The Single Most Important Question to Ask About the Iran Deal →

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, played an absolutely crucial role in motivating the world, and the Obama administration, to oppose Iran's nuclear ambitions. But he has become an impotent player in this drama in part because he seeks a perfect solution to the Iranian challenge. There is no perfect solution.

You can't continue to sanction them and get them to drop nuclear research. Iran will undoubtedly be more powerful that it was before, but without the specter of a nuclear device to support its ambitions in the future.

How SQLite Is Tested →

As of version 3.8.10, the SQLite library consists of approximately 94 thousand lines of C source code. By comparison, the project has 91,515 thousand lines of test code - 971 times as much test code!

The Making of Lemmings →

Lemmings simply offers something different. The sprites with flouncy hair soon become friends, their dedication and helplessness an irresistible pull. The size of the lemmings, that first impulse behind their creation, has the neat effect of making minor hills huge and half-screen gaps cavernous, thus ennobling their acts.

One of the best video games ever made. I still have it on all my computers just to explode some pixels while listening to MIDI classical music from time to time.

How World War III Became Possible →

There is a growing chorus of political analysts, arms control experts, and government officials who are sounding the alarm, trying to call the world's attention to its drift toward disaster. The prospect of a major war, even a nuclear war, in Europe has become thinkable, they warn, even plausible.

The Social-Network Illusion That Tricks Your Mind →

This is the majority illusion — the local impression that a specific attribute is common when the global truth is entirely different.

The reason isn't hard to see. The majority illusion occurs when the most popular nodes are colored. Because these link to the greatest number of other nodes, they skew the view from the ground, as it were. That's why this illusion is so closely linked to the friendship paradox.

What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work →

This approach to business is sometimes called the "Hollywood model." A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-­term, project-­based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-­term, open-­ended jobs that can last for years.

Machine Vision Algorithm Chooses the Most Creative Paintings in History →

The problem of finding the most creative paintings is similar to the problem of finding the most influential person on a social network, or the most important station in a city's metro system or super spreaders of disease. These have become standard problems in network theory in recent years, and now Elgammal and Saleh apply it to creativity networks for the first time.

Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web →

Here's an absolute fact that all of these reporters, columnists, and media pundits need to get into their heads:

The web doesn't suck. Your websites suck.

All of your websites suck.

You destroy basic usability by hijacking the scrollbar. You take native functionality (scrolling, selection, links, loading) that is fast and efficient and you rewrite it with 'cutting edge' javascript toolkits and frameworks so that it is slow and buggy and broken. You balloon your websites with megabytes of cruft. You ignore best practices. You take something that works and is complementary to your business and turn it into a liability.

The lousy performance of your websites becomes a defensive moat around Facebook.

What Your Open Source Culture Really Says →

<blockquote

Our company is open sourcing this project/product/codebase because we want to make it available to the world, give back to the community, and promote innovation on top of our existing work.

What Your Culture Really Says: Someone on our team built this shit in their spare time because our engineering team is full of special snowflakes with too much venture funding who don't understand the term "company priorities." [...] We tried to sell this as a proprietary product and no one wanted it and/or we were too incompetent to sell it.