Talking about creating "delightful" user experiences is actually user-hostile when it wrongly presumes that your customer wants to be emotionally involved with your service at all.
Fast and invisible are often the better parts of delight.
At this point, the worm makes use of two recently discovered Windows bugs. One bug relates to network printers, and the other relates to network files. The worm uses those bugs to install itself across the local network, onto all the other computers in the facility.
Since the average cost of a movie ticket in the United States is around $9, going to just two movies per month resulted in a good deal for the customer, and a loss for the company.
Jen Simmons This applies to so many social networks, not just YouTube:
This. Is. Important.
Don’t link to the tweets / web pages / people who are enraging you. It helps and rewards them. It gives them a voice. It promotes their ideas.
Subtweet them. Talk about the bigger idea and critique that.
I learned studying my YouTube metrics: people who downvote the videos actually help them rank higher in the YT SEO algorithm. Because engagement = higher ranking, even if that engagement is negative. If you downvote, you promote what you don’t like.
It’s terrifying that both of these things are true at the same time in this world:
• computers drive cars around
• the state of the art test to check that you’re not a computer is whether you can successful identify stop signs in pictures
When someone disagrees with you online & demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, u can save a lot of time by not doing that.
Dude, I’ve known u for ten seconds & enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
Kevin Farzad You'd think I have this figured out by now, but no:
The most important thing I've learned in life, and I can't stress this enough: you gotta make a salad in a bigger bowl than you think
Just encountered another dockless car obstructing the sidewalk. These things have become such a nuisance since they launched. The city really needs to start regulating private use of public space.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT: I am considering publishing as simply “T. Eliot” going forward. It has a concise dignity, I feel; an aura of seriousness. “T. Eliot”. What do you think?
Periodic reminder that we can see your MailChimp list names when we unsubscribe…
Lori G Someone posted a clickbait "by age 35 you should" think piece, which I'm too old to link to, but the Twitter reactions are gold:
By age 35 you should have a huge box of cables but you can't throw them out because you're pretty sure you still need a couple of them but you're not sure which ones
After conducting research, we discovered that participants generally preferred the lighter (and sometimes the hybrid) themes over the dark theme. Participants also had better first impressions of these themes …
Surprisingly though, the performance data from these same users revealed a different story, as users made decisions faster, and just as accurately, with charts displayed in the dark theme.
95 percent of ATM transactions pass through COBOL programs, 80 percent of in-person transactions rely on them, and over 40 percent of banks still use COBOL as the foundation of their systems.
I like how every software license pretty much sums itself up in the first handful of words.
MIT: "Permission is hereby granted."
BSD: "[Redistribute] and use."
ISC: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute."
zlib: "This software is provided 'as-is'."
GPL: "PREAMBLE"
And here is where the vulnerability lays. The mergeBrowserWindowOptions function didn't take into account what the default values of these restricted attributes should be if they were undefined. In other words, if webviewTag: false wasn't explicitly declared in your application's webPreferences (and was therefore being inferred by explicitly setting nodeIntegration: false), when mergeBrowserWindowOptions went to check the webviewTag, it would then come back undefined thus making the above if statement return false and not apply the parent's webviewTag preference. This allowed window.open to pass the webviewTag option as an additional feature, re-enabling nodeIntegration and allowing the potential for remote code execution.
The maximum interval in an incremental back off loop for a client should always be less than the amount of time it takes you to accidently drink a bottle of bourbon wondering if things are going to work again after you fix a service and before the next retry happens.
Backblaze "Our CTO found this on reddit. Heh. Heheh."
In the interest of preserving these blocks of uninterrupted time, the product engineering organization at Pinterest experimented with putting 9AM-5PM no meeting blocks on engineers’ calendars from Tuesday–Thursday
1/ “Writing is thinking” is my favorite saying in “how to work” in a company. It is very interesting to dive into this a bit because I often get so much pushback, especially from startups and/or those focused on agility.
Eventually, I found a treasure trove of examples by Engineering Leaders from companies with some of the best culture in tech.
They called them Manager READMEs, or Manager User Manuals. And they’ve graciously let me share them with you.
Electric Sheep
Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone Google Assistant will call the restaurant so you don't have to. And it will sound like a real person, with simulated hmm's and uh's. Obviously significant ethical implications when computers pretend to be people (Robocalls have been doing this for a while). But OTOH some people struggle with phone calls, and most small businesses have not embraced SMS or webchat.
