sirgawain33

I really liked Dr. Dwork's Turing lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsA4w3itxA0

It's an introduction to differential privacy to an academic audience (i.e. not necessarily computer scientists). I sweeps across a range of surprising real-life privacy attacks that are possible against anonymization approaches that feel good-enough. Really gives you a sense for sort of problem that privacy protection is in today's world of greatly increased data collection and computational power.

Differential Privacy is a mathematical property. Here is the precise definition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Definitio...

One way to phrase it intuitively is "the probability of any particular output from two databases that differ by one element is almost the same". The bound on "almost" is captured by the privacy parameter ε.

One of the smoking guns that this algorithm is not differentially private is that the code doesn't import `random` anywhere! A differentially private algorithm is always going to be stochastic.

I was curious how this application approached privacy budget management (e.g. how the privacy parameter ε is accounted for over multiple searches), but, flipping through the source, this application doesn't appear to use Differential Privacy at all.

The anonymization approach implemented is "generalization". Here's a test showing the outputs this app would produce:

https://github.com/abe-winter/arbout/blob/master/test/test_d...

I've been partial to Heinlein's idea of the "general specialist" lately:

"Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts— get job done fast before irreversible physiologlcal change marooned them four hundred thousand kilometers from home. But despite two training tours I was not gung-ho computerman; higher maths are beyond me. Not really electronics engineer, nor physicist. May not have been best micromachinist in Luna and certainly wasn’t cybernetics psychologist. But I knew more about all these than a specialist knows—I’m general specialist. Could relieve a cook and keep orders coming or field-repair your suit and get you back to airlock still breathing."

from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Great article. I'll add one: caching doesn't address underlying performance issues, just "sweeps them under the rug".

I've seen many devs jump to caching before investing time in understanding what is really causing performance problems (I was one of them for a time, of course). Modern web stacks can scream without any caching at all.

Years ago, a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf really opened my eyes up to this idea. [1] He takes a vanilla PHP app (Wordpress, I think) and dramatically increases its throughput by identifying and tweaking a few performance bottlenecks like slow SSL connections. One of the best lines: "Real Performance is Architecture Driven"

[1] I think it was a variation of this one: https://vimeo.com/13768954

I highly recommend this road as well.

Three exercises along the lines of the parent that I found particularly valuable:

1. Compare VanillaJS TodoMVC to your framework of choice

http://todomvc.com/

https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/examples/va...

What does the framework buy you? Is the framework-powered code easier to read? Easier to understand for a newcomer to the code base?

2. Read every line of Effective Javascript (it's short and eminently practical) and write out every code example.

http://www.amazon.com/Effective-JavaScript-Specific-Software...

There are about a dozen small errors in the code in the book, see if you can find them.

3. Read substack's alternative Javascript build flow:

http://substack.net/task_automation_with_npm_run

Think about the possibilities and limitations. (I personally love his approach at the beginning of projects when I could care less about fiddling with gulp and want to get into exploring the guts of a problem)

Instead of "buckling down", I have found the opposite the be pretty effective. William James explains:

"If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccuptation about their results.

...

Say to yourself, 'I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not.' Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently."

Unless I'm being thick, I think the point of this parable is to question the developer, not the interviewer.

Despite using a bunch of fancy new language feature, name-dropping Knuth, and describing the solution for an hour, the result is code with no additional benefit and significantly worse maintainability.

Sometimes being smart doesn't have to look so smart.

Would be interesting to see some specs/measurements to substantiate their proposed energy savings -- without an insulated heating vessel it's hard to believe this is more energy efficient than existing technology.

Haha, I am not an expert in the least. I would be happy to hear my evidence is bunk. I'm just trying to point toward a source that I found interesting and informative.

Indeed, with food production, the evidence and points of view are always very diverse and nuanced. It's a complex subject--endless, really.

Here's a clip about banana chemical treatment...

> "...Zemurray finally addressed the problem. He found a solution, which he called 'Bordeaux Mixture' and that combined copper sulphate, water, and lime. Zemurray's experts cautioned him against its overuse but he had it pumped on the plantations in increasing quantity. It was a cocktail with quite a pleasant name, but the giveaway was in the title of those employed to spray and pump it: veneneros, or for want of a better translation, 'poisoners'

I would be very interested to find out if the industry decreased the pesticide/fungicide load since this was documented. I'm quoting secondhand here, Chapman notes in the 2007 book

> Of the world's food crops, the banana is the most chemically treated (so we depend on its skin's ability to prevent disease)

The story of marketing bananas is such a strange one. The 'Father of Public Relations', Edward Bernays, was heavily involved. There isn't a compelling dietary reason to eat bananas (expect, I suppose, if it's the only thing you've got). They resorted to the same marketing tactics that were used to sell cigarettes.

> "Samuel Crowther...looking back on nearly twenty years later on these early days of United Fruit in his book The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics, what was being discovered was that 'demand is a thing which must be created" (51)

Without getting into too much of a discussion about health and diet... I find that the heuristic that "anything new is bad" seems to work pretty well with food. Trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, factory farms, etc.

