Actual pictures of electron densities (orbitals) - <AUTHOR> http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/09/16/real_electrons.php

<comment><USER2> I've seen this same picture with different articles 3 times in the last month at least on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get how this stuff works. My understanding is that it was impossible to "see" electrons because they're so small that photons can't bounce off of them. How does this work? Also, how do they color it? Is it artificially added? I can't see why it would be naturally blue.

<comment><USER4> Where is the electron in that picture? It is "the electron density around one nucleus".

<comment><USER5> Finding the electron is tricky business. That question goes deep into quantum mechanics.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read that electrons inside us are moving around 4.9 million miles per hour.

<comment><USER7> You are a little off-topic here, but you may no know it. The number you are referring to is (I think, but your number is a little high...) for the average (specifically, the r.m.s speed) of an electron which is one of many (classical) things all at the same temperature (that is,in thermal equilibrium), at the temperature of the human body.

If you're not familiar with these concepts, re-read the above but skip the stuff in parentheses.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for letting me know I am a bit off topic. I had just read this:

<http://education.jlab.org/qa/electron_01.html>

and converted to MPH. I was contributing something I thought was of interest and very much on topic.

<comment><USER7> You might like this one better: [http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_do_electrons_move_between...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_fast_do_electrons_move_between_orbitals)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video comments: Interesting trend, but not as efficient as text - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/24/video-comments-foolish-or-future

<comment><USER2> Personally, I find myself skipping past most of the video comments. I think, just like one might see on a site like ValleyWag, the content (or in this case, a video comment) that gets the most clicks will often include a pretty girl.

You can't "scan" the content of video comments like you can, say, this comment. It's an interesting idea, but seems to disrupt the flow of communication.

Case in point, I just watched a 20 second clip of Arrington saying, "Um.. Uhh.." and not much more. His text comments are obviously a tad more engaging.

These seem much more suited to a video site, like YouTube, than a comment thread. Please, Hacker News, don't adopt video comments!

</comment><comment><USER3> Video comments seem kind of lame. They take more time to view than just reading the text.

Doing video polls sounds more interesting, with the poll-reading community up- voting the best video comments for each given question.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree with the others--video presentations take too long to parse.

Besides, I only watch videos from the 70s. If you want me to watch your video comment you'll have to travel back in time and appear on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert or The Old Grey Whistle Test.

</comment><comment><USER5> You don't get to watch/listen to the video comments at your own speed. I think that's an extremely important thing we rely on when surfing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Video comments might be a way to control the flame baiting that happens with anonymous comments.

<comment><USER7> I don't know, maybe people will start leaving video comments while wearing troll masks and flamesuits?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most people are just not as well spoken on camera as they are in text.</comment>


SEPTA Stats: Real-Time Analytics for Philadelphia Regional Rail - <AUTHOR> http://www.septastats.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. This is a project I cranked out in my spare time to give better insight to how our regional train system is doing. Feel free to hit me up with any questions or comments!</comment>


Is Nvidia the leader in autonomous driving computation platforms? - <AUTHOR> May be someone with knowledge of the industry can throw some light. They seem to be the leaders as of now, if you don't count Google obviously. Are there competitors to NVidia? <comment><USER2> Look at the companies providing advanced driver assist technology to the cars people actually buy. I'd personally consider them leaders due to the slow and steady approach.</comment>


Is Sails.js dying? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/balderdashy/sails/issues/3429#issuecomment-165004024 <comment><USER2> Was it ever big to begin with? Aside from Meteor, the JavaScript community doesn't seem to be interested in Rails-like frameworks.

<comment><USER3> There's a few big MVCish frameworks out there, like keystonejs: [https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone](https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone). But, yea, it's so easy in Node to make a small server that works without one of these frameworks that it's not always worthwhile.

<comment><USER4> Right; if you're building a large system, you'll want to structure your design around a set of common patterns. Just writing a ton of hapi/express/koa routes works only up to a point, past which the application's complexity becomes a hindrance to future progress. As with any system.

If you're building a website for your cat, then sure, the tools you use don't really matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote the comment that OP linked to. IMHO, Sails is dying, which is why many of the project maintainers have started building a successor: [https://github.com/trailsjs/trails](https://github.com/trailsjs/trails). Yes it rhymes, no it's not a fork. It's a modern re-write with modern tools and ES6, built around similar conventions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes. Like, 99% of js frameworks are.

<comment><USER6> I find the JavaScript world exhausting right now, there are too many frameworks popping up and dying for me to spend the time investing into learning something new only for it to be gone in a few weeks. I rarely do node on my servers, but when I do it's still plain old express with some simple middleware, nothing too fancy.

<comment><USER7> true. Usually, i just stumble upon those framework. If i see something nice, i will integrate it to my barebone hapijs project template.

<comment><USER8> I use Hapi with Waterline and I love it. I'm looking forward to exploring Trails (pardon the pun) and integrating with my Hapi projects.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity and Origins (Except how is built) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY <comment><AUTHOR> Not into this game myself, but I am terribly curious how the program is architected/written. When I hear the myriad bizarre possibilities, it sounds like it could rapidly become a terrible mountain of spaghtetti code, and with so many strange interactions, would not be naturally stable or playable.

Is the secret sauce that they've made a really well-designed object model that somehow scales up well? Seems like a world rife with terribly O() complexity potentially, too.</comment>


First introduction to LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Learn_LaTeX_in_30_minutes <comment><USER2> I absolutely love ShareLaTeX. It's one of the few products that is kind of niche but does one thing and does it really well. I definitely get $8 a month worth out of their service. Having used MacTeX and similar products, ShareLaTeX is just a much smoother user experience. Not to mention their documentation is great and really gets to the point of what you are often trying to do. I've used their service on the last three research papers I've written and have been sharing the platform with different professors I work with.

(I sound like a shill, but check my comment history — I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy customer.)

<comment><USER3> Personally I just can't get used to using a slow web app. I much prefer working in a native editor or IDE (like TeXStudio). I still use Sharelatex in a pinch, when I'm another machine or something, but I breathe a sigh of relief when I'm back on a native app.

<comment><USER4> One of my favourite feature of Overleaf (another cloud LaTeX Editor) is that I can use git to work on my cloud project on my local machine. It seems to me the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> I didn't know that! That does seem like a sweet feature. I'll try it out next time I need to use these services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I strongly dislike LaTeX mostly because of its terrible error messages, because of the mess of incompatible packages and because of its inflexibility in layout adjustments.

I admit that I never sat down to understand the latex design principles and learn it the hard way. So maybe I'm just uninformed.

But seriously, I just want to write some text with formulas.

The error messages are so useless, usually I'm forced to trace a bug by commenting out sections of text. For even the most trivial features, packages have to be included. Finding the right set of compatible packages is a science on its own. Usually you start with somebody else's document header and try to tweak it to your needs.

And good luck placing an image on the page where you want it.

I assume that if you spend some time understanding the language, it becomes clearer and less of a mess.

But I feel like there is room for a declarative text editor that's a little bit more intuitive.

