2020 Oct 21, 3:50
Its rare to find devs anticipating Unicode control characters showing up in user input. And the most fun when unanticipated
is the Right-To-Left Override character U+202E. Unicode characters have an implicit direction so that for example by default Hebrew characters
are rendered from right to left, and English characters are rendered left to right. The override characters force an explicit direction for all the text that follows.
I chose my Twitter display name to include the HTML encoding of the Right-To-Left Override character #x202E; as a sort of joke or shout out to my favorite Unicode control character.
I did not anticipate that some Twitter clients in some of their UI would fail to encode it correctly. There's no way I can remove that from my display name now.
Try it on Amazon.
How about pages that want to tell you about the U+202E.
Unicode 2015 Oct 19, 9:37 2015 Jul 23, 12:34 2012 Jul 30, 3:49
Chaos Monkey randomly kills your Amazon Web Service VMs increasing the failure rate forcing your web service to deal with it.
technical programming web amazon netflix 2012 Feb 22, 6:54
Automated authors writing books and automated middle men trying to sell over priced books at a profit. The author of the blog post claims to be human, but I’m not so sure.
humor technical amazon economics bots 2011 Apr 27, 2:21Competing price setting algorithms create a very high priced book. "But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at
$23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping)."
humor internet blog science book commerce ad 2011 Apr 4, 11:18Two eBook frauds involving the automated creation and publishing of books in order to make money off the long tail. The spam of books.
ebook fraud bruce-schneier security amazon copyright publishing 2010 May 10, 8:43Charles Stross on the intersection of ebooks and the publishing industry. Includes the answer to the misinformed question "why are you charging so much for access to the file your authors emailed
you?" Also includes this quote on Cory Doctorow "... Cory is a Special Snowflake with EFF superpowers and New York Times Bestseller mojo which make him immune to the normal laws of man and nature."
charles-stross cory-doctorow ebook drm amazon publishing kindle apple book 2010 May 3, 7:27Amazon has the most highlighted passages of Kindle users. Of course Dan Brown is all over that. But in 94th place of most highlighted is a passage from the 'Kindle Shortcuts' book on how to highlight
passages: "Go to top Notes and Clippings (Kindle 2) To create a highlight: use the 5-way controller to highlight the content you want to clip and then press the 5-way to save your selection...
Highlighted by 319 Kindle users"
humor highlight amazon kindle technical meta 2010 Mar 11, 7:36Boing Boing recommends I buy things. Probably a good selection of odd or geeky gifts.
boingboing amazon gift purchase wishlist 2010 Jan 28, 4:00Jonathan Zittrain on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, artificial AI, and related topics.
jonathan-zittrain video amazon mechanical-turk mechanicalturk technical 2010 Jan 28, 2:36Amazon's Mechanical Turkers enact the Prisoners Dilemma.
amazon mechanical-turk psychology economics prisoners-dilemma 2010 Jan 6, 9:20"Amazon called me today to discuss my $2.9billion purchase"
humor amazon web internet economics money 2009 Dec 4, 5:06"If you want to watch videos from the National Archives today, they try to talk you into buying a DVD from the official government partner, Amazon.Com...To demonstrate to the Congress that if we
liberated this wonderful content people would really care, I forked over $251 for 20 DVDs and posted them on-line."
video history politics government public-domain internet-archive 2009 Dec 3, 1:54Uses Amazon's mechanical Turk program to test framing: "Framing the outcomes in positive vs. negative terms produced a reversal of participants’ preferences for the two programs. In condition 1, the
majority of respondents (69.4%) favored Program A, exhibiting risk aversion. In condition 2, the majority of respondents (65.3%) favored Program B, exhibiting risk seeking."
via:pskomoroch science experiment social risk security mechanicalturk amazon 2009 May 29, 12:12"Any object in Amazon S3 that can be read anonymously can also be downloaded via BitTorrent. ... Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a "?torrent" query
string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object." Yes, this is awesome!
torrent amazon s3 bittorrent p2p via:pskomoroch 2009 May 13, 10:35In my first linear algebra book they had examples of linear tranformations applied to an image of a cartoon sheep. The fist example was a shear mapping.
sheep humor amazon mechanicalturk via:swannman 2009 May 1, 11:25Seems like this would be a good gift for someone. "...all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William
Shatner. Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Rescue 911 Shatner, Singer Shatner, Shakespearean Shatner, Twilight Zone Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Esperanto Shatner, Priceline Shatner, SNL
Shatner, and - of course - William Shatner!"
humor book gift wishlist william-shatner shatner startrek via:boingboing 2009 Apr 8, 10:40A good gift for a particular subset of people I know. "Also has commentary from Limoncelli and some other internet gods. Worth many geek points - full of lulz!!"
gift wishlist book ietf reference rfc humor
Amazon Fresh just went up $300/yr. Angry and sad to switch services after ~5yrs.
Alternatives recommendations? http://www.geekwire.com/2014/tough-swallow-longtime-amazon-fresh-customers-bolting-new-299year-subscription/ …
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