Blog AF

As my friend Leo would say, my lack of link-posting has been circumstantial, not intentional.

Last week found me busy, and uninspired. The weekend, on the other hand, gave me a lot to think about. I listened to the audio-book version of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and watched 13th, both of which I would highly recommend. I also attended a few LitQuake events, one of which was especially worthwhile.

For a while now, I have been saying that I want to write more, and this weekend gave me even more ideas, as it put a lot of things in perspective. The goal for the upcoming weeks is to put my thoughts down on paper.

Also, I read a bunch of interesting things about the election, but you’re probably tired of that. I am too.

In the mean time, here are links worth reading.

• Developer hiring and the market for lemons
  Dan Luu
  

  A critique of Spolsky’s Finding Great Developers, based on solid microeconomics. Luu compares the software engineering labor market to Akerlof’s market for lemons. The argument against Spolsky’s model seems to be based on two ideas: first, that there is an information asymmetry for both hiring managers, as well as engineers, and second, that the proportion of dysfunctional teams is larger than Spolsky implies. The article goes into an extensive study of the market structure, and possible solutions for both managers and engineers. The main takeaway, is that job hunting and hiring for software engineers is hard.

• The White Problem
  Quinn Norton - The Message – Medium
  

  An explainer on race in the US, which I can’t recommend enough. Norton’s two part post helped me re-contextualize the present via history I was unaware of (part two, here).

• Echo, interfaces and friction
  Benedict Evans
  

  We are nowhere near a transparent general AI, and all the companies buidling voice interfaces know that. By now, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have all been positioned away from such an all-encompassing solution, pushing for ever narrower use cases. Like the AIs out of Facebook’s bot fiasco of 2016, voice interfaces seem to be adding more friction than they take away.

• An Economics Nobel for Examining Reality
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  When people think of economics as a discipline, they tend to think of the broad themes they read about in the newspaper: interest rates, trade, unemployment, the housing market, etc, usually analyzed at the macro level. However, as Smith points out, microeconomics has slowly gained steam, developing more reliable models than macro in the last few years. Better tools, new methods, as well as data, are driving this change. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in more Nobel Prizes going to the microeconomists as of late, including this year’s winners.

• A half-million Brazilians want to break away and form a new country
  The Washington Post
  

  More of the same. I still believe modern nations might be unraveling. Another case of “we don’t want to pay for them, because they are not us”.

• The Hard Raise
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  From an anecdote of a “hard raise,” I think what Wilson makes in this post is an argument against easy money. When companies persevere against hard conditions, they come out stronger, with smarter theses, and better strategies.

• How the Fed Turns Good News Into Bad
  Narayana Kocherlakota - Bloomberg View
  

  In which Kocherlakota explains so much of what’s wrong with techno-pessimism, while making a case for paying attention to second and third order effects.

• A Great Fight of Our Times
  David Leonhardt - The New York Times
  

  Throughout history, not all generations get to be better off than the previous ones, and that seems to be the case of the United States today… unless things change. “The moral case for a fairer society is clear. But there is also a self-interested case.”

• Our Need for Purpose and Recognition
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  I have been thinking a lot about Maslow’s hierarchy as of late. Luckily, I am part of the minority that gets to worry about these things.

• A Short Primer On The Thiel Dust-Up
  Alex Wilhelm - Mattermark
  

  Tech Twitter blew up on YC’s face this week. It is rare for tech celebrities like David Heinemeier Hansson, Marco Arment, Thomas Ptacek, Jeff Atwood, and even Maciej Cegłowski to agree on things, but they have all come out with pitchforks after Sam Altman and Paul Graham for their defense of Peter Thiel. Even if Hillary wins, Trump has put strain on the Silicon Valley technorati.

• Angus Deaton on Inequality, Trade, and the Robin Hood Principle
  EconTalk (Podcast)
  

  Not suprisingly, the idea of redistribution is not taken well by Roberts, but the underlying themes are more interesting anyway. Touching on cosmopolitanism, identity, and other recurring subjects of this blog, Deaton and Roberts discuss the state of the US’s poor, questioning whether a poor person in the south is objectively worse off than a poor person in Africa, for example.

• The Wells Fargo Hustle
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  The stories coming out of the Wells Fargo scandal are rough. Incentives in the financial markets are turned on their heads, and it is amazing that the extensive regulation can’t handle these issues. Golden parachutes and bail-outs aside, this is insanity.