<comment><USER6> What you are describing sort of goes against the tenets of LaTeX. You aren't supposed to worry about formatting, just content. You have to explicitly tell it when you want to deviate from the template. In terms of placing figures, you just have to write \begin{figure}[h!].

I've never really had a problem with the error messages or packages personally.

<comment><USER5> I think it's a legitimate wish to change the footer height in a document.

<comment><USER7> \setlength{\footskip}{ _length_ } should do the job. You might have to reduce the \textheight to make room. What are you trying to achieve?

<comment><USER5> I'd probably try the /setlength command, but not consider that I have to adjust the invisible /textheight. Then I would wonder why it did not work.

With HTML, at least I have the inspector to see where bounding boxes are. With latex I'm blind.

<comment><USER7>
        \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
        \usepackage{layout}
        \begin{document}
        \layout{}
        \end{document}

Ought to sort you out. There's also the showframe package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Besides Googling for tricks, another way of learning LaTeX is to download the source code for nice-looking papers that you find on the arXiv.

For example, for "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent" arXiv:1606.04474 ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474)), if you click on Download->Other formats, you get the latex source code and in this case also the Omnigraffle files for the diagrams.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just in time! I use pandoc to generate PDF files from markdown, but it's not a straightforward process in any case but creating documents that look like Donald Knuth dashed them off in 1978. Pandoc is super flexible but your output goes through LaTeX templates so customizing them felt out of reach given my limited time--until now.

<comment><USER10> Here is another one that prefers markdown with pandoc.

IMHO, it's much better to use markdown generally and insert latex only when it is completely necessary.

A latex usage example is creating a tikz picture or for introducing \pagebreak or \framebreak in pdfs or beamer presentations.

For the rest of the cases, markdown is much less verbose and can accomplish the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While this is a decent guide, I find that being skillful in latex comes from memorizing many highly specific commands. I spend most of my time googling for things such as "How to use (a), (b), (c) for enumerating lists".

<comment><USER9> ...but this article is giving me the context I need to understand the Google results

<comment><USER12> True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, I shared the LaTeX documentation of ShareLaTeX with you because it is plain excellent.

Right now, I'm finishing my doctoral thesis and compiling locally, because I'm without internet for long times due to travelling. Therefore, I scraped the docs to have a local copy.

Am glad to see the praise for ShareLaTeX here, though. Especially due to their solutions with ridiculous error messages and their general approach. When I encounter a cryptic problem I switch from vim+vimtex to texstudio -- which usually helps a lot by providing an overview, syncing the logs to the occurrence, organizing them by severity and enhancing understanding by unfolding the log.

The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the- tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks.

For general interest, my current LaTeX workflow is:

      * Write in vim + vimtex.
      * Switch on continuous compiling (that's like ShareLaTeX).
      * Using synctex to preview with zathura (lightweight pdf).
        + This is really nice, you can configure vimtex to it.
        + CTRL-Click into the (zathura) pdf focuses vim to the
          corresponding position
        + <leader>lv in vim jumps to the position in the
          pdf being open side-by-side in zathura.
      * In case of complex errors open texstudio
      * Save battery, use vimagic and be happy.

<comment><USER13> > The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the- > tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks.

There is also the (awesome) fact that ShareLaTeX is free software (under the AGPL no less).[1]

[1]: [https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex](https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex)

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know this. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Always pleased to see more resources encouraging more LaTeX use. ShareLatex and Overleaf are doing a great job of promoting Latex.

Fwiw my Getting to Grips with LaTeX[1] tutorial have been around for years and are well used.

[1] [http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex](http://www.andy- roberts.net/writing/latex)

<comment><USER15> I used your tutorials to learn LaTeX around 2008-2009. Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> LyX[1] can be a better intro to LaTeX. It was posted on HN before. But really, it's the most powerful WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX, and it still provides access to the .tex source of the document. You can use the interface and learn the language at the same time.

Besides, custom shortcuts make LyX much faster than writing TeX directly with autocomplete.

[1] [https://www.lyx.org/](https://www.lyx.org/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Honest question: I tried using LaTeX for a homework assignment. I had already done all the work on some loose paper, but it was all over the place and thought LaTeX-ing it would help readability. It took me about three hours and I wasn't even halfway done (there were four questions and I had barely done the second one)... Is taking this long normal for LaTeX? or is it something you get better at with practice?

<comment><USER18> I'm doubtful that using Latex for ephemeral stuff like math-heavy homework is a good use case. It's excellent for documents like journal papers and tech reports that you will be revising and distributing, and perhaps coming back to months later. It's also great for collaboration. I could see it working for a lab report.

With mathematical homework, aren't you spending significant time ensuring that what you typed into Latex rendered correctly? (I.e., the edit-compile-look loop?) I sometimes omit parentheses or put braces in the wrong place, which causes the display to be in error. Introducing another step in the process seems troublesome, and would take me out of the "zone" of problem-solving. (I.e., handwritten copy -> Latex -> rendering vs. just handwritten copy.)

I switched from troff to Latex around 1991. The explanatory tables for the sprinkler system and the electrical panel for my house are in Latex. So, I'm a Latex-phile, just skeptical about this case.

<comment><USER19> It makes grading easier, so you get better feedback---and more attention to substance.

Every graduate math class I've taken has asked for typeset problem sets; some have required it.

<comment><USER18> Wow, I am surprised and intrigued! Last time I took a graduate math class was 1995. It was definitely pencil and paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found that, for someone with programming experience, the core LaTeX is quite easy to teach. I use it for all my school projects, and ShareLaTeX just works. I also managed to use it(Nothing Fancy) collaboratively with a friend of mine, with only ~5min introduction (Although I was sat next to him, so not quite the same as learning it alone).

</comment><comment><USER21> >ctrl+f "lyx" > 0 results

[https://www.lyx.org/](https://www.lyx.org/)

Gonna plug Lyx, the best tool for writing LaTeX without actually feeling like you're writing LaTeX.

<comment><USER22> Not responding, and [http://isup.me](http://isup.me) confirms it's down.

<comment><USER21> It's back. Go check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A nice intro project is writing your CV in latex, using packages like [https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv](https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv)

<comment><USER24> I don't know about that. Formatting a CV is so fiddly and LaTeX is at its best when you can relax your grip and let it do its job. I'd recommend writing something really simple. Take ten minutes and write up the notes from your last meeting. They'll look amazing, and there's basically no formatting required beyond perhaps bulleted lists. It's hard enough just to get over the hump of having source code that's distinct from your finished document, without jumping straight in to the least rewarding part of LaTeX, which is trying to make things look just how you pictured them.

<comment><USER25> For my last job change I rewrote my then-outdated resume in Latex using a modified version of the popular resume style. The reason was that I found the usual suspects (Word, Docs) just as fiddly with what I was trying to format, but without the clean evolution that a .tex file in a git repo provided. Getting this just right did take time, but I did it iteratively and now have an excellent base that is exactly how I want it, and something that looks better than the word processor templates. Overall it was a worthwhile investment IMHO.

