Oddhead Blog

Here are my notes from Yahoo! Open Hack Day NYC. For other perspectives read New York Times open sourcerer Nick Thuesen or the Yahoo! devel blog. You can watch videos of some of the talks or browse pictures.

First off, I cheated. I went to sleep in a hotel room rather than hack all through the night. (Even in college I woke up at 4am rather than pull an all nighter.) Still, I made decent progress on some pet projects including combinatorial betting. Daniel, Sharad, and Winter from Yahoo! Research New York participated for real, working through the night. Returning in the morning showered and caffeinated to greet the sleepwalkers was a little surreal. A number of ex-Yahoos joined the festivities including David Yang, Mor Naaman, and Chad Dickerson. (Havi joked that Yahoo! is like finishing school for entrepreneurs. If you count Yahoo! capture and releases like Mark Cuban and Paul Graham, the spreading influence is enormous.)

Clay Shirky kicked off the event. He’s a fantastic speaker — watch his talk here. His punch line — that successful communities like facebook, twitter, flickr, and wikipedia start small and cohesive (as opposed to large and fragmented: see Yahoo! 360) — was aimed perfectly at the many founders and foundreamers in the audience. There were speakers from Mint and foursquare and tutorials on the Yahoo! Application Platform, Yahoo! Query Language (the most popular service), Yahoo! TV widgets, and more. There was a round of Ignite NYC, a barrage of twenty-slides-in-five-minutes talks, some educational (geek’s guide to patents), some charitable (aid to South America), some hilarious (spaceman from outerspace), some thought provoking (makerbot 3d printers), and many all of the above (meta mechanical turk; the Emoji translation of Moby Dick). Watch the Ignite talks here.

A bunch of small touches made the event memorable, including a steampunk-themed hacking hall complete with retroRed Victorian couches, portraits of hackers through history, funky tweet-streaming sculptures, chalk drawings of old patents, power cords dangling from hanging bird cages, and a guitarhero-foosball corner. The food was tasty and at times eccentric, like the hot dog stand and toppings bar under a rainbow umbrella, ice cream cart, and old-fashioned popcorn machine. There was plenty of beer, coffee, red bull, sliders, and cookies, and even (gasp) vegan fare, salmon, and salad.

I give the event an A for style (decor, food) and content (talks, hacks, organization). The one sour note was the wireless — certainly a key ingredient for a good hack day — which began flaky and ended slow but acceptable.

I attended the YAP tutorial and created a rudimentary application. I was pleasantly surprised how simple the process was — the documentation and sample code are great. You can get the hello world app (complete with social hooks) running and add some ajax magic within minutes.

By far one of the coolest sights was the MakerBot Industries 3D printer in action. It sucks in plastic wire, melts it, and deposits it in perfect formation to produce coins, busts, parts for itself, or almost anything in the thingiverse. For Hack Day, the device printed news headlines in peanut butter on toast. We met an nyc resistor who was working on a conveyer belt mechanism for his own MakerBot printer, and he invited us to craft night at their shared hackspace in Brooklyn (a place that would be heaven for my dad and brother; Sharad, Jake, Daniel, and Bethany went to check it out).

I missed the tutorial on Yahoo! TV widgets but I’d like to learn more. They are now in most major TV brands including Sony, Samsung, and LG — millions of sets around the world in the coming months. (The Sony won editor’s choice in the Sept 2009 issue of Wired magazine; the Samsung and LG rated close behind. The sole TV reviewed without Yahoo! Widgets, a Panasonic, was ridiculed for is clunky Viera Cast online interface.) If you’re an internet video startup, like my friend, you need a widget channel. Personally, I’d love to see a sports game tracker that highlights pivotal moments by monitoring in-game betting odds.

Footnote: Two Yahoos made a humorous video (that’s both self-promotional and -deprecating) on what people in Times Square think ‘hacker’ means:

See Paul Tarjan and Christian Heilmann for real definitions.

Join us on October 9, 2009 at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York City for Yahoo! Open Hack Day NYC. Come to listen, learn, and meet, but mainly come to make. Your goal: in 24 hours hackmash something together for bragging rights and prizes. Speakers include Clay Shirky (NYU), Carrie Cronkey (Mint.com), Dennis Crowley (foursquare), and Rasmus Lerdorf (inventor PHP). Register here. It’s free.

The 24-Hour Hackathon begins Friday afternoon. We encourage you to play around with Yahoo!’s Open Platforms and APIs like YAP, YQL, YUI, TVWidgets, our Social APIs, and more. And of course, feel free to use other APIs, developer tools and whatever software/hardware floats your boat…

At the end of the 24 hours, the hackers will have the chance to debut their hack and winners will be awarded with some enviable prizes…

And of course we will keep you well fed and hydrated throughout the two days. There will also be sleeping areas in case you want to take a nap.

Previous: the what and why of Open Hack.

1. New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day)

Monday, November 9, 2009 | 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
The New York Academy of Sciences, New York, NY, USA

NYCE 2009 is the Second Annual New York Computer Science and Economics Day. The goal of the meeting is to bring together researchers in the larger New York metropolitan area with interests in Computer Science, Economics, Marketing and Business and a common focus in understanding and developing the economics of internet activity. Examples of topics of interest include theoretical, modeling, algorithmic and empirical work on advertising and marketing based on search, user-generated content, or social networks, and other means of monetizing the internet.

The workshop is soliciting rump session speakers until October 12. Rump session speakers will have 5 minutes to describe a problem and result, an experiment/system and results, or an open problem or a big challenge.

Invited Speakers

• Larry Blume, Cornell University
• Shahar Dobzinski, Cornell University
• Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
• Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University

CFP: New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day), Nov 9 2009

2. 11th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’10)

June 7-11, 2010
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom) has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory, systems, and applications for electronic commerce. The Eleventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’10) will feature invited speakers, paper presentations, workshops, and tutorials covering all areas of electronic commerce. The natural focus of the conference is on computer science issues, but the conference is interdisciplinary in nature. The conference is soliciting full papers and workshop and tutorial proposals on all aspects of electronic commerce.

For a long time I was terribly confused and conflicted about net neutrality (and embarrassed about being uncommitted on such a core issue in my industry). On the one hand, paying more for higher quality of service is only natural and leads to better provisioning of resources and less waste. HD movie watchers can pay for low latency streaming while email users need not. Treating their packets the same is madness, even worse legislating it so. On the other hand, many people I respect including economically literate ones vociferously argue for net neutrality. And Comcast “shaping” Skype traffic scores an 88 on the Ticketmaster scale of evil.

The key to understanding this debate is recognizing the difference between anonymity and egalitarianism. A mechanism is anonymous if the outcome does not depend on the identity of the players: two players who bid the same are treated equally. It doesn’t matter what their name, age, or wealth is, what company they represent, or how they plan to use the item — all that matters is what they bid. This is a good property for almost any public marketplace that ensures fair treatment, and one worth fighting for on the Internet. AppleT&T should not block Google Voice just because it’s a threat. In fact, even without legislation, it’s almost impossible to bar anonymous participation on the Internet. Service providers can, if forced to, encrypt their packets and hide their content, origin, and purpose, making them indistinguishable from others.

However no one would argue that everyone in a marketplace should receive identical resources. Players who bid more can and must be distinguished (for example, by winning more items) from players who bid less. So, while it’s wrong to discriminate based on identity, it’s absolutely essential to discriminate based on willingness to pay. That is the difference between an egalitarian lottery (silly) and an anonymous marketplace (good).

Somehow the net neutrality debate has confounded these two issues. I agree that any Internet constitution should include that all packets are equal regardless of their creator or purpose (charging $30 for “unlimited” data and in addition 30 cents per 160-char text message scores 72 on the ticketmasterindex). However, users or services who are willing to pay for it can and should receive higher quality. To do otherwise virtually guarantees wasting resources.

Update 2009/08/27: Mark Cuban (as always) says it well. [Via Tom Murphy]

Lance Fortnow wrote a terrific op ed in the current issue of Communications of the ACM, arguing that the field of computer science should operate like most other academic disciplines and use journal publications as the primary measure of research contributions, freeing up conferences to serve a community role.

I agree (nearly) completely. The conference publication system is broken. Computer science papers are by and large not scholarly documents: many are sloppily written in deadline-driven haste with poor literature reviews, often blamed on page limits. Many reviews are rushed or cursory and decisions are safe at best, arbitrary at worst. The conference system encourages balkanization and discourages the emergence of a unified computer science conference.

Journals are better, as long as we move forward and not backward. We need open-access journals with fast turnaround times. Lance’s article itself underscores the point: it’s behind a pay wall, albeit a comparatively inexpensive and lenient one — Lance can distribute the near-final pre-print version on his own web page. That’s good but not good enough.

