Labnotes

Published

Weekend Reading — The entire internet

joel "someone's cow just walked over and fell asleep on my legs?? and now i cant fucking move or ill wake her up"


Design Objective

Design words with data Should the button say "Log in"? "Sign in"? How about "Sign on"? If only Google search could tell us what people call it …

Resilient Web Design A web book, and accompanying podcast. Check it out.

The Marline Story — From a sketch pad to #1 on the App Store I can see why people love this app.

Conversational Interface. Sketch/Illustrator templates for designing chatbots and messaging apps.

It’s not what you design, it’s why you are designing Why designers should think about "why" before delving into the "what".


Tools of the Trade

Fabulous macOS Tips & Tricks Shift + Cmd + Period is a cool trick if you're using dot files regularly.

How to create a good pull request A meta-guide for creating easy to review requests, and the follow up How to perform a good code review.

The Current State of Adaptive Design Comparing Sketch, Figma and Subform, to see how each deals with adaptive design.

dflemstr/rq A tool for performing queries on streams of records in various formats. Think awk/sed, but for working with structured (record) data instead of text.

Spacetime Helps your distributed team share their work hours on Slack.

CYHSM/chess-surprise-analysis "Find surprising moves in chess games". Sounds cool, but how do you teach a computer to recognize surprising chess moves?

The key concept is to compare the evaluations of a chess engine in low depths with the evaluation at high depths, with the idea that a low depth engine may represent a naive observer of the game

Mathpix Write an equation on paper, take a photo, and your phone will find a solution and plot it in 3D.


Lingua Scripta

The truth about traditional JavaScript benchmarks Time to retire SunSpider, Kraken, Octane and friends.

If we are serious about performance for the web, we need to start judging browser by real world performance and not their ability to game four year old benchmarks


Lines of Code

The Idea of Lisp is both simple and big:

Let me say that again: John McCarthy wrote 6 easy things in machine code, then combined them to make a programming language. Before that, the only higher-level programming language was Fortran, which took 18 man-years to develop. Fortran was a big achievement, but Lisp was a big idea.

Samantha 🐝 Quiñones

In 20 years of engineering I've never said, "thank goodness we hired someone who can reverse a b tree on a whiteboard while strangers watch"

Bob Ross, Game Dev

If you look at your old work and it looks terrible to you, that's a good thing. That means you are improving.


Architectural

Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles Understanding the CPU cost of different operations, helpful when writing performance sensitive code.

How To Make Your Database 200x Faster Without Having To Pay More? For business intelligence queries, which rely on large data sets, you can often reach 99.9% accuracy with 0.1% sample size. There's a name for this — Approximate Query Processing — and it's not as simple as picking sample data at random.

Saving the internet 2000 terabytes a day: fixing Font Awesome's fonts All the tricks to reduce font file size without compromising quality.


Locked Doors

New Scheme: Spread Popcorn Time Ransomware, get chance of free Decryption Key Ransomware, meet growth hacking.

FastMailʼs Values If you're looking for an email provider that will not recklessly lose, or for a price sell, your data.

‏Chris Adams‎

This is why security questions are dangerously irresponsible: Yahoo can change their database but users can’t change facts used elsewhere


Techtopia

Ivor Tossell

My Lyft's GPS is confused and has the car literally driving in circles. The driver, being middleware between app and car, obeys, baffled.

Trammell Hudson™

They said USB-C will make it possible to use the same cable for everything. No one mentioned reading tiny pale serial numbers on the cables.


None of the Above

@assaf Ground to air trolling.

Paul Phillips

The spaghetti code you call your belief system was written mostly by others and committed without review. You are its vigilant maintainer.

David Newbury

Going through old papers my dad gave me, I found his map of the internet as of May 1973.

The entire internet.

Facebook Finally Gets Real About Fighting Fake News Welcome to the fact-check industrial complex.

Joon Lee "i have concluded that this is one of the greatest videos on the internet"

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