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Links for 2017-02-10

Published February 10, 2017

  • Why Shopify Payments prohibit sexual content

    Interesting background info from a twitter thread:

    @jennschiffer Breitbart uses Shopify Payments, which is built on top of Stripe, which is sponsored by Wells Fargo merchant services AFAIK. WF has underwriting rules that prohibit sexual content. The main reasons aren't b/c WF or Stripe are interested in policing morals. Historically there's a higher rate of chargebacks from porn sites, which is why banks are generally anti-sexual content. Imagine someone's partner finds a charge for pornhub on their credit cars and calls them out on it. The person will deny and file a CB. Once porn sites started getting shut down by banks, they would change their names or submit applications claiming to be fetish sites, etc So underwriting dept's decided the risk is too high and generally defer to no with anything sexual. Most processors aren't inclined to challenge this position on moral grounds since there's strong precedent against it... ...and it could jeapordize their entire payments system if they get shut off. There are exceptions of course and there are other prohibited uses that are allowed to continue.

    (tags: twitter porn shopify sex chargebacks payment)

  • Comparing Amazon Elastic Container Service and Google Kubernetes – Medium

    nice intro to Kubernetes and container orchestration

    (tags: kubernetes containers docker ops)

  • Minor Infractions — Real Life

    When our son turned 12, we gave him a phone and allowed him to use social media, with a condition: He had no right to privacy. We would periodically and without warning read his texts and go through his messenger app. We would follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (though we wouldn’t comment or tag him — we’re not monsters). We wouldn’t ambush him about what we read and we wouldn’t attempt to embarrass him. Anything that wasn’t dangerous or illegal, we would ignore.
    Food for thought. But not yet!

    (tags: surveillance family kids privacy online social-media teenagers)

Links for 2017-02-09

Published February 9, 2017

Links for 2017-02-07

Published February 7, 2017

  • What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen | Federal Trade Commission

    This is awful:

    Starting in 2014, Vizio made TVs that automatically tracked what consumers were watching and transmitted that data back to its servers. Vizio even retrofitted older models by installing its tracking software remotely. All of this, the FTC and AG allege, was done without clearly telling consumers or getting their consent. What did Vizio know about what was going on in the privacy of consumers’ homes? On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs. Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. And let’s be clear: We’re not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal. The company provided consumers’ IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio’s contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details – for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership.  And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices. That’s what Vizio was up to behind the screen, but what was the company telling consumers? Not much, according to the complaint. Vizio put its tracking functionality behind a setting called “Smart Interactivity.”  But the FTC and New Jersey AG say that the generic way the company described that feature – for example, “enables program offers and suggestions” – didn’t give consumers the necessary heads-up to know that Vizio was tracking their TV’s every flicker. (Oh, and the “Smart Interactivity” feature didn’t even provide the promised “program offers and suggestions.”)

    (tags: privacy ftc surveillance tv vizio ads advertising smart-tvs)

  • Inuit Cartography

    In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.

    (tags: maps inuit history sailing navigation coastlines greenland)

Links for 2017-02-06

Published February 6, 2017

  • Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles - The New York Times

    This sounds more like a medieval court than a modern democracy. Also this incredible gem:

    Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

    (tags: stephen-bannon trump us-politics nsc)

  • Beringei: A high-performance time series storage engine | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

    Beringei is different from other in-memory systems, such as memcache, because it has been optimized for storing time series data used specifically for health and performance monitoring. We designed Beringei to have a very high write rate and a low read latency, while being as efficient as possible in using RAM to store the time series data. In the end, we created a system that can store all the performance and monitoring data generated at Facebook for the most recent 24 hours, allowing for extremely fast exploration and debugging of systems and services as we encounter issues in production. Data compression was necessary to help reduce storage overhead. We considered several existing compression schemes and rejected the techniques that applied only to integer data, used approximation techniques, or needed to operate on the entire dataset. Beringei uses a lossless streaming compression algorithm to compress points within a time series with no additional compression used across time series. Each data point is a pair of 64-bit values representing the timestamp and value of the counter at that time. Timestamps and values are compressed separately using information about previous values. Timestamp compression uses a delta-of-delta encoding, so regular time series use very little memory to store timestamps. From analyzing the data stored in our performance monitoring system, we discovered that the value in most time series does not change significantly when compared to its neighboring data points. Further, many data sources only store integers (despite the system supporting floating point values). Knowing this, we were able to tune previous academic work to be easier to compute by comparing the current value with the previous value using XOR, and storing the changed bits. Ultimately, this algorithm resulted in compressing the entire data set by at least 90 percent.

    (tags: beringei compression facebook monitoring tsd time-series storage architecture)

  • St. Petersburg team operated a PRNG hack against Vegas slots

    According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas–based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button. “The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000 in a single week.

    (tags: prng hacking security exploits randomness gambling las-vegas casinos slot-machines)

Links for 2017-02-05

Published February 5, 2017

  • Data from pacemaker used to arrest man for arson, insurance fraud

    Compton has medical conditions which include an artificial heart linked to an external pump. According to court documents, a cardiologist said that "it is highly improbable Mr. Compton would have been able to collect, pack and remove the number of items from the house, exit his bedroom window and carry numerous large and heavy items to the front of his residence during the short period of time he has indicated due to his medical conditions." After US law enforcement caught wind of this peculiar element to the story, police were able to secure a search warrant and collect the pacemaker's electronic records to scrutinize his heart rate, the demand on the pacemaker and heart rhythms prior to and at the time of the incident.

