Published
Weekend Reading — Thread
Jason Diller
"Thread"
Design Objective
This site is “taking the edge off rant mode” by making readers pass a quiz before commenting Smart: "The goal is to ensure that the commenters have actually read the story before they discuss it."
Software is like a pinball machine. Nobody reads the printed instructions clearly. They just drop their quarters and start pushing buttons
If you put links at the bottom of a page, but you also have infinite scroll on the page, you are a terrible person.
Tools of the Trade
https://icon.now.sh SVG icon placeholder microservice.
And remember, simulating a slower low end machine is only two clicks away in Chrome. You'll catch perf issues like nobodies business
Looking For The Logic Behind Logarithms O(N) vs O(log N) explained.
Cross-Site Request Forgery is dead! Not yet, browser support is still lacking, but SameSite is a welcome step in the right direction.
Prophet: forecasting at scale From Facebook, an open source forecasting tool with automated fitting procedures, available in Python and R.
Benjamin De Cock TIL
Friendly reminder: you don't need weird shenanigans to convert HTML strings to DOM nodes, there's a native API for that!
xkcd: An R Package for Plotting XKCD Graphs Cool.
Fuchs’ law: whenever programming gets so easy devs have free time to learn how to design, they invent tech that makes programming harder
What do we want?
Machine readable metadata!
When do we want it?
ERROR Line 1: Unexpected token /`
Lingua Scripta
babel-preset-env: a preset that configures Babel for you Easier way to configure Babel.
CS department updates introductory courses Java is out, JavaScript is in:
"It was clear that many universities were going in that direction. It’s 2017 now, and Java is showing its age.”
Reginald deBRAIDEWAD Yes, indeed.
async/await is a wonderful solution to a problem JavaScript gratuitously created by having asynchronous-only stuff with terrible semantics.
english-words-that-are-not-yet-npm-packages A CLI for finding available package names in the npm registry.
Lines of Code
- Why immutable-first?
- Because of its predictability.
Predictable systems generates less FUD and typically are less prone to fail.
Clint Smith Writing software is no different:
90% of being a writer is writing something you think is incredible, reading it the next day, realizing it's terrible, then eating many Oreos
Abstractions help you solve larger problems with less work but shield you from efficiency and performance issues. Make that trade on purpose
"What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." - Fred Brooks
Tess Rinearson "✨ software engineering ✨"
Refactoring code is a lot like cleaning your room: easiest if you do it on a regular basis.
Brian "When your code is a mess but everything works out in the end"
Architectural
When Hacker News commenters say "I could build that app in a weekend!" I think of this chart of how Slack decides to send a notification.
David Brady Bingo:
The older I get, the less I care about making tech decisions right and the more I care about retaining the ability to change a wrong one.
"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications." - David Parnas
A software system is a shared narrative about a problem and the community of people who come together to solve that problem.
Changelog "...And that, friends, is why we decided to paint this shed teal!"
Devoops
Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region TL;DR someone made a typo, took down entire region and all web apps that depend on it. Internet is in rage because blameless postmortems don't extend to service providers.
Amazon Web Service I can't even:
The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.
If you can't handle me in development, you don't deserve me in production
Peopleware
jason "If you want to know what its like to have kids and work from home..."
Locked Doors
How to Keep Messages Secure "Security experts give their best advice for keeping messages secure, whether you’re at a protest or just want to keep out snooping siblings." (That this was published in Teen Vogue should come as no surprise)
Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug This is bad. Here's a list of websites affected by this bug. Change your password now.
New Report: Businesses Suffer Serious, Measurable Damage From Data Breaches It's important that there be consequences to data breaches:
For organizations that suffered a breach, the effect was substantial: 22% of breached organizations lost customers -- 40% of them lost more than a fifth of their customer base. 29% lost revenue, with 38% of that group losing more than a fifth of their revenue. 23% of breached organizations lost business opportunities, with 42% of them losing more than a fifth of such opportunities.
Shattered SHA-1 is broken. "It is now practically possible to craft two colliding PDF files and obtain a SHA-1 digital signature on the first PDF file which can also be abused as a valid signature on the second PDF file."
Dot Ransomware: Yet another Commission-based Ransomware-as-a-Service
SHA256, RSA-4096, this ransomware may have better crypto than your online bank.
None of the Above
Alby "This is the best demonstration of shutter sync I've seen" (Also, doggo synchronized swimming
It May Be Your Microbiome Will Become Your Personal Pharmacy Using skin bacteria to treat ezcmea.
Algorithm Tips A growing list of potentially newsworthy algorithms used by the U.S. government.
802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks Why your 1.3 Gbps WiFi router barely gets above than 100Mbps.
Javier Santana "Learning a modern language vs learning an ancient language."
They're called Medium posts because they're neither rare nor well done
kent กิ sheely "There's so much going on with this mouse, I don't even know where to start"
Pineapple Pizza Tests Limits of Presidential Power in Iceland I wish that was the most pressing political issue in the US right now.
Amanda Terkel "wtf happened to my Lyft?"
Honest to God, I just got an email asking me for technical support with a Lotus 1-2-3 issue.
Comic Feeling "I've seen a lot on this life, but never a smoking Corolla using a selfie stick"
