Labnotes - Page 3

Weekend Reading — #WFH

Published on 2 months ago

Design Objective

How a Facebook Designer Thinks "Julie Zhuo describes how the development of new features starts with three questions: What people problem are we solving? How do we know it’s a real problem? And how will we know if we’ve solved it?" I recommend taking 35 minutes out of your day to watch this talk.

Start With A Goal. The Backlog Will Follow Goal driven development:

Out of that goal, a small feature list almost wrote itself. This is how planning should work; not with backlogs of feature requests, but with customers and developers closely collaborating to achieve goals.

It's similar in many ways to how TDD should work - in fact, arguably, it is TDD (except we start with business tests).

The magic of microcopy Delight is in the details.

The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and Product Experiments TL;DR Ask for specific stories about the past to generate better insights.

Arne Brasseur

Technical writing pro-tip. You can be accessible to people of varying skill level without dumbing things down or being condescending.

The little-known iPhone feature that lets blind people see with their fingers A quick look at how blind people use VoiceOver to navigate the iPhone UI.

As a Designer I want better Release Notes Tips to help you write better release notes.

Best Practices for Search Results If you're working on a search UI, here are 10 things to help you improve the search results UX. And please "Don’t erase users’ query after they hit Search button."

\m/ (-_-) \m/ "Remember kids, never do data visualization while under the influence."

Tools of the Trade

Driving user growth with performance improvements If you like optimizing the performance of web apps, you'll love this story:

The result of rebuilding our pages for performance led to a 40 percent decrease in Pinner wait time, a 15 percent increase in SEO traffic and a 15 percent increase in conversion rate to signup. Because the traffic and conversion rate increases are multiplicative, this was a huge win for us in terms of web and app signups. In 2016, this was our team’s biggest user acquisition win.

Round error issue -> produce money for free TL;DR Do not use floating point for money.

sindresorhus/fkill-cli Command line tool to find and kill a process with auto complete.

Linting HTML using CSS This CSS stylesheet will help you spot missing attributes, broken links, unaccessible images, and more.

Thou shalt not depend on me Analysis of outdated JavaScript libraries on the web. When was the last time you updated your client-side JavaScript dependencies?

The key lesson from our serverless migration How to go all in with AWS features, storage, security, etc. But also, vendor lock in.

AudioSet A large-scale dataset of manually annotated audio events to feed your machine learning models.

Next-generation IP spec edges closer to reality Credit to wayback_exe for picking up this forward looking article from December 1996.

Unexpected learnings from the CIA leak The banality of developing software at the intelligence agency: complaining about too much process, code reviews, copying code from StackOverflow, and JIRA. Also, lots of memes.

Benjamin Ellis Moore's law:

Google Chrome on my mac is currently consuming more memory than existed on the entire planet when I wrote my first programme…

Lingua Scripta

The Real Story Behind ECMAScript 4 The story of ECMAScript 4, what exactly happened behind the scenes, and why it never materialized.

Lines of Code

Vesa Karvonen "Never be impressed by complexity."

Manisha Agarwal Related:

"It's good to write clever code"

Writing clever code is a form of 'expensive signalling', like wearing expensive but easily damaged clothes

Programming Wisdom

“Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.” - Louis Srygley

The Practical Dev Too soon:

Architectural

Andy Hunt

"Surprise is one of the most expensive things you can put into a software architecture” — Adam Tornhill Author of Your Code as a Crime Scene

Serverless Architecture: Five Design Patterns The five predominant usage patterns of AWS Lambda serverless service, according to AWS Solution Architect Cassandra Bonner.

Redundancy does not imply fault tolerance An analysis of distributed storage reactions to single errors and corruptions. Watch as a Redis cluster loses all your data due to a trivial and expected disk failure.

Bud Caddell "Borrowing from @snowded to help teams align their tasks w/ the right approach."

Locked Doors

Do Not Return Calls or Texts From These Area Codes--It May Be a Scam If you don't recognize the phone number, a) do not pick up the phone!, and b) do not call back, c) if they left a voice message, Google the number before calling.

WikiLeaks CIA cache: Fool me once So a lot of people suddenly became aware the CIA is a spy agency. And no, the CIA did not wide-scale hack Signal or WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption still works. What they can do, if they gain physical access to your iOS/Android device, is install a listening bug and monitor everything you do.

The Life and Times of Zero-Day Vulnerabilities and Their Exploits Interesting tidbits from this report:

Zero-day exploits and their underlying vulnerabilities have a rather long average life expectancy (6.9 years). Only 25 percent of vulnerabilities do not survive to 1.51 years, and only 25 percent live more than 9.5 years.

For a given stockpile of zero-day vulnerabilities, after a year, approximately 5.7 percent have been publicly discovered and disclosed by another entity.

Once an exploitable vulnerability has been found, time to develop a fully functioning exploit is relatively fast, with a median time of 22 days.

oɥɔsɐp 🎣

Look, I'm not saying ATMs are trivial to hack, just that lots of them seem to run Doom okay. Infer what you will 😏

Peopleware

We are all each other’s emergency contact. We just don’t know it yet. "It was the highlight of my week. Because I was able to connect with someone who needed it, at the moment that they needed it."

What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer "In a sense, these GitHub notifications are a constant stream of negativity about your projects. Nobody opens an issue or a pull request when they’re satisfied with your work."

Running a business with boobs: the things I never say Dealing with everyday sexism in tech:

I’ve seen dudes being hailed as ambitious simply for quitting their cushy day jobs, yet it’s surprisingly common for women to be questioned on whether they are ambitious “enough.” Stop questioning the ambition level of women in business.

Martin R. Schneider Related. Read the entire thread:

We did an experiment: For two weeks we switched names. I signed all client emails as Nicole. She signed as me. Folks. It fucking sucked.

How the Design of Hotel Rooms Makes Housekeepers Invisible "Making housekeepers’ work invisible has been an objective of the hotel industry since its beginnings in the 19th century."

Techtopia

The 9-1-1 Paradox This article hides a broader lesson about systems engineering:

Ironically enough, the aging systems first responders use to communicate with one another may offer a layer of protection in such a scenario. “Those radio systems typically use old-school technology,” Forgety said. Which makes them safe from computer-age attacks. Then again, he added, “nothing is impossible.”

D Duh

Car salesman: and it has a back up camera
Me: Cool, where's the main camera?
Cs: Sorry no this is for backing up
Me: Ah, to the cloud
Cs: no

The Onion "Jumbled Nest Of Cords Makes Move To Third New Apartment"

None of the Above

These Folding Landscape Photos Will Mess With Your Brain Trippy.

Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump "Back in 1984, the main premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous."

Lindsey B "Hippos are way more dangerous than many people think watch as this one attacks a human :3"

Meet Silicon Valley's Secretive Alt-Right Followers Mother Jones digs into the racist tech underworld.

Thirteen thousand, four hundred, fifty-five minutes of talking to get one job One developers's job hunt, quantified and beautifully visualized.

Napflix "Siesta Video Platform." Boring videos to help you fall asleep.

Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War Fantastic write up by the New Yorker.

10 Apps That Will Help You Become A Better Investor This Year Round up of newish, user friendly, and budget friendly tools for everyday investors.

Ncore Retro Mechanical Keyboard

Weekend Reading — Thread

Published on 3 months ago

Jason Diller "Thread"

Design Objective

This site is “taking the edge off rant mode” by making readers pass a quiz before commenting Smart: "The goal is to ensure that the commenters have actually read the story before they discuss it."

Manisha Agarwal

Software is like a pinball machine. Nobody reads the printed instructions clearly. They just drop their quarters and start pushing buttons

Kevin

If you put links at the bottom of a page, but you also have infinite scroll on the page, you are a terrible person.

Tools of the Trade

https://icon.now.sh SVG icon placeholder microservice.

