All - Leonid Mamchenkov

Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence

This is an excellent take on why (we the) developers suck at time estimations. Basically, it boils down to two reasons: unknown details of the project and overconfendence.

First off, there are, I believe, really two reasons why we’re so bad at making estimates. The first is the sort of irreducible one: writing software involves figuring out something in such incredibly precise detail that you can tell a computer how to do it. And the problem is that, hidden in the parts you don’t fully understand when you start, there are often these problems that will explode and just utterly screw you.

And this is genuinely irreducible. If you do “fully understand” something, you’ve got a library or existing piece of software that does that thing, and you’re not writing anything. Otherwise, there is uncertainty, and it will often blow up. And those blow ups can take anywhere from one day to one year to beyond the heat death of the universe to resolve.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

WordPress Template Hierarchy

The most useful diagram for understanding how WordPress themes work – the WordPress Template Hierarchy – has been enhanced with some artistic detail, converted into an interactive link map, and copied over to its own domain. Excellent job!

Via WordPress Tavern.

Dialect Survey Results

This is one of the coolest things on language dialects that I’ve ever seen. A whole bunch of tiny differences all mapped out across the USA. Just change the question in the dropdown menu on the left, and look at the map on the right. Both composite and individual maps are available.

Via kottke.

Facebook’s first data center DRENCHED by ACTUAL CLOUD

Facebook’s first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers.

Via Slashdot.

Stunned. Angry. Fighting back against NSA spying. | EFFector 26.14

Last night, we received confirmation from a report in theGuardian that the National Security Agency (NSA) is currently collecting the call records of every Verizon customer in America. The NSA order forces Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.”

And that’s not all. Today, the Washington Post and theGuardian published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies. The government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.