<comment><USER26> Thing is, one of the aims of LaTeX is to separate content from formatting. I'm guessing in that in your resume.tex, the layout is fairly tightly bound up with the content, but it would be great to hear I'm wrong! Like, if you want it to have a different number of columns, or put the job title and years together outdented in the left margin or whatever, can you do that? Or are you kind of relying on a particular choice of style file?

<comment><USER25> The content is pretty bound up with the formatting, but it's just one file and I don't mind. At least it's explicit, and I can tweak the layout precisely vs. what I was able to do in Word (which I'm not that great at to be honest).

I just used the well-known Michael DeCorte resume template as a starter, adjusting to suit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to know LaTeX. And of course played with it a few times.

The issue is, I write something that requires a document editor like once month (if) and it's usually a minimal number of pages. I do it so infrequently it's always a huge pain even using Libre Office. And every time I think "it really ought to be possible to do this with Vim" (which I suppose LaTex would solve, and that's a big plus). It's just the learning curve/benefit ratio isn't there yet.

<comment><USER28> Something like Markdown, Restructured Text, etc. might be better. I'd suggest Emacs org-mode too but not sure if anything like that is available for Vim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We have built a reporting engine for PDFs on top of LaTeX; data is loaded using SQL, pre-processed with JavaScript if neccessary and then rendered using pdflatex.

Works great and is fast, but I wouldn't do it again (thinking about using CSS3 + print properties for that).

<comment><USER30> How would you say this went compared to off the shelf reporting engines? It seems like all reporting engines have major deficiencies and I've thought about trying something like this myself.

<comment><USER29> Frankly, we were not able to find something suitable. It needed to be fast (our largest report has like 2000 pages), needed to support advanced layouting (images outside of usual print margins, multi-pages tables with continued headers, ...) and we wanted to have some kind of templating language. Native node.js would have been nice, but not required.

Maybe I was out of luck, butI couldn't find anything useful fulfilling these requirements - if you have suggestions, I'd be interested in seeing what's possible.

How it went, though? Due to our use cases, this LaTeX service is a complexity beast. The templating isn't fun; LaTeX was not created to be templated itself. We have escaping in place, but from time to time user input breaks it. We have no way to let users create their own reports at this point. There are multiple reasons, but LaTeX being not that beginner-friendly is definitely one of them.

But given the template is correct and the user input is sane, it's fast and simply works.

<comment><USER30> The "least worst" I've ever used to SSRS (Microsoft), not sure if the 2000 pages will cause an issue or if the images outside the borders are possible though. Apparently it supports other data sources but I'm not sure how well, I've got an upcoming task at work to investigate this.

But 2000 pages? That's a data dump, not a report.

<comment><USER29> Those reports are usually printed and sent to members. Therefore, even the 2000 pages report needs to be well-formatted and layouted correctly, including addresses, brand images and stuff.

Amount wise it really feels like a dump, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's why I don't think it's worth any longer spending time learning LaTeX: When Donald Knuth came up with TeX, he had in mind the printed page. LaTeX gave writers the opportunity to control the way their printed documents looked like. It made writers their own typographers. But the future of documents is content and collaboration, not typographic style. Printing will become irrelevant, and the documents of the future will have to be interactive, executable and device agnostic. As we move forward Authorea provides the best of both worlds (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind the project). Authorea, which is a format agnostic collaborative platform, allows to write documents in richtext (word), markdown, LaTeX (or a combination of the three). It renders your docs to HTML, but you can export anytime to LaTeX (and PDF). Which means if you want, you can still convert your document to LaTeX without learning LaTeX syntax. It is version controlled (built on GIT) and allows to include data rich plots and Jupyter notebooks. We built it with the "paper of the future" in mind [https://www.authorea.com](https://www.authorea.com)

<comment><USER32> You mean to say that all we've been doing so far is just pretty printing our mundane thoughts since the invention of the written word and true value will only be unlocked by throwing away typographic knowledge accumulated over centuries and writing documents for the machines instead? Maybe you're right. Perhaps typography and the print media is finally truly obsolete. But you're not the first to make such a claim and you won't be the last. In the meantime, there's still a valid case for learning LaTeX well enough to be able to produce a correctly typeset document. Perhaps you should consider this viewpoint instead of dismissing TeX as an unwanted bastard child in your website's workflow?

<comment><USER33> > throwing away typographic knowledge accumulated over centuries

looking at that sample article, I would say yes, that's what they're saying:

[https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/152971-positive- bi...](https://www.authorea.com/users/3/articles/152971-positive-biodiversity- productivity-relationship-predominant-in-global-forests/_show_article)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I tried to learn LaTex a long time ago when I was just getting started with Linux, but gave up when I found that I could use MS Word and get what I needed, without the steep learning curve. I'm sure LaTex is much better than Word for some things, but I've never needed anything as specialized as LaTex. In fact, I don't use 99% of what Word is capable of and most of the time I'm using a simple text editor or vim or atom.

<comment><USER35> LaTeX was never meant to be used as a word processor. It's amazing for Math and other scientific writing, but apart from that, it's just much faster to open up your basic Word Processor and get on to playing the keys.

<comment><USER36> If you just want to put words on a page and print it out, sure, use a word processor.

But if you have to generate more than one document with the same formatting, or a very large document, LaTeX is the way to go.

I use it, interfaced with SQLite-generated CSV files, to compile 50 page reports for work with no effort at all. This process used to take hours.

Another thing I do for work is using SQL to actually generate LaTeX documents programmatically, using premade macros that are stored in a class file.

The power and consistent behavior is what makes it better than word processors.

<comment><USER9> Interesting approach. You imply that your output is not printed. It seems to me that HTML with style sheets would be an equally good approach? Not telling you, just curious about your workflow. Any browser can handle a 50 page document without breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER36> It is printed, in fact, so browser stuff wouldn't work.

<comment><USER37> It could. I have a couple of apps that will render HTML to PDF server-side for users to download.

Rendering LaTeX to PDF would be far less fuss, however, when you already have the HTML templates it is the path of least resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I feel this post could be edited to as "Learn a pinch of Latex in 30 minutes"....for some people title could be ambiguous...frankly we can't learn anything in 30 minutes...we just get a feel of any skills or concept....the concept of really learning is when we could put something to practical...if we couldn't put anything to practical its not learning but just skimming through the concepts.

<comment><USER9> Just did the whole intro and them some. You're right--but it's accompanied by a whole lot of other lessons that all take the same clear, humane, approach. I'm willing to accept a little hype for such a comprehensive presentation overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if Donald Knuth uses LaTeX or some other TeX macro package (e.g. Plain TeX).

<comment><USER40> > Andrew: What set of tools do you use today for writing TAOCP? Do you use > TeX? LaTeX? CWEB? Word processor? And what do you use for the coding?

> Donald: My general working style is to write everything first with pencil > and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the > text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. I use tex, dvips, and gv > to see the results, which appear on my screen almost instantaneously these > days. I check my math with Mathematica.

[http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)

<comment><USER39> So, one of the greatest minds of our time uses Plain TeX, it seems. Given that his texts look more complex than any other mathematical texts that I have seen, why would anyone prefer to use LaTeX instead?

<comment><USER41> Any anyone else use plain tex these days?

<comment><USER42> I have found spamming Google for LaTeX solutions to be really unsatisfactory and recently decided that I'd rather just learn my tools properly. This very very quickly led me away from LaTeX and over to plain TeX.

I have read through about 2/3 of the TeXbook so far and currently am writing my thesis in it. So far it's been really enjoyable! That's not something I could say about my past struggles with LaTeX.

Maybe once I have TeX down really pat, I'll peek back over into LaTeX, but for now I really don't see a need.

Getting a handle on the typographic primitives that TeX offers makes a huge difference. I've actually found it surprisingly easy to handcraft whatever macros I need. Though I do also use a the amstex macros.

Admittedly, it's easy to end up with a horrid mess of macros if you're not careful, but a bit of forethought and experience with frontend design patterns goes a long way.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with CJK languages nicely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you benefit from TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider supporting them with a membership in the TeX Users Group.

For full information see [http://tug.org/aims_ben.html](http://tug.org/aims_ben.html) but note that if you select to get the journal electronically then a one-year membership is $45. (If you are a student, recent student, senior citizen, or come from a country with a modest economy then the annual rate is $15.) It could not be more reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER44> ShareLatex and TeX in general is awesome. I use it for the Biblatex and I have dabbled with Beamer.

Two issues that I have run into are live word counts for assignments for profs who refuse to give page counts, and having to maintain multiple document versions manually (one in TeX, one in Word) because my field (Nursing) is full of non-tech savvy older profs who will look at you funny if you provide them with something outside their comfort zone.

</comment><comment><USER45> For pdf deliverables regarding things like a resume, I am wondering if it is just better to create an html document using FE web dev skills, and render it to pdf (having done the latex resume thing recently).

i.e. for PDF's (like a resume), What are the advantages of latex over html+css->pdf?

(This is assuming I don't care about things like table-of-contents generation or precise chapter-aware commands)

<comment><USER46> Nothing I can think of except for some typographic sugar that almost no one (except for other latex users or typography people) would notice. It really is not worth the frustration today.

<comment><USER47> I take issue with calling it a frustration. Especially since trying to get good page layouts with html is frustrating to me.

That said, if you need any document, be it a résumé or anything else, and you need it tomorrow, use the tools you know. And don't feel bad about not knowing other tools. Trying to get up to speed on anything that is worthwhile quickly on a new too will almost certainly be frustrating. Even word processors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here is an editor from a couple of years ago that lets you check your LaTeX:

[http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php](http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php)

More:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430)

</comment><comment><USER49> I've learned LaTeX by taking all lecture notes in LaTeX and googling all the stuff (or just leaving comment to google it later). Math was especially hard, but after a semester and a half I'm almost not googling and writing relatively complicated LaTeX as fast as regular text.

</comment><comment><USER50> I love LaTeX, but I disagree about that WYSIWYM.

It's really WYGIWYAF. What You Get Is What You Asked For.

<comment><USER46> WYGIWLTWBFY

What You Get Is What LaTeX Thought Was Best For You. So, images spreading to the margins of the page, a block of whitespace on the next page, lots of weird characters instead of your local characters and lots of more obscure stuff.

<comment><USER51> > lots of weird characters instead of your local characters

Is that really an issue with xetex, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> LaTeX I feel is going the way of HTML as a intermediate layer language that is not to be meant to be read/written by humans. Like others in this thread I much prefer writing in Markdown and then using something like Pandoc to convert to Latex.

</comment><comment><USER53> Always enjoyed services from sharelatex, they made a lot of stuff easier.

A looks like a nice tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER54> This didn't really answer "Why Learn Latex?". It mentioned some of the benefits of Latex as a format but what reason do I have for not using some sort of Latex generator?

</comment><comment><USER55> I figure the chance of downvotes is worth it for relating the most unexpected conversation I had socially I'm prompted by the commenter who above says they struggled and preferred Word. I use Word as a daily driver because of Excel embedding, and company policy, but this is about the value of pursuing LaTeX that may open not so unique possibilities:

Posted because there are lots more places where I think being up to speed with TeX / LaTeX can get you hired by someone interesting / or in lucrative if dull job, not necessarily as a programmer:

Through a friend, I met and chatted with, eventually for hours, the a gentleman whose last occupation turned out to be the publisher for authorized education books... In Iraq... Under Saddam.. Why we got so deep talking at my friend's dinner party? We were arguing the real time composability of TeX. I don't know the chances of such a conversation with any septuagenarian gentleman, to start with, but I hope my friend's promise to invite me next chance we can meet will arise. I encountered a delightful gentleman programmer by nature as opposed to training; his formal education was history and languages, self taught programmer, who also mentioned MCL. I last used LaTeX in earnest in the late 90s - his knowledge, I should have asked if he was actively using, seemed current... our mutual friend a publisher, this makes me think I ought inquire if a book is forthcoming. Regardless, I think it's fascinating just how entrenched TeX and LaTex are in the minds of users. And publishers I've met who use TeX are devotees. I've been told by a couple now, that they expect associates to pick it up on the job. So potentially this might be a angle for a programmer to side move into a different field. Associates hired or promoted to work with publishers are usually tasked with longer term research into subjects and trends, it looked to be rewarding work. And in politics, economics, tech obviously, a programmers skills might be enough for the transition, especially if the publisher felt lightweight on in house abilities.

I used to encounter commercial applications wrapping TeX frequently, in the 90s. One, by a British software house since subsumed in the XML everything, enterprise data / private equity rollup fad, I forget the names it went through, was essentially selling TeX, plus advert placement layout engine, used by FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, lots of Italian dailies, the EC, for a sweet 50,000 a seat.

Mass market Print publishers need tools to manage costs that drill down to the weight of ink used on the paper. It's a reason the InDesign ecosystem is stable- third party integrations that are expensive to write for a select audience. But smaller houses have wider tolerances, may "leave that to the printer" (hope they can get good bids without the pre press estimate), so the variety of pre press tools widens to include just LaTex and a impostor for separations/plates.

Knuth's Digital Typography, is a excellent read, and a chapter in that, showing by how much, and how easily, major press titles can be made more readable, save space, and more, became a brilliant sales tool for my consulting. If you know TeX / LaTex, and need a gig, Digital Typography, plus the addresses of nearby smaller publishers, might be a great way to catch good work. I found so, anyhow.

<comment><USER56> The British software house wasn't Advent 3B2, was it?

Being up to speed with LaTeX can get you hired, but you've always gotta be prepared for the excited, "You know LaTeX! Let's do all of our documentation in it!" and the gentle conversation that ensues about how expensive free software can get once you involve people and processes...not that LaTeX isn't great; I use it myself for print-ready PDFs, but for corporate manuals and stuff and getting tech writers off the street who can hit the ground running with it, it's just not the right solution for most organizations.</comment></comment>


"Column Tetris" – Calculating and Saving Space in PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2966524/calculating-and-saving-space-in-postgresql/7431468#7431468 <comment><USER2> It's really unfortunate how much of database technology requires manual tweaking, what is sensible and optimized should be the default behavior. Obviously for ALTER statements reordering of columns could mean a huge table rewrite, but there'd still be ways to handle it. On table create, though, you really should have to specify a manual override in order to prevent the DB from automatically performing these kind of obvious optimizations, IMO.

