The Insider News

Vinicius Vacanti[^]:

The funny thing is that within a few months of our launch, several competitors emerged and they all had crawlers. But, from our users’s perspective, we were more advanced since we had categorization which was definitely no easily automated task. We didn’t actually build a real crawler for the first 9 months and just kept scaling manually by hiring more data entry professionals. Instead, we were able to focus our resources on improving the product and user acquisition. It’s now clear to me that not building that crawling technology early on was one of the reasons our startup succeeded.

Brian Harry's blog[^]:

Yes, Update 3 is likely the last of the updates to the VS 2012 line. Of course, we'll still continue to fix any critical issues people find but we are winding it down and focusing on VS V.Next. I'd like to think many of the issues you refer to will get addressed there and, if not, I hope we'll get to them in the V.Next update train. Referring to the above - Update 3 is the update where we slow down the churn, address remaining high impact customer issues and any regressions introduced in Update 2.

Computational Complexity[^]:

Following the cupholder principle, GPUs began to evolve to allow easier to access APIs from more common programming languages becoming General Purpose GPU or GPGPUs. Several systems researchers at Georgia Tech and elsewhere are now redesigning chip layouts to make the best most efficient uses of CPUs and GPGPUs. The theory community hasn't seem to catch on yet. There should be some nice theoretical model that captures the vector and other operations of a GPGPU and then we should search for algorithms that make the best use of the hardware.

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

As a fair warning to the reader, these primers are a bit more terse than what you’d find in your average textbook. I only introduce the bare minimum required to understand the main content posts, so there are carefully chosen gaps whose exclusion is necessary for time’s sake. If the reader is confused about something, or wants a deeper explanation of a concept we deliberately leave out, feel free to leave a comment asking about it and we will do our best to fill in the gaps.

Channel 9[^]:

In this episode Nick Harris and Nathan Totten are joined by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Windows Azure, who introduces us to the new Windows Azure SDK 2.0. Scott shows off a few of the many new features in SDK 2.0 including the new Table Explorer and Query Builder. He demonstrates several of the new diagnostics features for Cloud Services and Web Sites, and he deploys a Cloud Service using the new parallel upgrade.

Ars Technica[^]:

Unveiled in 2005, Arduino boards don't have the CPU horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. They don't run a full PC operating system either. Arduino isn't obsolete, though—in fact, its plethora of connectivity options makes it the better choice for many electronics projects.... Last December, we featured 10 of the most amazing Raspberry Pi projects, including arcade cabinets, robotics, and a wearable computer. This one goes to 11—as in, we'll show you 11 awesome things hackers and electronics enthusiasts have created with the Arduino.

iFixit[^]:

Discover the Ouya: "a new kind of game console." This Android-powered system is the first of its kind. It's specifically designed to be open to professional and amateur game designers alike, with free software development tools included with every console. Full disclosure: The folks at Ouya tout this to be "the first totally open video game console." They have so much confidence in the Ouya, in fact, that they sent us a retail unit to take apart. Game on, folks.

Onion Inc.'s Tech Blog[^]:

After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.

paidContent[^]:

Microsoft, which already has a stake in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college bookstore businesses, is offering to buy them outright for $1 billion, according to a report in TechCrunch, based on leaked internal documents. The documents also reportedly say that Barnes & Noble plans to discontinue its line of Nook tablets by the end of fiscal year 2014, while letting the e-readers stick around for awhile longer.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day[^]:

On May 9, we invite you to participate in Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital (web, software, mobile, etc.) accessibility and users with different disabilities. The target audience of GAAD is the design, development, usability, and related communities who build, shape, fund and influence technology and its use. While people may be interested in the topic of making technology accessible and usable by persons with disabilities, the reality is that they often do not know how or where to start.

CodeProject[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Dave Auld, a CodeProject star that continues to shine brighter.

Troy Hunt[^]:

A couple of days ago I wrote about Why I am the world’s greatest lover (and other worthless security claims) and it really seemed to resonate with people. In short, whacking a seal on your website that talks about security awesomeness in no way causes security awesomeness.... So let’s check out exactly what’s going on here and you really need video to understand the fatal flaw in the logic of SSL logos coming down over HTTPS.

Jon Gallant[^]:

I’ve struggled with the challenge of work/life balance because I’m interested in so many things. I’ve learned to go through life in seasons and focus on a few things at a time, but it hasn’t always been that way. I don’t have it all figured out, but I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts with the hope that it helps someone that is struggling with balance or someone interested in finding out more about what life is like at Microsoft.

Nettuts+[^]:

Today, ECMAScript 6 is in the process of being finalized. ECMAScript is the foundation of JavaScript and, hence, exploring the proposed features today also means that we get a sneak peak at how we will be writing JavaScript in the near future! In this article, we’ll explore ten new features, with a significant focus on tools, browsers and transpilers.

mezzoblue[^]:

Wow. It’s finally happened. The CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today. The web has come a long way in the past decade. CSS3, HTML5, responsive web design, web fonts, a version of Internet Explorer that doesn’t make you want to commit seppuku every time you debug, and any other progress that we already take for granted. (You can get a sense of just how far we’ve come by reading the original cringe-worthy requirements.)

Devlicio.us[^]:

One of the really powerful features that TypeScript brings to the JavaScript world is some Static Typing, even if it is only at code/compile time. With TypeScript I can say that an object is of a certain type which implies there are only a limited set of properties/methods available to me. This is great, but it does limit the core power of JavaScript and dynamic languages in general.... Long story shot is that even though TypeScript tries to impose Static typing, which is AWESOME in most cases, you can still force it back to dynamic if you want.

Vladimir Vukićević[^]:

At the 2013 Game Developers’ Conference, Alon and I from Mozilla and Josh Adams from Epic Games presented a talk called “Fast and Awesome HTML5 Games”. We surprised people by showing off Unreal Engine 3 running in Firefox — compiled from C++ source with Emscripten, running smoothly and efficiently. Today, Epic is making the Epic Citadel demo available, so that you can try it out for yourself.