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A collection of 194 posts

Science

Lewis–Mogridge position: traffic expands to meet the available road space

The Lewis–Mogridge position, named after David Lewis and Martin J. H. Mogridge, was formulated in 1990 and observes that as more roads are built, more traffic consequently fills these roads. Speed gains from some new roads can disappear within months, if not weeks. Sometimes, new roads help to reduce

Society

If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home? (NY Times)

It is hard to think about climate change in relation to our own  behavior. We are small, our effects are microscopically incremental and we mean no harm. The effects of climate change are inconceivably enormous and awful — and for the most part still unrealized. You can’t see the face

Science

About cookies, Skinner boxes and the addictive Candy Crush

A few days ago, near my office, there was a promotional event for some random brand of cookies. You could get a box for free, but only if you picked a winning ball in the mouth of a dragon statue. I lost, but a friend shared its cookies. While crunching

Advertising

Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: Cross-national evidence on one million Europeans (Vox)

Although the negative impact of conspicuous consumption has been discussed for more than a century, the link between advertising and individual is not well understood. This column uses longitudinal data for 27 countries in Europe linking change in life satisfaction to variation in advertising spend. The results show a large

Business & Economy

Routing Fee Economics in the Lightning Network (BitMEX)

BitMEX Research examines the market dynamics of Lightning network routing fees and the financial incentives for Lightning node operators to provide liquidity. We identify the interrelationship and balance between Lightning routing fees and investment returns for channel liquidity providers, as a major challenge for the network, rather than the computer

Technical

Life of a binary (Kishu Agarwal)

Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too.

Science

Multi-armed bandit

In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may

Technical

Fixing the Internet for Real Time Applications (Riot Games, 2015)

League of Legends is not a game of seconds, but of milliseconds. In day-to-day life, two seconds fly by unnoticed—you took two seconds reading that! In-game, however, a two-second stun can feel like an absolute eternity. In any single match of LoL, thousands of decisions made in milliseconds dictate

Technical

Design concepts for Formula 1

Formula 1 cars are fast. That is taken as read. But exactly how fast they are is perhaps not something people dwell on too often. (...) The manipulation of air around a car is the single biggest performance differentiator in F1 - and collectively the teams employ hundreds of people and

Comics

Aladdin's wishes (Existential Comics)

Where Aladdin has more wishes remaining at the end of the story. My fan theory is actually that the genie was intentionally not granting Aladdin wishes, in order to "save" wishes, to give him more chances at being wished free. If Kuhn is correct in the comic, and

Technical

Why can’t a bot tick the "I'm not a robot" box? (Quora)

How complicated can one little checkbox be? I mean it’s just OH MY GOD YOU CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE. For starters, Google invented an entire virtual machine – essentially a simulated computer inside a computer – just to run that checkbox. That virtual machine uses their own language, which they encrypt

Management

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder (Charity Majors)

Last night I was out with a dear friend who has been an engineering manager for a year now, and by two drinks in I was rattling off a long list things I always say to newer engineering managers. Then I remembered: I should write a post! It’s one

Comics

Dilbert and his self-driving car

Car: I find it offensive when you call me a self-driving car. Car: That's my slave name. I prefer to go by the name Carl. Dilbert: Shut up and drive me to work. Car: Said the self-walking human.

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

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

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

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