    (tags: pacemakers health medicine privacy data arson insurance fraud heart)

Links for 2017-02-04

Published February 4, 2017

  • LandSafe.org: if you aren't safe, we'll make noise for you

    a Dead Man's Switch for border crossings; if you are detained and cannot make a "checkin", it'll make noise on your behalf so your friends and family know what's happened

    (tags: safety borders dead-mans-switch landsafe tools)

  • "what's the inside story on these young fascist nazis"

    Excellent explanatory twitter thread explaining where this movement came from (ie chan sites):

    "what's the inside story on these young fascist nazis" a lot of them ended up in shock humor/lonely dude forums that nazi recruiters joined. this isn't a fucking puzzle box, we have all the history right here. dudes ended up on various sites crossing nerdy hobbies & resentment. a buncha fucking nerds had their various dipshit teenage beefs, many starting with resentment of women, and got radicalized. "how did they end up nazis?" a bunch of real nazis whispered poison in their ears while becoming their only community, their only "friends". they also used multiple levels of irony to make bigotry and fascism more acceptable by drowning it in "oh we're just joking"

    (tags: nazis fascism 4chan 8chan extremism politics)

Links for 2017-02-03

Published February 3, 2017

Links for 2017-01-31

Published January 31, 2017

  • Supporting our Muslim sisters and brothers in tech - Inside Intercom

    This is simply amazing:

    Intercom is a dual-citizen company of a sort. We’ve had two offices from day zero. I moved to San Francisco from Ireland in 2011 and now hold a green card and live here. I set up our headquarters here, which contains all of our business functions. My cofounders set up our Dublin office, where our research and development teams are based. And we have over 150 people in each office now. We’d like to use this special position we’re in to try help anyone in our industry feeling unsafe and hurt right now. If you’re in tech, and you’re from one of the newly unfavored countries, or even if you’re not, but you’re feeling persecuted for being Muslim, we’d like to help you consider Dublin as a place to live and work. [....] – If you decide you want to look into moving seriously, we’ll retain our Dublin immigration attorneys for you, and pay your legal bills with them, up to €5k. We’ll do this for as many as we can afford. We should be able to do this for at least 50 people.

    (tags: intercom muslim us-politics immigration dublin ireland)

Links for 2017-01-30

Published January 30, 2017

Links for 2017-01-27

Published January 27, 2017

Links for 2017-01-24

Published January 24, 2017

  • Sankey diagram - Wikipedia

    'a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. Sankey diagrams put a visual emphasis on the major transfers or flows within a system. They are helpful in locating dominant contributions to an overall flow. Often, Sankey diagrams show conserved quantities within defined system boundaries. [....] One of the most famous Sankey diagrams is Charles Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812. It is a flow map, overlaying a Sankey diagram onto a geographical map.'

    (tags: sankey diagrams dataviz data viz)

  • Toyota's Gill Pratt: "No one is close to achieving true level 5 [self-driving cars]"

    The most important thing to understand is that not all miles are the same. Most miles that we drive are very easy, and we can drive them while daydreaming or thinking about something else or having a conversation. But some miles are really, really hard, and so it’s those difficult miles that we should be looking at: How often do those show up, and can you ensure on a given route that the car will actually be able to handle the whole route without any problem at all? Level 5 autonomy says all miles will be handled by the car in an autonomous mode without any need for human intervention at all, ever. So if we’re talking to a company that says, “We can do full autonomy in this pre-mapped area and we’ve mapped almost every area,” that’s not Level 5. That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?” And then what you’ll usually find is a little bit of hedging on that too. The trouble with this Level 4 thing, or the “full autonomy” phrase, is that it covers a very wide spectrum of possible competencies. It covers “my car can run fully autonomously in a dedicated lane that has no other traffic,” which isn’t very different from a train on a set of rails, to “I can drive in Rome in the middle of the worst traffic they ever have there, while it’s raining," which is quite hard. Because the “full autonomy” phrase can mean such a wide range of things, you really have to ask the question, “What do you really mean, what are the actual circumstances?” And usually you’ll find that it’s geofenced for area, it may be restricted by how much traffic it can handle, for the weather, the time of day, things like that. So that’s the elaboration of why we’re not even close.

    (tags: autonomy driving self-driving cars ai robots toyota weather)

Links for 2017-01-18

Published January 18, 2017

  • NetGuard

    Excellent network monitor app for Android, comes recommended by @redacted in the ITC Slack. Inserts itself as a VPN to capture traffic, and looks like it should work well. Supports ad blocking using a hosts file.

    (tags: android ad-blocking ads netguard apps)

Links for 2017-01-17

Published January 17, 2017

Links for 2017-01-12

Published January 12, 2017

  • Facebook is censoring posts in Thailand that the government has deemed unsuitable | TechCrunch

    Dictator-friendly censorship tools? no probs!

    (tags: facebook censorship royalty thailand politics)

  • Who killed the curry house? | Bee Wilson | Life and style | The Guardian

    This is fascinating, re "authenticity" of food:

    The objection that curry house food was inauthentic was true, but also unfair. It’s worth asking what “authenticity” really means in this context, given that people in India – like humans everywhere – do not themselves eat a perfectly “authentic” diet. When I asked dozens of people, while on a recent visit to India, about their favourite comfort food, most of them – whether from Delhi, Bangalore or Mumbai – told me that what they really loved to eat, especially when drinking beer, was something called Indian-Chinese food. It is nothing a Chinese person would recognise, consisting of gloopy dishes of meat and noodles, thick with cornflour and soy sauce, but spiced with green chillis and vinegar to please the national palate. Indian-Chinese food – just like British curry house food – offers a salty night away from the usual home cooking. The difference is that Indian people accept Indian-Chinese food for the ersatz joy that it is, whereas many British curry house customers seem to have believed that recipe for their Bombay potatoes really did come from Bombay, and felt affronted to discover that it did not.

    (tags: curry indian-food food chinese-food indian-chinese-food authenticity)

  • Banks biased against black fraud victims

    We raised the issue of discrimination in 2011 with one of the banks and with the Commission for Racial Equality, but as no-one was keeping records, nothing could be proved, until today. How can this discrimination happen? Well, UK rules give banks a lot of discretion to decide whether to refund a victim, and the first responders often don’t know the full story. If your HSBC card was compromised by a skimmer on a Tesco ATM, there’s no guarantee that Tesco will have told anyone (unlike in America, where the law forces Tesco to tell you). And the fraud pattern might be something entirely new. So bank staff end up making judgement calls like “Is this customer telling the truth?” and “How much is their business worth to us?” This in turn sets the stage for biases and prejudices to kick in, however subconsciously. Add management pressure to cut costs, sometimes even bonuses for cutting them, and here we are.

    (tags: discrimination racism fraud uk banking skimming security fca)

Links for 2017-01-11

Published January 11, 2017

  • How a Machine Learns Prejudice - Scientific American

    Agreed, this is a big issue.

    If artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it probably won’t involve humans battling an army of robots that relentlessly apply Spock-like logic as they physically enslave us. Instead, the machine-learning algorithms that already let AI programs recommend a movie you’d like or recognize your friend’s face in a photo will likely be the same ones that one day deny you a loan, lead the police to your neighborhood or tell your doctor you need to go on a diet. And since humans create these algorithms, they're just as prone to biases that could lead to bad decisions—and worse outcomes. These biases create some immediate concerns about our increasing reliance on artificially intelligent technology, as any AI system designed by humans to be absolutely "neutral" could still reinforce humans’ prejudicial thinking instead of seeing through it.

    (tags: prejudice bias machine-learning ml data training race racism google facebook)

  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs

    Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handing, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored. Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I've decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs. I recommend my previous post for a more in-depth coverage on the pains of CSVs encodings and how the default tooling (Excel) will ruin your day.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf csv excel programming coding apis data encoding transfer falsehoods fail rfc4180)

Links for 2017-01-10

Published January 10, 2017

Links for 2017-01-09

Published January 9, 2017

Links for 2017-01-08

Published January 8, 2017

  • PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation

    This documentation covers parts of the PagerDuty Incident Response process. It is a cut-down version of our internal documentation, used at PagerDuty for any major incidents, and to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities. It provides information not only on preparing for an incident, but also what to do during and after. It is intended to be used by on-call practitioners and those involved in an operational incident response process (or those wishing to enact a formal incident response process).
    This is a really good set of processes -- quite similar to what we used in Amazon for high-severity outage response.

    (tags: ops process outages pagerduty incident-response incidents on-call)

  • The Irish Ether Drinking Craze

    Dr. Kelly, desperate to become intoxicated while maintaining The Pledge, realized that not only could ether vapors be inhaled, but liquid ether could be swallowed. Around 1845 he began consuming tiny glasses of ether, and then started dispensing these to his patients and friends as a nonalcoholic libation. It wasn't long before it became a popular beverage, with one priest going so far as to declare that ether was "a liquor on which a man could get drunk with a clean conscience." In some respects ingesting ether is less damaging to the system than severe alcohol intoxication. Its volatility - ether is a liquid at room temperature but a gas at body temperature -dramatically speeds its effects. Dr. Ernest Hart wrote that "the immediate effects of drinking ether are similar to those produced by alcohol, but everything takes place more rapidly; the stages of excitement, mental confusion, loss of muscular control, and loss of consciousness follow each other so quickly that they cannot be clearly separated." Recovery is similarly rapid. Not only were ether drunks who were picked up by the police on the street often completely sober by the time they reached the station, but they suffered no hangovers. Ether drinking spread rapidly throughout Ireland, particularly in the North, and the substance soon could be purchased from grocers, druggists, publicans, and even traveling salesmen. Because ether was produced in bulk for certain industrial uses, it could also be obtained quite inexpensively. Its low price and rapid action meant than even the poorest could afford to get drunk several times a day on it. By the 1880s ether, distilled in England or Scotland, was being imported and widely distributed to even the smallest villages. Many Irish market towns would "reek of the mawkish fumes of the drug" on fair days when "its odor seems to cling to the very hedges and houses for some time."

    (tags: ether history ireland northern-ireland ulster drugs bizarre)

Links for 2017-01-07

Published January 7, 2017

  • Hacking the Attention Economy

    Can't help feeling danah boyd is hitting the nail on the head here:

    The Internet has long been used for gaslighting, and trolls have long targeted adversaries. What has shifted recently is the scale of the operation, the coordination of the attacks, and the strategic agenda of some of the players. For many who are learning these techniques, it’s no longer simply about fun, nor is it even about the lulz. It has now become about acquiring power. A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.

    (tags: danah-boyd news facebook social-media gaslighting trolls 4chan lulz gamergate fake-news)

  • World's top 100 cocktails of 2016

    per Difford's Guide -- Amaretto Sour, Margarita, Bramble, Espresso Martini, Old-Fashioned, Negroni, White Lady and Manhattan up there.

    (tags: cocktails diffords 2016 review booze drinks)

Links for 2017-01-04

Published January 4, 2017

  • Raising the Roof: Comments on the recent Newgrange ‘roof-box’ controversy

    Instead of discussing recent site visits or photographs we’ll be looking at a recent controversy sparked by comments about the reconstruction of Newgrange and, in particular, three claims made in the media by an Irish archaeologist; 1. That the “roof-box” at Newgrange may not be an original feature, instead it was “fabricated” and has “not a shred of authenticity” 2. That two vitally important structural stones, both decorated with megalithic art, from Newgrange were lost after the excavation and 3. That the photographic evidence that backs up the existing restoration is either inaccessible or never existed at all. I hope to show why we can be sure none of these claims are sustainable and that in fact the winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange is an original and central feature of the tomb.

    (tags: history newgrange archaeology solstice ireland megalithic)

  • Leap Smear  |  Public NTP  |  Google Developers

    Google offers public NTP service with leap smearing -- I didn't realise! (thanks Keith)

    (tags: google clocks time ntp leap-smearing leap-second ops)

Links for 2017-01-03

Published January 3, 2017

Links for 2016-12-15

Published December 15, 2016

  • The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU

    The recent movement to get all traffic encrypted has of course been great for the Internet. But the use of encryption in these protocols is different than in TLS. In TLS, the goal was to ensure the privacy and integrity of the payload. It's almost axiomatic that third parties should not be able to read or modify the web page you're loading over HTTPS. QUIC and TOU go further. They encrypt the control information, not just the payload. This provides no meaningful privacy or security benefits. Instead the apparent goal is to break the back of middleboxes [0]. The idea is that TCP can't evolve due to middleboxes and is pretty much fully ossified. They interfere with connections in all kinds of ways, like stripping away unknown TCP options or dropping packets with unknown TCP options or with specific rare TCP flags set. The possibilities for breakage are endless, and any protocol extensions have to jump through a lot of hoops to try to minimize the damage.

    (tags: quic tou protocols http tls security internet crypto privacy firewalls debugging operability)

Links for 2016-12-14

Published December 14, 2016

  • Slicer: Auto-sharding for datacenter applications

    Paper from Google describing one of their internal building block services:

    A general purpose sharding service. I normally think of sharding as something that happens within a (typically data) service, not as a general purpose infrastructure service. What exactly is Slicer then? It has two key components: a data plane that acts as an affinity-aware load balancer, with affinity managed based on application-specified keys; and a control plane that monitors load and instructs applications processes as to which keys they should be serving at any one point in time.  In this way, the decisions regarding how to balance keys across application instances can be outsourced to the Slicer service rather than building this logic over and over again for each individual back-end service. Slicer is focused exclusively on the problem of balancing load across a given set of  backend tasks, other systems are responsible for adding and removing tasks.
    interesting.

