"history" entries

Four short links: 18 August 2015

Four short links: 18 August 2015

Chris Grainger Ships, Disorderly Data-Centric Languages, PCA for Fun and Fashion, and Know Thy History

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 18, 2015
  1. Eve, Version 0 (Chris Grainger) — Version 0 contains a database, compiler, query runtime, data editor, and query editor. Basically, it’s a database with an IDE. You can add data both manually or through importing a CSV and then you can create queries over that data using our visual query editor.
  2. BOOM: Berkeley Orders Of Magnitude — an effort to explore implementing Cloud software using disorderly, data-centric languages.
  3. Eigenstyle — clever analysis and reconstruction of images through principal component analysis. And here are “prettiest ugly dresses,” those that I classified as dislikes, that the program predicted I would really like.
  4. Turing Digital Archive — many of Turing’s letters, talks, photographs, and unpublished papers, as well as memoirs and obituaries written about him. It contains images of the original documents that are held in the Turing collection at King’s College, Cambridge. (Timely as Jason Scott works to save a manual archive: [1], [2], [3])
Four short links: 23 July 2015

Four short links: 23 July 2015

Open Source, State of DevOps, History of Links, and Vote Rings

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 23, 2015
  1. The Future of Open Source (Allison Randal) — Inexperienced companies can cause a great deal of harm as they blunder around blindly in a collaborative project, throwing resources in ways that ultimately benefit no one, not even themselves. It is in our best interest as a community to actively engage with companies and teach them how to participate effectively, how to succeed at free software and open source. Their success feeds the success of free software and open source, which feeds the self-reinforcing cycle of accelerating software innovation.
  2. Puppet Labs’ State of DevOps Report (PDF) — Westrum’s model gives us the language to define and measure culture. Perhaps most interesting, Westrum’s model also predicts IT performance. This shows that information flow isn’t just essential to safety, it’s also a critical success factor for rapidly building and evolving resilient systems at scale.
  3. Beyond Conversation — tracing the history of the link from Memex to Web.
  4. Detecting Vote Rings in Product Hunt — worth implementing in every system that processes votes. Who are the jerks in a circle?
Four short links: 2 July 2015

Four short links: 2 July 2015

Mathematical Thinking, Turing on Imitation Game, Retro Gaming in Javascript, and Effective Retros

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 2, 2015
  1. How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Amazon) — Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God. (via Pam Fox)
  2. What Turing Himself Said About the Imitation Game (IEEE) — fascinating history. The second myth is that Turing predicted a machine would pass his test around the beginning of this century. What he actually said on the radio in 1952 was that it would be “at least 100 years” before a machine would stand any chance with (as Newman put it) “no questions barred.”
  3. Impossible Mission in Javascript — an homage to the original, and beautiful to see. I appear to have lost all my skills in playing it in the intervening 32 years.
  4. Running Effective Retrospectives — Each change to the team’s workflow is treated as a scientific experiment, whereby a hypothesis is formed, data collected, and expectations compared with actual results.
Four short links: 4 May 2015

Four short links: 4 May 2015

Silicon Valley Primer, GraphQL Intro, Quantum Steps, and Complex Systems

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 4, 2015
  1. Silicon Valley Primer — a short but interesting precis of what made the Valley great, with stories of the nobility. From a historian. All these new people pouring into what had been an agricultural region meant that it was possible to create a business environment around the needs of new companies coming up, rather than adapting an existing business culture to accommodate the new industries. In what would become a self-perpetuating cycle, everything from specialized law firms, recruiting operations and prototyping facilities; to liberal stock option plans; to zoning laws; to community college course offerings developed to support a tech-based business infrastructure.
  2. Introduction to GraphQL — We believe that GraphQL represents a novel way of structuring the client-server contract. Servers publish a type system specific to their application, and GraphQL provides a unified language to query data within the constraints of that type system. That language allows product developers to express data requirements in a form natural to them: a declarative and hierarchal one. The nightmare of the ad hoc API morass is a familiar one …
  3. Critical Steps to Building First Quantum Computer — The IBM breakthroughs, described in the April 29 issue of the journal Nature Communications, show for the first time the ability to detect and measure the two types of quantum errors (bit-flip and phase-flip) that will occur in any real quantum computer. Until now, it was only possible to address one type of quantum error or the other, but never both at the same time. This is a necessary step toward quantum error correction, which is a critical requirement for building a practical and reliable large-scale quantum computer.
  4. Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas (Nautilus) — In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science and culture. Together they tell a story of how the ideas that define humanity arise, when and why they die or are abandoned, the surprising possibilities for continued evolution, and our responsibility to nurture thought that might enlighten our future.
Four short links: 16 April 2015

Four short links: 16 April 2015

Relationships and Inference, Mother of All Demos, Kafka at Scale, and Real World Hardware

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 16, 2015
  1. DeepDive — DeepDive is targeted to help users extract relations between entities from data and make inferences about facts involving the entities. DeepDive can process structured, unstructured, clean, or noisy data and outputs the results into a database.
  2. From the Vault: Watching (and re-watching) “The Mother of All Demos” — “I wish there was more about the social vision for computing—I worked with him for a long time, and Doug was always thinking ‘how can we collectively collaborate,’ like a sort of rock band.”
  3. Running Kafka at Scale (LinkedIn Engineering) — This tiered infrastructure solves many problems, but it greatly complicates monitoring Kafka and assuring its health. While a single Kafka cluster, when running normally, will not lose messages, the introduction of additional tiers, along with additional components such as mirror makers, creates myriad points of failure where messages can disappear. In addition to monitoring the Kafka clusters and their health, we needed to create a means to assure that all messages produced are present in each of the tiers, and make it to the critical consumers of that data.
  4. 3D Printing Titanium, and the Bin of Broken Dreams — you will learn HUGE amounts on the challenges of real-world manufacturing by reading this.
Four short links: 14 April 2015

Four short links: 14 April 2015

Technical Debt, A/A Testing, NSA's Latest, and John von Neumann

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 14, 2015
  1. Pycon 2015: Technical Debt, The Monster in Your Closet (YouTube) — excellent talk from PyCon. See also slides.
  2. A/A Testing — In an A/A test, you run a test using the exact same options for both “variants” in your test. That’s right, there’s no difference between “A” and “B” in an A/A test. It sounds stupid, until you see the “results.” (via Nelson Minar)
  3. NSA Declares War on General-Purpose Computing (BoingBoing) — NSA director Michael S Rogers says his agency wants “front doors” to all cryptography used in the USA, so that no one can have secrets it can’t spy on — but what he really means is that he wants to be in charge of which software can run on any general purpose computer.
  4. John von Neumann Documentary (YouTube) — 1966 documentary from the American Mathematical Association on the father of digital computing, who also is hailed as the father of game theory and much much more. (via Paul Walker)
Four short links: 16 February 2015

Four short links: 16 February 2015

Grace Hopper, Car Dashboard UIs, DAO Governance, and Sahale.

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 16, 2015
  1. The Queen of Code — 12m documentary on Grace Hopper, produced by fivethirtyeight.com.
  2. Car Dashboard UI Collection — inspiration board for your (data) dashboards.
  3. Subjectivity-Exploitability Tradeoff — Voting-based DAOs, lacking an equivalent of shareholder regulation, are vulnerable to attacks where 51% of participants collude to take all of the DAO’s assets for themselves […] The example supplied here will define a new, third, hypothetical form of blockchain or DAO governance. Every day we’re closer to Stross’s Accelerando.
  4. Sahale — open source cascading workflow visualizer to help you make sense of tasks decomposed into Hadoop jobs. (via Code as Craft)
Four short links: 1 December 2014

Four short links: 1 December 2014

Marketing Color, Brain Time, Who Could Have Foreseen 19100, and ASCII Cam

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 1, 2014
  1. Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding — sidesteps the myths and chromobollocks, and gives the simplest pictorial views of some basic colour choice systems that I found very useful.
  2. Brain Time (David Eagleman) — the visual system is a distributed system with some flexible built-in consistency. So if the visual brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive. To accomplish this, it must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop: As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers’ brains would automatically resynchronize the signals; outside that tenth-of-a-second window, it suddenly looked like a badly dubbed movie.
  3. CS Bumper Stickers (PDF) — Allocate four digits for the year part of a date: a new millenium is coming. —David Martin. From 1985.
  4. ASCIIcam — real-time ASCII output from your videocamera. This is doing terrible things to my internal chronometer. Is it 2014 or 1984? Yes!
Four short links: 21 November 2014

Four short links: 21 November 2014

Power Assist, Changing Minds, Inside Index, and Poop History

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 21, 2014
  1. Wearable Power Assist Device Goes on Sale in Japan (WSJ, Paywall) — The Muscle Suit, which weighs 5.5 kilograms (12 pounds), can be worn knapsack-style and uses a mouthpiece as its control. Unlike other similar suits that rely on motors, it uses specially designed rubber tubes and compressed air as the source of its power. The Muscle Suit can help users pick up everyday loads with about a third of the usual effort. […] will sell for about ¥600,000 ($5,190), and is also available for rent at about ¥30,000 to ¥50,000 per month. Prof. Kobayashi said he expected the venture would ship 5,000 of them in 2015. (via Robot Economics)
  2. Debunking Handbook — techniques for helping people to change their beliefs (hint: showing them data rarely does it). (via Tom Stafford)
  3. Building a Complete Tweet Index (Twitter) — engineering behind the massive searchable Tweet collection: indexes roughly half a trillion documents and serves queries with an average latency of under 100ms.
  4. History of the Poop Emoji (Fast Company) — In Japanese, emoji are more like characters than random animated emoticons.
Four short links: 18 September 2014

Four short links: 18 September 2014

Writing Testable Code, Magical UIs, High-Performance ssh, and BASIC Lessons

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 18, 2014

  1. Guide to Writing Testable Code (PDF) — Google’s testable code suggestions, though C++-centric.
  2. Enchanted Objects (YouTube) — David Rose at Google talking about the UX of magical UIs. (via Mary Treseler)
  3. hpn-ssh — High Performance SSH/SCP.
  4. Lost Lessons from an 8-bit BASIC — The little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or at least disregarded as a relic from primitive times. That’s too bad, because while the language itself has serious shortcomings, the overall 8-bit BASIC experience has high points that are worth remembering.