The Weekly Weird - 2020-03-20

How much is high-frequency trading worth? About $5B
I would never have predicted that biological viruses were written in LISP and, as such, all end in ))))))))))))). Is CRISPR just the equialent of MOV then?
Semi-related, from the humans-gonna-human department: Millions watch live streaming of hospital construction in Wuhan.
Ars Technica summarizes how they function with no physical office. My personal take: all-remote is OK, all-in person is better (for the work), a mix is a goddamn disaster.
But is it "faster than C?"
I barely know the words in this article, much less enough of the subject matter to comment but 5nm and 3nm processes are coming.
Kind of depressing but also kind of fascinating look at the process of "viatication". Predicting the future is hard.
I could not love this more: It is a lovely day and you are a horrible digital goose.
From the Jepsen review of the most recent etcd: distributed locking is hard.
This is a tumblr page with screenshots of a twitter thread that made me laugh so loud I woke up three cats. It's about ceiling fans.
Calculating probability is straightforward but that usually doesn't generalize to useful intuitions in everyday life. Here's a nice collection of probability facts and some hn comments with more.
"Commercial space station" is a real headline. It's the future!

The Weekly Weird - 2020-01-24

Skorgu

OK, you caught me. This mailing list is basically curl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles | shuffle | head -n 1.
Now that is a zero-day.
How good are Rust's HTTP clients? Not quite as good as we'd like.
How to get hired (almost)!
What happens when Kubernetes gets cranky?
Roughly half the planet has more tastebuds than they thought they did.
The city that banned cars.

Skorgu

Nothing interesting happened over the last few weeks so OH WHO AM I KIDDING, How to flee justice with only a former Green Beret, a black roadie case, and two private jets. I wonder if they had to outbid the Venezualean gold shippers.
Why do we call it the "iron" age and not, say, the Flax Age?
Playing chess via text prediction.
My 19th century Cornish insults, let me show you them.
Stop reinventing spinlocks, just use Mutexes.
Antlers might be domesticated cancer.
The levity of the prose is a bit incongruous for the sadness of the subject but this 13-part piece on figuring out what happened to a German family in Death Valley was interesting.
I'm so glad we put all the data in the universe on a half-dozen providers and then made sure to rank them only by price. What could go wrong.
West of the Hajnal Line, ~10-20% of adults never married. East of it, nearly everyone married. There are lots of other things that line up suspiciously well with it, too.
Intel's new NUC is neat, socketable everything.
Computer acting up? It's hungry, give it snacks.

Skorgu

Big news! It turns out that being able to alter the voltage and clock rate of a CPU can let you violate security invariants. Ok, maybe it's not news exactly but it was in 2017.
I love this: a breaking-news site based on thirsty journalists' begging.
I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Please don't do anything that results in me being deposed. Coconut water is a reasonable blood plasma subsitute.
It remains unfathomably confusing that the MTA is ahead of at least one game.
FINALLY, an orbital bitcoin wallet.
"Bad" humanoid robots just paying attention to human performance may energize attentional control—as does human presence.
K-Syndrome and "Typhus".
When you're planning your heist, be properly equipped. Of course, first make sure your target hasn't seen you coming and prepared.
Math is so weird. We know of algorithms that are extremely Big-O efficient, even solving NP problems in polynomial time + a constant factor. The problem is that the constant factor is ... large. See also wikipedia and HN comments.

Skorgu

It is a red letter day.
The world is mad these days but we've made some improvements.
"ONE MILLION CANNIBAL ANTS TRAPPED IN SOVIET NUCLEAR BUNKER HAVE ESCAPED". So, uh, yeah.
Now this is the kind of robotics competition I want more of: HEBOCON: The Robot Contest for Dummies
Here's to the strange creatures. Specificaly, the crustacean-colored, extremophile lawn ornamants.
I have a soft spot for aerial firefighting so this puff piece about a privately-owned water-pickup site caught my eye.
Everyone knows pid 1 is special, here's a nice walkthrough to handling all the specialness yourself.
A bit afield from my normal content but music from Saharan cellphones fuckin' slaps. (As the kids say)

Skorgu