ilovecomputers

What the hell? I never knew they had a Q&A site. Their Coda help page told me to ask question on their Google Group.

> I see this misconception time and time again, especially among smart people who like to reduce the human body to merely a physical machine, often ignoring the whole biology thing.

Like the people behind Soylent?

This is exactly why Google' "Made with Code" campaign is so good: https://www.madewithcode.com/

Look at the message, it is about how computers are fun and empowering. Even with this general message, they still market to girls by simply showing how women and girls are involved with coding. The target of the campaign is girls, but the message is universal that girls don't feel like outsiders and even boys can tag along.

That strategy lead to quite the run-on sentence. You have much work ahead of you friend from that appearance alone.

That bias came from the necessity that engineering work is mostly invisible and you can't completely generalize every concept to fit every project. You need to put in extra work to visualize a graphic that would respond to the state of the system and the concepts you are visualizing might only be relevant to the project at hand. Despite these challenges, when we can visualize certain general concepts, which apply to a wide group of systems, but engineers do a good enough job and rarely are visual designers or UX experts involved. At that point its a cultural issue and that's why I'm grateful Bret Victor is around to advocate better designed tools for engineers.

That's why the team behind the Paper app were smart to make it a separate app instead of a redesign. They know the consistent negative user reaction when facebook redesigns.

The ones who create and like the "IF THIS PAGE GETS 500K LIKES, FACEBOOK WILL CHANGE BACK THE NEWS FEED" page.

"This is a strange one to me and can indeed be a sticky situation. I am NOT judging people who use Firefox, work at Mozilla, or even support Brendan’s right to his opinions. It’s fine that you think I shouldn’t judge his opinion. (This is getting confusing). However, this particular subject is not one that is negotiable to us. We are personally affected by his actions.

It’s not his belief that hurts us. It’s that he actively donated to a cause that directly negatively affected us, personally. It’s not abstract. It’s not a witch hunt. He’s certainly allowed to have his opinion, of course, but I’m allowed to judge his actions of supporting the cause financially.

Actions have consequences."

There you go, sums it up right there. Some past actions are hard to overlook when you're personally affected by it. However you view the news of Brendan Eich's new CEO position and people's opinions of that, you can't ignore the human element of his insignificant (financially) but significant (philosophically) prop 8 contribution and how people take it personally.

Edit: Adding onto my thought of how I view the human element in this story: we all try to be rational, but I bet you everyone of us throw that away for a gut feeling we have of someone. If you don't like someone, no amount of reason will make that go away. That feeling spreads to what they're associated with. In retrospect, we reason our gut feeling and we either turn out right or wrong. I understand hcatlin's decision in that sense since I have felt that way before.

You're missing the point. From this story alone, it seems the company is run by individuals who never mentally developed out of high school. Those incidents you mentioned are merely a red flag of the immaturity of some of these people. Awkwardly hitting on an employee to a point of discomfort, messing with someone's work cause they turned you down to a date, creepily staring at an employee in the gym; you should at least know well into your 20s and 30s that is inappropriate behavior at a workplace.

I would agree in that I wouldn't call this an instance of industry-wide sexism. The root of the problem is the immaturity at the leadership level of this company. If the leadership is as immature as this story is making it out to be, than these sexist incidents wouldn't have happened. Still, I shall reserve my judgment on GitHub until I hear more sides to this story.

Even experienced developers don't want to wad through unnecessary crap when they first get started with a project ;)

Care to share how you use Require with Angular? I know it requires you (hehe) to manually bootstrap Angular.

> with any shared dependencies lower down in the directory structure

Heh, I'm just imagining code bubble up :P

Though that's definitely a wrong way to think of it since it's a call tree, but it always bugged me that in JS, you'd have to download dependency code you might not use (hence important code "bubbles up"). That's why I'm intrigued to try Dart for it's "tree-shaking" compiler that removes unused code from dependent libraries.

The Angular Seed's way of organizing a project does not scale well as it organizes javascript files by type instead of grouping the types into different modules [1]. My team has found it successful, especially among new devs, to organize our controllers/services/whatevers in terms of features or areas of concern. This way a new programmer will find the part of the web app she only needs to worry about and ignore the rest. Its a great way of establishing clarity and conforming your code base to the way programmers think about your project.

Another gripe I must bring up with Angular is the lack of proper tools. Batarang has not updated for 7 months and it leaves so much to be desired for debugging with the Angular framework (especially when viewing bindings). Irregardless, these small pains I feel toward Angular are worth trading in the greater pain I feel from Vanilla/Jquery JS development.

[1] http://cliffmeyers.com/blog/2013/4/21/code-organization-angu...

Polycode looks remarkable! It's like Unity3D for creative coders.

Just when you think you've found all the environments for creative coding, you discover new ones and wonder who are these people outside of my clique who use them?

Except it is turning into that, like r/cringe.

r/tumblrinaction was great in pointing out the ridiculous beliefs and lengths others would go to in the name of "social justice." However, I've seen a surge in activity of making fun of overweight people[1] and even the mods breaking rule one[2]. I'm not surprised by these activities because I expect such group mentality to bring about the same kind of people that social justice warriors did. People make a mockery of "others," it's human nature.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/1ekf0f/thin_... [2]http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/comments/1eefjc/its_o...

> Are you implying that these panelists prefer pageviews over progress? If not, who are the boogeymen you are invoking here?

My guess it was a stab against Gawker Media?

I'm a student, with afternoon and evening classes. I don't have these freedom and perks. If anything, I look forward to getting a job so I can stop worrying about studying for a test.

Curses, I wish I knew about this when writing up the inventory to our budget. Here's their inventory: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AtIlZyLn99e6dGR...

Leave it up to MIT to push Maker culture. If you're a student there, check out their Hobby Shop: http://studentlife.mit.edu/hobbyshop

Well those innovations were all thanks to AT&Ts monopoly status where they didn't have to worry about quarterly reports: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-...

Also Unix was a rogue project because Bell Labs didn't want to fund an OS project after a previous one failed: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birt...

Is this based on Scratch? http://scratch.mit.edu/

The article states "A small amount of programming concepts had to be taught at the start and some single-concept examples are given, but the chapter always centers around a complete game."

But besides, getting to the point of premature successes:

In a way, you need a premature sense of accomplishment to keep a person motivated. Plus, if they ever come across the difficult portions of programming, that motivation might get them to go through the difficulty.

To me, the difficulty in programming is solving a problem using a lot of the difference concepts that make it up, but that's true with any profession and you can't get those concepts in your head unless you learn it one at a time.

What I don't want to see anymore is programming instructors teaching students a lot of concepts at the same time because to them that's the difficult way they learned and the "right" way to learn. That's just not a proper way to learn, you need to teach one concept at a time and if that means premature sense of accomplishment, so be it in the short term.

The article did make a very generalized statement that "nobody wants to learn programming, they want to learn how to make programs" when your curriculum is an exception. With your rhetoric, you were able to get people to learn by trotting on through concepts in their barest form.

Fundamentally, you're both teaching by example and the code is simple, so that the results have a clear correlation to it.

It seems to be an aesthetic choice as to whether you teach concepts outright and make it communicable with proper rhetoric or illustrate concepts by highlighting their use in a simple application. It's like two guitar instructors. One stresses etudes and practices alongside songs and another stresses songs alongside etudes and practices. I can't see either way hurting a student. Whatever the choice, you're packaging this information in a way that makes it digestible to those who want to learn how to program (either the way of rhetoric or application).

I would like to say this though, at least you guys are not teaching Java by programming within the Eclipse IDE, which isn't ment for beginners.

I've programmed an Atmel microcontroller from scratch. It wasn't fun adding all those components together just to bootstrap myself. Luckily I messed with Arduinos before, so at least I knew what I was doing and was getting to barebones of embedded systems.

Still, I would prefer to develop with the Arduino. It's just, such a fun way to get started with microcontrollers.

I tutored a friend who was in those OOP, Java, Intro to CS class. It was her second class of the series and she was so overwhelmed by all this stuff that was made for professional software engineers, that she just dropped that class. It wasn't mainly the courses fault that she left, she also forgot how to conjure up loops and how to use them, but knowing the professor she took last quarter (he likes to weed out people by making the class difficult) I can't really blame her for not having the enthusiasm to retain such information. I was in her shoes before, so I was very familiar with the "blank page" syndrom she was going through.

This "sink and swim" teaching mentality has to go. It seems like from this thread and the article that we are getting a better idea of how people like to learn programming. Let us actually put effort into teaching this way.

As someone who went through Intro to CS courses. I must say that including the object oriented paradigm of Java in an intro class really confused me for a good three years. It wasn't until I learned how data was organized and executed inside a computer that it all became clear to me what programming really consisted of.

This tool is wonderful. It visualizes the inner workings of a computer very well and how it translates to code. I hope this teaching tool is used on students after they've learned some basic programming concepts and syntax.

I wish this service would allow me to write my own personal message instead of appending it. The provided text, which I cannot change, has a line that I feel is too dramatic for the rhetoric I'm trying to keep: "provide cover for totalitarian regimes that want to undermine Internet freedom abroad."

Sure, that could happen eventually, but right now I want to express the immediate and probable effects of the bill that matters most to me (copyright holders bypassing due process to block online content).

So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?

Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w

There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/

Push Pop's first publication did have a novel interface, but it was fundamentally no different than what we are used to. It was a book with other forms of media embedded within it.

I can get behind Inkling being revolutionary because it seems to me (focusing on their Social Learning feature) that it is closer to Vannevar Bush's vision of the memex. It is like the memex[1] in that it is taking advantage of the interactivity and social capabilities of current tech to create an interface that better matches the way we learn. The way we learn indirectly from others via books (where information is frozen and up to you to learn from it) and the way we directly learn from each other (mainly communicating about a topic in a conversational manner).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

You obviously aren't aware of their plans with the new office: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bxuVyoeXcVk/ThSWd0Svi7I/AAAAAAAAAD...

I think the Paul Graham statue will tie the room together perfectly.