dmethvin

Enshittification. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Okay, I'll take a little time to brag. The word count challenge here got my interest at the time, so I whipped up an assembly language version of it and iterated several times, trying to figure out the value of switching different registers. In the end, I took second place:

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/blob/4028269f...

However, there's an interesting story behind this story. David Stafford, who came in first, posted that he thought he had the fastest solution and bet $100 that nobody could beat it. I posted my code which was significantly faster, and David tweaked it further to eventually win the challenge. Like a true person of honor, he did pay the $100 and I cashed his check.

If CSS was designed the way it is just to satisfy the constraints of 1996, then maybe that gives us permission 20 years later to do things a little differently.

Yeah, just like we can choose which side of the road to drive on or pick any arbitrary character encoding for an 8-bit byte.

This has a lot of really serious implications. I built a form for a charity that allowed users to buy a subscription but include an additional donation amount. Chrome was sometimes filling that field with the two-digit year. The charity got a lot of complaints and it ruined the trust relationship with the donors who didn't understand what was happening and thought it was intentional.

AMP is just a set of conventions and limitations that, when followed, make for a fast site. Anyone can make a fast site if they follow similar rules. Most sites don't do that because either the developers want to use something that's "nicer" to code but a lot bigger, or because the marketing department insists on loading 12 different tracking and analytics progams--when they probably only use one or two.

Yes, things are changing rapidly everywhere on the stack, but it seems that with front-end dev the same two things are left behind with each generation: performance and accessibility.

Each time we get close to making performant and accessible web sites easy for mortals to develop, some major disruption in the force occurs and well-crafted solutions no longer work in the new environment. So people reinvent them, poorly, and it takes another four or five years before things catch up.

I think many designers and developers prioritize their own needs or preferences and fail to advocate for what users really want. No user wants a web site or app to take 10 seconds to load on their phone, yet most do. Users don't care if your app is written in React, Angular, or served from a WordPress site. They just want to be able to use it.

I wasn't able to find any working examples from the homepage, even with the updated link. Can you link directly to a demo page or two that uses the library, rather than a Github repo with code that uses the library?

I don't think they want control over the browser market, just the browser users on Windows. People are less likely to ditch Edge if it is more compatible with the way Chrome and Safari work (including the ability to run Chrome extensions). That means they have more visibility and control over those users.

It's important to express the underlying reasoning for the policy: things with similar size and speed can be together, dissimilar things should be separated. Cars and bikes/scooters are not the same, and streets need to separate them via dedicated lanes. If not, those users are going to choose sidewalks as the lesser of two dangers.

The Microsoft Edge browser has had this feature for two or three years, by the same name. Chrome has something similar.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gui...

Quite often you have to manually do the task at least once to determine how to automate it. That tells you your upper bound on how much time can be saved.

If for example it only took 15 minutes of manual work it's highly unlikely that the payback of automation would occur any time soon. That's especially true because the 2nd or 3rd time there may be different special cases and you'd have to go back and change your automation.

Why did you hire a psychologist from the company that inappropriately disclosed data to Cambridge Analytica?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambri...

I completely agree that you can do a lot with jQuery or even plain DOM and JS. It's often the right way to go when there's already back-end structure like Wordpress, Drupal, or ASP.NET and you just need simple things like form validation.

The benefit that frameworks offer is exactly that structure that jQuery doesn't provide (and was never designed to provide). A long-lived SPA needs good structure. If you aren't good at understanding how to create it yourself a framework can save a LOT of work.

Here's the 990: http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/463/4634857...

See the bottom of PDF page 8 under Independent Contractors and the bottom of page 27. Note that p27 is NOT saying that all that money went to John Steele, just that he is an interested person in the transaction.

It looks to me like "Nautilus Ventures" is a for-profit that actually publishes and the non-profit pays that entity. All the operating expenses are there so the 990 doesn't really tell you what they spent.

