2020#55 Readings of the Week

September 19, 2020 4 minutes read | 845 words by Ruben Berenguel

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I have been on holidays, which has resulted in a lot of reading, mostly books.

Christopher Dresser’s Studies in Design — Christopher Dresser’s *Studies in Design*

Coffee Rust Is Going to Ruin Your Morning

If you like coffee, this is a terrifying tale.

Under the hood of calling C/C++ from Python

Interesting details!

Why Aren’t More Highly Intelligent People Rich? A Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Says Another Factor Matters a Lot More

In non-research-speak, a good partner sets a good example, and makes it possible for you to be a better you.

Talk about better half.

Indexing Spark Data with Microsoft’s Hyperspace

How come I wasn’t aware of this project from Microsoft? It’s not far off from what Databrick’s Delta does, although Delta (if my memory serves, haven’t checked the internals) uses an approach closer to zone maps/z-indexes like AWS Redshift does.

Which Parsing Approach?

More than what you want to know about parsing. Worth noting the footnote: PEG and parser combinators are just recursive descent in disguise, which matches my experience having written descent parsers and using PCs. I vastly prefer PCs, the code is more readable.

📚 Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

Occasionally rambling at times, but was an interesting read.

🍿 JSON Parser 100% From Scratch in Haskell

Best introduction to Haskell ever. It clarified a lot of things, and overall was a joy to watch. It’s 1h50 but so worth it.

Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell

Small interpreters are always fun to read.

‘A giant wheezing kazoo’: Golden Gate Bridge starts to ‘sing’ after design fix

Better than breaking down and people dying.

Effect of One-Legged Standing on Sleep

The days I’ve had strong leg workouts at pilates class, I’ve had awesomely deep naps. I will try.

Four reasons that PureScript is your best choice to build a server in 2020

I wanted to learn Purescript during holidays, but writing some for-fun Haskell utilities (and reading and doing nothing) ate most of my time, so I’m postponing Purescript for a few months. But the “write Purescript, use Python libraries” part is making my squirrel-sense twitch.

An Introduction to Reactive Programming in Python

I had somehow forgotten there is a Reactive framework for Python, RxPy. As a reader from my blog/newsletter you may be more familiar with another reactive framework, Akka.

📝 [1205.4797] Topology Explains Why Automobile Sunshades Fold Oddly

Our whitescreen folds like this. Interesting math underneath.

How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics

My former office mate worked on renormalization stuff for mathematical structures. He now works in banking 🤷‍♂️

📚 Stillness is the key

After The Mindful Geek (below) this was a flop.

📚 How to Fight a Hydra

This is a very short book, with strong echoes of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It was entertaining and mildly inspiring.

Huw Campbell - Dumb Spark Tricks

Unless I’m mistaken, it looks like this saves at least one serialization step in using a UDF in Spark.

Warren Buffett and the $300,000 Haircut

His friends and family regularly heard the young Mr. Buffett mutter things like “Do I really want to spend $300,000 for this haircut?” or “I’m not sure I want to blow $500,000 that way” when pondering whether to spend a few bucks. To him, a few dollars spent that day were hundreds of thousands of dollars forgone in the future because they couldn’t compound.