korch

This is the most mind blowing thing I've seen done in Javascript yet. Yes, I realize Google's NaCl and V8 are far more mind blowing on a technical level, but this impresses from the user point of view—it doesn't look anything like "the web" but it is all web. Great magic trick!

Can anyone think of a more disgusting, perverted use of the web stack than this? There's a reason nobody uses html and Javascript to represent an MMO game engine. But they did it and it look incredible!

Everyone betting long html5 right now is going to win in the end, because the browser will eventual become the universal UI and slurp in all other "micro-platforms". Yes Apple, this means Cocoa Touch too...

If the folks making Aves wanted to really blow everyone's minds, they would make Aves output Objective-C code. Then you write your iPhone/iPad game in html/javascript, port it to Objective-C, and you're done. Since Apple has publicly blessed PhoneGap, we know html/javascript will never fall under the exclusionary rule 3.1.1. This means Apple just setup html/javascript to be the victor on mobile and gaming platforms.

I have actually seen that happen, although it was at a factory, not some white collar place(where the watch would be better). A man worked there for 20 years and the owner gave him a $40 watch. He certainly earned only slightly more than minimum wage those 2 decades—more than the co-workers he himself oversaw. It was quite surreal, and unfortunately the meaning of it was lost on most present. I quit that job not long after. There is a vast, quasi-invisible economic divide in America between rural and urban. Perhaps it's always been this way.

Is it just me, or in the past few months have I seen a lot more browser based web widget builders oozing out of the cracks of the various Cappuccino/Javascript/Ruby/etc frameworks? As html5 ascends over flash's corpse this year, we might just hit an inflection point where the level of sophistication of web builder apps passes the drawbacks by doing more desktop-y things.

I think open graph is going to be a bitter poison pill for Facebook, and once they see what users actually do with it they will have no choice but to cripple it. Though I'm glad to finally see Brad Fitzpatrick's open graph idea from years ago on Livejournal come to fruition.

Tucked away in the announcements was a policy change to allow 3rd parties to now store Facebook user data for more than 24 hours. Facebook now wants every web site to embed their widgets, so to do that, they have to make their data freely available. Facebook might be a far better walled garden than AOL ever was, a truly wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon; but open graph turns them inside out.

Now what's to stop the rest of the web from just looting all of Facebook's data?

Some will argue that this is a similar pattern to being indexed by Google—trying to lock down content backfires, because if you give it away, the traffic Google brings you more than makes up for whatever you lost. So too for Facebook—they get more traffic back by giving away data compared to forcing everyone to facebook.com.

Everybody knows Facebook will become the next Myspace(Friendster, yadda, yadda), even if nobody knows quite how it's going to happen. (Kind of like how everybody knew the housing market was in a bubble, yet kept playing it up.) Blowing open the gates on data sharing is going to hurt Facebook more in the long term, because it opens up new opportunities to leverage user data across the whole web ecosystem in ways which Facebook cannot control. It's inevitable that someone is going to build a popular service on top of Facebook's user data; structued in such a way that Facebook itself couldn't clone it internally without compromising their other products and partners. While this itself is great for users and the whole web, it's not going to be so great for Facebook.

Google has to do this, it's an existential threat to their money maker PageRank. Imagine a few years out, after most of the web is no longer organized as static documents linked together(nice for crawling!), but transforms into a real-time evolving mish-mash of web API's, re-re-aggregators, and interconnected web services. i.e. the top 10 social networking sites will account for 90%+ of user activity, and it's their APIs & data we'll all be using.

You can't crawl that.

Anyone else worry that Google's inevitable grand "evil" act will ironically be them holding back the web from transforming into this? Microsoft could have totally killed Google by hitting the fast-forward button on Ajax in 2004, by leveraging IE to make the whole web into the "Deep Web." You can't sell ads on what you can't crawl—just see what Apple is doing with iAd to carve out mobile.