That would cost Apple a lot if those people had Apple Care. Better for Apple if the minority people who perceive a problem come in and ask for a replacement/

I agree with your premise but the example problem already has many established companies including Engaging Networks, EveryAction, Salsa, and Luminate. As a startup your job will either be to completely replace their stack in one fell swoop (VERY hard as a startup with no track record) or to somehow integrate in with the existing stack and eventually push it out (also hard but doable).

This is from a year ago.

As someone who wants to contribute to a project for the first time, there would be nothing more frustrating than spending time creating what I think is a good pull request, only to have it be turned down (which it will be).

Issues help new contributors and repo veterans determine whether it's worth the extra effort to create a pull request. The problem with low-quality issues needs to be addressed by automation and filters, which GitHub hasn't done yet.

He might think otherwise because it climbed to the top of HN but doesn't have any explanation (here or on the actual page) of what it does or who/what it might be useful for.

Corrosion from leaking electrolyte would eventually short the battery terminals to the protective shield around the battery cells. At that point the battery would catch fire. It just happened to me 3 months ago, 2002 Prius on a battery that was serviced for the recall in 2004. Electrolyte continued to leak, obviously. :/ https://twitter.com/davemethvin/status/782610209525170176

It's quite a burden to maintain two different sets of APIs.

jQuery 3.0 lets you do for..of for a jQuery collection even.

Right, that is the advantage of having an API layer that the developer (not the web platform) controls. The more we dump into the web platform the bigger it gets because it's nearly impossible to remove anything. The idea of the Extensible Web Manifesto is to provide primitives in the web platform and let people build more powerful abstractions over them in JavaScript.

You could view jQuery as that type of abstraction. If you decide to use some other abstraction (e.g. React) you can switch your web page/app and you aren't paying the cost of having jQuery embedded into the web platform.

Got the original Coin, it was defective and I was sent another one. I used it on a transaction and it charged a card different than the one showing on the display. By then most of my frequent buys were at stores that take chip cards so I stopped carrying it. Still waiting for my Coin 2.0 that should have shipped in Q1.

I sympathize with the libertarian "I should be able to decide what I put in my body" but the fact is that right now anyone using e-cigs has no idea what's in that juice they fill their devices with. Studies have found some pretty nasty stuff in there (besides the nicotine) including diacetyl. If you want to encounter corporate overlords, try suing them after the fact for destroying your lungs. They will argue you knew it's dangerous and you decided to put it in your body.

The only time I have heard of that is when sponsors buy a slot to pitch their product or service. Was that your situation?

In most conferences that are not marketing-oriented, the speakers are the product being sold to the attendees. Many conferences pay the speaker's expenses for travel, and may even pay them some speaking fee.

If you are a speaker being offered a fee to speak, however, be very careful about overseas conferences. People have been turned away at the border because the officials may see the money being paid as a job.

"As a responsible developer you will, of course, want to verify that any package upgrades function as advertised. The real world is a messy place; there’s nothing we can do about that but be vigilant."

Being a programmer you may, of course, try to automate that verification process with something like greenkeeper.io. That opens up its own kind of exploit opportunities.

https://twitter.com/davemethvin/status/711181897712455680

Dedicating your development time to a laundry list of "best practices" doesn't pay off that well. Measure where your web page is spending its time and fix that. Take image sprites for example. Setting them up takes extra steps and complexity in your build process and requires you to track which images you are using. With HTTP2 becoming common the cost of individual image requests isn't that bad.

Right, for the human there are still the English API docs to figure out the arguments and return values. These are the type annotations that TypeScript uses to let you know when you've misinterpreted the API docs, which is an incredible time saver.

I have to assume he's been told not to speak about details until the executives came up with a plan. If that is the case, GitHub management is really making his job a living hell. Why have someone whose job it is to work with the community if everything has to be micro-managed by higher-ups?

why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?

The big users with lots of followers are the ones who create the large audience for Twitter to reach. Right now those people create content for free, if you start charging them they are likely to leave.

If Twitter could create a model like Youtube where big content creators with lots of followers shared revenue, that would straighten out the incentives. There's a model here, it just may not be as big as Twitter thought it was a few years ago.