You can trigger an AWS Lambda function to automatically create a thumbnail when an image is uploaded to Amazon S3, verify address updates in an Amazon DynamoDB table, or process click-stream data in an Amazon Kinesis stream, without having to manage any compute infrastructure.

Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

チームラボの猪子氏がTEDxFukuokaで紹介した、日本と西洋での空間認識の違いについての話がとてもおもしろかったので紹介。

マリオはなぜ世界でヒットしたのか？　チームラボ・猪子氏が語る、日本的空間認識とクリエイティビティの関係性

プレゼンテーションの内容を省略すると、

西洋の空間認識だと、パースペクティブを意識する。 よって、絵の登場人物になりきると視点が変わって絵の全体を意識しなくなる。絵の全体の意識が変わる、と言う方が適切なのかもしれない。

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My team and I wrote an app that will apply findings from a recent research paper to your Facebook graph. The app won’t post to your wall but it will show you both the shape of your friend network and which of your friends are most mathematically important to your life.

Instead of looking at a metric like the number of friends you have in common, this algorithm takes it a step further. It looks at how well connected your mutual friends are with each other, and suggests that having more diverse mutual friends indicates a stronger, more important relationship.

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Most people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress sandwiches. Still, every year or so someone takes me aside and says, you actually are weirdly polite, aren’t you? And I always thrill. They noticed.

Politeness buys you time. It leaves doors open. I’ve met so many people whom, if I had trusted my first impressions, I would never have wanted to meet again. And yet — many of them are now great friends.

An excellent piece by Paul Ford on the often underestimated value of politeness.

I’ve made a small update to the Pokemon Fusion site, and added Missingno. as a hidden pokemon.

I was inspired by the incredible Mewtwo x Missingno. fusion artwork that was posted by StarvingStudents on his deviantART page

Missingno. appears whenever there is an invalid ID in the URL, so acts as a fun 404 page. You can try it out here

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Q: What do you do when you’re being scammed by a Chinese scam artist? A: Use their country’s internet censorship against them.

LINE, the hugely popular Japanese messaging app, has been seeing a recent surge in scamming activity. In the most common scenario, the scam artist will gain access to a user’s account and message their friends, asking them to purchase online gift cards and send the serial number. Many people were targeted by this scam, and it received some mainstream media attention.

But once it was determined that the majority of the scam artists were Chinese, the users began fighting back in a hilarious way.

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My long-standing goal, in both work and personal life, is to create “fun”. I currently make games for a living, so I’ll be focusing on games for this post.

What is Fun?

Games like Flappy Bird and 2048 show that as long as you have one crucial element that provides fun, even the simplest of games can be a huge hit. And in fact, for games like these it is necessary that they be the simplest of games, with no other elements distracting from that core nugget of fun.

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仕事でも、プライベートでも、自分の昔からの目標は「面白い」を創ること。 ゲームを創る職についているので、今回はゲームの話が中心となる。

「面白い」とは？

Flappy Birdや2048のようなゲームが見せてくれたように、 根本的な面白い要素さえあれば、どんなシンプルなゲームでも大ヒットする可能性がある。 むしろ、これらのゲームは最もシンプルであることが必須で、根本の面白さの邪魔をする要素がない、というのも成功の要因だと言える。

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Euclid The Game is a puzzle game that challenges you to use simple methods like drawing circles, translating lines, and bisecting angles to solve geometric puzzles. Very addicting, and it made me remember just how powerful tools like a compass can be.

Peter Welch has published an excellent piece on punctuation and writing style in the English language.

Yes, you can use punctuation in incorrect ways, but that does not mean there is only one way to use it. A friend recently told me publishers don’t care whether you use an oxford comma or not, as long as you pick one and stick with it. This is stupid. If punctuation obscures or distorts the meaning of a sentence in an unintended way, it is wrong, but apart from that, punctuation is about rhythm. An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author’s voice, it’s a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea. Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours.

I own a copy of The Elements of Style which is one of the most prescriptive books around regarding what “good writing” is. Though Welch’s essay has a nearly opposite message, urging writers to do what they must at the expense of constrictive rules, I love both for describing excellent writing and leading by example.

I do believe that there can be a single guiding principle for good writing. At their core, the two contrasting works in fact have the same core message: be deliberate.