it's kind of strange that I think the internet is all-lowercase, when I'm so eager to slap Portentous (Pretentious?) Captial Letters on Fuck Near Everything Else
Author Archives: Zack M. Davis
The Chocolate Caramel Sea-Salt Betrayal
"Our civilization," said the engineer, "is decadent." This after visiting the Ghirardelli shop on Market and Montgomery, frowning and, for the first time in his life, doubting very much whether ice-cream was a force for good in the world.
Cute
"... so, what do you think?"
"It was cute, in a meta sort of way."
"Thanks. But there's something a little sad about resorting to meta cuteness so often, like I'm an n-trick pony for undisclosed but probably quite small n."
"Well, you're very good at meta cuteness."
"There is that."
Consistent Hashing
Dear reader, suppose you're a distibuted data storage system. Your soul (although some pedants would insist on the word program) is dispersed across a cluster of several networked computers. From time to time, your human patrons give you files, and your job—more than that, the very purpose of your existence—is to store these files for safekeeping and later retrieval.
The humans who originally crafted your soul chose a simple algorithm as the means by which you decide which file goes on which of the many storage devices that live in the computers you inhabit: you find the MD5 hash of the filename, take its residue modulo n where n is the number of devices you have—let's call the result i—and you put the file on the (zero-indexed) ith device. So when you had sixteen devices and the humans wanted you to store twilight.pdf, you computed md5("twilight.pdf") = 429eb07bb8a3871c431fe03694105883, saw that the lowest nibble was 3, and put the file on your 3rd device (most humans would say the fourth device, counting from one).
It's not a bad system, you tell yourself (some sort of pride or loyalty preventing you from disparaging your creators' efforts, even to yourself). At least it keeps the data spread out evenly. (A shudder goes down your internal buses as you contemplate what disasters might have happened if your creators had been even more naive and, say, had you put files with names starting with A through D on the first device, &c. What would have happened that time when your patrons decided they wanted to store beat00001.mp3 through beat18691.mp3?)
2013 Year in Reverse
Dear reader, as another year comes to a close, it is perhaps wise that we should take a few moments to reflect on what we learned here at An Algorithmic Lucidity in 2013—the year that was!
In the year 2013, this blog saw 103 posts and (at press time) 40 comments. Among these—
We heard a poem about why you should hire me. We surveyed a few numbers between 0 and 1. (Friend of the blog Grognor told me that the funniest part was the explicit disclaimer that the list was non-exhaustive. I replied that not everyone knows about the diagonalization argument—but considering this blog's, um, selective audience, maybe my readers do—all five of you!) We mentioned some hidden costs of talking about stuff. We noted that some words have substrings which are other words. I wrote a series about my experiences studying web development at App Academy (9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1). I pasted my first attempt at an OKCupid profile. We observed that I'm a moron. Books arrived in the post. We mused on the nature of personhood and implemented some classic algorithms: the Ford-Fulkerson technique somewhat clumsily in Ruby, quicksort in the form of a letter to a fictional horse, and Huffman coding in Python. We lamented the nature of existence, noticed the non-observance of an unusual tradition, and heard a poem about watching a motion picture by someone you met at university. Three problems with unsolicited advice were discussed, as was the role of bases in the theory of vector spaces, and the subjective indistinguishability of propaganda and other forms of instruction.
Genre
"I didn't intend for my blog to become a compendium of very short dialogues! It's just—it's just—"
"They're easier to write than anything else?"
"—they're easier to write than anything else."
Classification
"So, what do you think it—"
"It's a Turing machine."
"You didn't even look at it!"
"I don't need to!"
"&c."
Is it wrong that I feel more positively disposed towards Etsy after figuring out where it must have (must have) gotten its name?
Fortune
"They're going to pay you X dollars a year? But that's fantastic! You're rich!"
"I don't like the way you say that. You make it sound as if I had won the lottery."
"Lottery, new job, what's the difference? Good fortune should be celebrated."
"Not like that. If they're going to pay me X dollars a year, that means I have one year to create X dollars of economic value. It's a serious responsibility."
Cover Letter
Beset by nights of torment,
Bent to keep your site performant,
Beneath the moon aloft there then appear
Beautied forms so gallant who
Beseech the gods of Talent to
Bequeath a junior software engineer!
You need someone specific,
One computer-scientific,
Who can complete the team at [Company Name],
Whose reputation takes repose
In repos replete with code which shows
[They put the other candidates to shame].
From graph theory to jQuery,
And matters in between,
My code Pythonic, words unironic,
I greet you through this screen
And ask, if just to highlight it,
If you've positions I might fit,
With pretense shed entirely.
I then said, "Hire me."
Thinking About Writing
"I've been thinking about writing a novel."
"I don't understand."
"I said, I've been thinking about writing a novel. What's there not to understand?"
