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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I agree for inline code comments, like, “# Save the sprocket”, right above the line that saves the sprocket. Does this include documentation? Because when I see a prepareForSave function that references 10 other functions and I just want to know, “Is this mutating and how is it preparing for save and when should I call it?”, having the author spend 15 seconds telling me is less time consuming than me spending 5 minutes reading code to find out. Anyone who has read API docs has benefited from documentation.


  • This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.

    Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.

    I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.






  • As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

    Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.



  • There are degrees. If someone’s sharing about their recent stillborn child, it’s probably best not to bring up that one time I was 6 and my cat died and I can really, really sympathize. Anyone who worries about this is probably that person and could spend more time asking questions and less time, “relating”.




  • I’m sure most people here don’t remember when power strips and HDMI cables were $40 and coin batteries were like $15 each pre inflation because stores wanted to make money on them. We could only read, listen to, and watch what our local stores decided to stock and most things didn’t have reviews. If we needed a new power adapter for that one device with a special shaped connector, too bad. It’s literally impossible to buy it.