The Insider News

Hack a Day[^]:

Positioning the solar arrays on the ISS is an incredibly complex task; if parts of the arrays are in the shadow of other parts, they’ll bend due to the temperature difference and eventually break. NASA would like more power to run science experiments and other cool stuff, so they’re turning to hackers so they can optimize the amount of power generated on the ISS.

AnandTech[^]:

Several years in the works, the main claim to fame is that the keyboard is designed from the ground up for ergonomics. To that end, they’ve ditched the traditional layout and staggered keys in order to provide an optimized layout that offers better comfort while typing, but the changes are something that will take a lot of practice typing before you can type anywhere near your regular speed.

The Atlantic[^]:

While many debates over technology and privacy concern obscurity, the term rarely gets used. This is unfortunate, as "privacy" is an over-extended concept. It grabs our attention easily, but is hard to pin down. Sometimes, people talk about privacy when they are worried about confidentiality. Other times they evoke privacy to discuss issues associated with corporate access to personal information. Fortunately, obscurity has a narrower purview.

99U[^]:

One day while driving home, I thought: "Why don’t I just stop using email altogether?" That night while drifting off to sleep I imagined my email-free life. I liked the picture. Within the same week, I made the decision to cut email out of my life. Here's how it worked.

ROUGH TYPE[^]:

It’s that memory-scraping thing that gets me. There’s something poignant about it. You let Watson luxuriate in the hot mess of the Urban Dictionary, opening up all sorts of weird and wonderful new vistas for the straightlaced chap, and then, as soon as he says something a little bit naughty, a little bit off-color, you start cleansing his memory, washing his mind out with soap. That doesn’t sit well with me.

GigaOm[^]:

Nokia has just done something pretty unusual: it’s invited its users to effectively tailor an element of its smartphone hardware to their individual needs. As a Friday present for its more enterprising fans, the Finnish firm announced the release of what it calls a ’3D-printing Development Kit’, or 3DK, for the back shell of its Lumia 820 handset.

http://damienkatz.net[^]

My post The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C generated a ton discussion on Reddit and Hacker News, nearly 1200 comments combined as people got in to all sorts of heated arguments. I also got a bunch of private correspondence about it.
So I'm going to answer some of the most common questions, feedback and misunderstandings it's gotten.

Troy Hunt[^]:

I write a lot about website security. Sometimes I’ll publicly point out flaws in software but there are many, many other times where it remains a private conversation for various reasons. The one common thread across most of these incidents is that as developers, we often make bad security design decisions. It’s us – the organic matter in the software development process – that despite the best of intentions make bad choices that introduce serious risks.

mathbabe[^]:

I’m learning a bit of R in my current stint at ThoughtWorks. Coming from python, I was happy to see most of the plotting functions are very similar, as well as many of the vector-level data handling functions. Besides the fact that lists start at 1 instead of 0, things were looking pretty familiar. But then I came across something that totally changed my mind. In R they have these data frames, which are like massive excel spreadsheets: very structured matrices with named columns and rows, on which you can perform parallelized operations.

Lars Strojny[^]:

PHP is not a “real” or “pure” functional language. Far from it. We don’t have a proper type system, the cool kids make fun of our exotic syntax for closures and we have array_walk() that looks functional but allows altering state. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting building blocks for functional programming.

Sanity Phailed.me[^]:

Math Problem of the Day: In this post, we’ll explore a scenario where the non-commutativityassociativity of floating point arithmetic can lead us into trouble.

hamxiaoz[^]:

So you had a project. You scratched your head a couple of days and came up a really nice and robust design. “The design solves the problems now and it should be able to handle future changes.” You thought that.... Two years later, the ‘future’ has come.

CNET News[^]:

Japanese digital device consumers are some of the savviest in the world. So, a report Thursday showing that the Nexus 7 has bested the iPad in market share is worthy of attention.... Not surprisingly, one of the big draws of the Nexus 7 -- which is co-branded with Asus, the manufacturer of the tablet -- is price, according to Nikkei. It's about a $100 less in Japan than Apple's least expensive tablet, the iPad Mini.

Built on Facts[^]:

In politics we often hear that every vote counts. In Reddit, we can actually figure out how much each vote counts. If I upvote or downvote a post, how far does my individual vote move that post in time?