Depixelizing Pixel Art
Naïve upsampling of pixel art images leads to unsatisfactory results. Our algorithm extracts a smooth, resolution-independent vector representation from the image which is suitable for high-resolution display device

High Scalability – High Scalability – The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought For $19 Billion
How do you support 450 million active users with only 32 engineers? Let’s find out…

The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia | Ars Technica
The untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA's finest hour.

Josh Haberman: On “The Future of JavaScript MVC Frameworks”
The article starts by noting that the React/Om library (which the author also wrote) is 2-4x faster than Backbone in "Benchmark 1" of TodoMVC, and about 800x faster than Backbone for Benchmark 2. This is followed with a profiling graph that shows Backbone making a ton of short-running function calls, where React/Om make many fewer calls that run longer.

harelba/q
Have you ever stared at a text file on the screen, hoping it would have been a database so you could ask anything you want about it? I had that feeling many times, and I've finally understood that it's not the database that I want. It's the language – SQL.