A profile of the wonderful Internet Archive. No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t. Brewster Kahle is my hero. Kahle…
Jonathan
This weekend, a man wearing a skull mask posted a video on YouTube outlining his plans to murder me. I know his real name. I documented it and sent it to law enforcement, praying something is finally done. I have received these death threats and 43 others in the last five months. This experience is…
I’ve said it before: if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug. It cripples performance.
Simon St. Laurent on uncertainty as a feature, not a bug. As much as I like “the Web Platform” sparing me syllables over HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more, Jeremy Keith is right: treating the web as a platform with all the brittle expectations of a platform is a terrible idea.
I read a long article called “My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord” last month. It was utter crap, and so similar to a lot of utter crap I’ve been reading about the women fighters of the Kurdish YPJ militia in Syria that I realized it’s time somebody called foul on the…
A sugar baby is a young male or female who is financially pampered and cared for by a sugar daddy or sugar mommy in exchange for companionship. Welcome to Sugar Babies, a column about sugar babies and the food they eat on dates. Lula's sugar baby story is different than most—it's really more of a…
Remember that thing with the nude photos of Kim Kardashian in Paper magazine a few weeks ago? Ends up long-time friend of the Internet Greg Knauss is the guy who engineered their server setup to handle the influx of tens of millions of page views. Paul Ford: Hosting that butt is an impressive…
The software industry is a fascinating place. As programmers, we have the best and worst job in the world. What we do is so rewarding and challenging that many of us have been doing it for free since we were eight. We’re paid to think, and to put pure logic into systems that effectively do our…
I was chatting with some people recently about “enterprise software”, trying to figure out exactly what that phrase means (assuming it isn’t referring to the LCARS operating system favoured by the United Federation of Planets). I always thought of enterprise software as “big, bloated and buggy,” but…
But in Paris, the lines between freedom, anger, and extremism are messier than we can admit. Quinn Norton Jan 13, 2015 · 12 min read By Quinn Norton was two hours from Paris when France suffered its most deadly terrorist attack in more than 50 years. Two brothers walked into the office of the…
Well, that was quite a ride. 50K hits on my Angular article (which is a LOT for me), and still people trickling in. Predictably, trolls came out in the comment threads on Hacker News and Reddit, but also some thoughtful reactions, and even a few who defended my article. It almost seems as if the…
Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end (written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com The No True Scotsman fallacy leads to arguments like this: Person A: “No Scotsman ever steals.” Person B:…
There’s more than a whiff of Indie Web thinking in this sequel to the Cluetrain Manifesto from Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger. The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want. It’s quite lawn-off-getty …but I also happen to…
MVC is a phenomenal idea. You have models, which are nice self-contained bits ofstate, views which are nice self-contained bits of UI, and controllers which are niceself-contained bits of … What? I’m certainly not the first person to notice this, but the problem with MVC as given isthat you end up…
Systems (and by "systems" I mean "everything") can be modeled as stocks and flows. [1] Stocks are quantities that accumulate (or disappear) over time, like money in a bank account or code in your repository. They may not be physical, but they are observable in some sense. Flows are how the stock is…
I’m always surprised to find that working web developers often don’t know (or care) about basic protocol-level stuff like when to use GET and when to use POST. My point is that a lot of web developers today are completely ignorant of the protocol that is the basis for their job. A core…
December 2014 American technology companies want the government to make immigrationeasier because they say they can't find enough programmers in theUS. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreignerstake these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers.Who's right? The…
Caleb Wilde wants to reacquaint us all with the uncomfortable, eye-opening realities of death. Continue reading on Medium »
I didn’t go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway, and I have designers and programmers to thank for it. In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook. I know they’re probably pretty proud of the work that went into the “Year in Review” app they designed…
Russ Cox rsc@swtch.com January 2012 Introduction In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google.At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it rangrep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results.Of course, that implementation…
Re:writing, Re:reading, Re:thinking – Web Design in Words The web is read/write. Except, of course, that it isn’t. I’m sure you’re well aware that Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision was of a web that would enable people not only to publish webpages, but also to modify the webpages they visited. He…
Put aside some time to truly savor this piece. So good, in so many ways. ★
Blackstone’s Formulation suggests that “[i]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. It’s a founding principle of America, and our own John Adams expanded upon it thusly: We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished,…
My third post about typography in sci-fi has been gestating for a while now. Indeed, it’s been slowly taking shape – you might say it’s been forming itself inside of me – for really quite some time. I’m delighted to say that it is now ready to burst forth from my allegorical chest, and to spatter…
The last time Frank Rich had a conversation with Chris Rock was in early 1996, when they and the 1950s teen heartthrob Pat Boone were thrown together in a New York television studio as panelists on Bill Maher’s old show Politically Incorrect. This time they had two conversations in a New York hotel…
High-level design principles for JavaScript on the web.
(What a read) RT @Salon: Stop thanking me for my service: "As a veteran, I'm tired of being blindly celebrated." http://t.co/sf0j8V8r5r
Cascading Style Sheets turned 20 years old this week. Happy birthtime, CeeSusS! Bruce interviewed Håkon about the creation of CSS, and it makes for fascinating reading. If you want to dig even deeper, here’s Håkon’s 1994 thesis comparing competing approaches to style sheets. CSS gets a tough rap.
A couple of years ago, a startup called Stamped created an app and service that let you rate anything and everything. Your local doughnut shop? Rate it and tell your friends. Your favourite beach? Rate it and tell your friends. In fact, rate anything you want! But Stamped never anticipated the…
In early September, Brentford owner Matthew Benham held a question and answer session with the club’s supporters. A city trader turned betting professional and football league team supremo, Benham has ushered in a forward-thinking era at Griffin Park where many of the sport’s accepted conventions…
Cool front-end developers are always pushing the envelope , jumping out of their seat to use the latest and greatest and shiniest of UI frameworks and libraries. They are often found bridging the gap between native apps and web and so will strive to make the UI look and behave like an app. Which…
In a war with many villains, these are the good guys. Seven days inside the life-and-death world of Syria’s first responders — the last hope for civilians caught in the chaos. By Matthieu Aikins Photographs and video by Sebastiano Tomada Nominated for a 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature…
Kazi drives a Toyota Prius for Uber in Los Angeles. He hates it. He barely makes minimum wage, and his back hurts after long shifts. But every time a passenger asks what it’s like working for Uber, he lies: “It’s like owning my own business; I love it.” Kazi lies because his job depends on it. After…
Remember when I was talking about refactoring the markup for Code for America? Well, it turns out that Heydon Pickering is way ahead of me. He talks about the viewpoint of a writer (named Victoria) who wants to be able to write in Markdown, or HTML, or a textarea, without having to add classes to
Considering the indie in indie web Craig Mod Sep 2, 2014 · 5 min read Publish everything everywhere. Anything anywhere. Publish twice, thrice, just don’t break the contract if you got paid. Copy the bits, it’s what they want. Data wanna be free. Call the Archive Team. Call the Internet Archive. Call…
Giulio Selvaggi was asleep when the shaking started. It was the night of April 5, 2009, and the head of Italy’s National Earthquake Center had worked late into the night in Rome before going home to crash. From the motion of his bed, Selvaggi could tell the quake was big — but not close. When you’re…
I think for a lot of rappers here, no matter what you value strongly or disregard as minor in a rapper’s style, you’d have to agree with me. My estimation as Lil Wayne as a very good but non-top 10 rapper is actually not one of those rappers, as long as you break agreement with my argument’s premise…
You are a threat. It’s a strong word. I don’t mean that you intend pain, injury, or damage. But I’m an introvert and you – as a new unknown human – are a threat to me. I don’t know what you want and you most definitely want something and until I figure that out, you’re a threat. See… I have control…
If you’re looking for something good to read to finish the weekend, you’ll find nothing better than Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 profile of McSorley’s Old Ale House, newly (but I think only temporarily) freed from the confines of The New Yorker’s paywall. Just read the first paragraph and see how Mitche
08.13. 2014 It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB. Hey, wake up. God is great.…
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