Assorted Links

Always start with politics, especially if it fails to handle externalities (MR).

Marginal Revolution’s 2015 top posts are worth a look.

A reasoned discussion on markets, economics, politics.

So on the first point, it really comes down to whether you classify all government action as anti-market or you think of efficiency oriented policy as pro-market. (PSJ)

And

The problem is not that most politicians and pundits take economic principles too literally; the problem is that most politicians and pundits are utterly ignorant even of these principles. (Vox Imperatoris quoting Don Boudreaux)

Almost beyond human: A new 100 mile ultramarathon record of 11 hours, 40 minutes 55 seconds. That’s in the ballpark of running four consequitive three-hour marathons.

At the dawn of time, when nuclear energy was hunted down by knights, and science still was a deadly endeavor, some people died tickling the dragon’s tail (HN).

Less real death, more efficiently encoded virtual death and non-death.

A call to actually invest into sane authentication systems (HN). 2nd’d.

I am working toward moving from Jekyll to Hugo, work that is most definitely not being helped by Hugo’s Jekyll importer (it doesn’t really import, and I assume I have again been doing stuff nobody else does).

Neither is it helped by some quirks like Go’s time-formatting code: To specify the intended datetime format, provide an example (instead of looking up strange formatting codes). Caveat: There is exactly one reference time, and you have to use the exact same year, month, day, minutes, seconds that are in the example: It’s only 2006, January, 1st, at 15:04. Totally obvious – after having format errors, and cursing half an hour.

Writing an operating system in a safe language with a garbage collector tends to inspire awesome people writing awesome compilers optimizations (HN).

A reminder to never trust anyone, anything: Credit card payment protocols are crap (s.a. Heise), and Vodafone is infecting your websites (HN). There was also something about some antivirus thingy doing virus-y thing-ies. Who keeps using that stuff?

To the exciting things of tech: Gephi 0.9 has been released (HN), including a fix so you can install and run it without curious Java errors (I tried, it’s true). Rust is still great, really. E-Mail will be saved by JMAP (HN). D3 gains a new abstraction (HN). Perl 6 actually exists (HN). And I have to read again when greedy algorithms work well (HN).

New year approaching. Better hide.