“Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively. I first wrote about this in 2007, after 18 months of isolating and frustrating work on a website: Brace yourself for the initial angry wave of criticism: How dare you, I hate it, it's ugly, you're stupid. The Internet runs on knee-jerk reactions. People will test your work against their pet theories: It is not free, and thus has no value; it lacks community features; I can't believe you don't use dotcaps, lampsheets, or pixel scrims; it is not written in Rusp or Erskell; my cat is displeased. The ultimate question lurks beneath these curses: why wasn't I consulted?

So to reword an earlier question: can these sorts of minimalist businesses actually address serious world problems? I’m not sure. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I’m sure someone out there can give us a few examples. The lifestyle design gurus themselves would say that they’re helping people live their dreams, have more free time to spend with their families, etc. and that those are worthy goals in and of themselves. There may be some truth in that – if the dreams sold by lifestyle design gurus is actually attainable. More on that later.

There’s a lot more that rebase can do, a look at the man page or The Git Book can tell you a lot more.

As a summary:

checkout a local private branch and work in it.
Use ‘git rebase’ frequently to keep up to date with the master repo
Merge changes into master from your rebased local repo
Furthermore, when you merge your changes, you have three choices:

git merge {branch}: brings in all commits/history from branch
git rebase {branch}: same as above, basically
git merge –squash {branch}: brings in changes as one commit, throws away history
git rebase -i {branch}: brings in changes as one commit, condenses all history into a single log entry
Git rebase takes some getting used to, but the results are worth it. I highly recommend giving it a try.

The Jenks optimization method, also called the Jenks natural breaks classification method, is a data classification method designed to determine the best arrangement of values into different classes. This is done by seeking to minimize each class’s average deviation from the class mean, while maximizing each class’s deviation from the means of the other groups. In other words, the method seeks to reduce the variance within classes and maximize the variance between classes.[1][2]

When small start-ups I’ve spoken with do make money, they often find it difficult to recruit additional investment because most venture capitalists — and often the entrepreneurs they finance — are not interested in building viable long-term businesses. Rather, they’re interested in pumping up enough hype and valuation to find a quick exit through an acquisition at an eye-popping premium.

A problem I experienced while starting coding with NodeJS environment and Express framework is that I had difficulties to quickly make a well structured app. I spent too much time on organizing my modules and writing helpers. Paradoxally with Express, I like the fact that I am free to do what I want and don’t encounter too much constraints due to the framework. At last, it was harder to design front end code than back end code.
To deal with that, I used two tools that fit in my requirements :
RailwayJS : a lightweight framework on top of express. It offers the structure and the vital functions I need to write a good backend and configure express properly.
Brunch : an application assembler to organize and build cleanly my front-end code.

lots of readi

" In most of physics—and, indeed, in all of science—we rely on theory to understand our results. We build mathematical models and fit them to our results. But usually there are some parts of the system that remain unknown, or are too complicated to model, so we approximate the parts we can't model and leave the unknown parts as free parameters. Then, when the results don't fit, we vary the free parameters to make them fit."

It turns out that we don’t know the procedure. We haven’t got any clue to just how difficult the procedure is. We aren’t computers. We don’t follow procedures. And so comparing the complexity of the manual task, to the complexity of the procedure is invalid.

This is one of the reasons that estimates are so hard, and why we get them wrong so often. We look at a task that seems easy and estimate it on that basis, only to find that writing down the procedure is actually quite intricate. We blow the estimate because we estimate the wrong thing.

When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the product being sold,” but I think that by now we all get that. The digital substance of our friendships belongs to these companies, and they are loath to share it with others. So we build our little content farms within, friending and upthumbing, learning to accept that our new landlords are people who grew up on Power Rangers. This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

Design patterns are reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. They are both exciting and a fascinating topic to explore in any programming language. One reason for this is that they help us build upon the combined experience of many developers that came before us and ensure we structure our code in an optimized way, meeting the needs of problems we're attempting to solve. Design patterns also provide us a common vocabulary to describe solutions. This can be significantly simpler than describing syntax and semantics when we're attempting to convey a way of structuring a solution in code form to others. In this book we will explore applying both classical and modern design patterns to the JavaScript programming language.

Whatever it is, I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying. Here are a few things that I want to start expecting people to be familiar with, along with some resources you can use if you feel like you need to get up to speed. (Thanks to Paul Irish, Mike Taylor, Angus Croll, and Vlad Filippov for their contributions.)

Matt Webb has an interesting post looking at the sale of Instagram to Facebook through the eyes of an aspect of Marx, particularly this quote from this very good article about Marx by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. Matt applies this to Instagram: What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos — this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos.

The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.

I've uploaded Hoverbattles to its own server on EC2, and it has been running fine with an uptime of over 96 hours so far, and this is great!

http://hoverbattles.com

I've wanted to share a few of the mistakes/lessons learned writing and deploying a multiplayer game built entirely with JavaScript on top of NodeJS and WebGL for a while and this represents an opportune moment to do so.