Kamal and Panos also have some refreshing ideas on this subject. Platforms like Yoav Freund’s machine learning forum represent a natural and intelligent evolution of peer review.

First micro lending, then microblogging, now microfunding.* Announcements of three funds recently sixdegreed their way to my doorstep, each smaller and faster than the next, a trend iconified by the famously speedy and minuscule Y Combinator:

1) George “Greek geek” Tziralis’s openfund; 2) Kevin Dick’s Black Swan Fund [via Daniel Horowitz]; and 3) the Awesome Foundation [via Foo Camp list].

The beginning of a trend?

*Yet still no micropayments!

Quantifying New York’s 2009 June gloom using WeatherBill and Wolfram|Alpha

In the northeastern United States, scars are slowly healing from a miserably rainy June — torturous, according to the New York Times. Status updates bemoaned “where’s the sun?”, “worst storm ever!”, “worst June ever!”. Torrential downpours came and went with Florida-like speed, turning gloom into doom: “here comes global warming”.

But how extreme was the month, really? Was our widespread misery justified quantitatively, or were we caught in our own self-indulgent Chris Harrisonism, “the most dramatic rose ceremony EVER!”.

This graphic shows that, as of June 20th, New York City was on track for near-record rainfall in inches. But that graphic, while pretty, is pretty static, and most people I heard complained about the number of days, not the volume of rain.

I wondered if I could use online tools to determine whether the number of rainy days in June was truly historic. My first thought was to try Wolfram|Alpha, a great excuse to play with the new math engine.

Wolfram|Alpha queries for “rain New Jersey June 200Y” are detailed and fascinating, showing temps, rain, cloud cover, humidity, and more, complete with graphs (hint: click “More”). But they don’t seem to directly answer how many days it rained at least some amount. The answer is displayed graphically but not numerically (the percentage and days of rain listed appears to be hours of rain divided by 24). Also, I didn’t see how to query multiple years at a time. So, in order to test whether 2009 was a record year, I would have to submit a separate query for each year (or bypass the web interface and use Mathematica directly). Still, Wolfram|Alpha does confirm that it rained 3.8 times as many hours in 2009 as 2008, already one of the wetter months on record.

WeatherBill, an endlessly configurable weather insurance service, more directly provided what I was looking for on one page. I asked for a price quote for a contract paying me $100 for every day it rains at least 0.1 inches in Newark, NJ during June 2010. It instantly spat back a price: $694.17.

It also reported how much the contract would have paid — the number of rainy days times $100 — every year from 1979 to 2008, on average $620 for 6.2 days. It said I could “expect” (meaning one standard deviation, or 68% confidence interval) between 3.9 and 8.5 days of rain in a typical year. (The difference between the average and the price is further confirmation that WeatherBill charges a 10% premium.)

Below is a plot of June rainy days in Newark, NJ from 1979 to 2009. (WeatherBill doesn’t yet report June 2009 data so I entered 12 as a conservative estimate based on info from Weather Underground.)

Indeed, our gloominess was justified: it rained in Newark more days in June 2009 than any other June dating back to 1979.

Intriguingly, our doominess may have been justified too. You don’t have to be a chartist to see an upward trend in rainy days over the past decade.

WeatherBill seems to assume as a baseline that past years are independent unbiased estimates of future years — usually not a bad assumption when it comes to weather. Still, if you believe the trend of increasing rain is real, either due to global warming or something else, WeatherBill offers a temptingly good bet. At $694.17, the contract (paying $100 per rainy day) would have earned a profit in 7 of the last 7 years. The chance of that streak being a coincidence is less than 1%.

If anyone places this bet, let me know. I would love to, but as of now I’m roughly $10 million in net worth short of qualifying as a WeatherBill trader.

Via Muthu. This is mind boggling to me.

Sparasites on the web now somehow find it worth their while to invade ultra-specialized academic conferences. Call them splORGers. (In close analogy to sploggers).

The website focs2008.org appears to be the official home of the 49th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. (In fact, it’s the top result for the search “focs 2008″ in Bing, Google, and Yahoo!.) Historically a few hundred people attend to hear talks like “A Hypercontractive Inequality for Matrix-Valued Functions with Applications to Quantum Computing and LDCs”.

The website appears fully functional: you can browse the entire website structure including internal links like the list of accepted papers and external links like the online registration form.

But look more closely at the lower left corner of the front page. What do you see? SPAM KEYWORDS!: “Data Recovery Dell Memory HP Memory PC RAM wow accounts WoW gold”.

WTF??!!

It turns out that focs2008.org is NOT the official FOCS 2008 conference home page. Rather, it’s http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~FOCS2008/. (Yahoo! ranks this site in second place, Bing and Google in seventh.)

This doesn’t seem like a zero-cost no-brainer automated attack. It involves identifying the appropriate domain name and mirroring another website, not as one-click as it sounds. There’s even a small sign of manual effort: the fox graphic in the upper left links to focs2007.org rather than 2008, as in the original. And of course there’s the cost to register and host the domain.

So why bother? Clearly, the perpetrator is not expecting real people to click on the spam links. At it’s peak, about as many people searched for “focs 2008″ as for “pennock” and the offending links are fairly obscure. This is most certainly about siphoning link juice from seemingly legitimate .orgs that search engines trust.

But can that benefit really outweigh the cost? Again and again I simply fail to grok the economics of spam.

SplORGers have also set up camp at focs2007.org and ioi2008.org. Curiously, focs2009.org has a more transparent yet still head-scratching disclaimer.

Today, I stumbled onto a similar spamfiltration on mortgagepoints.com, the first external link on the Wikipedia definition of mortgage points, prompting me to finally write this post. Look what our ultra open web has wrought!

For the second time, a hacker (in the swine sense of the word) broke in and defaced Oddhead Blog. Once again, I’m left impressed by the ingenuity of web malefactors and entirely mystified as to their motivation.

Last week several readers notified me that my rss feed on Google Reader was filled with spam (”Order Emsam No RxOrder Emsam Overnight DeliveryOrder… BuyBuy…”).

The strange part was, the feed looked fine when accessed directly on my website or via Bloglines. Only when Google requested the feed did it become corrupted, thus mucking up my content inside Google Reader but not on my website.

(Hat tip to Anthony who diagnosed the ailment: calling curl http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/ yielded clean output, while the same request masquerading as coming from Google, curl -A ‘Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 10 subscribers; feed-id=12312313123123)’ http://blog.oddhead.com/feed/, yielded the spammed-up version.)

In the meantime, Google Search had apparently deduced that my site was compromised and categorized my blog as spam. Look at the difference between these two searches. Nearly every page containing the query terms, no matter how tangential, takes precedence over blog.oddhead.com in the results. [2009/06/23 Update: This is no longer the case: Apparently Google Search has reconsidered my blog.]

So began a lengthy investigation to find and eradicate the invader. The offending text did not appear anywhere in my WordPress code or database. Argg. I found that my plugins directory was world-writeable: uh oh. Then I found a file named remv.php in my themes directory containing a decidedly un-automattic jumble of code. Apparently this is an especially nasty bugger:

I’ve never seen a hack crop up with the tenacity of “remv.php” tho. Seriously, it’s kind of scary.

I’m still not sure how or even if an attacker used remv.php to corrupt my feed in such a subtle way. I decided on surgery by chainsaw rather than scalpel. I exported all my content into a WordPress XML file, deleted my entire installation of WordPress, reinstalled WordPress, then imported my content back in. I restored my theme and re-entered some meta data, but I still have many ongoing repairs to do like importing my blogroll and other links.

The attack was clever: a virus that sickens but does not kill the patient. The disease left my web site functioning perfectly well, making it less likely for me to notice and harder to track down. The bizarre symptom — corrupting the rss feed but only inside Google Reader — led Chris to wonder if the attacker knew I was a Yahoo! loyalist. That seems unlikely. I don’t think I have enemies who care that much. Also, the spammy feed appeared in Technorati as well. Almost surely I was the victim of an indiscriminate robot attack. Still, after searching around, I couldn’t find another example of exactly this form of RSS feed “selective corruption”: has anyone seen or heard of this attack or can find it? And can anyone explain why?

What did I learn? I learned to listen to Chris and not make him mad.