I watched his thermodynamics videos and was quite impressed. It's actually difficult to find approachable course material in that topic, but he thoroughly explains it, all the way down to Boltzmann's H-theorem. How one guy manages to cover all this material is incredible—he's going to become the Max Headroom of Internet education!

And it sounds like his plans for the future are ambitious: can you imagine the day when every lesson from an entire K-12 + 4 college years of education can be watched on Youtube? Just fast-forward or rewind to wherever you are and learn at your own pace.

It's also a clever inversion to achieve an optimization we programmers can appreciate. If students are basically learning 90% identical content, then instead of every student having a separate teacher, just record one really, really exceptional teacher covering everything, and all students use that teacher. I guess this means the world needs a lot fewer teachers, but everything gets balanced, so those teaching resources could be applied to more complicated lessons that cannot be learned rote from video recordings. The incredible end result being basic education levels are lifted for everyone. Now that's a plan!

Uh, why is Google releasing this? Wouldn't this code give hackers a good head start to create an OCR system capable of trivially defeating CAPTCHA everywhere?

Or maybe they've realized any human computer test based on text recognition is flawed, and so what better way to force the web to upgrade than to make OCR trivial? I rather like this shotgun approach to AI.

Buried in the details of the indictment, they show Wiseguys had a reciprocating agreement with downstream broker clients to provide virgin credit cards used in the bulk ticket purchases. i.e. Give me a clean card with a high($100k+) limit, and pay an X% "service charge", then I'll buy you any tickets you want using my scalper-bot-net.

I'm not sure what the exact rules are for requiring a real identity to be linked to a corporate credit card. In this case, the broker's corp cards were not being used in the same way a typical employee would expense a purchase to the business. Rather, Wiseguys was just making up fake identities, and providing their own employees real identities for cards(this was the mistake that got them noticed). All of this is pretty straight forward financial fraud on the banking side of things, and not Ticketmaster's ToS.

It's also relevant to understand how we got here, a read a little history to avoid repeating it. An oldie but goodie: The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

The book is about the incident where the Feds first raised the legal issue of reading anyone's email without a warrant, and in a way it became the war that launched a thousand Internet legal advocacy organizations; which is where we are right now.

Is it a good thing that universities, who hold an implicitly benevolent, non-profit societal role, should also have such high profit margins on their "student"-players?

If the football team is bringing in the dough to fund a big chunk of the operating expenses, but aren't being fairly compensated, then the universities are exploiting those students for profit. What I don't see is how universities can use this same logic to justify using their sports teams to fund their academic operations.

This pattern sounds familiar, where else have I seen it, oh yeah: the rich should pay for the poor, because they are lucky enough to have more. (I actually believe this, and I'm just using parallel logic). A few student athletes will win the lottery moving into the pro's, so colleges "tax" athletes by not paying them, and substitute the incentive of "you might be the next Lebron." (Do s/Lebron/Google/ and doesn't it sounds eerily similar to VC startup logic?!) Then the rest of the student body benefits because the football team just paid the salary of the Poetry professor.

It might work this way, but I doubt it, although I'd love to see a study confirming how much money trickles back into colleges from their sports teams. We can just look at the larger macroscopic view for how efficient trickle down economics really is: of all the hundreds of billions given to the rich elites, how much of it trickles down to the poor? I bet the football team is keeping most of its profit, and in fact on average is a net loss to its attached college.

I hope this is indeed true, as I've been having a helluva time finding Rails dev work in West LA...

So it's probably time to pull all my email out of Gmail and onto my own email server. At least the gov't hasn't yet routed around that basic personal liberty and property right. Surely many geeks will be moving away from freemium webmail that's wide open to the gov't, but where will they be going? Does anyone know of a good open-source Gmail front-end clone? If somehow this doesn't exist, open-source developers unite, let's do this!

You can't talk about college costs and not also mention the enormous impact the college sports industry has had on transforming colleges from their academic role in society to that of being prestigious "mini-corporations."

Where is all the money going? Who's the top paid guy at university X? Oh, it's the football coach. Well why does he get to make $3 million a year while we just raised tuition 8% across the board, and cut financial aid by 20%? And that fat new sports arena which the university board of regents approved and just built for $100 million? Well, it doesn't count, because free market capitalism still applies to academic institutions—our true revenue source is selling and catering to sports fans. Professors, students, research, those are of course net losses, we just pay to keep them around in order to justify the existence of the sports team.

In a way, a University's brand, physical grounds, and costumed staff is a Disneyesque facade for the real money maker: football. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much into my Jean Baudrillard...

"Real Hackers" generate black holes, constructing them in turn to generate sub-Universes, causing a Universal exception, which can be used as a buffer overflow exploit in the Laws of Physics. Basically, if you can figure out how to do this, you'll be Neo.

I'm sick of seeing the right-wing's tired old, sacred myth that "American's pay less taxes." It's total BS. While this isn't targeted directly at the poster, since you seem pretty open to figuring out the truth, but the hint of this myth is there.

Why is it that everyone who trots out this myth feels like they can ignore the "non-tax" taxes of FICA(social security & medicare)?

If you add in what you pay to FICA(social security & medicaid), and also add in the out of pocket expenses you bear for your own health care, now the average American's tax burden is not only almost identical to most of Europe, but is probably a tiny bit higher. Around ~50% or so.

The US federal gov't sure as hell benefits by having half the voting population(Republicans) believe this myth. It's just deceptive accounting semantics—make everyone pay something, but don't call it a "tax", voila, now you can claim to have far lower taxes than any other G8 nations! But it's a lie.

I think most Americans are plain fools when it comes to taxes. No wonder the gov't is able to spend $0.53 of every tax dollar on war and killing poor, non-white human beings, and NOT have riots in the streets, or their greatest existential fear: a mass scale tax "protest" movement. And don't even get me started on how stupid everyone is for the annual tax season "refund" rigmarole. What kind of idiots(other than our insolvent banks) give the Federal gov't an interest free micro-loan over a year?

From another perspective, RMS's setup is also so much of a hair shirt that he'd be one of the hardest tech celebrities for hackers to target. Especially considering he only infrequently connects to the Internet like a nuclear submarine surfacing to communicate with a satellite.

Fantastic! I just always knew that in our distopian cyberpunk future, we mercenary code gargoyles would all be covered in some kind of digital war-paint-camouflage as we wage secret mercenary wars on behalf of covert multinational-mega-city-corps.

Seconding Jorge Luis Borges! Even before Godel, Escher, Bach! Although Borges is pre-computer era, and is long part of the literary Canon, I think the tone of so many of his stories make a lot more sense from the perspective of the Internet era. If Google were an author, I think it would be Borges more so than any other writer.

Borges constantly wove themes of what is too much knowledge, how are we ensnared and consumed by it, and ultimately how are beauty & wonder itself contained in that paradoxical process from which all things flow.

^this

While I think it's great what these outreach organizations have accomplished, the tone of this article is a perfect example of how journalists poorly depict homelessness.

It's de-humanizing.

For a second there I did a double take because it resembled an old article from The Onion, which was pointing out how journalists do this so often that nobody notices.

Do a search and replace on the article, replace the homeless man's name "Heavy" with "animal", and the article still makes perfect sense, except instead of being about sociology, it's now zoology, like one of those fluff local news pieces about some wild animal that ended up in the city limits and was causing a nuisance. Except it's a man.

Very nice, thanks for sharing! I had been hoping someone would open-source a SE clone for Rails. And double-plus-good for having the feature of importing SE sites right off the bat! I actually hate the limited way SE is using tags, and have wanted to try making my own.

One more thing: reading the linked PDF case file and seeing all the emails clearly establishing criminal fraud, it looks like this company could have benefited grealy by the infamous advice:

"Never write when you can talk, never talk when you can nod, and never nod when you can wink, and never write an e-mail because it's death."

-- Eliot Spitzer

Spitzer also should have ironically added "and never leave a tangled financial trail that can be unravelled back to yourself."

Holy shit, this hits really close to home! I almost worked for this company a year ago! No really—here's proof: http://i.imgur.com/nrGSm.png

I was a dev at Ticketmaster for 2 years(Perl, blech!), got laid off(during the worst job market of all time, thanks!), then out of the blue got a call from a recruiter to interview with this company. They were going by the name "REM", one of their shell companies. Their office was Beverly Hills adjacent on a top floor in the AIG building, across the street from the fancy hotel where the President stays when he's in LA. Snazzy real estate indeed, so they were obviously making a lot of dough to afford that kind of rent. I interviewed with Ken, the company owner and primary defendant in the DOJ's doc, for a little over an hour.

I realized pretty quickly into it that this wasn't a legit smaller indie ticketing company, but an all out scalper company. Ken did talk too openly about his operations, so my spidey-sense was going off that it wasn't legit. Having been in the ticketing industry, I was able to have a more detailed conversation with him about various practices. It was pretty clear all his money was coming from scraping TM. I think the first thing he said that set off my red alarm was "every programmer I have is paired with an off-shore Romanian programmer who does the work." (My mind's translation: "Uh-oh, run, you'll be miserable here, at yet-another company that doesn't really get nor care about software.")

I did find it fascinating to hear about ticketing from the other side of the fence, after being at TM, where the daily war of attrition against brokers & bots is permanent and unwinnable, the scalpers attain an aura of mystery & annoyance. If you sell a lot of tickets, but don't lock down your site with captchas and go all out with engineering clever session/identity persistence strategies, the scalper bots of the world will absolutely kill you on traffic, while continuously holding up your entire inventory, and ruin your real customer's experience.

After realizing it was a scalper company and deducing that they were making millions on a startup-sized skeleton team, I thought why the hell not go work for them, for a few months maybe, it'll be awful (the ticketing industry sucks to develop in because you can't do anything customers really want), but nobody else in West LA was hiring and I was desperate that month. The way I see it, merely scraping a web site violates TOS, not criminal law. I had no idea that the logistics of this kind of enterprise also involved complex financial fraud, so I wouldn't have pursued this if I knew that aspect. I figured at the time that if I was going to do thankless development for a scam company getting rich off of skimming off of an even bigger unofficial monopolist who themselves are skimming off from the general public under a blind and lumbering gov't regulator, who just got rid of my job at the height of all-out market panic, all in an industry I want to get out of, and in a niche where I can't be open about anything I do and where loyalty is valued more than my programming-wizardry, then I better charge those jerks a high price.

So I told Ken I wanted at least $125k/yr and I never heard back from him after he said he wanted to make me an offer. I figured good riddance, no sense in getting involved with a crap job if they won't put their money where their mouth is—company's who talk big are a dime a dozen. However, I was puzzled why he didn't complete the offer, as everything they were doing was stuff I knew all about from my time at TM, so I thought I was his ideal candidate. Based on the DOJ pdf case file, they were making $40 million a year, making my salary request mere pocket change to them.

As you can see from my linked email screenshot, they weren't looking for any specific technical skills, but were instead soliciting blind loyalty above all. If that's the primary skill you need from your devs, then it's another red flag indicating a pretty bad working environment and crappy development process.

Ultimately I think he didn't hire me because of something I said during the interview along the lines of "TM could put you out of business overnight if they just knew you existed, because scraping simply isn't a technically feasible solution on a growing scale large enough for it to work indefinitely." Scam artists hate being outed by smarter people, so I proved I wasn't a lackey-type. Knowing TM's system, it simply can't be scraped on a wide scale without privileged insider access(i.e. scalping your own tickets, ala the Ticketsnow fiasco) without getting noticed and shut down. Plus they have the greatest security-by-obscurity of any other company I know: there's an entire 2nd back-end, behind the entire customer facing LAMP stack, of emulated VAXen running legacy Pascal code originally written in 1982 and left running since then. Yes, when you buy a ticket from TM, the tickets come out of a VAX, which is embarrassing as far as "innovation", considering it's now 2010.

