day with, giving you a tiring but rewarding memory of 24 hours rather than what seems like an echo of a previous experience.

I very highly recommend contracting with a well-established company to attain the work visa, and freelancing with a few different companies to gain experience and perspective before signing on with a company.

I'd highly recommend against working for a company that doesn't value a subset of your skills more highly than the others; a somewhat specialized position will pay better.

I would also highly recommend that you work for a company (or many companies) with vision, mission, and values that you connect with strongly.

There are some advantages to adding the copyright, but none of them are legal... sort of.

The way copyright law works isn't black and white - it's more like a harsh linear gradient where there is a lot of space of black and a lot of space of white, but a sliding scale between.

When you put the copyright explicitly on your site, you are making a statement - that the contents of the site are, indeed, unmistakably copyrighted and should not be reused without proper permissions (or at all, in most cases).

While you receive copyright implicitly by law in the US, the severity of possible legal action is partially dependent on what a judge says makes sense. For instance, one could easily (albeit ignorantly) make the accident that something on GitHub isn't copyrighted because GitHub hosts a ton of open source stuff. If the copyright is explicitly stated, for a person to copy it would portray a gross disregard, and lack of responsibility and due diligence.

So, yes, there are good reasons to place a copyright symbol, but it doesn't necessarily change your copyright status by law.

Love Spring. Will help every day development immensely.

Thank you for the ActionMailer previews. Working on an app with a bunch of mailers - things get wily fast, and a bunch of static files sit around to be tested for display.

I think the secrets.yml idea, while in development, is awesome and helpful for organization. However, I'd be a little concerned that a single file has everything secret-y in it. Maybe that's paranoia though. It'd be nice if this wasn't just a config thing that I could hand roll myself, and instead offered some sort of obscuration/security measure in and of itself.

On one hand, I agree with this: women should be treated as equals in business situations.

On the other hand, I believe this: it is perceived as inappropriate when an authoritative figure of one sex is seen in a semi-private setting with a subordinate of another sex.

Can of worms in this comment aside, that is the perception. This is particularly more prevalent when one or the other of these people is married.

Why in the world would this be true?

Because people have unfortunately abused situations like this far too often, or at least handled them in unwise ways far too often. To conform to one part of the story is, however illogically, perceived as an implied possibility for the second part of the story.

This has everything to do with media, but it also has everything to do with setting proper boundaries. I think it's certainly similar in situations where the woman is in authority. The thought is, if there is never a chance for inappropriate things to happen, they won't; secondly, good people make mistakes. This doesn't mean they absolutely will - but it's in the same category as "the only safe sex is no sex at all." Complete abstinence has become the cultural standard for this particular behavior, and perception is the judge.

Awesome - never seen HipCV before, but that's definitely down the direction I'm thinking. Certainly not an all-things solution, which is what I like about it.

Thanks for the info!

This looks like an awesome idea. Honestly one of the better executions I've seen in quite a few senses.

There are quite a few things I'd say make this difficult to a first time user.

1. The tools being on two separate sides of the site seems strange to me; the left side seems to be drawing (or otherwise "putting") tools, the right side seems to be "editing" tools. Except that the pen is on the right. And so is the text box.

2. There is no "active" state for the selected tool, so I may very easily get confused about what is going to be done when i click.

3. The modality of any of the tools could be changed in some ways; for instance, having a delete "tool" rather than a delete "button" is more like erase, as pranavpiyush mentioned.

4. Using prompt for entering your name isn't great; using prompt to enter text onto the canvas is really very frustrating.

5. The trash icon is confusing. I'd rather have a "clear this board" icon, or go full-fledged whiteboard with it and show me a whiteboard eraser. I don't throw my whiteboard markings in a trash can - I erase them. If you're going to take advantage of skeuomorphs, make sure they are the right ones.

6. If sharing the URL is a core functionality, make that url easily copyable inside your interface. Most of the time, I am not going to share this on Twitter or Facebook. Most of the time, I'm going to send that url to a coworker or friend.

7. I have no clue where to "save". With something like this, I don't think we've yet reached the implicit "auto-save" feeling. I need to feel secure about my board and accessing it at another time.

8. Uploading an image is a great idea, but don't make me drag unless you're going to keep my dragged area visible; when I drag, the marker goes away and the modal replaces it - that makes me feel like I made a mistake.

9. When I drag a shape over another shape, a new bound shows that implies that the two shapes may be merged, but that doesn't happen when I drop the shape.

10. Many move tools also "select" an element for further manipulations (like moving with a mouse) - a simple version of this might be a good addition, along with basic scaling operations.

11. I like colors - I like picking my own, too. Any regular old color picker will do, or at least a hex input, so I can use my brand colors (or whatever).

