Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Bookmarks – It’s a note card world, we just live in it

Adama’s rule, AI arms race, and a topless Chris Pine (we hope).


So, earlier this year, I opened up a fresh pack of DotDash cards from my pals a Nock and wrote down all the ideas and topics for the course. Putting only one idea, topic, assignment, or lesson per notecard. Then I laid everything out to survey what was there.

Being able to see it all visually like this proved to be immensely helpful. I could quickly move stuff around and get an idea for the overall flow of the course.

Behind The Scenes of The Focus Course: Outlining, Architecting, and Writing by Shawn Blanc (790 words).

I’ve been testing this over the summer—using note cards and pen-and-paper notebooks to organise my work.

Not because analog has some sort of inherent advantage or anything. Merely that sometimes when you feel stuck, changing your methodology is enough to unstick you.

Worked for me, at least.


it's 2015. the os x calculator gets "stuck." hit Clear 50 times, it doesn't matter. i have to quit and reopen the app. this is normal.

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) July 27, 2015


Its time to embrace Adama's Rule: If it can kill you, do not connect it to the Internet.

— Nicholas Weaver (@ncweaver) July 27, 2015


It is scary, but it isn’t anything new. And it’s why I recoil from men who are extremely keen to tell me exactly how Feminist they are. Besides the fact that I am personally put off by lifestyle activism and Feminism-As-Identity when it comes to any person (I don’t care about the talk much at all, let’s see that walk though), in my experience, the men who yell the loudest about how much they care about my liberation are statistically more likely to be abusive on a personal level.

why i don’t trust Feminist Men/problems with progressive rhetoric by (718 words).


Musk/Hawking are obsessed with an AI arms race, but the real victims of autonomous weapons would be the same third-world poor we kill now

— Maciej Ceglowski (@baconmeteor) July 27, 2015


"Don’t create five-year revenue projections; create 12-month expense projections." - @davemcclure

— John Fazzolari (@fazz) July 27, 2015


And then there’s journalism, where reporters come out with shocking and surprising stories every day, and no one ever gets to reanalyze the underlying reporting. Think of all the people who end up not being quoted at all, or who are only quoted anonymously, and remember that in journalism, what you leave out can be much more important than what you put in. (That’s Bernstein’s main charge against the NYT’s nail-salon story: that the paper was highly selective about what it published, and that while certain things in the story might have been narrowly true, the story as a whole was not the whole truth.) Journalists know full well how deeply wrong journalism can be and often is, but we try to put that out of our minds. There’s even a name for that self-deception: the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Why you can’t trust journalism by Felix Salmon (2207 words).


There are fart MP3s on Soundcloud that have more likes than G+ has active users.

— Tom Morris (@tommorris) July 28, 2015


Masculinity is an unalterable biological reality. Also here's the new shit you need to wear and drink this summer to continue to be a man.

— Christopher Whitman (@SeeBeeWhitman) July 27, 2015


Technological change might be disruptive, but technology (especially software) is entrenching. It solidifies How Things Are Done.

— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) July 28, 2015


No-one should be reduced to their sexual value, but only with men do we routinely treat it as laughable that they have sexual value at all.

— Andrew Wheeler (@Wheeler) July 28, 2015


We’re pushing the web forward to emulate native more and more, but we can’t out-native native. We are weighed down by the millstone of an ever-expanding set of tools that polyfill everything we don’t understand — and that’s most of a browser’s features nowadays. This is not the future that I want to push the web forward to.

Therefore I call for a moratorium on new browser features of about a year. Let’s postpone all completely new features that as of right now don’t yet work in any browser.

Stop pushing the web forward by (1842 words).

While I do think that the only real way to fix things is a re-architecturing from ground up (possibly even forking web apps into a completely separate platform) this would give web practitioners (devs, browser vendors, documenation writers, etc.) much needed breathing room.


Individually, we know that features over experience is a disaster. We've known it for decades. Yet, collectively, we keep doing it.

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 28, 2015

Wait, that can't be right. We know that the market is rational. It keeps choosing features over experience, so features > experience. QED.

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 28, 2015

Here's a HN thread (https://t.co/m27IA6emn9) unironically expressing the opinion that I just joked about. https://t.co/71mxN6A7vD

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 28, 2015

hi I'm a programmer, religious people are stupid literally believes that an economic system has the properties of a diety

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 28, 2015

I want to sit in a room for an hour with every HN commenter ever, one by one, and ask "How do you know that that is true?" until they stop.

— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) July 28, 2015


No one piece of technology will make or break your career. Focus on being adaptable and master learning new things.

— Nicholas C. Zakas (@slicknet) July 29, 2015


"I don't do drugs" says the caffeine and sugar addicted person frantically pressing buttons on a meaningless app like a B.F. Skinner pigeon.

— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) August 2, 2014


I am seriously okay with Chris Pine as Steve Trevor if his main job in the movie is to get kidnapped and be shirtless and tied up.

— Katie Schenkel (@JustPlainTweets) July 29, 2015

… aka the traditional tropes involved with Steve Trevor's character.

— Katie Schenkel (@JustPlainTweets) July 29, 2015


Humility doesn't run opposite of confidence. In the best people, it runs side by fucking side.

— MC Rantz Hoseley (@MysteryCr8tve) July 29, 2015


Icons for tech concepts usually calcify around the time the tech hits the mainstream (handle=phone, camcorder=video) It's not a "bad thing".

— Neven Mrgan (@mrgan) July 29, 2015

Updating the icon constantly is MORE confusing, a fully abstract representation more so. It's best if the shape is very "iconic" though.

— Neven Mrgan (@mrgan) July 29, 2015

A shopping cart is stretching the idea of "iconic"; it's fussy, detailed. An envelope is a pleasant, simple shape to represent "email".

— Neven Mrgan (@mrgan) July 29, 2015


At the end of the day, it sucks that the Play Nice system didn’t pan out as well as Strange Flavour had hoped, but it provides a valuable lesson for developers working inside the wild world of the App Store: The vocal minority of people who don’t like common IAP models isn’t a super-viable customer base to build your studio around.

Strange Flavour Ditching Their “Play Nice” IAP System, Returning to Paid Games by Author Eli Hodapp (510 words).


My boss had a talk with this “comic book legend” and defended me. My boss told him: do not make my employees feel uncomfortable, that is unacceptable. Then “comic book legend” immediately called DC President Paul Levitz to have me fired from my job. No exaggeration: literally, he called the President of my company to have me fired. He referenced some small edit in his story (like, punctuation or changing a verb), and how it was part of a “conspiracy” by me personally to humiliate him. “You must fire this impudent woman at once.” 

Now: I didn’t get fired. And I was believed and defended by my boss. But this anecdote illustrates a couple of things that I think is germane to this conversation about Bill Cosby:

“Why did they go to his hotel room?” by (908 words).

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