This past week I got to travel to Portland for work, and took a couple of extra days to explore the city. I was attending a conference, PyCon, which took up most of my time, but I still got to travel quite a bit. For the nerds out there, here are some notes about my experience at the conference itself. Otherwise: Continue reading...
Although I hate road trips, I love traveling and seeing new places. It didn’t take much convincing after reading about the flower bloom in Southern California to get me excited about renting a car and heading down the highway for 5 hours to see it.
We clearly did not do things right, though. Between missing the fine print on the rental agreement, getting to the campsite after the welcome center had closed, and forgetting to get firewood ahead of time, we were pretty stressed on our ride there. Luckily, getting out of the city and camping in the wilderness has its way of soothing even the most restless of Avys. More...
For some reason, things have been quiet around here lately. I guess work has kept me busy, and I haven’t been too motivated to either take photos or share links on my blog. That’s how you get The Great Link Dump of April 2017.
I wish I had more to share of my day at the races, of my walks through the city, and of these black and white shots. Especially the black and white shots.
This post feels jumbled up. A collection of collections, thrown together due to lack of better options. I’d apologize, but its better than not posting, and I’m hoping it gets the ball rolling again. More...
It has been a linkless month, so here’s a brain dump.
See also, The Squid.
This article was awesome. The basic idea it tries to get across is that because cities are multicultural and inclusive, they are also more productive. This vision of the city as a bastion of openness and tolerance, unlike the insular rural communities that voted for Trump, is not new, but the post sparked some interesting conversation online. For example see Noah Smith’s, Ross Douthat’s and Chris Arnade’s takes.
It is always good to hear these insider views of how companies got started. Much like Airbnb selling Obama-O’s, or Drew Houston forgetting his USB drive, these origin myths are just that, stories, but they reinforce the idea that all you need to start a startup is to solve a pain point.
Thinking about technical complexity as a moat is interesting, especially considering the initial discussion about “the shape of the cost-functionality curve.” I definitely believe that there are increasing costs to adding functionality, or as the author says “Features interact — intentionally — and that makes the cost of implementing the N+1 feature closer to N than 1.” This is exactly why a startup can come up with a simple product and blow a big co out of the water. They don’t have to worry about how all the other pieces in the business - and in the code! - interact with each other.
Stochastic modeling is a really cool topic, and here we see it applied to the transitions between programming languages.
This is another version of Noah Smith’s Beware of Thinking like an Economist. Here the argument is “there are certain problems that only sociologists can solve,” which is probably just as bad. However, the historical aspect is interesting, especially the fact that there could have been a Council of Social Advisers.
Nothing about Farhad’s argument seems controversial to me. There are still unsolved problems in the vein of “finding a needle in a haystack” where separating signal from noise has become increasingly difficult, but the expansion of content produced by humans can only be a good thing. If we trust that willingness to pay will somehow sort out the good vs. bad content problem in the long run, we’re headed in the right direction.
Starting with the case of Big Tobbaco vs. Medicine in the 50s and 60s, and continuing with Trump and Brexit, Harford makes an argument against ignorance. Agnotology, “the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced,” is a really interesting concept that I had never heard of. The punchline is that we need to get people excited about learning, and make them curious about the world in which they live in, so that they seek out truth on their own. Not an easy endeavor.
Life somehow keeps teaching us that we have no idea what we’re doing. “Growing up” is about learning from your experiences, but there are always new mistakes to make.
All new technology can be seen as a double edge sword. Luckily, crypto wasn’t killed by the US government.
The cyber is hard.
This happens daily to me. Sorry. Not sorry.