Least common multiple of the first n positive integers

Thursday, June 29, 03:08 UTC @ John D. Cook

Here’s a surprising result: The least common multiple of the first n positive integers is approximately exp(n). More precisely, let φ(n) equal the log of the least common multiple of the numbers 1, 2, …, n. There are theorems that give upper and lower bounds on how far φ(n) can be from n. We won’t prove or […]

A practical fpt algorithm for Flow Decomposition and transcript assembly. (arXiv:1706.07851v2 [cs.DS] UPDATED)

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The Flow Decomposition problem, which asks for the smallest set of weighted paths that "covers" a flow on a DAG, has recently been used as an important computational step in genetic assembly problems. We prove the problem is in FPT when parameterized by the number of paths, and we give a practical linear fpt algorithm. Combining this approach with algorithm engineering, we implement a Flow Decomposition solver and demonstrate its competitiveness with a state-of-the-art heuristic on RNA sequencing data. W

The Quantum Complexity of Computing Schatten $p$-norms. (arXiv:1706.09279v1 [quant-ph])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We consider the quantum complexity of computing Schatten $p$-norms and related quantities, and find that the problem of estimating these quantities is closely related to the one clean qubit model of computation. We show that the problem of approximating $\text{Tr}\, (|A|^p)$ for a log-local $n$-qubit Hamiltonian $A$ and $p=\text{poly}(n)$, up to a suitable level of accuracy, is contained in DQC1; and that approximating this quantity up to a somewhat higher level of accuracy is DQC1-hard. In some cases th

Nonconvex Finite-Sum Optimization Via SCSG Methods. (arXiv:1706.09156v1 [math.OC])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component, the complexity of SCSG to reach a stationary point with $\mathbb{E} \|\nabla f(x)\|^{2}\le \epsilon$ is $O\left (\min\{\epsilon^{-5/3}, \epsilon^{-1}n^{2/3}\}\right)$, which strictly outperforms the stochastic gradient descent. Moreover, SCSG is never worse than the st

Lossy Kernels for Connected Dominating Set on Sparse Graphs. (arXiv:1706.09339v1 [cs.DS])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

Given a graph $G$ and $k\in{\mathbb N}$, the Dominating Set problem asks for a subset $D$ of $k$ vertices such that every vertex in $G$ is either in $D$ or has a neighbor in $D$. It is well known that Dominating Set is ${\sf W}[2]$-hard when parameterized by $k$. But it admits a linear kernel on graphs of bounded expansion and a polynomial kernel on $K_{d,d}$-free graphs, for a fixed constant $d$. In contrast, the closely related Connected Dominating Set problem (where $G[D]$ is required to be connected)

On the complexity of finding internally vertex-disjoint long directed paths. (arXiv:1706.09066v1 [cs.DS])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

New Results On Routing Via Matchings On Graphs. (arXiv:1706.09355v1 [cs.DS])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In this paper we present some new complexity results on the routing time of a graph under the \textit{routing via matching} model. This is a parallel routing model which was introduced by Alon et al\cite{alon1994routing}. The model can be viewed as a communication scheme on a distributed network. The nodes in the network can communicate via matchings (a step), where a node exchanges data (pebbles) with its matched partner. Let $G$ be a connected graph with vertices labeled from $\{1,...,n\}$ and the dest

Tight Euler tours in uniform hypergraphs - computational aspects. (arXiv:1706.09356v1 [cs.CC])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

By a tight tour in a $k$-uniform hypergraph $H$ we mean any sequence of its vertices $(w_0,w_1,\ldots,w_{s-1})$ such that for all $i=0,\ldots,s-1$ the set $e_i=\{w_i,w_{i+1}\ldots,w_{i+k-1}\}$ is an edge of $H$ (where operations on indices are computed modulo $s$) and the sets $e_i$ for $i=0,\ldots,s-1$ are pairwise different. A tight tour in $H$ is a tight Euler tour if it contains all edges of $H$. We prove that the problem of deciding if a given $3$-uniform hypergraph has a tight Euler tour is NP-comp

