Rarest Form of Chipset

I use a lot of these tools basically every day, and I feel like not many people know about them. hopefully someone finds these useful! if you have any other good links, feel free to add them.

gitignore.io - generate a .gitignore file for your git project

regexpal.com - interactive regex tester

codeshare.io - collaborate on code with multiple people editing

hastebin.com - like pastebin, but prettier and more direct. also, your posts aren’t public by default.

this wonderful stackoverflow thread describing lesser known but useful data structures

prettyrfc - the RFC is now DIAMONDS

shortcutfoo - learn shortcuts and commands for basic development tools (vim, emacs, git, etc)

so here I am with more

this is how zip archives work, visually

here’s a zip file that is 42 bytes, and expands to be 4.5 petabytes

here’s a list of useful bash tricks that Ya Boy uses literally every day

use GNU stow to store your dotfiles

holy shit check out this guy who made an open source tricorder

this is a really, REALLY good description as to how modern microprocessors work. it covers pipelining, branch prediction, and all of those other lovely CPU tidbits

a genetic algorithm that designs the best 2d cars. it’s great to help you understand genetic algorithms and what they can do

a post about the process of reverse engineering the game Yoda Stories, if you like the idea of reverse engineering things, it’s a great walk-through of the steps he took

Hyperpolyglot - programming language reference sheets, presented side-by-side for easy comparison

Paperscape - an interactive visualization and bookmarking tool for the arXiv

ImgOps - your one-stop image tool shop. Reverse image searches, file conversion, metadata, etc. It’s all there.

AlternativeTo.net - a search engine for software alternatives

GitHub Gist for the Github experience for codesnippets (yes it’s a mini git repository, so cloning and changing is available)

Who doesn’t like Kanban? Here have an awesome tool to keep track of your tasks. Trello

lorempixel - Placeholder images galore

I use yeoman to bootstrap most of my webprojects

Cmder - For people stuck with Windows that want a better terminal experience

(about Windows OS) “Ha, it’s pretty dumb that you have to turn off your computer by going to the start menu.

Look, you Apple fanatic, I can see where you’re coming from, but really, no really, where else would you put it?

On a Mac, it’s just called the “Apple menu”. Look.

It’s the same as doing this.

Albeit, there is less “bloat” in Mac than in Windows 10. (I could clean it out, though. Maybe I’ll find some time.)

But look at Windows 7.

It’s the same in Linux OSes.

You can’t even complain about how it’s named, either.

The “Start” menu doesn’t even say “Start” on it anymore.

But either way, it’s called the “Start” menu because that’s where you can start things.

Really, all you’re doing is starting the shutdown program.

Even without all of this, you could’ve set the power button to turn off the computer, and avoided saying your little sentence altogether.

“But it’s too easy to accidentally press the power button.”

For how long have you used a Windows machine? This is not a genuine problem if you’ve had the thing for more than a couple of days, unless it’s a real cheap-o compoot. Get comfy with your keyboard config, or “Choose what the power buttons do,” as Windows would say. Set it to hibernate, or something. Modern computers don’t take more than 20 seconds to go into hibernation, and take even less time to start back up (that is, assuming you treat your computer with any amount of decency).

Alright, mini-rant over. The sentence was probably just something the guy read from another Mac user on Facebook. It was really dumb, though, so I had to do a thing on it. Of course, I didn’t say any of this to him. All I said was “…where else would you put it?” rather timidly. He had already walked away before I finished that sentence, though.

Kiki Kang for Cosmopolitan China 

~ China (I Supermodel 1) ~

It’s estimated that humans are producing the equivalent of 10 million Blu-ray discs’ worth of data every single day - and all of those ones and zeroes have to be stored somewhere. Now researchers in the UK just might have the solution: a five-dimensional (5D) digital data disc that can store 360 terabytes of data for some 13.8 billion years.

To create the data disc, researchers from the University of Southampton used a process called femtosecond laser writing, which creates small discs of glass using an ultrafast laser that generates short and intense pulses of light. These pulses can write data in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by 5 micrometres (that’s 0.005 mm).

So where do the five dimensions come from? First there’s the three-dimensional position of each dot within the layers, and then the extra dimensions are the size and orientation of the dot. The nanostructures created by the technology can be read using an optical microscope in tandem with a polariser (a filter designed to block specific polarisations of light).

The team behind the new 5D discs says these discs could be most useful for institutions who deal with large archives: libraries, museums, and anywhere else extensive records are kept (like a Facebook data centre).

“Someone special I knew wrote, “The price we pay for living full authentic lives is occasionally having our hearts broken.” I think that that’s true. Pain isn’t beautiful or poignant, but sometimes, if you can get through it, it contextualizes what comes later. A year is a short time. You never think that that’s long enough to substantially change what you’re capable of doing, but what you choose to do every day eventually shapes who you are. A year ago, as much as I loved tech, I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to be in engineering or study computer science. Since then, I’ve learned six programming languages, taken seven CS classes, and worked on twenty-odd personal projects. There’s nothing intrinsically meaningful about a GitHub streak, but, somewhere along the way, I started remembering what it felt like to be myself.”

holy smokes. #GOALS

Code skills will get you hired in 2016

Why This MIT Dropout Started an Anti-College

Disenchanted with the out-of-date curriculum of traditional college, Jeremy Rossmann dropped out of MIT. Within a few years, he and co-founder Ashu Desai, started The Make School, a college replacement program for founders and developers. 

Instead of tests, there’s project-based work. Instead of tuition upfront, there’s a debt-free model charged to students only once they find employment after graduation. The Make School also claims to bring its students better access to top tech company functions, networking, and guidance as they shape their career. 

Classes focus on developing desirable qualities and capabilities as expressed by current hiring managers in Silicon Valley. Beyond programming classes, subjects also include nutrition, health, writing, and exercise - tools to succeed in a professional life.

The Stack - A Simple Data Structure

A stack is a data structure that consists of a collection of elements and has two principal operations: push, which adds an element to the collection, and pop, which removes the last element that was added.

Stacks are simple in nature, but don’t let this fool you they are indeed quite powerful. Expression evaluation and syntax parsing. Calculators use a stack structure to hold values known as reverse Polish notation. Expressions can be represented in prefix, postfix or infix notations and conversion from one form to another may be accomplished using a stack. Many compilers use a stack for parsing the syntax of expressions or program blocks before translating into low level code (such as the example above). Most programming languages are context-free languages, allowing them to be parsed with stack based machines (wikipedia).

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS