A Rogue State Along Two Rivers
The victories gained by the militant group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region known as the cradle of civilization.
Hasnain says:
This is one of the best infographics / interactive reports I've ever seen. Hats off.
Posted on 2014-07-05T05:40:40+0000
Your high IQ will kill your startup - Jamie's Blog
This article was originally published on March 4, 2010 at Max Klein’s blog. It has since fallen off the Internet and into the great 404 void. I am republishing it here because it is one of the very few blog posts that I’ve read in my lifetime that have stuck with me. If the original …
Hasnain says:
This is applies to much more than just startups, and everyone should read it.
"Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your startup. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you."
Posted on 2014-07-05T05:29:46+0000
A Closer Look at Android RunTime (ART) in Android L
With the latest I/O conference, Google has finally publicly made public its plans for its new runtime on Android. The Android RunTime, ART, is the successor and replacement for Dalvik, the virtual machine on which Android Java code is executed on. We’ve had traces and previews of it available with K…
Hasnain says:
"ART patches up many of the Achilles’ heels that comes with running non-native applications and having an automatic memory management system. As a developer, I couldn’t have asked for more, and most performance issues that I needed to work around with clever programming no longer pose such a drastic problem anymore."
Posted on 2014-07-05T05:23:03+0000
Kallithea
Kallithea, a free software source code management system supporting two leading version control systems, Mercurial and Git.
Push the Red Button: Breaking Spotify DRM with PANDA
moyix.blogspot.com
Full Stack Python
Full Stack Python explains each layer of the web application stack, from the server up through the rendering in a user's browser.
New York's Shadow Transit
New York’s unofficial shuttles, called “dollar vans” in some neighborhoods, make up a thriving transportation system that operates where the subway and buses don’t. This interactive project, with videos, maps out that system.
Lionel Messi Is Impossible
In their Group F World Cup match late last month, Argentina and Iran were still deadlocked after 90 minutes. With the game in stoppage time and the score tied at 0-0, Lionel Messi took the ball nea...
Hasnain says:
A few choice quotes:
"By this point, it should be evident that Messi has at least a little bit of skill."
"First, to ensure that we’re celebrating the greatness of Messi and not the greatness of Barcelona, we need to make sense of Messi on Barcelona. The easiest way to do that is to evaluate Barcelona without Messi, also known as the Spanish national team."
"Coming in just behind Messi with 289 goals and assists since the 2010 World Cup is Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi’s rival from Real Madrid. When it comes to scoring, these two aren’t just on top of the pile, they’re hang-gliding somewhere way above it."
Posted on 2014-07-01T23:12:16+0000
The One-second War (What Time Will You Die?) - ACM Queue
Thanks to a secretive conspiracy working mostly below the public radar, your time of death may be a minute later than presently expected. But don't expect to live any longer, unless you happen to be responsible for time synchronization in a large network of computers, in which case this coup will lo…
Hasnain says:
This is a really really great read.
"But Linus' [Torvalds] observation that "95 percent of all programmers think they are in the top 5 percent, and the rest are certain they are above average" should not be taken lightly: very few programmers have any idea what the difference is between "wall-clock time" and "interval time," and leap seconds are way past rocket science for them. (For example, Posix defines only a pthread_cond_timedwait(), which takes wall-clock time but not an interval-time version of the call.)"
Posted on 2014-07-01T06:23:50+0000
What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse | Autopia | WIRED
The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists…