Published
Weekend Reading — It's now safe to turn off your computer
@teenybiscuit (Also and also and also)
Design Objective
The Myths of UX Design/ Product Design/Whatever They Call It This Week Explains away the confusion between UX design, product design, ID/AI/UI, if you're into that sort of things.
When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages There is no such thing as "the average ___":
Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips.
...
If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.
The new CSS property that’s about to become overused on the mobile web TL;DR -webkit-backdrop-filter:blur( );
Tools of the Trade
pyupio/statuspage A status page generator that you can host free on Github. Uses Github issues to display incidents and labels for severity.
How I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier Talk about misleading pricing: with Glacier you don't pay for how much you downloaded, but how much you could download in a given month:
Glacier data retrievals are priced based on the peak hourly retrieval capacity used within a calendar month. You implicitly and retroactively “provision” this capacity for the entire month by submitting retrieval requests.
rhysd/NyaoVim Modernize Vim by running it inside a browser, Electron in this case.
American Statistical Association releases statement on statistical significance and p-values TL;DR "The p-value was never intended to be a substitute for scientific reasoning." Here are the six principles to avoid misusing the p-value:
- P-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified statistical model.
- P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance alone.
- Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.
- Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency.
- A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.
- By itself, a p-value does not provide a good measure of evidence regarding a model or hypothesis.
Track Changes Podcast #3: Make HTML Great Again Which candidate has the best web platform?
c-jump ® Ski & Snowboard Race "Discover fundamentals of computer programming by playing a board game!"
Lingua Scripta
I wonder if time spent typing
constmakes up for all those "amazingly concise" arrow functions we now have. There's no way out...
Lines of Code
5. Federally Funded Custom Code as Open Source Software Fantastic news from the US government:
Although the minimum requirement for OSS release is 20 percent of custom code, covered agencies are strongly encouraged to publish as much custom-developed code as possible to further the Federal Government’s commitment to transparency, participation, and collaboration
Perhaps instead of "we must get better at estimates" we should try "let's become less dependent on fortune telling."
@sonicadvance1 "Typical code debugging."
Locked Doors
Watch a Gun Safe Get Cracked Open with Just a Paper Clip This safe has biometric fingerprint sensor ... and a backdoor.
Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism That was totally unexpected, and only everyone saw it coming.
Techtopia
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5 In the end, AI isn't about machines that think like humans, it's about machines that think their own way, and that's both interesting and scary:
These abstractions all made a lot of sense, and feels natural, and certainly helps game play -- no player can consider the dozens (sometimes over 100) stones all as individuals and come up with a coherent game play. Chunking is such a natural and useful way of thinking.
But watching AlphaGo, I am not sure that's how it thinks of the game. Maybe it simply doesn't do chunking at all, or maybe it does chunking its own way, not influenced by the physical world as we humans invariably do. AlphaGo's moves are sometimes strange, and couldn't be explained by the way humans chunk the game.
https://twitter.com/jgden/status/706827845134323712 "4 stages of email"
- Hi!
- Sorry for the slow reply.
- Sorry for the really slow reply!
- Move into a folder named "too awkward to respond".
Teenagers react to Windows 95, cannot imagine what their elders endured My favorite part, the reactions to "it's now safe to turn off your computer." Software has come such a long way.
Peopleware
Career Advice No One Tells You That's quite true:
The name of the game is noticing the ‘unspoken rules’ around you, and giving people what they want before they have to ask you. That’s how you win.
None of the Above
I FOUND IT. I FOUND THE INTERNET SWITCH.
The Relativity of Wrong Not everything is absolutely wrong or absolutely right, there are degrees of being wrong.
Never Mind Trump. The Internet Wants to Watch What’s Behind Him Is this the best correction, or what?
Correction at 9:58 a.m. on 3/09/2016: Due to an oversight involving a haphazardly-installed Chrome extension during the editing process, the name Donald Trump was erroneously replaced with the phrase “Someone With Tiny Hands” when this story originally published.
The Bike Wars Are Over, and the Bikes Won What happens when city officials are allowed to do what's right by their residents, and ignore the vocal NIMBY:
None of the bike-lane opponents’ predictions has come to pass. City streets have never been safer, more economically thriving, or offered more transportation options than they do today. My successor as Transportation commissioner is greatly expanding the network of bike paths and doubling the size of the city’s bike-share system.
@Edubya Can't argue with this:
The most exciting three words in the English language are "Out for Delivery."
MentalHealthError: an exception occurred "Avoid falling in love with hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings."
When the sky crashed in Odessa
