Commonmark.js has a lovely feature that's rare in markdown renderers: it exposes an AST! https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark.js/#usage
This makes it so much easier to extend/modify the syntax in a robust manner.
miniblog.
I'm coming to the view that microblogs (tweets) and normal blogs are too time focused. There's a pressure for novel ideas, ideas must be polished, and they assume you don't want to edit old ideas.
Perhaps a bliki is a better model? https://martinfowler.com/bliki/WhatIsaBliki.html
On the importance of good written communication to maximise your effectiveness as an engineer: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/on-writing-well/
Ted Nelson introducing some of the basic principles of Xanadu, his hypertext design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac
He stresses the importance of visible hyperlinks, an interesting choice when some UI designers argue that today's underlined links are distracting for readers.
HN discussion of interesting technology demos for fifth graders: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20069714
One popular suggestion was browser tools, showing how web sites can be modified.
Another great idea is showing screenshots of bugs in realistic games and how they can go wrong.
Texture is a fun web-centric tool for creating interactive fiction webpages. Rather than accepting arbitrary sentences as inputs, you drag verbs onto nouns in the current paragraph.
Here's an example: https://texturewriter.com/play/jake/predictions-for-a-strip-mall-psychic
Fuchsia, Google's new operating system, has increasingly more information available online, including some design docs!
https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/the-book
Percy is a neat product for CI of visual changes: https://percy.io/
It reminds me of Wraith: https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith but neatly packaged as a service to run against pull requests.
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000) https://web.archive.org/web/20060420001914/http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html
Discusses how hard it is to build novel systems today.
Would it be possible to quantify perceived coolness of different programming languages?
My only idea so far is look at how many HN stories mention each language, relative to their usage levels (according to the SO survey).
A transcript from a deeply insightful @strangeloop_stl 2018 talk: comparing software design to programs that generate programs.
Deductive synthesis can give us insights on choosing abstractions, and counter-example guided synthesis is much like TDD!
https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/12/my-strange-loop-talk-you-are-program.html
Defining extensible macros, and a helpful approach of classifying syntax into distinct categories: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/not-everything-is-an-expression
Red Hat/Fedora is the biggest supporter of https://x.org/, and they expect it to move to maintenance-only soon: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly
Users are increasingly cynical of "only N still available" messages trying to persuade you to buy: https://behavioralscientist.org/consumers-are-becoming-wise-to-your-nudge/
Even the makers of Flash argue against splash pages on websites! https://www.marketingsherpa.com/content_by_legacy_id?legacy_id=2529
I love it when a years-old patch eventually gets applied upstream: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24645
It gives me hope that sending patches is almost always worthwhile!
(These days I have commit access to Emacs too.)
Really cute introduction to Smalltalk programming from 1983. It starts with an explanation of mice and "scroll menus" (scroll bars), then shows cross-referencing code, lints, autofixes, and inspecting instances of newly defined objects!
https://youtu.be/JLPiMl8XUKU
YouTube adds more transparency and options to the recommendations it offers:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-26/youtube-lets-users-override-recommendations-after-criticism
If a user types hUNTER2 and your service corrects it to Hunter2, have you reduced security? How much will it help?
This fun paper explores this Q, finding you can preserve security and fix 10% of logins:
pASSWORD tYPOS and How to Correct Them Securely https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a799.pdf
An introduction to the world's largest CRM, the importance of allowing users to build custom logic, and a discussion of providing a programmable AWS Lambda style platform: https://tryretool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/
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