DamnInteresting

5 ms·

31.
by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
Well, our unwillingness to be beholden to sponsors is just part of the reason we avoid advertising, but it's not an empty concern. We've done stories that big brands wouldn't like (the true story of Colonel Sanders, the New C
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
> DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it? Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is an unreliable narrator. I'm also assuming yo
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
It's true that some kind of monetization change was inevitable, but I wished at the time they had executed differently. I just wanted fans who wished to see our posts to see our posts, no more, no less. The only options FB gave were to
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
There are a few considerations. One is that the 'Give a Damn' system only aims to collect about $1,800/month, an approximation of our monthly expenses (not just hosting, but author payments, subscriptions to archives, researc
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/ Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
> I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach our catalog; if you compare publication dates
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
> 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with both 99PI and RadioLab on separate occasions (
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
Heavens to Betsy. My server alerted me that traffic was far exceeding a median Thursday. For the record, I am a fairly active user on HN, but I was not responsible for sharing this link here, directly or otherwise. I have little stomach for
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
One thing you can do is store a word profile in your database, which is a string of all of the letters in the word in alphabetical order. So the word profile for 'apple' is 'aelpp'. Then you can just include all of the w
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
I've built a some word games over the years (e.g., wordwhile.com, omiword.com), and one thing I've discovered is that players find it very unsatisfying when they enter a real, valid word and the game rejects it. I imagine that the
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of th
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
Here in Salt Lake City, a prolonged drought has made it a tinderbox. Home fireworks are prohibited, and there's signage up all over the place warning of the danger. And yet, the firework stands popped up in grocery store parking lots l
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
I was in my car with my seven-year-old when the Paul Simon song "You Can Call Me Al" started playing. She saw it pop up on the infotainment screen, and wanted to know why anybody would want to be called A.I. (our household has a l
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CEO Says He'll Fire Any Employee Who Sends Him More AI Slop(futurism.com)
1 points by DamnInteresting 3mo ago|0 comments
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
This is reminiscent of Coley's Toxins[1], an early experimental cancer treatment using Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. Coley and other practitioners claimed some substantial success, but the mechanism of action was not understood, a
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
And they got Rick Moranis out of retirement to reprise his role as Dark Helmet, which is just delightful. I hope we see more of him in movies now that his children are grown.
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
I've been building sites on WordPress for over 20 years, and it's fine, but if I were building a new site today, I'd probably use ClassicPress[1]. It's a fork of WordPress that eliminates a lot of the cruft that WordPres
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by DamnInteresting 3mo ago
When I was kid, I was playing Nintendo games with my cousin, and my very straight-laced Mormon mom kept calling for me to come upstairs for dinner. I kept replying, "Just a sec!" as we tried to finish the stage. After a few times
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
One recalls the Pentium FDIV bug, where an estimated 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results[1]. A small subset of Pentium users would ever encounter the problem, yet it was considered a
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
Most of the time it's also necessary to put quotation marks or similar formatting (e.g., box, pullquote, or indentation) on the cited text to make it clear a) that it is a citation; and b) where the citation begins and ends. If one doe
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
> I prefer to toggle the dots to avoid seeing them when I’m driving the car. Please do not look at your phone screen while driving the car.
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
Unlike many other apple varieties these days, SweeTango are only available in traditional "apple season" (Autumn months through November in the USA). I've long been a fan of HoneyCrisp, so I tried SweeTango, and while it was
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
I've started working on a new browser-based word game[1], it'll be my third so far. I'm also sketching out the next one after that. I didn't know this kind of thing would be habit-forming. [1] I'd link to my first t
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
Video overview of the technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8yRlA7jqEQ Ordinarily I don't prefer video, but the visuals are helpful here. Also, an online interactive, but it seems to only work in Chrome: https:
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
All my life I've gone by my middle name, and it's turned out to be useful in a similar way. When I receive a message or phone call and they address me by my first name, I immediately know it's someone who doesn't really
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
I received the exact same email, except they offered me 50% of earnings, so the message sending script probably has some randomization built in. My guess is that their true objective is to get you to install their "interview support ap
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by DamnInteresting 4mo ago
No, money down![1] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/102sh8/one_of_...
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Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”(arstechnica.com)
517 points by DamnInteresting 5mo ago|197 comments
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by DamnInteresting 5mo ago
I've had my writings directly plagiarized by other people--people who made word-for-word copies of my work, replaced my name with their own, and made a tidy profit on it. They profit more than I ever managed, because they have more res

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