hashtagMERKY

Not a software engineer, sorry. What’s a matcher? Google didn’t help.

I'm not sure what we'd call a thing that bends (I suppose it would depend on what is being bent and how), but bender is pretty much exclusively used to mean a gay person or a very drunken night.

I agree that it doesn't inhibit its use as a product name though. Git seems to be doing just fine.

That's a bit of a false equivalence, really. There's no good reason why someone should call you King, but Chelsea Manning's gender identity is female, so it makes sense to refer to her as female.

Ah I hadn't read that far down. Thanks!

I can't confirm from my own experience, but popular tech reviewer MKBHD tweeted something similar[0].

[0] https://www.twitter.com/MKBHD/status/827182930954973185

I'm loving Jekyll. I've been building a blog with it and it's been a joy so far. I also have a 'main site' (just links to my social media and a little 'about me'), which I made using old-fashioned hand-written HTML and CSS. When I started on that I was a total noob, and now I have to update and maintain it, I understand the error of my ways. I'll probably switch to Jekyll for that too. At the moment I'm hosting everything on Netlify.

This is probably the biggest improvement to Siri they could make right now. The ability to enter commands to a natural language command line could be really convenient.

I can't work out the purpose. It feels scary and Orwellian but I don't know why they want to collect all this data. Who benefits?

In a totalitarian regime it makes sense because you can use it to prevent political opposition. But in this case, it's a democratic government that can easily be voted out. It doesn't help anyone cling to power.

Maybe I'm over-thinking, but I can't work out the point.

For static sites I used to use surge [0], but now I use Neltify [1] for my site [2], because it offers free SSL on your own domain, and continuous deployment from a GitHub or Gitlab repository. You can set your own build options, for example to build Jekyll.

(I have no affiliation with Netlify I just think their service is neat.)

[0] https://surge.sh/

[1] https://www.netlify.com/

[2] https://gilly.tk

edit: formatting

For some reason I never used FB for other accounts - I always used Twitter or Google, so it wasn't a problem for me. I guess if I deleted my Google account a lot of things (GitHub, Freenom, Soundcloud) would go down too.

If I'm honest, I'm exactly the same: I'm on HN right now to avoid my matlab coursework. While HN doesn't feel like it's designed for distraction in the same way FB and Twitter are, it does seem to have the same effect: there's a reliable, constant stream of content that's vaguely stimulating. I think this is the combination that's so addictive. It feels as though your brain enters a lower energy state where content is being fed into it with minimum effort. Something about the lack of required energy to find and consume content seems to be what makes it powerful.

This part really resonated with me:

> Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it’s designed to be used — persistently throughout your waking hours — the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.

I've recently been finding it really hard to concentrate on my work and I genuinely think this might be the reason. I find myself compulsively opening twitter and tumblr and scrolling through for ages before realising that literally none of it is interesting. I'm just scrolling past brightly coloured images and auto-playing videos while completely distracted and detached from the real world.

I agree with the sentiment elsewhere in these comments that the solution isn't to completely delete your accounts (I think they can have some value when used in moderation), but rather to change the way I use them. Maybe deleting the native apps and using the webapps will raise the barrier to entry high enough that I'll only use them when there's actually something I want to do on them.

As for Facebook, I deleted that a few months ago and my quality of life instantly increased.

Thanks for this advice. I'm a bit of an ubuntu fanboi, but I've been getting a bit irritated by some of the stability issues and rough edges. I'll give Debian a try as soon as I have time.

I really dislike auto-playing audio and video as well, for all the reasons you mentioned, but also for a less logical reason: it just makes it feel like the browser isn't on your side. If a site is automatically playing audio or a video advert, its design is not in the user's interest, so in that situation your software has to choose whose side to take. I just want and expect the software I have installed on my computer to take my side, and always act in my interests. It probably sounds silly but I just think software should always be primarily designed for the end user.

Someone who knows more about this than me: given the significant negative reaction to the new MacBooks and the state of the mac lineup in general, is Apple likely to release a more suitable lineup in 2017 in response, or will they largely ignore the reaction?

Slightly off-topic, but the overlapping text on mobile is making my eyes bleed.

I remember watching William Hague on the news using the fact that two girls had been radicalised via Twitter as justification for more snooping powers. All the tweets were public and they were even showing them on screen while he was saying it. Just demonstrates how little logic there can be behind the extension of snooping powers.