I also found a bunch of useful WordPress security tips, resources, and plugins that might be useful to others including my future self:

• WordPress, remv.php and you
• 3 must apply security tips for WordPress
• Hardening WordPress
• 5 plugins to keep WordPress secure
• Anatomy of a WordPress hack (”The kicker? All these sites were on Dreamhost.”)
• Did your WordPress site get hacked?
• DreamHost: Troubleshooting hacked sites
• Dealing with a hacker on DreamHost
• Docs on WordPress feeds
• AskApache plugin to display all the internal WordPress URL rewrite rules (example use) (I couldn’t discern how to interpret the output)
• WordPress exploit scanner plugin (I didn’t use after this question spooked me)
• Secure WordPress plugin
• AskApache password protect plugin

Sunday I returned from a trip to Bangalore, India, where I gave a talk on “The Automated Economy” about how computers can and should take over the mechanical aspects of economic activity, optimizing and learning from data in the way people cannot, with detailed case studies in online advertising and prediction markets. You can read the abstract, watch archive video of the talk, view my talk slides, browse the official pictures of the event, or see my personal pictures of the trip.

Some say everything’s bigger in Texas (most vociferously Texans). They haven’t been to India. My talk is part of Yahoo!’s Big Thinkers India series — four talks a year from (so far) Yahoo! Research speakers. If the Thinking isn’t Big, the crowds certainly are — the events can draw close to 1000 attendees from, apparently, all over India. Duncan Watts says its the largest crowd he’s spoken too; me too. This time they disallowed Yahoo! employees to attend the main event and the hotel ballroom still filled to capacity.

Here is a linked-up version of my journal entry for the trip, a kind of windy and winded thank you letter to Bangalore. If you’re not interested in personal details, you might skip to Thoughts on Bangalore.

Getting there

The Philadelphia airport international terminal is dead empty. I breeze through security — the only one in line. I’m inside security two hours early thinking that either the recession is still in full force or traveling internationally on a Monday night out of Philadelphia is the best ever. Maybe not. Get on plane. Wait two hours on tarmac. Apparently a two hour layover isn’t enough leeway on international flights. Miss my connecting flight in Frankfurt by a few minutes. Team up with a fellow passenger in the same boat. We are rebooked via Dubai. Fly directly over Bagdad. Dubai is an impressive airport. Endless terminals lined with upscale shopping. Packed with Asians, Europeans at midnight and beyond. From there, Emerites Air to Bangalore. Only 9 hours behind schedule. Sneezing fits begin after 28 hours of airplane air.

Day 0: Yahoo! internal practice talk

Driver right there outside baggage claim, nice guy. Takes me to hotel. Over an hour. Traffic. Time for shower, NeilMed nasal rinses (bottled water), Sudafed, but not sleep. Call home. Yahoo! Messenger with Voice doesn’t roll off the tongue like ‘Skype’, but it rocks. Super clear and dirt cheap. Lauren and the girls are so sweet. Miss them. To Yahoo! office. Meet Anita, Mani. Time for Yahoo! internal version of Big Thinkers talk. Nose is still running. Drips and wipes during my talk. Talk goes well but I run out of time for prediction market section and this seems what people are most interested in. I’m glad I had the practice run to work out the kinks and rebalanced the talk. Back to hotel. Call home again for a recharging dose of home. I missed Ashley’s graduation from pre-school: she did great: they sang six songs and she knew them all. She was dressed up in a yellow cap and gown. I’m upset I had to miss such an adorable milestone but am proud of my little girl (and dismayed she is rapidly becoming not so little!). More NeilMed. Room service. (Called “private dining” here — sounds illicit.) Sleep! For a few hours at least. Wake up in the middle of the night since it’s NY daytime. Finally get back to sleep again.

