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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

Jun 2, 2012

Twitter Engineering: Improving Performance on twitter.com →

Or When Twitter Acknowledged Hashbangs Were Bad.

Jun 1, 2012

Stuxnet Confirmed to be of American Origin →

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

There are just some classified things that probably should remain classified. At the same time, props to us for a job very well done.

May 30, 2012

Could You Build a Scale Lego Model of the Death Star? →

If a Lego Millennium Falcon is yea big and ... multiply by 3 ... carry the 1 ... Not a chance.

May 29, 2012

Revisiting Why Incompetents Think They're Awesome →

Cognition, metacognition, and the Dunning-Kruger principle (or why in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good).

May 28, 2012

What Chinese Consumers Want →

China is a Confucian society, a quixotic combination of top-down patriarchy and bottom-up social mobility. Citizens are driven by an ever-present conflict between standing out and fitting in, between ambition and regimentation. In Chinese society, individuals have no identity apart from obligations to, and acknowledgment by, others. The clan and nation are the eternal pillars of identity. Western individualism—the idea of defining oneself independent of society—doesn't exist.

A good look into the cultural motivations of Chinese consumers, and what brands must project in order to be successful there.

May 27, 2012

Meet the Tireless Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL →

Eric Simons managed to live in AOL's Palo Alto campus for two months.

Contacted for comment, David Temkin, senior vice president of Mail and Mobile for AOL, told CNET, "It was always our intention to facilitate entrepreneurialism in the Palo Alto office -- we just didn't expect it to work so well."

May 26, 2012

Silicon Valley Tech Exec Popped for Allegedly Stealing Huge Cache of LEGO Bricks →

"In his house, we found hundreds of boxes of unopened LEGO sets," said Liz Wylie, a spokeswoman for the Mountain View police. "He sold 2,100 items in just over a year on eBay.

And here I thought I liked LEGOs...

May 25, 2012

Why Shutting Airports Is Not the Best Way to Halt a Global Flu Pandemic →

Ignoring problems with the article's writeup, this is actually an interesting finding, and my public health friends are about to get an email.

May 24, 2012

The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man →

A great article from New York Magazine on the ways in which Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has matured (and some of the ways he hasn't).

May 23, 2012

Facebook's Business Model →

If there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it's that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don't have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends.

Chris Dixon wrote something I was formulating in the draft stage, and it's better. Search engines benefit from users' intent. Just go read his post.

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H. Parker Shelton

I'm just an ordinary thirty-something who's had some extraordinary opportunities. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, work for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, code websites and applications, take the occasional photograph, and keep a constant eye on current events, politics, and technology. This blog is the best of what catches that eye.

 
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