wylie

It already fooled a friend of mine with a tweet at him. But if it were a human I would think it has incredibly bad taste in articles.

This article isn't about feeling guilty. It's about feeling responsible.

Big surprise. It's not even the first time they've done this (remember Google profiles?)

I'm so glad that somebody built a better front-end for SuperCollider. It's badly in need of a better guide and tutorial for new users, and this seems like an excellent way to go about it.

This really hits home with me. The university where I go to school is very bureaucratic, and I think it lacks a strong community. After a year of not doing anything about it, I finally found people who feel the same way, and after talking briefly we're actively trying to "hack" our culture into something we want.

Even though we haven't changed anything at our school, we now have this tiny community of people who want to build things. But the only way to start is to figure out that there is a problem. I think that's the best message of this article: Figure out what you want, and you're already most of the way there.

In Patrick Collison's presentation at Startup Bootcamp last weekend, he really brought home the social impact that a payment processing company can have in the third world. Even though it's US only for now, this team has huge goals and the experience and vision to back it up.

Their goal is to abstract away the complexity of payments, especially internationally. I wish them luck, and can't wait to use it.

I consider myself to be a programmer and a designer, and while my education has mostly been focused on programming, I have taken a fair share of art and design courses as well. Everything I have learned and done leads me to the same conclusion that Mark makes: good programming and good design are not very different.

What the article is not saying is that being a good programmer will give you good design skills. (Usually it's inversely correlated.) But both programming and design require logical thinking, abstraction, and creativity. They both take practice and a certain mindset. While programmers use data to model software, a designer will base their decisions on what's best for users.

The key point of this article is that as a programmer, you can (and should) start thinking about your design from the user's perspective. Focus on what's best for the users, don't compromise there, and then worry about implementation. It's a recipe for success.

This title was misleading here. This is an article about drugs, not rugs.

The author says that psychedelic drugs are "one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience," yet also that "there is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential." This seems like a contradiction of sorts, and I wonder if he's trying too hard to make a case for drugs based on his own experiences.

Do you think that learning about parallelism would help a beginner to learn how to program, or to understand code better? I consider myself an intermediate programmer, with about five years of experience, but have never explored HPC. Not sure it would have helped me more to have done so as a beginner.

I like this because it's so simple and easy to measure.

Yeah, the URL was http://gush.wufoo.com/forms/automated-office-hours-with-pg/ It probably went over the limit for free forms.

Though building a chatbot is slightly different than building a form.

Thank you! I'm glad you asked about this, because I'm really proud of how well we worked together. We had two developers and two designers/strategists, and only one person with previous hackathon experience. The idea came from an offhand comment when we got stuck on another silly idea. After hashing it out, we realized that we all had the same goal in mind and started to build.

It was easy to split up the work because our skill sets were so different. We weren't stepping on each other's feet, and because of the time constraints, we didn't have time to second-guess anything. We used Dropbox and Github to manage our files, and frequently pushed updates to each other.

Dmitri wrote the server and scraped the CrunchBase. I wrote all the Javascript, except for the backend API calls and some setup logic. Adrian and Chris created all of the game mechanics and graphics, our main website, and some sounds that we never ended up using.

We did have some tense moments where Dmitri and I were both editing the Javascript and had conflicts, so we decided to both work on the same screen to stay sane. But everything else was a collaboration towards a shared vision, where we each had very clearly delineated roles.

This is irrelevant. The bug happens specifically while using Facetime, an Apple app, so it might be feasible for it to set the last image as the launch image. Also, Apple is notorious for using undocumented APIs in their own apps.