Links from 2014 (497 links)

The system PA uploaded your personal hospital records to is said to be Google BigQuery. It supports one-click database sharing with any other Google account, and is hosted on servers outside the UK (and possibly outside the EU, in breach of the EU Data Protection Directive). And what they uploaded was the entire shooting match—full personal medical records indexed by NHS patient number—with enough additional data (post code, address, date of birth, gender) to make de-anonymizing the records trivial.

First Movers tend to launch without really fully understanding customer problems or the product features that solve those problems. They guess at their business model and then do premature, loud and aggressive Public Relations hype and early company launches and quickly burn through their cash. This is a great strategy if there’s a bubble occurring in your market or you are going to bet it all on flipping your company for a sale. Otherwise the jury is in. There’s no advantage.

There are people in my profession who think they can ignore this problem. Some are murmuring that this mess is like MMR, a public misunderstanding to be corrected with better PR. They are wrong: it's like nuclear power. Medical data, rarefied and condensed, presents huge power to do good, but it also presents huge risks. When leaked, it cannot be unleaked; when lost, public trust will take decades to regain.

It gets worse.

The internet makes it absurdly easy for marketers to harness the tiniest twinges of boredom or loneliness or desire, channelling them into sales via "variable rewards" – so much more addictive, as Skinner discovered, than predictable ones. A fascinating new book, Hooked, by Nir Eyal, presents itself as a guidebook for companies who want to create "habit-forming products". But it's also a cautionary manual for resisting them. Eyal urges businesses to think ethically. (Creating addictive products you wouldn't use yourself, he says, "is called exploitation".)

"Absurdly easy" may be overstating things. I like the "wouldn't use it yourself" part. Not a bad general guideline.

Self-esteem fits perfectly over the top of the traditional ideal of the free and noble individual, striving to achieve the American dream. The movement’s sin was making it sound easy. It removed the part about striving, replacing it with an unearned assumption of exceptionalism. The lesson became that simply wanting it is enough. You’re special. You deserve it.

The first part of this (at least) is really quite good.

Seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.

However friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane.

Scrum seems to be particularly common as the nominative process the team is following. For many people, this situation is exacerbated by Scrum because Scrum is process that's centered on project management techniques and deliberately omits any technical practices, in contrast to (for example) Extreme Programming.

You can't do this shit on an amateur basis and not get burned. Handling money makes you a target: the more money, the bigger the bullseye: and you can't write secure software on the run or patch up a proof of concept to production quality on a shoestring budget.

If you create a page using X, Y% of mobile users can use it

It's painful for me to write critically about a project like care.data, because I love medical data, and I know the good it can do. We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS. Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.

So here's my advice: if you're thinking of opting out – wait. If you run care.data – listen.

So frustrating.

Highlight "weasel words" and passive voice as you write in Sublime Text.

Via ttscoff.

The solution to this, with a lot of help from Heroku Support is: use a build pack!

Also: PHP.

Inject your Bower components right into your HTML from Grunt.

Keep multiple browsers & devices in sync when building websites.

Why bother with a classic CMS any more?

Our content site is in a private Github repository that all Asanas have access to. We create and edit the Markdown files directly through their web interface. Technical teammates can clone the repo locally and use whatever tool stack they choose.

Non-technical teammates don’t need to know Git – they just need to know that “commit” basically equals “save” – and that they can’t break anything because it’s all version controlled. The Github editor renders the Markdown for you when you commit – so you can see that your styling worked.

Easy version control and collaboration to improve your writing.

Write better with a simple markdown editor, version control and easy collaboration tools.

Via monospaced.

Singularity is based on internal ratios instead of context based which allows for better gutter consistency across breakpoints. Ratio based math also allows for non-uniform grids in any unit you want to use.

A multi-transport API Server with integrated cluster capabilites and delayed tasks.

Hand-picked registry of Node.js frameworks.

a node.js module built specifically to enable you to build correct REST web services.

A showcase of problems once hard or impossible to solve with CSS alone, now made trivially easy with Flexbox.

A simple guide to responsive design.

A Mac PrefPane to manage all your Homebrew-installed services

Shopify alternative.

This is what he believes it would take to refashion the progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favour of argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no "middle" or third way, no such thing as a moderate (people can hold divergent views, conservative on some things, progressive on others – but they are not moderates, they are "biconceptual"); and the understanding that conservatives are not evil, unintelligent, cynical or grasping. Rather, they act according to the moral case as they see it. If they happen to get rich, and make their friends rich in the process, that is just the unbidden consequence of wealth being the natural reward of the righteous, in their moral universe.

There may certainly be things you'd find more fulfilling. But if you need to do stuff to be happy, you are letting yourself suffer from attachments to things that more the most part are relatively inconsequential.

PG's essay suffers from this assumption that happiness is tied to achievements.

I used to think that too. The problem with that line of thinking is that it often leads to putting the shutters on and focusing on getting stuff done to get your happiness from it eventually, while ignoring all the sources of happiness around you. Further, that makes procrastination worse, in my experience: It creates guilt that you're picking the short term pleasures instead of doing the stuff you're sure will make you fabulously happy later, once you've just achieved something.

These days, I still get stuff done - more than ever, in fact -, but I might suddenly stop during my commute and look up at the clouds and enjoy the sight, or just close my eyes for 10 seconds and enjoy the calm, and I'm happy whether or not I'm doing anything. The two are not related. If you can't be happy even while doing the dishes, or fighting your way onto a commuter train, or carrying out some mind-numbingly boring menial work, you're missing out.

Government Service Design Manual