The Accidental Engineer

tl;dr: I’ve started a new project called The Accidental Engineer.

I plan on writing a lengthier explanation for what it is and why I’m doing it, but that will have to wait.

On the Market

An interesting long-form article on working for art auction house, Sotheby’s:

On the Market

Generative Text Models

A couple of Google research blog posts from the last year that are indicative of the future of text-based communication:

• Smart Reply
• Allo

Additional links:

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
• Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
• Understanding LSTM Networks
• Smart Reply: Learning a Model from Conversational Data

github-email-thief

Github (and Bitbucket as well) expose the vast majority of their users’ email addresses via commit metadata.

As a proof-of-concept, I made a single page app using Angular + the Github API to demonstrate how browse-able/scrape-able this contact information is.

Live demo here.

You can check if your Github username is affected.

You can read about how to hide your email address here.

The project is non-commercial and MIT-licensed.

Make Your Own Gmail

I made a frontend for Gmail prototype called “make-your-own-gmail”, that can be skinned as you see fit.

I hope this might help you wrap your minds around single page apps, and also empower you to believe that you can improve email even if you aren’t employed by Google or a major email provider.

It’s entirely AngularJS, using the Google JavaScript SDK for Gmail.

If you’d like to host this at your own domain you’ll need to obtain a Google Developer’s key from the Developer’s Console.

I’d also highly recommend that you host it over HTTPS.

NB: email composition “kind of” works–there is some road to cover if you want to reproduce all of the features available to users at mail.google.com.

[messaging] Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

Insight into the anti-spam and abuse efforts at Google:

[messaging] Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

It is rare to hear “from the horses mouth!”

Hedge Funds’ Use of Alternative, Unstructured Data to Generate Returns

How to value data:

• Scarcity (how many other actors in the market have it)
• Granularity (time, aggregation)
• Structure (vs. unstructured–“cost”)
• Coverage (demographics, geos, industry coverage)

Really great talk from an Ex-SAC Capital Director.As the saying goes, “from the horses mouth”

Image Hosting as a Business

Drew DeVault, creator of now-defunct MediaCrush, has some interesting things to say about the image-hosting business:

The Profitability of Online Services