After 1970, people had to spend more on rent

Interesting:

From 1940 to 1960 across 20 large U.S. cities, rental housing’s price fell, renters’ incomes rose, rent’s share in household budgets fell, and, as expected, renters’ real housing consumption increased. From 1970 to 2010, rental housing’s price increased, renters’ incomes decreased, but, unexpectedly, renters’ real housing consumption increased. We find neither demographics nor housing supply factors account for the anomalous post-1970 increase in renters’ housing consumption. We conclude that after 1970 there was a nationwide increase in renters’ preferences for ...

Read More Source

The rarity of a game that allows much expression of femslash

Overwatch fans and femslash

Slash, as this is known in fandom circles, has a long history of sparking the imagination, stretching as far back as Star Trek. Historically, a lot of slash has focused on men’s relationships with each other (M/M), while fan-created material about women’s relationships (also known as femslash, or F/F) feels an underappreciated but no less ferocious wing of shipping. An informal 2013 count of the tags in on Archive of Our Own, a popular fanfiction library, shows ...

Read More Source

An unusual election in the USA

This isn’t normal. This will be a reference point for decades to come. The Republican nominee has a strange obsession denouncing a woman who disappointed him 30 years ago. And as one commenter said, the use of “my” in “my worst Miss Universe” is absolutely creepy. He doesn’t own her.

Online beauty gurus have become much more reliable than brands

Interesting:

This seems to mirror general consumer consensus that online beauty gurus have become much more reliable than brands. The brands are, in turn, increasingly reliant on bloggers for marketing. … The beef stems from a Vogue roundtable published on Sunday in which several editors discussed Milan Fashion Week and denigrated style bloggers in the process. Vogue.com’s chief critic Sarah Mower turned a nose up, stating, “The professional blogger bit, with the added aggression of the street photographer swarm who attend them, is ...

Read More Source

Why wouldn’t people buy Hermione Granger and the Philosopher’s Stone?

This is an interesting argument, that Hermione might have been one of the more original aspects of Harry Potter, and perhaps its most tolerable aspect.

This is something that the Harry Potter fan community has been discussing for years: Hermione drives the story because she has her own story. No one in their right mind would trust 13-year-old Harry Potter with a Time Turner, but Hermione gets one and she deserves it. She dates a celebrity, and she outsmarts Rita Skeeter, ...

Read More Source

Andrew Montalenti: Ask a teacher, police officer, or firefighter if they are paid proportional to the value they add

It’s an interesting essay, but I can’t go along with the complacency that’s implied. If people are paid unfairly, then we should try address that. Programming might seem to be reasonably paid when compared to doctors or lawyers or teachers, but there is the larger issue, are workers, as a group, being paid fairly? Anyone who reads history is aware that during the Gilded Age monopolists bribed politicians to enrich themselves to the detriment of the public. The ...

Inequality ruins romance

Interesting article:

Lily is, essentially, upper middle class. She has enough money and status to play bridge and attend balls with the truly wealthy, but she is living beyond her means, and her debts are always mounting. In order to secure a place for herself in society and to pay off her debts, she has to find a rich husband. Lily’s story illustrates the strain of the upper middle class trying to achieve true wealth—and the terrible consequences of failure—in a ...

Read More Source

Software as a metaphor for human behavior

I’m focusing on “sensitivity chip”. Interesting:

Jennifer Aniston is interviewed by Vanity Fair’s Leslie Bennetts. In the profile, titled The “Unsinkable Jennifer Aniston,” Aniston (crying the whole time) speaks on her marriage to Pitt, telling Bennetts, “We’re divorced, and you can see why,” referring to the aforementioned W spread.

She adds, “Brad is not mean-spirited; he would never intentionally try to rub something in my face. In hindsight, I can see him going, ‘Oh—I can see that that was inconsiderate.’ But I ...

Read More Source

Rapidly Exploring Random Trees

Interesting. It says the RRT proceeds by breaking the Voronoi spaces into smaller Voronoi spaces. The algorithm has a bias towards unexplored territory, unlike a purely random algorithm, which tends to loop back to explored space. I didn’t dig into the algorithm, but I can imagine how this would be useful in some situations.

Women at the White House amplify what they each say, so as to avoid being ignored

This is brilliant:

In the early days of the Obama White House, nearly two-thirds of Obama’s senior staffers and advisors were men. The Washington Post reports that the “women complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored.”

So, the women of the Obama White House banded together and sketched out a strategy that would effectively force their male colleagues to listen to them. They called it “amplification,” a simple ...

Read More Source

As a consolidation client for Kinesis, ZeroMQ is much better than Kafka

This is fantastic:

With the problem of real-time log consolidation solved with ZeroMQ, supporting durable storage of logs for later post-processing becomes a smaller and a much more manageable challenge. For example, off the shelve solutions like Logstash are capable of capturing data from ZeroMQ and publishing it to a variety of destinations. In our particular situation at Auth0, we are already using AWS Kinesis, ElasticSearch, and Kibana as a log processing pipeline in other parts of our operations. As such we ...

Read More Source

I always learn what I need to know about a year too late

At Celolot I wrote a bunch of Clojure apps that talked to each other over Redis thanks to Carmine/Nippy. We passed around maps, and each app checked a field in the map to see if the map was a message that it was suppose to respond to.

But I bet this is a thousand times faster:

ZeroMQ does not have a first class notion of a topic, yet it does have a first class concept of a subscription filter. Subscription filters ...

Read More Source

Camille Fournier on ephemeral nodes in etcd

I missed this the first time. In etcd a service needs to constantly update the fact that it is alive. If it dies, its info disappears. So other services can contact etcd and ask “Who is alive right now?”

ZooKeeper allows stateful connections. Thick clients. But what happens when you try to use ZooKeeper from a language that does not allow threads? Do you block on the only thread that you have?

For pub-sub she recommends RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ.

Why would I ever want to use Docker?

I’m trying to be open minded about Docker, but it is a struggle to grok why this is good. Do I want to bind all dependencies to my app? Great, then I’ll build uberjars that combine everything into 1 binary. But how will I work with Ruby On Rails? That’s easy: it is time to move away from Ruby On Rails. If Ruby can only be kept alive by using Docker, then we should give up on Ruby.

How will ...

The universe as a Church encoding

I think it is extremely messy that math has integers, fractions, irrational numbers and worse. If I was rich, I would work on a model of the universe where the only primitive is the function. One has to admit, the idea of a universe with only one primitive is extremely attractive.

In mathematics, Church encoding is a means of representing data and operators in the lambda calculus. The data and operators form a mathematical structure which is embedded in the ...

Read More Source

Unary Numeral System

Interesting:

Addition and subtraction are particularly simple in the unary system, as they involve little more than string concatenation. The Hamming weight or population count operation that counts the number of nonzero bits in a sequence of binary values may also be interpreted as a conversion from unary to binary numbers. However, multiplication is more cumbersome and has often been used as a test case for the design of Turing machines.

Compared to standard positional numeral systems, the unary system is inconvenient ...

Read More Source

What sort of apps would we get if everyone could program?

This issue has been brought up many times over the decades, most especially with Hypercard, and then again with the invention of the Web in 1989. Are there categories of software that we don’t get now because the only people who create software are highly skilled specialists?

Here is a story of a young woman creating an app, and it suggests what the world might be like if anyone could create software:

A lot has changed since I was in ...

Read More Source

Video games as a supplement to other mental medications

Interesting:

At a young age I knew I was different, but always just hid behind a theatre kid exterior and chalked all my anxiety up to “budding creativity” that just needed an outlet. Surprise! Turns out my anxiety is actually a chemical imbalance in my brain that kept escalating until it exploded. I was nearly 21, living at college, and having a full-on anxiety attack every day. After dropping about 10 pounds (I’m very small to begin with) and not being ...

Read More Source

The promise of equity no longer aligns the interests of workers and startup founders

This essay is fantastic:

Sure enough, companies like Snapchat and Palantir have adopted policies that either vest employee options over a longer period of time (five years in the case of Palantir) or back-weight the bulk of vesting later in an employee’s tenure (Snapchat vests only 10% the first year, 20% in the second, 30% in the third, and 40% in the fourth). Still, while this adjustment may strike VCs and founders as a reasonable tradeoff, lengthening the time workers are ...

Read More Source

It took me 10 years to write that 5 line app

There is the story where Picasso paints a quick sketch and wants a huge amount of money for it, and the art collector says “It only took you 15 minutes to make that sketch!” and Picasso says “I spent 60 years learning how to do that in 15 minutes.”

Maybe something like this applies when it comes to microservices. When I advocate for microservices, I bring 17 years of experience to the conversation. The first 7 of those years meant ...

The economy is a collection of many distinct but interconnected practices

Or as Joseph Schumacher said, “The social process is really one indivisible whole!”

This is interesting:

We should see our economy not simply as a capitalist market system but as a collection of “many distinct but interconnected practices”. Neither the traditional economist’s focus on firms in markets nor the Marxist political economist’s focus on exploitation of wage labour by capital is a viable way of understanding the real economy, and the book takes some steps towards an alternative view.

Both of ...

Read More Source

Post-Real Theory

I think this is actually happening in most fields, not just economics. It’s happening in physics, in biology, in computer technology:

In response to the observation that the shocks [in DSGE models] are imaginary, a standard defense invokes Milton Friedman’s (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed authority that “the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (p.14).” More recently, “all models are false” seems to have become the universal hand-wave for dismissing any fact that does not conform to the ...

Read More Source

Petty Revenge Stories

I am thinking of launching yet another blog service, so I am studying existing blog services.

I am curious how certain Tumblr blogs manage to attract enough of an audience that they get a steady stream of submissions. Petty Revenge Stories, for instance. How did this get famous enough that now it gets a steady supply of submissions.

As near as I can tell, the owner of Petty Revenge Stories never speaks. They do not offer a performance of their ...

Is this a story about women in journalism in the 1920s, or is this a story about burnout?

Since I’ve dealt with my own episodes of burnout, I would say this sounds a lot like burnout. If you both love a profession and find yourself unmotivated to do the work, then you are suffering from depression/burnout.

The couple married in 1934. Velva sold her automotive Corona and would soon retire to the serenity of the Outpost Estates home where Rick grew up. She was free from the rat race.

And yet, when I looked in city directories for the ...

Read More Source

For the last 10,000 years, the banking industry has relied on eventual consistency

Why do computer programmers feel smug offering the following example, when it is so clearly wrong?

Transactions, to a database, are important, because banks must keep track of money. Suppose a person were to move $100 from their Savings account to their Checking account. Suppose $100 is added to checking, and just then the electricity dies, and the computers die, before $100 can be subtracted from their Savings account. The person now has an extra $100, which they should not ...

Read More Source

How not to transition from celebrity life to politics

Ivanka Trump is used to getting easy questions from the celebrity press. She is surprised to face tough questions now that she has entered politics. Interesting:

For the rest of the interview, she’s combative: “You said he made those comments,” she says to Gupta. “I don’t know that he said those comments.” When Gupta reiterates that, yes, Donald Trump said pregnancy was an inconvenience, Trump responds, “There’s plenty of time for you to editorialize around this, but I think he put ...

Read More Source

I keep really good company

This article by Yegor Bugayenko cites the following people:

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Alan Kay

Paul Graham

Richard Mansfield

Eric Raymond

Jeff Atwood

Linus Torvalds

Oscar Nierstrasz

Rich Hickey

Eric Allman

Joe Armstrong

Rob Pike

John Barker

Lawrence Krubner (me)

Asaf Shelly

I must be doing something right to get cited alongside Edsger W. Dijkstra, Alan Kay, Paul Graham, Linus Torvalds, and Rich Hickey.

Americans are less enamored of the status quo

Interesting:

Politics is seeping into American public life — and with it, the belief that the status quo isn’t worth saving

We’ve seen in this cycle — in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders as well as Donald Trump — the appeal of a politics that puts forward a robust alternative vision for society. A politics that doesn’t just promise improvements to the lives of individual voters but declares what America itself ought to be.

That’s not a vision that can be put into ...

Read More Source

Failing to expand cities will come at a cost

This article does not do much more than remind us that automobiles have been the primary transportation mechanism of the last 100 years, and therefore growth and autos are linked. A different technology would generate different results. But we should also the cultural and political paralysis that contributes to this. Ideas about private property work well when we discuss unsullied fresh ground way out in the middle of nowhere. Ideas of private property break down when we are discussing Manhattan. ...

I am confused why large firms acquire smaller firms

It is well known that most mergers are failures. Hundreds of good studies have been written on the subject. And yet large firms continue to acquire smaller firms.

There are other ways that large firms could behave:

1.) A large firm, with mature markets and steady cash flows, act as venture capitalists, funding hundreds of small firms and setting them free

2.) A large firm, with mature markets and steady cash flows, could simply give the money back to investors

So why acquire? ...

When is consistency needed in a database?

This is a great comment :

Consistently is overvalued. Requiring consistency in distributed system generally leads to designs that reduces availability. Which is one of the reasons that bank transactions generally do not rely on transactional updates against your bank. “Low level” operations as part of settlement may us transactions, but the bank system is “designed” (more like it has grown by accretion) to function almost entirely by settlement and reconciliation rather than holding onto any notion of consistency. The real world rarely involves ...

Read More Source

Why insult your customers?

This seems like an unnecessary self-inflicted wound. I get defending one’s work as an artists, but there is a conflict between asserting a vision as an artist and being a businessperson who has a comfortable relationship with one’s customers.

For the USA economy, 2015 was the best year since at least 1999

Very interesting:

That is great news of course. Do note however the following (NYT):

The median household income is still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, before the recession. It also remains 2.4 percent lower than the all-time peak reached during the economic boom of the late 1990s.

Even with this unexpected and quite remarkable income gain, America is close to having gone twenty years without a significant money pay hike for its middle class category.

And do note this: two days ago, ...

Read More Source

The fraud at WellsFargo is historic

So you might have bank accounts that you don’t want and you never asked for? You might be charged fees on these accounts? Reasonable people should find this terrifying:

If you Google the phrase “bank cross-selling,” you don’t get many hits about the recent Wells Fargo scandal, in which thousands of bank employees were fired for the most blatant sort of corporate fraud. “Team members,” as Wells Fargo prefers to call its employees, had strict mandates to sign existing customers ...

Read More Source

Why did Salesforce use markup tags for VisualForce?

By now, I think we can agree, using HTML for the web was a mistake. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee could not have known that back in 1989. He was thinking that he could create a Semantic Web, and for that, the use of a markup language was defensible. Only in retrospect do we see that HTML was mostly used as a GUI for TCP/IP. Eventually Sir Tim Berners-Lee conceded the point, and so he went off and created RDF.

But ...

Could crime prediction software force patterns of crime to continue as they have in the past?