Sample-based high-dimensional convexity testing. (arXiv:1706.09362v1 [cs.CC])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

In the problem of high-dimensional convexity testing, there is an unknown set $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ which is promised to be either convex or $\varepsilon$-far from every convex body with respect to the standard multivariate normal distribution $\mathcal{N}(0, 1)^n$. The job of a testing algorithm is then to distinguish between these two cases while making as few inspections of the set $S$ as possible. In this work we consider sample-based testing algorithms, in which the testing algorithm on

Anytime Discovery of a Diverse Set of Patterns with Monte Carlo Tree Search. (arXiv:1609.08827v4 [cs.DS] UPDATED)

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The discovery of patterns that accurately discriminate one class label from another remains a challenging data mining task. Subgroup discovery (SD) is one of the frameworks that enables to elicit such interesting hypotheses from labeled data. A question remains fairly open: How to select an accurate heuristic search technique when exhaustive enumeration of the pattern space is infeasible? Existing approaches make use of beam-search, sampling and genetic algorithms for discovering a pattern set that is no

Default Logic and Bounded Treewidth. (arXiv:1706.09393v1 [cs.AI])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we study Reiter's propositional default logic when the treewidth of a certain graph representation (semi-incidence graph) of the input theory is bounded. We establish a dynamic programming algorithm on tree decompositions that decides whether a theory has a consistent stable extension or can even be used to enumerate all generating defaults that lead to stable extensions. We show that, for input theories whose semi-incidence graph has bounded treewidth, our algorithm decides whether a theo

On Compatible Triangulations with a Minimum Number of Steiner Points. (arXiv:1706.09086v1 [cs.CG])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

Two vertex-labelled polygons are \emph{compatible} if they have the same clockwise cyclic ordering of vertices. The definition extends to polygonal regions (polygons with holes) and to triangulations---for every face, the clockwise cyclic order of vertices on the boundary must be the same. It is known that every pair of compatible $n$-vertex polygonal regions can be extended to compatible triangulations by adding $O(n^2)$ Steiner points. Furthermore, $\Omega(n^2)$ Steiner points are sometimes necessary,

On the Complexity of the Word Problem for Automaton Semigroups and Automaton Groups. (arXiv:1611.09541v2 [cs.FL] UPDATED)

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we study the word problem for automaton semigroups and automaton groups from a complexity point of view. As an intermediate concept between automaton semigroups and automaton groups, we introduce automaton-inverse semigroups, which are generated by partial, yet invertible automata. We show that there is an automaton-inverse semigroup and, thus, an automaton semigroup with a PSPACE-complete word problem. We also show that there is an automaton group for which the word problem with a single

Critical Vertices and Edges in $H$-free Graphs. (arXiv:1706.09043v1 [cs.CC])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

A vertex or edge in a graph is critical if its deletion reduces the chromatic number of the graph by 1. We consider the problems of deciding whether a graph has a critical vertex or edge, respectively. We give a complexity dichotomy for both problems restricted to $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs with no induced subgraph isomorphic to $H$. Moreover, we show that an edge is critical if and only if its contraction reduces the chromatic number by 1. Hence, we also obtain a complexity dichotomy for the probl

DynASP2.5: Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions in Action. (arXiv:1706.09370v1 [cs.LO])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

A vibrant theoretical research area are efficient exact parameterized algorithms. Very recent solving competitions such as the PACE challenge show that there is also increasing practical interest in the parameterized algorithms community. An important research question is whether dedicated parameterized exact algorithms exhibit certain practical relevance and one can even beat well-established problem solvers. We consider the logic-based declarative modeling language and problem solving framework Answer

Accelerations for Graph Isomorphism. (arXiv:1706.09230v1 [cs.DS])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we present two main results. First, by only one conjecture (Conjecture 2.9) for recognizing a vertex symmetric graph, which is the hardest task for our problem, we construct an algorithm for finding an isomorphism between two graphs in polynomial time $O(n^{3})$. Second, without that conjecture, we prove the algorithm to be of quasi-polynomial time $O(n^{1.5\log n})$. The conjectures in this paper are correct for all graphs of size no larger than $5$ and all graphs we have encountere