On a side note, I've started to hear more buzz around this, but when we can have obvious indexing, sharding, caching, and query planning handled by ML...we will see a real revolution in the way we handle data. The models could be generalized to some degree across data sets and query patterns, but pretty easily progressively trained in production for a particular data set. The outputs we optimize for are basically read time, write time, and storage space...which all strike me as relatively easy targets for training. How great would it be to just move some sliders for those 3 around based off of preference and call it a day?

<comment><USER3> To me, this just seems to be struct packing[1] on the database layer. I would find the opposite behavior of automatic reordering of columns strange.

[1] [http://www.catb.org/esr/structure- packing/](http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/)

<comment> vertex-four As a counter-argument: databases do ~interesting~ things with your queries and the layout of your data anyway. SQL is meant to be declarative - it's not meant to define exactly how an operation is done, only that it's done in a method that results in something that _logically_ looks like what you've declared it to look like. So as long as the row is ordered correctly when you do a `SELECT *`, it'd be perfectly reasonable in my opinion to store it physically in any order the database engine prefers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I run into answers by Erwin Brandstetter on StackOverflow just about every time I search for something related to Postgres. I'm curious about his background and how he became such an expert in this area... it's inspiring and extremely helpful!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of the interesting optimizations that DBMS should do automatically but it doesn't.

[https://github.com/NikolayS/postgres_dba](https://github.com/NikolayS/postgres_dba) \-- this toolset includes a version of report (see report a1) which analyses all tables in your database and shows opportunities to optimize.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was one of the first "non-obvious" optimizations I learned about w/ SQL DBs. Obviously, if you understand how the database works (and allows you to ALTER it quickly), you'll know padding always matters off the bat, but man, wouldn't it be nice if Postgres just optimized your CREATE TABLEs for you?</comment>


What is scrum and how to apply it to a startup - <AUTHOR> http://miguelgfierro.com/blog/2014/what-is-scrum-and-how-to-apply-it-to-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> The product owner bit is crucial. Right now I work on a team with no product owner and it is just 2 devs who are trying to cobble together an agile/scrum process because that is what management wants to see. A lot of the time I have nothing to do since new features are not being suggested. There is also no active QA work as well so nk bug fixes either unless I do the QA myself.

<comment><USER3> I feel you dude, my team is treated like the CTO's personal skunk works and he basically tells us to build X but then we never have a product owner... and I die a little on the inside each time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you try to act as an unofficial product owner? Like trying to do everything right but without explicitly saying it</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should we abandon our product? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
We've spent the last few months developing a product, but now we've hit a wall and we're thinking about abandoning it. We'd appreciate your brutally honest feedback about what we should do and if our solution makes any sense at all.
For context, here is our YC startup school presentation, and our landing page:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxpVkonSHJQ
- https://tuiqo.com
Basically, we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues. While trying to find product market fit, we've separately tested it with different target groups, like writers, journalists, lawyers, academics and digital content creators. We kept getting great feedback from these groups, but had a hard time converting any actual users. We had to stop developing because while trying to sell it, everyone kept requesting more and more different features, and it seemed no matter what we would add, still no one was ready to pay for it.
Do you think there is any scenario where someone would find this useful enough to actually use it or pay money for it? Or did we just build something that seems interesting to a lot of people but no one is really willing to use it? <comment><USER2> Your website is beautiful, name could be better because I'm not sure how to pronounce it so hard to tell friends. Unfortunately idea/product itself isn't something I can give much feedback on, I'm mostly a developer so I didn't realize this was a problem people had, I guess I can kind of understand some professions (lawyers, creatives) could really use this though but it's a tough sell getting people to change their ways unless it dramatically makes things better for them. It's hard enough making tech people do it in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> _we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues_

Document versioning is orthogonal to text editors and text editors are a mostly solved problem for most people anyway. Solving people's document versioning issues means meeting them where they are and providing additional capabilities not sending them back to ground zero. To put it another way, if a customer adopts your solution and your company goes out of business, the customer should be no worse off than if they had not adopted your solution.

The minimum viable product is not a text editor because text editors are complicated -- never mind Vim or Word or Emacs, the current state of even Notepad and Nano reflect many years of development.

The great news is that you have people who will talk to you. Ask them what their current versioning problems are. Become an expert in _actual_ document versioning problems before deciding on a solution. Solve one organization's document versioning problems first. Go deep before going broad.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> "We kept getting great feedback from these groups"

If someone says "they love it" and "it looks awesome", or "that's such a great feature", that's just them being nice. Did they actually ask you for an account to use? Did they ask when it would go live so they could pay you?

If not perhaps there's no market. For whom isn't basic collaboration (aka Google docs) enough?

The only group I could reasonably see paying for this are the lawyers, and I don't see it happening (they're not know for being cutting-edge in tech adoption). But I've been wrong before :)

Yes I would abandon it.

P.S.: the startup school link doesn't work for me, looks like requires a login.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      "Did they actually ask you for an account to use? Did they ask when it would go live so they could pay you?"

No, they haven't. They all missed some features before they'd be willing to commit. We realise most of these people were probably just trying to be nice :)

      "The only group I could reasonably see paying for this are the lawyers, and I don't see it happening
      (they're not know for being cutting-edge in tech adoption). But I've been wrong before :)"

Exactly, you're not wrong, we've reached the same conclusion. Lawyers really suffer from this problem and see us as a potentially great solution but as one of them put it: "It took us 10 years to learn MS Word, we are not changing to something new."

Thanks for the honest feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, the problem is your marketing. Time to pivot, your idea is not unique what you have built is the basics of a document management system. This problem has been solved by virtually every EMR, and other companies with products such as OnBase. The good news is that you are not alone, and there are other succesful/profitable businesses in this market space.

Remember you do not have to be Unique or the best in the market; you just have to be better than some.

<comment><AUTHOR> Marketing/sales are definitely one of our biggest issues. We understand that there are many enterprise document management systems, and that is exactly why we went to those markets where companies/users cannot afford those expensive EMS, or they are simply too complex for their needs. We want to pivot, and that is exactly what this post is all about. Thank you.

<comment><USER6> Consider reaching out to Kan and team at AtriumLTS. Not sure what their company is all about but before walking away you can try and get it into the hands of someone who might be able to integrate it into their company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, we did through our YC SS network. We talked to Kan's co-founder who confirmed that lawyers do have this problem, but kind of they themselves don't know how to approach it. The reason: It's hard to make them switch and use new technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think you are right that you should stop development until you get a few customers for the current version -- otherwise you may spend time not focusing on the selling aspect! The web-site tells what the product does like it would be obvious to users, but you probably need to present a specific use- case/example/workflow where it will help an end-user. And this use-case should target the specific type of customer you want. Also, probably target a segment where people will try new stuff (i.e where they don't necessarily love Microsoft Word, etc) -- it seems like a interesting product for startups to write up product manuals maybe? Narrow your product's/service's focus market....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1.- name is ugly

2.- you don't have a target market

3.- while the Lawyers seem like a great target market, they like to use Word.

4.- there are Word products already in the market, so it's a Proven niche.

5.- I would drop the name and go for a Product that works inside Word with minimal fuss.

6.- Do you have the time and energy?

7.- why did you make this product?

</comment><comment><USER9> Landing page looks really nice but I couldn't see any pricing.

I couldn't see any reason that this wouldn't sell.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no pricing page because we haven't identified the market yet (as we wrote above). Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like a wiki to me. Packed with some "interesting" features (blocks/tabs). Don't see the connection with the headline "document versioning".

</comment><comment><USER11> If this supported docx format, you could sell it to law firms

<comment><USER12> You think so? We've talked to a few law firms, and it seems it's a really hard market to crack. Docx support was our next feature before we decided to halt new feature development.

<comment><USER13> Maybe sell it as a plugin for MS Word? Querystorm[1] (ThingieQuery, previously), a plugin that allows SQL queries on Excel spreadsheets, seems to be doing pretty well.

[1]: [http://www.querystorm.com/](http://www.querystorm.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> A plugin could be an interesting option, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You might want to narrow the audience if you keep getting feature requests. Make the product awesome for one of those groups you talked to and then grow from there.

<comment><USER15> But at what point does it become too many features? You can't just keep developing for free can you? I assume they are running out of funds...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> the concept looks cool!

but I can't think of too many cases where we need multiple versions of a same document.

</comment><comment><USER17> Your presentation needs improvement.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean the landing page: how we pitch the product? Or video presentation?

<comment><USER17> The video presentation is particularly bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Online Historical Encyclopaedia of Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://hopl.info/home.prx <comment><USER2> The "genealogical tree" looks interesting. Unfortunately the JPEG compression applied to the image makes the names of the languages illegible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since when Dlang is "Variant on C++" Also, they have Dark Basic but not DIV ??

</comment><comment><USER4> Unnavigable. The image is not a map, the search expects exact year, and top links refer to papers and other items. Maybe I will wget for personal use.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Object REXX, 1996, International" seems a bit thin for an encyclopaedia entry.

<comment><USER6> It would be nice if it redirected to REXX if it was that small: [http://hopl.info/showlanguage.prx?exp=868&language=REXX](http://hopl.info/showlanguage.prx?exp=868&language=REXX)

<comment><USER5> I was thrown by the coloured overrides and removal of underlines from the normal display of hyperlinks and wasn't looking at the actual entry. I've read the explanation page for all of the colours, now. (-:

That said, the real entry says "OO version of REXX".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It stops with 2004. Where there no new languages afterwards?

<comment><USER8> Certainly not. We had enough languages by then and nobody thought a new one would add any more value.

It is also when the relevant xkcd came out, spurring people to stop creating languages.</comment></comment>


Free Ebook: How to Code in HTML5 and CSS3 - <AUTHOR> http://howtocodeinhtml.com/ <comment><USER3> Any recommendations for a backend web developer who knows the basics of HTML and CSS but not much more?

<comment><USER4> Related question: how do "pros" write web pages. Do they do it by hand or do they use some type of wysiwyg editor?

I know the basics of HTML/CSS too (I suppose all programmers do), but still I don't feel qualified to make a web page. It seems to me that it's more a designer than a programmer task, am I wrong?

<comment><USER5> I use vim with a few plugins to support newer CSS3/HTML5 related syntax.

[https://github.com/othree/html5.vim](https://github.com/othree/html5.vim)

[https://github.com/hail2u/vim-css3-syntax](https://github.com/hail2u/vim- css3-syntax)

Chrome Developer Tools are invaluable in my workflow.

[https://developer.chrome.com/devtools](https://developer.chrome.com/devtools)

I can't speak to what the majority of designers use. I would guess that Dreamweaver is less popular today than it was before. I might be wrong, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks easy to follow and the design is clean. It mentions accessibility in the 'What's next?' chapter, though, while I would have hoped this would be covered as part of the material in general.

For example, the section on forms suggests you use the 'for' attribute to link a label with a form element, which is great, but it wouldn't take much extra text to give a short explanation why this is helpful to many users.

<comment><USER7> Hi,

Thanks for your feedback! I will consider your points (very good) when working on the next releases.

Author

<comment><USER8> Can I suggest adding a section on responsive web design? Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't read through more than the ToC at the moment -- but here's a quick summary of what I'd be interested to see, aside from just putting together uncluttered (and as-semantic-as-possible) HTML and maintainable CSS:

Support for older browsers -- I'd assume anything here will support evergreen browsers (including current IE) and emphasize how to always support that baseline. But what's involved in supporting older versions of IE, in particular? Easy mode: IE9+. Hard mode: IE6+. (I haven't had business reasons to support anything older than that, fortunately). There's obviously work involved (and not all sites need to do it) but it's worth pointing in the right direction for those who need to know.

Support for devices: how will it display on a phone? Tablet? What's likely to break? What main approaches are there? E.g., horiz elements wrap to vertical, different display entirely, let the user zoom/scan around, etc..

i18n/l10n: when you add multi-language support, some text will suddenly be three times as long, or even need to be displayed right-to-left. Numbers may align differently. What will happen to your menus, dropdowns, titles, etc.? Will they wrap in an ugly way, or be cut off? It's pretty common for things to just break, because the original site was built by someone who assumed "Home" would always be 4 chars.

And accessibility (already mentioned in another comment). Going into depth may be overkill, but I'd strongly advise covering the choices that _ruin_ accessibility entirely. There are basic best practices that aren't too hard to follow that will make a site at least usable by people with non-standard browsers (even if it won't win any awards).

<comment><USER10> > Support for older browsers...

Please no. The web industry has suffered enough because of IE. There's no reason for a book like this to even acknowledge it's existence. Of course I'm referring to older versions of IE. Newer ones at least support common use cases.

I'd maybe mention the use of something like Respond [1] to deal with media queries but I wouldn't go any further than that.

1\. [https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond](https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond)

<comment><USER9> > There's no reason for a book like this to even acknowledge it's existence.

That's not right; of course there's _are_ reasons, though you're welcome to debate how much weight those reasons have.

I don't know what percentage of sites have a business need to support old IE versions.

I know we do -- our site is used by medical staff in hospitals where the PCs are locked-down, upgrades are hugely expensive and difficult (the silent auto- upgrade approach just isn't safe), and so even though _no one_ likes IE7 there are still plenty of hospitals who haven't yet succeeded in upgrading.

There are other industries besides healthcare that suffer from this effect as well -- think especially of cases where companies have paid serious money for custom-developed systems that were cutting-edge in 1999, and thus were fully- browser-based and used the leading browser technology at the time, which was IE 5 with a ton of ActiveX (or Java applets?). If they still fill the business need perfectly well, the options around upgrading are not at all clear-cut.

I'm not sure how big this need is; I'm obviously biased because it affects me directly.

<comment><USER10> Follow up question.

Do you feel like the industry's support for older versions of IE perpetuates the idea that businesses can continue using such archaic systems?

<comment><USER9> It's the sort of question that needs more data than just what I think about it.

