The emperor’s new clothes were built with Node.js - I know sadly little about Node.js but this goes against the hype and is thus interesting. So what does Node.js give us? Performance 1-5x slower than Java [like Clojure] according to the Benchmarks Game (contrary to other benchmarks with the opposite result as mentioned in the comments), use of a single CPU/core on our multi-cpu, multi-core machines, callback hell. At the same time, there are good non-blocking servers available in other languages (Clojure's http-kit, Vert.x, etc.) (Update: From the comments it seems that f.ex. the "callback hell" situation is geting better with 0.11, fibers and other things I do not know anything about. Also Sandro has a nice anti-comment (No. 36).)
The Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech 5 min video is a nice companion :)
The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) (7 min) - you've certainly seen this one but I had to put it here; a young engineer is hammered into being an "Of course I can do it, I am an expert" 'expert/consultant' during a business meeting. Maybe you too have experienced a dialog with the business where your true expert opinion was crushed by the business people's insistence on their absurd requirements?
Kent Beck: Learning About TDD: The Purpose of #isTDDDead - what is the purpose and value of TDD? Where are the limits of its value? "I recognize that TDD loses value as tests take longer to run, as the number of possible faults per test failure increases, as tests become coupled to the implementation, and as tests lose fidelity with the production environment."
Failure & Cake: A Guide to Spotify’s Psychology of Success - want to be innovative and successfull? Learn to embrace failure, nurture the "growth mindset" (failure as opportunity to improve) rather than the "fixed mindset" (I do not learn and every failure shows I have no value). Read this if you want your org to be a better place to work!
Non-tech
LSD — The Problem-Solving Psychedelic - I never knew that drugs could be used to something positive, with an incredible effect. Are you stuck with a tech/design/art problem? Try LSD! :-)
The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway - "Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. [..] 60% of French public debt is illegitimate" - not improving the lives of people but thos at power/rich. Time to reconsider this debt business and ways to make our system better?
Forbes: Why Financialization Has Run Amok - Wall Street is the kind and companies do everything to look better in its eyes - including giving up on opportunities. The might of the finance sector is destructive to our economy and distorts it, away from producing more value to making financial institutions richer, away from (value) creative activities to distributive ones. The article describes the problem and proposes a solution including limiting the size and leverage of banks, taxing financial transactions etc. Example of the effects: "[..] a cabal of senior IBM executives and the managers of some big investment firms got together and devised a five-year scheme—IBM’s Roadmap 2015—for increasing IBM’s earnings per share—and their own compensation—through measures that are not only increasing earnings per share but also steadily crippling IBM’s ability to innovate and compete [..]"
Why Can't We All Just Get Along? The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality - very interesting criticism of "morality" that is mostly based on emotions and thus contradictory, a good argument for utilitarian morality [not that it hasn't its own challenges]. According to the author, many conflicts are nor primarily due to divergent values but due to different interpretation of the reality and history (such as "who has right to this land?"). People suffer "[..] from a deep bias—a tendency to overestimate their team’s virtue, magnify their grievances, and do the reverse with their rivals." "This is the way the brain works: you forget your sins (or never recognize them in the first place) and remember your grievances. [..] As a result, the antagonisms confronting you may seem mysterious, and you may be tempted to attribute them to an alien value system." This leads to partial judgements that play very badly with another psychological feature - "Namely: the sense of justice—the intuition that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished." "When you combine judgment that’s naturally biased with the belief that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, you wind up with situations like two people sharing the conviction that the other one deserves to suffer. Or two groups sharing that conviction. And the rest is history." And "The most common explosive additive is the perception that relations between the groups are zero-sum—that one group’s win is the other group’s loss." => "So maybe the first step toward salvation is to become more self-aware."
"When you’re in zero-sum mode and derogating your rival group, any of its values that seem different from yours may share in the derogation. Meanwhile, you’ll point to your own tribe’s distinctive, and clearly superior, values as a way of shoring up its solidarity. So outsiders may assume there’s a big argument over values. But that doesn’t mean values are the root of the problem."
Those who choose not to act in the trolley dilemma "[..] are just choosing to cause five deaths they won’t be blamed for rather than one death they would be blamed for. Not a profile in moral courage!"
Clojure Corner
The Case for Clojure (video, 5 min) - a short video arguing for Clojure as a good solution language based on its simplicity, power, and fun factor. There are many claims and few facts (as dictated by the short length) but it might be interesting for somebody.
CrossClj.info - cross-reference of many OSS Clojure projects - find all uses of a fn across the projects, all fns with a given name, all projects using ring, ... . Search by fn, macro, var, ns, prj.