Labnotes

Marques Brownlee "Ok well played @elonmusk @Tesla"

---

Design Objective

Scott Bateman 👇 Thread on the design choices in airplane UI:

Almost every switch, lever, or handle that a pilot may have to move whilst inflight is shaped differently. Whether it be the external lights, radar controls, or the temperature control for the air conditioning, they are all subtly different. #AvGeek #Aviation

Jeff Morris Jr. And building that POV into a cohesive product offering:

The hardest part about product has nothing to do with designing UX/UI or motivating engineers.

Those skills can be learned through hard work.

The hardest part is having a unique point of view about the world & being able to articulate those ideas to customers in a simple way.

The changes! 😎

Antti Oulasvirta 👇 VR/AR will never work in practice, no way to solve usability issues, a thread:

Rant: Nine reasons why I don't believe in current VR/AR technology.

HoloLens, Magic Leap, and Oculus: Mind-blowing videos, and the market is estimated to explode to $200 billion by 2025 (Statista). So what's wrong?

HCI research tells why we haven't seen a killer app yet: 1/22

Luke Wroblewski 👇 VR/AR with new input modes and better screens, just a matter of time, a counter-thread:

1. many of these issues stem from trying to put graphical user interfaces into the real World. Porting windows, icons, menus, keyboards, etc. to 3D space & asking you to point at them will cause many HCI issues. wrong interaction model.

---

Tools of the Trade

tef of the author These are damn good heuristics:

the three true estimates:

it's quicker to do than to explain
it will be done by the next meeting
it won't

the three true priorities:

yesterday
right now
never

the three true results:

i made one change
i changed several things and missed one
changed everything & still broken

AnnaR 💡

TIL: Google Slides has an option to live-machine-caption your slideshows 🤯 Seems like a valid option if the venue you're presenting at doesn't provide CC!

Nader Dabit I know a lot of developers who do that, unironically:

I love how we as developers expect so much free shit, free applications, free platforms. When they try to monetize we flip out.

We then complain if we're not yet making absurd amounts of money building things for our companies, who we expect to make money to pay us (but how?) 🤔

Scott Hanselman 😭

Rather than “git blame” I would like to see “git I did the best I could with the tools and organizational structure available to me so just give me a little space and time and it will get fixed eventually”

Thomas Fuchs Both funny and sad (also):

Legendary Apollo project programmer Margaret Hamilton, next to a printout of the node_modules directory listing for her first Hello World react app

---

Web-end

Vincent Riemer 👇 Thread on running smooth animations:

[1] Transforms, transforms, transforms, transforms (and opacity)

I almost never animate any property other than transform/opacity. When paired with tasteful usage of will-change, you let the browser skip some of the more expensive rendering steps (paint/layout). (5/9)

@rem OMG he's right!

You've met the only unclosable HTML tag, right? <plaintext></plaintext> works today (try it in jsbin, jsfiddle, codepen, etc), and refuses to close and it'll baff all the subsequent markup onto the page (including it's own closing tag). Fun times, eh? Straight from the 1990s.

---

Lines of Code

Andreas Klinger Just this week, I had to figure out which of three similar repositories hold the actual code we use in production:

Job interview: "Solve this recursive graph problem"

Daily work: "Figure out why in this legacy app there are five things named almost the same. And which one to use."

James Newton-King The hardest problem in computer science is not giving up:

This is it. The end of my career. I've fought this bug for 3 hours and I can't defeat it. The bug defies logic and reason. The rest of my days will be spent in eternal struggle against an amorphous foe, destined to-

Oh, there was a typo in an environment variable. Never mind.

Hakim El Hattab "tfw your hotel shower is a more prolific OSS contributor than you"

---

Architectural

Bryan Caplan Defines the software industry to a tee:

The classic mistake of the old: Thinking there are no new ideas.
The classic mistake of the young: Thinking your ideas are new.

Eloi Valley 🔥

kuberbetes is just websphere for millennials. I shan't be reading any replies,

---

Peopleware

There’s an optimal way to structure your day—and it’s not the 8-hour workday Pomodoro fans, here's another data point for you:

In the process of measuring people’s activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: the length of the workday didn’t matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest.

Alistair Croll 💯

Less “women in tech” panels.
More women, in tech panels.

A New Luxury Retreat Caters to Elderly Workers in Tech (Ages 30 and Up) Not. The. Onion.

---

Teamwork

Steven 👇 On managing inputs vs outputs:

2/ Will riff from my POV on this.

At scale the inputs (themselves a product of alignment/collab) are
• Resources
• Schedule
• x-team technology bets
• Scenarios or “themes”

Output is created/owned by the team (recursively) within those constraints.

6 phrases managers need to stop using in team meetings Or why “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions” is well intended but ineffective.

Amir Salihefendić Key takeaway: "Blocks becomes a non-issue as you are blocked by default"

0/ Remote work isn't exceptional as companies that are spread around multiple offices have done it for the last many years. The special sauce is communicating asynchronously as the default 💡 Here's a thread about why.

Corey Quinn Bingo!

I object to the reality that you can be trusted with root in production, but not the judgement to make a $50 purchase.

Priya Ghose 🔥

“Never attribute to stupidity or malice that which can be adequately explained by structural alignment of incentives.”

-Hanlon's Razor as revised via @kevinakwok

---

Techtopia

Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway Serving relevant ads doesn't require surveillance, a rant:

That's a lot about profiling for ad targeting, which obviously doesn't work, if anyone would just stop and look at it. But there are way too many people incentivized to believe otherwise. Meanwhile, if you care about your privacy, all that matters is they're still collecting your personal information whether it works or not.

matt blaze More states should enact bans on cashless retail:

Philly just banned credit- and debit-card only retailers, citing, among other things, economic inequity (not everyone has a card) as well as the privacy implications of requiring all customers to use trackable payments. Interesting policy tradeoff space here.

---

Startup Life

Eric Paley 👇 How to tell a story during an investor pitch:

When getting ready to pitch VCs, founders often jump right into assembling a slide deck.
I think this is a mistake.
I’d suggest that you start by writing twenty headlines that sum up your startup, and only then build the slides.
Here’s why:
1/11

Amazon Almost Killed Best Buy. Then, Best Buy Did Something Completely Brilliant "This is how Best Buy used a combination of corporate strategy and emotional intelligence to save itself from ruin." Best Buy didn't save itself from Amazon, it saved itself from itself. They turned into a retailer you'd want to visit.

---

None of the Above

Julia Macfarlane "Siri give me a metaphor for life"

CNN A breakaway female cyclist was forced to stop during a prestigious race in Belgium after she started to catch up with the men's competition, which had started 10 minutes earlier.

christine røde Me:

every time i pack for a trip, i somehow convince myself that i will require 3 outfit changes a day like some sort of fashion blogger, only to get there and happily wear the same jeans and tshirt for days in a row???

Jessie Char "that wfh life"

your friend myk 👇 This thread, smh:

unpopular fantasy opinion: dragons shit gold. that's why the lairs are filled with it etc, they don't collect it they create it. Think about it - do you ever see dragons bringing sacks of gold home?

No, it's whole cows. Then time passes, then there's gold.

Not rocket science.

Andy Ryan "I'm close to breaking this whole thing wide open"

AT&T’s new HBO chief criticizes Netflix, says it ‘doesn’t have a brand’ I guess he's talking about "HBO and chill" …

Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home to Stay Warm and Grow Food All Year Long Never too cold, and they can grow grapes, tomatoes, and cucumbers. What more do you need?

Woman reads fine print on insurance policy, wins $10,000 in hidden contest That one time reading the EULA paid off:

Hidden deep within the text of her Squaremouth insurance policy was a contest to win $10,000. The company buried instructions for claiming the grand prize in the fine print of every Tin Leg Travel Insurance contract.

"If you've read this far, then you are one of the very few Tin Leg customers to review all of their policy documentation," the fine print read. It included an email address and said the first person who replied would win the prize.

Subaru Buggy Drift Highlights Crazy fun, and you can build one yourself:

The Real Flat-Earth Conspiracy Is Selling Overpriced T-Shirts At least flat earth is harmless, and doesn't spread measles:

Apart from the charge to engage seriously with this movement — something I haven’t managed to do — the best part of the film is how many times the Flat Earthers disprove their own ideas with elaborate experiments.

Well, that and the amazing T-shirts they all wear.

The Dad "Now THIS is how you spend a snow day with your kid. [Scott Theisen]"

Ash Crossan "Me not being dramatic"

---

Design Objective

Austin "If you want to be noticed during a portfolio presentation, tell a good story."

Norgard 👍

A useful tool is to end every product meeting with the following question, "Is this the simplest solution we can come up with."

Marc Hemeon When there's a will, there's a workaround:

I just spent .99 to get a 10 minute silent song because autoplaying music in cars is still a thing we can’t turn off in iOS...

Title of song is sonit always plays first...

Dare Obasanjo "No intuitive UI survives its first encounter with an end user"

---

Tools of the Trade

75 years since Colossus arrived at Bletchley The world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, celebrates its 75th birthday.

vim.dev is not what you think it is …

Introducing Package Diff See the difference between two published releases of an npm package.

AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers vs. API Gateway integration TL;DR AWS Lambda is fast enough for most use cases.

emacs.dev is probably what you think it is …

Jake Williams "Does Python scale? You bet it does..."

---

Web-end

Cleave.js Format your <input/> content when you are typing.

Animation in React @nearform/react-animation for all your component transition animation needs.

Epilepsy Blocker A chrome extension that blocks dangerous, flashing GIFs. For people with photosensitive epilepsy that triggers from exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or from certain visual patterns.

---

Lingua Scripta

Johannes Ewald "TIL exporting a function named then can be problematic 😱"

every_jorendorff Easy to fix, just add setTimeout, a thread 👇:

ECMA has changed the behavior of await p; to NOT create an extra promise (and enqueue an extra job) if p is already a promise. This makes await faster. No downside. Good idea!

So, I've got a patch for this. Guess what happens when I run all our browser regression tests.

Jane Manchun Wong 230K+ lines of code!

Google Domains, despite its recent redesign, is actually built with Google Web Toolkit

It loads megabytes of JS bundle, which is loaded by eval, which is compiled from Java!! Omg my eyes

If you wondered why the first page load of Google Domains is so sluggish, this is why

---

Lines of Code

Avdi Grimm In response to this monstrosity of a configuration file:

It is generally true that if you can fool developers into thinking they are "mastering" something hard (as opposed to learning tolerance for something badly designed), you can build a fiercely loyal priesthood.

Enrique "It's always a timezone-related issue"

More than once I've run into tests that start failing at 6pm. I live in Mexico City (GMT-6). By now, whenever that happens I immediately suspect a timezone-related issue.

It's always a timezone-related issue.

---

Architectural

The coastline paradox This basicly explains why software project estimations are always wrong:

The closer you look, the more wiggles and squiggliness you come across and instead of converging on a more accurate length, the coastline just keeps getting longer. The smaller your ruler, the longer it gets.

your friend myk "lol what a great definition of 'eventual consistency'" (original comic)

---

Peopleware

Daniel Gross True, but easier said than done:

Hardest part about hiring as a founder isn’t finding people. It’s orienting your schedule to spend enough time on recruiting.

You’re likely under-investing in it. Inertial draw is always towards the urgent, not the important. Audit your time. Eyes on the prize!

Sophie Alpert 🤔

if A players hire A players but B players hire C players… who hires B players?

Kathryn Brightbill This thread has some great stories: "What is your most on brand story from your childhood?" 👇

---

Locked Doors

David Byttow Shares his on brand story from his childhood:

My mom controlled our AOL account when I was about 13 and would come into my room to sign me in. So, I created an entirely fake AOL login flow in Visual Basic and had her sign me in once to capture the password. Old school phishing.

Top ten most popular docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities Good to know:

The official Node.js image ships 580 vulnerable system libraries, followed by the others each of which ship at least 30 publicly known vulnerabilities.
...
The current Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Node.js runtime is version 10. The image tagged with 10 (i.e: node:10) is essentially an alias to node:10.14.2- jessie (at the time that we tested it) where jessie specifies an obsolete version of Debian that is no longer actively maintained.

If you had chosen that image as a base image in your Dockerfile, you’d be exposing yourself to 582 vulnerable system libraries bundled with the image

---

Electric Dreams

Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it Finally, a use for AI.

Saleem Rashid 🤖

asimov's fourth law: a robot must not click the "i am not a robot" checkbox

hardmaru 🏎

A fun way to learn about neural networks and AI is to implement a simulation game giving your agents little neural net brains, and training them using a simple method like evolution.

