I just tried it in Safari 11.1 on macOS 10.13.4 and it works. Grey checkers is when it's loading. It initializes the board by sending everyone about 10kb of data which on slower connections can take a few seconds. Other than that my only guess is that it only works on the latest version of Safary and Mac. I used lots of ES6 features natively in the browser with no Babel/compiling/etc phase.
This was inspired by reddit's r/place experiment last year, I never tried it but read about it after the fact. It looked fun and I like social collaborative creative things, so I wanted to make a kind of replica of it. That's how this came about.
Part of the social experiment of it is that it's supposed to be so minimalist that there's no need for instructions. That said, clicking a pixel is supposed to change it to your current color, kind of like in mspaint. What browser/device are you using?
I've found working on http://editfight.com to be extremely enjoyable. It's an online collaborative pixel art app with a fixed size grid. I made it for fun, and a few really talented pixel artists came and have made some awesome things. But the best part is that they have constantly given me feedback on what would improve their experience, and I've been able to add the features they're asking for within the hour, and it's been a really enjoyable cycle of that for probably 2-3 weeks now. It's so incredibly gratifying to see them appreciating and finding useful all the new features I keep adding for them. It's kind of addicting to keep improving the site for them and watching them use the improvements to make more and more amazing things. One of the biggest examples of this has been the "create a gif from the time-lapse of everyone drawing" feature which someone else suggested, and surprisingly only took about an hour to implement. It's pretty niche, but the few people who find the site and like it, they come back to it like every day and keep making incredible artwork in it.
Sorry, it was worded differently at first and a commenter here (a writer) suggested some edits and I made the changes, but I guess there's been some confusion since then. They were two identical crimes, but they happened about 5 years apart.
Well first of all I think regardless of whether it's a minor offense relative to other offenses, my crimes did a lot of real and possibly long-lasting damage to some teenage girls and their families. And I think the fact that when you google my name a bunch of newspaper articles come up with reiterate this and force it on the front of people's mind, that doesn't do me any favors. I've tried contacting those newspapers to ask for the articles to be taken down so I can have a better chance at getting a job, but I can't find a phone number where I can talk to anyone at those newspaper companies who even has the ability to take such a request.
Thanks. I applied at TopTal about 9 months ago or so, but did not pass their algorithm-heavy coding test. That said, I've passed every other algorithm test and coding test I've been given by other companies. But TopTal has the hardest one by far considering I never went to college for coding and university-style algorithms are not my strong suit.
Good point, I put that first because that's going to be the biggest question in people's mind so I wanted to answer it up-front and move on to what I can offer them.
It's definitely me. I spent a ton of effort this morning buying the new domain name and doing everything I can to remain anonymous. I only added the portfolio website after a lot of recommendations here, and kind of gave up my anonymity that way. Only time will tell if it was the stupidest decision.
No I did it intentionally. I can't reply under the other account (rate limited) and since I put my portfolio up, which already gives away my identity, I may as well just stop being anonymous. This may be a stupid decision, who knows. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I need a job.
1. I do have a portfolio but was a bit nervous to post it publicly on this website considering that opens me up publicly to scorn and wrath of anyone and everyone who is (rightfully) offended by my crimes. Either way, I've added it to the site.
2. True, I wrote this website in a rush. I copied the HN color scheme and decided to stick with that considering I only posted the link here. But valid point.
3. By putting the emphasis on what you get out of hiring me, I tried to avoid looking like I'm complaining.
4. Very good point. I've added my portfolio to the site. Sincerely hope this decision doesn't come back to bite me.
I'm not familiar with the JS proposal process. Is this likely to become an official feature now that it's been proposed? If so what's the usual timeline of that look like? I would love to have this feature ASAP in the browser and/or Node.js and am eager to find out when that will be possible.
Meh, I learned modern JavaScript and dove deep into how JS works over the last year and I think it’s probably one of my favorite dynamic languages if not my most favorite one. The syntax is a nice sweet spot, the semantics make more sense in most situations than Ruby or Python, the lacking standard library has been more than made up for by third part packages. I’d love to work in JS in the future which isn’t something I’d have said 10 years ago and especially not 20 years ago.
I love seeing little niche MMO games like this! Anyone remember mienfield.com? This site reminds me of that, but that site kept going down and coming back up, and reddit.com/r/mienfield kind of narrates the life and eventual death of that site, which is neat to see unfold over time. But what's most interesting to me is that although so many people found this kind of simple MMO game extremely fun and kept going back to it (our family played mienfield on and off for weeks, maybe months!), the site couldn't find a way to support itself financially and eventually died. I'm not sure what would have been the best financial model for it either. But either way, it's super cool and inspired me to buy editfight.com and transform it into a new kind of MMO game every few months. To me the best part of these kind of games like minesweep.glitch.me here is that people have to find ways to interact and communicate with very little conventional ways (no comments, no live chat, etc) and instead have to use the game itself to communicate, to coordinate and plan, or just to say hi to each other! It's like getting back to the raw fundamentals of human interaction before there was formalized speech or writing!
In terms of the tech stack, the front-end has no dependencies and uses the native WebSocket object and a <canvas>. The grid is 100x100 and every grid has up to 16 colors, which is encoded via hex, so that it sends 10kb to every new client. The backend only uses the uws and uuid packages, and runs on a single t2.micro instance on EC2 as a single node.js process. Really trying to push the limits to see how much can be done with how little.
I feel like I come across this same sentiment time and time again in other people's articles, especially found on Hacker News or in the comments here: shut your devices off, and enjoy life in a more conventional way, and you'll be much happier. Unfortunately I don't think I've lived up to that myself since I wrote this article 8 years ago, and we've fluctuated here in our household between getting rid of social networks and computers and TV for periods of time, and going back to them strong. I think mostly that just goes to show just how strong the network effect can be, and that it really helps to surround yourself physically with like-minded people who have similar life goals as yourself.
What I didn't realize when I wrote this is that fear sells, and how intertwined that is with our economy of wanting things for free, allowing ourselves to become the product instead of paying money, and having the media control how we feel so they can sell us anti-depressants or whatever fad diet plan or a shiny new car so we don't feel like we're in an infinite loop going nowhere (which they can make us feel via selective news), or really anything. I feel like recent events in recent years have helped me to see there's a bigger picture behind this and that it's more intentional than I thought before. I was stupidly optimistic and thought it was purely because of our demand, not realizing how much forced artificial supply has to do with it.
What always scares me away from assembly every time I try to learn it is that principle that makes code more dangerous or rigid or difficult to evolve, the more manual work you have to do in it. Like how it’s harder to refactor C code than Python because of how the implementation and algorithms get closer to each other the lower you get. And since assembly gives you almost nothing, changing an algorithm seems to mean massive changes. Which implies heavy up front design work. Which is contrary to the kind of exploration and experimentation I like to have in my side projects, especially video games, which is presumably the main type of program for NES.
Pretty darn cool! One limitation I wish I could think of a workaround for is that "cutting out" parts of some letters (C, G, J, Q) requires laying a rotated white square over it, with white as the hardcoded background color. So this will only work with other background colors if you know the background color ahead of time or can configure it in JS or something.
In my experience yeah. And even still in the past decade. People on IRC want to sharpen their chops and keep their skills fresh, and if you’re respectful and doing most of the learning in your own, they’ll usually be glad to give feedback or suggestions, or even help you understand difficult topics. It’s mutually beneficial to all involved, even lurkers can benefit a lot from it. Hugely underrated resource. I’m not sure if the same culture is there in slack though, but plenty of people still use IRC to socialize and learn and teach.
There are some larger businesses that do right by their customers and employees, because the leadership has a strong sense ethics and of responsibility for the ethics of their whole company.
I wrote and maintained cleancoders.com for Uncle Bob for the past few years. Gained a ton of experience writing clean, maintainable code. Open to calls, phone at top of resume.
Objective-C also allows nil to receive messages which then just returns nil also. I’ve always found this really natural in that you can assume something is either valid or null and avoid a whole lot of null checks this way. That said, I’ve never been terribly frustrated by other languages either which throw when calling methods on null. Maybe it’s because of heavy use of certain design patterns that make it so it’s never really a surprise?