The full story with the mindblowing rocket @elonmusk & @SpaceX just announced and why you might end up on it one day https://t.co/Ae9xdh1H8s https://t.co/jBE2BHwL3Q

With recent efforts at drafting a constitution for NZ stalled, a new and engaging approach is called for: https://t.co/5dAAl2u6Rq

Why is there a Swarbrick-shaped hole in the Herald’s 23-page election guide? Hayden Donnell has a whinge. The Herald’s recent local body election guide is mostly unremarkable. There are interviews with the main mayoral contenders. An obligatory trudge through the wards. An even more obligatory…

I started a new experiment the other day, born out of a few comments from readers. They all remarked how much better it is to edit writing with the software keyboard, over a physical one on the iPad. Which is funny because I was actually thinking about working on setting up a mechanical keyboard…

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a…

Path tracing is a method for generating digital images by simulating how light would interact with objects in a virtual world. The path of light is traced by shooting rays (line segments) into the scene and tracking them as they bounce between objects. Path tracing gets its name from calculating the…

National MP Nuk Korako has the luck of the draw earlier this week, when his ‘lost luggage’ member’s bill was drawn from the biscuit tin of democracy that the Office of the Clerk keeps to conduct the member’s bill ballot. Bills, particularly amendment bills, can be hard to grasp. You might have to…

T en years ago I found myself standing outside the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. I looked out over acres of glinting windshields in a packed parking lot. I’d reached this spot by driving from Ann Arbor on the I-94, where the highway sometimes reaches 12 lanes across, in a little…

Thoughts on building a remote culture, from a remote CEO Paul Farnell 6 min read· Aug 4, 2016 -- One of our annual meet ups. This was a beer tasting in Vermont. (Revised August 2022) One of my goals as the CEO of Litmus is to build the company I want to work for. It’s the reason we offer 28 days of…

In Part 1 of this post, I used the example of iceblocks to explain how well-intentioned efforts to reduce New Zealand’s ‘official’ dirty energy* emissions can actually increase the global total of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere. I concluded that an approach to discouraging dirty energy…

Announcing 'the War for Auckland', the most ambitious project we've ever attempted https://t.co/FxaeQiDfhT please read, share and help

A non-homeowner's guide to the bubble that is going to take you all down https://t.co/xJCK5TYOy6

Thomi Richards https://kiwi.pycon.org/schedule/presentation/75/ Connascence is the taxonomy of coupling: it allows us to specify how two or more pieces of code are connected, and suggests ways of minimising the impact of that coupling. Ultimately this allows developers to write software that is more…

The TV upfronts that I wrote about last week may seem like an odd entry point to discuss Brexit and its relationship to technology, but the core insight in that piece is critical. From my follow-up in The Daily Update: While it is fine and useful to look at industries like TV or transportation or…

Fog Creek Software has been going for over 15 years . During that time we’ve created many products. Some have worked out well (like FogBugz , Stack Overflow , and Trello ), others, not so well. For our latest creation, HyperDev , a developer playground for full-stack web apps, it’s too early to…

Credit: Flickr / Takashi Hososhima The two hardest things about becoming a manager have been: 1) the emotional exhaustion, and 2) letting go of the part of my identity that was tied up in writing code. I accepted that writing code wasn’t the best thing I could do reasonably quickly, but it took…

On school deciles as code for things unsaid. https://t.co/mH9ldQH9RP #edchatnz

Some of the issues with Customs having the power to force people to unlock/decrypt devices at the border: https://t.co/QMB8TAesZd

Ryan McGeehan 6 min read· Feb 6, 2015 -- I want to help you through your first security incident. It will not be easy. We’ll assume you and the team have never really thought about security before and are now left to manage the panic response after the breach. In other words you’re totally fucked.…

After sharing the idea behind this post with Bruce Schneier, I’ve been encouraged to think a little more about what Werewolf can teach us about trust, security and rational choices in communities that are, or are at risk of, being infiltrated by a threat. I’m not a security expert, but I do spend a…

TL:DR You can not observe a developer without altering their behavior. First a story. Several years ago I worked on a largish project as one of a team of developers. We were building an internal system to support an existing business process. Initially things went very well. The user requirements…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. In a post last year, we laid out the human lifespan visually. By years: By months: And by weeks: While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. But fuck it. The days…

One of New Zealand’s best and most illustrious book editors, Stephen Stratford (“I am a polite person, mostly”), vents about having to deal with writers and publishers. What I dread #1 When meeting someone new, the question I most dread is, “What do you do?” It is really hard to answer. As a…

A JOINT Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles. But it’s all rhetoric and no data , which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed…

Comments allow readers to respond to an article instantly, asking questions, pointing out errors, giving new leads. At their best, comment threads are thoughtful, enlightening, funny: online communities where readers interact with journalists and others in ways that enrich the Guardian’s journalism.…

Annals of Medicine Personal Best September 26, 2011 No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.Illustration by Barry Blitt I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating…

I am arriving in Brussels. The train from London is full of the usual Chinese tourists and bored businesspeople. The city doesn’t, contrary to the impression given by CNN, resemble Kabul. Rows and rows of untouched houses scream bourgeois calm (actually, they gently whisper bourgeois calm). As I…

A Hacker’s Guide to Bending the Universe If you’re going to conquer the world, you can’t let a broken CRT monitor stand in your way Gif by Nihil Minus W hen it’s functioning properly, a cathode ray tube is an engineering marvel more impressive than the Golden Gate Bridge. You might have seen a tube…

UPDATE: I’ve added a short section on the topic of . I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical…

Contents: | | Introduction: Why good commit messages matter If you browse the log of any random Git repository, you will probably find its commit messages are more or less a mess. For example, take a look at these gems from my early days committing to Spring: Yikes. Compare that with these more…

You’ve probably heard this Seinfeld joke: According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy. Knowing…

Beats: Space Space is where we project our dreams–and our nightmares–of the future. Beats: Food Food structures our day, and food systems shape our world Beats: Disability “Disable” is an active verb, and disability describes the social and environmental barriers that prevent access just as much as…

Business | Schumpeter The fashion for making employees collaborate has gone too far |5 min read IN MODERN business, collaboration is next to godliness. Firms shove their staff into open-plan offices to encourage serendipitous encounters. Managers oblige their underlings to add new collaborative…