"bunnie huang" entries

Four short links: 3 September 2014

Four short links: 3 September 2014

Distributed Systems Theory, Chinese Manufacturing, Quantified Infant, and Celebrity Data Theft

  1. Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems EngineerI tried to come up with a list of what I consider the basic concepts that are applicable to my every-day job as a distributed systems engineer; what I consider ‘table stakes’ for distributed systems engineers competent enough to design a new system.
  2. Shenzhen Trip Report (Joi Ito) — full of fascinating observations about how the balance of manufacturing strength has shifted in surprising ways. The retail price of the cheapest full featured phone is about $9. Yes. $9. This could not be designed in the US – this could only be designed by engineers with tooling grease under their fingernails who knew the manufacturing equipment inside and out, as well as the state of the art of high-end mobile phones.
  3. SproutlingThe world’s first sensing, learning, predicting baby monitor. A wearable band for your baby, a smart charger and a mobile app work together to not only monitor more effectively but learn and predict your baby’s sleep habits and optimal sleep conditions. (via Wired)
  4. Notes on the Celebrity Data Theft — wonderfully detailed analysis of how photos were lifted, and the underground industry built around them. This was one of the most unsettling aspects of these networks to me – knowing there are people out there who are turning over data on friends in their social networks in exchange for getting a dump of their private data.
Four short links: 3 April 2014

Four short links: 3 April 2014

Github for Data, Open Laptop, Crowdsourced Analysis, and Open Source Scraping

  1. dat — github-like tool for data, still v. early. It’s overdue. (via Nelson Minar)
  2. Novena Open Laptop — Bunnie Huang’s laptop goes on sale.
  3. Crowd Forecasting (NPR) — How is it possible that a group of average citizens doing Google searches in their suburban town homes can outpredict members of the United States intelligence community with access to classified information?
  4. Portia — open source visual web scraping tool.
Four short links: 18 April 2013

Four short links: 18 April 2013

Bitcoin Bundle, HTML Escaping, Open as in Gongkai, and Glass Reflections

  1. The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi NakamotoI can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis block. It can be identified by constant slope segments that occasionally restart. Also this entity is the only entity that has shown complete trust in Bitcoin, since it hasn’t spend any coins (as last as the eye can see). I estimate at eyesight that Satoshi fortune is around 1M Bitcoins, or 100M USD at current exchange rate. Author’s credible. (via Hacker News)
  2. Houdini (Github) — C library for escaping and unescaping UTF-8-encoded HTML, according to OWASP guidelines.
  3. The $12 Gongkai Phone (Bunnie Huang) — gongkai isn’t a totally lawless free-for-all. It’s a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching. It’s very different from Western IP concepts, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it.
  4. Jan Chipchase on Google Glass (All Things D) — Any idiot can collect data. The real issue is how to collect data in such a way that meets both moral and legal obligations and still delivers some form of value. An interesting observation, one of many within this overview of the usability and third-party user experience of Google Glass-like UIs.
Four short links: 12 February 2013

Four short links: 12 February 2013

Handmade Hardware, Tab Silencer, Surprise and Models, and Sciencey GIFs

  1. Your USB Sticks Are Made With Chopsticks (Bunnie Huang) — behind-the-scenes on how USB sticks are made.
  2. mutetab — find and kill the Chrome tab making all the damn noise! (via Nelson Minar)
  3. Visualization, Modeling, and Surprises (John D Cook) — paraphrases Hadley Wickham: Visualization can surprise you, but it doesn’t scale well. Modelling scales well, but it can’t surprise you.
  4. Head Like an Orange — science animated GIFs, assembled from nature documentaries. (via Ed Yong)
Four short links: 11 January 2013

Four short links: 11 January 2013

Comms 101, RoboTurking, Geek Tourism, and Implementing Papers

  1. How to Redesign Your App Without Pissing Everybody Off (Anil Dash) — the basic straightforward stuff that gets your users on-side. Anil’s making a career out of being an adult.
  2. Clockwork Raven (Twitter) — open source project to send data analysis tasks to Mechanical Turkers.
  3. Updates from the Tour in China (Bunnie Huang) — my dream geek tourism trip: going around Chinese factories and bazaars with MIT geeks.
  4. How to Implement an Algorithm from a Scientific PaperI have implemented many complex algorithms from books and scientific publications, and this article sums up what I have learned while searching, reading, coding and debugging. (via Siah)
Four short links: 7 January 2013

Four short links: 7 January 2013

Building DroneNet, Manufacturing Help, Native Mobile Look, and Libre 3D Printing

  1. DroneNet: How to Build It (John Robb) — It’s possible to break the FAA’s “line of sight” rules regarding drones right now and get away with it to enable fast decentralized growth. This strategy works. e.g. PayPal flagrantly broke banking laws and regulations in order to out-compete a field of competitors that decided to follow the law. (via Daniel Bachhuber)
  2. How to Make a BOM (Bunnie Huang) — yet more very useful howto information for people looking into Chinese (or other) manufacturing.
  3. JuniorA front-end framework for building HTML5 mobile apps with a native look and feel.
  4. LulzBot — robust 3D printer, with full specs for making your own. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 12 November 2012

Four short links: 12 November 2012

Motivated Learning, Better Hadoopery, Poignant Past Product, and Drone Imagery

  1. Teaching Programming to a Highly Motivated Beginner (CACM) — I don’t think there is any better way to internalize knowledge than first spending hours upon hours growing emotionally distraught over such struggles and only then being helped by a mentor. Me, too. Not struggle for struggle’s sake, but because you have built a strong mental map of the problem into which the solution can lock.
  2. Corona (GitHub) — Facebook opensources their improvements to Hadoop’s job tracking, in the name of scalability, latency, cluster utilization, and fairness. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
  3. One Man’s Trash (Bunnie Huang) — Bunnie finds a Chumby relic in a Shenzhen market stall.
  4. Dronestagram — posting pictures of drone strike locations to Instagram. (via The New Aesthetic)
Four short links: 1 May 2012

Four short links: 1 May 2012

Self-directed Education, Bunnie Huang, ssh in the Browser, and Screen Size

  1. Sugata Mitra: Beyond The Hole in the Wall (YouTube) — great talk by the education researcher Sugata Mitra whose big kick is self-directed learning. Great stories about the deployments and effects he’s had with technology and supervision rather than teaching, but the end is a real kicker: the core skills we have are literacy, search, and belief. Of the three, the most problematic is belief: when and how do/should we turn something we’ve read into something ingrained, accepted, and built-upon? (via Tara Taylor-Jorgenson)
  2. Interview with Bunnie Huang (Makezine) — fascinating interview with the hardware guy behind the Chumby. It’s all gold, from rapid iteration at early stages of hardware through to the need to simplify. I think one of the most gut-wrenching realizations that small companies have to make is that they aren’t Apple. Apple spends over a billion dollars a year on tooling. An injection molding tool may cost around $40k and 2-3 months to make; Apple is known to build five or six simultaneously and then scrap all but one so they can evaluate multiple design approaches. But for them, tossing $200k in tooling to save 2 months time to market is peanuts. But for a startup that raised a million bucks, it’s unthinkable. Apple also has hundreds of staff; a startup has just a few members to do everything. The precision and refinement of Apple’s products come at an enormous cost that is just out of the reach of startups.
  3. ssh as Chrome Extension — can’t help but feel that building a secure login system on top of web browsers on top of operating systems isn’t going to be more secure than building a secure login system on top of the operating system.
  4. (Tablet) Size Matters (Luke Wroblewski) — as the screen gets bigger, we use the Web more.
Four short links: 23 September 2011

Four short links: 23 September 2011

Visualizing Populations, Hardware Futures, Radio Different, and Kooky Javascript

  1. How Many Really? — project by BERG and BBC to help make sense of large numbers of people, in the context of your social network. Clever! (via BERG London)
  2. Why the Best Days of Open Hardware Are Yet To Come (Bunnie Huang) — as Moore’s law decelerates, there is a potential for greater standardization of platforms. A provocative picture of life in a world where Moore’s Law is breaking up. A must-read.
  3. Ira Glass on RadioLab — fascinating analysis of a product that’s the result of skilled creators with high standards and a desire to do things differently. Lessons for all who would be different. (via Courtney Johnston)
  4. Scripting Photoshop with Javascript — Javascript is the new BASIC. (via Brett Taylor)