2021#09 Readings
4 minutes read | 733 words by Ruben BerenguelLooks like my mojo is coming back.
I have submitted a presentation proposal to 3 big data conferences (haven’t heard back yet from any, but CFPs are still open), and I’ll be talking a bit about Haskell and parser combinators at Hybrid Theory’s lunch-and-learn (which we call time of technical tales since it’s not during lunch). Yesterday I wrote the skeleton I want to explain on Friday, and I will probably polish it for anyone’s use and publish in the coming weeks.
šæ Art of Craft (Traditional Globemakers)
If you like maps, this is like porn. Trust me. Here’s the about page of the company highlighted in the video, if you are anything into maps you have already heard of them.
How Materialize and other databases optimize SQL subqueries
How the sausage is made in databases is fascinating.
š Radical candor
It was pretty good. If you have been a teacher at a university some of the performance review “rules and tips” are painfully obvious. I’d give it 4.5 āļø, wins half a star by quoting a song by Meat Loaf.
Integrated vs type based shrinking
A comparison of value shrinking in Hypothesis (Python) and Quickcheck (Haskell) by the Hypothesis author, from 5 years ago. The claim that Quickcheck’s is bad and Hypothesis' is good, then, needs to be taken with a grain of salt (check the comments at the time in r/haskell). For example, I’m surprised about the mention that having shrinkers for types does not extend to complex datatypes: I would expect this to be derivable.
How We Optimized Hero Images on Hotels.com using Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms
At work we’ve had a MAB with Thompson sampling forā¦ 3 years or so (developed with a minuscule team, out of comparison with Expedia). Ours is trained in batch, served in real-time though.
Googleās FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
Of these, the one I find more worrying is fingerprinting, although the privacy quota proposals should help prevent it. Although to be fair, FLoC is not that useful after all.
Googleās Outsized Share of Advertising Money
Another side of the FLoC and other announcements (by John Gruber).
Python Insider: Python 3.10.0a6 is now available for testing
Structural pattern matching is coming!
Journey of a single line
The drawings here are mesmerising, and now I want to draw similar. A bit like the water drops I had to try to draw.
š Working Backwards
The idea of working backwards, the PR-FAQ and the written narratives are interesting concepts but the book felt like an Amazon advertisement.
š Leadership is Language
I found it worse than Turn the Ship Around. At points it seemed to be just a rehashing of Agile development principles applied to other areas. If you are doubtful between this and TtSA, skip this.
Brussels sprouts
Straight out of Michael Kohl’s newsletter. I love brussels sprouts, pan-roasted.
The making of Dark Castle: An excerpt from The Secret History of Mac Gaming
This was an entertaining read: I love the early story of game developers.
Make the Ancient Road Snack of Central Asian Nomads
It seems to be a bit too much work, given I don’t plan on raiding any villages any time soon. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Modern Microprocessors - A 90-Minute Guide!
I have only skimmed it, since I’m no longer in deep-down performance improvements (and never was too much into it). I kind of knew how to have good performance and some stupid tricks in the Pentium II/III era (how to avoid some pipelining issues, or keeping speculative execution happy), but nowadays microprocessors do too many things, as you will see in this article.
