Posts Tagged ‘biography’

An Insight into the mind of a former deviant

April 30th, 2010

The title is scraped from the link text I used to describe an article I wrote in 2004, during my first semester of college. I think I did it to satisfy a creative writing class assignment, only it wasn’t particularly creative since it was true. Reading it now, I take particular pleasure in the bits about “violently opposing” government intrusions into the internet. (I miss youthful indignation, self-righteousness, and the joys of masquerading as a rebel.)

It is also poetic in a semi-tragic way that, within a few weeks after writing this and resolving to “make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile,” I was diagnosed with cancer. It’s been nearly six years, but it looks like I might soon start making good on that promise.

The following is copied verbatim from the internet archives of that article.

Understanding the spammer

By A Former Spammer

As a spammer, I never gave much thought as to what I was actually doing. My world was filled with statistics describing my latest spam campaign and the zeros to be inscribed on my check. I did not consider the work I was doing to be damaging to anyone because as a spammer you do not see the human aspect of things.

My average day would begin around 1:00pm. I would lazily wake up and stumble to my computer to determine what I had earned overnight. This startling effort on my part was followed by breakfast while watching the afternoon presentation of Law and Order and the occasional shower.

Eventually, after my lethargy subsided, I would get to work. Contrary to the popular perception, spammers do work hard. My goal was to make money by deceiving internet service providers who have a bigger bankroll than I did. I had do be both clever and unethical. Luckily, I had every advantage. Receiving a few messages about enlarging your respective body parts is considered a far lesser evil than not delivering that message from your stockbroker about shorting AOL Time Warner.

After coding for a few hours and trying a few minor changes on my messages, the message would eventually get through and I would exploit it until my computers would groan from exhaustion. After that, it would be time to reboot, load another mailing list, and spam some more.

While the computers continued to churn out my utterly misleading messages, I had the delight of dealing with other spammers so I can keep propagating my unsolicited and generally useless product. At first glance, spammers seem to have an innate friendliness towards each other but it is completely superficial. You have to manage to get the resource you are seeking from someone who perceives you as a further source of cash. Spammers will mislead spammers just as the mislead the Send To recipient. There is no honor among thieves.

Eventually, I would get my new mailing or proxy list and the whole process would start again. I had a routine and my bank account went up in cartoonist intervals.

If it is not already apparent, this is quite a job of a seventeen year old to have. My friends were all slaving away at the local McDonalds while I was sitting in my air-conditioned bedroom eating grapes in my boxer shorts. They were making minimum wage, I was making thousands a week. Also something to keep in mind, I was a mediocre spammer.

Understand, the majority of spammers enter the industry because it is so simple and for a decent programmer the entry cost is near zero. One of my first spam exploits utilized a popular web-based messaging service and twenty free http proxies resulting in $7,000 profit in a mere two weeks. What incentive did I have to stop?

Well, I am nineteen now and I no longer spam but I can tell you I still had no real incentive to stop other than my maturation. I no longer want to make money; instead, I want to make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile. Something ethical. This is by no means a message of hope to the internet community. No one should be so ignorant to state the spam problem will just work its way out or reach some type of equilibrium. Spam will not go away until one important criterion is reached; reduce the profit margin made by spam. Government regulation is not the answer. The internet started as a great democracy and I will violently oppose any attempt to remove this system. This is important to keep in mind considering the recent legislations passed by the United States government. The internet community coupled with good programmers and willing consumers can prevail in the war on spam. Ironically, I am now fighting on the side of the white hats.

Signing my name to something for the first time,
John B Nelson

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Posted in Introspection

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Why I Blog

April 29th, 2010

Sometime last year, I had started maintaining email correspondence with a number of people from a diverse set of professions. Whenever I had an idea or a question that I was unable to fully flesh out or answer myself, I would find someone who was an “expert” on the topic and email them. Initially, I received replies, but they were terse. Courtesy dictated that they answer — especially those at academic institutions – but they felt no obligation to continue the conversation.1

As time progressed, my messages became more finely crafted. My questions were more specific and the background material was assembled with more clarity. I learned to write better.2 The act of writing diligently was in and of itself helpful, and writing with a critical reader in mind imposed diligence. I now offered value to the recipient, whereas before I was at best a nuisance. My ideas and alleged insights were at least well-formed, albeit not always novel. The recipients began to answer out of interest instead of obligation. The correspondence ceased to be one-sided — now, I had conversations and debates. At the point when I started BCC’ing people, I realized it would simply be easier to continue in blog format. Instead of updating a few people with a follow up email, they could just revisit the post and look for edits or comments; instead of emailing the same group of people every time I had a new idea, they could just add me to their Google Reader.

Like many nerds, I have attempted to create many blogs. (A small set, limited only by those I can recall instantly, includes: JustLikeJesse, ChasingSparks, jbn, and JohnBNelson.) Previously, I started blogging motivated by either AdSense or vanity — I wanted either money or attention or both. My interest in blogging waned shortly after the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” post and immediately before I found anything interesting to say. This blog, PathDependent, is the only blog of mine that has not floundered after one week — and it’s the only one where money and fame were never motivators.

Assuming I write reasonably well, my blog posts get attention. Attention by itself is useless at best while attention with comments is very valuable. There are limits to what I see in my own writing and thought processes. An idea may have such appeal to me that I completely ignore very relevant, seemingly tangential details — or major mistakes. Commenters — especially those that I do not know and thus have no requirement of politeness given anonymous commenting — have become unit testers for my ideas. Without commenters — private or public — I would not maintain this blog.

I blog because it helps me learn.

Notes:

  1. Looking back, many of the emails resembled a parent handling a child who persisted in recursive “but why?” conversations. I’m almost embarrased by some of the messages.
  2. HackerNews is probably more responsible for improving my writing than anything else. Conversation threads with karma acts like a unit test framework for ideas expressed in English.
  3. I am defining success in terms of how it helps me explore ideas. The metric I use to judge success is the number of email messages elicited by each post.  I usually get a handful per-post now. While my traffic stats are beyond my expectations, traffic is valuable only insofar as it improves the odds of good feedback.

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Posted in Introspection, Observation

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Perpetual Motion, Hacking, and the Contemporary Philospher’s Stone

October 29th, 2009

Perpetual Motion

At age thirteen, I invented a perpetual motion device. Obviously, I was a genius. Recognizing the magnitude of my discovery, I decided to patent the machine in order to capture the associated rewards. Years of groping through Popular Science magazine — it was my pre-pubescent version of pornography — meant I knew where to find patent lawyers: pages -1 through page -5.

Excitedly, I called the patent attorney that seemed to be the most affordable. I confidently declared that I had invented a perpetual motion machine and required a patent. The attorney did not seem impressed. Apparently, I was not the first person to try and patent a perpetual motion device. In hindsight,  I am willing to bet that patent attorneys who advertise with Popular Science magazine are continuously flooded with similar claims. After signaling irritation that was detectable even to a thirteen year old, she informed me that she would send the requisite forms but could not proceed without a fully functional prototype to submit as evidence. Apparently, this guy named Newton did not think perpetual motion was possible, so the patent office was not very liberal in awarding patents for such inventions (anymore).

I proceeded immediately. First, I spent my accumulated birthday money on magnets from Edmund’s Scientific. Next, I used K’NEX to build the scaffolding for a ring of magnets that would surround the central magnetic rotor. When the magnets arrived, I hastily lashed them to my plastic toys and and let ‘er rip. The magnet slowly swung around before settling in at the weakest point of the rings magnetic field.

Frustrated, I retrenched and thought about what had gone wrong. I was able to deduce that the magnetic fields of the independent magnets become part of a system when joined with the other magnets. They would not independently push the rotor — it didn’t work like that. However, committed to my brilliance, I thought of various ways to work around the problem such as using the momentum of half-filled water canisters to overcome the “humps”. Obviously, I did not overturn the laws of the universe. My idea may have been naive, but I learned a lot about systems while enjoying the exhilaration of experimentation. This experience may have had a major impact on my life.

Hacking

When I was young (before my attempt at overturning the laws of the universe), I asked my father to help me learn how to program. Since these were the days of DOS and Norton Commander, QBasic was to be my playground. Although I learned basic programming logic, I did not progress far enough to be capable of implementing a Gorrillas clone. Sadly, given my age, I enjoyed the instantaneous rewards associated with sports more than the personal satisfaction offered by solving problems with computers. My growth as a programmer was arrested.

Then came the movie Hacker’s. Hacker’s resurrected my interest in programming. Hacker’s — with the help of a young Angelina Jolie — gave programming sex appeal. It became my ambition to become ‘Cereal Killer’ (seriously, Zero Cool/Crash Override was boring).

This happened to be the same era of AOL ‘proggies’ and ICQ. For about six months, a friend and I ran a site called The Digital Underground that was a AOL themed repository while also releasing our own 133t apps. We were cool. We knew it.

That lasted for at most nine months. That is roughly the intellectual half-life of VB, even to a young programmer. I left that world behind and ventured out to C, C++,  and Python. Using better tools, I made applications that were reasonably complex and much more rewarding: spam-bots.

Now, I was a h4×0r. Around freshman year of high school, I was making 1-2k a week working after school. This was when I started hating school. Partially because my after-school work was much more intellectually challenging and mostly because I was making “bank”.

Fortunately, my career in spam was not to be. After a little more than a year, my parents had caught on — they did not approve. This shifted my efforts to a more worthwhile and exponentially more challenging arena: markets.

The Contemporary Philosopher’s Stone

I think reading Matt Ridley’s, The Origins of Virtue, in 9th grade seeded my intellectual development (thanks, Mr. Ridley). I became fasinated with complex systems like Conway’s Game of Life, Rule 30, ants, and Axelrod. Nothing was more interesting to me than Cellular Automata, ANN’s, PSO, and genetic algorithms. Soon, I realized there was a potentially practical application. With spamming out of the way, I now combined all my interests: programming, complex systems, and trying to do the supposedly impossible. I set out to beat the market.

This is not a huge leap from my past projects. There are strong parallels between perpetual motion and trying to overcome the efficient market hypothesis. And, just like with past projects, my efforts led to procuring new tools. At various stages in the past eight years (I am still pursuing this path), I have become proficient or better in ASM x86, C, C++, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Erlang, PHP (front-end), Pascal, and Haskell. I have reproduced many popular financial models while trying to understand and improve them. This was all far more rigorous than that I was being exposed to in school (undergrad) at the time.

This brings me to now. I have spent the past 8 years trying to come up with an algorithm that finds pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness. This has given me what I believe is a powerful understanding of complex systems. Complex systems modeled on computers have become my contemporary Legos — and, I want to play all day long.

In all likelihood, I will not make a breakthrough discovery. The fog that is my ambition may be obscuring reality. I am exploring an alternate area of the landscape of solutions. I may be hill-climbing a local unexplored minima — but hold out because of the potential for maxima. However, f*ck it. I want to spend my time doing what I enjoy most.

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Posted in Introspection

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