The best thing I've ever seen written that explains the Tea Party.
The answers to these questions, and the way these documents are handled and discussed in the weeks and years to come, aren't limited to the journalism ethics classroom. [...] When it comes to future handling of such information, the gray area in which they reside — between public and private, between prurient and illuminating — might not be the exception, but the new normal. The stance that journalists and academics take on these documents has the potential to guide our nation's understanding of how we treat the compromise of the 21st century's most valuable commodity, for both individuals and corporations: privacy.
The new reality is that journalists simply do not own the news cycle. [...] The new role of journalists, for better or for worse, isn't as gatekeepers, but interpreters: If they don't parse it, others without the experience, credentials, or mindfulness toward protecting personal information certainly will.
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.