jsiarto

Good point. I just checked our company's web analytics and IE makes up about 2% of web traffic. So it's not dead yet, but I guess you can make a case for not supporting it.

I thought CSS variables were still not fully supported enough to use in production. I know you can use a polyfill, but that seems to detract from the minimalist approach of these basic CSS frameworks: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables

Not exactly the same--but NASA has a pretty cool dashboard for the Deep Space Network: http://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html

Hey very cool! I work as a contractor within the NASA Earthdata team and I'm always finding interesting things like this as I learn more about the program. NASA is a great steward of what I think is some of the most important data we have about our planet. Much of it is publicly available, but not many people know about it.

If you guys like this NOAA app, you'll probably like NASA Worldview too: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/

It's more focused on Earth sensing data products, but it has great satellite imagery and overlays.

I'm sitting here reading this after spending the last two days at Goddard Space Flight Center in MD and I can pretty much assure you that the engineering talent there would run circles around the folks building social apps in the Bay Area. Have to agree with @drpancake here, this attitude is the primary reason I stay away from SF.

l9.

Tables are for tabular data--designing with HTML/CSS isn't perfect, but using tables for layout is an even less-elegant solution. It leads to a markup soup of nested tags and tables and difficult-to-maintain codebase. Good design and good markup go hand-in-hand and often you need to strike a balance between flashy visual design and solid underlying structure. This is also why visual designers should understand how their designs get implemented in HTML and CSS--it will create a restraint and limit the amount of "hacks" you have to do to make a design work.

Also remember that not everyone views the web in a browser. Having well structured markup helps those that use screen readers or alternate methods of browsing the web.

This. If your company clears one million in yearly sales and spends $980,000 to make that happen--you are running a $20,000 per year company. There is nothing wrong with this, but I hate when these metrics get thrown around without context. There are $1M companies that make less profit than a hot dog cart (which subsequently, in the right location is a damn good business).

I agree completely, but I also teach non-CS students mostly in design. If version control is a foreign concept to some CS students, it's not even on the radar of most of my design group.

This is the case in the classes I teach. We use Git as the primary vehicle for submitting assignments and tracking work. I usually spend the first week introducing students to the Linux shell and interacting with Git and Github.

I agree that there are more important concepts that need to be covered in freshman/intro level CS courses, but some of the graduates I was meeting and interviewing had not even heard of version control or source code management, let alone spent any time collaborating with a team of developers. They were not getting any exposure to it at any level within their program. It didn't even seem like something they had been introduced to. IMO, source control management should be as essential as ssh-ing into a remote server or running/compiling a program in the shell.

In the US -- there is no "minimum amount when authorities check bank accounts" -- they can't legally do that. You are required to report all income to the IRS regardless of source and it's generally not a good idea to mix personal and business accounts. An LLC, EIN and bank account take about 1 hours worth of paperwork and you're generally set to start exploring the business side of an idea.

Former student pilot here: you literally spend countless hours on "coordinated turns" which involve proper use of both roll and yaw controls (ailerons and rudder). It's much more difficult to do it properly than most people think.

Also, I would describe landing a small plane--and I've heard others describe it this way--as a "controlled crash." You are basically stalling the thing on top of the runway.

Every time I see posts like this, I come back to warpspire's "Dumb Software:" http://warpspire.com/posts/dumb-software/

"But wait until you see the light! Software today is intelligent! Asynchronous front ends generated from esoteric scripting languages running on clusters of distributed virtual machines around the globe! Death to repetition! It’s more productive! It’s scalable! It’s fault tolerant! I followed the light and it only ended in darkness."

I also don't understand comments like "we can make drastic changes in the UI without any change on the backend"

In Wordpress or a Rails App, I can change the entire UI without having to touch any "backend" code (controllers, models, functions, etc). Am I missing something here?

This. I just started contracting with a company full of Rails developers. They expect me to be able to implement my designs within the Rails ecosystem and also expect that I generally understand how to function within a Rails development group.

I also teach this to my web design students. We start every semester learning basics in the command line and how to use Git/Github to collaborate with other people in a dev team. They are required to turn in all their assignments via Git pushes. You will never be designing in a vacuum and the ability to seamlessly integrate into whatever dev environment is already established at a company is a huge selling point for new grads looking for a job.

This again? This debate surfaces every other month and the arguments are always the same. Basically, it all comes down to the job and the person. In big organizations, sometimes designers can get away with only being Photoshop people. In smaller firms, designers have to be more flexible and should be expected to implement their own designs.