TIL that changing random stuff until your program works is "hacky" and "bad coding practice" but if you do it fast enough it's "#MachineLearning" and pays 4x your current salary
But it wasn't until hitting "print" on the fourth machine - from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis.
verylegit.link Turns any link into a suspicious looking one.
None of the Above
The Cube Rule of Food Identification Are hot dog sandwiches? Are pop tarts a type of ravioli? The Cube Rule applies simply geometry to answer life's toughest questions.
Jamie Wilkinson I'm very familiar with this part of writing a talk:
At that point in talk writing where I haven't written anything but the house is spotless
Matthew Gerring A thread about San Francisco hills, service workers, MedCal eligibility rules, and the superiority of Merino Wool:
I usually work as a freelance software engineer. Today, I’m a bike messenger. Thanks to a surprise layoff, I have to scramble to pay my rent & bills next month. I need to hit 20 deliveries by 12am to do it. Follow along! (Thread)
41 Strange "Unusual 65ft-tall beech tree found in the Balkan Mountains (photo: Deyan Kossev)"
The two began with a single volt. Not much happened. The patient’s well-being or “happiness level” was around 2, while his anxiety was up at 8. With a single volt more, the happiness level crawled up to 3, and his anxiety fell to 6. That was better but still nothing to write home about. At 4 volts, on the other hand, the picture was entirely different. The patient now described a feeling of happiness all the way up to the maximum of 10 and a total absence of anxiety.
Mothership.sg "New type of display seen in Hong Kong"
If you have time to implement error messages for both devices, opt for placing them to the right of the field on desktop and below the field for mobile devices.
Much of bad design isn't bad design — it's work done without design. Somebody had to fulfill a commitment and there was no time to think or room to change course. The way companies make commitments is the first design problem. It constrains everything afterward.
Andrew Chen On "Conservation of Intent", a theory of why increasing conversation by X% seldom affects key metrics:
1/ OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that's +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right? Wrong :( Turns out usually it goes up a little bit, or maybe not at all. Why is that?
Sketchize Printable templates for sketching mobile/tablet/desktop UIs.
Tools of the Trade
Lobe Lobe is a new service for building and training deep learning models, using a simple, visual interface. Got to check it out. Here's the sample project for Hotdog / Not Hotdog.
Today, a guy at work brought us candies made with salty liquorice that taste really really awful 😖 So an idea flew around the office: "when you break the build you eat a candy".
Now everybody is super careful and tests (more) their code 😂
Solis Mac app for live design: integrates with your code editor, to show real time, multi-viewport preview.
Rust in production at Figma If you're interested in Rust, some lessons here about performance (fast, low memory) and ease of us (not quite there yet). TL;DR they ended up with a Node/Rust hybrid solution.
You know how HTTP GET requests are meant to be idempotent? Well, do I have the story for you ... a while back I added WiFi control to our garage doors with little Wemos D1s.
The authors also suggest that ascribing blame or community sanctions may be less effective than offering community members a way to "save face" "without having to admit that they deliberately violated the community's norms." They describe a system called stopit designed at MIT to address computer-based harassment. When users reported harassment, the system sent a message to the alleged harasser claiming that the alleged harasser's account may have been compromised and urging them to change their password.
I use 1Password to generate answers for BS "security questions." Extra entropy. Just spelled out a 27 character combo of letters and numbers. Rep asked "That's your pet's name?!"
Said "As far as you know, it is. The real name is all over my wife's social media."
The sheer amount of detail that went into Heathrow Airport's #MayThe4th sign is lovely. Note that the "next info" on the Kessel run flight is the release date of SOLO. Also thumbs up for "possibly a trap" on the Death Star flight.
Johnson told Lifehacker that she and her co-authors submitted the paper with two spaces after each period — as was proper. And the journal deleted all the extra spaces anyway.
Note: An earlier version of this story published incorrectly because, seriously, putting two spaces in the headline broke the web code.
BTW I'm writing this blog post in monospaced font, so two spaces after the period. It's published as HTML, with a variable-width font, so one space after the period. Having the cake and eating it too?
My brain every morning: your issue is very important to us, please hold as our call volume is high, and coffee is still coming online…
christina rotondo "my mom put oil on her bird feeder to keep squirrels from stealing the bird food and"
Steve Rogalsky From a Twitter debate about "craftsmen", and the need to deprecate this gendered term:
A fond memory from my university days: I was seeking to understand why we can't use "mankind" or "men" for all cases. A wise woman asked me to name 10 famous men. I named 10 famous males, and no females. Her point exactly.
That's the problem with using craftsmen for all cases.
"Hey space astronomer, where is space?" [Space astronomer puts on his lab coat and adjusts his space safety goggles] "According to my latest science, there is space."
Bobby Laurie: PEOPLE: Listen to your flight attendants! ALMOST EVERYONE in this photo from @SouthwestAir #SWA1380 today is wearing their mask WRONG. Put down the phone, stop with the selfies.. and LISTEN. **Cover your NOSE & MOUTH. #crewlife #psa #listen #travel #news #wn1380
Ok so maybe if panicking people can't put on your weirdly-shaped cup thing right, ITS BEEN BADLY DESIGNED.
There's no nose notch, or elongated side, or anything that would suggest to a (currently scared shitless) person that it goes over your nose.
Technical writing is 10% typing and 90% trying to think of good examples.
Clemens Vasters Blockchain are great at solving a problem you may not have, thread number 49824:
The specific combination of well-understood architectural building blocks that make up "blockchain" is very well applicable, but nearly exclusively applicable to all-around trustless global ledger accounting problem (e.g. "coins").
🏎 Mario Kart: CSS 🏁 You can turn left and right, even switch drivers, all made with CSS and without a single line of JavaScript.
Lingua Scripta
Node v10.0.0 Major new release, with major support for promises: in the file system API, await for reading input streams, finally, and more. Time-travel debugging looks cool. See also.
Announcing npm@6 Another major release, and npm@6 will audit your dependencies:
Soon, every user of the npm Registry will begin receiving automatic warnings if you try to use code with a known security issue. npm will automatically review install requests against the NSP database and return a warning if the code contains a vulnerability.
Lines of Code
abstractionscon "What five words best describe programming?"
Nora Jones: "I can do this in five words" Cassidy Williams: console.log('did this work?'); Sarah Mei: "Probably take about two weeks" Clay Caviness: "Small change; no tests needed" Joe Beda: "How did this ever work?" type error: "error: expected url::Url found url::Url"
Our servers run on Kiritimati time (UTC+14) …
Specifically to make tests fail. It’s the furtherest time zone we could find (from the US), and every new team member breaks the build at least once because of this.
FoundationDB team developed the database inside a deterministic simulation. They abstracted away IO operations like network and disk, which allowed injecting all kinds of faults while running clusters under the load inside an accelerated time.
Simon Brown Or as they say, weeks of code changes can save you an hour of architecture design:
A humble suggestion to anybody contemplating a greenfield microservices architecture, especially if you're replacing a monolithic "big ball of mud" that has become hard to work with ... draw some diagrams showing your proposed design.
Not once in my 20 year career have I seen a sales person held accountable for selling something that doesn’t exist. And yet I’ve seen countless engineers held accountable for not delivering something that was sold that didn’t exist. My single biggest frustration with our industry
Adil Aijaz "My take: If you do one thing, do CI. If you do two things, do CI and trunk based development. If you do 3 things, do CI, trunk based dev, and feature flags."
Despite using AWS for a decade, I never get over that heart-stopping feeling when your console is inexplicably empty, and then you realize you're in the wrong region
Changelog "And you thought your production deploys were tricky..."
She did this the other day and my heart immediately began racing. Why? I’m not sure. All she did was say hi, a perfectly legal and normal thing for anyone to say to anyone else …
It has at least partly to do with the fact that conversations online never really end or begin, so it’s immediately alarming that she is not just saying the thing she ostensibly intends to tell or ask me.
Search for public Trello boards of companies, to find login credentials, API keys, etc. or if you aren't lucky enough, then you may find companies' Team Boards sometimes with tasks to fix security vulnerabilities
Remember how my iPhone got stolen by bikers who snatched it from my hand last week? I have reason to believe that the thieves are now trying to get me to reveal my iCloud password to reset it using an ingenious scam. It's useless to them without the iCloud password (thread)
CIA: Collect It All For the spy-curious, a card game based on the CIA's training game: Collection Deck.
"Data is the new oil" is a phrase often heard in our world of late. Repeated again by Audi just now. This is a loaded statement, and those who use it don't seem to understand the implications.
"biggest tool was GEDmatch, a Florida-based website that pools raw genetic profiles that people share publicly. No court order was needed to access that site’s large database of genetic blueprints."
Seen at a Harbin restaurant: swinging cradle for your phone, I'm told to cheat the "10k steps/day" test & qualify for health insurance discounts, presumably while you relax, eat & drink more, or have another cigarette.
Everyone at home kept watching Netflix using my profile. Messed up all my lists and history... so I renamed “Dad” to “Install Windows Updates Now.” Problem solved.
I keep asking kids what they want to do when they grow up and none have said 'answer emails' there's going to be a ton of disappointment when they find out
Sarah Rose "soooo, I no longer feel like a crazy person for losing random socks..."
Am I saying that in order to be considered a successful designer that you have to actually design something that gets built? Well to be honest, yeah, kinda. Talking about the plans you had for your spouse’s birthday that you didn’t follow through on aren’t going to do you any good.
My favorite idea from accessible design is the thought that we are born unable to walk, and many of us die unable to walk, so we should consider ourselves "temporarily mobile" in between and design a world accordingly, with affordances for all.
Thread with screenshots: In America, mainstream native desktop (macOS or Windows) are in decline, and developers increasingly opt for building web apps or Electron apps. However, web apps vs. native desktop apps is a completely different story in companies such as China.
FiraCode Fira Code is based on Fire Mono, and adds ligatures for commonly used programming symbols, for a more readable text:
This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like .. or //, ligatures allow us to correct spacing.
Nerd Fonts A collection of developer-friendly fonts (SourceCodePro, FiraCode, Inconsolata, etc), that are patched to include developer icons (Font Awesome, Material Design, Powerline, etc).
John O'Nolan If you're planning on using Slack for community groups, read this first:
After 4 years of running a (11,000 member) public Slack community for @TryGhost — today we’ve decided to shut the whole thing down for good.
I’ve got a few interesting observations to share from the experience, and what we’re moving to now instead.
shutdown -h 0 # Stop the auto playing sound that you're hearing, wherever it's coming from. This will also exit your editor.
Peter Brandt "Computers spitting out charts did not exist in 1975. This is a Copper P&F chart I kept by hand. We used graph paper to hand create price charts."
Focusing on Focus Styles I'm familiar with the :focus selector, but wasn't aware of :focus-within, or the upcoming :focus-visible.
Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here TL;DR iOS 11.3 ships with Service Workers, and a half-baked implementation of PWA, that's more annoying than useful. Better hide manifest.json when you sniff Safari user agent.
Do I even want to know why Debian has a security update for beep(1) today?
Facebook Container Extension A new extension for Firefox that "helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container." Basically, Mozilla is treating Facebook as malware that needs to be contained. Related …
This is the most CLEVER phishing scam I’ve ever encountered and for a second it almost got me.
Here’s how it works: they ask you to send them the password reset code they have requested gmail send to you, claiming it will stop someone’s access but in fact it just lets them in.
Each bottle has a scannable code on the back that puts you in a virtual underground room where a hologram of the Master Distiller challenges [you] to crack the code by selecting four aromas and four flavors out of several combinations
Funny Money
Nicholas Weaver "My slides for tomorrow: I have ~5 minutes to explain to an audience for a class on "Blockchain" at Berkeley why it is total bullshit. I didn't go easy."
Techtopia
AlterEgo A wearable device that can listen to what you say with your "silent" voice:
At first, you spoke the words you read out loud, but then you learned to voice them internally and silently. In order to then proceed to faster reading rates, you had to unlearn the “silent speaking” of the words you read. Silent speaking is a conscious effort to say a word, characterized by subtle movements of internal speech organs without actually voicing it. The process results in signals from your brain to your muscles which are picked up as neuromuscular signals and processed by our device.
The scholar Danielle Keats Citron cites the example of Colorado, where coders placed more than 900 incorrect rules into its public benefits system in the mid-2000s, resulting in problems like pregnant women being denied Medicaid.
...
The appeals process was difficult to navigate, and Eppink says it was “really meaningless” anyway, as the people who received appeals couldn’t understand the formula, either. They would look at the system and say, “It’s beyond my authority and my expertise to question the quality of this result.”
None of the Above
Scott Helme "Mobile banking is great until you're in Hawaii and can't pay invoices or bills because timezones... 🤦♂️"
A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd."
"What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did.
Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.
John Bick "That awkward moment you realize you did it wrong your whole life." (works better with glover needles)
parker Another iteration of Car vs Bike fighting over public space:
“Screw these VCs only funding trivial stuff for rich people!”
VCs: “Lets compete to see who can invent cheap ecological transit for all. Bikes, scooters, rollerblades. Let’s try it all!”
“Screw these VCs. I hate seeing all these scooters everywhere. Where’s my Uber?”
