The Diff - Longreads + Open Thread
This is The Diff’s weekly roundup of longreads, books, and open questions. Feel free to drop in links and comments of interest to fellow readers. You’re on the free list for the newsletter. For full access—and to read the back catalog—subscribe today! Longreads
Books
Open Thread
New - Reader Feedback!A reader recently pointed out that open threads have a cold-start problem: if you read right away, there won't be any comments, and if you wait too long, you might miss responses. With that in mind I thought it would be good to highlight some feedback each week. In last week's post, I asked what makes some institutions hard to disrupt. From Philo:
Which raises the question: what leads to an unusually high- or low-turnover industry? Two other pieces of feedback from this post on applying the concept of type-safety to emails and other corporate communications ($): Umang Jaipuria has an earlier post expanding on the broader concept of a cultural vocabulary, and Nate Meyvis has thoughtful pushback. Specifically:
There's often convergent evolution towards the same endpoint that uses mutually incompatible and path-dependent efforts to get there. Maybe if you're obsessed with type safety and you treat software as an instantiation of a theorem, you won't be able to inhabit the mindset of someone who uses good testing and might analogize their program to a factory—a factory where the ideal defect rate is zero but where the achievable one is nonzero and it's critical to weigh costs and benefits. (Another conclusion here is that if you borrow a mental model from a field you're less familiar with, there is a good chance that someone who actually works in that field will respond with a much more thoughtful set of analogies. Please use this trick responsibly.) A Word From Our SponsorsImport millions of rows of messy customer data in minutes “Hey, can you send me a spreadsheet with the following columns at minimum?” Sounds simple enough, but ask 100 customers to do it, and chances are you’ll get 100 different spreadsheets, documents or formats sent back to you. Now try collating all that data into one place, without losing your mind. Or worse, asking your customer to do it. If this sounds anything like your team’s reality then you need to get some help from Flatfile — who have built the ultimate data importing cheat code. Their innovative platform lets your customers drag and drop their data into your system without formatting beforehand. Then the magic starts. Smart matching, file hooks and algorithmic data detection means that a messy file that used to take hours can now be imported, cleaned and validated in literally minutes. The best part? You can embed Flatfile straight into your product, or in a prebuilt hosted page. You’re a free subscriber to The Diff. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. |
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Clean Trades and Dirty Hedges
Monday, June 13, 2022
Plus! Cash as Cosmetics; Two Inflations; AI; Offline-to-Online; Starlink; Diff Jobs
Longreads + Open Thread
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Progress, Bobusuke, Permission, Allocation, Nuclear, YouTube, Disruption
Valuation Metrics: A Cross-Examination
Monday, June 6, 2022
Plus! What's Still Fundable (Con't.); ESG and Measurement; Sentiment Tracking; Volatility; Diff Jobs
Longreads + Open Thread
Saturday, June 4, 2022
Private Government, Cheating, Entropy, Science, Stretch Wrap, Trains
AWS for Industry, But Better: The Railroad Investment Case
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Plus! Smart Margin; Peak College?; Two-Sided Markets; Bonds; Diff Jobs
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