Labnotes

Published on

awedgewood "Put a wig on your dog and watch the neighbours freak out."

Design Objective

It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green When Apple added iMessage and colored iPhone-to-iPhone messages blue, we got snobby with the greens. A small design decision that bears large affect on the product and its user base.

A Jobs-to-be-Done primer I'm definitely going to hire this resource when I need to explain to how to think JTBD.

rgarner

The last twenty years building the web no-one asked for in two wireframes

How Flipboard Chose Form Over Function For Their Web Version For Flipboard it's a matter of form over function, and getting to 60fps animations was more important than building an accessible app.

tef

responsive (you can resize the window)
real time (you don't have to hit refresh)
modern (the back button doesn't work)

a guide to web apps

jaffathecake

Hardware: Fuck it, duct tape.
Development: Fuck it, regex.
Design: Fuck it, modal dialog.


Tools of the Trade

Markdown Style Guide First and foremost, Markdown should be readable as plain text.

Grafana 2.0 Alpha & Preview Amazing dashboard for Graphite and OpenTSDB.

EmailJS "Send emails directly from Javascript. No server code needed."

Non-app Mockup Printable PDFs for all your mockup needs.

Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway Removing Flash from Firefox would be a killer feature.

Automating Tinder with Eigenfaces So someone wanted to date a stereotype and spare themselves Tinder-induced RSI. But if you're interested in facial analysis and prediction, there's now an open source project for that.

slicknet

Nothing says 1.0.0 like 1.0.1.


Lingua Scripta

io.js v1.2.0 Errors io.js documentation covers common JavaScript errors and their meaning. Very helpful.

Using Homebrew to manage Node.js and io.js installs on OSX TL;DR brew link --force iojs

Experimental New Directions for JavaScript Some interesting ideas behing a new "use sanity" directive, and also some less interesting ideas about adding more Java to JavaScript.


Lines of Code

Providence: Failure Is Always an Option A helpful post-morten on failing a project by choosing too many new technologies. It's a combination of warts from new and immature technologies, and missing the benefit of skills and tooling you collected around your long established technologies.

marktimemedia

Two branches diverged on Git, and I—
I pulled the one less traveled by,
And now there are several merge conflicts.


Startup Life

The $1 billion company that prefers 40 year old coders who only work 45 hours a week (Now that’s a unicorn) I'll save you the link, it's Slack. That this is newsworthy is a sad statement about the prevailing hiring practices in silicon valley, and kodus to Slack for doing it's part to make a change for the better:

“There are no brogrammers… and we have maternity and paternity leaves that recognize the reality of being a parent.”

Slack may have sprinted into the Unicorn club, but Butterfield is sending every signal that he wants to build a company that’s sustainable for the long term. More of this please.


Not a Doctor

Are Your Medications Safe? "Ask your doctor if you're experiencing any signs of …" A condeming look at how the FDA buried evidence of fraud in medical trials.

Don’t read the comments—they can make you mistrust real experts

If you claim you're a doctor online, people may trust you more than the CDC.


None of the Above

Robot Vacuum Sucks Up Woman's Hair in South Korea And so it begins …

I'm Brianna Wu, And I'm Risking My Life Standing Up To Gamergate But it's really about ethics in game journalism. How did we let it come to that?

DanielEricLee

In the evening commute hours, be nice to everyone. You never know who may have spent the last 8 hours writing HTML for emails.

Lovebook Growth hacking to get laid: Lovebook finds you a match by running a Facebook targeted ad campaign.

RikerGoogling

reboot starship in safe mode

Published on

API XKCD nails it again

Design Objective

Breaking It Down You can’t ship what you don’t understand:

  1. Before you come up with a solution, figure out your problem.
  2. The solution should match your problem’s size.
  3. Break it all down.
  4. Review often.

Keeping GitHub OAuth Tokens Safe And now for something totally different. Github is both taking security very seriously and sweating all the little details:

Starting today you can commit more confidently, knowing that we will email you if you push one of your OAuth Access Tokens to any public repository with a git push command. As an extra bonus, we'll also revoke your token so it can't be used to perform any unauthorized actions on your behalf.

Material Design for Bootstrap If you didn't like how Bootstrap made your site look like very other site, you'll hate this theme that makes your site look like every other Google. I appreciate familiar UIs, so thinking of using this in a future project.


Tools of the Trade

What Will Save Us from the Dark Side of CSS Pre-Processors? I'm not saying alternative languages are bad, but if what you're after is cross-browser compatibility and new CSS features, consider writing your stylesheets in the native CSS4 and using a post-processor.

addyosmani

Protip: With @ChromeDevTools open, click/hold the Reload button for bonus Empty Cache & Hard Reload options:

On Use of the Lang Attribute The HTML lang attribute and how it affects accessibility. Also just learned, and it makes perfect sense that:

Firefox, IE10, and Safari (as of a year ago) only support CSS hyphens: auto when the lang attribute is set

mkcast Super cool: "A tool for creating GIF screencasts of a terminal, with key presses overlaid."

Condense "OCR everything on the fly."

Icecomm.io WebRTC as a service, currently in beta.

slacker-cli Messages to Slack from command line.

DrawAttention Adds a whiteboard to the back of your computer/tablet: “you need more than digital space, you need a white space.”


Lingua Scripta

Variables and scoping in ECMAScript 6 Everything you wanted to know about let and const.

What Are Weakmaps In ES6? And what they're good for.

ECMAScript 6 from an Attacker's Perspective Just because you can't use ES6 with all browsers, doesn't mean attackers aren't writing code to use ES6 features available in some browsers. Specifically, most XSS filters, JavaScript sandboxes and other security features, are only looking out for ES5 exploits.


Lines of Code

The Queen Of Code A short and fascinating movie about the legacy of Grace Hopper.

What Color is Your Function? On the difficulty of working with a mix of synchronous and asynchronous functions, the promise of async/await, and why some languages opt for threads.

Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems

We found the majority of catastrophic failures could easily have been prevented by performing simple testing on error handling code – the last line of defense – even without an understanding of the software design.

Applying Eigenvalues to the Fibonacci Problem Because math!

Commits.io Connect your Github repo, upload a logo, and Commits.io will turn the source code into a poster you can hang on the wall.

deech

I'm a 10x engineer, where x is my original estimate.


Locked Doors

Ulbricht guilty in Silk Road online drug-trafficking trial The conclusion to the Government vs Dread Pirate Roberts is as epic as the rest of this absurd trial. Here's the defense, claiming their client is guilty of being stupid:

An entire copy of the Silk Road site was found, encrypted, on a thumb drive on Ulbricht’s bedside table. “Would Dread Pirate Roberts do that?” he asked.

As Flash 0day exploits reach new level of meanness, what are users to do? Another day, another Flash vulnerability. But if you do need to use Flash, at least use Chrome:

Attacks exploiting CVE-2015-0313 are unable to escape the Chrome security sandbox, research from Trend Micro found.”

Anthem confirms data breach, but full extent remains unknown Is your Target-gifted free credit card protection about to expire? Good news: Anthem will soon offer you free credit protection. While Anthem disclosed the breach on January 27, 2015, the web site they created for that disclosure was registered on December 13, 2014, a quick 3 days after they detected the attack. Because PR takes priority over information security.

Your Local Gas Station Could Be a Major Security Vulnerability

This scan revealed 5,800 vulnerable ATGs globally, with 5,300 of them in the U.S. The researchers then sent Get In-Tank Inventory Report requests to these exposed ATGs, quickly gleaning a station’s name and address along with the number of tanks and their levels and fuel types.

Three credit card transactions could reveal your identity It only takes three transactions to fingerprint you.

Get Your Loved Ones Off Facebook You know FB tracks and analyizes whatever your share on the site, but do you realize how prevasive their data collection goes? All those lame-ass "Like us on FB" buttons no one clicks on? They exist to track every web page you visit. Much more is collected about you than you realize, or opted to share.


Not a Doctor

Here’s What’s Actually In Your Supplements The thing about "alternative medicine" is that, if it was medicine, it wouldn't need to call it "alternative":

the New York attorney general’s office found that four out of five of the most popular herbal supplements sold at those major retailers contained precisely zero of the ingredients listed on their labels.

I’m an Anti-Braker A great take-down on the anti-vaccine "logic".

seldo "Dear anti-vaxxers: I report, you decide."


None of the Above

8-bit Simpsons

Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society The public "is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment," except for that part where we believe what we want to believe and damn what science has to say:

Citizens’ and scientists’ views diverge sharply across a range of science, engineering and technology topics. Opinion differences occur on all 13 issues where a direct comparison is available. A difference of less than 10 percentage points occurs on only two of the 13.

Stupid Tricks with Promoted Tweets Since they're not going away, might as well use them for some good old pranking.

Tech’s High Barrier to Entry for the Underprivileged

The Truth About What Went Wrong With The Third Season Of Star Trek

thegrugq

Guess which one is the weed grow house? Yeah, police guessed that one too...

Published on

_youhadonejob "Simple but effective."

Design Objective

Why you should share your dirty work by Jonas Downey of Basecamp

When you look at most designers’ portfolios, you usually see beautiful, polished work … but the final product is only a small percentage of your total effort. It just represents your last decisions that made the cut.

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft dumps their legacy Outlook client in favor of a modern email client they acquired with Acompli. What's a modern email client, you ask? One designed post mobile, for email sessions under 30 seconds, for a perpetual manicured inbox (act or postpone). And Microsoft just beat Apple and Google to the punch,

Is Google Translate the Next Great Dating App? Sometimes, broken technology can be quite charming.

Kit FUI Like IMDb but for Fictional User Interfaces from movies and TV shows.

500. Internal Server Error Bloomberg wins the Internet. Also, this and this and of course this.


Tools of the Trade

Comcast "Simulating shitty network connections so you can build better systems." The perfect name and a useful command line tool to boot.

Stream processing, Event sourcing, Reactive, CEP… and making sense of it all

PubCSS: Formatting Academic Publications in HTML & CSS CSS for academic publications, with the nice benefit that it can do double column output for print, and single column output for how you're really going to read that paper (mobile/web).

assaf

JSF. Look it up. Then make sure your MVC framework does nothing of this kind. You're welcome.

importantshock "the greatest computing ad of all time"


Lingua Scripta

New string features in ECMAScript 6 At last, I can title with "*".repeat(50)

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Lo-Dash v3 The latest release of Lo-Dash adds speed, lazy evaluation, native ES6 suppor, and more.

Destructuring and parameter handling in ECMAScript 6 I have mixed feelings here. Half of what you can do with destructuring results in simpler, cleaner code. Half of what you can do, leads to Perl.

2to3 What's new in 6to5 3.0: faster compilation, new loose mode for faster execution, and more.

GonzoHacker

I can't tell if this is script is written in ES6 or has an unresolved merge conflict

tproger "JSON Statham"


Lines of Code

wraithgar

My coding style is reactive programming: I wait for the bugs before reacting to them.

jonathan_oliver

When I don't want people to touch my code, I write "// " at the very top.

HackerNewsOnion

Top 9 Reasons Arrays Are Confusing, You Won’t Believe #0


Locked Doors

taylorswift13

Cause the hackers gonna hack, hack, hack, hack, hack...

The GHOST Vulnerability Cute logo, serious business, time to upgrade.

Bug in ultra secure BlackPhone let attackers decrypt texts, stalk users Can we just agree there's no such thing as secure code written in C?

In unmanaged languages such as C, these flaws often result in invalid memory accesses that can be exploited in ways similar to so-called use-after-free bugs.

fanf42

OH: I wish Alice and Bob would just sort their shit out & move in together so they didn't keep having to send each other encrypted messages


Technodupia

Searching for Sex Exploring sex in the US through Google search results.

toothpick App Store activism:

A tip calculator that suggests a lower tip when your server is a woman.

elonmusk Does your car receive useful software updates?

Tesla P85D 0 to 60mph acceleration will improve by ~0.1 sec soon via over-the-air software update to inverter algorithm


None of the Above

Barisieur An alarm clock and coffee brewer. Enough said.

The Real Reason Kids Aren't Getting Vaccines It comes down to our broken health system:

The study found that an astonishing 49 percent of toddlers born from 2004 through 2008 hadn't had all their shots by their second birthday, but only about 2 percent had parents who refused to have them vaccinated. They were missing shots for pretty mundane reasons—parents' work schedules, transportation problems, insurance hiccups.

WiFi Map Passwords for public Wifi spots (iPhone/Android). Worked out well the two times I used it.

Reasons You Were Not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender. McSweeney at its best.

Cliptext A Chrome extension for sharing text as images, because Twitter 140 limit.

YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video YouTube and NetFlix now do native video in Safari. For everything else, Chrome still ships with Flash because not sure exactly why. Another trick is switching the UA string to mobile device, some sites will then do native video.

Tomgram: Ann Jones, Answering for America WTF is wrong with the US?

In fact, if you are an American, you are statistically in less danger of dying from a terrorist attack in this country than from a toddler shooting you.

Men Promise Brooklyn Women 8 to 12 Inches, Deliver 4.3

The Curse of Akathisia Why anti-depression drugs can be effective and yet lead to suicides.

Slavatar Beef up your social profile with an "Artisan, hand-drawn Avatars".