I've gone with a brain-dump of various related learnings, as well as a couple of periphery items - first off, we'll go with the reason I couldn't keep Hoverbattles up on the old server.

I will write a simple application to capture details from various websites. The beautiful thing is Javascript has been handling DOM objects for years. In fact Javascript was created to handle DOM objects. No wonder that it’s more mature than any other html parsing library. Also, given that there are many elegant frameworks like Prototype, Mootools, JQuery etc. available to use, scraping websites with Node.js should be easy and fun. Let’s do it. Let’s write an application to collect data from various book selling websites.
Create a basic searcher.js module. It would provide the fundamental skeleton for writing website specific tool.

After following many outdated and incomplete instructions for setting up a web development environment on a Mac, and spending a lot of time finding solutions to the problems I encountered along the way, I decided to put together detailed tutorials for both Snow Leopard and Lion.

I started with a clean system, and the following are the steps that worked for me. If you run into an issue, or find an error in this tutorial, please let me know and I’ll update it.

Up until recently, the only way you could get the Command Line tools required for web development was via the full Xcode package, which is almost 2 GB in size. For Lion users, Apple now offers the Command Line Tools as a separate, much smaller download, which benefits those who don’t plan on writing Mac or iOS apps.

This InstallFest is a set of step-by-step instructions for installing Ruby, Rails, and other important tools on Mac, Windows, or Linux computers. Originally developed for the Railsbridge Workshops, it is a community-supported open-source documentation project. If you want to contribute, click the [git] link at the top-right corner of any page and submit your change on GitHub.

Sidenote: I have an objection to the Dyson Airblade in that previous generations of hand-driers encouraged me to move and play with my hands, attempting to find for myself some kind of expertise or intelligence in drying, but the Airblade, in order to achieve its own efficiency forces all of its users to adopt identical movements, removing autonomy from millions to save money for the owners of the establishments in which it is installed. I have been roboticised

giant walking oil rigs

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations. What innocent heroes don't always understand is that they play a useful role for people who have much more cynical motives. The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved. If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

The model of writing Liars and Outliers itself appears to be based on a limited set of rules: Provide a wide range of interesting examples of a complex ill-defined phenomena; refer to expert opinion from a variety of sources; identify a limited set of parameters and controls; make models; note the deficiencies of said models; form vague general principles; change the topic and repeat.

...the data collected by the instrument had to pass any scrutiny thrown its way, and the collected data had to be traceable to a given instrument so that if its calibration is incorrect, its data can be selectively excluded without poisoning the entire dataset. Radiation monitoring is a politically sensitive subject, and certain parties have interests to manipulate the data one way or the other to promote their views with the public. Ad-hoc data collection networks suffer from the possibility that their efforts can be discredited by institutions with big budgets who find that the readings represent an inconvenient truth.

When raising money, you may find it much easier if you haven’t written a line of code but have your pitching strategy down. Only build something that you know you can launch and monetize without outside investment. If you need to raise money early–stop building and start talking.

The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications with Node.js, teaching you everything you need to know about "advanced" JavaScript along the way. It goes way beyond your typical "Hello World" tutorial.

Source code for Micropolis / Simcity

In this article I hope to take you through the steps required to get a fully-functional (albeit feature-light) persistent blogging system running on top of node.

The technology stack that we'll be using will be node + express + mongoDB all of which are exciting, fast and highly scalable. You'll also get to use jade and stylus for driving the templated views and styling! We will be using npm to ease the package management and installation issues.

This article will be fairly in-depth so you may want to get yourself a rather large mug of whatever beverage you prefer before you settle down :)

Tetris is about death, in a way, though it’s at least courteous enough to only star geometric shapes and not feature any abstract human scream sounds.

This handbook introduces you to the legal, social and technical aspects of open data. It can be used by anyone but is especially useful for those working with government data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data – why to go open, what open is, and the how to do open.

"Natural" is a general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, and some inflection are currently supported.

Some use-cases for building a classifier:

Spam detection, for example you could build your own Askimet API;
Automatic assignment of categories to a set of items;
Automatic detection of the primary language (e.g. Google Translate);
Sentiment analysis, which in simple terms refers to discovering if an opinion is about love or hate about a certain topic;

Here's how I would do it... I'd have a config file that's always loaded in my app,

config = require('./config')(express)

Then I have my config file which has something like:

module.exports = function(express) {
    var host = 'yourhost.com'
    var port = '1234'
    if (process.env.C9_PORT) {
         this.db = createClient( host, port, '213j23jk4hhjlks99wi3');
    } else if (process.env.NODE_ENV == 'production') {
         this.db = createClient( host, port, process.env.DB_PASS);
    } else if (process.env.NODE_ENV == 'test') {
           // test db or mock db connection
    } else {
          // maybe local db settings?
    }
    
    return this;
};

oh and I just passed express because when I did something like this with a config file, I had some additional server configuration that needed it

Previously I wrote two tutorials on how to style the image element with CSS3 inset box-shadow and border-radius. The trick is to wrap the image with a span tag and apply the image as background-image.

