When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose

The date was 15 July 1969. As the Saturn V rocket towered over the launchpad, about to send the first men to the moon, two dozen black families from poor parts of the south, accompanied by mules and w

By Alex Abella If you think the Internet came out of Silicon Valley, that NASA planned the first satellite to orbit Earth, or that IBM created the modern computer—think again. Each one of these breakt

I don't know of any ludicrous speeding tickets so I can't participate in today's QOTD, but it did remind me of my favorite SR-71 story. This is an expanded excerpt from Brian Schul 's book Sled Driver : Flying the World's Fastest Jet. (which happens to be out of print and ludicrously expensive now,…

It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind a

Tim Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both bro

When I began my career in elementary particle physics, the great figures who taught and inspired me had been part of the Manhattan Project generation that developed the atomic bomb. They were proud to

Yesterday I shared a brief passage from W.E.B. DuBois on Confederate monuments. Below is an short essay from DuBois on Robert E. Lee’s legacy published in 1928. Source: The Crisis, March 1928, v.35, n

Radar It's time to stop cursing the network we have and build the network we want. July 13, 2017 Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. On July 12, users of

A disembodied voice sounded over a loudspeaker. “Incoming. Take cover,” it warned to anyone within earshot. Then, the sirens began to wail. Erin Delaney assumed it was a drill. She peeked down the hal

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Karim Said of NASA. Karim was instrumental in NASA’s successful HTTPS and HSTS migration, and we’re happy to help Karim share the lessons NASA learned from that

6 min read· Mar 21, 2017 -- Two and a half years ago, I dialed in to a videoconference from my office at Google DC for what I thought would be a routine meeting. A colleague and I were talking to Mike

Apr 3, 2017 How To Secure Your Web App With HTTP Headers About The Author Hagay has been busy building software for the past 15 years, and still enjoys every bit of it (literally)! He engineered and s

When WIRED asked me to guest-edit the November issue, I didn’t hesitate. I know it’s the height of election season, and I happen to have a day job that keeps me pretty busy. But given the chance to im

In the early years of this blog I wrote a lot about the personal struggles of people who had attained financial independence only to find out that it revealed that money was not what was standing in t

I gave the closing talk at the Render conference in Oxford a few weeks back. It was a very smoothly-run event, the spiritual successor to jQuery UK. In amongst the mix of talks there were a few emergi

From Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times DealBook: A billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur was outed as being gay by a media organization. His friends suffered at the hands of the same gossip s

May 23, 2016 Developing Dependency Awareness About The Author As would be expected from a former manager of the Web Standards Project , Aaron Gustafson is passionate about web standards and accessibil

Published inMaking Instapaper · 4 min read· Oct 23, 2014 -- … we just don’t know it yet. I first encountered the Content Security Policy HTTP header earlier this year when one of our users reported th

Published inChronic Build Failure · 6 min read· Feb 17, 2016 -- So much of our time as software developers is spent maintaining existing applications and services. I’ve always taken this as a given an

Once in a while—not quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to be a trope—people in the United States will freak out because a huge number of highly popular websites and services have

I’ll Never Be My Wife’s Equal Sometimes partnership is learning to be second best. Illustration by Kelsey Dake L aura, my wife, is smarter than I am. She has almost double the degrees. (This bit shouldn’t be entirely surprising; the gap between college and graduate degree attainment for men and…

The Internet of Things is starting to emerge. You can tell it’s just starting, because we’re still using the ungainly name ‘‘Internet of Things.’’ It’s one of those coinages that tells you that we don

By Hossein Derakhshan Illustrations by Tim McDonagh Seven months ago, I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled on the top floor of a building in a vibrant central ne

It’s been three months since we officially declared performance bankruptcy, which means it’s time to assess and highlight some of the optimizations we’ve made over that time. Our focus has been on imp

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like

This week I had something akin to an existential crisis. The whole thing was solely in my head, and alarming in intensity. If you ask me what triggered it, I couldn’t tell you. Though it might have be

The way forward Many believe we should leave the term “progressive enhancement” behind and start anew, but why not educate developers, clients and stakeholders and change many of the misconceptions su

Bring it! TransIP is in 2003 ontstaan vanuit de gedachte dat alles altijd beter kan. Door te blijven innoveren en continu onze producten en diensten te verbeteren zijn we uitgegroeid tot de grootste v

What is JavaScript Dependency? JavaScript Dependency refers to the reliance of a JavaScript code on other JavaScript files or libraries to function correctly. For instance, if a JavaScript file uses f

The internet is full of stories of “dream” agency environments: Google’s “sleep pods,” Yelp’s KegMate, this place’s air hockey table, that joint’s Zen rock garden. They read well in viral articles int