the bblog

Bad Transcript: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Samuel Bierwagen — 2013-05-23T02:50:48-07:00

I wrote a Bad Transcript for the new Star Trek movie. It's pretty good, you should read it.

The transcript, that is. The movie isn't good.

building dtwenty.org

Samuel Bierwagen — 2013-01-04T21:03:31-07:00

767 days ago, I commented on a HN submission about a random number generator:

3.) Providing random numbers as an advertisement for your fine line of hardware random number generators. Here it doesn't matter how much money you make [providing the numbers], you just want people to buy the hardware that made them. Oddly enough, none of the random number services (and there are quite a few) do this, for some inexplicable reason. There's not even an argument-from-proprietary technology, since HRNGs are supposed to generate perfectly random noise, and there's no way an attacker could stage a replay attack.

I left it there, because I was lazy. But last month, notorious badass Maciej Cegłowski created The Pinboard Co-Prosperity Cloud.

What is it?
The Pinboard Co-Prosperity Cloud is a startup self-incubator. Six successful applicants will receive a modest amount of funding and as much publicity as I can provide for their sustainable and useful business idea.
Is this a joke?
It is not a joke.
What are the requirements?
You must have a good idea that you are capable of building, a willingness to build it, and a plan for making it mildly profitable.
How much funding will I get?
Each successful applicant will receive $37. This will cover the cost of six months of hosting at prgmr.com and a productivity-enhancing hot beverage.

So I entered. Ha ha why not?

The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that I wasn't getting the joke. The idea was trivially simple. I already had a web server. I didn't need all that mad cash. I could just... build it.

So I did. It's right here. (EDIT 2013/3/22: I let the domain name lapse, and moved the content to bbot.org)

It was amazingly easy, even though this was pretty much my first major (har) piece of programming. I had never used python, javascript, or jquery before.

Web programming in the year 2012 has the smooth, well polished feel of something that has had the sharp edges worn off by the passage of thousands of other people. Getting nginx to talk to the WSGI server was a snap. Installing bottle.py was easy. JQuery was no problem.

Any time I had a problem, googling the error message would return a helpful, relevant page, explaining how my "build it as fast as possible, while learning as little as possible" design methodology had screwed me over again.

At the time, of course, it seemed a vast edifice of impossible complexity, but in retrospect it was painless. "It's easy to do if you know how to do it", maybe.

The only difficulty I faced was the hardware random number generator. The numbers had to come from it, since that was the whole point of the site; but my server was a virtual machine on the east coast, and my HRNG was sitting on my desk.

The "money" solution would be to buy a rackmount server, plug the widget into it, then slot it into a colo, but I didn't have money, and instead I had to be creative.

I couldn't just run the web server locally, since my ISP blocks port 80. Enter the ugly hack: I plugged the entropykey into a spare laptop, ran the application server on that, then ran a SSH tunnel to my web server, which communicates with the front end via JSON. It works, at the cost of an extra 150ms of latency per roll.

There's room to improve, of course. You could probably list off a dozen features dtwenty.org needs without pausing to draw breath, (starting with "make it less ugly") but, the ideal of the minimum viable product shines bright.

The second biggest problem after integrating the HRNG was the ad copy that makes up most of the page. It was originally twice as long-- ruthless editing has reduced to it merely "too long" from "far, far too long." This too could use improvement.

But! It's done and it works! Programming is fun.

"How would I get started" and the problem of truth

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-12-09T23:49:30-07:00

I've been meaning to write about Hacker News again, but have held back, since it's a pretty boring subject outside of HN's rather shallow pool of users. But recent events have forced my hand.

"How would I get started?"

Last night on Hacker News, someone asked a simple question with a complicated answer: “I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?”
I’m really disappointed in the universally pessimistic and generally unhelpful answers this question received. Some people pitched some interesting ideas and helpful analysis, but most of the replies reinforced the notion that Hacker News readers are predominantly male know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks.

