Interesting Things #37 — Happy New Year
Happy New Year!
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
The importance of Correctness in concurrent algorithms — Researchers prefer to spend some time writing a formal proof of correctness. In the software industry the mindset is nearly opposite. (hn)
“Cooperation Was Our Way Of Life” — Open Source Software and the Indigenous Critique. (hn)
How We Saved 70K Cores Across 30 Mission-Critical Services — Large-scale, semi-automated Go GC tuning at Uber. (hn)
The Asymmetry of Open Source — A comprehensive guide to funding open source software projects. (hn)
The power of defaults — Are network effects overrated? (hn)
Defining the web3 stack — Want to build on web3? This identifies the building blocks of the web3 technology stack in an introductory guide. (hn)
#work
You Don’t Have to Manage, But You Still Have to Lead (Oct 2021) — Technical leadership is broader than management. (hn)
#business
From Open Source maintainer to Founder / CEO — I can finally justify all those evenings and weekends working on FOSS. (hn)
How Shopify Outfoxed Amazon to Become the Everywhere Store — How long can it keep going? (hn)
#science
Cuttlefish-Like Robots Are Far More Efficient Than Propeller-Powered Machines — And they could soon help to explore the deep sea with their fins. (hn)
The rise and rise of corrugated iron — The past and present of an unfairly ignored building material. (hn)
Orbiter discovers ‘significant amounts of water’ in Grand Canyon-like area of Mars — An orbiter from the European Space Agency detected an area of water about the size of the Netherlands underneath Mars' surface. (hn)
The Year in Math and Computer Science — Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and physics. (hn)
Biological anomalies — Biology is filled with weird things. Let’s examine some of the anomalies associated with it. (hn)
#society
How and why did religion evolve? — Humanity’s most puzzling behaviour has deep roots in our evolutionary past. (hn)
Got Zoom fatigue? Out-of-sync brainwaves could be another reason videoconferencing is such a drag — Rhythms of your brain get in sync with the speech patterns of the person you’re conversing with. Videoconferencing throws off that syncing process. (hn)
Visualizing the $94 Trillion World Economy in One Chart — Which countries and regions contribute the most to the world economy? (hn)
The secret Uganda deal that has brought NSO to the brink of collapse — Things changed once US diplomats in Uganda got hacked by Pegasus.
#random
Review: ‘Bitcoin Widow,’ by Jennifer Robertson (QuadrigaCX) — A large cryptocurrency exchange collapsed after it’s founder died under bizarre circumstances. (hn)
#end
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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng
