Articles Review 2017

I have enjoyed a lot of reading this year so I wanted to to reflect on some of the things I read and enjoyed. In this post I will cover some of the articles.

I am a heavy Pocket user. Apparently I read 775k words on Pocket in 2017! According to Pocket, some of the topics that I read the most about were current events, security, programming, technology and sports. Below are some of the articles that I enjoyed in particular:

Wikipedia:

The website I have read the most articles from is probably Wikipedia. The articles have ranged from reading about Philadelphia and the Deccan Plateau to reading about Exploration of Mars and the Cassini-Huygens missions. I had heard a lot about the claim that Pi contains all possible sequences of numbers but after reading about Normal Numbers I found out that we don’t actually know if that’s true for Pi! I have read about many different security exploits over this year and the Row Hammer exploit was probably the most interesting.

Some other articles I enjoyed reading about are below.

Programming:

• Herb Sutter’s “GotW #91 Solution: Smart Pointer Parameters”: I have gone back to refer to this article multiple times over the year and I am sure I will go back many more times.
• Dan Luu’s detailed blog posts:
  • A history of branch prediction from 1500000 BC to 1995
  • What’s new in CPUs since the 80s and how does it affect programmers?
  • We saw some really bad Intel CPU bugs in 2015, and we should expect to see more in the future
• A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode: Probably a required reading for every professional programmer

Current Events:

• Crimintern: How the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks in Europe
• Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns
• How men continue to interrupt even the most powerful women: A stats-based approach to look at rate of interruptions in the Supreme Court
• Monks with guns: Covers religion based violence in Thailand
• The CIA Battled the Kremlin With Books and Movies

Sports:

• The Confessions Of An NBA Scorekeeper: It was fun reading about the ridiculousness of interpretation based stats like assists.
• The Save Ruined Relief Pitching. The Goose Egg Can Fix It.

Security:

• Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug
• Beyond public key encryption: A short primer on what else cryptopgraphy is capable of past the popular models
• Remote security exploit in all 2008+ Intel platforms: The original report of the Intel IME exploit