Here's A List Of The Darkest, Strangest Scientific Paper Titles Of All Time | IFLScience
some great papers here (via Emilie)
(tags: via:emilie funny papers science titles)
Month: October 2017
Yonatan Zunger's twitter thread on Twitter's problem with policy issues
'I worked on policy issues at G+ and YT for years. It was *painfully* obvious that Twitter never took them seriously.' This thread is full of good information on "free speech", nazis, Trump, Gamergate and Twitter's harrassment problem. (Via Peter Bourgon)
(tags: via:peterbourgon harrassment twitter gamergate threads youtube google-plus policy abuse bullying free-speech engagement)
What To Do When Your Daughter Is the Mean Girl | Psychology Today
Bookmarking -- just in case. hopefully it won't be necessary... good site for parenting advice along these lines.
I knew this day would come. I was, of course, hoping it never would-hoping that my daughter would never be mean to someone else's daughter-but as they say, I wrote the book on girl bullying in elementary school, so I knew that there was a pretty good chance that despite all of my best efforts, one of these days, my girl was gonna act like the mean one. This morning, she told me about it.
MaxMind DB File Format Specification
An interesting data structure format -- 'the MaxMind DB file format is a database format that maps IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to data records using an efficient binary search tree.'
(tags: maxmind databases storage ipv4 ipv6 addresses bst binary-search-trees trees data-structures)
IBM broke its cloud by letting three domain names expire - The Register
“multiple domain names were mistakenly allowed to expire and were in hold status.”
Open-sourcing RacerD: Fast static race detection at scale | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code
At Facebook we have been working on automated reasoning about concurrency in our work with the Infer static analyzer. RacerD, our new open source race detector, searches for data races — unsynchronized memory accesses, where one is a write — in Java programs, and it does this without running the program it is analyzing. RacerD employs symbolic reasoning to cover many paths through an app, quickly.
This sounds extremely interesting...(tags: racerd race-conditions data-races thread-safety static-code-analysis coding testing facebook open-source infer)
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Fascinating stuff -- from Felix Cohen's excellent twitter thread.
Solera is a process for aging liquids such as wine, beer, vinegar, and brandy, by fractional blending in such a way that the finished product is a mixture of ages, with the average age gradually increasing as the process continues over many years. The purpose of this labor-intensive process is the maintenance of a reliable style and quality of the beverage over time. Solera means literally "on the ground" in Spanish, and it refers to the lower level of the set of barrels or other containers used in the process; the liquid (traditionally transferred from barrel to barrel, top to bottom, the oldest mixtures being in the barrel right "on the ground"), although the containers in today's process are not necessarily stacked physically in the way that this implies, but merely carefully labeled. Products which are often solera aged include Sherry, Madeira, Lillet, Port wine, Marsala, Mavrodafni, Muscat, and Muscadelle wines; Balsamic, Commandaria, some Vins doux naturels, and Sherry vinegars; Brandy de Jerez; beer; rums; and whiskies. Since the origin of this process is undoubtedly out of the Iberian peninsula, most of the traditional terminology was in Spanish, Portuguese, or Catalan.
(tags: wine aging solera sherry muscat vinegar brandy beer rum whiskey whisky brewing spain)
The Best Way to Sous Vide Is to Shut Up About It
lol
(tags: sous-vide gadgets kitchen bros cooking cookery funny)
"1 like = 1 delicious cocktail recipe or booze fact."
Great cocktail factoid thread from Manhattans Project/Every Cloud's Felix Cohen
Alarm systems alarmingly insecure. Oh the irony | Pen Test Partners
Some absolutely abysmal security practices used in off-the-shelf self-installed wireless home alarm systems -- specifically the Yale HSA6400. Simple replay attacks of the unlock PIN message, for instance
What Parents Can Do When Bullying is Downplayed at School | Psychology Today
Despite the "Bully-Free Zone" posters that line the school cafeteria walls and the Zero-Tolerance policy that was boasted about during last September's Back-to-School night, your experience is that the school would rather not address the problem at all. The responses you get from your child's teacher include bland lip service [...]
