thathonkey

I think you're definitely an exception. I work with large editorial staffs every single day and haven't come across a single person who I think would feel comfortable crafting a "dynamic" story that is susceptible to losing and gaining chunks of copy depending on how much space there is. It would be a total sea change for how most editorial shops operate. They are so detail oriented, and to them, every word counts and has a distinct purpose within the greater text. Basically, if it could be cut, it would have already been cut (either by the author or by a managing editor).

To have a whole section arbitrarily cut from the version of an article that user X reads on their iPad vs user Y on a big screen laptop would be met with skepticism at best, outright horror at worst.

I am a writer as well and I can't imagine writing like that or how such a system could possibly work from a technical perspective, much less a UI perspective.

PS. I didn't mean to say that creative people can't be technical or vice-versa, just that writing tends to be a creative-oriented job while programming is obviously a technical-oriented job. Obviously there is overlap between the two and many people excel at both. Sorry if it came out sounding like I believe there is a creative|technical binary.

Interesting idea but I'm skeptical that any writer would ever be able to adopt something so "technical" (for lack of a better word). Writers just don't think like that and I don't think they ever will. It's a wall between creative types and tech types that is here to stay, imho.

You could have spent the 5 minutes on their website that I did to find the endpoint reference which shows that yes, you can get to quite a bit of the API without authenticating:

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/endpoint-reference/

You are confused: you've confused sand and plastic. Two totally different things.

I think they hope the API will be used to drive subscriptions to their service. If that ends up being the case, they'll probably keep it around. Of course, nobody can look into the future and see what will happen. Building a business around a public API like this would probably not be a smart move... yet.

We do need to talk about mental health. As a culture. But, sorry, I am not going to read Techcrunch article about it.

Even publications that dedicated to following mental health (and ostensibly authored by "experts" in the field) tend to do a dubious job of describing what is an extremely complicated problem to which THERE IS NO QUICK FIX. Read that again. Addressing mental healthy problems is very hard work and treatment plans vary by individuals (not even by disease) so even once you find a doctor you like - no easy task - and whether you go into psychotherapy or the psychiatric [aka prescribed] route or both - you have a long, hard road ahead of you which will require a lot of patience from you and those that you maintain relationships with whether they are work or personal.

There are lots of mental health disorders of which depression is a common symptom. It's important to work with a doctor you feel comfortable with to figure out if you suffer from depression, or if the root cause is some other disorder (OCD, bi-polar, anxiety are common amongst SDE types) which routinely causes you to feel depressed for days or weeks (or god forbid, months) at a time.

Even if you are comfortable going the medication route (and there are many reasons why this choice should not be made lightly, especially if it is via anti-depressants or another - they're all habit forming and bring their own set of side-effects and problems), it is a long an arduous process to find the right one/right dosage/etc. that will work for you (if there even is one). Each one takes weeks to see results typically.

Anti-depressants help some people greatly. Others will struggle with them and find them counter-productive to their treatment. There is no one-size-fits-all treatment plan. Mental health is a subject that doesn't get attention in any facet of American culture.

PS. There is no evidence to suggest that the software industry suffers disproportionately from mental health issues compared to any other.

All valid points but there are ways that you can implement prototypes safely (even in the presence of other utility frameworks that might implement their own version), or use one of the many other ways JavaScript provides you for.

The author complains about having to type "items[items.length - 1]" a bunch but then shows how to implement last() and first() himself very easily via prototyping 6 lines of code onto Array.

So... what is the problem again?

(a lot of the other stuff in the article is valid though)

Great all the comments are ignoring the (pretty damn interesting) point made in the article and rather just attacking the aesthetic of the blog. Way to go HN!

Pretty sure they use some software that adds accents and such back at publish time. The reason I suspect this is because these characters are used so consistently throughout their website. So it's either that or their entire writing staff is extremely well-disciplined.

I HAVE to take a break from Hacker News whenever some hot button story like Ed Snowden or Heartbleed is dominating the entire front page. I don't need to see a dozen blogger's opinions on simple news items like that. If I want thorough analysis of those types of important issues, I'm definitely not looking to the Hacker News crowd to source them. Prog blogs are awful. And so is some amateur libertarian paranoid's half-baked, uninformed opinion on complicated issues like NSA surveillance programs.

Yeah but you don't pin things to bulletin boards using needle and thread so while clever, it doesn't really match their concept like you suggest.

What is your point exactly? It sounds like what you're suggesting is simply not practical (that all developers should be well-versed in all facets of software development, even those skills only employed by a minority of developers).

A quality education is a quality education. I'm sure he takes into consideration more than just the major and letter grade achieved though (obviously getting a B avg in MIT's CS program would not be the same as getting an A avg in Auburn's).

Anyway I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what someone's academic focus is. Smart, impassioned people can excel at any field that they take the time to become educated in. Not to mention that programming and computer engineering is much more about experience than we'd like to admit.

Just curious how much experience to you have using git? Days, weeks, months? Have you worked on a team using it before or just by yourself? These aren't loaded questions.

Ah. I'm not super familiar with that "bug" - is it that "touchmove" events don't get fired for single-finger scrolling (panning)?

Perhaps you could make it work (albeit less gracefully) in iOS by reconciling the header visibility state once "touchend" finally gets fired though? Assuming "touchstart" gets fired as you'd expect, you can do a bit of manual calculation to determine if the y-position changed enough to warrant header hide/show.

Didn't work in iOS Chrome or Safari (the header remains fixed at the top regardless of scroll behavior).

Cool effect for desktop but if you can get it working as a responsive solution I think it would be a lot more useful to people!

The whole article is way too long. He makes the same points over and over again... and then he doesn't even know what happened to Metafilter.

Pretty sure they don't check for definition knowledge in competitive play though? Probably because it is so problematic.

There is just something about old Soviet-era architecture and infrastructure that I really love. It always looks so surreal and other-wordly to me (an American).

You mean a collocation dictionary? I've never heard of a dictionary of synonyms and a quick Google search didn't really come up with anything. Could you point me in the direction of a publication? Thanks!

Do these page performance optimizations check out across the modern browsers? Chrome and Firefox tend to implement such things differently. Not sure about Safari, IE11, etc.

That's a pretty lame rule if I may say so myself. Kinda of violates the whole spirit of the game. You have to use real words that you know how to spell. Requiring a definition, especially one that matches some chosen dictionary, opens up a lot of weird challenge problems. Definitions are much more fluid than spelling (although spellings can change over time as well). Spelling and whether or not a word is "real" tend to be much more cut and dry.

Thesaurus will give you synonyms but won't provide any detail about the nuanced differences between their semantics. The article specifically talks about why Webster's unabridged dicts are different from thesauri...

Inline diffs are good for small changes here and there throughout a file. They are pretty worthless for large changes to a file (eg. heavy refactoring).

Bitbucket (and probably Github, too?) uses inline by default on pull requests but has a button to show a side-by-side and another to see the actual file.

How do you get it working? I've never been successful

Copy and paste support mostly.

So you could say that it loosely means "Western Education/Thinking is a sin" - just not a literal translation?

We use separate repos and it works out well. It's nice having separate Git histories that pertain to different areas of the codebase.

Our workflow covers all the potential problems you named (eg. scripts to keep everything up to date, tests that get run at build or push time after everything is already checked out from the individual repos, etc.).

We've been running this way for over a year with literally zero issues.

you probably feel like dos equis beer guy but to the interviewer you just have pupils the size of saucers and can't stop feeling the fabric of your clothes really earnestly