Interesting Things #27 — Extra megabyte
Hi,
This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff.
Happy reading!
#tech
Hey linker, can you spare a meg? — Would you patch your linker to get an extra megabyte of memory? These people did. It made sense for them. (hn)
A complete guide to code reviews — Why the most successful teams use code reviews, how to adopt them with your team, and what 16 best practices we recommend. (hn)
The Return of the Unix Shell — The Unix shell is pervasive and entrenched in our computing infrastructure. Recent virtualization and containerization trends are propelling its use. (hn)
An UPDATE without a WHERE, or something close to it — A violation of the principle of least surprise, particularly when the impact can be so big. (hn)
So You Want to Write a Technical Book — This post is a collection of the many things I have learned along the way in the twenty years that I have been writing books. (hn)
How Microsoft reduced Windows 11 update size by 40% — “reverse update data generation” efficiently distributes the forward delta whilst maintaining a path back to its original state. (hn)
SizeBench: a new tool for analyzing Windows binary size — A new static analysis tool which helps with understanding binary size on Windows. (hn)
#work
How Thoughtful Communication Makes Us Unreasonably Productive (Aug 2021) — How we use efficient and deliberate communication to keep Slack notifications and meetings to a minimum, and focus 36 hours/week. (hn)
Why is everyone quitting, and how do I know whether it’s time to leave my job? — Waves of Americans are leaving their jobs as part of the ‘Great Resignation.’ Here’s why. (hn)
How I learned to stop worrying and love TailwindCSS — Why TailwindCSS works for me and a short history of how we all ended up here. (hn)
‘The double income was too good to pass up’: meet the white collar workers with two full-time jobs — With many people still working from home, there’s a thriving online community of ‘2xers’ who are secretly juggling multiple roles. (hn)
#business
Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web — From sex to free speech, what goes online is increasingly up to financial companies. (hn)
Mapping the Insights that Drive Startup Ideas & Theses — A framework developed by working backwards from the Mental Models for Ideation. (hn)
Managing Engineering Managers: A Primer — Hiring, onboarding and evaluating. (hn)
The Ultimate No BS Guide For Startups With Dozens of Free Resources — From ideation, validation, and launch to marketing, growth, and scaling. (hn)
#science
Phage therapy research brings scientists a step closer to harnessing viruses to fight antibiotic resistance — As bacteria increasingly develop resistance to antibiotics, scientists have moved closer to harnessing viruses as an alternative form of therapy. (hn)
How five zebras that escaped a Maryland farm are surviving suburbia — Experts said they’re likely doing just fine, munching on grass and staying away from loud noises, highways and humans. (hn)
Plants can prepare for insect attack sequence — When wild black mustard plants defend themselves against an initial enemy, they already anticipate the need to later fend off other, different enemies. (hn)
Butterflies released in Finland contained parasitic wasps – with more wasps inside — Some of the caterpillars contained a parasitic wasp. Living inside some of these small wasps was another even tinier, rarer “hyperparasitoid” wasp. (hn)
Physicists announce the world’s most precise measurement of neutron lifetime — When neutrons are free and floating alone outside of an atom, they decay into protons and other particles in about 15 minutes. (hn)
#life
Fleeting Memories of Youth and the Increasing Impermanence of Culture — How will we remember our personal past in the future? (hn)
The Exhibitionist Economy — The emergence of new cultural norms has seen citizens broadcast aspects of their personal lives that had hitherto remained out of public view. (hn)
Joe Biden’s Proposed Ban on Fast, Effective Dishwashers Is a Gift to Big Business — Who would have thought that how long a dishwasher takes to clean dishes is regulated by the government? (hn)
Nothing Is What It Seems — The shape of every person’s individual perspective is called the Reality Tunnel. (hn)
The Forgotten Preacher Who Predicted Black Holes a Century Ahead of Einstein — In 1783, this obscure English rector predicted black holes using Newton’s classical mechanics. (hn)
#end
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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng
