Hello, World

Here’s why I gave up trying to explain the Chinese family...

Tue, 14 May 2013 22:02:14 -0400

Here’s why I gave up trying to explain the Chinese family tree to people.

You have to admit, though, that with this system, you know exactly where in the tree someone is in relation to the person referring to the relative.

And today in Bike Lane Hazards: linepointpath: We’ll need to...

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:02:23 -0400

And today in Bike Lane Hazards:

linepointpath:

We’ll need to get that mango out of he bike lane before bikeshare starts. on Flickr.

Summertime Gig with WNYC Data News

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:06:00 -0400

datanews:

We’ve got the perfect summer-break job for someone who digs data, has a nose for news and works fast.

It’s six weeks on WNYC’s Data News Team. Join us and you will:

Help WNYC cover breaking news, like our Hurricane Sandy work

Help reporters find and mine data for major stories

Help make maps, charts and web apps

Help brainstorm and build feature projects, like the Dogs of New York

Help the journalism we do in New York and New Jersey

Have a fun time with a fun team

Our ideal helper loves the challenge of finding information and data, and enjoys working with it once it’s in our hands. They’re creative, inquisitive and unafraid of new technologies.

The gig runs from mid-May through June, and pays $3,000 for the period. It’s geared for college students, especially those in a journalism program with data skillz or those in a computer science program with interests or experience in journalism.

It’s a limited-time offer, so act now! Apply with this quick form.

photo by Alex Howard / @digiphile

michalva: Gif for CHRISTOPH NIEMANN’s new app If I download...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:38:39 -0400

michalva:

Gif for CHRISTOPH NIEMANN’s new app

If I download this, you might not see me again for a few weeks…

A choice New Yorker cartoon caption contest submission by Roger...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:52:55 -0400

A choice New Yorker cartoon caption contest submission by Roger Ebert.

R.I.P.

"You either tell the computer what to do and you’ve got lots of great career options. Or the computer..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:22:13 -0400

““You either tell the computer what to do and you’ve got lots of great career options. Or the computer tells you what to do and you end up working in a shoe store.””

- Harsh, but fundamentally correct.

Opening a Gateway for Girls to Enter the Computer Field

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:49:09 -0400

You: You’re freaking out about Google Reader shutting down.

Me: You should use Newsblur, by my friend Samuel Clay.

Here’s what he’s done since the Reader shutdown announcement, and what you can look forward to in the coming months. I’ve been using Newsblur since its beta and paying for it since they offered a premium user level, and it’s been great.

newsblur:

At 4:16pm last Wednesday I got a short and to-the-point email from Nilay Patel at The Verge with only a link that started with the host “googlereader.blogspot.com”. The sudden spike in NewsBlur’s visitors immediately confirmed — Google was shutting down Reader.

Late night at the office

I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur. With the deprecation of their social features a year ago I knew it was only a matter of time before Google stopped supporting Reader entirely. I did not expect it to come this soon.

As the Storify history of the Reader-o-calypse, NewsBlur suffered a number of hurdles with the onslaught of new subscribers.

A few of my challenges and solutions

I was able to handle the 1,500 users who were using the service everyday, but when 50,000 users hit an uncachable and resource intensive backend, unless you’ve done your homework and load tested the living crap out of your entire stack, there’s going to be trouble brewing. Here’s just a few of the immediate challenges I faced over the past four days:

My hosting provider, Reliable Hosting Services, was neither reliable, able to host my increasing demands, or a service I could count on. I switched to Digital Ocean and immediately got to writing new Fabric scripts so I could deploy a new app/task server by issuing a single command and having it serve requests automatically within 10 minutes of bootstrapping.

It didn’t take long to max out my Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) account’s quota of 10,000 emails a day. So a few hours into the melee I switched to Mailgun, which unfortunately resulted in emailing myself 250,000 error reports. If you tried to email me and couldn’t get through, it’s because 50,000 emails about lost database connections made their way ahead of you in line.

Eventually, I was just plain blacklisted on SES for sending too many emails.

Fortunately, when the PayPal fraud department called because of an unprecedented spike in payments, I was prepared.

Paypal’s fraud department just called, asked me what’s going on. Asked the rep from Omaha if she’s heard of Reader, and then a big Ohhh.

March 17, 2013

HAProxy would serve errors (site is down, maintenance, timeouts, etc) with a 200 OK status code instead of the proper 500 Exception status code because of a ridiculous undocumented requirement to include HTTP Headers at the top of the error template. When your webapp uses status codes to determine errors, you get extremely strange behavior when it loads utter crap into your DOM.

The inevitable file descriptor limits on Linux means that for every database connection you make, you use up one of the 1,024 file descriptors that are allocated to your process by default. Changing these limits is not only non-trivial, but they don’t tend to stick. This is responsible for bringing down Mongo, PostgreSQL, and the real-time Node servers, all at different times of the night.

The support queue is enormous and I’ve had to spend big chunks of my 16 hour days reassuring paying customers that eventually Stripe will forgive me and my unresponsive servers and will send the payment notification that is responsible for automatically upgrading their accounts to premium.

The sad extent of my St. Patrick’s Day

As a one-man-shop it has been humbling to receive the benefit of the doubt from many who have withheld their judgment despite the admittedly slow loadtimes and downtime NewsBlur experienced. Having the support of the amazing NewsBlur community is more than a guy could ask for. The tweets of encouragement, voting NewsBlur up on replacereader.com (If you haven’t yet, please tweet a vote for “#newsblur to #replacereader”), and the many positive comments and blog posts from people who have tried NewsBlur is great.

It has also been a dream come true to receive accolades from the many who are trying NewsBlur for the first time and loving it. Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally).

NewsBlur users are intelligent, kind, and good looking!

The next three months

Over the next three months I’ll be working on:

Scaling, scaling, scaling

Launching the redesign (which you can preview)

Listening to all of you

For those of you who are still trying to decide where to go now that you’re a Reader refugee let me tell you a few of the unique things NewsBlur has to offer:

Radical transparency. NewsBlur is totally open source and will remain that way.

It still feels like RSS, just with a few more bells and whistles. NewsBlur provides actual list of posts, as opposed to the more curated magazine format of some of the other popular replacements. This clean interface makes it easy to see the stories you want. One innovation however is the four different view options you have. NewsBlur can show you the original site, feed, text or story view.

It has training. NewsBlur hides stories you don’t want to read based on tags, keywords, authors, etc. It also highlights stories you want to read, based on the same criteria. This allows you to find the stories you care about, not just the stories that the hive cares about. And best of all, NewsBlur will show you why stories are either highlighted or hidden by showing the criteria in green or red.

NewsBlur has rebuilt the social community that Google had stripped out of Reader. Users can share stories through their Blurblog and discover new content by following friends’ Blurblogs. The People Have Spoken is the blurblog of popular stories.

Because NewsBlur is entirely open-source, if you don’t want to pay you can host your own server. Instructions are on GitHub, where you can also find the source code for the NewsBlur iPhone + iPad app and Android app.

Most importantly, NewsBlur is not entirely a free app. The immediate benefits of revenue have been very clear over the past few days. Not only are NewsBlur’s interests aligned with its users, but as more users join NewsBlur, it makes more revenue that can be used to directly support the new users. Not convinced that paid is better than free? Read Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski’s essay Don’t Be a Free User.

Shiloh during better times. Your premium subscription goes to both server costs and feeding her

With NewsBlur’s native iOS app and Android app, you can read your news and share it with your friends anywhere. And with the coming improvements over the next three months, you bet NewsBlur will be the #1 choice for Google Reader refugees.

Join NewsBlur for $24/year and discover what RSS should have been.

Wealth, risk, and stuff

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:54:04 -0400

vruba:

Via Anne Galloway on Twitter, I just saw Living With Less. A Lot Less, an opinion piece in the New York Times.

I run into some version of this essay by some moneybags twig-bishop about once a year, and it bugs me every time.

Here’s the thing. Wealth is not a number of dollars. It is not a number of material possessions. It’s having options and the ability to take on risk.

If you see someone on the street dressed like a middle-class person (say, in clean jeans and a striped shirt), how do you know whether they’re lower middle class or upper middle class? I think one of the best indicators is how much they’re carrying.

Lately I’ve been mostly on the lower end of middle class (although I’m kind of unusual along a couple axes). I think about this when I have to deal with my backpack, which is considered déclassé in places like art museums. My backpack has my three-year-old laptop. Because it’s three years old, the battery doesn’t last long and I also carry my power supply. It has my paper and pens, in case I want to write or draw, which is rarely. It has a cable to charge my old phone. It has gum and sometimes a snack. Sunscreen and a water bottle in summer. A raincoat and gloves in winter. Maybe a book in case I get bored.

If I were rich, I would carry a MacBook Air, an iPad mini as a reader, and my wallet. My wallet would serve as everything else that’s in my backpack now. Go out on the street and look, and I bet you’ll see that the richer people are carrying less.

As with carrying, so with owning in general. Poor people don’t have clutter because they’re too dumb to see the virtue of living simply; they have it to reduce risk.

When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only have that kind of lightness through wealth.

If you buy food in bulk, you need a big fridge. If you can’t afford to replace all the appliances in your house, you need several junk drawers. If you can’t afford car repairs, you might need a half-gutted second car of a similar model up on blocks, where certain people will make fun of it and call you trailer trash.

Please, if you are rich, stop explaining the idea of freedom from stuff as if it’s a trick that even you have somehow mastered.

The only way to own very little and be safe is to be rich.

razorshapes: Nikki Graziano Found Functions “Nevertheless, the...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:38:02 -0400

razorshapes:

Nikki Graziano

Found Functions

“Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics… and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music… Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.” - Paul Lockhart

Investigative Journalism Iconathon The New York Times

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:19:06 -0500

thenounproject:

A couple weeks ago we ventured to New York City for an Iconathon at The New York Times building - a suitable venue for creating symbols around the theme of Investigative Journalism. Our goal for this Iconathon was to make symbols that will help visualize information and data in the news, as well as create symbols that can be used by reporters to discuss current events. A mix of journalists, editors, graphic designers, web developers and civic-minded participants volunteered their Saturday to help accomplish this goal.

Chrys Wu (Hacks/Hackers NYC), Scott Klein (Editor of News Applications at ProPublica), and Matt Ericson (Deputy Graphics Editor at The New York Times) started off the day with insightful presentations on how symbols help to share information with the public through new age journalism. In today’s digital era, symbols are frequently used on mobile news apps and interactive websites to effectively communicate information about current events in politics, government, environment, technology, etc. Given the abundance and depth of information for a lot of these topics, visual graphics help tell these stories in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.

(Presentation by Matt Ericson from The New York Times)

After the presentations we split into teams and generated ideas for concepts like Gerrymandering, Wire Tap, Fracking, Dark Money, Abuse of Power, and Drone.

We ended the day with a group critique to discuss which ideas were the most successful at illustrating each concept. The open discussion allowed everyone to compare sketches and work in a collaborative effort to choose the most comprehensive symbols. The best ideas from each topic will soon be transformed from rough sketches into graphic icons that will be free to download as public domain.

A huge thanks to all of the volunteers who participated, The New York Times for sharing their phenomenal space with us, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews for sponsoring, and ProPublica and Hacks/Hackers NYC for helping to organize the event!

More photos from the Iconathon are on Flickr.

Recently saw Sondre Lerche in concert. Great show. This is a...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:46:19 -0500

Recently saw Sondre Lerche in concert. Great show. This is a more intimate interview from Kaleidoscope Pictures.

Dahle Disko by 120 Days. The song came out last year, I think,...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 22:42:38 -0500

Dahle Disko by 120 Days. The song came out last year, I think, but I only discovered it about a week ago.

Bon weekend, mes amis.

dbreunig: Aerial views of Facebook’s, Twitter’s, and Tumblr’s...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:33:24 -0500

Facebook HQ

Twitter HQ

Tumblr

dbreunig:

Aerial views of Facebook’s, Twitter’s, and Tumblr’s headquarters, respectively. All images are the same scale.

One of the quirks of the digital age is that very small populations construct the social environments of astoundingly large populations. I’ve commented on the impressiveness of this before, “[Facebook has] built a design and interaction system used across the world by a massive amount of cultures. Mandarin, with its 1.1 billion speakers, is the only language or medium with more native participants than Facebook.”

But as digital participants become more numerous and sophisticated, I often wonder when a cultural bottleneck will emerge. At what level of sophistication will users chafe at the systems designed by a handful of people half a world away and turn to more local offerings?

This problem is surely exacerbated by campuses, though it’s unclear to what degree. Building bubbles to keep employees at work as often as possible – shuttling them to work, feeding them, entertaining them, providing them with exercise – reduces the amount of serendipitous encounters they can have. Their connection to the world they build for risks becoming more and more tenuous. And as each company grows around its campus, the Founder’s Effect kicks in and any problems becomes exacerbated.

