Photo by Grant Mitchell

Delegate co-memberships – A network map showing which groups Republican and Democratic convention delegates belong to and how large ones like the NRA and the Sierra Club are connected to each other

A short note on random load balancing – Interesting algorithm that has a lot of the advantages of doing completely random assignments of tasks to buckets, but with a lot less variance in the work assigned to each bucket

Politicosphere – A network map of political news sites. I’m impressed by the presentation, it’s actually a pretty useful way of exploring the political blogosphere

Myths and Fallacies of “Personally Identifiable Information” – Another great post by Arvind, this time dissecting why “PII” is not a very helpful concept, since it encourages people in the mindset that a simple “anonymization” of obvious identifiers is enough to safeguard people’s identity

Tell them no, just never use that word – The hardest part of being an engineer is bridging the gap between users’ expectations and the limits imposed by technology. At the start of my career if I was asked for something impossible I’d say no and explain why. It took me a while to learn to shut up and let them explain what they wanted in more detail and think of creative ways of satisfying their underlying requirements