Lots of emotional content here, but not much meaning. The attitude behind these two paragraphs becomes clearer if we look at some other quotes:

"Black Swan Farming"

In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. I don't know whether these expectations are innate or learned, but whatever the cause, we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing.
That yields all sorts of strange consequences. For example, in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. [1] I haven't really assimilated that fact, partly because it's so counterintuitive, and partly because we're not doing this just for financial reasons; YC would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch. And yet it's true.
To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. [2] You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
It's a constant battle for us. It's hard to make ourselves take enough risks. When you interview a startup and think "they seem likely to succeed," it's hard not to fund them. And yet, financially at least, there is only one kind of success: they're either going to be one of the really big winners or not, and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they succeed the effect on your returns will be insignificant. In the same day of interviews you might meet some smart 19 year olds who aren't even sure what they want to work on. Their chances of succeeding seem small. But again, it's not their chances of succeeding that matter but their chances of succeeding really big. The probability that any group will succeed really big is microscopically small, but the probability that those 19 year olds will might be higher than that of the other, safer group.
The probability that a startup will make it big is not simply a constant fraction of the probability that they will succeed at all. If it were, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible question of whether they'll succeed really big.

"Why I now, unfortunately, hate Hacker News"

raffi 114 days ago | link
Most companies fail. It's a safe bet to predict failure. It's pretty lame to celebrate that failure from the sidelines.
Vision is not "how is this guaranteed to fail?" but how could it possibly succeed despite the odds?

A core tenet of hacker ethics, the zeroeth law perhaps, is being right, having correct perceptions regarding the universe. A map that matches the territory.

Under this ethical system, the above statement makes less than no sense. The most likely outcome is failure... but you shouldn't predict failure?

However, the way startup financing is currently organized, a VC fund can shrug off a dozen miserable failures to chase the one Google or Intel.

The purpose of Hacker News is to advertise Y Combinator startups, such as 9gag. The purpose is not to act as a prediction market. In fact, since one of the major routes of of startup profitability is being purchased by another company, accurate predictions of value are contrary to Y Combinator's interests. Y Combinator wants valuations as high as possible.

Someone starting a new cable company in 2012 is very likely to fail. This is the correct prediction: it is the outcome with the highest probability.

But a new cable company which somehow isn't immediately crushed, would have an enormous customer base, and could potentially make billions and billions of dollars.

To someone steeped in the Bay Area Startup lottery culture, this isn't an insanely stupid idea at all. It's almost a safe bet. With the force of millions of dollars behind you, being right is irrelevant.

why does nanoblogger generate broken links

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-10-15T18:24:59-07:00

(Attention conservation notice: I found an obscure bug in my blog publishing software. You are unlikely to care about it.)

Why the hell does my site have so many broken links?

I'll spare you the grimy details of the hour of troubleshooting, and jump right to the punchline. Nanoblogger 3.4.2 has a bug which generates bad relative links when you do ./nb update all

Nanoblogger is no longer updated, so this isn't a problem that can be solved by upgrading. I didn't want to dive into the parsing engine, so I had to find a workaround, which turned out to be pretty simple: just update it a year at a time. ./nb update YYYY works perfectly. (ex. ./nb update 2012) I've only got six years of archives, so all I had to do was run it six times.

I'm posting this incredibly boring post in the hopes it'll save one of the six other users of nanoblogger some confusion in the future.

wherein I write a guest post

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-10-06T15:26:52-07:00

I just did a guest post for the Armchair Brandology blog:

A modern nation, like a corporation, is a machine made of humans. Its genetic code is ideas, encoded as words on paper.
Such immaterial entities are exquisitely sensitive to language, and how it's used. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can kill a nation.
So the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are purposely branded so that there's no way to refer to them without implictly taking a stand. Like how the abortion debate is framed as "pro-choice/pro-life", except that both sides in this argument have nuclear weapons.

You should check it out!

escape.sh

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-09-30T07:13:13-07:00

I've pasted a lot of IRC logs into a lot of HTML documents, which is always a pain, since angle brackets are obviously a special character in HTML, which means I have to do a search and replace with the equivalent entity codes. I usually did this manually, using whatever graphical text editor was handy.

But that's Not The Hacker Way. I'm editing a text file produced by one program, so another program will accept it. String processing isn't a job fit for a human. This is something that should be done by a third program.

