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Tuesday, October 17, 21:23 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I noticed recently that Nima Arkani-Hamed was giving a talk at Cornell, with the title Three Cheers For “Shut Up And Calculate!” In Fundamental Physics. No idea whether or not video is now or will become available. From the abstract … Continue reading →

Tuesday, October 17, 17:18 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, October 17, 16:23 UTC @ Backreaction

I’ve had many interesting reactions to my recent post about inflation, this idea that the early universe expanded exponentially and thereby flattened and smoothed itself. The maybe most interesting response to my pointing out that inflation doesn’t solve the problems it was invented to solve is a flabbergasted: “But everyone else says it does.” Not like I don’t know that. But, yes, most people

Tuesday, October 17, 16:23 UTC @ Backreaction

I’ve had many interesting reactions to my recent post about inflation, this idea that the early universe expanded exponentially and thereby flattened and smoothed itself. The maybe most interesting response to my pointing out that inflation doesn’t solve the problems it was invented to solve is a flabbergasted: “But everyone else says it does.” Not like I don’t know that. But, yes, most people

Tuesday, October 17, 14:47 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Quantum computing is at the threshold of tackling important problems that cannot be efficiently or practically computed by other, more classical means. Getting past this threshold will require us to build, test and operate reliable quantum computers with 50 or more qubits. Achieving this potential will require major leaps forward in both science and engineering. […] The post Quantum Computing: Brea

Tuesday, October 17, 14:20 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Studies of the energy-harvesting proteins in primitive cells suggest that key features of photosynthesis might have evolved a billion years earlier than scientists thought.

Tuesday, October 17, 14:14 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, October 17, 14:08 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 232# Comments: 292 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier

Tuesday, October 17, 14:01 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 12:57 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 12:11 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“This is going to have a bigger impact on science and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves. We’re going to be puzzling over the observations we’ve made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come.” -Duncan Brown Detecting black holes and the gravitational wave signals from them…

Tuesday, October 17, 10:00 UTC @ Swift.org

This post describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.1. Swift 4.1 is a source compatible update to Swift 4.0. It will contain a few additive enhancements to the core language as well as improvements to the Swift Package Manager, Swift on Linux, and general quality improvements to the compiler and Standard Library. Swift 4.1 is not binary compatible with 4.0. It contains a variety of under-the-hood changes that are part of the effort to

Tuesday, October 17, 08:44 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Tuesday, October 17, 07:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 05:33 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 04:13 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

Assuming a conjectural upper bound for the least prime in an arithmetic progression, we show that n-bit integers may be multiplied in O(n log n 4^(log^* n)) bit operations.

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we study the algebraic formula complexity of multiplying $d$ many $2\times 2$ matrices, denoted $\mathrm{IMM}_{d}$, and show that the well-known divide-and-conquer algorithm cannot be significantly improved at any depth, as long as the formulas are multilinear. Formally, for each depth $\Delta \leq \log d$, we show that any product-depth $\Delta$ multilinear formula for $\mathrm{IMM}_d$ must have size $\exp(\Omega(\Delta d^{1/\Delta})).$ It also follows from this that any multiline

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

A parallel algorithm for maximal independent set (MIS) in hypergraphs has been a long-standing algorithmic challenge, dating back nearly 30 years to a survey of Karp & Ramachandran (1990). Despite its apparent simplicity, there have been no general sub-polynomial-time algorithms or hardness reductions. The best randomized parallel algorithm for hypergraphs of fixed rank $r$ was developed by Beame & Luby (1990) and Kelsen (1992), running in time roughly $(\log n)^{r!}$. The key probabilistic tool

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based approach for estimating local 3D shape properties in point clouds. In contrast to the majority of prior techniques that concentrate on global or mid-level attributes, e.g., for shape classification or semantic labeling, we suggest a patch-based learning method, in which a series of local patches at multiple scales around each point is encoded in a structured manner. Our approach is especially well-adapted for estimating local shape properties such as normal

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We prove that deciding whether the Runner can win this turn (mate-in-1) in the Netrunner card game generalized to allow decks to contain an arbitrary number of copies of a card is weakly NP-hard. We also prove that deciding whether the Corp can win within two turns (mate-in-2) in this generalized Netrunner is weakly NP-hard.

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We consider the problem of quantum state certification, where one is given $n$ copies of an unknown $d$-dimensional quantum mixed state $\rho$, and one wants to test whether $\rho$ is equal to some known mixed state $\sigma$ or else is $\epsilon$-far from $\sigma$. The goal is to use notably fewer copies than the $\Omega(d^2)$ needed for full tomography on $\rho$ (i.e., density estimation). We give two robust state certification algorithms: one with respect to fidelity using $n = O(d/\epsilon)$ copies, a

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We present the Multi-vAlue Rule Set (MARS) model for interpretable classification with feature efficient presentations. MARS introduces a more generalized form of association rules that allows multiple values in a condition. Rules of this form are more concise than traditional single-valued rules in capturing and describing patterns in data. MARS mitigates the problem of dealing with continuous features and high-cardinality categorical features faced by rule-based models. Our formulation also pursues a h

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we introduce a generalized asymmetric fronts propagation model based on the geodesic distances and Eikonal partial differential equations. One of the key ingredients for the computation of the geodesic distances is the geodesic metrics, which can govern the action of the geodesic distance propagation. We consider a Finsler metric with the Randers form, through which the asymmetry and anisotropy enhancements can be taken into account to prevent the fronts leaking problem during the fronts p

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

Run-length encoding Burrows-Wheeler Transformed strings, resulting in Run-Length BWT (RLBWT), is a powerful tool for processing highly repetitive strings. We propose a new algorithm for online RLBWT working in run-compressed space, which runs in $O(n\lg r)$ time and $O(r\lg n)$ bits of space, where $n$ is the length of input string $S$ received so far and $r$ is the number of runs in the BWT of the reversed $S$. We improve the state-of-the-art algorithm for online RLBWT in terms of empirical construction

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

A trajectory is a function that specifies the location of a moving entity through a certain time interval. In this paper we study the problem of finding the hotspots of polygonal two-dimensional trajectories, regions in which the entity has spent a significant amount of time. The best optimal algorithm, due to Gudmundsson, van Kreveld, and Staals (2013), finds an axis-parallel square hotspot with fixed side length in $O(n^2)$. We present an approximation algorithm with time complexity $O(n \log n)$ and a

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The family of judicious partitioning problems, introduced by Bollob\'as and Scott to the field of extremal combinatorics, has been extensively studied from a structural point of view for over two decades. This rich realm of problems aims to counterbalance the objectives of classical partitioning problems such as Min Cut, Min Bisection and Max Cut. While these classical problems focus solely on the minimization/maximization of the number of edges crossing the cut, judicious (bi)partitioning problems ask t

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We study the problem of clustering sequences of unlabeled point sets taken from a common metric space. Such scenarios arise naturally in applications where a system or process is observed in distinct time intervals, such as biological surveys and contagious disease surveillance. In this more general setting existing algorithms for classical (i.e.~static) clustering problems are not applicable anymore. We propose a set of optimization problems which we collectively refer to as 'temporal clustering

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We show that by restricting the degrees of the vertices of a graph to an arbitrary set $ \Delta $, the threshold point $ \alpha(\Delta) $ of the phase transition for a random graph with $ n $ vertices and $ m = \alpha(\Delta) n $ edges can be either accelerated (e.g., $ \alpha(\Delta) \approx 0.38 $ for $ \Delta = \{0,1,4,5\} $) or postponed (e.g., $ \alpha(\Delta) \approx 0.95 $ for $ \Delta = \{ 1,2,50\} $) compared to a classical Erd\H{o}s--R\'{e}nyi random graph with $ \alpha(\mathbb Z_{\geq 0}) = \t

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We investigate the computational complexity of the satisfiability problem of modal inclusion logic. We distinguish two variants of the problem: one for the strict and another one for the lax semantics. Both problems turn out to be EXPTIME-complete on general structures. Finally, we show how for a specific class of structures NEXPTIME-completeness for these problems under strict semantics can be achieved.

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The problem of identifying a planted assignment given a random $k$-SAT formula consistent with the assignment exhibits a large algorithmic gap: while the planted solution becomes unique and can be identified given a formula with $O(n\log n)$ clauses, there are distributions over clauses for which the best known efficient algorithms require $n^{k/2}$ clauses. We propose and study a unified model for planted $k$-SAT, which captures well-known special cases. An instance is described by a planted assignment

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

An uncertain graph $\mathcal{G} = (V, E, p : E \rightarrow (0,1])$ can be viewed as a probability space whose outcomes (referred to as \emph{possible worlds}) are subgraphs of $\mathcal{G}$ where any edge $e\in E$ occurs with probability $p(e)$, independently of the other edges. These graphs naturally arise in many application domains where data management systems are required to cope with uncertainty in interrelated data, such as computational biology, social network analysis, network reliability, and p

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In this work, we study the problem of dispersion of mobile robots on dynamic rings. The problem of dispersion of $n$ robots on an $n$ node graph, introduced by Augustine and Moses Jr. [1], requires robots to coordinate with each other and reach a configuration where exactly one robot is present on each node. This problem has real world applications and applies whenever we want to minimize the total cost of $n$ agents sharing $n$ resources, located at various places, subject to the constraint that the cos

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We propose a general framework for interactively learning models, such as (binary or non-binary) classifiers, orderings/rankings of items, or clusterings of data points. Our framework is based on a generalization of Angluin's equivalence query model and Littlestone's online learning model: in each iteration, the algorithm proposes a model, and the user either accepts it or reveals a specific mistake in the proposal. The feedback is correct only with probability $p > 1/2$ (and adversarially incorrect w

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We introduce a new problem in the domain of mobile robots, which we term dispersion. In this problem, $n$ robots are placed in an $n$ node graph arbitrarily and must coordinate with each other to reach a final configuration such that exactly one robot is at each node. We study this problem through the lenses of minimizing the memory required by each robot and of minimizing the number of rounds required to achieve dispersion. Dispersion is of interest due to its relationship to the problems of sca

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

Given a drawing of a graph, its \emph{visual complexity} is defined as the number of geometrical entities in the drawing, for example, the number of segments in a straight-line drawing or the number of arcs in a circular-arc drawing (in 2D). Recently, Chaplick et al. [GD 2016] introduced a different measure for the visual complexity, the \emph{affine cover number}, which is the minimum number of lines (or planes) that together cover a crossing-free straight-line drawing of a graph $G$ in 2D (3D). In this

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We consider the following geometric optimization problem: find a convex polygon of maximum area contained in a given simple polygon $P$ with $n$ vertices. We give a randomized near-linear-time $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for this problem: in $O(n( \log^2 n + (1/\varepsilon^3) \log n + 1/\varepsilon^4))$ time we find a convex polygon contained in $P$ that, with probability at least $2/3$, has area at least $(1-\varepsilon)$ times the area of an optimal solution. We also obtain similar result

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The increasing popularity of jumbo frames means growing variance in the size of packets transmitted in modern networks. Consequently, network monitoring tools must maintain explicit traffic volume statistics rather than settle for packet counting as before. We present constant time algorithms for volume estimations in streams and sliding windows, which are faster than previous work. Our solutions are formally analyzed and are extensively evaluated over multiple real-world packet traces as well as synthet

Tuesday, October 17, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a set of positive numbers. A graph $G$ is called an $\mathcal{A}$-embeddable graph in $\mathbb{R}^d$ if the vertices of $G$ can be positioned in $\mathbb{R}^d$ so that the distance between endpoints of any edge is an element of $\mathcal{A}$. We consider the computational problem of recognizing $\mathcal{A}$-embeddable graphs in $\mathbb{R}^1$ and classify all finite sets $\mathcal{A}$ by complexity of this problem in several natural variations.

