Category: Nerdy

If you have web developer friends, show them this article and watch as their face starts to twitch. TL;DR: good piece about browser inconsistencies around HTML forms (of which there are many)

1995 was a good year. Friends, ER, Xena were all on TV. TLC had dominated the charts with “Waterfalls”. Browsers were ok, because HTML was pretty ok. We had Mosaic, Netscape and IE1, and the HTML2 spec was finally getting around to standardizing forms. 1995 was the year when <input> was born, and now that it’s about old enough to drink, we need to have a talk.

Oh man, just found this other awesome quote:

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, JavaScript

You see, I can justify CSS quirks. I worked on Chrome for 2 years, I work next to the Blink team now, I understand we’re all writing different renderers and they all have their own CSS bugs. However, the <input> API isn’t quirky — it’s literally just a jar of spiders, and the moment you open the jar, it’s too late. You’re covered in spiders. Even your cat is a spider now. Better find some fire.

Source: I ♡ you, but you’re bringing me down – Monica Dinculescu

TL;DR: the author set up neural networks to auto-generate clickbait headlines. View the output at http://clickotron.com/ or click through to read about the system.

In total, this gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.

Source: Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks | Lars Eidnes’ blog

There are a lot of funnily-named startups here… Having a comedic actor guess what they are = lulz. Here’s my favorite:

WhalePath
T.J.’s guess: “That’s a site that tells you the general migration patterns of whales. And it’s not a very funny site. It’s incredibly informative. It’s for the maritime man in all of us.”
Actually: A crowdsourced business growth site

Source: TJ Miller of HBOs Silicon Valley Tries to Guess What 10 Actual Startups Do

TL;DR: apparently altruistic hackers made a botnet that removes other malware from easily-compromised routers.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time a computer virus has removed others from the system!

They also placed their malware (or goodware depending on which way you look at it) under the General Public License, the widely-used free software license written by Stallman.There’s still a concern that despite the hackers’ promises, they could still use Wifatch for evil – something The White Team even warned about. When asked if they could be trusted, the hackers wrote: “Of course not, you should secure your device.”

Source: Meet The Mystery Vigilantes Who Created ‘Malware’ To Secure 10,000 Routers – Forbes

Another awesomely audacious aspiration aims to truly decentralize the web once and for all: IPFS

Remaking The Internet With IPFS
The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.

Source: Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch