In Search of The First Comment
Are you writing your code for humans or computers? I wasn’t there, but my guess is that at the dawn of computing, people thought that they were writing for the …read more Continue reading In Search of The First Comment
Category Archives: comments
Naming Names
We have all heard that good variable names are important for creating readable programs — advice that will serve you well when you come back to your code two years later, or even twenty. Sometimes, when you are so deep …read more
Hackaday Passes 1,000,000 Comments
For just over sixteen years we’ve been publishing fresh hacks every day. We’ve just passed another milestone: the one millionth Hackaday comment was made just a few minutes ago.
A million of anything is impressive, but it’s not the sheer volume that’s on my mind today, but how time and …read more
This Machine Learning Algorithm is Meta
Suppose you ran a website releasing many articles per day about various topics, all following a general theme. And suppose that your website allowed for a comments section for discussion on those topics. Unless you are brand new to the Internet, you’ll also imagine that the comments section needs at …read more
This Chrome Extension Lets You Tune Out Toxic Comments Online
“Tune” is an app that uses machine learning to filter what it thinks is “toxic” content, but it’s far from perfect. Continue reading This Chrome Extension Lets You Tune Out Toxic Comments Online
Pedos pollute YouTube comments on kids’ videos, advertisers flee
Can YouTube ever keep video comments under control, or it is time to kill off comments altogether? Continue reading Pedos pollute YouTube comments on kids’ videos, advertisers flee
The Anxiety of Open Source: Why We Struggle With Putting It Out There
You’ve just finished your project. Well, not finished, but it works and you’ve solved all the problems worth solving, and you have a thing that works for you. Then you think about sharing your creation with the world. “This is cool” you think. “Other people might think it’s cool, too.” So you have to take pictures and video, and you wish you had documented some more of the assembly steps, and you have to do a writeup, and comment your code, and create a repository for it, maybe think about licensing. All of a sudden, the actual project was only …read more
Continue reading The Anxiety of Open Source: Why We Struggle With Putting It Out There
Instagram now lets you block people from commenting on your posts
Instagram introduces new tools to promote a safe, kind environment Continue reading Instagram now lets you block people from commenting on your posts
Is there a way to prevent comments from being abused for command and control?
Botnets typically are coordinated over protocols like HTTP or IRC. However, to make such command and control traffic harder to spot, attackers have occasionally turned to other channels, including normal-looking communicatio… Continue reading Is there a way to prevent comments from being abused for command and control?
Using real names online ‘leads to discrimination and harrassment’
Common sense suggests that requiring people to use their real names online would lead to better behaviour – but the evidence doesn’t support that Continue reading Using real names online ‘leads to discrimination and harrassment’