Hacker News 200

Ponzi.io

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 11:19:00 -0800

Comments: "Ponzi.io"

The Egg

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 14:34:05 -0800

Comments: "The Egg"

URL: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

style.org > The Weight of Rain

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 14:48:05 -0800

Comments: "style.org > The Weight of Rain"

URL: http://style.org/visualized/

Feb. 8, 2014

Below is a summary of my talk yesterday at the second Visualized conference, which was held at the Times Center.

I’m writing from memory so this is only an approximation of what I said.

Good morning!

My name is Jonathan Corum and I work upstairs.

CUBE

I know many of you were at the Dome last night, but I wanted to start this morning with a Cube.

Behind me, behind this screen, is a 70-foot cube planted with birch trees.

HMWhite

And because it’s a cube it casts these deep, very linear shadows.

HMWhite

And it’s a fitting backdrop for this conference because the position of the trees is based on a visualization.

A visualization of average sunlight during the growing season.

And when I walk in the building in the morning, it’s a nice reminder that visualizations don’t have to be one way, from the real world to print or the real world to the screen.

Sometimes a visualization can escape that screen and find its way back into the natural world.

Here are the trees as they appeared earlier this week, on Monday ...

... and here’s how they looked last October, the week that the speakers were announced for this conference.

And here are the days in between.

I took three photos every time I entered the building, so this is about three and a half months condensed into one minute.

I’ll let this run ... we’re entering November ... December ... January ... and finally approaching this week.

Notice that this kind of progression doesn’t require a lot of explanation. We all have a deep understanding of the passage of time and the changing seasons: leaves falling, snow melting, time passing.

So if I was trying to make some kind of graphic out of this, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time explaining that leaves change color and fall, or snow melts, because I expect the reader to already have that understanding.

But I might point out something like this, a small change that jumped out at me.

This image is from late November, during Thanksgiving week. And this is the same image, 24 hours later.

I’ll show that again. Notice how every living thing — every green thing — is pressed down a few inches?

That’s the weight of rain.

So when I’m looking at data, or working on an explanatory graphic, these are the moments I’m looking for.

Little “Aha!” moments that I can point to, and say “Look here, something happened,” and then try to explain.

Often those small moments can help lead a reader into the graphic, or help to explain the whole.

MARS

The trees are a simple example, and it only took a few seconds a day to take the pictures.

But for the past six months I’ve been trying to do something similar ... on Mars.

Specifically right here, in Gale Crater.

Many of you may know that, a year and a half ago, NASA dropped a rover into this crater, and it’s been driving around and exploring ever since.

This is roughly what it looks like. The rover is called Curiosity, and it’s about the size of a car.

And it sends back lots of data, much of it in the form of imagery.

Here’s a typical page of images for one Martian day.

And I noticed these raw images coming back to Earth, but I couldn’t find any coherent overview of what the rover was up to each day. NASA has some information, but it’s often days or weeks behind.

So the work is in sorting through these images and trying to find what’s important or interesting for that day.

For example, for this day of images the rover was examining possible drill sites.

I’m taking images like these ...

... and turning them into panoramas that help put the reader there.

Or taking scattered shots like this, these small slices of time ...

... and trying to stitch them into animations.

Little “Aha!” moments that hint at how the rover moves, like this ...

And since there’s no single narrative of what the rover has been up to, I tried to pull information from multiple sources, and string that into a simple, continuous narrative.

Along the way I had to explain to myself, and then to readers, differences in time on Earth and Mars. A Martian day, a Martian year.

And I’ve also tried to find ways to show the changing seasons.

There’s no snow on Mars, and no visible changes to indicate seasons, so I tried to use daily temperature data to show the rover entering Martian winter.

I built a simple timeline showing the major stops the rover has made ...

... and then tried to wrap it all into a framework.

Here is a simple sketch, showing a map and photograph.

(As I get older my sketches get uglier, but maybe clearer.)

And this project is still going on. The rover is still making its way to the mountain you see here in the distance.

I mostly work with science graphics, so most of my graphics are done after the scientific paper, after the discovery has been made, after the press conference.

So it’s been a luxury to work on science as it’s happening, and to try to make an interesting narrative when the end has not been reached.

KEPLER

Mars has lovely imagery, but what do you do with projects that are all numbers?

One example is the Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009.

The print graphic at left is a nice rendering by Frank O’Connell.

This is the visible sky we can see from the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Kepler was designed to stare at a small patch of the sky for several years.

It tracks more than 100,000 stars, looking for small, regular dips in light that might be an orbiting planet passing in front of the star.

And it found hundreds of possible planets, all across its field of view, which scientists then worked to confirm.

And as new planets were confirmed, the scientists would write a paper: single planets, multiple planets, planets orbiting binary stars (two stars together), and planets of different sizes.

And as these papers came out I would make small graphics.

I tried to add some scale by comparing the orbits with the orbit of Mercury, for example.

But it still felt very responsive: paper, graphic, paper, graphic, paper, graphic.

I was still only showing one planet system at a time.

One possibility was to take several of the early discoveries and make a larger graphic explaining how the planets were found and what the dips in light look like. Showing a bit of the data that contains these dips and trying to put the new planets in context with other known planets, like those in our solar system.

This was a half-page print graphic, but it’s a lot to explain and a lot for readers to try to hold in their heads.

Another attempt was to try to explain the goal of the Kepler mission, finding planets in the habitable zone, the area around a star where liquid water might exist on a planet’s surface.

Here’s another half-page graphic that compares different stars to our Sun and Earth, which is near the inner edge of the habitable zone.

But in all of these graphics, it seemed like something was missing.

We’re finding planets, which is amazing when you think about it.

But I was only showing a small slice of the data.

The data is not hard to find. Here is the current list of Kepler’s confirmed planets.

And so I looked at this and tried to find the smallest subset of data I would need to draw a planet orbiting a star.

This was my fairly ugly sketch.

And after a few days swearing at my computer trying to learn d3, I came up with this.

Pretty basic, right? But the nice thing about d3 is that, once you put in the work to get here ...

... it’s not that much more work to get here.

This is the first working draft of the graphic.

The graphic tends to get washed out in projectors, so I made a brighter version.

If you haven’t seen this before, it currently shows more than 190 planets in about 100 star systems.

I gave a quick video walkthrough, but you can see the actual graphic here: Kepler’s Tally of Planets.

So what are the traps in making a graphic like this?

What are some of the things I try to avoid?

I think many of the infographics we see are really just counting: 190 beers, 190 cups of coffee.

If the only thing you’re doing is coming up with a single number, then you’re doing arithmetic, not visualization.

So I want to make sure that in showing planets I’m not doing some variant of this: 190 planets.

This might be an exaggeration, but it’s the kind of thing I want to avoid.

And I think that the goal of visualization is not finding elaborate ways to encode information. I try to encode as little as possible.

You could imagine taking the same planet data and coming up with any number of geometric shapes to encode it. Maybe the vertical bar is star temperature and the horizontal bars are planet orbits.

But to me this feels like imposing a design on the data, and drawing attention to the design more than the data.

I don’t want my readers to have one finger up here on the key, and another finger down here on the graphic, looking back and forth trying to understand the design. I want the design to disappear.

And I don’t want the reader to have to work hard to decode the information — that’s my job as the designer.

I also want to make sure that I’m not introducing any patterns that don’t exist in the data.

For example, this diagram has the star numbers on the left, and the planet names — the planet letters — on the right. It looks impressive, but the X-like patterns of connecting lines are meaningless. It’s just a reflection of the way the items are ordered, and doesn’t have any interesting meaning in the real world.

There are an infinite number of ways of encoding information.

But just as I wouldn’t ask my readers to learn semaphore or Morse code to read one of my graphics — both of these say “Visualized” — I also don’t want to write microlanguages for my data that readers have to translate. If I do that, I’ve lost my reader before I’ve even started.

Kepler does have a key with four interlocking scales: two for size, one for orbital distance and one for temperature.

But I spent a lot of time trying to make them feel intuitive and natural. I tried to make the graphic understandable on first viewing, even if the reader doesn’t look at the key.

And most importantly, I try to keep in mind that visualization is not the same thing as explanation.

If I visualize something and walk away, I’ve only done half the job.

I’m certainly not the first person to use planet data.

There have been many attempts to use and explain similar data sets, including a lovely piece by Jan Willem Tulp, who is speaking next.

But some attempts are visualizations that don’t try to explain, like this one by NASA. It’s animated, but I’m only showing a still. It’s fine as a visualization — the designer clearly understands the data, and has made many design decisions: colors and sizes, large planets and invisible stars.

And the graphic raised questions when I saw it. For example, what is that big yellow planet near the bottom? But it gave me no way to answer those questions without looking for the data and trying to find the largest planet.

I didn’t show this slide, but another example of visualizing without explaining is the Kepler Exoplanet Candidates video by Jer Thorp, which is impressive but hard to decipher.

Kepler’s Tally is self-updating. I run a script, and it updates itself with any recently-confirmed planets.

The last time I updated it this large star appeared, and immediately caught my eye.

My first thought was that it was a mistake, so I went to look at the script and the data. Both looked ok.

Then went to find the paper announcing planet Kepler 91b, and it turns out it’s a dying planet. The star is expanding and will swallow the planet within about 300,000 years.

And the star is so big, and the planet so close to it, that sunlight falls on more than half of the planet at once.

If the yellow here is the light that Earth receives, the red is the extra area in sunlight.

I wouldn’t have found this without the interactive, and without the graphic giving me some way to answer my question.

And I tried to put some of that “Aha!” moment back into the graphic, for the next reader who notices that star and has a question about it.

CLOSE

I haven’t shown you many projects this morning, but they do have a theme.

The Curiosity mission is a search for evidence of past water on Mars.

And the Kepler mission is a search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone, where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet.

Both are examples where we — we as humans — are looking for evidence that another form of life might have responded to, or felt, or perhaps even been conscious of ...

Thanks to Eric Klotz and everyone else at Visualized for the invitation to speak.

For another one of my talks, see Storytelling with Data.

Bug#727708: call for votes on default Linux init system for jessie

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:31:01 -0800

Comments: "Bug#727708: call for votes on default Linux init system for jessie"

URL: https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00294.html

Sign in - Google Accounts

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 17:38:51 -0800

Comments: "Sign in - Google Accounts"

URL: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

One account. All of Google.

Sign in with your Google Account

Create an account

One Google Account for everything Google

Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty! - Laptop Audio Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 07:29:55 -0800

Comments: " Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty! - Laptop Audio Forum - Laptop - Dell Community "

URL: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3517/t/19492918.aspx

tippy1000You would think that companies would have a buffer to keep that from happening. They can dim a screen to protect your monitor, but no way to keep a speaker from blowing?

Probably they don't blow. My guess is that they are burning out or having mechanical failure from the heat produced by unnaturally high average amplitude. I heard that one of the Dell laptop models got a BIOS revision to help protect the speakers from the VLC Player but I don't know how such protection could work except by lowering the overall volume.

I played some short samples of a pop tune with VLC Player and simultaneously recorded them into a graphic audio editor, and made some screen shots of the amplitude waveforms -- just the left channel to keep it simple. These amplitude graphs represent the relative energy of the audio signal. The highest peaks represent the greatest amplitude, which increases as the waveform moves away from the center crossing line in either up or down direction. The center "zero crossing" line represents silence.

Example 1 shows VLC playing the tune normally with its volume set at 100%.

Example 2 is VLC Player playing the tune with the volume set to 200%.

In both examples, the maximum amplitude of the signal is nearly as large as it can get, which is the saturation point of 0 dB (zero decibels). The 2nd example would sound louder because its average amplitude is greater. That is shown in the graph by the increased density of the waveform. A greater proportion of the signal is close to 0 dB.

VLC can't make the laptop's amp produce more wattage than it was made to produce, so where does the increased volume come from? The program seems to increase the signal's amplitude to beyond the 0 dB limit -- super-saturation. That would definitely increase the volume but the problem is that signal over 0 dB create very blatant digital distortion -- basically a loud noise. To fix that, all of the signal over 0 dB is simply chopped off, or clipped.

Example 2 shows the increased average amplitude but with a form of distortion known as "clipping". It is called "clipping" because of the way the graph looks after parts of the signal have been hacked off. It is a form of distortion because the waveform has been ruined by hacking off parts of it. If you play a song with VLC Player set to 200% volume you can easily hear the distortion in the audio signal.

Here are very extreme close-ups of examples 1 & 2. The waveform in example 1 resembles a sine wave more or less.

Example 2 is the same slice of music but with VLC Player's volume set to 200%. The maximum amplitude is the same as in example 1, but now there is much more of the signal near maximum so the average amplitude is much greater here. In example 1, the waveform was forming peaks near the maximum. In example 2 the waveform is creating plateaus near the the maximum, which means that it is now starting to look more like a square wave -- typical of hard clipping.

The maker of VCL Player says there is nothing about the player that can cause damage to laptop speakers, and for all I know that may be true. Those guys are smarter than me. However these graphs demonstrate that the player creates hard clipping when the volume level is set to 200% and dramatically increases the average amplitude.

The graphs actually under-represent the increase in the amount of average amplitude between example 1 and 2. That is because the graphs represent amplitude in decibels, which is a logarithmic scale. If the graphs accurately represented the increase in amplitude they would be too big to use. The bottom line is that there is a whole lot of extra energy for the speakers to have to convert into mechanical energy and heat without breaking down.

Wikipedia has an explanation of why hard clipping can damage speakers in its article on audio clipping. It also mentions another problem with hard clipping that can destroy speakers, upper level harmonics, but that is probably not the main concern.

Girls and Software | Linux Journal

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 08:29:46 -0800

Comments: "Girls and Software | Linux Journal"

URL: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux kernel developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would produce a near-vertical line. I was hoping the piece would invite a Linux hacker on the female side of that graph to step up and move the conversation forward. And sure enough, here we have Susan Sons aka @HedgeMage. Read on.—Doc Searls

Yep, I said "girls". Since men were once boys, but women sprang from the head of Zeus full-grown and fighting like modern-day Athenas, you can start flaming me now for using that nasty word...unless you'd like to see the industry through the eyes of a girl who grew up to be a woman in the midst of a loose collection of open-source communities.

Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding when I was six years old, sitting in my father's basement office, on the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a summer of determined trial and error, I'd managed to make some gorillas throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!

When I was 12, I got my hands on a Slackware disk and installed it on my computer—a Christmas gift from my parents in an especially good year for my dad's company—and I found a bug in a program. The program was in C, a language I'd never seen. I found my way onto IRC and explained the predicament: what was happening, how to reproduce it and where I thought I'd found the problem.

I was pretty clueless then—I hadn't even realized that the reason I couldn't read the code well was that there was more than one programming language in the world—but the channel denizens pointed me to the project's issue tracker, explained its purpose and helped me file my first bug report.

What I didn't find out about until later was the following private message exchange between one of the veterans who'd been helping me and a channel denizen who recognized my nickname from a mailing list:

coder0: That was a really well-asked question...but why do I get the feeling he's a 16yo boy? coder1: Because she's a 12yo girl. coder0: Well...wow. What do her parents do that she thinks like that? coder1: I think she's on a farm somewhere, actually.

When coder1 told me about the conversation, I was sold on open source. As a little girl from farm country who'd repeatedly been excluded from intellectual activities because she wasn't wealthy or urban or old enough to be wanted, I could not believe how readily I'd been accepted and treated like anybody else in the channel, even though I'd been outed. I was doubly floored when I found out that coder0 was none other than Eric S. Raymond, whose writings I'd devoured shortly after discovering Linux.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I did. I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly, writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid, so when I needed help, the community was there. I'd never met another programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don't generally get to have the experiences that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then, in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn't turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young woman who's already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Young women don't magically become technologists at 22. Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood, because that's when the addiction to solving the puzzle or building something kicks in to those who've experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I imposed my will on a couple electronic primates.

Unfortunately, our society has set girls up to be anything but technologists. My son is in elementary school. Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try.

My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a mom who coded while she breastfed and brought him to his first LUG meeting at age seven weeks. The first time he saw a home-built robot, it was shown to him by a local hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer one of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his school acting like girls were dumb?

Thanks so much, modern-day "feminism", for putting very unfeminist ideas in my son's head.

There's another place in my life, besides my home, where the idea of technology being a "guy thing" is totally absent: my hometown. I still visit Sandridge School from time to time, most recently when my old math teacher invited me in to talk to students about STEM careers. I'm fairly sure I'm the only programmer anyone in that town has met in person...so I'm something of the archetypal computer geek as far as they are concerned. If anything, some folks assume that it's a "girl thing".

Still, I don't see the area producing a bunch of female hackers. The poverty, urbanization and rising crime aside, girls aren't being raised to hack any more in my hometown than they are anywhere else. When I talked to those fifth-grade math classes, the boys told me about fixing broken video game systems or rooting their phones. The girls didn't do projects—they talked about fashion or seeking popularity—not building things.

What's Changed?

I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", and many are old enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women, and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is "old" (sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father's age than mine.

The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the first time in my 18 years in this community.

When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a "woman in tech" feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:

The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no make-up.
The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.
The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should worry about it.

With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!"

I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited. They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12 men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.

I've never been segregated into a "Women in X" group, away from the real action in a project. I've got enough clout to say no when I'm told I should be loyal and spend my time working on women's groups instead of technology. I'm not young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada Initiative who'd have me passive-aggressively redcarding anyone who bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social conflict I have is because of my sex.

Here's a news flash for you: except for the polymaths in the group, hackers are generally kind of socially inept. If someone of any gender does something that violates my boundaries, I assume it was a misunderstanding. I calmly and specifically explain what bothered me and how to avoid crossing that boundary, making it a point to let the person know that I am not upset with them, I just want to make sure they're aware so it doesn't happen again. This is what adults do, and it works. Adults don't look for ways to take offense, silently hand out "creeper cards" or expect anyone to read their minds. I'm not a child, I'm an adult, and I act like one.

My Boobs Don't Matter

I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs.

There aren't very many girls who want to hack. I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that girls are given fashion dolls and make-up and told to fantasize about dating and popularity, while boys are given LEGOs and tool sets and told to do something. I imagine it has a lot to do with the sort of women who used to coo "but she could be so pretty if only she didn't waste so much time with computers". I imagine it has a lot to do with how girls are sold on ephemera—popularity, beauty and fitting in—while boys are taught to revel in accomplishment.

Give me a young person of any gender with a hacker mentality, and I'll make sure they get the support they need to become awesome. Meanwhile, buy your niece or daughter or neighbor girl some LEGOs and teach her to solder. I love seeing kids at LUG meetings and hackerspaces—bring them! There can never be too many hackers.

Do not punish the men simply for being here. "Male privilege" is a way to say "you are guilty because you don't have boobs, feel ashamed, even if you did nothing wrong", and I've wasted too much of my time trying to defend good guys from it. Yes, some people are jerks. Call them out as jerks, and don't blame everyone with the same anatomy for their behavior. Lumping good guys in with bad doesn't help anyone, it just makes good guys afraid to interact with women because they feel like they can't win. I'm tired of expending time and energy to protect good men from this drama.

Do not punish hackers for non-hackers' shortcomings. It is not my fault some people don't read man pages, nor is it my job to hold their hand step-by-step so they don't have to. It is not my place to drag grown women in chains to LUG meetings and attempt to brainwash them to make you more comfortable with the gender ratio, and doing so wouldn't work anyway.

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

I remember in those early days, in my haven, if someone was rude or tried to bully me, the people around me would pounce with a resounding "How dare you be mean to someone we like!" Now, if a man behaves badly, we're bogged down with a much more complex thought process: "Did this happen because she's a woman?" "Am I white knighting if I step in?" "Am I a misogynist if I don't?" "What does this say about women in technology?" "Do I really want to be part of another gender politics mess?" It was so much simpler when we didn't analyze so much, and just trounced on mean people for being mean.

Tim Armstrong blames “distressed babies” for AOL benefit cuts. He’s talking about my daughter.

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 09:07:42 -0800

Comments: "Tim Armstrong blames “distressed babies” for AOL benefit cuts. He’s talking about my daughter. "

URL: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/02/tim_armstrong_blames_distressed_babies_for_aol_benefit_cuts_he_s_talking.html

Photo by Deanna Fei

Late last week, Tim Armstrong, the chief executive officer of AOL, landed himself in a media firestorm when he held a town hall with employees to explain why he was paring their retirement benefits. After initially blaming Obamacare for driving up the company’s health care costs, he pointed the finger at an unlikely target: babies.

“Two things that happened in 2012,” Armstrong said. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.”

Armstrong exposed the most searing experience of our lives for an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.

Within hours, that quote was all over the Internet. On Friday, Armstrong’s logic was the subject of lengthy discussions on CNN, MSNBC, and other outlets. Mothers’ advocates scolded him for gross insensitivity. Lawyers debated whether he had violated his employees’ privacy. Health care experts noted that his accounting of these “million-dollar babies” seemed, at best, fuzzy.

Plenty of smart, witty people took to Twitter to express their outrage—or mock outrage. The phrase “distressed babies” became practically an inside joke, as in, “How many distressed babies does AOL pay this guy?” A few AOL employees made cracks like this: “I swear I didn't have any babies in 2012. Don't hate me for messing up your 401(k).”

For the record: It was me. I don’t work for AOL; my husband does. One of those “distressed babies” was our daughter. We pay our premiums for a family health plan through AOL, which is why we had coverage on the morning I woke up in acute pain, only five months into what had been a completely smooth pregnancy.

Late Saturday, Armstrong finally issued an apology in an email to employees: “On a personal note, I made a mistake and I apologize for my comments last week at the town hall when I mentioned specific healthcare examples.” He also announced that he would restore the old retirement savings plan. This is commendable, but the damage to my family had already been done.

Here is how we supposedly became a drain on AOL’s coffers. On Oct. 9, 2012, when I woke up in pain, my husband was at the airport about to board a flight for a work trip. I was home alone with our 1-year-old son and barely able to comprehend that I could be in labor. By the time I arrived at the hospital, my husband a few minutes behind, I was fully dilated and my baby’s heartbeat was slowing. Within 20 minutes, my daughter was delivered via emergency cesarean, resuscitated, and placed in the neonatal intensive care unit.

She weighed 1 pound, 9 ounces. Her skin was reddish-purple, bloody and bruised all over. One doctor, visibly shaken, described it as “gelatinous.” I couldn’t hold my daughter or nurse her or hear her cries, which were silenced by the ventilator. Without it, she couldn’t breathe.

That day, we were told that she had roughly a one-third chance of dying before we could bring her home. That she might not survive one month or one week or one day. She also had at least a one-third chance of being severely disabled, unable to ever lead an independent life.

As shell-shocked and stricken as we were, my husband and I were not oblivious to the staggering tolls, emotional and financial, attached to a baby like ours. Watching her tiny, battered body struggle to carry out the simplest functions, we couldn’t help wondering at what point the level of her suffering might outweigh the imperative to keep her alive at all costs.

For longer than I can bear to remember, we were too terrified to name her, to know her, to love her. In my lowest moments—when she suffered a brain hemorrhage, when her right lung collapsed, when she stopped breathing altogether one morning—I found myself wishing that I could simply mourn her loss and go home to take care of my strapping, exuberant, fat-cheeked son.

But the neonatologists also described my daughter as “feisty” and “amazing.” And over the next weeks, she fought for every minute of her young life, as did her doctors and nurses, and we could only strive to do the same.

My daughter had to spend three months in the NICU, dependent on many high-tech medical apparatuses and round-the-clock care. She endured more procedures than I can count: blood transfusions, head ultrasounds, the insertion of breathing tubes, feeding tubes, and a central line extending nearly to her heart.

Some commentators have questioned the implausibility of “million-dollar babies.” I have no expertise in health care costs, but I have a 3-inch thick folder of hospital bills that range from a few dollars and cents to the high six figures (before insurance adjustments). So even though it’s unlikely that AOL directly paid out those sums, I don’t take issue with Armstrong’s number.

I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.

Flappy Bird by the Numbers

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 14:02:28 -0800

Comments: "Flappy Bird by the Numbers"

URL: http://zachwill.com/flappy-bird/

After hearing about Flappy Bird the past couple days, I decided to download its 68,000 iTunes reviews last night. I explain some of the technical details down below, but I honestly don’t think that’s the most interesting story here. In fact, while the internet keeps pushing The Verge’s $50,000-a-day story about the app, I think the onslaught of Flappy Bird downloads that’s happened in the past two weeks is a much more interesting storyline.

In late December and early January, I’m guessing Dong Nguyen probably used some sort of service to download/rate Flappy Bird on the App Store. The end goal was probably to generate some buzz for a game that originally had been released at the end of May and then updated in September for iOS 7. With six months of nothing happening on a game he had made in a week’s spare time, a marketing experiment around the holiday download season couldn’t hurt.

It worked. Flappy Bird started getting over 20 reviews a day (sometimes a whole 5 reviews in a single hour). At the time, this had to be somewhat encouraging. I mean, with weeks of nothing happening, 20 reviews every day from the end of December until the beginning of January had to be a good start.

On January 9th, Flappy Bird hit the milestone of 90 reviews in a single day. The experiment paid off. The game could become a niche success with thousands of downloads (approximating from review count). And, that’s the end of the story.

But wait, by the 12th, that number doubled — and by the 17th, it doubled again. The game no one cared about was up to over 400 reviews a day. On the 18th, over 600 — on the 19th, more than 680.

And, then it started to come back down to Earth. Still over 600 reviews a day on January 20th and 21st, but it had probably peaked. All good things must come to an end, right?

Except January 22nd was the first day of 100 reviews in an hour. In a single hour, 100 reviews. A new record of 800 total reviews on the day. If you keep that in mind, and use the numbers as a yardstick for what his download count must have looked like, the next week must have been absolutely insane.

On the 24th, Flappy Bird had 136 reviews submitted in a single hour — over 1,100 total reviews on the day. Two days later, on January 26th, it peaked at 206 an hour (and 1,600 reviews on the day). Two days later, 330 reviews an hour. The next day, over 400. On January 30th, more than 500 reviews in an hour (more than 4,600 total reviews on the day). On the last day of the month, more than 630 reviews in a single hour — 5,500 total on the day.

And then, February 1st hit.

You’ve got to keep in mind that this game is a Helicopter clone with Mario-inspired graphics. It was made in a single week, and largely ignored by users for months. The initial release was ignored. The update was ignored. The reviews and ratings during the holiday season were ignored.

Even after possibly using some sort of small bot network, the total app downloads had to be relatively minor at the beginning of January. It was still going completely unnoticed on the App Store. (I’d suggest probably less than 10,000 iOS devices had Flappy Bird on them before January 9th.)

January 22nd Dong Nguyen was probably extremely excited about the couple months worth of revenue his marketing experiment had pulled off. With the recurring in-game ads and 800 reviews in a single day, Flappy Bird was beyond a success. Mission accomplished.

February 1st Dong Nguyen, on the other hand, must have questioned if the world had lost its mind.

On February 1st, reviews exploded to 800 in a single hour. 6,500 iTunes App Store reviews in a single day. February 1st is the day Dong Nguyen woke up, stretched, checked email, checked Twitter, checked iTunes, and witnessed millions of downloads happening.

Millions.

You can only imagine what that must have felt like.

This is the same app no one cared about for more than half a year. Just one month prior, it was a great day if Flappy Bird got 20 total reviews on the App Store. Up until January 9th, there had never been an hour in which Flappy Bird received even 10 reviews (most of the time it was under 5).

After that, the rest is history. An obscure game no one loved became the most downloaded app on the App Store (not of all time, but of the moment). The App Store even tweeted their high score. And then, he took it down.

This is less a story about a guy making $50,000 a day and more about a developer who just rode one hell of a roller coaster this past month.

Technical Notes

If you think of iTunes as a big hybrid native/web app (which it is), then it’s probably safe to assume JSON/HTML APIs exist for apps and reviews (which there are). I used Charles and wrote a simple Scrapy project to download the 68,000 reviews and user pages.

I was originally planning to focus on the December/January Flappy Bird reviews — I thought it’d be fun to prove that they were most likely bots. After loading the reviews into pandas and playing around with the data, though, it became pretty clear those had little to nothing to do with the success of Flappy Bird.

The bump in reviews on January 9th probably started the snowball effect for Flappy Bird. I’m not exactly sure what influencer or dumb luck helped make that possible, but the 20ish reviews each day at the end of December are a pretty moot point. Diving into the numbers for the past two weeks, I’d be surprised if Dong even remembers that time. He’s seriously been on one hell of a roller coaster ride — and that ended up being much more interesting (at least to me).

Godot Engine

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 20:37:20 -0800

Comments: " Godot Engine "

URL: http://www.godotengine.org/wp/

Home reduz

Godot Engine has been developed as an in-house engine with a track-record of more than a decade of published games. It took a long time but it’s finally ready for everyone. Godot brings to the table a large array of features and a different approach to making games, which combined allow single developers and teams to be more efficient than ever.

The Engine

Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can export to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn, allowing you to become productive in a matter of hours.

Godot is BETA. Collaborate!!

Having been developed as in-house means that the user experience may still not be ideal for everyone. The features needed to make a great game are there, but we really need your help to fix all the rough edges and improve usability (via feedback and/or code contributions). We know we are close to having an awesome, open source, game engine with nothing to envy from the best commercial offerings, but we can’t do this alone. This is why Godot is now open source, so everyone can help us reach this goal.

Why Mt. Gox is full of shit - joepie91's Ramblings

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 06:46:47 -0800

Comments: "Why Mt. Gox is full of shit - joepie91's Ramblings"

URL: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2014/02/10/why-mtgox-is-full-of-shit/

According to Mt. Gox, they discovered a critical flaw in the design of Bitcoin, allowing people to 'steal' Bitcoins by changing the ID of a BTC withdrawal transaction after-the-fact, claiming to customer support that they never received it, and having them resend it. This would be a possibility, because the Bitcoin protocol does not 'sign' the transaction ID, and it could thus be spoofed. They go on playing the 'white knight', strongly implying that they've been the first to find said flaw, and are in talks with developers to get it fixed.

Except that's a big crock of shit.

The issue with spoofing a transaction ID does indeed exist, and is known as transaction malleability. However this is not, as Mt. Gox claims, a "new finding" - it has been known and documented for years. Consequently, the official Bitcoin daemon (bitcoind) does not rely on a transaction ID to determine if a transaction succeeded, and people writing their own implementation have been warned about this for those same years.

So why does Mt. Gox experience this issue? They run a custom Bitcoin daemon, with a custom implementation of the Bitcoin protocol. Their implementation, against all advice, does rely on the transaction ID, which makes this attack possible. They have actually been warned about it months ago by gmaxwell, and have apparently decided to ignore this warning.

In other words, this is not a vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol, but an implementation error in Mt. Gox' custom Bitcoin software.

So, why does Mt. Gox claim that it's a problem with the Bitcoin protocol? This appears to be part of Mt. Gox' long tradition to deflect the blame to something or somebody else, while ignoring warnings from competent developers. Mt. Gox has been showing constant incompetence, in just about every aspect of their operation, and doesn't ever seem ready to own up to it.

But let's come up with some concrete examples of this, huh?

Remember when Mt. Gox suffered serious trading engine lag due to a DDoS, even though they were behind Prolexic DDoS mitigation, which is notorious for its capability to deal with huge attacks? Mt. Gox never told the real story behind this: they failed to block direct access to the original server IP that Prolexic was tunneling to, which meant that a simple scan of the (small) IP range owned by Tibanne Co., the (then) parent company of Mt. Gox and Kalyhost, would very quickly reveal the real Mt. Gox server.

Since there was no protection here, and the entirety of Mt. Gox, including their website and trading engine, ran on the same server, it was trivial to slow down their entire trading engine, bypassing Prolexic entirely. This was a trivial configuration error, that any competent system administrator would have caught and dealt with in an instant. But not Mt. Gox.

Or let's take that historic hack of Mt. Gox, which temporarily dropped the exchange rate to $0.01 per BTC, and involved a large Bitcoin heist. What they didn't tell you, was that several vulnerabilities in the Mt. Gox website and API were reported a while before the hack, and that the Mt. Gox staff more or less waved them away, completely ignoring their severity. This included MySQL injection vulnerabilities, just to put things into perspective a little. One of these vulnerabilities was almost certainly the attack vector that was used for the heist.

Or, on a more personal note, that time I lost $50 from my Mt. Gox account, shortly before the above large hack occurred. Apparently that was "my own fault for getting my account compromised", even though I was using a random 20-character KeePass-generated password, several other people reported a similar account compromise, and none of my other accounts were compromised. To this day, Mt. Gox has failed to acknowledge their role in this compromise, and has failed to refund me.

These are just a few examples of the past incompetence and lack of responsibility on the part of Mt. Gox; and now they are shifting the blame for their own faulty implementation to the Bitcoin protocol, possibly causing significant misinformation amongst the general public, just to avoid having to admit that they did something wrong.

The time to stop using Mt. Gox has been long overdue. Move your business to a more serious exchange, one that is willing to admit their failures, should they occur. One that has the best interests of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem in mind, rather than their own bottom line.

Typical Programmer - Why don’t software development methodologies work?

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 06:56:47 -0800

Comments: "Typical Programmer - Why don’t software development methodologies work?"

URL: http://typicalprogrammer.com/why-dont-software-development-methodologies-work/

I’ve worked on big projects, small projects, in huge teams and by myself, in fossilized federal agencies and cool Silicon Valley companies. I have learned and used at least twenty programming languages. I’ve lived through waterfall/BDUF (big design up front), structured programming, top-down, bottom-up, modular design, components, agile, Scrum, extreme, TDD, OOP, rapid prototyping, RAD, and probably others I’ve forgotten about. I’m not convinced any of these things work.

[Edit: Let me explain what I mean by writing methodologies "don't work." I mean they don't deliver a predictable or repeatable software development process in and of themselves. I don't mean that using a methodology dooms the project. Most software development methodologies try to make programming a more engineering-like process, and in that regard they fall short.]

How can you tell if a methodology works?

Whether a methodology works or not depends on the criteria: team productivity, happiness, retention, conformity, predictability, accountability, communication, lines per day, man-months, code quality, artifacts produced, etc. Every methodology works if you measure the right thing. But in terms of the only measurement that really matters—satisfying requirement on time and within budget—I haven’t seen any methodology deliver consistent results.

My own experiences are anecdotal, but they are shared by almost every programmer I know. It turns out that anecdotes are all that anyone has: rigorous studies of software development methodologies haven’t been done because it’s impossible to control for all of the variables.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine two teams of programmers, working with identical requirements, schedules, and budgets, in the same environment, with the same language and development tools. One team uses waterfall/BDUF, the other uses agile techniques. It’s obvious this isn’t a good experiment: The individual skills and personalities of the team members, and how they communicate with each other, will have a much bigger effect than the methodology.

In his 2003 thesis People and methodologies in software development Alistair Cockburn concludes “People’s characteristics, which vary from person to person and even from moment to moment, form a first-order driver of the team’s behavior and results. Such issues as how well they get along with each other and the fit (or misfit) of their personal characteristics with their job roles create significant, project-specific constraints on the methodology. This result indicates that people’s personal characteristics place a limit on the effect of methodologies in general.”

Our own worst enemy

When I started programming in the 1970s software development was tightly controlled by management through a hierarchy of project managers, business analysts, and senior programmers. We did not get to pick the language or tools. I worked on some big, complex projects in companies that worked this way. Some succeeded, some didn’t. Now it’s common for the programmers to choose the methodology and style of working, along with their languages and tools. Analysts are not part of most programmer’s experience anymore, and project managers have been reduced to “team leads” and “Scrum masters,” neutered of any managerial authority and not really in control of anything other than rituals dictated by team consensus.

Strict management, in love with Gantt charts and schedules and documentation, was reduced to “stakeholders” and “users,” and then abstracted away into “user stories.” It’s common now for me to get involved in a project that seems to have no adult supervision. Surprisingly, left to themselves programmers don’t revert to cowboy coding—they adopt or create methodologies stricter and more filled with ritual than anything I experienced in 1980. In fact programmers today can be much more rigid and religious about their methodologies than they imagine a 1970s-era COBOL shop was. I now routinely get involved with projects developed by one or two people burdened with so much process and “best practices” that almost nothing of real value is produced.

Once a programming team has adopted a methodology it’s almost inevitable that a few members of the team, or maybe just one bully, will demand strict adherence and turn it into a religion. The resulting passive-aggression kills productivity faster than any methodology or technology decision.

Does anything work?

My own experience, validated by Cockburn’s thesis and Frederick Brooks in No Silver Bullet, is that software development projects succeed when the key people on the team share a common vision, what Brooks calls “conceptual integrity.” This doesn’t arise from any particular methodology, and can happen in the absence of anything resembling a process. I know the feeling working on a team where everyone clicks and things just get done. What I don’t understand is why I had that feeling a lot more in the bad old days of BDUF and business analysts than I do now.

I think programmers should pay much more attention to listening to and working with their peers than to rituals and tools, and that we should be skeptical of too much process or methodologies that promise to magically make everyone more productive. Maybe social skills come harder to programmers than to other people (I’m not convinced that’s true), but developing those skills will certainly pay off a lot more than trying yet another development methodology.

Facebook Fraud - YouTube

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 07:31:59 -0800

Comments: "Facebook Fraud - YouTube"

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Facebook Fraud

Published on Feb 10, 2014

Evidence Facebook's revenue is based on fake likes.
My first vid on the problem with Facebook: http://bit.ly/1dXudqY
I know first-hand that Facebook's advertising model is deeply flawed. When I paid to promote my page I gained 80,000 followers in developing countries who didn't care about Veritasium (but I wasn't aware of this at the time). They drove my reach and engagement numbers down, basically rendering the page useless. I am not the only one who has experienced this. Rory Cellan-Jones had the same luck with Virtual Bagel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-...

The US Department of State spent $630,000 to acquire 2 million page likes and then realized only 2% were engaged. http://wapo.st/1glcyZo

I thought I would demonstrate that the same thing is still happening now by creating Virtual Cat (http://www.facebook.com/MyVirtualCat). I was surprised to discover something worse - false likes are coming from everywhere, including Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. So even those carefully targeting their campaigns are likely being duped into spending real money on fake followers. Then when they try to reach their followers they have to pay again.

And it's possible to be a victim of fake likes without even advertising. Pages that end up on Facebook's "International Suggested Pages" are also easy targets for click-farms seeking to diversify their likes. http://tnw.co/NsflrC

Thanks to Henry, Grey, and Nessy for feedback on earlier drafts of this video.

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Hello Reddit – I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft founder. Ask me anything. : IAmA

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 09:29:51 -0800

Comments: "Hello Reddit – I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft founder. Ask me anything. : IAmA"

URL: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1xj56q/hello_reddit_im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill/#b02g10f20b14

First of all, thanks for doing the AMA. And congrats to you on your spanking-new CEO.

My questions:

1) How does Mr. Nadella's vision differ from yours and Mr Ballmer's?

2) A couple of articles I read recently mentioned that the board is going to be putting pressure on the new CEO to exit the devices business and focus more sharply on enterprise customers. Your thoughts on that? If it means anything, I am a huge fan of the Surface. Can't afford one, but I have used the first one . Hugely impressed.

3) Also, this is pertinent to where I live -- India. A few people have a somewhat negative impression of the work that the B&MGF is doing; specifically, they claim it has an agenda to push products manufactured by American drug companies. Would you like to respond to that?

4) Can I have a tour of your home if I am ever in the area?

That's all for now. Thanks once again.

10 Things We Forgot to Monitor

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 11:06:58 -0800

Comments: "10 Things We Forgot to Monitor"

URL: http://word.bitly.com/post/74839060954/ten-things-to-monitor?h=2

There is always a set of standard metrics that are universally monitored (Disk Usage, Memory Usage, Load, Pings, etc). Beyond that, there are a lot of lessons that we’ve learned from operating our production systems that have helped shape the breadth of monitoring that we perform at bitly.

One of my favorite all-time tweets is from @DevOps_Borat

"Law of Murphy for devops: if thing can able go wrong, is mean is already wrong but you not have Nagios alert of it yet."

What follows is a small list of things we monitor at bitly that have grown out of those (sometimes painful!) experiences, and where possible little snippets of the stories behind those instances.

