What’s Up With That: Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse | Autopia | WIRED
The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists…
Nathan Myhrvold's Recipe for a Better Oven - IEEE Spectrum
We cook our food using technology invented to bake bricks. We can do a lot better
Hasnain says:
This is a really good article and discussion on oven technology.
Posted on 2014-06-30T20:01:03+0000
staltz/introrx.md
The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing - Gist is a simple way to share snippets of text and code with others.
Hasnain says:
This is a really good introduction to (Functional) Reactive Programming.
Posted on 2014-06-30T19:52:54+0000
Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater
Not long after the security firm’s top manager in Iraq told a State Department investigator “that he could kill” him, the inquiry was abandoned. Weeks later, the firm’s guards killed 17 civilians in Iraq.
Hasnain says:
"Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports."
It's sad that investigative journalism like this is getting rarer and rarer these days.
It also doesn't help that Risen, a critically lauded Pulitzer prize winning journalist, is facing jail time for not disclosing his sources for his book.
Posted on 2014-06-30T16:52:33+0000
Announcing rest - A Haskell REST framework
We are excited to officially announce the open source release of our REST framework rest! rest is a set of packages used to write, document, and use RESTful applications. You write your API in Haskell using rest
The Science of Problem Solving
A review of the science behind problem solving, how it functions in the brain and how we can do it better.
On the Structural Differences of Higher Education in the UK and US
I explore why I believe the UK system of grading to be more effective than the US system, leading to a higher quality of education and a more valuable degree.
San Francisco Would Be a Better City With Twice as Many People
California is an earthly paradise. Yet there is something badly broken about the Golden State. At its best, California is America’s America, where the young and adventurous go for a fresh start. The trouble is that housing in much of California has become so expensive that the young and adventurous.…
Undefined behavior can result in time travel (among other things, but time travel is the...
The C and C++ languages are notorious for the very large section of the map labeled here be dragons, or more formally, undefined behavior.
Hasnain says:
This is really cool. As well as the two linked article series on undefined beaviour in C/C++
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know.html
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213
Vim Awesome
Awesome Vim plugins from across the universe
This CEO is out for blood
Elizabeth Holmes founded her revolutionary blood diagnostics company, Theranos, when she was 19. It’s now worth more than $9 billion, and poised to change health care.
A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
That's right: Officers threw a flashbang grenade in my son's crib -- and left a hole in his chest. It gets worse
What it Feels Like to Be Washed Up at 35
A behind-the-scenes report from the most ageist place in America: Silicon Valley.
Enfold Homepage
[av_one_full first] [av_image src=http://runpee.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/combo1.png attachment=5171 align=center animation=no-animation link= target= styling= caption= font_size= appearance=][/av_image] [/av_one_full] [av_one_fifth first][/av_one_fifth] [av_one_fifth] [av_image src=http://runp…
Hasnain says:
For everyone with small bladders.
"Each movie has a list of carefully selected Peetimes. We try to find 3-5 minute long scenes that don’t have crucial plot twists, or LOL moments, or exciting action."
Posted on 2014-06-22T20:19:30+0000
Employees That Stay In Companies Longer Than 2 Years Get Paid 50% Less
The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year. There are millions of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on one that we can control. Staying employed at the same company for over 2 years on average is going to make you earn [...]
“Coder’s High”: One Hit and You’re Hooked for Life!
These days I write more than I code, but one of the things I miss about programming is the coder’s high: those times when, for hours on end, I would lock my vision straight at the computer screen, trance out, and become a human-machine hybrid zipping through the virtual architecture...
When drones fall from the sky
More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, showing the potential dangers of throwing open U.S. skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation.
On Mining - ethereum blog
Decentralization, n. The security assumption that a nineteen year old in Hangzhou and someone who is maybe in the UK and maybe not have not yet decided to collude with each other. There has been a large amount of ruckus in the past week about the issue of mining centralization in the Bitcoin network…
Hasnain says:
This is really really well written and worth reading. Relates to bitcoin mining and the recent 51% attack.
