"invisible economies" entries

Four short links: 6 November 2014

Four short links: 6 November 2014

Javascript Testing, Dark Data, Webapp Design, and Design Trumps Data

  1. Karma — kick-ass open source Javascript test environment.
  2. The Dark Market for Personal Data (NYTimes) — can buy lists of victims of sexual assault, of impulse buyers, of people with sexually transmitted disease, etc. The cost of a false-positive when those lists are used for marketing is less than the cost of false-positive when banks use the lists to decide whether you’re a credit risk. The lists fall between the cracks in privacy legislation; essentially, the compilation and use of lists of people are unregulated territory.
  3. 7 Principles of Rich Web Applications — “rich web applications” sounds like 2007 wants its ideas back, but the content is modern and useful. Predict behaviour for negative latency.
  4. Collaborative Filtering at LinkedIn (PDF) — This paper presents LinkedIn’s horizontal collaborative filtering infrastructure, known as browsemaps. Great lessons learned, including context and presentation of browsemaps or any recommendation is paramount for a truly relevant user experience. That is, design and presentation represents the largest ROI, with data engineering being a second, and algorithms last. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 30 September 2014

Four short links: 30 September 2014

Continuous Testing, Programmable Bees, Deep Learning on GPUs, and Silk Road Numbers

  1. Continuously Testing Infrastructure — “infrastructure as code”. I can’t figure out whether what I feel are thrills or chills.
  2. Engineer Sees Big Possibilities in Micro-robots, Including Programmable Bees (National Geographic) — He and fellow researchers devised novel techniques to fabricate, assemble, and manufacture the miniature machines, each with a housefly-size thorax, three-centimeter (1.2-inch) wingspan, and weight of just 80 milligrams (.0028 ounces). The latest prototype rises on a thread-thin tether, flaps its wings 120 times a second, hovers, and flies along preprogrammed paths. (via BoingBoing)
  3. cuDNN — NVIDIA’s library of primitives for deep neural networks (on GPUS, natch). Not open source (registerware).
  4. Analysing Trends in Silk Road 2.0If, indeed every sale can map to a transaction, some vendors are doing huge amounts of business through mail order drugs. While the number is small, if we sum up all the product reviews x product prices, we get a huge number of USD $20,668,330.05. REMEMBER! This is on Silk Road 2.0 with a very small subset of their entire inventory. A peek into a largely invisible economy.
Four short links: 12 August 2014

Four short links: 12 August 2014

Digital Services Playbook, Brain Computer Interface, In-Game Economics, and Motorcycle Reality

  1. US Digital Services Playbook — good sense from the US Govt’s latest “try not to cock up more Govt IT projects” brigade.
  2. Open Brain-Computer Interface — “open” as in “source”, not as in “cut”.
  3. Blockmarket — visibility into the in-game trading of The Blockheads. (via Dave Frampton)
  4. Skully (trigger warning: TechCrunch) — a step towards augmented reality for motorcyclists: panoramic visual awareness via in-helmet display.
Four short links: 3 March 2014

Four short links: 3 March 2014

Vanishing Money, Car Hackery, Data Literacy Course, and Cheaper CI

  1. The Programming Error That Cost Mt Gox 2609 Bitcoins — in the unforgiving world of crypto-currency, it’s easy to miscode and vanish your money.
  2. Ford Invites Open-Source Community to Tinker AwayOne example: Nelson has re-tasked the motor from a Microsoft Xbox 360 game controller to create an OpenXC shift knob that vibrates to signal gear shifts in a standard-transmission Mustang. The 3D-printed prototype shift knob uses Ford’s OpenXC research platform to link devices to the car via Bluetooth, and shares vehicle data from the on-board diagnostics port. Nelson has tested his prototype in a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 that vibrates at the optimal time to shift.
  3. Making Sense of Data — Google online course on data literacy.
  4. Cost-Efficient Continuous Integration at Mozilla — CI on a big project can imply hundreds if not thousands of VMs on Amazon spinning up to handle compiles and tests. This blog post talks about Mozilla’s efforts to reduce its CI-induced spend without reducing the effectiveness of its CI practices.
Four short links: 5 July 2013

Four short links: 5 July 2013

Tracking Bitcoin, Gaming Deflation, Bloat-Aware Design, and Mapping Entity Relationships

  1. Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph (PDF) — We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a succinctly persistent way. (via Alex Dong)
  2. Majority of Gamers Today Can’t Finish Level 1 of Super Mario Bros — Nintendo test, and the President of Nintendo said in a talk, We watched the replay videos of how the gamers performed and saw that many did not understand simple concepts like bottomless pits. Around 70 percent died to the first Goomba. Another 50 percent died twice. Many thought the coins were enemies and tried to avoid them. Also, most of them did not use the run button. There were many other depressing things we noted but I can not remember them at the moment. (via Beta Knowledge)
  3. Bloat-Aware Design for Big Data Applications (PDF) — (1) merging and organizing related small data record objects into few large objects (e.g., byte buffers) instead of representing them explicitly as one-object-per-record, and (2) manipulating data by directly accessing buffers (e.g., at the byte chunk level as opposed to the object level). The central goal of this design paradigm is to bound the number of objects in the application, instead of making it grow proportionally with the cardinality of the input data. (via Ben Lorica)
  4. Poderopedia (Github) — originally designed for investigative journalists, the open src software allows you to create and manage entity profile pages that include: short bio or summary, sheet of connections, long newsworthy profiles, maps of connections of an entity, documents related to the entity, sources of all the information and news river with external news about the entity. See the announcement and website.
Four short links: 14 January 2013

Four short links: 14 January 2013

Open Source Metrics, BitTorrent to TV, Tumblr Value, and Variable Fiction

  1. Open Source MetricsTalking about the health of the project based on a single metric is meaningless. It is definitely a waste of time to talk about the health of a project based on metrics like number of software downloads and mailing list activities. Amen!
  2. BitTorrent To Your TVThe first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed. (via Andy Baio)
  3. Tumblr URL Culture — the FOO.tumblr.com namespace is scarce and there’s non-financial speculation. People hoard and trade URLs, whose value is that they say “I’m cool and quirky”. I’m interested because it’s a weird largely-invisible Internet barter economy. Here’s a rant against it. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Design-Fiction Slider Bar of Disbelief (Bruce Sterling) — I love the list as much as the diagram. He lays out a sliding scale from “objective reality” to “holy relics” and positions black propaganda, 419 frauds, design pitches, user feedback, and software code on that scale (among many other things). Bruce is an avuncular Loki, pulling you aside and messing with your head for your own good.
Four short links: 10 January 2013

Four short links: 10 January 2013

Engineering Virality, App Store Numbers, App Store Data, and FPGA OS

  1. How To Make That One Thing Go Viral (Slideshare) — excellent points about headline writing (takes 25 to find the one that works), shareability (your audience has to click and share, then it’s whether THEIR audience clicks on it), and A/B testing (they talk about what they learned doing it ruthlessly).
  2. A More Complete Picture of the iTunes Economy — $12B/yr gross revenue through it, costs about $3.5B/yr to operate, revenue has grown at a ~35% compounded rate over last four years, non-app media 2/3 sales but growing slower than app sales. Lots of graphs!
  3. Visualizing the iOS App Store — interactive exploration of app store sales data.
  4. BORPHan Operating System designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a ‘hardware process’, which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for “Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware”.
Four short links: 9 January 2013

Four short links: 9 January 2013

Bitcoin Numbers, Augmenting People with Computers, EBook Creation, and Answering Your Questions

  1. BitCoin in 2012, By The NumbersOver the past year Bitcoin’s value when compared to the US Dollar, and most other currencies, increased steadily, though there was a large spike and subsequent dip in August. Interestingly, the current market cap is actually at a peak for 2012, exceeding the spike in August. This can be attributed to the fact that tens of thousands of Bitcoins have been introduced into the economy since August, though now at the slower rate of 25 per block.
  2. Man-Computer Symbiosis (JCR Licklider) — In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone. There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. Fascinating to read this 1960 paper on AI and the software/hardware augmentation of human knowledge work (just as the term “knowledge worker” was coined). (via Jim Stogdill)
  3. Papyrus — simple online editor and publisher for ebooks.
  4. howdoi (github) — commandline tool to search stackoverflow and show the code that best matches your request. This is genius.
Four short links: 17 October 2012

Four short links: 17 October 2012

Invisible Data Economy, Hacked Value, Open Algorithms Textbook, and Mobile Testing

  1. Beyond Goods and Services: The Unmeasured Rise of the Data-Driven Economy — excellent points about data as neither good nor service, and how data use goes unmeasured by economists and thus doesn’t influence policy. According to statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real consumption of ‘internet access’ has been falling since the second quarter of 2011. In other words, according to official U.S. government figures, consumer access to the Internet—including mobile—has been a drag on economic growth for the past year and a half. (via Mike Loukides)
  2. How Crooks Turn Even Crappy Hacked PCs Into Money (Brian Krebs) — show to your corporate IT overlords, or your parents, to explain why you want them to get rid of the Windows XP machines. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Open Data Structures — an open content textbook (Java and C++ editions; CC-BY licensed) on data structures. (via Hacker News)
  4. Mobiforge — test what gets sent back to mobile browsers. This site sends the HTTP headers that a mobile browser would. cf yesterday’s Responsivator. (via Ronan Cremin)