robertparker

March 3, 2022

I downloaded my spending transactions from Plaid via a python script, and want to look at my spending trends over time. There's a few things I've realized with the data:

1. debits to my account (i.e. refunds from stores, and credit card payments) are counted as negative numbers, which throws off this calculation. To get around this, I'm removing all negative numbers. I probably should include refunds, since getting a refund does behaviorally change how I'm spending. But I'm removing because my refund was for a large purchase (a bed that was approx $2k).

2. Rent totals skew my spending patterns. My goal is to actually just look at my elective spending, not fixed spending. Even if my rent goes up or down over time, my opinion here is that that should not meaningfully affect how I spend. The reason is because I calibrate my rent based on my overall wealth, not based on how much I would like to spend monthly. Plaid does a good job of identifying rent payments; however, I airbnb'd for 9 mo

robertparker

Why Octal Zeros Endanger Democracy

On Macbooks atop plastic tables, Dartmouth seniors freely register to vote in the 2020 primary, the culmination of a long legal battle with New Hampshire state officials who sought to limit liberal college voters in a swing state. A few whoops, fueled by adrenaline and catharsis, filter through the crowd as they hit “Submit.”

Soon after, every voter application is rejected.

This time, there is no political machine to blame. This happened because of something far more opaque: a software bug.

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robertparker

Want to fork your own gists? No fork button? No problem! Install this user script by clicking refork.user.js' "raw" link down below: ⇓

robertparker

Recurse: Code Like You Mean It

Tomorrow I start six weeks at the Recurse Center (RC), a self-directed program for people who want to dramatically improve their programming skills. I am starting with a winter “batch”: 30 of us who will share a space in Brooklyn and learn, collaborate, and, at times, code together. Even after my batch I will have access to a diverse alumni network across the world. This is why RC has been described as “the world’s best programming community with a three-month onboarding process in New York”.

At my last job, our CTO kicked off biannual hackathons by posing the question, “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” What emerged were incredible ideas brought to life, and others still impressive in failure: something from nothing. I see RC having a similar spirit. All those times I told myself “I don’t do front-end”; what if I did? When I had an idea involving hardware, why not learn and built it mys

robertparker

Little Women: A Review

Little Women has never been my cup of tea. I gravitate towards sweeping epics, rife with war and politics, crossing generations, continents and covering the spectrum of emotion. By its title alone, Louisa May Alcott’s novel always seemed the opposite: domestic; small. But home for the holidays with my girlfriend and her lovely family, I was overpowered and we took a Christmas trip to see Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation.

It is seven days later and now I have watched the 1994 film, binged on interviews, podcasts, and articles about the story, and bought a copy of the book. I already feel a claim to the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. I like epics -- and Little Women is one.

My newfound interest has granted me access to what feels like a secret celebrity book club, and I listen with intent as Gerwig and her contemporaries analyze the sisters’ relationships, their struggle to stay together through illness and war, and their search for salvation through art and marriage. Gerwig expl

robertparker

Topeka School by Ben Lerner: A Review

My Kansas pride can be many things, but it is always cringeworthy. When I’ve traipsed around New York bars celebrating KU basketball victories, or too-excitedly played the name game with someone-who-knows-someone from Kansas, I can sense the embarrassed twitch of my east coast friends, putting up with the endearing Midwestness of it all.

Of course, the same tends to be true of the darker sides of Topeka; Brown v Board, the Phelps family.

And so it is with Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. The day it came out, I bragged to the bookstore cashier in Greenpoint that I was also a former Topeka High School debater -- just like Ben Lerner! and the protagonist! -- and practically shouted “Happy reading!” to the guy with the book in line behind me.

What I expected was a novelization of Lerner’s childhood in Topeka -- and by extension, mine (“It’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about my life,” I explained to a friend). What I got was much different, and deeper, and dar

robertparker

venv/
.pytest_cache
__pycache__
*.csv

robertparker

""""A script for sending an email to a user with their previous day's purchases.
"""
import math
import os
from pprint import pprint
from typing import List
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from textwrap import dedent
import argparse

robertparker

##Welcome to the Integration Decade

We are commonly told there is a bubble. That is only partially true -- what is actually happening is a natural response to the mistaken thought that a single company would "win" the tech space. Instead, we are evolving towards a fragmented space. 

What that means is that our identities live across different platforms, with a poor effect on user experience. Companies today building "platforms" and "networks" seem to define user experience strictly within the context of the app they are building, and not the broader context of how they are used across apps.

How does this change? More data on how apps are used. More understanding that value does not increase with time spent on a platform, but time spent off of it.

robertparker

Not all tech companies are startups.

We tend to equate them with tech companies, but fundamentally startups are businesses designed to grow quickly. To echo an oft-repeated truism: startup = growth.

Then why the free association between startups and tech? Over the past decade, the easiest way to grow quickly has been to acquire online users. The transitive equation has been: startup = growth = online users = tech.

In fact, we wrongfully equate startups with the tech industry. Startups are high-growth companies with large market potential. Tech reflects society's adaptation towards software automation tools, and spans culture, management, and technology.