pessimism's comments

pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Denmark confirms US sent rendition flight for Snowden

The law involves confiscating valuables and money, but it does so much more than that, including, but not limited to, increasing the waiting period for family reunification.

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).

pessimism | 10 years ago | on: Denmark confirms US sent rendition flight for Snowden

His former boss and predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen was Bush’s biggest supporter and ditto on the Iraq War.

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

GIFs are so stupidly easy to use and distribute that I sometimes can’t wrap my head around how convenient the format is.

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: Why can't America have great trains?

I love public transportation, and I love how good Denmark is compared to other countries.

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”

You get a message in the top bar to “upgrade”, but you can’t click it, and if you’re not a nerd who follows tech news, you wouldn’t know that Microsoft want you to use the new Outlook app instead.

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

It’s an old list by now, but I keep updating it; you can also contribute to the original list (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647) on which this was based.

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

I once used a SaaS—or whatever you call the abstraction on top of that—and ended up paying $80 for a “sample” EC2 instance of theirs that was just idling, after I had activated it a month earlier.

Soured me on trying out new platform services pretty damn hard.

pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Waffle.io

Communicating the progress of a project or feature is something really important I think open-source people need to realize, when they have a fairly non-technical audience.

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)

Funny you bring up the aspect of saving the trees, because I followed up the post with a suggestion for how Google can reduce the waste by taking more control of the print experience in Chrome: http://www.modrenman.com/2013/05/01/save-the-rainforest-goog....

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

Over the many hacks (breaches, as companies prefer to call them) we’ve come to see, as a user who at times felt nervous about how I was affected, I have tried to write a simple guide for how companies can disclose a hack in a way that will assuage my concerns in the best way possible: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/5072091.

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: The Case for Filth

As someone with severe dust-mite allergy (that went undiagnosed until I was 18), please consider cleaning your space—regardless of who you are. Clean houses are more than status symbols.

pessimism | 12 years ago | on: Free vector icons

As someone with open projects on GitHub that may or may not be a future source of income (lol), specific and succinct language on the licensing is probably your best way to ensure adoption of your product.

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?

@Brown_Moses (https://twitter.com/brown_moses) is one of the best people to follow on these subjects.

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....

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