Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way. What's less immediately clear is why, precisely, that happens.
An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting.
Collusion to attack one of the world's largest Internet companies is sure to end well.
The satellite can tell that the total amount of nighttime light emitted during the holiday season is as much as 50% greater than during the rest of the year.
There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone. First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. [...] Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins.
In QA, there is a distinct moment. It comes once you're deeply familiar with your product or product area; it comes when you're lost in your testing, and it comes in an instant. You find a problem, and because of your strong context about your product, you definitely know: Something is seriously wrong here.
I learned today that the root causes of a HTTP 404 response in one of our applications are not distinguished at all. Thus, the team literally has no idea which one of the causes is the underlying issue. I don't need strong product context to know that the ability to detect failures and the ability to understand failures is the most important part of software development. Good software without a good QA mindset isn't good software.
This is still one of the most useful career posts I ever read, but as far as I can tell I never linked it here.
Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.
A cool look at math, music, and a conclusion that I will forever be required to point out about tuning pianos.
You can't wish away Design Process. It has been in existence since the dawn of civilization. And the latest clever development tools, no matter how clever, cannot replace the best practices and real-life collaboration that built cathedrals, railroads, and feature-length films.
I've noticed this more as I've transitioned to a more agile development world at Skype. Constantly shipping and constantly shipping MVPs means we're less frequently shipping code we're proud of.
Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971, but have seemingly stalled since despite growing wealth and technological capability.