The history of bananas shows that the production and demand for the fruit is both very new and completely artificial.

Again, please feel free to draw your own conclusions. The only point to make here is that I found the reading surprisingly fascinating -- a banana is not just a banana.

We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article.

The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because of heavy marketing efforts by Central American railroad builders (they had to do something with the land along the sides of the newly built railroads, and bananas happened to fit).

They are heavily chemically treated, more than any other fruit. They've been a monoculture almost since Day 1.

Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'

I didn't find this article all that well written or informative. I recommend Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

I also happened to read John McPhee's Oranges at the same time. The contrast between the orange (an ancient fruit, widely consumed, hardy, with a rich literary tradition) and the banana is stark.

Both books, by the way, are great little studies in technology business. Techno-optimism, marketing, PR, globalization, manic CEOs; it's all there.

I used to think I had this problem, too. I developed an elaborate categorizing and indexing scheme. I tried to apply it outside of my personal knowledge, creating a crawler/indexer for research and web sites in one my areas of interest. I thought "if only we organize things better we can change the world!"

I realized over time that the collection wasn't the hard part. It was the categorizing and simplifying. The author hits on it a few times:

"It is the extraction and organization of the information that takes time... I know full automation is not feasible, since the imposition of meaning onto the raw information is something that I must do, not the computer."

In my experience, the simplifying is really where you get all the gain.

What is simplifying?

It's distilling a complex research paper into a few key data points. It's naming files well so that you can search them with Spotlight. It's learning to write more clearly. etc.

That last one -- clear writing -- should have been obvious. Good writers manage to convey so much information in so little space. How do they do it?

The parallel to programming should be obvious. When you name things well, they become very easy to find and use.

We can expand this to a bigger point: if you really want to get smarter, you need to be learning to simplify because your brain can only hold so much at once.

It's like learning the law of gravity rather than cataloging every time an apple falls from a tree.

The following unintuitive conclusion arises: you should be looking to make your "Personal Knowledgebase" more difficult to grow because it forces you to go through the simplifying process sooner.

I stole this idea from someone on HN: anytime I find an idea or quote that I think it important, I clip it into a Word Document and print it out. I keep these in a binder. I have gone back to these notes so many more times than anything that I have in any digital form. More significantly, these bits of information have influenced my life more often and more deeply.

I could dig up examples of nicer looking finned pots. The name escapes me at the moment, but I remember seeing one at a conference last year.

The point is that the technique was well known. It's not manufacturing or aesthetics that's been holding back the technology.

This article is a great example of NIH syndrome.

You can get the same improvement with "About $5 of materials and an hour of time." [1]

That's by Dale Andreatta, a mechanical engineer that's been tinkering with improved stoves for decades. But he's not the only one, there are plenty of pot tweaks that achieve comparable or better the the improvements cites in the article.

Like many commenters below bring up, there are other design constraints to cooking technology than raw throughput -- performance at low temperature, manufacturing complexity, ease of cleaning, evenness of heating, performance under varying ambient conditions (humidity, wind, temp).

I encountered many such rocket scientists (literally) while designing improved stoves over the last few years. The engineering of stoves only superficially resembles the engineering of jet engines: the quantities are all different (low flow rate, low pressures, lower temperatures) and, as a result, the overall drivers of performance are very different (for example, stove to pot efficiency is largely governed by excess air control, NOT surface area)

A good example is that I got many recommendations to add "swirlers" [2] to stoves to improve mixing and reduce output CO. This works great in a jet, but it's useless in a stove: there's not enough pressure generated by natural draft to make the device effective.

[1] pg. 14 http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/ethos/files/ethos2008/Sat%20AM%2...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=swirlers+jet+engine&espv=2&t...

The machine worked! We boiled water for a few cups of coffee.

The write up is coming. Eventually.

I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1]

Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger quantities (the videos linked in other comments don't show them too well)

http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7 http://ricehusk.cc/

They're a fascinating material, quite unlike anything else in nature.

They've got this really high silica content and unique lattice structure that makes them really tough. They've got a weird particle size/shape, making them fluffy but also with a very high angle of repose (meaning you can pile them up into an almost vertical wall)

Trouble is that it's hard to do anything economically productive with them. Those boats in the picture I linked above float all around the Mekong delta, not all of them dropping of the rice hull to someone that would use it.

I was surprised to see quite big rice hullers (2 stories tall) being operated by a few guys all over rural Cambodia. The big challenge for most people seemed to be financing the fuel not the upfront capital investment of the huller. The most prevalent technology was diesel powered hullers. Some people were piloting gasifiers that would use the rice hulls themselves as fuel.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Very interesting to see someone in the US playing around with this stuff!

[1] https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent...

I've bought over 100 books in the last 6 months. Maybe more. I wouldn't step foot into any of the bookshops proposed here.

70% of so of my books are from a local thrift shop. We go every week and buy a stack of books at a time. There's stuff here that you don't find anywhere because it's coming from people cleaning out bookshelves that are decades old.

