Posts

The first order of people who don’t get data analysis are those who believe it’s impossible to make accurate predictions based on data models. They’ve been much discussed all week in light of the controversy over Nate Silver’s predictions about the Presidential campaign. If you want to catch up on this topic, Jay Rosen has a useful round up of links. There are, however, a number of other mistaken ideas about how data analysis works as well that are also problematic. For example, professional blowhard Henry Blodget argues in favor of using data-driven approaches, but then saying the following: ...

From Google Maps: Hurricane Sandy: NYC This is what I was talking about the other day when I talked about developing a capability in mapping. If Apple is going to catch up with Google in this area at all, they need more than a mobile app.

You should read John Alspaw’s essay, On Being A Senior Engineer, even if you don’t aspire to be a senior engineer. Maybe you already think of yourself as a senior engineer. Maybe you work in some completely unrelated field. What it’s really about is becoming a mature professional and not only mastering the skills of your field but passing them on to other colleagues in useful ways as well. I recently read a post about the value provided by managers. I was not surprised to read that managers do add value, but I was a bit surprised at the means by which that value is added. I would have assumed that it was by keeping people happier, removing distractions that sap productivity, or helping to prioritize work. As it turns out, the actual value is in teaching people how to do their jobs better. ...

Advanced Vim registers Tom Ryder’s Arabesque is one of my favorite developer blogs because it’s almost always about how to get more out of your tools. In this case, he talks about a Vim feature that I’m eager to master – registers (think multiple clipboards for Vim). A colleague who happens to be an Emacs user and I were talking about the massive productivity advantages to be gained by mastering Unix text editors. They’re power tools built by and for people who live in their text editors all day over the past two or three decades. It’s tough for any old graphical editor to compete. ...

Amazon has gotten a lot of bad publicity today because they canceled the account of a customer named Linn and deleted all of the content on her Kindle because her account was flagged by a fraud detection algorithm that linked her account to an account associated with fraudulent activity. Let’s look at what went wrong. First, a lot of the coverage is focused on DRM. This is the risk of purchasing DRM-protected content. Amazon was able to revoke her access to material that she previously purchased because of the DRM. That’s bad. DRM is bad. Don’t buy books protected by DRM. ...

Google has published a gallery of photos from inside its data centers, and it’s the best data center porn you’ll ever see. I love the little Google-themed bike in this photo. (Via Co.DESIGN)

Federal judge Richard Posner discusses the role luck plays in success: I think that ultimately everything is attributable to luck, good or bad. Not just the obvious things, like IQ, genes that predipose to health or sickliness, the historical era and the country in which one is born, the wealth of one’s parents, whom one happens to meet at critical stages of one’s life and career, one’s height and looks and temperament, to the extent genetic, and one’s innate propensity to risk or caution (that is an exceptionally important factor); but also the characteristics that cause a person to make critical decisions that may turn out well or badly, characteristics that really are derivative from some of the previously noted “luck” characteristics. The decision-determining characteristics include intelligence, imagination, attitude toward risk, and personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, maladjustment, indolence, and having a low or high personal discount rate (how future-regarding one is or is not). Talent is luck but so is the propensity for working hard (often the consequence of a compulsive personality) or not working hard. ...

Matthew Yglesias writes about the fact that Android is massively successful and yet loses money for Google. This reminds me a lot of Sun and Java. Java is one of the most successful programming languages ever introduced, and indeed practically spawned an industry unto itself. Furthermore, many, many companies have made money using Java in all kinds of ways. The funny thing was that Sun never really made any money with Java. It didn’t enable them to sell hardware, or server software, or development tools. It’ll be interesting to see what Google does with Android in the long term. ...

The ‘Eyeball to Eyeball’ Myth and the Cuban Missile Crisis’s Legacy In the New York Times, author Michael Dobbs dismisses the myth that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with a showdown. People overvalue confrontation and brinksmanship, but as the article points out, this approach invites truly disastrous outcomes.

If you are a Web developer, you should check out Brendan Eich’s Strange Loop presentation on The State of JavaScript. JavaScript was supposed to be my 2011 skill of the year, but I really didn’t make any progress toward that goal and wound up learning other things instead. This year I’ve learned a ton of things, but not much JavaScript. In the meantime, JavaScript has become an even more essential skill for developers. As it turns out, I have managed to learn a fair amount of Scala and Hadoop since I wrote that post, and I’m learning Python right now as well. Maybe in 2013 I’ll get back to JavaScript. ...