Internet lore claims Apple modelled their design after much research into sleep breathing rhythms. This piqued my curiosity, how did this wonderful little light work and how true was it to human breathing?
A visual remix of Wikipedia's 188 different cognitive biases that distort and refract our thinking: a beautiful cheat-sheet for your home or workspace.
I feel similarly: it's a scary message! I posted it and emphasized some of the points because I think it's important to not be complacent. If you're a rubyist who lived through the excitement and explosion of 2006-2010-ish, you might dismiss Node.js and friends as fads. You might assume that the rest of the world will have learned from the lessons of the Ruby community. Even if you don't believe those things, I wouldn't blame rubyists for assuming that previous pillars / saviors of the Ruby community — Yehuda, DHH, _Why, Matz, etc. — will soon stand up again and "make things right" by setting the tech community straight as to the benefits of Ruby / Rails.
But what this post concisely shows is that those heroes of the past probably won't. Many of them have moved on. Ruby hasn't been the "new shiny" darling of the open source community for some time. Ruby is in a very delicate transitional time. And unless the current group of active Rubyists take this very seriously, and ask how they (we!) can help make Ruby a durable, meaningful, dynamic, powerful community for the long-term, that much of the efforts and great work of Ruby and Rails will likely forgetten faster than you can say "down-vote".
This link jumps to the actual beginning of the talk, skipping the preamble which is mostly specific to RSpec, focusing instead on the crisis the Ruby community currently faces[1] and the opportunity / responsibility the community has to respond.
[1] namely that the shiny newness of M.E.A.N. and Node/React/Angular plus the widely discussed performance challenges of Ruby & Rails have put Ruby + Rails on the back burner in the zeitgeist.
Few souls on HN will remember as far back as the (ahead of its time) Amiga / NewTek VideoToaster, but Showbox reminds me of how I felt when I first saw the 'Toaster.
One view of Showbox is that it's basically a browser-based version of something that 20 years ago was a industry-changing hybrid hardware/software workstation, and I think that says a lot for how far we've come.
did you consider expanding this into a single page with inter-textual headers, instead of having to click to read each one? would love to speed-surf this :)
Is it? Not sure, but the Coin team went gangbusters on the promotion and it seems to have worked great for them. I couldn't visit any social site today without someone talking about Coin. But I've a feeling that payment cards are far from a winner-take-all business.
The Protean Echo, OTOH, has been in development for some time. Thiago first gave me the demo at the Tech Brewery in Ann Arbor, MI and it blew the doors off anything we'd ever seen that was remotely similar. The form factor of the card itself — clear “Gorilla glass”, like the iPhone screen, with embedded circuits — and the whole user experience are beautiful. I just wish they'd hurry up and release it!
His point was that people could use bare git without github, but many use Github, which isn't free according to three of the four freedoms RMS lists in the essay [1], no matter how much we hackers might love it. Lots of people love Excel, too, but that doesn't make it free software.
[1] Github:
(0) freedom to run the program as you wish - YUP
(1) freedom to study & change the source - NOPE
(2) freedom to make and distribute exact copies - NOT SO MUCH
(3) freedom to make and distribute copies of your modified versions - NO