harry-wood

There's a couple of options listed here https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Geocoding "Photon" and "Pelias" which were built on ElasticSearch

The "Learning on the job" section brought back some memories of my experiences solo-developing a rails app. I made some of the same mistakes, although I think I mostly made the mistake of avoiding learning. I knew I should be writing tests with minitest or rspec, but never made time to learn it (instead I rolled my own request test framework!) And I stuck with subversion because I didn't fancy learning this newfangled git thing. When it finally came to hiring a second developer they had to teach me these things, and they thought I was an idiot :-(

Simulating physics of muscles/skeleton structures has been done many times over, and I feel like the focus on eyes and vision is what makes this one interesting. Anyway it's quite a fun category of youtube video: https://www.google.com/search?q=simulating+evolution+muscles They tend to be two-dimensional or have other big simplifications. I guess trying to evolve a "real" organism explodes in complexity very quickly even if you ignore the "brain".

I've ended up keeping a bit of list of events listing websites here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapping_Weekend_Howto#In... So I've added radius.to to that.

This is for running community events for OpenStreetMap, and so one quirky requirement is that ideally we show OpenStreetMap rather google maps (perhaps as an option). We also like to see open source options, of which there are a couple listed on there (more suggestions welcome!)

But all of these considerations are less important than the big one: Discoverability. meetup.com wins by having a list of events which is not just searchable and taggable etc, but also massive. So people just browse on there and find your event via their interests. That's a tough thing for any newcomer to compete with obviously.

There's a typo in the "Mission" section "Only by limiting the reliance on AI and continue to create original content can propel us forward as a species". An AI wouldn't have made that kind of mistake

yes. I see what you're saying.

heads out into the street to start a fist fight

Strong nostalgia whenever I see the BBC Elite opening screen!

These days we can re-live it easily in the browser: https://bbc.godbolt.org/?autoboot&disc=sth%3AAcornsoft%2FEli... Although I can also recommend "oolite": http://www.oolite.org/ which is an open source modernised elite with game play kept quite faithful to the original (I'm currently hooked on this and wasting more my life trying to get that "Elite" rating all over again)

Similar. That Christmas when my dad & I started working through the BBC BASIC manual, I thought that this was the exciting experience of owning a computer which my friends were all on about (and I was excited by it!)

...It was only some time later I learned about loading pre-written programs (games) on it.

If you can pinpoint the data in OpenStreetMap we could try to figure out if this is something wrong in the map data (Anyone can fix it!), or maybe it's a tag they should be filtering out on the OpenRailwayMap rendering.

There's another site called https://openstationmap.org/ which shows some details within train stations in a fun 3D way, letting you flip through the "levels" data (Again, all data from OpenStreetMap). I feel like these two could combine nicely somehow.

Memset is based in the UK. Used them a few years back, but I'm afraid we moved to AWS after a few too many reliability issues.

I didn't understand that bit to be honest. Maybe because I'm from the UK. Why was the media coverage in the years after 9/11 disastrous?

But "early Rails hype/philosophy" is the only thing you've said specifically about Rails. I think I know what you mean though. There are strong philosophies in the Rails (and more generally ruby) communities. Opinionated coding, and software craftsmanship is lauded, more than in other language communities I think.

As a result, rules of thumb like DRY are drummed into new developers. The overall effect of that is probably better code quality in general, but yes probably more instances of them being over-used.

But if Rails has the problem of folks over-using DRY, what are other languages communities doing? Just not doing so well at telling people about DRY in the first place?

Top search result for "alternative music notation" is https://www.dodekamusic.com which looks like it has the same ideas, plus a rectangular rhythm design which makes it all _look_ different at a glance (for better or worse)

The twinkling children's TV style background music in that video is not making it any less creepy.

"reasonable perceived effort" or maybe "reasonable perceived smarts". I think wordle fools us into thinking we're smart. Even though on some level we know it cannot take genius, it _feels_ like we've done something really clever, against the odds, when when we whittle down the possibilities to one word after just few guesses. It's counter-intuitive how quickly we solve it. Reminds me of the birthday paradox.

Yeah "not in an annoying way" is certainly debatable. Personally I'm not annoyed by it, but I can see why people would be. Whoever made this spoiler bot seemed pretty annoyed by it :-) https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1485660308622528513

The worst offenders seem to be news sites run by traditional newspapers. Friends share links to these quite a lot, and very often I follow the link to an article that sounds quite interesting, and then... As you say, text jumping around, giant pop-ups, videos playing. I put up with it to a point, but if it's taking me three/four seconds and I'm still trying to close things down to read the article, then I'm thinking "That's a shame. I was interested to read the article... but not _that_ interested". I don't really understand why this happens. Isn't it just obviously bad web design at that point?

Yes. I didn't do much with wordpress for years, but always thought of it as a very open-source-ish community. Recently I find myself taking on a pre-existing wordpress site with a lot of plugins. I was quite surprised by the way so many plugins are available for $$$. It's sort of impressive "professionalisation" of the ecosystem. I can see it's allowing/encouraging glossy presentation, explanatory videos, documentation, and support guarantes, but there's a voice in my head thinking "Nah! These PHP snippets are all supposed to be free aren't they?"

Yeah. There's bizarre situations where 'view source' shouldn't really be necessary/beneficial and yet somehow it's a handy life skill. I remember doing it while booking a flight on RyanAir (Very bad website. I knew the option to not pay for extra insurance had to be on the page somewhere!)

Building a browser as a desktop application would be quite hard, but I reckon I do it as a web application.

The bit about petroleum solvents, makes me wonder about sinkholes. "causes it to dissolve and break down into a non-load-bearing sludge", so if some joker tips a bottle of that in the park then a sludgy hole in the ground will start forming?

Yeah that's been my impression at a lot of hackathons, but I think it has be accepted at least to some extent, as just "good preparation" rather than cheating. In fact I'd recommend doing it (Pre-wrangle the dataset into the format you need. Test out some tools. Prepare some components to assemble). I've only been organised enough to do this on a couple of occasions, but this way I've enjoyed the event more. More likely to achieve satisfactory hack project, and/or more time to socialise at the event.

There's usually quite a strong "time crunch" element. In my more snooty moods I say hackathons only teach bad habits and how to throw together software in a dreadfully hacky rushed manner. But in truth these are not always bad habits. Delivering a quick prototype to a tight deadline is a useful skill. I usually fail miserably at hackathons, which I find interesting. I think it means I should hone my dreadful hackery skills, because I can be too slow and considered and perfectionistic as a developer.

yes I'd like to know more details. This video shows a bit more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hN3dBpPu8Q

Bi-drectional? Looks like those adjusting flaps are to make it bi-directional yes, but maybe the angled legs mean it has a preferred flow direction (I'm guessing).

How power is transmitted back to shore? The video seems to show, in red, some good old "big fat cable" technology. It's described only as powering the Orkney Islands. I wonder if surplus energy there can be fed back to the mainland grid.

How it's anchored in place? Two massive mooring cables front and back. The main central cylinder floats, with the legs and rotors dipping down into the water (Maybe obvious, but not to me at first)

I can recommend OpenStreetMap alternatives mentioned at the end of the article. I'm not sure why it says they "still collect data". Pretty sure OsmAnd and Maps.ME are not collecting data in any surprising/evil ways (particularly as they can work entirely offline!)

The article says they "just aren’t as good" which obviously isn't very specific, but if you live in an area where the map detail doesn't seem so good, then you're in luck. Adding details of your neighbourhood to OpenStreetMap is a lot of fun! Might seem like on odd way of looking at things, but seriously. You should try it. Contribute to a not-for-profit free and open map of the world!

Is it open data? (meaning open licensed)

https://ebird.org/science/download-ebird-data-products

  "eBird provides open data access in several formats" - sounds good!
  "to logged-in users" - less open but maybe fair enough if they're worried about hosting a heavy download.
  "after completion of a data request form" - starting to sound quite restrictive.

Anyone know what actual license & copyrights are applied to the data? Anyone filled out the form and received the data?

Also https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti and loads more: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti#notable-derivatives-or...

I've come across these kinds of prototype link sharing sites in my battles with SEO spam. On the face of it SEO spam is simple: the bad guys bung a load of links into your wiki or blog comments in the hope of gaining google rankings for their "SEO clients", but... Increasingly they started bouncing links all over the place in complex spamdexing webs. Link sharing sites often get thrown in the mix, along with cross-linking other blogs/wikis where they've got their spam to stick. This all makes it easier to evade any filtering by a particular blog/wiki admin, but maybe also makes it harder for google to filter and down-rank the baddies, and finally depending on how complex a spamdexing web is, it offers protection to their clients because it ends up being impossible to see which end websites the spammer is actually aiming to promote (the links tucked away amidst the randomised cross-linked chaos)

But maybe that was a game of a few years ago, and now spam bots are mostly just trying to push porn on social media.

My high school experience (in the UK three decades ago) doesn't really fit with this blog. We were taught quite a lot about scientific methods to the point where we often wanted the science teacher to just stop with meta-teaching and throw some science facts at us! Maybe it means they didn't really succeed in getting the point across :-/