Posts

Financial journalist Roland Legrand argues that journalists should learn to program. He says: All of this takes time, and maybe you’ll never find enough of it to get good at all this stuff. Still, we must try. The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you become proficient at the latest language. What is important, however, is that you’re able to comprehend the underpinnings of programming and interactivity – to be able to look at the world with a coder’s point of view. ...

I’ve been saying for some time that in the smart phone market, Google is Microsoft and Apple is, well, Apple. Apple was never going to be the dominant player in this market in terms of market share, simply because they only have one or two phone models at any given time, are only on one carrier in the US, and won’t license the operating system to any other handset makers. They want to sell enough high margin products that people love to be extremely profitable, and are very successful with that strategy. ...

The world of sports is in the latter stages of a revolution of data-driven analysis. The ultimate question in sports analysis is, what determines whether a team wins or loses? Traditionally, most people believed that the determining factors were those that sports journalists liked to write about and that coaches felt like they could control. Back in the day, everyone talked about leadership, and chemistry, and clutch hitting, and all sorts of other human factors that were unquantifiable. The numbers show that the truth is more boring than that – once you learn how to properly measure player performance, statistics show that teams with better players usually win. When teams underperform or outperform their statistical predictions, more often than not it’s due to luck. ...

I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. Steve Jobs, talking about people paying for content. Update: Scott Rosenberg responds.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...