Hacker News Reader

kentbrewon How We Got the Favicon (2017)

thehistoryoftheweb.com is a cultural treasure and I'm very happy it's there. One thing that would make me like it more: if I could submit a pull request or two....

kentbrewon 50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels

The Earthsea books are wonderful.

kentbrewon 50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels

Some very strong choices here. Here's another great one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum

kentbrewon When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

Pay special attention to the reasons the author gives under "ask if it's okay first."

kentbrewon When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

Same. If you can possibly manage a stint at Netflix, do it.

kentbrewon 24a2: An ultra-minimalist game engine

Here's Samegame in 24a2:

https://kentbrew.neocities.org/samegame/

Wishing for a mouseover event....

kentbrewon Ask HN: What is total mass of human-infecting SARS-CoV-2 Covid-19 virus

This sounds like a Google interview question....

kentbrewon Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

Spent that night in the NOC, for absolutely nothing. The only thing that broke was our guestbook, which came from Matt's Script Archive and thought the year was 19100 on New Year's Day.

kentbrewon List of Twitter mute words for your timeline

If you don't like the way desktop Twitter periodically overrides your system settings and returns you to "top" tweets, try Twitter System Saver: https://github.com/kentbrew/twitter-setting-saver

kentbrewon Xenon Death Flash: a free physics lesson (2015)

Xenon Death Flash is the name of my next band.

kentbrewon Ask HN: Do you still code in BASIC?

I did a ton of good work in QuickBASIC 4.5. Wrote some shareware games, one of which was converted to a successful commercial product. Plus lots of contracting in the 80s for people who needed data (send back and forth on floppies) converted from one accounting system to another.

kentbrewon Help me ask why you didn't just

Avoid "why." Instead ask about "how" and you'll get lots of "why" for free.

"I'm trying to visualize doing this without using sshd and am drawing a blank. It's probably something really basic I'm missing; would you mind telling me how you did it?"

Key here is to be genuinely interested. If all you want is to slap the other developer around they will know.

kentbrewon Yahoo Pipes

At that point in history APIs that returned a JSON object wrapped in a callback were few and far between (and Yahoo! had almost all of them). Pipes would give you anything you wanted in a callback, allowing for nothing-but-front-end mashups of anything that would hold still while being scraped.

Craigslist banned Pipes and un-banned it after YDN employee Jeremy Zawodny went to work there:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/01/craigslist-yahoo-pipes-fli... https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/craigslist-yahoo-pipes/

kentbrewon Yahoo Pipes

Maybe check Tom's leaving-Yahoo post? There's a paragraph listing a bunch of the devs:

"So I want to personally thank Seth Fitzsimmons, Samantha Tripodi, Jeannie Yang, Chris Martin, Ben Ward, Kevin Ryan, Phil Pearson, Rabble, Arnab Nandi, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Ayman Shamma and everyone else who worked on Fire Eagle at any point in its life. I learned an enormous amount from all of you."

http://plasticbag.org/archives/2010/05/my_last_day_at_yahoo

kentbrewon Yahoo Pipes

If I recall correctly Pipes was originally a 100%-Sunnyvale product, predating Brickhouse.

kentbrewon Yahoo Pipes

As a fresh Yahoo! Developer Network employee I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched, which caused the service to be taken offline for capacity upgrade.

I had an interesting series of voicemails, ranging from "dude, WTF?" to "okay, we need to talk to you right away" to "we're pretty sure you're fired" but ending with "hey, Tim O'Reilly picked it up and ALL IS FORGIVEN THANK YOU!!!"

https://web.archive.org/web/20070302201929/http://developer....

kentbrewon Yahoo Pipes

Possibly Tom Coates?

kentbrewon Half of us have quit our job because of a bad boss (2015)

Key passage from my last two letters of resignation: "There is exactly one person in the world who is allowed to speak to me in that tone of voice, and I am MARRIED TO THAT PERSON."

kentbrewon The Unix Game

Lost me at "please log in or register."

kentbrewon Web Components could replace frontend frameworks?

When you write something like this please include a date of publication.

kentbrewon How Banksy Authenticates His Work

"His?" https://www.theonion.com/area-grandmother-comes-forward-as-b...

kentbrewon Ask HN: I was made redundant yesterday, and I want some coding ideas

Resurrect a beloved thing that was shut down. Google Reader, perhaps.

kentbrewon Undefined medium – A free and open-source monospace typeface

font-family: undefined;

... is going to make for some alarming-looking stylesheets.

kentbrewon Show HN: Linjat, a small puzzle game

Why is there a Done button?

kentbrewon Two years later, I still miss the headphone port

Headphone jack, escape key, Magsafe adapter.

kentbrewon Show HN: Automatically delete your negative point HN comments

How many Hacker News points equals one GitHub star, anyway? Is there a Coinbase-like thing for Internet Points?

kentbrewon Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?

Also graphed and discussed by diffuseprior some time ago, here: https://diffuseprior.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/kalkalash-pinp...

kentbrewon Ask HN: Why did you quit your last job?

My boss was a screamer/yeller/banger. (There's only one person in the world who's allowed to use that tone of voice on me, and I am married to that person.)