tomek_zemla

It's an interesting question that has already been playing out for a while in visual arts. Artists who create images by writing computer programs (computational/generative arts and design) are often looked down upon in comparison with traditional painters for example. Photographers were also accused of not being artists for many years until general public warmed up to photography and 'important' museums accepted them. Because... it was a machine that took pictures.

Here are some resources I found useful (on top of Tufte):

1. Work of Alberto Cairo: http://www.thefunctionalart.com. 2. Searching Pintrest for UI/UX, dashboard, information design related keywords. 3. Work of Ben Fry and Fathom: http://fathom.info. 4. Work of Georgia Lupi and Accurat: http://giorgialupi.net and http://www.accurat.it. 5. Infosthetics Blog: http://infosthetics.com. 6. Work of Gregor Aisch from New York Times: http://driven-by-data.net 7. Information Graphics book from Taschen: http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/design/all/04984/f...

The last one is a huge brick with many interesting and/or beautiful examples and it also exists as iBook for about $10!

The above resources contain another set of links to great many sources of inspiration...

Yes, it always baffled me, too! Especially because I have been studying from his books and they are exceptional both in terms of visual design and content!

Exactly. It would be interesting to hear from some Google employees here, both men and women, about their good or bad sexism related experiences at the company.

Here is an idea for workaround. Have two passwords. One normal, the other one wipes out the phone. Back up your device to the cloud before you travel. Hand it in with a good smile and bad password...

Actually majority of people searched going through borders turn out to be perfectly innocent... Which means that if the law does allow officers to search everybody's personal information on their electronic devices they can browse at will my personal communication every time I cross the border.

One good thing about this story is that electronic device searches on Canadian borders are somewhat in the legal grey zone and this will force the courts to clarify the rules. And... allow public to voice their approval or disapproval of this ongoing practice.

Right... Maybe the guy has dark skin?

Another option would be to have more options to display addition development related information in side columns. Code statistics, terminal window, program source code visualization, live browser output for Web coding and such...

Absolutely! I would gladly contribute to a Kickstarter fund to pay for your efforts. I am sure I am not the only one...

This is awesome. Congratulations! It should be thrown in the face of the textbook publishing industry that still charges $100+ dollars for yearly reprints of paper bricks.

This is what the textbooks should be in the 21st century! Outstanding work and hopefully it will inspire new generation of academics to take the outdated textbook publishing monopolies out of the loop in the future.

I feel the same... Forcing me to de facto advertise the product before I had a chance to even read the sample puts into question the quality the content I would find inside the book. My steps were the following. I bookmarked the book. I learnt I would need to endorse it to peek into the sample. I didn't. I removed the bookmark of the book from my collection.

From HN Submission Guidelines: 'Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.' https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Actually the number does not surprise me, but the source would be great. My informal observations show that great number of knowledge workers freelance on the side of their day jobs, so I suspect that the number of full-time freelancers and part-time freelancers is different.

Also, the studies might indicated breakdown by profession and how it changed over time... Programmers, graphic designers, writers, etc.

Learnt recently that origins of the word 'technologist' are from Greek 'tekhne' which is art/craft...

Wouldn't it be more interesting if it showed some sort of information about the source code? For example the edits over time similar to this project: http://www.bewitched.com/historyflow.html

It all depends on the country. In Canada you can register as self employed where the government gives you special tax numbers (one federal and one provincial). You use them to add tax charge on the service and report the money back to government. It's very simple bit of paperwork and it does not require any money. The registration itself takes an hour of filling up the forms.

At this point you are a registered freelancer and can run one person business, no employees, but you could have subcontractors. There is also no company, no .Inc.

You can go one step farther and register a company where you do establish legal entity with the .Inc attached to it. For simplicity you get the number/name and you can associate other branding name or names to make it marketing sexy. It's also rather simple, takes another hour and costs about $250 for starters, although I believe there are some variations where incorporation costs a bit more, but still a few hundred dollars.

Once you are incorporated the accounting becomes slightly more complicated. While being a registered freelancer you can pretty much do your own number adding for taxes, having the company means us are better of hiring part-time accountant to deal with the paperwork.

A lot of people in the technology/design/multimedia fields work as registered freelancers because there is no limit to income related to it, paperwork is simple and in Canada there is not culture of businesses suing each other all the time like in the US. So, there is no need to have separate legal entity to protect yourself. It's very convenient and many small businesses in the first year or two of existence run as a freelancer who hires other freelancers. Only once the business truly starts becoming a company and wants to provide perks and benefits to employees and also start looking 'bigger' on the market it is being registered as proper corporation.

I think it's a very valuable system for stimulating small business growth. The cost to try is very low and simple to do.

Somebody who uses actively the language on regular basis and has interest to learn more about it to be more efficient and might have interest in JavaScript tools and/or utilities that might his/her work easier. Or... another take. Somebody who types JavaScript code at least a few hours per week on regular basis. That's my rough definition.

Yes, this is the exact thinking! But, I would like to make the most educated guess what subject matter would work before writing two chapters of a book. Programming graphics on Canvas is a niche and I would love to know if it's a 10K programmers crowd or 100K in size?

I read the thread you mention and I am actually one of the people who spent $45 on that book and did find it useful to get faster at Sublime Text.

The ideas I am considering would address the needs of a subset of JavaScript programmers - specifically ones doing work with HTML5 Canvas API. There are some books and resources obviously, but none I would consider very good. My inspiration here is the quality of work of Jon Duckett - http://javascriptbook.com - great content and exceptional design!

So, I am looking for the estimate of JS programmers in order to estimate a small subset that would enjoy high quality Canvas graphics programming content...

A prominent author Steven Johnson tries to answer this question in his 2010 book: 'Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation'... Interesting read!

Some tools lend themselves to starting small and expanding through add-ons, pro features or alternative versions. The example that comes to my mind is GreenSock (http://greensock.com) which started as small, simple Flash (ActionScript) library, but evolved into a large set of animation related libraries and plug-ins covering also HTML5 (JavaScript) and offering various licences starting from free to commercial/paid.

I don't know the internal details, but I have used it on multiple occasions over the years and the impression I get is that it evolved from a free, personal side project into more professional product and company. I suspect that the creator also gets commissioned projects as additional revenue stream. And judging from its consistent evolution over the years it must bring profits that justify working on it!

Yes! Search is a must. I specialize in certain types of work so keyword searches are crucial to me...

Paul Krugman received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008. It is rather unlikely you can find contradictions in his arguments... http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped...

You just made me want to read this book... Thank you.

CDN $16.99 Kindle Edition. Note that there are free Kindle readers for pretty much all platforms, even the in browser Web one if you don't have anything else. Also... should appear shortly in public/university libraries.

And here.

Judging from the brevity and clarity with which the summary was expressed above I assumed that writing comes easily to the author. He could probably elaborate on each point (or maybe add a few more) to turn it into small case study e-book guide. This is just like social media presence and marketing. A byproduct that costs maybe $10 and at least pays for itself, but ideally drives even more traffic to the website and generates additional profit on its own.

I would buy/read it! (Just brainstorming here...)

It's a nice and clear summary. You could probably expand it into mini book - one page per each point listed - and sell it for additional revenue...

Alternative titles I believe are briefly A/B tested for click through rates when published - it's a standard procedure at NYT and other news sites these days. Plus title 'correction' could have been made by the editors already after it was out.

It is amazing that a private, armed company with commercial interests is de facto giving orders to government officials and... the situation continues.