Posted on 2014-06-21T02:18:42+0000
A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What's Causing It
Until now.
Cgrep by awgn
Cgrep is a grep tool suitable for searching in large code repositories. It supports 30 programming languages and searches that go beyond the simple pattern matching. It enables context-aware filtering and semantic searches through wildcard combinators.
Hasnain says:
Semantic code searches - this seems really useful. Can't wait to use it.
Posted on 2014-06-21T00:24:50+0000
Belkasoft - Leading Digital Evidence Extraction Software for Computer Forensic Investigations.
Belkasoft - forensic and system software tools. Instant Messengers, Browsers, Mailboxes, Pictures and Videos search, analysis and extraction. Find Internet Evidence quickly!
Hasnain says:
SSD's seem dangerous. Article is actually titled
"Why SSD Drives Destroy Court Evidence, and What Can Be Done About It"
Posted on 2014-06-21T00:24:11+0000
Videogrep: Automatic Supercuts with Python
Videogrep is a python script that searches through dialog in videos and then cuts together a new video based on what it finds. Basically, it's a command-line "supercut" generator. The code is here ...
Free Music Streaming & Downloads with Simple Choice Plans | T-Mobile
Stream music from leading services like Rhapsody and it won’t count towards your 4G LTE data plan. Free lifetime Rhapsody music and more.
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds
Before Risk, before Dungeons & Dragons, before Magic: The Gathering, there was Diplomacy. One writer enters international competition to play the world-conquering game that redefines what it me...
Thousands of secret keys found in Android apps - CNET
Even among the top apps found on Google Play, researchers have found a crucial security flaw that could compromise user data.
Cap'n Proto: Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, and SBE
Yesterday, some engineers at Google released FlatBuffers, a new serialization protocol and library with similar design principles to Cap’n Proto. Also, a few months back, Real Logic released Simple Binary Encoding, another protocol and library of this nature.
No Money, No Time
The poor are under a deadline that never lifts.
How to Fold a Julia Fractal — Acko.net
These imaginary numbers?called complex numbers when combined with our ordinary real numbers?are
What if Quality Journalism Isn't?
By now you have probably already read the leaked Innovation Report from The New York Times. And if you haven't, you should. It provides a great overview of the challenges and thinking that are happening in the industry, not just for The New York Times, but for every newspaper and magazine.
Starbucks to Provide Free College Education to Thousands of Workers
Through an unusual arrangement with Arizona State University, the company will pay for its workers to earn college degrees.
jakubroztocil/httpie
httpie - HTTPie is a command line HTTP client — a human-friendly cURL replacement.
SSD shadiness: Kingston and PNY caught bait-and-switching cheaper components after good reviews...
There's an increasing about of evidence to suggest that certain manufacturers are swapping out SSD hardware behind-the-scenes, and that products are suffering from it. It wouldn't be acceptable in other markets, and it's not acceptable here.
The Largest Black Hole In the Known Universe
It’s a huge surprise, and shows up in the most unlikely of places!
Hasnain says:
"For this galaxy, there must be a central black hole with a staggering 17 billion Solar masses, or a whopping 14% of the stellar mass of the galaxy! This is an unprecedented number; not only is this by far the most massive black hole we’ve ever found, but this is also the largest ratio of a black-hole-to-host-galaxy mass we’ve ever seen!"
Posted on 2014-06-16T01:16:34+0000
I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
Some things I've learned. - Morgan Housel - Financials
jq
jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. jq is written in portable C, and it has zero runtime dependencies.
The End of Cuisine
Nathan Myhrvold, the Mad Hatter of modernist cooking, invited the movement’s leading chef, Ferran Adrià, over for a 50-course, lab-prepared meal. It was a lot to digest, sure, but what does a feast like this mean for the future of eating?
