pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Denmark confirms US sent rendition flight for Snowden
pessimism's comments
pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Denmark confirms US sent rendition flight for Snowden
He has a vested interest in ignorance of the past—so much so that he shut down the investigative committee for the very same war as one of the first things when he won the election last year.
pessimism | 10 years ago | on: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
pessimism | 10 years ago | on: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
A while ago, I tried to be a good nerd and convert some GIFs to HTML5 video, and I crashed and burned pretty hard: https://ndarville.com/asides/webvideo/.
I gained a new appreciation of GIFs that day.
That said, it would be great if we got a compromise where browsers can load only the first frame of the GIF and play the reminder on click or touch to save all the loading and data—on both sides, really.
pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Awesome D3
pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Why can't America have great trains?
But this is not to say that we haven’t had absolutely execrable forays with our trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC4.
What I mean to say is that, sometimes, public transit is less something to “figure out” than something to “get right”. We got public transportation right, but we’ve been doing our darndest to fuck it up on multiple occasions.
pessimism | 11 years ago | on: Microsoft break acquired Acompli app overnight with vague message to “upgrade”
So the effectively broke all Exchange/Google-related updates for people at work and home, since the app stops to fetch updates—I stopped receiving e-mails from what I can tell.
pessimism | 11 years ago | on: List of Web Business Models
pessimism | 11 years ago | on: List of Web Business Models
I’m sure you have more great suggestions for what can go on the list; new models keep popping up with companies like Patreon.
Feel free to—also—post your suggestions on the Gist. GitHub currently does not support notifications for gists, so don’t get mad if I don’t get back to you. :)
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: SaaS Builders: Beware The Free Trial
Soured me on trying out new platform services pretty damn hard.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Waffle.io
I think GitHub milestones are central to productivity and communicating progress to a base of interested parties, so I would recommend focusing on milestones specifically—also to encourage their use—rather than showing one huge list of issues by default. It’s fairly disorienting, even to me as a regular GitHub user and contributor.
Those cards take up an awful lot of vertical space, which I don’t think is going to scale well with a large project. Look at project like Bootstrap: https://waffle.io/twbs/bootstrap. Because you load the issue on scroll, I can’t even get an idea of how many issues there are from the size of my scroll bar. Milestones are the main way for repo owners to manage a large number of issues.
From what I could tell, you can sort by milestones using a filter, but for some reason, the list of milestones wouldn’t load?
A while back, I created a small never-to-be-finished project called milestones.js to involve a general audience in the progress of upcoming features—taking advantage of milestones: https://github.com/ndarville/milestones.js. At the bottom of the README are some related projects that might be of interest to you as well.
In other words:
1. Find out who you want your users to be.
2. Find out what they should be shown.
3. Focus on milestones, GitHub’s killer productivity feature.
4. Fit more issues vertically; the card metaphor isn’t that important.
5. Know that the dynamic loading of issues on scroll is working against you from a UX perspective.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Whither print.css? A Rallying Cry for a Web That’s Fit to Print (2013)
More than anything else, I just wanted to bring attention to something I think many people don’t know about, because I think it’s mostly a case of people not minding printed web pages rather than them not caring.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Important Kickstarter Security Notice
I originally intended to convert it to a disclosure generator, but I haven’t had the time.
I hope it can be of some help to you in dealing with this awful situation, and I’m terribly sorry this happened to you.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer
Specifically, the American Dental Association's
guidelines for heathy persons suggest that
* children receive 1 x-ray every 1-2 years,
* teens every 1.5-3 years,
* and adults every 2-3 years.
~ http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/243952.phpI was personally very surprised and alarmed by this.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do I add $100k to my 2014 income?
I put the list on GitHub and updated it with new concepts I found interesting every now and then: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324.
There should be something there to pique your interest.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
At the very least demand they contain, say, ten characters of contextual wording to discourage this lazy kind of argument.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: The Case for Filth
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Free vector icons
I just cannot be bothered to risk using an icon font in a GitHub repo only to have to bleach every trace of it, because I misunderstood the license or the author’s intent.
To help remember just how the hell the most popular “free” font icons are licensed, I created a gist: https://gist.github.com/4443939. There is no way that overview looks simple to anyone.
This is what I as a developer think about as the very first thing, when I see a collection of free-asterisk icons.
The cognitive load of parsing the legalese, especially from the standpoint of someone with zero jurisprudence is a huge toll and reason for my personal bounce rate on similar products.
Consider what the point of your free icons are (portfolio vs. seeing your icons everywhere), and how you wish to stand out (quality vs. licensing).
They say cache invalidation and naming things are the hardest thing in programming, but licensing is definitely up there; at the very least, it is something most people in the field do not—but should—understand.
+++
tl;dr: If you launch a set of free(*) icons, crystal-clear licensing should be at the top of your checklist.
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: What is Happening in Istanbul?
Eliot is an interesting example of one a single well-connected individual can accomplish in the digital age: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-brown-moses-blog/x/255....
His feed is a bit of a firehose feed, so I recommend you only follow him, whenever you need to immerse yourself in an ongoing story.
The things going on in Turkey are so insane, they have to be seen to be believed.
EDIT: His YouTube playlist with videos of the clashes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvUktDH-OBM&list=PLPC0Ude....
pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Crate.io: A new kind of Python package index
Happens at
https://crate.io/social-auth/complete/github/?code=123
People put it in quotes, because they think it gives them an excuse to use the misnomer, which is bad journalism on their part.
It’s basically in the interest of the administration that people only thought the bill concerned jewelry confiscation, as it distracted from all the other heinous things in the text.
The former bill, which has since become law, is L87 (ie Bill 87).