The Bank of England, I found out recently, produces a quarterly bulletin. The Bank published a couple of fascinating – to me at least – articles on how money is created and destroyed in the modern economy in their quarterly bulletin for Q1 2014:
While other articles in the bulletin look to be fairly specialised, I found these opening two quite accessible. Mostly anyway, some paragraphs required a little more thinking than I was willing to put in for now.
At the crux of the articles is the theory, which the Bank says is the currently correct one, of how money is created. Surprisingly, money is created by commercial banks when they lend to you, me, companies and so on. Out of thin air, a higher number appears in our deposit accounts. On the bank’s side, a corresponding lending account appears. As we pay back into that lending account, we are actively destroying money. So money is created from nothing and, mostly, returns to nothing.
When I start an app like Word by typing its name into Alfred, I almost never want to do anything other than open a new, blank document. Instead, by default, tons of apps show a “New Document” dialog, offering to help me by creating a generic looking flyer, brochure or todo list.
Soroush Khanlou recently wrote The GCD Handbook, a cookbook for common Grand Central Dispatch patterns. It’s a great set of patterns, with code examples.
While a great example of semaphores, I wondered whether the code in the Limiting the number of concurrent blocks section could be improved – I’ll explain why below. Soroush and I emailed back and forth a little bit, and came up with the following.
“Less is more”. It’s a frustrating phrase. Less is not not more; by definition, it never can be. But sometimes less is better. On the other hand, sometimes more is better. Mostly, from what I can tell, there are some things where less is better and others where less is worse. Often there’s a level which is just right: more is too much, and less is too little. Salt intake falls into that bucket.
Less is more is a paraphrasing of a whole book, The Paradox of Choice, written by Barry Schwartz. It’s become a bit of a mantra, one that is deployed often without thought: “this page is cluttered, we need to remove stuff; less is more, dude”. This closes a conversation without exploring the alternatives.
It’s looking increasingly, however, like the idea is either false or, at the very least, that the book length discussion is more appropriate than the three word version.
Once you’ve learned the basics of using Lua in HAProxy, you start to see a lot of places the scripting language could be useful. At Cloudant, one of the places we saw that we could make use of Lua was when selecting from the various backends to which our frontend load balancers direct traffic. We wrote a simple proof of concept, which I wanted to document here along with some of the problems we hit along the way.