Tuesday, October 17, 01:11 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 410# Comments: 131 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude,

Tuesday, October 17, 00:42 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 243# Comments: 97

Monday, October 16, 23:52 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La teoría del modelo estándar nació con la unificación electrodébil que publicó Steven Weinberg en 1967. Su famoso artículo “A Model of Leptons,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 19: 1264 (20 Nov 1967), doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264, fue enviado a dicha revista el […] Leer

Monday, October 16, 19:56 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 227# Comments: 124 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some

Monday, October 16, 19:18 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

No! (As Simon Thompson explains.) You cannot not love the "exploration of the length function" at the bottom. Made me smile in the middle of running errands.

Monday, October 16, 19:14 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Monday, October 16, 18:48 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 711# Comments: 248 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude, donations are very much appreciated. PayPal and Bitcoin both accept

Monday, October 16, 18:23 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

My grandfather, said Alex, used to be a lawyer. He have done a lot of pro bono work when he was young. And there was one thing, he told me, that was constantly bugging him. All the petty criminals he was defending treated him with suspicion. They got along just all right with the prison guards who often treated them unkindly or even cruelly. They were friends with all the janitors and the cooks. Yet the very person who came to defend them, of h

Monday, October 16, 17:39 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Hoy ha nacido la cosmología basada en ondas gravitacionales gracias a la estimación de la constante de Hubble lograda usando la onda gravitacional GW170817. La detección óptica de la fuente de GW170817 permite usarla como candela astronómica (como se […] Leer más

Monday, October 16, 17:17 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 369# Comments: 81

Monday, October 16, 16:05 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, October 16, 16:01 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Monday, October 16, 15:59 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Let EQ = {w : number of a's = number of b's } Let EQO = { anbn : n ∈ N} (so its Equal and in Order) Typically we do the following: Prove EQO is not regular by the pumping lemma. Then to show EQ is not regular you say: If EQ was regular than EQ INTERSECT a*b*= EQO is regular, hence EQ is not regular (I know you can also show EQ with the Pumping Lemma but thats not important now.) One can view this as a reduction:

Monday, October 16, 15:52 UTC @ Sean Carroll

Everyone is rightly excited about the latest gravitational-wave discovery. The LIGO observatory, recently joined by its European partner VIRGO, had previously seen gravitational waves from coalescing black holes. Which is super-awesome, but also a bit lonely — black holes are … Continue reading →

Monday, October 16, 15:18 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Se confirma el rumor, la colaboración LIGO-Virgo ha observado la fusión de dos estrellas de neutrones. Sendos cuerpos con un diámetro de unos 20 kilómetros se han fusionado en un agujero negro (lo más probable, aunque no se puede […] Leer más

Monday, October 16, 14:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, October 16, 14:01 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying…

Monday, October 16, 14:01 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, October 16, 14:00 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Astronomers have for the first time matched a gravitational-wave signal to a kilonova’s burst of light, observations that will “go down in the history of astronomy.”

Monday, October 16, 13:47 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 260# Comments: 84

Monday, October 16, 13:14 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

$\newcommand{\c}{\mathcal{C}}\newcommand{\R}{\mathbb{R}}$An important task in trajectory analysis is clustering. The results of a clustering are often summarized by a single representative trajectory and an associated size of each cluster. We study the problem of computing a suitable representative of a set of similar trajectories. To this end we define a central trajectory $\c$, which consists of pieces of the input trajectories, switches from one entity to another only if they are within a smal

Monday, October 16, 11:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 432# Comments: 167

Monday, October 16, 11:42 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Sometimes it is convenient to use a web view to show some static HTML content in an iOS app. If you have adopted dynamic type elsewhere in your app it can look odd if that text does not also respect the user’s choice of content size. Luckily there is a way to use dynamic type when displaying text in a web view. Using Apple System Fonts It turns out to be easy to use dynamic type with HTML content. You just need to choose the Apple system font

Monday, October 16, 10:09 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

The propaganda of yesteryear used to be of "four legs good, two legs bad" kind. It praised its authors and denounced their enemies. As kids during the communist era we've learned how, in capitalist countries, food is burned or dumped into the sea while children in Africa are dying of hunger. As teenagers we've listened to Radio Free Europe which taught us about human rights violations in the eastern block. From ou

Monday, October 16, 10:05 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“You are… six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot… hurt me!” -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears, our personalities, and…

Monday, October 16, 09:08 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 1347# Comments: 404 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude, donations are very much appreciated. PayPal and Bitcoin both accepted. Thanks!

Monday, October 16, 08:23 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 227# Comments: 49

Monday, October 16, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

Mi luna favorita ocurre justo después de la nueva, cuando apenas tiene uno o dos días. La literatura ha hecho llover cascadas de lírica y prosa sobre la luna llena en forma de nocturnos paisajes románticos o monstruos entrevistos a su luz acerada, pero para mí esa luna es poco más que un foco que … Continúa leyendo Cenicienta

Monday, October 16, 08:00 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 269# Comments: 27

Sunday, October 15, 16:06 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

You have surely heard about the idea that the development of embryo recapitulates stages in the evolution of the particular organism. The idea is no longer embraced by biologists. Still, human embryo does have slits that resemble gills and tadpole has a tail that it loses as it matures. The current uderstanding is that yes, development of embryo does reflect the course of evolution but the correspondence is so quirky and intricate that we can't really accept it as a law of natur

Sunday, October 15, 15:49 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.” -Jim Lovell Well, the Scienceblogs comments are still on the fritz, requiring me to manually un-spam them one-at-a-time, but Starts With A Bang! is still going strong with some fabulous stories based on the best knowledge we have! This next week is poised to…

Sunday, October 15, 11:43 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El pasado 12 de octubre de 2017 en el LHC se colisionaron por primera vez núcleos de xenón-129 (formados por 54 protones y 75 neutrones). Hasta ahora solo se habían colisionado protones y núcleos de plomo-208 (con 82 protones […] Leer más

Saturday, October 14, 19:06 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

“No hay partículas, solo hay campos. El universo está constituido por campos. No se trata de campos clásicos, como la gravitación, sino de campos cuánticos descritos por la teoría cuántica de campos. [Esta] es la opinión de la mayoría […] Leer más

Saturday, October 14, 18:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Probability has surprising uses, including applications to things that absolutely are not random. I’ve touched on this a few times. For example, I’ve commented on how arguments about whether something is really random are often moot: Random is as random does. This post will take non-random uses for probability in a different direction. We’ll start […]

Saturday, October 14, 14:47 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

The 50th anniversary of electroweak unification is coming up in a couple days, since Weinberg’s A Model of Leptons paper was submitted to PRL on October 17, 1967. For many years this was the most heavily cited HEP paper of … Continue reading →

Saturday, October 14, 14:01 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” -William Blake When it comes to the ultimate question of the size of the Universe, we have to look to greater…

Saturday, October 14, 13:39 UTC @ John D. Cook

There are many conventions for describing points on a sphere. For example, does latitude zero refer to the North Pole or the equator? Mathematicians tend to prefer the former and geoscientists the latter. There are also varying conventions for longitude. Volker Michel describes this clash of conventions colorfully in his book on constructive approximation. Many […]

Saturday, October 14, 10:36 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

I am not an expert in the field so take this with a huge grain of salt… When we hit a sigularity I have no idea of what's going to happen. In fact, nobody else does. But until then there's a more mundane risk that worries me. What if we modify the problem this way: What if the algorithms remained as dumb as they are today, or even as dumb as they were in 1950's, but, to compensate, they would get an ability to control human behaviour? That would be pre

Friday, October 13, 16:38 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

In the last post, we discussed Voevodsky’s homotopy type theory. One of the important notions is whether a space is contractible, this being the base case for the inductive definition of homotopy levels. It turns out that the algorithmic undecidability … Continue reading →

Friday, October 13, 16:02 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El color amarillo, naranja y rojo en los loros (psitaciformes) es debido a unos pigmentos llamados psitacofulvinas (el color verde es combinación de psitacofulvinas amarillas y el color azul estructural de las plumas). Las psitacofulvinas son sintetizados por el […] Leer más

Friday, October 13, 15:20 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Friday, October 13, 15:01 UTC @ Sean Carroll

Trying to climb out from underneath a large pile of looming (and missed) deadlines, and in the process I’m hoping to ramp back up the real blogging. In the meantime, here are a couple of videos to tide you over. … Continue reading →

Friday, October 13, 14:00 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in technology and public health and welfare.”…

Friday, October 13, 10:53 UTC @ Backreaction

Living in a Bubble?[Image: YouTube] We are made from stretched quantum fluctuations. At least that’s cosmologists’ currently most popular explanation. According to their theory, the history of our existence began some billion years ago with a – now absent – field that propelled the universe into a phase of rapid expansion called “inflation.” When inflation ended, the field decayed and its

Friday, October 13, 10:53 UTC @ Backreaction

Living in a Bubble?[Image: YouTube] We are made from stretched quantum fluctuations. At least that’s cosmologists’ currently most popular explanation. According to their theory, the history of our existence began some billion years ago with a – now absent – field that propelled the universe into a phase of rapid expansion called “inflation.” When inflation ended, the field decayed and its

Friday, October 13, 07:17 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

He participado en el episodio 132 del podcast Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido [iVoox, iTunes], titulado “Detectada la Materia Perdida; Escudo Planetario para la Tierra; Supernova 1987; Los Anillos de Haumea”, 12 Oct 2017. “La tertulia semanal ha repasado […] Leer más

Friday, October 13, 04:01 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a.k.a. COPD, is a progressive lung disease which causes breathlessness and is often caused by cigarette smoke and air pollution. By 2030, it is expected to be the third leading cause of death worldwide, with 90% occurring in low and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. The Centers for […] The post

Thursday, October 12, 15:20 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Simple math can help scheming politicians manipulate district maps and cruise to victory. But it can also help identify and fix the problem.

Thursday, October 12, 14:00 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“It’s hard to build models of inflation that don’t lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [it] seriously.” -Alan Guth…

Thursday, October 12, 12:52 UTC @ Computational Complexity

We've had a big week of awards with the Nobel Prizes and the MacArthur "Genius" Fellows. The MacArthur Fellows include two computer scientists, Regina Barzilay and Stefan Savage, and a statistician Emma

Thursday, October 12, 12:28 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La terapia génica CRISPR-Cas9 in vivo requiere vehicular la proteína Cas9, el ARN guía y el ADN donante hasta el núcleo de la célula objetivo. El uso de adenovirus tiene algunos inconvenientes que pueden ser resueltos usando nanopartículas de […] Le

Thursday, October 12, 07:33 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Ash Maurya, Founder/CEO, LeanStack Ash Maurya is the author of ‘Running Lean’, ‘Scaling Lean’ as well as the Lean Canvas business modeling tool. Ash is driven by the search for better and faster ways for building successful products. He has developed a systematic methodology for raising the odds of success built upon Lean Startup, Customer […] The post

Wednesday, October 11, 19:58 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Among the various fields of exploration in artificial intelligence, deep learning is an exciting and increasingly important area of research that holds great potential for helping computers understand and extract meaning from data, e.g. deciphering images and sounds. To help further the creation and adoption of interoperable deep learning models, IBM joined the Open Neural […] The post

Wednesday, October 11, 18:43 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

A couple of recent discussions about quantum mechanics that may be of interest: There’s a recent paper out by Don Weingarten that looks looks like it might have a different take on the fundamental “many-worlds” problem of, as he writes: … Continue reading →

Wednesday, October 11, 18:28 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La Inteligencia Artificial está de moda gracias al aprendizaje profundo (deep learning), las redes de neuronas artificiales multicapa entrenadas con un algoritmo de retropropagación (backprop). Mucha gente cree ver una revolución emergente en esta tecnología; sin embargo, casi nada ha […]

Wednesday, October 11, 17:02 UTC @ x.ai

One of the hallmarks of our work future is time. As we offload more mundane and repeatable tasks to machines, we’ll be rewarded with more time to focus on the … View Article The post The Stoic’s guide to time appeared first on x.ai.

