Shubhro Saha on why software engineers should write. Hear hear.
Category Archives: Asides
With the news that PGP is one of the things that is still tough for the NSA, now is a great time to donate to GnuPG, which I just did.
Longreads has just published their best of 2014 list which has plenty to keep you entertained and read for hours.
How Paul Graham Is Wrong
I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m confused with the head-in-the-sand approach most tech companies are taking simultaneously complaining that there are lots of great people they can’t bring into the US, but being stubborn on keeping a company culture that requires people to be physically co-located.
In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes. This is where I feel like Paul Graham misses the most obvious solution to the problem.
If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.
Update: There is a vigorous discussion also happening on Hacker News.
We Are Young Acoustic
Janelle Monae is always amazing.
Performance As Design, by Brad Frost. Great thoughts and links. Performance is going to be a big focus for me in 2015.
I kind of want spell check for emails I receive, not just ones I send. Also someone needs to make a Ubiquiti server hosting service.
Life Hack: Put leftovers on top of your Mac Pro to keep them warm.
“Because the most-popular songs now stay on the charts for months, the relative value of a hit has exploded. The top 1 percent of bands and solo artists now earn 77 percent of all revenue from recorded music, media researchers report. And even though the amount of digital music sold has surged, the 10 best-selling tracks command 82 percent more of the market than they did a decade ago. The advent of do-it-yourself artists in the digital age may have grown music’s long tail, but its fat head keeps getting fatter.” — The Shazam Effect.
“If, like me, you are a staunch pogonophile and do not believe there is a single man who cannot be improved with a beard, these are happy times indeed.” The Guardian asks Have we reached peak beard?. Also check out their take on the lumbersexual, which a closet full of plaid shirts might indicate I’m trending toward.
Munchery is Eating the Restaurant, a cool write-up of Munchery which I’ve been a long-time fan of and is an Audrey company. Whenever I’m in SF I order from Munchery.
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission in 2002 reclassified high-speed Internet access as an information service, which is unregulated, rather than as telecommunications, which is regulated. Its hope was that Internet providers would compete with one another to provide the best networks. That didn’t happen. The result has been that they have mostly stayed out of one another’s markets.
Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability. Also has one of my favorite animated GIFs I’ve seen in a Times story.
From Novice to Master, and Back Again, by David Mackenzie.
I like to use the analogy of building bridges. If I have no principles, and I build thousands of bridges without any actual science, lots of them will fall down, and great disasters will occur.
Similarly here, if people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori. You will just produce these outputs and hope for the best.
Today I learned there’s another Michael Jordan that is as awesome in machine learning as #23 is at basketball. IEEE’s article Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts is worth a read and a re-read.
It’s also worth noting that Professor Jordan did an AMA on Reddit, and actually disagreed with the title and characterization of the IEEE interview and wrote a follow-up and response on a WordPress-powered blog.
I’m as likely to give Twitter a hard time as anyone, but today I want to tell you about something great they did: Twitter open sourced their emoji set for anyone to use. We’ve been working with them behind the scenes on this and launched the emoji for WP.com as well. Support will be coming to Jetpack soon.
OnBeep, an Audrey company, has introduced their first product, the Onyx. It’s a lot like the communicator from Star Trek. (Don’t wear it with a red shirt.) Business Insider covers the news pretty well.
I spoke with Tony Conrad and Laurie Segall at Web Summit in Dublin today and was able to announce that Automattic has acquired Code For The People to join our VIP team. Techcrunch also covered the news.
Mother Jones covers the results in Texas of the election in a harsh but fair way: Wendy Davis Spent $36 Million and All She Got Was This Lousy Landslide. Now What?. I think Texas will be the focal point of American politics in years to come, but this was not the year it started.