Thursday, September 27, 2018

[Links of the Day] 27/09/2018: data-centric internet master thesis, Critic of deep learning, Fairer machine learning

  • Scalable mobility support in future internet architectures : MIT Master Thesis by Xavier K. Mwangi where he argues for a move away from host centric (IP) toward a data-centric approach where the naming and routing scheme revolves around object name resolution architecture. The argument behind this is to eliminate the tight coupling between location and data and allow a more fluid interaction, especially in an ever increasing mobile world. 
  • Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal : Critical analysis of the recent deep learning revival and argumentation by the authors that deep learning will be soon replaced by other technique as we want to progress toward artificial intelligence.
  • Delayed impact of fair machine learning : A paper that tries to answer the central question of fairness of machine learning algorithm. I.e. how to ensure fair treatment across demographic groups in a population when we let a machine learning system decide who gets an opportunity (e.g. is offered a loan) and who doesn’t.


Tuesday, September 25, 2018

[Links of the Day] 25/09/2018 : Investigating opaque algorithms, Good Go Makefile, Uber metric storage platform

  • Investigating opaque algorithms : Eye-opening set of pieces of journalism that investigates, audits, or critiques algorithms in society. It is amazing how the impact of code is often overlooked while it impacts so many lives on a daily basis. 
  • A Good Makefile for Go : even with go you cannot escape the mighty makefile 
  • M3 : Uber metric platform, built as a storage backend for Prometheus. It handles all the compaction, compression and data aggregation so you don't have to pay these huge AWS bills at the end of the month because you have hyper scaled infrastructure that generates terabytes of metrics... Hoo wait you still do, but at least not because of your monitoring storage cost :) [github]


Thursday, September 20, 2018

[Links of the Day] 20/09/2018 : Arxiv paper viewer, Artificial intelligent atomic force microscope, What they don't teach you running a business by yourself

  • Arxiv Vanity : If you are like me and read a lot of papers from Arxiv. This website will save you a ton of time. It allows you to render academic papers from Arxiv so you don't have to download or decipher the pdf. It makes life so much easier if you are on mobile and can't wait to read the latest paper on kitten deep learning recognition.
  • Artificial Intelligent Atomic Force Microscope Enabled by Machine Learning : the authors demonstrate how you can use artificial intelligence with an atomic force microscope for pattern recognition and feature identification.
  • Things they don’t teach you running a business by yourself : great short post on the different aspect of running a small business by yourself. If you want to start your own business, I would also advise reading "Start Small, Stay Small" - by Rob Walling and Mike Taber. It was an eye-opener. You don't have to go big with your business. Instead, you can run ten simultaneous businesses, diligently managing and tracking his time to run each one as efficiently as possible. It doesn't matter if one falters. This approach allows you to create a comfortable cushion and increase the chance of a higher payoff.

by dahlig

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

[Links of the Day] 18/09/2018 : Data transfer project, Observability pipeline, and Operating systems Book

  • Data Transfer Project : open-source, service-to-service data portability platform. Not really sure who would want to transfer data between facebook - google and Microsoft from a privacy point of view... But there is probably a use case. 
  • Veneur : distributed, fault-tolerant pipeline for observability data. This is a really cool project that allows to for aggregate metrics and sends them to downstream storage to one or more supported sinks. It can also act as a global aggregator for histograms, sets and counters. The key advantage of this approach is that you only maintain, store ( and pay for ) the aggregated data rather than the tons of separate data points. 
  • Operating Systems - Three Easy Pieces : free operating system book centred around three conceptual pieces that are fundamental to operating systems: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence




Thursday, September 13, 2018

[Links of the Day] 13/09/2018 : Kubernetes in Docker, Forensic Diffing AWS image, Consistent File system on top of S3

  • kind : Kubernetes-in-Docker - A single node cluster to run your CI tests against that's ready in 30 seconds
  • diffy : Diffy allows a forensic investigator to quickly scope a compromise across cloud instances during an incident, and triage those instances for followup actions.
  • Snitch: Box created a Virtually Consistent FileSystem build on top of S3. An interesting solution that allows Box to prevent data loss by building a consistent solution using an eventually consistent storage. Sadly not open sourced... 



Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Amazon ads stuffing and upcoming “China Crisis.”


This article on #amazon stuffing its search results with ads reminded me of the tipping point when I did the switch from #altavista to #google search.





When the results are optimised to sell you something vs tuned to answer your search, the user starts to lose confidence in the service.

As David J. Carr suggested:
This behaviour is probably rooted in the tension between Bezo’s “I’m sceptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centrepiece” and Olsavsky’s “Our strategy is to make the customer experience additive by the ad process”.

Moreover, it indicates a switch from quantity over quality as they are probably willingly accepting that they can’t guarantee the quality & the authenticity of the products sold by the swarm of third-party vendors under the Amazon brand ( as in via Amazon website).

Last but not least, Brands and Sellers are increasingly competing with 3-week product lifecycle of pseudo-brands. Chinese producer can get to market a smartwatch lookalike within five days and using these self-serve ad platforms can outspend x100 at the bottom of the funnel.

As it becomes hard to compete with those Amazon is naturally increasingly banking on its logistics and distribution platform advantage. When the pseudo-brand life-cycle shorten the only common part of the product experience that will remain constant will be the delivery experience.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

[Links of the Day] 11/09/2018 : Impact of legalizing Marijuana on housing market, Taleb's technical incerto


  • Does legalizing retail marijuana generate more benefits than costs ? :  the authors look at the impact of legalizing marijuana in Colorado and tries to quantify its impact by analysing the change in the housing market. Spoiler: it seems that there was a significant positive impact from the legalization of the house price due to a strong increase in housing demand.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb technical Incerto: A mathematical parallel version of the Taleb's Incerto books 
    • The Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: a look at fat tails and what they mean from different points of view as well as their real-life implications
    • Silent Risk : provides a mathematical framework for decision making and the analysis of (consequential) hidden risks
    • Convexity, Risk and Fragility : a look at Decision theory is not about understanding the world, but getting out of troubleand ensuring survival.