colby

colby, 8 days ago to random

I'd love to see a video in the vein of that one about Cleveland tourism parody from years ago that highlights how the Central Library in Austin is not awesome and is actually dogshit and everything you don't want in a public library.

colby, 8 days ago to random

text/uri-list is underrated and OPML is overrated.

colby, 10 days ago to random

Please stop saying you can't version control spreadsheets (read: of the sort understood/created by Excel). Sure you can. Why can't you? You can even diff them. OOXML is as check-inable as a dump of HTML + media assets comprising a website.

colby, 1 month ago to random

Responding to a discussion where a typo or other error in some open source project's documentation is being discussed and telling a stranger to go file a bug report is pure /r/choosingbeggars-tier behavior, and too many programmers act like it's not.

colby, 1 month ago to random

I could be overlooking something but I'm pretty sure I can count on two fingers the number of instances where I've heard someone without a CS background use the word "algorithm" without getting it totally wrong.

colby, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

I wish that the default response to obnoxious social pressure about slow progress from unpaid FOSS devs weren't phatic, obligatory references to mental health, etc. I wish it were rather unequivocal acknowledgement of the cause:

"Mr Kumar is right. No one has stepped up to cover the costs nor created the conditions otherwise that would permit this to happen swiftly. So it's only going to happen in the small increments that I can sacrifice. I don't owe anyone an apology. Deal with it."

colby, 2 months ago to random

Browser makers could ship native support for viewing and editing CSV sheets tomorrow, just like they shipped native support for PDF; or they could ship native support or sorting and filtering tables on any page, just like they shipped native Picture-in-Picture for video. They choose not to.

colby, 2 months ago to random

How good is Google at organizing the world's information, really? Where's the confluence of Google products/services that lets me point my reader at a few paragraphs of text containing an unattributed direct quote and it links the quote to its source?

(Not only does this not exist, but currently Google Search is in such poor shape that even manually copying and pasting a quote in to try to search for it often turns up no results—even when it's from a page we already know Google knows about.)

colby, 3 months ago to random

@spiralganglion in the latest Future of Coding episode, you were right both about what von Neumann machines are (and aren't) and that bogosort isn't funny.

colby, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Sometime around Firefox 3, the default settings changed from keeping 9 days of browsing history to 90 days. You could override this with a number of your choosing or change it to just never purge history, and it was awesome.

At some point that changed—you can no longer configure Firefox through its settings page to keep history indefinitely. Eventually it'll just quietly start deleting your data. The worst is the "quietly" part—you're never alerted that this is happening. Very lame.

colby, 3 months ago to random

I wonder how many people share the quiet disdain I have for people naming things "Standard <whatever>".

colby, 3 months ago to random

One day someone is going to release a Pascal dialect that is a 1-for-1 match to an existing Pascal except its lexer uses curly braces instead of BEGIN/END and it's going to be wildly successful.

colby, 3 months ago to random

@geoffreylitt writes "conversations around extensions tend to focus too much on security at the expense of all else", and he's not wrong. It's actually pretty crazy how much attention has been squandered. There's also a thriving FOSS culture, whether new-style or old (e.g. GitHub-era vs Debian), that is a sufficient check against malfeasance. It, too, though, gets locked out by uniform application of policy that mostly has the average Windows user in mind.

colby, 5 months ago to random

@ntnsndr the link to the MEDLab fediverse account (<https://social.medlab.host/@medlabboulder>) in your profile is a 404. You want <https://social.medlab.host/@medlab> instead.

colby, 5 months ago to random

People: you don't have to use pip for version control. You can just use Git.

I bring this up, because @dubroy wrote a perfectly lucid post about "cold-blooded software" <https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/> that includes this explicit counsel:

> A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

... and still people are arguing in the comments about requirements.txt.

colby, 5 months ago to random

@amyjko typo "Mastadon":

<https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/contact>

colby, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

RSS and Atom have an autodiscovery mechanism where a computer can locate the feed for a given blog/podcast/whatever. We need the same sort of thing for store hours. A simple way to obtain a JSON description from websites of local businesses listing what time they open, what time they close, which holidays they're going to be shut down, etc.

colby, 6 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

"All" — one of the most awkward salutations regularly encountered in the corporate world (as in, "Hey, all" or, even weirder, just "All:").

PSA: you can say "Hey, everybody". It's not uncouth, despite what your brain is telling you, and "All" doesn't make you come across as more refined. "All" does come across as weird. Nobody talks like that.

colby, 6 months ago to random

Re @sir's campaign to get people to use plain-text email (<https://useplaintext.email/>): it would probably be more productive at this point to give people a self-documenting browser-based downloadable form, have 'em fill it out and attach it along with any other relevant attachments (i.e. patches) and program the daemon at the other end to throw away the email body when this attachment is present, extract whatever they wrote into the form, and treat that like it's email. No client config needed.

colby, 6 months ago to random

Can people just skip straight to publishing their stuff in some reasonable form where it already feels like Reader Mode (or unclutter.it)? That way there's no need to download all the auxiliary junk that gets stripped out/cleaned up in the first place... (and no need to run the extension)

colby, 6 months ago to random

I once read a comment by @simon on HN about how every proposal at his org needed to have an "alternatives" section, and one of the alternatives had to be "do nothing". <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623388>

There needs to be standard yardstick for marketing campaigns that ranks its efficacy against just handing the money that would have been spent during the campaign (including marketing dept salaries) to random strangers. Marketing departments that don't carry their weight get axed+replaced.

colby, 6 months ago to random

"Dependencies Belong in Version Control" <https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-version-control/>

via @forrestthewoods

colby, 6 months ago to random

Another day, another insufficiently introspective companies-are-abusing-the-generosity-of-FOSS-programmers post that doesn't attempt to address the role/culpability that individual developers who are employed at these company have in this system.

colby, 7 months ago to random

Treating bug reports as if every one is a cry for help from someone looking desperately for a solution that will unblock them is the equivalent of doing a dynamic_cast to an incompatible type. Not something that should make it through review.

colby, 7 months ago to random

I have noticed an inverse correlation between projects/communities that get stuff done + generally stay on top of things versus projects/communities that have decided at some point to put up a Discourse message board.