There’s a strong case to be made that as Facebook and Twitter have amassed such huge user bases we should take advantage of the fact that so many of their users are already logged in and just one click away from entering your app. I know that argument all too well, because I made it to my colleagues. We tried that experiment, and found that while there are some marginal improvements to login failure rate, they come with a price. Do you want to NASCAR-up your login page? Do you want to have your users’ login credentials stored in a third-party service? Do you want your brand closely associated with other brands, over which you have no control? Do you want to add additional confusion about login methods on your app? Is it worth it? Nope, it’s not to us.

Biases in how data are collected, a lack of context, gaps in what’s gathered, artifacts of how data are processed and the overall cognitive biases that lead even the best researchers to see patterns where there are none mean that “we may be getting drawn into particular kinds of algorithmic illusions,” said MIT Media Lab visiting scholar Kate Crawford. In other words, even if you have big data, it’s not something that Joe in the IT department can tackle—it may require someone with a PhD, or the equivalent amount of experience. And when they’re done, their answer to your problem might be that you don’t need “big data” at all.

An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.

Swedish, adding to all the awesomeness, has proven especially adept at coining new words for the new circumstances occasioned by new technologies. Below, some of the best Swedologisms I could find, via the Swedish news site The Local. We should, obviously, incorporate them into English as soon as possible.

Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes. In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase.

So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites. And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or against my religion. I can tell you all manner of good things about languages I avoid, and all manner of bad things about languages I enjoy. Go on, ask! It makes for interesting conversation. PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.) PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all. But I’ve got to get this out of my system. So here goes, one last try.

[Jag läser aldrig någonsin Aftonbladet men jag blev tipsad om denna debattartikel...] Media spelar dess­utom upphovsrättsbolagen rakt i händerna. De skriver glatt att ”debatten är över” därför att Spotify, ”lösningen”, finns. Lösningen på vad? För problemet låg aldrig hos artisterna eller konsumenterna, utan hos en industri i kris. En liknande kris som medierna själva befinner sig i, där de själva letar efter ”lösningen”. Att Spotify är ett nytt monopol måste ifrågasättas. Var är de annars så kritiska kultur­skribenterna?

The iteration is a cornerstone of agile development. It provides a heartbeat for the team and its stakeholders, and a structure for various routine activities that help keep development work aligned with what the customer needs. However, the way many teams run their iterations creates serious pitfalls which can keep them from delivering software as effectively as they could.

The orthodox approach to the iteration is to treat it as a timebox for delivering a batch of stories, which is the approach most Scrum teams take with sprints (the Scrum term for an iteration). In recent years many teams have scrapped this approach, either using iterations more as a checkpoint, as many ThoughtWorks teams do, or scrapping them entirely with Kanban and Lean software development.

The Encrypted Media Extensions (DRM in HTML5) specification does not solve the problem the authors are attempting to solve, which is the protection of content from opportunistic or professional piracy. The HTML WG should not publish First Public Working Drafts that do not effectively address the primary goal of a specification.