Regular expressions inspire fear in new and experienced programmers alike. When I first saw a regular expression — often abbreviated as “regex” — I remember feeling dizzy from looking at the litany of parentheses, asterisks, letters, and numbers. Regular expressions seemed nonsensical, impenetrable.…

An on-the-ground investigation reveals that the U.S.-led battle against ISIS — hailed as the most precise air campaign in history — is killing far more Iraqi civilians than the coalition has acknowledged. In Iraq, an on-the-ground investigation suggests that coalition airstrikes have killed many…

There was one line in TechCrunch’s report about Facebook’s purchase of social app tbh [sic] that made me raise my eyebrows (emphasis mine): Facebook announced it’s acquiring positivity-focused polling startup tbh and will allow it to operate somewhat independently with its own brand. tbh had scored…

The title is pure clickbait, and the moral panic early in this article repeats the Toyota myth, but then it settles down into a fascinating examination of abstractions in programming. On the one hand, there’s the problem of the not enough abstraction: having to write in code is such a…

Cindy Sridharan Aug 11, 2017 · 19 min read In this post, I aim to: — Shed light on some of the presumed benefits of small functions — Explain why I personally think some of the benefits don’t really pan out as well as advertised — Explain why small functions can actually prove counterproductive…

OK…I have to say that, most of the time, I feel a little bit sorry for people who make horrendous translation mistakes. This is not one of those times . This pic came across my desk about nine months ago, and it may just be the worst example of a self-translation disaster I’ve ever seen. In fact,…

You may have heard of Project Quantum… it’s a major rewrite of Firefox’s internals to make Firefox fast. We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser, Servo, and making massive improvements to other parts of the engine. The project has been compared to replacing a jet engine while the jet…

Photo By Fancycrave PEP 498 introduced a new string formatting mechanism known as Literal String Interpolation or more commonly as F-strings (because of the leading f character preceding the string literal) . F-strings provide a concise and convenient way to embed python expressions inside string…

Aug 19th 2017 Created on: 15 August 2017 at 15:15 (Delivered after 1 seconds) From: Larry Page [*********@google.com] To: James Damore [***********@hotmail.com] cc: [all-staff-worldwide@google.com] Subject: Re: “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” Dear James, You’re probably expecting me to start by…

The ocean of ideas, teeming with words and numbers, is underpinned by a vast tectonic plate that’s powerfully transforming the language. It’s the force that gives rise to new continents of meaning, while it inters the remains of countless extinct species. We know its name, but we rarely think about…

Larry Zottarelli, who recently retired from the Voyager flight crew. Credit... Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times Feature As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. Larry Zottarelli, who recently retired…

About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running … More about VitalyFriedman … July 5, 2017 Designing The Perfect Date And Time Picker Upgrade your inbox and get our editors’…

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The trophy cabinet in our Academy at Cobham is full with every notable piece of silverware it can win in development football. The Under-18 Premier League national title secured in May was the last remaining prize now sitting alongside FA Youth Cups, UEFA Youth Leagues and Under-21 titles. Players…

Frances has written up some of the history behind her minting of the term “progressive web app”. She points out that accuracy is secondary to marketing: I keep seeing folks (developers) getting all smart-ass saying they should have been PW “Sites” not “Apps” but I just want to put on the record…

May 29, 2017 To say that I was disappointed when Apple released iOS7 in 2013 is an understatement. To be on-trend, Apple had flattened their entire UI without any real reinforcing principles. This came with countless oversights to the user’s experience which took a backseat to dropping…

One More Thing Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership 05.16.17 On June 7, 2011, a local businessman addressed a meeting of the Cupertino City Council. He had not been on the agenda, but his presence wasn’t a total surprise. Earlier in the year the man had expressed his…

There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit. It’s through this exponential lens that eating the world becomes not just a motto for software at large, but a…

A chance meeting on a minibus in Costa Rica inspired a young American to start crowdfunding healthcare for people all over the world. So what happens when Silicon Valley meets some of the world’s poorest countries? Andrew Hankinson went to Haiti to find out. On the flight to Haiti I sit with a…

Wikimedia / donatas1205 / Billion Photos / vgeny Karandaev / The Atlantic T HE HISTORY Of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas…

There are a lot of scary things happening these days, but here’s what keeps me up late at night. A handful of corporations are turning our open internet into this: These corporations want to lock down the internet and give us access to nothing more than a few walled gardens. They want to burn down…

Our answer machines have an over-confidence problem. Google, Alexa, and Siri often front that they’re providing a definitive answer to questions when they’re on shaky ground—or outright wrong. Google’s Featured Snippets Are Worse Than Fake News , writes Adrianne Jeffries, pointing out the downsides…

Gaia Vince discovers that analysing the genetics of ancient humans means changing ideas about our evolution. The Rock of Gibraltar appears out of the plane window as an immense limestone monolith sharply rearing up from the base of Spain into the Mediterranean. One of the ancient Pillars of…

David Marchese has a terrific interview with David Letterman for New York Magazine: Was it hard to adjust to civilian life? It’s still hard. I have trouble operating the phone. That’s the God’s truth. I needed a pair of shoelaces. And I thought, Hell, where do you get shoelaces? And my friend…

This document goes beyond PEP8 to cover the core of what I think of as great Python style. It is opinionated, but not too opinionated. It goes beyond mere issues of syntax and module layout, and into areas of paradigm, organization, and architecture. I hope it can be a kind of condensed "Strunk &…

T he dystopian genre of books, TV, and film seems like an odd place to look for sanctuary. Following a year in which there seemed to be no upper threshold for chaos—ascendant nativists, refugee crises, political vitriol, and ever-grimmer ecological forecasts all played their part—the dystopian…

Shayla Love’s mother and grandparents lived through China’s Cultural Revolution – now she wants to know what biological traces of their trauma she carries within her today. One night in February 1970 in eastern China, 16-year-old Hongbing Zhang washed dishes and idly listened as his parents…

Thousands of families are still waiting for news of missing loved ones, 25 years after the bloody Balkans war. Ed Vulliamy meets the scientists piecing together the evidence from mass graves, and the relatives hoping for justice – and a body to bury. They are the unquiet dead. Laid out in rows…

If Guillermo Amor wanted to impress you, he wouldn’t have to try very hard. A product of Barcelona’s fabled youth academy, La Masia, he graduated to the first team to become a regular in Johan Cruyff’s ‘Dream Team’ and a Spain international. Amor was an artful midfielder, poised and perceptive,…