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It varies for me depending on my mood state. I find it most vivid in bouts of psychosis. I remember once being in such a state and being overwhelmed by my mind's eye seeming even more vivid than the images coming into my actual eyes. Seeing two distinct views at once was quite disorienting.

I'm a bit surprised at how often it seems to come up in random comment threads. The atmosphere here feels increasingly unwelcoming lately.

Or maybe people feel like they're just having abstract, hypothetical intellectual discussions. But when I read these threads, it just feels like signal after signal that I no longer fit in or have a place here.

Puzzle games seem like the perfect example of an entire genre that strives to get the difficulty level “just right.”

I think Stephen’s Sausage Roll might be my absolute favorite recent example of this. The Talos Principle and the Witness are also other great recent examples.

Also, to your last comment about adjusting difficulty in the UI: many, many single player action/adventure games have this. It’s been a commonplace thing for quite a while now. It also enables cool things like maximal-difficulty speed runs.

I recently had a great time watching someone speed run Metal Gear Solid 2 at its absolute highest difficulty level (that I don’t think the game even offers to players until the first play through is completed). I believe it was a recorded speed running-for-cancer event or something like that. I’ll have to try to find the YouTube video.

Actually, here it is: https://youtu.be/3DDMhcxUoAc. Obviously not something to watch if you ever want to play the game and haven’t yet. Another excellent one for MGS3: https://youtu.be/jUMDBOasRbA

I’m guessing they’re either referring to the unbelievably gigantic number of threads making it impossible to find the important and notable ones, or they’re referring to the fact that significant forums on the site have been closed down and either deleted or hidden.

I was active on SA from 2004 to 2010, and at one point I was a contractor who worked on the forum code. I was also an admin for a short period. Having been so immersed in the forums for so long, it blows my mind to think that so much internet culture originated on SA. They basically invented the now hugely popular meme format, though they were called image macros then. “tl;dr” and “pro tip” originated there. 4chan was a spin-off forum from their anime forum. I’m sure there’s more I’ve missed.

The allegations in the article against Lowtax are disturbing to say the least.

What’s the deal with the Git repo not including any source code? Is this a common way to use GitHub these days, as a download server for closed source projects?

When we were prototyping Git support, one of the first things we investigated was having automatic conversion between Hg and Git on the server. We weren't able to get the performance to a level where responsiveness would be acceptable, and maintaining consistency between the two repos was complex.

It's something we might revisit in the distant future. As a middle ground, I've been thinking of implementing support for multiple SCMs in a single repository with the conversion/syncing process left up to the user. But that'll probably take more than a couple of 20% days to bang out. :)

If you're interested, I have some patches against hg-git that make it easier to take an existing Hg repo and convert it to Git (as opposed to the other way around). I haven't had a chance to prepare them to go upstream yet, but my repo's here: [link redacted]

I was never really a fan of iTerm, but I do really like using my mouse in terminal applications, so I wrote a SIMBL plugin for Terminal that implements support for mouse tracking: [link redacted]

Also, I think a recent update added support for horizontally splitting windows (with cmd+D).

I do agree though, I think Apple could do a much better job with Terminal.

Here's some stuff I find useful when editing Python:

    (setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t)
    (setq longlines-show-hard-newlines t) ; displays "\" at the end of lines that wrap past the window's edge

    ; camel case word navigation
    (when (boundp 'subword-mode)
      (add-hook 'after-change-major-mode-hook '(lambda () (subword-mode 1))))

    ; Bindings
    (defun delete-backward-indent (&optional arg)
      "Erase a level of indentation, or 1 character"
      (interactive "*P")
      (if (= (current-column) 0)
          (delete-backward-char 1)
        (let ((n (mod (current-column) standard-indent)))
          (if (looking-back (concat "^\s*" (make-string n 32)))
              (if (= n 0)
                  (delete-backward-char standard-indent)
                (delete-backward-char n))
            (delete-backward-char 1)))))

    (defun newline-maybe-indent ()
      "Like newline-and-indent, but doesn't indent if the previous line is blank"
      (interactive "*")
      (if (= (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position))
          (newline)
        (newline-and-indent)))

    (add-hook 'python-mode-hook
              '(lambda ()
                 (hs-minor-mode 1) ; code folding
                 (define-key python-mode-map (kbd "RET") 'newline-maybe-indent)
                 (define-key python-mode-map (kbd "DEL") 'delete-backward-indent)
                 (define-key python-mode-map (kbd "M-RET") 'hs-toggle-hiding)))

    ; On-the-fly spell checking
    (add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (flyspell-prog-mode)))

    ; On-the-fly pyflakes checking
    (require 'flymake-point) ; shows errors in the minibuffer when highlighted (http://bitbucket.org/[redacted]/dotfiles/src/tip/.emacs.d/plugins/flymake-point.el)
    (setq python-check-command "pyflakes")
    (when (load "flymake" t)
      (defun flymake-pyflakes-init ()
        (let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
                           'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
               (local-file (file-relative-name
                            temp-file
                            (file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
          (list "pyflakes" (list local-file))))
      (add-to-list 'flymake-allowed-file-name-masks
                   '("\\.py\\'" flymake-pyflakes-init)))
    (add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (flymake-mode 1)))

My entire .emacs is here: http://bitbucket.org/[redacted]/dotfiles/src/tip/.emacs

Get like 2 or 3 different cheat sheets and keep them available whenever using Emacs. Steal someone else's ~/.emacs[1]. Make sure you use those Emacs key bindings in your shell. Bonus points if you're on OS X, which has Emacs bindings for all native text widgets.

[1] Here's mine: http://bitbucket.org/[redacted]/dotfiles/src/tip/.emacs :)

http://bitbucket.org/[redacted]/dotfiles/src/tip/.emacs

http://bitbucket.org/[redacted]/dotfiles/src/tip/.emacs.d/pl...

Probably my favorite bit of the config is that it uses flymake to run Pyflakes on my Python code as I'm writing it. I also have a little plugin that shows the error in the minibuffer area when the point is over the offending line.

It also disables backup/autosave file littering by using a locked down directory in /tmp.

As far as bindings go, I wrote delete-backward-indent for python-mode which deletes a level of indentation instead of just one space. There's also newline-maybe-indent that doesn't indent if the previous line has no indentation.

Everything else is pretty straightforward customization, I think. flyspell-prog-mode is another thing worth mentioning: it highlights spelling errors, but only in strings and comments.