alexandros

If you're looking for anecdata, I can tell you that after stopping coding and doing "business stuff" for a while, including the "engineering management" role, I did catch my perspective shifting away from that of a developer, towards that of a business guy. Adding some coding to my routine has helped get that back, besides a number of other benefits.

We've been using ghost for the startup, and I've been using it for my personal blog as well. I credit it with making writing more enjoyable, leading to more being written. By far my biggest issue was losing text, which should be fixed in 0.4. The joys of using alpha software. Best of luck to the Ghost team. I expect great things from them.

That's awesome! I'll add it in the post somewhere, thanks!

Nice! maybe I should do one in angular/svg just to close the loop with my previous blog posts? Maybe.

It wasn't actually part of my PhD. But it didn't delay me too much in the sense that I was able to stop on time to finish my PhD work. In fact, over the next 4 month period I wrote up my thesis and coded up the prototype as well, which I hadn't done in the 3 years prior. I do conjecture that my performance in the PhD work relates to the time spent on the 17x17 but besides certain specific items, it's just conjecture.

I'm in the real world now for good, and I might be lucky that things in the class that would invoke the reaction this problem did, are few and far between. I'd like to find something that I can enjoy this much while being profitable, but, oh well, a man can dream, right?

something I left out of the article is that most of that time was during my PhD :)

I don't agree that mobile devices are resource-starved. Tim is an old hand so there must be concrete examples behind the words, but as stated I don't get it.

Also, it's quite easy to make fun of a language by stating one non-central feature that's counter-intuitive. End of the day, anyone working in a language seriously learns the corner cases and moves on. After a while, it's no longer relevant to them.

I did like the discussion of dynamic vs. static though. It really feels dynamic is good for early codebases and static for late. So why aren't there languages that allow you to move to static as your codebase matures? TypeScript adds optional typing but doesn't quite go the whole way unfortunately.

Thanks for the kind words. Truth be told, I didn't expect this post to do this well, and also I am learning a lot from all the responses. Unfortunately I do run a startup, so I am not sure how much more time I have to put on this. Hopefully the ideas herein will ignite someone to actually get that proper d3/angular integration going. Fingers crossed.

Even if it all gets buried under high-level visualisations, it's better to have fewer moving parts and a smaller cognitive model in case you do need to dive in. But the premise of d3 is that you tweak your visualisations. There are other libraries like raphael that are supposed to be higher level.

But there are many times you need to create something new. At least I've had to, maybe I'm atypical. And when that time comes, I prefer manipulating familiar HTML and AngularJS that I also already know, than needing to understand yet another toolkit's approach to bindings.

Think of d3 as a framework and a standard library. This post is about replacing the framework. However, d3 still has a load of ready made controls such as the axes. These don't exist for this new approach yet, at least not natively.

But I have released code (see the bottom of the post or just https://github.com/resin-io/triangular.js ) that allows Angular/SVG graphs to add axes. Just didn't want to go deeper into documenting that too as I've gone past 2000 words already.

Hopefully in the future this will be done in pure angular, as these directives use more or less the old approach of encapsulating d3 in a directive. But at least they are re-usable.

Apologies for the 'back' hijack. It could have something to do with the plnkr.co embeds? Otherwise the page is pretty simple.

The graphs aren't interactive in their current state (but there's nothing stopping them from being made interactive).

PART-TIME HOLIDAY PROJECT

We are Resin.io, you can be anywhere.

We will offer £500 each to two projects that use Node.js on a Raspberry Pi. The resulting code should be open-sourced on GitHub but we do not require transferring ownership to us. The amount may not be much but may be a good extra incentive if you were looking to do a cool side-project with JS and hardware over the holidays.

Proposals should be sent to project at resin dot io. We will respond within a week and you'll have until the end of the year to complete the project. Projects will be judged based on how original the idea is. Bonus points for using more than one Raspberry Pi for the end result. If you offer to document your process and/or blog about it, we'll be even happier.

As mentioned, the resulting code will remain yours and you can keep evolving it (or not) as you please after the end of the project. We simply want to encourage cool JS projects on embedded devices. Some examples: http://ni-c.github.io/heimcontrol.js/ , http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/ .

This to me sounds like a company terrorised that the political-correctness police is coming after them, and going way too far in the opposite direction just to prove their PC credentials. While on first read I was as surprised as anyone at the magnitude of the over-reaction, on second read, I'm starting to think how bad things have become, i.e. the environment of fear, to lead companies to react this way.

Surface is a legitimate verb, just like any other. Perhaps the author isn't native, and is using a different verb than the one you'd like. Or perhaps that's how he feels like expressing himself. But it is shocking you'd think this is a worthwhile comment and others would upvote you on it.

It's quite sad that this comment is currently the top comment, in an article that raises quite an important topic for the JS and iOS developer communities. As much as I loathe the "hn is turning into reddit" crowd, this is much worse. HN is turning into a criticism machine that when it can't find anything worthwhile to criticise, will literally criticise anything at all rather than elevate a positive comment to the top.

Some friends are involved with this. Feels pretty relevant: https://www.tigernation.org/

I can connect you if you like, email in profile.

That looks super-interesting, thanks for pointing it out.

It's something we're tremendously interested in as we'd like to be able to reach as many devices as possible. In fact one of our favourite devices to play with is the mk808[1] which is natively an Android device. We've had to put Ubuntu on it to get it to play along, but the Android install still performs a lot better (and needs no maintenance from us) so we'd love to just be able to work with that.

What we've done gets Docker over the 32-bit and "ARM architecture" barriers, so Android should be very feasible. Even the 3.8 kernel shouldn't be absolutely necessary since we got the devicemapper version of Docker to work (though there may be other gotchas).

In other news, chromium can now run on Wayland, which can run on Android, and also Docker can run chromium inside it, so Docker-on-Android is the last missing link for some pretty mindblowing use cases.

If anyone's interested in working on that, my email is in my profile, we'll help however we can.

[1]: http://www.geekbuying.com/item/MK808-Dual-Core-Android-4-1-J...

Yup :) The team is split between the UK and Athens.

Thanks for the excellent questions. I started writing a response but it became way too long, so I moved it to the blog:

http://resin.io/blog/why-port-docker-to-the-raspberry-pi/

Hi Matthew, I'm interested in how you're dealing with code deployment. Have an email address in profile if you want to talk.

Awesome stuff.. any pointers to where this work is getting done?

If anyone gets that done it will make us very happy! We run our servers on CoreOS, putting it on the devices as well would be awesome. AFAICT it's about getting etcd to run on the Pi, as well as any other small projects that make up CoreOS.

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully the instructions in the article will be helpful to the docker team first and foremost, and adventurous hackers possibly. The hope is that this will become part of official docker, not that people will have to repeat a 100+ step process.

As a side note, getting this working on Raspbian should be feasible (consider it an exercise for the reader), we just used Arch as we've focused on that for a bunch of other things.

Happy to have this out there. We worked quite hard on this the past few weeks, hopefully it will help people see the benefit of Docker for the embedded world as they have seen it on the server side.

Funny you mention "not being able to go to school" as a problem that can't be solved by the internet, because with all the knowledge that's in there, someone with time and motivation can really get a lot of the benefits of a school. Knowledge is the power to stand on the shoulders of giants and optimise your way through a tough situation. At least that's one way it could work. This isn't just about school reports.

Some times taking more time (and/or better coders) to do something 'right' vs. just hacking it together is the difference between failure and success. So from an individual startup's POV this may not be worth doing. Having enough users/success to warrant a security breach is a luxury problem when viewed from the eyes of an entrepreneur with no product.

On the other hand, collectively, startups losing everyone's credentials/data are burning the commons wrt people's willingness to use new products.

But then on hand #3, it's not as if BigCo's have a much better record, so I guess this gets chalked up to the general 'why in the world do we release software this bad?' and the general answer is 'because people have been trained to accept it'. In the same way that if the car was invented today it'd never surpass our current health&safety considerations.

So I guess my point is, software is terrible in general, and security is just one aspect of many. As long as we don't have a better way to write it, it'll keep being bad. It's not fair to expect startups to set a higher standard, when they're optimising along several other dimensions at the same time.

vitamin C hyperdosing and vitamin D supplementation are entirely different topics.

Can confirm making the exact same self-observation

Thinking about the ideas you bring up.. it seems we humans have been playing on the same level as the bacteria upto now. Greedy algorithm vs greedy algorithm. Could we perhaps use certain antibiotics that will force bacteria to evolve in a way that opens up a certain weak spot which we will then allow to spread through their population before we step in and wipe them out using this forced back-door? This simple 1-2 plan seems enough to really cause evolution a problem if humans can coordinate enough to pull it off (and a plausible plan appears, details..).

So I guess the sign to look out for is Samsung licensing the Amazon APIs?