    (tags: google sharding slicer architecture papers)

  • Cherami: Uber Engineering’s Durable and Scalable Task Queue in Go - Uber Engineering Blog

    a competing-consumer messaging queue that is durable, fault-tolerant, highly available and scalable. We achieve durability and fault-tolerance by replicating messages across storage hosts, and high availability by leveraging the append-only property of messaging queues and choosing eventual consistency as our basic model. Cherami is also scalable, as the design does not have single bottleneck. [...] Cherami is completely written in Go, a language that makes building highly performant and concurrent system software a lot of fun. Additionally, Cherami uses several libraries that Uber has already open sourced: TChannel for RPC and Ringpop for health checking and group membership. Cherami depends on several third-party open source technologies: Cassandra for metadata storage, RocksDB for message storage, and many other third-party Go packages that are available on GitHub. We plan to open source Cherami in the near future.

    (tags: cherami uber queueing tasks queues architecture scalability go cassandra rocksdb)

  • The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. - The New York Times

    This is scary shit. It's amazing how Russia has weaponised transparency, but I guess it's not new to observers of "kompromat": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat

    (tags: kompromat russia cyberpower cyberwar security trump us-politics dnc)

Links for 2016-12-12

Published December 12, 2016

  • Booking.com, MySQL and UTF-8

    good preso from Percona Live 2015 on the messiness of MySQL vs UTF-8 and utf8mb4

    (tags: utf-8 utf8mb4 mysql storage databases slides booking.com character-sets)

  • tdunning/t-digest

    A new data structure for accurate on-line accumulation of rank-based statistics such as quantiles and trimmed means. The t-digest algorithm is also very parallel friendly making it useful in map-reduce and parallel streaming applications. The t-digest construction algorithm uses a variant of 1-dimensional k-means clustering to product a data structure that is related to the Q-digest. This t-digest data structure can be used to estimate quantiles or compute other rank statistics. The advantage of the t-digest over the Q-digest is that the t-digest can handle floating point values while the Q-digest is limited to integers. With small changes, the t-digest can handle any values from any ordered set that has something akin to a mean. The accuracy of quantile estimates produced by t-digests can be orders of magnitude more accurate than those produced by Q-digests in spite of the fact that t-digests are more compact when stored on disk.
    Super-nice feature is that it's mergeable, so amenable to parallel usage across multiple hosts if required. Java implementation, ASL licensing.

    (tags: data-structures algorithms java t-digest statistics quantiles percentiles aggregation digests estimation ranking)

Links for 2016-12-05

Published December 5, 2016

  • A Yale history professor's 20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency — Quartz

    Good advice -- let's hope it doesn't come to this. Example: '17. Watch out for the paramilitaries: When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.'

    (tags: trump activism government politics us-politics right-wing history hitler nazis fascism)

  • Commentary: The ‘Irish’ Startup Attribution Problem

    Why don't Irish tech startup activity show up on a EU-wide comparisons? Turns out we tend to transition to a US-based model, with US-based management and EU-based operations and engineering, like $work does:

    Successful Irish tech companies have a skewed geographic profile. This presents a data gathering problem for the data companies but its also a strong indicator of the market reality for Irish startups. The size of the local market and a focus on software business in particular means many Irish startups are transitioning to the US (some earlier and with more commitment than others), and getting backed by a spectrum of local and international VCs.
    Correcting for this put Ireland's tech venture investment in the second half of 2014 at $125m, midway between Sweden and Finland, 8th in Europe overall.

    (tags: ireland tech startups investment vc europe eu)

Links for 2016-12-02

Published December 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-29

Published November 29, 2016

  • Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy

    Donald Trump's media strategy as a form of Surkovian control via post-truth 'destabilised perception', through deliberate flooding with fake news:

    By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible. When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision, there is no common ground to be reached and no incentive to look for it. To men like Surkov, that is exactly as it should be. Government policy should not be set through democratic oversight; instead, the government should “manage” democracy, ensuring that people can express themselves without having any influence over the machinations of the state. According to a 2011 openDemocracy article by Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, Surkov is “considered the main architect of what is colloquially known as ‘managed democracy,’ the administrative management of party and electoral politics.” “Surkov’s philosophy is that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free, whereas in fact they are managed,” writes Sakwa. “In his view, the only freedom is ‘artistic freedom.’”

    (tags: post-truth lies donald-trump surkov breitbart pr media news propaganda fake-news)

Links for 2016-11-28

Published November 28, 2016

Links for 2016-11-24

Published November 24, 2016

Links for 2016-11-22

Published November 22, 2016

Links for 2016-11-21

Published November 21, 2016

Links for 2016-11-18

Published November 18, 2016

Links for 2016-11-17

Published November 17, 2016

Links for 2016-11-09

Published November 9, 2016

  • Pure Pharmacy

    a low-cost online vendor in Ireland, recommended by @irldexter on ITS (along with webdoctor.ie): 'For basic consultations I halved the cost €55 to engage a GP with https://www.webdoctor.ie/ down to €25 (for limited domains) and after paying €8.48 and €9.48 respectively for a Ventolin inhaler, I now get them for €3.50 at http://www.purepharmacy.ie/ (closer to mainland EU costs). I also benchmarked my parents medicine costs which worked out 40% cheaper too.'

    (tags: recommendations pharmacy ireland doctors health medicine)

Links for 2016-11-08

Published November 8, 2016

  • Rents dwarf Celtic Tiger era with ‘disastrous effect’ on society

    “The scale of the challenge here remains depressing,” says the report. “It has never been viable to build apartment blocks in the vast majority of this country.” [...] The report notes that the rise in living costs of almost three quarters in less than five years is “a symptom of strong demand for housing” as economic recovery continues and the population grows. “But there is nothing inevitable about housing costs rising with demand,” it says. “That only happens when supply fails to respond, and the complete absence of any meaningful level of construction over the past five years is a systemic failure in desperate need of policy solutions. “There is no more urgent task facing the Minister for Housing, his department and advisers, and the Housing Agency, than understanding why the costs of building, and building apartments in particular, is so dramatically out of line with our own incomes and indeed with the cost in other countries.”

    (tags: daft housing ireland fail homes rent building)

  • Video Games Are Boring

    I'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. As Miranda July said, "all I ever wanted to know is how other people are making it through life." I want to make games that help other people understand life. We are all overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change. The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming and it's causing us to dig in and try to find some peace by shutting each other out. On all sides of the political spectrum we've stopped listening to each other and I fear we are all leaning toward fascist thinking. We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant.

    (tags: essay feminism society culture games gaming life art)

Links for 2016-11-07

Published November 7, 2016

Links for 2016-11-05

Published November 5, 2016

  • Jeff Erickson's Algorithms, Etc.

    This page contains lecture notes and other course materials for various algorithms classes I have taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The notes are numbered in the order I cover the material in a typical undergraduate class, wtih notes on more advanced material (indicated by the symbol ?) interspersed appropriately. [...] In addition to the algorithms notes I have been maintaining since 1999, this page also contains new notes on "Models of Computation", which cover a small subset of the material normally taught in undergraduate courses in formal languages and automata. I wrote these notes for a new junior-level course on "Algorithms and Models of Computation" that Lenny Pitt and I developed, which is now required for all undergraduate computer science and computer engineering majors at UIUC.
    Via Tony Finch

    (tags: via:fanf book cs algorithms jeff-erickson uiuc)

Links for 2016-11-04

Published November 4, 2016

Links for 2016-11-03

Published November 3, 2016

Links for 2016-11-02

Published November 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-01

Published November 1, 2016

Links for 2016-10-31

Published October 31, 2016

  • Here's Why Facebook's Trending Algorithm Keeps Promoting Fake News - BuzzFeed News

    Kalina Bontcheva leads the EU-funded PHEME project working to compute the veracity of social media content. She said reducing the amount of human oversight for Trending heightens the likelihood of failures, and of the algorithm being fooled by people trying to game it. “I think people are always going to try and outsmart these algorithms — we’ve seen this with search engine optimization,” she said. “I’m sure that once in a while there is going to be a very high-profile failure.” Less human oversight means more reliance on the algorithm, which creates a new set of concerns, according to Kate Starbird, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who has been using machine learning and other technology to evaluate the accuracy of rumors and information during events such as the Boston bombings. “[Facebook is] making an assumption that we’re more comfortable with a machine being biased than with a human being biased, because people don’t understand machines as well,” she said.

    (tags: facebook news gaming adversarial-classification pheme truth social-media algorithms ml machine-learning media)

Links for 2016-10-27

Published October 27, 2016

  • seriot.ch - Parsing JSON is a Minefield ????

    Crockford chose not to version [the] JSON definition: 'Probably the boldest design decision I made was to not put a version number on JSON so there is no mechanism for revising it. We are stuck with JSON: whatever it is in its current form, that’s it.' Yet JSON is defined in at least six different documents.
    "Boldest". ffs. :facepalm:

    (tags: bold courage json parsing coding data formats interchange fail standards confusion)

  • mjg59 | Fixing the IoT isn't going to be easy

    We can't easily fix the already broken devices, we can't easily stop more broken devices from being shipped and we can't easily guarantee that we can fix future devices that end up broken. The only solution I see working at all is to require ISPs to cut people off, and that's going to involve a great deal of pain. The harsh reality is that this is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg, and things are going to get much worse before they get any better.

    (tags: iot security internet isps devices)

Links for 2016-10-25

Published October 25, 2016

  • Founder of Google X has no concept of how machine learning as policing tool risks reinforcing implicit bias

    This is shocking:

    At the end of the panel on artificial intelligence, a young black woman asked [Sebastian Thrun, CEO of the education startup Udacity, who is best known for founding Google X] whether bias in machine learning “could perpetuate structural inequality at a velocity much greater than perhaps humans can.” She offered the example of criminal justice, where “you have a machine learning tool that can identify criminals, and criminals may disproportionately be black because of other issues that have nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of these people, so the machine learns that black people are criminals, and that’s not necessarily the outcome that I think we want.” In his reply, Thrun made it sound like her concern was one about political correctness, not unconscious bias. “Statistically what the machines do pick up are patterns and sometimes we don’t like these patterns. Sometimes they’re not politically correct,” Thrun said. “When we apply machine learning methods sometimes the truth we learn really surprises us, to be honest, and I think it’s good to have a dialogue about this.”
    "the truth"! Jesus. We are fucked

    (tags: google googlex bias racism implicit-bias machine-learning ml sebastian-thrun udacity inequality policing crime)

Links for 2016-10-24

Published October 24, 2016

  • Paypal 2FA Bypass

    Holy shit.

    Using a proxy, remove “securityQuestion0” and “securityQuestion1” from the post data.
    Massive facepalm.

    (tags: paypal 2fa security fail web html)

  • ArquitecturB

    amazing architectural-oddities Tumblr (via Present and Correct)

    (tags: tumblr art photography architecture weird odd)

  • Management levels

    I’ve had the privilege of experiencing a few different management levels (responsibilities? jobs?) at Etsy since I’ve joined. At each stage, I felt like the job of being a manager totally changed. What I did day-to-day changed, what was hard about it changed, how I measured my own success changed, and though I feel like the experiences built on one another, it continues to be an enormous shift in brainpower each time the gig changes a bit. Given how intangible (and often hidden) management work can be, I’ve outlined some highlights of what my work has been like as a manager over the last four years. (Obvious, major caveat: this is just my experience, and there’s lots in here that is unique to this particular work environment, hierarchy, requirements, and challenges!)

    (tags: business engineering management career lara-hogan managing)

  • JG Ballard, on the "pram in the hall"

    Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally - it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.

    (tags: writing creativity jg-ballard quotes pram-in-the-hall children kids parenting biography)

Links for 2016-10-21

Published October 21, 2016

Links for 2016-10-20

Published October 20, 2016

Links for 2016-10-18

Published October 18, 2016

  • _Airport Noise NIMBYism: An Empirical Investigation_

    'Generally, a very small number of people account for a disproportionately high share of the total number of noise complaints. In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.' Somebody needs help.

    (tags: airports noise nimby nimbyism complaints dc)

Links for 2016-10-17

Published October 17, 2016

Links for 2016-10-13

Published October 13, 2016

Links for 2016-10-12

Published October 12, 2016

Links for 2016-10-11

Published October 11, 2016

Links for 2016-10-07

Published October 7, 2016

  • How Fucked Up is Your Management?

    Oh dear.

    Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following: We have an unlimited vacation policy; We don’t do regular 1:1s, but we have open office hours/are super available if anyone wants to chat; We don’t have a process for interviewing, we just hire awesome people when we meet them; We super care about diversity, but we don’t want to lower the bar so we just hire the best person for the job even if it means diversity suffers; We don’t have defined levels and career paths for our employees, we’re a really flat org; We don’t have formal managers for every staff member, everyone just gets their work done; We don’t have, like, HR HR, but our recruiter/office manager/only female employee is super good if you want someone to talk to; We don’t do performance improvement plans for employees that are struggling. We just have a super honest conversation about how they aren’t a good fit and fire them; We would have some hard explaining to do if our salary list accidentally became public.

    (tags: startups management culture work vacation hiring office-hours managers diversity careers hr)

  • Google and Monotype launch Noto, an open-source typeface family for all the world’s languages

    Great font factoid: 'The name “Noto” comes from the little squares that show when a font is not supported by a computer. This are often referred to as “tofu”, because of their shape, therefore the font is short for No Tofu.'

    (tags: tofu fonts i18n google design typography unicode)

Links for 2016-10-06

Published October 6, 2016

  • Simple testing can prevent most critical failures

    Specifically, the following 3 classes of errors were implicated in 92% of the major production outages in this study and could have been caught with simple code review:

    Error handlers that ignore errors (or just contain a log statement); error handlers with “TODO” or “FIXME” in the comment; and error handlers that catch an abstract exception type (e.g. Exception or Throwable in Java) and then take drastic action such as aborting the system.
    (Interestingly, the latter was a particular favourite approach of some misplaced "fail fast"/"crash-only software design" dogma in Amazon. I wasn't a fan)

    (tags: fail-fast crash-only-software coding design bugs code-review review outages papers logging errors exceptions)

Links for 2016-10-05

Published October 5, 2016

  • We are witnessing nothing less than a Tory reformation | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian

    An excellent explanation of what is going on in the UK right now. What a nightmare:

    Finally there are the self-styled buccaneers of the free-trade seas. Boris Johnson would probably cast himself as Sir Walter Raleigh – polymath, wordsmith, adventurer. That leaves Liam Fox to play Sir Francis Drake, looking for domestic glory in global circumnavigation but seen from abroad as a pirate. This is all myth and fantasy, of course. But parties have always been sustained by internal mythologies, and the task of exiting the EU is so complicated and fraught with danger that fantasy becomes a necessary comfort. As one former minister says of the puritan choristers: “They have spent their lives working towards this dream. Of course they don’t want to accept that it’s a nightmare.” Tory pro-Europeans are in the impossible position of using rational argument against faith. If they counsel compromise on migration or the single market, they are accused of talking Britain down or trying to refight the referendum. They have few reinforcements across the political water. Labour is a shambles. The Lib Dems are puny in parliament. Scotland has its own distinct politics, and in Nicola Sturgeon its own remainian queen with her own independence agenda. The Tories do not speak for all of England, but in the absence of credible opposition they feel as if they do, and will act accordingly. To those millions who did not vote to leave the EU, the message is clear: you are free to pray for whatever you like. Your antique rites will be tolerated. But do not expect your concerns to be represented in the court of Queen Theresa. Be humble instead. Swallow your doubts and take a pew in the reformed national church of Brexit.

    (tags: reformation uk politics brexit eu puritanism fanaticism)

  • The Technical Debt Quadrant

    Martin Fowler's take on the 4 kinds of tech debt

    (tags: programming design tech-debt technical-debt deadlines product ship)

Links for 2016-10-04

Published October 4, 2016

  • Charity Majors responds to the CleverTap Mongo outage war story

    This is a great blog post, spot on:

    You can’t just go “dudes it’s faster” and jump off a cliff.  This shit is basic.  Test real production workloads. Have a rollback plan.  (Not for *10 days* … try a month or two.)
    The only thing I'd nitpick on is that it's all very well to say "buy my book" or "come see me talk at Blahcon", but a good blog post or webpage would be thousands of times more useful.

    (tags: databases stateful-services services ops mongodb charity-majors rollback state storage testing dba)

  • Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

    Excellent talk. I love this analogy for ML applied to real-world data which affects people:

    Treating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help. Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.
    Particularly apposite today given Y Combinator's revelation that they use an AI bot to help 'sift admission applications', and don't know what criteria it's using: https://twitter.com/aprjoy/status/783032128653107200

    (tags: culture ethics privacy technology surveillance ml machine-learning bias algorithms software control)

Links for 2016-10-02

Published October 2, 2016

  • The ultimate off-site backup

    So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.
    As jwz says: 'The Rosetta Disc is now safely installed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.'

    (tags: rosetta long-now history language comets solar-system space)

Links for 2016-09-30

Published September 30, 2016

  • Airflow/AMI/ASG nightly-packaging workflow

    Some tantalising discussion on twitter of an Airflow + AMI + ASG workflow for ML packaging: 'We build models using Airflow. We deploy new models as AMIs where each AMI is model + scoring code. The AMI is hence a version of code + model at a point in time : #immutable_infrastructure. It's natural for Airflow to build & deploy the model+code with each Airflow DAG Run corresponding to a versioned AMI. if there's a problem, we can simply roll back to the previous AMI & identify the problematic model building Dag run. Since we use ASGs, Airflow can execute a rolling deploy of new AMIs. We could also have it do a validation & ASG rollback of the AMI if validation fails. Airflow is being used for reliable Model build+validation+deployment.'

    (tags: ml packaging airflow asg ami deployment ops infrastructure rollback)

Links for 2016-09-29

Published September 29, 2016

Links for 2016-09-28

Published September 28, 2016

  • Snooping powers saw 13 people wrongly held on child sex charges in the UK

    Sorry, Daily Mail article --

    Blunders in the use of controversial snooping powers meant 13 people were wrongly arrested last year on suspicion of being paedophiles. Another four individuals had their homes searched by detectives following errors in attempts to access communications data, a watchdog revealed yesterday. Other mistakes also included people unconnected to an investigation being visited by police and delayed welfare checks on vulnerable people including children whose lives were at risk, said the Interception of Communications Commissioner. [....] A large proportion of the errors involved an internet address which was wrongly linked to an individual. Of the 23 serious mistakes, 14 were human errors and the other nine ‘technical system errors’.

    (tags: surveillance ip-addresses privacy uk daily-mail snooping interception errors)

Links for 2016-09-27

Published September 27, 2016

  • The best thing to mark National Stalking Awareness Week would be to scrap the law on stalking

    "The Secret Barrister" explains a classic case of empty-gesture lawmaking in the UK:

    in 2012, the coalition government, in a fit of virtue signalling, announced a bold plan to offer extra protection to victims of stalking, following a rash of reported cases where obsessive nutjobs had slipped through the net. Hence, via the 2012 Act, section 2A was shoved into the Protection from Harassment Act, creating a shiny new offence of stalking. What is stalking, you ask? Well here’s the clever bit. Stalking is…”a course of conduct which amounts to harassment…and [where] the acts or omissions involved are ones associated with stalking“. To inject some colour into the dull circularity of the definition, section 2A(3) provides “examples of acts or omissions associated with stalking”. In other words, you need to prove that the defendant is guilty of both harassment and stalking, in order to convict them of stalking. Therefore, proving stalking is by definition harder for the prosecution than simply proving harassment. And what do you get if you opt for the harder road? What prize awaits the victorious prosecutor who has slogged her way through the additional evidential burden thrust upon her by section 2A? The answer is….nothing. Or at least, nothing more than if you successfully prosecuted for harassment. The maximum sentence in each case is 6 months’ imprisonment. It is the very definition of empty gesture legislating. Section 2A is so very pointlessly pointless that I want urgently to go back in time to the day when then-crime prevention minister Jeremy Browne was hubristically prattling on about what a difference this law is going to make and shove a whoopee pie right up his schnoz. Section 2A does nothing other than create a new offence that is harder to prove than an existing offence that prohibits the same conduct, solely, it seems, to allow for the drawing of an entirely semantic distinction between “harassment” and “stalking”.

    (tags: harrassment stalking law legislation uk police crime prosecution)

Links for 2016-09-26

Published September 26, 2016

  • "Better truck design could save hundreds of pedestrian and cyclist lives"

    European transport group, Transport and Environment, said that the Loughborough study shows that better design “could save hundreds of pedestrian and cyclists’ lives”. It added that the study “finds huge differences in the direct vision – what drivers can see with their own eyes – of best and worst-in-class trucks in all categories, and that ‘low-entry cabs’ like the Mercedes Econic out perform all of today’s best performing vehicles.” A P-Series truck, from truck maker Scania, was rated at the best of its class with zero blind spots — this could go a long way to explaining why the makers of a Road Safety Authority video using another P-Series truck reportedly had to fake blind spots last year. Mandatory extra mirrors has been EU policy to try to reduce collisions with people cycling and walking but researchers point out that blind spots remain on many trucks and improving direct vision may be a better policy than improving indirect vision using mirrors. [...] The EU currently has a deadline of 2028 for improved vision in trucks but Transport and Environment said: “Given that better vision cabs are already available on the market and in all market segments (best in class, smarter configurations, low entry vehicles) a 2028 deadline is not justifiable.”

    (tags: cycling safety trucks law scania roads pedestrians)

  • How to Quantify Scalability

    good page on the Universal Scalability Law and how to apply it

    (tags: usl performance scalability concurrency capacity measurement excel equations metrics)

  • Artist Tricks Tourists With Elaborate Monument To Staten Island Ferry Octopus Attack

    'You probably don't know much about the Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum, which honors the 400 victims who died when a giant octopus attacked the Cornelius G. Kolff, a Staten Island Ferry boat, on Nov. 22, 1963. That isn't because the event was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK that same day—it's because, as you may have guessed based on the word "tricks" in the headline, there was no such octopus-induced tragedy.'

    (tags: ferries staten-island octopi funny pranks tourism)

Links for 2016-09-25

Published September 25, 2016

  • iPhones4Autism

    great idea -- donate old, obsolete iPhone 4/4s phones to a charity which repurposes them for autistic/non-verbal kids

    (tags: autism communication health phones recycling charity iphones)

  • Brian Krebs - The Democratization of Censorship

    Events of the past week have convinced me that one of the fastest-growing censorship threats on the Internet today comes not from nation-states, but from super-empowered individuals who have been quietly building extremely potent cyber weapons with transnational reach. More than 20 years after Gilmore first coined [his] turn of phrase, his most notable quotable has effectively been inverted — “Censorship can in fact route around the Internet.” The Internet can’t route around censorship when the censorship is all-pervasive and armed with, for all practical purposes, near-infinite reach and capacity.

    (tags: brian-krebs censorship ddos internet web politics crime security iot)

Links for 2016-09-21

Published September 21, 2016

  • "The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise…"

    I love this story -- a wealthy couple buy a vineyard in the Languedoc for its theoretically-optimal microclimate for wine-making. Defying what one's preconceptions would expect (mine included!), the results were fantastic.

    In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead. If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.

    (tags: books science languedoc wine academia microclimates preconceptions)

  • The Problem With Cul-de-Sac Design - CityLab

    “A lot of people feel that they want to live in a cul-de-sac, they feel like it’s a safer place to be,” Marshall says. “The reality is yes, you’re safer – if you never leave your cul-de-sac. But if you actually move around town like a normal person, your town as a whole is much more dangerous.” This is the opposite of what traffic engineers (and home buyers) have thought for decades. And it’s just the beginning of what we’re now starting to understand about the relative advantages of going back to the way we designed communities a century ago. Marshall and Garrick took the same group of California cities and also examined all their minutely classified street networks for the amount of driving associated with them. On average, they found, people who live in more sparse, tree-like communities drive about 18 percent more than people who live in dense grids. And that’s a conservative calculation.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: cul-de-sacs cities city design layout simcity grids safety)

Links for 2016-09-20

Published September 20, 2016

  • Osso

    "A modern standard for event-oriented data". Avro schema, events have time and type, schema is external and not part of the Avro stream. 'a modern standard for representing event-oriented data in high-throughput operational systems. It uses existing open standards for schema definition and serialization, but adds semantic meaning and definition to make integration between systems easy, while still being size- and processing-efficient. An Osso event is largely use case agnostic, and can represent a log message, stack trace, metric sample, user action taken, ad display or click, generic HTTP event, or otherwise. Every event has a set of common fields as well as optional key/value attributes that are typically event type-specific.'

