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Science Startups, UAV Platform, Distributed vs Scalable, and Multiplayer Spreadsheet
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VCs Return to Backing Science Startups (NY Times) — industry and energy investment doubled this year, biotech up 26% in first half, but a lot of the investments are comically small and the risk remains acutely high.
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dronecode — Linux Foundation common, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The platform has been adopted by many of the organizations on the forefront of drone technology, including 3DRobotics, DroneDeploy, HobbyKing, Horizon Ag, PrecisionHawk, Agribotics, and Walkera, among other.
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Distributed is Not Necessarily Moe Scalable (Murat Demiras) — well-reasoned and summed up in this tweet by @jamesiry: Some people when faced with a problem think, I know, I’ll use distributed computing. Now they have N^2 problems..
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ethersheet — open source collaborative/multiplayer spreadsheet.
Angular Style, Consensus Filters, BASE Banks, and Browser Performance
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Angular JS Style Guide — I love style guides, to the point of having posted (I think) three for Angular. Reading other people’s style guides is like listening to them make-up after arguments: you learn what’s important to them, and what they regret.
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Consensus Filters — filtering out misreads and other errors to allow all agents, or robots, in the network to arrive at the same value asymptotically by only communicating with their neighbours.
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Why Banks are BASE not ACID — Consistency it turns out is not the Holy Grail. What trumps consistency is: Auditing, Risk Management, Availability.
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perfmap — front-end performance heatmap.
Tracking Awareness, Simple GUIs, Service Design, and Pull-Based Development
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Floodwatch — a Chrome extension that tracks the ads you see as you browse the internet. It offers tools to help you understand both the volume and the types of ads you’re being served during the course of normal browsing, with the goal of increasing awareness of how advertisers track your browsing behavior, build their version of your online identity, and target their ads to you as an individual.
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slfsrv — create simple, cross-platform GUI applications, or wrap GUIs around command-line applications, using HTML/JS/CSS and your own browser.
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Service Design Toolkit downloads — posters and templates for workshops, posters, and exercises.
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Work Practices and Challenges in Pull-Based Development: The Integrator’s Perspective (PDF) — Our key findings are that integrators struggle to maintain the quality of their projects and have difficulties with prioritizing contributions that are to be merged. To which every open-source project maintainer says, “no shit Sherlock” and “thank god it’s not just me” simultaneously.
Robot Learning, Internet Confidentiality, Bootstrap Material Design, and Bitcoin Adoption
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Robotics Has Too Many Dreamers, Needs More Practical People (IEEE) — Grishin said that while looking for business opportunities, he saw too may entrepreneurs proposing cool new robots and concepts but with no business cases to support them. The robotics industry, he added, needs more startups to fail to allow entrepreneurs to learn from past mistakes and come up with more enduring plans. A reminder that first to found rarely correlates to biggest exit.
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Fixing the Internet for Confidentiality and Security (Mark Shuttleworth) — Every society, even today’s modern Western society, is prone to abusive governance. We should fear our own darknesses more than we fear others. I like the frame of “confidentiality” vs “privacy”.
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Bootstrap Material Design — a material design theme for Bootstrap. Material design (Google’s new design metaphor/language for interactive UIs) is important, to mobile and web what HIG was to MacOS, and it specifically tackles the noisy surprises that are app and web interfaces today.
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Simon Wardley on Bitcoin — Why I think US will adopt bitcoin … it is currently backed by $284m in venture capital, you’re going to get it whether you like it or not.
Good Communities, AI Games, Design Process, and Web Server Library
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15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging (Anil Dash) — If your comments are full of assholes, it’s your fault. Good communities don’t just happen by accident.
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Replicating DeepMind — open source attempt to build deep learning network that can play Atari games. (via RoboHub)
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ToyTalk — fantastic iterative design process for the product (see the heading “A Bit of Trickery”)
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h2o — an optimized HTTP server implementation that can be used either as a standalone server or a library.
Bubble Talk, Pants Build, HTML Processing, and Use Regulation
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Bill Gurley on Startups and Risk (Business Insider) — No one’s fearful, everyone’s greedy, and it will eventually end.
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Pants — a build system from Twitter and others.
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pup — commandline tool for parsing and processing HTML.
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Use Regulation (Slate) — the take on privacy that says that data collection isn’t inherently bad, it’s the (mis)use of the data that should be policed. The author of this piece is not a believer.
Pragmatic Ventures?, Pictures Vanishing, Vertical Progress, and Visualising Distributed Consensus
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Intellectual Ventures Making Things (Bloomberg) — Having earned billions in payouts from powerful technology companies, IV is setting out to build things on its own. Rather than keeping its IP under lock and key, the company is looking to see if its ideas can be turned into products and the basis for new companies. Crazy idea. Madness. Building things never works.
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Twitpic Shutting Down — I guess we know what Jason Scott will be doing for the next three weeks.
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Thiel’s Contrarian Strategy (Fortune) — the distinction Thiel draws between transformative, “vertical” change—going from zero to one—and incremental, “horizontal” change—going from one to n. “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress,” he explains in the book’s first chapter. “If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
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Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus — making sense of something that’s useful but not intuitive. Awesome.
Sibyl, Bitrot, Estimation, and ssh
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Sibyl: Google’s System for Large Scale Machine Learning (YouTube) — keynote at DSN2014 acting as an intro to Sibyl. (via KD Nuggets)
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Bitrot from 1997 — That’s 205 failures, an actual link rot figure of 91%, not 57%. That leaves only 21 URLs as 200 OK and containing effectively the same content.
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What We Do And Don’t Know About Software Effort Estimation — nice rundown of research in the field.
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fabric — simple yet powerful ssh library for Python.
Plant Properties, MQ Comparisons, 1915 Vis, and Mobile Web Weaknesses
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Machine Learning for Plant Properties — startup building database of plant genomics, properties, research, etc. for mining. The more familiar you are with your data and its meaning, the better your machine learning will be at suggesting fruitful lines of query … and the more valuable your startup will be.
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Dissecting Message Queues — throughput, latency, and qualitative comparison of different message queues. MQs are to modern distributed architectures what function calls were to historic unibox architectures.
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1915 Data Visualization Rules — a reminder that data visualization is not new, but research into effectiveness of alternative presentation styles is.
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The Broken Promise of the Mobile Web — it’s not just about the UI – it’s also about integration with the mobile device.
Web Spreadsheet, Correlated Novelty, A/B Ethics, and Replicated Data Structures
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EtherCalc — open source web-based spreadsheet.
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Dynamics of Correlated Novelties (Nature) — paper on “the adjacent possible”. Here we propose a simple mathematical model that mimics the process of exploring a physical, biological, or conceptual space that enlarges whenever a novelty occurs. The model, a generalization of Polya’s urn, predicts statistical laws for the rate at which novelties happen (Heaps’ law) and for the probability distribution on the space explored (Zipf’s law), as well as signatures of the process by which one novelty sets the stage for another. (via Steven Strogatz)
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On The Media Interview with OKCupid CEO — relevant to the debate on ethics of A/B tests. I preferred this to Tim Carmody’s rant.
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CRDTs as Alternative to APIs — when using CRDTs to tie your system together, you don’t need to resort to using impoverished representations that simply never come anywhere near the representational power of the data structures you use in your programs at runtime. See also this paper on Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types.