May 2010 – rc3.org

Month: May 2010 (page 1 of 3)

Tyler Cowen on poor explanations

May 31, 2010 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Tyler Cowen, in a post on why politicians aren’t more aggressively trying to stimulate aggregate demand, writes:

In general you should be suspicious of explanations which take the form of “if only the good people would all band together and get tough.”

The corollary is that attributing bad decisions to stupidity or evil doesn’t do much good, either. People make stupid and evil decisions for reasons, and it’s the reasons that matter.

How Fisher-Yates shuffling works

Eli Bendersky explains why the Fisher-Yates shuffling algorithm works:

What I do plan to do, however, is to explain why the Fisher-Yates algorithm works. To put it more formally, why given a good random-number generator, the Fisher-Yates shuffle produces a uniform shuffle of an array in which every permutation is equally likely. And my plan is not to prove the shuffle’s correctness mathematically, but rather to explain it intuitively. I personally find it much simpler to remember an algorithm once I understand the intuition behind it.

This is the algorithm that the Collections.shuffle() method in Java uses.

Our misplaced faith in technology

May 29, 2010 / Rafe / 9 Comments

I’ve been reading about the oil spill voraciously, but haven’t posted about it. What is there to say? It’s an incredibly difficult problem that was caused by cascading failures and perhaps bad judgement on the part of BP. I say perhaps, because it also involved very bad judgement on the part of the United States government, which granted licenses to oil companies to drill deep water wells even though the oil companies were not prepared to deal with blowouts that occur at depth.

A couple of pieces really hit home for me this week. The first is Ezra Klein’s noting that those “bound to happen eventually” crises do occur:

The last few years have been an ongoing seminar on the reality of serious risk. Very bad things that look likely to happen eventually do happen. The financial crisis, the Massey coal-mine disaster, the Greek debt crisis, the BP oil spill. The last few years have also been an ongoing seminar in the many ways that we ignore risks that we don’t like to think about, and the role that our evasions play in making the eventual catastrophes worse than they needed to be.

His point is that global warming is perhaps the biggest crisis of this kind that we’re not addressing, but I think his larger point is well taken.

The second is Elisabeth Rosenthal’s New York Times article that takes on our faith that we will always develop the technology we need to fix the problems that we create. Increasingly, that faith looks misplaced.

In this specific case, what stuns me is the amount of discretion BP had in terms of how they drilled and capped the well. There were many points at which they could have made more conservative (and expensive) choices that would have reduced the risk of the blowout, but BP, at its own discretion chose the cheaper, faster approach. As the Wall Street Journal article points out, BP was paying $1 million a day to keep the drilling platform over the well. The incentive to cut corners is strong when millions of dollars are at stake, and the odds of a blowout destroying the rig, killing workers, and spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean seems remote. It sure seems like all of the precautions BP skipped should be mandated by law.

John Gruber on clipboard manipulation

May 28, 2010 / Rafe / 7 Comments

John Gruber weighs in on the increasing popularity of a service that adds a citation to the user’s clipboard when they copy text from a Web site:

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

The first time I saw it in action, I was amused by the novelty, but these days I’m in the Gruber camp. What I hadn’t realized is that not only does the service (provided by Tynt) add a citation to whatever you copy, but it also notifies the server that you copied text in the first place.

He also explains how to block Tynt using the hosts file.

Practical open source

May 26, 2010 / Rafe / 4 Comments

Tim Bray on answering questions about Android for developers:

Quite a few of the developers who walked up haven’t learned about Practical Open Source; that you can answer an immense number of questions by just downloading the system source code and plowing through it.

One of my standard two part interview questions of late is, “When is the last time you solved a problem by looking at the source code for a library or framework you use?” and then getting them to explain what they found out. I consider it a strong warning sign when a developer doesn’t bother to download the source to the open source tools they use or isn’t willing or able to answer their own questions by reading the source code.

Treme episode 7 essential reference

May 25, 2010 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Sorry for the late posting of this week’s reference. I’ll blame it on Lost fatigue.