If a town starts off, years ago, policing an area heavily because that area is black, and therefore many incidents in that area are formally reported, and then software is used to look for patterns of reports, and the software highlights the black areas, then we are using software to legitimate the over-policing of certain neighborhoods.

Very interesting article:

The fact that we even call these systems “predictive” is itself a telling sign of excessive confidence in the systems. The ...

Read More Source

Are ebooks in decline?

Interesting:

And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from e-book sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big Five publishers.

…The AAP also reported, though, that e-book revenue was down 11.3 percent in 2015 and unit sales down 9.7 percent. That’s where things get misleading. Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. ...

Read More Source

Rolling coal is sheer aggression

This is an interesting point:

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention.

There’s no faux nostalgia involved. Unlike with, say, hunting, there’s no tale of rugged rural self-sufficiency to draw on. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition ...

Read More Source

When co-workers doubt complaints of sexual harrassment

This is a story that I think will become a reference point, in future years, for how badly one’s co-workers react to this kind of thing:

Skepticism of women who report sexual misconduct is deeply ingrained in our culture. It’s a reflexive, often subconscious bias that can be hard to shake. Some people will take longer to shake it than others — even in the relatively hip-to-feminism era of 2016 America.

So it’s always encouraging to see people realize and publicly ...

Read More Source

Women generally do more housework than men, but this pattern varies immensely in degree across countries and over time

The most interesting sentence:

These patterns of behaviour exist even among individuals living alone

This is a great article, but it doesn’t mention the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. But this seems to be an example of Sapir–Whorf:

Women generally do more housework than men, but this pattern varies immensely in degree across countries and over time. Why?

Using time-use survey data from the US, we show that female immigrants coming from countries whose dominant language relies on sex-based grammatical distinctions bear a far larger share of ...

Read More Source

Political reactions to recent protests in Dallas

Interesting the way some people see broad conspiracies in what is probably a small terrorist plot:

Walsh gained a reputation while in office for aligning himself with a group of politicians who showed themselves to be rape apologists just before the 2012 election (which Walsh lost to Rep. Tammy Duckworth). Walsh, who is pro-life without exception, also somehow misinterpreted science so grossly that he stated publicly that it was virtually impossible for a woman to die from a pregnancy.

“This is an ...

Read More Source

When women’s entrance to the workforce had the most effect

I am surprised that women’s entry into the labor force was no longer a driving power as early as the 1970s. The big surge is entirely in the 1960s.

Comparing data sets that are imbalanced

Interesting:

Research on imbalanced classes often considers imbalanced to mean a minority class of 10% to 20%. In reality, datasets can get far more imbalanced than this. —Here are some examples:

1.) About 2% of credit card accounts are defrauded per year1. (Most fraud detection domains are heavily imbalanced.)

2.) Medical screening for a condition is usually performed on a large population of people without the condition, to detect a small minority with it (e.g., HIV prevalence in the USA is ~0.4%).

3.) Disk ...

Read More Source

Base 10 numbers need log(10) digits to be described

I’m sure I knew this example once, but I’d completely forgotten it, and it is so perfectly obvious when we talk to non-technical people and they ask for an example of what logarithmic growth looks like:

In mathematics, logarithmic growth describes a phenomenon whose size or cost can be described as a logarithm function of some input. e.g. y = C log (x). Note that any logarithm base can be used, since one can be converted to another by multiplying ...

Read More Source

Accessing any single element in an array takes constant time as only one operation has to be performed to locate it.

This seems like it could be used as a trick question that would trip me up during a job interview:

An algorithm is said to be constant time (also written as O(1) time) if the value of T(n) is bounded by a value that does not depend on the size of the input. For example, accessing any single element in an array takes constant time as only one operation has to be performed to locate it. However, finding the minimal ...

Read More Source

Beware Big O Notation in higher level languages

This essay has a nice bit of details about a general point that needs to be made:

Here we get the result that will be counterintuitive to many. No matter how large n gets, the Array List still performs better overall. In order for performance to get worse, the ratio of inserts to iterations has to change, not just the length of the collection. Note that isn’t an actual failure of Big O analysis, it is merely a common human failure ...

Read More Source

The gamification of Slack makes it addictive but also makes it a drain

Very interesting:

Everything bad about Slack is fundamentally Slack’s fault. Slack’s sane default for a new user is to play a sound and send a desktop notification every time anything happens anywhere. There is no way to simply turn off the screaming red circle on the dock icon. There is no way to simply fold away the sidebar so you can focus on whatever it is you are trying to do. These UI nitpicks help us understand Slack’s conception of the ...

Read More Source

Some blunt advice on management

This is an interesting essay:

Managing people at startups is different because you have no safety net. You may think, having spent a few years at a big company in a management position, that you know how to manage already. You’ve given performance reviews, done interviews, dealt with project timelines, played politics. You know the basics. Right? Here’s what you don’t see until you leave the safety of a big company. You don’t see the millions of invisible systems all around you ...

Read More Source

Hausdorff space

What is fully normalized data? Reading up on this, it is fascinating to consider the overlap here between database schemas and topology:

In topology and related branches of mathematics, a Hausdorff space, separated space or T2 space is a topological space in which distinct points have disjoint neighbourhoods. Of the many separation axioms that can be imposed on a topological space, the “Hausdorff condition” (T2) is the most frequently used and discussed. It implies the uniqueness of limits of sequences, nets, ...

Read More Source

What Gawker did well

Interesting:

What Gawker did at its best was stand up and say, “No, you’re right, these are lies, you are correct to think that you are being lied to” and for however long that assertion hung there in the air you were able remind yourself that you weren’t wrong to feel discomfort with what whatever narrative they were pushing at you. You weren’t alone. It did not make the world better but at least it pressed pause on the world’s becoming ...

Read More Source

What is continuous?

I like this simple set of examples:

As an example, consider the function h(t), which describes the height of a growing flower at time t. This function is continuous. By contrast, if M(t) denotes the amount of money in a bank account at time t, then the function jumps at each point in time when money is deposited or withdrawn, so the function M(t) is discontinuous.

The nostalgia for old games

Interesting that someone brought back Runequest:

Thanks to your overwhelming support during our Kickstarter, we are proud to announce that RuneQuest 2 (and 1) are Back in Print and back with Chaosium! Just in time to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Glorantha.

This is the game that started it all. It defined the d100 role-playing experience, with skills instead of levels and having a game tied into a deep mythic background: Greg Stafford’s world of Glorantha. Steve Perrin and Ray Turney worked with ...

Read More Source

How Uber failed in Japan

Really interesting:

This strategy has been phenomenally successful in America, but has failed miserably in Japan for three key reasons. #1 People Trust Government More than Industry My libertarian friends in San Francisco find this baffling. They often dismiss it as brainwashing or propaganda when I explain it, but it’s not. The United States is unique in the free world for our visceral disgust for and distrust of our own government.

It’s not that people is Asia consider government motivations to be pure. Over ...

Read More Source

Content on the web doesn’t pay, and giving up on comments will make everything worse

It’s a failure of leadership when a content play can not figure out how to make money off of comments.

All the money goes to the systems that collect the comments (Twitter, Facebook).

NPR is making an announcement today that is sure to upset a loyal core of its audience, those who comment online at NPR.org (including those who comment on this blog). As of Aug. 23, online comments, a feature of the site since 2008, will be disabled.

With the ...

Read More Source

Progressive values in science-fiction and fantasy

Interesting to see this change happening now and not in, say for instance, 1975.

The three fiction longer-fiction categories were each won by a woman of color: N.K. Jemisin (Best Nove), Nnedi Okorafor (Best Novella) and Hao Jingfang (Best Novellette). Additionally, Michi Trota, one of the editors of Uncanny Magazine, noted that she was the first Filipino to win a Hugo.

Jingfang, who hails from China, won for her story Folding Beijing, and is the second Chinese science fiction authors in ...

Read More Source

Mena Trott did not understand the online world she was helping to build

This has been common, with the technical and business leaders having no understanding of the implications of what they were building. This is the norm, not the exception.

Trott has an interesting golden rule that she would like to see bloggers adopt. “If you aren’t going to say something directly to someone’s face, than don’t use online as an opportunity to say it,” she says. “It is this sense of bravery that people get when they are anonymous that gives ...

Read More Source

It’s not even XML!

Dave Winer said he is deeply depressed. Sometimes he seems frightened by the march of change. I suppose that is an aspect of depression. His initial fear of JSON seems like an expression of fear:

I’ve been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. The advantage ...

Read More Source

Finding novelty via friends is a metric not yet captured by recommendation engines

This is a good point:

The traditional regime of recommendation systems has been obsessed with (1). What’s the uplift of recommendation algorithm A vs recommendation algorithm B? Which is driving more click-thrus and conversions?

There’s something fundamentally broken in the this way of thinking though. I don’t care what the computer says. I care about what my friends say. The meaningful music I’ve discovered over the last 10 years has been music liked by someone I respect. Friends. Other musicians I ...

Read More Source

Detecting voting rings with HyperLogLog

While this seems like a clever trick, I typically want a lot of metrics regarding voting, so throwing away the metadata doesn’t seem like an option to me. As an aggregate tool whose only purpose is finding voting rings, maybe this useful maybe?

But consider what would happen if we created a HyperLogLog counter for every user on Reddit, and any time that a user receives an upvote, we update the corresponding HyperLogLog counter with the id of the user ...

Read More Source

Manila Social Club

I’ve heard good things about this place and I keep meaning to get dinner here.

Great browser software in 1996

These technologies sound so amazing, I wonder what happened to them?

Atlas is the precursor to the next step in Navigator’s evolution, Version 3.0. It’s “alpha” code; in other words, that celebrated tower in Pisa is more stable. When it works, Atlas promises to deliver:

VRML viewing. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is one of the competing standards for expressing three-dimensional information in compact form. VRML documents can be static or interactive. For example, you could create a Web page that ...

Read More Source

Social media is the highlight reel of other people’s lives

Interesting comment:

Social media and the internet has made it incredibly easy to see the various people out there who are in the top of their league at any particular hobby, vocation or activity, and made it seem like that’s the ‘norm’. If you’re an entrepreneur, it can feel like everyone’s making millions off their startup ideas and that anyone who isn’t is a failure. If you’re a web developer, it can seem like the majority of developers are experts in every ...

Read More Source

The oxytocin receptor gene comes in several variants

Interesting:

“The oxytocin receptor gene comes in several variants, and there are indications that some of these variants make you respond in less reactive ways to oxytocin in your blood,” explains Luc Goosens, a developmental psychologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. If you have the most common genotype of the oxytocin receptor gene, GG, you may be more attuned to the emotions of others but also more sensitive to rejection and more likely to end up feeling lonely.

In a ...

Read More Source

The Big O cheat sheet

I just discovered the Big O cheat sheet and I think this is very useful:

Raj Bhakta is a pathetic loser

This fellow Bhakta sounds like a lot of the wealthy people I’ve had as clients and as business partners. Immune to normal reality because of their wealth. They “fail” by doing something embarrassing, but they are incapable of failing in the Greek Tragedy sense: of falling out of their social class. Their family won’t let them fall.

Actually, I don’t know anything about Bhakta, but he does remind me of my ex-business partner:

1.) parties too much

2.) wants a glamorous life

3.) believes ...

Faraday’s breakthrough came when he wrapped two insulated coils of wire around an iron ring

I just realized that I’ve been confusing Faraday and Maxwell. It’s Maxwell who did the 4 equations.

Faraday’s breakthrough came when he wrapped two insulated coils of wire around an iron ring, and found that upon passing a current through one coil a momentary current was induced in the other coil.[2] This phenomenon is now known as mutual induction.[44] The iron ring-coil apparatus is still on display at the Royal Institution. In subsequent experiments, he found that if ...

Read More Source

The 1990s were a golden age for paper magazines

Even if the big profits were for the weeklies (Time, Lucky, Life) back in the 1950s and 1960s, for originality and dare, the magazines in the 1990s were amazing.

In the early ‘90s, one magazine helped change the scope of alternative publishing during the unpredictable era of print media with a simple question: “Would you chew up a nasty-tasting vitamin B-12 for $5? Yes or no?”

The question, though random, seemed innocent enough. What no one predicted though, was that this ...

Read More Source

Empathy overreaches when we can’t know and we can’t judge wrap themselves around each other so tightly that they become indistinguishable

I love the part at the end:

Here’s an example of guilt I have felt over earning a living: Back in May, I asked one of Gawker’s writers, Jordan Sargent, to write up a blog post as word spread that the music writer Sasha Frere-Jones had resigned from his job as a pop critic at the Los Angeles Times. I felt some self-reproach doing so, even though it was Frere-Jones who did the Bad Thing, and not me.

The Bad Thing was ...

Read More Source

A virus that breaks itself up into 5 pieces before it spreads

And biology is also stranger than we can know:

A team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has found a mosquito virus that’s broken up into pieces. And the mosquito needs to catch several of the pieces to get an infection.

“It’s the most bizarre thing,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, who wasn’t involved in the study. It’s like the virus is dismembered, he says.

“If you compare it to the human body, ...

Read More Source

A galaxy of almost pure dark matter

The universe is stranger than we can ever know:

But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy’s star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many.

The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists ...

Read More Source

The political divisions in working class towns

The end of this article was where it got interesting:

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Traficant, who went by the nickname Jimbo, annoyed and defied members of both parties, dished out scathing personal insults, blasted Washington insiders and purported to speak for the average Joe. He proposed sending troops to secure the Mexican border and criticized free trade. He even sported a flamboyant and gravity-defying hairdo, though it proved to be a toupee.

Back in Youngstown, the fondness for Mr. Traficant lingers despite ...

Read More Source

The end of the 58 year old political cycle

Why did the the Western countries favor trade liberalization after World War II? There were many reasons, but a lot of it was driven by war. The USA wanted to create a free-trade zone that would be solid against Communism. France wanted to bind Germany in the European Coal and Steel Community to make World War III impossible. The great European empires collapsed, and the newly freed Third World had to be tempted away from Communism. The trade opened ...

More help for those who want to cheat school

Wow, this is eye opening:

On any given day, thousands of students go online seeking academic relief. They are first-years and transfers overwhelmed by the curriculum, international students with poor English skills, lazy undergrads with easy access to a credit card. They are nurses, teachers, and government workers too busy to pursue the advanced degrees they’ve decided they need.

The Chronicle spoke with people who run cheating companies and those who do the cheating. The demand has been around for decades. But ...

Read More Source

Technology’s productivity shrinks the economy

Interesting:

But how will this technological progress show up in conventional economic statistics? Here the picture is somewhat mixed. Take GDP, for example. This is usually defined as the market value of all final goods and services produced in a given country in a particular time period. The catch is “market value”—if a good isn’t bought and sold, it generally doesn’t show up in GDP. This has many implications. Household production, ad-supported content, transaction costs, quality changes, free services, and ...