Hasnain says:
"After 45 courses, I was lowing like a cow. In my food- and wine-altered state, I began to meditate on the notion of death by senseless beauty."
Posted on 2014-06-16T01:14:03+0000
Window into Airbnb’s hidden impact on S.F. - San Francisco Chronicle
Thousands of San Franciscans have transformed their homes into impromptu inns using Airbnb, the website that lets people rent rooms or houses to travelers.
Ars tests Internet surveillance—by spying on an NPR reporter
A week spent playing NSA reveals just how much data we leak online.
German man locked up over HVB bank allegations may have been telling truth
Gustl Mollath was put in a psychiatric unit for claiming his wife was involved in money-laundering at the Bavarian bank. But seven years on evidence has emerged that could set him free
Hasnain says:
"A German man committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital after being accused of fabricating a story of money-laundering activities at a major bank is to have his case reviewed after evidence has emerged proving the validity of his claims."
Posted on 2014-06-10T02:12:41+0000
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » My Conversation with “Eugene Goostman,” the Chatbot that’s All...
If you haven’t read about it yet, “Eugene Goostman” is a chatbot that’s being heavily promoted by the University of Reading’s Kevin Warwick, for fooling 33% of judges in a recent Turing Test competition into thinking it was human, and thereby supposedly becoming “the first program to pass the Turing…
Hasnain says:
Scott Aaronson on the chat bot everyone seems to like.
Posted on 2014-06-10T02:03:19+0000
No, A 'Supercomputer' Did NOT Pass The Turing Test For The First Time And Everyone Should Know...
So, this weekend's news in the tech world was flooded with a "story" about how a "chatbot" passed the Turing Test for "the first time," with lots of publications buying every point in the story and talking about what...
Google Embraces Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing | Enterprise | WIRED
On Tuesday Google will offer tools that can accommodate Docker containers on the company’s cloud service, Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine, and it will release additional software that can juggle containers across all sorts of outside services and machines as well.
Hasnain says:
"So many others are saying the same thing. But they’re not Eric Brewer."
Posted on 2014-06-10T01:49:01+0000
....without needing to remove the GIL at all. Presentation I gave at PyData NYC 2013. Video of...
PyParallel: How we removed the GIL and exploited all cores
Hasnain says:
This is really interesting (and enlightening with regards to the great windows async APIs)
Posted on 2014-06-08T03:57:50+0000
mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2014-06-06: Secrets of dispatch_once
Reader Paul Kim pointed out an entry on Michael Tsai's blog about making dispatch_once fast. While the comment in the dispatch_once source code is fascinating and informative, it doesn't quite delve into the detail that some would like to see. Since this is one of my favorite hacks, for today's arti…
Hasnain says:
This is really cool and really detailed. Hardware for the win.
Posted on 2014-06-07T01:50:32+0000
Sensemaking: The Most Important Tech Job That Doesn't Actually Exist
Yesterday I asked a prominent VC a question: "Why is it that, despite the fact that so many successful startup ideas come from academic research, on the investment side there doesn't seem to be anyone vetting companies on the basis...
Python to OCaml: retrospective - Thomas Leonard's blog
29,215 lines of Python to OCaml (learning OCaml along the way). command (325 lines of OCaml) and uses Lwt rather than its own asynchronous framework (483 lines of Python).
Hasnain says:
Long and great writeup. The series of linked articles is well worth reading as well.
Posted on 2014-06-06T17:57:03+0000
Home - GoNative.io
Convert your website into Android and iOS apps for free.
Dash - Documentation Browser, Snippet Manager - Kapeli
Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash searches offline documentation of 150+ APIs and stores snippets of code. You can also generate your own documentation sets.
I Sold My Startup for $25.5 Million. Here’s How I Did It.