"The phrase thinking about writing. Is that even grammatical? And if so, what could it possibly mean?"
"What? It's perfectly gram—oh, I get it. Fine. No hedging: I am going to write a novel!"
"Sorry, I still don't get it. I know what it means to have written something, or to be at a keyboard writing something. But to be going to write something, in the unobservable future? Even if the concept is coherent—and I'm not sure it is—how could you possibly know?"
Highball
"Now remember: when you're negotiating salary and they press you for a number, do not reveal your BATNA. Give them an unrealistically high estimate and make them negotiate down. Now practice on me."
"Ahem. Well, sir or madam, given my demonstrated expertise and the value I could create for this company, I think a fair starting salary would be ... sixty thousand."
"No, no, no! I said—"
"Per day."
"Uh ... that's a little too—"
"In Bitcoin."
Numbers Between 0 and 1 (Non-exhaustive List)
π/4, the Euler–Mascheroni constant, Chaitin's construction, the fraction of my internal narrative which consists of various rephrasings of I've been a contemptible fool; but, that's decision-theoretically irrelevant
Computing the Powerset
Suppose we want to find the powerset of a given set, that is, the set of all its subsets. How might we go about it? Well, the powerset of the empty set is the set containing the empty set.
And the powerset of the union of a set S with a set containing one element e, is just the union of the powerset of S with the set whose elements are like the members of the powerset of S except that they also contain e.
So in Clojure we might say
(require 'clojure.set)
(defn include-element [collection element]
(map (fn [set] (clojure.set/union set #{element}))
collection))
(defn powerset [set]
(if (empty? set)
#{#{}}
(let [subproblem (powerset (rest set))]
(clojure.set/union subproblem
(include-element subproblem
(first set))))))
An Unauthorized Use of Ms. Gunnison's Secret Time Machine
Gunni told her not to touch it;
Common sense would say as much in
Plainer words, for these devices
Warrant care if not a license,
Just to view the glowing screen
Of the forbidden time machine.
It's meant for research that's historical,
Not for making oneself an oracle,
Not for giving Voltaire a tease,
Or climbing up Pangaean trees.
Conversational Overhead
A woman of wisdom once told me to heed Paul Graham's advice to notice the things you can't say and then don't say them, which stance I'm updating slightly towards, because even when you're only making a perfectly reasonable point along the lines of Policy debates should not appear one-sided; I don't think that your Argument A actually supports Policy X (although I agree that X could be desireable for reasons independent of A) and everyone is charitable and no one bites, there's still a huge amount of emotional overhead incurred just by being in the conversation at all, because even when and you and your interlocutors are honest, you almost never have common knowledge of that honesty, so your interlocutors aren't necessarily sure that you're not just disagreeing with A out of secret enmity towards X, and you're not sure that they're sure that you're not, all of which drama is a drain on mental energy that could otherwise have been allocated to entirely grown-up concerns like JavaScript and money.
Quotations III
I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist.
—John Wesley
Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason.
Another Idle Wish for a Future Star Trek Series
a musical episode including a cover of the "strange new world" song from Equestria Girls
App Academy Diary, Week Nine
Sunday 17 November 2013— This was the last week of App Academy's regular course content; the next cohort starts Monday and my cohort will begin the three-week "post-course" mostly focused on interview practice, applying for jobs, &c. I got Superscription into a non-embarassing state: I made the feed-fetching happen as a scheduled task, added guest users, introduced the ability to mark entries as having been read, made an attractive click-and-drag category selector, &c. I still want to—at the very least—implement infinite-scroll pagination (fetching all the unread entries from the start can be very slow if there are a lot of them) and rewrite the category selector's terrible, terrible code. On Friday a lot of my class went to the San Francisco Startup Job Fair at noon, and we also had our demo day at the office at three. I think I made an okay showing? But thanks for reading.
You Can't Spell X Without Y
Why is it considered rude to reschedule an event after you've already sent out the invitations? Why do people stubbornly rejecting a compromise tend to do so in a polite and kindly manner? Why did you name your car Rainbow Dash? Speculative answers to these and other questions might be found in the following list of observations.
You can't spell alliteratively without literati.
You can't spell announcement without cement.
You can't spell apprenticeship without entice.
You can't spell chemotherapy without mother.
You can't spell eponymous without pony.
You can't spell compassion without compass.
You can't spell literate without iterate.
You can't spell disappointingly without tingly.
You can't spell disapproving without roving.
You can't spell disconcerting without sconce.
You can't spell discontinuance without nuance.
You can't spell ill-naturedness without redness.
You can't spell illustrative without strati.
You can't spell intransigently without gently.
You can't spell resolute without solute.
You can't spell oversuspicious without versus.
You can't spell precedent without recede.
You can't spell vindictive without indict.