Free (do what ever you want) photos.

The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives.

Vintage photos from the public archives. Free of known copyright restrictions. Recapturing History.

Programming languages shape the way their users think—which helps explain how tech startups work and why they are able to reinvent themselves.

Will people of color ever make it to the end of the world?

Mad Max: Fury Road should not exist.

Max isn’t emasculated by this exchange: there’s no humor about giving the gun to a woman, nothing self-deprecating about his inferiority, no hint at all that he sees what happened through their gender. In fact at no point in their relationship does gender play any role at all: they are each warriors, each trying to survive, each rescuing each other, together for as long (or short) as that makes sense.

Here’s the secret: endings are actually kind of awesome. No organization is started with the hope that it will become an antiquated behemoth that blocks progress with bureaucratic bloat — they calcify over time. Accepting the possibility of the end means periodically taking a critical look at your work and recognizing when its time has passed. Letting go of a project or an organization returns all of the resources it’s tying up — funding, attention, time, the emotional labor contributed by you and others — to the ecosystem. Whether by you or others, those resources will be recombined into new, surprising forms. Calcify not like a kidney stone but like coral: announce that your work is done so that others can build on your accomplishments.

I get angry in SF, too. I saw a quote at the African American museum from Rep. Barbara Jordan that read, “All blacks are militant in their guts, but militancy is expressed in different ways.” For me, militancy is best expressed by attacking the problem and not just complaining about it. I’m furious about the homeless problem in SF, so I’m working to do something about it. And I’d like to see more Blacks in tech, so I started with myself.

It’s not just that the target country happens to be rich while the immigrant’s home country happens to be poor (or, I might add, in political turmoil, in a state of civil war, etc., etc.). Those conditions hold in the home country because of the destructive effects of Western involvement — not just during the era of “official” colonization, but on an ongoing basis. People generally don’t leave prosperous, self-sufficient countries en masse in order to drive cabs and clean hotel rooms in a foreign country where they will be hated and scapegoated.

While Kanye's not an activist in the traditional sense, his entire career makes clear he is motivated by resistance.

But it is just that pre-cognitive nature of desire and the unconscious that makes self-hate such a virtue for men. It isn’t actual “self-hatred” either, but rather, a deep skepticism of oneself—a profound mistrust of what it means to be a man. To be a good straight man is to be in a constant state of deprogramming oneself, unlearning, emptying out a vessel that has been filled with toxicity since its creation.

Who is writing these descriptions? I'm sure these companies find a perfect match now and again. But I have a feeling that's not the norm. It's more likely that many of these companies just don't know what they need so they look for everything. A recruiter or HR person whips something up and puts it out there to see who bites. Maybe they'll catch a unicorn!

Welcome to the land of musical serendipity, where you can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks.

And to design is to take purpose into account — as my friend Jared Spool says: design is the rendering of intent. You can’t separate an object’s function from its intent. You cannot critique it, you cannot understand it, and you cannot appreciate something without thinking about its intent. You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for how what you’ve designed affects the world. Mikhail Kalashnikov is responsible for as many deaths as the people who pulled those triggers.

Yet, the refrain I hear far too frequently is, "Protests don't produce change." Technically and practically, this just isn't true.

Having a non-trivial number of women submitting presentations seems to have made it so that a non-trivial number of women are speaking at No Show Conference. Imagine that.

A while back, I received a very angry email from someone about an article I once wrote. In the article, I mentioned that I wasn't a huge fan of eating in pretentious restaurants. I also mentioned that I am a vegan, which this man did not appreciate.

Removing white or black backgrounds from an image in Photoshop is easily done in many ways. Here's how to do it using blending sliders.

Being transgender today is still unreasonably hard, but it is far from hopeless. This is the first in a series looking at the challenges ahead.

his terrifying disorder turns people into zombies, into living, breathing ghosts; they believe they died, or never existed. And somewhere in their brains may be the key to human consciousness.

An experiment to show how designing for The Fold can be treacherous. Each line below is from a random sampling of past-visitors' viewport heights. Take care when making assumptions about people's screen sizes on the web.

The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play.

I find it sad and disturbing that children learn so quickly and normatively to distrust women. Any commitment to parity means challenging the stories we tell them. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table. It’s not easy. But, really, what’s the alternative?

Music could be worthless and, for some of us, it would still be priceless. That’s why it’s worth so much.

When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.

Economic status dictates class and diet. We arrange food in a hierarchy based on who originally ate it until we reach mullet, gar, possum, and squirrel—the diet of the poor. The food is called trash, and then the people are.

More than a million free vectors, PSD, photos and free icons. Exclusive freebies and all graphic resources that you need for your projects.

The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.

“See… when I was 19, I lost my childhood home to a fire.”