But for a gut feeling -- no, not at all. No one wants to support old browsers, and if you pay for custom site development, it's a common practice to add seriously high extra fees if that's a requirement.

And so most sites _don 't_ support them.

But all of this doesn't really encourage or discourage a business that has really poor options around upgrading. In some ways it's just irrelevant; they're using the browser as a tool for employees to complete specific tasks, and if Facebook doesn't work (but the expensive internal tools do) that's just fine.

The two domains collide when there are _new_ , external tools that are introduced to the environment. ...and this is why we need some support of old IE, because we really don't want our sales pitch to include "...but you'll need to also spend untold amounts of cash and effort to upgrade your browsers, first".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apendix A. would be to know the difference between markup and code...

<comment><USER12> Appendix B – "Correction to Appendix A"

"It is reasonable to say that HTML markup is code (and writing HTML markup is coding), provided that people understand that it is comparable to using coded notations when talking or writing. Think about the use of product codes, or using special code books when sending telegraphs, so that short coded presentations stand for long statements, or using colors as codes so that red means "stop" or "warning" or "hot". It's a matter of using some notational system which has been specifically agreed upon. (Actually, natural languages are not completely different from codes; they too are based on agreements, just more vague and implicit.)"

[https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/prog.html](https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/prog.html)

To be honest, it's a bit silly to argue this stuff to begin with. As long as the meaning "to write/type HTML and CSS" was conveyed, does it really matter? To look at a document as big as this and latch on to the code vs. not code distinction (an arbitrary one depending on how you look at it) in the title is to miss the document's greater value.

<comment><USER11> I think it does matter because code makes it sound complex, wheres markup explains what it actually is. I don't think everybody in this world should know how to program ("code") but I do think every person in this world should know the concept of markup, because essentially that's the same thing as knowing how to structure text which is just as important as spelling and grammar.

<comment><USER13> What is your definition of 'code'?

<comment><USER11> To make it simple I'd say markup is about structure where code has inherent meaning.

For example:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Here the markup does not change the fact that the dog is lazy. That is the markup does not give meaning to the sentence.

But with code, the meaning is "coded" in to the text. Lazy could be code for yellow, which in that case changes the meaning of the sentence.

<comment><USER14> >I'd say markup is about structure where code has inherent meaning.

With this definition couldn't you make the argument that code that defines structure isn't code, but markup?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems to be really well crafted for the complete beginners with step-by-step, encouraging approach (LEGO, clear transition from text to HTML with side-by- side comparison etc.)

If you're targeting novices, perhaps you'll find some inspiration for the layout in O'Reilly's "Head First" series: [http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/head- first.do?sortby...](http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/head- first.do?sortby=publicationDate&page=all)

They have done incredible work to make not only the content, but also its presentation attractive for the beginners.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thank you! This was timely for me.

I'm teaching my small nephew basics of web development and from now on I'll be following your book.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Good luck!

Author

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just out of of curiosity: Which tools did you use to write the book? I know it's especially hard to create different file format (HTML, epub, PDF).

<comment><USER7> HTML to write a book. PrinceXML to generate a PDF out of it. Then calibre for Mac to generate epub/mobi from HTML. I had to edit manually the output from calibre though.

<comment><USER18> Take a look at Scrivener[1], it might be a good fit for you.

[1] [https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Whenever I see one of these free books or websites, I say "Oh boy! I'm finally going to sit down and learn how to code/build websites/etc." I start but after a while I begin to slow down and ultimately stop.

I want to learn to code but every guide and how-to I read tells me to start with a different programming language and I never know who to trust.

<comment><USER20> Well, that is true when there are several languages that overlap (for example, you might want to do some server stuff and you find that there is C++, Java, C#, etc.); however, if you are trying to learn the web, then you definitely need to learn HTML and CSS, since those are the only languages available that do the thing they are good at.

If you are trying to build websites, then that's the way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "I cried when I wrote it." A glowing endorsement indeed from the author - <USER2> heartily approve!

</comment><comment><USER22> Great beginners guide! Perhaps consider selling it, or adding a donate button. I've noticed that I always finish books I've actually paid for :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Something like this but for JavaScript would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER24> Add some exercises. Even better, add tons of them :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Thanks to the author. Just what I was looking for!

</comment><comment><USER26> Except...it isn't coding, it's markup.

Not trying to be pedantic. There is a huge difference between the two.

<comment><USER27> Certainly true, and when I teach I try and make sure the distinction is respected. However as time goes in, it's worthwhile to highlight the ways markup is slowly becoming like coding. Semantic markup acts a lot like an instruction for the crawlers reading pages. CSS and its robust pre-processor eco-system now allow variables, mixins and includes which make it a great introduction to programming concepts for those totally new.

<comment><USER26> If One can't write bubble sort, a genetic solver or iterate through data (array, list, dictionary, whatever) while making decisions I think it is safe to say it is not coding.

If you can't go through a CS curriculum with it then it isn't coding? Maybe that's the distinction.

Yet I do see your point and there's probably nothing horrible about using it in your title. "Learn HTML and CSS Markup" may have been a better title, possibly even from an SEO perspective.

Again, not trying to be pedantic. Not a big deal. No data structures were harmed in the making of this title.

BTW, that aside, this nicely done. I am going to have my son go through it.

<comment><USER28> If you want to explain how markup is different from a general purpose language, you can always refer to the fact that markup isn't turing complete, and can't be used to perform arbitrary loops and arithmetic.

But that would also make things like basic SQL 'not coding', and any program you wrote where you didn't use an arbitrarily long loop.

That makes "print('Hello world')" not coding, and then it becomes clear that you're drawing an arbitrary line in the sand. "If you aren't writing compilers, you're not coding" or some such nonsense.

HTML and CSS are languages for en _coding_ the semantics of webpage formatting and content. They are domain specific languages. They are not turing complete. But they _are_ coding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When you read the first line of Chapter One, "I really like The Verge", you suddenly lose all interest in the rest of what he has to say.</comment>


Show HN: Interview with ex-Google engineers, get feedback and land a job - <AUTHOR> https://refdash.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you're currently looking for a job, give it a try. I would love to hear your feedback on the process.</comment>


Benchmark Capital takes on 8th partner: Mitch Lasky (Jamdat CEO) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/03/19/benchmark-capital-hires-lasky-of-jamdat-fame/ <comment><AUTHOR> _"The firm prides itself the equal status of its partners, in contrast to many other firms, where there can be hierarchies ranging from managing partner on top to the suitcase-carrying principal at bottom. The Benchmark partners took a "pay-cut" to bring Lasky on board -- dividing profits ("carry") and fees by eight, instead of seven."_

Not knowing much about the way VCs are structured internally I found that pretty interesting. It does seem like a big vote of confidence that they would split profits like that -- just like a startup might.</comment>


If you were making an app store, what would the rules be? - <AUTHOR>

I think the app store model is a very good one, not just for phones, but for most any sort of general-purpose consumer computing device. To have every application on the system, as well as the OS itself under a common installation/update mechanism along with a repository of software known to be non-malicious would be... a lot like a modern Linux distribution, actually. Of course, Linux distributions lack a mechanism for buying software, and many find the idea of doing so abhorrent.<p>If you were in charge of the app store for some new platform, be it a netbook, tablet, phone or something not yet invented, what rules would you put in place? We're all aware of the problems with Apple's approach, but we have no shining example to point to and say "that's the way". <comment><USER2> <http://baseshield.com/> is a YC-funded app store for Windows that has a lot of good things going for it.

Does anybody familiar with the company know what the process for getting apps added to their library is? They've made such a good job of the implementation—I particularly like the fact that they use virtualisation / sandboxing to protect the host system—I'd be interested to hear what rules they have in place for app additions.

<comment><USER3> Right now the best way to add an app is to email your setup program (or a link) to email@example.com. Then we'll get it packaged up and added to the store.

We know this process is a little awkward now, but we've got some exciting new stuff coming out soon that makes sandbox creation easy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some rules that come to mind for me are:

* Apps must not alter data they did not create without explicit permission from the user.

* Apps must not cause advertising to be displayed outside of their own UI or when not in the foreground (the meaning of which depends on the platform's UI).

* Apps must not alter data on other devices without explicit permission from the user of the other device.

* Apps most not transmit data from the device without explicit user permission.

Some grey areas I don't know how best to handle are:

* Plugins and the like that might violate the rules despite the original app being ok.

* Agreements with third-parties (e.g. phone service providers). To what degree should it be up to the maintainer of the app store to enforce those agreements?

* Allowing installation of apps through other mechanisms.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning C++ for Java developers - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm a Java developer who's developed an interest working with a couple C++ based projects (OpenCV and  QGIS in particular).  I know that there are bindings for other languages for both of these projects, but I feel its time to buckle down and learn C++.
Does the community have any recommendations for learning C++ from the perspective of someone who has only worked with Java and Python in their educational/professional career? I also want to make sure I'm learning modern best practices and not outdated techniques, which is a hazard of Googling for random web tutorials. <comment><USER2> I used this book [0] for my C++ course at uni a few semesters ago and found it rather easy to follow and Weiss does a good job going through the differences between Java and C++.

The biggest difference for me from Java is the fact you have to manage your own memory as there is no garbage collector to clean up after you in C++. This book covers memory management, operator overloading, and functors quite well.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Java-Programmers-Mark-A- Weiss/dp/01391...](http://www.amazon.com/Java-Programmers-Mark-A- Weiss/dp/013919424X)

</comment><comment><USER3> check out some good C++ open source projects, like Chrome from Google and Folly from Facebook.</comment>


Microsoft Edge Beats Chrome by Over Three Hours in New Battery Usage Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/microsoft-edge-beats-chrome-by-over-three-hours-in-new-battery-usage-test/ <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, maybe the link should be replaced by this one from Microsoft: [https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2017-04/WebdriverM...](https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2017-04/WebdriverMethodology.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this because using edge is so horrific that it stops people from wanting to use their computer so much?</comment>


Negative effects of LocalStorage expiry for 1Password - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209563 <comment><AUTHOR> This also hurts my app ([https://afinestart.me/](https://afinestart.me/)) because the free, no-account-needed version stores users' bookmarks in localStorage (only the web version though, the extensions have their own, more persistent local storage).

</comment><comment><USER2> Having the 1Password secret key purged from browser storage is indeed unacceptable. It's essentially half of the vault secret (the other half being the master password). If they can no longer keep the secret key in browser storage, vaults are going to be less secure.

I hope Apple backs away from its plans.</comment>


Gevent For the Working Python Developer - <AUTHOR> http://sdiehl.github.io/gevent-tutorial/

<comment><USER2> Great article!

I think gevent zeromq is no longer necessary

[http://zeromq.github.io/pyzmq/api/zmq.green.html](http://zeromq.github.io/pyzmq/api/zmq.green.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Gevent looks like a nice system, but as far as I can tell doesn't support Python 3. Does anyone have a sense of when support is planned?

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, quite a few critical libraries still only Python 2.7. Many of them, including gevent, are definitely trying to port to Python 3 but it's sometimes not an easy task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do some post-response clean up using uWSGI+Gevent

[http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Gevent.html](http://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Gevent.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for providing such a nice post. Article and examples were explained well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great works, thanks.

I like the tracing of execution, very helpful!</comment>


Kara Swisher Deconstructs Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more-reasons-to-worry-about-facebook

<comment><USER2> boo, link-jacked; actual Kara Swisher link:

[http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more- reasons-...](http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070925/15-billion-more-reasons-to- worry-about-facebook)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everything new about facebook (widgets/apps/etc) is more or less opposite from why everyone old joined up. The only feature change that improved the facebook/brought in more people was the newsfeed and that was only after initially running into a huge resistance against it from within the community.

Hustling to find a way to monetize the users by continuing to add features isn't going to get them far. What else could be done to dramatically alter the experience and generate more people or more activity? I think the success has gone to Mark's head and agree that he should cash out now.

Not to say that it won't be a service used by millions for years to come, but the model for growth seems to have hit it's peak.

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's recap.

1) If you build a cool site that's interactive and brings in lots of users, most likely it has a "popularity curve" where it's really cool at first, then it's the thing to do, then it's kind of old hat, and finally you are left with the die-hards. Perhaps some sites keep users for 15 years, but to me building the next cool social networking site for pet rock lovers (or whatever) looks more like creating a popular TV show.

2) Big companies come along and buy up these small fish while they are in their growth phase. The more users you have and the faster you are growing, the more perceived value you have.

3) They then absorb small fish into their larger operations, eventually completely consuming small fish. Oddly enough, this keeps them from following the same popularity curve as everybody else: they are always refreshing the mix by bringing in new blood and content. This means there is a huge amount of pressure on large organizations to buy up small companies. Very interesting.

4) As an entrepreneur, you always have to ask yourself whether you still have a long way to grow, or if you are closing in to your peak. The related article says that Facebook will peak, and I believe it. The problem is that every company believes it will change and dominate the world as we know it. Rationally, Facebook owners need to make the call about where the most value is. But there might not be a lot of rational thinking going on at this point.

Sorry to repeat all of that. I was just trying to get my head around the concepts in the related articles. Good food for thought! I love contrarian articles.

</comment><comment><USER5> Swisher is entitled to her skepticism but it's a little absurd for her to be offering Zuckerberg valuation advice, implying parties to the negotiation are 'delusional' and 'insane'.

A company is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Those with ultimate say over whether FB is worth $X billion are those who buy and sell $X billion companies, in whole or significant part. That includes people advising and courting FB, who know a lot about its internals, prospects, and strategic value.

As Swisher notes, a few months ago, when speculation centered on a $6 billion valuation, she suggested in that range, Zuckerberg would be a 'fool' to not take the money and run. Well, if the latest WSJ report is to be trusted, now valuations over $10 billion are on the table. So what was the foolish advice?</comment>


Liz Warren: I'll Smash Up Amazon, Google, Facebook – If Elected to White House - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/08/liz_warren_technology_break/ <comment><USER2> And you can guess who is not going to get any funding from Silicon Valley</comment>