Reposted from the private Forte Labs forum, for students of Tiago Forte’s online courses.
Austin Kleon’s post “The importance of revisiting notebooks” inspired me to pull my stack of filled notebooks off the shelf and build an index of their contents. I’ve doodled and kept stream-of-consciousness logs in notebooks for years and years, but I only started keeping old notebooks in 2015 — possibly because that was when I first tried using the Doane Paper small utility notebook.
Distill is a new machine learning journal, designed to support interactive visualizations that clarify the ideas in their articles – much like how Bret Victor approaches explanations.
Editors Shan Carter and Chris Olah lay out their vision in “Research Debt”:
In research, we often have a group of researchers all trying to understand each other. Just like before, the cost of explaining stays constant as the group grows, but the cost of understanding increases with each new member.
This morning, I started a new web server at a previously unused domain. Google and Bing crawlers found and started crawling it within an hour. Shortly after, the Wordpress attacks started.
198.1.74.103 - - [07/Dec/2016:11:06:53 +0000] "GET /news/wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 404 178 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" I’m not running anything but NGINX serving static files, but let this be a lesson. Never, ever think that you can run your own Wordpress server (or anything else) and not care about security.
At FiveThirtyEight, Craig Fehrman writes about the increased polarization of state politics.
In 2016, then, the most interesting thing about our state politics is how these two strands, the everyday and the ideological, intersect. State politicians are becoming more partisan and more polarized, much like national politicians. But this party-driven approach isn’t just influencing left-right issues like abortion or guns. It’s spreading through every part of state government, with surprising and potentially troubling results.
Last week, I posted my beliefs. The next section of my Codex Vitae catalogues the activities that I’ve found most critical for my fulfillment and self-care.
Activities & Their Ends Exercise Exercise will help me maintain my physical health and support a high quality of life as I age.
Exercise improves my mood. Consistent exercise is critical to keeping sadness, paranoia, and grouchiness at bay.
Buster Benson, behavior change junkie and creator of 750 Words, maintains a catalogue of his beliefs as a version-controlled document. Inspired by his example (and Shawn Blanc’s Core Curriculum) I started doing the same. Until now, I’ve kept my own privately and reviewed them weekly. On re-reading today, I see no reason not to share. So here you are: my own beliefs, acquired through reading and experience, subject to revision, and situated on the boundary between universal and instrumental truths.
The Slack blog describes in “Slack 101: Onboarding” how they use their own chat platform to manage their work. My first reaction to Slack was “OK this is cute but not substantially better than HipChat or Campfire”. Now that I’m a member of 11 (!!!) different Slack communities1, I’m convinced that Slack is an incrementally better team chat system. Reading about how their own internal channel-naming conventions has me convinced that they get the information architecture of communication in a deep way.
This is the binomial distribution, which represents the probability that you will have k successes out of n trials, when the probability of a successful trial is p.
To get concrete, if you want to know how likely it is that you’ll get five heads if you flip a coin ten times1, then the binomial distribution is your pal. How do I know that? Because after reading a bunch about statistics, I’ve ultimately ended up with some kind of hazy flow chart in my head, lining up which distribution to pick to model different situations.
Vermont Code Camp was yesterday. As usual, it was a friendly and inclusive environment. The organizers (Rob Hale and Julie Lerman) do their best to accept every proposal, so it’s a great place for folks to try out public speaking in front of an audience of a few dozen people.
I gave the talk “Seeing the Matrix with tcpdump”, which was all about how to peak under the head of application protocols like HTTP using tools for troubleshooting TCP connections.
Event sourcing is an architectural pattern where you persist commands to mutate your data instead of overwriting the old values. Readers are responsible for building their own view of the data from the sequence of edits.
This sounds cool, but I haven’t implemented a system with event sourcing yet. I started hearing the term tossed around a few years ago, alongside some other buzzwords that sound exciting like “actors systems”, “domain-driven design”, and “CQRS”.