C Francis Nwafili

And remember, simulating a slower low end machine is only two clicks away in Chrome. You'll catch perf issues like nobodies business

Looking For The Logic Behind Logarithms O(N) vs O(log N) explained.

Cross-Site Request Forgery is dead! Not yet, browser support is still lacking, but SameSite is a welcome step in the right direction.

Prophet: forecasting at scale From Facebook, an open source forecasting tool with automated fitting procedures, available in Python and R.

Benjamin De Cock TIL

Friendly reminder: you don't need weird shenanigans to convert HTML strings to DOM nodes, there's a native API for that!

xkcd: An R Package for Plotting XKCD Graphs Cool.

Google Unveils Neural Network with “Superhuman” Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image Oh, wow.

Thomas Fuchs

Fuchs’ law: whenever programming gets so easy devs have free time to learn how to design, they invent tech that makes programming harder

maxwell ogden

What do we want?
Machine readable metadata!
When do we want it?
ERROR Line 1: Unexpected token /`

Lingua Scripta

babel-preset-env: a preset that configures Babel for you Easier way to configure Babel.

CS department updates introductory courses Java is out, JavaScript is in:

"It was clear that many universities were going in that direction. It’s 2017 now, and Java is showing its age.”

Reginald deBRAIDEWAD Yes, indeed.

async/await is a wonderful solution to a problem JavaScript gratuitously created by having asynchronous-only stuff with terrible semantics.

english-words-that-are-not-yet-npm-packages A CLI for finding available package names in the npm registry.

Lines of Code

Tomás

Why immutable-first?

Because of its predictability.

Predictable systems generates less FUD and typically are less prone to fail.

Clint Smith Writing software is no different:

90% of being a writer is writing something you think is incredible, reading it the next day, realizing it's terrible, then eating many Oreos

Casey West

Abstractions help you solve larger problems with less work but shield you from efficiency and performance issues. Make that trade on purpose

Programming Wisdom

"What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." - Fred Brooks

Tess Rinearson "✨ software engineering ✨"

Bob Ross, Game Dev

Refactoring code is a lot like cleaning your room: easiest if you do it on a regular basis.

Brian "When your code is a mess but everything works out in the end"

Architectural

Matt Haughey

When Hacker News commenters say "I could build that app in a weekend!" I think of this chart of how Slack decides to send a notification.

David Brady Bingo:

The older I get, the less I care about making tech decisions right and the more I care about retaining the ability to change a wrong one.

The Practical Dev

"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications." - David Parnas

The Automationist

A software system is a shared narrative about a problem and the community of people who come together to solve that problem.

Changelog "...And that, friends, is why we decided to paint this shed teal!"

Devoops

Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region TL;DR someone made a typo, took down entire region and all web apps that depend on it. Internet is in rage because blameless postmortems don't extend to service providers.

Amazon Web Service I can't even:

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

Elliott Kernber

If you can't handle me in development, you don't deserve me in production

Peopleware

jason "If you want to know what its like to have kids and work from home..."

Locked Doors

How to Keep Messages Secure "Security experts give their best advice for keeping messages secure, whether you’re at a protest or just want to keep out snooping siblings." (That this was published in Teen Vogue should come as no surprise)

Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug This is bad. Here's a list of websites affected by this bug. Change your password now.

New Report: Businesses Suffer Serious, Measurable Damage From Data Breaches It's important that there be consequences to data breaches:

For organizations that suffered a breach, the effect was substantial: 22% of breached organizations lost customers -- 40% of them lost more than a fifth of their customer base. 29% lost revenue, with 38% of that group losing more than a fifth of their revenue. 23% of breached organizations lost business opportunities, with 42% of them losing more than a fifth of such opportunities.

Shattered SHA-1 is broken. "It is now practically possible to craft two colliding PDF files and obtain a SHA-1 digital signature on the first PDF file which can also be abused as a valid signature on the second PDF file."

Dot Ransomware: Yet another Commission-based Ransomware-as-a-Service
SHA256, RSA-4096, this ransomware may have better crypto than your online bank.

None of the Above

Alby "This is the best demonstration of shutter sync I've seen" (Also, doggo synchronized swimming

It May Be Your Microbiome Will Become Your Personal Pharmacy Using skin bacteria to treat ezcmea.

Algorithm Tips A growing list of potentially newsworthy algorithms used by the U.S. government.

Ans Hekkenberg

802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks Why your 1.3 Gbps WiFi router barely gets above than 100Mbps.

Javier Santana "Learning a modern language vs learning an ancient language."

Max Stoiber

They're called Medium posts because they're neither rare nor well done

kent กิ sheely "There's so much going on with this mouse, I don't even know where to start"

Pineapple Pizza Tests Limits of Presidential Power in Iceland I wish that was the most pressing political issue in the US right now.

Amanda Terkel "wtf happened to my Lyft?"

Mitch Kapor

Honest to God, I just got an email asking me for technical support with a Lotus 1-2-3 issue.

Comic Feeling "I've seen a lot on this life, but never a smoking Corolla using a selfie stick"

Weekend Reading — Tornado full of sharks

Published on 3 months ago

You Had One Job "Don't be afraid."

FYI I'm traveling and AFK, so no Weekend Reading next week. I'll do my best to catch up when I come back. And also, if you know anyone who would enjoy Weekend Reading, send them here to sign up.

Design Objective

Cognitive Overhead is Your Product’s Overlord — Topple it With These Tips The dimension that matters most is cognitive simplicity — how easy your product is to understand:

Users shouldn’t sit on the sidelines, nor do heavy-lifting in apps. Go in between. Make them roll up their sleeves.

Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus Putting navigation top and center.

Inclusive Design at Microsoft Once again, a helpful chart showing the benefits of accessible design:

Maintaining Accessibility in a Responsive World Dealing with adaptable CSS layouts and assistive technology.

A Dao of Product Design Let's talk about the social and societal impact of our products being used by millions of people every day.

Tools of the Trade

Writing Less Damned Code "Unprogressive Non-Enhancement" 40 minute talk, entertaining and insightful, that will teach you how to accomplish more by doing less front-end development.

FloydHub Is PaaS for training and deploying deep learning applications. With version control, Jupyter notebooks, CLI and web dashboard, and a lot of other goodness.

littlstar/s3-lambda JavaScript library for functional processing (map, reduce, filter, et al) of S3 objects.

ImageOptim API makes pages load faster ImageOptim now available as a service.

“I didn’t know Sketch could do that!” I didn't either. Lots of cool tricks, like drag & drop to replace image, drop to Slack, snap to text path, card grids, and more.

Holy Sh!t~ Designing with Craft by InVision LABS in Sketch When you need your sketches filled with sample data.

Team Libraries in Figma Sketch has the ecosystem, but Figma may get ahead on features.

How to Spot Openwashing What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really “open”?

Ergonomica A Python-based alternative to Bash, with all the goodness of a proper language:

$ ls -> (filter) x[0] == "P"
Pictures  
Public

Jake Archibald Why am I crying?

To change the mouse pointer with CSS, use "cursor"

To set it to a pointer, use "default"

To set it to a hand, use "pointer"

Why u crying?

Éimear "Fun fact: the Irish language has had a word for computer for about 1200 years."

Lingua Scripta

Mathias Bynens Fun fact:

As a result, any single-line URL is valid JavaScript. E.g.

https://mths.be/

https is the label // starts a comment

JosephPecoraro

In Safari's Web Inspector you can use simple await expressions in the Console! Fun way to get a value out of a Promise or use fetch.

Lines of Code

Ship Small Diffs Hang this on your office wall: "Ship small diffs, because the last thing you changed is probably setting those fires."

The First Program I Ever Wrote Debugging in the age of punch cards and green bar paper.

A demon, uninvited That same thing happened to me, 3 decades into my career:

Are you a new developer?

Are things hard?

I've been doing this for ~7 years and just lost 30 minutes of my life to a single rogue space.

Helen

youtube channel where you get drunk and try to read code you wrote five years ago

Francisco Alonso "fixing bugs"

Architectural

Gwen (Chen) Shapira

OH: you need two copies of the Kafka book - for availability. Or three, for quorum.

MicroCapClub Same with software developers:

Many in finance like to sound smart by making things complex. These people usually work for other people. Successful people simplify things.

Peopleware

Better wisdom from crowds You can get more accurate results from crowd sourcing answers, when you factor in the Dunning–Kruger effect:

Philadelphia is not the capital of Pennsylvania; the correct answer is Harrisburg. But most people believe Philadelphia is the capital because it is a “large, historically significant city.” Moreover, the people who mistakenly thought Philadelphia is the state capital largely thought other people would answer the same way. So they predicted that a very high percentage of people would answer “yes.”

Meanwhile, a certain number of respondents knew that Harrisburg is the correct answer. However, a large portion of those people also anticipated that many other people would incorrectly think the capital is Philadelphia. So the people who themselves answered “no” still expected a very high percentage of “yes” answers.

Sarah Mei Read the entire thread:

Most people see management as an authority role, but it's not. It's a service role.

Vala Afshar How to be a better mentor in four easy steps:

A good mentor will:

push you

guide you with questions

expect continuous improvement

teach you how to think, not what to think

Locked Doors

Ed Sheeran Explains How Taylor Swift Stops Her Songs from Leaking Better opsec than your IT department:

“I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it and they flew to San Francisco, and played the song I’ve done with her,” he said. “And they asked if I like it and I was like ‘Yeah’ and then they took it back. That’s how I hear it.”

University attacked by its own vending machines, smart light bulbs & 5,000 IoT devices And it gets even weirder:

The “incident commander” noticed “the name servers, responsible for Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups, were producing high-volume alerts and showed an abnormal number of sub-domains related to seafood.

FCoTR User Group "OH MY GOD, PAY IT NOW"

Techtopia

CNN "'Plan Bee' is a personal robotic bee designed to mimic how bees pollinate flowers and crop." Someone did not watch Black Mirror S03E06.

Rob Lach. "Hey @Google, exactly what kind of AI am I helping you guys train with this?"

None of the Above

Paul Savage "My new Hobby is photoshopping the eyes from Pixar's Cars onto the rigs from Mad Max: Fury Road"

Sloane Crosley "There is honestly no point in doing anything but this guy's job."

Bayesian Inference Simple interactive visualization to help explain/explore Bayesian inference.

Vala Afshar "Somebody thought it was a good idea to teach robots how to be exceptionally good with swords."

rosa would have won "Increasingly impressed with anyone who manages to write near-future SF under these conditions"

Jacob Schwartz git commit -m "fixed issue with fan"

Weekend Reading — Crashing buildings

Published on 3 months ago

Edwin van Andel "That moment when your building crashes..."

Design Objective

Case study: How complexity creeps in Adding enterprise features, realizing they burden product and support, without a debt on sales, and phasing them out.

Design Checklist Google's design checklist for building conversational UIs.

What we can learn from Alexa’s mistakes Lessons from using Alexa, and how to build a better conversational UIs.

Apple’s Icons Have That Shape for a Very Good Reason So new thing I learned today, tangency vs curvature continuity:

A ‘secret’ of Apple’s physical products is that they avoid tangency (where a radius meets a line at a single point) and craft their surfaces with what’s called curvature continuity.

Kerntype How good are you at kerning? I got 92/100.

Graphic Mint "Pencils have a great UI with undo and a built in progress bar"

Tools of the Trade

Milanote "The notes app for creative work" promises to help you collect ideas and research notes, for individuals and teams.

Mnemonist Curated collection of data structures implemented in JavaScript, including bloom filter, heap, multiset, suffix array, etc.

Using functional programming in Python like a boss: Generators, Iterators and Decorators Functional programming in Python. I love these literal programming notebooks, that mix markdown explanations with executable code samples. You can also view the notebook as slides.

Unlearning descriptive statistics On the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics, and when to use them:

Descriptive statistics is when you ask five people and they all tell you coffee makes them sleepy. Inferential statistics is the realization that a survey of five people isn't much information to go on and that actually, no, coffee is not a great sleeping aid. Means and medians are descriptive, hypotheses and margins of error are inferential.

How to check progress of running cp? "On recent versions of Mac OS X you can just hit CTRL+T to see progress."

Introducing Docker Secrets Management Docker adds secret (credentials, tokens, passwords, etc) distribution to the platform.

Fluid Paint Gouache painting in the browser. Impressive demonstration of WebGL that doesn't eat up 100% CPU.

Lingua Scripta

6 Great Uses of the Spread Operator The spread operator (new in ES6) is fantastic and you really should be using it for all it's worth. For example, to combine arrays:

var arr1 = ['two', 'three']; var arr2 = ['one', ...arr1, 'four', 'five'];

Lines of Code

Top ten pull request review mistakes A checklist:

Use this article as a starting checklist, or an inspiration for one. Over time, you and your team can build up a custom list of reminders for important but easily-forgotten considerations. Eventually, your pull request process will become a powerful feedback loop for improving your team’s culture and code quality.

A better way to interview software engineers Interesting idea, for hiring experienced developers:

To get there, we start with a set of standard questions about past code review experience for some background, then dive into a GitHub pull request of around 200 lines of intentionally buggy and messy code and ask the candidate for feedback on how to improve it. We finish with a few last questions about the code as a whole and time for them to ask about our development process.

Peopleware

Dear JavaScript Maintainers, "First of all, thank you, this isn’t said enough." And needs to be said more. So, thank you all, for all your work and effort, that makes our lives easier.

Lindsay Holmwood “People with targets […] will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.” – Deming

Techtopia

Paul Kilduff-Taylor

COMPUTER: I can render the shimmering fantasy worlds of your dreams 60 times a second

ME: search some emails for a string

COMPUTER: oh no

Genève "Just a lazy Saturday morning... updating my breast pump's firmware"

Locked Doors

Beware: Most Mobile VPNs Aren’t as Safe as They Seem A look at 283 mobile VPN apps in the Google Play store revels most of them (> 80%) don't offer much protection, and many spy on you. Be careful what you install, and consider a reputable paid VPN app/service (most run $5/month).

An Unusually Well-Disguised Malware Scam on Upwork: How I Almost Got Infected With a Keylogger This scam can target anyone on any service, not just Upwork gigs, so watch out for these telltale signs.

Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—And Casinos Have No Fix Cheating is easy when your opponent is a pseudo random number generator.

Finding Ticketbleed A TLS vulnerability similar to Heartbleed. This is the story of how Cloudflare reverse engineered the vulnerability in response to a customer issue.

None of the Above

daniel_barker. "Well played, Wikipedia. Well played."

Fix Wi-Fi Problems in macOS Sierra Got hit by the WiFi bugs, so trying out these fixes.

#86 Man of the People Reply All tells the story of an ill-informed con artist, who manipulates the media, and almost takes over a state (podcast).

Cami When you're late to work and traffic gets in the way …

The Massacre That Wasn’t, and a Turning Point for ‘Fake News’ I leave you with these two sobering words: "crowdsourcing reality".

Michael Hendrix. "USS Gerald Ford launching trucks to test its jet catapult is the most American thing ever"

How to write a successful conference proposal Whether this is your first talk proposal, or you've done it before, check against this list. And don't forget, if you have more than one idea, you can submit multiple proposals.

Manisha Agarwal

Protip: Try not to forget your passwords. The security questions make you relive your entire childhood and regret your life choices

Here are 250 Ivy League courses you can take online right now for free Computer science, social science, humanities, business management, and much more.

Ross McCulloch "What a great ending😀"

Weekend Reading — Walks like a duck …

Published on 4 months ago

Santero "Huh. Man with dogs in his pockets walking his duck, which has shoes on"

Design Objective

Atomic Design by Brad Frost Brad Frost explains atomic design, and how to apply its principles to your very own design system.

