- New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images — using satellite images of Wal-Mart and Target parking lots to predict quarterly returns. (via Hacker News)
- Form and Code — beautiful book on the intersection of code, design, architecture, form, and function. One of the authors is Casey Reas who was also one of the people behind Processing. (via RandomEtc on Twitter)
- Cable Map — major underwater communications cables around the world. (via berkun on Twitter)
- Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand The Brain (Pharyngula) — To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.
"finance" entries
Four short links: 19 August 2010
Satellite-based Forecasting, Design Book, Submarine Cable Map, Brain Science
Four short links: 20 April 2010
CS Epigrams, Star Trek Made Real, Python Filings, and Difficult Games
- Epigrams in Programming — all from the remarkable Alan Perlis. By the time I learned that he was responsible for such gems as “Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon”, “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing”, and “Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?”, he had died and I never had a chance to meet him. “The best book on programming for the layman is “Alice in Wonderland”; but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.”. (via Hacker News)
- Tricorder for Android — app that shows all the info from the sensors: local magnetic field, RF, acceleration, sound, etc. They really need a designer to make this look more like Star Trek than an Apple ][c program. (via attercop on Delicious)
- Will Wall Street Require Python — with Release 33-9117, the SEC is considering substitution of Python or another programming language for legal English as a basis for some of its regulations. Reminds me of Charlie Stross’s “Accelerando” where companies bylaws are written in Python and largely autonomous.
- Hatetris — game of Tetris that deliberately gives you the most difficult pieces. I love inversions like this, which present their own algorithmic challenges distinct from the original’s.
Four short links: 31 March 2010
Messaging, Predicting, Visualising, and Patenting
- ZeroMQ — bold claim of “Fastest. Messaging. Ever.” LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
- Prediction Market News (David Pennock) — HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. Interestingly, another company called Veriana Networks is close to launching a competing Hollywood derivatives market called the Trend Exchange.
- A Pivot Visualization of my WordPress Blog (Jon Udell) — using pro-am data exploration tools from Microsoft (Pivot) to work with information from his blog. Contains the scripts he used to do it.
- Select Committee Report on Patents Bill (PDF) — New Zealand Government select committee recommends no software patents in NZ. We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented. We received many submissions concerning the patentability of computer programs. Under the Patents Act 1953 computer programs can be patented in New Zealand provided they produce a commercially useful effect [footnote: Under the Patents Act 1953 mathematical algorithms as such are not patentable. They may be patented under the Patents Act when used in a computer, so long as they produce a commercially useful effect.] Open source, or free, software has grown in popularity since the 1980s Protecting software by patenting it is inconsistent with the open source model, and its proponents oppose it. A number of submitters argued that there is no “inventive step” in software development, as “new” software invariably builds on existing software. They felt that computer software should be excluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques. In general we accept this position.
Four short links: 24 March 2010
Goat Economics, Android Tablets, In-Browser Annotation, Rational Security Rejection
- The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble — hilarious economics parable.
- The ZenPad — look for more Android-powered tablets. (via azaaza on Twitter)
- Diigo — browser plugin to archive, highlight, and annotate web pages, then share and collaborate on those augmentations. (via an annotation of Zittrain’s Future of the Internet and How to Stop It)
- So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users (Microsoft, PDF) — To make this concrete, consider an exploit that affects 1% of users annually, and they waste 10 hours clearing up when they become victims. Any security advice should place a daily burden of no more than 10/(365 * 100) hours or 0.98 seconds per user in order to reduce rather than increase the amount of user time consumed. This generated the profound irony that much security advice … does more harm than good. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 22 March 2010
Trading Software, Learning Programming Languages, Web Security Scanner, Learning as Game
- Marketcetera — open source trading platform.
- Google Code University: Programming Languages — video-based classes on C++, Python, Java, and Go.
- Skipfish — open sourced web application security scanner, from Google.
- Professor Swaps Grades for XP — divided class into guilds, awarded XP for achieving various solo, guild, and pickup quests. (via johnny723 on Twitter)
Four short links: 8 January 2010
Healthcare Data, GNU Econometrics Library, Visualizing Changes, View Source Under Attack
- Testing, Testing — at the end of an interesting article on health care reform comes this: The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment. At the end of each month, we have county-by-county data on unemployment, and we have prompt and detailed data on the price of goods and commodities; we can use these indicators to guide our economic policies. But try to look up information on your community’s medical costs and utilization—or simply try to find out how many people died from heart attacks or pneumonia or surgical complications—and you will discover that the most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren’t broken down to a county level that communities can learn from. It’s like driving a car with a speedometer that tells you only how fast all cars were driving, on average, three years ago.. (via auchmill on Twitter)
- Gretl: The GNU Regression, Econometrics, and Time-Series Library — GPLed cross-platform software package for econometric analysis, written in the C programming language. (via Hacker News)
- 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time (Flowing Data) — just what it says. (via mattb on Delicious)
- View Source is Good? Discuss (Alex Russell) — fantastic post, mandatory reading. View-source was necessary (but not sufficient) to make HTML the dominant application platform of our times. I also hold that it is under attack — not least of all from within — and that losing view-source poses a significant danger to the overall health of the web.
Four short links: 12 November 2009
CRM on Rails, Data Mining on Hadoop, Disappointing Keynotes, The Teapot Effect
- Fat Free CRM — open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system.
- Bixo — open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets)
- Andy Kessler’s Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) — I’m sorry to hear it, because I loved Andy’s book How We Got Here about the intersecting histories of economics, finance, and technology. Read the book instead of reading about the disappointing keynote.
- The Teapot Effect — the thing I love about geeks is how their passion causes them to explore, ruthlessly and quantitatively, the everyday phenomena that the rest of us take for granted. Such as dribbling teapots: “Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.” Read the post and the research it talks about to learn how to prevent Dribbling Teapot Syndrome ….
Four short links: 12 October 2009
DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail
- Snowball — a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
- Insider Trades — a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
- Air New Zealand Slams IBM — central point of failure in the outsourced IT. “In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
- Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers’ Data — Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.
Four short links: 19 August 2009
Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM
- Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias — “Burying the other evidence: […] Doesn’t most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School’s famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks’s success? (via Hacker News)
- A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies — insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
- s3cmd — commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
- DIY GSM Network — wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)
Four short links: 31 July 2009
NoSQL, Goldman Sachs, Yahoo! Developer Products and Bing, and Alternate Reality
On this day in history, Mt Fuji exploded (781), Daniel Defoe was put in the stocks for seditious libel but was pelted with flowers (1703), the first U.S. patent was issued (1790), and the radio show The Shadow aired for the first time (1930).
- Tokyo Cabinet: Beyond Key-Value Store — description of Tokyo Cabinet and code examples in Ruby. More on the nosql move to leave relational databases behind for certain modern problems (such as scaling).
- The Great American Bubble Machine (Rolling Stone) — I know it’s old hat, but read it for the poetry if for nothing else. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
- Yahoo!’s Developer Program and Bing — note from Yahoo! to developers, saying that YQL, YUI, and Pipes are safe. For SearchMonkey and BOSS they currently do not have anything concrete to tell you. I assume (and hope) that Delicious is a top-level product, not something under “search”. (via Simon Willison)
- Preparing Us for AR — (Schulze & Webb) round up of some apps and toys that show what AR might be, unfettered by current day technological constraints.