Q2 is starting out okay – just won (received a non-equity-loss investment of) 15 bitcoins from Jack Levin at PHD4 with Lightbox Reality last weekend.

Still keeping things low-key… because I still haven’t figured what to do with all this.

Accepted to Makerfaire and Augmented World Expo. Waiting on SIGGRAPH.

More recently, I had a spare hour to burn waiting for a Play Store cache to refresh, so I tried posting under my first name. It’s impossible not to get sucked into a barnyard, once you get into it.. Or rather, I made two posts and received the dreaded error message:

“You’re submitting too fast. Please slow down.”

WTH!?

Apparently, someone has already added this ambiguous and oddly-enforced message to the worst place for pg to start a features request list ever, and some tech-ish startup guy who writes less than me and has issues with hadoop thinks it has to do with political correctness. There are a bunch of people who believe that this is what the hellbanned message looks like.

So, reading the message at face value, my initial impression was:

Ridiculous, considering that I spent many solid minutes pondering and reviewing content in-between posts. Apparently, “many” has been quantified by limits set here https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

(def recent-spam (site)
  (and (caris (banned-sites* site) 'ignore)
       (recent-items [is (sitename _!url) site] 720)))

(def recent-items (test minutes)
  (let cutoff (- (seconds) (* 60 minutes))
    (latest-items test [< _!time cutoff])))

; New user can't submit more than 2 stories in a 2 hour period.
; Give overeager users the key toofast to make limit permanent.

(def oversubmitting (user ip kind (o url))
  (and enforce-oversubmit*
       (or (check-key user 'toofast)
           (ignored user)
           (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*)
           (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*))
       (len> (recent-items [or (author user _) (is _!ip ip)] 180)
             (if (is kind 'story)
                 (if (ignored user) 0 1)
                 (if (ignored user) 1 10)))))

It appears that users subject to this draconian punishment are discriminated based on

I’m tempted to fix up the snippet, except it’d never get accepted… and it really doesn’t seem a good use of time to spend any more time than the past ten minutes on arc, a language invented to be a dead language.

(And, posted!)

I’m a big believer that, “With great power, comes great responsibility,” and money — on the order of a billion dollars — is essentially extreme power. With that amount, you can buy anything you (or anyone you personally knew) could ever need, and you’re going to end up with a lot of it left, unless you make a lot of unsensible purchases of arbitrary amounts… The best use would be more in the area of philanthropy, to make the real lasting contributions to humanity, beyond the shallow overhang of acquisitions and corporate politics.

So, that said, to finally answer the question… If I had a couple billion dollars, the first thing I’d do is call up Peter Diamandis and launch an X Prize for Teleportation. And then, I’d retire to being a physicist again, and solving that teleportation problem myself to earn my own money back. Transportation and allocation seems to be the biggest problems in the world — from time wasture in commute to people being inevitably late to world hunger (there is probably enough food being thrown out daily at these SF bay conferences to feed Africa, now what if you could instantly beam this food over to someone who really needs it). Along the way, I suppose I’d also figure out how to make a Star Trek-worthy replicator, to instantly create anything, for reals — including coffee, black and genuine-tasting tomato juice. Talk about crazed intellectual philanthropy? xD

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Archive.org API is similar to S3, with objects (files) contained in a bucket (organizer) system. The base url is s3.us.archive.org

Putting files on there requires an odd curl syntax, with basic-auth – this may cause issues with some existing S3 wrappers/SDKs.

curl --location --header 'x-amz-auto-make-bucket:1'
       --header 'x-archive-meta01-collection:opensource'
       --header 'x-archive-meta-mediatype:texts'
       --header "authorization: LOW [KEY]:[SECRET]"
       --upload-file [/path/to/filename] http://s3.us.archive.org/[bucketname]/[filename]

After you call this, you should delay() or sleep() for 10 seconds or more, or do a mini-DDOS loop checking if the bucket resource exists, before proceeding to adding more files:

curl --location --header "authorization: LOW [KEY]:[SECRET]"
       --silent --show-error
       --upload-file [/path/to/filename] http://s3.us.archive.org/[bucketname]/[filename]

Make sure that a space separates all parameter and values.

The server is very unreliable. If you followed the above, and put sleep() or delay() methods in between calls, and things still don’t work, it’s very likely archive.org ran into a blip, usually in retrieval, rather than storage.

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sudo port install mariadb-server configure.compiler=llvc-gcc-4.2

If needed, you may need to update the macports repo list before calling the above:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port upgrade outdated

The second line above will probably take an hour. Or more. Please be plugged in. With connectivity.

June 1996 to June 2001 – Age 11: Taught myself BASIC and a few other languages from some old library books. Finally signed on the Internet for the first time in 1997. Henceforward, taught myself web design, discovered (Macromedia) Flash (v3!), nearly failed 8th grade science, grounded and forbidden to use the Internet, won US$10,000 in a teens-only international web dev contest, learned Perl then PHP/MySQL, became a notorious writer of Buffy TVS fan fiction, founded a web design company, monopolized every single issue of the school literary journal, learned Visual Basic 6, C++, then .NET, built a anyone-can-build Flash-websites platform, haunted various code-bases. Became convinced that programming is too ephemeral, but an equation is forever…

June 2001 to June 2006 – Age 16: As a junior in high school, I plunged straight into the subjects I was most horrible at, viz., math and science. It was a cruel self-enforced boot camp disciplining my creative mind that tends to wander – I spent 10+ hours a day studying subjects I disliked, under some silly education theory that I absolutely need to learn this stuff pronto (before I lose all that plasticity of mind and intensity of a teenager). Well, just a wee bit of vanity that I might be able to contribute to the next big physics theory. By 2002, I’d finished all of the lower division math and physics courses. I started my freshman year at UCSD, full ride, senior-standing, with the freedom to take graduate courses and to declare a triple major in Bioengineering, Physics and Philosophy — four years later, founded a garage-based speaker company, finished the core grad courses that a physics grad student takes before spending the rest of her tenure on research, before leaving due to not being able to decide which area I really wanted to focus on.

June 2006 to June 2011 – Too much dreary math/sci from the past 5, not enough literature and philosophy of the profound kind. Let’s begin “my lost years” incognito, with an artist pen name that’s a play on words over an Sketchup-ly urban fantasy web series project I halted at the time. From absolutely nothing, started a literary journal then an arts nonprofit and island-sized art gallery and Shakespearean Theatre company, got thousands of people I don’t know to donate to my cause for the arts. Unfortunately, it was all “out of this world” — set in the modern equivalent of Narnia, complete with deities that play by unknown rules, with power to end your access to Narnia at whim, and destroy all that you’ve created — coupled with the kind of pathos that happens when the deities’ internal communication seem to fail even despite all that magic (cough: cloud infrastructure), and you’ve got plenty exposure to corporate drama, even as a third party. Had a complete nervous breakdown around the time of my TED fellow interview in 2009, learned Esperanto, then took a respite, back into the real world, starting from absolutely nothing again, as a writer for the Examiner.

June 2011 to … – Back to my roots. Computers and the still-infinite potential in webby-mobile startups. Been off the map for too long, so let’s start by being a professional hackathon junkie. Test out my ideas among new people I don’t know. Scored $25,000 (cash + prizes) via closer to 2-dozen hackathons in three months, and now, this story begins…