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tvararu

466 karma · joined March 24, 2012

https://vararu.org/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/tvararu; my proof: https://keybase.io/tvararu/sigs/jtl6VBrmo15IcT8bBNeKPwPuwMFmSvnnFgHOwd1VpUk ]

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tvararu··on 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats
Nothing. You can plug in four chargers, one in every port, and it will only draw power from one.
tvararu··on Typora – A cross platform markdown editor
It costs $2.60 to view the website in Canada with non-retina images.

Source: https://whatdoesmysitecost.com/test/161007_QR_78c23294113b6c...

tvararu··on Apple takes on Google and Microsoft with iWorks real-time collaboration
Numbers, Sheets and Keynote are all free apps. Office for Mac is not.

Keynote for iOS also serves as a very reliable and easy to set up presentation remote.

tvararu··on Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook
I agree with the adjacent comment that your story smells of confirmation bias.

I suggest conducting an experiment: speak to your girlfriend (away from your phones) and establish a list of highly specific subjects/products. Then, bring these subjects up in conversation when near the phone(s). If what you're saying is true, they should start popping up in the Facebook ads.

tvararu··on Boaty McBoatface and the False Promise of Democracy
London's skyline includes buildings affectionately referred to as the gherkin [1], the cheesegrater [2], and the walkie-talkie [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/122_Leadenhall_Street

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_Fenchurch_Street

tvararu··on US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses
> This has been a UK government stance for a while

As further confirmation, it's cemented as one of the ten design principles behind GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/design-principles#tenth

tvararu··on Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous
I actually learned enough git to be dangerous by reading "Learn Rails by Example." And some TDD, and some Heroku, and some Bootstrap, all as side-effects from the main dish. Quite an eye-opener.

Thank you for all your work!

tvararu··on The State of Meteor Part 2: What Happens Next
I haven't used ASP.NET Web Forms but from giving them a brief look I would say so. Combined with SignalR.
tvararu··on Angular 2 Beta released
> While you can upgrade apps in a "big bang" approach where you halt production until everything is rewritten

That is some very unsound advice. I find it worthy of ridicule that it's being suggested as a possibility.

The upgrade path was very necessary to address the huge amount of breaking changes.

tvararu··on Show HN: Jukedeck – create unique, royalty-free music for your videos using A.I.
I didn't know that! Maybe that's why I can't recall how any of it sounds, short of a disconnected beep and boop here and there.
tvararu··on Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
The reason I thought the previous version was a webview was due to the not-really-native-looking settings pane (Cmd+,), which turned into a much more typical looking one post-update.

Thank you so much for the input, and thanks for helping build something I enjoyed using.

tvararu··on Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
I felt this coming given my experience using the Mailbox desktop app since it launched:

- Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one.

- Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state.

- Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview.

- Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more.

- Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state.

- This announcement.

From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1]

After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether.

This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread.

I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RewriteCodeFromScratch

tvararu··on Flexbox Froggy: A game for learning CSS flexbox
I thought that was intentional; the copy for levels 3 and 4 heavily hint at what the values should be. The learner is encouraged to try and guess.

This is similar to the way that https://rubymonk.com/ for example shows you how to do `2.even?` but doesn't show you the equivalent method for checking if a number is odd.

tvararu··on Fallout 4 Service Discovery and Relay
Fallout 4, being a Bethesda game, has first class modding support on desktop PC. AFAIK, Xbox One should be getting similar capabilities within the next year, and PS4 is rumoured to follow suit.

Mods give you complete access to accomplish anything with the game world or interface, even morph it into a completely different game.

tvararu··on Making Elm faster and friendlier in 0.16
> What I really would like to see is a counter example. Some GUI that just can not be done in Elm.

I'm on the Elm/FRP fence myself but your comment here reeks of turing tarpit:

"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

tvararu··on System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance
The first time I did visual regression testing, I generated a bunch of screenshots on my Mac, chucked them into version control, and then ran the tests on CI. They broke because of the font rendering differences between OS X and Ubuntu.

The tool I used, PhantomCSS, did allow for a threshold underneath which pixel differences would not get picked up, but I opted instead to run my tests locally in vagrant so that the environment would be closer to identical to CI.

So yes, platform noise is just one of the myriad of challenges you have to solve when implementing such tooling.

tvararu··on System shock: A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance
> And remember, nothing was broken in a way that a machine would notice, so automated acceptance tests wouldn't have caught this regression.

I'd like to nit here that visual regression test harnesses for web application development do exist. [1] [2] [3] Using something like Sauce Labs you could conceptually have these tests run on Windows machines in the cloud.

However, having implemented visual regression testing in the past in various projects, I can personally vouch that it's a huge waste of time. Your tools will break all the time, your tests will break all the time, and you'll generally have a bad time.

[1] https://github.com/chenglou/node-huxley [2] https://github.com/Huddle/PhantomCSS [3] https://github.com/bradgignac/janus

tvararu··on A Good Vimrc
This depends on what you're hosting your article on, but you could either generate the vimrc programatically from the code in the article or generate the article from comments placed in your vimrc. Similar to a .litcoffee file.
tvararu··on A new approach to web performance
I cackled and spat on my screen when I read the /s, well played.
tvararu··on React Color – Color Pickers from Sketch, Photoshop, Chrome and More
You're mixing two different problems. Just because you write your CSS in JavaScript doesn't mean you have to deliver them as inline styles. [1] [2] [3]

CSS in JS is about leveraging the (relatively sane) variable/procedure declaration and control flow semantics that are already available to you in JavaScript. How you deliver them to get the best possible performance is a wholly different problem.

[1]: https://github.com/kodyl/stilr [2]: https://github.com/robertknight/ts-style [3]: https://github.com/chenglou/RCSS

tvararu··on The adblocking revolution is months away
If the buttons are rendered on the client, they won't show up at all before the script loads.
tvararu··on Why Invest in Tools?
I do think that Brian overstates Rails' importance. Rails and Ruby aren't exactly earth shattering; the web would be the same as it was yesterday if these technologies disappeared today. For example, RubyMotion; were apps not built before that? The only thing that did was let Ruby devs write for iOS. Have apps increased in quality since RubyMotion? No. It just made it easier for Ruby devs to not learn Objective C. But it hasn't innovated much in terms of the user. Most of what they've done has been in PHP frameworks; how innovative is that really? I actually like Rails, but it isn't like they've invented HTTP. It's just another framework. I can do some cool stuff, but nothing that could not be done before. It all feels like a self congratulatory circle jerk with actual user-level improvements that would not be particularly noticeable by the average user; the Basecamp UX I am presented on the web is still the same cluttered mess it has always been. So what magic is this innovation actually creating? Just because we like a particular framework doesn't elevate it to the level of earth shattering. It certainly hasn't had the effect on the web that PHP has.
tvararu··on TANX: online multiplayer tank battle using WebGL and Node.js
Opened this on my iPhone and it started running at 60 FPS with on screen controls and everything. Holy.

Brilliant.

tvararu··on Mozilla to open first-world front in Firefox OS war
Got to try a Firefox OS phone (or three) last week at a short hackathon in Telefonica Digital's offices in London.

The first device I tried (and apparently the one with the beefiest hardware) was an Alcatel One Touch Fire. My enthusiasm took a sharp turn downward from the moment I unlocked the device; accomplished by sliding the screen left to right, the animation was jerky, did not track my finger accurately, and skipped to the end when I let go of the screen halfway through the width of the screen.

One of the hosts was quick to point out that the lock screen interaction was actually custom programmed by Alcatel, and so is the rest of the user interface, at which point he pointed to try a different device running something closer to "stock Firefox OS."

I'm enthralled by the promise of helping the web win by creating a device category where the web is a first-class citizen, but I'm doubtful it will happen if manufacturers outsource their tasteless UI customizations to web dev interns.

Sunspider came out at roughly 1600ms, which places the mid-2013 Alcatel somewhere in the performance bracket of an iPhone 4 (mid-2010, flagship device). Despite the rough benchmarks, I ran some Famo.us demos and they were surprisingly usable, and I could easily get a physics-backed drag interaction to run smoothly inside the browser.

I'm waiting to try out a Firefox OS phone with cutting edge hardware.

tvararu··on The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
> I would be willing, however to pay 20+ dollars if someone could give me something close to say, Fallout 3 for my phone though.

We're already there. You can play, today, on your iPhone and/or Android device: GTA San Andreas, Bioshock and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. These are complete ports that spare no features from the originals.

However, I found that the experience is not what I sought it out to be. I realised that these are games that require focus, since they rely on immersion. The only situation in which I can actually sit down to play them for any meaningful amount of time is when I'm at home on a weekend; in which case, why not just use a console or my computer, with vastly superior input devices and display quality?

tvararu··on Meteor hits 1.0
Spot-on explanation, wish I could be so coherent when trying to explain Meteor to other people.
tvararu··on Show HN: Solitaire made in Dart
I just realized how important it is that cards not only have their number (9, 3, K, etc) printed in the top-left but also an appropriate number of symbols on the body of the card. My eyes seem to gloss over the cards and at first glance I failed to notice that I could start by stacking some of them instead of drawing 3 more.

I see the symbols are just unicode, so you could use some CSS absolute positioning to create the different arrangements.

tvararu··on Lotus, a web framework for Ruby
> seizure-inducing animations

You don't need JavaScript for that.

    div {
      animation: seizure 16.6ms infinite alternate;
    }
    
    @keyframes seizure {
      0%   { background: black; }
      100% { background: white; }
    }
tvararu··on Impress.js
If you're interested in building a single-page website or app with similar layouting and transitions I recommend the much more flexible, cross-browser friendly jmpress.js[1] jQuery port.

[1] http://jmpressjs.github.io/jmpress.js/

tvararu··on Google Trends - Hot Searches
Mary Lou from Codrops has a neat tutorial about making a similar grid layout: http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/06/19/dynamic-grid-with-tra...
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