thedudemabry

That's reasonable, but it seems to be equivalent to creating a top-level function and associated global variable in other languages. Java's prohibition of those constructs necessitated the class wrapper, but doesn't appear to provide any benefits over another more generalizable method, namespacing.

I totally agree that the singleton detail is beside the article's point, but what is the modern case for singletons? It seems like singletons are now considered a synonym for global variables. What other purpose do they serve?

Yikes! 50x monthly payment + 3 payment deposit for a rental? I had no idea NYC was _that_ bad. I live in Denver, one of the highest cost-of-living growth cities in the US (aside from the spurious oil-boom townships in the midwest), and $2,000 a month would get you a nice 1,000 square foot mortgage in a good area, even with horrible credit, and like 3% down, say $6,000.

I totally get that the reasons for choosing a city are varied and I wouldn't argue that anyone should move to a city strictly based on cost. But that seems impossible for a community to maintain a sustainable workforce. How do commuters even afford to cross the bridges and tunnels?

My response exactly.

On first read, this appears to be the best and most pragmatic of all possible proposals. I'm nervous about its reception and subsequent tearing-down, but this is an FCC I can get behind.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this problem lately and haven't found a good answer. The need for pagination seems to stem from:

1. The desire to limit the size of HTTP responses. 2. The lack of the ability to notify a browser that you're done loading/rendering async content.

Aside from page-flip-metaphor apps like the one posted here, it doesn't seem like a desirable UX pattern.

Have there been recent (or not so recent) developments in either of those problem areas?

Depending on your diet and sodium tolerance, broth can be a good alternative to coffee. I'm on a ketogenic diet (high fat, moderate protein, very-low carbs), so I have a few extra mg of sodium to play with, but I've tried stretches of replacing morning coffee with hot chicken broth and it is exactly as pleasant, without the caffeine ups and downs.

While I agree that Monopoly is a rightfully derided board game among the pantheon, I think the author pulled meaningful analysis from why it did initially appeal to the public.

Also, in case anyone unfamiliar with modern board games is reading, if you buy one board game this year, buy Pandemic. It's a challenging co-op game you can play with just your spouse or with up to 4 friends and it guarantees a fun night. That, or Cards Against Humanity :)

I agree. The author has released something into the world in the hopes that it will further progress for someone else or themselves. That's awesome. And the OSS community on GitHub has some great tools to fork the project if the author disengages.

But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.

It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?

This is a terrible thought, but my honest first thought when I read the title was, ”Yikes. Someone arranged a ’Most Dangerous Game‘-style scenario over TaskRabbit?“

While I was very pleasantly surprised as I read the letter, I had this fleeting thought as well. But although the FCC has been an occasional nuisance in the last 25 years, they naively seem to me to have been a generally good force in broadcast competition.

I really enjoyed the game, but (possible minor spoilers) the game crashed in Chrome Canary right when I think I was about to see an ending. On purpose?

I'm not sure I entirely understand his argument. He seems to be arguing that: 1) Javascript is too complicated for non-web-developers who want to develop a website. 2) That complexity means that CSS is great as-is, not that the complexity needs to be examined. 3) OOCSS, SMACSS, and BEM are advantages of CSS's rules, not bandaids to patch them. 4) CSS rules as "hints" are an advantage, not an excuse for a lack of robustness.

Yuck. While there might be a tiny sliver of a journalistic integrity accusation amidst the noise, this video was a tornado of slut-shaming. I feel gross now.

I stumbled upon this book reference, along with Edwin Tufte's awesome trilogy, back in college on Bret Victor's old links page: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links . That reading list has a TON of great links.

I completely agree. To borrow a common refrain among my group of coworkers: presume goodwill. It's amazing to see the interactions of a group of very effective developers feeling out the finished product as they venture into interesting territory. I'm incredible happy that they posted this!

Yeah, that thought makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Kickstarter campaigns were interesting precisely because they didn't equate investment with profits. They attempted to align investment with niche product delivery.

Agreed. This is a "gamble to win a product that you want" game, not a "gamble to win a stake in a company that you like" game. The very product-based focus of the transaction is intended to discourage thinking of it as an investment. I think Notch was perfectly reasonable in his analysis. He got the product that he wanted, but was disappointed that their tactics after fulfillment were to cash out and align their direction with Facebook's. And he doesn't trust facebook.

A very good point. Pixar is notably a huge fan of Ghibli studios, which has ventured into less child-friendly fare in the past. But they have always been a big proponent of universal stories, stories which do not demean children nor sacrifice their integrity to subtextually cater to adults. I would bet that they would be making the same movies that they are now, but Disney would not have released Frozen (as a childless 20-something duder, I was absolutely ecstatic watching that old-style Disney musical.)

> I was day dreaming about how far they could take this and imagined them freezing the scene and the three of them breaking character/fourth wall to pitch a product and then unfreezing the scene and going back to acting. You could imagine this getting so popular that it eventually becomes annoying and then eventually edited out of any shows/movies.

This has been around for a while: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ProductPlacement/LiveA...

I'm not sure about that figure. The price of a console-available, AAA game on Steam seems to keep pace with the prices of the big-box stores and specialty retailers for the first 6-12 months. The major differences seem to be the availability of the game years after release and the ability to provide front-page notifications of deeply discounted older (or critically panned) games.

Haha, the first in-car app that came to mind was an illegal street racing lap timer. Perhaps it's a positive that the App Store censors will be approving apps, at least initially.

"more successful tests on live pigs followed"

So... someone's ordinary Wednesday consisted of shooting pigs and stuffing the wounds with tiny sponges? I imagine in a laboratory setting? That's gotta suck.

I've been just dumb lucky in that the companies I've worked for have been very supportive of individual engineers’ efforts to learn new things. Whether through funding conference attendance and/or travel, or by simply giving employees time during work hours to learn on their own. But the biggest gift my past and present coworkers have given me was demonstrating that learning outside of the job is an essential component of doing great work.

It wasn't until my first few times sitting in on hiring discussions that I encountered professional engineers who didn't take an outside interest in expanding their toolset.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with them. They are fantastic folks who are very good at their chosen profession. And for the majority of professions (I only have anecdotal knowledge of this, but I would love to hear examples from other fields) that is enough to ensure stable employment. But I can't imagine the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that accompanies company layoffs and downsizing when you haven't played outside of your comfort zone in a while.

This is just a long-winded way of saying, “great summation, SheepSlapper!”

Yay!

Wow! That's a snappy site. Major props to the frontend dev(s).

A great group blog that keeps tabs on interactive and generative literature is http://grandtextauto.org/. I highly recommend it.

I wonder how blurred the lines can truly become between code and literature, though. If a piece of code is primarily intended to be read and discussed, does that make it literature?

That's an interesting point, that literature can also be approached as a dissection. But I think that Mr. Seibel's observation still holds. Literature is primarily intended to be read and discussed, while code is primarily intended to perform a job. One lends itself to an experiential conversation and the other very contextual explaination.

The state has implemented a seed-to-sale tracking system called MITS: http://www.mymits.com/

My employer, MMJMenu :)