Published on

Well, technically …

Design Objective

Sounds like a Party The new Sonos logo is absolutely brilliant. Scroll to see the sound waves:

Neven Mrgan on Why Skeuomorphism Is Like a Classic Car

People wouldn't have fallen in love with cars in the 40's if cars had immediately looked like that, so they had to be flashy objects.

Conversational commerce

Messaging apps bring the point of sale to you.


Tools of the Trade

GitHub Cheat Sheet Very handy list of cool features of Git and Github. Keep this one handy.

Unlocking Disk Utility’s hidden secrets Pro tip: run disk repair before doing any OS X upgrade, or a simple disk mishap would leave you in an endless reboot loop. Don't ask how I know.

Docker and the PID 1 zombie reaping problem What you need to know about process reaping, PID 1, and Docker containers.

jessitron

Selenium is like alcohol. Fun at first. You start to abuse it. Soon, weekly meetings about how much money and time you're wasting. @tsmarsh

meat

all my software projects will have a README and a FORGIVEME


Lingua Scripta

ES6 Module Gotchas A few things you need to know about ES6 modules when making the switch from CommonJS or AMD. Also, this Gist will show Why it's hard to map ES6 modules 1:1 into CommonJS or AMD.

Elevator Saga A game where you get to program an elevator in JavaScript.

Gitlet Git implemented in JavaScript. With its heavily annotated source code this project is about learning Git from the inside, and learning from other people's JavaScript experience.


Lines of Code

Knowing Where to Type ‘Zero’ The story of getting a huge performance win by typing a single zero.

Scalability! But at what COST? What happens when you pit 128 cores of scalable graph processing systems against 1 single-threaded laptop?

Rather than making your computation go faster, the systems introduce substantial overheads which can require large compute clusters just to bring under control.

In many cases, you’d be better off running the same computation on your laptop.

Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop cluster Same but from a different perspective, this time pitting Hadoop against xargs | awk.

Why I Don't Teach SOLID Solid thinking:

To help manage the madness, we then introduce an IoC container. And a mocking framework for our tests. If it was intelligible before, now it's really not intelligible. You now literally can't find a call to 'new' anywhere in the code. Good luck reasoning about any piece of code now. But it's ok. Because it's SOLID. It's great design!

rockbot

As a software developer, when I say I’m a “morning person,” what I really mean is that sometimes I’m the first one in the office at 9:45am.

The world seen by an "Object-Oriented" Programmer


Locked Doors

Prosecutors in Silk Road Trial Present Damning Evidence From Ross Ulbricht's Computer If you're involved with the Dread Pirate Roberts trial, you should have watched the The Princess Bride at least once:

"The key could have been shared by several people," Christin told VICE News. "In particular, it could have been passed on from one owner to its successor."

The possibility that multiple users — and multiple people using the Dread Pirate Roberts handle — were in control of Silk Road at various times is central to the defense.

A Spy in the Machine How Bahrain used FinFisher to hack activists under the nose of the British government.

HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites "HTTP is a stateless protocol," they said, "don't use sessions, use URLs to carry state," they said. Then this happend. In other news, Mozilla working on a new meta header to limit referrer leaks.

Texts From AT&T Are Easy To Spoof TL;DR AT&T is teaching its customers to fall prey to phishing attacks. I think Verizon is doing the same thing. Be safe and never trust SMS sent by your wireless carrier.

Critical Vulnerability in Verizon Mobile API Compromising User Email Accounts TL;DR you can access any customer's account by changing the URL. Another reminder why you should never trust anything important (like email, SMS, photos) to your cell phone carrier.

Remember That Undeletable Super Cookie Verizon Claimed Wouldn't Be Abused? Yeah, Well, Funny Story...

Gitrob: Putting the Open Source in OSINT Sanitize your Github repositories:

Gitrob is a command line tool that can help organizations and security professionals find such sensitive information. The tool will iterate over all public organization and member repositories and match filenames against a range of patterns for files that typically contain sensitive or dangerous information.


Peopleware

women-in-software-eng Answers the question, which companies hire women for engineering roles.

JamesTamplin

You can go to meetings, be on top of email, or do work.

Pick two.

I Survived Another Meeting That Should Have Been An Email So there's that:


None of the Above

TylerHuckabee "When you find out Skymall has filed for bankruptcy."

Crash Override Zoe Quinn launched a new network to support survivors of online harassment:

Crash Override is a support network and assistance group for victims and targets of unique forms of online harassment, composed entirely of experienced survivors. Our network includes experts in information security, white hat hacking, PR, law enforcement, legal, threat monitoring, and counselling.

Streamus Streamus is a fantastic Chrome extension that turns YouTube into a music player. As pleasent to use as Spotify or Rdio, except streaming from YouTube (music, not videos) at a price you can't beat.

Vanguard's Best ETFs Got some cash/401K/IRA you need to park and no clue about investing?

iPet Companion "Play with sheltered pets live over the Internet."

What 'MacKeeper' is and why you should avoid it Party's over. Holidays now means cleaning your family's computers, even if they all use Macs:

… luckily I have moved my parents onto iPads as there main computer so don't have these issues anymore.

DeVitoChris Know your audience.

Urgent.ly Roadside Assistance as a phone app.

NickatFP "Natural selection in action"

I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone. I got labeled the ‘world’s worst mom.’ Apparently, there's a term for kids that are allowed to play outside and go places on their very own: "Free Range Kids".

dandolfa

Word of the day: ERRORGANT: "To be twice as certain as someone who is merely arrogant while possessing only one-tenth the requisite facts."

Ship your friend bubblewrap That thing you do after sending all your enemies glitter.

What should I do about Youtube? What happens when a single company gains control over a medium:

A lot of people in the music industry talk about Google as evil. I don’t think they are evil. I think they, like other tech companies, are just idealistic in a way that works best for them. … They can’t imagine scenarios outside their reality and that is how they inadvertently unleash things like the algorithmic cruelty of Facebook’s yearly review (which showed me a picture I had posted after a doctor told me my husband had 6-8 weeks to live).

Sealioning I finally figured out what it stands for:

Published on

History_Pics "Modern ruins"

Design Objective

Font Pair Helps you pair Google fonts.

WhiteAlbum People are weird, witness this inconvenience photo app that sounds like it will be totally fun to use.

Mobile First While the Internet hasn't been too kind to brick and mortar, mobile is changing that:

That fundamental shift in behavior is mobile: the most interesting place to be is no longer in front of a computer, it’s to go out into the world with a computer in your hand. And in that view, it’s no surprise that “3rd-places” like bookstores are experiencing a renaissance – or that physical goods, a welcome break from that ever-present screen, are more desirable than ever.

Here's What Some Teens Are Using Instead Of Snapchat And Instagram To Share Pictures In Class It turns out people who are not me are also using AirDrop for sharing stuff.


Tools of the Trade

blessed-contrib "Build dashboards using ascii/ansi art and javascript" Perfect for movies producers.

(Ab)using CSS3's :nth-child selector to invent new ones Like everything in CSS, powerful if you can figure out how to use it.

rauschma "That’s how you sent bug reports in 1985."

Vintage Terminal Effect in CSS3 CSS3 helps us restore the glory of CRT past.

Why DNS in OS X 10.10 is broken, and what you can do to fix it For Yosemite, Apple dropped the reliable DNSResolver and replaced it with the buggy discoveryd. I don't recommend switching back, but if you must, it looks fairly easy.


Lingua Scripta

Essential JavaScript Links Recently edited list that covers ES6/7.

6to5 + esnext 6to5 and esnext are merging, fantastic news for developers who want to use ES6/7 today.

hide-stack-frames-from Eliminates stack trace noise by hiding stack frames from any node module.

In-browser Redis A proof of concept Redis ported to the browser using Emscripten.

getify

"the nature of promises is that they remain immune to changing circumstances." house of cards, s1e1. also javascript.


Lines of Code

Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Original Source Code [1978]

SlexAxton

If at first you don't succeed, run the tests again to see if maybe one of them is flaky and if that doesn't work maybe just delete them.


Locked Doors

XSS game A game that teaches you how to XSS, hopefully so you learn not to trust client input.


Peopleware

alexch

Standup is not for asking "what did you do yesterday (and why isn't it done yet)?" but "what are you doing today and how can I help?"

iamdevloper

“You’ll mostly be rolling out CRUD features from this endless backlog”.

Honest job ads for developers.


None of the Above

Be My Eyes Fantastic use for technology:

Be My Eyes is an app that connects blind people with volunteer helpers from around the world via live video chat. Download now and start helping blind people see.

Hermione Granger and the Goddamn Patriarchy

“It’s funny you should say that, because I’m Hermione Granger, The Girl Who Gave Literally Zero Fucks.”

How Amazon Tricks You Into Thinking It Always Has the Lowest Prices

Here’s What Happens When You Install the Top 10 Windows users: stay away from "free download" sites.

Ship Your Enemies Glitter "Glitter as a Service: want to piss off someone you dislike for only $9.99? Let us send them some stupid fucking glitter that is guaranteed to go everywhere."