2020#59 Readings
4 minutes read | 764 words by Ruben BerenguelI have played a ton of virtual table tennis this week.
Last week (10 days ago) I got an Oculus Quest 2, my first VR experience. I was literally blown away, had to quit a boxing game due to the fight-or-flight response 🤣. This is a stand-alone, untethered headset and as such most games are physically intense. After being very sore (blame Thrill of the Fight and HoloPoint) I purchased Eleven Table Tennis and so far it has been excellent, as realistic as holding a real bat. I never was much of a table tennis player, only playing casually when I was in a place with a table, but after a week I have improved tremendously. So much fun.
How to debug remote work, as suggested by new research
There are some interesting results and predictions from this research. We’ll see what happens in the coming year.
Visualising binary files with space-filling curves
This looks like an interesting tool to visually figure out what files are about.
Migrating from a plain Spark Application to ZIO with ZparkIO
It’s interesting to know, but it doesn’t seem that much better compared with the alternative of not using ZIO for this use case.
Unifying the Technical Interview
Aphyr’s crazy posts are always so fun and crazy. Not only he gets awesome ideas, but also implements them, and just for fun. Don’t miss the rest.
Twitter thread: Machines are making beautiful things without even trying to
Our egos are telling us that we can do it better, but the reality is that we would be much better served focusing on simplifying our world before the complexity builds up to the point of collapse.
A Warning About Glassdoor
I had never trusted Glassdoor much for positive reviews, but used it to gauge negative reviews. If what is in this post is true, it will be completely pointless for anything in the future.
Analyzing the Design of Unusual Japanese Butter Tableware
These are awesome design ideas!
đź“š Lord of Light
I have most of Roger Zelazny’s paperbacks (haven’t read all of them yet, time is finite). Ever since I read Zelazny’s Lord of Light and The Chronicles of Amber I re-read at least one of them yearly. This year (and I think last) was Lord of Light’s time. It’s an excellent book, and like every time I mention it: it would make a terrific TV series or movie.
MONOSPACE by @p01
This is one of the most impressive Javascript demos I have ever seen. It’s just 1021 bytes… and it has speech synthesis.
Adding Fun to the Configuration Burden
I guess Dhall makes a lot of sense when you write it, but I find it hard to read afterwards. This is despite the tutorials I have tried being very straightforward, I guess it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
Discrete optimization for on-call scheduling (Part 1)
I probably won’t check the other parts, but this is one of the clearest set of examples about using MiniZinc I have read in months. It also comes with a great list of resources to learn at the end.
Multi-Armed Bandits and the Stitch Fix Experimentation Platform
Serves as a very good primer on multi-armed bandit. For the record, we’ve had a similar system (contextual, real-time multi-armed bandit in production for more than 2 years đź’Ş).
Use “pseudo-sets” to control how many actions people take
The results of this study seem to match my experience and those of people I know (and is used by many, many companies already) so… try to add it to your arsenal of mind tricks.
Microsoft-Backed Databricks Plans IPO Next Year
I’d be more likely to invest in Databricks than in Snowflake, given the chance. For one, Snowflake doesn’t seem to have a solution for streaming, which is a relatively large problem space on its own.
