- AR Drone That Infects Other Drones With Virus Wins DroneGames (IEEE) — how awesome is a contest where a group who taught a drone to behave itself on the end of a leash, constantly taking pictures and performing facial recognition, posting the resulting images to Twitter in real-time didn’t win.
- BitCoin-Central Becomes Legit Bank — After all this patient work and lobbying we’re finally happy and proud to announce that Bitcoin-Central.net becomes today the first Bitcoin exchange operating within the framework of European regulations. Covered by FDIC-equivalent, can have debit or credit cards connected to the BitCoin account, can even get your salary auto-deposited into your BitCoin account.
- The Antifragility of the Web (Kevin Marks) — By shielding people from the complexities of the web, by removing the fragility of links, we’re actually making things worse. We’re creating a fragility debt. Suddenly, something changes – money runs out, a pivot is declared, an aquihire happens, and the pent-up fragility is resolved in a Black Swan moment.
- xcharts (GitHub) — sweet charts in Javascript.
Four short links: 7 December 2012
Drone Games, Bitcoin Bank, Antifragility, and Javascript Charts
The United States (Code) is on Github
Open government coders collaborate to liberate legislative data from Congress.
When Congress launched Congress.gov in beta, they didn’t open the data. This fall, a trio of open government developers took it upon themselves to do what custodians of the U.S. Code and laws in the Library of Congress could have done years ago: published data and scrapers for legislation in Congress from THOMAS.gov in the public domain. The data at github.com/unitedstates is published using an “unlicense” and updated nightly. Credit for releasing this data to the public goes to Sunlight Foundation developer Eric Mill, GovTrack.us founder Josh Tauberer and New York Times developer Derek Willis.
“It would be fantastic if the relevant bodies published this data themselves and made these datasets and scrapers unnecessary,” said Mill, in an email interview. “It would increase the information’s accuracy and timeliness, and probably its breadth. It would certainly save us a lot of work! Until that time, I hope that our approach to this data, based on the joint experience of developers who have each worked with it for years, can model to government what developers who aim to serve the public are actually looking for online.”
If the People’s House is going to become a platform for the people, it will need to release its data to the people. If Congressional leaders want THOMAS.gov to be a platform for members of Congress, legislative staff, civic developers and media, the Library of Congress will need to release structured legislative data. THOMAS is also not updated in real-time, which means that there will continue to be a lag between a bill’s introduction and the nation’s ability to read the bill before a vote. Read more…
Four short links: 6 December 2012
What You Do, Wordnik Branches, 5 Whys, and Hardware Hackathon
- You’re Saving Time — can you explain what you do, as well as this? Love the clarity of thought, as well as elegance of expression.
- Related Content, by Wordnik — branching out by offering a widget for websites which recommends other content on your site which is related to the current page. I’ve been keen to see what Wordnik do with their text knowledge.
- How to Run a 5 Whys with Humans, Not Robots (Slideshare) — gold Gold GOLD! (via Hacker News)
- Open Computer Project Hackathon — have never heard of a hardware hackathon before, keen to see how it works out. (via Jim Stogdill)
Four short links: 5 December 2012
Poetry for Professionals, HTTPS Setup, Geodata Mining, and 3D Popup Print Shops
- The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals (HBR) — Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman once told The New York Times, “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”
- First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection — far more than you ever wanted to know about how HTTPS connections are initiated.
- Google Earth Engine — Develop, access and run algorithms on the full Earth Engine data archive, all using Google’s parallel processing platform. (via Nelson Minar)
- 3D Printing Popup Store Opens in NYC (Makezine Blog) — MAKE has partnered with 3DEA, a pop up 3D printing emporium in New York City’s fashion district. The store will sell printers and 3D printed objects as well as offer a lineup of classes, workshops, and presentations from the likes of jewelry maker Kevin Wei, 3D printing artist Josh Harker, and Shapeways’ Duann Scott. This. is. awesome!
Four short links: 4 December 2012
Future is Burked, P2P Currency, Stuff That Matters, and Avatar Widget
- James Burke at dConstruct — transcription of his talk. EPIC. I love this man and could listen to him all day long. (via Keith Bolland)
- Mechanism Design on Trust Networks (CiteSeerX) — academic paper behind the Ripple Bitcoin-esque open source peer-payment digital currency.
- What If Money Was No Object (YouTube) — about finding your way to stuff that matters, and worth it just for the last lines. (via Rowan Simpson)
- photobooth-js (GitHub) — BSD-licensed html5 widget that allows users to take their avatar pictures on your site.
Emerging languages spotlight: Elm
Evan Czaplicki on breaking the HTML-CSS-JavaScript blockade with functional reactive programming.
Over the next few months I’ll be taking a look at new and emerging programming languages. The following piece is the first in this series.
The Elm Programming Language, created by Evan Czaplicki, tackles web interaction and takes on the big three — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Czaplicki to talk about why he decided to take on this daunting project and how Elm could revolutionize web programming.
Czaplicki was working on a front-end web project and he was thinking about how is it that web development can be “so frustrating in a way it didn’t have to be.” That was the day Elm was born (he talks about that moment in this segment of our video interview).
Today’s websites bear virtually no resemblance to those from 10 years ago, so why are we using the same tools? Cyclical upgrades to HTML, CSS and JavaScript have certainly enhanced and improved upon older versions. HTML5 has taken some great leaps forward. But we’re still using the core.
Coming from a functional programming background led Czaplicki to think about web programming from the perspective of functional reactive programming. What is functional reactive programming? It takes away the idea that interaction between a website and user is static — updating only at certain moments or clicks — and inserts the capability to update as events happen, like mouse movements. Czaplicki gives more detailed insight here. Read more…
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 