Day 1: Meetings

Hard to wake up at 9am = midnight. Shower. Feel 1000% better. Driver takes me to the Yahoo! office. It’s in a complex with Microsoft, Google, Target, Dell, and many other US brands. Once you’re inside it’s like every other Yahoo! office except the food — built essentially to corporate spec. Meet with Anita, Raghu, and Rajeev: go over PR angles and they brief me on the media interviews. These guys and gal are on top of things. Meet with Mani and her team: great group. Skip intern pizza talks because I can’t eat cheese, going for the cafeteria instead. Mistake. Order a veggie grill thinking that since it’s grilled, it’s cooked enough. I only take a few bites of this before thinking it’s too risky. I eat some bread and Indian mixtures. Not sure what the culprit is but something doesn’t sit well in my stomach. Give prediction markets portion of my talk to a few interested people in labs. Very sharp group. Meet with Dinesh and Sachin, their intern, and one other. Interesting work. Meet with Chid and Preeti on Webscope. Back to hotel. Call Lauren. Good to hear her voice. Ashley wants to say hi. She’s so adorable. She finds it hilarious that I am about to have dinner while she is eating breakfast. I can hear her laughing uncontrollably at the thought. Sarah says hi too and even ends our conversation without prompting with a “bye, love you”. I go down to the restaurant for dinner. Have a chicken Indian dish with paratha (is it lachha paratha?) bread. Spicy (sweat inducing) yet so delicious. The bread is fantastic — round white with flaky layers. Back to room. TV. CNN. CNBC. ESPN. Hard to sleep. There is an incredible thunderstorm with torrents of rain. I open my balcony door briefly to catch its power. I find out later that monsoon season is just beginning. I also find out that it rained so hard and so long that the roads flooded to the point of becoming impassible. In fact, Anita, the Bangalore PR lead, had a near-disastrous experience in the rapidly flooding streets on her way home and had to turn back and check into a hotel before going home briefly in the morning and then back to Yahoo! for our am meeting. Finally get to sleep.

Day 2: My talk!

Hard to wake up at 8:30am too. Talk’s today! Nerves begin. Media interviews are first! Even worse. Turns out they went fine. Two nice/sharp reporters, especially the second one who really knows her stuff and spoke to us (Rajeev and I) for 1.5 hours. She’s especially interested in the prediction market stuff since that is something new. She may write two articles (for Business World India). Lunch, then a bit of time to rest and freshen up. Stomach is not doing well. Pepto to the rescue. Back down to lobby. They take my picture in the courtyard. Then into the ballroom. Miked. Soundchecked. They accept a final last minute change to my slides: hooray! Room starts filling. 100 people. 200. 300. Now 500. It’s time to start! Rajeev gives a very nice intro. I walk up the stairs onto the stage. I’m miked, in lights, speaking in front of 500 people expecting a Big Thinker. Here I go! “Four score and seven years…” Ha ha. Actually: “Thanks Rajeev, and thanks everyone for your time and attention. I am happy and honored to be here. I’m going to talk about trends in automation in the economy…”

65 minutes later “Thank you very much.” Applause. I think it went well: one of my better talks. I covered everything, including the prediction market stuff. It turns out, like at Yahoo!, and like the journalists, the audience is more interested in prediction markets than advertising. Lots of questions. Some I follow, some I can’t parse the words, others I hear the words but just don’t understand. I do my best. Several people mention they follow my blog: gratifying. After the official Q&A session ends, there is a line up of folks with questions or comments and business cards. It’s the closest I’ll ever be to a rock star. A handful of people wait patiently around me while I try to get to everyone. Eventually the PR folks rescue me and take me to a “high tea” event with Yahoo! Bangalore execs and some recruiting targets. Relief and euphoria kick in. It’s over. I talk with a number of people. I make my exit. Private dining. Call home. Lauren has explained to Ashley that I am on the other side of the world, so when she has the sun, I have the moon. So I can hear Ashley asking in the background, “does Daddy have the moon?” I do. She can’t stop laughing. A repeat of game 6 of the Stanley Cup is on Ten Sports India. I watch it, getting psyched for Game 7. I check online for Ten Sports schedule. Game 7 will be on at 5:30am! I can’t miss that! Set my alarm. Try to sleep. Can’t sleep. Try to sleep. Can’t sleep. Try with TV on. Can’t sleep. Try with TV off. Can’t sleep. Finally fall asleep… Alarm!

Day 3a: Penguins win the Stanley Cup!

