Published
Weekend Reading — Baby Jesus and miracle flights
Design Objective
Flick Scrolling gesture Hopefully coming soon to the iPhone.
Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps, and the uncanny valley… From which you'll learn how frames per second relates to our eyes constantly jiggling in our heads. Jiggle, jiggle.
Tools of the Trade
The Blockchain is the New Database, Get Ready to Rewrite Everything No. And no. But inspite of the intellectually dishonest title, this post is an intersting read worth your attention. Distributed trust and smart contracts together could indeed lead to new classes of applications we haven't yet imagined. Also, if you're planning yet another distributed Twitter alternative …
Mozilla Research Projects All the cool projects happening at Mozilla in one place, including Emscripten, Sweet.js, Paralle.js, Shumway.
Reminder for 2015: 'Usage' should be the top section in your README. 'Installation' comes after I'm sold to your idea.
Lingua Scripta
Classifying Asynchrony An interesting way to classify callbacks, promises, event emitters and streams.
ECMAScript 6: new OOP features besides classes Method definitions, property value shorthands, computed property keys, and much more.
Lines of Code
Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations If your validation methods are throwing exception, that might be a code smell:
Exceptions signal something outside the expected bounds of behavior of the code in question. But if you're running some checks on outside input, this is because you expect some messages to fail - and if a failure is expected behavior, then you shouldn't be using exceptions.
Why DRY? How to do DRY right:
This is, in my experience, the most important reason to follow the Rule of Three: wait, until you have more facts available to you. You don't have to take the rule literally either. You can wait until you have four, five, or six examples of the duplication, if the rate of change is low.
tottinge The simple formula that always works:
Q: "How do we convert story points to hours?"
A: "Assign the story to developers and see when it's done."
Peopleware
nzgb:
People love to generalize.
On recruiters Me, after I got tired of people on Twitter getting nasty with recruiters:
Remember, recruiters are Others. We don't welcome them at tech events, then we lol at how clueless they are about tech.
Recruiters are the Borg. They have a hive mind. If you're nasty to one, they'll stop contacting you. True story.
One person's recruiting spam is another person's lead to a better job. I look at my inbox and count my privilege.
I'm not interested in it getting any better, because all these emails i can easily delete are a sign of how well my industry is doing.
Crazy idea. Mentor a recruiter.
Locked Doors
8 Free Privacy Programs Worth Your Year-End Donations
Did North Korea Really Attack Sony? and
A Lot of Smart People Think North Korea Didn't Hack Sony The infosec consensus — in these two and many other articles — is that we don't know yet, because it takes a lot of time to properly attribute attacks, and also, probably not North Korea. Thankfully, the mainstream media and FBI know better.
On Terrorism How to tell whether something is terrorism:
Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending. Terrorism is an autoimmune disorder of democracy.
None of the Above
COBI. World’s Smartest Connected Biking System Dope. Thumb controls, turn signals, all the sensors you need, face plates to match every bike style, theft deterrant, and a beautiful phone app. It even got proximity light, like a luxury sedan!
Why airlines want to make you suffer No, you are not imagining things. This it just how the system works:
The airlines, and some economists, argue that the rise of the fee model is good for travellers. You only pay for what you want, and you can therefore save money if …
But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.”
Also:
There is also the plummet in the price of oil, which the airlines seem to have collectively agreed is no reason to reduce fares or even remove “fuel surcharges.”
Who invented the fake Ayn Rand film review? Don't confuse multiple discovery for plagiarism.
Overheard at Wholefoods "We can only bake gluten free cookies for Santa, honey."
What Happened When The New York Times Tried To Profile Marissa Mayer Last week I linked to the original post because I thought it was an interesting look at how Alibaba gave Mayer a shield to turn Yahoo around. And this week I'm linking to this article, because I do agree the original article was sexist.
Secret Language Of Flight Attendants Is Your New Inflight Entertainment Baby Jesus and miracle flights.
Startup Fighter See if you can guess the startup name from the pitch.
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science:
In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.
Christmas Serial SNL parody of Serial is funniest thing I've seen all week.