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hamstersoup

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Will Moffat, Scottish geek working in Belgium on www.jooki.rocks

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The article presents some great 'explorable explanations' by (or inspired by) Bret Victor.

This really does seem like the future of communicating hard concepts.

At high school I would often write BBC Basic simulations of the dull problems we had been given as homework. I was so much more passionate when I was exploring and learning myself.

I highly recommend the Handmade Hero series referred to in this blog post. I've been following the archives on YouTube (at 2x speed). Casey Muratori is an engaging presenter and I'm rediscovering my love of low-level programming.

I was about to start a big project on App Engine, so your comment is worrying.

Anybody else having reliability problems with GAE or is this just an isolated case?

The slider serves as a simple privacy reminder on your home page. It only takes a few moments at youropenbook.org to make it clear that many people could benefit from such a reminder.

It's not the intention that you would interact with the slider frequently. If you drag it to a different setting a dialog box would popup and explain exactly what the consequences would be.

Most people would be happy with simple privacy settings, and there's still a customize link for the power user.

(disclaimer, I worked on this)

Facebook has focused on the social graph, Freebase connects people and more. We liked the lightweight approach of the Graph API, so here's our version: http://graph.freebaseapps.com/the_simpsons/seasons?html=1

You can even use Facebook usernames (if we have them) http://graph.freebaseapps.com/facebook.jackie/movies?html=1

One neat feature is the ?html=1 mode, which makes the JSON api browsable. I'd love to see other apis implement this.

What do you think?