Viewing profile — ashrk

Yeah, I've got three of the little buggers. Thanks for keeping it civil, I could have been less blunt in my initial response. I'm a little sensitive to this one because my wife and…

> Sometimes your kid will only eat sugary cereals for breakfast Present healthy food. Vary it day over day in case they really do have some strong dislike for something. If they do…

I spent a lot of time a few years back reading some Russian world traveller's photo blog (he looooved taking photos of signs and fire hydrants and such, which I wasn't super into b…

In order—and mind I'm not like amazing at this so take none of this as best practice: - Stepping through with a debugger. Static analysis call graphs in stricter languages[0]. Runt…

Mobile, probably a lot of data-analysis jobs provided you get to present results. Desktop work if you can get it. Non-traditional UI like voice. You can spend (what will seem like)…

Sure, and man are the easy wins satisfying. Fixing shitty data access methods/patterns is one of the easiest ways to get a "WOW!" out of a client or product owner if you're stuck i…

No (or long-broken) tests and no easy (at least partially automated and otherwise documented) way to build and/or run the code locally are the norm for others' codebases I've inher…

I see it on here from time to time on here but have never heard a person in real life mention it, so... maybe? Incidentally, I'd pick map & navigation data as the one big Web thing…

Pretty sure it's from The Gateless Gate (I recognize it, which means it's probably from there). Zen tales tend to present a couple major challenges to the reader: 1) Going into the…

The difficulty is you have to achieve traction and scale to compete with a company that's making tons of money exploitatively and user-hostilely strip-mining their own system and r…

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but as someone who's used Google since back when it had a bunch of serious competitors, I'd also pick 2008-2010 as about the time the…

> HTML is the most popular language in the world. Like x86 assembly is, sure. Though way less well-suited to its modern purpose than that is. It's alive by accident and momentum, p…

The most valuable ones mostly aren't ad supported or paid anyway, and without competition from ad supported sites even more free ones for more purposes would exist and thrive (e.g.…

HTML did stagnate, in part because JS was available. How many sites expose the built-in file upload element these days? It's clearly terrible, yet hasn't improved in many, many yea…

I think a hypertext browser that, by default, lets any document you load also spy on your session as clearly as if there were a camera over your shoulder is nuts, but inevitable wi…

Yeah, you'd have to prevent JS from catching a broad set of user events at all, and disallow modification of most of the DOM by it. Again, basically restrict it to tightly-context-…

HTML stagnated badly and this was exacerbated by the "we can just let Javascript and/or CSS handle it" effect. With a less-free Javascript it'd have been necessary to add things li…

> I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud o…

I just want to be able to have multiple, suspendible desktop sessions with different apps running and/or installed and different files available. Ideally I should be able to kick u…

Seems like there's either a speed of light and things can happen before we see them, or light's transmitted instantaneously. Doesn't make sense to talk about light's speed if the t…

Duke Mu of Ch'in said to Po Lo: 'You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?' Po Lo replied: 'A good hor…

I've found I have to turn mathematics algorithmic to understand it, thinking through what each symbol does to the things passing "through" it. Attempting to understand equations pe…

This is all stuff covered in my undergrad International Political Economy class in the early 2000s, and I'm pretty sure none of it was fresh then. The benefits of the market largel…

Huh. I hit a ton just trying to manage some files and burn a cd or two. Workflow inconveniences, crashes in various applications, little "some KDE service you've never heard of has…

Not the OP but my most recent attempt to ditch Windows on my gaming desktop ~6 months ago was tripped up when I discovered that core software like file managers and such still cras…