I think the Internet has made the printed book even _more_ important, largely because so many people are ignoring it. Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical: the ease and abundance of online information makes you feel informed, but usually just results in me-too thinking.

Jonathan Franzen notes in an essay that people used to wait for the next great novel like we wait for summer movies. I believe he goes on to lament the fact. I think this change is for the better; the book has transmuted into a source of arcane information that's of real consequence in business, writing, or, best of all, just living.

With that in mind, the bookshop shouldn't emphasize what's popular, "curated", or recommended. Give me things no one else is reading. I want Zafon's Cemetery of Forgotten Books, not "Yo! Sushi".

A few specific responses to the article:

Recommendations: Amazon's recommendation engine never gives me good suggestions. I think it's because once you've read something you like your thinking evolves and you want something _different_, not something similar. For that reason, I would be really skeptical of the digital suggestion features these proposals tout.

Social: reading is anti-social. Period. It should enrich your ideas and conversation without people noticing. Nobody is impressed that you're carrying around _Infinite Jest_.

e-books: the materiality of a book is crucial. I can often remember spatially where something is in a book. Underlining physically helps attach ideas. When you flip through the book, the lines don't flow to different pages each time you read (very annoying when trying to dig up quotes later). You're not going to read that many books in your life, the expense of physical books isn't really a good excuse.

This is probably all really terrible business advice for booksellers.

Great link to the talk, thank you. I haven't seen a good TED talk in years, but this was an exception.

That said, I agree with the other comments in this thread that linking the blog post to the Labor Theory of Value doesn't really make sense. I don't see anywhere in the post that defines "work" in a way that excludes activities that generated perceived value.

I think an interesting follow up conversation is to consider what "doing" really means. The Rory Sutherland talk you link makes a compelling case that there is an entire class of activities that generate value for a product/service but that you cannot directly measure in terms of material result (at least not right away) e.g. Frederick the Great spending time convincing people that potatoes are good wouldn't have tangible results until much later when demand rose.

Anything by William James. A Rorty and Dewey book are on my shelf. A few authors mentioned by James that I liked: JS Mill, is one. Interestingly, Jack London treats themes in pragmatism (in the Sea Wolf, for example)

Notch had really similar advice in the Minecraft movie. The interview asks him for advice for aspiring game devs, and he responds in a wonderful deadpan: "don't follow any advice" (paraphrased)

Although, interestingly, the creation and growth of mine craft fit the author's advice pretty closely (untraditional marketing, huge idea, just release it)

Edit: Here's the link to Notch's advice - http://youtu.be/ySRgVo1X_18?t=1h20m36s "Do you have any words of advice for people out there" "The best advice I can give anyone is 'don't listen to advice'"

Don't miss the fractal ants at the bottom! A wonderful visual analogy that shows Bret practices the ideas he's encountering in this research.

I started taking research notes this year in a similar way to the linked article: a document of quotes from books and blogs clipped with my comments. It is sort of magical the result, you reveal big ideas that talk to each other across the divisions of books. You can see it on this site, it really seems the ideas fit together into parts of a coherent overall image.

One difference in my method to Bret's is that I print my notes and put them in a binder. The physical result seems to make the ideas "more real" than when they are buried in text files.

Highly recommend this practice. Everyone has their own big ideas,perhaps only sub consciously voiced and this sort of activity helps bring them to life.

Thanks for the great link!

I upped my amount of reading taking the opposite approach to the author: buying more books that I don't read.

The mechanics work something like this:

- its easier to read a book you're motivated to read

- you're not sure what you will be motivated to read until after you've finished your current book(s)

- so, buy books you might be interested in advance, they'll be there and ready when the motivation hits

I buy books in theme areas: pragmatism, biographies of creative people, mythology, etc. That makes a smooth transition from one book to the next easy. You tend to read your current book with an eye to what's coming up on your shelf this way.

Also consider that you don't always want to read dense books. So having more books on hand helps you regain motivation in the down times by having easier stuff on hand. Jonathan franzen had a really nice essay on this about how pulp mystery novels kept him sane.

It helps that I have a used bookstore nearby where I can buy books for a dollar or so. But, anyway, there's so much cheap stuff on amazon that anyone can apply this approach without breaking the bank.

Hope this helps other folks read more. Reading has helped my coding and business more than any other habit.

I learned French in a way with many similarities: I took a semester of engineering courses at a French uni.

Like the author notes, the trick seemed to be (1) you are interested in the exact meaning of the words and phrases (2) finding many `hooks` for memorizing. In my case, it was specific problem sets, personalities of profs, ... (3) rhythm and structure. For him it was the structure of web sites. For me, it was class schedule.

I did about zero language specific training that semester. Got good grades, even by French standards. I did have a scare half way into the semester by doing poorly on half my midterms, but pulled it through by the end.

I did have a foundation of high school language courses, but I was about as poor of a language student as you can imagine.

Interesting, but plenty of examples of just the opposite.

"Von Neumann ... received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German marching music on his gramophone, which distracted those in neighbouring offices, including Einstein, from their work. Von Neumann did some of his best work blazingly fast in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its TV playing loudly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann