Published
Weekend Reading — I am not a robot
Leaked Footage of the Rogue One Sequel
Design Objective
The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything Cool is all about finding optimal newness:
The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new. There is an “optimal newness” for ideas, Lakhani said—advanced yet acceptable.
Tools of the Trade
24 ways Advent calendar for web geeks. 24 worth-your-time articles about web design and development to read over the holidays (or whenever, my Instapaper queue will take all of 2017 to read, so who am I to judge?)
Octobox Take back control of your GitHub Notifications.
Voca Modular JavaScript string manipulation library.
v.camelCase('bird flight'); // => 'birdFlight'
v.sprintf('%s costs $%.2f', 'Tea', 1.5); // => 'Tea costs $1.50'
v.slugify('What a wonderful world'); // => 'what-a-wonderful-world'
10 Things You Might Not Know About Using S3 Such as:
Newcomers to S3 are always surprised to learn that latency on S3 operations depends on key names since prefix similarities become a bottleneck at more than about 100 requests per second.
Explaining the battery life problems with the new MacBook Pros Why the battery on the new MacBook Pros is a let down, and what (little) you can do about it. BTW it's normal if the first few days, battery life is non-existent, due to the setup overhead of apps like Spotlight, Dropbox, Mail, Backblaze.
The Methbot Operation Investigating a bot that makes its owner $3~5M a day by faking hundreds of millions of video views. The technology behind it includes Node, Cheerio, tough-cookie, and JWPlayer. (PDF)
7,500 Faceless Coders Paid in Bitcoin Built a Hedge Fund’s Brain A hedge fund that crowd sourced all its algorithms.
Lines of Code
JavaScript Clean Coding Best Practices Read, practice, share with your team. For example:
Use intention-revealing names and don't worry if you have long variable names instead of saving a few keyboard strokes.
If you follow this practice, your names become searchable, which helps a lot when you do refactors or you are just looking for something.
functional-programming-jargon From arity through functor and traversable, all the functional programming terms you may have heard but can't exactly figure out, explained in plain terms with simple examples.
things that take way longer than they should:
- standups
- naming things
- adverts at the cinema
- DNS propagation
- gift wrapping
Machine Teaching
A Visual and Interactive Guide to the Basics of Neural Networks A gentle introduction to the basics of neural networks. No brain science, just understanding the simple formula y = Wx + b.
Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks Is as easy as you think it is.
Deep Learning the Stock Market Some of this goes over my head, still an interesting read on using machine learning for something that's fairly easy to grasp: predicting the VIX.
Locked Doors
Tom Scott New phishing attack that can easily fool anyone:
This is disturbingly clever. You get sent to a text/html data URI! Not testing any further but, blimey, talk about using power for evil.
Your threat model just changed EFF urging the tech industry to adjust to the new reality, work to defend Internet users, and delete your logs.
Peopleware
Jen Simmons Don't forget that …
Not everyone works for VC-backed app-focused startup. In fact by volume, globally, hardly anyone works for a VC-backed app-focused startup.
Fiora@MAGfest 🏳️🌈 "i'd like to propose an alternative to the whiteboard interview"
The Psychology of White-Collar Criminals
Usually, a gut feeling that something will be harmful is enough of a deterrence. But when the harm is distant or abstract, this internal alarm doesn’t always go off. This absence of intuition about the harm creates a particular challenge for executives.
Techtopia
Two days with the shadowy emoji overlords Investigating the secret cabal that decides which emojis are fit to grace your screen.
Andrew Benson That is me:
I just keep checking boxes with the phrase "I am not a robot" without any self-reflection.
Chris Miller Related:
Apparently there is a little known Fourth Law of Robotics that prohibits robots from clicking the checkbox "I am not a robot"
None of the Above
Ok San Francisco, this is getting ridiculous. Deconstructed bread? How am I even supposed to eat this?!?
Aerial "Aerial is a Mac screen saver based on the new Apple TV screen saver that displays the aerial movies Apple shot over New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, China, etc."
My son clearly has a better grasp on the real world than his teacher does.
