§ Speaking of, want to feel more official? Check out the White House Web API Standards.

§ By the numbers: Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries.

§ I wouldn’t bet against JavaScript now that four vendors are competing hard on it. Case in point, Firefox sticks it to Google with OdinMonkey, which can boost JavaScript performance by 1000% or more.

§ Shot Spotter: a network of hidden microphones that detects gun fire.

§ Guillaume Marty:

Now that we have rounded borders, shadows, gradients in pure CSS, designers decided that the new trend will be flat UI design!

§ “If our universe was a simulation you could totally tell. There’d be things like a fastest possible speed…”.

§ Checkboxes that kill your product:

What I do want to put the focus on, however, is that you have to perform an audit of your product every so often and see how the people using your product have changed, and what kind of functionality that made sense at the time may not make much sense anymore.

§ How to preserve bash history in multiple terminal windows.

§ An interesting trend: GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows.

§ More sorting awesome: HungarianDanceQuickSort and StackSort.

§ New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence.

§ Petting Zoo, a wonderful story of the creative process.

§ A primer on internet latency: video buffering or slow downloads? Blame the speed of light.

§ Mobile has it worse: the nuts and bolts of hitting the 1000 millisecond “time to glass” target.

§ Big performance wins by optimizing fonts using connect-fonts middleware.

§ Ambient sounds to boost your workday creativity.

§ FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition.

§ One of the best features of Node: a community that stands up to misogyny.

§ How to run Chrome in playback mode for bulletproof demos.

§ Multi-user tmux made easy with wemux.

§ Only if you still need to support IE8: A Subtle Difference Between Window Properties and Global Variables.

§ Guess who else supports hashtags? That’s right: the OS X Console app does.

§ Quirksmode on takes a look at the different CSS units:

The rule here is clear: the farther you are from Korea, the wronger you implement em and rem.

§ This might explain why we don’t see people upgrading from IE 8 to 9, and from 9 to 10, in any significant number:

Traffic from Internet Explorer browsers all dip at the weekend and traffic from all other browsers, most notably Chrome and iOS Safari, increase.

§ jQuery Behavior Miner will tell you when users are agitated:

• Hitting multiple time rapidly a keyboard key
• Maintaining multiple keyboard key at the same time
• Clicking multiple time a dom element (generally buttons)

§ Abba is a self-hosted a/b testing framework. Nice client-side API.

§ Strategies for avoiding the spaghetti graph. Guilty, but now I know better,

§ Puzzle box: The quest to crack the world’s most mysterious malware warhead. A tale of hashes and spies.

§ Matthew Might:

Thousands gather in front of Y Combinator to await the puff of white smoke that signals the selection of a new RSS reader.

§ Chrome Developer Tools: using the console and emulating mobile devices.

§ Daemon Showdown: Upstart vs. Runit vs. Systemd vs. Circus vs. God.

§ Designing for Retina: The One Pixel Rule.

§ Git gutter for Vim. Exactly what it says on the box.

§ Mailappapp:

Revolutionizing the way you revolutionize email.

MailappApp lets you quickly and hipsterly create another mail app, because that’s totally what everyone wants.

§ A lot of what we think we know about human psychology only applies to westerners, and often, we’re the edge case. The psychology of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) Americans.

§ Pictures from a developer’s life.

§ A gentle introduction to CSS layouts.

§ Coming in CSS, support for detecting pointer devices with CSS media queries. Apparently, not that simple:

And herein lies the problem with developers having control: we’re guessing based on the information we’ve got. Today we base our guesses on screen size; but when these media queries come in we’d be guessing based on pointer accuracy and hover capability… which is better but still not ideal, because it doesn’t tell the whole story. So do we need even more media features to get the level of control we need?

§ The little details that make such a big difference: Breaking down Amazon’s mega dropdown.

§ Hilaruous tongue in cheek, Announcing the Flat Design Conference:

Come see famous designers speak on topics such as:

• Rounded Corners: Are They Flat Enough?
• 10 Photoshop Tips For Not Using Shadows

You may want to skip this conference and just go ahead and use Flat UI Free.

§ The GitHub Generation: Why We’re All in Open Source Now.

§ Brian McKenna:

“OO mocking” means something else to functional programmers.

§ Head Like A Hole mixes perfectly with Call Me Maybe.

Much less edgy, but geek funny, Hey I just forked you, this code is crazy. I made some changes so pull me, maybe?

§ Myth busting the HTML5 performance of transform:translate vs. top/left.

§ Do androids read electric books?: typography and new features (and upcoming) CSS features.

§ Browserhacks is a handy reference to JS/CSS hacks targeting specific browsers.

§ Dom4, a polyfill for new DOM Level 4 API: Element#prepend(), #append(), #before(), #after(), #replace() and #remove().

§ Manipulating content with CSS3 transforms: on using scale, rotate, skew and perspective.

§ The Overbite Project, a Gopher client for modern browsers. For more modern Gophery (iPhone apps, servers, etc), check out One Thing Well that apparently is having Gopher appreciation week.

§ Faruk Ate?:

“Nobody, ever.” — Everybody, repeatedly.

§ The Problem Of CSS Form Elements:

Through the years, this lack of detail in the CSS specification has forced Web developers to produce a significant number of tests and examples whose primary goal is to reduce form elements to a common visual denominator in order to get a cross-browser rendering of elements such as input, select, fieldset, legend and textarea. In this article, we will cover some of the CSS patterns used by Web developers to tame the visual layout of form elements.

§ Stop Using Small Font Sizes:

TL;DR: 16px minimum font-size for body text, 1.5em line-height for said text; max width should be 60-80 characters == 27-35em.

§ Type rendering on the web. 7 part series. Ever wondered why text looks different on different OS/browsers?

In summary, most people reading text on the web view type in one of these five ways. Mac OS X users see Core Text, Windows 7 and Windows Vista users see either DirectWrite or GDI, and Windows XP users see GDI.

§ Loader.io is a free load testing service that allows you to stress test your web-apps/apis with thousands of concurrent connections. Pretty damn awesome.

§ What’s New in Ruby 2.0.

§ Laser-guided precision phishing. For example, this fake NATO Membership Action Plan using 0-day PDF exploit, assembly-level backdoor, and Twitter for command and control.

§ Programming Wisdom

Theory is when you know something but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works but you don’t know why. Programmers combine the two.

§ Parallel.js gives you high level access to multicore processing using web workers. Runs in modern browsers and Node.js

§ Resemble.js analyses and compares images with HTML5 canvas and JavaScript.

§ Rollbar just launched out of beta. We migrated over from AirBrake a couple of months back, and it works like a charm (we do Node and Ruby). Better error messages, daily summary, multiple logging levels, and more. Recommended.

§ the_silver_searcher — A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster.

§ Anonymous Confessions from Programmers:

I often write just “Bug fixes” in release notes because I am too ashamed to mention the details of the stupid bug I introduced last version.

§ Stop and read. Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.