the alpha mini-newswire

A similar article from the NYT.

Unfortunately, I didn’t memoize Squished Status, so wasn’t able to submit it on time. Sigh. The problems were fun though - an enjoyable use of a couple of hours during the weekend.

I am rather disappointed at how few of my friends gave this a shot, though!

If I were hiring, I’d much rather see someone’s code on GitHub than a resume.

I imagine pretty much all consumer electronics have this problem, but this is something that I think Apple is well positioned to change.

Huh, I didn’t know this:

Under current law, shareholders can sue corporate boards for not maximizing profits, a risk that hamstrings companies interested in pursuing costly environmental or social initiatives.

Brian Lam on being happier by reducing technology and noise in his life.

“The menu button was a source of frustration for users,” Duarte says. “You never knew if there was going to be any functionality hiding behind that button or not.” While doing baseline user research, the Android team discovered that many users felt dumb using the system because they couldn’t figure out how to access all its features. “We went through and eliminated all the hidden affordances [controls], places in the system where it wasn’t clear what you had to do, or where somebody would have to teach you, or where you’d have to just try it [to figure out what it did],” Duarte says. To reduce the learning curve, all essential actions in each application are right up on the surface screen. “That makes everything much more discoverable and much faster.”

(Emphasis mine.) Remind you of anything? That’s right - this is the same motivation that Apple had in shipping one-button mice by default. Force developers to really think about UX, instead of just cramming everything into the context menu.

This is what my code looks like when I’m writing some short scripts to solve problems. Specifically, those of the Facebook Hacker Cup Qualification Round. If I were being more rigorous, these would probably be a) object-oriented and b) have basic tests.

A neat exploration of lambda calculus using nothing in Ruby except procs.