Published
Weekend Reading — Now that's a bad day
Design Objective
Why do people think Apple Pay is so innovative when an equivalent feature has been part of Android for over two years? The difference between a feature dump and a humanized solution.
A Watch Guy's Thoughts On The Apple Watch After Seeing It In The Metal Well written piece, especially if you like to accessorize with a quality watch.
7 A/B Tests You Should Be Running On Your Welcome Emails Test everything, including that which is not so obvious.
The Curious Case of iPhone 6+ 1080p Display TL;DR Don’t use 1920 x 1080 for iPhone 6+ design, instead use 2208 x 1242. More here.
The 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make
Very few of us have had to formulate hypotheses and design experiments since perhaps our elementary school science fair days.
And while the scientific method conceptually is easy to grasp, putting it into practice can be much more challenging.
Jeffrey Zeldman: 20 years of Web Design and Community I enjoyed watching this.
First law of 2FA: though shalt put your verification code early enough in the SMS it shows up in the preview window on iOS or Android.
Tools of the Trade
hello.js A client-side Javascript SDK for authenticating with OAuth2 and querying REST API's. Supports Google Data Services, Facebook Graph, Windows Live Connect and more.
Better Work, Faster with Sketch Plugins Suggested Sketch plugins to ease web design.
Writing Extensions for Firefox Is Barely Worth the Trouble I absolutely agree with this sentiment:
Mozilla, this relationship has problems. And it’s not us, it’s you. You need to change. You need to organize your documentation, clean up your developer tools, and dedicate time and money to basic things — like making the debugger work.
realms.io "Git based wiki written in Python Inspired by Gollum, Ghost, and Dillinger. Basic authentication and registration included."
CausalImpact Open-source package for estimating causal effects in time series. Interesting.
ComcastifyJS Because sometimes images just load too damn fast!
Lines of Code
ECMAScript 6 modules: the final syntax Tip: when transpiled to ES6, the new module syntax works great with Browserify.
Taming the Asynchronous Beast with CSP in JavaScript Got core.async/Go envy? There's a js-cs for that.
- You don’t call a transducer
- Only composition is allowed
- Better stateful than pure
CSP and transducers in JavaScript If you love layers of abstractions, today is your lucky day!
The Lesser Known Normal Forms of Database Design:
-1st Normal Form: The database contains at least one table that is an exact copy of another table, except with additional columns.
I was in favour of space exploration until I realised what it'd mean for date time libraries
Peopleware
CODE Debugging the gender gap Upcoming documentary about the dearth of American female and minority software engineers.
Jury duty summons are a great way to get everyone to recognize a project’s bus factor before there’s an actual disaster…
"I finished a project early" - you planned poorly.
"I finished late" - you underestimated.
"I finished on time" - must be bugs.
Software.
Locked Doors
How Instagram’s drug deals go undetected A burner phone could still uncover your location by sending SSIDs of nearby WiFi networks, using VPN/Tor is not enough, so drug dealers resort to running Instagram over VPN inside an Android emulator running inside a VM on a burner laptop.
iPwned: How easy is it to mine Apple services, devices for data?:
The iCloud restore feature essentially allows an attacker to create a clone of the victim’s device (at least, within the storage limits of the device being used). … Even creepier, the iCloud access also gives the attacker the ability to stalk the victim in real-time by using the Find My iPhone feature.
Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto The other reason Gmail reads all your emails? Open messaging network, end to end encryption, and good spam control: pick two.
Detectify Security scanner as a service, because "hack yourself or someone else will".
Lynis An auditing tool which tests and gathers (security) information from Unix based systems.
The world's first cryptocurrency written in PHP Yes, the codebase is as bad as you'd imagine. Also TIL:
There were people commiting sudoku over the bitcoin scandal.
Today in 1940 George Stibitz performed the first remote operation on a computer using a teletype terminal. It wasn't encrypted.
Two Wheels
Here's What Getting Doored Looks Like From A Cyclist's Perspective Here's the thing: riding close to the curb or inside the bike lane is a courtesy you extend to car drivers only when it's safe for you to do so.
Related, if roads were like bike lanes.
The curious case of the cyclist’s unshaven legs So it turns out shaving your legs can help reduce drag and make you faster, but more important:
The revised results should remind us not to place too much faith in any single experiment, and to consider all findings tentative until replicated – including the new shaving findings.
None of the Above
How I Rebuilt Tinder And Discovered The Shameful Secret Of Attraction:
Even as more and more people marry “across” lines of race and religion, fewer and fewer are willing to cross the education/class line.
How to see into the future Can we predict the future? Yes, with some training, team work and open mindedness. Where most people fail is that they're not really trying to see the future:
This is because our predictions are about the future only in the most superficial way. They are really advertisements, conversation pieces, declarations of tribal loyalty – or, as with Irving Fisher, statements of profound conviction about the logical structure of the world
The Unexotic Underclass Could Silicon Valley build less Instagrams, and do more to solve the Big Problems that ail the US?
What's The Fare Compare fares between Lyft, Uber, Sidecar and good old fashioned Taxi.
PopKey If you're not sure about upgrading to iOS 8, this will definitely change your mind: "Introducing the world's first animated GIF keyboard."
The New Racism: First you deny racism exists
cmd.fm A command line interface (that actually runs in your browser) for playing internet radio from SoundCloud.
Hollywood's Vaccine Wars: L.A.’s "Entitled" Westsiders Behind City’s Epidemic Why is vaccination even a choice you can opt-out of?
If someone doesn't have an Apple Watch on which to receive your heartbeat you can just call them on the phone and breathe heavily #lifehacks