davidork

so, speedcrunch, but on the web. got it.

Adobe flash was like lead paint, irradiated water and asbestos insulation... at one point in time it seemed like a good idea, but in hindsight they were terrible ideas and should just be left behind.

it would be a lot rmore interesting if they were hacked by an inside party.

I started programming in high school, probably around 9th grade, I picked up a book on c at B&N, it was written with devC++ in mind as the IDE.

The next year I took my first "formal" programming class. Programming 1 at my highschool was based on visual basic.net. I had already learned how to make my own "debugger" using console out, but being able to add watches and breakpoints and actually see the internals of my program shift about as I stepped through it was awesome.

Despite having a proper IDE, my Programming 1 class spent all of 1 class period on how to use the debugger built into visual studio.

Having taken programming 2 in high school (java) then Liberty basic in freshman year in college and then back to c/c++ again in college I can say without a doubt programming classes massively undervalue debugging skills.

Once you get your first language under your belt the other languages come easier, as most of them are vastly similar. variables, limits, etc, how things are passed around and referenced change, but the basic function and control structures if then else switch case, for,do,etc are all roughly the same. - edit- at least higher-ish level languages,

I think programming curriculums should include an entire section on debugging. How to isolate specific issues, watches, off by one errors, byref/byval issues, top down order of operations issues, figuring out how a language handles a datatype mismatch etc.

Whoever originally invented the wheel ultimately is responsible for all weapons of war.

once the cat is out of the bag, it's not going back.

This smells like someone inventing a moral dilemma because the FUD didn't work on the users to make them stop using open source, so they're gonna try to get the developers to stop making it.

Being that the vast majority of the public facing internet is ad driven there will always be some sort of leaning.

Allowing the users to choose their own filters will allow advertisers to actually read the market based on the the sites that are whitelisted in the filters instead of shotgunning ads at any website that claims to be relevant to the target demographic they can actually see the popular ones that users choose based on these filters.

its still targeted advertising, but abstracted one layer away from the actual user so that the targeted ads don't have to be as fucking creepy with all the data they're gathering on people. With the customer choosing what sites they want to see results from, the advertisers can stop wasting money on ad revenue for click farms that everyone hates.

its a better deal for advertisers, and provides a better end result for the user and some degree of transparency.

It can't make people accept inconvenient/uncomfortable facts, it won't solve any political problems. You can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink, you can point out any number of problems to a person but you cannot make them care.

edit- relevant to solso's comment about an active choice

The active choice democratizes the ad market allowing users to choose, instead of the passive route of allowing an algorithm to coerce the market.

Pinterest is ad fueled zombie. Scrape the web, rehost thumbnails of other useful/interesting images, put up ads, pollute image search results until the heat death of the universe.

so... don't get rid of search engine filter "bubbles" that turn the web into an echo chamber, let the people build their own echo chambers?

I mean, its at least transparent, people are aware of it or have to opt in.

It feels like a weird compromise in terms of misinformation, cultural division, etc... but letting people choose which kool-aid they're drinking instead of letting the "totally not hand tweaked for edge cases in favor of the creator of "the algorithm"" to decide. Out of the handful of "ideas" around wrangling the the trashfire that is the modern internet, this seems like the most sane the best fit solution so far.

In terms of it being an actual search tool for finding information, answers, documentation, references that are actually relevant or useful it sounds insanely useful.

Narrow down searches for anything + "datasheet" to manufacturer websites and a handful of non paywalled datasheet catalogs - fuck yeah!

I forsee lots of angry website owners who run fluff content or bury reposted useful info under mile thick layers of ads.

the way its communicated is crap, it feels self-help author/marketing guru.

but, it's true. writing stuff down allows you to consolidate the various thought fragments and pieces of information, potentially elucidating things you already knew, but didnt know you knew because the pieces weren't connected together in the "big picture" so you missed the correlation.

braindump on a topic, all the relevant details and bits of information you recall about it. organize it into a outline/bullet points and then narrate it to yourself as you go through, filling in the gaps between your bullet points.

its not really the writing that does the magic, its consolidating thoughts, fragments, memories in an ordered fashion to be presented to someone else that doesn't have the same context you do in your own head.

basically defragmenting your brain.

dunno about windows, but in llinux its fairly simple. I've had to do do this a lot of this sort of thing on big disk images my friend made with some weird program that pads the start of everything with 512 bytes of some random crap.

dd skip=10 iflag=skip_bytes if=original.file of=first10ktrimmed.file

despite being old, and the amount of insanely horrible things you can do when you mess up the syntax or mistype something using it, dd is fucking amazing.

to be fair, its not directly editing the file, but making a copy with the first 10k skipped.

you could have a jump/pointer that points to the shortened first block of the file and then at the end of that, a pointer/jump to pick up where the rest of the file continues, but you'd wind up with misalignment and fs fragmentation.

it used to be. Then the internet became a product. It became a storefront, and home to the advertising apocalypse that will probably wind up being the catalyst for the downfall of the human species.

there's still funny/weird shit out there, but you have to dig pretty deep, sift through the ads, copypasta, and general crap content to find it... eventually it'll all be banned/deleted for some reason or another.

i just looked at the website, went to the main page and watched bits and pieces of the gameplay video.

rogue-lite: check. metroidvania(gotta get that retro street cred) : check. Bland uninspired assets: check. post mortem blog post posted to some link aggregator about how you released the same thing that every other copypasta developer on greenlight has crapped out for the past 3 years and it isn't selling well?: check.

yep. 3 years, down the crapper.

I agree. Minimalism in the "unix" sense (Write programs that do one thing, and do that one thing well.) is beautiful.

Minimalism to get rid of all this useless fluff that no one ever uses is practical.

Minimalism in coding, not using overly complicated structure,functions,etc Is great for your sanity as well as anyone who has to deal with your code.

Minimalism as a feature on a checklist is going to harm anything or anyone involved.

If your obsessive about optimizing and tweaking your project (and try to keep a practical head about you) eventually the line between form and function will merge, that's when you stop.

One word comment. In a discussion about whether or not minimalism has gone too far. I lol'd.

Agreed. I find yahoo especially very noisy, entirely too much going on. Its not ideal being that finding something specific on the yahoo homepage requires some ctrl+f for the unfamiliar user, but as you said it is functional enough for "parents" to use.

I have some sort of eye/brain issue when reading big blocks of text if the line spacing is too tight I'll start reading the next line down in the middle of a sentence, particularly when I'm tired.

more text left to right (@~90% page width) + appropriate vertical spacing (~1.25 depending on font) = bueno for my eyeballs at all times.

sorry, personal preferences.

I'd actually like to see some metrics/research on that.

I know a few websites (google,etc) have done studies with eyetracking and such and tried to quantify what the user was looking at and make some generalized assumptions.

I'm not sure typography optimizations made based on the typical ADD user scanning for one little blurb of information from search engine results, work as well when the user is attempting to "consume" all the content on the page as in the case of an interesting news article or blog.