nuclearsandwich

Neither have we. We plan to keep at it though.

Just a quick note. Avoid w3schools[0]. The Mozilla Developer Network docs[1] look much nicer and are far more accurate.

[0]: http://w3fools.com [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML

If you want to do visual programming, check out the Processing languange (http://processing.org) as well as Hackety-Hack (http://hackety-hack.com), which is a Ruby Environment for kids of any age to learn how to program.

Hackety-Hack.com also has a StackOverflow-like Question/Answer page for people new to programming to get assistance.

Programming is fun and rewarding, but it's also one of the most challenging mental exercises you can submit yourself to. Be prepared to feel discouraged once and a while but don't let it sink in. Anyone with drive can learn to program!

I like aafire and sl a lot.

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=12473

One of the things Whisper had was a method of encrypting SMS messages so they still fit in an SMS message, perhaps Twitter is hoping to take advantage of that?

As someone who teaches beginning Ruby and Rails workshops. I often find the limiting factor in getting to where students want to go is comfort with Ruby itself, Rails automates so many of the early details that knowing a little bit more about what Ruby is doing can be phenomenally enabling.

By all means learn both at once, but stay just a little ahead in your Ruby skills.

The Ruby Koans is great for solidifying Ruby concepts glossed over in Rails.

http://rubykoans.com

I agree with all these. I would however recommend getting Agile Web Development With Rails directly from Pragmatic Press as you can be certain you're using the most up-to-date edition (4th with Rails 3.1) and can purchase solely the ebook if you want to save some money and/or trees.

http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...

- Standing station (technically sit-stand but I never sit). - Imprint Runner floor mat - Macbook Pro 8GB, 2.5GHz Core i7, SSD - 25inch Asus Monitor - Das Keyboard Ultimate (recently switch to silent after complaints from coworkers) - Logitech G5 Gaming Mouse (a good mouse is a weighted mouse) - Reasonably crappy Sennheiser headphones - Vim and iTerm in full screen, occasionally switch to X/XMonad+urxvt when I start missing proper window managers.

I recognized your buildout and thought "huh, looks like JFB... oh it is JFB."

It's constant, almost everyone experiences it. Best thing to do is look at some really old code you wrote and realize how far you've come. After that, write more code, read more code, write more code. Programmers all want to be better, this drive helps us become so, but it also drastically diminishes our ability to be content with our current situation. If you really want to see how far you've come. Find someone who reminds you of yourself and mentor them. It's much easier to perceive change in others than change in ourselves. Watching mentees progress reminds you of when you underwent the very same realization and helps you become more aware of liminal points in your programming journey.

Network Issues

Issue: We are currently investigating network issues with our upstream provider.

Aug 09, 2011 – 2:37 UTC – less than a minute ago

Anyone else getting "Coupon agileweek" has expired?

I use it as the bootstrap step for Homebrew and RVM and other things that depend on GCC then I ignore it.

Switch to Linux, use a tiling WM, download the first four seasons of IT Crowd. Watch them in a 1 inch floating screen while doing your job. Wait for the laugh from boss's office. Or is it only sound... yeah just quit and work somewhere awesomer.

http://redcareditor.com is a free and open source TextMate-like editor and worth checking out. If you really want TextMate specifically I would appeal to the developer themself. Many of us know how rough tight financial situations are but the amount of free (in speech and beer) editors out there makes piracy nothing but crass.

Awesome. Thanks for that. I've always enjoyed the link between Platonic forms and object Classes.

ahhhphilosophy.jpg

You're absolutely right, I spent most of the past three years writing Java, C++, C, and C# and they all use semicolons and I certainly forgot about them whilst coding in those langs. But the penalty is in transitioning between languages that use or don't use those features. When I'm writing in C and the like, I tend to stick within that language. But with JavaScript and Ruby, I do a lot more context switching back and forth. Anything I can do to reduce the penalty of moving between one and the other is worth doing in my opinion. Especially when it doesn't affect the final result.

thanks Jeremy, do you mind if I insert your comment in the main body of my post?

I am still a student of computer science and in my university's Java encapsulated worldview they've not discussed the finer points of non class-based OOP. I will do more research on the subject.

I'm still using Javascript at the end of the day, I'm just doing so via an interface that I find more readable and writeable. I don't see it as much different than letting a minifier optimize my javascript rather than writing it that way by hand.

I see your point. Punctuation is a vector for meaning and clarity but is Javascript's syntax any more informative than Coffeescript's? It isn't in my observation. It certainly offers more flexibility in style, but why would you need it? I can't conceive of a reason besides minification.

Your comparison with novels I think is a bit skewed. Literature has a whole different set of readability enhancements such as fully justified text, variable-width fonts, as well as margins and padding. Punctuation in English has been evolving for centuries as people settle on the minimum needed to convey the full meaning as unambiguously as possible. But English also has many many more sets of valid (as well as various definitions of valid) constructs than Javascript does and thus may require a more robus set of punctuation.

I'm working on it. I did mention that I'm learning Javascript at the same time. I should add Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts to my coffeescript resources list. Can you link me to an article explaining hasOwnProperty?

Yeah, you've hit on what really appeals to me about those three and others like them. They shift focus to what's really important in each case.

In HTML I want to focus on document structure, not closing my tags. In CSS I want to focus on style and visual consistency, not nesting. In Javascript I want to focus on application behavior, not semicolons.

Someone should write an arc interpreter and call it tan so we can have arctan. Arctan? Arctangent? The inverse of the tangent function. Hu- hullo? Is this thing on or what?

They need to unify design and behavior. It looks cleaner, there's less clutter and the things I use have been brought to the forefront.

Check out Noisebridge, a primarily hardware oriented hackerspace. The general fantasticness of whoever is there when you show up will blow your mind.

TryRuby.org and Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby are good foundations for Ruby. Then RailsForZombies.com is a completely browser based interactive tutorial for Ruby on Rails, from there I too would recommend the Rails Tutorial which just got a Rails 3.1 Chapter today.

self reply. Did HN ever parse markdown or am I delusional?

Reason #1 to root and jailbreak anything: If you can't open it then you don't really own it. You have to make things yours or companies will continue to lease you their products for outrageous sums of money. So do it for justice.

Plus all the freaking SSH clients in the app store cost money. I've never seen a platform with such an inverted price vs. value scheme. All of the amazing new innovative software that I would be more than willing to pay for such as Aweditorium and Flipboard is free but all of the stuff I would consider basic utilities like SSH/IM/IRC clients are $2-$5 and definitely not so special as to deserve that price tag. There's a distinct lack of free (as in speech) software on iOS unless you jailbreak.

I use [Archlinux][Arch] everywhere on production servers at work and at home. [Arch]:http://archlinux.org At work we use Arch for the following reasons * It's simple. Using Arch is dead easy compared to Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware (my old favorite). * It's vanilla. Arch doesn't mess with upstream code, it contributes to upstream. * It's current. Arch has the freshest packages. Partly because of it's vanilla policy. As a startup using the latest tech it's quite foolish to use a distro that bundles old (Admittedly proven) versions of our tools. * It's stable (enough). This one is the most disputed but if you pay attention when you `pacman -Syu` it's pretty tough to break a system. I'm running the testing repo on my home workstation and laptop because core is too boring.

__Some reasons not to use Arch__ * You have to pay attention. You can't just forget about it for long periods of time. * It is currently susceptible to (theoretical) man-in-the-middle attacks on mirror sites. To get around this you could use the Arch Build System (Like Gentoo or ports) and build everything you need from source then use that machine as a local mirror. So if total security is a must just use Gentoo. * It moves fast. Don't expect to be running Postgresql 8.4 on here it or anything that isn't the latest release. Major upgrades are announced so everyone sees them but there's no support cycle for old releases. Upgrading individual packages rather than the whole system for long periods of time is haphazard and not sustainable. * They're already using Py3k as `/usr/bin/python`. This is part of moving fast but I put it here because it's exceptionally important and upset a lot of Python folks.

Sometime in the coming months I am actually preparing a longer form version of this for my blog. I'll naturally post that to HN.

To each's own. But you will pry my ThinkPad running Archlinux from my cold dead hands and the first eight of you to try will be bludgeoned to death with it. The ninth will have a perfectly functional, if cracked, laptop.