Posts

Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony is one of my favorite essays I’ve read lately. Here’s her advice on performing an irony self-assessment: Here is a start: Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd? Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style? The most important question: How would it feel to change yourself quietly, offline, without public display, from within? ...

Kottke.org gueest blogger Sarah Pavis collected stories from readers about connections made online, especially by way of Kottke.org. Here are the results. An amazing number of the good and interesting things that have happened to me in life have been a result of the connections I’ve made online – through rc3.org, through The Well, through other people’s blogs. Every Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the Internet and the people I’ve met through this amazing medium. ...

Don’t change sshd’s port From Arabesque, my favorite blog for Unix geeks. I always change the sshd port, so I’m delighted to read a sound argument against doing so.

I really liked this post by Camille Fournier, who runs the engineering team for Rent the Runway. When confronted with the problem of giving customers the confidence that the garment they rent will fit properly when it arrives, engineers tend to turn to solutions that involve 3D modeling and “virtual fit assistants.” Unfortunately, real humans are put off by these approaches. The solution they arrived at is much lower tech, but much better for customers. There are two takeaways, I think. The first is that diversity of all kinds on a team is valuable because it leads to a wider variety of proposed solutions to problems. The second thing is that this kind of problem really proves the value of experimentation as a product development approach. Try things and measure the results. You’ll probably wind up being surprised. ...

The New York Times ran two opinion pieces this weekend right next to each other that both stand at the intersection of the how the government and politics work and social change that results from technological change. In the first, Joe Nocera argues that the big question in the resignation of David Petraeus is whether we’re comfortable with the FBI snooping through our email on relatively flimsy grounds: But the Petraeus scandal could well end up teaching some very different lessons. If the most admired military man in a generation can have his e-mail hacked by F.B.I. agents, then none of us are safe from the post-9/11 surveillance machine. And if an affair is all it takes to force such a man from office, then we truly have lost all sense of proportion. ...

Twitter is pivoting Dalton Caldwell looks at some recent Twitter moves and tries to predict the company’s upcoming strategy. Here’s what he argues that it’s about: The Discover tab is the future. Rather than forcing normal users to make sense of a realtime stream, they can see what content is trending. Here’s what I don’t get. You can facilitate the mode of usage that Twitter may envision for everyday users without hurting the power users that have made it what it is. How did celebrities and “brands” figure out how to engage on Twitter? By watching the pioneering users of the service build a following. And many of those users have become celebrities in their own right in the context of Twitter. If Twitter put me on their board (and they should), that’s the advice I’d give them. Passive users may contribute most of the revenue, but the power users contribute most of the energy. ...

One thing I’ve come to appreciate in the past year is the degree to which a solid math education can benefit a software developer. Google software engineer Javier Tordable surveys the math behind a number of Google products in his presentation Mathematics at Google. Inspirational.

The People’s Bailout Occupy Wall Street is raising money to buy debt that’s in collections for pennies on the dollar and then forgive it. Incredible example of hacking the system for positive change.

The main thing we learned last night from the massive success of the poll aggregators that I wrote about before the election is that the polls do accurately reflect the variables that have traditionally been thought of as beyond polling. The Republicans launched a massive legislative voter suppression effort that probably affected the results. The Obama campaign put together what was probably the greatest get out the vote effort in history. What we learned is that their impact was factored into the polls. Even the naive model used by electoral-vote.com did pretty well (their Rasmussen-free map did as well as Nate Silver). Forecasting the election by aggregating state polls is a winning strategy, at least for the time being. ...

Canadian writer Colby Cosh takes more advanced whack at Nate Silver today, arguing that it’s foolish to equate defending Nate Silver and defending science. I agree. He also argues that Nate Silver’s actual analytical skills are likely overrated, going back to his days as a baseball analyst. For more on that, check out the comment thread on this post at Baseball Think Factory. This comment from that thread gets pretty close to the truth: ...