HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dmerfield

1,061 karma · joined January 17, 2011

https://lllllllllllllllll.com, dmerfield@gmail.com
submissionscomments
dmerfield··on Apollo 15 postage stamp incident
Not sure if you’re hinting at this but President Clinton was actually caught renting out a room in the White House:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Bedroom_for_contribu...

dmerfield··on Icons: Avoid temptation and start with user needs
The NHS front-end library is a particularly thoughtful set of interface components:

-https://nhsuk.github.io/nhsuk-frontend/

-https://github.com/nhsuk/nhsuk-frontend

I’ve cherrypicked a few here and there for a number of projects and they’ve worked well.

dmerfield··on Crossfont: Easy-to-use font editor for Mac
I'm sceptical but more than happy to be wrong. Fonts are surprisingly complicated software and my suspicion is that the market of people who casually want to make them is small.

If someone interested in learning how to make fonts asked me for advice, I'd recommend he invest his time in FOSS software rather than proprietary tools which can (and do) fold and disappear. I've worked through FontForge's Beginners' guide and I'd recommend it to people with even a minor interest in type. You'll learn a lot beyond how to use the software itself:

http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

dmerfield··on Crossfont: Easy-to-use font editor for Mac
Note that there is a powerful and stable font editor called FontForge, widely used by professional type designers, which happens to be GPL-licensed:

https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

dmerfield··on BitChute Suspended By Patreon
No it doesn’t. Free speech means allowing nazis to express themselves so you and others can understand nazism.

If you’re genuinely interested in understanding the principle of free speech, I recommend this as an introduction:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/

dmerfield··on Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
Per Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e) of the Code of Federal Regulations, typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States:

https://www.bitlaw.com/source/37cfr/202_1.html

Note that although the design of the typeface is not copyrightable, the computer programs which generate typefaces (‘fonts’) contain elements which are:

https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf

dmerfield··on Emoji resistance
The article is worth reading in its entirety but here is the thesis:

"Emoji is a language of borrowed “words” “curated” by technocrats (experts, presumably of technology, at the Unicode Consortium), who release those new “words” to platform vendors like Apple, Google, Facebook, & Twitter, who then decide how their users can express these “words” by altering their visual representation. (See Emojipedia for myriad examples ranging from humorous differences in artistic taste to clear differences in meaning.)"

I shared the article because it articulates the feeling I've long held that there is something Orwellian about emoji.

dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
You are correct and it will be fixed. The rate limit on LE certificates for subdomains was too low for my usage. Since LE have recently released support for wildcard certs, I will be enabling HTTPS traffic on Blot subdomains as soon as I can.

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-envir...

dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
Understood. It's on the list → https://blot.im/updates (under payment methods)
dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
Have fixed this, not sure what I was thinking.
dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
Blot recently added support for git, I just haven’t updated the homepage to reflect this:

https://twitter.com/Blot__/status/996506149712211968

dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
Glad to hear you like it so far. I’m working on a redesign of the dashboard to bring it in line with the front-facing site. I know it’s not good enough as it is and I promise it’ll be fixed.

p.s. I recently added support for git if you’d rather not use Dropbox (https://twitter.com/Blot__/status/996506149712211968). And as a point of trivia, Blot launched just under four years ago here on HN in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8183498

dmerfield··on Blot – a blogging platform with no interface
Should be fixed now. One of the servers went down and was struggling to restart under the increased load.
dmerfield··on The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe
The map of Protestants and Catholics is the one that leaps out at me as aligning quite closely:

Religion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Catholicism,_...

Unemployment: http://thesoundingline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EU-and...

dmerfield··on Stripe Billing
Glad to hear it but that's not what my email said. Here's the only mention of pricing in the email I received:

> Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing.

The Stripe billing starter plan says it's free for the first $1m, 0.4% surcharge after that. Am I missing something?

dmerfield··on Stripe Billing
But with the additional fee, right?
dmerfield··on Stripe Billing
Does this mean I can still create classic subscriptions (that are free of the 0.4% surcharge) and process them myself?

Edit: The answer is no.

This announcement has burnt through a lot of goodwill that’s accumulated over the years. Not cool!

dmerfield··on Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)
They don't call it the Grauniad for nothing!

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#In-jokes

dmerfield··on Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog
Oops, I was working on the documentation earlier today. Will fix those broken links tomorrow. Thanks for letting me know!
dmerfield··on Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog
I run a small blogging platform (https://blot.im) and get a steady stream of Medium-apostates who've made this realization. Medium is a deeply flawed product and is not designed in the best interests of its writers or its readers. I recommend The Billionaire's Typewriter by Matthew Butterick if you're interested in why this is so:

https://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html

Medium's trendy design can be enticing but I'd try to steer people towards a platform over which they have control.

dmerfield··on An Open Letter to Patreon
They're the hardest people to defend and that's exactly why their freedom of speech needs to be defended.

When you can't say 'fuck', you can't say 'fuck the draft':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_v._California

dmerfield··on An Open Letter to Patreon
Right, when Patreon started kicking off people on the fringes of the political spectrum (Nazis, Antifa, Alt-right) they moved to a 'free-speech' alternative called Hatreon:

https://hatreon.net/

dmerfield··on Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens’ emotional states
By not using Facebook's app.
dmerfield··on Facebook Australia allowed advertisers to target teens’ emotional states
Not it's not. It's time to stop supporting ad-based businesses. Install an adblocker. Install an adblocker on your friends' and family's computers.
dmerfield··on Uber’s Anthony Levandowski out as Advanced Technologies lead amid legal fight
Do you really think he should be in prison for intellectual property infringement?
dmerfield··on Google announces workshops to tackle the spread of hate speech and fake news
I'm aware. My point was that the founders of the US Government chose to uphold the principle of free speech. The founders of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter chose not to.
dmerfield··on Google announces workshops to tackle the spread of hate speech and fake news
Nor is a government. But the founders thought the principle of free-speech was a good one and so we have the 1st amendment.
dmerfield··on Ask HN: Most Sites Don't Use a CMS Like Wordpress – What Non-CMS Do You Use?
I use https://blot.im because it has no publishing interface and because I built the platform myself.
dmerfield··on Noam Chomsky: American Power Under Challenge
Are the 1000+ bases part of a strategy to avoid nuclear proliferation? America agrees to provide security to its allies and in return its allies agree not to acquire nuclear weapons? How else are Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia etc... able to protect themselves against nuclear states?
dmerfield··on Blot – blogging from a Dropbox folder
Yeah, Calepin was one of the services which inspired Blot. Sad to hear it's shutting down:

https://twitter.com/calepinapp/status/631518650051231744

Page 1 of 3Next →