Still a big list but improving from past ones ;)
- "Before scaling up your methodology, consider scaling down the mess. That often is a better solution" @gasproni
- The /bin/true Command and Copyright: An incredibly stupid example of copyrights, thankfully the solution is easy and faster.
- Exploding Git Repositories: Similar to XML bombs and Zip bombs, now how to OOM your repository server.
- Loot Boxes Are Designed To Exploit Us + Gamers Like Opening Loot Boxes Too Much to Stop Now, Even at the Expense of Balanced Gameplay: In the past we had the physical collectible kiosk cards (about movies, TV series...), now is the digital era, but everything is so much simpler to grab your money. I personally hate this mechanics in videogames so much I either don't play them or just cheat the "money" to get unlimited units (if is a singleplayer game), but on the other hand games like Diablo 3 have been abusing the psychology of (perfectly calculated) random loots since before this loot boxes madness... The only videogame I see balancing this pretty well is Hearthstone (but because there I think devs make you pay for playing arenas/tournaments instead of for the cards themselves).
- NGINX Rate Limiting: Interesting article on how to use Nginx's builtin rate limiting features to control HTTP traffic bursts
- Severe flaw in WPA2 protocol leaves Wi-Fi traffic open to eavesdropping + Key Reinstallation Attacks: Breaking WPA2 by forcing nonce reuse: Very severe Wifi issues... read carefully both links to know the scope and small mitigation steps, but let's hope router manufacturers rush to provide patches.
- Introducing Lifecycle Policies for Amazon EC2 Container Registry: ECR is slowly getting better, now supporting specifying policies to kill old container images.
- Finding Truth in History: Some highlights: "History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events"; "...its complexity makes it difficult for us to learn exactly why things happened the way they did"; "Finding truth in history is about understanding that this truth is not absolute".
- One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end: A melancholic story of Twitter from its early times to the hate pool it is now. Plus this sentence from the text: "when leadership doesn’t want something fixed it’s close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn’t see something as a problem, it’s not getting fixed at all"
- Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia: It seems I'm not alone, and that there are way more extreme cases than just wanting to keep (some) privacy. Very interesting read, which also touches the "variable rewards" topic (loot boxes thing)
- Activision patent matchmaking system pushing microtransactions: If loot boxes issues weren't enough, now this... unbalancing and tweaking matchmaking rules to maximize benefit from buying virtual items and faking for you a sensation of having done well (by matching where your new shiny object outmatches other players who didn't paid for it). So sad to see videogames evolve to this.
- Why Trello Failed to Build a $1 Billion+ Business: "Why I wish I'd sell a company for 425 million dollars". Not a bad read but I personally disagree with the point of view of making your product bigger, fatter and full of features "to better sell it". IMHO Trello decided to stick to a "everyone gets most features" plan and kudos for that (and for the money of the buyout).
- The pitfalls of A/B testing in social networks: On the complexities of A/B testing, community-based A/B testing and specific dating sites challenges. Interesting reading, and I agree with the "you can't really trust anything from an A/B test in social networks" sentence (except maybe if you're Facebook with so many millions of users).
- Adding Kubernetes support in the Docker platform: Unexpected but interesting move!
- Hey Siri: An On-device DNN-powered Voice Trigger for Apple’s Personal Assistant: Extense and detailed (at least for noobs like me) article on how Siri works, really interesting reading.
- Why Surge Prices Make Us So Mad: What Springsteen, Home Depot and a Nobel Winner Know: Really interesting the "please the fans" approach of not too high ticket prices despite demand. Well, and in general the whole article is worth reading. Again Uber gets some hits for being the bad example...
- Windows now includes gaming cheat detection at the system level: Ugh... I'm stuck with Windows 7 for gaming and as time goes by, reasons pile up to keep doing so. Hopefully as almost nobody uses the Universal Windows Platform won't gain traction but I really dislike this invasive "protections".
- Nielsen says it can now measure Netflix streaming: It all sounds "curious" until you realize that in order to measure what you're watching, they have to be listening, right? And with this smart TVs that have already been proven multiple times to send data to the manufacturers, could now mean you might provide that data unwittingly...
- Polygonal Planet Project, a study in tilesets: Beautiful WebGL mini-planet renderer
- Chrome Dev Summit 2017: All the videos from this Google event.
- Pay with Google and speed through checkout: New payment system which promotes both a quick process and no transaction fees... which is nice to hear but makes me wonder if they either want to enter the market or they plan to monetize your shopping behaviours, etc.
- The scale of tech winners: " the four leading tech companies of the current cycle (outside China), Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, or ‘GAFA’, have together over three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined (‘Wintel’, the dominant partnership of the previous cycle), and close to six times that of IBM. They have far more employees, and they invest far more."
- Firefox 58 warns you if sites use Canvas image data: Nice that at least one browser cares about this and removes the need for extensions/addons...
- Google Colaboratory: Basically they've setup a free google-hosted jupyter notebook.
- Saying Goodbye to Firebug: Firefox 57 will kill FireBug, but as everything is already on the Dev Tools, is just an expected and unalarming passing. Circa 2009 FireBug was the only and best tool for web development and Javascript debugging :_)
- Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility: Amazon keeps growing their could-provided database services... 3x throughput, 6-way replication and up to 64TB, not bad for huge amounts of data!
- Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL adds high availability and replication: And Google Cloud Platform fights back against AWS by also offering their hosted PG with steroids.
- Announcing Snyk-Powered Linting in Sonar: A vulnerable JavaScript libraries linter, both installable from npm and able to test from the web. Interesting to detect obsolete and vulnerable Javascript.
- DjangoCon US 2017 and PyGotham 2017: Talks from this two Python-related events are available.
- new "Activity Recognition" Android permission: that shares with apps whether you're walking, driving, sitting... Another darky step, especially since you cannot disable it!
- uncaptcha: 85% success rate defeating Google Captcha (via the audio mode) is quite decent for automation...
- Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens: I'm speechless...
- How the Frightful Five Put Start-Ups in a Lose-Lose Situation: From Spain the scenario doesn't looks as grim, but at least there's hope with some of the new players that enter the market, but it is true that many huge companies eat smaller ones and then they dissapear (and their products die)
- Mobile @Scale 2017 recap: Quite out of the ordinary scenarios but no less interesting talks
- A surge of sites and apps are exhausting your CPU to mine cryptocurrency: Because as usual, instead of protecting users (visitors on this case), the mandatory opt-in version is late and does not block existing setups. Another reason to have a Javascript disabling extension installed in your browser...
- A list of everything that could go in the
<head>of your document: Very cool resource for html templating. - Documentary on the 80s and 90s Demoscene: The Art Of The Algorithms: Youtube documentary about the Hungarian demoscene. A bit narrowed on scope but still interesting to watch if you like the topic.
- How Netflix works: the (hugely simplified) complex stuff that happens every time you hit Play: Nice entry-level description of how Netflix (but could be generalized to video streaming) works.
- "What's the difference between AI and ML? It's AI when you're raising money, it's ML when you're trying to hire people" @WAWilsonIV
- The Numbers on Your Memory Card Explained: To handle with the mess of speeds, compatibilities and strange codes on them.
- One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week: It is sad that is not a greener option (and seems to be getting worse as transaction calculations cost grows).
- Waymo's fully self-driving cars are here: Despite being a seemingly low-risk scenario (I can’t imagine yet in a huge city center), level 4 self-driving cars and this video look to me like real science fiction.
- GitHub welcomes all CI tools: Nice list of the most used Continuous Integration tools. It is a bit mixed as some like Jenkins don't offer SaaS while CircleCI or TravisCI do, but based on my experience I highly recommend any of the top 3 ones (top 2 if you don't want to self-host and maintain it).
- PostGIS Performance Profiling: Good intro to what happens when you render map tiles regarding using PostGIS and some optimizations.