The Weekly Weird - 2015-04-01

Skorgu

2015-04-01 13:59

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).