Labnotes

Greg Young "I had never seen this expressed in art before but brilliant!"

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Design Objective

I Can Has Petz? The new Petbarn branding is brilliant.

Pavel A. Samsonov 🧼 Someone bought the wrong soap, still good advice on UX:

Your product must provide feedback to the user when a function is activated, otherwise they can't know that it's done anything.

This is true of analog products too - for example, liquid soap doesn't need to foam, but that's how we know it's working.

Brian Lovin ⭐️

This is what FB developers will see in their local sandbox when building features for the upcoming redesign. Regardless of your stance on FB the company, this is a really powerful example of how a considered developer experience can directly impact the end user experience.

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Tools of the Trade

Microsoft to Ship a True Linux Kernel With Windows 10 WSL So maybe 2019 is The Year Of Linux On The Desktop! There's also a new command line terminal.

Unlike WSL1, which used a Linux-compatible kernel, WSL2 will use a genuine open-source kernel compiled from the stable 4.19 version release of Linux at Kernel.org.

While Microsoft will be providing the Linux kernel, they will not provide any Linux binaries to go with it. Instead, users will still need to download their favorite Linux distribution from the Microsoft Store or by creating a custom distribution package.

Introducing GitHub Package Registry 🚀

GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. … And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come.

Seb Lee-Delisle "Look at this gorgeous thing. I learned to program on this in 1983. The Sharp PC-1211"

Command Line Magic 🤔

If you cat /dev/urandom forever it eventually outputs a secure version of wordpress.

AnnaR "tfw your coworker is a time traveller"

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Web-end

Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query Quick and easy hack to disable animations for users who prefer reduced motion.

kkuchta/css-only-chat Of the bonkers things you can do with CSS: async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.

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Lines of Code

Kelly Vaughn 👇 This thread has all the best responses:

Oh you're a developer? Name 3 of your favorite commit messages

1. Elegant fix for tricky bug.
2. Remove fix for bug. Does not fix bug.
3. Bug fixed. TODO: find a less hacky solution!

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Peopleware

Dani Donovan 👇 An illustrated thread about living with ADHD:

All or nothing.

For me, #ADHD results in a lot of black-or-white thinking. Anything less than perfect feels like a total failure. Breaking even ONE DAY of a streak immediately results in falling off the wagon.

I am 100% or 0%, and have a hard time accepting anything in between.

Robert Sweeney This post went viral because we all know it's true:

I turned down Daniel Buchmueller for a job at Netflix. After a 60 minute interview I was on the fence, so I concluded that he "wasn't senior enough." He went to Amazon instead where he co-founded Amazon Prime Air (their drone delivery service) and was #2 on Fast Company's "Most Creative People" list.

At some point, we programmers are going to have to admit that we really can't judge another programmers technical abilities in a 60 min interview. We end up hiring programmers that are good at interviewing, but not necessarily good at doing the job. And we miss out on engineers like Daniel.

---

Locked Doors

The inception bar: a new phishing method Makes a web page that looks like the browser, greenlock certificate and all.

Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time Devices that only records when triggered by a "wake word", except they're too easily triggered to wake up and record:

I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

Matthew Green 🔥

I used to feel that tech companies competing to market “privacy” could only result in a win for consumers. Now I’m starting to wonder if it serves the same purpose as carmakers adding an “eco” mode to your SUV.

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Techtopia

People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps How an obsolete medical device with a security flaw became a must-have for some patients with type 1 diabetes.

These Ads Think They Know You The good news is, the data that's collected about you isn't all that accurate. The bad news is, inaccurate data is used to make decisions about you:

The accuracy of predictions made by data providers is difficult to verify. The companies release little evidence that those included in these groups actually belong there. A study from 2018 found that the gender assigned by data brokers was accurate, on average, only 42 percent of the time — that’s worse than just flipping a coin. So in the ads we bought, we expected many men would see ads aimed at women and vice versa.

---

Electric Sheep

Chris Harris This is such a cool effect: "First attempt at removing cars off the roads with neural nets. Will have to dream harder."

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None of the Above

Kelly "I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations"

Charlie O'Donnell 😭

I learned from an early @Casper engineer that at least two people returned their mattresses PACKED BACK INTO ITS ORIGINAL BOX.

Legend has it that both also folded their receipts in half ten times.

Fox Benwell "Internet! May I present to you, ENTHUSIASTIC POST-CAT, who often waits by the door for our postie or those charity-bag drop offs, and stashes all her spoils upstairs."

josé morales "at no point did I know what was coming next in this sentence" 😭

VANITY FAIR: Airbnb will pivot to video with the release of its first-ever feature film, Gay Chorus Deep South, set to debut at Tribeca Film Festival

Lukas Stefanko "Teenagers trying to make phone call on ancient apparatus"

Daniel Silvermint 👇 No spoilers in this thread, other than you might care less about the last season, after reading this (I do). Also applies to many other TV shows (and some movies) that struggle to switch between plotter and pantser modes:

It has to do with the behind-the-scenes process of plotters vs. pantsers. If you’re not familiar with the distinction, plotters create a fairly detailed outline before they commit a single word to the page. /2

KRON4 News When your city has a chronic infrastructure problem, but also strong DIY ethos:

'Pothole Vigilantes' are hitting the streets of Oakland at night to fill potholes

Genetically Tweaked Viruses Just Saved a Very Sick Teen The search for new antibiotics is taking a wild turn, as we learn how to use viruses to fight bacterial infections:

It hijacks a bacteria’s machinery to make millions of copies of itself, eventually bursting the cell apart and killing it.

Alejandro Ramirez Of course!

I was curious to see if a nonsense LinkedIn account would also receive job offers. It does! :D

Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same I love driving through the US and watching the different architectural styles, sometimes distinct to a single county or city. So that's going away. OTOH we get more housing, and more livable urban centers.

Beluga whale returns iPhone to thankful owner in wild video Just a few weeks ago, this helpful whale was a suspected Russian spy.

Max. "David Bowie as Yerba Mate: a thread"

This Weekend Reading is short and not on a weekend. Just returned from vacation, road trip through beautiful Montana and Idaho.

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Design Objective

How Netflix’s Customer Obsession Created a Customer Obsession This article is full of nuggets, here's one:

Based on consumer insights and learnings, do you have a product strategy that defines your hypotheses about what you hope will fulfill the trifecta of delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?

Personalisation is not the end-game of marketing Bingo:

You may find the customer’s idea of personalisation is more akin to excellent customer service, rather than a post-purchase email offering a similar-looking jumper on sale.

RaminNasibov "30 years"

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Tools of the Trade

Develop, edit & deploy websites entirely in the cloud with the CodeSandbox, Contentful and Netlify trio These three are remarkable at lowering the barriers for software development.

halvarflake And maybe also the most popular database system:

Excel is the most popular functional programming language.

Disk Usage Exactly.

amy nguyen "you ever wish jira was your therapist" 😭

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Web-end

Lynn Fisher z-index: -1;

---

Lines of Code

Sarah Frier Software development is exactly the same:

writing process, basically:

• Can't fall asleep because I have an idea for how to write an important scene or section
• Spend daytime trying to recreate midnight genius brain, only to find that on paper it sounds less genius
• repeat

taylorconor/quinesnake "A quine that plays snake over its own source!"

Josh Johnston "when I review my own code"

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Peopleware

Katrina Kibben 💯

Repeat after me: Retention, then recruiting. Make sure you have built a place people want to work before you try to hire the masses to join the misery. It will make things a lot easier.

Jason Lemkin That sounds about right:

About 20% of the advice from a great mentor should make you uncomfortable and even a bit annoyed

They will know where you aren't pushing hard enough, but should be

---

Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 A thread:

“As a product manager...how do you earn the respect and trust of your team?”

A couple things
1/10 - Don’t hide things from your team in an effort to protect/shield them. That’s weird. It’ll come back to bite you.

---

Devoops

Lorin Hochstein 👇 Every single reply …

Let’s play a game: using five words or less, utter a phrase that will elicit a great story from a software engineer with years of operational experience.

I’ll start: “health checks”

Dan Veditz Noted!

Note to self: only use certificates that expire on a work day morning, early in the week. You will thank yourself later.

---

Locked Doors

Sindre Sorhus I had a similar issue with nodejs/security-wg. Overzealous attempts to flag expected behavior as security vulnerabilities is not helping open source security:

Many of @snyksec's vulnerability reports are bullshit. They classified all execa versions as vulnerable because it exposes childProcess.exec(). Duuh. That's kinda the point of the package. They also don't contact maintainers before publishing their reports either.

Rajiv Shah "I think the backdoor issue's been solved 🤔"

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None of the Above

Les Bians Terribles "I was looking up how to clean a cat's eye boogers and I'm losing my shit"

Showerthoughts 👀

You never realize how much you use the internet until you go through your search history for 20 minutes looking for something from yesterday

Space Explorer Mike Mind blowing:

This is time lapse footage of neurons making new connections to other neurons.
This is what your thoughts look like!

Credit: to reddit user /u/AmazingScallion

Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr after squandering its potential Bury the lede:

On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr and “very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content.”

FoxDefeated "Saw this reddit post title and got really mad but it’s actually good"

Emma Taylor 👇 Alternative title, "[How] the Allies won the war because a coder wanted his lunch sooner"

How do I know so many made-up stories about how the Enigma code was cracked and didn't know until yesterday how interesting the real story is? A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park just casually blew my mind with a bit of the story. /1

They Want It to Be Secret: How a Common Blood Test Can Cost $11 or Almost $1,000 Broken by design:

“Some of these really simple diagnostic tests — what the heck?” Mr. Gaynor said. “It does mean, in a sense, the market is broken in terms of problems with market power.”

Silicon Valley is awash in Chinese and Saudi cash — and no one is paying attention TL;DR "You thought you’re in business. You’re actually in politics.”

with POCKETS! (h/t monkchips)

Scott Hanselman "I have never felt so special"

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Design Objective

Doug Collins Way to drive the point home:

Give your users a warning and an out before they take actions with potentially catastrophic consequences. #ux #design

Sarah Federman 💯

Your periodic reminder that design is what ships, not what you want to ship.

nicole The hardest problem in design is knowing the limits of the medium:

it takes 1 minute for a designer to add unnecessary fanciness that costs a developer hours of time, technical debt, and can even make things less accessible by not using out of the box element features

Patricia Aas "Progress bars are surprisingly hard to do well"

Lydia Nicholas Good point!

Just interrupting truism "older people don't use technology" to remind it's often because tech DOES NOT WORK FOR THEM.
Low circulation in your fingers? Touch screen won't respond. Got a tremor? Out of luck. Low contrast designs without zoomable text? It's doable but exhausting.

Doug Collins 🚀🐙

What does this button do?

A. Launch the octopus.
B. Activate the showerhead.
C. Turn on the grow light.

This is why icons need labels.

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Tools of the Trade

Chaos Oh, snap!

last week i got to witness an engineering department lose a full day's work because if you put an emoji in a git commit message, Atlassian Bamboo chokes on it forever and you're forced to rebase master, like you should NEVER DO. this was of course referred to as The Emojiency

somebody asked me which emoji it was, and i didn't actually know, so i had to go find out

it was 🤦🏻‍♂️

can't see how that could have been improved upon

Hazel Clementine That explains … a lot:

math notations explained

=      equals
=/=  not equals
<      left
>      right
!       LOUD NUMBER
~     worm
π     stonehenge
√     right answer
x      wrong answer
⋯    soon…
∮      what Exactly the fuck
∝    fish
∞    fish with 2 heads
↯    lightning
:⇔   he Scream

Ken Shirriff Why don't I have this knob on my laptop?

Back when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shilings in a pound, the IBM 1401 computer had optional hardware (i.e. transistors) to do arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence. Of course, there were two incompatible data standards—BSI and IBM—so this knob selected the format.

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Web-end

davy "I put a webcam in a favicon you're welcome Demo"

Nick Sherman "Checks out"

---

Lingua Scripta

Announcing WAPM: The WebAssembly Package Manager WebAssembly on the server side is an interesting development.

Chris Heilmann 🤔

It is confusing that JavaScript conferences are both events and functions.

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Lines of Code

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp Not sure why they expected more out of Accenture:

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
...
Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claimed, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.

Kevin Isom Sigh. Yes.

Ah, the weekly security alert emails from @github or as I like to call them, the regular reminder of just how many unfinished ideas I've had over the years.

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Peopleware

Jennifer Kim One of the trickiest part about interviews:

If you hire/interview people, keep in mind that every candidate in front of you will have either a marketing problem or a self-awareness problem. Your job is to figure out which.

I don’t remember where I first read this, but I think about it often.

In other words, under-confidence vs over-confidence.

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Techtopia

Troy Hunt 😂

I’m a responsible parent so I use the controls on iOS to limit screen time on the old iPhone my 9-year old uses. A white-listed exception is iMessage; he’s worked out he can send someone a YouTube vid then watch it in iMessage to circumvent the control. So proud 😅

Danny Tuppeny We're slowly approaching the point where you need DevTools and Wireshark just to keep the lights on in your house:

The smart meter in-home-device that @bulbenergy gave us seems to do 2 DNS queries every 3 seconds. The WiFi light is continually flashing like it can't connect. 🤷🏼‍♂️

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley Spot on (h/t DynamicWebPaige)

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Locked Doors

Brooke Simmons The appropriate reply to the "Five X" memes:

Five jobs I’ve had:

1. Don’t
2. answer
3. security
4. questions
5. on Twitter

A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions I guess "don't reuse your private key" is the new "don't reuse your password":

the researchers not only found that cryptocurrency users have in the last few years stored their crypto treasure with hundreds of easily guessable private keys, but also uncovered what they call a "blockchain bandit." A single Ethereum account seems to have siphoned off a fortune of 45,000 ether—worth at one point more than $50 million—using those same key-guessing tricks.

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None of the Above

ScienceHex I love this new meme that's going around Twitter of people as X:

Queen Elizabeth as Turkish food: a thread

oshu C 😭

I want to see a version of Star Trek where instead of ending transmissions dramatically, everyone has to click the "confirm" button to end their Zoom calls

Steve Chambers "There is no day that can't be improved by seeing pictures of how they weigh an owl."

LEGO Joseph Smith Good point:

Nobody talks about Jesus' miracle of having 12 close friends in his 30s

aly 👇 No spoliers!

Game of Thrones but with Mean Girls subtitles.

dirtyIiar "Did you know professional tag was a thing?"

Cyrus 🔥

If you:

1. go to Google right now
2. enter "Thanos"
3. click the golden glove
   You can get a live inside look at Google's secret strategy to send fewer clicks to publishers

arstechnica "How serious does Volvo take safety research? They have a freaking fake moose for testing."

Vala Afshar "The stunning focus and balanced head of the kingfisher while hunting"

Space Explorer Mike "Neat or Cheat?"

Vinay Patel "GDPR is my therapist"

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Design Objective

Why EU Regions are Redrawing Their Borders Good lesson in politics, though I'm mesmerized by the visualization. It hijacks browser scrolling, but at least puts it to good use.

58 bytes of css to look great nearly everywhere I love the simplicity of this.

main {
  max-width: 70ch;
  padding: 2ch;
  margin: auto;
}

Doug Collins 😂

Users don't usually read directions. They are a last resort. When they do, they need them to be short, easily readable, and, most importantly, accurate.

2/3 will not do the trick.

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Tools of the Trade

Sortraits Visual portraits of sorting algorithms.

Assistant Developer I think not enough people consider that often new tech/tool just moves problems around:

A reasonable (according to me anyway) shorthand for evaluating a new tech/tool:

1. What problems does it solve?
2. What new problems does it create?
3. What problems does it just move around.

Hints:

• 3 is usually the largest group
• People often confuse 3. With 1.

Nikita "I’m a programmer, I build an adapter when I need one"

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Web-end

Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser CPython compiled to WASM and running in the browser.

jake albaugh "when your friend throws you a dumb idea like a URL-based graphic eq, don't think twice, just do it."

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Line of Code

Luke Zoltan Kelley "I'm never getting those 20 minutes back"

Christina Zhu Exactly! (h/t Damien Joyce)

software engineering be like

zz z z
　 ＜⌒／ヽ-､_＿_
／＜_/＿＿＿＿／
　￣￣￣￣￣￣￣


　   ∧_∧     I FIGURED OUT
　 (　･ω･)     HOW TO FIX THAT BUG
 ＿|　⊃／(＿＿_  
／　└-(＿＿＿_／

---

Architectural

Giles Colborne 👇 Slow down to go fast:

Most organisations I speak to say: we can’t deliver stuff fast enough.

But when we work with their teams we cut delivery time (drastically), even though we spend more time on some activities.

What’s going on? (thread)

Rahul Goma Phulore 🤷‍♀️

"What the heck is this? You said during the interviews that you had a Kafka-based architecture?!"

"No, mate. You heard it wrong. We said we have Kafkaesque architecture."

Tom Gauld "Surprising performance outcomes"

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Peopleware

Hillel 👇 TL;DR We have ample evidence that sleep and stress affect our productivity. Also, we know code reviews are very effective. The rest is opinion.

One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal methods, not ANYTHING.

Allow me to explain why.

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform 💡 Always ask yourself “and then what?”

Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

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Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 Sprints are about incremental delivery, iterative development, and rapid learning. Not more frequent deadlines. Thread:

The value of “sprints” is largely misunderstood / glossed over.

Sprints are meant to be a healthy (and effective) forcing function / enabling constraint ... not a way to drive teams/individuals...not a hamster wheel ... not “breaking up a project” (1/n)

---

Representation Matters

Female representation matters. Colorado’s legislature proves that. 12 weeks of paid family leave, fully funded kindergarten, and an aggressive climate change bill.

TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be I bet they could have designed a better algorithm with fewer false positives:

“It doesn’t feel random when it happens three times in a row. It doesn’t feel random when you see that all the people around you, who don’t look like you, aren’t asked to step aside,” Knoderer said. “I don’t want to change the way my hair grows out of my head.”

Dominique Apollon Representation matters:

It's taken me 45 trips around the sun, but for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a "band-aid" in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it in the first image. For real I'm holding back tears.

---

Techtopia

Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent I'm curious, how do you "unintentionally" write code that reads data from one system, and then convert and upload it to your servers? How do you "unintentionally" deploy that to production? How do you "unintentionally" monitor that it works correctly for 1.5 million people, and "unintentionally" fix the inevitable bugs that pop up?

"… When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet It turns out that solving online harassment, misinformation, and radicalization isn't all that difficult. As long as CEOs have the incentive to act.

Within a few hours, the worst Tide Pod videos were scrubbed from YouTube, and the platform changed its algorithm so anyone searching for them would be shown a safety video.

“No debate, just action,” said Mr. Pritchard. A few months later, P.&G. announced that it would resume advertising on YouTube.

Sam This is creepy! But also, what other words can I yell into my phone and have free stuff delivered to my house?

I yelled into my phone “I’m pregnant” for 5 minutes on Sunday to see which apps would start advertising baby things. Definitely NOT pregnant. Zero babies in my sphere. Didn’t get any ads, but just received these free formula samples in the mail, which is creepier.