Wednesday, October 11, 16:46 UTC @ Backreaction

Wednesday, October 11, 16:46 UTC @ Backreaction

Wednesday, October 11, 16:12 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Voevodsky’s friends remember him as constitutionally unable to compromise on the truth — a quality that led him to produce some of the most important mathematics of the 20th century.

Wednesday, October 11, 15:43 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

I recently participated in a panel at Applied Materials’ 2017 Analyst Day to talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Yes, a materials company asked me, an executive overseeing semiconductor research, to join other technologists to give our view of AI – demonstrating how interest in AI has permeated all aspects of the IT industry! To lead […] The post The era of AI — and the technologies that w

Wednesday, October 11, 15:29 UTC @ tecosystems

it begins A post shared by stephen o'grady (@stephenogrady) on Oct 5, 2017 at 6:37am PDT On March 3, 2011, I sent an email to a few people internally, subject line “Conference Thoughts.” It was about the possibility of RedMonk hosting its first event, one that that would later come to be called the Monktoberfest.

Wednesday, October 11, 15:29 UTC @ tecosystems

it begins A post shared by stephen o'grady (@stephenogrady) on Oct 5, 2017 at 6:37am PDT On March 3, 2011, I sent an email to a few people internally, subject line “Conference Thoughts.” It was about the possibility of RedMonk hosting its first event, one that that would later come to be called the Monktoberfest.

Wednesday, October 11, 14:57 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Wednesday, October 11, 14:31 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” -Augustine of Hippo Science isn’t the easiest endeavor you can undertake. Sure, the rewards are tremendous: you can wind up understanding any phenomenon in the Universe as well (or better) than any human has ever understood…

Wednesday, October 11, 14:03 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Lianna Patch and Alli Blum here – conversion copywriters extraordinaire and not-so-secret SaaS geeks. Having met online just a few weeks before Business of Software 2017, Alli and I naturally threw caution to the winds and decided to become in-person BFFs at the conference this year. But mere friendship wasn’t enough for two Type A […] The post Guest Post: &#

Wednesday, October 11, 02:56 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

Every die-hard fan of the scientific method knows that Karl Popper was a baller. While his achievements clearly extend far beyond analysis of the scientific method alone, he is arguably best known for his work on

Tuesday, October 10, 23:08 UTC @ inessential.com

I don’t normally head home after lunch, but today I was on the bus going back to Ballard, about to open iBooks on my phone and get back to reading The Caledonian Gambit (which I’m thoroughly enjoying), when I decided to check Twitter first — and saw Marco’s tweet about Overcast’s oldest crash. I’ve written before about how I love

Tuesday, October 10, 18:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

You can now create campaigns to promote your apps on the App Store in Canada, Mexico, and Switzerland, in addition to the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Ads for new storefronts go live October 17, 2017.Search Ads provides an efficient and easy way to promote your app at the top of relevant search results. Try Search Ads for free with a 100 USD credit when you set up your first campaign.Learn more about Search Ads.

Tuesday, October 10, 16:19 UTC @ NSBlog

It's finally here! I'm pleased to present The Complete Friday Q&A Volumes II and III. (Read More)

Tuesday, October 10, 15:11 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, October 10, 14:06 UTC @ John D. Cook

The latest episode of Star Trek Discovery (S1E4) uses the word “supercomputer” a few times. This sounds jarring. The word has become less common in contemporary usage, and seems even more out of place in a work of fiction set more than two centuries in the future. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the term “supercomputer” […]

Tuesday, October 10, 14:03 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.” -Carl…

Tuesday, October 10, 13:00 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Repeating radio bursts are among the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. A new theory explores how some of their puzzling properties can be explained by galactic lenses made of plasma.

Tuesday, October 10, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Workers with lower-than-median wages are often prone to financial instability and affected by bank policies such as penalty and overdraft fees, leading to a vicious cycle of debt and poor credit. During 2016 alone, banks made over $30 billion from overdraft fees. The workers with the least financial cushion are typically the most vulnerable in […] The post AI-based financial advisor for low-wage w

Tuesday, October 10, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved?

Monday, October 09, 22:00 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El pasado 4 de octubre de 2017, ATLAS y CMS, los dos grandes experimentos del LHC, alcanzaron una luminosidad integrada de 100 fb−1 (inversos de femtobarn). Esta cifra se ha alcanzado tan solo 7 años después de que su […] Leer más

Monday, October 09, 19:01 UTC @ John D. Cook

I’ve written a page that will show a different exponential sum each day, images along the line of the post Exponential sums make pretty pictures. Here’s page: https://... Here are a few sample images. Small changes in the coefficients can make a big change in the appearance of the graphs.

Monday, October 09, 18:07 UTC @ John D. Cook

Overfitting happens when a model does too good a job of matching a particular data set and so does a poor job on new data. The way traditional statistical models address the danger of overfitting is to limit the number of parameters. For example, you might fit a straight line (two parameters) to 100 data […]

Monday, October 09, 16:14 UTC @ Computational Complexity

When I first saw posts about Michael Cohen (see here, here, here) I wondered is that the same Michael Cohen who I knew as a HS student? It is. I share one memory. Michael Cohen's father is Tom Cohen, a physics professor at UMCP. They were going to a Blair High School Science

Monday, October 09, 16:03 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“You were always a good officer. Until you weren’t.” -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages and internet memes have helped disseminate bits…

Monday, October 09, 12:53 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

In my life I met lots of smart people. I've also met few intellectually honest people. I value the latter more because they are much more rare. Intellectual honesty is a topic that I am interested in for a long time. What's fascinating about it is that it is a faculty that's crucial in such a wide range of endeavours. You need it in science. You need it in art. You need it in engineering. Let me give you few examples. The scientific one is easy to explain. S

Monday, October 09, 08:55 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Applications of AI are quickly becoming ubiquitous, powered by algorithms that learn from large amounts of data. Humans, on the other hand, learn very differently: they are able to reason based on a small number of assumptions and a set of logical rules. Our IBM Research team designed a method capable of combining these two […] The post New model augments visual recognition to help AI i

Monday, October 09, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

Here at MartianCraft, we know a thing or two about app development. But we don’t just make great apps for you - we can also teach you how to make them yourself. If you’re just starting out on the journey, welcome aboard! Below is some advice for anyone wondering if app development is for them, and if so, how to get started. Expectations

Sunday, October 08, 13:40 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

When I was young I've read about Nuremberg trials. What have struck me the most was the apparent lack of guilt on all sides. Everyone was just following orders. Or at least that's what they said. That made me think about whether an atrocity on the scale of holocaust could be committed entirely blamelessly. If you see a person drowning, I reasoned, and you don't help them you will be blamed and punished. However, if a person is dying due to inability to purchase expensive

Sunday, October 08, 04:00 UTC @ ImperialViolet

Last time I reviewed various security keys at a fairly superficial level: basic function, physical characteristics etc. This post considers lower-level behaviour. Security Keys implement the FIDO U2F spec, which borrows a lot from ISO 7816-4. Each possible transport (i.e. USB, NFC, or Bluetooth) has its o

Saturday, October 07, 17:09 UTC @ John D. Cook

Exponential sums are a specialized area of math that studies series with terms that are complex exponentials. Estimating such sums is delicate work. General estimation techniques are ham-fisted compared to what is possible with techniques specialized for these particular sums. Exponential sums are closely related to Fourier analysis and number theory. Exponential sums also make […]

Saturday, October 07, 15:57 UTC @ Planet Lisp

This is a listing of projects that I've started, some of which I've completed. The intent is to spread awareness about the work I've done, as I speculate that a lot of people don't know about most of it, even though it might prove useful to their own projects. So, hopefully this article will help a bit in that regard. I won't go into much detail in the descriptions, as that would take too much of both your and my own ti

Saturday, October 07, 13:13 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

I suppose you are familiar with the news stories such as "92% of Americans belive they have above-average IQ". The phenomenon stems from a cognitive bias known as Dunning-Kruger effect which leads people to not recognize their ineptitude and perceive themselves as superior to their peers. Also, you may have wondered how would you act if you lived in Germany under Hitler, in USSR under Stalin or in North Korea under Kim Jong-un. In a private corner of your mind y

Saturday, October 07, 12:16 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Friday, October 06, 21:15 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

ARKit lets you seamlessly blend realistic virtual objects with the real world, so you can take your apps beyond the screen. Use these resources to learn how to clearly indicate when the user enters AR, show users what to expect from your AR experiences with app previews, and build Face Tracking support for iPhone X.Interface DesignProvide an intuitive initialization process within your app to clearly indicate when the user enters AR.Read the Human Interface Guidelines.App PreviewsCreate short videos of your

Friday, October 06, 18:41 UTC @ Azimuth

Vladimir Voevodsky died last week. He won the Fields Medal in 2002 for proving the Milnor conjecture in a branch of algebra known as algebraic K-theory. He continued to work on this subject until he helped prove the more general Bloch–Kato conjecture in 2010. Proving these results—which are too technical to easily describe to nonmathematicians!—required […]

Friday, October 06, 15:48 UTC @ TED Blog

Five months ago, BMW i and TED laid down a challenge. What would the future of mobility look like? There were no constraints on time frame or existing technology. The Next Visionaries project was conceived as a free form exercise in innovation and ideation with the goal to surface some truly breakthrough concepts. Ideas poured […]

Friday, October 06, 12:55 UTC @ NSBlog

It's fun to re-imagine traditional techniques with a Swift twist. I've implemented a type-safe layer on top of the venerable NSUserDefaults, and I'm going to discuss my little library today. Credit/blame for this idea goes to local reader José Vazquez, although he inspired it by accident while talking about something else. (Read More)

Friday, October 06, 12:50 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Eric Ries launches his new book, ‘The Startup Way’ this month. “My research has focused on what causes established companies to maintain success, and The Startup Way provides practical guidance on how to do just that.” Clay Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School You should probably get yourself a […] The post

Friday, October 06, 12:38 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

We consider the Minimum Perimeter Polygon Problem (MP3): for a given set V of points in the plane, find a polygon P with holes that has vertex set V , such that the total boundary length is smallest possible. The MP3 can be considered a natural geometric generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which asks for a simple polygon with minimum perimeter. Just like the TSP, the MP3 occurs naturally in the context of curve

Friday, October 06, 12:32 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Finding nonoverlapping balls with given centers in any metric space, maximizing the sum of radii of the balls, can be expressed as a linear program. Its dual linear program expresses the problem of finding a minimum-weight set of cycles (allowing 2-cycles) covering all vertices in a complete geometric graph. For points in a Euclidean space of any finite dimension $d$, with any convex distance function on this space, this graph can be replaced by a sparse subgraph obeying a separator theorem. This graph s

Thursday, October 05, 21:16 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, perhaps you’ve seen the latest episode, The Retraction Reaction. If not, you might be interested in the following transcript (taken from here). The show has always done a good job of … Continue reading →

Thursday, October 05, 17:35 UTC @ Computational Complexity

STORY ONE: I always tell my class that its OKAY if they don't have the latest edition of the textbook, and if they can find it a cheap, an earlier edition (often on Amazon, sometimes on e-bay), that's fine. A while back at the beginning of a semester I was curious if the book really did have many cheap editions so I typed in the books name. I found a free pdf copy as the fourth hit. This was NOT on some corner of the dark web. This was easy to find and free. There were a fe

Thursday, October 05, 16:58 UTC @ TED Blog

Complex times require a bold embrace of diversity and difference — and an ability to turn the unknown into an advantage. How can we tap into the unexpected? For a fifth year, BCG has partnered with TED to bring experts in education, diversity, AI, biology and more to the stage to share ideas from the forefront […]

Thursday, October 05, 16:51 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Over the last year or so, three of my colleagues: Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Pat Kua, have been working on the book "Building Evolutionary Architectures". The book is now done and available. It's does a great job of capturing what we at ThoughtWorks have learned about this topic over the last decade or so. I wa

Thursday, October 05, 14:48 UTC @ x.ai

STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education is often trumpeted as a panacea for economic growth. It’s the key to our future where all the good jobs and wage growth … View Article The post Why we need to build more humanity into STEM education appeared first on x.ai.

Thursday, October 05, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This past week IBM’s Zurich Lab participated in two very special events. As a follow up to the formal events surrounding the Kavli Prize, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters have started a series of symposia featuring their Laureates to not only recognize their accomplishments in a more public setting, but […] The post Two Days, Two Diffe

Thursday, October 05, 12:00 UTC @ Swift.org

Swift has language constructs that allow you to specify your program’s expectations. If these expectations are not met at runtime, the program will be terminated. For example, indexing into an array implicitly expresses an expectation that the index is in bounds: // Program will terminate if 'index' less than 0 or greater than 'array.count - 1'. let element

Thursday, October 05, 09:46 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Last time we saw Eric Ries in London was at the launch of the Lean Startup book in 2012. As we prepare for our upcoming evening with Eric Ries to celebrate the launch of The Startup Way, 15th November, Central London, we took a look back at the last time he was in town… Don’t […] The post Last Time We Met Eric Ries – The Lean Startup London Launch ap

Thursday, October 05, 06:02 UTC @ Azimuth

I haven’t spoken much about the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, but it’s going well, and I’ll be speaking about it soon, here: • International Open Access Week, Wednesday 25 October 2017, 9:30–11:00 a.m., University of California, Riverside, Orbach Science Library, Room 240. “Open in Order to Save Data for Future Research” is the 2017 […]

Wednesday, October 04, 23:51 UTC @ gilded : rust

Using the data structures from arena-tree as an example of a tree, something like the following could work. use serde::ser::{Serialize, Serializer, SerializeStruct, SerializeSeq}; impl<'a, T> Serialize for Node<'a, T> where T: Serialize { fn serialize<S>(&self, serializer: S) -> Result<S::Ok,

Wednesday, October 04, 23:40 UTC @ John D. Cook

If a function of one variable has two local maxima, it must have a local minimum in between. What about a function of two variables? If it has two local maxima, does it need to have a local minimum? No, it could have a saddle point in between, a point that is a local minimum […]

Wednesday, October 04, 19:45 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The deadliest skin cancer is melanoma, which will be responsible for over 9,000 deaths in the United States in 20171. Melanoma is unique among cancers in that it arises as a visible and identifiable mark on the surface of the skin – unlike cancers of the breast, lung, or colon that develop hidden from our […] The post A second set of eyes – Using computers to aid melanoma detectio

Wednesday, October 04, 16:07 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

First, Albert Kwon provides an overview of recent systems for secure and private communication. While messaging protocols such as Signal provide privacy guarantees, Albert's selected research papers illustrate what is possible at the cutting edge: more transparent endpoint authentication, better protection of communication metadata, and anonymous broadcasting. These papers marry state-of-the-art cryptography with practical, privacy-preserving protocols, providing a glimpse of what we might expect from tomor

Wednesday, October 04, 12:16 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Wednesday, October 04, 12:00 UTC @ Swift.org

In the latest release of Swift, dictionaries and sets gain a number of new methods and initializers that make common tasks easier than ever. Operations like grouping, filtering, and transforming values can now be performed in a single step, letting you write more expressive and efficient code. This post explores these new transformations, using some grocery data for a market as an example. This custom GroceryItem struct, made up of a name and a department, wi

Wednesday, October 04, 10:48 UTC @ Emilian Bold's blog

As part of the Apache NetBeans IP clearance we are combing through all the code and dependencies. One interesting thing we bumped into was that the jsch 0.1.54 binary JAR we are using has a different hash (and size) than the binary JAR from Maven Central. The old hash is 0D7D8ABA0D11E8CD2F775F47CD3A6CFBF2837DA4, the new one is DA3584329A263616E277E15462B387ADDD1B208D. The binaries are 278,612 bytes vs 280,515 bytes in Mave

Wednesday, October 04, 09:16 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

I've started programming early, in 1984 when I was 11 years old. Back then I just had an idea of what the program should do and I did whatever was necessary to get there. After that initial period of pogramming I haven't cared about it too much. I did whatever programming assignments we've got in school and later whatever work I needed to do to feed myself, but that was it. In the spare time I was mostly drinking with artists. That changed in 2004. Back then I star

Wednesday, October 04, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

FreeBSD 10.4-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 10.4. More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.

Wednesday, October 04, 02:19 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Two more tragic losses coming before a greater tragedy Composite of crops from src1, src2 Michael Cohen and Vladimir Voevodsky were in different stages of their careers. Cohen was a graduate student at MIT and was visiting the Simons Institute in Berkeley. He passed away suddenly a week ago Monday on a day he was […]

Tuesday, October 03, 21:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

iPhone X features the stunning 5.8-inch Super Retina display, enabling even more immersive app experiences. Start testing your apps now to make sure they are ready to take advantage of the Super Retina display by respecting safe areas, supporting adaptive layouts, and more.Learn about updating apps for iPhone X.

Tuesday, October 03, 20:59 UTC @ TED Blog

It seems these days, everybody’s getting hacked. With so much of our most sensitive information stored on servers in some remote part of the world, it seems concerningly easy for malicious hackers to worm their way past secure firewalls and into bank accounts, credit card databases, corporate emails and even hospital systems. On a global […

Tuesday, October 03, 20:18 UTC @ inessential.com

As a young developer I didn’t pay that much attention to accessibility. I figured that most people didn’t need those features, and it was something I could get to later. Plus: adding those features wasn’t easy back in those days. Things have changed. For one thing, supporting accessibility features — at least on Macs and iOS — has gotten much easier. It’s almost delightful with how much you get for free and how easy it is to add what’s missing. Apple deserves a huge amount

Tuesday, October 03, 13:30 UTC @ x.ai

One of the most important things we do on the product team at x.ai is talk to our users. Talking to the people who are actually using our product every … View Article The post How we automated our user research with Typeform, Zapier and Amy appeared first on

Tuesday, October 03, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Imagine covering the globe with a sheet of artificial, internet-enabled neurons. And these Internet of Things (IoT) neurons could send their local information to other neurons just like the synapses in our brains. For example, a ground temperature neuron at one location gets collected and shared with air quality neurons, and vice versa. This spatio-temporal […] The post IoT neurons go macro, go global with

Tuesday, October 03, 11:59 UTC @ John D. Cook

One way to obfuscate code is clever use of arcane programming language syntax. Hackers are able to write completely unrecognizable code by exploiting dark corners of programming techniques and languages. Some of these attempts are quite impressive. But it’s also possible to write clean source code that is nevertheless obfuscated. For example, it’s not at […]

Tuesday, October 03, 07:17 UTC @ Backreaction

“Do you hope to win a Nobel Prize?” asked an elderly man who had come to shake my hand after the lecture. I laughed, but he was serious. Maybe I had been a little too successful explaining how important quantum gravity is. No, I don’t hope to win a Nobel Prize. If that’s what I’d been after, I certainly would have chosen a different field. Condensed matter physics, say, or quantum things. At

Tuesday, October 03, 07:17 UTC @ Backreaction

“Do you hope to win a Nobel Prize?” asked an elderly man who had come to shake my hand after the lecture. I laughed, but he was serious. Maybe I had been a little too successful explaining how important quantum gravity is. No, I don’t hope to win a Nobel Prize. If that’s what I’d been after, I certainly would have chosen a different field. Condensed matter physics, say, or quantum things. At

Tuesday, October 03, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved?

Monday, October 02, 17:44 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

At this point, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss of LIGO have (deservedly) won just about every scientific prize out there, for the first observation of gravitational waves. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe they’ll be getting the Physics … Continue reading →

Monday, October 02, 12:35 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Working with the priorities of Auto Layout constraints can be a bit of a pain with Swift. You often just want to set a priority that is one more or one less than some other priority. Unfortunately the strong type safety of Swift means you cannot just treat the priority as a number the way you could with Objective-C. Layout Priorities Consider a typical auto layout setup where I have a label and a text field arranged to horizontally fill a view:

Monday, October 02, 12:30 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

2017 has been an unfortunate year for Fields medallists. Maryam Mirzakhani, who won the Fields medal in 2014, passed away at the untimely age of 40. Two days ago, she was joined by Vladimir Voevodsky, 2002 Fields medallist, who was … Continue reading →

Monday, October 02, 00:26 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Found on the ARM community's embedded blog. It seems that Forth may be making a comeback. "8th" - a gentle introduction to a modern Forth 8th is a secure, cross-platform programming language based on Forth which lets you concentrate on your application’s logic instead of worrying about differences between platforms. It lets you write your code once, and simu

Sunday, October 01, 18:58 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I was very sorry to hear yesterday of the announcement from the IAS of the untimely death of Vladimir Voevodsky, at the age of 51. Last year I had the chance to meet Voevodsky and talk with him for a … Continue reading →

Sunday, October 01, 18:44 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Sunday, October 01, 00:46 UTC @ Indie Stack

Shortly after macOS 10.13 was released, I received an oddly specific bug report from a customer, who observed that the little square “swatches” in the standard Mac color panel no longer had any effect on MarsEdit’s rich text editor. I was able to reproduce the problem in the shipping 3.7.11 version of MarsEdit, which for various … Continue reading Swatch Your Step

Saturday, September 30, 21:18 UTC @ John D. Cook

How many musical scales are there? That’s not a simple question. It depends on how you define “scale.” For this post, I’ll only consider scales starting on C. That is, I’ll only consider changing the intervals between notes, not changing the starting note. Also, I’ll only consider subsets of the common chromatic scale; this post […]

Saturday, September 30, 18:53 UTC @ John D. Cook

Database fields can combine in subtle ways. For example, nationality is not usually enough to identify anyone. Neither is religion. But the combination of nationality and religion can be surprisingly informative. Information content of nationality How much information is contained in nationality? That depends on exactly how you define nations versus territories etc., but for […]

Saturday, September 30, 12:21 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Friday, September 29, 20:20 UTC @ TED Blog

Worldwide, nearly one out of every hundred children is born with a congenital heart disease, which can vary from defective vessels and leaky valves, to holes in the heart. Dr. Franz Freudenthal (TED Talk: A new way to heal hearts without surgery) deals in the latter as a pediatric cardiologist who has developed a better, […]

Friday, September 29, 15:50 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Notes & Pictures from Business of Software Conference USA 2017 Collaborative notes from attendees, blog posts, pictures and other good stuff from the 11th Business of Software Conference USA. Read on for the definitive guide. Thanks to all of the hard note taking elves at Business of Software Conference USA. Notes and blog posts from attendees […] The post Notes &

Friday, September 29, 15:38 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Zack Urlocker, COO, Duo Security Zack Urlocker is an executive, advisor and board member with over twenty years of experience in the software industry. He has helped scale revenues in startups from under $6 million to over $100 million and has had multiple billion dollar exits. He has held executive positions at Zendesk (COO), MySQL […] The post Scaling to a Billion

Friday, September 29, 15:00 UTC @ The Geomblog

I'm a perpetual student when it comes to my guitar-playing. I started off learning acoustic guitar, and taught myself a little bass in college. When I was in the college band our music advisor played some classical guitar and that got me hooked. I've had a number of teachers through grad school and beyond, but I've always plateaued out at a level where I'm competent but no better. At some point I realized that what motivated me to play was the right kinds of music (this I also learnt when watchin

Friday, September 29, 14:25 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Feedback from #BoS2017 Here at Business of Software HQ we’ve landed without too much turbulence (metaphorical or aeronautical) back into a week of sitting at desks and sending emails – a far cry from being in Boston last week for the 11th annual Business of Software USA Conference. Having said that… We’ve had the biggest grins on our faces […] The post “The Pen Is Horrible

Friday, September 29, 14:15 UTC @ Business of Software USA

I must admit I didn’t get what design origami was at first. I had visions of artful but frustrating paper folding. It turned out to be an excellent tool to help visualize the customer experience of a conference attendee. In a post conference workshop with Bernhard Ferro and Sean Mcguire from Tieto, participants were walked […] The post Design Origami – visual mapping of u

Friday, September 29, 09:14 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Scientists have made amazing advances enabling machines to understand language and process images for such applications as facial recognition, image classification (e.g., “cat” or “dog”) and translation of texts.  Work in the IBM Research lab in Dublin this summer was focused on a very different problem: using AI techniques such as deep learning to forecast […] The post Using deep

Friday, September 29, 06:02 UTC @ The Geomblog

After the infamous Google memo (and frankly for much longer if you work in algorithmic fairness), the idea of something being a "social construct" has popped up again, and I will admit that I've struggled with trying to understand what that means (damn you, focused engineering education!) Ta-Nehisi Coates' article about race is a short and excellent read. But I also want

Friday, September 29, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

Building modular projects with Xcode requires a good understanding of the project structure and its foundational concepts. The project structure is something that we don’t usually care much about unless we start growing the project by adding more dependencies. Even in that case, most of the projects use CocoaPods that does the setup for us, or Carthage that doesn’t do the setup, but makes it as easy as just adding a couple

Thursday, September 28, 16:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I've got a test version of Quicklisp available. It uses pure Common Lisp code to verify file SHA digests and OpenPGP signatures, from bootstrap to library loading. To try it out, fetch the following file: https://... Load it into a Lisp implementation with (load "quicklisp.lisp") and follow the prompts. It's best to start with a Lisp that doesn't have Quicklisp already l

Thursday, September 28, 15:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The world’s population is rapidly aging: today there are 617 million people over the age of 65. By 2050, that number will jump to 1.6 billion. The population of seniors over 80 is expected to triple in that timeframe, and in some Asian and Latin American countries, it’s expected to quadruple. People might be living […] The post Using AI to help Aging Populations Live Better appeared first o

Thursday, September 28, 14:21 UTC @ tecosystems

If you talk to its competitors, partners and even unrelated third parties today, most will eventually ask some form of the same question: what is Microsoft doing? The company’s macro strategy is well understood, of course, and even the object of much admiration. The fact that a company as large and successful – and as

Thursday, September 28, 14:21 UTC @ tecosystems

If you talk to its competitors, partners and even unrelated third parties today, most will eventually ask some form of the same question: what is Microsoft doing? The company’s macro strategy is well understood, of course, and even the object of much admiration. The fact that a company as large and successful – and as

Thursday, September 28, 14:20 UTC @ Computational Complexity

I'd like to remember two young people who's lives were taken way too early. I didn't know either well but both played large roles in two different communities.

Thursday, September 28, 13:37 UTC @ x.ai

Intelligent machines are starting to do many tasks that until recently were the exclusive domain of people. From delivering pizza to filing simple legal briefs, AI-powered software agents and robots … View Article The post AI and the rise of the emotional economy appeared first on x.ai<

Wednesday, September 27, 23:36 UTC @ TED Blog

TEDGlobal 2017 was an important homecoming to the African continent, and a ton of work went into creating an authentic experience, from the curation of talks to the music to the graphics and stage design. Saki Mafundikwa, a graphic designer, filmmaker, design teacher and founder of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (and a TED […]

Wednesday, September 27, 20:08 UTC @ Indie Stack

I wrote on Monday about issues with Xcode 9 relating to code signing. Although the gist of that post involved sandboxed Mac applications that launch sandboxed child processes, the fundamental issue is a bit broader: Xcode 9 adds a “com.apple.security.get-task-allow” entitlement to any binary it signs. For the majority of developers, this is probably not … Continue reading

Wednesday, September 27, 18:10 UTC @ Indie Stack

Since I updated to macOS 10.13 High Sierra, some of my unit tests broke. Examining the failures more carefully, I discovered that they were making assumptions about the order that Foundation’s FileManager.contentsOfDirectory(atPath:) would return items. I wrote a quick playground to test the behavior on a 10.12 machine: import Foundation let array = try! FileManager.default.contentsOfDirectory(atPath: … Conti

Wednesday, September 27, 15:27 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

The miniaturization of devices and the prolific interconnectedness of these devices over high-speed wireless networks is completely changing how commerce is conducted. These changes (a.k.a. digital) will profoundly change how enterprises operate. Software is at the heart of this digital world, but the software toolsets and languages were conceived for the host-based era. The issues that already plague software practice (such as high defects, poor software productivity, information vulnerability, poor softwa

Wednesday, September 27, 13:19 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Social enterprises present solutions to major social challenges such as climate change, global inequities, educational gaps, and many others through social innovation[1]. In fact, social enterprises attract a growing amount of talent, with an estimated 3.2% (global average) of adults between 18 to 64 attempting to start a social enterprise[2].  However, many get lost early […] The post

Wednesday, September 27, 11:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Iteration of the quadratic function f(x) = 4x(1-x) is a famous example in chaos theory. Here’s what the first few iterations look like, starting with 1/√3. (There’s nothing special about that starting point; any point that doesn’t iterate to exactly zero will do.) The values appear to bounce all over the place. Let’s look at a […]

Wednesday, September 27, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The April to June 2017 Status Report is now available.

Wednesday, September 27, 06:09 UTC @ Backreaction

Dear Chris, The standard model of particle physics contains two different types of particles. There are the fermions, which make up matter, and the gauge-bosons which mediate interactions between the fermions and, in some cases, among themselves. There is one additional particle – the Higgs-boson – which is needed to give masses to both bosons and fermions. Neutrino event at the IceCube

Wednesday, September 27, 06:09 UTC @ Backreaction

Dear Chris, The standard model of particle physics contains two different types of particles. There are the fermions, which make up matter, and the gauge-bosons which mediate interactions between the fermions and, in some cases, among themselves. There is one additional particle – the Higgs-boson – which is needed to give masses to both bosons and fermions. Neutrino event at the IceCube

Wednesday, September 27, 01:52 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Just saw this on Hacker News -- Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtual Machine with the following overview: Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communica

Tuesday, September 26, 21:39 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I don’t know if I ever mentioned this, but quite a while ago I replaced the “latexrender” TeX plugin being used here by a mathjax one. As I find time, I’m now going back and editing old posts to get … Continue reading →

Tuesday, September 26, 17:21 UTC @ tecosystems

Thirty-five days after publicly stating, in response to objections from the Apache Software Foundation among others, that the company would not be re-licensing its React library, Facebook on Friday announced that it was re-licensing its React library. It was a surprising but welcome reversal for many in the industry, including Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg. Ten days

Tuesday, September 26, 17:21 UTC @ tecosystems

Thirty-five days after publicly stating, in response to objections from the Apache Software Foundation among others, that the company would not be re-licensing its React library, Facebook on Friday announced that it was re-licensing its React library. It was a surprising but welcome reversal for many in the industry, including Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg. Ten days

Tuesday, September 26, 15:56 UTC @ x.ai

This week, Techweek100 recognized x.ai as an Established Leader in New York, and we’re pretty chuffed about it. The Techweek100 is a prestigious annual award by Techweek, a tech festival … View Article The post x.ai selected to the NYC Techweek100 Awards appeared first on x.ai.

Tuesday, September 26, 15:13 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Copattern matching and first-class observations in OCaml, with a macro, by Paul Laforgue and Yann Regis-Gianas: Infinite data structures are elegantly defined by means of copattern matching, a dual construction to pattern matching that expresses the outcomes of the observations of an infinite structure. We extend the OCaml programming language with c

Tuesday, September 26, 10:01 UTC @ brucknerite

Los hilos de Twitter estén de moda como forma de contar historias (¡gracias, Manuel Bartual!). Tienen a su favor el poder ver en tiempo real cómo se desarrollan; en su contra, lo engorroso que puede ser seguirlos. Para evitar esto, los momentos de Twitter pueden ser una herramienta interesante para recoger esos hilos lanzados al … Continúa leyendo Mi charla de #Naukas1

Tuesday, September 26, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved?

Monday, September 25, 21:21 UTC @ Indie Stack

I ran into a subtle bug with Xcode 9 that I think is worth sharing. Specifically, this bug affects Mac applications that: Are sandboxed. Launch a sandboxed subprocess with NSTask (or posix_spawn). Configure the subprocess to inherit the parent’s sandbox. When such an app is compiled with Xcode 9, the subprocess will crash whenever the … Continue reading Sandbox Inheritance Tax

Monday, September 25, 14:38 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Sketchnotes from Business of Software Conference USA 2017 Lianna Patch at Punchline Copy not only did a Lightning Talk at Business of Software Conference USA last week, she took some pretty cool sketchnotes of the talks when she wasn’t preparing to give her own. We will add these sketchnotes to the collaborative notes and publish […] The post Sketchnotes from Busine

Monday, September 25, 14:30 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous post looked at a particular cellular automaton, the so-called Rule 90. When started with a single pixel turned on, it draws a Sierpinski triangle. With random starting pixels, it draws a semi-random pattern that retains features like the Sierpinski triangle. There are only 256 possible elementary cellular automata, so it’s practical to plot […]

Monday, September 25, 12:55 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Another year passes and another set of changes to the Swift String API arrives. Swift 4 brings some much needed improvements and simplifications to String. These are my notes on what I needed to change to update my Swift String Cheat Sheet for Swift 4. You can find the original and now updated guide and Xcode playground here: Swift String Cheat Sheet

Monday, September 25, 02:41 UTC @ Planet Lisp

2017-10-15: Tweaked the hash merge function to actually deliver the claims (one-universality isn’t enough). Whenever I mention a data or work distribution problem where I ideally want everything related to a given key to hit the same machine, everyone jumps to consistent hashing. I don’t know how this technique achieved the mindshare it has, although I suspect

Monday, September 25, 02:01 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(This post is inspired by the choice of a female to be the next Doctor on the TV show Dr. Who. Note that you can't say `the next Dr. Who will be female' since Dr. Who is not the name of the character. The name has not been revealed. Trivia: The first Dr. Who episode was the same day Kennedy was shot.) I give a contrast and then say why it might not be valid: Star Trek- The Original Series. 1966. There is a black female communications officer, a Russian officer and an Asian o

Sunday, September 24, 07:17 UTC @ Planet Lisp

This short essay will tell you about my favorite macro, nest, discuss the modularity of syntax extension, and use the implementation of that macro as an illustration for how to use defmacro, syntax-rules and syntax-case, providing along the way a comparison between these respective macro definition systems. Using the nest macro When I started

Saturday, September 23, 17:31 UTC @ John D. Cook

A couple months ago I wrote about how a simple random process gives rise to the Sierpinski triangle. Draw an equilateral triangle and pick a random point in the plane. Repeatedly pick a triangle vertex at random and move half way from the current position to that vertex. The result converges to a Sierpinksi triangle. […]

Saturday, September 23, 15:16 UTC @ gilded : rust

submitted by /u/luisbg [link] [comments]

Saturday, September 23, 14:43 UTC @ TED Blog

Forty-three years ago this week, the number one tennis star in the world, 29-year-old Billie Jean King, agreed to take on 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, in a match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” The prize was $100,000 — which compared with today’s million-dollar-winning pots wasn’t much — but it was the first time that women [

Saturday, September 23, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The second RC build for the FreeBSD 10.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Saturday, September 23, 00:57 UTC @ NSBlog

Soon after Swift was initially open sourced, I wrote an article about how weak references are implemented. Time moves on and things change, and the implementation is different from what it once was. Today I'm going to talk about the current implementation and how it works compared to the old one, a topic suggested by Guillaume Lessard.

Friday, September 22, 21:20 UTC @ TED Blog

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Farewell to Cassini — and here’s to the continuing search for life beyond Earth. In mid-August, PBS released a digital short featuring Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist and the leader of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to […]

Friday, September 22, 17:29 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

For quite a while Leonard Susskind has been giving some wonderful courses on physics under the name “The Theoretical Minimum”, pitched at a level in between typical popularizations and standard advanced undergraduate courses. This is a great idea, since there … Continue reading →

Friday, September 22, 16:44 UTC @ tecosystems

One of the most common questions regarding open source licensing today concerns trajectories. Specifically, what are the current directions of travel both for specific licenses as well as license types more broadly. Or put more simply, what licenses are projects using today, and how is that changing? We’ve examined this data several times, most recently

Friday, September 22, 16:44 UTC @ tecosystems

One of the most common questions regarding open source licensing today concerns trajectories. Specifically, what are the current directions of travel both for specific licenses as well as license types more broadly. Or put more simply, what licenses are projects using today, and how is that changing? We’ve examined this data several times, most recently

Friday, September 22, 15:43 UTC @ TED Blog

On September 11, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. Residents spend four months in TED’s New York headquarters with other exceptional people from all over the map—including the Netherlands, the UK, Tennessee and Georgia. The new Residents include: A filmmaker creating a movie experience that […]

Friday, September 22, 15:33 UTC @ Indie Stack

Apple released Xcode 9 earlier this week, and in spite of a few glitches here and there, I have found the update to be an overall improvement over Xcode 8. It’s nice that Apple continues to invest in the core tools for Mac and iOS developers. I’ve been dabbling in more and more Swift development … Continue reading Better Swift Completion →<

Friday, September 22, 15:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Much like a pod of whales or a pack of wolves, did you know that a group of gorillas is called a band? In this blog series, we’re going to introduce you to members of our band – engineers, technical recruiters, PMs, designers, and more who make up the most important asset in Gorilla Logic…our […] The post Member of the Band – Full Stack Developer Juan Carlos Ve

Friday, September 22, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

Es posible que saliendo de Madrid por la A-1 hacia el norte, alrededor del kilómetro 72, hayáis visto un grupo de grandes antenas parabólicas. Si conocéis —al menos de oídas— el Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex de Robledo de Chavela no es raro que penséis que allí, en la falda de la sierra norte madrileña, … Continúa leyendo «Antenas abandonadas» en Nau

Thursday, September 21, 23:46 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Whenever I teach discrete math and use FML to mean Formula the students laugh since its a common acroynm for Fuck My Life. Now they laugh, and I say I know why you are laughing, I know what it means and they laugh even harder. BUT it got me thinking: Pigeonhole Principle! There are more things we want short acroynms for then there are short acroynms. Below are some I thought of. I am sure there are others, in fact I am sure there are websites of such, but I wanted to see which o

Thursday, September 21, 21:19 UTC @ Azimuth

I’m running a special session on applied category theory, and now the program is available: • Applied category theory, Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, 4-5 November 2017, U.C. Riverside. This is going to be fun. My former student Brendan Fong is now working with David Spivak at MIT, and they’re both coming. My […]

Thursday, September 21, 18:30 UTC @ John D. Cook

A random number generator can have excellent statistical properties and yet not be suited for use in cryptography. I’ve written a few posts to demonstrate this. For example, this post shows how to discover the seed of an LCG random number generator. This is not possible with a secure random number generator. Or more precisely, […]

Thursday, September 21, 18:17 UTC @ TED Blog

The advance toward a more connected, united, compassionate world is in peril. Some voices are demanding a retreat, back to a world where insular nations battle for their own interests. But most of the big problems we face are collective in nature and global in scope. What can we do, together, about it? In a […]

Thursday, September 21, 17:15 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

We haven’t found Planet Nine yet, in case you were wondering. To date, the telescopic searches have really just begun to scratch the surface of the area that needs to be scanned, and, while clever new projects to find Planet Nine with different techniques have been proposed, most of these efforts are just getting underway. But don’t worry: the new season of Subaru searching starts tonight! With good weather, we should be able to scan a significant pa

Thursday, September 21, 14:59 UTC @ Backreaction

I made some drawings recently. For no particular purpose, really, other than to distract myself. And here is the joker:

Thursday, September 21, 14:59 UTC @ Backreaction

I made some drawings recently. For no particular purpose, really, other than to distract myself. And here is the joker:

Thursday, September 21, 13:29 UTC @ John D. Cook

Video by my friend Aaron Benzel showing the debris and cleanup typical of neighborhoods that flooded in Harvey.

Thursday, September 21, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

—Las ciencias nacen desnudas y temblorosas, Simplicia, como bebés recién alumbrados. Sus madres no pueden sospechar, como las de los hijos reales, hasta dónde llegarán sus vástagos. ¿Se alzarán frente a la ignorancia, cambiarán las vidas de millones de seres, dominarán el mundo? ¿O fracasarán, serán olvidadas y reemplazadas por otras más fértiles? En el … Continúa leyendo

Wednesday, September 20, 21:52 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Non-determinism: a sublanguage rather than a monad A puzzlingly named, exceedingly technical device introduced to structure the denotational semantics has by now achieved cult status. It has been married to effects -- more than once. It is compulsively looked for in all manner of things, including burritos. At least two ICFP papers brought it up without a rhyme or reason (or understanding), as the authors later admitted.

Wednesday, September 20, 18:31 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

IBM’s Cognitive Horizons Network produced more than 70 peer-reviewed AI publications in its first year With over two decades of AI research expertise across our global labs, our scientists take pride in their ability to explore, invent and uncover new innovations, but we also understand that the solutions to the most complex AI problems will […] The post The Best of Minds: IBM’s Commitment to Advancing AI R

Wednesday, September 20, 17:39 UTC @ Recent commits to luajit-2.0

Thanks to Joshua Haberman.

Wednesday, September 20, 16:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

Now it’s quicker and easier for users to see your app's rating, with just one summary rating that displays on your product page. This summary rating is based on ratings of your app's current version as of September 19 (Pacific Time), and is specific to each territory on the App Store. New ratings will continue to count towards this summary, and you can choose to reset your summary rating when you release a new version of your app. Customer reviews for all versions of your app will continue to display on y

Wednesday, September 20, 15:50 UTC @ TED Blog

Two years ago, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson graced the TEDWomen stage with a moving talk about why climate change is not only a threat to our environment, but also a threat to the human rights of many poor and marginalized people around the world. Mary is an incredible person who inspires me greatly. […]

Wednesday, September 20, 12:56 UTC @ John D. Cook

In the previous two posts we looked at a randomization scheme for protecting the privacy of a binary response. This post will look briefly at adding noise to continuous or unbounded data. I like to keep the posts here fairly short, but this topic is fairly technical. To keep it short I’ll omit some of […]

Wednesday, September 20, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

In the previous post we looked at a simple randomization procedure to obscure individual responses to yes/no questions in a way that retains the statistical usefulness of the data. In this post we’ll generalize that procedure, quantify the privacy loss, and discuss the utility/privacy trade-off. More general randomized response Suppose we have a binary response […]

Wednesday, September 20, 06:37 UTC @ Planet Clang

Compilers are complex pieces of software and have a multitude of command-line options to fine tune parameters. Clang is no exception: it has 447 command-line options. It’s nearly impossible to memorize all these options and their correct spellings, that's where shell completion can be very handy. When you type in the first few characters of a flag and hit tab, it will autocomplete the rest for you.BackgroundHowever, such a autocompletion feature is not available yet, as there's no easy way to get a comple

Wednesday, September 20, 03:11 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

What is drama therapy? Kathryn Farley obtained her PhD from Northwestern University in performance studies in 2007. After almost a decade working in that area, she has just started a Master’s program at New York University in a related field called drama therapy (DT). Today, I thought I would talk about the math aspects of […]

Wednesday, September 20, 00:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

The App Store has grown beyond anything we could have ever imagined. And now, with daily stories by our editors, a dedicated Games tab, lists for all kinds of apps, and much more, this beautiful new design provides an amazing place to highlight your incredible work — and help customers discover new apps and games.Share Your PresenceJoin us in celebrating your app on the new App Store by promoting your updated product page. Simply download the marketing toolkit and share your app or game with the world.Dow

Tuesday, September 19, 20:40 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

We’ve increased the cellular download limit from 100 MB to 150 MB, letting customers download more apps from the App Store over their cellular network.

Tuesday, September 19, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Suppose you want to gather data on an incriminating question. For example, maybe a statistics professor would like to know how many students cheated on a test. Being a statistician, the professor has a clever way to find out what he wants to know while giving each student deniability. Randomized response Each student is asked […]

Tuesday, September 19, 12:00 UTC @ Swift.org

Swift 4 is now officially released! Swift 4 builds on the strengths of Swift 3, delivering greater robustness and stability, providing source code compatibility with Swift 3, making improvements to the standard library, and adding features like archival and serialization. You can watch a quick overview of it by watching the WWDC 2017: What’s New in Swift presentation, and try out some of the new features in this

Tuesday, September 19, 10:10 UTC @ brucknerite

El pasado #Naukas17 en el Euskalduna de Bilbao fue, una vez más, el evento de divulgación científica a seguir. Aquí tenéis mis diez minutos de charla, «La hiperestafa del hiperbucle», en los que me afané en explicar qué es exactamente el Hyperloop de Elon Musk —sorprendentemente hay mucha desinformación al respecto— y por qué no … Continúa leyendo

Tuesday, September 19, 09:58 UTC @ Backreaction

I’m still writing on the book. After not much happened for almost a year, my publisher now rather suddenly asked for the final version of the manuscript. Until that’s done not much will be happening on this blog. We do seem to have settled on a title though: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.” The title is my doing, the subtitle isn’t. I just hope it won’t lead too many readers

Tuesday, September 19, 09:58 UTC @ Backreaction

I’m still writing on the book. After not much happened for almost a year, my publisher now rather suddenly asked for the final version of the manuscript. Until that’s done not much will be happening on this blog. We do seem to have settled on a title though: “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.” The title is my doing, the subtitle isn’t. I just hope it won’t lead too many readers

Tuesday, September 19, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Tuesday, September 19, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved?

Tuesday, September 19, 01:16 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Some people believe living in Costa Rica is all about living on the beach, surfing, and hanging out with a bunch of monkeys. Well, when I move there in October, I will actually be living and working in the capital, San José, spending time with Gorillas in our Nearshore Development Center! In this series, you […] The post Nearshore Software Development: Costa Rica Bound appeared first

Monday, September 18, 17:12 UTC @ TED Blog

Sethembile Msezane’s sculptures are not made of clay, granite or marble. She is the sculpture, as you will see in her talk — which you can watch right now before you read this Q&A. We’ll wait. The fragility of the medium combined with the power of her messages make for performances that literally stop people […]

Monday, September 18, 16:49 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

In cardboard, the safety and care for stuff is the important reason for its existence. Similarly, in XML and JSON the safety and care of the data, both in transit and in storage, are why we bother.

Monday, September 18, 14:27 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

When Apple revealed the iPhone X with a top “notch” and bottom home screen indicator the reason behind some SDK changes at WWDC 2017 became clearer. Safe area layout guides may help but there are still some gotchas for table/collection views and the search bar. Safe Area Layout Guide Apple added the safe area layout guide in iOS 11 replacing the top and bottom layout guides with a single guide. Here is what the safe area looks like on an

Monday, September 18, 14:20 UTC @ Arek Holko

Core Data is not a first-class citizen in the Swift world. Its inherently dynamic nature is lurking at us through an attribute created specifically for it: @NSManaged. Let me show you how this dynamic nature caught me off guard. I ended up with a property having a value I’d never assigned to it! @NSManaged means dynamic Imagine we’re starting a new project and need a way to represent a user. We’ve got:

Monday, September 18, 11:39 UTC @ joe cieplinski

In choosing the iPhone 8, what I’d miss most of the X are probably the OLED display and Face ID, but those aren’t must-have features for me, either; certainly not worth spending €350 more to have them (I think those €350 would be better spent on an Apple

Monday, September 18, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Monday, September 18, 04:36 UTC @ Computational Complexity

On Nate Silver's page he sometimes (might be once a week) has a column edited by Oliver Roeder of problems. Pretty much math problems though sometimes not quite. Some are math problems that I have seen before (e.g., hat problems). I don't bother submitting since that would just be goofy. I would be ringer. Some are math problems that I have not seen before, I try to do, I fail, but read the answer and am enlightened. I call that a win.

