bdr

Speaking of “witty, and learned, and wise, and humane”, this post is all of the above. The kind of writing that, before you’re even done reading, makes you eager to look up everything else the author has written.

I enjoyed it too, a long time ago, and some sentences have stuck with me. This is the first time I’ve seen someone mention it. Felt inspired by Pale Fire.

I think they mean that, with writing, it’s easier to parse complex syntax trees. Think fractal dimension and finite vs stack memory.

> Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours

This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.

Stinky Pinky! https://www.nosupplies.com/play/stinky-pinky

There are plenty of tools for organizing activities. Meetup’s real value, which no one has replaced yet for various reasons, is in getting new people to join.

One more to add from the early days: widespread use of  , the character entity for a non-breaking space.

They were used to move text to the right to the left within a container. Or (IIRC) in table cells to make them behave, similar to 1x1 spacer gifs. Some pages had hundreds of nsps. Just kind of a general way to add margin or padding.

Crazy idea: a red team for hire that tries to scam your relatives (but doesn’t actually go through with it). Seems like the most effective way to teach people what to look out for.

It's worth noting that betaveros won several previous Advents of Code without using Noulith. You can't attribute too much of this year's success to the language. Still, it's pretty cool, and I've really enjoyed reading his solutions. Noulith feels like walking through a syntactic candy store and eating whatever you want.

I agree. One additional detail to notice is the use of horizontal space. There are several different widths being used, depending on the type of content. (I'm on desktop.) I like the varying "full-width" image sizes, as well as the footnotes on the side. But most exciting to me is how the content gets wider for side-by-side image and text components, such as the early MS-DOS CLI screenshot. This component uses the extra horizontal space that it needs to, while maintaining flow with the rest of the writing above and below it. It's elegant and I believe it's an innovation. After experiencing this post, the typical blog or article layout crammed into a fixed-size column seems straitjacketed. It's inspiring.

This isn't true, and also makes no sense. (How would he have paid taxes? What money would the police have seized?) Speaking from first-hand experience, there's a significant community of collectors who like and will buy Shvembldr's work.

Two things that might help. First is acknowledging that the benefit of a joke isn't just the humor, it's making yourself look funny. If you notice and factor out the part of you that wants to seem funny, fewer jokes will cross the threshold of being worth saying. (Maybe 10% fewer. :) The second is the understanding that jokes disrupt a conversation. A conversation is a collective effort that creates a certain mood, and unless entertainment is the main goal of the conversation, then jokes have a cost. They hinder people from what they're trying to do.

Fixed formatting

  _,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_,-*^*-,_

Instead of /list, I remember the bots advertising with ASCII decorations like this:

_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^ Enter 33 for /\/\ /\/\ ^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_,-^-,_

(You'd type "33" in the chat to get a Mass Mail in your inbox.)

Slightly OT, but for the historical record:

> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.

I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.

Creator here. Your World of Text was launched via HN 12 years ago! Seems today's traffic took the server down, but we're back now.

There's a great, recent podcast episode covering the history of the site, including "the line" mentioned in another top-level comment: https://www.cultorjustweird.com/episodes/episode/1d3933d1/s2...

Hey, yourworldoftext creator here! It was launched here on HN. Thanks for the mention.

I love what you've done--lots of great features here. Curious to hear more about how you deal with spam. And generally happy to chat/brainstorm anytime.

A few things I like about this work:

- With generative art there's usually a tension between variety and beauty, but Fidenza achieves an extraordinarily high level of both.

- I like the Artblocks model in general. Pieces are minted on-chain. It means the artist can't curate the output, so the algorithm itself is the art. Artists have been making generative art for decades, but it feels like this is the way it was always meant to be done.

- Artists can make certain outcomes of their generative algorithms more rare than others. The decision of what should be common or rare can be made for commercial reasons (kind of like hologram trading cards), or artistic reasons. After studying all the ways Fidenza runs, it seems like Tyler Hobbs has hewed really closely to the artistic ideal.

Hey, cool!

This seems like an ok time to plug my mom's project, https://joyceimages.com/.

She has spent the past 10 years collecting old documents, photos, and artifacts mentioned in Ulysses. For example, there are some really obscure people mentioned in it who she's found pictures of. It's a fun game for her, and if you're reading along it can help you picture what's going on!

The goal is to eventually cover every line of the book.

Many person-lifetimes of work have been spent on fighting spam/abuse/harassment on internet platforms. The idea proposed here is to greatly reduce this cost by making users pay a small, fully refundable deposit.

These things come and go: virality, selling shovels, uncanny valley, Dunning-Kruger, Overton window, Dunbar's number...

While there is some signaling and "everything looks like a nail"-ness happening, I think on balance it's are a good thing. These concepts, including the ones you mentioned, are genuinely useful. Their hype cycles are a collective process by which we figure out when and where the concepts are most useful, and then they settle into their place.

Maybe this one https://www.producthunt.com/posts/milk-video-2

I'm so excited for this

If you're interested in how ancient humans lived, I recommend "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived among the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. It has a nice mix of information, narrative, and hypothesis. Grass beds are one of the first things she talks about.

Pictures don't do giant clams justice at all. Seen in person, they glow like something from outer space--like galaxies or nebulae or some kind of sci-fi light creature.

There is nothing in the Node ecosystem to replace Django’s ORM, migrations, or admin.

In my startup, I’m using a typescript/node backend to serve graphql, while still using Django for migrations and the admin. It’s a bit odd but works fine.

If you’re starting a new project, I’d strongly consider using Django for the whole backend, with graphene for graphql, and create-react-app on the frontend. Apollo’s type generation is a big help in keeping the two parts synced.

Thanks!

Hi HN, this is fun social utility I hacked together over the past couple of days. I see it in the same vein as Bitly and Linktree-- filling a small gap in existing in existing products.

If you host online events, is this something you would use? What would it take to get there? Or is it simply not worth the extra steps involved?

For another previous effort, @bradneuberg built some stuff around this a while back. See http://forge.blueoxen.net/purple-include/ and http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/labels/purple%20include.h....