started a Patreon to help support the exploding usage

Not all of this is necessary to make a fast, fluid API

You’re meticulous about little micro-optimizations (e.g. debouncing, event delegation

There’s not much you can do in a social media app when you’re offline

someone did a recent analysis showing that Pinafore uses less CPU and memory than the default Mastodon frontend

the fact that Mastodon has a fairly bog-standard REST API makes it pretty difficult to implement offline support

it would be a pure DX (Developer Experience) improvement, not a UX (User Experience) improvement

it’s a lot of work to manually migrate 200+ components to what is essentially a new framework

The web started off as a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-write-for infrastructure. Programmers have remodelled HTML in their own image, and made it complicated, hard to implement, and hard to write for, excluding many potential creators.

When can we expect the Web to stop pretending to be the old things, and start being what it really ought to be?

This conference imitating the old Providing papers for this conference is a choice between latex (which is a pre-web technology) or Word! There's a page limit! There's a styleguide on how references should be visually displayed! IT'S ALL ABOUT PAPER!

This post is a narrative rant (in the same vein of Dan Luu's "Everything is Broken" post) about my problems one afternoon getting a Fancy New Programming Language to work on my laptop.

We weren't able to compile this code

Some people are extremely gifted mathematicians with incredible talent for algorithmic thinking, yet can be totally shut down by build configuration bullshit.

The repo was 3 years old. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to get running again? Ha!Here's what went well.Installing Android Studio. I remember when this was a chore - but I just installed the Flatpak, opened it, and let it update.Cloning the repo. Again, simple.Importing the project. Couple of clicks. Done.Then it all went to hell.

Since infrequent developers spend relatively little time dealing with the language, setting up and running additional pieces of software is a much higher overhead for them and is generally not worth it if they have a choice.

I sometimes find myself hacking together a quick console-based or vanilla JS prototype for an idea and then just stop there because messing with different cloud providers, containers, react, webpack and etc is just soul draining. I remember when I was 14 I'd throw up a quick PHP script for my project, upload it to my host and get it up and running in just a few minutes. A month ago I spent week trying to get Cognito working with a Serverless API and by the time I figured it out I was mentally done with the project. I cannot ever seem to get over this hump. I love working on side projects but getting things up and running properly is just a huge drag these days.

My husband reviews papers. He works a 40h/wk industry job; he reviews papers on Saturday mornings when I talk to other people or do personal projects, pretty much out of the goodness of his heart. There is no way he would ever have time to download the required third party libraries for the average paper in his field, let alone figure out how to build and run it.

I was trying to make it work with Python 2.7 but, after installing the required packages successfully I get the following error:

Cidraque · 2016-Oct-23 Only linux? :( Matt Zucker · 2016-Oct-23 It should work on any system where you can install Python and the requirements, including windows.

Hi there, I can't run the program, it gives me this output and I can't solve the problem by myself

I think I tried to install Jekyll once and I had the wrong version of Ruby so I gave up

[Note: I am doing edits directly in dist/source-map.js because I did not want to spend time figuring out the build process]

My first experience with Scheme involved trying and failing to install multiple Scheme distributions because I couldn’t get all the dependencies to work.

The hidden curriculum consists of the unwritten rules, unspokennorms, and field-specific insider knowledge that are essential forstudent success but are not taught in classes. Examples includesocial norms about how to interact with authority figures, whereto ask for unadvertised career-related opportunities, and how tonavigate around the official rules of a bureaucracy.

The fact that most free software is privacy-respecting is due to cultural circumstances and the personal views of its developers

Thereafter, I would need to build an executable, which, depending on the libraries upon which the project relies could be anything from straightforward to painful.

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean

We undoubtedly produce software by backward techniques. Weundoubtedly get the short end of the stick in confrontations with hardwarepeople because they are the industrialists and we are the crofters. Softwareproduction today appears in the scale of industrialization somewherebelow the more backward construction industries. I […] would like toinvestigate the prospects for mass production techniques in software.17

well the real world of course isn't statically typed

I keep repeating this in the hopes that it sticks, because too much OO code is written like Java, and too many programmers believe that OO is defined by Java.

The key and only feature that makes JavaScript object-oriented is the humble and error-prone this

If you don’t own your platform (maybe you’re publishing to Substack or Notion), you can at least save your website to the Wayback Machine. I would also advise saving your content somewhere you control.

When talking to Ollie about this, he told me that some people leave their old websites online at <year>.<domain> and I love that idea

we should be able to utilize tabs for any application and combine tabs between them

Thompson observed that backtracking required scanning some parts of the input string multiple times. To avoid this, he built a VM implementation that ran all the threads in lock step: they all process the first character in the string, then they all process the second, and so on.

The next article in this series, “Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach,” discusses NFA-based submatch extraction. The third article, “Regular Expression Matching in the Wild,” examines a production implementation. The fourth article, “Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index,” explains how Google Code Search was implemented.

A more efficient but more complicated way to simulate perfect guessing is to guess both options simultaneously

A contributor license agreement, or CLA, usually (but not always) includes an important clause: a copyright assignment.

People are greedy. They tend to be event-gluttons, wishing to receive far more information than they actually intend to read, and rarely remember to unsubscribe from event streams.

Relative economies of scale were used by Nikunj Mehta in his dissertation to compare architectural choices: “A system is considered to scale economically if it responds to increased processing requirements with a sub-linear growth in the resources used for processing.”

the era of specialization: people writing about technical subjects in a way that only other scientists would understand. And, as their knowledge grew, so did their need for specialist words to describe that knowledge. If there is a gulf today, between the man-in-the-street and the scientists and the technologists who change his world every day, that’s where it comes from.

A few people even complained that my dissertation is too hard to read. Imagine that!

The problem is that various people have described “I am using HTTP” as some sort of style in itself and then used the REST moniker for branding (or excuses) even when they haven’t the slightest idea what it means.

It isn’t RESTful to use POST for information retrieval when that information corresponds to a potential resource, because that usage prevents safe reusability and the network-effect of having a URI.

the methods defined by HTTP are part of the Web’s architecture definition, not the REST architectural style

most folks who use the term are talking about REST without the hypertext constraint

what application means in our industry: applying computing to accomplish a given task

How about an example that doesn't make you cringe: a piece of code known as Foo.java from conception through all its revisions to the most recent version maintains the same identity. We still call it Foo.java. To reference a specific revision or epoch is what Fielding is getting at with his "temporally varying member function MR(t), where revision r or time t maps to a set of spatial parts" stuff. In short, line 15 of Foo.java is just as much a part as version 15 of Foo.java, they just reference different subsets of its set of parts (one spatial and one temporal).

it’s definitely too late for a clearer naming scheme so let’s move on

it sounds like it’s some complicated technical internal thing

after almost 15 years of using git, I’ve become very used to git’s idiosyncracies and it’s easy for me to forget what’s confusing about it

I think that the website code started to feel like it had bitrotted, and so making new blog posts became onerous.

almost every other time I've had the misfortune of compiling a c(++) application from scratch it's gone wildly wrong with the most undiagnose-able wall of error messages I've ever seen (and often I never manyage to figure it out even after over a day of trying because C developers insist on using some of the most obtuse build systems conceivable)

where I have access to the full reply chain, of which my own instance often captures only a subset

I realized that what I wanted is not a better Mastodon client, but a better Mastodon workflow

In many ways, computing security has regressed since the Air Force report on Multics was written in June 1974.

the modern textual archive format

The solution, Hickey concludes, is that we ought to model the world not as a collection of mutable objects but a collection of processes acting on immutable data.

HTML had blown open document publishing on the internet

Hixie does have a point (though he didn't make it explicitly) and that is that the script doesn't really add anything semantic to the document, and thus would be better if it was accessed as an external resource

the thought of a richly self-documenting script

or slightly more honestly as “RESTful” APIs

REST purists

Fielding’s dissertation isn’t about web service APIs at all

how REST became a model for web service APIs

today it would not be at all surprising to find that an engineering team has built a backend using REST even though the backend only talks to clients that the engineering team has full control over

why REST is relevant there

Fielding came up with REST because the web posed a thorny problem of “anarchic scalability,” by which Fielding means the need to connect documents in a performant way across organizational and national boundaries. The constraints that REST imposes were carefully chosen to solve this anarchic scalability problem.

the common case of the Web

REST gets blindly used for all sorts of networked applications now

inspired by Unix pipes

should

He was interested in the architectural lessons that could be drawn from the design of the HTTP protocol; his dissertation presents REST as a distillation of the architectural principles that guided the standardization process for HTTP/1.1.

The biggest of these misconceptions is that the dissertation directly addresses the problem of building APIs.

Toillustrate this principle, an HTML page typically provides the user with a num-ber of affordances, such as to navigate to a different page by clicking a hyperlinkor to submit an order by filling out and submitting an HTML form. Performingany such action transitions the application to a new state, which provides theuser with a new set of affordances. In each state, the user’s browser retrievesan HTML representation of the current state from a server, but also a selec-tion of next possible states and the information required to construct the HTTPrequests to transition to those states. Retrieving all this information throughhypermedia allows the application to evolve without impacting the browser, andallows the browser to transition seamlessly across servers. The use of hyperme-dia and HATEOAS is central to reducing coupling among Web components, andallowed the Web to evolve into an open, world-wide, and long-lived system.In contrast to the above example, when using a non-hypermedia Web service(e.g., an implementation of CRUD operations over HTTP), developers have tohard-code into clients all the knowledge required to interact with the service.This approach is simple and intuitive for developers, but the trade-off is thatclients are then tightly coupled to the services they use (hence the need for APIversioning).

Finally, it allows anauthor to reference the concept rather than some singularrepresentation of that concept, thus removing the need tochange all existing links whenever the representationchanges

A resource can map to the empty set, which allowsreferences to be made to a concept before any realization ofthat concept exist

Messages are delineated by newlines. This means, in particular, that the JSON encoding process must not introduce newlines within a message. Note however that newlines are used in this document for readability.

without raising an error

ECMA-262 grammar

offline documents

This poses a problem that we'll need to address.

Browsers

This is of course ideal

Our main here is an immediately invoked function expression, so it runs as soon as it is encountered. An IIFE is used here since the triple script dialect has certain prohibitions on the sort of top-level code that can appear in a triple script's global scope, to avoid littering the namespace with incidental values.

The code labelled the "program entry point" (containing the main function) is referred to as shunting block.

It expects the system read call to return a promise that resolves to the file's contents.

system.print("\nThis file doesn't end with a line terminator.");

and these tests can be run with Inaft. Inaft allows tests to be written in JS, which is very similar to the triple script dialect. Inaft itself is a triple script, and a copy is included at tests/harness.app.htm.

The project archive's subtree

[ 0, 0, 0, 1 ]

returns [ 0, 0, 0, 1 ]

propertes

returned

In fact, this is the default for DOS-style text-processing utilities.

The hack uses some clever multi-language comments to hide the HTML in the file from the script interpreter, while ensuring that the documentation remains readable when the file is interpreted as HTML.

please. If I want to open a link in a new window, I'll do it myself!

the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created

as the ecosystem around it swirled, the web platform itself remained remarkably stable

There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time. It would be one thing if I planned to continually work on this code; it’s usually simple enough to migrate from one version of a depenency to the next. But I’m not planning to ever really touch this code again unless I absolutely need to. And if I do ever need to touch this code, I really don’t want to go through multiple years’ worth of updates all at once.

as much as I love TypeScript, it’s not a native substrate of the web

Web components encapsulate all their HTML, CSS and JS within a single file

That’s the honest-to-goodness HTML I have in the Markdown for this post. That’s it! There’s no special setup; I don’t have to remember to put specific elements on the page before calling a function or load a bunch of extra resources.1 Of course, I do need to keep the JS files around and link to them with a <script> tag.

Rather than dealing with the invariably convoluted process of moving my content between systems — exporting it from one, importing it into another, fixing any incompatibilities, maybe removing some things that I can’t find a way to port over — I drop my Markdown files into the new website and it mostly Just Works.

although they happened to be built with HTML, CSS and JS, these examples were content, not code. In other words, they’d be handled more or less the same as any image or video I would include in my blog posts. They should be portable to any place in which I can render HTML.

JSON deserializes into common native data types naturally (dictionary, list, string, number, null).You can deserialize XML into the same data types, but

- if (!(typeof data === 'string' || Buffer.isBuffer(data))) { + if (!(typeof data === 'string' || isUint8Array(data))) {

code leveraging Buffer-specific methods needs polyfilling, preventing many valuable packages from being browser-compatible

For security reasons, the nonce content attribute is hidden (an empty string will be returned).

wokesockets

this script runs every minute on a cronjob, and rebuilds my site if the git repo has been updated

you'd need to wind up with external dependencies, since you'd likely need to rely on javascript

scrape user IP addresses

say you want to print the visiting users IP address - how would you do this on a statically generated website? to be honest i'm not sure. typically, you would scrape a header and display it

(I implement this second stock Firefox environment not with a profile but by changing the $HOME environment variable before I run this Firefox. Firefox on Unix helpfully respects $HOME and having the two environments be completely separate avoids various potential problems.)

You can see how this would happen after seeing former UT Dean of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”(DEI) Skyller Walkes, screaming at a group of students

screaming at a group of students

The important part, as is so often the case with technology, isn’t coming up with a solution to the post portability problem, but coming up with a solution together so that there is mutual buy-in and sustainability in the approach.

You can do this trick with the “view image”  option in the right-click menu, too – Ctrl-clicking that menu item will open that image in its own new tab.

This is great stuff!

Yesterday I spent a few hours on setting up a website for my music, but then instead of launching it I created a Substack.

zero, it is reasonable to delete the grave-stone

One response, suggested in Ashman andDavis [1998], is that referential integrityis more of a social problem than a tech-nical problem

If you think about it, even the callback function in a standard Array.prototype.filter() call is a selector.

his changes

With his additional changes

else if (i === key.length - 1)

this netted another 200ms improvement

we know that we're splitting a string into an array of strings. To loop over that using a full blown iterator is totally overkill and a boring standard for loop would've been all that was needed.

Given that the array of tokens grows with the amount of code we have in a file, that doesn't sound ideal. There are more efficient algorithms to search a value in an array that we can use rather than going through every element in the array. Replacing that line with a binary search for example cuts the time in half.

Standards are made by those who show up. But.. it is a privilege to have the opportunity to show up.

JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++.

Tumblr (owned by Yahooath!)

I was browsing someone’s site yesterday, hosted on Wordpress, yay! Except it was throwing plugin error messages. Wordpress is still too hard to maintain. Wordpress is not the answer.

Princes! listen to the voice of God, which speaks through me! Become good Christians! Cease to consider armed soldiers, nobles, heretical clergy, and perverse judges, as your principal supporters: united in the name of Christianity, learn to accomplish all the duties which it imposes on the powerful. Remember that it commands them to employ all their force to increase, in the most rapid manner possible, the social happiness of the poor.

The spirit of Christianity is meekness, gentleness, charity, and, above all, loyalty; its arms are persuasion and demonstration.

Whats the total power consumption of all Android devices? Shaving just 1% is probably a couple of coalfired power plants worth of CO2.

Bare-bones setups are either presented as temporary – something you grow out of – or as some sort of hair-shirt hippie modernity avoidance thing – a refusal to engage with “modern” web development.

The amount of boilerplate and number of dependencies involved in setting up a web development project has exploded over the past decade or so. If you browse through the various websites that are writing about web development you get the impression that it requires an overwhelming amount of dependencies, tools, and packages.

my theory is that you can get a modern web dev setup without node or a package manager, using only a tiny handful of standalone utilities and browser dev tools

Reading through your link I caught myself thinking if I would put up with all those boilerplate nix steps just to add a new page to the site.

compute-heavy

We're setting these chemists up with conda in Ubuntu in WSL in a terminal whose startup command activates the conda environment. Not exactly a recipe for reproducibility after they get a new laptop.