Designing for iPad Power Users If you are working on an iPad app, then please, yes and thank you.

The Problem with Liberal White Designers Jennifer Daniel:

Nothing has forced myself to reckon with what is important to me more than talking to people who disagree with me. I would challenge designers to talk to people who challenge them. People who don’t look like you, people who don’t think like you, people who make you angry and confused. It’s fucking hard but you can do it, or at least try.

Linea - Sketch Simply Iconfactory's new sketch app for the iPad.

Tools of the Trade

We built a PWA from scratch - This is what we learned Caching gotchas and strategies, offline workers, add to home suggestions, and more.

Adventures with NPM or: How I Learned to Stop Shrinkwrapping and Love Yarn Mirrors my frustrations with npm. Be advised, Yarn is not bug free, not even close, but so far has proven more dependable than npm.

Magnet Cool little OS X app to help with window placements.

This browser tweak saved 60% of requests to Facebook On cache-control: immutable (shipping in Firefox) and the recent caching improvements in Chrome.

The future of the page cache Apropos, "Caching is the art of predicting the future, he said."

How to Prevent Gmail From Displaying An Image Download Button In Your Email If your email has an image above a certain size, Gmail will display an image download icon. Here are three techniques to disable this icon.

Pixel Recursive Super Resolution One step closer to CSI infinite zoom:

… by incorporating the prior knowledge of the faces and their typical variations, an artist is able to paint believable details. In this paper, we show how a fully probabilistic model that is trained end-to- end can play the role of such an artist by synthesizing 32×32 face images depicted in the middle column of Figure 1.

Lee Byron

Finally an answer to the age old riddle. Which came first?

node -p "[ '🥚', '🐔' ].sort()[0]"

🐔

Lingua Scripta

Martin Kleppe: 1024+ Seconds of JS Wizardry -- JSConf EU 2013 The art of writing exceptionally compressed JavaScript.

Int64 & More Slides from Brendan Eich talk to TC39, about Int64, Uint64, and beyond.

Lines of Code

Jedd Ahyoung

"What is technical debt?" Technical debt is hard to explain, but a picture is worth a thousand words

Sarah Mei In response:

It's not debt. It's clutter that eventually leaves you so little room to maneuver that you lose the game.

It's the same with software design. To avoid clutter, come in with a plan, but alter it to fit each new feature request you get.

Land Mines Preventing database landmines in your project: avoid shortcuts, be obvious, consider migrations.

Gregory Brown

Share domain knowledge 100x more often than you do tips on how to turn three lines of code into one line of code.

Alex Levenson

Devoops

GitLab.com Database Incident Or, why you must practice database recovery every so often:

So in other words, out of five backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place. We ended up restoring a six-hour-old backup.

Peopleware

Managering in Terrible Times First, read Productivity in Terrible Times. Then follow these guidelines for supporting your team:

As managers, one of our responsibilities is to provide the safest workplace we can to those around us. This includes members of marginalized groups who are dealing with a rapidly worsening environment, folks who may be anticipating legal challenges, and people with families who are uncertain about their ability to keep their jobs and stay safe in their communities. How do we support our reports in this rapidly changing political environment?

Locked Doors

Coded A video series about the new generation of hackers that are rising up and fighting corporate/government surveillance.

Hotel ransomed by hackers as guests locked out of rooms Literally, locked doors. (Thanks andrew)

You're a victim with one word in 'Can you hear me?' phone scam TL;DR if you don't recognize the caller, send them to voice mail:

A growing "Can you hear me?" phone scam can make you a victim if you utter just one word: "Yes."

Certified Malice Now that HTTPS adoption has reached the tipping point, we have to reckon with the ease of acquiring intentionally deceptive certificates:

In my mind, this is a critical failing—while much of the objection is well-meaning (“We want a level playing field for everyone”), it’s extremely frustrating that we punish users in support of abstract ideals.