Also, when did HTML and CSS become "code?" These are markup and style languages and are the very basic building block of the web. If you design for the web, you should be able to implement those designs in HTML and CSS. I wouldn't, however, expect that same designer to build out the Rails backend.

I live in Michigan and wife's cousin's husband (still with me here?) was the first in Michigan to get a Model S. I've had the privilege to ride in it and it's an amazing piece of engineering. No detail was overlooked and I truly felt like I was riding in the future.

Everything from the LCD center panel to the door handles popping out when you get close to them--just fucking amazing. I'm a huge supporter of Tesla and everything Musk is doing--crossing my fingers that they can stay viable.

Completely agree--we always start our analysis with basic questions the client wants answered. I also appreciate how in-depth your piece was--we need more research and case studies like this. If I have to listen to one more social monitoring tool salesperson tell me how amazing their sentiment analysis is without ever showing concrete examples and results...

This is a very interesting study--nice work! Our company does social research for all types of companies and we've found most automated sentiment analysis to be subpar (at best, 60% accurate). The problem with just looking at words is that there is no context of the whole Tweet and computers are generally bad at picking up sarcasm, innuendo and turns of phrase that may contain negative words in a positive manner (toward the brand or company).

I realize that this isn't the key focus of your paper, but we've found that sampling and human analysis/tagging is far more accurate at judging the sentiment around a brand, company or topic.

Then draw your wireframes on paper... I do most initial design wireframes in a notebook anyway--it's faster, easy to make changes and serves the same purpose. I believe they call this "paper prototyping" and I'll take that over wireframing apps any day.

Well for one, in some parts of the country residential solar means a $0/mo electric bills and in somes cases you spin the meter in reverse and build a credit. The panels themselves are maintenance-free, have 20-30 year warranties and (personally) just look plain cool.

I have a family member who has a large array on his roof and he runs his entire house and charges his Tesla all off the grid. He's still connected, but in most cases he runs a $0 bill.

Great comments above on the "sorting" that seems to be happening in America. Personally, these Silicon-X names are dumb. I especially dislike New York being called "Silicon Alley" as there aren't really any alleys in NYC (this is why the trash is put on the street). Chicago, however, has alley ways and so that name might be more fitting for the windy city.

I am currently visiting/working in NYC and staying on the Lower East Side. Seriously, everyone here dresses like that--this hipster thing goes way deeper than I could have imagined...

"Besides, getting in Y Combinator is easy: just be wicked smart, create a beautiful product, get millions of users, and build a revenue stream that grows 20% each month."

If your company's revenue stream is growing 20% each month on the backs of millions of users, why are you applying to Y-Combinator?

No, I don't mean minify--I mean the SASS has to be run through a preprocessor before you have usable CSS. If I write the CSS, I instantly have usable CSS. I like using minimal tools for web design--browser and text editor. I don't want things I have to compile before I can see them in the browser.

I also think the mixins and nesting are overstated in terms of increasing the efficiency of designing sites with CSS. I am not typically declaring colors 20 times, or doing nesting so deep that it becomes confusing.

The benefits don't outweigh downsides of dealing with SASS files and preprocessors.

I guess the mixins and nesting are nice, but who the hell wants to compile their CSS before it goes live. Good font end devs know how to organize their own stylesheets and reduce duplication. Some things don't need the engineering/CS treatment. Some times it's ok to have to declare #fff more than once...

Ouch--the thought of that debt is just staggering. That is currently more than my mortgage and student loan combined. BU is a great school--not for $200K though. I can't image that there are that many degrees in which $200K is worth it...

While obviously stories like this work out for some people--I think the general advice of dropping out of college to start a startup is a very bad idea. First, maybe 5% of people are driven/motivated enough to actually have a chance of making that decision work out. Second, odds are your startup will fail and you may need to fall back on that degree to get a new job.

I would also argue that there are missed opportunities by leaving school early. Some of my best professional relationships started at Michigan State and they continue to help me build my career.

Also, $200K+ in student loan debt? Where the hell was he going?

EDIT: Also, why not just start the damn company while you're still in school? I'm sorry, but I had more free time in college than I can remember and having a side project was not a huge deal. No different than when people start their business on the side while still maintaining their 9-5.

EDIT 2: Full disclosure: I work for MSU as an adjunct so I have a strong financial interest in people getting their degrees (especially in STEM fields!).

Not to burst anyone's bubble here but this is a science experiment that people have been doing for a long time. I made one of these in middle school 15 years ago out of the same stuff (plywood, leaf blower, tarp material).

Cool project, great to do with kids--but hardly an innovative hack-a-thon project.

http://amasci.com/amateur/hovercft.html