Instagram isn’t just small; it’s tiny. It’s miniscule. It is famously located in Twitter’s old digs in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. But here’s the thing: Instagram subleases its space from another company. Instagram isn’t in Twitter’s old office, it’s in Twitter’s old conference room. The entire company is nothing more than a collection of desks arranged bullpen-style in a room that is smaller than most two-car garages.

Teextile
Design By Humans
teefurycopy Apparel
Tilteed
ShirtFight
Uneetee
Cameesa
GoodJoe
Springleap
laFraise
Chimpogo
Ink-Hound
ReThink Clothing
Scopial
Shirt.Woot
anothersite
FullMetal T-shirt

A few days ago I was doing a TON of scraping, and as you know, without the right tools, scraping can be a REAL pain. Out of my pain comes your pleasure — here’s a list of scraping tools and resources which will make your life MUCH easier the next time you need some information from a crufty old website. If you’re short on time, skip to the end and read the tl;dr.

The common feature in all three methods is an affirmative action approach: the active promotion of the underrepresented group. Passive methods (such as increasing potential rewards for everyone) do improve participation by women, but they also improve men's performance as well, which leaves the gender gap in place. Affirmative action, on the other hand, not only changes the odds of success by women, but (according to the authors of a related study) also increases their confidence and willingness to compete in the first place. If the competitors know they have a higher chance of success before the contest even begins, the authors suggest, they are more likely to enter it with a positive view of their own abilities. In addition, excessive confidence in male competitors is reduced because they know rewards will be distributed in a different manner.

That’s the first reason we’re thrilled about the widget-microformat approach iBooks is taking — we can build to the spirit of the functionality, rather than just mimic the functionality. We can parse the intention of a microformat — it’s impossible to parse the intention of a chunk of JavaScript. We’re not forced to build an iBooks clone, which work would hold no attraction for us.

The second reason is that the ebook experience is kinda shit. For lots of reasons. It has been worse, but it could be so much better. Right now a bunch of smart companies, including Apple, and including Amazon with their KF8, and also including Booki.sh, are hammering away at that problem.

Nevertheless, I think some of Fox's recommendations verge on censorship -- their aim is to stop the public from being misdirected to unreliable findings, but the solutions are all oriented toward stopping the reporting of unreliable findings. I would prefer to see a change in emphasis away from reporting findings and toward reporting process. Scientists trust science without trusting every result, because they understand the process of science. The public will be better informed about scientific results when they see the process in action. A sharp reporter should not only attend to the immediate result of a study but the process underway to test and possibly reject today's findings.

Here’s the deal. Your grandma can now create a viewport. And so can the kid next door. These may not be ‘proper’ browsers, and they may not (yet) be fully interactive, but they can load a pretty sophisticated web page. A year from now, the most popular ‘browser’ may just be be the embedded web view full of ‘related’ links in a Stephen King iBooks bestseller. Basing breakpoints on popular viewport dimensions is clearly a foolish pursuit.

There is a very real, mesurable cost associated with calls to 311 contact centers. The Pew report mentioned above reviewed the budget allocations and call volumes of 15 large U.S. cities that run 311 centers. It estimates the average cost per call to 311 centers over these 15 cities at $3.39 per call.

Revenue earned providing low-cost demographic data to local non-profits and research for commissioned projects from larger philanthropic clients such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Sprague Foundation, isn't enough to keep the organization going according to Carlson. In addition, funding from donors has declined in recent years.  "Data infrastructure is a tough sell for a donor," said Carlson. "We are hearing more that [donors] were choosing direct service organizations, which is understandable given the economy."

To quote David Leggett, "The most reasonable case for omitting objects from a mobile site is when the object wasn’t essential to the desktop site in the first place."

Don’t leave these decisions solely up to designers and developers. Chances are, we’re too concerned about things like browser compatibility and page-load time to give much thought to them. I happen to be a designer who believes that people visit websites for the content, not the design—but that doesn’t mean I want to be making decisions about content priority myself.

The Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development has jurisdiction over those matters which directly affect the economic and technological expansion and development of the City and economic attraction to the City; and shall work with those public and private organizations that are similarly engaged. The Committee also has jurisdiction over the consideration, identification, goals, plan and approach to the annual and five year Capital Improvement Programs. The Committee may hold community hearings to determine the priorities to be considered in the formulation of such programs.

Responding to an RFP for the City of Chicago is a herculean task… this approach to an RFP results in proposals from one type of contractor: firms that are very large and able to jump through all the hoops that the City has to ensure the minimum amount of risk and liability for the City itself.