An early weird this week as I'm out tomorrow.

• Presented without comment: http://www.daniellesucher.com/2012/04/nantucket-an-accidental-limerick-detector/
• Generally if you need this much horsepower in a single box you've made a horrible mistake somewhere but it's cool to read about: http://anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review
• "Controlled and altruistic violence": http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/anatomy-of-error
• Think what you will about Facebook but they have some real engineering chops for some things: https://twitter.com/mattjroper/status/598489543478751232/video/1
• "...betting $19,000 to win a $700 pot just isn't something that a person would do.” http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/everyone-wins-when-a-computer-learns-from-poker-pros
• Isn't SSL grand? https://certsimple.com/blog/chrome-outdated-cryptography
• What would your name have been in 2000? http://time.com/3856405/baby-name-popularity/#
• Ahem: http://backronym.fail/

• Rust!

  • From a C++ programmer's perspective: https://plus.google.com/+nialldouglas/posts/AXFJRSM8u2t
  • From another perspective: http://www.evanmiller.org/a-taste-of-rust.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546382 )
  • And a (truly) glorious introduction to error handling. You might note some similarities: http://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545647 )

This double edition brought to you by the letter goldenrod and the number Rhinovirus.

• I barely follow this article but the bits I think I understand sound utterly fascinating: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-chase-moonshine-s-shadow/
• Totally awesome: http://www.seastar-project.org/
• some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440886
• If anyone needs me I'll be trying to figure out a way to justify buying one of these as a recruiting tool: https://throt-l.com/aircraft/gigantic-rc-jet-turbine-powered-sr-71-blackbird-showing-off-its-ultra-fast-flying-skills/
• For something named "open compute" details have been hard to find. Fortunately this is changing: http://anandtech.com/show/9138/open-compute-hardware-tried-and-tested
• Presented without comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
• Ok so the actual exploit here isn't that interesting but http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/27/implant-android-attack/
• "Contagious leukemia" https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/cell-line-infections-or-my-dog-has-no-bones/
• (I haven't read this in detail but it sounds interesting) http://www.ethos-os.org/\~solworth/petullo14ethosTypes-20140518.pdf
• From the "technical solution to social problems" department: http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/
• When you make a "rocket science" joke at the mad scientist's convention you get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_%28rocket%29 I mean...it would be 165 decibels five miles away. Most of a Saturn V first stage would fit inside the nozzle bell. What.
• Seems like a potentially useful primitive, pipe postgres changes into kafka: https://github.com/confluentinc/bottledwater-pg
• Now that Elon (we're totally on a first-name basis, that whole restraining order is just a joke) is done introducing his new economy of scale\^W\^W\^W world saving technology it's time to figure out if it's actually any better than regular old batteries (hint: LCA is life cycle assessment) : http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/05/sustainability-off-grid-solar-power.html (Part 1 is very good as well)
• Ever hear of those training missions and disaster simulations and wonder how much they're just making stuff up? Turns out at least this time it's frighteningly accurate: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-military-knew-the-nepal-quake-
• was-coming-87c2535aa352
• Why I'm not a pilot: http://i.imgur.com/E26u8VM.gif
• Be your own NSA for the low, low price of [redacted] http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/bms/
• PoC||GTFO is a new infosec/hacking/cursing a lot magazine in the tradition of Phrack: http://openwall.info/wiki/people/solar/pocorgtfo . The PDFs are...more than meets the eye but I won't spoil anything.
• A fascinating article that demonstrates how much information you can get out of 'metadata', even when the subjects of your investigation are being (somewhat) careful: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-hezbollah-connection.html

• In 2012 there were 1,701,500 truck drivers in the US. http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/freightliner-unveils-first-autonomous-semitruck-licensed-to-drive-itself-on-highways

  • ...and I have no idea how many pick-and-pack warehouse employees there are: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/fetch-robotics-introduces-fetch-and-freight-your-warehouse-is-now-automated
  • ...and, ok yeah this is a reach because there are zero tiny, super-strong employees in the world but if there were they'd be in trouble! http://bdml.stanford.edu/Main/MicroTugs

• Amazon's Aurora database is pretty neat: https://engineering.opendns.com/2015/04/07/redesigning-mysql-aws-tech-talk-on-the-aurora-database/

• Computer vision is getting good alarmingly fast: https://twitter.com/MS_Ignite/status/595365048547180545 (there's a clip of it in motion at about the one-hour mark in http://video.ch9.ms/ch9/ddc8/b373e7b1-6045-4234-9a33-e8cefde8ddc8/KEY02.mp4 )

I suck at email this week so not much here.

• Weird: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/being-framed-need-genetic-engineering-help/
• We do need a dashboard like this though: http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php
• Buffett: http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2015/02/12/betting-with-buffett-seven-lean-years-later/
• When even the 20ms hiccup from bouncing HAProxy is too much: http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-haproxy-reloads.html
• See also the comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9369051
• Just what we need: self-powering cameras. http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/selfpowered-video-camera-could-run-indefinitely-in-bright-light
• You mean laws apply to the cloud? http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-still-wont-release-irish-emails-2015-4

An extra chunky weekly weird served up piping hot just for you Guvnor!

"Computer scientists often look at Web pages in the same way that my friend looked at farms. People think that Web browsers are elegant computation platforms, and Web pages are light, fluffy things that you can edit in Notepad as you trade ironic comments with your friends in the coffee shop. Nothing could be further from the truth. A modern Web page is a catastrophe. It’s like a scene from one of those apocalyptic medieval paintings that depicts what would happen if Galactus arrived: people are tumbling into fiery crevasses and lamenting various lamentable things and hanging from playground equipment that would not pass OSHA safety checks. This kind of stuff is exactly what you’ll see if you look at the HTML" http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/ToWashItAllAway.pdf

• Bodies are weird: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeteners-may-change-our-gut-bacteria-in-dangerous-ways/
• sudo yum remove gnome-screensaver: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/04/i-told-you-so-again/
• A vaguely interesting look at the logistics behind the Falklands invasion: http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2015/04/logistics-of-the-san-carlos-landings/

• A set of interesting posts about password strength. We've been doing this for /how/ long and we still can't get it right?

  • https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-password-strength-estimation/
  • https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325952
  • http://world.std.com/\~reinhold/diceware.html
  • http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/memorize-random-60.pdf

• Vendor? we don't need no stinking vendors: http://smcleod.net/building-a-high-performance-ssd-san/

• Your financial technology business plan is bad and you should feel bad: https://medium.com/bull-market/a-cynic-s-guide-to-fintech-3cd0995e0da3
• See also: https://mechanicalmarkets.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/a-few-notes-about-hft-as-a-business-and-the-virtu-ipo/

• Yike that's fast:

  • http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-SSD-750-Series-12TB-PCIe-and-25-SFF-Review-NVMe-Consumer/Conclusion-Pricing-an
  • http://anandtech.com/show/9090/intel-ssd-750-pcie-ssd-review-nvme-for-the-client
  • (of course this is faster but: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/6075/seagate-1200-stx00fm-12gb-s-sas-enterprise-ssd-review/index10.html )

• "Literally" is literally not literally: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/literal-meaning-is-an-oxymoron/

• A grey market in losing (!) lottery purposes to offset the tax liability of gambling wins. What a world: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/06/gamblers-tax-season-lotto-scam.html

An early April Fool's issue since I'm out the rest of the week. There will be no jokes in this email since early-april pranks haven't been funny since http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Serriffe

• Putting Observability First: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/\~srk31/blog/2015/02/20/
• Oh goodie: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-air-force-has-a-computer-killing-cruise-missile-6a0bcf481ce1
• Can we just talk about how awesome this is? We're going to land a little probe on an asteroid, pick up a big ol' rock and then use the added mass from the rock to tug the whole @#$% asteroid into lunar orbit. http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-announces-details-for-2020s-asteroid-capture-mission
• Some fascinating stories about the early days of FedEx from the guy who wrote most of the scheduling software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9281466
• Press button, receive stuff: https://www.amazon.com/oc/dash-button/ (of /course/ it's an API: https://www.amazon.com/oc/dash-replenishment-service )
• "randomness is a way to prevent systematically doing the wrong thing when you don't have enough information to do the right thing." http://www.awsarchitectureblog.com/2015/03/backoff.html (And the whole rest of that blog is pretty good too)
• I feel like someone mentioned this around the office but here's a nice article about abusing self-trade protection: https://mechanicalmarkets.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/manipulation-using-compliance-tools-equities-analysis-inspired-by-allston-case/
• DARPA gets all the best toys: http://go.usa.gov/3rut4
• Bitcoin is OLD NEWS man, Vanilla ice cream with boring sauce. We're all about Lightning now: http://lightning.network/ (http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=450 and http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=462 for a bit more).