tl;dr For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue…

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Getty Images In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be…

Photo: John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. I’m an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages. This stumps me a little…

Depression doesn’t discriminate. Everyone is a potential target for it, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, geographical location, or income. We are all subject to its grasp, and remember, it’s not the same thing as sadness. Sadness is when you feel down because things aren’t going your way.…

Author: “No Bugs” Hare Follow: Job Title: Sarcastic Architect Hobbies: Thinking Aloud , Arguing with Managers , Annoying HRs , Calling a Spade a Spade , Keeping Tongue in Cheek Click to enlarge NB: scale is logarithmic! [[TODO: TLB]] Premature Pessimization Easy on yourself, easy on the code: All…

Zelda 3D isometric , Sir Carma, 2016 Retronator Stray Pixels Earlier this year, somebody asked on Quora : What is the difference between pixel and voxel? I sometimes can’t help myself, so instead of giving a straight answer, I wrote a whole article on the topic. I get the question. Society serves…

I created a bot to respond to these types of emails… Sarah: My husband dead two years ago and the family members wants to kill me and my children and seat on the inheritance he left for us with bank here l am now in a hiding with my kids and the documents of inheritance is with us… Bot: Very nice!…

It was the “roaring twenties” in America, and business was good. Even for criminals. In Chicago, Al Capone had slowly built himself an empire making upwards of $100M each year. He was a shrewd businessman. The only problem? He was in the business of narcotics, prostitution, gambling, and even…

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” ― Sydney Smith Regret prison. That’s a horrific place to be, isn’t it? Just sitting in your mental cell, torturing yourself with regret. Because let’s face it, you’re a prisoner of…

Von STEFAN ANKER Meine Güte. Als fröhlicher Konservativer war ich doch überwältigt von den heftigen Reaktionen auf meinen Text zum Hype um den Tesla. Ich hatte keine Zeit, jedem Kommentator hier oder auf Facebook einzeln zu antworten, weil ich – gedungener Lohnschreiber der alten Industrie – schon…

Von STEFAN ANKER Ich bin es langsam leid. Sobald irgendwo ein Tesla Model S um die Ecke schielt, bekommen alle Schnappatmung. Sie preisen den Wagen, der je nach Ausführung bis zu 700 PS mobilisiert und irrsinnig gut beschleunigt, und natürlich vergessen sie auf keinen Fall, im selben Atemzug die…

Published on November 5, 2015 It took years for the Internet to reach its first 100 computers. Today, 100 new ones join each second. And running deep within the silicon souls of most of these machines is the work of a technical wizard of remarkable power, a man described as a genius and a bully, a…

Damn you, Peter Jackson! Let’s end this debate once and for all. Humans can see frame rates greater than 24fps (although plenty of people will argue that they can’t on the internet). I’ll explain more in a future post if necessary, but let’s take that as read. Once you’ve accepted that fact, the…

Want to know what 100 million stars looks like? If so, check out this image of Andromeda , a galaxy located a mere 2.5 million light-years away. The 1.5 billion-pixel image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope—the highest-resolution image by Hubble yet produced, composed of 7,398 exposures—and…

Tesla cars have one security advantage that a lot of other cars don’t: the electric vehicles are impervious to hot-wiring, so a thief can’t just break into your $100,000 vehicle, pop open the steering column, futz with some cables and drive off. But if he has a computer with him, he could “hot-wire”…

Der Parteikonvent der SPD hat sich mit 56% der Delegiertenstimmen für die Vorratsdatenspeicherung ausgesprochen. Überraschend wenig, weil natürlich nicht zufällig “Gerüchte” aufgetaucht sind, Gabriel habe mit Rücktritt im Falle der Ablehnung der VDS gedroht. Vielmehr gehört so ein “Durchsickern” zum…

This was the most-read story on BBC Earth in 2015. Here is another chance to read it. It could happen to anyone. Maybe you're out trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race, or maybe you're just on a long walk and you slip. Whatever the circumstances, at some point we all find…

Corbis Frau kaut Nägel: Eine einfache Therapie kann beim Aufhören helfen Immer wieder wandert die Hand zum Mund, malmen die Zähne auf den Nägeln, wie ferngesteuert. Neuropsychologe Steffen Moritz spricht über die Gründe des Nagelkauens und eine einfache Verhaltenstherapie, die er entwickelt hat.…

Anzeige D er Ausbau der Fotovoltaik ist in Deutschland zwar ins Stocken geraten. Doch in dieser Woche feierte die Agentur für erneuerbare Energien noch einmal die gewaltigen Ausmaße der Solarstromproduktion, die Deutschland mithilfe üppiger Subventionen inzwischen aufgebaut hat. „Mit einer…

I feel like a fraud — and that’s a good thing. Yesterday I announced that I am starting a new role at Microsoft and the feedback was nothing short of overwhelming. Messages on all kind of platforms came in and my phone didn’t stop vibrating all day. It was tough to keep up with the messages and the…

Providing well-written documentation helps people understand, make use of, and contribute back to your project, but it's only half of the documentation equation. The underlying system used to serve documentation can make life easier for the people writing it—whether that's just you or the team you…

Few people have stood at the gates of hope — through world wars and environmental crises and personal loss — with more dignity, wisdom, and optimism than Joanna Macy during her six decades as a Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, and pioneering philosopher of ecology. Macy is also the world’s…

Erinnert sich noch jemand an Echt? Diese Band aus Flensburg, die kurz vor der Jahrhundertwende lebensabschnittsprägende Parolen in die Köpfe pubertierender Jungen und Mädchen hämmerte? "Alles wird sich ändern, wenn wir groß sind", sangen damals all jene mit, die heute um die dreißig sind. "Meine…

Klar rührt mich so was auch! Bilder, auf denen Soldaten ihren Frauen und Freundinnen vor den Kameras „Auf Wiedersehen“ sagen. Filme, in denen Paare sich tränen- und umarmungsreich auf dem Bahnsteig verabschieden. Ein Paar vor der Sicherheitskontrolle am Flughafen, das sich in den Armen liegt, bis…

Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into space. The other gets a job as an astronaut, too, but on this occasion he decides to stay home. After a year in space, the traveling twin returns home and they reunite. Are the identical twins still…