The Weekly Weird - 2016-01-01

Skorgu

2016-01-01 11:00

That other jane street.
OCaml (MirageOS in fact!) DHCP implementation: Charrua.
more hoverboards!
State considered harmful
Stock market lazers!
Making the rounds: The Normalization of Deviance is not as sexy as it sounds but it's an important facet to consider when evaluating systems. No matter how good your procedures are, if nobody follows them you're still screwed. More on this by Dan Luu.
Making secure hardware is really hard. Note that this particular vulnerability is fixed in firmware but still.
I'm tempted by the convenience of real wireless charging.
Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy & Physics: A Topical Index. I can't possibly express the extent to which this is relevant to my interests.
Surprise, surprise: credit card reader systems aren't very secure.
Let's Draw Feynman Diagrams! (via)

The Weekly Weird - 2015-12-25

Skorgu

2015-12-25 11:00

Merry Christmas, Elon!
- Hope it makes up for your last birthday. Congratulations to all of SpaceX, it's a hell of an achievement (turn that sucker to 4k for maximum enjoyment).
- Pretty pictures! More pretty pictures! A collection of amateur videos of the event.
- If you're still confused at what exactly happened, here's a plot of the booster's flight path, compared to Blue Origin's. Which, again, not in competition! Both are good! More rockets!
- What tickles me is that physics trolled the spectators. Even Musk himself! Clearly SpaceX has weaponized comic timing.
- Not everyone is happy though.
Because I never get bored of saying it: orbit is a speed, not an altitude. (via)
Data parallelism in Rust. This demonstrates how the (annoying, esoteric) safety guarantees of regular rust code can enable some neat higher-order abilities.
"Regulation D ... places a limit of six withdrawals or outgoing transfers per month from savings or money market accounts".
This Juniper backdoor is fun to watch. Of course, it's actually two back doors.. The second one looks pretty impressive. In general, crypto geeks are excited.
No amount of software trickery will stop intentional backdoors but there are attempts to examine the underlying systems with far greater rigor. For example, what happens when you memcmp strings of differing lengths? If you're surprised that the C standard isn't quite as bulletproof as it ought to be, well, you shouldn't be.
Reminder: monsters are real.
The Department of Homeland Security is learning that GPS isn't really that secure by default.
"Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program."
SeaQuest, eat your heart out
Reason #258 that HN is the only tech news site worth bothering with: multiple malloc implementors in one thread.
Why does Dole own container ships?
I have not read in detail but:
- How we suck at stopping terrorism
- Anything that reduces the marginal cost of strong types has got to be a net win: Progress on gradual typing.
I will never get tired of reading about AIG: The True Story of the ‘Greatest Corporate Failure in American History
A good summary on the IEX controversy, if you can call it that. I particularly like the letter from the 8th grader. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to front-run myself a beer.
I don't really know how to evaluate tiingo, it does seem to have a lot of nice data in a less-ancient format than is usual for finance. It is a little weird though. HN Comments, featuring the author.
Efforts to connect the 3 US power grids continue. (You did know there were 3 US power grids, right?)
I'm wary of dipping into politics here but there are a few stories that are at least superficially interesting enough to warrant deviation from that rule:
- Here's a grand comment about that whole Bernie Sanders/DNC thing that makes it actually make sense.
- And a long (~14,000 words!), suspiciously-pat exploration of Trump's candidacy and John Boyd's OODA principle. It verges on being a just-so story but I found it interesting nonetheless. Certainly the differing stucture of the debates wrt poll numbers is not something I'd put together quite so concretely. Yes, I did read it all.
Ok fine, I'll mention Star Wars. There are elements of a great story in the Prequels but it's fair to say that the actual movie that got made was godawful. No I haven't seen the new one. No, I don't plan to. Because JJ Abrams, that's why.

Books I Read in 2015

Skorgu

2015-12-23 11:17

A reasonable year for books, not as many as I would have liked and not nearly as 'literary' as I would like. I'm learning to not beat myself up about not finishing a book if it stops grabbing me, hence all the incompletes.

