hipsters_unite

Nice to see that you've changed the hovers to being the HN grey, I think I said on the first one that it was too 'Black text on white' and this time your subtle improvements have made a big difference to legibility so far as I'm concerned. Well done!

I have no idea how much time I lost to playing EV Nova as a teenager... I hope they don't fold after all this.

The problem is that if you go for a clean (read: white-heavy) design, then you end up with black text on white background. I prefer the classic HN purely because it is (to me) a bit milder on the eye. Kudos for trying though.

Wow, the tone of this article is way off. Potentially decent point about online revenue obscured by a massive superiority complex.

I guess they figure it's better to be safe than sorry? With the patchiness of laws viz., the internet, can't blame them.

My dad worked his way up (several companies) from being an engineer to a technical manager and most of his success was from repeating 'keep it simple' at key junctures, so far as I can tell.

That right there is the problem with Treehouse vs. Lynda - Lynda tends to have a decent chapter on setup, installation and gotchas... but to be honest, paper books have weaned me off Treehouse. I think their front-end stuff was great, but I can't help but feel that their back-end (read: Ruby/Rails) content was lacking.

> "If anything, low retention is a good thing insofar as it means that the courses are demanding and people who aren't dedicated trickle out."

This. You need gumption to succeed in a traditional university course so surely the same will apply to a MOOC with adequately difficult content?

This.

Whenever I've hit challenges when learning to set up things (like recently making the move from Windows -> Linux and having to start from scratch with my dev environment) I've learned the most. Also, it teaches you that you've got the determination to succeed, which at some point you will need to be an effective programmer.

Lynda.com and Treehouse both do those, but ultimately for me Google searches and blog tutorials generally win out (especially for Linux configuration).

Yeah, me too. I was like 'but Rdio is great!'

Yeah, I guess in tech we're lucky enough to be able to say check somebody's GitHub and see if they actually can write code...

I think a potential employer would be able to sniff out somebody unqualified pretty quickly - but at least taking and completing the course shows a certain determination... maybe that's what needs acknowledging instead.

Exactly. I've done some from Udacity and not cheated (what would be the point in taking it otherwise?), but though they were hard enough and I felt a sense of accomplishment, I don't think I deserve actual credit. It's on my CV, but in the 'miscellaneous' section, not where my actual qualifications are - exactly where (I imagine) I'd put a class that I audited, US-style.

Yeah, if I understand correctly it's going to be a version of Ubuntu...

Sounds like it. I used to have quite vague ideas of colours and shapes when hearing sounds but years of listening to music gave it more structure. Though I do also get it with days, a little bit with hours in the day and months in the year... though that's another story :)

There's a few good Alastair Reynolds short stories where characters have a Glass-like assistant called an 'Aide Memoire' which they use to process the amount of information they get due to networks. A good side effect is also that as the characters age they still have recall of the facts stored.

Even if Glass isn't the right implementation, I love the fact that Google are trying to make something Minority Report-level wacky a mainstream consumer item.

Really like the second comment as a tl;dr of the article - "That's the exact paradox of starting your own business. If it works, you end up running a business instead of doing whatever it was you started the business to do."

Fair play to Charles Stross for just wanting to write.

Totally agree. Tried a few other things before it and so few get the balance of explaining enough 'why' to make a task not arbitrary, while also keeping you grounded in the practical stuff you actually need to know.

I realised this about a year ago - I was working a day job, writing at night and trying to find a job in that industry... one day I started coding instead. I still write, but it's just another part of my income.

Exactly - the flexibility of Ruby still means it's going to do things that align with its core strengths better. No language is one-size-fits-all anyway.

This is awesome. Was thinking the last few days that I wanted to switch back to FF from Chrome but that the dev tools were the only thing keeping me around. Nice work!

This is great! I've been using HW2 screens as backgrounds for my computers since I was a teenager... still hasn't been bettered.

Or you can take natural law thinkers like Grotius - in essence, their thinking derived from religion thus: you are owned by God -> you cannot kill yourself -> in times of hardship (an in extremis condition) you must take what you need in order to live. Very interesting, as he also defined property in terms of his religious beliefs...

I guess what I'm getting at is either you have the people breaking into the grain stores (in Grotius' day, anyway) or you provide some means of subsistence.

'SEO' as it is sold to clients by SEO companies is packaged as another form of advertising, nothing more. It's an industry that thrives on subverting the discourse on search keywords to sell stuff.

The biggest problem with online ads is it's yet another sphere of influence which advertising is taking over and colonising with its discursive values (he said, idealistically). If I can click a magic button and have ONE place in my life with no ads, then why not make that the internet?

FWIW, I'm a semi-pro music journalist (try making money doing that these days), and I think online publishing is crying out for a non-intrusive way of monetizing that doesn't involve advertising.

"If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo."

This describes every bad job I've ever had. You do a great job, nobody cares, you do a mediocre job, you feel bad. Lose lose.

> "You can do both, and if possible, you should." I've also had my own business for about three years. I'd agree that you can learn a lot, but it's very different from what you can learn in an internship.

For instance, running a record label I've learned how to do things on literally zero budget, network like crazy and the stubbornness and determination involved is probably the only reason I've ultimately been able to learn how to program.

That said, I did a non-technical internship at Mixcloud a couple of years ago and the exposure to the environment as well as pieces of advice and experience have repeatedly been useful to me since... plus it was probably the first step on the road to learning to code as well.

All that considered, I have no idea why you'd see it as an 'all or nothing' thing - I once released two EPs while I was interning at NME... that's what evenings are for.

If there's a place for co-operative energy, there's a place for co-operative ISPs... the idealist in me really wants to see that.