JCSato

Basically same deal here.

In my experiences growing up, if something was fully restricted, it made me: a) really want that thing (happened a lot with tech) b) develop really unnatural aversions to it (a religious upbringing made this rear it's head in a lot of plays)

So my (completely amateur) opinion is to have a policy like you're doing, but only enforce it like 80% of the time. 100% is where you start to get into giving people complexes territory.

"But I think the key is finding things he enjoys just as much as playing video games or watching tv."

LEGOs are real expensive these days, and you really have to kind of. . .tailor the experience for them until they're 6 or so, so that they use them safely and so that they aren't presented with too much complexity and once. That said, for both my 5 yo nephew and myself growing, they're a great toy because they can be a group or solo activity, and because they help respond to creativity ("I want to build X!") without removing all the imagination - video games tend to offer a more "complete" experience (i.e. leave fewer "gaps" for the child to fill), and less modular toys can feel limiting in what kind of play can be accomplished.

Just my two cents.

I've been playing through the Metal Gear series in release order, starting the MSX games, currently on Peace Walker.

It took me until 3 to actually think Kojima was decent at storytelling, and then 4 got me onboard the "Kojima is a genius" train. Metal Gear's backdrop is a fever dream about the military industrial complex, but the storytelling is always much more focused on exploring themes and ideals than it is dedication to realism.

FWIW, there has been a significant increase in the quality of his work. Solid 1 was kind of puerile and hamfisted in its approach to its themes, in a kind of "terrible shounen anime" kind of way. Solid 2 was a really amazing prediction of the way surveillance works in a modern society, but was needlessly obtuse. Solid 3 was way easier to digest, and Solid 4 was sublime. But neither really work in isolation from the first two, and slogging through them definitely takes a lot of patience, so I see where you're coming from.

I guess the way I'd summarize is: a lot of people talk about abandoning setting details for other motives (e.g. there are monsters in the witcher, so why can't there be a sizeable black population), but Kojima is one of the few I'd trust to actually pull it off - I just need it to not be ~1999 Kojima.

So, just to get my own biases out of the way first: I'm a big webpack fan, with no qualifications. I think it's a fantastic tool, and I've had the complete opposite experience of the OP.

This response comes off as kind of snide, as does the post it responds to; I don't care to tone police, so that's fine, but I do want to try to understand the perspectives here.

I'm imagining you're coming from a place of: you have a (fantastic) tool with unique challenges, and it's incredibly frustrating to have that tool judged a) based on requirements it wasn't designed around and b) (likely?) based on older versions of your tool that has since been improved. Those are fair things to take issue with.

A couple things, though: "Hey thanks for the candid opinion!!!" - This seems pretty obviously disingenuous. "Maybe it's been awhile since you have taken a look at our documentation!" - Comes from the position that OP is simply out of touch, and that their issues aren't valid. They may or may not be, but this is "Maybe you're wrong!" and not "Maybe there's been a misunderstanding!" "So if you have great ideas, please let me know. :-D" - In context with the above, this is more like "Let me know when you actually have a great idea" than it is like "Please open an issue or pull request so we can actually fix it". The OP does clearly have an issue with Webpack - "You spend 2 days getting it into some semblance of a working state, and never touch it for fear of introducing a new issue" - and that issue can be addressed, if developed into something more actionable, or may already be solved by the improved documentation of 2.0 & 3.0. As it stands, though, it seems more likely to me that nothing comes out of it, which is a shame.

Not trying to put words in your mouth, I just expect you're more frustrated and want to make a better tool than you are trying to necessarily defend your tool, and I'm not sure you're communicating the former over the latter. Would love clarification if I've misinterpreted something, or correction if I seem totally off the mark. And again, lest I come off more aggressive/dismissive than I intend - thank you for all your work developing and maintaining Webpack. I imagine it's a relatively thankless task for the breadth of what it offers.

You're a class act, shamdasani. Thanks for sharing. :)

Congratulations!

Not to ignore the point being illustrated, nor the tongue-in-cheek nature of it, but a symbol on the flag of Nazi Germany and a Latin phrase from the middle ages that some undesirables on the internet use don't really seem comparable in scale, and scale is the important thing here.

MAGA, for instance, was memetic, so if you use/repurpose it, there's a relatively unambiguous origin. Deus Vult in this context, not so much; it lacks the spread and saturation necessary. If the Swastika was only present on a small subset of Nazi paraphernalia, it wouldn't be nearly as taboo - it's till so toxic today because it was on everything and so readily associated.

So I don't really think that argument applies here.

That's kind of the failure of Deepfreeze - GG wanted to prove that their claims about journos held water, but when they provided and standardized their data it's so off-putting and clinical that it's hard to not dismiss as a little creepy.

Used to love RPS, before most of its best writers left. Now it's a not particularly exceptional group of writers and the most whinging, entitled EiC/owner I've ever seen. There's nothing quite like seeing John Walker act like a 2 year old in every comments section.

As far as other good outlets, I think Techraptr is the only one I know of that holds water these days. Loved Tom Francis' work at PC Gamer back in the day too, before he left.

Me too, haha

Ran into similar shock recently while working on a project. Ended up just making my own - was actually fairly straightforward, and pretty fun. Creating 6 <select> menus for date time input would have been obnoxious enough as a developer, but I can't imagine filling that in as a user and not hating the experience. Glad to see Firefox moving in this direction.

This article doesn't really talk about medieval life at all, save for a mention at the end:

"The cards' suit symbols differed, but as in The Courtly Household Cards, the pip cards are individuals of varying social ranks. These cards could not trump the face cards, but they could trump one another in a topsy-turvy order. Thus, the moneylender trumps the nobleman, the priest the moneylender, the bawd the priest, the pimp the bawd, the innkeeper the pimp, the wine merchant the innkeeper, and so on. This upturned order cannot have pleased the authorities. Such decks of cards based on social strata, nonetheless, may well have been common for German playing cards before suit symbols related to the hunt were adopted."

Most of the rest is talking about how great and well preserved the artistry of this particular deck of cards is (admittedly, it is pretty fantastic).

My two cents as somebody who's made the shift from C++ & Java to web dev over the past year or so:

The complexity really depends on where you start. Part of what muddies this with web dev is how many resources there are. If you look up "what front end developers need to know in 20XX", you get a dizzying amount of results. Learn React, Redux, SASS/LESS, Angular, Express, Webpack, Docker, etc. There are lists upon lists and tutorials on tutorials.

A while back, before Google made it a standard feature, I did a project that took a Google maps route and found gas stations along said route, giving you back a list of stations with prices, etc. You could select a station, and it would update your route automatically. The whole thing was vanilla JS and Node (ok, I used jQuery for AJAX requests). No frameworks, no build tools, just plain old Javascript.

As I got deeper into Node, though, I found myself taking advantage of frameworks and packages naturally because they solved a problem I'd previously encountered. React makes things like dynamic lists of gas stations much easier to organize and keep consistent. Preprocessors take a lot of tedium and guesswork out of CSS. All of these things are an important part of being a "Front End Developer" because they make development easier to maintain, structure, and build upon. They don't change the fundamentals of what you're doing.

This isn't really any different from being a native developer. A few years back when I was trying to make a super basic C++ GUI application. I kept bouncing between GDI+ to GDI to Direct2D to Direct3D to SDL to OpenGL, etc. I was too focused on trying to find the appropriate tool that would conform to my expectations of how the app "should" be developed, and I gave up. I didn't have a good sense for what problems those things solved, so of course I had no idea why I would use one over the other or which stack was best for my use case. A little while ago I took a stab at graphics programming at a much lower level, spent some time with DirectX and OpenGL, and I would approach my C++ app idea much differently now because of that knowledge.

I think anybody who gets into web dev by trying to learn frameworks is going to have a daunting time. Try making your app with vanilla HTML, JS, CSS, and a simple Node server (don't even bother with express, just use Request and localhost). Look at what was tedious or difficult about it, then go find a framework that fixes that thing. All these tools build on each other incrementally like that. Don't start with React, make it all in HTML, then make the incremental transition to Handlebars, then make the transition to React (for example). The vanilla stuff won't make you a front end developer, just like how me writing something in OpenGL doesn't make me a "graphics programmer", but it will give you the foundation required.

This is why I love HN. Thanks for the resource!

"In addition, the company is required for 20 years to implement a comprehensive software security program for most consumer software preloaded on its laptops. The security program will also be subject to third-party audits."

So basically. . .Lenovo laptops have to come with anti-virus? I'm curious what "comprehensive software security program" entails, and whether or not it'd be free for consumers.

Finally bought a license a week ago - happiest I've been to spend money in a long time. Every other editor I use, I end up doing a bunch to try to make it more like Sublime. Congratulations to the team!

I'm in tears.

Glen Cook's The Black Company. Really moody, terse writing style; very refreshing contrast to your typical fantasy novel.

A number of people have mentioned Dan Abramov's Redux tutorials on Egghead, which I recently went through and got a lot out of. As a supplement/alternative I also found this series of LearnCode tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w-oQ-i1XB8&index=1&list=PLo...) to be really useful and informative. Where Abramov's series was great for seeing how to start with the most simple integration of Redux and building up to an advanced one, these start out advanced, allowing it to cover a few more topics (like middleware). Just figured I'd throw that in.