Issue #80 Happy new year 🎆🎉
Curated list of blogs, videos, papers, podcasts on programming and distributed systems.
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.
- Neil Gaiman
Posts
Working for Microsoft cost me $200 million
"Cash this check, quit your job. This is a zero risk opportunity for you."
I said, "Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to Level 60 next year." - #garrytan #blog
Minimalism — The most undervalued development skill
Focus on the bare essentials and get rid of the rest. It's an easy way to differentiate, because most others are doing the opposite: tons of crap. - #volument #blog
My Business Card Runs Linux
I thought to myself, “These processors are nearly cheap enough to give away.” After a while I hit upon the idea of making a barebones Linux board in a business card form factor. - #thirtythreeforty
How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?
FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades, huge budgets, and an eSports ecosystem. But what about its core, the shooting mechanics? How have we progressed on that front? Why do some guns feel like it’s the real thing, while others feel like toys? - #gamasutra #blog
Recursion and Fractals
Recursion can be implemented in Scratch by making a block that uses itself. This can be used to create fractals. A fractal is pattern that produces a picture, which contains an infinite amount of copies of itself. - #scratch-wiki
Apple News No Longer Supports RSS
#mjtsai #blog
What the f*ck Python! 😱
Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets. - #github #satwikkansal
Working for a startup makes less sense
And, I’m not here to try to show you some statistics or a magic formula and convince you to choose one way of life over the other — obviously, that’s your decision to choose, and I believe everyone reading this is smart enough to decide between a startup or big company depending on a number of variables and what you value the most. There are certainly pros and cons to both. - #zainamro
Go + Services = One Goliath Project
Moving to Kotlin was an appealing alternative. While we were at it, we decided to dig deeper into other options. Looking at the languages that have first-class support in Google App Engine, another serious contender appeared: Go. - #engineering #khanacademy
Fast
Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. - #patrickcollison
Broken Web
This Page is Designed to Last
The effects are long term, but the achievements are incremental and can be implemented by website owners without being dependent on anyone else or waiting for a network effect. You can do this now for your website, and that already would be a positive outcome. Like using a recycled shopping bag instead of a taking a plastic one, it's a small individual action.
This article is meant to provoke and lead to individual action, not propose a complete solution to the decaying web. It's a small simple step for a complex sociotechnical system. So I'd love to see this happen. I intend to keep this page up for at least 10 years. - #jeffhuang
The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland
As I keep browsing today’s internet, I keep recalling this extract. It’s the same thing happening with the modern web: If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have. - #omarabid
Paper
Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns
Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education. - #stlouisfed
Tweets
Videos
A Breakthrough in Graph Theory - Numberphile
Hedetniemi's conjecture