Really hard to wake up at 5:30am. Actually maybe not quite as hard since it’s 8pm in my head. Game on! Nerves are racked up. Can’t sit down: bad luck. Pacing. No score first period. Tons of commercials, all for Ten Sports programming: wrestling, cricket, tennis. Every commercial repeats three times. Is period two coming? Yes, it’s back on! Pens score first! Fist pumping and muted cheering. Can they really do this? No sitting rule in full effect. Pacing. Pens score again! Talbot second goal. Wow, is this real? Can it be? Don’t think about it yet. Don’t celebrate to soon. Plenty of time left. Period two end at 2-0. Unbelievable. All the same commercials come back, three times each. Period three begins. Stand up. Pace. Clock ticks. Pens are playing too defensive: not taking shots, just throwing the puck out of their zone. This isn’t good. Detroit is getting tons of chances. Fleury is awesome. Five minutes left. I let myself think about winning the cup. Mistake! Detroit scores! It’s 2-1! Nerves are ratcheted up beyond ratcheting. I think about it all slipping away. How awful that would feel. If Detroit ties it up, imagine the let down, the blown opportunity. Clock ticks. More chances. More saves. More defense. It’s working! Detroit pulls their goalie. Pressure. Final seconds. Faceoff in our zone. Detroit wins control. Shot. Rebound. Right to a Red Wing — Nick Lidstrom — in perfect position. He shoots. Fleury swings around. He saves it! It’s over! Pens win the Cup! Super fist pumping, jumping around, dancing, muted cheering. They did it! How amazing it feels after last year’s loss to the same team. After falling behind 2-0 and 3-2 in the series. They came back! A delicious payback with the same but opposite script as last year: a two goal lead cut in half in the waning minutes, a flurry of attempts at the end including a few-inch miss of the tying goal in the last seconds. These guys are young and have the potential to rule hockey for several years if they’re lucky. Mario Lemieux is on the ice. How sweet. Twice as player, now as owner, the one who saved hockey in Pittsburgh. What a year for Pittsburgh sports! Two nail biter games, two comebacks, two championships. City of Champions again. Too bad the Pirates have no shot to join them in a trifecta. Back to sleep.

Day 3b: Sightseeing

Phone rings at 11am — my driver is here. Off to do some whirlwind sightseeing. Everyone here who finds out I have a day off recommends I leave Bangalore — Bangalore is just not that nice, nothing really to see, they say. They all recommend Mysore, 3.5 hours away, but that is too far for my comfort level given that my flight is late tonight and it’s supposed to thunderstorm. We start with some souvenir shopping on “MG Road”. My driver takes me to a store and waits in the car outside. I walk in an instantly there are people greeting me and showing me things. One aggressive man takes over and remains my “tour guide” through the whole store. The fact that I reward his aggressiveness by following along and eventually buying stuff will only bolster him to do more of the same in the future. Annoying but clearly it works. I do negotiate him down, but I leave still feeling I didn’t bargain hard enough and with a bit of distaste in my mouth that I fueled and validated the pushy tactics. Next we drive past parliament and the courthouse. Impressive, large, old buildings. But I can just gaze and take photos from the car — can’t go inside. Next we drive past Cubbon Park — tree lined paths and flower gardens in center city. Next is ISKCON temple. But it’s closed. So one more round of shopping at a place called Cottage Industries. I’m wary given the last experience, but go anyway. This one is better. Again one person escorts me around but I feel less pressure. Plus I’m more prepared to say no and negotiate harder. I leave with what seems like a fair amount of value in goods. I recommend Cottage Industries to future visitors: more professional, more familiar (items have price tags), lower pressure, greater variety, and higher quality than at least the first shop I visited. Now we’ve killed enough time and the ISKCON temple is open. It’s a giant Hare Krishna temple. The parking lot is full. I tell the driver it’s ok — we don’t need to go. He says “you go, you go”. “Ok” I say. We drive around again to the same full parking lot. The attendant waves at us to leave, blowing a whistle. My driver is talking to him. They are talking quite heatedly. The attendant in his official looking uniform is waving us on vigorously. Although I can’t understand the words, he is clearly telling us the lot is full and we must leave immediately — we are holding up traffic. My driver is getting more insistent. They are yelling back and forth. I have no idea what he says but it works. The guard let’s us in. Meanwhile another car sees our success and tries to argue his way in too but to no avail. I ask my driver what he said: he simply replies “don’t talk”. Indeed once we’re in, there is an empty spot. We put all my bags in my suitcase in the trunk and cover my backpack. We take off our shoes and my driver leads me to the temple. He knows the back entrance and is guiding me to cut in front of lines everywhere. We walk past the main attraction: the altar with some people on the floor worshiping. Then the line weaves past a gift shop of course: I buy a crazy looking book (Easy Journey to Other Planets). We need to kill some time. We go to the gardens again to walk around. We walk into the public library. Most books are in English. Most seem old and worn. The attendant says the library is 110 years old. We start walking through the garden but I am paranoid about mosquitoes/malaria so we turn around early to return to the car. We go to UB City where I meet Rajeev. It’s a thoroughly modern office tower half owned by Kingfisher of Kingfisher Airlines. The building is full of high-end shopping like almost any upscale western mall with all the same brands. Here is the Apple Store. Here is Louis Vuitton. We have dinner at an Italian restaurant that could be anywhere in the western world, owned by an Italian expat. The only seating is outside and I remain worried about mosquitoes but don’t see any. The food is good and the conversation is good. This place is the closest I’ve seen of the future of Bangalore. In the center of town, a gorgeous building filled with gleaming shops and tantalizing restaurants and bars, with apartments and condos within walking distance, and a palm-tree-lined street leading to the central town circle and the park. As Rajeev says, though, whereas New York has hundreds of similar scenes, Bangalore has one. For now.