This demo trains a small neural network to drive around the track after only a few generations:

Graham Cluley "Turing test."

---

None of the Above

Story Of My Fucking Life New favorite Instagram account, these fake real life book covers are everything!

AlwaysAshley Every printer owner can relate:

Me: And print.
Printer: No
Me: But why?
Printer: No yellow ink
Me: It’s a black and white document.
Printer: I NEED yellow
Me: You don’t.
Printer:
Me: But —
Printer: I’m not running a fucking charity, get me yellow
Me: Ok but this is the last time.
Printer: lol no

hoskas This also happens to me every time I open Instagram:

I bet there's a word in German for when you get a very brief glimpse of a fascinating tweet just as the page reloads and no matter how far you scroll, you never ever see that tweet again.

Tim Dunn "The world record for pulling a train... with model trains."

Manisha Agarwal 😭 I go to physical therapy twice a week, so I can relate:

My friend who's a physiotherapist thinks that half the guys on Tinder are using ten-year-old photos, the other half are married, and the other half are single for a reason.
I'd like to tell her that's three halves, but you don't debate math with someone who's rotating your spine

The Hoarse Whisperer I'd join:

Okay, hear me out.
New business idea: a sleep gym.
No athletic equipment. Only private nap cubbies.
Your friends when they see you hustling off in sweats: “Where ya going?”
You: “The gym. Back in an hour.”
I would seriously join a sleep gym.

RNIB 🐫 CamelCase FTW:

Make sure you capitalize the first letter of each word in hashtags so that screen reader software reads out each word separately. It also makes them #EasierToRead!

Jedi Cinememer "Danny Ocean describes Facebook's ambitious new messaging strategy. See Facebook plans to let Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp users message each other."

Quantitative easing was the father of millennial socialism Actions have consequences, part I:

Mr Bernanke’s unorthodox “cash for trash” scheme, otherwise known as quantitative easing, drove up asset prices and bailed out baby boomers at the profound political cost of pricing out millennials from that most divisive of asset markets, property. This has left the former comfortable, but the latter with a fragile stake in the society they are supposed to build.

Lyft's financials show a $911 million loss ahead of its IPO Actions have consequences, part II:

The company has been clawing market share from industry leader Uber, according to the filing. Lyft claimed 39 percent of the U.S. market at the end 2018, up 17 percentage points over two years.

Two years ago: With just her words, Susan Fowler brought Uber to its knees.

Axel Rauschmayer Actions have consequences, part III:

If we see this popup on a Medium post, we can’t use it for @ESnextNews. 😢

Matt Jameson "Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls."

It's infuriating how often I google a story to verify it, and the results are:

1. NYT (no free articles left)
2. Fox News (always free)
3. WaPo (no free articles left)
4. Breitbart (always free)
5. Daily Caller (always free)

Guess what people end up reading when this happens?

In Mod We Trust There's no escaping the click-bait industrial complex:

The Verge brings this up as an example of the totalitarian and dehumanizing environment that Facebook moderators experience. But I imagine that if an employee had written down (or used their phone to take a picture of) some personal details of a Facebook user, The Verge (or some identical publication) would have run a report on how Facebook hired contractors who didn’t even take basic precautions to protect user privacy.

I’m not saying nobody should ever be allowed to do investigative reporting or complain about problems. But I would support some kind of anti-irony rule, where you’re not allowed to make extra money writing another outrage-bait article about the outrages your first outrage-bait article caused.

De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation TL;DR Scientists picked a single-cell alga, introduced selective pressure in the form of a predator, and watched as it evolved into a multicellular organism over ~750 generations.

Andrew Cunningham 🤦‍♂️

The people who make USB are at it again!!

• USB 3.1 gen 1, which used to be USB 3.0, is now USB 3.2 gen 1
• USB 3.1 gen 2 is now USB 3.2 gen 2
• USB 3.2 is now USB 3.2 gen 2 2x2 because it’s twice as fast as USB 3.2 gen 2 (aka USB 3.1 gen 2)

'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports In many places in the US, recycling is over, and instead we get incinerate pollution. But you can still reduce and reuse! ♻️

Jennifer Wright "This woman is both my hero and history's greatest villain."

Everyone should know about @bunnyarchive: tweet @bunnyarchive bunny for a cute bunny pic!

