Update : It's the day after Thanksgiving in the US, meaning most Ars staffers are on the lookout for deals rather than potential stories. With folks off for the holiday, we're resurfacing this consume

Say you run a new team. You have carte blanche to implement any policies you want to make the people more productive and the code less buggy. What do you do? Careers have been built selling the answer

In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up

In his seminal book Seeing Like a State , James Scott describes what he calls “high modernists:” lovers of orders who mistake complexity for chaos, and rush to rearrange it from the ground up in a mor

Nobody wants to leave their apartment anymore. That’s the prevailing sentiment on the internet, anyway. Mean Girls memes and Viola Davis gifs celebrate the joy of canceling plans. Essays offer neurosc

If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had g

The majority of meetings are a waste of time. And in my opinion, one flavor of meeting that tops the charts in uselessness is the “status update” meeting. You know this meeting— the meeting where everyone gets together to share what they’ve been doing. It’s ironic that meetings like this exist…

Those who know about us have power over us. Obfuscation may be our best digital weapon. There are still ways to carve out spaces of resistance, counterargument, and autonomy. Source image: Lianhao Qu,

Published in Curiosity by Design · 3 min read · Oct 15, 2019 -- A plain language word list for UX writing and help content to make your writing sound more human. Illustration by Anne Smith At SurveyMo

Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images “I cheated on my ex during our relationship and she found out shortly after we broke up,” a Reddit user posting from the burner account Khaleesiscorned wrote in the spring

Engadget investigates: Is it "iPod shuffles" or "iPods shuffle"? https://t.co/XFHYsqQunn

How Pebble’s watches have stuck around is a fascinating story. A crazy dedicated community reverse engineered their servers and set up their own infrastructure. The watches are still running strong, three years after the company failed. https://t.co/AyA6LOVURb

We are being lazy if there’s something that we ought to do but are reluctant to do because of the effort involved. We do it badly, or do something less strenuous or less boring, or just remain idle. I

Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in tur

It’s hard for me to write about the differences between Android and iOS, and I struggle to comprehend how people go about it. So if you are looking for that kind of overview you are going to be disapp

neuroscience To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight September 24, 2019 A brain circuit that suppresses distracting sensory information holds important clues about attention and othe

11 Answers 11 Sorted by: Reset to default 55 This is a topic near and dear to my heart... This makes me think there's something systemic that's contributing , something that works against good people

Orlando Ferguson's Flat Earth Map of 1893 mocked 'round earth believers' as seen in this detail from the map's margins. PUBLIC DOMAIN Please log in to bookmark this story. Log In Create Free Account C

In the past year, I’ve been on a mission to pester as many people in my life as possible. The first victim was my editor, whom I abruptly asked one morning to stop messaging me about story ideas on ou

I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs , Uber's

Lockheed's A-12 Oxcart spy plane, which the company developed for the Central Intelligence Agency, was a direct response to the growing vulnerability of its earlier U-2 Dragon Lady to hostile air defe

Every now and then an idea just hits you like a ton of bricks. Have you ever experienced that? You’re reading something, or listening to something, or driving to work and thinking about nothing in par

Back in 2012, in a possibly unasked-for departure from his usual writing on food (classic Kenji!), Kenji published an article called "Our Secret List of Banned Words," in which he shared the words and

7 min read · Aug 20, 2018 -- Our quest for meaning ultimately distorts our understanding of what creates success. I’m going to take a break from writing about mainframes to do something a bit differen

T he ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and

Actually quite clever: "Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt" – Peter T Leeson | Aeon Ideas https://t.co/QQQOjC66nd https://t.co/8BFAVbW0DO

I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format. First, they claim that hiring is broken . Next, they descr

Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for s

Before his resignation in late 2017 , Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick faced more than his fair share of scandals . But by far the most (read: least) important of these was Kalanick's oft - repeated cl

When I graduated and started at Atomic, I had a lot of anxiety because I felt like I was surrounded by wizards . I’ve spent the last three years learning to think like a wizard, to conjure joy from pa

An ‘Atlantic’ cover article claimed to have closed the case on the unexplained disappearance of MH370 in 2014, but there are still gaps in the story Published in OneZero · 11 min read · Jun 28, 2019 -

3 min read · Jun 27, 2019 -- Images from Hand Signals on Wikipedia I take issue with a lot of standard advice. “Pick your battles” is terrible, and “Stay in your lane” is something of a trigger phrase

If I have to listen to one more banal ode to “hard work”, I’m going to puke. It’s such a trite tribute that keeps getting heaped on anyone who’s ever become even mildly successful, as though it was so

A common debate in software development projects is between spending time on improving the quality of the software versus concentrating on releasing more valuable features. Usually the pressure to del