Location isn’t everything, but it certainly is a variable. Looking at the new Facebook HQ, bordered by residential areas, corporate parks, and salt ponds, it’s hard not to appreciate the asset Tumblr has that barely anyone talks about.

It will be interesting to see how campuses affect future products. And how we might measure or observe how this manifests in the first place.

Update: To be fair, isolate campuses can have good quirks. Sure, you risk the Founder’s Effect but you also get Genetic Drift: crazy ideas that arise because you don’t have an overarching culture to keep them from occurring. Google is a great example of someone who suffers from the Founder’s Effect (Wave, Buzz, …) but benefits from Genetic Drift (Glass, driverless cars, …)

My Oscar Ballot

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 01:03:25 -0500

newyorker:

There’s no point to letting indignation, or even just personal preference, override the rational effort to forecast the Academy’s likely misjudgments. The Oscars are the way that Hollywood’s insiders want to be perceived by the world. The following predictions are less their view of the industry’s best achievements than of the choice of work that they’d elect to represent them; the awards are the industry’s advertisement for itself.

Richard Brody casts his Oscar ballot: http://nyr.kr/11XQz7S

Pair wine and food by chart.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:23:36 -0500

Pair wine and food by chart.

ilovecharts: Temperature + what type of Nordic ski wax to use...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:59:57 -0500

ilovecharts:

Temperature + what type of Nordic ski wax to use for the snow conditions. Photo taken today in Girdwood, Alaska.

-Sarah Gonzales

seejohnrun: tumblr.js JavaScript client Today I’m excited to...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:56:35 -0500

seejohnrun:

tumblr.js JavaScript client

Today I’m excited to announce the release of tumblr.js, the first of several official API clients we’ll be rolling out over the next few months.

You can install it now with npm, and start making something awesome:
var tumblr = require('tumblr.js');
var client = tumblr.createClient({
  consumer_key: 'consumer_key',
  consumer_secret: 'consumer_secret',
  token: 'oauth_token',
  token_secret: 'oauth_token_secret'
});

// Name all of the authenticating user's blogs
client.userInfo(function (err, data) {
  data.user.blogs.forEach(function (blog) {
    console.log(blog.name);
  });
});
It comes with full support for all of the API V2 endpoints including tag search, following, liking, and post creation. For more detail, see the GitHub page.

More to come soon!

According to the board, wrestling is no longer a “core...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:44:09 -0500

According to the board, wrestling is no longer a “core sport” in the Olympics and it will have to petition for inclusion in 2020 along with, and I am not making this up, sport climbing and wakeboarding. This is terrific. Why don’t we just hold the Olympics in an REI outlet store somewhere? (via Wrestling out of the Olympics - Grantland)

Iconathon on Investigative Journalism at The New York Times

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:22:40 -0500

thenounproject:

The Noun Project has teamed up with ProPublica and Hacks/Hackers NYC in organizing an Iconathon to create a new visual language around Investigative Journalism. This Iconathon will be held at The New York Times building on Saturday, February 23rd, and is sponsored by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews and The New York Times.

We’ll be creating symbols for concepts in watchdog journalism such as public records, on-the-record sources, corporate malfeasance, and illustrating the ways power may be abused in both the public and private sectors. The icons created will be released into the public domain to be used in news applications and interactives, as well as to illustrate reporting series, Web site topic pages, and mobile applications.

The Iconathon will kick off with presentations on tech & investigative journalism by Scott Klein - editor of News Applications at ProPublica, and Matthew Ericson - deputy graphics director at The New York Times. “A new set of icons for news will help graphics editors and news application developers use graphical shorthand in place of lengthy explanation — the proverbial thousand words — and to tell meaningful and impactful stories more gracefully and graphically” - said Scott Klein.

Event Details:

When: Saturday, February 23rd from 10:30am to 4:00pm
Where: The New York Times building at 620 8th Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10019
RSVP: Seating is limited, RSVP for free tickets.

The Noun Project organizes Iconathons to engage the general public in the design process, so no design or art skills are necessary - all are welcome to participate!

According to Chrys Wu of Hacks/Hackers NYC “Investigative journalism is about explaining complicated concepts and revealing systemic problems. If we can do that visually, it can help readers better understand the reported stories.” We’re honored to help out in such an important endeavor.

*Detective icon is by Simon Child.

harkaway: For everyone who can’t cope without Radio 4 today.

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:32:22 -0500

harkaway:

For everyone who can’t cope without Radio 4 today.