Some Articles: Authentication, Painting, Citizen Journalism, and Angle Investing

Who are you, really? The value of incorrect response in challenge-response style authentication. « Hype Cycles Service providers (electricity, cable, wireless phone, POTS telephone, newspaper, banks, credit card companies) are regularly faced with the challenge of identifying and validating the identity of the individual who has called customer service. They have come up with elaborate schemes involving the last four digits of your social security number, your mailing address, your mother’s maiden name, your date of birth and so on.

Dabblers and Blowhards About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters, in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase “computer science”. When this essay came out, I was working as a computer programmer, and since I had also spent a few years as a full-time oil painter, everybody who read the article and knew me sent along the hyperlink. I didn’t particularly enjoy the essay — I thought the overall tone was glib, and I found the parallel to painting unconvincing — but it didn’t seem like anything worth getting worked up about. Just another programmer writing about what made him tick.

Citizen Journalism Expert Jay Rosen Answers Your Questions - Slashdot We posted Jay Rosen’s Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he’s obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a “must read” for anyone interested in the growing “citizen journalism” movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member – and please note tha…

A Simulation of Angel Investing In angel investing, it’s the extreme distribution of payoffs that keeps things interesting. If anything, it resembles buying a deep out-of-the-money call option, but with nonlinearity. If you win big you might find yourself in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. That’s incredibly unlikely, but still possible.