2020#38 Readings of the Week

January 28, 2020 4 minutes read | 652 words by Ruben Berenguel

Skipped last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This week has more machine learning than usual for no special reason. Posting this at 4 AM because for some reason I could not sleep and decided I may as well finish this.

NOTE: More machine learning, some Python and the usual mixers. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here. You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Eunoia: Words that Don’t Translate

No words to describe it

Ask HN: What do top engineers you know do that others don’t?

There are many interesting Ask HN posts. Like this one.

Getting started with giotto-learn

Topological features… 🤔

GPT-2 As a step toward general intelligence

The brain isn’t directly doing math, it’s creating a model that includes math and somehow doing the math in the model. This is hilariously perverse.

Agar Art Contest 2019

Uh.

Are Daily Scrum meetings worth it?

If they are done properly, why not? I suspect this heading violates Betteridge’s law of headlines.

Here Dragons Abound: New Mountain Style

I always enjoy checking this blog.

Advertising Makes Us Unhappy

I wonder if the effect is higher for people working in the field.

Add to weekly readings How we made Captain Planet and the Planeteers

This was a classic of my childhood, in Catalan in TV3.

Measure Code Execution Time Accurately in Python

Interesting! Accounting for the systemic error in measuring function calls.

A sad day for Rust

There is a constant noise about how “bad, toxic” the Scala community is, and I always point out that all programming language communities have issues, because they are formed by humans. This does not mean we can’t improve, but that saying “your community is worse and you should leave it” is not a productive way of treating the issue.

Google plans to kill off third-party cookies in Chrome ‘within 2 years’

SameSite took around the same amount of time. So not sure we can trust this timeline

BlackRock Has Green Plans

Beware, Bloomberg’s paywall is strong. An analysis by Matt Levine about BlackRock’s letter to greenify.

How we reduced our Apache Spark cluster cost using best practices

Nothing in this list should surprise you. If it does, ping me.

Virtual DOM is pure overhead

I rarely touch Javascript, but I keep an eye. Svelte seems to be gaining mindshare/generating more noise

Toyota (music instruments) tweet

Just a tweet. Won’t comment

Interior Design

6 iron planets

A Burning Nation, Led By Cowards

Very sad read about the land down under.

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

Simplification can lead you astray (this is not about code legibility)

The Mechanical Muse

Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud

Goodbye, Clean Code

The issue should be with the actions, not the result. Also, clean code should be easy to extend. Don’t throw the baby with the bath water and all that.

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