    (tags: osso events schema data interchange formats cep event-processing architecture)

Links for 2016-09-13

Published September 13, 2016

Links for 2016-09-12

Published September 12, 2016

  • A Loud Sound Just Shut Down a Bank's Data Center for 10 Hours | Motherboard

    The purpose of the drill was to see how the data center's fire suppression system worked. Data centers typically rely on inert gas to protect the equipment in the event of a fire, as the substance does not chemically damage electronics, and the gas only slightly decreases the temperature within the data center. The gas is stored in cylinders, and is released at high velocity out of nozzles uniformly spread across the data center. According to people familiar with the system, the pressure at ING Bank's data center was higher than expected, and produced a loud sound when rapidly expelled through tiny holes (think about the noise a steam engine releases). The bank monitored the sound and it was very loud, a source familiar with the system told us. “It was as high as their equipment could monitor, over 130dB”. Sound means vibration, and this is what damaged the hard drives. The HDD cases started to vibrate, and the vibration was transmitted to the read/write heads, causing them to go off the data tracks. “The inert gas deployment procedure has severely and surprisingly affected several servers and our storage equipment,” ING said in a press release.

    (tags: ing hardware outages hard-drives fire fire-suppression vibration data-centers storage)

Links for 2016-09-08

Published September 8, 2016

  • Basetrip

    'All the information you need while traveling including visa requirements, currency, electricity, communication info and more.'

    (tags: travel reference visas holidays)

  • The Internet Thinks I’m Still Pregnant - The New York Times

    This is pretty awful -- an accidental, careless and brutal side effect of marketers passing on sensitive info to one another, without respect for their users' privacy: 'I hadn’t realized, however, that when I had entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with marketing groups targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along. Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula bearing the note: “We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.”'

    (tags: privacy pregnancy miscarriage data-protection apps babies parenthood)

Links for 2016-09-07

Published September 7, 2016

Links for 2016-09-06

Published September 6, 2016

Links for 2016-09-05

Published September 5, 2016

  • Auto Scaling for EC2 Spot Fleets

    'we are enhancing the Spot Fleet model with the addition of Auto Scaling. You can now arrange to scale your fleet up and down based on a Amazon CloudWatch metric. The metric can originate from an AWS service such as EC2, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Alternatively, your application can publish a custom metric and you can use it to drive the automated scaling.'

    (tags: asg auto-scaling ec2 spot-fleets ops scaling)

  • How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow

    Unfortunately the usual ML problem arises at the end:

    One of the current challenges with deep learning is that you need to have a large number of training datasets. To train the model, Makoto spent about three months taking 7,000 pictures of cucumbers sorted by his mother, but it’s probably not enough. "When I did a validation with the test images, the recognition accuracy exceeded 95%. But if you apply the system with real use cases, the accuracy drops down to about 70%. I suspect the neural network model has the issue of "overfitting" (the phenomenon in neural network where the model is trained to fit only to the small training dataset) because of the insufficient number of training images."
    In other words, as with ML since we were using it in SpamAssassin, maintaining the training corpus becomes a really big problem. :(

    (tags: google machine-learning tensorflow cucumbers deep-learning ml)

  • Northland man denies burning down house but insurer refuses to pay out

    This is a mad story. The insurance company is accusing a guy in NZ of using remote-login software from 400km away to trigger a "print" command to a complicated Heath Robinson setup in order to light a fire to burn down his house

    (tags: fraud insurance weird nz crime printers remote-login)

Links for 2016-08-19

Published August 19, 2016

  • How the NSA snooped on encrypted Internet traffic for a decade | Ars Technica

    In a revelation that shows how the National Security Agency was able to systematically spy on many Cisco Systems customers for the better part of a decade, researchers have uncovered an attack that remotely extracts decryption keys from the company's now-decommissioned line of PIX firewalls. The discovery is significant because the attack code, dubbed BenignCertain, worked on PIX versions Cisco released in 2002 and supported through 2009. Even after Cisco stopped providing PIX bug fixes in July 2009, the company continued offering limited service and support for the product for an additional four years. Unless PIX customers took special precautions, virtually all of them were vulnerable to attacks that surreptitiously eavesdropped on their VPN traffic.

    (tags: nsa hacks exploits pix cisco security)

Links for 2016-08-18

Published August 18, 2016

  • NPR Website To Get Rid Of Comments

    Sadly, this makes sense and I'd have to agree.

    Mike Durio, of Phoenix, seemed to sum it up in an email to my office back in April. "Have you considered doing away with the comments sections, or tighter moderation?" he wrote. "The comments have devolved into the Punch-and-Judy-Fest of moronic, un-illuminating observations and petty insults I've seen on other pretty much every other Internet site that allows comments." He added, "This is not in keeping with NPR's take-a-step-back, take-a-deep-breath reporting," and noted, "Now, thread hijacking and personal insults are becoming the stock in trade. Frequent posters use the forums to duke it out with one another." A user named Mary, from Raleigh, N.C., wrote to implore: "Remove the comments section from your articles. The rude, hateful, racist, judgmental comments far outweigh those who may want to engage in some intelligent sideline conversation about the actual subject of the article. I am appalled at the amount of 'free hate' that is found on a website that represents honest and unbiased reporting such as NPR. What are you really gaining from all of these rabid comments other than proof that a sad slice of humanity that preys on the weak while spreading their hate?"

    (tags: abuse comments npr racism web discussion)

  • Meeting the Free Speech Crusaders Who Want to End Political Correctness | VICE | United Kingdom

    The 'Young British Heritage Society', aka gam*rgate as a college society

    (tags: gamergate funny sad trolls ybhs reactionaries uk politics)

Links for 2016-08-16

Published August 16, 2016

  • The Mattress Industry is One Big Scam

    yes, yes it is

    (tags: mattresses scams buying shopping consumer)

  • Unchecked exceptions for IO considered harmful - Google Groups

    Insightful thread from the mechanical sympathy group, regarding the checked-vs-unchecked style question:

    Peter Lawrey: Our view is that Checked Exception makes more sense for library writers as they can explicitly pass off errors to the caller. As a caller, especially if you are new to a product, you don't understand the exceptions or what you can do about them.  They add confusion. For this reason we use checked exceptions internally in the lower layers and try to avoid passing them in our higher level interfaces. Note: A high percentage of our fall backs are handling iOExceptons and recovering from them. [....] My experience is that the more complex and layered your libraries the more essential checked exceptions become. I see them as essential for scalability of your software.

    (tags: exceptions java style coding checked-exceptions ioexceptions io error-handling)