Cmptr chss

I've given this post my performance optimization tag. Sometimes you want to optimize for programmer productivity, sometimes for execution speed, sometimes for space. Olivier Poudade, a fan of "sizecoding," has done that, building a chess-playing program that fits in 487 bytes, as Leo Kelion reports. In other words, Poudade's BootChess, after assembly, takes up less memory than the markup for post you just read.

What's new?

Melody Joy Kramer and some of her folks re-imagine how a home for digital news works. My favorite idea from the brainstorming session: News Based on News People Far Away from Me Have Read.

Leave no rider behind

Two very different solutions to the user experience problem of vending a card for riding the subway, from New York's MTA and the Bay Area's BART. I love the hand-drawn flow charts by Aaron Reiss.

When Antenna Design came in, commuters were having a hard time adjusting to a pay-first interface, a system much like BART’s current ticket machines. “I saw immediately that wasn’t going to work,” said [Masamichi] Udagawa, “the interface was a big problem.”

New Yorkers simply didn’t trust the machines.