AndrewStephens

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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
It is a shame that HTTPS is required for sites these days but that doesn't change the fact that it really is necessary, even for the smallest of blogs. HTTPS does three interrelated things: Encryption - the data cannot be read by an in
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I visited Novelty Automation in London a couple of months ago - it is everything you could wish for and more. Get there when it opens as it is a small space and does fill up quickly.
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I have some bad news for you about news.ycombinator.com or any other web forum. Unless you actually own the web site you can be prevented from posting on a whim. Of course, most reputable forums have policies and rules but at the end of the
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
All that is happening on Discord these days. It is a shame that this is not happening over open protocols but I doubt most people care.
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago. I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. I
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I loved CYOA books as a child of the early 80s. It was a boom time for choice-based books. CYOA was first but books aimed at more mature (meaning much more gory) audiences were common. Fighting Fantasy was probably the best known, but Lone
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I did this for my old blog back in the 2000s - I used an online service that produced a pretty bad font that I could clean up using FontForge into something reasonable. It was a fun novelty but my penmanship is pretty bad and once in a whil
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
There are several reasons that you cannot just count the number of times your server has served the page. The biggest is bots - on my site (and I assume most others), legitimate requests are far, far outweighed by bots. Sometimes you can te
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
> out at sea Surely you mean ASEA, my least favorite crossword non-word.
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
The beacon API has exactly one use - reliable analytics. Sending a ping on leaving the page is a pretty contrived example - the beacon API is useful at any time. I use the beacon API in my homebuilt hit-counter. It means that even if the us
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
It's my website and I'll do what I want! :) More seriously, you bring up a good point about form factors. I imagine you are reading my site on a cell-phone. On these devices I purposely made the page width more-or-less fill the wi
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I have been using (an older version of) Tufte CSS on my blog[0] for years now. I had to tweak it quite a bit before I thought it looked OK on both phones and tablets but I really think it does work well for the longer-form posts I was origi
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
This is the way. As this article details, there are so many circumstances that preclude DLLs being unloaded completely that I was surprised that their design actually worked at all. So many language constructs do not play nicely with the id
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I really could have used this last year when I was making a web adventure game with randomly created map. SVG is one of those frontend technologies that seem pointless until you really need them. Dynamically creating SVG in response to user
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I like your solution - I think it is perfectly fine for a low traffic blog. Personally I find comments not worth the bother and purposely did not include them on my site. My blog is an expression of my personality and the idea of other peop
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I used his songs as examples in a web audio project a few months ago - as others have mentioned Lehrer generously put all his music in the public domain making it perfect for use in other projects. Originally I was going to use one of his a
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimu
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I used to be a bit of a parser purist but lately I have been coming around to choice-based games. Although choice-based games have traditionally been simpler, there is nothing saying that a choice-based game cannot have a complex model of t
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
This is by far the gentlest introduction to shaders I have found. It was a great help when I was working on a toy system to crossfade between images on a web page. Such a shame it has never been completed.
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
> But the worse problem is, who decides what's "damaging"? The politicians do. It is the courts that decide damages. My argument in the post is that it is really only the widely distributed "viral" posts that cau
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Sorry, I was imprecise with my comparison. A better analogy would be that the USPS doesn't scan your post to figure out which pieces of mail you are likely to actually look at and then affix stickers to those letters advertising relate
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Personally I think that social media companies should be at least in part liable for content posted by their users. There is a tendency to treat social media as a mere conduit, like the post office, that should not be responsible for conten
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Thanks. I originally just wanted pixel-to-pixel dithering (quite difficult with modern browsers and retina class displays) but after I saw the results I knew I needed to add lower resolutions as well. It looks really good with some images,
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
This implementation is great and the interface brings back memories. I was wondering why my Atkinson dithering web-component[0] was getting more hits today - sad news. I’ve always thought that Atkinson dithering produces the nicest images o
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I have a scattershot blog with infrequent posts and random projects. While I enjoy attention I have found that chasing views is a losing game. Now my goal is to write the posts I would like to see. One trick I have found to maintain focus i
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
The differences between the Amiga and Mac are a fascinating study in priorities. The Amiga was orientated around home use so its graphics hardware was designed to be attached to a TV. That design goal affected the entire system, to the poin
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
I am the OP. Please understand that I am not against coding problems in interviews. Anyone who has done any interviewing will tell you that a surprising number of supposedly qualified applicants cannot code at all (usually because they have
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific
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by AndrewStephens 1y ago
Damn you, that’s going be stuck in my head all day.

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