What I'm reading 5/30-6/6

2016-06-06

On #Tronc, Journalism, and Its Value - Allison Hantschel

  1. "Nobody checking Facebook on an iPhone made the Tribune a national joke today, and if there was no internet at all in the world, newspaper companies would still be imploding because stupidity is a constant, whereas technology changes with the times."

  2. "I saw the strings that held us up, and I saw how thin they were, how frayed."

  3. "They spent so much time, in fact, telling people about the name they ran out of time to tell people how to advertise in it or where to pick it up."

The Big Uneasy - Nathan Heller

  1. "At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think."

  2. "...a student wanted trigger warnings on 'Antigone.'"

  3. "'They do not make eye contact! They do not look into your motherfucking eyes!'"

  4. "Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics, had problems with the program at the time, in part, he said, because thinking in terms of cultural identities often leaves out a critical factor: class."

A Tool For Thought - David Nolen

  1. "I think it's no small part of the attraction of Lisps that the use/mention distinction becomes at least slightly blurred."

  2. "By casting validation as fundamentally a parsing problem (computer science!), we get a wonderfully expressive language for crisply describing our Clojure programs without changing how we joyfully write them."

  3. "So I think clojure.spec gives us a pretty damn nice hammock away from the hammock and I look forward to hearing more about it from the larger community."

Canada's $6.9 Billion Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware—and Still Out of Control - Charles Graeber

  1. "Most wildfire policy involves stepping on fires close to inhabited areas as quickly as possible, resulting in an increasing number of mature-growth trees and an accumulation of tinder."

  2. "Experts consider those above 4,000 kilowatts per meter to be too dangerous to be worked by fire crews on the ground, and water bomber aircraft are futile at 10,000 kW/m. By the time Tiedemann heard the evacuation order, the heart of the fire near her home was estimated to be raging at 100,000 kW/m.

Constraints - Cristina Videira Lopes

  1. "If we want enforcement, constraints need to be included in the design of the language itself."

Gunfire Is Reversing the Great Migration in Chicago - Alex P. Kellogg

  1. "Census data released in late March showed that Cook County, which includes Chicago, experienced the greatest population loss of any major U.S. region in 2015, topping even Michigan's Wayne County, home of Detroit, which for decades has been the fastest shrinking big city in the nation. "

Changelog for Elixir v1.3 - Jose Valim and contributors

  1. "Elixir will now warn if constructs like if, case and friends assign to a variable that is accessed in an outer scope."

  2. "Note describe blocks cannot be nested. Instead of relying on hierarchy for composition, we want developers to build on top of named setups."

Sisyphus on Fire: The Coming Agile Dystopia - Marc Phillips

  1. "This is project management theater."

  2. "A world of ash and soot. Bodies and brains toiling day after day, pushing boulders up steep mountainsides."