What I'm reading 5/16-5/23

2016-05-23

The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness - Helena Fitzgerald

  1. "My unmitigated joy at the simple fact of being left alone was perfect in a way that very few larger, adult joys have ever been able to recreate since."

  2. "It is becoming the witch in the forest, powerful and watchful and silent, setting visitors on edge."

  3. "I moved through these scenes like a ghost yet felt astoundingly whole."

  4. Thanks to Jacob Lundborg for the article

The Security Mindset - Bruce Schneier

  1. "They can't walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can't use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can't vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can't help it."

  2. "If I wanted to evade this particular security device, how would I do it? Could I follow the letter of this law but get around the spirit? If the person who wrote this advertisement, essay, article or television documentary were unscrupulous, what could he have done? And then, how can I protect myself from these attacks?"

Arbitrage Discovered - Matt Levine

  1. "But this contract was not typical: prices for the funds were published each Friday, and clients were allowed to switch funds at those prices anytime before the next price was published, even if markets moved in the meantime."

  2. "Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."

My time with Rails is up - Piotr Solnica

  1. "Rails has been built with the ease of use in mind. Do not confuse this with simplicity."

  2. "As everything with Rails, it was 'nice and easy in the beginning' and then it would turn into unmaintainable crap."

  3. "Competition fosters progress and innovation, competition creates a healthier ecosystem, it allows people to collaborate more, to share what's common, to build better foundations. This is not what's happening in the Ruby community."

  4. "Breaking through with new ideas is hard, to say the least, as every time you come up with something, people just want it to be Rails-like and work well with Rails."

At the UN, new global fault-lines over moral matters are emerging - Erasmus

  1. "The United States, the European Union and Canada are appalled by the fact that 11 gay and transgender groups have been barred from the gathering under pressure from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which groups 57 mainly Muslim lands."

Functional Programming, Abstraction, and Naming Things - Stephen Diehl

  1. "The argument that Monoid should be called something else (maybe Appendable) is about as convincing as the proposition that a Group should be Clock."

  2. "Groups, like many concepts in functional programming, are often some of the first concepts that we encounter that defy a reduction down to our everyday experience; and are a constant point of confusion because of it."

Understanding Transducers - Elben Shira

  1. "One important property of transducers is that they should employ only one collection regardless of the number of transformations."