---

Design Objective

@edwinwee Next level presentation:

Today I gave a lightning talk on emdashes and endashes and passed out these custom M&Ms. I was so pleased with myself.

Helen Tran So much this!

I mean no disrespect to the Lyft Design team... in my perfect world the app simply asks, "Would you get into this car again?" Or assumes, "Yes" until otherwise noted.

The rating system is exhausting and leaves room for random punishment based on people's arbitrary moods.

Giora Morein Factor this into your design process:

You will only know all the requirements of a story when it is completed (not before you start it) #agile #scrum

---

Tools of the Trade

OptimalBits/bull Bull looks like a solid choice: Redis-based job queues for Node applications.

Mozilla to use machine learning to find code bugs before they ship That's a substantial reduction in bugs:

That system found some 60-70 percent of buggy commits, though it also had a false positive rate of 30 percent. Even though this false positive rate is quite high, users of this system nonetheless felt that it was worthwhile, thanks to the time saved when it did correctly identify a bug.

Magnus Edenhill "I too ❤ Logs. left: streaming, right: batching"

Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications Interesting technique (looking at you, Electron):

This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ applications. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking the classical Robson bounds with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the-art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption; in particular, it reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%.

Teletype Model 33 "git push so slow"

---

Web-end

Details on <details> Using the HTML native details element and Web components to build drop-down menus and dialogs.

Pure CSS Still Life - Water and Lemons Mind blowing! Still life with CSS.

---

Lines of Code

Manisha Agarwal 😅

In software development, there's probably no worse situation than "it works, but nobody knows why."

---

Architectural

Roman Kofman My experience also confirms that adding slack to your roadmap speeds development in the long run. 👇 Thread:

When people complain about tech debt, and business disregard for it, they don't usually actually mean a limited set of specific issues.

What they're complaining about is a lack of "slack" to take on un-prioritized, but important work.

Slack is important for any healthy team.

Sakhavat Mammadov "When you keep postponing simple but important solutions .."

---

Team Work

Bret Taylor The story of how Google Maps “Satellite” mode was almost named “Bird Mode” has all the right elements of corporate decision making process, but with a happy ending.

---

Locked Doors

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook. That we accept this as normal …

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

Using DNA Databases To Find Your Distant Relatives? So Is The FBI. Fingerprint matching are so last century:

A majority of Americans could be genetically traced by the FBI using consumer genealogy databases and pinpointing a distant family member’s DNA, researchers say, greatly expanding investigators’ ability to identify members of the public suspected of crimes.

Eric Lawrence "Wife wrote a shopping list and entrusted my 5yo to deliver it to me. #infosecmetaphors"

---

Techtopia

Nike’s smart sneakers are breaking when used with an Android phone The day your shoes stop working and you have to wait for a software patch … say what???

Affected owners say either their left or right shoe no longer pairs with Nike’s app, meaning it can’t be used to tighten their fresh pair of $350 self-lacing shoes.

OTOH while not as stylish, they do have more processing power than a PDP-11.

Austen Allred 🤔

If you think about it the technology industry is just a giant mechanism for moving money from Saudi Arabia to San Francisco landlords

basibanget "Thank Excel!"

---

Electric Dreams

Do Neural Nets Dream Of Electric Hobbits? Explores the relationship between the GTP-2 algorithm (remember, from last week), and recent concepts of how/why the human brain dreams.

---

None of the Above

Gabby Tropea "My sister accidentally locked me out of the house so I went to check if the back door was unlocked and this happened"

Ryan Gantz 😭

boarding order:
1st class
flyvantage 9000 unobtanium elite cardholders
veterans (thanks for your service!)
skynet chryogen billionaire club members
travelers with kids
Verizon GO90 customers
flyvantage 7500 goldlife partners
YouTube Red subscribers
folks wearing UNIQLO™
group A

Benji "When you try to help but have no idea what you're doing"

Kevin Roose I can't complain about tech giants harming the social fabric, without pointing out examples of good stewardship. 👇 Thread:

Pinterest has half the staff of Twitter and 1/20th the staff of FB. No war rooms or byzantine enforcement frameworks or faux-democratic governance councils. It just saw people using its platform in a harmful way, and...blacklisted them. Wild!

Flightradar24 — how it works? TIL this real time map of commercial plane traffic is made by hobbiests, and for about $50 you can build your own tracker and contribute to the effort.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes "Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women – and puts lives at risk."

Dragons and Beasties These sculptures are the most adorable!

Rebecca Mix "my coworker has this hanging by her desk and I cannot stop laughing" (source)

---

Design Objective

4 Reasons Why You Should Design Without Color First 🤔 Using B&W as constraints for your early design iterations:

When you start designing keeping the B&W color palette constraint in mind, most of your thinking time goes into figuring out how to space things right to be able to seem like things are grouped together. You start thinking about the invisible yet more important aspects such as readability (line height, paragraphs and typography), center of attention (call to action buttons and sizes) and scannability (grouping of elements, spacing)

don’t get clever with login forms Your login forms should be simple, predictable, and play nicely with password managers. That's it. Avoid clever interactions that ends up turning into daily annoyances. For example:

This pattern is incredibly tedious.

1. Enter email into login form.
2. Open new tab or switch programs.
3. Open your inbox.
4. Find message from service (if you don’t get distracted by other emails first).
5. Open message.
6. Copy gobbledygook password.
7. Go back to website.
8. Paste in gobbledygook password.
9. Submit login form. Holy shit.

Robin 💡

Good UI design is 90% making things load quickly and 10% typography.

How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) Know your audience. Also, use less “furniture”:

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

Martyn Reding "Hey @Tesco the menu on your leaflet seems to be broken. You’re welcome 👍🏼👍🏼🤓"

---

Tools of the Trade

Sebastian Markbåge Cool tip (better if you understand the underlying principles):

This is a little known React optimization pattern. React rerenders this component deeply when updateX is called, and since children can't have changed, it automatically bails out of trying to update the children. No need for sCU, memo, etc.

Paul Frazee Mighty useful:

ℹ️ Bash tip: if you need to run a quick command in another directory, surround your call in parenthesis. This causes the command to be run in a "subshell" which is discarded after the command runs, keeping your CWD the same.

Example: (cd ~/work/foo ; npm install)

Archmonad of Saturn "Reading up on the PDP-11 minicomputer system and the module control panels are all absolutely gorgeous!"

redactyl.js "Redact sensitive information from JSON for logging (Node.js)" Also, I just love the name of this module.

Alec Muffett "BEST #XCODE REVIEW EVAR"

---

Web-end

Using the Little-Known CSS element() Function to Create a Minimap Navigator Interesting CSS feature, hopefully this one gets supported beyond Firefox.

1991 Server-side web framework written in Forth.

---

Lingua Scripta

Leah "Have an inspirational quote™"

---

Lines of Code

Nearby Cats 👍

A lot of programmers make the mistake of thinking the way you make code flexible is by predicting as many future uses as possible, but this paradoxically leads to less flexible code.

The only way to achieve flexibility is to make things as simple and easy to change as you can.

Mel Learn to throw code away:

Lessons from art school: one professor had us spend 4 hours on a still life painting only to have us reuse the same canvas for the following session with a different subject.

Don’t get attached because you can do it again and better.

Ryn Daniels 😭

OH: "I regret to inform you that that's a load-bearing yak you're trying to shave."

---

Architectural

andrew turley 🙋‍♀️

Most people are capable of building systems that are twice a complex as the systems they are capable of maintaining.

---

Peopleware

Tommy Collison 💯

I've had a couple of knee surgeries, and I've never forgotten a nurse who, after I told her how I was feeling, said "So — better than yesterday, and not as good as tomorrow?" If that's true of you learning a new thing, you're on the right track.

No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. In spite of the title, this article makes some good points on setting boudaries and when to not respond to emails. Also, reminds me I've got a few emails to respond to brb …

I have a few general rules. You should not feel obliged to respond to strangers asking you to share their content on social media, introduce them to your more famous colleagues, spend hours advising them on something they’ve created or “jump on a call this afternoon.” If someone you barely know emails you a dozen times a month and is always asking you to do something for him, you can ignore those emails guilt-free.

On Being A Principal Engineer A career path that doesn't require managing people:

Yes I am still a maker not a manager and I do not have anyone reporting to me but my new position now requires leadership duties that are best not left implicit or not handled with the same outcomes oriented focus as my past coding assignments. One of the most important competencies of a principal engineer is to become a force multiplier.

