Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake

Because it's not.

This one got me in stitches, a collection of developer insider jokes in one huge sentence:

AND ANOTHER THING when it’s midnight and your x-axis formatting function doesn’t convert UNIX times into JavaScript date objects properly because there’s no timezone information and I dunno JavaScript was written by some guy in two weeks (yeah I ain’t afraid to call it out what of it) and your binary-search based conversion of sparse timeseries data into uniformly dense timeseries data is causing so many data points to be graphed that it’s slowly crashing Chrome and you’re watching helplessly as your RAM goes up and Chrome won’t close the tab and it just doesn’t seem right that 2016, the year of the Linux Desktop has brought us this situation I mean I thought if you had enough .js libraries this stuff was meant to just scale right up so tha-

Cool hack and awesome, fun writing, but on a more serious note : how is knowing your friends' usage/sleep patterns useful in any way? Could it be used for some dark, machiavélique purpose?

And how about for advertisers? "Get your sleeping pills here" type ads?

Thank god HN doesn't have the same feature (ehh, I suppose at least). But how about linkedin and reddit?

I also bet that Whatsapp has this feature since I often see "Last seen at ...".

      "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

[2] probably co-written - or at least "heavily influenced" - by Marshal McLuhan

[3] http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html (very mild NSFW language of the form "____ happens")