Time to flush all those tabs again. Some interesting stuff I bumped into recently-ish.
Finance, Economics, Politics
- The Color of Debt: How Collection Suits Squeeze Black Neighborhoods: Another great example of how markets are not so efficient for certain things and not exactly fair.
- Pulled back in: The Economist's take on how the emerging markets credit bubble will play out. Not sure if I agree with their analysis, but its certainly very worrying to see so much EM debt piling up in such a volatile world.
- ISIL: Who’s Calling the Shots?: Interesting analysis, much better than the usual superficial take one is used to from mass-media.
- The Other France: As with the previous article, I cannot help but be surprised - even more so with this one. Truly, an amazing, in-depth job. Surprisingly good coming from the American media. If you have watched La Haine, read this. If you have read this, watch La Haine.
- Elon Musk talks Climate Change and Carbon Tax at the Sorbone (12.2.15): Musk raises some interesting points, as usual, such as why we need to tax carbon or else.
- 'My father had one job in his life, I've had six in mine, my kids will have six at the same time': The Guardian's take in this new world of job displacement and "job context switching". Very interesting.
- Ship it! QuantLib, IPython Notebook, and Docker: QuantLib conference is over, and sadly there are very few videos. This one bucks the trend. The ever informative Luigi talks about how QuantLib is moving with the times.
- Morgan Stanley axes 400 bankers as bond-trading income dives: The contraction of the traditional banking industry continues, even as cryptos are growing insanely.
Startups et al.
- Tesla is copying Apple's business model: very interesting comparison between Tesla and Apple's businesses. I don't fully agree with the article, but to be fair it does raise a number of interesting points. I definitely think that when Tesla can deliver mass-market quantities they will dominate sales in a similar fashion to the iPhone.
- ARM: Britain's most successful tech company you've never heard of: Short history of ARM. It would be great to have a book about these guys!
- DoorDash Wants to Own the Last Mile: interesting story of a startup that focuses on "last mile" delivery.
- BitPesa: cool African start-up in the BitCoin / MPesa space.
- LulaLend: Another cool African start-up that is doing well in the payments space.
- Elon Musk and Y Combinator President on Thinking for the Future: Altman and Musk discuss the future. Shame the presenter is not a bit geekier or it could have been one of the best.
- Elon Musk with his Brother Kimbal Musk on a panel: Since we're doing the Musk fanboy thing, here's a great panel with Elon and his brother. A more personal view of his achievements.
- Jeff Bezos vs. Elon Musk: A Thrilling, New Space Race: More Musk fanboying; lets go all the way and read up on the latest about the space race. Very interesting.
- Tesla Shareholders Meeting June 2015: Final Musk fanboying. I think Tesla is one of the few companies where non-shareholders tune in just to listen and get inspiration. Elon, nerdy and awkward but great and inspiring as always. Choice quote: "I'd expect SpaceX to go public once we get regular flights to mars." - very few people could get away with a statement like that.
General Coding
- Gene Amdahl, Pioneer of Mainframe Computing, Dies at 92: I've heard the name a lot but never really read about the man.
- Why you should understand (a little) about TCP: The new generation discovers the joys of understanding low-level protocols. And Nagle (yes, he of Nagle Algorithm fame) replies on that thread.
- systemd.conf: Videos from the conference. Have watched a couple, seemed like a lively conference. Hard to imagine an init system with its own conference though!
Databases
- When are we going to contribute BDR to PostgreSQL?: For those (like me) who keep moaning about the lack of BDR in Postgres, a great explanation of how the patchset is being merged. Great work by the 2nd Quadrant guys.
C++
- New ELF Linker from the LLVM Project: LLVM keeps on delivering! Now a new ELF linker. To be totally honest, I haven't even started using Gold in anger - I get the feeling the LLVM linker is going to be transitioned in much quicker than Gold.
- Clang with Microsoft CodeGen in VS 2015 Update 1: OMG, OMG how cool is this - MSFT decided to create a backend for Clang that is totally compatible with MSVC AND open source it! This is just insane. This means for example that you now can develop C++ on Windows without ever having to use MSVC and Visual Studio. It also means you can cross-compile from Linux into Windows with 100% certainty things will work. It means that projects like Wine and ReactOS can start thinking about a migration path into Clang (not quite as simple as it may sound but surely makes sense). CLion with Clang on Windows will rock. The possibilities are just endless. I never quite understood what C2 was all about until I read this announcement - suddenly it all makes sense. This is fantastic news.
Layman Science
- Jeff Hawkins on Firing Up the Silicon Brain: OK, let me totally honest: I love Jeff Hawkins. I read On Intelligence far too many times to count and would be lying if I didn't admit that it had a little bit to do with my forays into Computational Neuroscience. So as you can imagine, I'm rather excited about HTM and Numenta's latest developments. This article is a good catch-up, if slightly high-level. If you want something slightly more technical but still very approachable, Principles of Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM): Foundations of Machine Intelligence is a must watch.
Other
- NoiseRV Live: Still discovering this Portuguese musician, but love his work. Great concert. Could do a little bit less talking between songs, but still - artists prerogative and all that.
- Warm Focus: Winging It: Interesting set of "intelligent dance music" as we used to call it back in the day.
- Mosaic - The “First” Web Browser: Super-cool podcasts about internet history. It would be great to have something like this for UNIX!
- Jackson C. Frank (1965): Tragic musician from the 60s. Great tunes.
- Reason in common sense: Always wanted to read Santayana properly. Started, but I guess it will be a very long exercise. Interesting, if somewhat strange book.
- Ceu - jazz baltica Live (2010): New find, Brazilian musician Ceu.
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