Paul Bronks "How to finish an argument when you're wrong."

---

Locked Doors

Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police At least this dystopia comes with free one-day delivery, and takes only 5 minutes to install:

Not only does this portal allow police to view Ring customers on a handy, Google-powered map, but it also makes requesting customer surveillance video a matter of several clicks.
...
“Many people are not going to feel like they have a choice when law enforcement asks for access to their footage,” said Cagle.

Ian Coldwater 😮

They call it C because it's short for CVE

---

Electric Dreams

The Tinder algorithm, explained Can algorithms help you find love, or at least optimize for engagement?

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators Definitely not "too dangerous to release", some sites specialize in producing daily content like that. But ignore the clickbait, and it's really interesting how far AI has evolved:

When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.

Daniel Gross "During WW2 the RAF flew missions solely for the purpose of generating training data:"

---

None of the Above

Gone In A Generation Washington Post interactive exploring how climate change is disrupting lives across the US.

Showerthoughts 🤔

House cats are basically lions that figured out how to get more calories out of a single human #Showerthoughts

Brett Wilson "This is what a Silicon Valley Thai restaurant looks like."

Benedict Evans So true:

Why is the default view in Google Docs an unsorted, read-only list of the 3,000 documents that anyone has ever shared with the team in the last 5 years?

Molly "Anyone need a job? A position just opened up"

MZS Rule to live by:

Roger Ebert was asked why he gave LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake 2.5 stars, mainly due to a graphic rape scene, but gave 3.5 to the original, which had a similar scene. "I wrote that original review 37 years ago. I am not the same person. I am uninterested in being 'consistent'."

James Melville "Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed by the incredible product design magic show."

The Bad Science of Exercise Recovery TL;DR

They’ll run trials with a small number of participants or force extreme circumstances on their subjects. She refers to the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, where researchers found that “if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much.”

flex tillerson "'how to survive an ostrich encounter' is the only wikihow article I care about"

Writer Louis Leung Please!

Million dollar idea: A smoke detector that shuts off when you yell "I'm just cooking!"

Kitten Rescuers Netflix and purr.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think How misinformation propagates and what we can do about it.

Pileup on the I-70 near Kansas today Stay safe out there!

Tess Rinearson This is absolutely how we "rough out" winter in San Francisco:

TERRIBLE WINTER WEATHER
seattle: 2 feet of snow
chicago: -20 degrees fahrenheit
san francisco: really bad clouds

1969 & 70 - Bell Labs check this photo album

---

Design Objective

Can't Unsee Fantastic game. If you're a developer working to bring designs to life, and struggling with the finer graphics, this is a good way to train your design eye.

Freddie Iboy Thread:

I've felt absurdly lucky the past two years working at Tinder and now it's my last week here. I'm heading over to Amsterdam soon to go work at @Framer ❤️

A couple of lessons that I learned from the Tinder interface as parting advice. None of this is gospel.

---

Tools of the Trade

Rodrigo Pombo Brilliant!

I was playing around with some text animations and thought I could use them to show a file's history on @github

Dan Abramov React components are … components. They're not functions, even though they can be written as such. They're not objects, even though they can be written as classes. They're something we're not as good at describing. This is thread makes the point and helps put React hooks in context:

If you look at it this way, there’s nothing magic about useState or useEffect. Of course they “know” which component they belong to! React knows it just like your language knows which variables belong to which function, and when to destroy them.

WebSockets the UNIX way "It's like CGI, twenty years later, for WebSockets"

$ cat my-program
#!/bin/bash

# Count from 1 to 10 with a sleep
for ((COUNT = 1; COUNT <= 10; COUNT++)); do
  echo $COUNT
  sleep 0.5
done
Start websocketd and tell it about your program:

$ websocketd --port=8080 my-program

Aron Griffis 🔥

Working on a new Bash book. So far:
Intro: You chose the wrong tool.
Ch 1: Have you considered Python?
Ch 2: Try calling Python from your Bash script.
Ch 3: If you're still here, try adding quotes.

Jochem I'm going to name my channel no-agenda-meeting:

TIL some @SlackHQ channel names that'll result in a nice message once someone leaves the channel... like a funny goodbye:

• my-phone-in-a-cab
• the-love-of-my-life
• running
• alive
• outer-join

After /leave the remaining channel members will see:
> John Doe left #running"

---

Web-End

Gary "Wrong. The ONLY way you should organise CSS properties is like a Christmas Tree."

