A key difference between collectibles and bitcoin/cryptocurrency is that collectibles don't claim to be money nor are they trying to replace current money systems. I'm no expert on money, how it works and how it gets value, but I would be interested to find an article discussing whether cryptocurrency has enough of the qualities of "money" to replace any current money system.
The Hitachi Magic Wand never claimed to be a sex toy, and yet it is almost universally recognized as one. It doesn't really matter what is claimed...there are some cryptocurrencies that are technically better suited to currency use cases than Bitcoin, but they aren't popular enough to be used as a currency, so Bitcoin is still more of a currency than they are. Even Tide detergent can be recognized as a currency if enough people use it like one [0].
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies certainly share a lot of the properties of money: cleanly divisible, readily accepted as a medium of exchange, and difficult to counterfeit. But as much as it is used as a currency, there doesn't appear to exist much of a lending market (a key property of money), and there are tons of people that are sitting on it like an investor might sit on gold stockpiles or land, which makes me think the baseball card analogy is still appropriate.
Did anyone actually know about this? I discovered it because it kept happening to me by accident when I would be moving a window. Still don't know if this is a desirable feature or not...
I don’t really understand why DMCA thinks this is necessary. Twitch streamers playing an artists’ music while they stream can only help an artist in my mind.
> Articles have plenty of conceptual mistakes. And people are not perfect, either! Senior developers are not always good developers.
I think this point is well made. It is a good caution when consuming content on the internet to always be assessing. I seek to understand how something works before I use it.
Yet here's my question: Does this mean I should not be writing for my personal blog?
Writing helps me work out, articulate and understand better the tech that I am working with. And it might help others to work it out as well, even if it's not perfect.
This is crazy; 2000 years later and the Romans are still shaping our society. I think this goes in the face of modern intellectual elitism that says we're the smartest generation to have ever lived. NO, we're just have the most tech to work with because of the all the genius that came before us. We're just iterating. I really tilts when people would rather say aliens built the pyramids than to accept the Egyptians were as intelligent, if not more so than our generation.
I doubt the Romans actually had any influence on the design of these systems. The reason the author says the concept is "unfamiliar" is because it's immediately obvious and doesn't warrant a name.
>> because of the all the genius that came before us. We're just iterating.
I'd say the last couple hundred years has been a little different than the previous several thousand. We are smarter. Agricultural improvement mean that far more of our population is free to deal with scientific or technical problems, as opposed to laboring in the fields to meet basic needs. A greater percentage of our people are literate. life expectancy is up. Our perspective on the world is greater.
Why does this matter? I often hear climate deniers (and similar people) claim that humans have been on earth building cities for thousands of years, that what we are doing now is iterative and therefore any exponential changes cannot be attributed to our impact. But we are new. Current generations are exceptional in almost every way. We need to understand that while we are linked to the past, we are definitely not a mere iteration of it. To quote Lord Dracula in the new BBC miniseries: "You seem to be accelerating."
> this goes in the face of modern intellectual elitism that says we're the smartest generation to have ever lived
We’re the most capable. “Smartest” is ambiguous. But we have more people working more productively on more problems than the Romans did. And we’re finding new solutions faster and more broadly.
Roman administration was ahead of its time. It serves as great precedent. But a single agency of modern bureaucracy outclasses the Roman Republic or Empire on almost every metric.
The impact of the raw number of people we have now should not be overlooked, either. Today, there are more people in the United States than there were in the entire world during Roman times.
We have efficiencies of scale that they could never realize just due to our population size. Or course, we also have new problems due to that scale. We'd have a lot less to worry about in terms of wild habitat loss and CO2 emissions in a world with in a world with 20x fewer people.
It is believed that the number of people at previous times was also limited by the energy available. See how the population graph looks like -- the real exponential growth starts at earliest around 300 years ago:
Great point. I actually wrote about this as I reflect on building the website. Next.js pre-renders the static files at build time, so JavaScript isn’t building the site on the client side or even on the server side. You get the benefit of writing in React (DRY, modular, and JavaScript focused) over just writing HTML.
You have to weigh costs when talking about benefits. In the case of a small site with static content, you could write it with no JS code at all. The React code arguably makes it DRY and modular and all that, but unnecessarily. Now it's an order of magnitude more complex, with dependencies and a rendering step that don't need to exist at all.
DRY, modular, etc. are not blanket principles that one must honor at all cost, in every circumstance. They are ways to simplify and organize complex code bases. Not making the code base complex in the first place takes first place, though.
Brian Kernighan wrote "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." The best way to control complexity is to eliminate it, and not introduce it in the first place.
And it allows me to dynamically "fetch" my writings as I add more. I don't have to create a whole new html file. I simply write a markdown file, add it into the repo on github (I use slackedit which syncs directly to the github repo), then the website gets rebuilt with HTML, and then deployed.
Making the code base more maintainable and better suited for my purposes.
On the other hand, I do agree with you. React is a bit heavy weight for a static website. Next.js still ships the whole react bundle in production. So, while time to first paint is the same speed as a simple html, js site, the time to interaction is much slower and the network load higher.
I do something similar to publish my site/blog. I write in Markdown, then push to GitHub, which converts the Markdown to HTML and serves it through GitHub pages. I have my own URL but the site actually runs on GitHub. There's a build step but it's handled automatically in GitHub. I'm just writing Markdown.
Also, I want to look more into Brian Kernighan. I've heard this quote thrown around quite a bit and I want to do more reading up on him. I always love learning more.
That quote is from the book Software Tools, kind of hard to find these days but well worth it. Kernighan is most famous as the K of K&R, co-author of The C Programming Language, probably the best book ever written about a programming language. He also co-authored The Elements of Programming Style, also hard to find now but mostly available online.
Job hunting during a global pandemic is not easy. I send out 5 applications a day with a custom cover letter and hear back on 1 out of 10, usually a rejection, not even a phone screen. Available, qualified candidates are on the rise and hiring freezes abound.
But amidst all this craziness, the last thing I wanted to avoid distraction. I needed a project to continue growing as an engineer and doing what I love--coding.
I recently spoke with a friend from undergrad, Jared Gorski. We talked about web development, his work at Liferay, my work on Nautilus (a dev tool that visualizes Docker Compose instances). He also started sharing with my how he recently updated his website to improve speed. After our conversation, I checked it out and was inspired. I had already been thinking about SSR (server side rendering) and how to leverage it. Thus, the mission to build this website was born.
I would love any feedback from the Hack News community on the site. Thanks!
This is a good post and it came at a perfect time. I am currently developing my own personal website. The aesthetic of this one is in the ballpark of what I am shooting for. I am also planning on including a section for writing.
I am curious thought, how do people suggest I create new articles and upload them to the webpage? Do I just write the article in html? Or should I create a form that I can submit posts through? Also, how should I store them? Should I store them as an html file or txt file in s3? I'm not too familiar with storage for blog posts. If anyone has some good site recommendations or references, I would appreciate it!
A highly relevant thing for your search is something known as the Jamstack [1].
People typically use "Static Site Generators" to create blogs which relies more on content than on fancy login flows or database connection flows. Those flows are still possible but Jamstack allows for a low bar high ceiling scenario when you are starting to build your own blog.
To compare the endless list of static site generators, what they are and how you write posts, go to StaticGen [2]. My recommendation:
- Pick "Hugo" for a great out-of-the-box experience with fair flexibility.
- Pick "Gatsby" for virtually unlimited flexibility with React-based generator.
Having gone through this whole process myself last year, I would definitely recommend a static site generator. My site [1] is built on Jekyll [2], stored in a Github private repository and is hosted by Netlify [3] for free. The only running cost is the domain name.
Personally I didn't really enjoy setting up Jekyll since I'm not all that at home with Ruby so I would recommend looking at alternatives. Once it's set up though, it's very convenient to work with.
The Github repo is cloned locally, I write posts in markdown and then simply push to the repository. Netlify watches the repository for changes and automatically deploys whenever there's changes. It's very convenient. The compilation cost is paid upfront so the page is very fast as well. Last I checked, it scored 98-100 on all metrics in Lighthouse.
For my low-aesthetic zine (https://freezine.xyz), I just have a git repo full of html and css files i edit by hand. it's not that hard. most of the new pages start out like this:
!doctype html
<meta charset='utf-8'/>
<title> the page </title>
<style> h1 { font-weight: bold } </style>
<h1> Hello, world </h1>
<p> here's some body text </p>
I do all the writing in html, it's really not that bad. I'd start simple and only add more complicated steps if you want to. It's not that hard to add a python or node or Makefile or whatever script that takes a folder full of markdown files and creates another folder full of html files.
I should say, you probably have different goals than me, but as a full time engineer I wanted to make this site as easy as possible to work on and not get stuck fiddling around with configuration or other bullshit timewasting stuff that doesn't actually help me get my ideas out. It's extremely refreshing to work this way :)
Have a look at static site generators. I‘ve used both Hugo and Nextjs and can recommend them.
Also there is nothing wrong with just editing html directly. It is a very good starting point for many projects like personal sites and other small projects.
the application runs entirely on your local system. no information is uploaded. No network requests are made. if you are concerned about security, Nautilus is open source. You can check out the code on github. You can even clone the repo and package the application yourself.
Yeah, you'll have to bypass all those securities if you want to download. We are working on getting our application certified with Apple, Microsoft, linux and all the browsers. If you're worried about security issues, the whole product is open source. You can check it out on our github. But, I promise, everything stays on your system.
If you want to be extra safe, you can clone/fork the repo and compile/build the dmg yourself. First, run `yarn` and then run `yarn package-mac`
