The Insider News

Stack Exchange[^]:

Ask Patents is a new Stack Exchange site launching today that allows anyone to participate in the patent examination process. It’s a collaborative effort, supported by Stack Exchange, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Google Patent Search team. It’s very exciting, because it is opening up a process that has been conducted behind closed doors for over 200 years. Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software, a field that is near and dear to us.

The Next Web[^]:

On Wednesday, Sophos antivirus products did something very wrong: they started detecting false positives. The company has since fixed the issue, but only on Thursday did it become clear what the fiasco was all about: the Sophos software was detecting its own binaries as malware. Here’s what happened.

CodeProject[^]:

The design of CodeProject has changed over the years, as one would hope and expect. The design, however, was often a result of expedience over planning and as such it often became, well, a little haphazard and often more thought was put into cramming as much as possible on a page instead of thinking about what should actually be on a page.

Yang, who had a PhD in physics and started working for CME in 2000, wrote computer code for the company and had access to the company's proprietary software for its global trading platform.

Bastard Programmer from Hell
if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews.

programming in the twenty-first century[^]:

Why did the Forth community expend so much effort gazing inward, constantly rethinking and rewriting the language instead of building applications that incidentally happened to be written in Forth? Why was there such emphasis on machine-level efficiency instead of developer productivity? In 2012 it all seems like so much madness, considering that I could write a Forth interpreter in Lua that when running on an iPhone from a couple generations back would be 10,000 times faster than the most finely crafted commercial Forth of 30 years ago. I'm not even considering the tremendous hardware in any consumer-level desktop.

Less Than Dot[^]:

Yes it is finally here. The yield keyword has come to VB.Net. It has been in C# for a while. This is all in attempt, no doubt, to make C# and VB.Net a bit more compatible. To annoy us less when you have to use the other language. To make our lives easier and more comfortable. Alas they failed again.

UX Movement[^]:

In today’s age of instant gratification, making users wait too long for your application to load is a user experience issue. If users get the feeling that your application loads too slow, they’ll grow impatient, and spend their time elsewhere. While there are technical things you can do to speed up load times, some feature-rich applications have no choice but to make users wait a while in order for the application to work properly. When you’ve optimized your application all you can and it still feels slow, there’s a way you can speed up your user’s sense of time to make them feel like your application loads faster than it really does.

Michael O.Church[^]:

One of the easiest ways for an epithet to lose its value is for it to become over-broad, which causes it to mean little more than “I don’t like this”. Case in point is the term, “spaghetti code”, which people often use interchangeably with “bad code”. The problem is that not all bad code is spaghetti code. Spaghetti code is an especially virulent but specific kind of bad code, and its particular badness is instructive in how we develop software.

Leif Singer's Blog[^]:

Previous research suggests that the publicity on GitHub that is making developers’ actions and interactions more visible might have an effect on how software development practices are communicated and how they diffuse in projects. My colleagues and I wondered: which influence does this have on testing practices? Does this create new challenges, and if so, how do developers cope with them? Which strategies do members of GitHub use to create a beneficial testing culture in their projects?

Edge[^]:

With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society.

GigaOm[^]:

It is hard to imagine that it has only been five years since the smartphone revolution started in earnest. The sensor driven modern marvels are not only redefining how we interact with the world, but they are also having unintended consequences. Like helping make cheaper robots.

Steve Olsen[^]:

The GIF graphics file format was invented by CompuServe in 1987. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce "GIF": like "jif" as in the peanut butter, or with a hard 'g' as in "gift" as a majority of Mac users seem to prefer. With this page I intend to clear this up once and for all...

Coderoshi[^]:

An organization can actually be too smart for its own good... they can be too Egghead to talk to your average person. If your group is run by ten 160 IQ people, you're probably going to do amazing work. Sadly, most people probably won't ever know it. Just as the Dunning-Kruger Effect points out, it takes knowledge to recognize genuine knowledge in others.

Math Hombre[^]:

I've been asked multiple times this week about good iPad apps for math... so time to put together a list. I have not had an opportunity to use most of these with students yet, so I'm going on my impressions and recommendations. Many of these do have android versions.