Steve Yegge's blog, later continued under the assertTrue name, mixes software opinions with posts on health, longevity, and research claims.
HN links it for the serif readability myth post. Commenters are mixed, calling some posts linkbait or lacking added value, and one disputes a splash screen rant.
Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all).
Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN readers:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734
by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:
> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.
[1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html%E3%80%80
> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog
That was followed up by another set of comments:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084
> I'm beginning to flag these posts.
I agree.
Ah, this site again. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327200 for context.
The author's posts vary greatly in quality. Sometimes they're reasonable. Sometimes they're stuff like "antidepressants in tap water cause autism" (http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/antidepressants-tap-water-and-autism.html) and "Do warnings on cigarette packs cause lung cancer?" (http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/do-lung-cancer-warning-labels-cause.html). When an article makes it to the front page of HN, a domain expert usually comes along to tear it apart. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140049 for a recent example.
Combined with the author's constant self-promotion (see https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog), I tend not to believe much written there. He's optimizing for page views, not scientific accuracy.
Sounds to me like he's either temporarily enraged, or is trying to get fired.
The spashscreen does 1 thing, it tells the user that the app is loading and you don't need to click the exe/icon again.
His solution to a 5-10 second load time is to provide a fake UI, record phantom mouse clicks, and also give the user a game to play, only makes everything worse.
Some apps have to initialize, and without that you are left with an empty shell of a UI that has no functionality. Or even worse, a slugish UI that initializes in-place or during work... Which then causes the typical user to go online and rant about how his app is broken or unresponsive.
Though I like what he has posted on the rest of his blog...
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/
"So before you go around claiming that serif typefaces are easier to read than sans-serif typefaces, you might want to do a little checking around. The embarrassing truth is, there's no solid research to back up that claim."
Source with references: http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-serif-readability-myth.html
One of many studies that show it's actually additional spacing that's at work when small text readability is improved with serifs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4612630/
It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed.
[1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html
From the guidelines:
> Please submit the original source. If a blog post
> reports on something they found on another site,
> submit the latter.
Here's the actual item, rather than the reddit submission:
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2010/02/voronoi-tessellation-in-linear-time.html