Author here - loving all the discussion! I was a bit intimidated to submit this to hn - I'm humbled that someone else thought it was worth posting. Of course, happy to answer any questions anyone may have!
> You'll need to enable Javascript to see this section sorry! There's a slider that lets you see how changing the delay in a GIF file will affect the end results. It's pretty cool.
Thank you: this is an excellent way of handling the situation.
It’s not very common for people to handle these sorts of situations elegantly. I disable JavaScript by default (mostly for performance, frankly), and I encounter such elegance only once or twice a year.
(For myself, I take care on my site in the few places I ever use JavaScript, and also even vary my content in feeds where it depends on JavaScript or site styles, which I’ve never noticed anyone else do. make-and-git-diff-test-harness and dark-theme-implementation are slugs of two sample articles that both vary by JavaScript and feed, I won’t drop links.)
Great writing and research. You added great examples to make it clear, both in code and gifs. It was both fun to read and interesting. I was surprised to see Netscape running, I might try as well to play with the first JavaScript.
Thank you! I used VirtualBox running Windows 95, but there were a lot of roadblocks - finding a Netscape 2.0 installer, mounting it etc.
Unfortunately I didn't document the process at all and have forgotten everything, so I can't give much useful info, apologies. Just know that there is pain down that path.
This is off topic, but I don't think the problem is just that the Twitter is terrible.
If you want to link to a thread, you should click on the first tweet of that thread and copy its url. It's easy to see the rest of the thread: just scroll down.
If you want to link to one tweet in a thread you should click on that tweet and copy its url.
The person who posted the link to HN did the latter, while they should have done the former.
Twitter could make it easier to see that a tweet is part of a thread though.
While we're off topic here's my little rant about Twitter "threads":
It's easy to see all of the tweets made by the author, at least those made as replies to themselves, but reading the actual threads is hard or impossible. At least I haven't figured out how to do it despite considerable effort.
For example, say you want to view the replies to the tweet above the linked tweet, the one about "assert". There are supposedly 4 replies. If you tap that tweet you remain in the same list of self-replied tweets. There are replies at the end, but are they replies to the tweet you want to focus on? It doesn't look like it, but who knows, maybe? It's even worse on linger Twitter self-reply "threads".
I don't know how Twitter's engineers got the well-established threading pattern so wrong. This behavior doesn't even increase the number of ads you see.
I was so sure I copied the first tweet to submit. That is why the title is the same as the first tweet. Somehow I messed it up. May be Dang could change it to
Another great Firefox example is the shortcut for "close all the tabs" (ctrl+shift+q), which also happens to be adjacent to "go to previous tab" (ctrl+shift+tab). Depending on your preferences, there won't even be a warning popup if you accidentally press it.
