The Insider News

Ariya Hidayat[^]:

After you’ve seen the chart of JavaScript keywords distribution, it’s time to go a bit deeper to the syntax level. This time let’s find out the most popular JavaScript statements.

good coders code, great reuse[^]:

I was implementing password authentication for VNC in node.js the other day and faced a problem where it would just never successfully authenticate. I checked my implementation several times and it seemed fine. Then I tried to implement it in Python just to see if I was missing something obvious. Let's go to the code and see what's happening.

Paracode[^]:

You might or might not have heard about the 501 manifesto. A 501 programmer is the one that runs out of the office at 5:01, regardless of any importance of him staying and keep his responsibilities aligned. The addendum of pitying open source or programmers who love what they’re doing is pretty insulting. We (programmers) are a culture now, and usually the passionate ones are the ones that are being mocked.

I, Cringely[^]:

Today at IBM the US workers who try to save the business are the first in line to lose their jobs. Management accountability is gone. The people who mess up get to keep their jobs; and those trying to retain the business lose their jobs. How fair is that?

The Atlantic[^]:

Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that's not all: in the next year that number is going to double, and the year after that it will double again, and so on and so on.

The Endeavour[^]:

What is randomness? Nobody knows, or at least there’s no consensus. Everybody has some vague ideas what randomness is, but when you dig into it deeply enough you find all kinds of philosophical quandaries.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices?

Need for Air[^]:

The game of go is very interesting from an AI programmer’s point of view, because of how difficult it is to make a computer compete against a strong human and how researchers approached the problem. Paradoxically, the use of randomly played games has helped computers get much stronger.