project.”

I met with Kahneman at a Le Pain Quotidien in Lower Manhattan. He is tall, soft-spoken, and affable, with a pronounced accent and a wry smile. Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”
In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion. “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.
The most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can. And “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,” an idea and term thought up by Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist. A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

Source: Cognitive Biases and the Human Brain – The Atlantic

Timsort was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002, it has been a standard sorting algorithm for Python since Python 2.3. Python’s sorted and list.sort function uses Tim sort. Java uses Timsort in JDK for sorting non primitive types. Android platform and GNU Octave also uses it as a default sorting algorithm. Timsort is a stable algorithm and beats every other sorting algorithm in time. It has O(nlogn) time complexity for worst case unlike quick sort and O(n) for best case scenarios unlike merge sort and heap s

Source: Timsort: Fastest sorting algorithm for real world problems. – DEV Community

Early in the computer revolution, the US government had a problem. Nearly all of its computers relied on proprietary software from companies like IBM and Honeywell. So it asked Stanford University mathematician George Forsythe to create an abstract language for all computers. Two years later, his team developed a thing called computer science, and issued a standard 10-page curriculum. An updated version is still used globally today.
“So, engineering, business, and computer science: Three completely different applied sciences, emerging from three completely different technical regimes, with different impulses,” Bell said.

Source: How brand new science will manage the fourth industrial revolution | ZDNet

So what would the decline of America look like? I don’t ask the question because I think it’s happening (yet?), but because even the most inveterate optimist should be interested in the dangers, if only to ward them off.

Source: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire – Bloomberg

Microsoft’s current breakaway success, and following that’s a deeper dive into each item. The list:

1. Azure Is Hyperscaling.
2. The Azure Buildout Is Accelerating.
3. Massive Mission-Critical Workloads Are Moving To Azure.
4. Creating A Path To The Cloud Via Hybrid.
5. Creating A Path To The Cloud Via Microsoft 365.
6. Microsoft Reveals Its “Real Competitive Advantage.”
7. And, Microsoft Reveals Its “Best-Kept Secret.”
8. SaaS: Dynamics 365 Versus ‘The Monoliths.’
9. The Power Of Leverage.

• The LinkedIn Effect.

Source: Why Amazon Can’t Match Microsoft In The Cloud: 10 Insights From Satya Nadella

Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard

Not long ago, I came across a little-known speech titled, “You and Your Research”.
The speech had been delivered in 1986 by Richard Hamming, an accomplished mathematician and computer engineer, as part of an internal series of talks given at Bell Labs. I had never heard of Hamming, the internal lecture series at Bell Labs, or this particular speech. And yet, as I read the transcript, I came across one useful insight after another.
After reading that talk, I got to thinking… what other great talks and speeches are out there that I’ve never heard?
I’ve been slowly searching for answers to that question and the result is this list of my favorite interesting and insightful talks that are not widely known. You may see a few famous speeches on this list, but my guess is that most people are not aware of many of them—just as I wasn’t when I first started looking around.
As far as I know this is the only place where you can read transcripts of these speeches in one place.

Source: Famous Speeches: A List of the Greatest Speeches of All-Time

“You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming Background For many years, Bell Labs ran an internal speaker series known as the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series. This particular talk, given by Dr. Richard W Hamming in 1986, was focused on answering one question: “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”

Source: “You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming | James Clear

So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Here, too, the research is instructive. To begin with, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. [7] Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in time. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend. [8]

Source: How to Make Friends, According to Science – The Atlantic

Bourdain wrote about suicidal despair twice, to my knowledge. The first time was in his second crime novel, Gone Bamboo (1997) in which the philosopher-hit man Henry Denard finds himself in deep trouble with the mob, who’ve caught up with him on the island of Saint Martin.

Leaving the Mariner’s Club, he took the mountain route back to the pond, the scooter handling differently without Frances holding on in the rear… A few hundred yards ahead, the road took a steep drop down the other side of the mountain to the sea. The road was ungraded and unbanked; one could easily fly right off the side of that mountain, and Henry considered that option, toyed with the idea as if playing with himself, not serious, just to see how bad things were…
Bad manners to kill yourself. Realizing how drunk he really was, Henry started up the scooter and drove cautiously home.

Curiously, he wrote the same scene a second time, in a memoir, the 2010 Medium Raw; it had really happened. But the memoir relates the scene happening about eight years after the novel was published—in 2005 or 2006, after the crash of his first marriage to Nancy Putkoski, the high school sweetheart whom he’d followed to Vassar.

That’s where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not very well lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers… were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was… I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs’ edges approaching the French side. Here, I’d really step on the gas… depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I’d decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.

Bad manners!? His manners were immaculate.
Bourdain was a very private man but there were things about him that could be intimated from his work. One of these things being that the real person, the man underneath, was troubled in some secret way, and that he needed to hide that trouble, to dress it up for public consumption.
I wonder whether this is not just one more bad thing about exceptionalism, the thing we are in fact not really getting away from. Parachuting in to enjoy the hole in the wall is still parachuting in. What if you still end up in the good hotel, the big house, the apartment on the 60^th floor? Maybe it’s the exceptional, special people with no faults, the people who have to perform “authenticity” flawlessly, all the time, for everyone, who are, who must be, the most troubled of all.
Did anyone ever ask him what that moment meant, or when it really happened? I wanted to, but I felt constrained, like it would be intrusive and rude to ask: Did you really almost drive off the edge of an unbanked road in Saint Martin? When? Why? How many times did you think about killing yourself? I think maybe your real friends knew something about that, but maybe not enough.
Even now with all I knew and have learned, I could believe anything about this gifted, passionate man’s death. Outrageous stories of every description came out after the reports of his suicide in an Alsatian hotel, and I could believe any one of them. I could believe that he was taken out by a hostile government or by some political enemy. That he just judged himself very hard one night and chose deliberately to end it. That he had a wild moment of uncontrollable panic. That he had a broken heart. Any of these things, or none of them.

Source: The Anthony Bourdain Interview

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” — John Meynard Keynes

Source: Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform