The Insider News

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Everyone likes the idea of a cheat mode, or "God Mode." Many years ago - I think around 1993 - Doom introduced the idea of switching a player into God Mode within the game by typing IDDQD. You'd then be invincible and get to feel like you'd discovered an exciting secret "easter egg" in the game. How exciting the the developers hid this for us to find! You may have heard of a "God Mode" hidden in the depths of Windows 8 (or 7 for that matter)... and it "unlocks" a bunch of secret functionality. Let's try.

Tools of Change for Publishing[^]:

While all content is trending towards CSS and JavaScript, the core technologies of the browser, it seems a little weird to position EPUB as being a collection of things that do something different from what browsers do. The nuance might not be clear so here goes... EPUB is essentially a collection of standards wrapped up inside a zip file with a few extra bits that ‘bind’ the content together. The extra bits give metadata and information needed for books including a table of contents, etc. Most of the standards wrapped up by this zip file are standards made for, or predominantly made for, browsers.

Robert MacLean[^]:

One of the toughest problems I faced when I built Notepad Classic was an issue where many functions like Go To & Find were always off a few characters. After a bit of experimenting I noticed a pattern, it was off by the number of characters equal to the line number (0 based).... It turned out that the way the string functions count a line break.

The Cafes[^]:

In my day job I work with a lot of very smart developers who graduated from top university CS programs such as MIT, CMU, and Chicago. They cut their teeth on languages like Haskell, Scheme, and Lisp. They find functional programming to be a natural, intuitive, beautiful, and efficient style of programming. They’re only wrong about one of those. The problem is that my colleagues and I are not writing code in Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Clojure, Scala, or even Ruby or Python. We are writing code in Java, and in Java functional programming is dangerously inefficient.

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.