• Half a House
  99% Invisible (Podcast)
  

  Necessity is the mother of invention, quite literally. This episode makes it easy to imagine what the village might look like, but after seeing the photos I think the audio doesn’t do it justice. An excellent idea, and an important example of why the US sometimes lags on the innovation side.

• In Line
  The Memory Palace (Podcast)
  

  A short episode, based on a 1964 New York Times article. Nate DiMeo tells us a story we’ve all heard before, but which, sadly, must be retold over and over again.

• Map of the Internet
  Quartz
  

  I am sharing this, even though I honestly did not read the whole thing. An 11 part epic on how the internet works. A good production, even if a bit overwhelming.

Just like last week, these were ready yesterday, but the debate talk made me push them for a day. A lot of political content, but the kind that runs deeper than the election cycle’s scandal du jour.

It might be time for me to solidify some of these thoughts, and do a write-up of my own.

• Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
  Dan Luu
  

  If there is one thing I have learned over the last year, it is that even small projects require huge overhead when your tolerance for error is small. Building services with acceptable uptime, reliablity, and performance is extremely complicated, if not nearly impossible. “I could do that in a weekend” is a strawman. In fact, I have come to the opposite realization… it is surprising that anything works at all, even when thousands of human hours are invested!

• Deep-Fried Data
  Maciej Cegłowski - Idle Words
  

  As usual with Maciej, there are many layers to this essay. The comparisons between libraries and the internet are not new, and his railing against large companies aiding online surveilance are more than expected. Much more interesting are the questions brought up about archiving the modern web - where content is selected, joined, and rendered dynamically per user at load time, with large portions behind walls: What is the point of building a community you don’t own? What should be kept for posterity? What is a the point of a site’s snapshot without the code that makes it work? What happens when a company dies, or misses, and we go beyond simple link-rot? The conclusion is hand wavey, but the future of the internet is, as Maciej put it, contingent.

• When world leaders thought you shouldn’t need passports or visas
  Speranta Dumitru - The Conversation
  

  I had never thought about the fact that passports are a recent construct. Obviously, it makes sense, but when I first read it I was baffled that they were a new necessity only a hundred years ago. In historical context, freedom of movement ties very nicely with a lot of themes I have been thinking about related to sovereignty, national identity, shared culture, and their implications. Be it due to globalization, radicalization, or you-name-it-ization, the modern nation-state may be slowly breaking down.

• Immigration: the right's problem
  Chris Dillow - Stumbling and Mumbling
  

  To continue the theme of freedom of movement, let’s talk immigration policy. In short, Dillow argues that the free market right should support open immigration in much the same way they support free trade. If freedom was something that the conservatives really cared about, they could not be this inconsistent, and they surely would push for more lenient immigration laws than the left. Once again, it is a matter of boundaries, and identity: freedom for whom?

• Trade Show
  Planet Money
  

  More of the same. I am on a roll, I guess. It is odd that both US presidential candidates are against trade in this election, so the Planet Money folks compressed a quarter millenium of trade history for us. While superficial, there is a good discussion of The Wealth of Nations, and who benefits from tariffs vis-a-vis open borders and other trade policies. They touch on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, which we can see across the ladder from regional to supranational deals. I assume the bipartisan anti-trade sentiment in the US is just a blip, and that we’ll soon revert to the trend of freer trade.

• Why Are Politicians So Obsessed With Manufacturing?
  Binyamin Appelbaum - The New York Times
  

  It is easier to sell people on a safe past than an unsure future. Our brain is hardwired with biases, trained by thousands of years of evolution. It can trick us on false positives and overblow our fears, or it can make us think that the past was, by its own nature, better than the future. What seems irrational is that no candidate has capitalized on this, realizing that there is a discrepancy between public discourse and the numbers. Soon, some candidate will catch the tailwind instead of falsely promising restoration.

• The Intellectual, Yet Idiot
  Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Medium
  

  The more I read Taleb, the less I like him. The IYI concept is worth sharing, though, because it is pervasive, and we all fall in the trope at times. “The IYI has been wrong, historically, on [a ton of things,] but he is convinced that his current position is right.” The key to ridding one’s self of the YI part is to have an open mind, accept errors as they are revealed, and course-correct accordingly.

