Interesting Things #36 — Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas!
This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society.
Happy holiday reading!
#tech
How Long Do Disk Drives Last? — This reported has been updated since it was originally published in 2013 to provide the latest information and statistics. (hn)
The container throttling problem — Most CPU bound services start falling over at around 50% CPU utilization and almost all services start falling over soon after. (hn)
Practice Routines for a Winning Software Development Team — Sure a bigger team can be assembled, but we will exceed them in sharpness of individual team members, and in team synergy. (hn)
Short guide to Linux phone desktops — Choosing a graphical environment for traditional Linux computers is already confusing for some users. Deciding one for Linux phones is twice as hard. (hn)
3 Painful Lessons Learned From Building A Blockchain Game In 3 Weeks — Here’s a short journal of the things I learned, including coding a custom NFT contract and web3 website. (hn)
Learning a technical subject — I write about how I learn, so I can analyze if there is a method to this madness. (hn)
Why I wrote my own Go HTTP client — Requests is a convenient Go library for building, sending, and handling HTTP requests. (hn)
The internet runs on free open-source software. Who pays to fix it? — Volunteer-run projects keep the internet running. The result is unsustainable. (hn)
#work
NYC Just Passed a Law Requiring Employers to Post Salary Ranges in Job Ads. There’s Actually an Upside — Being more forthright with salaries in job listings could help you hang onto employees amid the Great Resignation. (hn)
Confessions of a Recovering Corpspeaker — But when I listen to myself talk sometimes I think… Can I sound, somehow, more human? (hn)
Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects — You can get better results by focusing on milestones instead. (hn)
#business
This is why all electric cars look exactly the same — We’re approaching a future where car drive platforms will be white-label goods from Foxconn-like suppliers. (hn)
The Last Last Mile — Pryce-Jones realized people liked his flannels but loved immediacy. Speed was the differentiator. (hn)
Strangers from the internet paid for my MacBook Air: on my 4th year of indiehacking — I finally make money from strangers off the internet. (hn)
#science
NASA’s Perseverance rover finds organic chemicals on Mars — It’s not a detection of Mars life, but it’s certainly intriguing. (hn)
Robotic fish scares invasive species so badly that it cannot breed — Eastern mosquitofish can be prevented from reproducing by scaring them. (hn)
#society
We Don’t Have To Die — All that stands between you and this future immortality is freezing your brain and then storing it until future tech improves. (hn)
In Case I Die — Existential topics that might interest other people. (hn)
25 Anti-Mimetic Tactics for Living a Counter-Cultural Life — Craft a life that is a little more free from the herd, and a bit more open to the spontaneity and wonder of new things. (hn)
The Harvard Job Offer No One at Harvard Ever Heard Of — An online scam targeted prominent women in India, telling them the Ivy League was calling. (hn)
Meet the man who accidentally started an assassin hiring website — He just wanted a catchy website name. Now, he hands people over to the police for trying to have their enemies killed. (hn)
#random
This Georgia teacher read the fine print — and won $13K — Florida company slipped secret contest onto last page of travel insurance policy. (hn)
Enraged monkeys kill 250 DOGS by dragging them to the top of buildings and dropping them — Revenge after pups killed one of their infants in Indian village. (hn)
#end
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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng
