The Weekly Weird - 2016-02-12

Ahem. Let's try to get back on track with my three thousand unread news items.

• Amazon updated their terms of service. Ctrl-F 57.10.
• Goddamn it Brendan Gregg, you're making the rest of us look bad. "Oh I'll just trace all executions in interactive bash shells, systemwide from the kernel". Jerk.
• This firewall, it protects you how, exactly?
• I profoundly don't get Snapchat, it's just alien to me. This is the first thing that's come close to being comprehensible to me and possibly justifying its enormous valuation.
• Microsoft announces submarine data centers. I'll have you know I suggested buying a surplus naval sub and parking it directly between NYC and London for latency arbitrage years ago. More and more.
• A new transit line in NYC? A streetcar joining Brooklyn and Queens? Never gonna happen.
• Blah blah blah gravitational waves (not gravity waves). Boring. Now, the vibration isolation system for the optics, that's cool.
• Prime Numbers Are Hard.
• Confused about the precise mechanisms behind the Flint lead contamination? Chemical and Engineering News has you covered.
• Concurrent hash maps for C++. A truly excellent thread on mechanical-sympathy exploring them in (much) greater depth but quickly and awesomely derails into a fascinating discussion of weak memory models and the philosophy of optimizing compilers and undefined behaviour. Not to be missed.
• "Dutch Police Train Eagles to Tackle Drones". More.
• Build a better mousetrap and the world will forget about you for 155 years until it catches a mouse in the museum.
• Removing dead cells slows aging. Mefi comments. Alternatively, just decouple age and mortality rate like these ants.
• Today in headlines from the future: "Luxembourg Wants to Lead the Way in Asteroid Mining".
• Computers are considered 'drivers' for legal purposes and the Dutch are building driverless shuttle busses.
• A C++ Developer sees Rust for the first time and the same program implemented in C++ and Rust.
• One of the best (IMO) arguments against most conspiracy theories is how many people would have to keep silent. Finally, solid science backs me up.
• I only skimmed this but numerically analyzing musical trends to identify cultural inflection points is just cool.
• The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen.
• What, exactly, is concrete? Surprisingly, we didn't actually know until now.
• Barcode Recovery, or, structured data is hard to redact.
• We all use GPS to set our clocks and that makes for one enormous correlated failure domain.
• Homomorphic encryption is super cool. Here's a nice summary article and some good HN comments.
• Dan Luu on tail latency.
• NSA Roundup from Schneier: Quantum, Reorg, TAO.
• The Montreux Jazz Festival is all online.
• On the topic of Westphalian states no longer being apex predators, watching Ecuador and Chevron fight is interesting.
• If your civilization expands fast enough it can actually change the shape of the universe.
• Keybase.io now has a filesystem, so of course the first thing to do is build a blog with it. HN comments.
• A Hacker News for AI code: TensorTalk.