Thoughts on Bangalore

Bangalore is a city of jarring contradictions, a hard-to-fathom mix of modernity and poverty. Signs with professional logos and familiar brands are set askew on dilapidated shacks and garages lining the road. While many live on dollars and day and others beg, the majority are smartly dressed (men invariably in button-down shirts), have mobile phones, and are intelligent and friendly. There are gleaming office towers indistinguishable from their western counterparts, yet a strong rain can flood the roads to the point of become impassible for hours and day-long blackouts aren’t uncommon. Many billboards are in English, sporting familiar brands and messages. Others, like sexy stars promoting a Bollywood film, are entirely familiar, English or not. Others are impenetrable. Still another advertises a phone number to learn why Obama quoted the Koran.

BMWs and Toyotas join bikes, motorcycles, pedestrians, aging trucks and buses, and colorful open-air motorized rickshaws in a sea of disorganized line-ignoring sign-ignoring traffic. People drive here the way New Yorkers walk sidewalks: weaving past one another in a noisy self-organized tangle that somehow — mostly — works. You can eat outside in a restaurant bar next to upscale shops, a fountain, and smiling yuppies, yet worry that a malaria-infected mosquito lurks nearby or that a washed vegetable will turn a western-coddled stomach deathly ill. When two people ride a motorcycle, as is common, only the driver wears a helmet — the passenger clinging on behind does not: new and old rules on display atop a single vehicle. And the traffic. Oh, the traffic. Roads are clogged nearly every hour of every day. My Saturday of sightseeing was as bad or worse than weekday rush hour. The extent of congestion itself illustrates Bangalore’s two faces: so many people with youth (India is one of the youngest countries in the world), energy, purpose, and the means and intelligence to accomplish it overtaxing a primitive infrastructure. Buildings are going up according to western specs, but under old-time rules where corruption reins and bribery is an accepted fact of life by even the western-educated aspirational class (about 20% and growing, according to Rajeev).

Thoughts on Yahoo! Labs Bangalore

The folks I met are impressive. Rajeev has done a great job hiring talented, driven folks. Mani’s group of research engineers is fantastic. One is headed to Berkeley for grad school and asks great questions about CentMail. Another proposes an attack on Pictcha. Another (Rahul Agrawal) has read up deeply on prediction markets, including Hanson’s LMSR.

Thoughts on the Yahoo! Big Thinkers India program

The whole event was organized to precision. Anita, the PR lead, was incredible. I especially appreciated the extra “above and beyond” touches like having someone pick up Yahoo! India schwag for my family and send it to my hotel after I forgot: so nice. Raghu, who arranged the media interviews, is supremely organized and on top of his game. The fact that the event draws such a large crowd shows that there is great thirst for events like this in Bangalore. I’m not sure whose idea it is, but it’s a brilliant one: great marketing and great for recruiting.

Thank you Bangalore

In sum, thanks to the people of Bangalore for a fascinating and rewarding trip. Thanks to Rahul at the travel desk whose instant replies about the driver arrangements calmed my nerves on the stressful day of my departure. Thanks to the Yahoo! folks who arranged and organized my talk, and the Yahoo! Labs members for seeding an exceptional science organization. Thanks to my driver who got me everywhere — including into full parking lots, back entrances, and fronts of lines — with efficiency, safety, and a smile (when I tipped him, I tried to think wwsd: what would Sharad do). Thanks to those who attending my talk and whom I met afterward: it’s gratifying and invigorating to see your level of interest and enthusiasm (and your numbers). And thanks Bangalore chefs for keeping any stomach upset relatively mild and brief.

At the airport on the way out, the flight is overbooked and they are offering close to US$1000 plus hotel to leave tomorrow. Not a chance. It’s been fun and an adventure but my nerves are on high and I miss my family: it’s time to make the 20+ hour journey home.