Ancillary Sword
The Magician's Land
The Three Body Problem (incomplete)
Libriomancer, Codex Born, Unbound
Thank You, Jeeves
Omon Ra (incomplete)
Stations of the Tide
1Q84 (staggeringly incomplete)
The Desert Spear (incomplete)
The Lost Fleet: {Dauntless,Fearless,Courageous} (third one incomplete)
Superintelligence
Nexus, Crux (incomplete)
Another Fine Myth
The Annihilation Score
The Man with the Golden Torc, Daemons are Forever
The Fractal Prince (incomplete)
Crooked
Ancillary Mercy
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
The Traitor Baru Cormarant
Hive Mind
Seveneves

The Weekly Weird - 2015-12-18

Skorgu

2015-12-18 11:00

Lead is horrific. I just learned that sub-Saharan Africa banned lead in gasoline in 2006.
I'm really hoping this whole thing is just a viral promotion for a Bill Murray heist movie. Strange time to be alive. More on this toolbag.
Finally, I'm safe against the Advanced, Persistent Threat of backspace.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the new Expanse series from SyFy. I enjoyed the books.
WebAssembly is happening!
I used to make fun of the 'purely free' extremist sect of the free software movement, obviously the intervening time has proved them right and me quite wrong. It's nice to see that there are still efforts to make completely free hardware though of course we're not there yet.
Kerberos on Windows is not so hot
In all seriousness, I wish the BATS team the best of luck with their second try at IPO.
Java has hard-coded 65535-entry limits on a whole bunch of things. 64k ought to be enough for anyone, eh?
The best phrase in science is "that's funny...". I also like the phrase "nowhere near moving champagne even vaguely close to the fridge".
Life imitates Chuck Jones.
I...can't imagine attaching giant, hydrogen-filled balloons to the electricity grid would work out well but it's a mighty fine image.
'SCP-grade psychic biohazard.'
You guys know that Archduke Ferdinand's assasination was actually a showdown between time-travelers, right?
Japan leads the world in finding inventive uses for drones.
"You must notify BIS and the ENC Encryption Request Coordinator via e-mail of the Internet location (e.g., URL or Internet address) of the publicly available encryption source code or provide each of them a copy of the publicly available encryption source code."
I've always thought that language is more important to thought than we think.
I need to learn tensorflow.
Onion soup! Note this is kind of gross so don't read at lunch.
Imaginary Irony Loops.

The Weekly Weird - 2015-12-11

Skorgu

2015-12-11 11:00

The Tamagochi Singularity is just unspeakably awesome. Somewhere in the complexity space is a line past which doing this is actually cruel and it's more than a little unnerving that we, as a species, don't know where it is.
There's nothing about the most recent Satoshi-unmasking that I don't love. Tessier-Ashpool! PGP Keys! Tor! Panama! TULIPS! POLICE RAIDS! Hn comments the first and the second.
Some more footage of my veryfavorite helicopter, the K-MAX putting out a fire. I feel like the trend of defense research focusing on non-combat automation is worth watching. Firefighting like the K-Max and SAFIR, logistics like K-MAX and the original Grand Challenge and of course the Fukushima-inspired 2015 Grand Challenge are all solid, real-world use cases that would be hugely beneficial in combat but don't make people freak out about Terminators.
If you give people a signal that correlates with something they care about, you should not be surprised when they use it to approximate that thing. Will MnDOT resist the urge to 'optimize' this relationship? What does this imply for congestion pricing? How long until GPS navigation apps parse this signal (or the reverse!)? Tune in next week for the next episode of "Things Nobody But Me Finds Interesting".
Hey Malaysia, I'll take those 747s off your hands for cheap.
In more "userspace all the things" news: OpenFastPath, a userspace TCP/IP stack.
wat
Fleeing the IRS just got harder.
Rust 1.5! cargo watch is welcome, I miss omake -P every time I use a build system.
"Go peddle your diabeetus-buns somewhere else, satan!"
Because BGP is fun, hosting your own Anycast DNS system for cheap.
A little more about Thunderbolt 3
I only skimmed this article on engineering margins but it seemed interesting: Margin Call: Fermi Problems, Highway Horrors, Black Swans, and Why You Should Worry About When You Should Worry
Bush hid the facts
Vice Grips are great but this One Simple Trick can make them way better!

The Weekly Weird - 2015-12-04

Skorgu

2015-12-04 11:00

Trigger warning: perl
3D print a ~~revolver~~ pepperbox.
Amazon is getting its money's worth from the Clarkson deal: Amazon Prime Air. Note the new vehicle is quite a bit larger and more asymmetric than the previous big-ass quadcopter and has a specific range of 15 miles. IEEE Spectrum is not impreessed
CONIKS: Bringing Key Transparency to End Users
When in doubt, as-a-service it
I'm cautiously excited about only ever having a single type of plug for everything. The 10gbe support is particularly relevant to my interests as I have a zfs server and windows desktop and the 1gigabit pipe between the two is Quite Insufficient.
Right now we can only see large expolanets in tight orbits. Let's put that in a more visual form
Sooo...time to pick up Chinese?
Type safe sql query builder in rust: Diesel
Software defined...bgp? SDX is a clever idea for making an IXP smarter
Gibson? Hacked.
"Topics in High-Performance Messaging" is worth a read.

The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-27

Skorgu

2015-11-27 11:00

TO CANADA, BROTHERS!
Hokay, so here's the earth, 20 years later
I just want to point out that the naive, gb-for-gb price multiplier between hard drives and SSDs is about 5x(!). Between the premium dropping like a rock and available SSD sizes going up, I'm excited to be able to replace my 8-disk zfs box with the prize from a box of cereal in a few years.
If you like dark chocolate you're probably a psychopath. (am I doing this clickbait thing right?)
Congratulations to Blue Origin on its first flight and VTOL recovery! Of course, as my good buddy Elon points out, getting to space and getting to orbit are very different things. It doesn't matter of course, getting to space cheaply is the goal, whose name is on the rocket is secondary. The important thing is that this is another source of flight-miles and engine-burn-minutes, each of which brings us closer to making rocket science boring.
Even with mucho rockets the future won't resemble Star Trek. Unless you think P=NP. (Seriously, this explains so much)
Slate has a good insiders' account of the Sony hack. It's an interesting case study in what happens to a disrupted organization.
Realtime video captioning. Open source!
Formula E (the electric Formula 1 thing) is going to have AI drivers soon.
It must be so exhausting to be djb, having to descend from the clouds to explain why we're all wrong about how big our encryption keys should be.
Gravity is a pain in the ass but millions of years of evolution has made working without it obnoxious. The solution, of course, is jetpacks.
A series about adding garbage collection to rust: part 0 and part 1.
Postgres is grand, Paxos is grand, is the combination twice as good or half??
Just freaking use ECC memory.
"[Ganeti] doesn't manage VMs, it manages locks and the VMs are just an unfortunate side effect"

The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-20

Skorgu

2015-11-20 11:00

Given the recent events in Beirut, Paris and Mali it seems like a good time to a) cry and b) look at how Facebook's "I'm safe" thing works.
cat palate cleanser.
It turns out that building a nuclear reactor is startlingly similar to building (some types of) nuclear reactor. So why not build nuclear reactors in shipyards? Someone give these guys $700 million already.
If you watched the whole thing you might be thinking to yourself "lots of small, independent units that fail fast and safe? that sounds like ~~SpaceX~~ ${devops_fad_term}", you're not wrong. Nuclear has higher stakes but similar design features.
The Cloud is really just computers in a datacenter and most of those datacenters are in a handful of jurisdictions. That's changing, with several providers opening more region- or nation-specific locations. What happens when you can cryptographically split your data across n of those regions? Are you actually safer from court orders? Is it easier to get a "shut this shit down" order than a "give me your data" one?
A quora answer about D, Rust and Go was making the rounds earlier this week. I don't really disagree with anything except the phrase "rust skipped leg day" which means something very different to me than its use in this article. Lifters who skip leg day aren't mocked for looking imbalanced or goofy, they're mocked for focusing on asthetics over fucntionality. Leg day is a day you spent building strength that's useful instead of sexy. If anything, I think Rust is the exact opposite of this: focusing on the annoying, unsexy things like safety and correctness instead of sexy things like distributed systems. Not that it matters because, as we know, worse is better.
Weird things are happening in the world financial system.
...this is not one of them, it's just dumb..
I'd hate to derail New York's favored pastime of complaning about the subway with actual facts but this article on the signaling system is fascinating. [via, HN comments]
Kind of a neat contactless power/data connector for robotics. It's basically a long-form ad, is targeted to low-bandwidth and -power applications but still interesting. Seems like it has really nice properties if you're building self-assembling robots for example.
If I win the lottery, this is the house I'm building.
Earth just got hit by ... something.
If you don't know gdb (and I don't), you might like to spend some time using it to defuse a bomb (no pressure). I guess you'd call this a CTF? Seems like a good interview question actually. Part 2.
This is the latent singulatarian in me but some day prosthetics are going to be objectively better (and awesomerer) than the meatware we're born with.
I wouldn't recommend relying on this for security but it sure sounds secure
Some day I'll learn to drive a rally car (for real, not just in video games). Until then I'll have to content myself with practicing shouting like a codriver.
I like this idea of writing by omission.
From the department of everything-is-signaling: laptop stickers
An article on some new things Microsoft was working on which I've only skimmed.

The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-13

Skorgu

2015-11-13 11:00

"Winning at life is all about who can exploit externalities the hardest" -- a wise man

An excellent overview of the new graph isomorphism result.
From the this-timeline-is-the-strangest-timeline department: if Satoshi Nakamoto wins the Nobel Prize in Economics, they'll just transfer the $M to 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1.
Superconductors are one of those technologies (like fusion or P=NP) that would reshape the world in about an hour and a half singlehandedly. There was some noise about -70° superconductivity a while ago which has now been peer-reveiwed and published in Nature. It's still under (hilariously) high pressure and H2S isn't a fun material to work with but -70 is achievable with normal lab equipment (I'm told). More excitingly, it's surprising and from surprised scientists come breakthroughs.
Hackers! Insider trading! Yawn.
I always enjoy watching the legal system deal with big changes in society. For example, there's about to be a (US) property rights regime for asteroid mining.
Having just fiddled with Docker I'm convinced that the ergonomics of it are beneficial. The performance story is complicated, especially considering the diversity of networking models supported. Here's RedHat's opinion.
It's a lifetime career goal of mine to never write a line of Java. Mind you, Java is approximately as old as Home Alone and Lisp is approximately as old as the Vietnam War. (h/t jetpack)
SPEAKING OF JETPACKS. Now to be clear, I'd kill myself 8 seconds into using one but man are they cool. I can almost imagine a world in which the autopilot is strict enough (but not too strict) that these are safe enough to use. I can much more easily imagine a world in which this kind of power to weight makes VTOL cat litter delivery drones feasible.
While we're on the subject of getting up close and personal with the results of exothermic reaction, it would be remiss of me to have never linked to Ignition, a delightful 1972 book on the development of rocket fuels.
NASA mission posters are a trove of nerdy glory.
House Iter
First rule of secret data: Don't broadcast it on TV. (Alternatively, suuure guys, that was totally secret)
Detroit is getting 10gbit (apparently not a typo) home internet access. There are surely more factors than fat pipes and cheap land but I wouldn't be surprised to see remote workers (and maybe eventually startups) looking in that direction.

The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-06

Skorgu

2015-11-06 11:00

Well, uh, someone might have solved Graph Isomorphism in "just above P" time. No big deal.
Here's a nice little non-flying drone to deliver your packages.. I think, as always, that the concerns about theft and liability are vastly overblown and trivially solved by not being stupid and insurance, respectively. Remember, if you're running a fleet of these things you have super-accurate records of when you had a problem, where, and what was happening leading up to it. Oh look, this block has a 60% higher loss rate? Send drones in pairs for a while. Doesn't help? Route around it and email the cops.
Every so often people remember that this whole internet thing is literally a series of tubes and worry about the safety of those tubes. If that bothers you, just use satellite communication instead and eat the latency hit. Surely that's safe from this manner of interference.
That time I tried to buy a barrel of crude oil is entertaining as-is but the HN comments are horrifying. H2S is not to be fucked with.
That's where my short-throw dipstick goes. (Lots of bad language)
It looks like someone is finally taking the SABRE engine seriously. I don't think it should cost that much, since C-7 Aerospace has one for quite a lot less already.
Getting these things right is, after, all, rocket science.
Did the Chinese Military test an anti ballistic missile system?
I'm not 100% up on the state of the art of drone navigation but I think collision avoidance with onboard processing is pretty near the bleeding edge.
Ooops.
Any site called Avoid Humans is going to be right up my alley. [via]
I've seen those 'jet' ads on the subway and basically discounted them as foolish VCs and their money being parted. I don't necessarily think I was wrong but they do use F# on their backend.
"An increase in the mortality rate for any large demographic group in an advanced nation has been virtually unheard of in recent decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union." The full study is quite readable (and horrifying, etc).
In other 'scientific article' news, Man Dies After Tapeworm Inside Him Gets Cancer is...weird.
We've got all these cores that aren't getting any faster so what do we do with them all? One answer (Intel's) is to use them to poll the network to reduce latency and the next logical step from there is to use them to poll the disk to reduce latency. Note that all of this is in userspace.