The Insider News

Martin Kleppmann’s blog[^]:

Pretty much everyone agrees that if you have a choice between a simpler software design and a more complex design, all else being equal, that simpler is better. It is also widely thought to be worthwhile to deliberately invest in simplicity — for example, to spend effort refactoring existing code into a cleaner design — because the one-off cost of refactoring today is easily offset by the benefits of easier maintenance tomorrow. Also, much thought by many smart people has gone into finding ways of breaking down complex systems into manageable parts with manageable dependencies.... But there is a subtlety that I have been missing in discussions about software complexity, that I feel somewhat ambivalent about, and that I think is worth discussing. It concerns the points where external humans (people outside of the team maintaining the system) touch the system — as developers using an API exposed by the system, or as end users interacting with a user interface.

Small Basic[^]:

In the spirit of the early days of PC programming, here is my proposal to all of you: The 50 Line Small Basic Challenge! I proposed this challenge about three years ago as the "25 Line Challenge", and it was such a success that it spawned a competition to see who could squeeze the most complex code into the smallest space. The results were brilliant. It was quickly discovered that you could use the String and Stack based nature of the arrays to produce some startlingly compact, obfuscated and unreadable code.

TED.com[^]:

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

webplatform.org[^]:

Web Platform Docs is a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. Even though Web Platform Docs is still in alpha, you can already find lots of valuable content on the site.... In the future, Web Platform Docs will include even more content for you to explore such as live code examples, resources for educators and much more. To get there faster, we’d like to invite you to also contribute your knowledge. We hope you will join us!

netvlies.nl[^]:

Apple’s Retina revolution is an interesting evolution that is turning the design world upside down. The Retina display has a high enough pixel density to prevent pixelation to be noticable to the human eye. Therefore a Retina display is a lot sharper and more pleasant to look at. Apple has doubled the amount of horizontal and vertical pixels on the iPhone, The New iPad, and now also on the new MacBookPro. The Retina revolution is irreversible, and other companies have already started or will also start implementing this new Retina technology.

The Washington Post[^]:

Swipe, swipe, pinch-zoom. Fifth-grader Josephine Nguyen is researching the definition of an adverb on her iPad and her fingers are flying across the screen. Her 20 classmates are hunched over their own tablets doing the same. Conspicuously absent from this modern scene of high-tech learning: a mouse.

PandaWhale[^]:

I believe that the API contributed hugely to Twitter's growth, which was really kind of miraculous since nothing about it was particularly well-designed. For one thing it has always been pretty fail-y, even for OAuth. And rather than scaling the service and improving availability, Twitter has consistently fallen back on trying to limit API usage by enacting restrictive policies and rate limits. It's also pretty clear that Twitter never invested much time or thought into refining the API to be a good general resource for developers building arbitrary apps. Rather, the API was built more or less directly out from the same backend infrastructure of the website itself. You have to do significant post-processing of data to get it out of a form that's useful for anything other than replicating the core Twitter experience (which they famously don't want you to do).

Ubuntu[^]:

Now multi-core Android phones can be PCs too. Ubuntu for Android enables high-end Android handsets to run Ubuntu, the world's favourite free PC desktop operating system. So users get the Android they know on the move, but when they connect their phone to a monitor, mouse and keyboard, it becomes a PC.

NYTimes.com[^]:

Mr. Phillips and Vlingo are among the thousands of executives and companies caught in a software patent system that federal judges, economists, policy makers and technology executives say is so flawed that it often stymies innovation. Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Just over a year since the final launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis and the retirement of the Space Transportation System, SpaceX has successfully launched a Dragon spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket — the first ever commercial resupply mission (CRS-1) to the International Space Station.

BBC[^]

Hackers have massacred all the virtual characters in some of online adventure game World of Warcraft's major cities.

Matt Might[^]:

The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate. The halting problem is famous for being undecidable. That is, no algorithm can solve it for all programs and all inputs. This complicates any attempt to predict program behavior: we can make predicting almost any program behavior equivalent to predicting the termination of a nearly identical program. Static analyses are algorithms that do their best to defy the undecidability of the halting problem: they attempt to predict program behavior.

Debugging Toolbox[^]:

There are many free tools used to troubleshoot and debug software. Below I present a list of the tools that my peers and I use most of the time. Though most of the tools below are free Microsoft tools, not all are very well known.

Nettuts+[^]:

When you hear the word “algorithm,” you probably respond in one of three ways: 1. You immediately know and understand what we’re talking about because you studied computer science. 2. You know that algorithms are the workhorses of companies like Google and Facebook, but you aren’t really sure what the word means. 3. You run and hide in fear because everything you know about algorithms reminds you of high-school Calculus nightmares. If you are one of the second two, this article is for you.