1 - Fork Rate

We once had a problem where IPv6 was intentionally disabled on a box via options ipv6 disable=1 and alias ipv6 off in /etc/modprobe.conf. This caused a large issue for us: each time a new curl object was created, modprobe would spawn, checking net-pf-10 to evaluate IPv6 status. This fork bombed the box, and we eventually tracked it down by noticing that the process counter in /proc/stat was increasing by several hundred a second. Normally you would only expect a fork rate of 1-10/sec on a production box with steady traffic.

check_fork_rate.sh

2 - flow control packets

TL;DR; If your network configuration honors flow control packets and isn’t configured to disable them, they can temporarily cause dropped traffic. (If this doesn’t sound like an outage, you need your head checked.)

$ /usr/sbin/ethtool -S eth0 | grep flow_control
rx_flow_control_xon: 0
rx_flow_control_xoff: 0
tx_flow_control_xon: 0
tx_flow_control_xoff: 0

Note: Read this to understand how these flow control frames can cascade to switch-wide loss of connectivity if you use certain Broadcom NIC’s. You should also trend these metrics on your switch gear. While at it, watch your dropped frames.

3 - Swap In/Out Rate

It’s common to check for swap usage above a threshold, but even if you have a small quantity of memory swapped, it’s actually the rate it’s swapped in/out that can impact performance, not the quantity. This is a much more direct check for that state.

check_swap_paging_rate.sh

4 - Server Boot Notification

Unexpected reboots are part of life. Do you know when they happen on your hosts? Most people don’t. We use a simple init script that triggers an ops email on system boot. This is valuable to communicate provisioning of new servers, and helps capture state change even if services handle the failure gracefully without alerting.

notify.sh

5 - NTP Clock Offset

If not monitored, yes, one of your servers is probably off. If you’ve never thought about clock skew you might not even be running ntpd on your servers. Generally there are 3 things to check for. 1) That ntpd is running, 2) Clock skew inside your datacenter, 3) Clock skew from your master time servers to an external source.

We use check_ntp_time for this check

6 - DNS Resolutions

Internal DNS - It’s a hidden part of your infrastructure that you rely on more than you realize. The things to check for are 1) Local resolutions from each server, 2) If you have local DNS servers in your datacenter, you want to check resolution, and quantity of queries, 3) Check availability of each upstream DNS resolver you use.

External DNS - It’s good to verify your external domains resolve correctly against each of your published external nameservers. At bitly we also rely on several CC TLD’s and we monitor those authoritative servers directly as well (yes, it’s happened that all authoritative nameservers for a TLD have been offline).

7 - SSL Expiration

It’s the thing everyone forgets about because it happens so infrequently. The fix is easy, just check it and get alerted with enough timeframe to renew your SSL certificates.

define command{
 command_name check_ssl_expire
 command_line $USER1$/check_http --ssl -C 14 -H $ARG1$
}
define service{
 host_name virtual
 service_description bitly_com_ssl_expiration
 use generic-service
 check_command check_ssl_expire!bitly.com
 contact_groups email_only
 normal_check_interval 720
 retry_check_interval 10
 notification_interval 720
}

8 - DELL OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA)

We run bitly split across two data centers, one is a managed environment with DELL hardware, and the second is Amazon EC2. For our DELL hardware it’s important for us to monitor the outputs from OMSA. This alerts us to RAID status, failed disks (predictive or hard failures), RAM Issues, Power Supply states and more.

9 - Connection Limits

You probably run things like memcached and mysql with connection limits, but do you monitor how close you are to those limits as you scale out application tiers?

Related to this is addressing the issue of processes running into file descriptor limits. We make a regular practice of running services with ulimit -n 65535 in our run scripts to minimize this. We also set Nginx worker_rlimit_nofile.

10 - Load Balancer Status.

We configure our Load Balancers with a health check which we can easily force to fail in order to have any given server removed from rotation.We’ve found it important to have visibility into the health check state, so we monitor and alert based on the same health check. (If you use EC2 Load Balancers you can monitor the ELB state from Amazon API’s).

Various Other things to watch

New entries written to Nginx Error Logs, service restarts (assuming you have something in place to auto-restart them on failure), numa stats, new process core dumps (great if you run any C code).

EOL

This scratches the surface of how we keep bitly stable, but if that’s an itch you like scratching, we’re hiring.

# 28 January 2014

Godot Engine

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:07:18 -0800

Comments: " Godot Engine "

URL: http://www.godotengine.org/wp/

Home reduz

The Engine

Godot is BETA. Collaborate!!

etymology - Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 20:43:28 -0800

Comments: "etymology - Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange"

URL: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/9780/did-english-ever-have-a-formal-version-of-you

Actually, somewhat contrary to the fine answer selected above, you was not originally the form that paired with the familiar singular thee. Rather, the nominative (and vocative) form was ye. The now-common you was originally used in objective forms alone, so accusative or dative.

For example, Wordsworth draws the nominative–dative distinction when he writes in Lyrical Ballads vii: “Yet ye are seven! — I pray you tell, Sweet Maid, how this may be.” A vocative example by Shakespeare can be found in Richard II III. ii. 84: “Looke not to the ground, Ye fauorites of a King.”

The OED explains of ‘ye’ how:

In the earliest periods of English ye was restricted to the nominative plural. In the 13th cent. it came to be used as a nominative singular = ‘thou’, first as a respectful form addressed to a superior. This use survives in modern dialects, especially (in the form ee) in interrog. and imperative formulæ (e.g. Dee = ‘do ye’), but also in objective uses = ‘thee’ (e.g. Oi tell ee). When you had usurped the place of ye as a nominative, ye came to be used (in the 15th cent.), vice versa, as an objective singular and plural (= ‘thee’ and ‘you’). Now (in all uses) only dial., arch., or poet.; in ordinary use replaced by you pron. Illustration of Forms: a. OE ge, gie, gee, ME ȝie, (gie, ge), ME ( ME–17 Sc. printed ze) ȝe, ME ȝee, north. yhe, ME–15 north. ȝhe, ME–16 yee (ME jȝe, hye, ME iȝe, iye, (i)he, 16, 18 dial. yea), ME– ye. b. In combination, proclitically or enclitically, with other words, as: †ȝet = ye it, yare = ye are, y’have; d’ee, dee = do ye, hark’ee, harkee. Now dial. 1 a. The pronoun used (as the plural of 2nd singular thou pron.) in addressing a number of persons (or, rhetorically, of things), in the nominative (or vocative). †2 b. In apposition to self (ye self, ye selven = yourselves): see self pron. 2. Obs. 1 c. In apposition to and preceding a n. (or adj. used absol.) in the vocative. 2 a. Used instead of thou in addressing a single person (originally as a mark of respect or deference, later generally: cf. thou n., you pron.). 2 b. In apposition to and preceding a n. in the vocative. 3 a. Used as objective (accusative or dative) instead of you (in plural or singular sense). †3 b. Used redundantly (‘ethical dative’). Obs.

In contrast, here’s its note about you:

Originally the accusative and dative plural of the second personal pronoun: see thou n. for the declension of the 2nd person pronoun in Old English and Middle English. Between 1300 and 1400 it began to be used also for the nominative ye pron which it had replaced in general use by about 1600. During the 14th century it also appears as a substitute for the singular obj. thee n. and nominative thou n., being originally used in token of respect in addressing a superior, but later also to an equal, and ultimately generally: compare thou pron. 1. Thus you is now the general pronoun of the second person, nominative or objective, singular or plural.

The historical forms given for you are:

Forms: OE–ME eow, (OE ieow, iow ME ȝeau, heou, heow, how, ȝehw) ME eou, ȝeu, ȝew, ME ou, hou, ȝu, ME iou, æu, ew, heu, eo, oeu, howe, ȝeow, ȝuw, ov, ME ow, owe, ȝiu, ME eu, yu, (15 Sc.) ȝou, ME iow, ȝue, ȝuu, ȝouȝ, yuu, youu, yhow, ME ȝowe, ȝhow, ȝo, (15–16 Sc.) ȝow, ME–16 yow, ME ȝoue, ȝewe, ȝhu, yowe, yoow, yw, yo, yewe, Sc. yhu, yhw, ME–15 youe, 15 iow, 16 yew, ME– you, (18 dial. and vulgar yah, yer, also yez pron.).

Whereas the historical forms given for thou are:

OE–ME ðu, OE–ME þu, (ME tu, tou, -te), ME (þe, þeou), ðhu, ME þou, ME–15 thu, (ME þouȝ), ME þow, ( -tow), ME–15 thow, ME, 15 (18 dial.) th-, th’, (ME thowe), ME– thou. (Mod. dial. thau, thaw, thah, tha; theau, theow, thoo, thu; tau, taw, ta, tay; teau, teaw, teu, too, tou, tow; doo, dou, du, etc.: see Eng. Dial. Dict.)

There’s a lot more than that there if you check out the OED entries for ye, thou, and you.

Postscript

It looks like Georgia doesn’t like ȝ (U+021D LATIN SMALL LETTER YOGH) very much.

Hm, I don’t imagine there’s any way to get the font’s small capitals? That would certainly be useful.

answered Jan 7 '12 at 23:41

Today is The Day We Fight Back

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:27:43 -0800

Comments: "Today is The Day We Fight Back"

The Bottom Feeder: Why Indie Developers Go Insane

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 04:27:41 -0800

Comments: "The Bottom Feeder: Why Indie Developers Go Insane"

URL: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.ie/2014/02/why-indie-developers-go-insane.html

After I started writing games in 1994 and went full-time in 1995, I soon came to a conclusion about the people who do what I do for a living: "These people are all crazy."

Then, as I got older, I realized that I am crazy too.

Then, as I got even older, I switched to a better truth: Everyone is crazy. Every human has his or her damage. Nobody gets out of this world alive.

It's just that indie developers tend to have high visibility, high stress, and small support groups. These factors mean that, when these devs break, you see it, and it's spectacular. Twitter has only helped to make self-immolation faster, easier, and more public.

A lot of people love indie games because they can so clearly be the product of real people. They aren't focus-grouped, penny-pinching, soulless chum. At their best, they have character. You might not like my games, but you can tell I CARE. They're works of love, recognizably the product of passionate brains.

And, since we care about the product of these brains so much, it's sometimes worthy to look at the brains themselves. Brains that spend half their time receiving more accolades than they deserve and half their time being the target of laserlike hate. These crazy, crazy brains.

I wanted to write a bit about the brain of the indie developer under stress. I don't want pity. I just think someone might find it interesting to read what it can be like to be in this particular box.

What Brought This On?

For years now, the iTunes (and lately Google Play) app store has been this gigantic, rushing torrent of infinite money, and everyone has scrambled to grab their piece.

It's the most soulless, joyless, metric-obsessed market/ethics-free-zone imaginable. There is nothing that can't and won't have all fun and creativity sucked out of it to earn an extra penny from the "whales" (i.e. compulsives) who will happily shell out a hundred bucks a month to get Candy Crush Saga to let them play Bejeweled. (Hot tip: Uninstall Candy Crush Saga and play all the Bejeweled you want forever ad-free for three bucks.)

So for the last couple weeks, people, when they weren't raging about EA's pillaging all of their happy memories of Dungeon Keeper, were noting the runaway success of a tiny, free, ad-supported game called Flappy Bird.

Let's be clear. It's not a great game. It was written in three days by a young Vietnamese man named Dong Nguyen. It's really simple, crushingly difficult, pretty derivative, weirdly addictive, and marketed purely by word of mouth. And it became a huge hit, sucking the attention away from a million equally derivative money-sinks.

According to the author, Flappy Bird was averaging $50K a day. So here come the haters ...

If You Think There Is Something Bad About Flappy Bird, Here Is Why You Are Wrong

The Internet exists to crap all over everything. And Flappy Bird is simple, silly, derivative, and casual-friendly, so it was sure to bring the self-styled Defenders of Gaming out of the woodwork.

And why do people object to it?

One. The gameplay is similar to many earlier games. Well, of course. Flappy Bird is very similar to a host of press-the-button-to-make-the-helicopter-or-bird-stay-in-the-air games going back years. So what? Here's a news flash. If you write any sort of simple game, there is a %99.999 chance somebody already did it.

You can't copyright gameplay for a reason. If you could, small developers (including me) would never stand a chance.

(Many have claimed that Flappy Bird is a ripoff of a game called Piou Piou, which is laughable if you bother to actually try the games. They play entirely differently.)

Two. The art style is super-similar to early Nintendo games. Yes, Flappy Bird's art is reeeeeally close to some Nintendo games that came out in the last century. I've never seen proof that assets were lifted. It's just similar.

So what? Again, you can't copyright an art style, for a reason. If your art style could never be similar to someone else's, small developers (including me) would never stand a chance.

Three. The game is pretty rough. So what? If people choose to play it, nobody voted you the Queen of Gaming. It is so, SO not your business. I think players of Candy Crush Saga or mobile Dungeon Keeper are getting rooked and could get a lot more similar fun elsewhere for way less money, but I'm not running up and down the subway slapping the iPhones out of their hands.

Want to see people hate on Flappy Birds for no good reason? Look at this gross bit of anti-journalism from Kotaku. As of my writing this, the article begins with an update that basically says, "We changed the title of this article as it was pure slander." (Kotaku has since apologized for this piece, so thanks for that, I guess.)

Or look at this vicious example. Or this straight-out slander from the famed game critics of, um, canada.com. (At least Kotaku apologized.) Or, on in the best pretentious grad student style, this hilariously bizarre article in The Atlantic.

Or read the petty, jealous comments of any article on it. I promise you the author has. Every single one. Which is why this happened ...

Rough Lessons In How Humans Work

Dong Nguyen quit. A fortune coming through the door, and he walked away. As I write this, Flappy Bird has been removed from app stores.

Think about this. I mean you, personally. Think about what it would take to make you run from a gold mine like this. Really. Think about why someone would do this.

This is not about money.

If you've experienced any time as a public figure, especially one that is mainly hated on, it makes a lot of sense.

Dong Nguyen is a young guy. He wrote a game for fun, put it out there, and found himself at the target end of a massive wave of attention, much of it negative. I can't stress enough how insanely terrifying this can be, and he wasn't ready.

Hardly the first time this happened. Remember when Phil Fish, the successful author of Fez, canceled Fez 2 and quit the industry in a fit of pique? I've never been Phil Fish. I don't know exactly what was happening in his head when this happened. But it did happen, and I can totally relate.

It can be hard to understand why someone would kill a product that's making a fortune. Anyone can say, "Oh, gee. He has money. Who cares?"

Well, I promise you, there are things that money can't buy. If you are going mad, you can't buy yourself sane. Some people can take this sort of attention. Not everyone. And some people can take it, but it makes them ... weird.

I'm Crazy Too.

I've been the target of my fair share of hate. Real example: E-mails from angry schizophrenics. People who tell me they hope I go out of business and my kids never go to college. Pictures of me Photoshopped in various unflattering ways.

And, of course, the occasional truly unhinged message that I forward to my friends and ask, "Tell me honestly. Should I be worried about my safety here?"

I've been doing this for a long time, and I have a pretty thick skin. Even then, this stuff has an effect. You can't help it. It's part of being human. One angry message has more effect than ten friendly ones. It has a real psychic weight. And, once you know it's there, turning off your computer and avoiding Twitter doesn't remove it.

When my games had their own Humble Bundle, I should have been happy. I mean, I was, in a way. It'll help send my kids to college, and who could argue with that?

Yet, I spent that week in my room quivering with terror. When my developer/writer/artist friends find themselves in similar situations, they are often the same. I've been asked, "This is going so well. Why do I feel horrible all the time?" We neither expect nor deserve sympathy, but that's what happens.

And when an indie dev becomes the hate target of the day, isn't up to it, and loses it a bit, the public responses are the same.

Suppose one day I get one insult too many, I go nuts and quit or freak out. Here's what people will say about me: What a weakling. What a wimp. What an idiot. Why does he care? Why doesn't he just turn the social media off? Why can't he be tough and awesome like me? Screw that guy.

All this, of course, from people who have never experienced being in even remotely the same position.

A Quick Aside

Everyone jokes about how supposedly soulless PR and marketing people are, but dealing with the masses is difficult, time-consuming, and an actual skill. To survive emotionally in a high-profile situation, you need a layer of protection between yourself and the raw feedback of humanity.

If Dong Nguyen got a PR flack, stayed off forums, and just wrote games, he could make a lot of money. However, as he has said himself, this isn't the sort of life he wants to live, and I can't blame him.

But if you've ever seen a public figure (politician, actor, musician, and yes, game designer) have a weird, inexplicable public flame-out, it might make a little bit more sense now.

Nothing Can Be Done, Of Course.

Reality is what it is. We devs would never have our attention and success without the Internet, but you have to take the good with the bad. If you want the attention, you also have to face the Hate Machine.

Sometimes it seems (accurately or not) like every gamer on the Internet seeks out their own little rantbox. A place to direct rage at their chosen target. Young male teens on one side, social justice warriors on the other, general cranks everywhere. Everyone has their axe to grind, and shouting is fun.

People have the right to give feedback, too. If I want to call out the Dungeon Keeper app or the hacky articles I linked to above, it's something I should be allowed to do. If you make your work public, people get to respond.

Trolling is annoying. (Though one man's troll is another man's brave truth-teller.) People troll because it works. When someone writes, "[Some developer] is a moron and his games suck," and the developer reads it, it hurts. You can't prevent it. It's just how our brains work.

I don't think this can ever change. (Though less slander from reporters who should know better would be nice, of course.) It's not about a broken system. It's about understanding, empathy, and remembering that the work you are shouting about was written by another human. An actual human, with feelings and stuff. And humans can be surprisingly fragile.

Saying that won't make any difference, of course. Haters gonna' hate. Trolls gonna' troll. But it feels nice to remind people occasionally, just the same.

Edit: Fixed a typo and made it clear one of the pieces linked was not actually by a grad student.

135 new currencies

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 06:17:48 -0800

Comments: "135 new currencies"

URL: https://stripe.com/blog/new-currencies

Thairu, February 11, 2014

As the internet’s global reach grows, Stripe users increasingly sell to worldwide audiences. Companies like DailyMotion in Paris, HubSpot in Boston, and Shopify in Ottawa build products that are popular everywhere, not just in their home markets.

Starting today, businesses using Stripe in the US and Europe can accept payments in 139 currencies. You can create charges in any of these currencies, and we'll automatically handle converting and transferring funds to you in your home currency. Currency conversion incurs a 2% fee atop market exchange rates.

With this change, you can easily tailor your pricing for different geographies. Localized pricing increases checkout completion rates by eliminating uncertainty for your customers and letting them avoid conversion fees.

You don’t need to do anything to enable this in your account—you can simply start passing the currencies throughout the API:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges \
 -u sk_test_mkGsLqEW6SLnZa487HYfJVLf: \
 -d amount=3000 \
 -d currency=cny \
 -d description="Premium plan" \
 -d customer=cus_X3he9Ex2Aenkc

The currency conversion rate is calculated in real-time and can be immediately checked by retrieving the relevant balance transaction via the API or just by navigating to the charge in the dashboard.

Particular thanks to our beta testers for helping us refine this feature, especially Couchsurfing and Edmodo. As ever, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Sony Waterproof mp3 Player Sold Inside Bottle of Water

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 06:51:46 -0800

Comments: "Sony Waterproof mp3 Player Sold Inside Bottle of Water"

URL: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2014/02/11/sony-sells-waterproof-mp3-player-inside-bottle-water/

What does a company do to convince potential customers that its product is genuinely waterproof? Well, aside from saying so on the packaging, it can sell the product already immersed inside a bottle of water.

Though the device itself was launched a while ago, Sony turned to Auckland-based ad agency DraftFCB to help market the product in New Zealand. And so they came up with the Bottled Walkman, which is sold from vending machines in public places such as gyms. Check out the demo video for yourself.

Don’t miss: This crowdsourced RoboCop remake is utterly bonkers

And: Waterproof iPods and surf-friendly smartphones are just the beginning

➤ Vending Times – [H/T PSFK]

Toward Go 1.3

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 08:29:59 -0800

Comments: "Toward Go 1.3"

URL: http://talks.golang.org/2014/go1.3.slide#1

Bitcoin Exchanges Under 'Massive and Concerted Attack'

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 10:05:03 -0800

Comments: "Bitcoin Exchanges Under 'Massive and Concerted Attack'"

URL: http://www.coindesk.com/massive-concerted-attack-launched-bitcoin-exchanges/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoinDesk+%28CoinDesk+-+The+Voice+of+Digital+Currency%29

A “massive and concerted attack” has been launched by a bot system on numerous bitcoin exchanges, Andreas Antonopoulos has revealed.

This has lead to popular exchange Bitstamp putting a temporary halt on all bitcoin withdrawals, and BTC-e announcing possible delays on transaction crediting.

Antonopoulos, who is the chief security officer of Blockchain.info, said a DDoS attack is taking Bitcoin’s transaction malleability problem and applying it to many transactions in the network, simultaneously.

“So as transactions are being created, malformed/parallel transactions are also being created so as to create a fog of confusion over the entire network, which then affects almost every single implementation out there,” he added.

Antonopoulos went on to say that Blockchain.info’s implementation is not affected, but some exchanges have been affected – their internal accounting systems are gradually going out of sync with the network.

He emphasised that this isn’t affecting withdrawals, because most exchanges are not processing them automatically.

Mt. Gox is the exchange that has suffered the most over the past few days, due to a number of factors, said Antonopoulos. One problem is that it was using a custom client (not the core Bitcoin software), on top of that there is the DDoS attack, plus it was using an automated system to approve withdrawals.

“This is not happening to other exchanges because they’re not stupid enough to issue withdrawals without checking them out first,” he explained.

Antonopoulos said we will see a few exchanges suspend withdrawals temporarily while they re-work their accounting systems to ensure they are not confused by the attack.

“It’s important to note no funds have been lost. Withdrawals have been halted to prevent funds from being lost or to prevent the balances from going out of sync,” he stressed.

Industry action

An industry-wide coordinated response has been put into action, with exchanges and core developers collaborating actively to attack the problem from multiple angles.

Various other groups within the ecosystem, including the big mining pools, are working to stop the issue from propagating across the network.

Any exchanges that are affected are working on fixing their internal systems so they correct the account balances and can resume withdrawals as soon as possible.

“I would expect to see withdrawals flowing again within 24 and 72 hours, and in the meantime, any withdrawals that were cancelled will reappear in customer account balances,” Antonopoulos explained.

Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik said the core bitcoin block chain consensus mechanism and payment system are continuing to work as before, and are not directly impacted by transaction malleability.

He added: “Web wallets and other services that build services on top of bitcoin are reporting problems similar to MtGox, and are taking safety measures to ensure no fund loss, during this network disruption.

“Yesterday’s statement must be revised: we will likely issue an update fixing two edge cases exposed by this attack.”

Bitstamp has issued a statement explaining that it has temporarily halted BTC withdrawals. It begins:

Bitstamp’s exchange software is extremely cautious concerning Bitcoin transactions. Currently it has suspended processing Bitcoin withdrawals due to inconsistent results reported by our bitcoind wallet, caused by a denial-of-service attack using transaction malleability to temporarily disrupt balance checking. As such, Bitcoin withdrawal processing will be suspended temporarily until a software fix is issued.

The statement goes on to reveal that no funds have been lost, nor are any at risk.

BTC-e later issued a comment via Twitter, elaborating on its service interruption.

Due DDOS on Bitcoin network there is a delay possible with crediting of transactions madden between 10-11 February. Be patient please #btce— BTC-E (@btcecom) February 11, 2014

Don’t panic

Antonopoulos was keen to stress that, although this is a serious attack, it doesn’t spell the end of bitcoin. He believes the DDoS attack will be “thwarted” and exchanges will be running as usual by Friday.

“I expect things will go back to normal and the honey badger of money can continue showing its resilience,” he said.

“The death of bitcoin has been prematurely announced so many times already that the obvious conclusion is that bitcoin is far more resilient than its critics would like to think. I am confident that in a few days, those who predicted the death of bitcoin will once again be proven wrong,” Antonopoulos concluded.

DDoS Trading Bots

ESR - Curse Of The Gifted

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:44:09 -0800

Comments: "ESR - Curse Of The Gifted"

URL: http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html

The Book of Graham : The Leveraged Sell-Out

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:30:47 -0800

Comments: " The Book of Graham : The Leveraged Sell-Out"

URL: http://www.leveragedsellout.com/2014/02/the-book-of-graham/

I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who’s graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews at prestigious financial institutions. I was sure there would be recruiters on campus, but I didn’t want to run the risk.

“Paul Graham says prestige is for suckers,” he emailed back within 2 minutes. “Paul Graham says I should follow my passion.”

“Who’s Paul Graham?” I asked. No response.

It turns out Paul Graham runs a “startup accelerator” located on 320 Pioneer Way in Mountain View, CA called Y-Combinator. Y-Combinator makes micro investments into very early stage companies and then helps these companies raise venture capital. Thousands apply for a few slots in two “classes” per year. AirBnB, Dropbox, and Reddit are among its alumni.

The accelerator takes small amounts of risk and offloads that aggregate risk onto a market of investors (the VC’s). Its Demo Day, which first showcases its companies, is a coming out event, like an IPO. And it attracts top young graduates, like my cousin, from across the world. I spent nearly a decade on Wall Street, and let’s be clear: that’s our model. Employing Type A personalities to shuffle around amorphous blobs of questionable value is not called a “startup accelerator”; it’s called Investment Banking.

And this guy Paul was about to steal Eric, brainwash him into thinking he was doing something else, and pay him next to nothing.

I could picture Eric at our east coast Christmas dinner in his startup T-Shirt, his sunglasses still on his head. “Every day we wake up and tell ourselves we have to just fail faster,” he’d say. My father would have a stroke. In six generations, our family had not failed once. Many Y-Combinator founders pay themselves less than $60k a year, about half of what you make your first year in finance. When I saw my cousin a few weeks later, he was flicking through his iPad. He raised his open hand in the air when I walked over to try to talk some sense into him. “Reading Paul Graham,” he said. “YC results in a week.”

I didn’t have much time.

I looked up Paul Graham’s essays. He attacks finance head on. “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy,” he says. “It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Instead, he encourages: “Do what you love.”

I researched Y-Combinator companies and found ones like HomeJoy and Prim. “Eric – what do you love more, house cleaning or laundry?” I emailed.

That day, I sent Eric a business class train ticket to come down to New York. We went out to dinner and then to PH-D. Two girls joined us at our table, and Eric asked which one he should go after. “Follow your heart,” I encouraged. And when the check came, I passed it to Eric and watched his eyes widen at the total. The host came over, expecting his card. I could see Eric sweat. “Oh, this shouldn’t be a problem,” I assured him. I turned to the host: “You accept equity, right?” Her face contorted. I elbowed my cousin. “Eric – tell her about your startup.”

That night, we were out until 5am, and at 8am, I woke up and saw Eric on his knees on the floor of my living room. His “love” was asleep in a t-shirt on the sofa, and he was hunched over his iPad, rocking back and forth, mumbling to himself. As I got closer, I saw Eric flipping through and reading Paul Graham’s essays out loud.

“The danger is when money is combined with prestige,” he said. “Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.” “Hackers and Painters are both makers.” He repeated that: “Hackers and painters are both makers.”

I kicked him with the side of my foot. “What are you doing, dude?” I said. The girl on the sofa rustled, but Eric stayed in his trance. I went back to sleep, and when I woke up, I found Eric in the exact same position, still studying his iPad.

“Your cousin is really…passionate,” sofa-girl said, yanking on her boots.

It was then that I started to realize just how formidable an adversary Paul Graham was. Eric had been ensnared in Paul’s net and now, wrapped in its warmth, all he and Paul’s militia of “hackers” felt they needed to survive was an Internet connection and a cup of Four Barrel drip coffee. Paul had actually convinced my cousin that he would be more than just a cog in Paul’s low risk (but Eric’s high risk) brokerage machine. I could feel him slipping away.

I texted a friend who still had YC ’11 in her email signature even though her company failed miserably. “What the hell goes on over there?” I asked. “What doesn’t?” she replied. I learned that Y-Combinator goes beyond just being a brand. It’s a community. In finance, we had a blowout holiday party and a liberal corporate card policy. Y-Combinator hosts weekly office hours and dinners and online forums. Constantly brainstorming and discussing and ideating their never-ending list of impractical concepts, Paul’s disciples begin to feel a shared identity, like they are part of something bigger than themselves. It becomes their religion.

“Eric!” I shouted. I snapped my fingers in front his face.

I had put together my own presentation for him. I called it: “Science.” I slid my iPad in place of his and began my pitch. Slides 1-5 were dedicated to the complete failure of venture capital as an asset class over its entire history. I had charts and quotes from the world’s most famous economists. Slides 6-10 listed all the defunct Y-Combinator companies, laid out in three columns in size 6 font. Next to them, the handful of wins looked insignificant. In my last slide, I showed Eric Y-Combinator’s hypocritical homepage, where it calls itself “the most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs.”

“Do you see?” I asked.

Eric looked up at me, and for a moment, I thought I saw recognition. Through his eyes, I swore I could make out the gears slowly turning into place. Finally, I thought. My body started to relax. Then Eric picked up his iPad, turned it towards me so I was staring directly at his guru’s face, and said:

“But Paul Graham says I must create.”

I grabbed Eric’s iPad from his hands, lifted it over my head, and hurled it down towards the floor as hard as I could. The screen smashed, and a piece of Gorilla Glass spun out and cut the top of my foot.

“ENOUGH!” I screamed.

The iPad was still on, and through the cracks in screen, I could see Paul staring up at me, smiling.

I went back to my room and slammed the door.

A few days later, my family received a group email with the subject line: “Changing the world!” My head sunk into my hands. Eric wouldn’t be going into finance. He and his co-founders had gotten accepted into Y-Combinator for their startup. “The pest control industry has no idea what it’s in for!!” he wrote. He quoted Paul Graham quoting Steve Jobs and assured us that everything they would do would be “insanely great.” No one responded.

Congratulations, Paul.

The legacy infrastructure to snatch young talent was built on the basic human desire of greed. But you, you leverage a much deeper insight. In constructing your 2%-10% value capture contraption, you’ve utilized something that didn’t even cross our minds in banking. You’re able to drive people to risk their lives and work long hours on your behalf with no Seamless account, no black car, all under the guise that it’s their idea. And to achieve this, you play upon a much more powerful human emotion, one that every successful campaign to delude America’s youth and lasting institution throughout history has had at its core:

Hope.

javascript - How does Facebook disable Developer Tools? - Stack Overflow

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 19:29:21 -0800

Comments: "javascript - How does Facebook disable Developer Tools? - Stack Overflow"

URL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21692646/how-does-facebook-disable-developer-tools

It works fine for me in Chrome - but Facebook do seem to be trying to disable the JavaScript console to prevent a recent scam.

Fortunately, they provide an option to turn this protection off - https://www.facebook.com/selfxss

With the above script added in your web application, try launching console and execute any script. You would notice the following message in console (and yes, typed in script in console did not get executed!)

Disable JavaScript execution from console

Most modern browser today offers developer tools either as part of browser engine (like Chrome Developer Tools in Google Chrome) or as extension mechanism (like firebug in Mozilla Firefox). These tools are certainly in a way responsible for making JavaScript a much matured language because they provide a powerful tool to debug through the script. Those shortcut keys (F8, F10, F11 etc), which use to work in powerful IDEs, was almost a privilege to other programming languages have finally arrived to JavaScript developers. Matter of no debate, powerful debugging tools is a mandate for any programming language to become mature enough to attract wide audience from developer community.

However as the debugging, which is open for all (remember, it is attached to browser and not to a particular IDE), gets more and more popular, anyone can write script snippet using console and get it executed in the host application environment (i.e., the web page which is being displayed in the browser). Obviously this cannot be considered as security threat since the user who is trying to execute any script snippet has execution permission. For example, if user has no permission to view account statement for other user, he/she cannot do so via executing script using console since the permission are governed by backing server code.

In certain cases, it is still possible that you may want to disable any kind of script execution via console for your web application due to business demands. For the practical reason, neither you can configure user's browser to disable console nor ask them to stop using console (both won't work, billions of user and why would they listen to you?)

In such case, the only practical possibility would be to host code in your web application which disallows any script execution via console. Wow! First question, is that even possible? How?

Yes, that's kind of possible and which is what I am going to explain now. Let's take example of Google Chrome Developer tools.

Chrome developer tools takes anything which is typed in to console as an input and simply passes it to evaluate function to run it in the host application environment. Before doing so, they create a property œ_commandLineAPI in console object and whole script gets executed in with block as

with ((window && window.console && window.console._commandLineAPI) || {}) {
// your script here.
}

Now seeing what we have above, it is very easy to say that the only way to stop execution of script code typed in console is to throw an exception before that.

A simplest way would be to save the console object in a function variable and define console property in window object with accessor/mutators (i.e., get/set). In get function, we could simply check if the property attached by chrome developer tool exists and if yes, throw exception (obviously which is not handled by anyone and hence stops execution of further code).

Here's the full code snippet:

<script type="'text/javascript'">
(function(){
 var _z = console;
 Object.defineProperty( window, "console", {
 get : function(){
 if( _z._commandLineAPI ){
 throw "Sorry, Can't exceute scripts!";
 }
 return _z; 
 },
 set : function(val){
 _z = val;
 }
 });
})();
</script>

Source: http://kspace.in/blog/2013/02/22/disable-javascript-execution-from-console/

John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 19:29:20 -0800

Comments: "John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar"

URL: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/john-yudkin-the-man-who-tried-to-warn-us-about-sugar-20140212-32h03.html

Not so sweet: sugar. Photo: Lyndall Larkham

A couple of years ago, an out-of-print book published in 1972 by a long-dead British professor suddenly became a collector's item.

Copies that had been lying dusty on bookshelves were selling for hundreds of pounds, while copies were also being pirated online.

Alongside such rarities as Madonna's Sex, Stephen King's Rage (written as Richard Bachman) and Promise Me Tomorrow by Nora Roberts; Pure, White and Deadly by John Yudkin, a book widely derided at the time of publication, was listed as one of the most coveted out-of-print works in the world.

Pure, White and Deadly.

How exactly did a long-forgotten book suddenly become so prized? The cause was a ground-breaking lecture called Sugar: the Bitter Truth by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at the University of California, in which Lustig hailed Yudkin's work as ''prophetic''.

''Without even knowing it, I was a Yudkin acolyte,'' says Lustig, who tracked down the book after a tip from a colleague via an interlibrary loan. ''Everything this man said in 1972 was the God's honest truth and if you want to read a true prophecy you find this book... I'm telling you every single thing this guy said has come to pass. I'm in awe.''

Posted on YouTube in 2009, Lustig's 90-minute talk has received more than 4.1 million hits and is credited with kick-starting the anti-sugar movement, a campaign that calls for sugar to be treated as a toxin, like alcohol and tobacco, and for sugar-laden foods to be taxed, labelled with health warnings and banned for anyone under 18.

Lustig is one of a growing number of scientists who don't just believe sugar makes you fat and rots teeth. They're convinced it's the cause of several chronic and very common illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes. It's also addictive, since it interferes with our appetites and creates an irresistible urge to eat.

This year, Lustig's message has gone mainstream; many of the New Year diet books focused not on fat or carbohydrates, but on cutting out sugar and the everyday foods (soups, fruit juices, bread) that contain high levels of sucrose. The anti-sugar camp is not celebrating yet, however. They know what happened to Yudkin and what a ruthless and unscrupulous adversary the sugar industry proved to be.

The tale begins in the Sixties. That decade, nutritionists in university laboratories all over America and Western Europe were scrabbling to work out the reasons for an alarming rise in heart disease levels. By 1970, there were 520 deaths per 100,000 per year in England and Wales caused by coronary heart disease and 700 per 100,000 in America. After a while, a consensus emerged: the culprit was the high level of fat in our diets.

One scientist in particular grabbed the headlines: a nutritionist from the University of Minnesota called Ancel Keys. Keys, famous for inventing the K-ration - 12,000 calories packed in a little box for use by troops during the Second World War - declared fat to be public enemy number one and recommended that anyone who was worried about heart disease should switch to a low-fat ''Mediterranean'' diet.

Instead of treating the findings as a threat, the food industry spied an opportunity. Market research showed there was a great deal of public enthusiasm for ''healthy'' products and low-fat foods would prove incredibly popular. By the start of the Seventies, supermarket shelves were awash with low-fat yogurts, spreads, and even desserts and biscuits.

But, amid this new craze, one voice stood out in opposition. John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at the University of London's Queen Elizabeth College, had been doing his own experiments and, instead of laying the blame at the door of fat, he claimed there was a much clearer correlation between the rise in heart disease and a rise in the consumption of sugar. Rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and students fed sugar and carbohydrates, he said, invariably showed raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it directly to type 2 diabetes.

When he outlined these results in Pure, White and Deadly, in 1972, he questioned whether there was any causal link at all between fat and heart disease. After all, he said, we had been eating substances like butter for centuries, while sugar, had, up until the 1850s, been something of a rare treat for most people. ''If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,'' he wrote, ''that material would promptly be banned.''

This was not what the food industry wanted to hear. When devising their low-fat products, manufacturers had needed a fat substitute to stop the food tasting like cardboard, and they had plumped for sugar. The new ''healthy'' foods were low-fat but had sugar by the spoonful and Yudkin's findings threatened to disrupt a very profitable business.

As a result, says Lustig, there was a concerted campaign by the food industry and several scientists to discredit Yudkin's work. The most vocal critic was Ancel Keys.

Keys loathed Yudkin and, even before Pure, White and Deadly appeared, he published an article, describing Yudkin's evidence as ''flimsy indeed''.

''Yudkin always maintained his equanimity, but Keys was a real a-------, who stooped to name-calling and character assassination,'' says Lustig, speaking from New York, where he's just recorded yet another television interview.

The British Sugar Bureau put out a press release dismissing Yudkin's claims as ''emotional assertions'' and the World Sugar Research Organisation described his book as ''science fiction''. When Yudkin sued, it printed a mealy-mouthed retraction, concluding: ''Professor Yudkin recognises that we do not agree with [his] views and accepts that we are entitled to express our disagreement.''

Yudkin was ''uninvited'' to international conferences. Others he organised were cancelled at the last minute, after pressure from sponsors, including, on one occasion, Coca-Cola. When he did contribute, papers he gave attacking sugar were omitted from publications. The British Nutrition Foundation, one of whose sponsors was Tate & Lyle, never invited anyone from Yudkin's internationally acclaimed department to sit on its committees. Even Queen Elizabeth College reneged on a promise to allow the professor to use its research facilities when he retired in 1970 (to write Pure, White and Deadly). Only after a letter from Yudkin's solicitor was he offered a small room in a separate building.

''Can you wonder that one sometimes becomes quite despondent about whether it is worthwhile trying to do scientific research in matters of health?'' he wrote. ''The results may be of great importance in helping people to avoid disease, but you then find they are being misled by propaganda designed to support commercial interests in a way you thought only existed in bad B films.''

And this ''propaganda'' didn't just affect Yudkin. By the end of the Seventies, he had been so discredited that few scientists dared publish anything negative about sugar for fear of being similarly attacked. As a result, the low-fat industry, with its products laden with sugar, boomed.

Yudkin's detractors had one trump card: his evidence often relied on observations, rather than on explanations, of rising obesity, heart disease and diabetes rates. ''He could tell you these things were happening but not why, or at least not in a scientifically acceptable way,'' says David Gillespie, author of the bestselling Sweet Poison. ''Three or four of the hormones that would explain his theories had not been discovered.''

''Yudkin knew a lot more data was needed to support his theories, but what's important about his book is its historical significance,'' says Lustig. ''It helps us understand how a concept can be bastardised by dark forces of industry.''

From the Eighties onwards, several discoveries gave new credence to Yudkin's theories. Researchers found fructose, one of the two main carbohydrates in refined sugar, is primarily metabolised by the liver; while glucose (found in starchy food like bread and potatoes) is metabolised by all cells. This means consuming excessive fructose puts extra strain on the liver, which then converts fructose to fat.

This induces a condition known as insulin resistance, or metabolic syndrome, which doctors now generally acknowledge to be the major risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and obesity, as well as a possible factor for many cancers. Yudkin's son, Michael, a former professor of biochemistry at Oxford, says his father was never bitter about the way he was treated, but, ''he was hurt personally''.

''More than that,'' says Michael, ''he was such an enthusiast of public health, it saddened him to see damage being done to us all, because of vested interests in the food industry.''

One of the problems with the anti-sugar message - then and now - is how depressing it is. The substance is so much part of our culture, that to be told buying children an ice cream may be tantamount to poisoning them, is most unwelcome. But Yudkin, who grew up in dire poverty in east London and went on to win a scholarship to Cambridge, was no killjoy.

''He didn't ban sugar from his house, and certainly didn't deprive his grandchildren of ice cream or cake,'' recalls his granddaughter, Ruth, a psychotherapist. ''He was hugely fun-loving and would never have wanted to be deprived of a pleasure, partly, perhaps, because he grew up in poverty and had worked so hard to escape that level of deprivation.''

''My father certainly wasn't fanatical,'' adds Michael. ''If he was invited to tea and offered cake, he'd accept it. But at home, it's easy to say no to sugar in your tea. He believed if you educated the public to avoid sugar, they'd understand that.''

Thanks to Lustig and the rehabilitation of Yudkin's reputation, Penguin republished Pure, White and Deadly 18 months ago. Obesity rates in the UK are now 10 times what they were when it was first published and the amount of sugar we eat has increased 31.5 per cent since 1990 (thanks to all the ''invisible'' sugar in everything from processed food and orange juice to coleslaw and yogurt). The number of diabetics in the world has nearly trebled. The numbers dying of heart disease has decreased, thanks to improved drugs, but the number living with the disease is growing steadily.

As a result, the World Health Organisation is set to recommend a cut in the amount of sugar in our diets from 22 teaspoons per day to almost half that. But its director-general, Margaret Chan, has warned that, while it might be on the back foot at last, the sugar industry remains a formidable adversary, determined to safeguard its market position.

Recently, UK food campaigners have complained that they're being shunned by ministers who are more than willing to take meetings with representatives from the food industry. ''It is not just Big Tobacco any more,'' Chan said last year. ''Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation and protect themselves by using the same tactics. They include front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt.''

Dr Julian Cooper, head of research at AB Sugar, insists the increase in the incidence of obesity in Britain is a result of, ''a range of complex factors''.

''Reviews of the body of scientific evidence by expert committees have concluded that consuming sugar as part of a balanced diet does not induce lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and heart disease,'' he says.If you look up Robert Lustig on Wikipedia, nearly two-thirds of the studies cited there to repudiate Lustig's views were funded by Coca-Cola.

But Gillespie believes the message is getting through. ''More people are avoiding sugar, and when this happens companies adjust what they're selling,'' he says. It's just a shame, he adds, that a warning that could have been taken on board 40 years ago went unheeded: ''Science took a disastrous detour in ignoring Yudkin. It was to the detriment of the health of millions.''

Sunday Telegraph, London

The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:31:03 -0800

Comments: "The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back"

URL: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/the-day-the-internet-didnt-fight-back/

Hemingway

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:29:50 -0800

Comments: "Hemingway"

Introducing Wit Speech API

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 06:33:40 -0800

Comments: "Introducing Wit Speech API"

URL: https://wit.ai/blog/2014/02/12/speech-api

12 Feb 2014 feature, speech

Voice commands are the future. Science-fiction has had them for decades and yet, we still have to reach for the remote to turn on the TV or set an alarm. Our mission is to change this. Adding a voice interface to an app or device should be simple.

Turning speech into actionable data

Today, we’re very excited to announce our new “Speech to JSON” API, four months after the launch of the “Text to JSON” API.

From now on, your app, device or even your website can stream audio to our server, and get actionable data in return.

See it in action for home automation:

How does it work?

Behind the scene, Wit combines various state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing techniques and several speech recognition engines in order to achieve low latency and high robustness to both surrounding noise and paraphrastic variations (there are millions of ways to say the same thing).

Fortunately, you don’t need to care about all this machinery. We focus all our energy into creating the simplest developer experience possible. You can be up and running in a few minutes using our website. Wit will adapt to your domain over time, from ice-cream distribution to space missions. Wit makes no assumptions and remains 100% configurable.

It will take you 5 minutes to build your own Wit configuration:

Consuming the API

Then, calling the API is simple. We provide client-side SDKs that handle audio recording and streaming for iOS, Android or even a simple webpage like this one. You can also use the HTTP interface to stream live audio or post a sound file:

Let’s take this sound (recorded from a celebrity in the valley – do you know who?):

Submit it to the Wit API with a POST request:

curl -XPOST 'https://api.wit.ai/speech' \
 -i -L \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
 -H "Content-Type: audio/wav" \
 --data-binary "@sample.wav"

You’ll get this in return:

{
 "msg_id" : "6a84eae3-969c-41ad-94d9-85076fbbdc99",
 "msg_body" : "set the kitchen table on fire",
 "outcome" : {
 "intent" : "set_fire",
 "entities" : {
 "object" : {
 "value" : "kitchen table",
 "body" : "kitchen table"
 }
 },
 "confidence" : 0.997
 }
}

Interested to build your own voice interface? Sign up here!

Team Wit

@WitNL

FlapMMO -- flapmmo.com

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 07:31:19 -0800

Comments: "FlapMMO -- flapmmo.com"

Chris Hates Writing • The anonymity I know

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 08:05:19 -0800

Comments: "Chris Hates Writing • The anonymity I know"

URL: http://chrishateswriting.com/post/76431353368/the-anonymity-i-know

The anonymity I know

Yesterday Sam Altman published a short post containing his thoughts on Secret, and also anonymity in general—namely that it breeds meanness, and that anonymous social networks are destined to decay and grow worse over time.

I strongly disagree. What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other.

"Anonymity" is itself a slippery term because people frequently use it to refer to everything that isn’t "real identity." Obviously identity is more nuanced than that (I prefer "prismatic”), but for some reason we choose to paint it in broad strokes comprised of two extremes. In the interest of simplicity, I’ll use anonymity to encompass the part of the spectrum that is not real identity, including pseudonymity and everything in between.

When I spoke at TED four years ago I concluded the talk with my concern that in the race to embrace social networking, anonymous communities were quickly going the way of the dinosaur, and that the world was on the verge of losing something incredibly valuable.

It’s an issue near and dear to me, as I’ve had the privilege of founding and presiding over one of the largest anonymous online communities—4chan—for more than a decade.

I was myself once ignorant of the benefits of anonymity. As a 15-year-old who spent his childhood and early teens hanging out in online chatrooms and forums, I wasn’t particularly drawn to the idea of anonymous contribution. When I encountered the inspiration for 4chan, a Japanese website called Futaba Channel, I found myself captivated by its unconventional imageboard format and how quickly content seemed to roll on and off the site—not its emphasis on anonymity and impermanence. Fascinated and frustrated by my inability to contribute (my Japanese is abysmal), I quickly translated the source code and threw it up for a few Internet friends to use.

The very things I overlooked as a teen quickly became the driving force behind the site, and are now deeply ingrained in its ethos as well as my own. Few communities have grown in size and come to influence mainstream culture as 4chan has, for as long as it has, and it is without a doubt the result of allowing people to interact without the burden of identity, and to share and explore new ideas together. For many, 4chan has become their “third place,” and provided a sanctuary away from the everyday stresses of home, school, and work life.

The combination of anonymity and ephemerality has fostered experimentation and creativity rarely seen elsewhere. It’s incredible what people can make when they’re able to fail publicly without fear, since not only will those failures not be attributed to them, but they’ll be washed away by a waterfall of new content. Only ideas that resonate with the broader community persist, creating the most ideal conditions for the production of viral content, which established 4chan as one of the Web’s earliest “meme factories.”

The conversation is “raw” to say the least—almost everyone checks their filter at the door. The resulting dialogue is about as honest as it gets. In lieu of traditional barriers to membership, the community uses cryptic and crude language to regulate who can and cannot participate. On the surface this may seem offensive, but it’s often meant to do little more than keep newcomers on their toes and encourage they lurk and learn the house rules before participating.

Few sites give their users a platform to share ideas quite like 4chan’s—a virtual Speakers’ Corner—where anyone can express their opinions on equal footing. Every person who creates a thread has that thread appear at the very top of the index, and no amount of karma or social capital can save it from the depths of irrelevance. It’s ideas, not reputations, that shine here.

4chan isn’t without its problems and is by no means a utopia, but in many ways provides an accurate representation of who we are: flawed, imperfect. I see beauty in that, and something worthy of continued exploration.

As someone who has spent their entire adult life educating the public about the benefits of anonymity and advocating for alternatives to “real identity,” I’m simultaneously excited and hesitant about what the next few months might bring.

Snapchat has changed the game. Its success has demonstrated that given the right offering, there is in fact mainstream demand for products that incorporate anonymity and ephemerality, and I’ve watched with bated breath as it’s kicked off renewed interest and debate over their merits.

It feels like we’re on the cusp of a fever pitch to explore this new—well, rediscovered—terrain, with entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists all lining up to understand and capitalize on the opportunities that await. I welcome these expeditions, but pray we will see people create thoughtful products that truly reimagine identity for the digital age rather than simply incorporating “anonymity” and “ephemerality” as marketing buzzwords.

It’s bound to be an interesting ride. Whatever may happen, I’m grateful to have a front row seat.

Elasticsearch.org 1.0.0 Released | Blog | Elasticsearch

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 08:53:10 -0800

Comments: "Elasticsearch.org 1.0.0 Released | Blog | Elasticsearch"

URL: http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/1-0-0-released/

Saying Goodbye To Python

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 11:31:42 -0800

Comments: "Saying Goodbye To Python"

URL: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2014/02/saying-goodbye-to-python.html

This post is long overdue; this isn’t a declaration of intent (any intent was long ago made real), just my reflection about my own path. I left the Python world a long time ago but I never took a chance to say goodbye.

While I had moved on from Python years ago, I felt a certain attachment to it well past then, not quite admitting to myself that I wasn’t coming back. When my proposal for PyCon 2013 was rejected I was frustrated (it was going to be a fun talk!) but for some reason that made me fully realized that I wasn’t part of the Python community anymore.

Python was the first — and I sometimes wonder if the only — programming community I was part of. Coming to Python was a conscious choice. In college I was interested in Scheme and Smalltalk. High-minded languages with interesting ideas, but hard to find practical uses. Scheme was always too underserved by its libraries and sparse academic community. In contrast Smalltalk was productive — it was built by and for people who loved to build things. (More credit here should probably go to Dan Ingalls than Alan Kay — I can sense in Dan Ingalls’s work a real passion for making things, and a pure but unproductive language would not have satisfied him.) But Smalltalk was and is a world of its own. It was culturally and technically pre-internet, pre-open-source, pre-online-community. And despite all the great things about the Smalltalk environment and language it couldn’t fulfill these then-new potentials, event as it tried to adapt. (I wrote a couple posts about this, intended as a sort of sympathetic explanation of why I couldn’t stick with Smalltalk: Where Smalltalk Went Wrong and a followup.)

At the end of my college career (1999ish) I consciously looked for a new home. I flirted with Perl, C, but knew they weren’t for me. Somewhere along the way I came upon Python, and it was good enough that I didn’t look for anything better. I can’t say I fell in love with Python like I had with Scheme and Smalltalk — Scheme was like an opening up of the world after going far beyond what anyone should ask of GW-BASIC, and Squeak/Smalltalk was a deep mysterious world, like coming upon the ruins of an ancient and advanced civilization. Python in comparison was practical — but I wasn’t in the mood at that time to discover, I wanted to build.

And I built a lot of things in Python. I was doing workaday web programming and my enthusiasm went more towards building tools to build stuff than in the building itself. I did build some cool products in those days, not just libraries, but for some reason it’s only the smaller units that I was able to push out. And I found a community in Python.

And I built. Back in the days I contributed to Webware, what felt like a completely different generation of web development in Python than today. I wrote SQLObject, my first foray into a oh-shit-people-are-using-this-I’m-not-sure-how-I-feel-about-that library. But SQLObject explored a lot of metaprogramming concepts that were quite novel in the Python world at that time. At the same time maintaining it felt like a terrible burden. It took me far too long to resolve that, and only once interest had died down (in no small part due to my lack of attention) did I hand it over to Oleg who has been a far more steady hand. This would be a pattern I would unfortunately repeat. But if SQLObject helped the next generation be better that’s good enough for me.

Later came WSGI which excited me with its subtly functional basis. I built a whole web framework toolkit (or a framework for building web frameworks?) in Paste. Few people really understood what I was trying to do with Paste — at times including me. Some people like Ben Bangert were able to see the principles underneath the code, and get them out into the world in the kind of usable state that I intended to enable. (And along the way I sometimes felt like I was doing the same for PJE.) Python web frameworks were a mess back then; ultimately reaching for the crown using a monolithic approach was a more successful technique than trying to build bridges as I attempted with Paste. I’m still not sure what lesson to take from that. Not a general lesson, but more understanding the landscape. And understanding what you can bring to a problem, and who you can bring with. I feel like I’m only now really understanding the importance of vision combined with a diverse group of skills and perspectives, and I have even more to learn about how to actually assemble and coordinate the right group of people in the right environment to succeed.

Somewhere around here I feel like I reached my 10,000 hours of Python coding. I wrote WebOb, taking the lessons of Paste and a better intuition for library design. I still think it’s the best mapping of HTTP to Python. Other libraries include more aspects of web development in their scope, or have better documentation, and more users, but when viewed with a particular lens I’m still very proud of WebOb. And it’s been an important building block in a lot of people’s explorations into building a web framework. Other libraries from this period are lxml.html, smaller things like WebTest, ScriptTest, MiniMock, Tempita, perhaps the over-ambition (or just mis-ambition) of Deliverance. That period felt like a clearing out of my system, unloading a bunch of ideas.

But for whatever reason my most successful tools were virtualenv and pip. These were never my greatest passions, or even close. They were about: (a) fixing personal annoyances in deployment (virtualenv), and (b) getting people to stop fucking whining about Setuptools and easy_install (pip). I’m not sure whether I blame the uneasy success of these tools on broad appeal, or that they are in a sense user-visible tools and not libraries, or that I didn’t like doing them because no one liked doing them and so there was a vacuum waiting to be filled.

And then my last project, Silver Lining. It was early on in the devops revolution, an attempt to think about what a generic container for web applications might look like. It was in a sense going deeper down the hole of virtualenv and pip, but with an aim to build a full product and not just a set of eclectic tools. No one cared. And I only cared a little — I cared because it was completing some ideas I’d long had about deployment, because for a certain kind of web application development it felt nimble and reliable, because it removed or automated tasks I didn’t like to do. But I didn’t care, no more than I cared about virtualenv or pip. I’d gone down a path that was about code and technical design, but if I stepped back it was unexciting.

And when I did step back there wasn’t anything in Python that excited me. Python was doing great, my interest had nothing to jumping on or off bandwagons. Python is doing great — better than ever (minor bumps with versions aside). But I think in my mind I’d always imagined I could build up just the right toolset, and using that toolset create the product I actually wanted to create — what exactly that product was, I don’t know, but with the right tools I imagined I could move fast enough and confidently enough to find it.

Sometimes when I’m feeling particularly excited about an idea, like really excited, I have to take a break. I need to calm down. Try to wrap my head around the ideas, because I know if I push forward directly that I’ll just muddle things up and feel disappointed. No, I don’t know that is true: maybe I don’t want to have to confront, in that moment, that the idea is not as cool as I think it is, or as possible as I think it is. But often I do step back into the problem, with ideas that are more mature for having thought more deeply about them. In a sense I think creating tools and libraries was a similar process: I felt too excited about creating something great, because I worried I’d muddle everything up, or afraid I just couldn’t pull it off, and so I stepped away and would work on tools.

I always directed my attention to the web, even if I got bogged down in the server. Somehow I skipped native GUIs, even as a user. But pure data processing without consideration for what you do with the data felt unexciting. And ops — that’s just the worst. I was, and am, a true believer in Free Software; and I was, and am, a true believer in the web. That is, I don’t see either as simply a means to an ends. But not for the same reasons, and I can believe in a web that isn’t open source, and open source that isn’t for the web. And yet writing it down I realize I don’t care about open source that isn’t for the web.

When I stepped back Python no longer seemed relevant to the web, at least not the part of the web that interested me. The tools I had built were no longer relevant either, they were not the tools with which I could realize my ambitions. The database-backed website, or the dynamic-HTTP-based web application, templates and deployments, anything you’d call “REST” — none of it seemed like the future, and whatever this vague thing was that I’d been looking for, I wasn’t going to find it there.

This wasn’t an actual revelation, I’m constructing it in retrospect. If you’d asked me I would have agreed with this notion even years earlier, and it’s not like I came up with some unique idea, if anything I would call it self-evident, don’t we all know this is where the world is going? And so I started to look towards Javascript and the browser and the DOM.

Somewhat before this I also joined Mozilla. But it would be backwards to say that Mozilla induced this change in perspective, that it tempted me away from Python. In fact I would have had a much easier time of it if I had just stuck with doing Python backend stuff at Mozilla.

The last few years of transition have been a struggle. With Python and the server I knew what I was doing. I was good at it, I felt competent. I could construct an opinion with confidence about all kinds of design questions. I was respected and my opinion would be listened to. I’d put in my 10,000 hours, I had achieved mastery.

Moving to Javascript none of this was true, and most of it still isn’t true. It might be easier to pull off this change if I was doing web development, surrounded with people making similar transitions, a little fish in the little pond of whatever group I was working with. But Mozilla is not that kind of environment. Which is okay — if I had been felt confident it would only be because there was no one to correct me.

It’s oddly common to see people talk about how a programmer can pick up something new in the matter of a few days or months. To find programmers that consider all that knowledge transferable (for instance). I don’t know what to make of it — my less forgiving self thinks these people have never known what real mastery is. I don’t think it takes another 10,000 hours to get mastery in a new language and environment… but it definitely takes some thousands of hours, some years of hard work. I only now feel like I’m getting close.

Maybe it’s my perspective on what mastery is. Deciding to do something and then doing it is good. It is not mastery. You have to pick the right problem to solve. You have to pick the right way to solve it. You need to know when to revise that plan, and understand the constraints that inform that revision. You need both large scale and small scale intuitions. And you need to be good enough at all the details of programming in that environment that you don’t get overwhelmed with the “easy” stuff, so you have mental energy to spare on the big stuff. The jump from Python to Javascript isn’t that big, the languages have a very similar shape. And the browser was already the environment focused on. And yet redeveloping my intuition for this new environment has taken time.

Sadly I’m not going to get back where I was, because Javascript is not Python. If there’s a Javascript community I haven’t found it, or it’s at least not a single entity. There is no community that created Javascript like the Python community created Python. Python comes from the internet in a way Javascript does not; Javascript was built for the internet, but Python was built on the internet. And I do miss the Python community, you’re good people.

But also whatever language partisanship I had is gone, and won’t come back in the guise of a new favorite language. This shouldn’t be confused with a disinterest in language. I still get as annoyed as ever by “use the right tool for the job” — the bland truism meant to shut down critical discussion and engagement with the tasks and choices in software engineering, replacing it with a weak passionless technical fatalism.

I suppose it is the platform that I am drawn to now before language. And the browser seems like the most interesting platform, not because it’s novel (though it is, it’s a runtime like few others), but because of how concrete it is, and of course how relevant it is to… anything. And the browser is no longer just the servant of a server, I prefer now to think of the browser as an independent agent, connecting to services instead of servers. Obviously that doesn’t describe a great number of running web sites, but it’s the model I see for the future, and a better perspective for understanding future architectures.

Still this only addresses which direction I’m looking towards, I still have to walk the path. I don’t want to get caught up in the weeds again, building tools for something I never manage to make. Right now I think I’m on to something in the area of collaboration, first with TogetherJS and now I’m thinking bigger with a new experiment. But while I feel like I’ve reached some competence in executing on these projects, programming is only one piece of bringing forward a larger vision. I still have a lot of learning to do, skills for which I haven’t put in the necessary time. How to recruit support, how to manage the project, how to negotiate between feasibility and user value, how to negotiate compromises in strategy and design. And collaboration itself is a whole domain of expertise. I’ve learned a lot, I can do things, but I am definitely not yet experienced enough to choose to do the right thing in these areas. And at this moment I’m worried I won’t have the room to learn these things, it feels like time is running out just when I’m pulling stuff together.

Anyway, that’s where I am now. No longer a language partisan, unclear of what community I am even participating in, I am less sure how to identify and self-identify myself. How do I describe myself now? Even as I find my technical footing I am still adrift. And so it’s hard to say goodbye. So instead I’ll say, Pythonistas: until we meet again. Maybe I’ll meet some of you over here.

Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion : The Two-Way : NPR

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 12:28:19 -0800

Comments: "Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion : The Two-Way : NPR"

URL: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/12/275896094/scientists-say-their-giant-laser-has-produced-nuclear-fusion

hide captionThe National Ignition Facility's 192 laser beams focus onto a tiny target.

LLNL

The National Ignition Facility's 192 laser beams focus onto a tiny target.

LLNL

Researchers at a laboratory in California say they've had a breakthrough in producing fusion reactions with a giant laser. The success comes after years of struggling to get the laser to work and is another step in the decades-long quest for fusion energy.

Omar Hurricane, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says that for the first time, they've produced significant amounts of fusion by zapping a target with their laser. "We've gotten more energy out of the fusion fuel than we put into the fusion fuel," he says.

Strictly speaking, while more energy came from fusion than went into the hydrogen fuel, only about 1 percent of the laser's energy ever reached the fuel. Useful levels of fusion are still a long way off. "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser," says Steve Cowley, the head of a huge fusion experiment in the U.K. called the Joint European Torus, or JET.

The laser is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. Constructed at a cost of more than $3 billion, it consists of 192 beams that take up the length of three football fields. For a brief moment, the beams can focus 500 trillion watts of power — more power than is being used in that same time across the entire United States — onto a target about the width of a No. 2 pencil.

The goal is fusion: a process where hydrogen atoms are squeezed together to make helium atoms. When that happens, a lot of energy comes out. It could mean the answer to the world's energy problems, but fusion is really, really hard to do. Hurricane says that each time they try, it feels like they're taking a test.

hide captionInside a capsule the width of a No. 2 pencil sits a tiny ball of hydrogen fuel. The lasers squeeze the fuel until it fuses, releasing energy.

E. Dewald/LLNL

Inside a capsule the width of a No. 2 pencil sits a tiny ball of hydrogen fuel. The lasers squeeze the fuel until it fuses, releasing energy.

E. Dewald/LLNL

"Of course you want to score real well, you think you've learned the material, but you just have to see how you do," he says.

Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat "F." For all its power, it just couldn't get the hydrogen to fuse, and researchers didn't know why. The failures have led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars. In 2012, the government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons.

But the fusion experiments continued, and Hurricane says researchers now understand why their original strategy wasn't working. In the journal Nature, he and his colleagues report that they've finally figured out how to squeeze the fuel with the lasers. By doing a lot of squeezing right at the start, they were able to keep the fuel from churning and squirting out. The lasers squeezed evenly and the hydrogen turned into helium.

The new technique can't reach "ignition," which is the point at which the hydrogen fusion feeds on itself to make more. Even so, JET's Cowley says, this is still a big moment for NIF.

"I think it's still a very important step forward, they reached fusion conditions, they made some fusion happen, and that's not been done before [with a laser]," he says.

Hurricane says no one knows for sure whether NIF can really reach the point of ignition. "It's not up to me; it's up to Mother Nature," he says. "But we're certainly going to try."

Evan M Rose. - Last Thursday, my brother, Stephen Rose fought...

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 14:30:24 -0800

Comments: " Evan M Rose. - Last Thursday, my brother, Stephen Rose fought... "

URL: http://evanmrose.tumblr.com/post/76463244600/last-thursday-my-brother-stephen-rose-fought

Last Thursday, my brother, Stephen Rose fought courageously against symptoms of mental illness. In the last 12 hours of his life, he did all the things he was supposed to do to get help in a moment of crisis - made multiple calls to his care providers, to 911 and even went to the hospital. He had been experiencing symptoms for several years but was in a highly-respected treatment program that was working intimately with him. He was planning for his happiness, his dreams and his future. Nonetheless, in a sudden and surprising turn, Stephen lost the battle and passed from this world. But despite this loss, through the efforts he inspired in us, we will not lose the war.

We often have preconceived notions of what someone struggling with mental health issues looks like. Steve did not fit any of them. He was polite, athletic, good looking and highly intelligent. He was a Harvard graduate and achieved a GPA of 3.5 in his recently completed psychology masters program. He applied to law schools and was receiving acceptances and even full scholarships. He planned to visit one of his top law school campuses and had social events planned for the week. Steve struggled with, but was not defined by his mental health issues. While his affliction sought to isolate him, he fought to connect with others. Where anxiety would cripple most, Steve put on a brave face and did his best to reach out. He wasn’t a tortured soul, crumbling under the weight of an impossible burden. He was a warrior, fighting an invisible and silent assailant in a battle to the death. His story — and the stories of many others struggling silently — must be told for the war to be won.

Steve’s legacy is one of love for his family and friends, kindness to all, deep thought and desire to connect with others despite the obstacles mental illness presented in his life. One of his favorite quotes was by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” This perfectly encapsulates how he was approaching his life and what he wished for others. Stephen sought to connect deeply with the ideas he engaged with as well as the people he met. The week before he passed, he started a blog for this exact purpose. We believe that even in death, his ideals can inspire others to share and connect—both those who are struggling silently to tell their story and connect with others, and for others who are not.

What happened to Stephen and our family is something that “happens to someone else.” Mental health issues exist at and beyond the fringe of acceptable conversation. In certain populations, like African American men and women, there is stigma. People are afraid to speak about it and those afflicted are even more afraid to seek help for fear of being ostracized. In populations of ambitious young people who are high achievers, the challenges are even more profound. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Mental health disorders should be better understood by young people in our society, as many of these disorders strike people in their teens and twenties. Families, schools, and communities need to be empowered to spot, understand, and embrace those who are struggling. And our failsafe systems to prevent a tragedy such as Stephen’s must be truly failsafe.

Our family will be inviting others to join us in sharing Steve’s story in the hopes of opening the conversation around mental health and eventually making an impact so that other families don’t have to go through the pain of losing a loved one. We will also focus on promoting the values that defined Stephen—kindness and sensitivity to others, inclusiveness, and open dialogue about ideas and ideals.

If you’re interested in building Steve’s legacy or hearing about the memorial service, leave your contact information at: http://bit.ly/stevecrose.

For those interested: He had just started a Tumblr at http://scrose.tumblr.com We are probably going to make it a memorial and keep it alive.

Hueman, how are you?

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 18:57:58 -0800

Comments: "Hueman, how are you?"

URL: http://www.huemanapp.com/apple.html

Apple,
Have a Little Huemanity

We made something. We use it. We love it. Apple rejected it.

The Hueman Collective got together over a long weekend, made up of developers, designers, musicians and filmmakers. Our goal was simply to get together to make something that weekend; anything.

The seed of Hueman was planted by data: A friend that has methodically tracked his personal relative happiness level for 10 years. Walking us through his data, he could instantly recall events from his life that affected his happiness. We could clearly see the 3 month period when his previous long-term relationship was faltering, and later, the 6 months leading to the marriage proposal to his (now) wife. He was able to see the ebbs and flow of life.

We were psyched. We wanted everyone to be able to see their own data. That weekend, we built a prototype that asked you every day, How was today compared to yesterday?

Deceptively Simple

One bad day can't really ruin you, just like one amazing day doesnt actually change your life - but one day can start a domino effect. You don't always realize it's happening, you just know that you've felt shitty or great for a while.

By taking 10 seconds a day to answer one question, you quickly figure out a few things about yourself:

Are you an optimist or pessimist?
Is something happening that is out of the ordinary?
Is it time to make a change?

8 months of private beta later, what have we learned?

Each of these graphs are an individual's life map, the spikes and dips instantly recognizable. In these intial months, our beta users have excitedly shared their personal graphs with others. They have told stories in response to the "What the hell happened there??" question. They've taken a moment, daily, to think about how things are going.

In our beta metrics, the average session length was 31 seconds. The submission takes, on average, between 5-10 seconds. The remaining time seems to be spent on the graph view, seeing how their most recent submission stacks up against their history.

Take a moment to reflect

Thank you for your reply.

We have found the following issue with your app.

2.12

We found that your app only provides a very limited set of features. It only functions as a once a day mood tracker. While we value simplicity, we consider simplicity to be uncomplicated - not limited in features and functionality.

We understand that there are no hard and fast rules to define useful, but Apple and Apple customers expect apps to provide a really great user experience. Apps should provide valuable utility, draw people in by offering compelling capabilities or content, or enable people to do something they couldn't do before or in a way they couldn't do it before.

We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional content and features to provide a more robust user experience. For information on the basics of creating great apps, watch the video "The Ingredients of Great Apps".

Apple seems to think Hueman lacks features and functionality, but they are completely missing the point.

For those that will argue that Apple rejected it for those reasons, the app is quite simple from a code perspective. It is written primarily in two simple web views: the submission screen and the graph.

If it's just using webviews, why does this need to be an app?

Hueman is free and anonymous, and to create that seamless experience, it needs to store data on your phone. If it was a web page on mobile safari, that data is more ephemeral.
The user needs daily local iOS Notifications to make Hueman part of their day.
The user needs the ability to share with other native apps such as Twitter, Facebook, Messages and more.
The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph views and scrubbing, ability to add media. etc... And by eventually letting people combine their data, you will be able to see how their relative happiness aligns to other users, a neighborhood and even the world.

Bring Hueman to life

Automatically tracking every instant, every moment, using technology is great. We do it ourselves, and have invested in fun upcoming products like Scanadu Scout Tricorder and TRACE. We're users of Moves and Strava, and the newly released Reporter from Feltron.

And for all the valuable data these apps collect, it still doesn't address the core value of Hueman. Hueman is about personal reflection, and presenting that data in a useful way.

It's been humbling for each of us to look back over the days and months that shape us, and look forward to when others can too.

How you can help

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please contact us via Twitter, Facebook or email and let us know what you think of our app concept and the situation we're in. Please share this and help spread the word. Together, we can make this simple, yet extremely valuable app freely available to everyone.

Sincerely, The Hueman Collective

Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable in All-Stock Deal Worth $45 Billion - WSJ.com

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 19:22:58 -0800

Comments: "Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable in All-Stock Deal Worth $45 Billion - WSJ.com"

URL: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303704304579379801986541412

Comcast Corp. said it agreed to buy Time Warner Cable for about $45.2 billion in stock, in a deal that would combine the nation's two biggest cable operators.

The boards of both companies have approved the transaction, which was announced Thursday morning.

With the proposed deal, Comcast almost certainly ends an eight-month takeover...

The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life - Page 1 - News - Dallas - Dallas Observer

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:31:54 -0800

Comments: "The Facebook Comment That Ruined a Life - Page 1 - News - Dallas - Dallas Observer"

URL: http://www.dallasobserver.com/2014-02-13/news/the-facebook-comment-that-ruined-a-life/

Approximately one hour after Justin Carter posted a sarcastic comment on a Facebook thread, his life began to unravel.

The first reaction occurred behind the scenes, in another country. The 18-year-old Carter had no way of knowing that, while he did grunt work at a drapery shop in San Antonio, a person in Canada saw his comments — posted 60 days after the Sandy Hook school-shooting tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut — freaked out and initiated a 24-hour chain reaction of insanity that would wind up with Carter facing 10 years in prison.

Carter's comments were part of a duel between dorks, and may have had something to do with a game with strong dork appeal called League of Legends. But the actual details and context of the online exchange are, in the eyes of Texas authorities, unimportant. Prosecutors say they don't have the entire thread — instead, they have three comments on a cell-phone screenshot.

Prosecutors have failed to produce the entire thread containing Carter’s alleged threat, according to his attorney, Don Flanary.

Josh Huskin

Attorney Don Flanary of San Antonio says Justin Carter was coerced into confessing something that wasn’t even a crime.

One of the comments appears to be a response to an earlier comment in which someone called Carter crazy. Carter's retort was: "I'm fucked in the head alright, I think I'ma SHOOT UP A KINDERGARTEN [sic]."

Carter followed with "AND WATCH THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT RAIN DOWN."

When a person writing under the profile name "Hannah Love" responded with "i hope you [burn] in hell you fucking prick," Carter put the cherry on top: "AND EAT THE BEATING HEART OF ONE OF THEM." (The Austin police officer who wrote up the subsequent report noted: "all caps to emphasize his anger or rage." )

That's when someone in Canada — an individual as yet unidentified in court records — notified local authorities. Because Carter's profile listed him as living in Austin, the Canadians sent the tip to the Austin Police Department. Along with a cell-phone screenshot of part of the thread and a link to Carter's Facebook page, the tipster provided this narrative: "This man, Justin Carter, made a number of threats on Facebook to shoot up a class of kindergartners. ... He also made numerous comments telling people to go shoot themselves in the face and drink bleach. The threats to shoot the children were made approximately an hour ago."

The information was forwarded to the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, an information clearinghouse for law enforcement agencies in Travis, Hays and Williams counties.

Center personnel ran Carter's name, found either a driver's license or a state ID card and discovered that the address listed was "within 100 yards" of Wooldridge Elementary School. Based on a Travis County prosecutor's belief that there was probable cause to charge Carter with a third-degree terroristic threat — which carries a penalty of two to 10 years — a judge issued an arrest warrant. U.S. marshals traced Carter to the drapery shop in San Antonio, where he worked, and handcuffed the cherub-faced, brown-haired teen. Until that point, his only brush with the law was a temporary restraining order two years earlier.

After his booking into the Bexar County Jail, authorities discovered that he actually lived in New Braunfels — Comal County. After his transfer there, his bond was increased from $250,000 to half a million dollars.

According to Carter's attorney, Don Flanary, the 18-year-old suffered brutal attacks in the Comal County Jail during the four months he was held there.

Police records allege that, upon being booked into Bexar County Jail, Carter stated, "I guess what you post on Facebook matters."

He had no idea.

When officers searched Carter's home, Flanary says, they did not find the hallmarks of a lunatic.

"They found no guns in his house," Flanary says from his San Antonio office. "They found no bomb-making materials." He follows this up with a dash of sarcasm that's not a far stretch from the rhetorical flourishes that put his client in peril: "They didn't find The Anarchist Cookbook. ... They didn't find, you know, a bunch of newspaper clippings on the wall — conspiracy theories, with yarn from one place to another. They didn't find pentagrams and candles. He wasn't listening to Judas Priest."

Flanary's explanation for this is simple: His client is not a nut. But Flanary can't say the same for the jam his client's in. "This whole thing is totally and completely bonkers."

In the absence of any other evidence mentioned in Comal County prosecutor Laura Bates' filings, it's hard to disagree. Despite repeated calls, the Houston Press was unable to speak with Bates or anyone else in the Comal County District Attorney's Office — a receptionist told us that the only person authorized to speak to the media was District Attorney Jennifer Tharp herself, and she was unavailable.

One of the most striking things about the evidence so far tendered by the state is what's missing: the entire thread — which wasn't on Carter's Facebook page — containing the damning comments.

"The state tells us Facebook didn't give it to them," Flanary says. He's unsuccessfully tried to find "Hannah Love," the only other profile included in the cell-phone screenshot; at this point, it's still unclear whether "Hannah Love" is the anonymous Canadian tipster.

Flanary believes it's paramount that if someone is criminally charged on the basis of his words, a jury needs to see all the words. In this case, that includes whatever comment precipitated Carter's hyperbolic rant.

Why Your Python Runs Slow. Part 1: Data Structures – Blog ~ Saulius Lukauskas

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 03:59:22 -0800

Comments: "Why Your Python Runs Slow. Part 1: Data Structures – Blog ~ Saulius Lukauskas"

URL: http://lukauskas.co.uk/articles/2014/02/13/why-your-python-runs-slow-part-1-data-structures/

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 08:31:12 -0800

Comments: ""

URL: http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/files/Plan9License

Ron Paul Launches Snowden Clemency Petition - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 11:29:18 -0800

Comments: "Ron Paul Launches Snowden Clemency Petition - Hit & Run : Reason.com"

URL: http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/13/ron-paul-launches-snowden-clemency-peti

Credit: Gage Skidmore/wikimedia

Today, it was reported that former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) launched a petition calling for NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to be granted clemency.

On the page on the Ron Paul Channel’s website where visitors can sign the petition, the former congressman says,

Edward Snowden sacrificed his livelihood, citizenship, and freedom by exposing the disturbing scope of the NSA’s worldwide spying program. Thanks to one man’s courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them.

The news of Paul’s petition comes on the same day it was reported that the European Parliament had voted against calling for Snowden to be granted asylum.

The New York Times and The Guardian both urged U.S. officials to grant Snowden clemency last month.

According to the Ron Paul Channel, Snowden’s temporary asylum in Russia will expire at the end of July.

Yesterday, Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on the motion “Snowden was Justified.” Speaking for the motion were legal adviser to Edward Snowden and ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. Speaking against the motion were former CIA Director James Woolsey and former federal prosecutor and contributing editor to National Review Andrew McCarthy.

Wizner said Snowden was justified “because he provided to journalists and through them to us information that we had a right to know and that we had a need to know. The government had not just concealed this information, it had lied to us about it.”

Woolsey claimed that Snowden had released information to “Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Pyongyang, Tehran, and so on.” Thankfully, Ellsberg pointed out that Snowden released information to journalists who have since reported on the documents.

Before the debate began 29 percent were for the motion, 29 percent were against the motion, and 43 percent were undecided. After the debate, 54 percent were for the motion, 35 percent were against the motion, and 11 percent were undecided.

Watch the debate below:

Good Samaritan Backfire — Medium

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 12:29:44 -0800

Comments: "Good Samaritan Backfire — Medium"

URL: https://medium.com/p/9f53ef6a1c10/

Solitary Confinement — Safety Cell

I was led into a corner.

“First we have to get you ready,” one of the deputies said. His arm undid the button of my pants, which at first I thought was a cruel joke, and then he yanked them down to my ankles.

They pushed me forward against the wall. I stumbled in my handcuffs and pant shackles.

“Step out of your pants,” they ordered. And as soon as I did: “Step out of your socks!”

Naked from the waist down, someone said, “Take off your shirt.” It was topologically impossible, given the cuffs. One of the deputies said, “I’ll do it.” I was uncuffed, my shirt was stripped with force, getting caught on my neck, tugging my head backwards, then up, then off.

The night shift deputies were cruel. They responded to questions in the tone of schoolyard bullies—tauntingly. They giggled as they slammed the door behind me. “You’ll see the doctor alright.”

On the floor lay a straight jacket made from the material used to pad furniture when it is being moved, and a second piece of the same fabric that I later used to cover the dirty floor in an attempt to sleep.

There were no knobs or protrusions in the room, just soft corners. The toilet was a hole in the ground, no toilet paper. The hole dropped down a few feet where it was intersected by a grate of prison bars. The flushing happened automatically, periodically, though I never felt the urge. Even one’s feces left prison upon evacuation, presumably to leave the subject without anything to play with.

I say this, because while the room was dirty, it was not as dirty as the next two cells I experienced the following day, which were smeared with feces and peanut butter. Approximately every 6 hours, a pushcart made its way around the prison with regulation peanut butter sandwiches. Only a fraction were consumed. Many were used for wall decoration or splattered against the ceiling.

I couldn’t bear to eat, so I took my rations home as a souvenir. Aside from the milk, they still seemed edible a month later. This is their strength.

Trapped in a rendition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

While the metal door was too thick for me to be heard if I did not scream, I could hear the muted screams of others across the jail. The din was anything but soothing.

When I asked for water, I was given enough (a couple Dixie cups’ worth) to barely keep my throat lubricated.

I was cold. The two pieces of fabric were not enough to spread on the filthy ground and also cover my naked body. I tried to sleep but it proved fruitless. Every 15 minutes, the metal peephole was creaked open, and I was expected to react, presumably to confirm that I was still alive. This was noted on a clipboard hanging beside the door.

Eventually, I found it most comfortable to stand by the cell door with the coarse fabric draped over my body. I looked out through a narrow slit of Plexiglas and tried to call attention from passers’ by. “Sir, Ma’am, could you please tell me… how long should I expect to be in here?”

A streak of being ignored was broken by a couple disheartening responses. “Usually we put people in there for 24 hours.”

Now I really felt like I was going crazy. Those weren’t the reassuring answers my inner optimist had hoped for. When I had told the arresting officers that I accepted my lot, this wasn’t the lot I was referring to. I didn’t expect a medal for fulfilling my civic duty, but I still felt like I had some fleeting right to something other than this. I banged on the metal door repeatedly until Deputy Terry showed up.

“Why am I in here?”

“You are crazy. You are a lunatic,” he pronounced.

“Do you know how I got here?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“This place—being in here—will make me crazy,” I pleaded.

“Good. That’s what you are and where you belong.” He spiraled his index finger by his muscular temple.

