Alexandre Storelli

Technical

Why Proof of Stake (PoS), an alternative to the energy-wasting Proof of Work (PoW), is not currently able to secure blockchain cryptocurrencies.

A topic not emphasized enough with PoS protocols is their lack of resilience in dealing with worst-case scenarios. (...) Thinking about worst case scenarios is an absolute must when dealing with critical systems, and even more important when these systems are on the global scale. (...) So how resilient is a PoW

Society

Très humain plutôt que transhumain ? (Alain Damasio, 2014)

La technologie nous donne un pouvoir accru sur le monde. Mais ne serions-nous pas en train de perdre quelque chose de très personnel, de très précieux ? La puissance. La puissance de vivre, d’agir par nous-mêmes, avec nos propres forces, notre puissance d’habiter le monde avec notre cœur et

Business & Economy

Lottery-Like Prizes Coax Savings. What’s the Risk in Expanding Them?

Popular though they may be, lotteries, with their billion-dollar jackpots, come uncomfortably close to being taxes on those who can least afford them. Millions of lower-income people funnel a disproportionately large amount of their paychecks into lottery tickets despite prohibitive odds, numerous studies have found. But protecting people by ending

Advertising

Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness (2017)

Lenny is a bot which plays a set of pre-recorded voice messages to interact with spammers. You might be surprised just how simple Lenny actually is (though a lot of thought has gone into what he says), yet he’s proven to be very effective at keeping spammers talking for

Management

Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta (Abe Winter)

(...) Stalin was a bad dude but Roosevelt arrived with an open mind; the American-British relationship was strained by lend-lease, the tremendous cost of the war to both parties, and each leader’s belief that the other wasn’t pulling his weight. Churchill, an old hand at spotting geopolitical threats, had

Philosophy

Tu seras poli avec ta Google Home (Gaspard Koenig)

Google Home, l'assistant personnel de Google avec qui l'on peut engager des rudiments de conversation, vient d'introduire la fonction « Pretty Please » qui récompense la politesse à son égard, suivant l'exemple d'Amazon avec Alexa . Les adultes se verront ainsi répondre sur

Society

Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? (2012)

(...) In studies of peer groups, [a psychology professor] observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had. Basically, she suggests, this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big

Advertising

Qui décide de la couleur de l'année ?

Si soudain les magasins de vêtements et de décoration, les publicités de voitures et les nouveaux immeubles se parent des mêmes tons, c'est par la grâce d'Intercolor. Une sorte d'ONU de la tendance qui anticipe les nuances à la mode. Une chromatographie. Lissez les

Philosophy

« Devant la Loi » : le judaïsme subversif de Franz Kafka (Mickaël Lowy, 2002)

La parabole « Vor dem Gesetz » (Devant la Loi) est un des textes les plus célèbres de Kafka et l’un des rares qu’il ait publiés de son vivant. Ce passage du roman inachevé Le procès était aussi un de ses écrits préférés, qu’il aimait lire à ses amis

Advertising

Why It’s OK to Block Ads (James Williams, 2015)

(...) Arguments against ad blocking tend to focus on the potential economic harms. Because advertising is the dominant business model on the internet, if everyone used ad-blocking software then wouldn’t it all collapse? If you don’t see (or, in some cases, click on) ads, aren’t you getting the

Science

Universal Quantum Phenomenon Found in Strange Metals

Experiments suggest that exotic superconducting materials share a “strange metal” state characterized by a quantum speed limit that somehow acts as a fundamental organizing principle. (...) The hypothesis is that electrons in strange metals might be “dissipating as quickly as they can consistent with the [Heisenberg] uncertainty principle,” Hartnoll explained. The

Advertising

Ads just work. No matter what you think

We’re surrounded by advertising. Every single day, no matter where we are, thousands of auditive & visual stimuli are force-fed to our brains. (...) The thing is, recent advances [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html] in psychology, social science & cognitive research have demonstrated that

Science

The Riemann Hypothesis, explained (Jørgen Veisdal, 2016)

Present an argument or formula which (even barely) predicts what the next prime number will be (in any given sequence of numbers), and your name will be forever linked to one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, akin to Newton, Einstein and Gödel. (...) Since the death of Riemann

Science

Why small water drops move on hot pans: Leidenfrost wheels explained

As reported in 1756 by Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, volatile liquids on hot solids form “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver”, a consequence of their levitation on a vapour cushion. This makes the drops spectacularly mobile, moving away as soon as they are deposited—an observation commonly attributed to gravity or surrounding airflows.

Science

How a Kalman filter works, in pictures

Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, [even if] it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty. (...) You can use a Kalman filter in any place where you have uncertain information about some dynamic system, and you can

Business & Economy

Elinor Ostrom: Fighting the Tragedy of the Commons

Among the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics was Elinor Ostrom, for her analysis of economic governance, especially in relation to the commons. While this choice took many in the profession by surprise, her life-long quest for an understanding of successful common property resource management holds important

Management

The open source model can play an important role in innovation, but know its limitations.

Ten years ago, on May 22, 1997, a little-known software programmer from Pennsylvania named Eric Raymond presented a paper at a technology conference in Würzburg, Germany. Titled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” the paper caused an immediate stir, and its renown has only grown in the years since. It is

Technical

How Open-Source licenses apply to NPM dependencies and Full-Stack JavaScript development (2017)

Before I was not concerned about license of npm package. I could check the license of immediate dependency but never checking 3rd party (transitional) dependencies. And then I met guys from legal department. I now believe that developers should have a basic understanding of software licensing to have a constructive

Science

Physics beyond the Standard Model

Recent CERN experiments have once again validated a prediction of the standard model. This is embarrassing for scientists, as they are looking for experimental clues of limits of the standard model. Standard model is known not to explain everything. More about these alternative models below (source Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.

Comics

Dilbert: treadmills and cubicles

* All your employees are fat and unhealthy. That's why you should replace your outdated cubicles with treadmill desks. My company makes a treadmill desk that requires no electricity. * What if the employees don't like it? * They already hate everything about their jobs. There's no

Science

Geometry and Elasticity of a Knitted Fabric (Physical Review X)

Pulling on a knitted scarf can stretch it to twice its length, even though the thread it’s knitted from hardly elongates. Knitting is a timeworn craft, at least a thousand years old, but no satisfactory account of the mechanics of its stretchiness exists. New theoretical work describes how individual

Comics

In Which Jean-Paul Sartre Attempts to Return Some Socks (Existential Comics)

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/248

Business & Economy

Blendle: Journalism needs a Spotify, a Netflix, an iTunes — whatever you want to call it

Music has Spotify. Video has Netflix. But journalism still didn’t have its own dedicated platform. As a former technology journalist myself, I thought that the lack of such a platform for journalism was pretty strange. Spotify not only helps me access all music, it also makes it easy to

Technical

1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

This paper from Mark Terrano and Paul Bettner explains the design architecture, implementation, and some of the lessons learned creating the multiplayer (networking) code for the Age of Empires 1 & 2 games; and discusses the current and future networking approaches used by Ensemble Studios in its game engines. https:

Management

The Two Types of Respect Leaders Must Show

There is a free and abundant resource most leaders aren’t giving employees enough of: respect. The author explains the two types of workplace respect (owed and earned), how to communicate them, and what happens when you don’t foster both. https://hbr.org/ideacast/2018/07/the-2-types-of-respect-leaders-must-show