1 night in September 2018 the food delivery service Deliveroo went haywire. It sent some customers the same food order several times, and other customers got nothing. In this video, Tom Scott explains that this was a classic example of the “2 Generals” problem, and how Deliveroo’s “Night of the Multiple Orders” could have been mitigated — by using something called an “idempotency token,” which allows a transaction to only happen once.
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Pleasure & Pain Log Scales
Based on: the characteristic distribution of neural activity, personal accounts of intense pleasure and pain, the way various pain scales have been described by their creators, and the results of a pilot study we conducted which ranks, rates, and compares the hedonic quality of extreme experiences, we suggest that the best way to interpret pleasure and pain scales is by thinking of them as logarithmic compressions of what is truly a long-tail. The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure).
AI vs Human Intelligence
Tomato Ramen
E.A.K. Ramen’s chef Kiyoyuki Miyashita will debut an idea he first began to consider 5 years ago. At his Hell’s Kitchen location, he’ll serve noodles in a cabbage broth — with some garlic and ginger for kick — that includes with a surprising ingredient: homemade tomato paste. “I love tradition. But what good is tradition without fun?”
Jackson Heights eats
In the last 10 years, the Jackson Heights dining scene has exploded. With an emphasis on South Asian, South American, Southeast Asian, and Mexican, it has one of the most interesting mix of reasonably priced restaurants in the city. And within each category, there is stunning diversity. You can get food from a restaurant representing a specific state in Nepal, or from a shop and beer bar that seeks to reproduce the sandwich culture of Lima, Peru. Meanwhile, the menu of a Filipino newcomer centers on the Bicol region of the archipelago. 1 area to watch lies along Northern Boulevard, where the growth in South American restaurants during this period has been amazing. Now there are many cocktail bars that mount happy hours from 16-20:00. (walk east from 80th Street and check the chalkboards), where a mixed drink can cost a mere $5, with cheap snacks galore. 3 restaurants specialize in elaborately topped hot dogs washed down with fruit drinks. So come with us now and enjoy the remarkable dining and drinking neighborhood of Jackson Heights.
West Village dishes
From a cheesy stuffed garlic flatbread to a powerful, spicy noodle soup, here’s a selection of some of the neighborhood’s most appealing dishes
Photo Query Matching
Google Local Photos Match the User Query
What does this mean for your business? Well given Google’s penchant for wanting to answer a users’ query and their belief that they can pick a photo better than you, it means the same thing that it always has. It means you need to upload lots of great photos so that no matter which one Google chooses it is a good one.
But now it also means that you really need to be thinking about photos that reflect the broad range of products and services that you deliver and that users might be searching on. If you carry wedding bands and engagement rings and earrings and necklaces you will want to be sure that you have great photos of each. And that they are easily identified in the image.
Against High Energy Physics
high energy physics thinks that bigger colliders will let them find new particles, but this view is probably wrong.
You could build a circular machine 3x the size of the Large Hadron Collider to collide electrons and positrons; you could upgrade the LHC, or even build a next-generation linear accelerator. Probing higher energies offers the hope of new physics — it could be supersymmetry, it could be something else, I don’t know what. But before exploring higher energies, it makes sense to me to build a muon collider, and to clarify the question of the Higgs first. Here we already have a particle that we want to explore. We may even find signs of new physics by studying the Higgs very precisely. For that we don’t need to go to a 100-kilometer-around tunnel. Think about how many days it takes to walk 100 kilometers! And it all has to be extremely functional, every single piece has to work — it’s a miracle if people succeed in making it work.
5-Star Mecca
Everything in Mecca Earns a 5-Star Review
We determined that the ratings for holy sites are so high because they primarily reflect the contributor’s spiritual experience—not their experience of more mundane, practical details like the crowds, the weather or souvenir sellers.
Rezdôra
Times critic Pete Wells just awarded Gramercy Italian restaurant Rezdôra a glowing 3 stars, commending chef Stefano Secchi’s “excellent” pasta tasting menu. Wells writes that the 5-course tasting was as if the chef had laid down a straight flush. He especially digs the maccheroni al pettine, served in a “smooth, almost fluffy” tomato-basil sauce, as well as the tortelloni filled with “plush fresh ricotta.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 