I tried to respond as he started walking way.

“Sir, might you consider for a moment that I am having a sane response to the conditions I’m being subjected? I was arrested by the very police I called to the scene of a medical emergency less than a block from my house, while heading home for the night.”

He stared at me bewildered, and never came near again.

Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen – $2.7 Miliion | Deep Dot Web

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 12:29:44 -0800

Comments: "Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen – $2.7 Miliion | Deep Dot Web"

URL: http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-hacked-bitcoins-stolen-unknown-amount/

Update 2: As the time passes there are more and more suspicions that this was in fact a SCAM by the Silk Road staff – and not a hack, we will post more details about it once, and if we get the full picture.

Update: The amount of BTC that was stolen was calculated by Nicholas Weaver @NCWeaver – Computer Security Researcher, to be around: 4474.266369160003BTC that are with the value of about $2.7 Million.

It was just announced in a post by Defcon the Silk Road administrator (this post will be updated as soon as we get more info) -
Yes, what seemed to be an imaginary situation until not long ago, just became true, the silk road2 – the site who counted to be the security fortress of the deep web just has been hacked with its bitcoin stolen. as he announced on the sites forums, we pasted his post here:

Link to the original thread on Silk Road 2 Forums: http://silkroad5v7dywlc.onion/index.php?topic=25091.msg491029#msg491029

=====Start Quote====

I am sweating as I write this.

Christmas brought grave news. I cannot adequately express how deeply honored I was by your unconditional support of my staff.

I do not expect the same reaction to today’s revelations. This movement is built on integrity, and I feel obligated to be forthright with you.

I held myself to a high standard as your leader, yet now I must utter words all too familiar to this scarred community:

We have been hacked.

Nobody is in danger, no information has been leaked, and server access was never obtained by the attacker.

Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty.

Despite our hardening and pentesting procedures, this attack vector was outside of penetration testing scope due to being rooted in the Bitcoin protocol itself.

This attack hit us at the worst possible time. We were planning on re-launching the new auto-finalize and Dispute Center this past weekend, and our projections of order finalization volume indicated that we would need the community’s full balance in hot storage.

In retrospect this was incredibly foolish, and I take full responsibility for this decision.

I have failed you as a leader, and am completely devastated by today’s discoveries. I should have taken MtGox and Bitstamp’s lead and disabled withdrawals as soon as the malleability issue was reported. I was slow to respond and too skeptical of the possible issue at hand. It is a crushing blow. I cannot find the words to express how deeply I want this movement to be safe from the very threats I just watched materialize during my watch.

I’ve included transaction logs at the bottom of this message. Review the vendor’s dishonest actions and use whatever means you deem necessary to bring this person to justice. More details will emerge as we continue to investigate.

Given the right flavor of influence from our community, we can only hope that he will decide to return the coins with integrity as opposed to hiding like a coward.

It takes the integrity of all of us to push this movement forward. Whoever you are, you still have a chance to act in the interest of helping this community. Keep a percentage, return the rest. Don’t walk away with your fellow freedom fighters’ coins. DPR2 returned the cold storage. I didn’t run with the gold. But two people alone cannot move us forward. It takes an entire community committing to integrity – and though this crushing blow will not stop us, it sure is a testament to how greedy some bastards truly are.

Being a part of this movement might be the most defining thing you do with your entire life.

Don’t trade that for greed, comrades.

I will fight here by your side, even the greedy bastards amongst us.

This community has suffered great financial loss over and over again, and I am devastated that it has happened again under my watch.

Hindsight is already suggesting dozens of ways this could have been prevented, but we must march onward.

The only way to reverse a community’s greed is through generosity. Our true character is revealed during trying times.

If this financial hardship places you at risk of physical harm, contact me directly and I will do my best to help you with my remaining personal funds.

Now what.

Never again store your escrow bitcoins on a server.

Silk Road will never again be a centralized escrow storage.

This week has shown the collateral damage we can cause by being a huge target and failing in just one unforeseen area.

I am now fully convinced that no hosted escrow service is safe.

If I cannot trust myself to keep a hosted escrow solution safe, I cannot trust anyone.

Multi-signature transactions are the only way this community will be protected long-term.

I am aggressively tasking our devs on building out multi-sig support for commonly-used bitcoin clients. Expect a generous bounty if you have the skill to implement this.

Until then.

1. We will never again allow ourselves to be a single point of failure. We will never again host your Escrow wallets.

2. Vendor registration is closed while we regroup.

3. All listings on Silk Road are now No-Escrow (Finalize-Early) for 1-2 months while we implement multi-signature transactions and lobby for mainstream Bitcoin client multi-sig support.

4. All unshipped orders have been cancelled.

5. Vendors may link to other marketplaces on a trail basis until we launch multi-sig, then we will re-evaluate based on community input. We do not want to be a centralized point of failure, but we also do not want to lead our buyers into dangerous waters.

6. From this point forward DO NOT trust markets with centralized escrow. Use multi-signature transactions whenever possible, with trusted third parties as escrow providers.

Everything will be offline for 24-48 hours to minimize variables as we continue to investigate. The evidence we have below will be expanded based on our findings.

- ——————

No marketplace is perfect. Expect any centralized market to fail at some point. This is precisely why we must unite in the decision to decentralize.

We are relieved that our security procedures protected user identities, and that no servers were compromised. This was not a worst-case scenario: nobody will be getting arrested from this. Financial loss is terrible, but will not put all of us behind bars.

The details we have on the hacker are below. Stop at nothing to bring this person to your own definition of justice.

Humbled and furious,

Defcon

- ——————

# Attacker Intel as of 2014-02-13 18:00:00 UTC

We normally do not doxx anyone, and hold user information sacred. But this is an extreme situation affecting our entire community, and all three users who have exploited this vulnerability are very much at risk until they approach us directly to assist with any information.

Do not reveal any details of the attack. This will jeopardize your reward. Contact us directly.

If anyone has purchased or sold to these usernames, expect generous bounties for any information you can contribute which leads to identification.

# Attacker 1: (Responsible for 95% of theft)
Suspected French, responsible for vast majority of the thefts. Used the following six vendor accounts to order from each other, to find and exploit the vulnerability aggressively.

## Usernames used:
narco93
ketama
riccola
germancoke
napolicoke
smokinglife

Transactions listed at bottom of this file. Finding Attacker 1 is top priority.

# Attacker 2: (Responsible for ~2.5% of theft, using same methods towards end of attack lifecycle, likely knows Attacker 1)
LethalWeapon – Australia – “stumbled upon” large amount of BTC

# Attacker 3: (Responsible for ~2.5% of theft, using same methods towards end of attack lifecycle, likely knows Attacker 1)
mrkermit – Australia

# Theft Withdrawal Transactions and historical withdrawals by Attacker 1
address,txid_cleaned
{Here some big list of withdrawal addresses with the stolen bitcoins}

=====End Quote====

Aside from the endless marketplaces being hacked every day now, this is the most shocking event we have encountered – as Silk Road being the largest DarkNet market nowadays was probably holding the largest sum of money of them all – it is not yet clear how many Bitcoins were stolen exactly, but its almost certain that this is about to become the largest theft in the Deep Web history – bigger than the Sheep Marketplace Scam that had amount equal at the time to $40 million in bitcoins stolen by its admins.

This case only serves as ANOTHER, Very Painful lesson about – why on-site escrows are bad, and should not be used! only direct transaction or mulsig escrow like the one offered at themarketplace.i2p are the safe way to conduct business on these sites.

Is this the end of the centralized marketplaces?

We sure hope so! as we posted here again and again, they are not safe, and will always end up being hacked or having the money stolen by their admins.

So who were the hackers?

Few hours before the announcement we at DeepDotWeb received a mail saying: “SilkRoad hacked, 150 BTC stolen, you heard it first from me” this was sent to us by a reddit user who claimed since yesterday he was going to hack SR and steal the sites money – we are trying to verify if this amount matches the amounts that were stolen by the “smaller” hackers that Defcon reported in his post, the others remain unknown.

The Silk Road moderators ranged from pleading or threatening the hackers:

To a complete shock:

To an Apology:

The users reaction was not much different obviously and ranged between shocked / angry / desperate or accusing the sites admins to the thief’s themselves:

IS ANYONE ELSE BUYINGGGG THIS? !!! WE ARE FIXING ESCROW WE ARE FIXING VENDOR REFUNDS? WE ARE DOING ALL WE CAN THIS SHEEP !!!! STYLE FUCKING BY OUR TRUSTED SR GUYS , ITS FUCKING PLAIN AND SIMPLE ESCROW SYSTEM WAS A SCAM SO EVERY COCKSUCKER WHO DIDNT FINALZE THE COINS STAYED IN THE BANK AND OPPS WE HAVE BEEN HACKED !!! WE ARE FIXING THE VENNDOR REFUND ? YEAH RIGHT RIGHT ANOTHER PERFECT SCAM, MORE COIN IN THE BANK AND AT THE RIGHT TIME AGAIN OOPSS WE HAVE BEEN HACKED \ DEFCON GO FUCK YOUR SELF , U GUYS HAVE NOT DOMNE NOTHING ABOUT THE ESCROW SYSTEM , U HAVE DONE NOTHIGN ABOUT VENDOR REFUND , ALL U GUYS DID IS LET THE FUCKING BANK BUILD UP AND SORRY GUYS WE HAVE BEEN HACKED EVERY DOG GETS THERE DAY AND I CANT WAIT TILL I SEE ONE OF U FALL

Some even tried to help in some way.

For us – the big question is “how much”? , we will keep following up on this and updating this post as we get new information – for now, you can check out other site on this list.

Share and Enjoy

Keybase.io

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 15:54:50 -0800

Comments: "Keybase.io"

Moon | Typeset In The Future

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 18:30:52 -0800

Comments: "Moon | Typeset In The Future"

URL: http://typesetinthefuture.com/moon/

I’ll tell you exactly where we are now. We are in the FUTURE; and we are on the MOON.

After studying 2001: A Space Odyssey in intimate detail, Duncan Jones’s Moon was the logical choice for my second foray into sci-fi typography. As this opening shot illustrates, Moon is a bleak, lonely, and above all beautiful love-letter to classic sci-fi typography and design. It’s also one of my favorite sci-fi films of all time.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention it originally, but this article contains some pretty massive spoilers about the plot of Moon. In my defense, you’re here to read about typography, and typography is always essential to the plot. Nonetheless, if you haven’t seen Moon, go and watch it first. The future will still be here when you’re done.

The searching question above is the opening shot of an infomercial for Lunar Industries. Their moon-based mining of Helium-3 is providing a plentiful source of energy on Earth. (On the evidence of the advert, they sound like a great company to work for. I’m sure they have strong ethical values.)

Sounds like science fiction, right? I’m afraid that’s where you would be wrong, sir or madam. As of January 2014, NASA is accepting applications from companies who want to mine the moon. This film isn’t science fiction – it’s inevitable science fact.

Fittingly, the infomercial finishes with an animation of the words ‘sun / moon / earth / energy / future’…

…and a transition to the Lunar Industries logo:

As introductions go, it doesn’t get more Eurostile Bold Extended than that.

And that’s where I have bad news, I’m afraid. It’s not Eurostile. It’s not even Eurostile’s daddy, Microgramma. According to conceptual designer Gavin Rothery, it’s actually Microstyle.

You’re probably wondering how to tell the three apart, right? Don’t worry – it’s trivially easy, as the big number two below will illustrate. Eurostile is in blue; Microgramma is in red; Microstyle is in green:

I’m glad we’ve cleared that up. (For ease of blog post cross-referencing, I’m going to put my fingers in my ears and continue to call it Eurostile anyway.)

Of course, sci-fi typography isn’t just about the Eurostile, you know. Eurostile has a long-standing competitor; a rival, if you will. And the yang to Eurostile’s tenuous yin is none other than our rectilinear friend, Bank Gothic. Moon uses both fonts in quick succession for maximum futuristic effect.

A clever 3D layout of Bank Gothic Medium is used for much of the film’s opening credits, superimposed in-and-over each of the positioning scenes:

One of these scenes introduces us to the film’s central character. Look! It’s Sam Bell, running on a treadmill to keep fit during his three-year stay on the moon. But what’s that on his t-shirt?

Haha! It’s a meaningless, throwaway gag about running. Because ‘runners don’t quit’, do they? Unless this comedy 80s typography has a deeper, hidden meaning…

One of my favorite things about Moon is its constant foreshadowing of the movie’s central twist. Wake Me When It’s Quitting Time is a pretty damn blatant forward reference to what happens later in the film. (And I hate to say it, type-fans, but that’s not Helvetica on Sam’s t-shirt. It’s Arial. You can tell from the Q and the G.)

This opening sequence is also the first time we discover that the moon base is called ‘SARANG – 사랑’:

This is essentially a duplication – the word ‘sarang’ is an English rendition of the Korean word ‘사랑’, which means ‘love’ or ‘affection’. (‘Sarang’ is also etymologically and graphically close to ‘saram’ or ‘사람’, which, ironically, can mean either ‘person’ or ‘people’.) In either case, it’s an unfortunate choice of name for Sam’s permanent home on the Moon, many thousands of miles away from his beloved wife and daughter.

Next up is Moon‘s title card, an inverted homage to Apollo 8‘s famous Earthrise photograph:

…albeit with more Bank Gothic than the original:

(The gradient fill effect on the MOON logotype is a popular sci-fi trope for adding drama to typography. We’ll revisit this in future blog posts.)

Moon uses an interesting angular typeface for its location-establishing shot:

This typeface is OCR-A, which was designed in 1968 for use in optical character recognition systems. It’s actually an ISO standard for character recognition. Moreover, it looks like THE FUTURE, and so it makes a perfect choice for on-screen interstitial positioning shots. (Matthew Skala has very kindly made a modern implementation of OCR-A available for free on his web site.)

Back inside the base, Sam notices that one of the four HE3 harvesters has a full load ready for collection. The on-screen display is classic Bold Extended sci-fi, with bonus points for yellow-and-white text and barber’s-pole patterning:

Also notable in this screenshot is a juxtaposition between the precision of the harvester’s on-screen display, and Sam’s hand-written customization of the surrounding fascia. This human customization of a clinical surrounding is something we certainly didn’t see in 2001, but it’s a common theme in Moon. Sam’s boredom keeps finding creative and subversive outlets within the strict design confines of the moon base environment.

Sam’s pressurized suit has three fabric mission patches:

Although Sam’s patches follow the Apollo mission patch trend for Bold Extended typography, they are very different from those of the Apollo era. NASA astronauts always had creative input into the patches for their missions. In his fantastic autobiography Carrying The Fire, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins describes the design process for the Apollo 11 mission patch typography:

I also penciled APOLLO around the top of my circular design and ELEVEN around the bottom. Neil didn’t like the ELEVEN because it wouldn’t be understandable to foreigners, so after trying XI and 11, we settled on the latter and put APOLLO 11 around the top.

Sam’s patches are the exact opposite of those from the Apollo era – rectangular rather than round; corporate and branded rather than personal and decorative.

Sam records a message for Lunar Industries central back on Earth. He’s unable to speak to them live, due to an ongoing problem with the long-range comms:

The on-screen interface is once again all about the Bold Extended. One of the buttons to the right of the screen has an interesting label. I wonder what it does?

Sam isn’t happy about the fact he’s been on the base for nearly three years. “I’m talking to myself on a regular basis”, he says. (Be careful what you wish for, Sam.)

Sam’s attempts to customize and personalize his environment continue in the living quarters. He’s keeping count of his days on the Moon with a dry-wipe marker on the bathroom wall. By my reckoning, this is 146 days and counting – not quite the nearly-three-years mentioned in the plot.

UPDATE: Patrick Devine has commented on Hacker News that there are actually 156 smileys, not 146. Turns out I miscounted. Patrick also notes that three years is exactly 156 weeks. Good spot, sir!

It’s not clear whether the facial emotions represent Sam’s mental state day by day. Nonetheless, they are a neat parallel to the simple expressions seen on the front of GERTY, Sam’s AI companion in the base:

GERTY communicates his emotions to Sam via the GERTY Unit Primary Emotional Interface. He has a stock set of emoji faces to draw on, based very closely on the standard emoticons that any Internet user will be familiar with. I’ll reference a few of them throughout this article, along with their official emoji names.

Sam has drawn a window and pastoral scene on another metal wall, and surrounded it with family photos…

…and the functional Eurostile of a harvester status screen is similarly customized with family photos and postcards:

Just readable amongst the photos is a Post-it note detailing Sam’s cheeky plans for starting the day:

07.30: Have a wank 07.32: Clean up mess 07.33: Nice cup of tea and a bickie

Sam might be American, but the film’s director and designer are definitely British. (To explain for Americans: ‘bickie’ is British slang for ‘biscuit’; ‘biscuit’ is British slang for ‘cookie’; and you can work out ‘wank’ for yourselves.)

This Post-it is particularly ironic in light of the quotation we see as the camera pans down the wall of photos:

‘Abstinence is a good thing, but it should always be practised in moderation.’ – Anon

I’m delighted to report that the card is set in popular sci-fi font Swiss 911 Compressed.

Next up is a gratuitous shot of Sam having a shower. If this isn’t a ‘backside of the moon’ gag, I’ll be sorely disappointed.

I’ve had a closer look, but I can’t see any typography:

If there’s no typography, then I’m afraid we’re just not interested.

After his shower, Sam gets his hair cut by GERTY:

GERTY is using a futuristic vacuum-based device to suck up Sam’s hair and cut it to the perfect length. You can just make out a Lunar Industries logo on the device’s hi-gloss handle:

Here’s how the device looks in close-up:

HANG ON A MINUTE. What’s that written on the transparent plastic tube?

Crop. Zoom in. Move left. Zoom in again. Enhance.

That embossed text appears to say:

www.haircut.com 2″ EXTENDER

Is this the Moon production team saying that at some point in the future, haircut.com will be purchased by a futuristic hair-cutting company who make robotic trimming devices?

No, dear reader, it is not. Because that future is already here. TODAY.

It turns out that haircut.com is the present-day home of RoboCut Inc.:

…and that RoboCut Inc. are the makers of the RoboCut DIY:

That’s right – the product you see in Moon is a product you can buy yourself today, for only $59.99 (including free shipping).

Want to know how the RoboCut works? Here’s RoboCut founder and inventor, Dr. Alfred Natrasevschi, to explain:

Haircut completed, Sam expresses his annoyance that LunarSat (a.k.a. ‘long range comms’) still hasn’t been fixed. GERTY notes that it’s fairly low on the company’s priority list right now. His passive role in this scene is fascinating. If you watch Moon after 2001, you can’t help but be suspicious of GERTY, in the same way that Ripley can’t help but be suspicious of Bishop in Aliens after her experience with Ash in Alien. GERTY is a calm, relaxing AI voice with a glowing camera lens and corporate logo on the front. Moon certainly isn’t afraid to play on our expectations. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Sam listens to a message from his wife and daughter. He can’t talk to them live due to the LunarSat mishap, but he’s delighted to see them nonetheless. Just look at the joy on his face:

No. Don’t look at his face; look at his clipboard. That’s where the typographic interestingness is most likely to be found.

Crop. Zoom in. Rotate ninety degrees. Zoom in again. Enhance.

Hold on a minute – it looks like this clipboard was signed on the 16th January 2008. But that’s not THE FUTURE – indeed, it’s not even after Moon was released!

Moreover, who’s the signatory? It looks remarkably like the name of the film’s line producer. (Damn you, high-definition film releases.)

Later on, Sam watches some TV. Specifically, he watches Bewitched – or as it’s also known in the future, ‘SUPERNATURAL COMEDY LADIES’:

As he makes a cup of tea, he spots a strange girl sat in his chair:

While he’s distracted by the plot, let’s take a look at two typographically-interesting posters in the background:

This poster, with its square iconography and cheery SELECTION EVENT – HEARTY FEEDING – PLEASE ENJOY – ORGANIC SUSTAINANCE MENU, makes you wonder if the Lunar Industries catering team learnt their trade at Aperture Science.

Even more interesting is a sign just visible beneath the pre-packed food boxes:

Organic Material – Soylent Storage

Soylent. That name sounds familiar. Surely this isn’t the same foodstuff made by the Soylent Corporation in 1973′s Soylent Green? Because if it is, that would be remarkably worrying. Soylent Green is People!

At least we can be confident that this Soylent isn’t made from people. After all, where would you get them from? There’s only one person on this moon base, and that’s Sam Bell.

Sam burns his hand in all the kerfuffle. GERTY fixes him up in the infirmary. Just visible behind Sam’s head is a screen with the comforting advice to “TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST”:

ROBOTIC ASSIST is the official name for GERTY 3000, Sam’s AI companion in the base (voiced by Kevin Spacey doing his best HAL impression). And why not TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST? I’m sure the 3000 series has a perfect operational record.

Sam goes to bed. Beside his bunk is issue 15 of Take Off Magazine:

Take Off was a 132-issue aviation partwork published in the 1980s by Eaglemoss. This issue features V-Bombers and Biz-Jets:

Sam has a sexy dream about his wife. It does not, however, contain any typography.

Sam is rudely awoken by his Karlsson Digibell Alarm Clock, which features a classic LCD font. Sam’s future version of the clock has a bonus feature compared to the one you can buy in shops today. That’s right – Sam’s version plays Chesney Hawkes songs.

Specifically, it wakes him up by playing Chesney’s number one hit The One And Only. “I am, the one and only”, croons Mr. Hawkes.

Yes, you heard me right – the filmmakers are foreshadowing upcoming events via the lyrics of a Chesney Hawkes song.

Over food, we see more of Sam’s Post-it reminders:

Water plants!! 11:30 Gaze at earth from window

…and a picture of the Earth, with Wish You Were Here on it. He really does want to go home, you know.

Sam also has an IKEA instruction booklet tucked behind his Lunar Industries sheet. The reasons for this are somewhat unclear.

Sam heads out to retrieve some more HE3 from Matthew, one of the harvesters. He sees a second vision of the mysterious girl, and crashes into the side of Matthew, damaging both himself and his rover. The rover’s emergency sign once again asks him to TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST:

There’s a clear message coming through from these on-screen text displays: if things go wrong, ROBOTIC ASSIST should be TRUSTed to make things right. Let’s fade to black with that sensible advice in mind.

Fade up from black. Why hello, Sam! You’re looking remarkably fresh-faced for someone who’s just nearly killed himself in an accident. How’s the head? Fuzzy? Tell you what, why not let GERTY run some tests to check for brain damage:

This test is a Concentration-style matching pairs game. (Unlike Concentration, these cards all have Lunar Industries logos on the back.) Some of the card symbols are reminiscent of Zapf Dingbats – such as the HEAVY GREEK CROSS, and a rotated BLACK DIAMOND MINUS WHITE X – but I do wonder if I’m reading too much into things, and the design team haven’t just drawn some pretty symbols in Illustrator. (I had hoped that the asterisk card might be my own personal favorite, the HEAVY EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER ASTERISK, but alas it is not to be.)

“Let’s try another test” says GERTY, like some kind of benevolent GLaDOS. The analogy makes me trust him even less.

Shortly thereafter, we overhear GERTY saying something to Lunar Central about “the new Sam”. What’re you going on about, GERTY?

I’ll tell you exactly what he’s going on about. This is a brand new Sam. He’s a clone of the original Sam Bell, and he’s just been woken up by GERTY. This might get confusing rather quickly, so let’s lean on our good friend ‘typographic convention’, and use subscript to refer to him henceforth as Sam2. Trust me, it’ll make life a damn sight easier once you know where we’re going with this.

Sam2 spots that Matthew has stalled. He asks GERTY to unlock the doors so that he can go and fix it. GERTY says “I’ll pass on your message”. (This is Lunar Industries speak for “I’m sorry Sam, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.)

Sam2 has a dream about his wife. This time, it’s not sexy at all – it’s psychologically and typographically disturbing. There’s a scary Sam1 under the bedclothes, and he works for RANUL SEIRTSUDNI, on the 랑사-GNARAS base:

Lunar Central tells Sam2 to stay put. GERTY apologies for being under strict orders not to let him outside. He’s acting like some kind of… benevolent HAL 9000. This analogy actually endears him to me slightly. Sam2 tricks GERTY into letting him go outside anyway. He finds Sam1 in the rover, and brings him back to the base. GERTY tells him that the person he’s found is also Sam Bell.

GERTICON: OHMYCRIKEYFACE

A considerable amount of plot happens. It’s all fascinating, but if I’m honest, it’s rather light on typographic action. I feel I’d be doing us a disservice to document the whole lot, but I will report an important bit of GERTY dialog when he’s explaining events to Sam1:

“I’m here to keep you safe, Sam.”

That sounds a lot like the First Law Of Robotics to me. If GERTY is programmed to follow the Laws, his robot AI is about to have some interesting choices to make.

A message comes through from Central to say that the crew of the Eliza are on their way to ‘rescue’ Sam2:

They look like a friendly bunch, don’t they? The instructions next to their mugshots say:

Lunar Industries rescue crews have your best intentions at heart. Please try not to panic until they arrive. Remain on-station and make sure you obey their instructions no matter how strange they may seem. After all they’re here to help!

What could possibly go wrong with a crew called Rothery, Ward and Shaw?

Sam2 realizes he must have come from somewhere on the base, and starts hunting around. He and Sam1 have a fight. Sam1 looks in a topical multi-mirror. (Don’t worry, that’s definitely Sam1 in both mirrors. After all, it’s not like there are any more Sams around, right?)

GERTY and Sam1 have a Big Chat. When pressed for the truth about his wife, GERTY says “I can only account for what occurs on the base”.

GERTICON: NOTHINGTOSEEHEREFACE

After some cajoling, GERTY finally tells Sam1 the truth. He’s a clone, and his memories of his wife and daughter are memory implants.

GERTICON: SADTRUTHFACE

The Sams find some signal-blocking antennas outside the base. Sam1 goes back to look at his old video logs. GERTY enters a special password on a Windows Keyboard to unlock all of the video diaries:

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the password begins with KLGAN. Unfortunately, the security-conscious Duncan Jones cuts away from the keyboard just before we can hack into his email.

Sam1 learns that Lunar Industries seem to view the words ‘termination’ and ‘contract’ in much the same way as the Mafia. Sam2 finds yet more long-range-comms-blocking aerials. He prints out their coordinates on a handy receipt printer:

I very much doubt those are going to become significant later on.

Now: I’m sure you’ve already noticed that these are Selenographic coordinates, as used to refer to locations on the Earth’s Moon. Specifically, the co-ordinates are:

LAT 034°23′01.2″S, LONG 124°56′67.6″E LAT 121°09′56.2″S, LONG 045°34′56.4″E

We’ll gloss over the fact that one of these numbers has sixty-seven seconds in a minute. However, it’s a little hard to ignore the latitude value of 121°S, given that the maximum value that latitude can take is 90°S at the pole. (Maybe Sam mistyped it due to the stubby fingers you get on space gloves.)

Back at base, the Sams discover a hidden room. Look at that: it’s Sams all the way down!

Trays 0001 through 0006 have already been opened. Sam0005 and Sam0006 (for it is they) decide to open tray 0007:

It’s the small details of this scene that I find most disturbing. Every pre-packed Samn has a pre-packed Wake Me When It’s Quitting Time t-shirt. The person at Lunar Industries responsible for this whole macabre set-up not only had the temerity to subject Sam Bell to his own personal Groundhog Day; they also had the gall to leave cynical in-jokes for every iteration to endure.

Once they’re out of the Tunnel Of Clones, Sam1 asks GERTY why he helped with the password. “Helping you is what I do”, says GERTY.

See, Sam1? I told you you should TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST – he’s definitely read the Laws. (Although he may have skim-read the bit about not killing people in a space-coffin.)

Sam1 drives the rover a very long way from the base, and re-establishes video contact with Earth. He calls his house. Turns out his wife is dead, but his now-15-year-old daughter has a chat with him anyway. She ends by shouting off-screen to her Dad to say that someone is asking about Mom. We hear the distinct voice of a certain Sam Bell in reply. Sam0 is still alive! (Sam1 closes the video call device quickly, and looks sad and pensive.)

The known-to-be-alive-ness of Sam0 gives an an alternative, cheerier way of looking at the pre-packed t-shirt dilemma for the less depressingly-morbid of you. Presumably Sam0 is complicit in the fact that thousands of Sams are in cold storage on the Moon. If he’s complicit in the scheme, could it be that these small personal details – even that seemingly-sinister t-shirt – have been chosen with Sam0‘s involvement, as homely comforts to soften the terror of Samn‘s reality?

I don’t think that’s the truth of it at all. But if helps you sleep at night, you’re more than welcome to run with it.

We’re back at the base. Sam1 continues to fall apart. Sam2 sees Sam1‘s video call with his daughter, and realizes that he and Sam1 will be killed when the Eliza crew arrive. He convinces GERTY to wake up a new clone. Let’s call him Sam3.

This section of the film gives us a rare close-up of the base’s OPERATIONAL NOTIFICATIONS board:

Amongst other things, we discover that Lunar Industries Ltd. is a Registered Company Of The United Kingdom No. 06346944. Delightfully, this is indeed the case. In addition to the scrolling Eurostile, there’s also a Big Countdown Clock (in a pseudo-LED font), reinforcing the time pressure of Eliza‘s imminent arrival. (It was conveniently fixed at 88:88 before the Eliza plot point came into effect.) Notable on both font displays is an illustrative dot-matrix resolution substantially lower than the actual resolution of the fonts displayed thereon.

Sam1, who is by now in a right state, wakes up to Chesney Hawkes. (See? I told you it was foreshadowing.) He discovers Sam3 in the infirmary.

Talking of foreshadowing: on the movie’s original one-sheet poster, there are three copies of Sam Rockwell’s name, as shadows behind the main one:

Strictly speaking, this is an accurate cast list. The film now stars Sam Rockwell0, Sam Rockwell1, Sam Rockwell2, and Sam Rockwell3.

To put it another way – the movie’s poster is four-shadowing the foreshadowing.

Maybe I should go and have a lie down for a bit, and come back when the conspiracy theories have subsided. It’s a shame sci-fi films don’t have intermissions these days. Let’s transplant the one from my 2001: A Space Odyssey post, and go and have a cup of tea while the Sams work out what to do next.

And we’re back. After much debate, it is decided that Sam1 will go back into the crashed rover; Sam2 will take the HE3 launcher back to Earth; and Sam3 will stay in the infirmary to be discovered by the crew of Eliza. He’s still unconscious, so he doesn’t know this yet, but it’s a decision made by a quorum of hims, so he can’t really complain.

Once he’s dropped Sam1 off, Sam2 loads up the HE3 launcher. GERTY suggests turning him on and off again so that he can’t provide any incriminating evidence to Eliza. “I’m here to keep you safe, Sam. I want to help you.”

Sam2 asks GERTY if he’ll be okay. “Of course. The new Sam and I will be back to our programming as soon as I’ve finished rebooting.”

GERTICON: YAYPROGRAMMINGFACE

Sam2 replies: “Gerty, we’re not programmed. We’re people, you understand?”

As GERTY turns round, we see that Sam1 has stuck a KICK ME Post-it on GERTY’s back side:

Sam2 turns GERTY off. After a short, poignant pause, he removes the Post-it from his back.

GERTICON: REBOOTINGFACE

Sam2 gets ready to launch back to Earth. At the very last minute, he realizes he can use the harvesters to knacker the signal-blocking aerials, and avoid Sam3 suffering a similar fate to his own. He grabs the piece of paper with Chekhov’s Coordinates on it:

…and types a long series of numbers into a keyboard with great precision despite wearing spacesuit gloves. The harvester coordinates update. Go Sam2!

This screen prompts a couple of interesting questions:

1) What’s an ‘OLD MAN OVERIDE’?

2) Is that an infinitely-looping BASIC program?

20 GOTO 10 10 GOTO 20

The Eliza arrives. Sam3 wakes up and asks GERTY what’s going on.

GERTICON: DONTASKMEJUSTREBOOTEDFACE

Eliza crew members find Sam1 in his rover. Sam2 has a psychedelic trip through space. A harvester crashes into an aerial. Long Range Comms finally start working. And if you look closely, you discover that the contents of the portrait-orientation comms monitor is actually being played from a DVD player plugged into a landscape monitor turned 90 degrees clockwise:

All of which is a timely reminder that this frankly awesome sci-fi film was made on a budget the size of a postcard. Which just makes its amazing styling and design all the more impressive. Indeed, Moon is one of my favorite examples of sci-fi storytelling through design – and, to my mind, a worthy successor to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

- @daveaddey

Postscript: Apart from the note about Microstyle, and a nod to the DVD players, I deliberately wrote this post without referring to Moon Conceptual Designer Gavin Rothery‘s superb ‘They Never Went To The Moon’ blog. I much prefer to write these posts as a response to just what I see on screen – it’s more fun that way. You should totally go and read his blog in its entirety, however, as he explains or expands upon much of what I’ve written above. The blog also includes images of many of the computer screens and stickers from around the base, along with Gavin’s original renders for the base design. Good work, sir!

Flappy Space Program by corpsmoderne

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 21:30:25 -0800

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URL: http://corpsmoderne.itch.io/flappy-space-program

De La Soul to Make Entire Catalog Available for Free for 25 Hours | Music News | Rolling Stone

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:32:23 -0800

Comments: "De La Soul to Make Entire Catalog Available for Free for 25 Hours | Music News | Rolling Stone"

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/de-la-soul-to-make-entire-catalog-available-for-free-20140213

De La Soul

Robbie Jeffers

February 13, 2014 4:35 PM ET

In honor of next month's 25th anniversary of their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul are making their entire catalog available for free download for 25 hours on the group's website. The download bonanza will begin on Friday, February 14th at 11 a.m. EST until Saturday at noon.

Check out 10 Unseen Photos Included in De La Soul's Album Downloads

"It's about allowing our fans who have been looking and trying to get a hold of our music to have access to it," De La Soul member Posdnuos tells Rolling Stone. "It's been too long where our fans haven't had access to everything. This is our way of showing them how much we love them."

The same things that made 3 Feet High and other De La albums so influential — its creative, if not fully licensed, use of a myriad of samples — has also prevented the group's work from appearing on many digital platforms. "It's been a trying journey," admits Posdnuos. "We've been blessed to be in the Library of Congress, but we can't even have our music on iTunes. We've been working very hard to get that solved." The rapper points to frequent personnel changes at record labels and hazy language in early contracts that have led to long delays in properly clearing the group's catalog.

The release of the group's catalog is the first of numerous upcoming projects. In a few weeks, they'll post new songs to their site, with You're Welcome, their first album since 2004's The Grind Date, expected to be released before summer. Next month will also see the release of Preemium Soul on the Rocks, a six-song EP with three beats each from DJ Premier and Pete Rock. The group is also planning a visit to Detroit to work on an unreleased beat from J Dilla, the prolific producer who passed away in 2006. "Dilla was the Tupac of producers," says Posdnuos. "He has so many unreleased things that no one has heard. His family knows how vital and important an ingredient his music was to our work."

Where does 3 Feet High and Rising rank on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time?

Asked about the status of You're Welcome, an album originally scheduled for release last year, Posdnuos says that it's "coming along amazingly," but points to self-criticism in its delay. "We have tons of music, but we're our own worst critics," admits the rapper. "Certain groups have too many 'yes men.' In our group, we have too many 'no men.' When we look back on some of the stuff we have, we're like, 'Yo, we need to just put this out.' The album is still called You're Welcome, but we also have this whole other album that we're working on that…Wooo, I wish I could talk about it."

Twenty-five years into their career, the group is ready, if somewhat cautiously, to adopt the more-is-more release schedule of its younger peers. "We're just getting in the mode of constantly giving people new music," says Posdnuos. "I'll be the first to say that not everyone can do it. You can put out a new mixtape every week, but it can dilute what you're putting out because you haven't had enough time to see what's going on with your life to write something from a different angle. With us, we've sat a long time without releasing an album. It's high time we start releasing a bunch of stuff because it's there."

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Losing graciously

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:32:23 -0800

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URL: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Friday, February 14th, 2014

With Bdale Garbee’s casting vote this week, the Debian technical committee finally settled the question of init for both Debian and Ubuntu in favour of systemd.

I’d like to thank the committee for their thoughtful debate under pressure in the fishbowl; it set a high bar for analysis and experience-driven decision making since most members of the committee clearly took time to familiarise themselves with both options. I know the many people who work on Upstart appreciated the high praise for its code quality, rigorous testing and clarity of purpose expressed even by members who voted against it; from my perspective, it has been a pleasure to support the efforts of people who want to create truly great free software, and do it properly. Upstart has served Ubuntu extremely well – it gave us a great competitive advantage at a time when things became very dynamic in the kernel, it’s been very stable (it is after all the init used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6 and has set a high standard for Canonical-lead software quality of which I am proud.

Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. It will no doubt take time to achieve the stability and coverage that we enjoy today and in 14.04 LTS with Upstart, but I will ask the Ubuntu tech board (many of whom do not work for Canonical) to review the position and map out appropriate transition plans. We’ll certainly complete work to make the new logind work without systemd as pid 1. I expect they will want to bring systemd into Ubuntu as an option for developers as soon as it is reliably available in Debian, and as our default as soon as it offers a credible quality of service to match the existing init.

Technologies of choice evolve, and our platform evolves both to lead (today our focus is on the cloud and on mobile, and we are quite clearly leading GNU/Linux on both fronts) and to embrace change imposed elsewhere. Init is contentious because it is required for both developers and system administrators to understand its quirks and capabilities. No wonder this was a difficult debate, the consequences for hundreds of thousands of people are very high. From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. I trust the new stewards of pid 1 will take that responsibility as seriously as the Upstart team has done, and be as pleasant to work with. And… onward.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2014 at 1:01 pm and is filed under ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Stephen Law: How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law" on the planet - my letter to OFAC

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 12:26:16 -0800

Comments: "Stephen Law: How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law" on the planet - my letter to OFAC"

URL: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2014/02/how-us-treasury-imposes-sanctions-on-me.html

Right, here's another thing I am getting off my chest - email letter to OFAC (edited slightly from version sent).

Dear OFAC

This correspondence is copied to my UK Member of Parliament The Right Hon. Andrew Smith. Please copy him into your reply.

My name is "Stephen Law". The name "Stephen Law" appear on OFAC's "specially designated nationals" list:

Here is the actual OFAC listing for "Stephen Law", alias of "Steven Law"

https://ofac.data-list-search.com/Entities/ByName/steven-law

This person is Burmese and is suspected by US Treasury of drug trafficking. He is the son of Lo Hsing Han (dubbed by US Treasury as "The Godfather of Heroin") and has a Singaporean wife. His addresses, as listed by you, are all in Burma and Singapore. None are in the UK.

I have discovered that, as a result of this listing, US Customs block shipments of goods to me here in the UK. Also when people try to wire me money from abroad (not just from the US, but from anywhere), for e.g. occasional travel expenses for academic conference attendance, the payment is interrupted and various checks are made before the funds are released. This became so bad during one period (a series of payments every single one of which triggered a block) that I had to switch to a different bank account. At no point was I told why this was happening (i.e. that you, OFAC, are responsible). The banks concerned believe they must keep this information from me (I was told this by my bank branch). Hence it took me many months to figure out what the source of the problem was: OFAC/US Treasury.

It appears any "Stephen Law" anywhere in the world will suffer this same treatment, as indeed will anyone who merely happens to have the same name or alias as one of your "specially designated nationals". This has proved frustrating, time-consuming and also costly to me personally. E.g. I have paid US$77 postage for goods it turns out I can never receive because they are returned by US customs to the US vendor because my name is listed. As a result of the OFAC listing, I cannot now order goods from - or receive gifts from friends and relatives in - the United States.

Can you inform me: given I am very obviously NOT the Burmese Stephen Law:

(i) how I can avoid having all goods shipped to me from the US to my UK address being blocked and returned to sender by US customs?

(ii) how I can avoid my own bank repeatedly asking me who I am (and requesting information including my DOB, which they already possess) before unblocking any payment from abroad?

My bank knows who I am, and they know I am not the Burmese "Stephen Law" on the specially designated nationals list, but still I have to go through this same rigmarole every single time money is wired to me. How do I avoid this please?

Yours faithfully

Stephen Law

PS Ofac-caused delays to payments to me can run into weeks. On one occasion I ran up overdraft charges as a result of not receiving funds blocked by OFAC.

PPS I was interviewed by Foreign Policy magazine about all this a short while ago.Also interviewed by News Hour on BBC World Service.

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