7 ms·
Some people might take issue with it, but the writing for this had me in stitches. I very much agree with the author on graphing libraries - there are a few goo
by 542458 11y ago
Some people might take issue with it, but the writing for this had me in stitches. I very much agree with the author on graphing libraries - there are a few good simple ones, but as soon as you want anything unusual you have to jump to these big, hard to configure monstrosities. More than once I've just given up and written my own server-side generator.
- NamTaf 11y agoI, too, am laughing way too much whilst at work over the writing of this.
- Lazare 11y agoI agree; the writing was excellent. The style might get old after a while, but it captured my feelings on several issues very closely. :)
- gtrubetskoy 11y ago+1 The javascript rant is epic! :)
- calhoun137 11y agonvd3 is actually really awesome http://nvd3.org/ http://nvd3.org/
- cargo8 11y agoThis was the funniest writing style since the WAT talks lol
- Symbiote 11y agoI decided the guy was British, but he's probably Australian. (His Github profile says so. Would you lie?) Lots of casual self-deprecation. I'd recommend well known comedians, but I'm no good at remembering names.
- swampthinker 11y agoWhat's striking about this writing style is that (as a junior dev) it's a lot easier to understand what he's doing. By sticking to jokes and a simple style, I never felt confused or lost in lingo.
- pdkl95 11y ago"too much medium, not enough message" The writing style works because those jokes, asides, and little mannerisms that are normally excluded from "serious" writing are part of how we think. When we refine our writing (or speaking) to - supposedly to make it less jumbled and easier to read - we usually end up removing a lot of the little details that made up the original thought. The writing may have much better grammar and organization, but real thought isn't perfectly organized and we end up losing some of the "character" in the original idea. (this may be good or bad, depending on the situation) Vi Hart has an amazing overview[1] of this concept, in which she discusses the very wise words of the Edmund Snow Carpenter in his[2] book "They Became What They Beheld". The trouble with knowing what to say and saying it clearly & fully, is that clear speaking is generally obsolete thinking. Clear statement is like an art object: it is the afterlife of the process which called it into being. The process itself is the significant step and, especially at the beginning, is often incomplete & uncertain. The best way to write will always depend on what the goals are, but in general the further away from the original thought you get, the more writing and other creative ideas tend to degrade. Incidentally, this tendency of a thought to degrade the further it gets from it's origin is also how plans become policy: [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4 [2] probably co-written - or at least "heavily influenced" - by Marshal McLuhan [3] http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html (very mild NSFW language of the form "____ happens")
- Outdoorsman 11y ago>>The best way to write will always depend on what the goals are, but in general the further away from the original thought you get, the more writing and other creative ideas tend to degrade.<< So very true... Open a vein...share yourself...reveal yourself...share what you've learned and let the excitement you felt while discovering it flow... For most writers, the majority of the time, your true audience will "get" both you and the ideas you're trying to share... Sometimes you'll expand the size of your potential audience with raw enthusiasm, even when they have no idea what you're talking about...
- WiseWeasel 11y agoI swear by Highcharts. It's big, and paid for commercial use, but you can chart pretty much anything with it, make it look exactly like you want, and it's relatively easy to get started and make nice interactive charts. No affiliation, I just use it for work: http://www.highcharts.com/ http://www.highcharts.com/
- randlet 11y agoYep. Love HighCharts and HighStock in particular which allows you to create wonderful time series charts.
- gt565k 11y agoHighCharts is awesome. I'm a big fan as well. I've used it for school projects and work before, and was amazed by the documentation and API capabilities. Everything is configurable and easy to figure out.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI'm still not sure how the "Free for Non-Commercial" license interacts with something like the GPL - it seems like I'd have to use BSD in my projects instead if I wanted to use this in open-source stuff. Edit: it's Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. I wonder if that stops me running ads on a site that uses it.
- randlet 11y agoFWIW in past I just emailed them asking for clarification about whether I needed a commercial license with my specific use case and they responded quickly and straightforwardly. Seems the easiest thing to do is just ask them rather than guessing or trying to interpret how the license is meant to be used.
- forty 11y agoIf you really want to know you should probably ask a lawyer or the rights holder but here is an interesting page: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial "The empirical findings suggest that creators and users approach the question of noncommercial use similarly and that overall, online U.S. creators and users are more alike than different in their understanding of noncommercial use. Both creators and users generally consider uses that earn users money or involve online advertising to be commercial"
- ohitsdom 11y agoEverything about the writing was perfect. Even the tumblr name, "literally words", is great.
- huckyaus 11y agoIf you found the article funny you may also enjoy one of the author's other projects, Swagify[0]. The source code[1] for said project is pretty great. Kind regards, [24x7BLAZEIT]XxXhUCkYau$XxX [0] http://swagify.net/ http://swagify.net/ [1] http://swagify.net/static/js/swagify.js http://swagify.net/static/js/swagify.js
- defaultnamehere 11y agoUh oh they know
- creamyhorror 11y agoDo you have stairs in your house? (i.e. do you browse SomethingAwful, because your style of sarcastic humour is pretty similar, going by your writing & the animated frog on Swagify, and yes yes i know the rules of HN...)
- EGreg 11y agoI love this guy's humor. I remember when I was 17 I used to write a column for flipcode.com where I thought I was being pretty funny in appropriate amounts (http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_06_Event_Handling_Model.shtml http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Theory_Practice-Issue_06_Ev... for example) but I like his jokes more! But hey, I was 17 and also it was me so... I'm biased.
- krivx 11y agoI used to read those articles! Fond memories.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- defaultnamehere 11y agoOh, no, I haven't really browsed SomethingAwful before, I just um I dunno make a lot of parody websites
- baby 11y agoI don't know why I swear by gnuplot and tikz. I feel like the more you use them, the more you will know how to use them, and the faster you will be. But then I use some wysiwyg and I make something much nicer in no time... Should I really give up on these tools :(?
- defaultnamehere 11y agoDepends how far you're Stockholm-Syndrome'd into using them =]
- baby 11y agoಠ~ಠ
- defaultnamehere 11y agoNice TextFace™
- gansai 11y agonice work!
- viraptor 11y agoThey're great, and I guess using them wouldn't really matter for this blog post. But they're useful for generating static things. As soon as you generate lots and lots of graphs dynamically, it's easier to offload it to the client. They'll download the JS library once (maybe even from the CDN, not from you) and you just push the data points which are 1/1000th the size of a rendered graph. (they'll also look better, because you can't do subpixel antialiasing without knowing the display) It depends on the use case.