• Startup Cargo Cults: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
  Leo Polovets - Coding VC
  

  We all fall prey to cargo cults: following our biases and finding patterns where there might be none, mimicking the inessentials and hoping we get the same results. Think hard about why you do things, and trim as necessary.

• Snapchat Spectacles and the Future of Wearables
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  There is too much Apple speculation here for me to make strong comments, but go read it. Products don’t exist in a vacuum.

• Economics Has a Major Blind Spot
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  A clear exposition one of my gripes about economics as a discipline: Once you layer in tax, after tax, after tax, and your policies start interacting with each other, they no longer achieve the desired effects.
  In the real world, no agent -however rational- can make optimal choices, as they don’t have nearly full information. To make things worse, solutions proposed at a given time might alter the underlying reality before they even go into effect, and no longer work as expected! By the time they are in place, policies are hard to change (this week’s EconTalk touched on that topic) and we deal with it by adding more crap on top. Living in a complex society does not by definition require the levels of complexity of modern legislation.

• Amazon’s Newest Ambition: Competing Directly With UPS and FedEx
  Greg Bensinger and Laura Stevens - The Wall Street Journal
  

  Similar to the recent Bloomberg article. Amazon seems more and more serious about their last-mile effort, and the incumbents are still incredulous.

• Trump was completely wrong about the Fed last night. But I’m glad the topic came up.
  Jared Bernstein - The Washington Post
  

  If the political system in the US is hard, and confusing, the Fed is probably one of the most misunderstood. Even having taken several courses on the topic, understanding the intended effects of central banking, and monetary policy, is tough. Bernstein makes a good case for the importance about better understanding it.

• Uncertainty Wednesday: Limits on Observations
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  Another good one in Albert’s series on uncertainty, easter egg included. “All observation necessarily entails compression of reality,” further compression from our tool’s resolution limits, and even more from measurement error. Regardless of how good your observations are, they will always be uncertain. Moreover, observations themselves can change the underlying state of reality. Not only in the uncertainty principle quantum sense, but also in the user research sense, for example.

• How Slack and Facebook Are Making Access to Information Less Democratic
  Ezra Galston - BreakingVC
  

  There are clear tensions regarding how information is stored and accessed on the internet. In the OSS world, there is a loud group that constantly complains about the IRC => Slack trend, for example. Whether the fringe is becoming more or less accessible, I don’t know, I have not tried to hang out there, but there is an overwhelming feeling of the walls closing in on themselves.

• The Falsity of False Equivalence
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  

  The fact that this is not clearer to the public at large is insane. It is a bizarre time to live.

• A mistake is just a moment in time
  Jason Fried - Signal V. Noise
  

  Internalize your mistakes, correct your course, but don’t forget you messed up.

• What San Francisco Says About America
  Thomas Fuller - The New York Times
  

  I lived in Chicago for 4 years, and I never saw levels of poverty and homelessness as intense as I see in San Francisco. However, both cities have poverty. Both cities have homelessness. In Chicago it is a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”, while in SF you see it day in and day out. Market Street and the Magnificent Mile are a stark contrast, but both cases require society to provide solutions. This article is missing a call to action.

• The Free-Time Paradox in America
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  
• Spotify Is Perfecting the Art of the Playlist
  Devin Leonard - Bloomberg
  

  Probably one of the best features in Spotify. Pretty cool story of how it came about.

• Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles
  Seth Stevenson - The Wall Street Journal
  

  A glimpse into the future of media/advertising, an interesting personal story, and a product I’d love to try. The back story of how this story got leaked by Business Insider, and the WSJ ended up being whipped into releasing it early says a lot about journalism in the 21st century, too. A lot to unpack.

• I Used to Be a Human Being
  Andrew Sullivan - New York Magazine
  

  Another piece about the perils of living attached to our screens, and taking a break from the addiction. These have become more and more common, but somehow Sullivan gives a refreshing view.

• The MIT License, Line by Line
  Kyle E. Mitchell - /dev/lawyer
  

  I wish I understood licensing better, but this is a first step. Open source software is amazing. It is one of the reasons computers today are as powerful as they are.

• Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes
  Matt Zucker
  

  Another cool project on image processing by Zucker. Code that solves a real problem, however tiny, is always worth reading.

A collection of photos from the past couple of months. The first few I took for my photo class, but I never shared here, while the later ones are mostly tests of my new lens. Still getting used to it. More...