I think it's really too bad the DOJ went after these guys instead of truly fixing the broken ticketing industry. This action by DOJ helps TM more than it helps anyone else(getting the gov't to kill your competition is sweet deal and an ancient tactic). I think the DOJ has their priorities backwards. Ultimately the consumers lose because they pay higher prices for lower quality, non-innovative services. They knock out one of the little parasites, who's botnet was probably causing huge headaches for TM, yet allow the LN+TM merger to go through, creating a whole new type of unfair monopoly. It's forrest for the trees, man.

Ideally I'd like to see the ticketing market resemble a stock exchange, and not an airline. I wish some startup would build this site! Every ticket that can be sold should be publicly listed, so nobody can unfairly profit by having private information about ticket inventory and price levels. (This ideal can be proven using game theory with asymmetric information!) There would be a few more mechanisms to design the right way to balance out the dynamics of the system and keep it fair, similar to how financial companies are regulated. Right now TM has a sweetheart deal, getting to play both sides of the fence—being an unregulated, de-facto market-maker, while not having to make the same kinds of fair concessions to the pubic in exchange for being allowed to be a market-maker(such as no front-running like Goldman Sachs).

Also, if on the off-chance anyone out there is thinking about doing something innovative with ticketing platforms + web + iphone, and if your plan is "crazy enough that it just might work", and if you're in LA, and if you're hiring, and if you're using Rails, hit me up! I'm looking for a job! I keep an eye out for this type of idealized ticketing company. I think it'll be a few more years until I see it, when some player can get enough leverage to take on LN+TM, both of whom truly are technical dinosaurs just waiting to get taken down by a pure Internet company. The real get-rich mystery to solve is what form that leverage will appear in. Really, the ticketing industry really is that inefficient, it's like someone left $100 million dollars just sitting there, for anyone to take, if they can spot how.

I was surprised by their common complaint that the Kindle doesn't have page numbers! What were they thinking to leave out that feature?! It cripples the usefulness of the device for heavy reading over longer time spans.

It wouldn't be the first time. Remember that IT guy who admin'd Bush's secret gwb43.com email servers(in overt defiance of mandated Federal record keeping laws) and who was involved with the election fraud in Ohio? That guy who conveniently died in a small plane crash in 08' right before he was facing summons to testify before Congress?

Oh and look at that, just a few weeks ago the NTSB ruled that accident was likely pilot error and not some kind of crazy conspiracy involving mechanical tampering: http://www.ohio.com/news/83119417.html

The world is more often than not a strange place.

From a microeconomic perspective, the specialization of labor undoubtedly allows us to maximize production, yet from a macroeconomic perspective, I think you're right.

I know Marx is beyond dated, and that it's only permitted to speak of him using hushed tones in serious conversation, however, in Das Kapital one of his fundamental arguments was that the long-run problem Capitalism is destined to face and ultimately lose to will be the problem of over-production. Which sounds counter-intuitive, as how could over-production possibly be bad? His argument is interesting and worth studying for itself, even if it is mostly outdated.

Yes. Yahoo's aesthetic melds better with Apple's own than with either Microsoft or Google. Apple bought Quattro so they are obviously cooking up something with advertising, which is another area in which Yahoo has value.

Microsoft's sole, yet-painful solution: a hard-reboot across the board resulting in "Winux".

It's cool to hear about Whitepages early history. For several years Whitepages was one of the last "big" all Perl shops in Seattle. Though their recent recruiting ads are for Rails developers, so perhaps they have since re-architected.

The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger

With that said, we all know an intuitive interface when we see one. It's just too difficult to separate an enormously complex and highly context-sensitive technical process that we've learned from some kind of ideal optimum. Saying a design is "intuitive" is analogous to saying one Turing complete language is "better" than another.