I admire how nimble you are. I aspire to write blog posts at the drop of a hat like this, but I rarely do.

I was a great marketer. I was getting feedback from customers, and I’d pass on every list of what customers wanted to engineering and tell them that’s the features our customers needed.

The best way to learn is through apprenticeship -- that is, by doing some real task together with someone who has a different set of skills.

<ol><oln>(b)</oln><oli>No employer shall discriminate in any way on the basis of gender in the payment of wages, or pay any person in its employ a salary or wage rate less than the rates paid to its employees of a different gender for comparable work; [...]</oli></ol>

There is one particular type of document in which the correct handling of the ordinal numbers of lists is paramount. A document type in which the ordinal numbers of the lists cannot be arbitrarily assigned by computer, dynamically, and in which the ordinal numbers of the lists are some of the most important content in the document.I'm referring of course to law.HTML, famously, was developed to represent scientific research papers, particularly physics papers. It should come as no surprise that it imagines documents to have things like headings and titles, but fails to imagine documents to have things like numbered clauses, the ordinal numbers of which were assigned by, for example, an act of the Congress of the United States of America.Of course this is not specific to any one body of law - pretty much all law is structured as nested ordered lists where the ordinal numbers are assigned by government body.It is just as true for every state in the Union, every country, every province, every municipality, every geopolitical subdivision in the world.HTML, from the first version right up to the present version, is fundamentally inimical to being used for marking up and serving legal codes as web pages. It can be done, of course - but you have to fight the HTML every step of the way. You have no access to any semantic markup for the task, because the only semantic markup for ordered lists is OL, which treats the ordinal numbers of ordered lists as presentation not content.

This is problematic if we wish to collect widespread metadata for an entity, for the purposes of annotation and networked collaboration. While nothing in the flat-hash ID scheme stops someone from attempting to fork data by changing even a single bit, thereby resulting in a new hash value, this demonstrates obvious malicious intention and can be more readily detected. Furthermore, most entities should have cryptographic signatures, making such attacks less feasible. With arbitrary path naming, it is not clear whether a new path has been created for malicious intent or as an artifact of local organizational preferences. Cryptographic signatures do not help here, because the original signed entity remains unchanged, with its original hash value, in the leaf of a new Merkle tree.

Retrieving desired revisions requires knowing where to look

Two previously-retrieved documents cannot independently reference each other because their identities are bound to authoritative network services.

Any addressable thing will have an identifier.

Hard-Copy Print Options to Show Address of Objects and Address Specification of Links so that, besides online workers being able to follow a link-citation path (manually, or via an automatic link jump), people working with associated hard copy can read and interpret the link-citation, and follow the indicated path to the cited object in the designated hard-copy document.

Link Addresses That Are Readable and Interpretable by Humans

Every Object Addressable in principal, every object that someone might validly want/need to cite should have an unambiguous address

designated targets in other mail items

The Hyperdocument "Library System" where hyperdocuments can be submitted to a library-like service that catalogs them and guarantees access when referenced by its catalog number, or "jumped to" with an appropriate link. Links within newly submitted hyperdocuments can cite any passages within any of the prior documents, and the back-link service lets the online reader of a document detect and "go examine" any passage of a subsequent document that has a link citing that passage.

or "execute the process identified a the other end."

Knowledge-Domain Interoperability and an Open Hyperdocument System

case Tokenizer.LDR: return 0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.LDB: return 0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.STR: return 0x01 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT; case Tokenizer.STB: return 0x01 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT;

0x00 * RSCAssembler.U_BIT

Comparing pancakes to file management is an apples to oranges comparison.

You'll likely use some libraries where people didn't use type checkers and wrote libraries in a complicated enough way that the analysis cannot give you an answer.

And, of course, just to be completely clear, this is valid syntax:let _true = true;_true++;_true; // -> 2