Month: December 2013

PHP function names

Turns out that 18 years ago, PHP had ~100 functions. The function names got put in a hash map. The hash function chosen? Strlen. Thus, the function names were chosen so the hash collisions would be minimized (by creating a uniform distribution of function name length). Which means the origin of all those insane and inconsistent names in PHP is even worse than I’d always thought. I am literally blown away. I can barely conceive of a more mind-shatteringly idiotic thing.

Bus bunching


MTA Bustime is progress (i wish all transit systems had this), but it just makes it painfully obvious how terribly run the MTA bus system is: busses always cluster together, instead of being properly spaced.
2015-05-21: It seems the reason (in NYC) is the inefficient boarding, which causes delays.

Click and hold a bar below to delay its respective bus. Note how even a short delay causes the buses to bunch together after a while. Hover over a stop to see its history. The area of the curve is cumulative wait time. Bunching makes the area

Affluenza

I thought the perpetrator was a victim because of the Justin Bieber haircut, but this is amazing too:

You have this problem, if “you have too much and you don’t know how to distribute it.” in his view, this “defense” is “not exclusively for the rich.” So, good news—if you live in poverty but have too much stuff to distribute, this defense may also be available to you.

2022-01-31:

Responding to the tragedy with a triumphant show of support, members of a local community came together Monday to express hope that killing 2 people in a drunk-driving accident would serve as a wake-up call to the promising young rich kid responsible. “With any luck, this little mishap will be a turning point for [perpetrator of DUI manslaughter] Greg [Nelker], and he’ll graduate and go on to Yale without incident,” said concerned resident John Morgan, adding that he was sure the 17-year-old high school senior and frequent drunk driver realized how lucky he was that nothing worse had happened.

Shenzhen

Bunnie Huang, a Research Affiliate for the MIT Media Lab with a PhD at MIT in EE, shares some stories about crossing the gap from a single home-made prototype to mass production, using supply chain services located in the Shenzhen area of China.

2015-06-04:

HAX invites teams with working prototypes to come to Shenzhen, China, for 4 months. Once they arrive, creators work with experts in a variety of fields to shape their designs, products and strategies. It’s like a boot camp for the world’s hardware-heads, in the heart of the most frenzied manufacturing hub on the planet.

i like to make fun of kickstarter but this is really cool, and much more useful than Y Combinator.
2015-08-10:

When it comes to manufacturing, no place in the world has the same kind of allure as the Pearl River Delta region of China. Within just a hour-long train ride, 2 vastly different cultures co-exist, each with its unique appeal that keeps attracting engineers, entrepreneurs and hustlers alike. On the mainland side, cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou bring the promise of cheap components, low-cost contract work, and the street cred of “having done the Shenzhen thing.” And on the island, the capitalist utopia called Hong Kong glows with all of its high finance and stories of lavish expat lifestyles.

2017-01-20:

Shenzhen completed 11 skyscrapers. That’s more than the US and Australia combined.

2017-02-05: if you want to bring manufacturing back, you have to switch to open source hardware and scrap all the patents overhead. as long as everything is slowed down by lawyers, shenzhen will innovate 3-10x faster.

Camden, Somalia

fires raged, violent crime spiked and the murder rate soared so high that on a per-capita basis, it “put us somewhere between Honduras and Somalia. They let us run amok, it was like fires, and rain, and babies crying, and dogs barking. It was like Armageddon.”