stevekinney

I'm not sure it's that simple anymore. I don't think I would pay for any GTD/productivity app unless it also had a mobile counterpart. Not only does this mean you'd need to create a compelling app for Windows, you'd also do the same on mobile and figure out how to sync everything together.

I don't have any data on this, but I suspect the Windows community is more split between iOS, Android, and Windows Phone than the Apple community.

I do know that up until a few months ago, Luke lived in New York City—so, that may have something to with the time zone field.

That works, but it isn't obvious to the user.

Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

That's a lot of people to filibuster.

I'm tempted to read too far into the colors on the invite (especially after the 5c announcement), but I suspect that (like the 5s and 5c announcement) most of what's going to be announced has already been leaked.

I just hope they release new MacBook Pros.

This probably isn't a completely analogous situation, but didn't Tim Cook just get grilled by Congress over something similar?

Awesome sauce.

Do you think you could include either a gist with the HTML or just an example of the bar chart on the page. I would like to see what the end result looks like before I go through the minor hassle of building it myself.

I see that this one has a USB 3.0 port (unlike the HP one that was announced a few days ago). That said, it seems to me that Google is making it hard to pick one given how many similar offerings they have on the page.

My wife and I joined the New York City Teaching Fellows—a NYC-based spinoff of TFA—in 2006 at the tender age of 22. I taught in the New York City public school system for seven years and earned my masters in special education and a school building leader license along the way. Much of the article jives with my experience.

Not only is there little to no support for teachers, but it sometimes feels like because there are a few bad teachers floating around in the system, that everyone needs to be punished and inconvenienced. I like job security as much as the next person, but I was a huge advocate for getting rid of tenure as a result.

I'm still incredibly passionate about education, but suspect that being a teacher is the best way to create change. Even in my short tenure, the amount of bureaucracy had increased exponentially. When asked for advice on becoming a teacher by a college student recently, I recommended against it—which broke my own heart, because I believe that it's an incredibly important profession—just not one I would give my twenties to again knowing what I know now.

The "flipped classroom" is an instructional technique where students watch a lecture or some other instructional resource on their own and then come to class to work on problems with the teacher. This is an alternative to the traditional classroom where the teacher lectures and then the students leave to do homework.

Apple will happily sell you a MacBook Pro, if you are interested in making this trade off.

Apple has a somewhat similar tool called iAd Producer.https://developer.apple.com/iad/iadproducer/ (I believe you might need the free developer account to view the page, however.) I know you can create iBooks Author widgets and other HTML5 components that aren't necessarily ads. Even if Google's goal is the same as Apple's (i.e. creating advertisements), I think that Google's branding makes their tool a bit more interesting for someone not expressly interested in creating ads.

Max Ogden, one of the contributors to Nodeschool.io, has an excellent tutorial on getting comfortable with Javascript.

http://jsforcats.com/

On Mac OS X, Sequel Pro is similar to HeidiSQL. I use it everyday and it's pretty incredible.

My least favorite—and all too popular—comment is the classic "How [or Why] did this make the front page of HN?" I have gotten to the point where I almost expect to see it near the top of every comments thread.

In fairness, the HN guidelines are pretty clear about this one:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

For a lot of people in non-technical professions it might actually be Windows XP.

That is, of course, if we're putting aside some of the basic UNIX tools that probably haven't changed since the 1970s—which I think is fair.

This is super useful. Oauth isn't my favorite thing to work with, and I'm new to iOS. This helped on both ends.

That, like your initial assertion, isn't really true.

Hacker School doesn't take a segment of your earnings either. They try to get you a job at then end they take a recruiting commission from whoever hires you, but nothing from the student.

In fact, I don't know of a single school that does this. gSchool refunds your tuition if you don't find a job. Flatiron School refunds a portion if you take a job through one of their partners. No one, as far as I know, takes a portion of student's salary beyond the tuition.

> You don’t need Hacker School, App Academy or one of those other organizations that trades their knowledge for your hard earned skrilla.

Hacker School is free. Essentially, it's a 3-month, self-directed program but you're surrounded by dozens of like-minded individuals and some incredibly talented veterans from the industry.

I suppose this doesn't mean that it's not legit, but those cases—for lack of a better term—don't look like any kind of packaging that Apple has put out or would put out. Apple has moved towards a flat design—on a hardware level, but I guess also on a software level—with it's devices since the iPhone 4. Those boxes look more like an old iBook G4 than anything else.

Maybe I am late to the game (this comment is 35 minutes old), but this has not made the front page of Hacker News as far as I can tell.

Congratulations on learning Ruby on Rails. JavaScript is a lot of fun and super powerful these days. I'm going to try to unpack your question to the best of my ability.

As you probably already know—JavaScript is a language and the rest are all libraries and frameworks built in JavaScript (Node also has a C++ core too, but I digress). Just like Ruby is the language that Rails is built in.

The first distinction is between client-side and server-side technologies. Client-side code (e.g. Angular, Ember, Backbone, jQuery) run the in browser on the user's computer. Angular, Ember, and Backbone try—to an extent—to apply the MVC approach (like in Rails) to your JavaScript on the client in an effort to keep your code organized and DRY.

You only need one of the three. Backbone is probably the most popular. Angular, which is built by Google, also has a strong following. Ember is up and coming, but it's built by Yehuda Katz amongst others. Yehuda is a core contributor to Rails and Ember shares many of the same values (e.g. convention over configuration). In addition, it's built to play nicely with Rails. Backbone is the most minimal of the three and Angular takes an approach that expands HTML in interesting ways. It's worth dabbling in all three and seeing which one tickles your fancy. I should note that you can use any of the three with Rails. That might be a good jumping off point as you explore the world of JavaScript.

Okay, now on to the server. Node.js is a completely different beast than Rails. It's a platform, not a framework. This a bad example, but it's probably closer to Apache, Nginx, Webrick, or Mongrel than it is to Rails or Django. It basically creates a server-side JavaScript environment based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine along with some basic modules for networking and filesystem IO.

A big difference is the community. The Node community tends to favor small, modular code that can be pieced together to create bigger systems. As a result, large monolithic frameworks like Rails haven't really gain any kind of traction in the Node community. The frameworks exist, sure—Sails and Tower are two such examples, but they haven't really taken off.

The best place to start is probably Express.js, a popular but lightweight framework for Node inspired by Ruby's Sinatra. If you're not familiar with Sinatra in Ruby, play with that first (along with Ember, Backbone, or Angular) and then try Express. Express is actually a little more robust than Sinatra (for example, it includes a solution for logging—Sinatra does not).

It's also worth getting comfortable with NPM (the Node Package Manager). It's a lot like RubyGems, but with some interesting differences—for one, it keeps your modules (gems to the Rubyist) in a directory local to the project. I like to think that NPM is what RubyGems would be if RubyGems got to start over knowing it's own mistakes.

I hope this helps. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (same username) if you have any further questions.

I suspect the developers are taking the hit in the name of free publicity. I know that when Marco Arment allowed Apple and Starbucks to give away Instapaper, he didn't receive any compensation.

When I saw this link, I expected that Apple was making their apps (e.g. Pages, Keynote, Numbers) free ahead of the anniversary of their App Store. Apparently, that's not the case.

Oh yea, it's totally the socialization aspect. There is a similar study (I don't have a link off-hand, but it was something covered at length in an Introduction to Sociology textbook I had years ago) that points out that people involved in their church communities enjoyed similar benefits to the drinkers. The key here is socialization. I suspect you don't earn anymore by getting ripped by yourself in the privacy of your home every night and subsequently showing up at work with a headache and a sour attitude every morning.

I started getting comfortable with Node as a sort of New Year's Resolution and, I have to say, one of my favorite parts has been the helpfulness and openness of the Node community.

A few months ago, I pinged Isaac on Twitter for advice on where to go next once you had a rudimentary understanding of how Node works. He encouraged me to dig into Node core and also to explore the source for NPM and libuv. I suggested that I was pretty sure that stuff was a bit over my head.

Isaac replied: "The best way to get strong is to lift heavy things."

That's a good point. There was a study back in 2006[1] that showed that people who drank made more money (about 10-14%) at their jobs than non-drinkers and social drinkers. So, it can me argued that drinking may actually help the economy as a whole, even if hangovers themselves cause a short term loss in productivity.

[1]: http://reason.org/news/show/127594.html

I'll begin with the standard disclaimer that I'm a bit out of touch with the Perl community (but that won't stop me from commenting). Technically, this has been done before with the abandonment of ECMAScript 4 in favor of skipping from ECMAScript 3 to ECMAScript 5.

As a New York City public school teacher, I am incredibly excited about Clever. When I started working at my current school, we had an "inquiry team", whose job it was to download spreadsheets from the myriad of different services and databases used by the Department of Education (as well as those adopted by my school in addition). The team would then go through the downloaded spreadsheets and try to make sense of the data by copying and pasting columns from one sheet to the other. The team consisted of about 5 teachers who spent hours of their own time doing this.

I wrote some database software that took a lot of the hurt out of the process. Pop in the data in CSV format and it crunches all of the numbers and connects all the dots. That said, the whole workflow is still a bit of a pain. Most of the data is locked up in silos lacking any sort of API, but sporting a user interface that compels a little piece of my soul to shrivel up every time I have to log in and download the CSVs. Additionally, I have to bother the school support staff because I don't even have access to some of the data. Each different data source requires me to write a different parser. In the mean time, I still have to plan lessons and teach kids.

I've kicked the tires on the Clever API and it's fantastic for my purposes. They've done some incredibly cool stuff to make it easy to access data I've previously struggled to get my hands on. I'm really excited about the work they're doing and super-excited for more partners to come on board and use their API. It's going to change the way we deal with student data and ultimately get quicker information out to our teachers so that they can make better instructional decisions for our students.