12. Not sure if it exists, but I don't see a way to add a new board. This is a space where this could be hugely beneficial - multiple boards, with titles. Then this easily becomes a teaching tool that maintains its own history; export to PDF? Sure. Export to PPT? Sure. Autoupload to slideshare? (Up to you. :) )

I'd be super interested to follow this project and contribute to some of these design tweaks if it were somehow open (or if contributions are a possibility).

I am particularly happy with the implementation of this being so close (geographically) to the tools I already use. I constantly have inspector open.

Now, the hard part will be figuring out exactly how this will fit into my existing workflow, which currently largely relies on console.log's to understand data and bindings (rather than element inspection).

Nice work.

This is in line with a long laundry list of horribleness about user experience as related to DMs in my opinion. They don't work as expected, and quite honestly to me it feels like Twitter is running a campaign to destroy peoples' love of the DM in search of a Solution, maybe in preparation for a dm 2.0 or something.

Some of the experience elements of DM have been fixed on the iPhone, but last I checked, the problems on web desktop made me so annoyed that I stopped using DMs altogether.

And here's the official Codex entry: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.8

Note: I am not the author of this pen, but it's one of a series of really cool pens using box-shadow extensively to create "pixely" illustrations.

Just as a fun polish, you should build really awesome "unavailable" pages for your 404s and 500s that points out the obvious semantic irony.

Agreed. I think this is also an issue with the way we teach; we should teach students to have the confidence to deny the solvability or soundness of a problem on their own (rather than forcing irrational thought in order to arrive at a solution).

This is the equivalent of teaching a programmer to "shut up and code", even though they may have objections to the proposed solution.

This is incredibly interesting to me, and points to a problem in our schools.

We traditionally teach children to solve problems that have solutions. In particular, eighth grade teaches pre-algebra and algebra, so the way students approach problems is directly connected to how the student decodes the language of a "word problem".

We need to change our conceptual understanding of what learning actually requires, and give students a situation in which they must write the problem themselves. Instead of "decoding" a predefined word problem, the student then must explore the situation and interpret the available information.

A good way to handle this problem is to allow students to write word problems for other students based on a set of data, and subsequently create the "answer key" that includes the mathematical proofs. Proofs should be taught from a much earlier age.

Two awesome pieces of marketing on this page.

1. "Your Best Email Address" - this page is almost invariably marketed to people who likely have at least 3 email addresses. I know what my "best" email address is, so this strikes a chord me. 2. "Your email address will never be sold, rented, or used in any way except to deliver you one relevant email on BootStrapping per week." - Nice, very specific constraints on what will be done with email addresses.

Looks like a cool idea, very similar marketing to the other weekly's I enjoy.

My point isn't invalid. Communication is messy, and this is an example of that.

"I was in the middle of the ocean!"

Did you think I was in water? You're wrong. I was on an island that is in the middle of an ocean.

"I stayed in a hotel in New York."

Did you think I rented a hotel room? No, I simply stood in the lobby.

You can't say that because someone says something without constraining it with every detail, that the communicated point is incomplete. Communication is a loose protocol.

So many of the comments here can be answered with the specs page. http://www.brck.com/specifications/

The design is intended, as most marketing pages are, to capture attention and interest. Scrolling storytelling is a very effective way to do that.

HN readers, in general, are very critical of emotional-impact-based decisions. The truth is, many people respond to things that are 90% aesthetic and 10% functional. Note: Jabberwocky[0]. If you want to dive in deep, you are a part of the crowd that doesn't make impulsive decisions based on marketing. Congratulations - click on the specs link to see an easily readable, fairly cold page.

If you want to make an impact on the majority of people, consider that most people are less concerned with technical details or even descriptive language, and more concerned with how they feel.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnwBHVQJWJs

Perhaps this is nit-picky, but this isn't at all parallax. It's fixed elements mixed with non-fixed elements. For it to be simulated "parallax", it must have elements that move at different speeds that mimic the effect that real-life parallax would have.

I think this is kind of like an air conditioning company saying, "If it can cool you off in the tropics, it can cool you off anywhere!"

The facts are simple: there are significant parts of Africa that are very sparsely connected to what is commonly available in many (or most) other countries of the world.

I get how this can be somewhat offensive, but I also think the point comes across and isn't directed at the African people.

If it works in Africa, then, objectively, it works in sparsely populated and sparsely connected areas.

It's certainly not meant to be a complete solution, but it can be expanded to include both horizontal and vertical scrolling, so that either will work.

Note - here's a quick shot at how a scrollwheel modification may work: http://codepen.io/jcutrell/pen/jqiDK

I'd love to see this as a zoomable timeline, where less important events are less visible when zoomed out, so that the timeline itself is fully visible at 100%.

Draggable timeline in a max 100% w/h window would fix the scrolling weirdness for folks who care, and would also be usable on a touch device, but I think the interaction should always feel full screen, regardless of where you are in the timeline.

Love this idea, quite a lot actually.

Perhaps this is marketable to the folks at Timehop? :)