DamnInteresting

I completely disagree. For me, Firefox is the best current browser on the whole, and in recent years I've moved most of my work and play away from Chrome, Arc, Safari, etc. in favor of Firefox. It has retained support for Manifest v2, which is huge for me. The Chrome maintainers seem hellbent on cultivating the web into an ad-addled hellscape.

> It's undated

I really dislike this trend of leaving off the publication date. It's a key piece of context, especially for nonfiction, where the known facts may have changed since the story was published (as is the case here).

I get that they want the content to seem evergreen and unmoored from the tyranny of the calendar, but unless they intend to constantly monitor/update the facts of the nonfiction, the date ought to be clearly visible.

One ought not underestimate the cumulative effects of time. Multiple long-running projects with modest income can be surprisingly lucrative.

I unapologetically love PHP + jQuery, even for new projects in 2025. The technologies are solid, and they didn't stop working just because they are no longer trendy. Is vanilla Javascript "better" than jQuery? Sure, in some ways. But for those of us steeped in jQuery, it's so much quicker to whip up an MVP. If the ~90k of bandwidth becomes an issue, I can always retroactively swap jQuery for vanilla.

This is quite true. I like to build browser-based games, and it is much more fun and stimulating to write a lot of the bits in old-fashioned HTML+SCSS+Javascript. I still use libraries for tricky stuff, like handling audio playback, but it's not that hard to implement one's own drag-and-drop (for example), and it works very well. Plus, there is the added benefit of understanding how things work.

Ads are like graffiti. When they first appear, they are a nuisance, a menace. But in the fullness of time they become interesting relics.

I've been trying to put the finishing touches on my daily word game Omiword (https://www.omiword.com/), but I've been waylaid by Stripe because they decided that a simple daily word game is a "restricted business," and they shut down my account.[1]

Now I need to figure out an alternate payment handler, or just give up on my modest monetization plan where players can pay a small one-time fee to unlock all of the archived puzzles. It was never going to make a fortune, but it would have been nice to offset some of the hosting expenses.

Don't use Stripe. They shit on you just because they can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

Yikes, that sure looks like a pattern. Back in 2015 when I first started using Stripe, they seemed so welcoming and easy to work with. The enshittification is real.

The future is now :(

I have some married friends who worked at Disneyland for years, and they have stories about wealthy park visitors and the escorted, line-skipping, side-loaded experience they have at each attraction. They are often shuttled around through dedicated parts of the underground tunnel system, and enter rides through alternate entrances, often experiencing the attractions entirely out of view of the gross public.

Oh hey Beestie! I don't know if you'll actually see this reply since it's belated, but alas. Thanks for saying nice words. I hope you are well. *cough*

Well, lots of kinds. I work a lot in front-end web dev, so I'm immersed in HTML, CSS/SCSS, Javascript, etc. Server-side, most of my experience is with PHP, but I've also worked with Python. I can code in Java, but I find it to be a joyless enterprise. At my current day job I mostly work with Perl, which is antique but charming.

My beard is getting gray enough that most tech places don't want me anymore, experience be damned. And my other skills (writing, editing, illustration, sound design, narration) are unlikely to earn me a living. It's an uncertain place to be.

If by 'the book' you are referring to David Gran's The Wager, it's worth noting that the article linked here (which I wrote) was published about 3 years before that book was published. I mention this only to dispel any impression that the article is derived from Gran's book.

Alan Bellows here, author of this article, and founder of Damn Interesting. For years I kept the site going by working a part-time coding job, along with occasional contract work. Combined with donations to the site, this brought in enough income to survive, while allowing me to dedicate 5-6 hours per weekday to writing/editing/etc.

Early in the pandemic my job wrapped up, and when I went looking for a new part-time or contract gig, there was absolutely nothing. I networked and searched for a year and a half, and never found a single part-time opening. In the meantime, donations to the site were on a steady downward trajectory. I was burning through my savings at an alarming rate.

Eventually I had to take a regular full-time job just to have income again. I hoped I could find some plausible approach, but so far it's been unworkable. I also have a six year old, so evenings and weekends tend to be spoken for. And after the little one's bedtime, there's not much left in the fuel tanks. I'm approaching 50 now.

Maybe I'll find a part-time gig, or perhaps some anonymous wealthy benefactor will fund the site for a while. Both have happened before. If not, we may need to pack it up soon. 20 years is a pretty good run.

> "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."

When I first watched this movie, I felt like this was a weak moment in the film. "Computer dating" at the time was laughably bad, so seeing a character regard it as infallible ruined the immersion.

With age and experience, I now see that some people just throw themselves behind certain technologies, and fail to find flaw. So maybe this character was just a misguided computer dating evangelist, blind to the technology's failings.

> Mac OS makes it very easy to type the em dash. You just long press the regular -.

Curious, this doesn't work for me. It does work for other characters, such as long-pressing 'n' to get variants such as 'ñ'.

I do use em dashes a lot though. I just use Shift-Option-hyphen.

> Also drag&drop to group is too precise

FWIW, you can also highlight multiple tabs and right-click "Add tabs to group".

> President Donald Trump personally called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday to complain about about a report that the online retail giant was considering displaying U.S. tariff costs on its product listings [...] Within hours of the call, Amazon publicly downplayed the scope of its plan — and then announced that it had been scrapped entirely.

Apparently Amazon's temporary spine was made of slugs, and it just got salted.

Nevermind, I've just discovered that the problem isn't Smithsonian, it's uBlock Origin's "cosmetic filters." One of the lists was removing the date from the Smithsonian pages. Inscrutable.

My home-grown daily word game Omiword[1] (previously discussed on HN[2]) is nearing completion. Just a few last features and bug fixes to go, including a hint feature, access to archives, and a sharing feature.

[1] https://www.omiword.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

I've been reading Smithsonian Magazine for a long time, and I would like to take this opportunity to complain about one element of their recent website redesign. I find it deeply annoying that there is no publication date anywhere on the page. It's especially annoying in their News section. Am I looking at new news, or old news? I do know that it's in the source code, but I shouldn't have to view source for such a basic and important detail.

Just click/tap on the emoji eyes to see the intended solution.

After a heavy snowfall, there is an increase in the rate of heart attacks owing to the exertion[1]. Easter is the busy season in Christian church, so it may be along the same lines.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/snow-shove...

Agreed, I find platform DMs completely unnecessary. If I want to solicit messages from people I don't know, I'll just publish an email address. A semi-disposable one if I'm worried about too much volume. On the occasion I've received a DM on Twitter, it generates an email to notify me that I've received a DM, but I can't reply to the email to reply to the person. Wastage.

Thanks! I hope to have the archive feature working within the week.

You are correct, it's my home-grown solution.

> I wondered if you were working to assure there is only one solution; from today's puzzle I see not, since I found "another."

In a perfect world there would be just one solution per puzzle, agreed. But the pool of possible puzzles would be so much smaller.

> It would be great to be able to start over.

Agreed, I think I'll add a "reset" feature that puts all of the tiles back in their starting positions (and allows replay if the puzzle is already solved).

> It would be great to keep track of how many distinct solutions you have found. / It would be great to know how many solutions there are.

Something like "you've found X of Y possible solutions", perhaps? Not a bad idea.

Several people have requested a button to move the tiles to their starting positions. It's on the to-do list. Thanks!

According to Merriam-Webster, "assi" is a synonym for yaupon, a kind of holly plant native to the southeastern U.S.:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assi

It's quite obscure, but valid.

Nice, thanks! I'm still working out how much the one-time fee should be (and of course I still need to code the archive access).