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mcrittenden

3,995 karma · joined November 10, 2009

Blog: https://critter.blog Email: mikecrittenden@gmail.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcrittenden GitHub: https://github.com/mikecrittenden
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mcrittenden··on GitHub Actions down again today
I believe that's here now: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/xflkh26pm7vv
mcrittenden··on Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system
A wag?
mcrittenden··on The world’s oldest ultramarathon runner is racing against death
"the 30 and 40 age groups tend to outperform younger runners"

Source on that? This seems to show the opposite: https://marathonhandbook.com/what-is-a-good-marathon-time/#:...

mcrittenden··on Ask HN: What's the name of the how things work interactive blog?
https://ciechanow.ski/
mcrittenden··on Ask HN: What book changed your life?
Can you provide a link or author name? I can’t seem to find that.
mcrittenden··on To Don't – The reverse to-do list
I've used it heavily for a couple years now. I describe it to people as tinker toys for building your ideal todo list app. There's an active official Facebook group community, if that's helpful at all: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1927874704161821
mcrittenden··on Write More, but Shorter
Fascinating! It was a really big realization for me in terms of how day to day choices of how to spend my time. Here's the post that I was referring to, if you're bored: https://critter.blog/2020/10/27/am-i-an-extrovert-or-an-intr...
mcrittenden··on Write More, but Shorter
Because when I post an article, and then visit the new page in incognito, my article isn't there, although articles posted after it appear fine. And if I post things from other domains using that same account, they show up on the new page immediately.

It makes sense - I spammed only my blog daily for months. I'm not complaining!

mcrittenden··on Write More, but Shorter
Hey thanks! Seems like your questions are based around building a following, and that's not something I've been concerned with, but here are some answers regardless.

1. I don't really use social media. My blog posts auto-post to Twitter and LinkedIn, and that's the extent of my social media engagement. I don't follow anyone on Twitter, for example. Sometimes people will email me if they feel strongly about a post. But for the most part, I solve for being "caught in a bubble" using a small Slack community I'm a part of, where some friends and former coworkers pick apart my blog posts and point out how stupid they are :)

2. I'm not really sure. I don't pay much attention to SEO since the traffic doesn't matter much to me. Don't get me wrong, I get a thrill when something I write makes the rounds and people seem to like it, but not enough to worry about optimizing for it.

3. I just use the built in Wordpress email subscription feature, which doesn't provide any open rates. I only have ~150 email subscribers anyway, and my blog itself only gets 100-150 views a day. In general, I've done basically no marketing for it outside of that I used to post a lot of them to HN until the domain got shadow banned.

mcrittenden··on Write More, but Shorter
I read a good bit too. I highlight the interesting bits (https://critter.blog/2021/04/01/the-evolution-of-my-ebook-hi...) and if something really stands out then I base a blog post on that thought. Here's a small example of that: https://critter.blog/2021/06/28/ignoring-the-reactionaries/
mcrittenden··on Write More, but Shorter
Oh hey, I'm the person mentioned in the first sentence of this post. I was wondering why my stats went up today!

I've published a blog post every weekday for over a year now (today's was #280). It's been life changing for me. It's now my go-to method for figuring out what I think about something and for crystallizing those thoughts and finding links between them.

- I figured out that I wanted a new job while writing a blog post (and I started that new job 9 months ago).

- I learned that I'm not an introvert, but rather a shy extrovert, while writing a blog post.

- That led into me realizing I have social anxiety while writing a blog post.

There are lots more examples of that. I'm often surprised to find that I don't actually believe what I thought I believed when I started writing that blog post.

Journaling never stuck for me because it felt like work, but making it public made it exciting and fulfilling enough to become a habit that I look forward to each day.

Since the author mentioned Zettelkasten, I'll add this: https://critter.blog/2021/02/10/blogging-as-a-zettelkasten/

mcrittenden··on PayPal Mafia
I just finished reading "Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley" which has a whole section on the PayPal Mafia. I never realized how influential that group was to startup culture.
mcrittenden··on Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design
Represent! I only stopped working with Drupal about 6 months ago.
mcrittenden··on Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design
For what it's worth, I built something very similar to this and it ran for 7 years until Google shut it down for violating the terms of service. Here's a blog post I wrote with specifics, I case it also applies to your service. https://critter.blog/2020/08/04/a-farewell-to-toogles/
mcrittenden··on Calibre – E-Book Management
Just curious, what do you like about it over other ebook readers? I've been using Moon+ heavily for years and it's fine but I'm interested in trying some others out.
mcrittenden··on Brave disables Chromium FLoC features
Brave [0] is a web browser, built from Chromium, but with built in ad and tracker blocking.

FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. The third party cookie is dying, and FLoC is a way for companies to group people together and track them, rather than tracking individuals. Here's more info about that [1] and here's an EFF article about why it's dangerous [2].

[0] https://brave.com/ [1] https://github.com/WICG/floc [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...

mcrittenden··on I can only think that modern front end development has failed
I wouldn't call it "bad". I'd say it's not perfect, and rightly so, because perfection would be lower ROI than some other things their developers could be doing.
mcrittenden··on I can only think that modern front end development has failed
I think the core mismatch here is that you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue. Those two things often do not overlap.

I can virtually guarantee you that NYT has spent thousands upon thousands of hours optimizing and multi-variant testing their headline display to maximize conversion. In other words, if they followed your advice, they would be leaving money on the table.

As for your stock ticker display bug, keep in mind that NYT likely employs hundreds of developers and dozens of teams each owning various pieces of the website. Bugs will make it to production, so it's a matter of prioritization. I'd be shocked if they weren't already aware of that bug. It's probably lower on some specific team's backlog than a bunch of stuff that will be more valuable for the company in terms of revenue.

mcrittenden··on John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
For anyone else wondering what NFTs are:

> Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are digital assets that are indivisible and provably unique. They can be used to represent both tangible and intangible items.

https://decrypt.co/resources/non-fungible-tokens-nfts-explai...

mcrittenden··on Ask HN: How to build empathy?
Can you suggest a good 101?
mcrittenden··on Ask HN: The last drop and “You`re fired” When?
I don't think that's an unreasonable phrase. "Hire slow, fire fast" is a well known strategy.
mcrittenden··on Ask HN: How did you decide between management and technical track?
I realized that I was procrastinating my "go heads down and write some code" tasks, but not my people/team/leadership/management work. That was all I needed.
mcrittenden··on Ask HN: What are your favourite micro blogs?
Well this is the first time I've ever stumbled across my name on HN! Thanks for the plug!
mcrittenden··on Ask HN: Best books on “friendship” and how to make/maintain friends?
I have no book suggestions, but for what it's worth the one way I've found to maintain friendships is to have recurring calendar invite hang sessions. Like every other Thursday, the calendar reminds us we're having lunch together or a zoom call after kids go to bed, etc. It sounds formal and awkward but it works and keeps friends from losing touch.
mcrittenden··on The parenting style that creates leaders
Lots of identical twin and adoption studies make a very convincing case that almost none of this stuff comes from parenting style and upbringing. It's all genetics.

https://www.todaysparent.com/family/nature-vs-nurture-does-p...

mcrittenden··on Why I Love Tailwind
This post may clear things up a bit (disclaimer, I wrote it):

"Utility classes vs. inline styles": https://critter.blog/2018/05/04/utility-classes-vs-inline-st...

mcrittenden··on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
Ah yeah sorry, Brave doesn't support paid extensions. It's a known issue with the browser. I usually direct Brave users to download a release package directly: https://github.com/mikecrittenden/shortkeys/releases

Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) with your order number and I'm happy to refund you.

mcrittenden··on Why I Love Tailwind
From the tailwind homepage:

> "Best practices" don't actually work. I’ve written a few thousand words [0] on why traditional “semantic class names” are the reason CSS is hard to maintain, but the truth is you’re never going to believe me until you actually try it. If you can suppress the urge to retch long enough to give it a chance, I really think you'll wonder how you ever worked with CSS any other way.

[0] https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...

FWIW, that linked post was the thing that convinced me to try it, and I haven't looked back.

mcrittenden··on Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?
I make about $400-500 per month on https://shortkeys.app - a browser extension for custom keyboard shortcuts to do all kinds of stuff.
mcrittenden··on Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says
They said: "I got them to try Jitsi once, which simply didn't work."
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