Bill Cheswick

Bill Cheswick is a cool dude. In the 80s and 90s, he ran the Internet Mapping Project, which was an attempt to collate the complexity that is our routing stack into something approachable. It also produced some really cool graphs: https://cheswick.com/ches/map/gallery/index.html As a young engineer, I had the opportunity to meet him at one of the tech conferences my dad was attending, where he gave me one of his printed copies of the internet map (and signed it). Hung on my childhood bedroom wall until my parents moved. Lovely piece.

The Cuckoo’s Egg is a great read. For another great hacking story from the same era, see "An Evening with Berferd: In Which a Cracker is Lured, Endured, and Studied": http://www.cheswick.com/ches/papers/berferd.pdf From the abstract: "On 7 January 1991 a cracker, believing he had discovered the famous sendmail DEBUG hole in our Internet gatewaymachine, attempted to obtain a copy of our passwordfile. I sent him one. For several months we led this cracker on a merry chase in order to trace his location and learn his techniques."

This has been covered on HN before (IIRC that's where I first read about it), but my favorite vision color "trick" is the McCollough Effect, mostly because of how long it lasts (weeks in my case, YMMV): http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/

While what you say is absolutely true, a cursory skim of the website's webmaster's profile[1] suggests he would be putting a lot of reputation on the line if he were acting maliciously. [1]: https://cheswick.com/ches/cv/index.html EDIT: Pardon my sudden lack of linguistic finesse, clearly the beer I had tonight was good.

Good one, added it to my Powershell profile for the occasional giggle so I can invoke it on demand, feel free to reuse it function Insult { (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://cheswick.com/insults") .ParsedHtml.getElementsByTagName("p")[2].innerText } #Outputs a random quality insult! Note: delete the space behind insults") Formatting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Have you heard about the McCollough[1] effect? Check the URL, it's an image you can look at for a few minutes, and it will change the way you process images for several hours. For me it lasted days. And it's all in the brain. http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/

This is yet another case of reporters grossly exaggerating a discovery. It was discussed 10 months ago on Less Wrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/8th/link_matrixstyle_learning/. Here's the actual paper: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Shibata-et-al… Also, it was already known that parts of the brain can be programmed by visual stimuli. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect and http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/index.html.

I really enjoyed reading this thread. The opening line (and core argument?) "Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering" triggered my neural network to respond. TLDR: graphs are ubiquitous in _science_, and for a data type to be useful it should not put the crossbar too high. (some history.) The Center for Nonlinear Studies (https://cnls.lanl.gov/External/) has a rich legacy of organizing annual Los Alamos Lab driven conferences in Santa Fe that bring together emergent disciplines. We combine overview talks by world experts and enough spaces in between these talks so that new bridges can be built at outstanding Santa Fe restaurants. I was co-organizer of the 2003 conference on Complex Networks, and this one was turning out to be a real banger. Sitting in the back with Aric Hagberg and Dan Schult (from Colgate University, but then spending his sabbatical at the CNLS) we were struck by how many really smart people were using "complex networks", but with very few computational tools available to them. That was the origin of networkx ( = network "X", reflecting the multidisciplinary renaissance we were watching). At that time python was a high-productivity starting framework to build the infrastructure, but I honestly expected that eventually there will be another language plugged in under the hood to make it more efficient for huge data sets on supercomputing architectures. We used the Guido v Rossum dict of dicts data structure idea (a few years old at that time) and…