Blog AF

Hi there. It had been a while! I have read a lot less than usual lately, but here are a few things I’ve recently enjoyed.

• I know how to program, but I don't know what to program
  Nano Dano - DevDungeon
  

  Through an analogy between learning CS, and how to play musical instruments, the author explains the value of reinventing the wheel: cloning other people’s projects allows you to learn useful patterns as you go. Start by mimicking, and continue adding your own features. The important part is putting your fingers to work. For example, I got my start with Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, and modified it bit by bit to fit my needs. One of the best pieces I have read on how to “level up” as a software engineer.

• If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
  Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden - The New York Times
  

  “White people studies.”

• The Netflix Tech Blog: Creating Your Own EC2 Spot Market
  Andrew Park, Darrell Denlinger, and Coburn Watson - The Netflix Tech Blog
  

  I learned this exists from my manager, who used to work at Netflix. Mind blown.

• What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant
  Matt McFarland - The Washington Post
  

  TLDR, no one noticed until the guy revealed it.

• 1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire
  Annalisa Merelli - Quartz
  
• Government Must Play a Role Again in Job Creation
  Eduardo Porter - The New York Times
  
• Today's rich families in Florence, Italy, were rich 700 years ago
  Matthew Yglesias - Vox
  
• Google’s Go-to-Market Gap
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  The “best” is not always enough.

• The Curse of Culture
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  Culture is fascinating, but also really subjective, making it hard to quantify, or analyze. To make it worse, it is turtles all the way down: culture matters at the company, division, group, team and individual basis, and the larger the company the more culture solidifies as a “thing” that makes that company what it is.

• The Empty Brain
  Robert Epstein - Aeon
  
• Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal v. Noise
  

  Speed is rarely the reason to pick a programming language these days. See below.

• Blue. No! Yellow!
  Robert C. Martin - Clean Coder Blog
  

  Mostly, its a matter of taste. See above.

• Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency
  Fred Ehrsam - The Coinbase Blog
  

  It takes guts to describe your company as the “…most popular way to buy, sell, and use bitcoin” or, more humbly, a “bitcoin wallet and platform” and then come out and say that something else is better, and possibly more sustainable, than BTC. Smells like a soft pivot to cryptocurrencies in general could be coming.

• The Father of Modern Metal
  Jonathan Waldman - Nautilus
  

  Never thought steel could be this fascinating.

• What disturbed me about the Facebook meeting.
  Glenn Beck - Medium
  

  If I am sharing an article by this guy, it must be good. Never thought I’d do that, but he does bring up good points.

• Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already
  Bryce Covert - The New York Times
  
• The G.O.P. Is Not America, Clinton Is Not Rubio
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• The End of the End of the World
  Jonathan Franzen - The New Yorker
  

  An epic article about Antarctica, family ties, global warming, and the future.

• Hello, This Is London Rising
  Andrew Godwin - Aeracode
  

  A very cool project. Can’t go wrong with mapping + Python + 3D Printing.

• Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow
  Joel Grus
  

  The machine learning inspired cousin to Fizz Buzz in Too Much Detail. You shouldn’t miss this one, even if your knowledge of ML is minimal.

• How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession
  Sean Captain - Fast Company
  

  The legal field is not very technologically enabled. As Casetext’s Jake Heller points out, “We’ve all seen this story. Whether it’s restaurants or encyclopedias, this is going to be replaced by an open knowledge solution.” The question is, which of all these services will win the market (full disclosure, my girlfriend works at Casetext, and I think they are doing great work at making legal data easily available).

• Writing with the machine
  Robin Sloan
  

  While I enjoy reading about the breakthrough techniques in deep learning, applied machine learning, with weird and fun objectives and non-standard datasets is much more exciting.

• Three Years in San Francisco
  Mike Davidson - Mike Industries
  

  The article talks about topics beyond management, but spends a good chunk of time discussing why projects with many moving pieces, many stakeholders, and many contributors are hard to do right. Mostly, because people are hard to understand. If you understand people, you’ll be a better engineer, better designer, and better manager.

• Apple’s actual role in podcasting: be careful what you wish for
  Marco Arment
  

  As Marco says, “…the last thing we all need is for the ‘data’ economy to destroy another medium.” Implied, but not mentioned in the article, is the discoverability problem of podcasts. Finding 10 shows that you generally like is easy. Finding the best episode of those 10 shows is impossible.

• The perils of mixing open source and money
  David Heinemeier Hansson
  

  Incentives…

• Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software.
  Rob Robinson - Medium
  
• It Takes All Kinds
  Justin Etheredge - CodeThinked
  
• Fifty years on, one of Mao’s ‘little generals’ exposes horror of the Cultural Revolution
  Tom Phillips - The Guardian
  
• Hot Chili Peppers, War, and Sichuan Cuisine
  Andrew Leonard - Nautilus
  

• Who Was Ramanujan?
  Stephen Wolfram - Backchannel
  

  Life is strange. One letter (email?) could really change yours. Send it today.

• What Military Jargon Says About Military Service
  Matti Friedman - The Atlantic
  
• Dynamic Typing > Static Typing?
  Greggman
  

  It is weird when you can’t credit an author because their work doesn’t list their name. </br> As a side note, tweeting this got me into a strange twitter fight.

• Stuck in the Middle With You
  Mark Suster - Both Sides of the Table
  

  Good analysis of why the US can’t play the isolation game going forward. Even if you don’t care about politics, and you should, it is worth your time just for the amazing list of books that Suster recommends.

• Eye Doctors Want To Shut Down This Online Vision Exam Startup
  Stephanie M. Lee - BuzzFeed News
  

  While I understand the point of regulation, Opternative delivers exactly what it advertises: refractive eye exams. The incumbents are just using regulation to push their interests and avoid getting pushed out of the market. But, obviously, I am biased. I used to work there.

• I’ve got a few questions for virtual reality filmmakers
  Lucas Matney - TechCrunch
  

  Possibly my favorite opening paragraph in a TechCrunch article, ever.

• Brad DeLong pulpifies a Cochrane graph
  Noah Smith
  

  Economic models can be bent to lie. Usually, not this blatantly, though.

• I tried to make my own tortillas from scratch the Mexican way in the US, and it was a disaster
  Ana Campoy - Quartz
  

  This article is just a curiosity. The fact that Quartz opens with “Leer en español” was very unexpected.

• The Increasing Problem With the Misinformed
  Thomas Baekdal
  

  Extreme clarity on the future of journalism, media, and strategies for companies in the space to respond to change. TL;DR: create better content or disappear. The arguments fit perfectly with Aggregation Theory, and while the article is a bit too focused on politics, the analysis could apply to any other news covered by the media, from the Tech Bubble, to ISIS, or Millenials. Long, but worthwhile.</br>I have been reading Baekdal for years. I can’t even remember how I ran into his blog, but it must have been 7 or 8 years ago, and I am glad I did.

• Demystifying Venture Capital Economics (Part 4)
  Andy Rachleff - Wealthfront
  

  While I have read (…skimmed 🙄) Mary Meeker’s report several years in a row by now, I had never consciously noticed the acceleration of adoption rates of new technologies.

• AdBlock Plus teams up with Flattr to help readers pay publishers
  Anthony Ha - TechCrunch
  

  Possibly more interesting than the opt-in model championed by Blendle.

• Inevitability in technology
  Benedict Evans
  

  Evans has a knack for finding great analogies from history. In most cases, path dependence, network effects, consumer lock in, and feedback loops matter more than any one decision. I wonder if we can systematically figure out the decisions that matter more…

• My path to OpenAI
  Greg Brockman
  

  Somehow, the dots connect in the future.

• Type Wars
  Robert C. Martin - The Clean Code Blog
  

  Was not expecting Uncle Bob to finish on that note. The history of programming languages is a big question mark for me. If you have a good book/blog post to recommend on it, please send it my way.

• Everything as a Service
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  Ben sounds more bullish in this article than in the past few, especially Exponent.

• Apple's Numbers
  Bob Lefsetz
  

  Yet another bear case for Apple pinned on the cult of personality for Steve Jobs. While I disagree with the overall message, the writing is really good, and Lefsetz does have a point on the strategy of innovation, viz. Christensen’s disruptive innovation.

• Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties
  Bess Kalb - The New Yorker
  

  The title says it all.

• The Case Against Reality
  Amanda Gefter - The Atlantic
  

  I have linked to Hoffman’s work before, and encouraged some of my friends to read his research. I think Gefter did a great job with this interview.

• The Feed Is Dying
  Casey Johnston - New York Magazine
  
• You play like you practice
  Jason Fried - Signal v. Noise
  
• Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its profits?
  Marcel Weiß - Early Moves
  
• Neural Networks Are Impressively Good At Compression
  Probably Dance
  

  A good explanation of neural networks by example. It is amazing how quickly the toy problem of learning a couple of weights, basic high school math, becomes untractable.

• Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently?
  Umer Mansoor - Code Ahoy
  
• How does knowledge get locked up in people's heads?
  Julia Evans
  

  Reminded me of Cesar Hidalgo’s book, Why Information Grows. At some point info HAS to be spread out across brains in the organization.

• On the (Small) Number of Atoms in the Universe
  Peter Norvig
  
• What Will Come After Payday Lending?
  Bethany McLean - The Atlantic
  
• Handcuffed to Uber
  Connie Loizos - TechCrunch
  

  Most of modern economics is based on the idea that people make decisions with a clear understanding of the consequences. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Whether we’re talking of switching to a new job, moving to a different state, picking an insurance plan or making a donation, there are always economic consequences that people don’t understand. The complexity of our world, some of it designed, some of it emergent, makes rational decision-making almost impossible. These Uber employees were definitely not aware of how big of an issue this policy would be years after they joined the company. (For more on the topic, take a look at Zach Holman’s post.)