This. Also, that.

School has started, here in the Bay Area.

Naturally, I have the sniffles, a scratchy throat, and a sinus headache.

Must. Sleep.

But, in the meantime, there's so much to read!

• What is Haberman?

  I’d never heard of “Haberman” before. The name of the neighborhood that people who live here would recognize is Maspeth (which you can see up-and-to-the-right of Haberman). Is Haberman even a real neighborhood? Why did Google put this giant Haberman label on the map?

• The Pin Is Mightier: Why it’s so satisfying to find—and make—fake locations in Google Maps.

  It’s chaos that Google appears hard-pressed to stop. In a June 2019 blog post, the company says it took down 3 million fake business profiles in 2018, around 85 percent of which were flagged by internal systems, and 90 percent of which were removed before users could see them. Google did not provide statistics on how many new businesses get added a year, or how many listings appear on Google Maps, but given that the service includes data from 220 countries, 3 million listings is likely a drop in the bucket. A Google spokesperson says the company has a team dedicated to Maps fraud, and has “strict policies in place” to detect fraud through “manual and automated systems,” but declined to reveal further details “so as not to tip off spammer or others with bad intent.”

• Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson

  This web page contains a free electronic version of my self-published textbook Algorithms, along with other lecture notes I have written for various theoretical computer science classes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 1998.

• Highlights from Git 2.23

  The open source Git project just released Git 2.23 with features and bug fixes from over 77 contributors, 26 of them new. Here’s our look at some of the most exciting features and changes introduced since Git 2.22.

• Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers SayAbout Technical Interviews?

  Posters report that these interviews cause unnecessary anxiety and frustration, requiring them to learn arbitrary, implicit, and obscure norms. The findings from our study inform inclusive hiring guidelines for technical interviews, such as collaborative problem-solving sessions.

• Tech Interview Handbook: Carefully curated content to help you ace your next technical interview

  The Tech Interview Handbook contains carefully curated content to help you ace your next technical interview with a focus on algorithms. While there are a ton of interview resources on the internet, the best ones are either not free, or they do not cover the complete interview process, usually only focusing on algorithms.

• How to Build Good Software

  Some core operating principles that can dramatically improve the chances of success:

  1. Start as simple as possible;
  2. Seek out problems and iterate; and
  3. Hire the best engineers you can.

  While there are many subtler factors to consider, these principles form a foundation that lets you get started building good software.

• Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible

  I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post.

• They Get Fired All the Time. And They Have No Idea Why.

  Through weeks of intensive research, a singular truth emerged. People with Asperger’s syndrome, the term still commonly used for one of the most well-known forms of autism spectrum disorder, bring serious advantages to the financial markets: extreme focus, a facility with numbers, a willingness to consider unpopular opinions, a strong sense of logic, and an intense belief in fairness and justice. But, like other autistic employees, they often feel alienated from their managers, colleagues, and clients. Sometimes they simply get fired.

• A Walk In Hong Kong

  All that prelude is to say, coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a less developed country like the United States is disorienting. If you have never visited one of the Zeroth World cities of Asia, like Taipei or Singapore, it can be hard to convey their mix of high density, mazelike design, utterly reliable public services, and high social cohesion, any more than it was possible for me or my parents to imagine a real American city, no matter how many movies we saw. And then to have to write about protests on top of it!

• WeWTF

  In frothy markets, it's easy to enter into a consensual hallucination, with investors and markets, that you’re creating value. And it’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market's halcyon: cheap capital. WeWork has brought new meaning to the word wallpaper.