Good advice for this nasty situation -- I'm thankfully not facing it myself, but bookmarking just in case...(tags: bullying kids school education psychology children parenting)
Cyclists: Let's Talk About Shoaling
You're stopped at a red light with a bunch of folks on bikes, when someone who's just arrived sails past everyone, right to the head of the class. It's a lot like seeing somebody in the Whole Foods express lane with too many things. In other words, it's the kind of behavior that triggers toothy-toddler rages in otherwise emotionally competent adults.
Oh god. This drives me nuts. (via Mark)(tags: shoaling cycling commuting bikes red-lights commute rage)
Commodore 64 Raspberry Pi Case with working power LED
3D-printed retro-pi cases (via Oisin)
(tags: via:oisin 3d-printing retropi cases raspberry-pi hardware cute)
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'AWS Lambda cheatsheet' -- a quick ref card for Lambda users
(tags: aws lambda ops serverless reference quick-references)
Turtle Bunbury - THE NIGHT OF THE BIG WIND, 1839 (Reprise)
The Night of the Big Wind was the most devastating storm ever recorded in Irish history. Known in As Gaeilge as ‘Oiche na Gaoithe Moire’, the hurricane of 6th and 7th January 1839 made more people homeless in a single night than all the sorry decades of eviction that followed it.
(tags: 1839 1830s 19th-century ireland turtle-bunbury history storms weather hurricanes)
One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end – Mike Monteiro
Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn’t realize the size of the bomb he’s sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it’s metaphorical. It’s not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he’s found himself responsible for. The power of Oppenheimer-wide destruction is in the hands of entitled men-children, cuddled runts, who aim not to enhance human communication, but to build themselves a digital substitute for physical contact with members of the species who were unlike them. And it should scare you.
(tags: politics twitter mike-monteiro history silicon-valley trump)
A history of the neural net/tank legend in AI, and other examples of reward hacking
@gwern: "A history of the neural net/tank legend in AI: https://t.co/2s4AOGMS3a (Feel free to suggest more sightings or examples of reward hacking!)"
(tags: gwern history ai machine-learning ml genetic-algorithms neural-networks perceptron learning training data reward-hacking)
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I want to talk about why this vulnerability continues to exist so many years after WPA was standardized. And separately, to answer a question: how did this attack slip through, despite the fact that the 802.11i handshake was formally proven secure?
Over The Air - Vol. 2, Pt. 3: Exploiting The Wi-Fi Stack on Apple Devices
This is the most amazing hack.
Upon successful execution, the exploit exposes APIs to read and write the host’s physical memory directly over-the-air, by mapping in any requested address to the controlled DART L2 translation table, and issuing DMA accesses to the corresponding mapped IO-Space addresses.
(tags: hacks exploits security ios wifi apple iphone kernel)
How to operate reliable AWS Lambda applications in production
running a reliable Lambda application in production requires you to still follow operational best practices. In this article I am including some recommendations, based on my experience with operations in general as well as working with AWS Lambda.
Amazon Shipping Filter - Chrome Web Store
a user script to determine when Amazon.{com,co.uk,fr,de,it,etc} will not deliver to your chosen delivery address, which is a common risk for Irish users
(tags: ireland shipping amazon buying extensions chrome userscripts shopping)
Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music
Not sure how accurate this is (it's not written by a Spotify employee), but seems pretty well researched -- according to this Discover Weekly is a mix of 3 different algorithms
(tags: discover-weekly spotify nlp music ai ml machine-learning)
Study: wearing hi-viz clothing does not reduce risk of collision for cyclists
Journal of Transport & Health, 22 March 2017:
This study found no evidence that cyclists using conspicuity aids were at reduced risk of a collision crash compared to non-users after adjustment for confounding, but there was some evidence of an increase in risk. Bias and residual confounding from differing route selection and cycling behaviours in users of conspicuity aids are possible explanations for these findings. Conspicuity aids may not be effective in reducing collision crash risk for cyclists in highly-motorised environments when used in the absence of other bicycle crash prevention measures such as increased segregation or lower motor vehicle speeds.
