Monday, January 18, 2016

Nerd Food: Interesting...

Nerd Food: Interesting…

Time to flush all those tabs again. Some interesting stuff I bumped into recently-ish.

Finance, Economics, Politics

  • Why Big Oil Should Kill Itself: This is a really, really interesting article. The gist of it is that the entire logic around oil exploration is now a fallacy and it makes more economic sense to simply give up looking for oil because all oil that is left is just to expensive to commercialise. It also has a very interesting take on the valuation of oil companies (and sources of take overs) but I won't spoil it for you. If you are into oil (or against it), its a must read.
  • Oil Goes Nonlinear: Short but thought provoking. I don't tend to agree with Krugman on a lot of things, but quite like this analysis.
  • Africa’s Boom Is Over: And the bad news continue. Totally spot on analysis of what will befall us.
  • American Spring: interesting take on the state of affairs of American politics. Not sure I agree with everything, but definitely food for thought. "Statistically speaking, what are the odds that the two most qualified candidates to be president out of 300 million people are siblings? Or married?" Indeed.
  • A Year of Sovereign Defaults?: Very good and very scary. This has to be on the cards, the only question is the timing.
  • Really rich people are suddenly paying quite a bit more in taxes: some good news on the equality front I guess. But not quite sure it makes much of a difference in the big scheme of US things.
  • Argentina's 'little trees' getting chopped down by new president: Seems like Argentina is going to go through yet another turbulent period, with some good and bad news coming out. Interesting take on the impact to the less well off of the new policies. The chap is certainly a doer, it seems: A fast start.

Startups et al.

General Coding

  • Feeding Graph databases - a third use-case for modern log management platforms: Very interesting ideas on how to use logging data in a graph database. Sounds extremely counter-intuitive, and then you start reading at which point its like "Damn, why didn't I think of that before!". Source: Hacker News
  • Moores law hits the roof: Seems like the exponential function is revealing itself as a sigmoid, as everyone knew it would. Some of the cracks that are already present in Moore's law. Interesting to note that a transistor is now only a few silicon atoms wide - meaning we can't really make it much smaller. Source: Hacker News
  • No, I Don't Want To Configure Your App: Call to arms to get us all thinking on just how many configuration knobs you need to use something. Source: Hacker News
  • Your IDE Is Killing You: Somewhat preaching to the choir, since I am an Emacs user of old, but still a very cogent argument on why relying too much on IDEs is not a good thing. Source: Bruno Antunes (twitter)
  • Starters and Maintainers: The different personas around an open source project. Interesting, its good to be aware of which hat you are wearing when.
  • I Moved to Linux and It’s Even Better Than I Expected: A feel good story about the Linux desktop. Given how slowly things are progressing on that front, we all need one of these some times to cheer us up. Main value of the article though.

Databases

  • Encrypted databases with ZeroDB: I'm not exactly impressed with the technology itself, but more with the ideas one can extract from it. Briefly: what if the database only stores encrypted data, which only each client can decrypt? This is certainly a very useful thing for certain types of information and a PostgreSQL extension would be most useful. Source: Hacker News
  • Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage: Great article on Postgres low-level details. One to read if you want to get serious about the Elephant but are not yet in the know.
  • Schema based versioning and deployment for PostgreSQL: Tips on how to manage versions for your stored procs, and also contains links for table management. For those of us not totally taken by NoSQL.

C++

Layman Science

  • Why String Theory Is Not A Scientific Theory: Doesn't say a lot of new things, but its good to remind ourselves on what exactly do we mean when we say "Science". This would save us from a lot of grief, such as considering Economics as a Science.
  • The cold fusion horizon: … talking about Science, I was surprised to find out that people are still talking seriously about cold fusion. Interesting article, because it takes the flip side of the Science coin: nothing should not be science unless it is not using the scientific method. Whilst up til now cold fusion has been more of a hoax, we should not discredit people who work on it provided they are following scientific principles. Who knows, they may be right in the end. Science is all about long-shots.

Other

Created: 2016-01-18 Mon 12:49

Emacs 24.5.1 (Org mode 8.2.10)

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