Time to flush all those tabs again. Some interesting stuff I bumped into recently-ish.
Finance, Economics, Politics
- A (not so) brief history of the fall and fall of the Nigerian naira: Very good read for Angolans; if nothing else, it makes us understand that our precious Kwanza behaves in many ways like any other petro-currency. Source: King Alfred (twitter).
- #ThisIsACoup - Episode 1- "Angela, suck our balls": A rather political take on the recent-ish financial mess in Greece. On a similar vein, BBC's A Greek Drama is worth a listen.
Startups et al.
- Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp And Brazil’s Congress Wants To Shut Down The Social Web Next: One of the most enlightened internet countries decides to shut it all down. Sad day for the Internet and for all Portuguese speakers. Source: Hacker News (twitter)
- Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius: So they found Satoshi (again). Hesitated in adding this link, to be totally honest - there have been far too many fakes to recount and the whole process is such a media circus that its best avoiding it altogether. But after reading it - questionable media behaviour notwhitstanding - it does appear to provide some insights into these bitcoin early days. Useful to anyone who likes BTC. There is also the Gizmodo report, with additional evidence. This is all getting a bit too much for my liking though.
- Jolla is back in business!: Good to hear Jolla is still going. Now that my Firefox OS phone is no longer supported, I am keen on getting a Jolla. Source: Hacker News (twitter)
- Tech and Banking Giants Join Forces with the Linux Foundation to Create New Open Source Blockchain 'Hyperledger': In truth, hard not to be sceptical - even though it's coming from the Linux Foundation. I guess - in this world of scalability wars - this must come as good news. However, I still think there is a lot of misunderstanding around Bitcoin and the Blockchain, and there are far too many "AOLs" out there trying to create their gated communities, failing to understand history (again). Not quite sure on which side of the fence to place this initiative but, alas, I'm more inclined towards the AOL side.
General Coding
- Yahoo’s Engineers Move to Coding Without a Net: How removing a testing team can help reduce the bug count and ramp up productivity. Source: Hacker News (twitter)
- Move Fast and Fix Things: An incredible tale of real engineering from the GitHub guys with lots of take-ins - Scientist is a pretty neat idea, for one. Worth a read and a re-read. Logically related to the previous article. Source: Hacker News (twitter)
- The Jacob’s Ladder of coding: Reminiscences on our beloved profession of coding. Long and deep, so still parsing.
Databases
- What's new in PostgreSQL 9.5: The RC's are starting and 9.5 looks to continue the trend of amazing Postgres releases. My only missing wish is for native (and full) support for bitemporality really, though to be fair Temporal Tables is probably enough for my needs.
C++
- Optimizing software in C++: One to bookmark now but to digest later. A whole load of stuff on optimisation.
- Support for Android CMake projects in Visual Studio: So, as if the latest patches to Clang hadn't been enough, MS now decides to add support for CMake in Visual Studio. A bit embryonic, and a bit too android focused, but surely it should be extensible for more regular C++ use. Whats going on at MS? This is all far too cool to be true.
- Quickly Loading Things From Disk: interesting analysis about the state of affairs of serialisation in C++. I'll probably require a few passes to fully digest it.
- Beyond ad-hoc automation: leveraging structured platforms: I've been consuming this presentation slowly but steadily. It deals with a lot of the questions we all have about the new world of containers and microservices, and it seems vital to learn from experience before one finds oneself in a much bigger mess than the monolith could ever get you into. Bridget Kromhout talks intelligently about the subject.
Layman Science
- The Church of D-Wave: So is D-Wave a quantum computer or not? It appears the verdict is "not", even with the 2X and the Google paper.
- Intelligence and the Brain: Oldish but still very good and relevant. Another high-level introduction to HTM.
- NASA probe shows how solar burps may have stripped Mars of water: How the sun could be responsible for stripping water away from the red planet.
- Artificial Intelligence Through Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Continuing my adventures in the HTM space, Dr. Paul Cottrell is my latest find. I'm still not totally sure I understand all concepts in this video but what I do understand - assuming they have succeeded in doing what he describes - seem mondo-cool. Basically, it's all about the application of HTM to Finance and trading. He also introduces the idea of adding sub-cortical machinery to HTM (which is just cortical); a most puzzling concept. Once I finish parsing this video, I intend to move to Neuroscience Foundation For Artificial Intelligence.
Other
- Benjamin Clementine - Le Ring - Live: Haven't totally made up my mind about Benjamin Clementine, but certainly a very interesting performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment