Jekyll2021-07-26T07:07:55+00:00 M. AlperDeveloper, Amateur Photographer, and Human After All.What I Read This Week: 2021-292021-07-25T00:00:00+00:002021-07-25T00:00:00+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft</a></p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Feynman:</strong> If we are just considering the round [manhole covers], then they are round by definition. That statement is a tautology.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">This Hacker News comment</a> on <a href=""><em>AWS’s Egregious Egress</em></a></p> <blockquote> <p>If it’s expensive to move data out of AWS, it’s not just about making it hard for customers to leave AWS. It means that any third-party service that wants to sell to AWS customers must also use AWS.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The Tyranny of Spreadsheets</a></p> <p>I did not find the article that interesting, seems like just another piece of content marketing, but well-written and particularly the following bit was incredible so I copy those four paragraphs:</p> <blockquote> <p>Standard practice then would be to vaccinate everyone for miles around. But <a href="">Foege</a>’s team just didn’t have enough doses. Instead, he used radio and the local network of missionaries to spot new cases. Every evening at seven o’clock, they’d switch on the radio and put the word out. Whenever an outbreak was reported, Foege and his team quickly raced to the scene and administered vaccines.</p> <p>The hope was to create something like a firebreak, keeping the disease from spreading. And it worked. Using this tactic, Foege’s team eliminated smallpox from eastern Nigeria within six months. It was 1967, and soon civil war engulfed the country. Despite the chaos and enormous bloodshed of that war, smallpox did not return.</p> <p>The secret was to worry less about the blanket coverage that was never quite good enough and to worry more about quickly finding exactly where each outbreak had appeared. Eradication was all about information. Up until that point, information had been very patchy. The WHO realised it had been finding only 100,000 or so cases each year against a backdrop of 10 million.</p> <p>Foege’s experience showed that public health workers could beat smallpox if they had the data. The strategy became known as ring vaccination. It’s not the same as contact tracing, but it has a lot in common: in both cases you need to rapidly isolate infected people and find their recent contacts.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Zip - How not to design a file format.</a></p> <p>It’s your classic rant about file formats — my favourite still being <a href="">the one about PSD</a>. A <strong>major</strong> advantage of Zip is both the ability to create one on-the-fly (streaming) and also the format allowing random access to its files without having to scan the whole archive (such as with tar, but then its name literally derived from “<strong>t</strong>ape <strong>ar</strong>chive” so you can’t be mad at it).</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Deurbanising the Web</a></p> <p>In summary, the author makes a point about why PDFs might be a healthier alternative to serving HTML pages. I don’t fully agree that PDFs are the best way forward, having tried reading it on mobile, but it is clear that there is <a href="">some interest</a> in an alternative to Web that is more lightweight and more private. My bet would be on neither.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">A Solarpunk Manifesto</a></p> <blockquote> <p>At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.</p> </blockquote> <p>It’s all about post-scarcity baby; information is not scarce!</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">This Hacker News comment</a></p> <blockquote> <p>I once figured that you don’t need light in your house if your eyes are closed, and I hooked up blink detection to my smart bulbs:</p> <p><a href=""></a></p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperIf Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft“Programming” By YAML2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:002021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00<p>I wrote more YAML than code in the past three months (at a temporary summer job) and it is <strong>ex-haust-ing</strong>.</p> <p>Some reflection reminded me of:</p> <blockquote> <p>They [Sussman and Abelson] felt that the SICP curriculum no longer prepared engineers for what engineering is like today. Sussman said that in the 80s and 90s, engineers built complex systems by combining simple and well-understood parts. The goal of SICP was to provide the abstraction language for reasoning about such systems.</p> <p>Today, this is no longer the case. Sussman pointed out that engineers now routinely write code for complicated hardware that they don’t fully understand (and often can’t understand because of trade secrecy.) The same is true at the software level, since programming environments consist of gigantic libraries with enormous functionality. According to Sussman, his students spend most of their time reading manuals for these libraries to figure out how to stitch them together to get a job done. He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?’”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking.</p> <p>—<a href="">Programming By Poking: Why MIT Stopped Teaching SICP (2016)</a></p> </blockquote> <p>Written after 10 days and 20 commits trying to set up <a href="">Knative</a> for <a href="">Kubernetes</a> in <a href="">KinD</a> on self-hosted GitHub CI runners.</p>Bora M. AlperI wrote more YAML than code in the past three months (at a temporary summer job) and it is ex-haust-ing.What I Read This Week: 2021-282021-07-18T00:00:00+00:002021-07-18T00:00:00+00:00<p>After a long intermission, I am happy to be back!</p> <ul> <li> <p><a href="">The Failures That Made Ian Fleming</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Born to a life of privilege (his paternal grandfather, a Scottish banker, was a self-made millionaire; his mother sported the aristocratic maiden name of Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose), Fleming was raised in some of the finest homes in Mayfair, Hampstead, and Oxfordshire. His maternal grandfather was captain in the Royal Buckinghamshire Militia, and his father rose quickly through the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars, and might have risen just as quickly in Tory politics had his life not prematurely ended in the Battle of the Somme. The family entertained and was entertained by the likes of Churchill and Disraeli; and Fleming, like most of the men in his family, attended Eton, establishing connections that would see him through a lifetime of opportunities to “fail upward.” (Just look at Boris Johnson.)</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday</a></p> <blockquote> <p>With no self-imposed time pressure, I was able to focus on just one thing: showing up every day and writing some code. Some features took an hour to implement, some took several hours spread over days, some even stretched into weeks, but it did not matter because there were no deadlines of any sort.</p> </blockquote> <p>Also my approach to <a href=""></a>. =)</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Stolen Picasso and Mondrian Paintings Found Stashed in a Ravine in Greece</a></p> <p>Good artists copy, great artists steal.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Oblique Questions</a></p> <p>I loved this:</p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Oblique Strategies is a card-based method for promoting creativity jointly created by musician/artist Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, first published in 1975. Physically, it takes the form of a deck of 7-by-9-centimetre (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black box. Each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.</p> </blockquote> <p>In homage to it I have been collecting my own set of “oblique questions”: questions that apply to engineering problems to get a different perspective on them.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The Success and Failure of Ninja</a></p> <blockquote> <p>If I were to summarize what I learned in a single sentence, it would be this: we talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues. […] That is, as programmers we like to talk about problems as if they are primarily technical — “how do I optimize this loop to squeeze more qps out of this service?” — when in my experience the tech almost always ends up secondary to bigger picture factors.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperAfter a long intermission, I am happy to be back!What I Read This Week: 2021-092021-03-07T00:00:00+00:002021-03-07T00:00:00+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever</a></p> <p>The long read of the week.</p> <blockquote> <p>The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.</p> <p>Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.</p> <p>The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The darkly soothing compulsion of ‘doomscrolling’</a></p> <p>The gist of it is the best put by <a href="">ersii</a> on <a href="">the Hacker News submission</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Remember to take breaks from the news cycles (whatever flavor of news and outlet you prefer) and try to not get emotionally engaged in what is really quite distant from your actual life.</p> <p>The news, wherever they come from and regardless of what they are about are mostly just a distraction from what actually matters, your own life, family and mission.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%</a></p> <p>A great short story about the accidental run-time complexity of using <code class="highlighter-rouge">sscanf()</code> while parsing JSON.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The Capitol Hill Babysitting Cooperative (CHBC) is a cooperative located in Washington, D.C., whose purpose is to fairly distribute the responsibility of babysitting between its members. The co-op is often used as an allegory for a demand-oriented model of an economy. The allegory illustrates several economic concepts, including the paradox of thrift and the importance of the money supply to an economy’s well-being. The allegory has received continuing attention, particularly in the wake of the late-2000s recession.</p> <p>At first, new members of the co-op felt, on average, that they should save more scrip before they began spending. So they babysat whenever the opportunity arose, but did not spend the scrip they acquired. Since babysitting opportunities only arise when other couples want to go out, there was a shortage of demand for babysitting. As a result, the co-op fell into a “recession”. This illustrates the phenomenon known as the paradox of thrift.</p> <p>Within a few years a new problem arose. There was too much scrip and a shortage of babysitting. As new members joined, more scrip was added to the system until couples had too much, but new members were not able to spend it because no one else wanted to babysit. In general, the cooperative experienced regular problems because the administration took in more than it spent, and at times the system added too much scrip into the system via the amount issued to new members.</p> </blockquote> <p>What an interesting gem! Mentioned by <a href="">shalmanese</a> on <a href="">a Hacker News thread</a> regarding private torrent trackers.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Honda’s Now Selling the World’s First Production Car with Level 3 Self-Driving Tech</a></p> <p>My family has a Toyoto Corolla Hybrid 2020 with Lane Tracing Assist (LTA) and Active Cruise Control (ACC) together which feels like magic! “<a href="">Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.</a>”</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Open source projects: consider running office hours</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Back in December I decided to try something new for my <a href="">Datasette</a> open source project: <a href="">Datasette Office Hours</a>. The idea is simple: anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with me on a Friday to talk about the project.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperAs the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than EverWhat I Read This Week: 2021-082021-02-27T00:00:00+00:002021-02-27T00:00:00+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">Daft Punk Break Up</a></p> <p>They are <a href="">human after all</a>.</p> <p>And here is <a href="">their 1997 BBC 1 Essential Mix</a>!</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Abundant Capital</a></p> <blockquote> <p>To be sure, there have always been bidding wars in private equity (of which venture is a subset), but these bidding wars are so frequent now as to be approaching the norm. If capital was actually scarce, this wouldn’t happen, there wouldn’t be enough money to create so many bidding wars.</p> </blockquote> <p>Thus act smart Aaron says; on another note, inflation is here.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Go is not an easy language</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Ideally a language should reduce the cognitive load required to reason about its behaviour; there are many ways to increase this cognitive load: complex intertwined language features is one of them, and getting “distracted” by implementing fairly basic things from those simple concepts is another: it’s another block of code I need to reason about. While I’m not overly concerned about code formatting or syntax choices, I do think it can matter to reduce this cognitive load when reading code.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Age of distractions</a></p> <blockquote> <p>By now, where I live, it’s been many months of nightly curfews and limitations on travel and social life. I consider myself a very fortunate person to have suffered a relatively small impact from the global pandemic. Nonetheless, I can’t stop but think about why my mind feels so exhausted while at the same time requiring a constant stream of stimulus that results in overbearing distraction.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Whistleblowers: Software Bug Keeping Hundreds Of Inmates In Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates</a></p> <p>A Boring Dystopia.</p> <blockquote> <p>According to Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers, hundreds of incarcerated people who should be eligible for release are being held in prison because the inmate management software cannot interpret current sentencing laws.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Playstation 2 Architecture</a></p> <p>Just the right amount of detail for a fan like me! Always brings me joy to read about my favourite game console ever.</p> <p>On a more remarkable note, it’s interesting to read the magic of hardware accelerators; <a href="">the old is new again</a>.</p> <p>Finally, <a href="">the whole blog is one of a kind</a>!</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Keeping platforms open</a></p> <p>A well-written article which I would not like to butcher for a summary; read it!</p> <blockquote> <p>This article is the second entry of series of posts exploring situations in which FOSS alone isn’t enough to secure user freedom.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperDaft Punk Break UpWhat I Read This Week: 2021-072021-02-21T00:00:00+00:002021-02-21T00:00:00+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">Specialization Is For Insects</a></p> <p>The following two entries are also great.</p> <blockquote> <p>A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">“User Engagement” Is Code For “Addiction”</a></p> <blockquote> <p>I believe that human beings, on some fundamental level as social creatures, need to have trusting face-to-face community with others. Forcing people indoors and abstracting their social interactions, forcing human contact into a communication channel that is both easily monetized and easily monitored, it harms our brains in a way that we don’t yet fully understand, in addition to giving untold amounts of power to private tech companies.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The Security Value of Inefficiency</a></p> <p><a href="">Texans are suffering</a> from a state-wide failure of their power grid, which reminded me of Schneier’s article on (in)efficiency.</p> <blockquote> <p>This drive for efficiency leads to brittle systems that function properly when everything is normal but break under stress. And when they break, everyone suffers. The less fortunate suffer and die. The more fortunate are merely hurt, and perhaps lose their freedoms or their future. But even the extremely fortunate suffer — maybe not in the short term, but in the long term from the constriction of the rest of society.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Many Small Queries Are Efficient In SQLite</a></p> <p>Yet another bullet point to add my SQLite love letter. For every single FOSS project I have been working on for the past couple years, SQLite has been my go-to database.</p> <blockquote> <p>SQLite is not client/server, however. The SQLite database runs in the same process address space as the application. Queries do not involve message round-trips, only a function call. The latency of a single SQL query is far less in SQLite. Hence, using a large number of queries with SQLite is not the problem.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets</a></p> <blockquote> <p>One of the core assumptions of modern systems engineering is that there’s a constant flow of defects: that people make mistakes. You can’t rely on people to not fuck up on their own: after all, the US still has 30,000 auto deaths a year. Rather, the best way to reduce the volume and severity of mistakes is to adjust the system itself. Either make them harder to do, make them easier to catch, or make them cause less damage when they do happen. Don’t just blame the drivers, give them safe roads! Give them seatbelts!