So yes... I have an assignment due tonight. It involves creating factorials, sorting algorithms and palindromes in a language called Haskell. It is what is known as a functional language. You write it like you would write math expressions. It's completely and totally different than a normal programming language. 

I have eight hours to do it. And I'm two hours in. I'm allocating three hours to learn Haskell. 15 minutes to break (now), and another five hours to do the assignment itself. 

http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters

So far, the link above is the only guide I have. I shall let you guys know how it goes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/po...s-out.html

I don’t usually keep up with the primaries too terribly closely. However, this time, I’ve been keeping up with some of them. It’s looking very quickly like Biden and Sanders are going to be head to head in the coming months. 

Sanders, incidentally, has had more support than anyone else on campus. There has been very significant support for him by student associations around here. 

I’m personally midline between conservative and liberal. I’ve voted for candidates on both sides, so I wind up keeping up with both democratic and republican conventions. What are your thoughts on the democratic debates as of this far?

Cities Skylines is a fantastic game out of the box. Unlike Simcity 4, you don't really need to have mods, per se, to play the game and enjoy it. But that being said, it's probably even more extensible than Simcity 4. If you were going to create a list of must-have mods, what would you put on the list? 

Mine: 

• Traffic Manager President Edition. (Much like SC4's NAM, althougn not quite as extensive. Lots of additional traffic tools. )
  
• Roundabout builder
  
• Bulldoze it (pretty useful. Automatically bulldozes abandoned buildings)
  
• 81 Tiles. (Lets you build beyond the game's default 9-tile limit)
  
• Network Extensions 2 (Adds new roads. Think SC4's RHW, but with regular roads and highways) 
  
• Move it! (Let's you move just about anything, and even allows you to adjust roads in miniscule ways after they have been built) 
  
• First Person Camera (Let's you view your city from any car or pedestrian's view. Very nice!) 
  

I learned to program on the Basic Stamp 2. It had a measly 2KB of program memory, and a very minscule amount of RAM (somewhere in the range of 256 bytes, maybe less). You could only really store a couple hundred lines of code for your program on the microcontroller, so it was anything BUT powerful. However, it was in the basic programming language, so it was extremely easy. 

Python is honestly pretty much just about as easy as BASIC is, while being far more powerful. It would be VERY interesting to see python on a microcontroller at some point, but being that Python's runtime environment is fairly heavyweight compared to a basic environment, I don't see this happening. 

Anyway, the basic stamp was very restrictive due to the extremely small amount of memory. Arduinos have long been the standard because they are more cost effective, more flexible, and much better in terms of hardware (and they are powered by 8-bit AVRs. There is a lot you can do, even with ancient CPUs). 

More interestingly, Parallax had the propellor microcontroller. It was a bit ahead of its time, but it was neat because it literally had eight cores on a single microcontroller. The programming language that it used, however, was VERY restrictive, as the ENTIRE interpreter had to fit within 512 bytes of memory per core. The propeller would have been a fantastic microcontroller with a slightly more powerful language to back it without having to resort to full C. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Stamp

As such, it seems that the arduino is more or less carrying the torch now. It's far more powerful, much more cost effective, and very widely accepted. Programs also don't have to fit inside of 2KB of EEPROM, which is nice.

Anyone ever used microcontrollers before? If so, what did you use, and what was your preference?

We have a birthday today for someone who has been a big part of this community (along with many other communities) for a very long time. So with that said, we want to recognize him here. 

Happy birthday brian!

I've used a few different CMSs (content management systems) over the years. Drupal used to be my go to. I really don't know what I was thinking. Drupal is one of the most difficult, least stable (unless you're a developer), and slowest CMSs in existence. It's also losing popularity. But for whatever reason, it worked really well for Simlink and I back when we used to make "filecave" file exchanges for game mods for websites. There wasn't really anything you couldn't do with it. It was pretty powerful once you got the hang of it, and at the time, it was often the only CMS you could use to get the job done if you needed something highly customized.

But I've been playing around with Wordpress now, and wordpress has about a 35% market share of all websites on the internet now. It's a lightweight little package made for blogs, but there is literally not much you can't do with it. It's rock solid. You can install themes, plugins, and updates with a single click. There are thousands of plugins that literally make almost anything possible. You can make social media sites, forums, galleries, corporate websites, or just about anything else. There are an increasing number of mega-corporations that are now using Wordpress over the alternatives.

Have you guys ever used wordpress? Do you think there will be any good alternatives to it in the long run, or is Wordpress sort of remaining the de-facto standard for easy content management systems?

I ask, because I've been messing with Drupal as well. Drupal has about 1/20 of the market share of Wordpress, and it used to be much more popular than it is now. Joomla is not really a realistic alternative, so it kinda seems like there's a ferarri racing against a ton of Altimas. There are alternative CMS', but they aren't really a match.

I also know that JS-frameworks such as Angular, and non-PHP solutions (nodeJS, Django/Flask, etc.) are gaining popularity as well. It will be interesting to see how PHP stacks up against the alternatives in 10 years.

What is the Fediverse you're probably asking... well it's a collection of servers using decentralized, open source, social media platforms.

what that means is that it's not controlled by corporations, nothing is on a single server that can be hacked, and it's free to join, plus there's cross pollination between it all.

some more well known platforms include mastodon, basically a twitter alternative with aspects of tumblr.  Frendica, a decentralized face book alternative where people can make their own servers and stuff, and peertube which is a peer to peer based decentralized alternative to youtube and other video sharing platforms.

it's a lot harder to do DMCA claims and such, and it's hard to have information be lost.

it's possible this is the future of social media once the corps stagnate a bit but who knows...

just wanted to share this crazy thing I've stumbled upon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

Finished up an 'alpha' version of a dark-theme userscript, I guess. like 95% of the site's functionality is there, minus the MyBB rich-text field for making posts and whatnot.

Screenshots:

Index page:


Thread/Post (Classic-Linear ONLY!)


Forum-View: 


Profile Page:


Newpoints:



TODO: 
- Post Control Buttons
- Checkboxes in various places
- UserCP is still mostly untested
- Threaded Post-view mode is untested
- Scrollbars


Stuff that I can't be f*** with:
- Anything to do with images or HTML
- The rich-text post editor
- Cross-browser support
- Removing any of the !important's in the code.

Installation:

1. Find the code here, copy/paste the whole thing.
   
2. Install Stylish for Chrome or FireFox
   
3. From Stylish, hit the three dots at the top, hit 'Create a New Style'
   
4. On the left from the New Style page, hit 'Import'
   
5. Paste the CSS in.
   
6. Save, exit, refresh Makestation.
   

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/politics/...index.html

I know we have multiple countries represented here at MS. (Some in Canada, Europe, and the US). Here in the US, there's a lot of talk going on about it. Most people don't really seem too terribly worried about it yet. Maybe concerned. But not in a state of panic. 

It's not that the virus has been proven to be extremely deadly (although deadly it is). We do know that Ebola was far worse, and much more serious. The issue with the Coronovirus is that we know very little about it. It's something that is pretty much completely new. We can't treat it the way that we treat the flu. We can't vaccinate against it the same way. 

What are your thoughts on the spread of the virus? How is it affecting your hometown or country?

I've long been looking for a screenshot for this. I finally found one, courtesy of JordanMussi on the MyBB community forums. Without further ado, this is how we used to look back in 2013.  



https://community.mybb.com/thread-129440...pid1022039

I miss the color scheme a little bit. I'd be willing to bring it back, but it needs some serious polish.