- sslh — ssh/ssl multiplexer.
- Github Says No to Bots (Wired) — what’s interesting is that bots augmenting photos is awesome in Flickr: take a photo of the sky and you’ll find your photo annotated with stars and whatnot. What can GitHub learn from Flickr?
- Four Assumptions of Multiple Regression That Researchers Should Always Test — “but I found the answer I wanted! What do you mean, it might be wrong?!”
- Tenth Grade Tech Trends (Medium) — if you want to know what will have mass success, talk to early adopters in the mass market. We alpha geeks aren’t that any more.
Four short links: 4 January 2013
SSH/L Multiplexer, GitHub Bots, Test Your Assumptions, and Tech Trends
Four short links: 3 January 2013
Historic Social Media, Latency Numbers, Quantified Auto, and I Feel Old
- Community Memory (Wired) — In the early 1970s, Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski and Lee Felsenstein set up a series of these terminals around San Francisco and Berkeley, providing access to an electronic bulletin board housed by a XDS-940 mainframe computer. This started out as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to share via computer — a kind of “information flea market,” a “communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interest,” according to a brochure from the time. What evolved was a proto-Facebook-Twitter-Yelp-Craigslist-esque database filled with searchable roommate-wanted and for-sale items ads, restaurant recommendations, and, well, status updates, complete with graphics and social commentary. But did it have retargeted ads, promoted tweets, and opt-in messages from partners? I THOUGHT NOT. (via BoingBoing)
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (EECS Berkeley) — exactly that. I was always impressed by Artur Bergman’s familiarity with the speed of packets across switches, RAM cache misses, and HDD mean seek times. Now you can be that impressive person.
- Feds Requiring Black Boxes in All Vehicles (Wired) — [Q]uestions remain about the black boxes and data. Among them, how long should a black box retain event data, who owns the data, can a motorist turn off the black box and can the authorities get the data without a warrant. This is starting as regulatory compliance, but should be seized as an opportunity to have a quantified self.
- Average Age of StackExchange Users by Tag (Brian Bondy) — no tag is associated with people who have a mean age over 30. Did I miss the plague that wiped out all the programmers over the age of 30? Or does age bring with it supreme knowledge so that old people like me never have to use StackExchange? Yes, that must be it. *cough*
Radar: Looking forward to 2013
Hidden economy, industrial Internet, consumer AI, data journalism, and other themes Radar will explore in the coming months.
The Radar team got together in December to work through our priorities for 2013. This blog is where we narrate our work, but our real goal is to identify and create new products and businesses for O’Reilly. This year we plan to be more intentional with our focus areas, and more transparent as well, with the hope that it will engage you in shaping the topics and where we go next.
In our discussions we worked through about 35 potential themes and narrowed them down to 10 that we are actively working on in the first quarter of 2013. Here’s the list along with the Radar team member who is focused on it.
Hidden/Sharing Economy — Tim O’Reilly
Consumer AI — Edd Dumbill
Data Journalism — Alex Howard
Future of Programming — Edd Dumbill
In-Memory Data Management — Roger Magoulas
Industrial Internet — Jon Bruner
Open Data Economy — Alex Howard
Professional Making — Mike Loukides
Robotics — Mike Loukides
Synthetic Bio / Bio Hacking — Mike Loukides
Each topic will launch here on Radar with “intention casting” posts like this and this so I won’t bother expounding on them here. The idea of being more explicit and transparent up front about our interests is to more actively engage you in the discussion. We know you’ll point us at things we wouldn’t otherwise find. Read more…
Four short links: 2 January 2013
University Hackathon, Pretty Code, Security Talks, and Sustainable Business Models for Journalism
- 2013 Spring PenApps — a student-run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania, biggest university hackathon in the world. (via Jim Stogdill)
- uncrustify — Source Code Beautifier for C, C++, C#, ObjectiveC, D, Java, Pawn and VALA.
- Mirror of 28C3 Talks — all the talks from the 28th Chaos Computer Congress. (via Reddit)
- SuBMoJour — Sustainable Business Models for Journalism — International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models. (via Stijn Debrouwere)
Four short links: 1 January 2013
Silicon Beats Meat, Workers against Machines, Quora Design Notes, and Free Data Science Books
- Robots Will Take Our Jobs (Wired) — I agree with Kevin Kelly that (in my words) software and hardware are eating wetware, but disagree that This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots. Civilizations which depend on specialization reward work and penalize idleness. We already have more people than work for them, and if we’re not to be creating a vast disconnected former workforce then we (society) need to get a hell of a lot better at creating jobs and not destroying them.
- Why Workers are Losing the War Against Machines (The Atlantic) — There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
- Early Quora Design Notes — I love reading post-mortems and learning from what other people did. Picking a starting point is important because it will be the axis the rest of the design revolves around — but it’s tricky and not always the first page in the flow. Ideally, you should start with the page that serves the most significant goals of the product.
- Free Data Science Books — I don’t mean free as in some guy paid for a PDF version of an O’Reilly book and then posted it online for others to use/steal, but I mean genuine published books with a free online version sanctioned by the publisher. That is, “the publisher has graciously agreed to allow a full, free version of my book to be available on this site.” (via Stein Debrouwere)
Saving publishing, one tweet at a time
Helping both readers and writers look good on social media.
Traffic comes to online publishers in two ways: search and social. Because of this, writing for the tweet is a new discipline every writer and editor must learn. You’re not ready to publish until you find the well crafted headline that fits in 100 characters or so, and pick an image that looks great shared at thumbnail size on Facebook and LinkedIn.
But what of us, the intelligent reader? Nobody wants to look like a retweet bot for publishers. The retweet allows us no space to say why we ourselves liked an article.
Those of us with time to dedicate are familiar with crafting our own awkward commentaries: “gr8 insight in2 state of mob,” “saw ths tlk last Feb,” “govt fell off fiscal clf”. Most of the time it’s easier just to bookmark, or hit “read later,” and not put in the effort to share.
Rescue is at hand. The writer and programmer Paul Ford has created a bookmarklet, entitled Save Publishing. On activating the bookmarklet while viewing an article you wish to share, it highlights and makes clickable all the tweetable phrases from the page. Read more…
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