2 min read

2019-02-18 Links

Why all apartment buildings look the same

“Stick construction allows builders to use cheaper casual labor rather than often-unionized skilled tradespeople. And it makes life easier for electricians, plumbers, and the like because it leaves open spaces through which wires, pipes, and ducts can run. Still, there’s a reason why stick wasn’t the default for big apartment buildings until recently, and why these buildings are limited in height: Sticks burn.”

In commmand (line)

“The stereotype of a Unix wizard is someone who could improvise programs like the one above. Maybe McIlroy carefully thought about his program for days, looking for the most elegant solution. That would seem plausible, but in fact he says the script was “written on the spot and worked on the first try.” He said that the script was similar to one he had written a year before, but it still counts as an improvisation."

Millennials on the move

High level programming wisdom

“Spend time on improving skills that help you become more productive in the long run. For example, it’s a fact that git is the version control system of choice. And there is no reason why this should change tomorrow. Or in 5 year’s time. That in turn means that you need to know the ins and outs of git. Period. It will make you so much more productive in the long run.”

Supercomputing in R

“Et Voila! We are connected to our remote head node and can run R code in the cloud without ever leaving the comfort of RStudio. And the amazing bit: all of this took me about a day to set up from scratch! I will leave it here for now. In the next post we will dive into the details of how to scale up the approach above to create an AWS cloud computing cluster. This approach is extremely powerful for embarrassingly parallel problems (which are actually not embarrassing at all, I swear!)”

Amathorn in NYC’s side

“The people even here in New York didn’t know what happened,” said one person involved in the monthslong deal that had become a lightning rod for liberal politicians. “That’s the problem. It was some Seattle decision.”