attractive nuisance

JavaScript: the good parts
by Douglas Crockford
Published 15 Nov 2008

That discipline makes it much easier to find the unintentional fall throughs. The worst features of a language aren't the features that are obviously dangerous or useless. Those are easily avoided. The worst features are the attractive nuisances, the features that are both useful and dangerous. B.6. Block-less Statements An if or while or do or for statement can take a block or a single statement. The single statement form is another attractive nuisance. It offers the advantage of saving two characters, a dubious advantage. It obscures the program's structure so that subsequent manipulators of the code can easily insert bugs. For example: if (ok) t = true; can become: if (ok) t = true; advance( ); which looks like: if (ok) { t = true; advance( ); } but which actually means: if (ok) { t = true; } advance( ); Programs that appear to do one thing but actually do another are much harder to get right.

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JavaScript contains a large set of weak or problematic features that can undermine our attempts to write good programs. We should obviously avoid JavaScript's worst features. Surprisingly, perhaps, we should also avoid the features that are often useful but occasionally hazardous. Such features are attractive nuisances, and by avoiding them, a large class of potential errors is avoided. The long-term value of software to an organization is in direct proportion to the quality of the codebase. Over its lifetime, a program will be handled by many pairs of hands and eyes. If a program is able to clearly communicate its structure and characteristics, it is less likely to break when it is modified in the never-too-distant future.

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
by Michael P. Lynch
Published 21 Mar 2016

The NSA programs are dangerous to democracy even if we assume that their architects were motivated by the best of intentions—as no doubt many of them were. Roads to unpleasant places are frequently paved with the sweetest of intentions. The NSA database could be described as a pool of information. This is an apt metaphor. In law, swimming pools are called attractive nuisances. They attract children and, as a result, if you own a pool, even if you are a watchful, responsible parent yourself, you still have to put up a fence. Similarly, even if we can trust that the architects of the NSA’s various programs had no intention of abusing the information they are collecting about American citizens, the pool of information could easily prove irresistible.

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Academia.edu, 135 accuracy, 14, 27–31, 39–40, 44–45, 130 of data searches, 163 sacrificed for a “noble lie,” 78–80, 82 Achilles, 13 actionable information, defined, 14 Affordable Care Act, 122–23 Afghanistan War, 137 Agarwal, Anant, 150 Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, The, 77 “aha” moments, 175, 176 AIDS, 198 airport body scans, 108, 109 Alexandria, library of, 8 Amazing Stories, 41 Amazon, 9, 80–81, 136, 141 tracking by, 90, 97, 105 Amherst University, 152 Anderson, Chris, 156–60, 182 “animal” knowledge, 131 answer “cards,” 66 AnswersinGenesis.org, 48 anterograde amnesia, 168–69 Apple, 77 a priori beliefs, 47 Arabic language, 81 Arab Spring, 66 architecture, as analogy for structure of knowledge, 126–28 “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” (Bostrom), 193 Aristotle, 171 artificial intelligence (AI), 116, 176 assassinations, 83 assumptions, in data analysis, 162 attractive nuisances, 98 authority: appeals to, 60–61 in educational models, 151 evaluation of, 62 questioning of, 34, 61–62 trust in, 34 automobiles, information technology compared to, xvii–xviii, 11–12, 180 autonomy: of decision, 102–4 democratic respect for, 58, 59–63, 101–7 privacy and, 89–109 of thought, 33–34, 39, 63, 147–48 threat to, 4, 102–7, 147, 187 Bacon, Francis, 9 Barnes and Noble, 9 BCIs, 191–92 Beck, Harry, 112–13 beliefs: anchoring of, 131–32 architecture of, 126–27, 129–30 assuming responsibility for, 6 capacity for change of, 53–54 collective, 117–18, 200 democratic encouragement of diverse, 60–61 faith-based, 47–48 justification for, 14–16, 128–32, 148 networks of, 128–32 private vs. public, 60–61 as receptive states of mind, 27 reinforcement of one’s own, 7, 43, 45–46, 49–50, 51–52, 54–55, 56, 61, 63; see also confirmation bias socially embedded, 116 undesired, 198 Bentham, Jeremy, 91, 92, 97 Berkeley, George, 68–69 Berlin Monthly, 58 Bible, 48, 49, 61, 66 big data: analysis in, see data analysis, data analytics definitions of, 8–9, 156 in digital form of life, 155–78 hyperconnectivity of, 184–88 limitations of, 183 mining of, see data mining participants in, 111–32 political economy of knowledge in, 133–54 privacy and autonomy issues of, 89–109 Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier), 8 “big data hubris,” 183 big knowledge, 155–63 “big man” theory, 162 Big Oil, 9 Bing, 30 blogs, blogosphere, 8, 24, 55, 65, 113, 118 Bloom, Paul, 54 Bloustein, Edward J., 101–2 Boden, Margaret, 176 Borges, Jorge Luis, 17, 44 Boston Marathon bombing, 31 Bostrom, Nick, 20, 193 bots, see socialbots Brabham, Daren, 136, 142 Brain in the Vat thought experiment, 18–20 brain-to-brain communication, 192 brainwashing, 102 Brandeis, Louis, 89–90, 94, 101 Brin, Sergey, 186 British Petroleum, 118 British Royal Society, 34 Bruner, J.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
by Cory Doctorow
Published 15 Sep 2008

This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold's voting machines division). The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what doesn't is wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws, creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed in a tangible medium" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking infinite.

Forever Free
by Joe Haldeman
Published 14 Oct 2000

The DON'T FEED THE FISH sign gave me an idea. I found Waldo Everest, who confirmed that the fish were fed a measured amount each day, and he agreed to go along with my plan: make the children responsible for actually scattering the feed. So the aquaculture pools would be their workplace, rather than a forbidden "attractive nuisance." I'd never heard of that phrase until Cat used it. Describes some people well. There were three shallow rice paddies which also were home to thousands of crayfish, not quite big enough for the menu yet. About half the floor area was given over to fast-growing grains, fish food. This floor smelled best to me, a whiff of the sea along with green growing things.

Leave the World Behind
by Rumaan Alam
Published 15 Dec 2020

The house was obscured by a sculpted hedgerow, someone’s pride, like a snowbank, like a wall. The front yard was bound by a picket fence, white, not a trace of irony in it. There was another fence, this one wood and wire, around the pool, which made the insurance more affordable, and also the home’s owners knew that sometimes deer strayed into attractive nuisances, and if you were away for a couple of weeks, the stupid thing would drown, swell, explode, a horrifying mess. Clay fetched the key. Amanda stood in the astonishing, humid afternoon, listening to that strange sound of almost quiet that she missed, or claimed she missed, because they lived in the city.

The Scientist as Rebel
by Freeman Dyson
Published 1 Jan 2006

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and Dennett’s are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply felt that ANY attempt to restrict the expression of his users was unconstitutional and immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance. Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto," Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. "Emmanuel Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with "Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.

Atrocity Archives
by Stross, Charles
Published 13 Jan 2004

The Yanks did, which was why they weren't letting her go, but they seem to have changed their minds in view of the security threat. She's not a US citizen and they've got her research findings; interesting, but nothing fundamentally revolutionary. Furthermore, with enough information about her out in the public domain to attract nuisances like the Izzadin al-Qassem hangers-on who tried to snatch her in Santa Cruz, they don't much want her around anymore. Which is why she's over here, in the Laundry and under wraps. They didn't simply deport her, they asked us to take care of her." "If it's not fundamentally revolutionary research, why are we interested in her?"

Saturn's Children
by Charles Stross
Published 30 Jun 2008

But there have been political problems in recent times, and unwelcome incursions. Grave robbers and genome bandits hoping to find undamaged chromosomal material with their vital sa-RNA and si-RNA sequences intact—even undenatured enzymes—have repeatedly tried to steal the buried mummies of Mars. The graves of heroes have become an attractive nuisance, a magnet for the worst of our kind. The sextons responded by defending it obsessively, in that very special manner that makes ancient and deranged arbeiters with no override so dangerous. I pass the first impaled skeletons fifty meters in. There are two of them, delicately threaded onto rust-reddened spikes to either side of the gravel path, just before a flight of steps that leads up to a carved waist-high stone balustrade and the first row of tombs.

Jennifer Morgue
by Stross, Charles
Published 12 Jan 2006

She steers me past the bar and into the outer room, past the jazz butchers. There are French doors open on the balcony. Where's Ramona? I worry. She wasn't in the back room, she's not here ... "For obvious reasons we don't make it too easy to reach the chief," Johanna murmurs. "When you're as rich as the Billingtons it makes you a target. Money is an attractive nuisance. We're currently tracking six stalkers and three blackmailers, and that's before you count the third-world governments. We've got enough schizophrenics to fill one-point-four psychiatric hospitals, plus an average of two-point-six marriage proposals and eleven-point-one death threats per week, and a federal antitrust investigation which is worse than all of them combined."

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
by Ted Conover
Published 20 Jan 2010

Almost always, I had to stop at the cell of Larson. “You chasin’ away my company again, Conover?” Shooing inmates away from the cell of my most popular keeplock was a never-ending job. All sorts of inmates liked to lean on the bars of R-29 cell and talk, talk, talk. Larson was, as I liked to tell him, an “attractive nuisance.” “What do you mean?” “It’s lawyer talk—like a swimming pool with no fence around it; little kids come by and fall in.” “Conover!” Larson feigned offense. “I know—nobody’s drowning here. But why does everybody want to talk to you?” Larson, tall and slope-shouldered, with long, braided hair, was sitting on his bunk as usual.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
by Betsy Beyer , Chris Jones , Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy
Published 15 Apr 2016

Monitoring Monitoring may have only three output types: Pages A human must do something now Tickets A human must do something within a few days Logging No one need look at this output immediately, but it’s available for later analysis if needed If it’s important enough to bother a human, it should either require immediate action (i.e., page) or be treated as a bug and entered into your bug-tracking system. Putting alerts into email and hoping that someone will read all of them and notice the important ones is the moral equivalent of piping them to /dev/null: they will eventually be ignored. History demonstrates this strategy is an attractive nuisance because it can work for a while, but it relies on eternal human vigilance, and the inevitable outage is thus more severe when it happens. Postmortems Postmortems (see Chapter 15) should be blameless and focus on process and technology, not people. Assume the people involved in an incident are intelligent, are well intentioned, and were making the best choices they could given the information they had available at the time.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

In effect they built their society on an ethnic division of labor, a sign of their own distaste for and superiority to trade and crafts. This segmentation opened enterprise to a few, but impeded its extension. In despotisms, it is dangerous to be rich without power. So in Turkey: capital accumulation proved an attractive nuisance. It aroused cupidity and invited seizure. Over time, the size of the Ottoman empire grew to cover all the Muslim Middle East (including Syria and Iraq), all of North Africa (including Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers), and a large chunk of southeast Europe plus lands around the Black Sea. This congeries of opportunistic acquisitions could not be administered uniformly.

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas
Published 28 Feb 2012

Brewery town, in whose stables were the brewers’ big horses, was not far away. Only a relatively short way out Fairmont Avenue was the park itself, with the trolley, the zoo, the views of the destruction of Pompeii left from the Centennial Exposition, and railroad tracks with standing freight cars and other attractive nuisances to deal with. We were chased from time to time by what we called railroad dicks, always more exciting to run from than mere cops. The summer jobs that Anna chose for her son were designed to expand his contacts as well as help pay family expenses. Through her wealthy Philadelphia clients, she was able to get work for him as a chore boy at the fashionable resorts and camps of the Adirondacks.

Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House
by Cheryl Mendelson
Published 4 Nov 1999

Or if you know, or should know, that a limited part of your land is habitually used by trespassers—perhaps passers-by often take a short cut across one end of your yard—you might have to make the area safe or warn the trespassers about any dangers. If the trespasser is a child, you face a greater risk of liability, especially if the child was drawn to your property by an “attractive nuisance,” such as a pond or high tower or some fascinating machine. If you had reason to know that children were likely to trespass and also knew, or should have known, that on your property or in your home there was a dangerous condition such as a swimming pool or swimming hole or a piece of dangerous machinery that is accessible and fascinating to children, and you failed to take reasonable steps to protect the children, you would face a likelihood of being found liable if some unhappy accident befell a child.

Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann

Only when all else fails do you even need to consider trying for any other type of attack (and even then, after you’ve slept on it, go back the following day and have another look just in case there was something there that you’d missed originally) 84. This extreme brittleness was the problem that more or less killed real-world use of the RC4 cipher. RC4 presented an incredibly attractive nuisance because it was the perfect algorithm for non crypt-expert developers to use to encrypt data, transforming an arbitrary-length string into an equal-length block of ciphertext85, which no other commonly-used algorithm does because they all require special data formatting or the use of additional cryptovariables in order to do their job.