What I'm reading 11/23-11/30

2015-11-30

Career Advice - Moxie Marlinspike

  1. "They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look."

  2. "I know that by making choices designed to land me in the first class cabin, it would be difficult to avoid also inheriting the dreariness associated with its current occupants."

  3. "I try to remind myself that if leaving prison is scary, the same is likely true for any genuine process of discovery."

Alex Majoli and the Creators of "Another Congo" Bare All - Paul Loomis

  1. "When do this I go and set up my lights without saying anything to anyone. So they feel like 'oh, we are on a stage.'"

Your Pipeline Argument Is Bullshit - Anonymous

  1. "When you talk only (or mostly) about the 'pipeline', I hear someone who doesn't want to work on hard problems. You don't have a 'women in tech' problem. You have a 'senior women in tech' problem."

Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion - Wikipedia

  1. "An unidentified female accomplice wearing a French maid outfit said to him, 'Bend over, bitch!'. The accomplice then started to spank the man with a flyswatter as the man screamed loudly."

  2. The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdgAMYjYSs

Primer - directed by Shane Carruth

  1. "Maybe it was the dramamine kicking in, but I remember this moment in the dark with the reverberation of the machine. It was maybe the most content I've ever been."

English is not normal - John McWhorter

  1. "But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels 'normal' only until you get a sense of what normal really is."

  2. "We think it's a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such."

The Advertising Bubble - Maciej Cegłowski

  1. "The problem is not that these companies will fail (may they all die in agony), but that the survivors will take desperate measures to stay alive as the failure spiral tightens."

Excerpt from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" - Richard Feynman

  1. "Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever."

The Yale Problem Begins in High School - Jonathan Haidt

  1. "'So let me get this straight. You were unanimous in saying that you want your school to be a place where people feel free to speak up, even if you strongly dislike their views. But you don’t have such a school.'"

  2. "After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male."

Refs and Transactions (Clojure) - Rich Hickey

  1. "Refs are bound to a single storage location for their lifetime, and only allow mutation of that location to occur within a transaction."

Atoms (Clojure) - Rich Hickey

  1. "Atoms are an efficient way to represent some state that will never need to be coordinated with any other, and for which you wish to make synchronous changes."

How I get ready: Karl Pilkington - Rosanna Greenstreet

  1. "There is no point me having a great dinner if my feet aren't happy."

Optimizing Hash-Array Mapped Tries for Fast and Lean Immutable JVM Collections - Adrian Colyer

  1. "Both Scala and Clojure use a Hash-Array Mapped Trie (HAMT) data structure for immutable collections. The HAMT data structure was originally developed by Bagwell in C/C++. It becomes less efficient when ported to the JVM due to the lack of control over memory layout and the extra indirection caused by arrays also being objects."