Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months. We are primarily looking for senior software engineers and/or engineering managers. But we would love to talk if you have less experience too! Our main tech stack is mostly TypeScript and Python.
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I’ve suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I’m stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere. I honestly never cared too much about finding a particular niche, I just wanted to write down stuff that I found interesting. I set up a Wordpress blog on my crappy Swedish virtual private server.
Turns out having a toddler isn’t super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don’t even finish all of them because life is too short! Some books are just not that interesting. So what were some of the books worth mentioning?
A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I’m going to go out on a limb here claiming that the US has a pretty dumb banking system. I could talk about it all day, but right now I want to focus on a very particular piece of it: how to verify your identity online.
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok…possibly also another 40 minutes tweaking the plots):
Here’s a dumb extremely accurate rule I’m postulating* for software engineering projects: you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem.
This is what I’ve noticed:
(Note that #1 and #2 are actually pretty different implications. But let’s get back to that later.)
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters.
Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn’t discover it serendipitously. Someone actually emailed me saying I was mentioned, and so I ordered the book for same-day delivery. But I was seriously planning to read the book anyway – having read both The Second Machine Age and Rage Against the Machine – they are great books and I’m not being biased.
There’s about 765 million blog posts about the diversity “memo” that leaked out of Google a couple of weeks ago. I think the case for any biological difference is pretty weak, and it bothers me when people refer to an “interest gap” as anything else than caused by the environment. Maybe because I have a daughter, maybe because I have too many female friends who told me stories how they were held back or discriminated against.
I just spent a few days in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. Even though we were on the west side of Italy, the Mediterranean sea was to the east, because the house was situated on a long bay. But zooming in even more, there were parts of the coast that were even more twisted – to the point where it had turned a full 360 degress so you ended up having the sea to the west again.
Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny.
I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years. Here’s some stuff I think everyone should follow. Not going to share a million blogs, just a few top ones. That way you don’t have to think about it, just subscribe to all of it:
I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
Here’s a fun analysis that I did of the pitch (aka. frequency) of various languages. Certain languages are simply pronounced with lower or higher pitch. Whether this is a feature of the language or more a cultural thing is a good question, but there are some substantial differences between languages.
This is a pretty dumb post, in which I argue that functional programming has a lot of the bad parts of libertarianism and a lot of the good parts:
Pareto efficiency is a useful concept I like to think about. It often comes up when you compare items on multiple dimensions. Say you want to buy a new TV. To simplify it let’s assume you only care about two factors: price and quality. We don’t know what you are willing to pay for quality – but we know that everything else equals:
Why does it suck to wait for things? In a previous post I analyzed a NYC subway dataset and found that at some point, quite early, it’s worth just giving up.
This isn’t a proof that the subway doesn’t run on time – in fact it might actually proves that the subway runs really well. The numbers indicate that it’s not worth waiting after 10 minutes, but it’s a rare event and usually involves something extraordinary like a multi-hour delay. You should roughly give up after some point related to the normal train frequency, and 10 minutes is not a lot at all. Conversely if the trains ran hourly, it probably would had been worth waiting an hour or more. My analysis gave me a lot of respect for the job MTA is doing.
I’ve been trying to learn Clojure. I keep telling people I meet that I really want to learn Clojure, but still every night I can’t get myself to spend time with it. It’s unclear if I really want to learn Clojure or just want to have learned Clojure?
One of my favorite business hobbies is to reduce some nasty decision down to its absolute core objective, decide the most basic strategy, and then add more and more modifications as you have to confront the complexity of reality (yes I have very lame hobbies thanks I know).
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data. The documentation is somewhat terrible, but here’s some relevant code for how to use the API:
(This is not a very relevant/useful post for regular readers – feel free to skip. I thought I would share it so people can find it on Google.)
My blog blew up twice in a week earlier this year when I landed on Hacker News. The first time I was asleep so I didn’t notice that the site went down. The second time I did notice, and scrambled to reconfigure Apache & MySQL to handle the load.
My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site while I was sleeping, and then obviously vanished from HN before I woke up. But it also got retweeted by a ton of people.
For some reason I decided one night I wanted to get a bunch of fonts. A lot of them. An hour later I had a bunch of scrapy scripts pulling down fonts and a few days later I had more than 50k fonts on my computer.
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least one book per week and in particular I wanted to brush up on management, economics, and technology. 2015 was also a year of exclusively non-fiction, which is a pretty drastic shift, since I grew up reading fiction compulsively for 20 years.
(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore)
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. Unfortunately predicting is hard, and unsurprisingly people look for the Magic Trick™ that can resolve all the uncertainty. Whether it’s recruiting, investing, system design, finding your soulmate, or anything else, there’s always an alleged shortcut.
I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our intuitive understanding of the world sometimes doesn’t make sense. Check out the visualization at bl.ocks.org!
Basically the idea is if you fly from Beijing to Buenos Aires then you can have a layover at any point of the Earth’s surface and it won’t make the trip longer.
I have spent some time lately with D3. It’s a lot of fun to build interactive graphs. See for instance this demo (will provide a longer writeup soon).
D3 doesn’t have support for 3D but you can do projections into 2D pretty easily. It’s just old school computer graphics. I ended up adding an animated background to this blog based on an experiment. The math is simple.
Saw this link on Hacker News the other day: The Highway Lane Next to Yours Isn’t Really Moving Any Faster
The article describes a phenomenon unique to traffic where cars spread out when they go fast and get more compact when they go slow. That’s supposedly the explanation.
I just pinged a few million random IP addresses from my apartment in NYC. Here’s the result:
Some notes:
The world:
Wow I guess it was more than a year ago that I tweeted this. Crazy how time flies by. Anyway, here’s my rationale:
I decided to plot the relationship for Luigi: {% include 2015-02-26-the-relationship-between-commit-size-and-commit-message-size.html %}