Read More Source

Normal_gaussian: The communication benefit group chats gave me was phenomenal

Interesting comment:

I was in school when msn and facebook were big. I lived in the same town as the school, which was a twenty minute drive from the village most of my friends lived in. They eventually forced me to use Facebook, and it changed my social life drastically. The communication benefit group chats gave me was phenomenal. Nowadays facebook lets me organise my climbing life, and makes a handy contact book for acquaintances. I’m on snapchat. I follow Justin because its funny, ...

Read More Source

Mitochondrial genes show a similar pattern of change in a vast array of creatures

Interesting study:

We found the same two mitochondrial genes (cob and nad5) under selection in lineages that independently invaded the land. This was a strong hint that similar selective forces left their footprint in the mitochondrial genome; both genes encode enzymes deeply involved in the energy production pathway, which is in line with our assumption that adaptation to the land environment required changes to cope with the increased energy demands.

Mitochondrial proteins are vital to organisms, and as such are highly conserved ...

Read More Source

Failure is everywhere

An interesting essay:

Which brings me to a paradox. Whereas our own eyes tell us that incompetence is ubiquitous, standard economic theory regards it as merely a temporary deviation. It thinks that agents are incentivized to optimize; that badly managed assets will be bought cheaply by people better equipped to run them; and that competition will drive incompetent firms out of business.

But this doesn’t happen – at least not fully. Even the best incentives can’t put in what God left ...

Read More Source

Will shows like “The Girlfriend Experience” ever explain the industry they cover?

Sad and lonely.

Empty.

Have there been good movies on this theme?

Why so few good shows for television or Netflix?

Some stories are written by those from the inside, but they never seem to get wide attention. Why?

It’s sort of like 50 Shades Of Gray. There have been hundreds of great novels written about BSDM. How is it possible that such a terrible novel carried BSDM into the mainstream? Why not one of the great novels? What is it about ...

I stopped counting, she said, because it was too upsetting

This is a very dark and tragic story:

With her co-op board’s approval, Linda set up another security camera in the hallway of the third floor, and pointed it at Alex and Jonas’s apartment. She would watch the footage periodically, and over the next two months, Linda began sending Detective Nugent still photos of what she had seen. “They would come in with women who were happy and relaxed, and the women would come out—woman after woman—would looked stunned and upset ...

Read More Source

The relentless criticism of sorority recruitment videos

An interesting point of view:

Despite the popularity of the 2016 Delta Gamma video, the comments it received on YouTube and Facebook are full of anger and criticism, particularly from men. The comments typically characterize the women in the video as shallow, dumb, slutty, time-wasting, privileged, un-diverse, and ignorant. “I look forward to seeing how little each of you contribute to society,” ran one typical piece of user feedback.

The existence of the video was an excuse for viewers to lash ...

Read More Source

Facebooks is aggressive about getting people’s data from any source that it controls

This is ugly, the aggressive way that FaceBook tries to seize information from people who do not want to share their information with FaceBook:

This is an incredibly ugly dark pattern. The ‘share information with Facebook’ nugget is hidden behind a toggle at the bottom of the screen, and will be guaranteed to be missed by the 99% of users who just want to talk to their friends. Then, once you’ve agreed to the terms and conditions, you’ve got a completely arbitrary 30 ...

Read More Source

The alt-right meme

I had literally not heard of the “alt-right” until yesterday. And now I see there are several articles about its influence on politics in the USA. I suppose this is a case of a particular movement hitting some new level of power and so everyone needs a label for it?

For instance, Hillary Clinton is complaining about the alt-right:

In her most direct critique yet connecting the Trump campaign to white nationalists and the conservative fringe, Mrs. Clinton is framing Mr. ...

Read More Source

End of the unacknowledged advertisement on social media?

Very slowly, the Internet is being forced to obey all the rules that apply to the rest of society:

Look at them, following rules! Only time will tell if these displays of somewhat honest business practices will stick or if they’re just playing along now while the story is still hot.

The Kardashian krackdown follows a report that the FTC is planning on getting tougher about sponsored content for all the C-list actors, reality stars and Instagram celebrities out there.

For now, an ...

Read More Source

City as skyscrapers

Interesting point:

One of the weird cultural things in the US is the equation of “urban” with “downtown” and “downtown” with “Manhattan-like.” Basically, the city is where the skyscrapers are. NIMBYism related to density in urban areas that experience it (San Francisco especially these days) always raises the specter of 2-3 story residential neighborhoods being turned into “Manhattan” (And by Manhattan they mean Midtown or Downtown. You know, where the skyscrapers are).

Not everybody wants to live in Manhattan! Fair enough. ...

Read More Source

Where is the magazine industry going?

A very interesting take on all of the dead magazines:

The landscape that the early Gawker was teleported into each day afresh, always with little memory of the blog-day prior, was dominated by the stark shadows of three sunward-facing editors who were largely famous for extremely failed magazines. The 102 weekly issues of Adam Moss’s 7 Days made his reputation as the best package-man east of Aaron Spelling’s house. He took over New York magazine when Gawker was a bubbly infant. ...

Read More Source

What did Gawker do?

“Performative ignorance” is a great phrase. I like this assessment:

When I think about the demise of Gawker, I cope by viewing it from a remove and as a narrative. If nobody starves and this somehow manages to leave freedom of press unscathed (the latter obviously being the bigger if than the former), what has been crafted is a tale that would seem too outrageous as fiction. Each chapter in Gawker’s trajectory, particularly the last few feverish, increasingly mad entries, has ...

Read More Source

How much did war contribute to the strength of the early blogosphere?

Or rather, how much is debate energized by having an important issue to talk about? I think of this in relation to Andrew Sullivan:

And after 9/11, General Sullivan enlisted in the Fighting 101st Keyboard Kommandos, otherwise known as the “warbloggers,” whose primary mission was to fight America’s most important enemy, the enemy at home known as “Americans.”

In the Sunday Times of London on September 16, 2001 (!!), Andrew had these lines:

The middle part of the country – the great red ...

Read More Source

The 20% of Real America

The math behind this is interesting:

If you’re one of these “real Americans,” you’re in the majority in almost every respect. Most Americans are white, most are Christian, most don’t have college degrees, and most live in the South or Midwest Census Bureau regions. And yet, only about 1 in 5 voters meets all of these descriptions.

Blinded by its simultaneous romanticization of and contempt for working-class America

A very interesting article:

But most of all, this kind of punditry, while ostensibly praising the Real America, is in fact marked by deep condescension. One pats the simple folk on the head, praising their lack of exposure to quinoa or Thai food — both of which can be found in food courts all across the country. Sorry, but there are no country bumpkins in modern America. Most of us, in all walks of life, have a pretty good sense of ...

Read More Source

When is a woman a woman?

A great article about Caster Semenya and the unfair way that the Olympics tries to narrowly define what it means to be a woman:

What is it, exactly, that makes me a woman? Is it my breasts? If so, is it because they are a certain size? Is it that I have a womb? Does it matter that I have no idea if my womb works because I’ve never tried to get pregnant? Is it my two X chromosomes or my ...

Read More Source

HAProxy for MySQL

Three years ago, I was intrigued to read that Twitter had implemented dynamic network topologies. Something similar is becoming more common, thanks to the use of Nginx/HAProxy. One can use this for many things, such as connecting to a pool of MySQL servers.

However, there are some downsides worth remembering:

You have to be careful to tune your xinetd script to increase the cps and per_source limits accordingly to the load that your pool of servers generate with this proxy forwarding. Assuming that ...

Read More Source

Is Twitter a common carrier or a community?

The debate continues:

Trying to be both a platform and a community are goals which are often in conflict, especially in terms of operations. Communities really need things like trust, reputation, moderation, rules, and enforcement. These are things that are hard to enforce programmatically, and often require a lot of customization. e.g. reddit started as a platform for communities, but the success of /r/all made it more a community of communities, at which point some of the more extreme communities became a ...

Read More Source

Unnecessary amounts of gender at the Olympics?

Interesting:

Indian gymnast, Dipa Karmakar, just missed an Olympic medal by a small margin. She is the first Indian female gymnast ever to compete in the Olympics. Dipa is one of only five women worldwide who have successfully completed the Produnova, the most difficult vault currently performed in women’s gymnastics. Here is an excellent article by Sharda Ugra of ESPN on Dipa, on the northeastern state of Tripura where she comes from, and on the story behind gymnastics’ unusual popularity there. ...

Read More Source

Limits on hate speech in Western democracies

An interesting article about hate-speech:

The second kind of argument concerns hate itself, and the insidious effects that hateful ideologies have on individuals, groups, and the polity. EU reports make an effort to capture the essential nature and harms of hate (link). Hate incites mistrust, disrespect, discrimination, and violence against members of other groups. The social effects of hate are toxic and serious. Do these effects suffice to justify limiting hate speech?

This is a difficult argument to make within the context ...

Read More Source

Clever uses of a custom TCP stack

Interesting:

Fun anecdote, at Blekko we had people who tried to scrape the search engine by fetching all 300 pages of results. They would do that with some script or code and it would be clear they weren’t human because they would ask for each page right after the other. We sent them to a process that Greg wrote on a machine that did most of the TCP handshake and then went away. As a result the scrapers script would hang ...

Read More Source

The Roman economy was in danger of continuous secular stagnation

Here is Mark Koyama, who sounds stupid while trying to sound smart:

For Brown’s thesis to hold, therefore, the Roman economy must have been in danger of continuous secular stagnation.

Of course, every single economy in the history of the world was in continuous secular stagnation before 5,000 BC, and nearly all economies were in continuous secular stagnation from 5,000 BC to 1,500 AD. Escape from continuous secular stagnation is rare. Continuous growth, for several decades, is extremely rare in human ...

What the culture gains and loses from gay dating apps

Interesting:

My biggest concern about my use of Grindr is that it will inflate my ego—and that I’ll furthermore get used to that inflation so that the day it pops, and I realize I’m too old to be considered desirable by any but a small niche, will fling me into a free fall. But for men whose egos have been already deflated by cultural stereotypes—as is the case for a gay Filipino-American academic I talked to for this piece, Anthony Ocampo, ...

Read More Source

All the ideas we never work on

This is funny:

Your day starts in Salesforce. You have to email a bunch of people. You briefly contemplate a business idea you have that will totally kill Salesforce and Facebook at the same time. But you need a technical co-founder. Eventually you’ll get to it — after all, you’re smart and destined for greatness yourself. And your friends all tell you how you should start something someday.

Your 27-year-old CEO calls an ad-hoc all-hands meeting and regales about company culture and how your ...

Read More Source

The big new insult of 2016

Interesting:

Although “cuckold” has been used since the thirteenth century (the word itself derived from cuckoo birds, which lay eggs in another’s nest), “cuck” was added to Urban Dictionary in 2007. Any more exact tracing of its origins is lost in the dense knot of the internet and the speed with which its population seized upon an insult to emasculate others. The word gained political potency during the 2016 election in the portmanteau “cuckservative” (cuck + conservative) used to imply that the ...

Read More Source

When algorithms betray you

Interesting:

You decide to share an article about Brexit from “The Atlantic”, which will somehow shed light to all your friends as to why it happened. The article is 1,000 words long — you only read half of it, but that’s good enough. It captures all the arguments you’ve been wanting to make for the past two months to your friends. Will this be the Facebook post that finally spurns your friends into action? You realize your Facebook friends all agree with your ...

Read More Source

Only good leadership can create good software

This is very true, and it applies to more than software:

Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond’s book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 2001) redefined our vocabulary and all but promised an end to the waterfall model and big software companies, thanks to the new grass-roots open source software development movement. I found the book thought provoking, but it did not convince me. On the other hand, being deeply involved in open source, I couldn’t help but think that it ...

Read More Source

A whole web site devoted to horror stories about Amazon.com

Wow, this is serious:

The next day I filed a complaint with HR and CC’ed my manager. This led to a phone call with HR asking me to allow them to investigate the situation and to keep the incident in confidentiality until the investigation was complete. (HR had trouble providing me with follow-up in writing— they preferred to keep everything face to face or over the phone.)

Naively, I agreed to keep it confidential until the investigation was complete. HR’s ultimate finding ...

Read More Source

Clever hacks whereby sites can see aspects of your browser history

Very interesting hacks:

Up until mid-2010, any rogue website could get a good sense of your browsing habits by specifying a distinctive :visited CSS pseudo-class for any links on the page, rendering thousands of interesting URLs off-screen, and then calling the getComputedStyle API to figure out which pages appear in your browser’s history.

After some deliberation, browser vendors have closed this loophole by disallowing almost all attributes in :visited selectors, spare for the fairly indispensable ability to alter foreground and background ...

Read More Source

The problem with Terry Richardson

This is a good point about Terry Richardson:

His style reflects the non-aesthetic of the grunge 1990s, when Richardson began work as a photographer, and his punk youth as a heroin addict. Subjects ranging from Beyonce to President Obama stand in front of a white backdrop, captured in candid and unexpected, yet still flattering moments strongly reminiscent of a rawer, sexualized Jeurgen Teller. Images posted to Richardson’s Twitter showcase mundane, unsurprising locations. The photographer appears in front of the camera ...

Read More Source

The control mania of Scrum

This is very good:

Scrum inhibits deep understanding and innovation This is actually my biggest gripe about Scrum. As mentioned above, in Scrum, the gods of story points per sprint reign supreme. For anything that doesn’t bring in points, you need to get the permission of the product owner or scrum master or someone who has a say over them. Refactoring, reading code, researching a topic in detail are all seen as “not working on actual story points, which is what you ...

Read More Source

The daily Scrum meeting is a pointless ritual

I love this:

The daily standup deserves a blog post of its own. This religious ritual has become a staple of every team in the world. Ten minutes of staring into the void, talking about what you did while no one else listens, because they were in the middle of something five minutes ago and will go back to it in another five minutes, and waiting for everyone else to finish. I know this sounds cynical, but it is the ...

Read More Source

If you measure programmers by points then they will optimize for points

The worst thing with Agile/Scrum is that you can hit all your 2 week targets and yet a year later have software that no one wants to use, so to the extent that Agile is suppose to reduce risk, it fails completely.

But why does it fail? This is good:

No matter how you define story points, the real issue with them doesn’t go away. The main purpose of points is making planning more reliable, and providing a temporal perspective ...

Read More Source

Problems with the Scrum process

This is a great conversation:

cageface says:

But the author’s criticisms of the incentives of Scrum are on point I think. Because the stories are always articulated in terms of user facing features they encourage developers to hack things together in the most expedient way possible and completely fail to capture the need to address cross cutting concerns, serious consideration of architecture, and refactoring.

This is how you can get two years into a project and have managers and clients that think that ...

Read More Source

The viewpoint of police in Germany

Interesting:

Another reason for that is the difference in prison sentences. If I was a drug dealer in the US and I had 20 pounds of coke in my trunk when a cop stops me for a broken taillight, I’d seriously calculate my chances of killing him and getting away. There is simply no reason for me to do that in Germany. The prison sentences are laughable here. It’s just not worth it. If they arrest me with the coke here, ...

Read More Source

The popularity of artificial languages in the 1800s

Interesting:

Volapük was a hit! Volapük clubs started popping up throughout Europe. Large conventions were held first in Friedrichshafen in 1884, then Munich in 1887, and finally Paris in 1889. The first two conventions were held in German, but by the third conference, everyone was speaking in Volapük, even the waiters!

Kerckhoffs, who was an early friend and popularizer of the language, would subsequently sow the seeds for its destruction. Kerckhoffs was unhappy with some parts of the language and thought they ...

Confusing French

Hilarious:

Gender’s a bitch. Le poêle: a stove. La poêle: a frying pan. A man’s shirt, une chemise, is feminine, but a woman’s shirt, un chemisier, is masculine.

This is also good:

Another way to try to rate the difficulty of a language is to consider its unusual features: putting the verb before the subject in a sentence, for example, or not having a question particle (“do”). Researchers analyzed two hundred and thirty-nine languages to create the Language Weirdness Index, anointing Chalcatongo Mixtec—a ...

Read More Source

What causes burnout?

A very interesting article:

We commonly use the term “burnout” to describe the state of exhaustion suffered by the likes of Steve. It occurs when we find ourselves taken over by this internal protest against all the demands assailing us from within and without, when the momentary resistance to picking up a glass becomes an ongoing state of mind.

Burnout didn’t become a recognised diagnosis until 1974, when the German-American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger applied the term to the increasing number of ...

Read More Source

You don’t have plenty of time

I love this:

“Plenty of time” is a fat bankroll, and you’re buying drinks at the bar. “Plenty of time” is wasted training cycles when you weren’t taking care of business. “Plenty of time” is failing at the little things, but it’s cool because it’s NBD. “Plenty of time” is spent before you know it. “Plenty of time” isn’t.

I’m not talking about priorities. You should have those, and believe me, Powerlifting hasn’t been #1 in my life maybe ever. I’m fine ...

Read More Source

Conversations which have not changed in 50 years

I relate to the bit about this conversation being tired:

How tired are you of talking about “women in comics?” Can the conversation move on to something more nuanced/complex or in your opinion is it still a necessity to highlight the gender disparity in your field?

I’m so tired that I could be medically dead. It’s historically and culturally ignorant; like, if you don’t know who Marie Severin is and why she’s important, you don’t fucking know comics. Period. To act like ...

Read More Source

Even for successful writers, the traditional publishing industry is brutal

A sad story and it raises the puzzle, yet again, of why publishing is such a strange disaster of an industry:

That novel was called Lightning Rods, and it came out two months ago, with the much smaller press New Directions. She tried at various points over the past decade, but Ms. DeWitt could not get the book published before then. The book should have seen the light of day almost 10 years ago, when it was bought—after lengthy negotiations—by Jonathan ...

Read More Source

The JustWorks job interview

One of the most popular posts I’ve written is “Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview“. People get a laugh out of the dumb things I do doing job interviews. Here is another such post.

I did a job interview at JustWorks. They asked me to write the code to solve this problem:

The cost of a stock on each day is given in an array, find the max profit that you can make by buying once ...

Read More Source

Prison should not be a government’s profit center

A very worrisome attitude among some government officials:

The next to fall in Mississippi will be workers at regional jails that have lost 20 percent of their inmates. Officials in Stone County and George County said that around 40 employees in each would be laid off if the jails were forced to close, a necessity if the inmate population or the state reimbursement doesn’t increase. The counties are losing $72,000 per month each, officials said. Both counties still owe significant sums ...

Read More Source

The IMF admits it has favored austerity at the wrong time and the wrong place

An interesting article:

It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.

The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European ...

Read More Source

The importance of the blogosphere for economics

An interesting article:

A few weeks ago was typical. After some time off, my feed aggregator displayed 794 blog posts, 56 of them foolishly filed into the “must read” folder. Here lay a polemic blasting the FT for worrying about China’s debts; there a graph strewn post about US inflation expectations. Virtuoso “infovore” Tyler Cowen had dug up a fascinating passage on how China runs monetary policy. Another polymath, Brad DeLong (former Clinton staffer and tireless scourge of rightwing bunkum), had ...

Read More Source

Is Docker ready for production?

I prefer uberjars to Docker, and I prefer fat binaries, such as those allowed by Go, over Docker. And still there is the question “Is Docker ready?”

Senex says:

I’ve been tracking the beta for a while. I’m confused about this announcement. These issues still seem unresolved? (1) docker can peg the CPU until it’s restarted

(2) pinata was removed, so it can’t be configured from CLI scripts

(3) it’s not possible to establish an ip-level route from the host to a container, which ...

Read More Source

Kent Beck suggests winter could come to the tech industry

Very interesting, especially since this is Kent Beck:

As a new millennium dawned, I was riding high. Extreme Programming was the flavor of the month, my price for consulting was crazy high and rising, XP Explained was a big hit. Two years later I was battling depression, I was burning through savings, and I couldn’t get a gig to save myself. In between I made bad decisions in a panic. It’s not the bad times that wipe you out, it’s the bad ...

Read More Source

Crime is rising in the outermost suburbs

For a few decades after WW II the middle class of America operated under the rule “The cities are dangerous, the suburbs are safe”. Apparently that began to change after 1990:

The violent crime epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s was concentrated in big cities, and the crime decline that followed was concentrated there, too. As someone who lives in a big city and remembers the 1980s, I can attest that the change has been dramatic, almost miraculous. But if ...

Read More Source

Flossing does not improve gum health

The British point of view:

The enthusiasm with which American dental professionals promote flossing despite the evidence, has raised the notion of a conspiracy with floss manufacturers. I don’t believe for a second that American dentists are in cahoots with floss makers, but why do they cling to the notion that floss is a good idea and keep recommending it? Perhaps because, like flossing, it’s a habit and after over a century of promoting the use of floss, it must be ...

Read More Source

A Swede lands in Silicon Valley and is disappointed

A very interesting point of view:

I encountered levels of homelessness and mental illness that I was entirely unprepared for, but was repeatedly discouraged from donating any spare change by my new American community. It’s not your problem, that was the mantra that un-ironically flowed from the lips of entrepreneurs that otherwise convinced themselves that they were making the world a better place, presumably for themselves and the people who were their problem. There was something absurd and almost obscene about ...

Read More Source

Why do people join hate groups?

This is an interesting article:

But it is problematic to use data garnered in externalist studies to draw conclusions about micromobilization since it is not possible to infer the motivations of activists from the external conditions in which the group emerged. Because people are drawn to far-right movements for a variety of reasons that have little connection to political ideology (Blee 2002)—including a search for community, affirmation of masculinity, and personal loyalties— what motivates someone to join an anti-immigrant group, for ...

Read More Source

Grief regarding the end of the old political system

My sense is the changes will eventually involve fundamental constitutional revision. For now, people are talking about minor changes of policy:

The emergence of the Trump and Sanders insurgencies in the US, the Brexit vote in Britain, the formation of ultra-nationalists movements in Europe, are obvious markers of the new mood. The sea-change presents itself in different ways in different places. ISIS is a protest too.

Writers on the left have been taking positions on these issues for years, not ...

Read More Source

Why people hate Clinton

This is an interesting point of view:

My research indicates that the reality — the facts (I realize facts are immaterial when talking to many Trump supporters) — are that Hillary Clinton is one of the most honest politicians tracked by the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking project Politifact. I would also call upon Jill Abramson’s piece in the Guardian. Most of you probably know Abramson from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Abramson writes:

As an editor I’ve launched ...

Read More Source

Square Space offers marketing nonsense when I want actual facts

Frustrating. Square Space offers a page remarkably free of any facts, which I suppose is meant to work as marketing, though it is so general and far removed from reality that it actually repels me from the service. I believe the line of reasoning was “Square Space exists to protect people from the technical details of building a website, so let’s avoid mentioning any specifics on the page about blogs” but in the end, a service does need to offer ...

Twitter is violence

A very controversial idea, that is interesting nonetheless:

The root problem with Twitter is that the product is carefully engineered to cultivate maximum violence. Not intentionally, of course, but rather through a combination of early product decisions that were not re-visited, together with blind optimization of Twitter’s game mechanics toward vanity metrics. Twitter’s cultivation of violence, in turn, affects user engagement, user churn, the demographics of Twitter, and numerous other factors that have resulted in Twitter’s total failure to become a behemoth ...

Read More Source

How to package dependencies in Golang

Very interesting, as I’m a fan of the idea of “vendoring”:

An attempt to fix packaging in Go:

Manul is a vendoring utility for Go programs.

What’s the reason for yet another utility?

Because all other vendor utilities suffer from the following:

Some wrap the go binary and spoof the GOPATH env variable. You will have a non-go-gettable project which needs additional software in order to compile and run;

Some copy the source code of dependencies into the vendor directory:

It will be nearly impossible to find ...

Read More Source

Google Maps does not name Nachitschewan?

I can not find a zoom level where Google Maps names Nachitschewan. Is this a political thing?

This is one dirty latrine

I’m trying to imagine how dirty a latrine gets after 220 years of use?

Cambridge researchers Hui-Yuan Yeh and Piers Mitchell used microscopy to study preserved faeces on ancient ‘personal hygiene sticks’ (used for wiping away faeces from the anus) in the latrine at what was a large Silk Road relay station on the eastern margins of the Tamrin Basin, a region that contains the Taklamakan desert. The latrine is thought to date from 111 BC (Han Dynasty) and was in ...

Read More Source

The advantage of a weight-balanced B-tree

A very interesting data structure of which I know nothing:

The rigidity of gender norms

An optimistic take would be that the people most willing to reconsider gender norms are non-conformists who see no need to get married. So the lack of flexible marriages doesn’t indicate a lack of flexible relationships. A very interesting article:

Bargaining models of the household assume that households are able to bargain – that men and women can change the way that they relate to each other; they can change the way that they spend money and allocate tasks. And ...

Read More Source

Romance writers lead the way regarding self-publishing

And self-publishing offers both money and artistic freedom:

According to the nonprofit Romance Writers of America, around 82% of US romance book buyers are women, and 41% are between 30 and 54 years old. Most romance authors are female. Yet for a long time, the link between writer and reader was broken by a long chain of agents, publishers, promoters, and retailers.

Perhaps one of the most shocking revelations of today’s romance renaissance is that readers aren’t crazy about those raunchy ...

Read More Source

A string of characters is best parsed using a finite state machine

I already knew this, but I don’t think I knew the extent of what was sacrificed to give Perl backreferences s:

Notice that Perl requires over sixty seconds to match a 29-character string. The other approach, labeled Thompson NFA for reasons that will be explained later, requires twenty microseconds to match the string. That’s not a typo. The Perl graph plots time in seconds, while the Thompson NFA graph plots time in microseconds: the Thompson NFA implementation is a million ...

Read More Source

Zach Tellman on the benefits of a senior engineer

Tellman is interesting as always:

senior engineers choose companies with the right risks

Every company has different risks, and so every company expects something different from their senior engineers. An engineer who has spent the last five years making small, continuous improvements to the processes in a larger company may not enjoy or even understand the sort of role expected by a three person startup. The expectation that “senior” is a fungible title is both widespread and harmful, leading to unrealistic expectations ...

Read More Source

The problems at Reddit

Three bits jump out at me from this article:

One individual speculated that the reemergence of the company’s drinking culture was to blame for the uncomfortable environment. Under Pao’s reign, Reddit tried to eradicate the bro-like amount of alcohol consumption at the office, but that went right out the window following Pao’s departure in July 2015.

“During all the leadership regimes, there were multiple incidents where employees would drink too much and end up in embarrassing and inappropriate situations,” a source ...

Read More Source

Strong law is stronger than strong code

I have been following with interest the conversations regarding crypto-currencies. These seem to have a strong appeal to people of beliefs that might be described as “libertarian”. These people believe there is some way to escape the need to engage in political struggle with their fellow humans, some way to avoid all the mess of life and instead go away somewhere else, and build an alternative system with an alternative currency. But these people are always a part of this ...

The problems with Clojure

The conflict between Object Oriented Programming and Functional programming comes up a lot with Clojure, because to do any serious work you have to eventually use some Java, which takes you back into the world of Object Oriented Programming. This sums up my feelings:

The thing I like most about Elixir is the low friction between it and it’s host language, Erlang. Erlang is a functional language right from the start, and the BEAM is designed to run a functional ...

Read More Source

Milo Yiannopoulos is proving the power of the modern troll

Milo Yiannopoulos has a style and humor that could only work in the era of Internet. He first gained fame from Gamergate. Trolls need attention, but they also get attention for getting attention — that is, their fans are often minor trolls themselves, all hungry for attention, so they give props to the better trolls, for being good at it, just like a tennis player might admire another tennis player of exceptional skill.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a bleach-blond Brit whose ...

Read More Source

The RegX that killed Stack Overflow

A great post-mortem of a crash at Stack Overflow:

The regular expression was: ^[\s\u200c]+|[\s\u200c]+$ Which is intended to trim unicode space from start and end of a line. A simplified version of the Regex that exposes the same issue would be \s+$ which to a human looks easy (“all the spaces at the end of the string”), but which means quite some work for a simple backtracking Regex engine. The malformed post contained roughly 20,000 consecutive characters of whitespace on a ...

Read More Source

The difference between Kafka and Kestrel

For my purposes, for the next 6 months, it seems that Kestrel will be all I need. I’d have to be very successful before I would need anything as complex as Kafka.

The biggest conceptual difference is that Kestrel is a simple stand alone queue where as Kafka is a full fledged queuing system.

Kestrel runs on a single machine and has no concept of clustering or failover or any other features you might expect in a queuing system. Instead the clients ...

Read More Source

Honey Lee Cottrell is dead

I haven’t read Susie Bright in a while, so I missed this:

Honey Lee was my second butch girlfriend, but she was my first famous love, my first older woman lover . At the end of our first date, she dropped me off on the curb and said, “Bye–You’re a nice kid.” I was put out by that, but I was dutifully intimidated. Honey Lee had already been partners with a string of women who were like the Who’s Who of ...

Read More Source

RabbitMQ is difficult, Kafka is awesome, Kestrel is beautifully simple

A great review of these 3 queues:

Not mentioned below is that RabbitMQ works hard to guarantee delivery of a message, so it is slow, but that is because it is in some ways doing more than Kafka.

RabbitMQ:

I created 4 queues, wrote a ruby client and started inserting messages. I got a publishing rate of about 20k/s using multiple threads but I got a few stalls caused by the vm_memory_high_watermark, from my understanding during those stalls it writing to disk. ...

Read More Source

Kestrel is as simple as Redis but Kestrel is an actual queue

I feel stupid that I didn’t look at Kestrel sooner. I feel especially stupid that I’ve been using Redis when I didn’t actually need it.

Redis has a beautifully flexible API which makes it tempting to use Redis for everything, but Redis is really a cache that focuses on speed above all else. Everything in Redis has to fit in memory, and Redis will drop anything that can’t fit in memory. Also, the stuff in Redis can be mutated, ...

Only use Amazon SQS if you need a high-latency high-concurrency service

Also interesting, don’t use Amazon SQS unless your needs fit this very specific model where you can deal with the latency and make up for it by being highly concurrent.

I just did some benchmarking the other day to compare Amazon SQS with RabbitMQ. Publishing and consuming 10,000 messages serially in 2 threads (one publishing the other consuming) on an EC2 instance took over 6 minutes using SQS and 12 seconds using RabbitMQ. I didn’t test ActiveMQ since their clustering is ...

Read More Source

For Apache Storm, use Kestrel

There is a lot in this thread that is interesting. This is coming from Nathan Marz, the guy who invented Storm. He says he uses Kestrel, so that is a big endorsement.

You want to make sure that your spout source can support the out of order acking that Storm requires for guaranteed message processing. We use Kestrel because it has this property and is the simplest. RabbitMQ is another good one to consider.

The problem with RabbitMQ

Seems like RabbitMQ is good but not perfect:

Much like you’d chuck memcached on each of your web servers and access them in a ring, Darner can occupy a small niche on each box in your fleet’s resources. Tens of MB of RAM and negligible CPU opens up hundreds of gigabytes of queue spool per node. As queue size grows, memory usage remains constant.

Contrast this with Redis, which is speedy but limited in queue size to what will fit ...

Read More Source

ZeroMQ is the opposite of a queue

Reading this again, several years after the first time I read it, and now it occurs to me: I would use ZeroMQ only in exactly those situations where I would not use a queue. If I only need a queue, I can use Kestrel. But if I need some messaging pattern that is not supported by any queue, then I would use ZeroMQ. That is, if I had a truly unique situation that needed a unique pattern, then ZeroMQ would ...

Everything you need to know about queues

This looks like an amazing resource and I’m sure I’ll go back and read more soon.

The New York Times uses RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is written in Erlang, so I was inclined to think well of it, though I heard criticism of it. And then the New York Times used it. A very surprising vote of confidence in RabbitMQ:

This architecture – Fabrik – has dozens of RabbitMQ instances spread across 6 AWS zones in Oregon and Dublin. The instances are organized into “wholesale” and “retail” layers. Connection to clients is via websockets/sockjs.

Upon launch today, the system autoscaled to ~500,000 users. Connection times ...

Read More Source

Gauges uses Kestrel which is based on work from Blaine Cook

Why does Kafka get all the attention if Kestrel is so reliable? I assume this is because Kafka can do so much more, though of course the devops work of Kafka can be frightening. I didn’t know about the Blaine Cook connection (of Twitter fame):

Before I get too far a long with this fairy tail, let’s talk about Kestrel — what is it and why did I pick it?

Kestrel is a simple, distributed message queue, based on Blaine Cook’s ...

Read More Source

Kestrel versus Resque

Interesting note about these queues, which certainly convinces me to use Kestrel:

There are a lot of things that could be done with either Kestrel or Resque. Because Resque is backed by Redis, you have to remember that all of the messages waiting to be processed have to be able to fit in the RAM of the Redis server, with Kestrel you could queue millions or billions of messages and then start to pull them off.

The biggest difference between the ...

Read More Source

How bad can MongoDB be with Dirty Reads?

Very worrisome, though no sane person would use MongoDB to track something involving money. That’s simply not what MongoDB is for.

How bad are dirty reads?

Read uncommitted allows all kinds of terrible anomalies we probably don’t want as MongoDB users.

For instance, suppose we have a user registration service keyed by a unique username. Now imagine a partition occurs, and two users–Alice and Bob–try to claim the same username–one on each side of the partition. Alice’s request is routed to the ...

Read More Source

How to return a disallowed field in GraphQL

Best Practices for GraphQL are still in a very immature stage, but these two ideas both have some merit:

First, return null for the requested field. This seems to work well in cases where there is no real harm in asking for a particular set of data and no real harm in denying it.

A good example would be asking for the email of a user where the backend only provides the user’s email to that user themselves. If I request my ...

Read More Source

Why has Google released gRPC

This is interesting:

Google has been using a single general-purpose RPC infrastructure called Stubby to connect the large number of microservices running within and across our data centers for over a decade. Our internal systems have long embraced the microservice architecture gaining popularity today. Having a uniform, cross-platform RPC infrastructure has allowed for the rollout of fleet-wide improvements in efficiency, security, reliability and behavioral analysis critical to supporting the incredible growth seen in that period.

Stubby has many great features – ...

Read More Source

An app to pay women for emotional labor

The modernization of the economy constantly brings forth new specialities that are at first astonishing, and in particular, previously unpaid work joins the wage economy. That trends is 500 years old. Women used to create all clothing at home, now clothes are created in factories, and sold in exchange for money.

So what about the emotional labor of trying to make a date work? Here is a type of work that somewhat overlaps with therapists and prostitutes.

Getting exactly what ...

Read More Source

Brad Sester is writing in public again

Brad Sester wrote a column on the world economy, all through the build up to the Great Recession. I read him all through 2007 and 2008. Then he went to the Financial Times and his writing was behind a paywall, and I didn’t have a subscription. But now he is again writing in a place I can read him:

Turkey has long ranked at the top of most lists of financially vulnerable emerging economies, at least lists based on conventional ...

Read More Source

The Republican National Convention

I laughed:

Jenkins also reportedly asked the crowd to “raise your hand if you believe in science,” to which they responded with boos.

Germs protect from allergies, biting nails helps

A very interesting theory:

When they tested at 13 for allergies to common things such as dust, grass, cats, dogs and molds, they found that 38% of those who had an “oral habit” tested positive — whereas 49% of those who didn’t suck their thumbs or bite their nails tested positive. This “protection” was still there at 32.

This fits with the “hygiene hypothesis,” which says that when children are exposed to germs early in life, their immune system gets trained to ...

Read More Source

Why I hate Ruby On Rails

I’m trying to help a friend with a very small Ruby On Rails project, where she needs a few elements of the interface tweaked. But this is Ruby On Rails, so of course I’m losing 3 hours trying to get setup. I’ve been drawn into the endless swamp of upgrading various libraries, which seems to be an automatic part of dealing with Ruby On Rails. If this was Clojure, or NodeJS, setup would have taken 5 minutes and I would ...

You are dragging this man by his ankles, through sliding glass doors down wide empty aisles

Isn’t this a brilliant opening paragraph?

You think: I want a flathead screwdriver. You imagine a large hardware store by your house. You are dragging this man by his ankles, through sliding glass doors down wide empty aisles, his pinkish, chewed down nails clacking against gray tile and his mouth still flapping though not saying too much of anything useful. In a word, blathering. Yammering. Prattling, etc. An unending tape loop of your yadda-yadda-yaddas.

That’s from Matthew Thompson. I worked with him ...

Why national legislators in the USA are ignorant about important topics

A very interesting article about the political process in the USA:

What now surprises me is when I come across a member of Congress who really does understand a particular issue in detail. And this sometimes does happen. Little pockets of expertise are scattered hither and yon all throughout Capitol Hill — especially when members dig in to work on idiosyncratic pieces of legislation that are off the radar of big-time partisan conflict. But on most issues, most of the time, ...

Read More Source

Mixins are harmful — the Javascript edition

Over the years there have been arguments against mixins, but the dominance of Object Oriented Programming meant that mixins still survived and had theoretical justification. Now, the spread of the Functional Paradigm has put renewed pressure on mixins. Dan Abramov at Facebook just came out with an essay against mixins:

“How do I share the code between several components?” is one of the first questions that people ask when they learn React. Our answer has always been to use ...

Read More Source

I am selling WPQuestions.com

I haven’t had the energy to make a successful business out of wpquestions.com, so I am going to sell it. Anyone interested should contact me.

I am selling the domain and the software and the datbase — the whole site.

$5,000 or best offer.

The decline of entrepreneurialism in the USA

Sad news about this 30 trend away from startups:

Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries hit an all-time low yesterday. Before you spin a story using recent events: remember long rates have been trending down for thirty odd years. And that’s true in most advanced economies. So think bigger than jobs day or Brexit or liftoff. And while I’ve got you thinking in decades not data releases … also consider that the share high-growth young firms, aggregate productivity growth, and general satisfaction ...

Read More Source

How people get sober

A good article. And the struggle to learn new habits:

The modern world is designed for loneliness. Podcasts, Netflix, Amazon streaming. All that technology can disconnect us, yes, but it can also keep us tethered when real human contact feels like too much work. I spent six months in hiding, and do you know what I discovered in that time? How common it was. So many people drop out of life for MUCH more dire reasons than mine. Medical diagnoses, ...

Read More Source

Edges is just a wrapper around the real results that adds extra data used for slicing the result cursor

I think the “edges” and “nodes” terminology is one of the most confusing things about React / Relay / GraphQL, at least at first:

Relay connection defines a relationship an an object that has two root fields: edges and pageInfo. Edges is just a wrapper around the real results that adds extra data used for slicing the results (cursors), PageInfo has metadata related to the current page. This is how it looks like:

connectionName { edges { ...

Read More Source

I remember Remember The Milk

I liked I Remember The Milk. We used it a lot from 2007 to 2009. It’s interface was simpler than Basecamp, but slightly more than Tada lists, so it fit a niche perfectly for me. But I no longer use it. The only todo software that would work for me is software that has total integration with my email, yet all such solutions tend to be heavyweight. So I’m still waiting for something good to show up. Perhaps it now ...

How to be a writer

I love this article:

I became a writer relatively late, well into my 40s. That makes me a second-career or mid-career writer, even though by now, I rarely use the qualifiers at all. Like millions of other people in the world, I now identify myself simply as a writer. It seemed like a great act of personal delusion (or vanity) to think I could join the ranks of such an exalted club, the one full of people whose tools are only ...

Read More Source

Make the Web compatible?

It must be 1999 again because someone is writing about browser incompatibilities:

Users won’t switch browsers, they’ll switch sites

You might think that users will switch browsers to use your site. But many won’t or can’t.

Users have no patience for things that don’t work, and they’ll just go to a competitor’s site instead. Failing at a critical point could turn a potential user away forever. According to Akamai,

32% of users who encounter a problem on your site are less likely to make ...

Read More Source

Asymptotic

I’ve always known what this word meant yet I don’t think I could have come up with so clear an example:

A simple illustration, when considering a function f(n), is when there is a need to describe its properties as n becomes very large. Thus, if f(n) = n2+3n, the term 3n becomes insignificant compared to n2, when n is very large. The function f(n) is said to be “asymptotically equivalent to n2 as n → ∞”, and this is ...

Read More Source

Emi Bryant Lotto moves to Kodansha

I worked with Lotto at Open Road Media. She is very in-touch with current trends in certain segments of the culture. In particular, new genres and new media formats, of which she can be said to be at the very cutting edge. From Japanese Kanji to manga to whichever genres of novels are doing well in the current publishing environment, Lotto is always absorbing more about this unique moment of rapid cultural evolution. I learned a lot from her.

Perhaps most ...

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you

These are great quotes:

Why are Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston pretending to date each other?

I admit, I am utterly intrigued with this story, since this is apparently how young people, and their celebrities, are adapting to the Internet. In an era where celebrities can’t have real privacy, the only way for them to control the narrative is to go to war with it.

Most telling, though, is Swift’s own demonstrated self-awareness about her image. Swift — not to mention her team of publicists and agents — is savvy about the realities of media attention, ...

Read More Source

Why the police sometimes abuse their authority

This is an interesting point of view, written by a black police officer:

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and ...

Read More Source

The era of important Web based startups is over

This says exactly what I have been thinking:

The reasons people shift startup founding and investing patterns at the end of the cycle include: Everyone is searching for the next thing. The period of 2004 to the 20-teens will be viewed as the era of network driven business, developer & B2B SaaS infrastructure, and the lean startup. This rich vein of innovation is not over, but appears to be slowing. As this happens, entrepreneurs and VCs go into search mode, trying to ...

Read More Source

England was already a great success by the 1600s

An interesting bit of economic history:

There are some signs of changes in relative productivity that might undermine this assumption. In Clark’s wage data, building workers’ incomes start to pull away from the 1620s, and from the 1680s masons consistently earn around a fifth more than agricultural labourers. In Allen’s wage data, the early seventeenth century is a period of relative prosperity for agricultural workers, and it is not until the 1680s that their earnings fall below those of building labourers. However, it is hard ...

Read More Source

The problem with the Swedish housing market is that there are no houses and there is no market

This seems a bit exaggerated:

In January, the government sat down with the centre-right opposition, hoping to reach an agreement on how to increase building. But the centre-left – wanting more state funded rental accommodation – clashed with the centre-right, which wants more deregulatory measures to encourage private construction.

“The problem with the Swedish housing market is that there are no houses and there is no market,” said Emil Kallstrom, a spokesman for the opposition Center Party after the centre-right pulled ...

Read More Source

Success hides your mistakes

This is a great interview with Tim Brady of Yahoo:

Craig : After you closed those first ad sales were you all still freaking out over if this would be viable to not?

Tim : It was probably a full year of discomforting uncertainty. Even after we brought Tim Koogle in, it wasn’t a sure thing. The Internet was a sure thing but Yahoo wasn’t a sure thing. It probably took until the end of ‘95 to guarantee that.

Craig : Interesting. ...

Read More Source

Writer vents their rage while quitting after 14 years with People magazine

This is funny and also a kind of interesting look at the modern magazine industry:

This is just what the entitled stars and their bat—t crazy publicists put me and many other talented, hard-working reporters through. You people, as it turns out, are worse. Stupidly, we expect loyalty and support from you after years of service. We are naïve. Despite your nicey nice, glossy and chirpy veneer, some of us think of you more as the Leo DiCaprio of magazines, ...

Read More Source

The tech elite of Silicon Valley are a surprisingly reactionary crowd

Interesting:

The second half of “Chaos Monkeys” takes place at Facebook, and it concerns the handful of dominant companies that have emerged from this start-up culture. These companies (in addition to Facebook, notably Google and Amazon), whose market values start at more than $300 billion, are approaching (or in the case of Apple and Microsoft, managing) middle age. In addition to contrasting their collective ethos with that of the start-up world, “Chaos Monkeys” touches on the also-rans like Twitter who failed ...

Read More Source

The Agile process of software development is often perverted by sick politics

For those of you who don’t want to read this whole essay, here is the summary:

The word “agile” has a plain meaning in standard English, and that meaning was considered something positive by software developers, so much so that the most successful new development process of the last 30 years calls itself “Agile”. However, at many of the companies that I have worked, actual agility is suppressed because of various political factors. Fear wins out over trust. Instead of actual ...

The whole publishing industry depends on Barnes and Noble

Interesting and sad:

If Barnes & Noble were to shut its doors, Amazon, independent bookstores, and big-box retailers like Target and Walmart would pick up some of the slack. But not all of it. Part of the reason is that book sales are driven by “showrooming,” the idea that most people don’t buy a book, either in print or electronically, unless they’ve seen it somewhere else—on a friend’s shelf, say, or in a bookstore. Even on the brink of closing, Barnes ...

Read More Source

In Pergamon there is a huge marble altar, forty feet tall with large sculptures: it also includes a Gigantomachy (Battle of the Giants)

This sounds amazing:

In January 1880 the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, author of Fathers and Sons and one of the most cosmopolitan Russian writers of the time, was visiting Berlin, when he paid a visit to the Altes Museum. What he saw there not only made a profound impression upon him personally but marked the beginning of a momentous transformation in European understanding of the art and culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. He had been standing before a group ...

Read More Source

Ленин — гриб

I would say this is an example of how dangerous it can be to remove all humor from a medium — people become more vulnerable to hoaxes:

Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.

The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). In the interview, Kuryokhin, ...

Read More Source

How much time and energy should a computer programmer spend learning a proprietary server system?

By itself, this is an anecodote about Google’s particular system: (but see my point at bottom)

Is there a lesson in this? Well, if I were in the business of programming Google App Engine, a few days’ effort up front to get it going might seem not to be a big deal. However, when I visit a team who have just added a new person, I invariably find that person struggling to set up their workstation. There’s usually someone in the room ...

Read More Source

If equity is compensation, can an employer ever take back compensation?

This is a very emotional point that comes up when a company pays workers with equity:

Scott’s post genuinely makes me angry. It uses subtle language to imply that employees are inferior individuals who are lucky that the owners of capital deign to share anything with them.

In Scott’s worldview, choosing to leave a company before it has exited is inherently disloyal. Even if they’re paying you under market. Even if you could contribute more value elsewhere.

I wonder if he would accept ...

Read More Source

Is Phoenix going to take over the tech industry?

If not, why? This has been one of the big puzzles of the last 30 years: if some technologies are clearly superior, then why don’t they take over? Apparently because they lack an element that appeals to management in big corporations? That’s always been the argument against Lisp: it is great for the individual master craftsman, but it doesn’t work in a big corporation full of badly paid, mediocre programmers.

Erlang has been the most safe, resilient technology out there ...

That strange isolation of raising kids

Very interesting:

Pregnancy and motherhood can be both a source of social detachment and foster an intense need for community, all at once. I’ve never felt simultaneously so siloed and also so much a part of the fabric of humanity than I have this past year, which hit me with endless contradictions. Pregnant, I felt incredibly special and also like a freak. I felt like an assembly-line conformist breeder and also an earth mama gushingly, glowingly, united with the cosmos (“like ...

Read More Source

Maybe students and professors need to push back against the University?

This is interesting:

I study Classics professionally, so I have more at stake in this issue than most. I taught Antigone just last semester. And I hope that students never stop being disturbed by it. If you’re mocking students for having a strong emotional response to that text, you haven’t read it. (It should but doesn’t always go without saying that, if you haven’t read something, you have no right to an opinion on its appropriateness for the classroom, particularly ...

Read More Source

The importance of taking a break

Such a good point about burnout and mental health:

I’ve definitely burnt myself out in the past. I’ve often worked morning till late night, most of the time, for months (years, since the breaks didn’t feel like they really counted?). And before that, being a broke student working multiple jobs wasn’t exactly great in terms of stress.

Part of me looks back and realizes that this is partially my fault, partially my managers’. The senior people around me also worked a ...

Read More Source

Merav Michaeli changes the Hebrew language

What an interesting fact:

Michaeli has long lobbied for action against sexual harassment and sexual assault, and has urged Israeli women to refrain from getting married until civil marriage is an option (in Israel, the rabbinate has jurisdiction over such matters; women married under Jewish law cannot get a divorce unless their husband agrees to it); she recently passed legislation creating alternative dispute solutions for couples seeking divorce. Perhaps most interestingly, she has had a remarkable influence on the Hebrew language ...

Read More Source

The arrogance of computer programmers

I think there is something to this:

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being ...

Read More Source

Niche content plays that I was not aware of

I stumbled upon this site and it seems like a Tumblr blog, but apparently it is business that tries to make money. . My first reaction is “There is no way this will work”. I will check back in a year. I like to track these things, because I learn so much when it turns out that I am wrong.

Why the public no longer listens to economists

Another interesting article:

One reason for the lack of faith is the failure to predict the Great Recession, but the public’s dismissal of macroeconomists is based upon more than the failure to foresee the dangers the housing bubble posed for the economy. It is also due to false promises about the benefits to the working class from globalization, tax cuts for the wealthy, and trade agreements – promises that were often used to support ideological and political goals or to serve ...

Read More Source

Which groups of people benefit most from global trade

This is an interesting article:

Economists have long predicted this sort of convergence. Observing how U.S. states tended to have more similar income levels over time, economists such as Robert Solow built models in which fast catch-up growth eventually leads to a more equal world. But the stubborn failure of global incomes to converge defied the theory, and economists were forced to accept the idea that countries’ differing institutions created differences in their long-run economic potential. That was a somewhat unsatisfying ...

Read More Source

Everyone who becomes a writer becomes a writer in their own way

A very interesting article:

I do not recall the exact moment, but I do remember the awkward conversations during the most self-doubting times. There was, for instance, the dinner party where my friend, the hostess, seated me beside a Pulitzer Prize-winning author as if we had something in common. I had recently finished the first draft of a novel, and on my desktop floated the files of a dozen or so essays that were in the process of being ...

Read More Source

What it is like to tutor the wealthy and the privildeged

An interesting article, from a tutor, about the way wealth sometimes protects mediocre students, and allows them to get into good colleges:

Because UT Austin is a terrific place—the rare kind of school that radiates both capaciousness and prestige—it is the top choice for many Texas high school students, and its unique admissions policy carries a lot of weight. It is discussed ad nauseam during application season; however, the reasoning behind this policy—behind the 10 percent rule, behind affirmative action—is not. ...

Read More Source

What age group stans on social media?

When the blogosphere was at its peak in 2005, I noticed that people only started blogging on political topics when they were about 24 or 25. If they were 18 or 19, large-audience blogging made no sense to them. At 18 or 19, what they wanted was a blog for their personal friends. They might have had a LiveJournal blog, and they expected a few of their friends to follow their diary. But blogging for a bunch of adults who ...

How can you not mention the writer and singer of a song?

I know the music industry is screwed up, but I’ve never seen this before. I listened to a woman singing a song credited to Calvin Harris and I wondered “Who is singing?” since it clearly wasn’t Harris. Apparently others are wondering too, because I found this article.

Pagination with React / Relay / GraphQL

This is an awesome article:

Relay proposes a standard to define a has-many relationship for a GraphQL field. This standard defines a common structure that allows Relay to paginate and filter the results in an efficient way by using cursors, which I’ll explain in a bit.

This is the definition of a Relay connection (from the Relay connection specs):

Relay’s support for pagination relies on the GraphQL server exposing connections in a standardized way. In the query, the connection model provides a standard ...

Read More Source

The dreamers of the Web are still dreaming

There is an effort to break open the closed silos of the Web:

Today’s Web has a number of problems, the attendees agreed; the most obvious being the kind of surveillance uncovered by Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ability to block access, like China’s Great Firewall.

Tim Berners-Lee, who founded the Web and is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium, pointed out how far it has strayed from the original dreams for the technology. “That utopian leveling of ...

Read More Source

VioletBlue writes of being harassed by Jacob Appelbaum

I am worried about psychopaths like Appelbaum and how they manage to go on with their harassment, year after year:

When Jake got hired, he started giving tours. I only went on one of them. I had invited my editor and colleagues from the Chronicle to that happy hour, and we decided to go with him when Jake began leading people through the buildings for his tour. Kink’s main offices at that time were a wide, open-plan floor, with no ...

Read More Source

What is a comic book?

Vox has an article that is suppose to list the best comic books being created right now. The list seems to be limited to USA creations, which is surprising given how much Japanese manga has become a part of what we consume, when we consume comics.

Suppli isn’t there.

Silent Voice isn’t there.

There is an abundance of good material coming from Japan. I can not possibly list all of the great publishers.

But whatever you might think of as ...

The world is full of buggy jobs boards

This is a follow up post to what I wrote about Made In New York.

If I go here:

https://www.themuse.com/jobs/yodle/full-stack-engineering-manager-20d14e

and click “Apply” then I end up here:

Cleary, something is broken.

“Full stack engineering” become “Director of Sales”?????

When your trusted friends take the side of a charming psychopath and gang up against you

Wow, this is a very sad and shocking story:

Because the last thing anyone needs is to be targeted by Jake Appelbaum, I purged everything this person and sent and refused to hand over anything on privacy grounds. I explained what my reasoning was for doing what I did, was chastised further, let it go and considered the matter over.

But really, I thought, why would Jake be so defensive about some random LT that might have otherwise gone completely unnoticed? ...

Read More Source

Trolling is more and more a professional specialty

Sad and sickening:

A few years ago, Jamie Bartlett, a social media analyst and author of The Dark Net, met up with the man behind a popular online white supremacist account in the UK. The meeting took weeks to set up—numerous calls and emails were exchanged before the man (whom Bartlett calls “Paul”) agreed to meet him in the small northern English town where he lived. When the two finally linked up, Bartlett said he was surprised to find that the ...

Read More Source

Demanding ssh key login to a server is safer than allowing passwords

This is good and true:

Require ssh key authentication

We tend to avoid passwords for logging into servers. There was a lot of discussion around this after Bryan’s original guide came out, but I tend to fall into this camp as well. Here are a few notes on this:

ssh keys are better than passwords only because they contain and require more information.

Passwords can be brute forced. Guessing a public key is so essentially impossible that they can be considered perfectly secure

What ...

Read More Source

Every manager needs to get better at firing people, because they always wait too long

The most common advice that I give to managers is “You need to fire more quickly”. It’s the most common advice I give because it is advice that managers do not want to listen to. Even supposedly “tough” managers hesitate far too long before firing people.

Apparently similar advice was given at Netflix:

McCord also convinced Hastings that he should ask himself a few times a year whether he would hire the same person in the same job if it ...

Read More Source

When a pregnancy isn’t viable

This is a sad story:

What happened at 31 weeks?

We went back to get a growth scan, and we saw the growth had fallen off a cliff. And this was the first time that we had been presented with this idea that there was something deeply wrong with the baby that had nothing to do with me. Until that point, all the really bad news had been with me, and my weird body. He had been thriving despite the environment.

But on ...

Read More Source

The NYC.gov website is full of bugs and errors

I tried to apply for a job here and the site was full of errors. They should hire me so I can fix this awful mess:

As to the following error:

(please note that all I was doing was uploading a tiny text file that was 315 bytes of information)

Incredible that anyone gets through this process:

Tech forums can be nasty

And Hacker News is already a million times better than places like Reddit. We need more diversity in tech, but some folks seem willing to undermine the project of reforming the industry. I still see comments like:

He was privileged to be a black man since this drastically improved his odds of getting into Princeton. It’s not anywhere near as much of an achievement as you are making it out to be.

As of 2006, between 2/3 and 5/6 of black ...

Read More Source

Mother and daughter and a short skirt

Just now. At the corner of Broadway and 96th street in New York City, daughter is 12 or 13, mother is 40 or 45, they are talking about a woman they just passed, who did not notice them. The woman was perhaps 20 and was wearing a red dress and holding a black purse.

Daughter: I so love her purse! And that dress! Such an outfit!

Mother: It was too short.

Daughter: And the fabric and…

Mother: It was too short.

Daughter: … the earrings ...

A screaming lunatic

True story:

Yesterday I went to the park along the Hudson River, near 96th st, and I started running north. I do a circuit up to 125th st, then back down to where there is construction around 88th st, and back, about 8 kilometers total. The path on the right side is sometimes for bikes and sometimes for a mix of bikes and pedestrians.

I’m running north and there is a guy on a bike coming toward me. He is extremely ...

Object/Relational Mapping is rarely worth it

I think this can be stated simply: for your basic operations (CREATE, UPDATE, READ, DELETE) then an ORM offers some convenience. But ORMs break down as soon as you have a complex query. And yet, if you start using an ORM because it helps you with the simple queries, it will seem natural to you to extend it and try to use it for the complex queries.

This is a strained analogy to the Vietnam war:

Object systems are typically characterized ...

Read More Source

Math is confusing even for those who are good at it

Always be learning:

Many people who are in this position, trying to learn mathematics on their own, have roughly two approaches. The first is to learn only the things that you need for the applications you’re interested in. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s akin to learning just enough vocabulary to fill out your tax forms. It’s often too specialized to give you a good understanding of how to apply the key ideas elsewhere. A common example is learning very ...

Read More Source

AWS is inappropriate for small startups because its complexity demands a specialist

Sean Hull references a conversation that he and I had in Slack. I would like to expand on the argument that I made then. You might want to read his essay first, where he makes these points about AWS:

1. Over 70 services offered

2. Still complex to build high availability

3. Need a dedicated devops

4. Orchestration involves many moving parts

5. Troubleshooting failed deployments is difficult

At the time of our conversation I had crashed an AWS instance and we were having trouble fixing ...

GraphQL is the best thing about React / Relay / GraphQL

React / Relay / GraphQL:

The big breakthrough here is obviously GraphQL. Not React or Relay, since there are many competing implementations that do similar things, but GraphQL. Even though there are graph query languages out there (Gremlin, etc) they were not suited to querying JSON over the wire. GraphQL is ideal. For my next project, I hope to do a Clojure implementation of most of GraphQL, because I think it can be married to Om.Next in a very powerful way.

Actually, ...

Inemuri

Interesting:

However, this experience of sleeping in the presence of others as children is not sufficient on its own to explain the widespread tolerance of inemuri, especially at school and in the workplace. After some years of investigating this subject, I finally realised that on a certain level, inemuri is not considered sleep at all. Not only is it seen as being different from night-time sleep in bed, it is also viewed differently from taking an afternoon nap or power nap. How ...

Read More Source

The lights at the Dentsu headquarters in Tokyo are automatically turned off at 10:00 PM. But what happens afterwards?

Krubner, you saved my day

Aw man, after all the mistakes I make, it is nice to know I help people sometimes:

Sometimes I make a bad decision

It’s very, very, very rare, almost unheard of, but sometimes I make a mistake.

I was helping at Open Road this spring. Sean Hull was also helping. Open Road runs a bunch of WordPress sites, such as The Line Up. All of the images for these sites were stored on a central NFS server. All of the machines were starving for hard disk space. The previous Director Of Technology had made many, many bad decisions, including the decision to save ...

Meditation can lead to madness

Interesting:

“Recovery,” “permanently ruined”—these are not words one typically encounters when discussing a contemplative practice.

On a cold November night last fall, I drove to Cheetah House. A former student of Britton’s, I joined the group in time for a Shabbat dinner. We blessed the challah, then the wine; recited prayers in English and Hebrew; and began eating.

Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior, works at the Brown University Medical School. She receives regular phone calls, emails, and letters ...

Read More Source

The thugs in Russia

There is a worrisome authoritarian movement in Russia. Many of its members are known criminals. They go after anyone who is vulnerable, just to demonstrate their contempt for the rule of law.

Datsik has a huge criminal background. He is an ex-fighter and boxer. Datsik has been imprisoned several times. He is a former member of the ultranationalist Slavic Union, which has similar political ideologies as Nazi Germany. The Slavic Union was banned in Russia because of their promotion of ...

Read More Source

Anna Rose Holmer is a genius

I saw a screening of this movie at the Gawker offices. I loved this movie. And Royalty Hightower is an amazing talent.

ANNA ROSE HOLMER: We started to talk about the film as a coming of age film—and even now, I’m so hesitant to use that phrase because it comes with a lot of baggage, particularly for stories about girls and young women. I think often it’s placed like five years later when you’re talking about sexual awakening, the idea that ...

Read More Source

The Belief that Tests are Smarter than Code Telegraphs Latent Fear or a Bad Process

This part is really good:

Programmers have a tacit belief that they can think more clearly (or guess better) when writing tests when writing code, or that somehow there is more information in a test than in code. That is just formal nonsense. The psychological perspective is instructive here, and it’s important because that — rather than any computational property — most drives developer behaviour. If your coders have more lines of unit tests than of code, it probably means one of several things. They may be ...

Read More Source

The problem with unit tests

Interesting:

Unit testing is of course not just an issue in object-oriented programming, but the combination of object-orientation, agile software development, and a rise in tools and computing power has made it de rigueur. As a consultant I often get questions about unit testing, including this real one from a recent client of mine, Richard Jacobs at Sogeti (Sogeti Nederland B.V.): My second question is about unit tests. If I remember correctly you said that unit tests are waste. First, I was surprised by that. Today however, my ...

Read More Source

Ruby On Rails is obsolete

This is a strange conversation to be having in the year 2016. Ruby On Rails changed the technology industry in 2004, but it can not claim to be winning in 2016. It still lacks a story for concurrency. It is being undermined by 2 forces:

1.) the need for concurrency, which is offered by other eco-systems, such as those that run the JVM. A language like Clojure offers the high level of meta-programming that Rubyists love, but with the vast arsenal ...

What does it mean for a criminal to express remorse?

Interesting:

I fully respected his right to a trial, but even after twelve jurors unanimously convicted him guilty of three felonies, all he has admitted to doing is ingesting alcohol. Someone who cannot take full accountability for his actions does not deserve a mitigating sentence. It is deeply offensive that he would try and dilute rape with a suggestion of promiscuity. By definition rape is the absence of promiscuity, rape is the absence of consent, and it perturbs me deeply ...

Read More Source

Elite conservatives attack the white working class

I am altogether amazed at the fissures opening up in the conservative coalition in the USA. The coalition came together after 1958, and has been the dominant voice in the USA since 1968. But that era appears to have ended.

My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at ...

Read More Source

Fighting against poverty, yet indulging in corruption

The progress is great, but the money wasted on corruption is very sad:

The outsiders’ view of Rio de Janeiro—sexy beaches and city slums—make an incomplete sketch of the country. 193 million Brazilians live outside of Rio, many of them digging into the ground for water, using a community phone to receive calls, and walking long distances to catch buses to banks, where they stand in line for hours while awaiting the government assistance promised by the Worker’s Party.

Many Brazilians would ...

Read More Source

What makes a great fake viral story

Interesting:

And then there’s the anecdote, which feels like a mini-drama in and of itself. Act 1: A young, beautiful woman auditions for a part. We know, because of the face of this young woman and the connotation of actorly dominance that it has come to carry, that she was, without question, good enough for the role. Act 2: The people making the film think she’s not beautiful enough. She was, or theoretically was, sent to the precipice of disbelief: the ...

Read More Source

How moderation grew up on the Internet

Interesting:

Mora-Blanco’s team — 10 people in total — was dubbed The SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department). They worked in teams of four to six, some doing day shifts and some night, reviewing videos around the clock. Their job? To protect YouTube’s fledgling brand by scrubbing the site of offensive or malicious content that had been flagged by users, or, as Mora-Blanco puts it, “to keep us from becoming a shock site.” The founders wanted YouTube to be something ...

Read More Source

Sexual ideas you should really avoid

This is funny. 33 things that happen in porn that you should never try yourself:

Propositioning your friend’s mom

Propositioning your mom’s friend

Propositioning your step-anybody

Spying on someone in the shower while assuming voyeurism turns them on

Picking someone off a street in your van

Sex with a strange pizza guy, plumber, electrician, or anyone else who’s paid by their employer to go to your house

Answering the door in only a towel

Answering the door completely naked and not expecting it to end ...

Read More Source

The way Trump is changing politics in the USA

In his excellent book Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch makes the point that the riot that occurred in Oxford, Mississippi (over the arrival of James Meredith) on September 30, 1962 was the last large scale white racist gathering in the USA for several decades. And for some decades, it seemed that there had been a permanent change in the USA, that such things would never happen again. And certainly, the Republican leadership would not allow such things, for a long ...

Pure objectivity in news is an impossibility

This is good:

Pure objectivity in news is an impossibility, and pursuit of such pure objectivity is a fool’s errand. As you pointed out, the editorial process in which a selection is made between newsworthy items is highly subjective. Every day only a few news items make it onto the front page, and there cannot possibly be a neutral metric that can determine which ones. Journalism doesn’t just provide the facts, it also has an obligation to educate and inform the readers. Impartiality ...

Read More Source

Sometimes peer review delays progress for many decades

This is what real leadership looks like:

Morris intentionally consumes H. pylori. Like Marshall, he becomes ill, but unlike Marshall, he is not completely cured by antibiotics. The infection will remain with him for three years.

I wish he had been given a medal for his self-sacrifice. He was attempting to save millions from suffering.

Interesting, though very disappointing:

1881 Klebs notes the presence of bacteria-like organisms in the lumen of the gastric glands.

1889 Walery Jaworski describes spiral organisms in sediment washings ...

Read More Source

The diverse factions of the progressive movement in the USA during 2016

Interesting:

1.Genuine idealists: For sure, quite a few Sanders supporters dream of a better society, and for whatever reason – maybe just because they’re very young – are ready to dismiss practical arguments about why all their dreams can’t be accomplished in a day.

2.Romantics: This kind of idealism shades over into something that’s less about changing society than about the fun and ego gratification of being part of The Movement. (Those of us who were students in the 60s and ...

Read More Source

Zana Vrangalova’s research on human sexuality

A very interesting research project:

Still, the site is far from clinical. The home page is a colorful mosaic of squares, color-coded according to the category of sexual experience (blue: “one-night stand”; purple: “group sex”; gray: the mysterious-sounding “first of many”; and so on). Pull quotes are highlighted for each category (“Ladies if you haven’t had a hot, young Latino stud you should go get one!”). Many responses seem to boast, provoke, or exaggerate for rhetorical purposes. Reading it, I felt ...

Read More Source

Math papers are hard to read because people invent their own syntax

Obviously professional mathematicians need the power to continue to create new syntax. But should there be a syntax for creating syntax? I’m thinking of Lisp programming languages, that allow a programmer to invent new syntax, but enforces some rules along the way. One counter-argument, to applying such reasoning to math, is that vernacular languages, such as English, can be used to describe any syntax. But that is surely cheating: if math is to be a language, then the syntax for ...

Why does Rails become awful?

Interesting:

Let me tell you a story about what can happen in a convoluted Rails codebase. Once, I joined an existing project. It was a huuuuge app which was running an on-line shopping community website. Complicated sales model, complicated promotions, complicated product setups, coupons, user groups, messages – it had it all. I joined them to help ship a few new features. One of my early tasks was to…add a link to something on some page. It took me few days ...

Read More Source

Chronological feeds are being replaced by algorithms

Any algorithm can be gamed, so Facebook and Apple and Google are actually increasing the number of ways that content pushers can manipulate the system.

The feed is dying. The reverse-chronological social media feed — the way you’ve read Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs (which is to say, the internet) at various points over the last decade, updates organized according to the time they were posted, refreshed at the top of the screen — no longer really makes sense. The ...

Read More Source

Angry while female

Interesting:

Why, asked thousands of Twitter and Facebook users, can’t a woman be outraged without being labeled a diva?

Anger, as we have been told ad nauseam during this election cycle, is the driving force of American discourse, the bond that unites supporters of billionaire dabbler Trump with the earnest progressives behind Sen. Bernie Sanders. It fuels our commentary, our comedy, our drama, our love of social media. At worst, we have become a nation of venters, easily provoked and quick ...

Read More Source

The dumbest name for a good architecture is “serverless”

I strongly agree that the idea is good, but the name “serverless” is really stupid:

So… this is backend infrastructure (i.e. it runs on a server) to let your team deploy “severless” apps…

So they’re serverless. Except the server you’re running it on. And the lamba/style code they wrote and uploaded to it.

But serverless, because no ops staff required. Except the ones who installed and maintain this.

This is like a snake eating its own tail and wondering what hurts.

Edit: despite my sarcasm, ...

Read More Source

The next wave of layoffs in tech

Interesting:

However, every time there is a great deflating, it is because the market is tired and preparing to embrace something different. So far I’ve been through several of these, chips in the 80′s dot coms in the late 90s, storage in the early 2000′s, and now either web 2.0 or social (depending on how you score it). Three threads are competing for the next round, IoT, Machine Learning, and Bioinformatics. CRISPR derived technologies could be in there too but ...

Read More Source

Who is Christian?

Interesting:

While the amount of constituents there is growing by the day, numbers in the West (the United Kingdom and United States, in particular) have nosedived in recent years, some 25 percent from 1972 to 2002, according to the Friends World Committee for Consultation.

You rarely hear about how truly fucking brutal it is

I love this, so very true:

Usually you read about startups on sites like TechCrunch where a startup in San Francisco made some app that does something inane like sends “Yo” to your friends and raises million of dollars their seed round that later sells for 100s of millions to billions of dollars. You rarely hear about how truly fucking brutal it is. It’s not the long hours that most founders say in interviews, it’s the mental anguish. The euphoric Mt. ...

Read More Source

Layers of abstraction build up in the financial world, just like they do in software

Interesting:

This is good and almost funny:

The financial system is built up in layers of abstraction over some vast and unwieldy machinery. The machinery is complicated in part in order to make the abstraction simple: You can buy stock with a click of a mouse because armies of people devote their careers to the legal niceties and operational maintenance and integration of all this back-office apparatus.

The boring details:

But usually it is more complicated than that. Mostly, it is inconvenient ...

Read More Source

Financial innovation is often just corruption by another name

Sad:

In other words, LendingClub is an originator, funneling loans upstream to Wall Street firms. And in executives’ desire to grow amid demands from shareholders — LendingClub went public in 2014 — they began to exhibit the tendencies of the banks they sought to out-innovate.

First, Laplanche approached the board about investing in Cirrix Capital, an investment fund that actually bought a lot of LendingClub loans. If LendingClub invested in Cirrix, then Cirrix could invest more in LendingClub loans, a bizarrely circuitous ...

Read More Source

The sad, slow way a system of cron scripts becomes ugly

Do you have a chore that needs to run in the background, maybe once a day, or once an hour? Cron scripts will save you! They are the most amazingly amazing thing God has invented since Adam and Eve! For sheer wonderfulality they have no equal among the products of mortal fallen flesh!

At least at first.

The simple cron script is wonderfully direct and efficient. But the first can lead to a second. The second can lead to a third. ...

If women could be fathers

Cloning would have to be 100% safe, and so would extracting the male genes from a woman’s cell. But the technology is not yet ready, and I have trouble imagining that any government will give this line of research any priority. Because a lot of people are afraid of women having that kind of freedom. But this is what Shulamith Firestone dreamed of:

So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass ...

Read More Source

Lying is a lot of work, especially in romance

Yes, the guy is trolling, but there is a grain of truth here. I do think lying requires a lot of work. For that reason, I avoid lying. I don’t have the energy for it.

I’m a corporate strategist so I approached my extramarital affair with an eye to the long game. I planned accordingly to have a mistress same as I planned years ahead to embezzle my retirement. Get married, share finances, and most importantly: have kids. Bind yourself ...

Read More Source

Love is hard because everyone is crazy

Interesting:

In a wiser society, prospective partners would put each other through detailed psychological questionnaires and send themselves off to be assessed at length by teams of psychologists. By 2100, this will no longer sound like a joke. The mystery will be why it took humanity so long to get to this point. We need to know the intimate functioning of the psyche of the person we’re planning to marry. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, ...

Read More Source

Weddings are not over

This is a very silly and stupid rant. This particular fight doesn’t really touch me directly. I’ve only been to two weddings in my life, for cousins, and I was young and I had to go. That was back in the 80s or 90s. But excess at weddings is likely to continue. Wealth in the USA is concentrating, and the working class no longer gets married, so marriage has emerged as a powerful status symbol. 50 years ago, when ...

If your characters don’t interact then you don’t have a story

I love this:

Maybe it’s the rape, or the violence, or how it’s really boring. Everyone seems to have an opinion about why Game of Thrones, once a mesmerizing fantasy land that darkly mirrored modern day dilemmas, has become near unwatchable. (Which is not to say people have by any means ceased to watch it.) But there is one reason that rises above them all, and it is very simple.

Hardly any of the characters on Game of Thrones interact with each ...

Read More Source

Innovation is dead

Funny:

Live from the Great Stagnation: Why in the past two centuries hasn’t there been a tea blend developed that I like more than Earl Grey? What is wrong with our innovation system—or with me?

Wikipedia: Earl Grey: “In one case study, a patient who consumed four litres of Earl Grey tea per day reported muscle cramps, which were attributed to the function of the bergapten in bergamot oil as a potassium channel blocker. The symptoms subsided upon reducing his consumption ...

Read More Source

What is education really for?

Interesting:

Forager children aren’t told what to do; they just wander around and do what they like. But they get bored and want to be respected like adults, so eventually they follow some adults around and ask to be shown how to do things. In this process they sometimes have to take orders, but only until they are no longer novices. They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be trained by many adults, can select ...

Read More Source

What do AWS services actually do?

I love this:

Data Pipeline Should have been called Amazon ETL

Glacier Should have been called Really slow Amazon S3

Kinesis Should have been called Amazon High Throughput It’s like Kafka

I have used this but I did not know the name:

Snowball Should have been called AWS Big Old Portable Storage Use this to Get a bunch of hard drives you can attach to your network to make getting large amounts (Terabytes of Data) into and out of AWS It’s like Shipping a Network Attached Storage device to AWS

These are useful names that actually describe what ...

The rare moments I help someone

I wish I was more active helping out on open source projects. The few times I’ve contributed, advice or code, I tend to get positive feedback.

And my code suggestions are not wholly misplaced:

So really, why don’t I do this more often? I really am not sure. I suppose the desire to start my own business had me focus all my efforts on that, instead of the various open source communities?

Femslash and the growing power of fandom

I’m not saying anything new if I say that fandom has changed the relationship between the reader and the author. I have the impression this change started in Japan and has been imported to the USA. That’s despite fandom mostly living on the Internet and the Internet having been mostly developed in the USA.

Fandoms influence on authors tends to be trivial. Two characters who have never kissed, but of whom there is slash fiction, end up kissing, and the ...

What does the word herbivore mean?

The herbivore serial killers:

He then spent six years in the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado, along with Charles Brown of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma – and watched the squirrel death toll soar to 163.

“It boggles the imagination that something like that was going on under our noses and we didn’t notice,” says Hoogland. He describes the killings as “quick, subtle and unanticipated”.

While some prairie dogs chased the squirrels, others stalked them, waited outside their burrows or even ...

Read More Source

Planning the wedding a long time before the wedding

Interesting and funny:

OK here’s the thing. Knowing what you want to wear…. sure. Fine. Its a time you get to wear a pretty dress. But until you’re kind of close to the actual deal, I absolutely can’t stand it when women taaaaalk and talk about a wedding that isn’t even remotely on the map. I’m in a in a 6 year relationship that’s headed towards marriage; I love TV shows like Say Yes to the Dress – I still don’t ...

Read More Source

The fanaticism of “test driven development” is slowly fading

This was one of those trends that went too far and I’m glad to see people talking about reasonable limits:

If you’re part of the Ruby On Rails community for a long time, you’ve probably read tons of articles about testing Rails application (less these days, though). Although there always have been diverging opinions on the matter, it seems the common wisdom was to say that you had to test everything: models, controllers, views and full-stack tests. Oh, and you had ...

Read More Source

Automation is putting people out of work

This should frighten people out of their complacency. Also, the trend starts in1958, not 1976.

From Tyler Cowen:

You sometimes hear there is no evidence of automation putting people out of work, but arguably the automation of manufacturing, plus IT-enabled foreign competition, are significant factors behind this trend. This picture also casts doubt on the common view that there are hidden real wage increases, not picked up by standard data and wage deflators and the like. You would expect ...

Read More Source

The languages of politics

Conservatives prefer the certainty of nouns:

This use of nouns, rather than adjectives, is seen to preserve stability, familiarity and tradition – all of which appear to be valued more highly by conservatives than liberals.

Because nouns ‘elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech’, they satisfy the desire for ‘structure and certainty’ that is common among social conservatives, the research authors found.

The research was based on studies carried out in three countries – Poland, Lebanon, ...

Read More Source

Churchill’s vivid writing

I’m coming back to writing lately, after 20 years, and I find that self-expression means very little to me now, whereas making money does, so I am much more interested in writing things that other people will find entertaining. So I can relate to this bit about Churchill’s writing:

In fact Churchill resigned from the Conservative front bench in the 1930s so he could earn more money as a writer and to some extent make up for these losses; that ...

Read More Source

Are bootcamps better than University?

My Europeans friends think its weird that universities in the USA insist that students take a wide range of classes. In Europe, university is seen as a time when one becomes a specialist in a particular skill. For instance, in Poland, it is common for a person to go to university for 5 years and graduate with the equivalent of a masters in a given field.

Especially considering how expensive university has become in the USA, asking students to take ...

Why are women paid less than men?

Interesting:

That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.

A new study from researchers at ...

Read More Source

RESTful APIs are dead, long live GraphQL

We can argue whether RESTful APIs ever existed, since very few ever implemented HATEOAS. Ruby On Rails claimed it offered RESTful APIs, but it never offered HATEOAS. After 10 years of failure, the world is looking for something new.

Interesting:

Imagine we have a simple application that fetches a list of stories, and some details about each one. Here’s how that might look in resource-oriented REST:

// Fetch the list of story IDs but not their details: rest.get('/stories').then(stories => // This ...

Read More Source

Picking React isn’t a technology decision, it’s a business decision

Interesting:

The clear winner right now, is React. Components all the way down makes your application much easier to reason about. The learning curve is very flat. The important APIs would fit on one page. JSX is awesome. You get all the power of JavaScript and its tooling when writing your markup. It is the natural match for Flux and Redux (more on that later). The React community is amazing, and produced many best of breed tools such as Redux (also more on that later). Writing high ...

Read More Source

Pay discrimination in tech

This sounds bad:

Women who write the software that runs on mainframe computers earn on average 72 cents per dollar earned by their male counterparts, according to research conducted by Glassdoor Inc., the online job information firm. That pay gap exists even after controlling for age, education, experience, job title, employer and location.

This suggests that the gap widens with age:

However, not all tech jobs pay men and women so differently. Among mobile developers, there is just a 2.9% gap between ...

Read More Source

Left-Pad as a service

Everyone is laughing over this. An 11 line function as its own NPM module? I am unsure how I feel. The trend has been to smaller and smaller pieces of functionality. I don’t find this outrageous. Still, the parody is funny:

c4n4rd is game:

This is really exciting!!! I was a bit disappointed that the right-pad will be out only in 2017. I am looking forward to that release because there is a high demand for it now.

What kind of ...

Read More Source

null

Testing WordPress to see if a title of “Null” works.

How long can an unsustainable economy grow?

Interesting, but wrong:

During the good times, “we always wanted to grow just a little more than we otherwise could.” There was always a reason why, if a little bit of growth was good, more would be even better. It was very easy to justify various kinds of mischief — from annual deficits to artificially low interest rates — in order to wring just a little more growth out of the economy. This is true whether your goals were motivated by ...

Read More Source

What name should the children get?

Interesting:

As my belly grew, the comments got even stranger. I had secretly hoped for no reaction, for our choice to be as common as saying, “I went with the mustard instead of the ketchup.” No reaction would mean something good, right? That women in this country are, for example, no longer considered the property of men, even in name. That archaic systems are truly collapsing. That we can reclaim language that was formerly used to control us.

But it seemed, ...

Read More Source

The First Civil War may end in time for the Second

Yet another sign that people are increasingly ready to move beyond the First Civil War:

Maryland lawmakers took a step Thursday toward scrubbing references to “Northern scum” and other Civil War-era phrases from the official state song.

The Maryland Senate voted 37-8 for the changes, while also recognizing “Maryland, My Maryland” as the state’s historic song. Supporters of the measure, which now goes to the House, said it was a compromise that removes offensive language and recognizes history.

“They keep the historic ...

Read More Source

History is not individuals

I’ve noticed this too. We’ve come a long way from Braudel:

As I more closely looked at the books displayed, I noticed a peculiarity. Almost all books … on the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions were not only critical of the revolutions, focused on the destruction they wreaked, but were exposés of their leaders, of their murderous natures and sexual perversions. Robespierre is a green-spectacled misanthrope who never had sex; Lenin hated people and loved only his mistress; Stalin was not ...

Read More Source

The monoculture of tech

Worrisome and very true:

(3), combined with (1), gets at what TrendCo’s real complaint with Mike is. He’s not their type. TrendCo’s median employee is a recent graduate from one of maybe ten “top” schools with 0-2 years of experience. They have a few experienced hires, but not many, and most of their experienced hires have something trendy on their resume, not a boring old company like Microsoft.

Whether or not you think there’s anything wrong with having a type and rejecting ...

Read More Source

The end of what was in San Francisco

Rarely does there seem so extreme a case of affluent people moving to a city because it seems creative, and then, by their own efforts, killing off the creativity.

Sad and worrisome:

I just can’t. I was born in San Francisco; my parents live there, today.

Gentrification is real and palpable. Once cozy neighbourhoods have become playthings for the rich and entitled. Where botánicas once opened their doors, now pricey designers have moved their precious boutiques. Where once a freewheeling, affordable, ...

Read More Source

The big trials remind us of the changing times

Oscar Wilde’s trial reminds us of where gay rights stood in the 1890s, his astonishingly bold defense of gay sex reminds us that Victorians standards were beginning to crack. Big trials do that, they make an era vivid. The same is true of the trial of O J Simpson, which reminds us of where race relations were in 1994/1995.

I’d forgotten how much Marcia Clark was herself put on trial during the trial:

But, surely, the hardest part ...

Read More Source

The end of the test-first mania

It worries me that the tech industry is driven by such intense manias, which have cost me several jobs. For a long time you were not allowed to question Object Oriented Programming. I still go to job interviews and I’m asked the basics of Object Oriented Programming, and it is clear I have to say nice things about Object Oriented Programming or I won’t get the job. Thankfully none of these people ever check Wikipedia, where I am cited as ...

How the movies talk about authoritarian tendencies

I don’t understand why the movies need to use superheroes to talk about these issues, but it is good they are talking about these issues:

The new politics at National Review

There are some fundamentally new politics being expressed by the National Review. In some ways, these beliefs sound like the unpopular conservative beliefs of the era before 1958, which is basically the era before the National Review (which got going in 1955 and which helped launch the modern conservative movement). There is an aspect to this writing that expresses the contempt that wealthy Protestants expressed for the working class back in the 1800s. Really, this is a kind of politics ...

Onyx tested by Jespen is genius tested by genius

Good lord, this makes me happy. I think Michael Drogalis is a very smart guy and everyone knows that Kyle Kingsbury is a very, very smart guy. Kingsbury’s work on Jespen is the finest work that anyone has ever done on the problems of distributed data. Onyx is exciting as an a Clojure answer to Apache Storm. Sad to say, Storm is written in Scala. The idea of testing Onxy with Jespen is one of the finest ideas ...

How to erase a woman from her biography

To the extent that identity is imbued in the body and manifests as a nose or an eyebrow or a skin color, then changing a nose or an eyebrow or a skin color, even in subtle ways, can erase a person’s identity.

I do not believe and never said that the nearly all-white team behind film are out-and-out racists who sought to disrespect Nina Simone’s legacy. But, as Coates notes, “racism is a default setting,” and unless we are doing ...

Read More Source

Living Social has raised more than $900 million to date

And it is dying. They just laid off more than half their staff. How do you gain so much investment and then die? Was the whole business opportunity a fad? An illusion?

The new politics in the USA

This is worrisome:

Dov Charney continues to self destruct

This is one of the more extreme examples of self destruction in recent USA business history.

The math teacher who could not read his own math writings

Interesting:

You can know someone day in, day out, love them completely and never really understand them

Interesting:

And that occurred to me over and over again as I read through the book. Couples tend have a lot of the same squabbles over money, domestic labor division, sex, free time, for a reason. But this book is not really a test of this couple; it’s a test of marriage itself. In a way, it’s an indictment of an institution that will take even the most easy going, low-key, adventuresome couple and leave them standing in the kitchen arguing ...

Read More Source

Unix processes have gotten bigger and slower over the years

Interesting:

The obvious question thus is: Why state machines? Why not processes or threads?

And the obvious answer is: Performance.

When UNIX was still young, scheduling was supposed to be done by the OS on per-process basis. When implementing a network server, for example, you were supposed to fork a new instance of the process for each TCP connection and rely on the OS scheduler to switch between the processes.

I guess it made sense from performance point of view back then. All ...

Read More Source

Had Linda been more confident, we’d have won

Interesting:

The other night, I was reminded that under-confidence also has costs. In our pub quiz one of my team-mates suggested several answers but with little confidence, causing our captain to choose other answers. However, she was right every time and our captain wrong. The upshot was that we slumped to an abject defeat to the bottom team in the league. Had Linda been more confident, we’d have won.

Is that right? Surely most of the blame attaches to the captain? What ...

Jakub Holý on copying :pre and :post conditions

Obviously I have read this article before (I offered response and was quoted before) but I’ve gone back to read it again and this jumped out at me:

Do you repeat the same checks again and again? Then you could either copy them using with-meta (they end-up in metadata anyway) or reuse the explicitly:

(defn with-valid-car [f] (fn [car] {:pre [:make :model :year]} (f car))) (def count-price (with-valid-car (fn [car] (do-something car)))) ;; or make & use a macro to make it nicer

That ...

Garth Greenwell talks about the importance, and the cost, of gay marriage

Very interesting:

I certainly was aware—and I was aware of this as a reader, and I was aware of this as somebody in the literary community—of this stigma about gay books. And I was also aware of a kind of gap between the generation of these trailblazers like Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, and my generation, in terms of those novels that document gay life at a particular moment. One explanation for that is very obvious: It’s AIDS.

Another explanation for that, ...

Read More Source

Sweden leads the world in the ratio of women to men getting college degrees

Interesting:

In 2013, six million students across OECD countries graduated from a higher education institution with a bachelor’s degree; 58% of them were women. This percentage ranges from 69% in Sweden [emphasis added] to 45% in Japan. Besides Japan, only Germany, Korea, Switzerland and Turkey still have more male than female graduates.

The history of temporary workers

Interesting:

Northwestern Mutual was not unique. For instance, “a large Milwaukee bank” faced the rising challenge of data entry, but the cost of the machines to enter the data—“Comptometers”—was prohibitive. Instead of hiring more people to work during the day, which would have required more machines, the bank hired “several hundred temporaries [to work] during a short evening shift” doing the data entry on the machines that the permanent staff could not. The hours of expensive overtime became hours of cheaper ...

Read More Source

What used to be bad about Microsoft

Apparently this has gotten better under the new CEO:

In my (very-biased) opinion, I believe collaboration is fundamentally broken at Microsoft. It is all about politics, not great outcomes, and that is absolute death in a functional organization, which has nothing but collaboration to hold together cross-functional product teams. At least in a divisional model all of the relevant team members have a common product and a common boss, meaning everyone has no choice but to work together. Unless the employee ...

Read More Source

Why women leave the STEM fields

These are worrisome stories:

I have my masters in a STEM field (forensic biology) and worked in the industry for 7 years before quitting and shifting careers completely. The terrifying and extremely persistent offers on late-night scenes, comments in the lab, and straight-up harassment from police officers in the field meant that I had to be an emotionless robot all the time or else risk my reputation/credibility. In many cases, my unresponsiveness made it worse and made the guy in ...

Read More Source