Way More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About "Animaniacs" »
Exactly what it says.
To the extent that in the future there’s an opportunity with Apple to authenticate through the pay-TV food chain as we’re doing with Microsoft, that’s something that we will participate in.
ESPN’s Sean Bratches, speaking fluent TV Executivese to Bloomberg.
What he’s trying to say is “sure, we’d love to offer live streams of ESPN content on Apple TV to people who are already paying for ESPN through their cable subscription, if Apple’s into that kind of thing.” Hope he’s not holding his breath.
Please Don't Learn To Code »
Jeff Atwood writes about the deeply frustrating “everyone should learn to code” movement, which also frustrates me because it feels symptomatic of a broader trend: a general cultural focus on how software is made over why we make it.
So much of the conversation in programmer circles focuses on things like methodologies, principles, or design patterns. These things are valuable as tools to help craft better code, in the same way that The Elements of Style helps one write better prose, but code isn’t good because it’s DRY or SOLID any more than a novel is good because the writer demonstrates good subject-verb agreement. Talking to fellow programmers sometimes feels too much like going to a seminar on the correct way to use a comma. (Or a semicolon, as it may be.) More code is not a solution for anything.
Fox News’s Shepard Smith reacts to Romney’s reaction to Gingrich’s exit from the Republican presidential race. I promise, it’s priceless.
Billionaire For A Day »
The NYT’s Kevin Roose lives like the 1% for a day, and reports back:
I’m outfitted for the day in a navy pinstripe suit, picked out by Clifton C. Berry, who outfits Wall Street workers with his own line of bespoke menswear. It’s probably the best I’ve looked all year. But I’m way overdressed for a meeting with the billionaire, who is wearing a sweater, jeans and sockless loafers.
During the trip, I ask the billionaire what it’s like to be among the richest people in the world.
“Look,” he says. “I think all it does is make things easier.”
Understatement of the year.
The Magic of Doing One Thing Well »
Or: “Multi-tasking: Threat, or Menace?” Tony Schwartz writes:
What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.
Most companies (including web startups), he said, are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “‘of course’ reaction from their users.”
Puzzled, I looked at him. And then it hit me: Great design means that one look and the end user reacts by knowing what to do with a knob or a button, without as much as even thinking about it. Of course this knob is what turns the volume up, or brings up the home screen.
Christian Lindholm, via Om Malik
The problem with this unsolicited redesign of Typekit from a couple of weeks ago is that, like a lot of unsolicited redesigns, it mistakes a lack of “wow” for a design problem, which the guy solves by adding more popovers, making the gradients eye-searingly bright, and taking over the four corners of the viewport in a very app-like, un-web-like, fashion. But “wow” usually isn’t the solution to a real design problem. Usually, if a design is successful, it shouldn’t seem designed at all.
Show How, Don't Tell What »
Ryan Tomayko on how he manages engineers at GitHub:
I actually don’t show people how to make decisions and ship product in any real direct way. There’s no How To Ship Product training class or anything like that. Instead, I just do work.
I write down ideas and then market them internally. I ask designers about their comps and concept work. I write code with kick ass docs and tests, sometimes while building out the backend for a feature and sometimes just to clean shit up because it needs it. I deploy responsibly because site stability is job number zero. I soft ship new features and try to get other employees to use them. I write and review blog posts and ship features. I fix bugs. I work with support.
That’s just how you ship software product in 2012.
Obama vs. Boehner: Who Killed the Debt Deal? »
Matt Bai tells the long, sad story of last summer’s initially promising but ultimately failed debt negotiations between John Boehner and the White House. In short, it seems the main reason Obama administration should have been less eager to make a deal was because the only people sane enough to negotiate with them (e.g. Boehner, who I wouldn’t previously have described as “sane”) were in no position to promise anything.
Why Facebook Bought Instagram »
Om Malik:
Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.
Bingo.
Buddhism and the Brain »
David Weisman in Seed, on a surprising overlap between what Buddhism teaches and science observes:
Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.
Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’ One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.
Facebook Buys Instagram »
You know this acquisition is different because Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post about it:
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
TechCrunch: Pair Programming Considered Harmful »
I agree with most of this. In my experience, pair programming is very useful as an occasional tool for transferring knowledge (i.e., when one developer knows a lot about something another developer needs to know a lot about). Other than that, I’m really not sure how much more valuable it is than a healthy code review process. That’s not to say developers shouldn’t huddle around a whiteboard or ask for a few minutes to talk or work through a problem. But nonstop pairing, every day? No, thanks.
The tension is between simplicity and obviousness. Eliminating on-screen chrome is simpler, more elegant and beautiful. But Apple’s use of minimal but persistent on-screen chrome makes things more obvious. Big differences can result from a slight shift in priorities: simple and obvious vs. obvious and simple.
John Gruber on Paper, the new iPad drawing app everyone’s talking about. Neither approach is wrong, though because Apple targets a mass audience who aren’t necessarily tech-savvy, obviousness might be a better choice than extreme simplicity.
Facebook May Sue Employers Who Demand Passwords »
This in response to recent reports of employers demanding access to job seekers’ private Facebook profiles. In a blog post, Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, spelled out why demanding a social network password is an even bigger deal than just invading one person’s privacy:
[A]s the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job.
