Thanks. It's a good quick run-through with the fundamentals and lives up to the title. I wish there would be simple and short illustrative examples/case-studies - or links to it - in the lessons to prove each point.

The worse, I guess, is the password constraint. I really fail to understand why should any application (except banking, may be) force its users to go for difficult passwords. I agree, it weakens the security - but warn them, don't force them. It should be a guideline; not a rule. Whether I want to follow it not is my decision; my risk.

I can't think of a set of rules to make passwords secure. It all feels like smokes and mirrors at this point. Are we going to have a blacklist of passwords that you can't use as passwords anymore (and require users to change password on next log in as we add new items to the blacklist)?

Otherwise, the more I read about these experts who can get 90% of a 16k password hash list figured out in a few hours, I can't think how MyAuntSally1 is any safer than donkey

My bank insisting on a hard-to-remember 8 character password isn't make it more secure than letting me pick a longer passphrase.

I was using the CodeAcademy courses, they are equally good. Although I have looked into only the first few lessons on learn-angular.

The whole story is enjoyable; especially the Ballmer Visit part. It's surprising to see the city council reacting that way to his visit. Something that is hard to understand in many parts of the world.

Maybe Ballmer was overkill in this situation. While I could see a local (German or even Bavarian since their German Headquarter is just out of Munich) manager with connections to members of the council being able to influence their decision, an American coming over and basically demanding from them to change their mind is probably the best way to enforce the idea even more.

The article mentions that the mayor had difficulties communicating in English good enough to feel comfortable. Add to that the slight dislike of American culture common with many people here, the high degree of local identification in southern germany and you get that result.

That said, there CEO flying over was probably the last straw they reverted to when everything else had failed ;)

A cleaner way to convert a function declaration into a function expression would be to use brackets

  (function() {
    //code here
  })();

This won't affect the return type of the statement; which in case of using ! will return boolean 'true' unless the function returns a truthy value. Plus using ! for this purpose, looks totally messy.

To extend upon this, you can also pass in references to decrease lookup time. That's why you see people doing:

   (function($,window) {
     //code here
   })(jQuery,window);

This reduces size after uglifying.

  (function(window, $, otherGlobal) {  
     $ = window.jQuery;
     otherGlobal = window.otherGlobal;

     //code here
  })(window);

This solves one of the problems that '!' does, but not the other. If this file is concatenated with one that looks like it would accept a function call, it will be an error, because javascript. e.g.

    (function(){/* stuff */}())
    (function(){/* other stuff */}())

Is interpreted as:

    (function(){/* stuff */)())(function(){/* other stuff */}())

To correct this, you also need a semicolon.

    ;(function() {
        //code here
    })();

Alternatively, if you can stomach it (I can't), you can use the !.

This is what I use- in fact, I've been confused by this thread because I've never seen the '!' hack before. Even though someone called in "javascript syntax 101." I must be using good sources to learn.

I'm one of the authors. We hope it's a good start of a collection for OmniGraffle users. Requesting everyone to contribute; submit more stencils and make this place great.

This is a great idea! I was shocked to see the stunt pulled by graffletopia given the community goodwill it had. Hopefully you can fill the void left by their dickish move.

FYI, clicking on "Submit a free stencil" takes me to a warning:

> We're sorry. This document is not published.

"Dickish move" is a strange way to put that. Do you think their service is free to operate?

If you're an Omnigraffle user, you've already paid for a professional-grade application, and the stencils offered by Graffletopia are inarguably huge time savers.

$24/year, even if you only use one stencil in one project, should be an expense not even worth mentioning (15-30 billable minutes?) for most professionals. Certainly when compared to the time required to create all those assets yourself instead.

Anyhow, to each their own, but I don't understand this kind of angry reaction when a free service becomes very popular and decides to start charging a completely reasonable fee for their offering.

Especially from an entrepreneurial community like HN.

The problem is that they are charging money for things that are free to distribute. I think most of the Graffle creators would be upset with this development if they were aware of how disingenuous this was. In fact, they (Graffletopia) are taking advantage of the fact that most of the items are not licensed in any way. For example: https://www.graffletopia.com/stencils/1197

This guy could very easily put his graffle on github (as Viget has done here: https://github.com/vigetlabs/Twitter-Bootstrap-for-Omnigraff... and License it as MIT, GPL, whatever.

$36 is not a reasonable amount to ask for. Nor is $24, especially in the days of Amazon S3 hosting, or even putting a slick static page up and pointing contributors and downloaders to Github. I respect the marketplace aspect, letting posters set a price on their work and taking something off the top. That's not dissimilar at all to what the Tuts+ and Medialoot marketplaces do. But they don't charge you to download their freebies, and charging someone for a membership to download more than one free item a month is total bullshit.

stencils.io is actually a static webpage with direct links to the stencil's original locations.

Thumbs up to you for doing it the right way.

Changed the privacy settings of the form. You should be able to submit a new stencil now.

Good idea. OmniGraffle users now can use such free stencil collections. It should grow.

Thanks. We'll do that soon.

We are putting up a fully functional demo to try out the whole product. It should up and running in a day. Will post the link here. Thanks.

First thing - don't search for motivation or don't try to get yourself motivated. You'll end up looking for things that will make you feel good which will in-turn promote procrastination and thereby take you away from actions. The truth is motivation doesn't last. It's a push mechanism. You'll have to focus on things that pull you towards it.

If you keep going like the way you are currently, how would your life be? Definitely you understand the problem with it and this post is the proof. But ask yourself - "why do you want to get A-levels at school?". If programming and researching keeps you going, by all means, you should focus on it. Make sure you put the best possible efforts in it; the rest will follow automatically.