(tags: health safety hi-viz clothing cycling commute visibility collision crashes papers)
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Not a very good review of Hazelcast's CAP behaviour from Aphyr. see also https://twitter.com/MarcJBrooker/status/917437286639329280 for more musings from Marc Brooker on the topic ("PA/EC is a confusing and dangerous behaviour for many cases")
(tags: jepsen aphyr testing hazelcast cap-theorem reliability partitions network pacelc marc-brooker)
House Six, the Heartbeat of Student Life – The University Times
Dilapidated but beloved, House Six shapes student life in Trinity and has for decades been the backdrop to changes in Irish society.
Ah, memories -- in my case mostly of all-night Civ games in Publications(tags: history tcd trinity house-six csc tcdsu dublin buildings landmarks)
London's Hidden Tunnels Revealed In Amazing Cutaways | Londonist
these really are remarkable. I love the Renzo Picassos in particular
(tags: design history london 3d cutaways diagrams comics mid-century)
Kremlin info-ops measured to have a total reach of 340 million with dark, divisive ads
when the virality and resharing is measured, it's far higher than previously estimated, according to this Washington Post article
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This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. [...] Why branchless? Because high performance CPUs are pipelined. That is, a single instruction is executed over a series of stages, and many instructions are executed in overlapping time intervals, each at a different stage.
Neat hack (via Tony Finch)(tags: algorithms optimization unicode utf8 branchless coding c via:fanf)
Internet speed guarantees must be realistic, says Ofcom | Hacker News
Good news from the UK. Hope this comes to Ireland soon, too
"Why We Built Our Own Distributed Column Store" (video)
"Why We Built Our Own Distributed Column Store" by Sam Stokes of Honeycomb.io -- Retriever, inspired by Facebook's Scuba
(tags: scuba retriever storage data-stores columnar-storage honeycomb.io databases via:charitymajors)
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A deep dive on how we were using our existing databases revealed that they were frequently not used for their relational capabilities. About 70 percent of operations were of the key-value kind, where only a primary key was used and a single row would be returned. About 20 percent would return a set of rows, but still operate on only a single table. With these requirements in mind, and a willingness to question the status quo, a small group of distributed systems experts came together and designed a horizontally scalable distributed database that would scale out for both reads and writes to meet the long-term needs of our business. This was the genesis of the Amazon Dynamo database. The success of our early results with the Dynamo database encouraged us to write Amazon's Dynamo whitepaper and share it at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP conference), so that others in the industry could benefit. The Dynamo paper was well-received and served as a catalyst to create the category of distributed database technologies commonly known today as "NoSQL."
That's not an exaggeration. Nice one Werner et al!(tags: dynamo history nosql storage databases distcomp amazon papers acm data-stores)
The world's first cyber-attack, on the Chappe telegraph system, in Bordeaux in 1834
The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.
(tags: bordeaux hacking history security technology cyber-attacks telegraph telegraphes-chappe)
Slack 103: Communication and culture
Interesting note on some emergent Slack communications systems using emoji: "redirect raccoon", voting, and "I'm taking a look at this"
This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017
I told a lot of people that I was going to watch Blade Runner for the first time, because I know that people have opinions about Blade Runner. All of them gave me a few watery opinions to keep in mind going in—nothing that would spoil me, but things that would help me understand what they assured me would be a Very Strange Film. None of them told me the right things, though.
(tags: culture movies film blade-runner politics slavery replicants)
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'Sampling tools like oprofile or dtrace's profile provider don't really provide methods to see what [multithreaded] programs are blocking on - only where they spend CPU time. Though there exist advanced techniques (such as systemtap and dtrace call level probes), it is overkill to build upon that. Poor man doesn't have time. Poor man needs food.' Basically periodically grabbing stack traces from running processes using gdb.
(tags: gdb profiling linux unix mark-callaghan stack-traces performance)
Report an Issue Online | Dublin City Council
handy self-service issue report portal, more direct possibly than FixMyStreet.ie
(tags: dcc dublin city council reporting civic traffic-lights roads paths)
Intel pcj library for persistent memory-oriented data structures
This is a "pilot" project to develop a library for Java objects stored in persistent memory. Persistent collections are being emphasized because many applications for persistent memory seem to map well to the use of collections. One of this project's goals is to make programming with persistent objects feel natural to a Java developer, for example, by using familiar Java constructs when incorporating persistence elements such as data consistency and object lifetime. The breadth of persistent types is currently limited and the code is not performance-optimized. We are making the code available because we believe it can be useful in experiments to retrofit existing Java code to use persistent memory and to explore persistent Java programming in general.
(via Mario Fusco)(tags: persistent-memory data-structures storage persistence java coding future)
Google and Facebook Have Failed Us - The Atlantic
There’s no hiding behind algorithms anymore. The problems cannot be minimized. The machines have shown they are not up to the task of dealing with rare, breaking news events, and it is unlikely that they will be in the near future. More humans must be added to the decision-making process, and the sooner the better.
(tags: algorithms facebook google las-vegas news filtering hoaxes 4chan abuse breaking-news responsibility silicon-valley)
the execution of James Connolly in cake form
As depicted in the Decobake 1916 commemorative cake competition. Amazing scenes of edible history
(tags: odd funny decobake 1916 history ireland republican nationalism james-connolly executions omgwtf cake)
Cashing in on ATM Malware - A Comprehensive Look at Various Attack Types
rather unnerving report from Trend Micro / Europol. 'As things stand, it looks like different criminal groups have already graduated from physical to virtual skimming via malware, thanks to the lack of security measures implemented by commercial banks worldwide. This is common in Latin America and Eastern Europe, but these criminals are exporting the technique and have started to victimize other countries.'
(tags: atms banking security trend-micro banks europol exploits)
Your Morning Sucks. Here’s How to Create a Dream Morning Routine.
this is fucking hilarious
(tags: funny self-parody morning routines via:dorothy hydration trampolines wtf manic)
The copyright implications of a publicly curated online archive of Oireachtas debates
"a publicly curated online archive of Oireachtas debates is so obviously in the public interest that copyright law should not prevent it." (via Aileen)
(tags: via:aileen copyright oireachtas debates ireland parliament archival history)
Share scripts that have dependencies with Nix
Nice approach to one-liner packaging invocations using nix-shell
In 1973, I invented a ‘girly drink’ called Baileys
The creation of the iconic booze:
'We bought a small bottle of Jamesons Irish Whiskey and a tub of single cream and hurried back. It was a lovely May morning. 1973. Underdogs Sunderland had just won the FA Cup. We mixed the two ingredients in our kitchen, tasted the result and it was certainly intriguing, but in reality bloody awful. Undaunted, we threw in some sugar and it got better, but it still missed something. We went back to the store, searching the shelves for something else, found our salvation in Cadbury’s Powdered Drinking Chocolate and added it to our formula. Hugh and I were taken by surprise. It tasted really good. Not only this, but the cream seemed to have the effect of making the drink taste stronger, like full-strength spirit. It was extraordinary.'
(tags: whiskey cream booze drinks baileys 1970s history 1973 chocolate cocktails)
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restore a versioned S3 bucket to the state it was at at a specific point in time
(tags: ops s3 restore backups versioning history tools scripts unix)
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Importing an EV from the UK into Ireland (specifically the Nissan Leaf). A little dated (2013) but possibly useful all the same