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estenh

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Software Engineer at Twitter. I like storytelling and making cool stuff. Oh, and Python and JavaScript. @esten on Twitter.

Recovering journalist.

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Fun idea, but your auth is quite broken right now. I keep losing my work; very frustrating. Also, already lost my work on one challenge from clicking the I/O button.

I like the cool 80s nostalgia, but it's not super-usable.

I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.

On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.

You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.

I have a friend who recently quit because of the crazy hours they were working him and the menial work he had to do. He told me he wasn't the only one quitting, lots of other people had been hired for similar positions and got frustrated and left.

This NYTimes piece on the company reads like an ad more than anything else. Pretty upsetting.

Is this in Chrome? I've seen that happen in FF, and I'm pretty sure it's just due to the way the API works in that browser.

Not sure what's going on if it's in Chrome. Fairly minimal latency on both my Mac and Windows machine.

It probably wasn't, but we needed some way to save high scores, and "outsourcing" auth to FB was the simplest way. I've done other projects where that's optional, and that'll probably be the end goal for this as well.

If it's any consolation, I don't like sites that only use FB auth either... this is just a product of the time-constraint.

We wrote a little game that should help with pitch recognition. Uses Couch for storing high scores, Redis for cache and Tornado for the server.

Makes use of Audiolib.js (https://github.com/jussi-kalliokoski/audiolib.js/) for audio that works in FF/Chrome. Bit weird in FF though, but at least it plays.

I did most of the JS and my friend did most of the backend. We were sorta on deadline, so the design isn't quite what I would call perfect (ha) and my JS is super-messy in places. Also, there are bits where I inexplicably use jQuery for stuff I had been doing without a framework and other weird inconsistencies like that, but hey, it works. Anyway, let me know what you think! Thanks.

Speaking as a photojournalist-turned-engineer, I think the idea of hacking photography is what got me into hacking software in the first place. I started collecting old cameras and fixing/modding them, making them do different things depending on what I liked, as opposed to what they were designed to do. Admittedly, being a gearhead doesn't help in the slightest, but playing around with cameras does lead to some interesting photography. Of course, all that hinges on having a somewhat relevant subject matter.

I had it explained to me once by one of my photoj professors that the photo consists of a message you're trying to convey about a subject. That can be done through technical proficiency or some strange artistic effects, so long as they all point towards the same message. Anything outside of that is just noise. Either technique for technique's sake or artistic effects for the effects' sake.

I watched this happen on Twitter. Hilarious distraction while I was doing some tedious work for class. Definitely didn't expect to see it on Gawker and ABC. Don't think the writer did either.

Now I'm just wondering when people will stop looking at this as some sort of societal commentary and realize it was just one guy having fun on Twitter while bored in a Burger King.

[dead] 15 years ago

Muse makes markup that looks exactly like I thought it'd look: ridiculously impractical and invalid. Fun.