Sunday, September 17, 19:59 UTC @ John D. Cook

From an FAQ post I wrote a few years ago: This may seem like an odd question, but it’s actually one I get very often. On my TeXtip twitter account, I include tips on how to create non-English characters such as using \AA to produce Å. Every time someone will ask “Why not use XeTeX and just […]

Sunday, September 17, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The first RC build for the FreeBSD 10.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Friday, September 15, 21:55 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Earlier this week Zohar Komargodski (who is now at the Simons Center) visited Columbia, and gave a wonderful talk on recent work he has been involved in that provides some new insight into a very old question about QCD. Simplifying … Continue reading →

Friday, September 15, 18:47 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

It was just Ken’s birthday Kenneth Regan’s birthday was just the other day. I believe I join all in wishing him a wonder unbirthday today. The idea of unbirthday is due to Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking-Glass: and is set to music in the 1951 Disney animated feature film Alice in Wonderland. Here […]

Friday, September 15, 17:11 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Much like a pod of whales or a pack of wolves, did you know that a group of gorillas is called a band? In this blog series, we’re going to introduce you to members of our band – engineers, technical recruiters, PMs, designers, and more who make up the most important asset in Gorilla Logic…our […] The post Member of the Band – Full Stack Web Developer Patrick Dobson appeared fi

Friday, September 15, 14:43 UTC @ NSBlog

I'm afraid I once again don't have a Friday Q&A for you today, but I wrote up the best new features in Swift 4 for the Plausible Labs blog, which is almost as good. Check it out over there! (Read More)

Thursday, September 14, 23:58 UTC @ John D. Cook

I was listening to My Favorite Theorem when Jordan Ellenberg said something in passing about proving Fermat’s little theorem from Pascal’s triangle. I wasn’t familiar with that, and fortunately Evelyn Lamb wasn’t either and so she asked him to explain. Fermat’s little theorem says that for any prime p, then for any integer a, ap = a […]

Thursday, September 14, 23:46 UTC @ TED Blog

Every year at TEDWomen, we gather to talk about issues that matter, to learn and bond and get energized. This year, we will be reconvening on November 1–3 in New Orleans — and we would love for you, and your amazing perspective and ideas, to join us and become part of this diverse, welcoming group that’s growing […]

Thursday, September 14, 18:04 UTC @ tecosystems

In many settings, open source licensing today is considered a solved problem. Not only has the Open Source Initiative (OSI) largely contained the long feared issue of license proliferation, the industry has essentially consolidated around a few reasonably well understood models. Copyleft licenses such as the GPL, which require users who would distribute the software

Thursday, September 14, 18:04 UTC @ tecosystems

In many settings, open source licensing today is considered a solved problem. Not only has the Open Source Initiative (OSI) largely contained the long feared issue of license proliferation, the industry has essentially consolidated around a few reasonably well understood models. Copyleft licenses such as the GPL, which require users who would distribute the software

Thursday, September 14, 17:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

The App Store Review Guidelines have been updated. We review all apps submitted to the App Store in an effort to determine whether they are reliable, perform as expected, and are free of offensive material. As you plan and develop your app, make sure to use these updated guidelines.Read the App Store Review Guidelines.

Thursday, September 14, 16:36 UTC @ Computational Complexity

It's Monday as I write this post from home. Atlanta, for the first time ever, is in a tropical storm warning. Georgia Tech is closed today and tomorrow. I'm just waiting for the power to go out. But whatever will happen here won't even count as a minor inconvenience compared to those in Houston, the Caribbean and Florida. Our hearts goes out to all those affected by these terrible storms. Did global warming help make Harvey and Irma as dangerous as they became? Hard to believe

Thursday, September 14, 09:32 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Azeem Azhar, Product Manager, Schibsted Media Group It is early days but change is coming. Faster than you think. You should worry, but are you concerned about the right things? Should you concern yourself with terrible tales of, ‘The Singularity’, or about how AI and Machine Learning will change the way that your business runs? […] The post Should We Be

Wednesday, September 13, 22:58 UTC @ TED Blog

Two African cooks walk into a bar; 30 seconds later they are arguing over whose country’s jollof rice is better. Or so the corny joke would go. The truth is, I really had no idea what would happen if we got Senegal-born chef Pierre Thiam (TED Talk: A Forgotten Ancient Grain That Could Help Africa […]

Wednesday, September 13, 17:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Editor’s note: This article is by Abhinav Kandala, Antonio Mezzacapo, and Kristan Temme, IBM Research Simulating molecules on quantum computers just got much easier with IBM’s superconducting quantum hardware. In a recent research article published in Nature, Hardware-efficient Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Small Molecules and Quantum Magnets, we implement a new quantum algorithm capable of […] The post

Wednesday, September 13, 16:02 UTC @ TED Blog

If you’ve seen Pierre Thiam’s TED Talk about fonio, then you saw that part when he actually handed food out to the audience, yes? For those who didn’t know to sit in the front rows to receive that blessing (or couldn’t be there in the first place), and don’t mind rolling up their sleeves in […]

Wednesday, September 13, 04:07 UTC @ Backreaction

I'm in Switzerland this week, for a conference on "Thinking about Space and Time: 100 Years of Applying and Interpreting General Relativity." I am also behind with several things and blogging will remain slow for the next weeks. If you miss my writing all too much, here is a new paper.

Wednesday, September 13, 04:07 UTC @ Backreaction

I'm in Switzerland this week, for a conference on "Thinking about Space and Time: 100 Years of Applying and Interpreting General Relativity." I am also behind with several things and blogging will remain slow for the next weeks. If you miss my writing all too much, here is a new paper.

Wednesday, September 13, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

As part of dynamic linking frameworks in your Xcode apps frameworks need to be copied into your app Frameworks folder. There are multiples ways to do so: Add a new Copy Files Build Phase, selecting Frameworks as the directory where you want the frameworks to be copied. Running a script that automates the copy step for you. The most popular dependency management tools in the c

Wednesday, September 13, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

If you build your apps in a modular manner using Swift, you have probably been in the situation where a ModuleX defines some mocks or testing data for its tests in its tests target, but they cannot be shared to be used from other tests targets, playgrounds, example apps… (essentially because they cannot import a tests target) With Objective-C it wasn’t an issue at all because we could mock the interface of our dependencies at runtime with just one line

Tuesday, September 12, 20:31 UTC @ absorptions

Voice inversion is a primitive method of rendering speech unintelligible to prevent eavesdropping of radio or telephone calls. I wrote about some simple ways to reverse it in a previous post. I've since written a software tool, deinvert (on GitHub), that does all

Tuesday, September 12, 19:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

With cellular, your apps can connect everywhere and anytime, even when not connected to an iPhone or Wi-Fi. Health and fitness apps can also take advantage of the barometric altimeter to display altitude changes and get improved accuracy for workout metrics from HealthKit.Learn about developing for watchOS.

Tuesday, September 12, 19:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

Now your tvOS apps can deliver amazing cinematic video experiences and stunning picture quality by taking advantage of 4K resolution, Dolby Vision, and HDR10. And with the new Siri remote, you now have three-axis gyro data available to create even more engaging gaming and interactive experiences.Learn about developing for tvOS.

Tuesday, September 12, 19:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

iPhone X features an all-screen Super Retina display for more immersive app experiences and Face ID, a secure new way to unlock, authenticate, and pay. The TrueDepth camera works with ARKit, and the A11 Bionic chip is designed for Core ML and Metal 2.Learn about developing for iPhone X.

Tuesday, September 12, 19:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

You can now submit your apps that take advantage of exciting new features available in the next release of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Build your apps using Xcode 9 GM seed, test with the latest releases of macOS High Sierra, iOS 11, watchOS 4, tvOS 11, and submit them for review.Download GM seeds.The all-new App Store on iOS 11 provides more opportunities to showcase your content with subtitles, promotional text, additional app previews that you can localize, and up to 20 promoted in-app purchases.Learn

Tuesday, September 12, 19:30 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

Design and Development VideosGet new insights on creating apps for the latest advancements in iPhone X, Apple Watch Series 3, and Apple TV 4K with a new collection of videos.Watch videos.Design TemplatesDownload the latest Sketch and Photoshop templates and guides to quickly and accurately design iOS apps that integrate seamlessly into the overall user experience of iPhone X.Download resources.

Tuesday, September 12, 17:59 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

In a classical Symbolic Perturbation scheme, degeneracies are handled by substituting some polynomials in $\varepsilon$ for the inputs of a predicate.  Instead of a single perturbation, we propose to use a sequence of (simpler) perturbations. Moreover, we look at their effects geometrically instead of algebraically; this allows us to tackle cases that were not tractable with the classical algebraic approach.

Tuesday, September 12, 17:00 UTC @ TED Blog

Any dedicated educator can tell you: A teaching job extends far beyond the hours of the school day. Molding the minds of future leaders while simultaneously ferrying them across the rapids of childhood and adolescence — and dealing with the economics of the job — is a calling not for the faint of heart. Here […]

Tuesday, September 12, 13:15 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Hilbert's two-dimensional space-filling curve is appreciated for its good locality-preserving properties and easy implementation for many applications. However, Hilbert did not describe how to generalize his construction to higher dimensions. In fact, the number of ways in which this may be done ranges from zero to infinite, depending on what properties of the Hilbert curve one considers to be essential. In this work we take the point of view that a Hilbert curve should at least be self-simila

Tuesday, September 12, 12:50 UTC @ John D. Cook

In the oral exam for my PhD, my advisor asked me a question about a differential equation. I don’t recall the question, but I remember the interaction that followed. I was stuck, and my advisor countered by saying “Let me ask you a harder question.” I was still stuck, and so he said “Let me […]

Tuesday, September 12, 11:55 UTC @ John D. Cook

It can be surprisingly easy to identify someone from data that’s not directly identifiable. One commonly cited result is that the combination of birth date, zip code, and sex is enough to identify most people. This post will look at how to quantify the amount of information contained in such data. If the answer to […]

Tuesday, September 12, 10:45 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

Some time ago I've written a short note about usage of term "gift culture" in "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond. Eric Raymond have responded here. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to properly respond until now. Today, finally, I've managed to write down some notes on the topic. But first, let me get some stuff out of the way. First, Raymond is cor

Tuesday, September 12, 05:32 UTC @ Azimuth

There will be a conference on applied category theory! • Applied Category Theory (ACT 2018). School 23–27 April 2018 and workshop 30 April–4 May 2018 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Organized by Bob Coecke (Oxford), Brendan Fong (MIT), Aleks Kissinger (Nijmegen), Martha Lewis (Amsterdam), and Joshua Tan (Oxford). The plenary speakers will […]

Monday, September 11, 19:54 UTC @ brucknerite

Es la misma tira de asfalto. Se desliza bajo las ruedas sin que yo la sienta más que como una vibración suave, kilómetro tras kilómetro, minuto tras minuto. A veces a la tira de asfalto la acompaña música que imaginaron personas que nacieron y murieron en lo que parece otro planeta sin esas tiras. A … Continúa leyendo La misma

Monday, September 11, 17:41 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

A new approximation algorithm Composite of src1, src2, src3 Ola Svensson, Jakub Tarnawski, and László Végh have made a breakthrough in the area of approximation algorithms. Tarnawski is a student of Svensson at EPFL in Lausanne—they have another paper in FOCS on matchings to note—while Végh was a postdoc at Georgia Tech six years ago […]

Monday, September 11, 16:00 UTC @ Planet Clang

The LLVM Foundation is excited to announce the selected proposals for the 2017 US LLVM Developers' Meeting!Keynotes:Falcon: An optimizing Java JIT - Philip ReamesCompiling Android userspace and Linux kernel with LLVM - Stephen Hines, Nick Desaulniers and Greg HackmannTalks:Apple LLVM GPU Compiler: Embedded Dragons - Marcello Maggioni and Charu ChandrasekaranBringing link-time optimization to the embedded world: (Thin)LTO with Linker Scripts - Tobias Edler von Koch, Sergei Larin, Shankar Easwaran and Hemant

Monday, September 11, 14:15 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

A small band of Gorillas created a three-week iBeacons and Hue Lights project using different technologies. In our first post, we introduced our project and provided a tutorial on implementing the Beacon SDK and integrating iOS devices through Bluetooth. In the second post, we discussed how to implement a Node.JS Server to manage and handle […] The post iBeac

Monday, September 11, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

You have probably heard all the buzzwords people use when trying to explain quantum computing (superposition and entanglement ring a bell?). Fans of xkcd – “the webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” – already know that when a subject is both philosophically exciting and mathematically complex, it’s easy to develop weird ideas about it, […] The post Quantum Computing: you know it’s coo

Monday, September 11, 09:27 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Apple added PDF vector images to the Xcode asset catalog in Xcode 6. It is a convenient way to build the image assets at 1x, 2x and 3x resolution without the pain of manually creating each file. What it did not do was give you truly scaleable vector images. Stretching an image above its base size left you with some ugly, fuzzy results. That changes with Xcode 9 with the possibility to keep the vector data and scale images at runtime. It also adds some accessibility improvements which work well al

Monday, September 11, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Monday, September 11, 01:49 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In 2009 I had a post about Movie mistakes (see here). One of them was the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz after he got a Diploma (AH- but not a brain) he said The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isoscles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh joy! Rapture! I have a brain! I wrote that either this mistake was (1) a mistake, (2) on purpose and show

Sunday, September 10, 23:06 UTC @ John D. Cook

Suppose you measure people on two independent attributes, X and Y, and take those for whom X+Y is above some threshold. Then even though X and Y are uncorrelated in the full population, they will be negatively correlated in your sample. This article gives the following example. Suppose beauty and acting ability were uncorrelated. Knowing how […]

Sunday, September 10, 14:25 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I don’t understand people who like to spoil surprises. I don’t get angry with them. I don’t tell them how to live, or anything. I just don’t get them. There have always been leaks surrounding new Apple announcements. This is why sites like MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and

Saturday, September 09, 23:40 UTC @ Quality Coding

A paper published in 2013 about Test Driven Development included the following diagram. Unfortunately, it gets some things wrong: A tweet from Nat Pryce sparked discussion: Grumpy request to academics: if you're going to publish ideas about how to improve TDD, get the original process right! pic.twitter.com/FaSU8CF6ol — Nat Pryce (@natpryce) September 7, 2017 First, […]

Saturday, September 09, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The fourth BETA build for the FreeBSD 10.4 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Saturday, September 09, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Friday, September 08, 19:07 UTC @ NSBlog

I'm afraid I ran out of time for Friday Q&A this week. Will shoot for next week instead. Instead, I present a little update about various other things in my world. (Read More)

Friday, September 08, 18:47 UTC @ TED Blog

Urban gentrification in Lagos is displacing hundreds of thousands of people who do not fit into the administration’s resplendent vision for the future. Their crime? Poverty. In what was one of the most moving talks of TEDGlobal 2017, OluTimehin Adegbeye calls us to consider the human cost of progress, specifically for the former inhabitants of

Friday, September 08, 18:18 UTC @ Sean Carroll

Joe Polchinski, a universally-admired theoretical physicist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, recently posted a 150-page writeup of his memories of doing research over the years. Memories of a Theoretical Physicist Joseph Polchinski While I was … Continue reading →

Friday, September 08, 16:35 UTC @ gilded : rust

submitted by /u/tbodt [link] [comments]

Friday, September 08, 15:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Much like a pod of whales or a pack of wolves, did you know that a group of gorillas is called a band? In this blog series, we’re going to introduce you to members of our band – engineers, technical recruiters, PMs, designers, and more who make up the most important asset in Gorilla Logic…our […] The post Meet Member of the Band – QA Engineer Mirna Viquez appeared f

Friday, September 08, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Friday, September 08, 05:46 UTC @ Azimuth

guest post by Spencer Breiner One Year Postdoc Position at Carnegie Mellon/NIST We are seeking an early-career researcher with a background in category theory, functional programming and/or electrical engineering for a one-year post-doctoral position supported by an Early-concept Grant (EAGER) from the NSF’s Systems Science program. The position will be managed through Carnegie Mellon University […]

Friday, September 08, 01:53 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Quanta magazine today has a column by Robbert Dijkgraaf that comes with the abstract: Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe … Continue reading →

Thursday, September 07, 17:06 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I've written about Portacle on a previous occasion, where I talked mostly about the issues I've faced. This time, however, I'm excited to announce that Portacle has finally reached version 1.0. This means that there are no obvious remaining issues that I am aware of. Everything should Just Work™. In case you're confused abo

Thursday, September 07, 15:34 UTC @ Computational Complexity

When I teach a small (at most 40) students I often have the dead-cat policy for late HW: HW is due on Tuesday. But there may be things that come up that don't quite merit a doctors note, for example your cat dying, but are legit for an extension. Rather than have me judge every case you ALL have an extension until Thursday, no questions asked. Realize of course that the hw is MORALLY due Tuesday. So if on Thursday you ask, for an extension I will deny it on the grounds that I already gave yo

Thursday, September 07, 12:38 UTC @ John D. Cook

Some theorems are cited far more often than others. These are not the most striking theorems, not the most advanced or most elegant, but ones that are extraordinarily useful. I first noticed this when taking complex analysis where the Cauchy integral formula comes up over and over. When I first saw the formula I thought […]

Thursday, September 07, 12:06 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I like the idea of sly: like slime, but cooler. Less conservative with changes, less concerned about backwards-compatibility, more features, cleaner implementation, etc. But I don’t know that much about it in detail, and I’ve never tried it - until now. I’m going to use sly exclusively for the month of September. As I bump into differences from slime, I’m taking notes and will share them here. I hope to give people a

Thursday, September 07, 03:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

As an MIT graduate and senior leader within IBM Research, I have always felt a close kinship between these two institutions. Both are renowned for their technical excellence, and both are strongly committed to pushing the frontiers of science and technology to solve problems that matter to the world. MIT’s motto “Mens et Manus” (Latin […] The post MIT and IBM: putting our “minds and hands” together

Thursday, September 07, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

watchOS 3 introduced the ability to include SpriteKit and SceneKit scenes inside of your watchOS projects. At the same time, Apple also introduced more animation capabilities with the standard WatchKit UI elements, but the power of Core Animation that iOS developers have become accustomed to was missing in watchOS. Fortunately, watchOS does have more animation abilities, but it relies on SpriteKit and SceneKit to perform those animations. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to create yo

Wednesday, September 06, 18:39 UTC @ TED Blog

When we started TEDWomen in 2010, we felt strongly that we wanted to include a series of talks we called “Duets” in which we would forego the traditional TED Talk model and present pairs of speakers instead of solo ones. There is no question that the Duets sessions are often among the most popular and […]

Wednesday, September 06, 16:16 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

When people ask me the question of where they should focus their time I ask them what is the one thing you could be the best in the world at? The answer might be going deep or going wide. The important thing is to spend your time on building the skills that will move you to where to you want to go.

Wednesday, September 06, 11:59 UTC @ Backreaction

Something else I made for the book but later removed. (Click to enlarge.)

Wednesday, September 06, 11:59 UTC @ Backreaction

Something else I made for the book but later removed. (Click to enlarge.)

Wednesday, September 06, 10:15 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

In my first post, I explained a simple three-step process to start any automation testing. In the second post, I explored REST API testing, its importance, how to create tests using Rest-Assured and how to integrate them with your ongoing development efforts. In this third and final installment of the automation blog post series, we will […] The post Automation Testing Part 3:

Tuesday, September 05, 23:26 UTC @ John D. Cook

Suppose you draw samples from two populations, one of which has a wider probability distribution than the other. How does the width of the distribution of the combined sample vary as you change the proportions of the two populations? The extremes are easy. If you pick only from one population, then the resulting distribution will […]

Tuesday, September 05, 14:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Right now the software world is booming, and with it, new organizations and ideas are pushing the limits of the market and creating new tech solutions at a mind-blowing rate. These solutions depend on the groups of talent developers, designers, DevOps and QAs that make it possible to have a product. The quality and velocity […] The post 6 Tips for Leading Software Development Teams appea

Tuesday, September 05, 00:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

What is FiveAM? FiveAM is a simple-yet-mature test framework. It makes test suites for your project easy to implement, maintain, organize and run. Motivation While it can't be said that there are no learning materials provided for FiveAM, it feels like they are lacking in both clarity and detail. Beginners are in need of gentle, friendly guidance. Experienced Lisp hackers are able to make do without it, but even they probably spend a little extra time tinkering, experimenting

Monday, September 04, 18:44 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

A fun pearl by William E. Byrd, Michael Ballantyne, Gregory Rosenblatt, and Matthew Might from ICFP: seven programming challenges solved (easily!) using a relational interpreter. One challenge, for example, is to find quines. Another is to find programs that produce different results with lexical vs. dynamic scope. The interpreter is implemented in miniKanren (of course), i

Monday, September 04, 16:37 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I really didn’t like my mid-2014 13-inch MacBook Pro. So much so, I’d put it firmly at the bottom of the list of Macs I’ve owned over the years. And that’s a long list, spanning from 1986 to present. I only bought that Mac because I

Monday, September 04, 14:47 UTC @ Computational Complexity

As a mathematician nothing grates me more than the expression "The exception that proves the rule". Either we bake the exception into the rule (all primes are odd except two) or the exception in fact disproves the rule. According to Wikipedia, "the exception that proves the rule" has a legitimate meaning, a sign that says "No par

Monday, September 04, 10:22 UTC @ Azimuth

When we design a complex system, we often start with a rough outline and fill in details later, one piece at a time. And if the system is supposed to be adaptive, these details may need to changed as the system is actually being used! The use of operads should make this easier. One reason […]

Sunday, September 03, 18:35 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

If you are one of the few LtU-ers not presenting (just kidding...), you can get your functional programming fix by following the live stream from ICFP, starting tomorrow at 11:00 (UK). Want to know when to tune in? Check out the incredible program!

Sunday, September 03, 15:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

After having some issues with microphone input handling in portaudio I took a shortcut and sketched Also ALSA: an interface to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture library. As the name suggests, it's not the first CL wrapping of it. It is however small, reasonably self-contained and can handle both input and output. LGPL to comply with alsa-lib.

Sunday, September 03, 06:03 UTC @ Azimuth

Launched 40 years ago, the Voyagers are our longest-lived and most distant spacecraft. Voyager 2 has reached the edge of the heliosphere, the realm where the solar wind and the Sun’s magnetic field live. Voyager 1 has already left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space! A new movie, The Farthest, celebrates the Voyagers’ journey toward […]

Saturday, September 02, 23:56 UTC @ John D. Cook

When you add people to a project, the total productivity of the team as a whole may go up, but the productivity per person usually goes down. Someone suggested that as a rule of thumb, a company needs to triple its number of employees to double its productivity. Fred Brooks summarized this saying “Many hands […]

Friday, September 01, 16:31 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Happy 15th Birthday Gorilla Logic! On the one hand, I’m proud to hit the milestone. On the other hand, I’m thinking, “Aren’t I supposed to be a startup zillionaire by now?” But, hey, Gorilla Logic has not only beaten the odds in becoming a successful business, we’ve outgrown the “small business” designation and have officially […] The post Happy 15th Birthday Gorilla Logic! appeared