Blog AF

• Resetting the score
  Benedict Evans
  

  Shifts in the landscape, and analogies of history, or how innovation in warfare technology can explain the implications of the rise of the smartphone.

• The Second Smartphone Revolution
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  
• Trackers
  Jacques Mattheij
  

  A story of anthropomorphic cookies, scripts, and ad-blockers.

• The Blood Harvest
  Alexis Madrigal - The Atlantic
  

  Our dependence on other species is not surprising. The depth of our dependence is.

• Zoning Plays a Big Role in San Francisco's Housing Crisis, Gentrification, and Wealth Disparity
  Kriston Capps - CityLab
  

  New wealth flowing into a city, plus old wealth’s “build new things in other places” attitude leads to gentrification. We’re not in a bubble, but in a bifurcation, and SF has no relief valve to rely on. Only new city policies could change that.

• The First Micropayments Marketplace
  John Granata, Ali Fathalian, Michael Goldstein, Eli Haims, Saivann Carignan, Matt Storus, and Balaji S. Srinivasan - Medium
  

  In which 21, the Bitcoin company, unveils what the future of the web might look like.

• Why Snapchat is an Important Media Company
  Mark Suster - Bothsides of the Table
  
• The Obama Doctrine
  Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic
  

  A fascinating (but, at 65+ pages, excessively long) piece on the Obama administration and its foreign policy legacy.

• How to Code and Understand DeepMind's Neural Stack Machine
  Andrew Trask
  

  Academic papers tend to utilize terse language and jargon to precisely describe processes and outcomes, but these “precise” explanations end up being impenetrable walls for the uninitiated. Thankfully, there are bloggers like Trask, Olah, Karpathy, and others who lower the bar to understanding the intricacies of academic machine learning. I am still trying to get through this one. Trask definitely made the task accessible. The DeepMind researchers, on the other hand, did not.

• In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Comeuppance
  David Streitfeld - The New York Times
  

  In a way, it is surreal to be living this first hand, knowing that I am part of the problem. How long can SF keep going without a policy change?

• Valley VCs Sit on Cash, Forcing Startups to Dial Back Ambition
  Lizette Chapman - Bloomberg Business
  

  As Ben and James have discussed in the last few episodes of Exponent, this is not a bubble. It is a bifurcation.

• Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why.
  Thomas Frank - The Guardian
  

  Very related to yesterday’s Noah Smith article on Bernie, and last week’s Stratechery on “The Voters Decide”. Both Trump and Sanders appeal to a population that is not addressed by mainstream media.

• Why the poor pay more for toilet paper, and just about everything else
  Emily Badger - The Washington Post
  
• The Data Sleuths of San José
  Christian Caryl - Foreign Policy
  

  I remember these events from when I was a kid, and it really interesting to see them exposed here again, a decade later, when I can actually understand them and their implications. I wonder what kind of data is available today, in Costa Rica and elsewhere, just waiting to be analyzed to uncover other schemes like these.

• Data structures in JavaScript
  Benoît Vallon
  

  Javascript is a weird language. Period.

• Scenes From A Bust
  Owen Thomas - Mattermark
  
• The End of American Idealism
  Charles M. Blow - The New York Times
  
• Is group chat making you sweat?
  Jason Fried - Signal v. Noise
  
• Why Is Flying Still Expensive Even Though Fuel's Gotten So Cheap?
  Joe Pinsker - The Atlantic
  
• Hey, Bernie Sanders, Trade Isn't All Bad
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  “…like finding out that reading in low light can be bad for your eyes, & reacting by giving up books.”

• Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Risk Aversion aka Concavity
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  By definition you expect to pay more for insurance than you expect get out of it. Yet, people pay for it. Wenger explains how this is not a contradiction: “Without risk aversion insurance math fundamentally would not add up.”

• Brilliant vs. Boring
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Warren Buffett vs. Hedge funds.

• The trouble with books
  Nick Szabo - Unenumerated
  

  Here, Szabo argues that conditions around book publishing and distribution makes for little variety, and unnecessarily long documents. He calls it the “trouble with books”, and poses the internet as the solution. The “trouble with the internet” is noise. Publishers and editors used to be trusted gatekeepers, ensuring a certain level of quality. There is too much content to consume from the Internet firehose. How do we deal with content quality assurance and curation in the internet era? How do we pick what we read?

• Ethereum: Rise of the World Computer
  Rick Seeger - Silicon Valley Data Science
  
• We are all a collective brain, so what's new?
  César Hidalgo - MIT PubPub
  
• War Stories: My Journey From Blindness to Building a Fully Conversational User Interface
  Chris Maury - Backchannel
  
• Making America Great Again Is a Local Job
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  

  “…divided government makes it impossible for any one person to do much of anything in Washington, and this is a feature, not a bug, of the Constitution.”

• Cheap oil is taking shipping routes back to the 1800s
  Chris Baraniuk - BBC
  
• (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
  Peter Norvig
  
• Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors
  Blake Ross - Medium
  

  A.K.A., a programmer’s view of security.

Today I am posting from Indianapolis! I am spending the weekend here with Hannah’s family, and I got a lot of reading done on the flight here, so the article selection today is better than usual.

• The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you
  Steven Parton - Science and Nonduality
  

  “Your thoughts reshape your brain, and thus are changing a physical construct of reality.” After all, it is all in your head.

• We Should All Have Something To Hide
  Moxie Marlinspike
  

  An oldie, but a goodie. Very fitting these days with the whole  vs FBI story. Moxie makes good arguments against 100% effective law enforecement.

• How to Deploy Software
  Zach Holman
  

  Making good decisions upfront, and investing in improving the software development process (via testing, CI/CD, etc.) is costly, but pays off over time. This is especially important as the organization grows. Building software is easier when you’re not afraid of breaking it.

• Seeing Economic Patterns That Don't Exist
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  
• We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
  Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror
  

  I have been involved in several interviews since I started working full time 8 months ago. The process is unbelievably broken. Jeff makes good points on how and why that is so.

• The architect of the Reich
  Michael J. Lewis - New Criterion