Time to flush all those tabs again. Some interesting stuff I bumped into recently-ish.
Finance, Economics, Politics
- Why Big Oil Should Kill Itself: This is a really, really interesting article. The gist of it is that the entire logic around oil exploration is now a fallacy and it makes more economic sense to simply give up looking for oil because all oil that is left is just to expensive to commercialise. It also has a very interesting take on the valuation of oil companies (and sources of take overs) but I won't spoil it for you. If you are into oil (or against it), its a must read.
- Oil Goes Nonlinear: Short but thought provoking. I don't tend to agree with Krugman on a lot of things, but quite like this analysis.
- Africa’s Boom Is Over: And the bad news continue. Totally spot on analysis of what will befall us.
- American Spring: interesting take on the state of affairs of American politics. Not sure I agree with everything, but definitely food for thought. "Statistically speaking, what are the odds that the two most qualified candidates to be president out of 300 million people are siblings? Or married?" Indeed.
- A Year of Sovereign Defaults?: Very good and very scary. This has to be on the cards, the only question is the timing.
- Really rich people are suddenly paying quite a bit more in taxes: some good news on the equality front I guess. But not quite sure it makes much of a difference in the big scheme of US things.
- Argentina's 'little trees' getting chopped down by new president: Seems like Argentina is going to go through yet another turbulent period, with some good and bad news coming out. Interesting take on the impact to the less well off of the new policies. The chap is certainly a doer, it seems: A fast start.
Startups et al.
- The WTF Economy: Tim O'Reilly (of publishing house fame) is setting up a conference in the future of work. Sounds extremely interesting. Hopefully, they will have a section dedicated to the developing world. Source: Tim O'Reilly (Twitter)
- Bitcoin is Being Hot-Wired for Settlement: Garzik is at it again. Interesting news of cryptos in the settlement front. Source: Jeff Garzik (Twitter)
- Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar AI Plan Is About Far More Than Saving the World: So it seems Musk and Altman want to ensure AI plays nice. Not quite sure he's right on this one. Steven Levy's version is available here, more of an interview with Musk.
- License to (Not) Drive: Levy gets to try the Google self-driving cars. Very interesting.
- Hire Literally Anyone: Extremely interesting. I always thought the existing hiring practices are not very well thought out, but this article makes me realise that the flaws are deeper than I expected. While we are on this topic, this ain't too bad either: How to Hire.
- The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment: Great - nay - insanely great analysis on the state of affairs in the BTC world. Spoken with authority.
- On the dangers of a blockchain monoculture: Pours more petrol in the raging BTC fire. Very interesting. Never saw BTC as a monoculture, but actually it so is.
- The Final Days of the Bitcoin Foundation?: And yet some more on the BTC impending doom. I just gotta stop reading about it now, the whole saga is far too depressing. Lets hope the technology survives where humans failed.
- IBM Talks Open Ledger Project, Bright Future for Blockchain: Still trying to catch my breath on all the BTC articles coming out, and lo-and-behold, I missed the whole Open Ledger thing.
- Apploitation in a city of instaserfs: Scary. Very scary. Reminiscent of the older Mirani article The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality. San Francisco is becoming more like Mumbai and that is not good news.
General Coding
- Feeding Graph databases - a third use-case for modern log management platforms: Very interesting ideas on how to use logging data in a graph database. Sounds extremely counter-intuitive, and then you start reading at which point its like "Damn, why didn't I think of that before!". Source: Hacker News
- Moores law hits the roof: Seems like the exponential function is revealing itself as a sigmoid, as everyone knew it would. Some of the cracks that are already present in Moore's law. Interesting to note that a transistor is now only a few silicon atoms wide - meaning we can't really make it much smaller. Source: Hacker News
- No, I Don't Want To Configure Your App: Call to arms to get us all thinking on just how many configuration knobs you need to use something. Source: Hacker News
- Your IDE Is Killing You: Somewhat preaching to the choir, since I am an Emacs user of old, but still a very cogent argument on why relying too much on IDEs is not a good thing. Source: Bruno Antunes (twitter)
- Starters and Maintainers: The different personas around an open source project. Interesting, its good to be aware of which hat you are wearing when.
- I Moved to Linux and It’s Even Better Than I Expected: A feel good story about the Linux desktop. Given how slowly things are progressing on that front, we all need one of these some times to cheer us up. Main value of the article though.
Databases
- Encrypted databases with ZeroDB: I'm not exactly impressed with the technology itself, but more with the ideas one can extract from it. Briefly: what if the database only stores encrypted data, which only each client can decrypt? This is certainly a very useful thing for certain types of information and a PostgreSQL extension would be most useful. Source: Hacker News
- Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage: Great article on Postgres low-level details. One to read if you want to get serious about the Elephant but are not yet in the know.
- Schema based versioning and deployment for PostgreSQL: Tips on how to manage versions for your stored procs, and also contains links for table management. For those of us not totally taken by NoSQL.
C++
- Lessons learnt from 10+ years with actors in C++: The voice of experience talks about what they learned from using Actors over more than a decade. Worth reading if you are into that pattern.
- Automating a C++ program from a Node.js web app: If you are considering exposing your C++ code into JS, this is a series of posts to read.
- Starting a tech startup with C++: lots of libraries I never heard of and an insight on the performance differences between python and c++.
- Writing modern C++ servers using Wangle: The follow up to the previous post, explaining how to write servers with Facebook technologies.
- I want my pony! Or why you cannot have C++ exceptions with a stack trace: very interesting. Since I started using Boost.Exception I never missed the stack traces either. Source: Hacker News
Layman Science
- Why String Theory Is Not A Scientific Theory: Doesn't say a lot of new things, but its good to remind ourselves on what exactly do we mean when we say "Science". This would save us from a lot of grief, such as considering Economics as a Science.
- The cold fusion horizon: … talking about Science, I was surprised to find out that people are still talking seriously about cold fusion. Interesting article, because it takes the flip side of the Science coin: nothing should not be science unless it is not using the scientific method. Whilst up til now cold fusion has been more of a hoax, we should not discredit people who work on it provided they are following scientific principles. Who knows, they may be right in the end. Science is all about long-shots.
Other
- Exit Sandman: Neil Gaiman goes in-depth with Overture, one of 2015's best comics: For the Sandman fans, the new (and last) Sandman book is all the rage. A great interview by the man himself.
- Dear Zachary: bumped into this via Wait But Why, and, as usual, great tip. Fantastic documentary.
- Solaris: Always wanted to watch this Tarkovsky movie and now it seems it is available online! This is part of an initiative described by Open Culture here. Source: Bruno Antunes (twitter)
- Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life: Found a Wittgenstein documentary, but sadly haven't had time to watch it just yet. In my watch list though.
- Je ne suis pas Charlie: Haven't yet watched it but seems thought-provoking. Watch listed.
- Tulipa Ruiz - Efêmera - Album Completo: New musical find in the Brazilian space (Portuguese).
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