chrishenn

This looks really excellent, I'm excited to try it out.

A similar and very powerful narrative can be found in _The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism_, by Edward E. Baptist. The book is slightly problematic in some of its methods, but overall I would highly recommend it to anyone who was taught the public school version of US history.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14894629-the-half-has-ne...

Cool!

I once wrote a much hackier version of complex arithmetic in JavaScript [0]. It was to support a visualization of the complex derivative [1].

I found it useful to think of a complex number as a point in R^2 that operates under some different rules. I used Mathematica's `ComplexExpand` to translate from traditional notation for complex numbers [2].

[0] https://github.com/chnn/multivariable-derivative-viz/blob/ma...

[1] http://people.reed.edu/~ormsbyk/projectproject/assets/posts/...

[2] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ComplexExpand.htm...

This is rad! I wish it had MathSciNet as well.

https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/index.html

Good ol' Socrates :)

This resonates with me very strongly. But it seems all too easy to extend this sentiment towards others and remind them that they don't know what they're doing, which creates a pretty toxic environment.

The violin plots are cool and look like a great alternative to box plots, I had not seen those before. Sweet!

I've been working with Ember over the past few months and am still impressed with how simple and productive it makes every day tasks. Basic CRUD stuff, especially render code, is a lot less drudge work. I'm even more excited for where the community is leading the framework, through projects like ember-cli and htmlbars.

Ember is conceptually pretty massive though. A tutorial like Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial would be a huge benefit, it looks like that's what this is aiming for. Thanks!

I will soon, thanks!

One pain point I've really felt recently with Python is in the deploy step. pip installing dependencies with a requirements.txt file seems to be the recommended way, but it's far from easy. Many dependencies (such as PyTables) don't install their own dependencies automatically, so you are left with a fragile one-by-one process for getting library code in place.

It was all fine once I got it worked out but it would so much nicer to provide a requirements.txt file and have pip figure out the ordering and dependency stuff. That and being able to install binary packages in a simple way from pip would make me much happier with python (no more waiting 10 minutes for numpy or whatever to compile).

As far as actual language features go however, I still find python a joy to work in.

Reed Esau creates a bunch of vim plugins for writing, I've found them to work very nice:

http://wynnnetherland.com/journal/reed-esau-s-growing-list-o...

I've always wondered what coding is like for those who don't speak english, or only speak a little. I imagine it's something like working with code beatified by this tool.

Almost every codebase is filled with english verbs and nouns. They are one of the primary tools for making source code readable by humans, not just machines.

Very cool tool.

How do provisioning systems compare to Docker? Right now I have a development environment that consists of salt stack provisioning Vagrant. Spinning up a production server just means running salt on the host (Rackspace, DO, whatever.)

Is there any use for Docker in this case?

Hey krrishd, I also offer my help. It will be the most useful for front-end web design, or maybe some minor backend things.

You are thinking of https://letscrate.com/.

When I was learning more about this, I found this[1] article to be of great help.

I think the key idea is that JS is a prototype-based OO model. It's easy to forget because there are so many abstractions[2] that act like a JS is a static class based OO language.

[1] http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ecmascript/chapter-7-1-oop-genera... [2] http://coffeescript.org/#classes

Thanks. The low level stuff certainly seems like a good thing to learn—I made an effort to read Code[0] a while back and most of it went over my head. The high level programming languages most people work in today are abstracted to a point where it's extremely hard to see their relation to the low level stuff. It would be nice to understand that link better.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

As a Senior in high school who already works in a startup, I have another question: what shit should I being trying to learn in college?

There's a prominent attitude here that a degree in CS isn't all that practical—work experience matters more. What should I try to get from college? Just wondering if anyone can chime in.

I built a site using ProcessWire[1] a while back, it was a joy to use. Really clean modern php cms.

[1] http://processwire.com/

I would add RequireJS to the list. Being able to think in terms of modules while developing a large application is extremely helpful, and explicitly defining dependencies is great when it comes time to build/concat the project.

Mocha is another alternative for testing. It's very flexible and with a little bit of work can be run from the shell (using phantomjs).

Are you using jsPlumb? I just spent some time on a project that uses jsPlumb for a similar effect.

I've never come across a website that I felt needed a responsive layout, though I regularly think emails are a pain to read on a phone if they use html.

However, most html emails are marketing emails, so I'm still not sold of the idea of responsive templates. The emails I really care about are plaintext (the best type of responsive design---so simple!)

If you enjoyed this piece, you might like the book "The Information Diet" [1]. It's not particularly compelling writing, but the author has good ideas that are very much inline with this post. Boredom is essential.

[1] http://www.informationdiet.com/

I used xflux when I used linux a while back, it worked very well.

"Twitter has an enormous advantage over Facebook in one key area: while people on Facebook tend to friend their friends, people on Twitter tend to follow their interests. The following graph from Twitter is worth far more on a per-account basis because it is directly monetizable in a way that Facebook’s generally isn’t – you can show prophylactic advertisements to Twitter users based solely on the people they follow, and probably get a much higher rate of interest. Compared to other social display ads, Twitter ads, it is rumored, work extremely well."

Facebook users friend their friends AND follow celebrities/brands/products. Facebook also encourages you to share a lot of information about interests and locations. You might also share the same on Twitter, but its not neatly saved as part of your profile.

I'm not sure Facebook will be able to make more money off advertising then Twitter, but if they don't, it wont be because of lack of information about your interests.

Seems like it will only help the very first part of making a web app, where you have to set up directories and libraries and such (scaffolding.) There is a package manager, but you could also use something like [Volo](https://github.com/volojs/volo).

If you use Google Apps with your own domain and make backups of your mail, then you have a very small chance of losing your address and your mail.

People hate on Google Apps, but you don't give up control if you follow both these steps (which is easy.)

I also don't see any reason why another email provider won't do what people are afraid Google will do.

“We believe in the power of the technical community to help improve GS Collections.”

They aren't accepting code contributions right now, so that doesn't make much sense.

OSX comes with (an old version of) python installed already.

Looks fantastic, though I thought they only used Backbone for their mobile site.

Fact based, data centric news can still be quite biased through selection of detail, so Im not sure its any more trustworthy than an article.

Love the site though, really well done.