Stuff I'm reading, blustery day edition

I think the New Normal is that it will rain only about 2 days a month.

But when it rains, it rains HARD.

• An Introduction to Computer Networks

  Welcome to the website for An Introduction to Computer Networks, a free and open general-purpose computer-networking textbook, complete with diagrams and exercises. It covers the LAN, internetworking and transport layers, focusing primarily on TCP/IP. Particular attention is paid to congestion; other special topics include queuing, real-time traffic, network management, security and the ns simulator.

• Surviving Data Science "at the Speed of Hype"

  There is this idea endemic to the marketing of data science that big data analysis can happen quickly, supporting an innovative and rapidly changing company. But in my experience and in the experience of many of the analysts I know, this marketing idea bears little resemblance to reality.

• Why Robot?

  All the hoopla about “robots stealing our jobs” has led people to assume that if some new technology performs a task traditionally performed by humans, it must be a robot. But the term carries a lot of pop-cultural baggage that risks clouding our understanding of what we’re really talking about when we talk about automation.

• Robot-writing increased AP’s earnings stories by tenfold

  AP managing editor Lou Ferrara told Automated Insights that the news cooperative’s customers are happy to be receiving more stories, and that automation has freed up reporters to work on more difficult stories, according to the release.

• Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard

  for the most part, these introductory tools do a great job of guiding you like a child in a crosswalk past the big scary variables and conditional statements and through the early phases of programming syntax. As you conquer one after another of their gamified challenges, your confidence rises. Maybe you can do this after all! How hard can it be? You're basically a developer already!

• Screw motivation, what you need is discipline.

  How do you cultivate discipline? By building habits – starting as small as you can manage, even microscopic, and gathering momentum, reinvesting it in progressively bigger changes to your routine, and building a positive feedback loop.

• DeathHacks

  There’s a lot of grunt work that needs to be done after a death. Magazine subscriptions need to be stopped. Home services like lawn care need to be curtailed or amended. Maintenance schedules need to be deduced from calendar entries or handwritten notes. A lot of this is just simple phone calls or emails. Some of it is not.

  The cable company, when called, wouldn’t let me downgrade my dad’s service without receiving a faxed copy of the death certificate and a letter outlining my executrixship. They insisted on me changing the account into my name, pronto. I hung up. Their online chat service, however, would let “Tom” do anything he wanted as long as he had the account number and the eminently guessable-by-me password that was the same as the alarm system’s. This was a reproducible result. Using my dad’s Google document with the usernames and passwords of all of his major accounts, I got a lot of things accomplished without having to speak to or see a real person.

• Stibitz & Wilson Honorees

  The George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Awards honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the fields of computing and communications. The Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Awards honor individuals who have made significant contributes to the preservation of biodiversity on Earth.