</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Computers Aren’t Fun Anymore</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Throughout <a href="">The Dream Machine</a>, a history of the early days of computing, tinkering and having fun was a recurring theme throughout the decades. I wasn’t around to experience the early days of computers myself, but they seemed to be genuinely exciting and rewarding. In the words of MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle: computers empowered their users, making them feel smart[er], “in control”, and “more fully participant in the future”.</p> </blockquote> <p>I miss the crudeness of old UIs a ton, not only in themselves (ie aesthetically) but also the way they used to stimulate thinking and a deeper understanding of the underlying system: compare <a href="">the tiny squares of old defrag.exe</a> to soulless progressbars of modern Windows for instance, the old version makes one wonder what each square might stand for? :)</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Washington Post public editor: The powerful have realized they don’t need the Post</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel, on behalf of the public. Politicians and officials and business leaders don’t want to talk to the press, subjecting themselves to the possibility of being made to look bad; they do it because they have always felt they had no choice. They felt that way because papers like the Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned them. There is nothing devious or ignoble about this; a powerful press, for all its flaws, is good for democracy, and tends to promote equality by holding the big shots in check. Anyone who has ever negotiated to land a contentious interview with a famous person knows that you only get those interviews when your subject fears what will happen if they don’t do the interview. Today, that fear is disappearing. We all need to figure out what to do about that.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><em><a href="">This Hacker News Comment</a></em></p> <blockquote> <p>Rather few web apps need high write concurrency and low write latency. Great many web apps serve 99.9% of hits with SELECTs only, and when some new data needs to be persisted, the user can very well wait for a second or two, so rarely it happens. But this is often forgotten.</p> <p>Same realization brought a wave of static site generators: updates are so rare that serving pages from a database makes no sense, and caching them makes little sense: just produce the “pre-cached” pages and serve them as is.</p> <p>Maybe a similar wave can come to lighter-weight web apps: updates are so rare that you don’t need Postgres to handle them. You can use SQLite, or Redis, or flat files as the source of your data, with massively less headache. Horizontal scaling becomes trivial. Updates are still possible, of course, you just pay a much lower complexity price for them, while paying a higher latency price.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now read this once again in the context of decentralised web. =)</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Ask HN: What are the best websites that the Anglosphere doesn’t know about?</a></p> </li> <li> <p><a href="">always bet on text</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Uber drivers are workers not self-employed, Supreme Court rules</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Looking at these and other factors, the court determined that drivers were in a position of subordination to Uber where the only way they could increase their earnings would be to work longer hours.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperSpecialization Is For InsectsWhat I Read This Week: 2021-062021-02-14T10:18:53+00:002021-02-14T10:18:53+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">Big name corporations more likely to commit fraud</a></p> <blockquote> <p>“Prestigious companies, those that are household names, were actually more prone to engage in financial fraud, which was very surprising,” said Jennifer Schwartz, WSU sociologist and lead author on the study. “We thought it would be companies that were struggling financially, that were nearing bankruptcy, but it was quite the opposite. It was the companies that thought they should be doing better than they were, the ones with strong growth imperatives–those were the firms that were most likely to cheat.”</p> <p>[…]</p> <p>The researchers noted that this type of elite, white-collar crime is understudied especially when compared with street crime even though it has more wide-reaching consequences.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Corporations Don’t Have to Maximize Profits</a></p> <p>Refutal of a “a total falsehood invented in the 1970s by Milton Friedman” as <a href="">referred</a> by Tom MacWright.</p> <blockquote> <p>There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is <a href="">utterly false</a>. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court <a href=";vol=000&amp;invol=13-354">opinion</a> in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href=""></a></p> <p>Indeed, <a href="">developing is undoubtedly hard</a>.</p> <blockquote> <p>I have experience with both contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code. This difference might be hard to perceive if you’ve been working with the project for a while. If I am new to a code base, I read each file as a sequence of logical chunks specified in some pseudo-random order. If I’ve made significant contributions before, the perception is quite different. I have a mental map of the code in my head, so I no longer read sequentially. Instead, I just jump to where the thing should be, and, if it is not there, I move it. Mental map is the source of truth.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Stop Swiss Cheesing your calendar</a></p> <p>TL;DR: If you are allocating time for meetings on your calendar, why not also allocate 3-4 hours long blocks for uninterrupted work?</p> <blockquote> <p>When a meeting ends, we need time to clear the head, reset and get in the zone to do the work, especially when the job requires a cognitive effort like coding or design or even writing an email.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Blog with Markdown + Git, and degrade gracefully through time</a></p> <blockquote> <p>It’s not going to matter for a month, or a year, or probably five years, but once it reaches that horizon of 10+ years where things start disappearing, it might really make a difference. Interested parties can still see content even after the original host is long gone. No one plans for their site to disappear, but most eventually do.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Continuous Integration</a></p> <p>Long read of the week.</p> <blockquote> <p>One of the most difficult parts of software development is making sure that you build the right software. We’ve found that it’s very hard to specify what you want in advance and be correct; people find it much easier to see something that’s not quite right and say how it needs to be changed.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Bitcoin is a disaster</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The scarcity of block chain space has led people to re-invent every last feature of the banks they thought they were going to be escaping.</p> <p>And it’s useless for small transactions.</p> </blockquote> <ul> <li> <p><a href=""><em>This Hacker News Comment</em></a></p> <p>An interesting take on Bitcoin’s position in cryptofinance.</p> <blockquote> <p>Most of the criticisms in this thread seem to be missing that Bitcoin is only layer 1.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href=""><em>That Hacker News Comment</em></a></p> <blockquote> <p>The situation reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It’s a great bit of political philosophy where he argues pretty convincingly that an anarchist society cannot exist for any appreciable length of time.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul> </li> <li> <p><a href="">I voted for I don’t want pattern matching.</a></p> <p>Yep, <a href="">PEP 634</a> “Structural Pattern Matching” in Python.</p> <p>In 2017, <a href="">I wrote</a> about the problems that the balkanisation of concurrency models in Python entails — for those who don’t know, that would be asyncio + <a href="">sans I/O</a>, multithreading (under <a href="">GIL</a>), and multiprocessing. Whilst I don’t think that the addition pattern matching will lead to a similar balkanisation, I think the trend is slightly worrying.</p> <blockquote> <p>Finally, I’ll reference something I swear I saw one very smart Pythonista say in an interview: “In Python, we don’t build Domain-Specific Languages, we build Domain-Specific Libraries”.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Stop Defacing Quotes With Brackets!</a></p> <p>The last rant of the week by Tom Scocca.</p> <blockquote> <p>This is not a question of mere taste or preference. Juliet did not say “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [is he] Romeo.” The Beatles did not sing “[They] Want[ed] to Hold [Someone’s] Hand.” Human beings quite easily and naturally follow grammar as it shifts from one point of view to another.</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperBig name corporations more likely to commit fraudWhat I Read This Week: 2021-052021-02-05T10:18:53+00:002021-02-05T10:18:53+00:00<ul> <li> <p><em><a href="">This Hacker News Comment</a></em></p> <blockquote> <p>BTW, for folks new in tech - it’s amazing how influential that wave of programs were, even though they largely failed in the marketplace. Napster founder Sean Parker later became the first investor and first president of Facebook. Also involved in the wave (in a tangential way) was Mark Zuckerburg, whose Synapse Media Player got a $M+ buyout offer from Microsoft while he was still in high school. Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s first two projects were Scour (a P2P filesharing app) and Red Swoosh (a P2P CDN). I met the AudioGalaxy founder while working on Google Search - he later went on to become one of the early Waymo engineers. The Kazaa founders later went on to found Skype, and we know where that went. Chord (an academic research project in distributed hash tables) was led by Robert Tappan Morris (originally famous for creating the Internet Worm of 1988), who then went on to co-found YCombinator, which owns the website you’re reading this on. The gossip protocol invented &amp; refined by Gnutella forms the basis for many cryptocurrency P2P protocols like Bitcoin &amp; Ethereum.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Don’t grow.</a></p> <blockquote> <p>When we talk about successful founders now, we’re rarely talking about the people who have built long term businesses, and made the successful transition from being a startup, to being an established, healthy and thriving company. For the most part, we’re talking about pump and dump high growth, media and VC darlings. The ideal is no longer the driven creator, whose dedication to her craft enabled her to design and sell a product. It’s the founder as a personality who has sold their product, their company, and ultimately themselves.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web (2015)</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Even before I went to jail, though, the power of hyperlinks was being curbed. Its biggest enemy was a philosophy that combined two of the most dominant, and most overrated, values of our times: newness and popularity. (Isn’t this embodied these days by the real-world dominance of young celebrities?) That philosophy is the stream. The stream now dominates the way people receive information on the web. Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex and secretive algorithms.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The Unexpected Find That Freed 20GB of Unused Index Space</a></p> <p>A concise story of practical value about maintaining a Postgres database.</p> <blockquote> <p>Coming from Oracle, I was always taught that NULLs are not indexed, but in PostgreSQL they are! This “Aha” moment led us to the realization that we were indexing a lot of unnecessary values for no reason.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites</a></p> <p>This <a href="">ACM CSCW 2019</a> submission comes with an easy to digest summary of dark pattern categories with examples &amp; screenshots on its website.</p> <blockquote> <p>Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. […] We discovered 1,818 instances of dark patterns on shopping websites, which together represent 15 types of dark patterns. These 1,818 dark patterns were present on 1,254 of the ∼11K shopping websites (∼11.1%) in our data set. Shopping websites that were more popular, according to Alexa rankings, were more likely to feature dark patterns.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">RISC-V isn’t as interesting as you think</a></p> <blockquote> <p>RISC-V intentionally defines a small ISA with extensions. While most larger implementations will implement a common set of extensions, having basic functionality in extensions could make software compatibility for binary distributions harder. This is made worse by RISC-V explicitly encouraging custom instructions for task-specific tweaks on vendor silicon – great for embedded, not so hot for general purpose computers and operating systems supporting them.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack</a></p> <p>Infrastructure providers’ (such as Amazon Web Services) denial of service to Parler sets a dangerous precedent in (1) encouraging <a href="">hybrid, and authoritarian regimes</a> to censor social media, and (2) putting the onus on the intermediates of a tech stack.</p> <blockquote> <p>Decisions made by companies at this layer of the stack to remove content or users raise greater concerns for free expression, especially when there are few if any competitors. For example, it would be very concerning if the only broadband provider in your area cut you off because they didn’t like what you said online—or what someone else whose name is on the account said. The adage “if you don’t like the rules, go elsewhere” doesn’t work when there is nowhere else to go.</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The Relentless Jeff Bezos</a></p> <p>The article is not as cohesive as I would like it to be but its <em>incohesive</em> bits are quite stimulating to read nonetheless.</p> <blockquote> <p>While the mythology of founders centers around a tortured genius solving a problem for themselves and only then discovering product-market fit, Bezos started with the solution and then looked for a problem. That solution, broadly considered was the Internet, and more specifically “the everything store”, a concept that crystallized in discussions Bezos had with David Shaw, the founder of the eponymous hedge fund where he worked. The problem was how to start, and Bezos settled on books; he explained in <a href="">a speech at Lake Forest College</a> in 1998:</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperThis Hacker News CommentWhat I Read This Week: 2021-042021-01-30T10:18:53+00:002021-01-30T10:18:53+00:00<ul> <li> <p><a href="">Habitat 67, Montreal’s ‘failed dream’ – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 35</a></p> <blockquote> <p>It was while travelling across North America as a student that Safdie surveyed grim apartment high-rises and unsustainable suburban sprawl. He returned home to Montreal with a mission: to “reinvent the apartment building”. He longed to create, as he put it in a 2014 Ted Talk, “a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit – Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors” (each cube has access to a roof garden built atop an adjacent cube).</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML</a></p> <blockquote> <p>Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you’ve created?</p> </blockquote> </li> <li> <p><a href="">I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea</a></p> <blockquote> <p>You can’t just create value for the user: that’s a charity. You also can’t just create value for your company: that’s a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you. A business plan, according to this textbook, starts with this simple question: how will you create value for yourself and the company?</p> </blockquote> </li> </ul>Bora M. AlperHabitat 67, Montreal’s ‘failed dream’ – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 35What I Read This Week: Introduction2021-01-30T10:18:00+00:002021-01-30T10:18:00+00:00<p>Life is too short to read mediocre books, and many things are mediocre, but I will probably spend a minute or two to read a blog post regardless. In fact, I love reading short bits of text since it’s cheap (to load), fast (to consume), and can be quite refreshing/informative.</p> <p>Using my side-business <a href=""></a>, I have subscribed to lots of blogs and news aggregators (e.g. <a href="">Reddit</a>, and <a href="">Hacker News</a>) and I read through tons of posts every day:</p> <p><img src="/blog/assets/images/newsmail-this-week.png" alt="I have received 1148 articles from this week alone!" /></p> <p>And so I have decided to share weekly the articles that are worth reading.</p>Bora M. AlperLife is too short to read mediocre books, and many things are mediocre, but I will probably spend a minute or two to read a blog post regardless. In fact, I love reading short bits of text since it’s cheap (to load), fast (to consume), and can be quite refreshing/informative.