This week’s episode was the toughest yet. We saw examples of two ways to die in the aftermath of Katrina. The first was death while in police custody, and the second was the death of the older trombone player. His story reminded me of Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, the famous bluesman who passed away shortly after the storm in September, 2005.

Of course be sure to check out the New Orleans paper’s installment of Treme explained for this week, which has lots of information about the housing projects that were at the center of this week’s episode. It also explains the context of the “green dots” reference.

Patrick Jarenwattananon interviews Josh Jackson about this week’s episode for NPR.

Both outlets discuss Cajun music, which finally got a little screen time this week. Tipitina’s was previously mentioned on the show, and this week the Pine Leaf Boys played their gig there.

The New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic organized the jazz bands in the airport. The clinic is a worthy cause, it provides health care services to musicians, most of whom have incomes well south of the poverty line.

We’ve seen a lot of the ugly side of law enforcement in Louisiana on Treme, but it’s not all bad. The other day I saw an article on a prisoner-staffed hospice program at Angola prison that has transformed it from one of America’s most violent maximum security prisons to one of the least violent.

Finally, the scene where Albert Lambreaux was arrested while squatting at the projects reminded me of the lyrics to Mardis Gras Indians chant “Indian Red,” featured heavily in episode 3:

We won’t bow down
Down on that ground
Because I love to hear you call my Indian red

You don’t have to use your imagination to figure out where those lyrics came from.

Sentences that provoke regret

May 22, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

From a New York Times article on a federal appeals court decision denying detainees access to US courts:

The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The court has ruled that as long as the government detains prisoners in Afghanistan rather than the US, they are not entitled to the same process as they would be if they were detained somewhere else, regardless of where they were captured. That’s quite a loophole.

In the meantime, Britain’s new government is confronting its complicity in torture and looking to roll back surveillance powers and other impingements on civil liberties. I’m envious and more disappointed than ever in the Obama administration.

Pushing the boundaries of privacy

May 21, 2010 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Tim O’Reilly argues that the nature of privacy is changing, and that it would be worse for companies not to experiment in that realm than it is for companies like Facebook to push those boundaries and occasionally run into trouble:

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It’s important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

It’s a well-considered post, but I think he lets Facebook off a little too easily. To me, Facebook has committed one cardinal sin: expanding access to information that has already been posted without getting permission from users. If I post a photo to Facebook and only my friends can see it, those are the only people who should ever be able to see it, unless I give Facebook permission to show it to more people. Any other course of action is hostile to users, and Facebook and other sites deserve to be pilloried for making those kinds of mistakes.

How Etsy does deployment

May 21, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Erik Kastner at Etsy explains how their team handles deployment. They have moved to a continuous deployment system based on a tool they built themselves. Here’s the bottom line:

Using Deployinator we’ve brought a typical web push from 3 developers, 1 operations engineer, everyone else on standby and over an hour (when things went smoothly) down to 1 person and under 2 minutes.

I particularly liked this question:

It’s a metric I’ve come to call the “quantum of deployment”: what’s the smallest number of steps, with the smallest number of people and the smallest amount of ceremony required to get new code running on your servers?

I wish everyone would write up how their deployment process works, just because I find it so darn interesting.

Google and Apple, let’s do this

May 20, 2010 / Rafe / 3 Comments

I’ve been following Google’s announcements from Google I/O with interest. Google announced version 2.2 of Android and a new set-top box, GoogleTV. The main takeaway from today’s events is that the competition between Apple and Google is heating up.

I think all of this is fantastic. Google and Apple both build great stuff, espouse completely different philosophies, and are scary in different ways. And they’re going to be fighting tooth and nail in a number of still unclaimed markets for every dollar of profit that’s available. There is no underdog here. Both operate from positions of strength and both have huge war chests they can bring to bear. Apple has $41.7 billion in cash. Google has $26.5 billion in cash. Microsoft wants to be a player in these markets as well, and they have $39.7 billion as well. So they have plenty of money to hire developers, build data centers, and buy up companies that look interesting. Nobody has market leverage of the kind Microsoft did in the desktop computing market during the browser wars of the nineties.

So right now we’re looking at a contest where the main weapons are quality of experience and openness. It’s going to be fun, and the competition is going to be incredibly beneficial to users.

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