New release of gen

I’ve a new release of gen, the generics-like tool for Go. It includes API changes so I suggest reading the changelog. Highlights: ..

Another reason publishers should adopt SSL: referrers

I previously mentioned that advertising-based publishers should embrace SSL as a product upgrade, a service to their customer. Here’s a more self-interested take. ..

Publishers and SSL

Here’s a good article about why news sites on the web are slow to embrace SSL. The short answer is, the advertising services they use are not prepared to support it. ..

Multi-credentialing

John Maeda of RISD has a riff about the future of college credentials, including the notion of an automated ‘degree’, which is generated by a machine based on the sum your achievements. He makes an analogy to Coinstar: pour in a bunch of individually valuable stuff, get out some paper which aggregates its value. ..

Progress bars cannot be accurate

We all see progress bars and some of us even implement them. And we’ve all seen how hilariously wrong they can be. There’s a reason for that. ..

Your site doesn’t need a novel progress indicator

There’s been healthy talk about progress indicators in the age of ajax. In our will-to-design I think some things are being missed. ..

Language and social signaling

I like language. I came to it causally at first, and more formally of late. ..

1.6% of what?

The NSA has published a paper claiming that it “touches” only 1.6% of Internet traffic. Now, 1.6% of something the size of the Internet is already enormous, but let’s demonstrate that the number represents are much larger share of human communications than one might intuit. ..

Incidence of compulsion

This is an encouraging story about Google exploring the ability to encrypt ‘sitting files’ in their Google Drive product. This is distinct from something like SSL, which only protects items in transit; most companies store the canonical file in the clear. ..

Epistemology and human factors: deal with ‘em

This study that Google conducted to find predictors for success in their hiring process is very interesting. Among the things that are not predictive of success: the candidate’s GPA, their ability to solve brain-teasers, and which manager did the interview. ..