https://www.fastcompany.com/3018071/what-software-makers-need-to-know-about-sound-effects
What everyday apps can learn from the sounds that suck us into video games.
Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor
Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy.
This pretax benefits startup is giving hourly workers a raise
Most of the baristas employed by the Brooklyn Roasting Company now take home $40 to $60 more a month. Not by working more hours or getting a raise, but by keeping more of the money they earn. The coffee-shop chain uses a service called Alice, which lets employers offer pretax spending benefits without any setup costs and enrolls their employees via text message.
What a 19th-century French novel tells us about Jeff Bezos and Amazon
Meet Emile Zola’s Octave Mouret: a Bezos-like merchant/innovator created 111 years before Amazon sold its first book.
Why Google defined a new discipline to help humans make decisions
Machine-learning systems are only as smart as their training data. So Google formalized the marshaling of hard and soft sciences that go into its decisions.
These Poverty-Fighting Startups Are Slaying Silicon Valley’s Sacred Cows
If you want to tackle society’s most intractable problems, start by ignoring some of the tech industry’s most cherished mantras.
How A Former Android Developer Created “The Martian,” A New Sci-Fi Masterpiece
With the help of 3,000 hardcore fans, Andy Weir wrote the book that is now the fall’s hottest movie.
What I Learned From Building An App For Low-Income Americans
The brief was simple: build a tech product for low-income American households. Except it wasn’t simple at all.
State of independence: An inside view of Minecraft developer Mojang
Mojang’s founders didn’t set out to become millionaires; they just like making games. Now they want to make Mojang the best workplace in the world.
The Father Of “Getting Things Done”: You’re Getting Me All Wrong
Productivity guru David Allen on Zen, doing nothing, and why some people need to “stop focusing on their goals and actually get shit done.”
Why Doctors Make Great Object-Oriented Software Designers
Building health care apps means knowing complex systems both biological and bureaucratic. Here’s how a company called Modernizing Medicine is meeting the challenge.
You’re A Developer. Do Your Kids Have Any Idea What You Actually Do?
We talked to children from ages 3 to 11 years old to find out what, exactly, they think goes on when mom or dad does “programming.”
How Sleep Became A Social Justice Issue
Health researchers are underscoring the connection between sleep, work, and poverty–and the immense value of sleeping in.
Can Robot Musicians Play Songs That Entrance Human Ears?
Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson talks more like an engineer than most engineers do, and Pitchfork has described his sound as angry-jazz-droids-run-amok. So when Jenkinson was asked to compose for a group...
Inside The Ad-Free, Crowdfunded Publication That Is Upending The Newspaper Business
Can two disgruntled newspaper editors and a crowdfunding campaign prove news can be a real business?
Gorgeous, Haunting Images Created By X-Ray
Dutch medical physicist Arie van ‘t Riet spent his career working in the departments of radiotherapy, radiology, and nuclear medicine in various hospitals. Then he started using X-rays to make art.
The Loneliness Of The Female Coder
It’s the loneliness that I remember most. More than the joy of cracking a problem, the satisfaction of getting a tricky piece of code to run, of releasing version 1.0...
Why Your Startup’s Culture Is Secretly Awful
Developers love to critique and improve systems and processes, so why do they never cast a critical eye on startup culture itself?
Five Powerful Reasons Coders Need Yoga
Yoga has an image as an activity for hippie girls, which I’ve found tends to put off male engineers. But yoga is about transforming your mindset as much as your...
How robots filmed Hollywood's latest blockbuster, 'Gravity'
Hollywood’s latest blockbuster, Gravity, was filmed by robots. Four giant industrial robots whisked props, lights and even actors around the set in a ballet of split-second precision, as well as...
More Than An Office, Teenage Engineering’s Minimalist Garage Is A Tinkerer’s Paradise
A band of sound-loving, self-taught engineers set up shop in a Stockholm garage so they can move stuff around, play with new machines and park their vintage cars.
How three Dubliners created F.ounders, a ‘Davos for geeks’
You don’t often find U2’s Bono, economist Larry Summers, and Wael Gnomin, the Google marketeer whose Facebook page helped spark the Egyptian revolution, at the same event. You certainly don’t...
Lessons From A Crash Course In Data Science
Data Scientist—technology’s hottest job title—I spent a month trying to figure out what, exactly, these mysterious new Masters of the Universe knew that I didn’t.
Dead Technology Commentators: Novelist Marcel Proust Takes On the Telephone
What can a dead French novelist tell us about about new technology? As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot.
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