---

Lingua Scripta

qntm "Try this, kids at home! (V8 only AFAIK so Chrome or Node.js)"

Lynn Hehe:

🌶️ HOT JAVASCRIPT TIP: 🌶️

to increment some counter on the page,

node.innerText += 1

doesn't work (0 → 01 → 011 → ⋯), but

node.innerText -= -1

works fine (0 → 1 → 2 → ⋯)

---

Lines of Code

Eric Lawrence I feel seen:

I find myself running code I wrote with the irrational hope that it has developed some improvements since I wrote it.

The “Bug-O” Notation “The Bug-O describes how much an API slows you down as your codebase grows.”

---

Locked Doors

Lesley Carhart 100%. Splitting hairs doesn't make people any safer.

Nest makes great points, but I dislike the trend of saying devices being maliciously accessed or abused weren’t ‘hacked’. It’s a weird kind of gatekeeping that kind of discounts the security hygiene and education issues most consumers are still struggling with. Outcome = same.

Kashmir Hill Unintended consequences:

Oh wow, Apple is getting rid of the mostly useless "Do Not Track" signal in Safari because it was a way to track people: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari_release_notes/safari_12_1_release_notes

Phishing email training The perfect excuse:

So every now and then my company sends out phishing emails to us to “test” us. The emails are obvious phishing emails but if you click one you have to sit through a boring hour long training that’s the equivalent of detention. The malicious compliance is I now open no emails from management with headlines that maybe a mundane task or generally something I don’t want to do. Whenever I’m asked why I didn’t respond I simply say I was being careful about phishing and I get praised for it rather than yelled at for dodging work.

Malware Unicorn The USB fairy is real!

In infosec folklore, if you leave a USB under your pillow at night, there will be malware on it the next morning.

---

Techtopia

Five Things That Scare Me About AI Not AI per se, but the blind use of algorithms we don't understand (could be anything with if/else branches):

Returning to the account of the popular 5th grade teacher who was fired by an algorithm, she suspects that the underlying reason she was fired was that her incoming students had unusually high test scores the previous year (making it seem like their scores had dropped to a more average level after her teaching), and that their former teachers may have cheated.

Daniel Holland "The perils of modern living."

---

Startup Life

David Frankel 🔥🔥🔥

"We learned a lot"

This phrase is almost always a euphemism for “We've spent nearly all of our capital, don’t have traditional traction, but need more money.”

Those four words that will chill a VC’s soul - here's what you should say if you're running out of cash/time. 1/9

---

None of the Above

Alex Rampell "This is the most brilliant iPhone app grouping I’ve ever seen..."

White gold: the unstoppable rise of alternative milks How wellness upstarts spoiled milk’s healthy reputation – and built a billion-dollar industry from juicing oats and nuts.

Michael Hainsworth "I was Today years old when I discovered this #lifehack"

Oregon Zoo "The best part of snow days in Portland ❄️"

Jeff Bezos Brings the Receipts In which Jeff Bezos stands up to blackmail, comes across as everyone's favorite underdog, there are nude pictures, and even the Saudi government is involved:

That strategic positioning hasn’t gone without notice. As Kristin Kanthak, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, put it on Twitter: “You know we are at a disgusting moment in our nation’s history when the billionaire sending out dick pics is the HERO of the story.”

ginaa wilsonn "So a month ago I dropped a ring & a clip down my bathroom sink and I’ve been scared to try to save it because I was scared it would just drop farther down but look at my cat being the fucking GOAT"

pico-8 Virtual console app for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. Looks like tons of fun!

Mike Rosenberg Journalism has a future, if you care about your subscribers:

The Seattle Times changed course to focus on stories that drive subscriptions - not clicks. Now we're at 41,000 digital subscriptions, up 21% in a year. And no layoffs.
Love working in a community that values independent journalism enough to pay for it

julius tarng Of course this blows up on Twitter:

So everyone was joking about Konmari-ing their Twitter, but I went ahead and made a tool for that:

Say hello to ✨ Tokimeki Unfollow ✨!

Hang out with virtual me and go thru your follows one by one. Do their tweets spark joy? If not, hit [Unfollow]!