---

None of the Above

Modacity This is how all cities should be designed:

You‘ll barely notice it, but this cycle track is actually crossed by two residential side streets.

Rather than treating bikes and humans as guests in the cars’ space, the opposite occurs, and the cycle and foot paths are continuous by design.

This should be standard everywhere.

Geraldine The entire thread is this funny. 😭

Inventor of the Dishwasher: I HAVE CREATED SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE ALL YOUR LIVES EASIER.
Humanity: WHOA. So we just put dirty dishes in and it cleans them?
IoDW: Um, no. You need to wash them first.
H: Uh...
IoDW: Not thoroughly. Just, like, what you'd do if you were drunk.

Megan Stalter "If she wanna eat a burger at 16 am let her wtf"

Status as a Service (StaaS) I like the analogy of social networks as ICOs:

1. Each new social network issues a new form of social capital, a token.
2. You must show proof of work to earn the token.
3. Over time it becomes harder and harder to mine new tokens on each social network, creating built-in scarcity.
4. Many people, especially older folks, scoff at both social networks and cryptocurrencies.

Sam "This took me way too long to see it, nature knows how to do camouflage"

Megan Carpentier 😱

I actually asked the doctor this week if I needed a measles booster and he replied by rote “only if you’re traveling places with outbreaks and low vaccinations rates” and then he stopped and we looked at one another awkwardly.

Klara Sjöberg "What happens with you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator."

How the Boston Marathon Messes With Runners to Slow Them Down Heat, hills, wind, and running the tangents.

Maker Faire "We're willing to bet that Takashi Kaburagi has the coolest Rubik's Cube on the block. Scramble it, set it down on the table, and stand back in awe as it solves itself!"

Paul R "Fun fact: You can make any Wikipedia article dystopian by changing it to the past tense."

Ocean diversity "Seal accidentally scares baby polar bear 🐳"

Galit Ariel "Because – Tuesday."

---

Design Objective

The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs ...?” A long and thorough read, exploring the visualization of related search terms.

Mitch Goldstein What about the prequels?

Graphic Designer
Product Designer
Interaction Designer
Web Designer
Digital Designer
UX Designer
Design: Ragnarok
Episode VII: The Designer Awakens
2 Graphic 2 Design
The Lord of the Fonts
Designers: Infinity War
The Designer Identity
Digital Designer & the Prisoner of Azkaban

---

Tools of the Trade

Up to 20% of your application dependencies may be unmaintained This number feels like it's on the low end, I venture to guess closer to 80%. But not the point. Tidelift's business model is selling maintenance contracts to businesses, and using that money to pay open source developers to maintain their codebase. Different from Gitpay. I hope both work out, and we find a sustainable model for open source development.

Matt Galligan It works! Maybe QR codes are useful after all …

First time seeing a QR code to join a guest WiFi network w/ a password at an office. Worked great on both my iPhone and iPad…had no idea this capability existed!

Found this generator for WiFi-specific QR code. Could be useful: www.qifi.org

Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old As a child of the 70's, I find these top-of-the-line computers fascinating. Back then, massive boards with blinking lights were both science fiction, and the cutting edge. Also, Mythical Man-Month.

---

Web-end

Nathan Froyd I can't even …

"...the user agent string for the latest Dev Channel build of Microsoft Edge: "... Edg/74.1.96.24" We’ve selected the “Edg” token to avoid compatibility issues that may be caused by using the string “Edge,”..."

We are now deliberately misspelling words in the User-Agent string.

Rob Dodson Have you noticed it as well?

The thing about position: sticky is that it only works in articles which explain how to use position: sticky.

Lynn Fisher This thread full of awesome CSS looping videos …

---

Lingua Scripta

Jordan Scalesz "Friendly reminder that "o_o" is a valid identifier in JavaScript if you want little buddies to watch over your functions"

---

Architectural

Jeff Atwood True!

Of all the technical debt you can incur, the worst in my experience is bad names -- for database columns, variables, functions, etc. Fix those IMMEDIATELY before they metastasize all over your codebase and become extremely painful to fix later.. and they always do.

Software Maintenance, Understanding the 4 Types Not all software maintenance is the same, and it helps to know the difference:

Every time that you make changes to a software system, it is essential to identify the type of maintenance that you are performing. Keeping track of it gives excellent insights into your engineering practices. For example, the percentage of time that you spend in each of the four maintenance types gives you an idea of the maturity and skill level of your software engineering organization. It can also give you an idea of the maturity level of your product and codebase.

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb So long REST, and thanks for all the fish.

Vallery Lancey The infinite cycle:

XKCD "Sandboxing Cycle" is an evergreen slide when talking about abstraction layers.

It's not just security... abstractions are inherently leaky, which means sometimes you want to access the layers below, which voids many of the benefits of the abstraction.

---

Locked Doors

Colm MacCárthaigh Patching in production, a thread:

I think right around this minute is just about exactly 5 years since the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL became public. I remember the day vividly, and if you're interested, allow me to tell you about how the day, and the subsequent months, and years unfolded ...

Kevin2600 "Perfect Social engineer example. Happy hacking 🤓"

Facebook Boots 74 Cybercrime Groups From Platform This is what happens to your meme data:

Researchers said a simple search on Facebook for keywords like “spam,” “CVV” or more returned results for a slew of groups carrying out these illegal services. In total, the groups had approximately 385,000 members – and some had been up on Facebook for as long as eight years, researchers said.

And, of course, the algorithm:

Ironically, when researchers joined some of these groups, Facebook’s algorithm suggested that they join other groups promoting illicit activity under its “Suggested Pages” tab.

Evan Osnos Lovely security "feature" in older iOS:

Uh, this looks fake but, alas, it’s our iPad today after 3-year-old tried (repeatedly) to unlock. Ideas?

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None of the Above

Nature News & Comment "Dr. Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm that helped capture the first ever image of a black hole, tells us what this breakthrough means for science 👩‍🔬 #EHTBlackHole #BlackHole"

How to make sense of the black hole image We have turned the entire Earth into one giant telescope!

Ronan Farrow "Ah yes, the classic homeowner’s problem of checks notes bees paying off your mortgage."

What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free? Don't worry. It turned out for the best.

A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes inside. Today, very few would do that. I think it’s the same with cars in the city center: One day we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea.

Shockingly Good Smartphones You Can Get for $350 or Less Let that video be a cautionary tale about removing your phone battery.

Luuuda You can never be too prepared:

A couple years ago in central park I saw a lady on her phone looking panicked and I overheard her say “ok what we need to do is run a chi-squared test immediately!”

I still think about that emergency chi-squared test

Ana Oppenheim "My German might be very basic but this headline is hard to disagree with"

Seth Masket "Oh, honey."

The Hill Switzerland's highest court overturns referendum for first time ever after finding voters were poorly informed

The Guardian’s nifty old-article trick is a reminder of how news organizations can use metadata to limit misinformation Simple tech tricks that can help combat misinformation.

The key to glorifying a questionable diet? Be a tech bro and call it ‘biohacking.’ Not mincing words:

It's fascinating to watch the language of food consumption mutate as it travels across genders. For decades, "dieting" was the domain of women. It looked like Weight Watchers, it looked like Snackwells, it looked like South Beach, but whatever it looked like, it was always portrayed as something simultaneously necessary, shameful, pride-inducing, hated and ever-present.

The term became a victim of “gender contamination,” as Amanda Mull wrote in the Atlantic — which is “when a product or idea becomes so female-coded that men are no longer willing to engage with it.”

Instead men — and the companies that cater to them — found new ways to describe food restriction. Not “weight loss” but “performance-enhancing.” Not “look great” but “perform better.”

Mashable "These sculptures are not what they seem"