Roundup: career building, nils in Go, CSS font-size, neural nets, CSS musings, trust, digital transformation, and an optical illusion
Murray Steele
Aug. 11, 2017
How to build a better job - Elena T
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/540648577/you-2-0-how-to-build-a-better-job
A discussion around crafting the boundaries of your job to make it be more meaningful to you.
Typed Nils in Go - Charlie E
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/09/typed-nils-in-go-2
Writing Ruby, an unexpected nil value has likely caused you pain once or
twice. In a language with static typing what does nil look like? Why
might nil not always 'equal' nil? This is a post about how this issue can
arise in the Go programming language.
Font-size: An Unexpectedly Complex CSS Property - Charlie E
https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/08/10/font-size-an-unexpectedly-complex-css-property
This is a post that sheds some light on the complexity of implementing font-rendering in a web browser but it also serves as a pretty good explanation of the surprising way that font-sizes are actually meant to work. I only got as far as the MathML section - at that point I'd got the message!
LSTM neural net to generate Hacker News submissions - Charlie E
https://medium.com/@hondanhon/i-trained-an-lstm-neural-net-to-generate-hacker-news-submissions-9213e1225208
I feel like this neural network already understands Hacker News better than humans. Is it generating titles or is it predicting the future? Some favorites: "The Simple Command Line Toolkit for Money", "Self-Driving Cars Using Docker Components" & "Ask HN: How do you manage your data scientists?"
CSS: what might have been - Murray S
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-languages-which-almost-became-css/
Most developers will complain about CSS at one point; "it's too verbose", "it doesn't have variables", "it doesn't support something that's easy in desktop layout", etc. Some complaints are valid, some are fixed by extra tooling like post-processors, and some are fixed by a deeper understanding of the language. This article looks at some of the alternative proposals for styling webpages that could have been chosen. I'm sure that if any of these had been chosen they wouldn't have substantively changed how hard it is to apply styling. We'd still be complaining about inconsistent support across browsers, and wailing about how hard it is to implement some designs. That said, I wonder how different the whole landscape of web development would have been if the one based on LISP had been chosen. Instead of a set of style declarations we'd have an entire programming language to work with. Exciting and terrifying in equal measure I think.
The evolution of trust - Ben W
http://ncase.me/trust
A cool demonstration of a multistage prisoners dilemma - and why it doesn't pay to be nice all the time.
‘Digital Transformation’ Is a Misnomer - Martyn E
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/digital-transformation-is-a-misnomer/
Nice concise piece on what Digital Transformation is and isn't.
Don't trust your eyes - Ben W
https://twitter.com/mryat/status/888642029361668096
I stared at this for ages wondering how it worked. For the lazy: https://twitter.com/aozora_unabara/status/888880145913618432
Track of the Week - Elena T
If your commute has been a bit soggy this week, this might help with walking like a badass to work.