What Caught My Eye - Week 3

This week has been extra busy, so this is a bit thinner than the last two!

Diversity in Tech

  • Female Founders: Paul Graham musing on technology entreprenurialism and women.

    So how would you cause there to be more female programmers? The meta-answer is: not just one thing. People's abilities and interests by the time they're old enough to start a startup are the product of their whole lives—indeed, of their ancestors' lives as well. Even if we limit ourselves to one lifetime we find a long list of factors that could influence the ratio of female programmers to male, from the first day of a girl's life when her parents treat her differently, right up to the point where a woman who has become a programmer leaves the field because it seems unwelcoming. And while the nature of this sort of funnel is that you can increase throughput by attacking bottlenecks at any point, if you want to eliminate the discrepancy between male and female programmers completely, you probably have to go back to the point where it starts to become significant.

    It seems to be well underway by the time kids reach their teens. Which to me suggests the place to focus the most effort initially is in getting more girls interested in programming.

  • 3 States had no girls take the AP CS Exam. Does support a little bit about Paul Graham's point above. More generally, I find this just teribly sad.

  • Just Because You’re Privileged Doesn’t Mean You Suck

    Having access to a computer is just one way I was privileged. There are countless others: I wasn’t raised in poverty, or in a country riddled with disease or corruption. I am a white man and have never faced racism or sexual discrimination.

    I don’t feel regret for who I am, I just recognize that not everyone has it so easy. Privilege is about being mindful of the fact that not all people have equal footing.

    It also an important first step towards correcting injustices, for if you truly believe that everyone has the same opportunities as you, there is no reason to advocate for change.

Technology

  • I sit on the skeptical side of the bitcoin bubble. One of my key problems with it has always been that it seems incredibly wasteful, in a way that never seemed socially justifiable. This article: What is Proof of Stake, and why it matters, points out that there exist alternatives to the current 'proof-of-work' regieme that exists in the crypto-currency world, with the possibility for societally beneficial currencies.

    This is a fascinating notion to me.

  • Embedded Security CTF: Experiment with working around security software in a safe environment:

    The Lockitall devices work by accepting Bluetooth connections from the Lockitall LockIT Pro app. We've done the hard work for you: we spent $15,000 on a development kit that includes remote controlled locks for you to practice on, and reverse engineered enough of it to build a primitive debugger.

    Using the debugger, you'll be able to single step the lock code, set breakpoints, and examine memory on your own test instance of the lock. You'll use the debugger to find an input that unlocks the test lock, and then replay it to a real lock.

    I got through the first non-tutorial lock. The second one, I'm still working on... Alas, my first idea of a buffer overflow got beaten by a locked page. Real vulnerability researchers are on level 18 or more by now, despite only having been released last night. They're good! The whole thing was put together by Matasano Security and Square, the commerce company.

On Geekdom

This piece by John Siracusa on 'The Road to Geekdom' is so good. Read the whole thing, but this quote tickled me sufficiently I am posting this from a bus:

You don’t have to be a geek about everything in your life—or anything, for that matter. But if geekdom is your goal, don’t let anyone tell you it’s unattainable. You don’t have to be there “from the beginning” (whatever that means). You don’t have to start when you’re a kid. You don’t need to be a member of a particular social class, race, sex, or gender.

Geekdom is not a club; it’s a destination, open to anyone who wants to put in the time and effort to travel there. And if someone lacks the opportunity to get there, we geeks should help in any way we can. Take a new friend to a meetup or convention. Donate your old games, movies, comics, and toys. Be welcoming. Sharing your enthusiasm is part of being a geek.

What Caught My Eye - Week 2

Diversity and Culture

  • A More Peaceful 2014: How people working on real issues can end up silencing each other while ostensibly working for the same causes.

    I find this post particularly interesting as someone starting a new blog in 2014. I will completely admit to a terror about posting on divisive issues rooted in a fear that I will be misjudged: labelled ignorant, harmful, or abusive when aiming higher.

  • On Technical entitlement: How early exposure to technology and skills changes our attitudes to them, in a way that discourages late starters. I especially enjoyed the following quote:

    For one thing, precocity is rewarded in tech. We all swoon over the guy who started programming robots when he was 6. Growing up in tech, I took this as a constant in life—if you’re doing cool things, the younger the better. But it’s become obvious that this is more unique. One of my friends working in finance put it this way: “If I told people I started shorting stocks when I was nine—not that I was, by the way—people wouldn’t be impressed. They’d only say, ‘Who was stupid enough to give you their money?’”

    Follow up with this post from Philip Guo on how privilege greases the wheels. He closes the piece with the following, which captures a lot of my thoughts on the topic too:

    I hope to live in a future where people who already have the interest to pursue CS or programming don't self-select themselves out of the field. I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to have gotten in college and beyond – unimpeded opportunities to develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and fulfilling.

    The bigger goal on this front is to spur interest in young people from underrepresented demographics who might never otherwise think to pursue CS or STEM studies in general.

  • The Next Civil Rights Issue: Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet (disturbing): Last week I mentioned how software can have political agendas, without meaning to. The kind of problems described in this article are another kind of politics, which I'd argue partially stem from the narrow perspective rampant in the creation of internet technologies.

    But no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. [...] And as the Internet becomes increasingly central to the human experience, the ability of women to live and work freely online will be shaped, and too often limited, by the technology companies that host these threats, the constellation of local and federal law enforcement officers who investigate them, and the popular commentators who dismiss them—all arenas that remain dominated by men, many of whom have little personal understanding of what women face online every day.

Art

Technology

  • Links 2013: Brett Victor's collection of papers and projects he fell in love with this year.

    My friends know that Brett Victor simultaneously fascinates and irks me. He's clearly thinking on a higher level than I am, and I can't shake the feeling that what grates at me is simply his genius; He's so much smarter than me that it burns.

    His historical awareness is also terribly painful. Watch his video on The Future of Programming, and you feel like we went down the wrong trouser leg.

New Years

Warning: Productivity Wankery Below

Resolutions are a pretty bad way to change things to be sure.

For me however, the start of the year has provided me with an ideal opportunity to sit down and re-group: Start re-thinking how I'm tackling the challenges ahead; Make some fresh starts and modest changes.

Here's a couple that are already paying off in my mind.

Email Lists

I'm starting to actively police my email subscriptions. Life on the internet means that without trying, you'll end up on 20 marketing lists and 10 newsletters every year.

Years back, I decided that rather than police them, judicious use of filters in Gmail would get them out of sight, out of mind.

It turns out, that this doesn't work terribly well for me: I feel the need to process the email eventually anyhow. As a result, I'm going through and hitting unsubscribe on every list that I would previously filter-away.

Organization

I'm tackling a huge project right now: My Master's thesis. If I'm brutally honest it got away from me between October and December of 2013. I have excuses, but essentially, I broke every organizational habit that had worked for me, and came into January looking at a mess of notes, sundry todo-lists, and a draft thesis peppered with notes and outlines.

To get back on track, I spent a large chunk of time on Monday regrouping. I've had a lot of success with Trello before, so I'm getting back on that wagon.

Tooling

'Right Tool for the Right Job' — We all know it, but we all fail sometimes. The worst is when you become painfully aware you've been using the wrong tool at a point where switching is infeasible— in the middle of a project let's say.

I experienced this on my last project,where I discovered that my data analysis tools— custom built Python and Numpy scripts— were very painful to use and too slow to adapt to new questions.

To rectify this for my thesis, I'm putting aside my distaste for R's craziness (There's a guide to R which has as its abstract "If you are using R and you think you’re in hell, this is a map for you.") in order to leverage its power for data analysis, and dumping data into SQLite for management.

One benefit to this is that I get to use ggplot2, which is phenomenal.

The World is Starting to Feel Like a William Gibson Novel

Does anyone else think the world is starting to resemble a William Gibson novel?

It's just little things, fragments of ideas and bizzare twists on what was normal that make living today feel like a missing Gibson novel.

Some examples:

The world is getting weirder. Maybe to be expected, but I feel like the world is getting... fictional.

What Caught my Eye - Week 1

Going to start a new thing here, by posting a weekly list of the most intersting things that caught my eye. It'll be a bit of a grab bag, but occasionally with topics.

Diversity and Culture in Tech:

  1. Explained: Why people are angry at Paul Graham: The last couple of years have been very eye-opening for me, as I've started to pay attention to the social issues and aspects of technology. I'm still digesting thoughts on this, with about two or three drafts of blog-posts sitting unfinished. However, Danilo Campos has written a fantastic post on why people are mad at Paul Graham after his comments were posted to ValleyWag.

    A particular quote I enjoyed:

    I’ve pointed out why someone might disagree, but not why they’d be angry.

    Here’s the issue: it’s not Graham’s responsibility to fix the inequities in tech. If he has no new ideas about how to fix the problem, though, the most productive action he can take as a prominent person is to pass the mic to someone who does. It’s easy to say “It’s a problem. I don’t know how to solve it. But I respect these folks who are trying and you should talk to them.”

    Instead, his overall tone is one of resignation. The position seems expert and defeatist.

    Not everyone is willing to give up the fight.

    While Graham shoves his hands in his pockets, real people are trying to make their mark on the world. They’re finding their progress in technology undermined by the frustrating fact that their paths look very different from Zuckerberg’s. Graham’s success has elevated him to a position of influence. In this case that influence is, even if inadvertently, impeding progress.

  2. Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker: A parallel that I just love.

    Like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s role of existing to serve the male film protagonist’s personal growth, the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker’s job is to embody the dream hacker role while growing the VC’s portfolio

  3. Resolutions: Gabe from Penny-Arcade confonting his own history with bullying, and how it has left him a bully himself.

  4. Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel: A reminder that software can convey politics, even more so when it's badly QA'd.

Compilers, Programming Languages:

  1. C# for Systems Programming: An early discussion of a MS Research project attempting to provide both speed and safety.
  2. C# for Systems Programming, The Error Model: An associated discussion of the error model.

Assorted

  1. Having a party? Everybody got a phone/tablet? Try Spaceteam. 4 player-in-a-room multiplayer.
  2. Why (I Hope) Blogs Still Matter in 2014: A very apropos post for someone starting another blog in 2014.