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Montagist

omg...Dubberly gives me inappropriate feelings. Lol!!!1111

http://www.dubberly.com/articles/becoming-a-digital-designer...

I seriously thought about that Digital Designer article for months after reading it - his take on the skills an interdisciplinary/digital designer should posesses. A -lot- of insight there, especially the fact that he mentions Tools for Making Tools, Systems that Evolve, and Histories....but most of all....-mooost- of all...Modeling with Fractals, Genetic Algorithms, and Cellular Automata (ftw!)

Re:Visualize Your Taxes on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @01:17AM (#2326109)
I went to one of their meetups about this but am just lost/uninspired as to what compelling story can be pulled from this data-set. It's just federal spending amounts broken down by very general categories and organizations which - without any other axes of data attached to them - make it hard to discern any kind of meaningful correlations.

You're also restricted to this and only this data set (and any data you can gather in the course of an interactive visualization's run).

http://whatwepayfor.com/

I like the idea of algorithmic logos/identities - concepts that aren't specific logos per se but instead provide a set of guidelines through which one's generated.
Re:Horror Stories From Women in Tech on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @01:01AM (#2326056)
Not valid at all, except that I know some people in that situation like to purposely ask jarring questions to see how one will respond to pressure. It may or may not have been condescending.
Ditto. This article's so well written; so much meat and actual, rigourous dissection of a problem and it's landscape. Super applicable to the idea i'll be submitting to YC o:) This is spot on what I most needed to read right now. I've had experience with all these different ecosystems and personality types and really had no idea such a distinctive, robust pattern of relations was lurking therein.
This doesn't apply to all such people but non-technical startup founders - unless the idea is very much -non- technical - don't garner any sympathy from me. My opinion is mostly based on having worked with, but mostly just for, some types who wanna squeeze you for technical information so they can shine for VCs without giving you much stake in anything. Worse yet are the ones who're aiming to be bought by Google or some other similar tech-giant that was founded by technical members. The smart people in this group will get paired up with a technical founder quick, but even still how will they know someone's the real deal? Really it just boils down to a question of how one expects to "win the war" if they are not - and have never been - "in the trenches"? Then again, I'm pretty certain those particular guys i've worked for were just special pieces of work and that senselessness is not a trait specific to non-technical founders o:)
Re:How a handful of geeks defied the USSR on Monday March 14, 2011 @11:29PM (#2325712)
This'd probably make a good movie. It's like Wargames meets Real Genius. Haha
Re:From AI to Twitter, Wall Street Outraces Regulators on Monday March 14, 2011 @10:42PM (#2325584)
Will there ever be a time when the government -isn't- outpaced by tech. innovation?
Slick production value. Wonder who made the video for them.
Re:Tell HN: Friend's don't let friends apply to NYC Seed on Monday March 14, 2011 @02:41PM (#2323800)
If you don't have the guts to stand by your opinion, how are we to take it (or you) seriously? I may have to look at them with a suspicious eye, but my opinion of you - whoever you are - has probably taken a greater hit.
Re:Hacker with iPhone takes over Times Square screens on Monday March 14, 2011 @10:18AM (#2322536)
"six monitors and an interactive 3d OS" - LoL! Password Swordfish, anyone?

I know some of the apple products -can- send video through the headphone jack, so that's not why I don't believe. I also know there are a lot of interesting public-space electronics hacking kits coming out of small arduino shops like Adafruit. Still though, I'm a bit skeptical. Really looking forward to seeing if this is legit.

This book covers all these tenets in greater detail and in more interesting ways:

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Language-Designers-Principles-U...

It would behoove anyone interested in this post to "cop that"

Re:Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL on Monday March 14, 2011 @10:04AM (#2322467)
There's a terribly large number of parallels between video-game design (teams) from years ago and the way certain contemporary technical yet creative projects could run. I wish there were articles like this written by members of Sonic Team.
Re:Brushing up on Computer Science Part 1, Big O on Monday March 14, 2011 @10:02AM (#2322464)
Big-O...one of those things I never managed (or cared?) to pickup regardless of how many times it'd been drummed into me in school. Any article that explains it in an approachable way is fine by me.
Re:The secret law of page harmony on Monday March 14, 2011 @05:01AM (#2321816)
Wow...you....sound like such a graphic design hater. haha
Re:New Rules for the New Bubble on Monday March 14, 2011 @04:49AM (#2321794)
Interesting way of looking at it - the startup -is- the prototype. Then against I suppose that's why they're called startups. If they had longevity then the name would be misleading. haha
Re:David Tisch: The Man Who Brought TechStars to NYC on Monday March 14, 2011 @04:28AM (#2321760)
Never even knew there was such an incubator in my city. This list of mentors local to the NYC area is intense.
I disagree with -you-, sometimes even coders can buy into hype. If you play up someone's ego and idolize them, they'll just continue to do things like not document their code or - as wulzcer put it [save an extra two lines but cost the next person two hours of debugging]. Never thought I'd be the guy talking like this, but rockstar attitude does little positive for the team.

