Published
Weekend Reading — Lobster Truck Heist
This week we solve a murder mystery, pick a card game, give Santa his cookies, chase a lobster truck, and learn to wrap presents like a pro!
Risachantag 2019.
Design Objective
Tuhin Kumar 👇 That's some cool design chops in this thread:
Over the last year I got to work on bringing fluidity to the Airbnb app.
We looked across entire guest side and through critical journeys and established a spatial model of our “canvas” — system (account & camera), map, base and scrim (media + modality).
Frontend Focus The top articles, stories, and tutorials of 2019.
Tools of the Trade
SQL Murder Mystery Learn SQL by trying to solve this murder mystery.
A crime has taken place and the detective needs your help. The detective gave you the crime scene report, but you somehow lost it. You vaguely remember that the crime was a murder that occurred sometime on Jan.15, 2018 and that it took place in SQL City. Start by retrieving the corresponding crime scene report from the police department’s database.
Jonathan Carter “In order to make it easier to visually explore HTML/JS/CSS, directly in @code, GistPad (https://aka.ms/gistpad) now allows you to create "Web playgrounds" that are fully editable mini web apps, that provide a live preview, and are persisted as GitHub Gists 🚀”
Giuliana Taylor Every year end, I get reminded about this. Every year end, I freak out a little bit, and scan the entire codebase for rogue Y's.
It's not just Java that does this, all libraties that are based on TR35. TR35 is why we can't have nice things.
PSA: TIS THE SEASON TO CHECK YOUR FORMATTERS, PEOPLE
TIL that Java's DateTimeFormatter pattern "YYYY" gives you the week-based-year, (by default, ISO-8601 standard) the year of the Thursday of that week.
12/29/2019 formats to 2019
12/30/2019 formats to 2020
Running a Website Monitoring Service with a Boring Technology Keep it simple, stick to stuff that works, and you know well (you can always change it later):
There is nothing wrong with using an old, boring technology. It feels ridiculous to even state that, but a lot of people in this industry are practicing HDD or RDD, AKA. Hype Driven Development or Resume Driven Development. Don’t get carried away by the hype. In fact, ignore most (if not all) of it. When in doubt, avoid complexity
ML Super Resolution - Pixelmator Blog “Making this available in an app like Pixelmator Pro has only become possible in the last couple of years” Maybe CSI wasn't far-off after all?
Jonathan Tietz Patent application be like:
"A Novel and Useful System for Ruling Middle Earth."
WHAT IS CLAIMED IS:
- A system of rings, comprising:
(a) a plurality of lesser rings; and
(b) a bringing-them-all-and-in-the-darkness-binding-them ring.
Tool Of The Day So this is how you cut wood!
Lingua Scripta
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — Adapted to JavaScript The official introduction to computer science (and a really good book), now in a programming language you'll actually use.
trekhleb/nano-neuron “🤖 NanoNeuron is 7 simple JavaScript functions that will give you a feeling of how machines can actually ‘learn’”
Lines of Code
Nobody learns how to write good software without writing lots lots of bad software first. Don't let fear that your code will suck paralyze you.
Challenging projects every programmer should try - Austin Z. Henley Getting into programming, or want to up-level your skills?
Below is a handful of software projects that taught me a lot. In fact, they're great because you could build them multiple times and learn new things each time. So whenever I don't know what to build or I want to learn a new programming language or framework, I start with one of these:
- Text editor
- 2D game - Space Invaders
- Compiler - Tiny BASIC
- Mini operating system
- Spreadsheet (hard!)
- Video game console emulator (hard!)
The Best Linux Blog In the Unixverse “This is how act when my code doesn't work ... ”
Devoops
Chris Adams “It’s never a bad idea to put a negative check for your test data into your production monitoring” Free trade isn’t forever: USDA tariff tracker removes fictional Wakanda as country
Deploy or Die - card game “Deploy or Die is a card game from webdevelopment environment. The goal is successfully deploy the three Deploy cards.”
Teamwork
François Chollet Not all people are the same, but do accommodate for people who work this way:
I believe deep thinking can only be done in writing. To follow an idea seriously, you must constantly pause to consider all possibilities, which takes time and care
Startup Life
First Round State of Startups 2019 Investment bubbles, diversity and inclusion, Glassdoor reviews, remote work, mental health, and the community moat.
Assaf Investors don't care what your deck looks like, but if a polished deck helps you present with confidence, worth a few $$$. Not this though … I can't even:
Jason Shuman 👟:
Founder friend just told me that SF deck designers have quoted him between $20K to $40K + the right to invest up to $250K...my mind is officially blown
Locked Doors
The Influencer and the Hit Man: How a Years-Long Domain Name Feud Ended in a Bloody Shootout I mentioned this domain heist last week. This is the full story: the people behind it, the domain, and why it mattered so much. Entertaining read.
Tom Simonite When unintended consequences hit you in the face:
Interesting things happened after San Francisco banned facial recognition:
Staff discovered they had made city-issued iPhones unlawful, because of Apple's Face ID.
SFPD had to disable a facial recognition system it had kept from public knowledge
TwistedDoodles “Cookies for Santa. #gdpr”
Techtopia
kate conger “Lyft is having a bit of a rough time with its community guidelines”
Deepfake Bot Submissions to Federal Public Comment Websites Cannot Be Distinguished from Human Submissions | Technology Science Recreating the net neutrality fake feedback.
The bot generated and submitted 1,001 deepfake comments to the public comment website at Medicaid.gov over a period of four days. … Survey respondents, who were trained and assessed through exercises in which they distinguished more obvious bot versus human comments, were only able to correctly classify the submitted deepfake comments half (49.63%) of the time … This study demonstrates that federal public comment websites are highly vulnerable to massive submissions of deepfake comments …
Also, GPT-2 — we're going to regret this piece of technology for many years to come.
Available To Hire
Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.
Lindsay Rae Grizzard Looking for part-time design contracts until April 15th. http://lindsaygrizzard.com
Wang Dan Senior web/mobile developer: Angular, React, Vue, Python, NodeJS, PHP, .Net, iOS/Android. https://portfolio-42c84.web.app/
Min and her Cat Looking for a new job/gig starting Feb/March. React, React Native, some TS.
Michał Januszewski My entire team was laid off this afternoon. Looking for iOS job once again. Warsaw/remote preferred.
None of the Above
Lynn Fisher “When you see a Baby Yoda cookie hack you try the Baby Yoda cookie hack.”
An escape room for academics:
You have to finish your current paper. That’s it.
I quoted the line ‘They were no longer little girls. They were little women’ in a school essay and found out later it wasn’t in the book and it was just something Moe said
Jason Schwartz This does sound very Boston:
Me: People should stop caricaturing Boston.
Boston: A man from Southie stole a truck loaded with $10,000 in lobsters, prompting another lobster truck to give chase, resulting in a crash between the two lobster trucks.
Foiled Lobster Truck Heist in Charlestown “Was a Very Boston Experience for Everyone Involved”
Danny Deraney “Because you want to see a baby piggy that was raised by a Pitbull, act like a Pitbull with its mommy.”
Charles Ornstein You're probably thinking, “of course they do!” And the data says so. What's interesting about this ProPublica project, this page, where you can search is your doctor paid to prescribe? This is journalism at it's best.
1/ For 10 years, my colleagues and I have been dogged by one mammoth question:
Do doctors who receive a pharma payment linked to a particular drug prescribe more of that drug?
We finally have an answer. 👇👇
China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences 🐖 What a story:
Chinese state media reported last week that gangs were exploiting the African swine fever crisis by deliberately spreading the disease by using drones to drop infected items on to pig farms. The farmers are then forced to sell meat cheaply to the gangs, who then sell it on as healthy stock, according to China Comment magazine, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua.
When Does the New Decade Begin: In a Month, or a Year From Now? Simple question with a simple answer. Do you want to be that person at the NY party that nobody can stand?
The Unexplained “This guy made a tiny apartment in an electrical outlet”
The Miseducation of the American Boy That's not what I hoped would happen to our youth:
Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting.
Blossom “Wrapping gifts got a whole lot easier with these clever ideas!”