Hanuman issued biometric ID card. Ganesh is still the cutest of them all.
The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction
Microservice Prerequisites - a good guide. Also a great reason to stick to monolithic architecture for as long as possible. Relatedly, distributed balls of mud.
Brief explanation of Smoothed Analysis. The full paper is also interesting.
Raiders of the lost ark, remastered. I'm not kidding, go watch this.
Proof Maintenance. Interesting tidbits:
Scott Alexander on Red Plenty. While the cyberneticists of old were unsuccessful (in part for reasons beyond their control), you certainly have to admire their utopian ambitions. Relatedly, Cosma Shalizi has a more detailed explanation of the math. Great quotes from Scott Alexander:
They [humans under communism] ... slack off because they don’t reap the rewards of their own labor...I don’t think it agreed with this. In certain cases, Russians were very well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”.
Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you.
Also An Important Message from Scott Siskind.
Introduction to automatic differentiation. This should be more famous than it is.
I'm currently enjoying the paper The limit distribution of the maximum increment of a random walk with regularly varying jump size distribution. Boy that's a mouthful. The gist of the paper is
How The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecast Model Works. Relatedly, this.
a. All cadets are expected to maintain proper military bearing and appearance during instruction in accordance with appropriate regulations... ... 1) Draw and label figures or graphs when appropriate. 2) Report numerical answers using the appropriate number of significant digits and units of measure.
Why Scrum Should basically Just Die
India's Mission to Mars Cost Less than the film Gravity
Nassim Taleb's takedown of Piketty - 156 and 158 are what I'm referring to. Taleb really needs to do something other than a gigantic 1990's themed HTML file.
Depressing: Partyism now trumps racism.
Apparently the Nazi's planned to deport the Jews to Madagascar.
I'm very surprised to see an insightful discussion of #gamergate on techcrunch.
Climate Science is Not Settled. Interesting article by Steve Koonin. For what it's worth, I can completely back up what he says about "challenges [...] posed by the complex computer models." I came to the same conclusion about the computer models a few years back (I was a computational physicist studying wave equations, so their numerical techniques were interesting to me). This is probably why many AGW proponents find the idea of geoengineering (which is completely supported by climate models) to be so scary - they don't really believe in the accuracy of their models.
Entrepreneur denounced for arbitraging the gender pay gap. I'm confused.