I sold my startup for $25.5 million on Monday just after 2:23 p.m. Pacific Time. Selling the company, Perfect Audience, to Marin Software took six months of writing carefully worded emails, meeting secretly in cafés, and pacing around the streets of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood after dark. In t…
Hasnain says:
"t was agreed that after weeks of due diligence, the seemingly 14,213 closing conditions had finally been met. Marin’s lawyers declared the deal “closed,” everyone dropped off the conference call, and my company officially belonged to someone else."
Posted on 2014-06-06T17:13:28+0000
Women 'Complain A Lot, Interrupt,' Developer Says At Conference
At a tech conference in Berlin, a developer compared a software plug-in framework to his girlfriend, saying she "complains, interrupts" and "doesn't play well with others."
Tickets for Restaurants
Visit the post for more.
Hasnain says:
This is an amazing writeup on business / marketing / lean software. Worth reading by everyone.
Posted on 2014-06-06T06:01:27+0000
UnRisk Insight: Fast Functional Goats, Lions and Wolves
In a recent post, Andreas declared his love for the programming language FORTRAN. He concluded his post with the question “Can a functional language do this as well?”, where he was referring to the efficiency of his FORTRAN solution for the goats, wolves and lion problem. He followed it up with anot…
Verizon, Netflix see red over network speeds
Earlier, Verizon sent Netflix a letter demanding the streaming service cease and desist false claims and unfair business practices on Thursday.
Hasnain says:
"This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their broadband provider,'' Netflix spokesman Jonathan Friedland said. "We are trying to provide more transparency, just like we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that discussion."
Posted on 2014-06-06T03:10:54+0000
tinsnail.neocities.org
tinsnail.neocities.org
Hasnain says:
"This website uses advanced neuroscience to determine your interests."
This is the dirt it had on me (in order):
technology
gaming
psychology
science
art
politics
programming
cooking
sports
writing
Errata Security: Can I drop a pacemaker 0day?
blog.erratasec.com
Hasnain says:
I do not want to be killed by a 0day in my pacemaker...
Posted on 2014-06-05T06:20:19+0000
Out in the Open: The Little-Known Open Source OS That Rules the Internet of Things | Enterprise...
In today's business world, disruption is a constant force that never lets up. At the annual WIRED Business Conference: Disruptive by Design, we celebrate the creative power of bold new ideas and the people that make them happen. See the event >
Big Bang blunder bursts the multiverse bubble
Premature hype over gravitational waves highlights gaping holes in models for the origins and evolution of the Universe, argues Paul Steinhardt.
Hasnain says:
“The inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.”
Posted on 2014-06-04T01:26:06+0000
Help us, Thomas Piketty: The 1%’s sick and twisted new scheme
David Graeber explains the long con the rich use to defeat labor, destroy the creative class, and demean your job
Hasnain says:
"Suddenly it became possible to see that if there’s a rule, it’s that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you’re paid for it. CEOs and financial consultants that are actually making other people’s lives worse were paid millions, useless paper-pushers got handsomely compensated, people fulfilling obviously useful functions like taking care of the sick or teaching children or repairing broken heating systems or picking vegetables were the least rewarded."
Posted on 2014-06-04T01:21:05+0000
The miracle-buster afraid to go home
An Indian man who made his career exposing miracles and the feats of holy men as myths is in exile in Helsinki afraid of jail and attacks if he returns home.
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2014-06-03T16:43:16+0000
Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones?
Here’s a simple fact with an uncertain explanation: historically, hurricanes with female names have killed more people than those with male ones. Kiju Jung from the University of Illinois at Urbana...
Click to view the original at phenomena.nationalgeographic.com
Inside the Shadowy World of High-Speed Tennis Betting
In January, Daniel Dobson was two months into a new job that allowed him the opportunity to travel overseas and watch live sports. It had a downside, though: It got him arrested in an incident that...
Hasnain says:
"Dobson’s job was to sit courtside at the Australian Open in Melbourne and use his cellphone to transmit the outcome of each point of the match he was watching. The faster he worked, the greater the edge his employers at Sporting Data Ltd. would have in the betting market."
Posted on 2014-06-02T05:57:09+0000
How To Catch A Chess Cheater: Ken Regan Finds Moves Out Of Mind
The United States Chess Federation
Hasnain says:
"The following is our June 2014 Chess Life cover story. Normally this would be behind our pay wall, but we feel this article about combating cheating in chess carries international importance. "
This is really well written, and a great analysis.
Posted on 2014-06-02T05:42:32+0000
PUBLISH OR BE DAMNED - The Gate | London
In 1963 John Kennedy Toole wrote “A Confederacy of Dunces”. It was different to a conventional novel.
Hasnain says:
“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.”
Posted on 2014-06-02T05:40:33+0000
Fifa faces call to vote again over 2022 World Cup after leaked Qatari emails
Communications purport to show series of payments to officials by Mohamed bin Hammam, who was Fifa's member for Qatar
Hasnain says:
"The Fifa inspection team ranked Qatar as the only "high-risk" option overall, yet it was still chosen by 14 of the 22 voting members of the executive committee in December 2010. The Fifa president said it was now "probable" that it would be played in the winter rather than the summer due to the heat. Blatter insisted, however, that Qatar, which spent huge sums on ambassadors and development programmes, had not "bought" the World Cup."
Posted on 2014-06-02T01:20:43+0000
Patience is a Virtue: Revisiting Merge and Sort on Modern Processors
Badrish Chandramouli and Jonathan Goldstein, in ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2014), ACM SIGMOD [June 2014]
Hasnain says:
Improvements in sorting algorithms. this is kind of cool.
Posted on 2014-06-02T01:18:28+0000
Write a program that makes 2 + 2 = 5
Write a program that seemingly adds the numbers 2 and 2 and outputs 5. This is an underhanded contest. Your program cannot output any errors. Input is optional.
Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim
Learning the lesson of vi
Teaching Distributed Systems in Go | Dave's Data
da-data.blogspot.com
Hasnain says:
This is great, both from a golang perspective and an educational perspective.
Posted on 2014-06-01T06:45:23+0000
Fixed Soccer Matches Cast Shadow Over World Cup
An investigative report by FIFA, obtained by The New York Times, found that a match-rigging syndicate and its referees conspired to fix global soccer exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes.
Hasnain says:
"South Africa won, 1-0. In Mr. Perumal’s memoir, he wrote that the fixers had wanted three goals in the match, and that $1 million “went up in smoke.” He also wrote that Mr. Goddard was “a big troublemaker.”
“This time, you really have gone too far and, you know, we’re going to eliminate you,” he said, according to Mr. Goddard. Mr. Perumal later bragged about the episode, the report said. But in his memoir he said that he had threatened only to sue Mr. Goddard for breach of contract, not kill him."
Posted on 2014-06-01T06:36:14+0000
It's the Latency, Stupid
Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something that seemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency t…
Universities can’t fulfil the myth, but they can’t become a vocational school either
Universities come with a mythical mission. But they don't fulfil it.
Hasnain says:
"I don't believe that we can actually do much about this. There are always those who go on to higher education seeking what is actually a vocational education: be it science, engineering, or math students, they are simply seeking a means to a job. Nevertheless, universities remain one of the only places where young people will encounter new ideas. This creates a tension: should we give in to the pressure, and become vocational training centers? After all that is what the majority of students, parents, employers, and politicians want."
Posted on 2014-06-01T00:59:47+0000
Story behind football's innovative yellow first down line | SI.com
The large conference room full of ESPN executives was silent as Jerry Gepner and I finished presenting a simulation of a yellow, electronic first down line for football telecasts in May 1998. Finally, the silence was broken.
Hasnain says:
This is a story of some really impressive computer vision work.
Posted on 2014-06-01T00:56:01+0000