Kinda funny that Yelp's on this list; I see their office everyday as the elevator passes by on the way to mine, -and- they've one of the worst apis ever. haha

Re:Skip Lists are Fascinating on Monday March 14, 2011 @03:27AM (#2321647)
They take a similar approach in this post here, geared towards actionscript: http://www.as3dp.com/2010/05/11/actionscript-3-0-skip-lists-...

Adv. knowledge of data-structures is definitely one of the hallmarks of a powerful developer.

Re:Git is as revolutionary as Unix pipes (2008) on Monday March 14, 2011 @03:24AM (#2321642)
I thought I was with you but I was just made a little more confused by that comment :\

I've yet to do a lot with Git, but your post has made me a lot more interested. After wikipediaing the features, I'm starting to see how one could save a lot of time by building an app on top of Git rather than recreate all this functionality from scratch.

Re:Git is as revolutionary as Unix pipes (2008) on Monday March 14, 2011 @03:12AM (#2321619)
Having the wiki paradigm in mind, it didn't occur to me that one -would- use their preferred text-editor, but that's maybe a big benefit right there. What if it were a desktop app running in the background that monitors these text files and is smart enough to handle all git operations behind the scenes? And what -is- it about long form writing that is just inconvenient on the internet? haha
Re:Unholy: _why's Ruby to Python compiler on Monday March 14, 2011 @03:06AM (#2321607)
why the lucky stiff was like the BucketHead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckethead) or Daft Punk of programming. I like that - besides the mysterious persona thing - he also reserved the right to follow any tangent; He's a musician as well and made an album for one of his programming books if i'm not mistaken.

If/when I release my programming mixtape - in which i'll spite hot fire about unit testing and my gripes with MVC - he'll definitely get a spot in the liner notes. haha :)

Re:League for Programming Freedom on Monday March 14, 2011 @01:47AM (#2321460)
There's a reasonable solution out there somewhere for protecting people's intellectual software property, but the patent office - like most government organizations - is severely behind the times.

Although it -is- terribly nice to see the Patent Office at least trying to adopt a more open model through initiatives like these: http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2011/11_03.jsp

I myself have been a member (albeit an inactive one) of Peer to Patent for awhile now. Another thing on my list of "cool sh*t i'd like to be involved with when I make the time" o:)

Is the recent attempt to take the FBI Agile a valid response?

http://gcn.com/articles/2011/01/11/ecg-problems-with-fbi-app...

This guy actually just blew my mind with the StopHop comment - I really had no idea and feel I should've heard or read something about it.

This resonates with me but was too open-ended. It really is just a social problem stemming from different sets of socio-economic priorities and values. I was the kid who would get in trouble for taking apart the vcr, but generally my parents encouraged me to experiment with whatever held my interests. I realize, however, that that wasn't the case for other black kids from the major-metropolitan area.

Re:Ask HN: An Acceptable Erlang on Sunday March 13, 2011 @11:33PM (#2321209)
I'm in the same boat on this one. I got an Erlang book, read up everything I could on the -background- of the language (It's older than Java!) Got all mushy over the features and the promise of potential 99.99 uptime or whatever the statistic. This functional programming syntax is difficult, though. I'll probably play with something like Reia (Ruby syntax, Erlang vm) but I realize I'd still have to get a good handle on the Erlang language regardless. I really feel like it was an arbitrary design choice :\
Re:The IDE must move onto the server on Sunday March 13, 2011 @11:02PM (#2321145)
Ditto on the java-applet comments - I was shocked. Haha.

In all seriousness, though, people have mentioned this before but I don't think anyone's really tackled any underpinning reason why an IDE should be in "the cloud" (::cringe:: yea, I went there).

If I think about it in terms of features such a setup could provide - cohesiveness btwn. client & serverside testing, development statistics in real-time, and highly integrated documentation & comm. - then perhaps it's kind of sexy. Seamless/buil-in pair-programming would seal the deal. It would be pretty awesome if it looked like Code Bubbles though...haha (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsPX0nElJ0k)

Re:Git is as revolutionary as Unix pipes (2008) on Sunday March 13, 2011 @10:54PM (#2321121)
Yea that seems like a pretty powerful concept in particular. I wonder, though, if people'd really care about the ability to edit something offline when they could just go with some wiki that has private restrictions on it.

I do, however, really like the idea of downloading a complete wiki, knowing that I can resync at a later date if content in my version becomes irrelevant.