Thus:

#!/bin/sh
#
# escape.sh - Escapes angle brackets in text files
#
# Turns angle brackets into < and > HTML entities.
# With --irc, replaces the first 8 columns (the timestamp) with an 
# opening angle bracket, using an ugly hack.
#
# This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

if [[ $* == *--irc* ]]
then
    sed -i 's/>/\>/g' $2
    sed -i 's/^......../\</g' $2
else
    sed -i 's//\>/g' $1
fi

(Github)

Then I stuck it in my $PATH with sudo cp escape.sh /usr/local/bin/escape This way you can run it from any directory just by doing escape example.txt

(It's not actually very Unixy-- it doesn't play well with pipes, and wildcard expansion in a directory will blow it up.)

Have fun!

ntpblogging II

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-08-25T19:00:25-07:00

(previously)

So now bbot.org is a Stratum 2 NTP Pool server. (Its wiki page.)

Joining the pool is pretty easy: You create an account, give them your server's IP address, wait for the monitoring server to decide you're stable enough (~8 hours) and boom, you're in.

(The interface is a bit awkward: you paste the address in there, you don't click the "Add a server" link, which apparently doesn't do anything.)

I found four upstream servers by pinging 0.us.pool.ntp.org repeatedly, and choosing the one that were closest to me. Since bbot.org is in a datacenter right on the internet backbone, close can be very close:

# ntpq -np
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
-72.26.198.240   209.51.161.238   2 u  273 1024  377    2.320    3.100   1.201
+69.164.217.193  128.59.59.177    3 u  825 1024  377    3.713    0.239   0.371
-108.61.73.243   209.51.161.238   2 u  237 1024  377    3.174   -1.069   0.398
+128.113.28.67   18.26.4.105      2 u  383 1024  377    6.828    0.382   0.141
*128.118.25.5    .WWV.            1 u  426 1024  377   11.537    0.225   0.310

I had hoped that <10ms ping times would result in magically low offset numbers, measured in the tens of microseconds, but apparently jitter becomes a bigger problem when you get that low.

My reference stratum 1 server is wwv.tns.its.psu.edu, an open-access tier 1 server that John Balogh runs. Thanks John!

ntpblogging

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-08-04T06:52:57-07:00

So I was farting about trying to figure out how to ask a NTP server what it thinks the time is without having to edit ntp.conf on the client machine, when I discovered that NTP is like SSH— any machine with it installed acts as a server.

So now both of my machines get their time from bbot.org:

magnesium:~ $ ntpq -np
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+76.72.161.27    138.236.128.112  3 u   44   64  377   81.174   -2.459   1.158
+209.177.158.233 134.21.35.167    3 u   42   64  377   62.137   -3.428   1.459
-64.34.171.122   198.60.22.240    2 u   42   64  377   85.527   -7.019   2.248
*69.50.219.51    209.51.161.238   2 u   36   64  377   54.501    0.361  45.780

bbot@neon:~ $ ntpq -np
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  jitter
==============================================================================
+76.72.161.27    138.236.128.112  3 u   60  128  377   80.328    0.690  10.561
*67.23.181.241   128.4.1.1        2 u   35  128  377   82.895    1.003   7.373
+69.167.160.102  204.9.54.119     2 u   70  128  377   75.712    4.162  12.724
+50.16.231.185   192.5.41.40      2 u   26  128  377   87.617   -0.344  64.595

(The legend for the inscrutable linux bullshit can be found in ntpq’s manual file)

(Of course, at the moment I took these screenshots, neither neon or magnesium were syncing to bbot.org…)

The magic incantation to ask a NTP server for the time is sntp,

$ sntp 0.pool.ntp.org
2012 Aug 04 01:30:15.000857 + 0.001475 +/- 0.083787 secs

Which will return, (if you’ve got a machine with accurate time) a tiny drift number (1.4ms) swamped by a giant lake of uncertainty. (83.7ms) This is because sntp can only request a single packet, which means it doesn’t have a good idea of the jitter between you and the remote machine. The NTP daemon manages to extract accurate time from the storm of random network noise by requesting lots of packets, then doing a lot of clever things. You can sanity-check sntp by going to time.is, which for any Linux machine will tell you that your clock is bang-on accurate. (NTP on Windows will only get the clock within 1000ms of the true time, by design. Microsoft assumes that their users aren’t pedantically obsessive nerds who absolutely positively must have the most accurate computer clocks possible. The same assumption can’t be made of Linux users.)

how to pass the washington state driver's test on your second try

2012-07-17T05:00:18-07:00

I've been spending a lot time recently negotiating various state agencies to acquire licenses, and I figured I would write up what I did, because this is a goddamn blog.

Electrician's License

This was more or less easy. I have a weirdo subtype: Nonresidential lighting maintenance and lighting retrofit (7A). Getting this required two years of on-the-job experience, having the supervising electrician witness that I had that experience on a form, getting that form notarized, paying a fee, and then taking two tests.

In the United States, all the states have been bullied into adopting a uniform electrical code, imaginatively titled the National Electrical Code. Every couple years it is updated to phase out certain old practices of electrical work, and institute new safety methods. The individual states often lag by a year or two when adopting: the latest version is NEC 2011, but Washington is still on NEC 2008, for various amusing political reasons.

One of those is money. The NEC, despite being, essentially, law; is actually produced by a for-profit industry association, which means the code will cost you money, and not a small amount of it: NEC 2011 costs $75. Perniciously, when a state updates to the latest version of the code, every single electrician in the state has to buy a new copy, and take various courses on the updated rules. The perverse incentive for the NFPA is to issue updates as often as possible, to extract the maximum amount of rent from their legal monopoly.

The licensing tests are open-book, but I didn't want to give the NFPA my money, so I pirated a PDF copy of NEC 2008, and studied that.

That's the first test. The second test is on 19.28 RCW, the Washington State law governing electrical work.

Both of these tests are administered by PSI Exams, a company that apparently exists solely for state governments to outsource test administration to. Presumably there's all sorts of kickbacks and bribe-taking involved here too, I didn't really want to dig too deeply.

So. I paid my fees, scheduled the test, and studied the Law. Finally, the big day came. I took the test, and passed the NEC portion, but failed the RCW portion.

The proctor printed out the sad evidence of my laziness and incompetence, and handed it to me. I looked at the paper, read it, then instantly forgot the information.

This was one of the most egregious failures of rationality in my adult life, so listen carefully: Somehow, after all that, I became convinced that I had failed the NEC portion, not the RCW.

This is partially explainable by the fact that the NEC part had pitched a couple slowballs over the plate regarding wire marking trivia. These would have been really, really easy to answer if I had a paper copy of the NEC with me... but I was trying to save money! Whoops. So I got those wrong, but still passed the test. My failure haunted me, somehow metastasizing in my head to "I flunked the entire test".

Wrong.

There's a waiting period before you can retake the test. In the time I purchased a physical copy of NEC 2008, and studied the heck out of it. I show up for the retest, code in hand, ready to trounce this test. I sit down at the computer... and the test is for 19.28 RCW.

I am confused. I complete the test, easily passing it. (It picked a different random set of questions, ones I knew the answers to this time, apparently.)

I pick up my book, walk out of the testing room, and tell the proctor that there is A Problem. I've been given the wrong test! I am absolutely, unshakably certain that I had failed the NEC part the first time, not the RCW part. A Mistake Has Been Made.

The proctor is not having a good day. To be precise, she is not having a good first day on the job. She is not familiar with PSI's computer system, but figures out that I had taken the test that had been assigned to me. She calls PSI technical support (for apparently, the fifth time that day) and we investigate. The conclusion is reached that everything is working fine.

I am still not convinced, but this is obviously not the place to resolve it. (The PSI testing center is a single, two-room office suite in a office park in a Seattle suburb) I'm holding things up for other people who actually took the right test, so I drive home, dreading what is obviously going to be a couple hours of phone hell, navigating the bowels of a giant bureaucracy to correct a weird computer error. This is going to really, really suck.

I get home, open a beer, and spend 10 minutes on hold. I finally get a rep, tell her my name, social security number, blood type, and secret fear; she accesses my file, and tells me that I've passed both tests. I am now a 7A licensed electrician.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Oh."

I thank her. I hang up. I feel like biggest idiot in the entire world, the dumbest man who has ever, or will ever, live.

So that's how I got my electrician's license. How I got my driver's license is similar in the broad strokes.

Driver's license.

In Washington state, if you're over 18, all you need to get a learner's permit is to pass a knowledge test, and pass a simple eye exam. I spend half an hour waiting for my number, while watching a lot of alarmingly old people renew their driver's licenses.

I pass the knowledge test with ease, (It's taken on a computer, which uses a CRT-based touchscreen! Blast from the past.) and receive my learner's permit on April 3rd, 2012.

I don't know much about learning to drive, but I've read a little about learning how to fly, so I keep a logbook.

Over the next month, I rack up 269.35 miles, and a number of hours that I really don't want to go through and add up, watch the instructional videos produced by the DoL, until finally I decide that I'm ready to take the test. It is scheduled for May 14th, 2012.

This is what it looks like when you fail a driving test. I got a 78/100, the passing score is 80/100.

Highlight:

"So, have you ever conducted a test where the guy hit someone?"
"I can't answer that."
"Oh."

So how did I fail the driving test? It's easy: during the test, a specific phrase is used. It is, "rejoin traffic."

When I took the test, it was a beautiful, sunny summer day. 70F, not a cloud in the sky. Driving tests are (almost always) conducted on empty side streets, since of course this is a driving test, and the driver may fuck up.

The street is empty. The proctor says, "rejoin traffic". I glance into a mirror and, duh, see nobody, so I just drive into the street.

No! Wrong! You're supposed to be pretending that there is traffic. They are looking for three specific things:

Checks mirror.
Physically turns around and checks blind spot.
Turns on turn signal.

If you miss any of those, you lose the maximum 4 points on that test, failing the section entirely. Do that often enough, and you fail the test.

Don't do that. Perform those three actions. Even better: say them out loud ("Mirror, blind spot, turn signal") Driving instructors like to be talked to, they want to hear you thinking through things. I also repeated instructions back to them, ("Turn left at the upcoming intersection" "Turning left, roger") which you probably don't have to do, but they didn't seem to mind.

I passed parallel parking perfectly... except for signaling.

Minor point loss: at a stop sign with a blind corner, you're supposed to come to a complete stop before the white line, creep forward until you have visibility, come to another complete stop, then go.

Something I was warned about by a friend who also recently took the test: the rules for parking on a hill are somewhat esoteric. (You have to point your wheels in a certain direction, depending on circumstance) Study them carefully, or else you'll be dinged the full 4 points on that test.

Note: a perfect score on the driving test means that they'll never touch the scoring form. If they write anything at all, it's because you screwed up, and they're deducting points. (If you ask the instructor what you did wrong, they may or may not answer. I think they're not supposed to, but if it's clear that you're going to pass, they may bend the rules. This means that they won't help you when you actually need it, but oh well.)

There's a couple of commonsense tips:

Drive slow. By default, I drive slowly enough to annoy my mother, so that wasn't really an issue, but still.
Bring a book to the DMV. Or something, anything. I had to keep myself entertained for a couple hours. Don't be like me. Be smart.
Don't argue with the driving instructor. That cannot possibly help. Unless it's a very obvious, and very trivial mistake, ("Your headlights aren't on." "Actually, they are." "Oh.") then disagreeing with them isn't going to end well for you.

Anyway, I passed the test with trivial ease on my second try. Anticlimax ending!

biolite camp stove

Samuel Bierwagen — 2012-06-13T23:35:54-07:00

So John Biehler just reviewed the Biolite camp stove. The gist is that it's a little wood stove which uses a thermoelectic junction to generate electricity that could be used recharge your phone, or whatever. At $129, it's a cute little gadget, that also happens to demonstrate why the TEC effect isn't used for commericial power generation.

Let's look at the numbers:

Fire power output (peak): 3.4 kw (lo) 5.5 kw (hi)
USB power output: Max continuous: 2W @5V, Peak: 4W @5V

Assume that it only manages the maximum continuous power on the "hi" mode. This gives us 2W/5500W = a magnificent final thermodynamic efficency of .036%