What I'm reading 1/4-1/11

2016-01-11

The internet has made defensive writers of us all - Paul Chiusano

  1. "I love this notion of relying on 'the common sense and ordinary charity of readers'. What a wonderful, inspiring idea."

  2. "I've also taken to toning down any rhetorical flourishes that could be interpreted uncharitably in a way that annoys some people. The result: boring writing stripped of a lot of my own personal style."

  3. "It encourages a tendency to be attached to ideas and defend them against attackers, rather than letting ideas exist separate from ourselves as they should."

William Klein's Tokyo Pop - Marlaine Glicksman

  1. "Klein, however, declared 'this Moriyama guy' not only as derivative but, he said, a 'rip-off.'"

DNC Chair, Fueled by Booze PACs, Blasts Legal Pot - Zaid Jilani

  1. "The fifth-largest pool of money the congresswoman has collected for her re-election campaign has been from the beer, wine, and liquor industry."

The sad graph of software death - Gregory Brown

  1. "The business side of the house may blame developers for not moving fast enough, while the developers blame the business for piling work on too quickly and not leaving time for cleanup, testing, and long-term investments. Typically, both sides have valid concerns, but they don't do an especially good job of communicating with one another."

Don't fear the Monad - Brian Beckman

  1. "If you know a function, you know everything you need to know to understand monads."

  2. "Everyone knows that one of the biggest problems in software today is controlling complexity."

  3. "We're out of control in the complexity space."

  4. "The way to control complexity is compositionality."

Yes, Give It Away - Richard Stallman

  1. "One of the important reasons for giving software away free is to enable the users to change it."

  2. "Furthermore, they develop self-reliance, confidence, and a sense of responsibility."

Paul Graham is Still Asking to be Eaten - Holly Wood

  1. "Most of us outside of Palo Alto have no idea how a product as fucking stupid as Peeple gets valued at $7.6 million while a 4th grade teacher can't pay off her student loans and pay rent at the same time."

  2. "But what the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society or even what we want. Because under conditions of extreme inequality, the market is biased towards people who have lots of money, at the expense of virtually everyone else."

Assassins Were Paid Less Than $30,000 to Kill Mexican Mayor - Ryan Devereaux

  1. "According to reports, sometime shortly after 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, intruders entered Mota's home, tied her up, beat her, and shot her in the head."

  2. "According to the United Nations, from December 2006, when the Mexican government first sent the military into the streets to take on the nation's drug cartels (eventually securing extensive U.S. support), to November 2012, a total of roughly 2 percent of 102,696 reported homicides led to prosecutions."

Type classes - Cats project contributors

  1. "The type class pattern is a ubiquitous pattern in Scala, its function is to provide a behavior for some type. You think of it as an "interface" in the Java sense."

  2. "We use this pattern to retrofit existing types with new behaviors. This is usually referred to as 'ad-hoc polymorphism'."

When anger turns to ink: A coming-of-age memoir by an artist enraged - The Economist

  1. "She burned to put her nib to political and social issues."