Automating Sized Type Inference for Complexity Analysis (Technical Report). (arXiv:1706.09169v1 [cs.LO])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

This paper introduces a new methodology for the complexity analysis of higher-order functional programs, which is based on three ingredients: a powerful type system for size analysis and a sound type inference procedure for it, a ticking monadic transformation, and constraint solving. Noticeably, the presented methodology can be fully automated, and is able to analyse a series of examples which cannot be handled by most competitor methodologies. This is possible due to the choice of adopting an abstract

Dispersion on Trees. (arXiv:1706.09185v1 [cs.DS])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In the $k$-dispersion problem, we need to select $k$ nodes of a given graph so as to maximize the minimum distance between any two chosen nodes. This can be seen as a generalization of the independent set problem, where the goal is to select nodes so that the minimum distance is larger than 1. We design an optimal $O(n)$ time algorithm for the dispersion problem on trees consisting of $n$ nodes, thus improving the previous $O(n\log n)$ time solution from 1997. We also consider the weighted case,

Relativization and Interactive Proof Systems in Parameterized Complexity Theory. (arXiv:1706.09391v1 [cs.CC])

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We introduce some classical complexity-theoretic techniques to Parameterized Complexity. First, we study relativization for the machine models that were used by Chen, Flum, and Grohe (2005) to characterize a number of parameterized complexity classes. Here we obtain a new and non-trivial characterization of the A-Hierarchy in terms of oracle machines, and parameterize a famous result of Baker, Gill, and Solovay (1975), by proving that, relative to specific oracles, FPT and A[1] can either coincide or dif

Generating Random Factored Ideals in Number Fields. (arXiv:1612.06260v2 [math.NT] UPDATED)

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We present a randomized polynomial-time algorithm to generate a random integer according to the distribution of norms of ideals at most N in any given number field, along with the factorization of the integer. Using this algorithm, we can produce a random ideal in the ring of algebraic integers uniformly at random among ideals with norm up to N, in polynomial time. We also present a variant of this algorithm for generating ideals in function fields.

A Fixed-Parameter Perspective on #BIS. (arXiv:1702.05543v2 [cs.CC] UPDATED)

Thursday, June 29, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

The problem of (approximately) counting the independent sets of a bipartite graph (#BIS) is the canonical approximate counting problem that is complete in the intermediate complexity class #RH\Pi_1. It is believed that #BIS does not have an efficient approximation algorithm but also that it is not NP-hard. We study the robustness of the intermediate complexity of #BIS by considering variants of the problem parameterised by the size of the independent set. We exhaustively map the complexity landscape for

WWDC17 Video Transcripts Now Available

Wednesday, June 28, 22:25 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Take advantage of transcripts to quickly discover and share information presented in WWDC 2017 videos. You can search by keyword, see all instances where the keyword is mentioned in the video, go straight to the time it was mentioned, and even share a link to that specific time.Watch session videos.

Denied Entry

Wednesday, June 28, 22:11 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 215# Comments: 39

The Why before the Why

Wednesday, June 28, 22:04 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

2D Syntax

Wednesday, June 28, 20:12 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 237# Comments: 46

My own private basic income

Wednesday, June 28, 18:52 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 359# Comments: 233

Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?

Wednesday, June 28, 18:32 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 412# Comments: 344

★ ‘Your’ vs. ‘My’

Wednesday, June 28, 18:12 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Imagine a review of the Mac SE/30 in 1989 that focused on the things that were still faster or better on DOS, like games or being able to write batch files. That’s what these “iPad Pro Still Can’t Replace Your Laptop” reviews feel like to me.

Zillow's second letter about McMansion Hell is still wrong

Wednesday, June 28, 17:34 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 240# Comments: 108

Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working fine

Wednesday, June 28, 17:27 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 217# Comments: 270

Automation Testing Part 1: Where Do I Start?

Wednesday, June 28, 17:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Automation testing should not be a burden for the development process, it should be part of it. In this first part of the automation testing blog series, we will explore a widespread process to choose where to start your automation efforts, tools that can be used and advantages they present.  Ever wonder if there is a universal process for automation testing? Well, it turns out there is! No matter what industry you are in or the technologies used to build applications, there is a simple, three-tie

iOS 10.3.3 beta 5 (14G5057a) Now Available

Wednesday, June 28, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

iOS 10.3.3 beta 5 (14G5057a) Now Available

macOS Sierra 10.12.6 beta 5 (16G23a) Now Available

Wednesday, June 28, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

macOS Sierra 10.12.6 beta 5 (16G23a) Now Available

How uncertain are LIGO’s first gravitational wave detections? (Synopsis)

Wednesday, June 28, 16:21 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds regarding the significance of the results. It is obvious that “belief” is never an alternative to “understanding” in physics.” -J. Creswell et al. Three times now, the LIGO collaboration has produced very strong evidence that black hole pairs, from…

Flawed reporting about WhatsApp

Wednesday, June 28, 16:18 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 316# Comments: 103

Analyzing Cryptocurrencies Using PostgreSQL

Wednesday, June 28, 16:11 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 433# Comments: 159

Solution: ‘Bongard Problems and Scientific Discovery’

Wednesday, June 28, 15:02 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Like scientific puzzles, Bongard problems can lead you through a frustrating blind search until you find that simple, elegant rule that fits a seemingly random pattern.

Sorting 2 Tons of Lego, Many Questions, Results

Wednesday, June 28, 14:07 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: http://... URL: https://... 272# Comments: 193

Subscribing by email

Wednesday, June 28, 14:03 UTC @ John D. Cook

You can subscribe to my blog by email or RSS. I also have a brief newsletter you could sign up for. There are links to these in the sidebar of the blog: If you subscribe by email, you’ll get an email each morning containing the post(s) from the previous day. I just noticed a problem […]

Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?

Wednesday, June 28, 12:45 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

What indicators do you look at to determine whether the company is in good or bad health or trending in a direction?Do you have anecdotes (or even more significant data!) about signs or events or shifts in culture that ended up foretelling a change to the company?[Update(s)]I mainly meant "startup" (i.e. not Fortune 500) when I said company. But I don't want to prevent discussions about larger entities, so perhaps we can preface comments with which type of company you're talking about if necessary.

The Tricky Translation of Mathematical Ideas

Wednesday, June 28, 12:25 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Big advances in math can happen when mathematicians move ideas into areas where they seem like they shouldn’t belong.

An easter egg for one user: Luke Skywalker

Wednesday, June 28, 10:35 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: http://... URL: https://... 737# Comments: 127

Ask HN: DevOps learning resources

Wednesday, June 28, 10:30 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Hey guys,I've been a developer for some time now, but I've never had to do anything with deployment, servers, and all these good things.I'd really like to have the basics so would you guys have some nice resources to gain some general knowledge about it. Thanks!

Ask HN: What are the best books on modern computer graphics?

Wednesday, June 28, 10:15 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Googling around, I can find many examples of this question, but they are all dated before the move to Vulkan/DX12, which I've heard has represented a big paradigm shift.Are the old recommendations still relevant? Or are there newer books which are more relevant to someone looking to get into the field today?

Show HN: Hackerhunt – categorised curation of Show HN submissions

Wednesday, June 28, 07:05 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 305# Comments: 65

Take Naps at Work

Wednesday, June 28, 02:26 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 465# Comments: 254

Americans don’t need more degrees, they need training

Wednesday, June 28, 01:23 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 248# Comments: 196

Magic-Wormhole – Get things from one computer to another, safely

Tuesday, June 27, 21:38 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 680# Comments: 174

How I learned to code in my 30s

Tuesday, June 27, 20:50 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 393# Comments: 186

Update Your Product Page for the All-New App Store

Tuesday, June 27, 20:30 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

★ ‘Inferior to a Laptop in Almost Every Way, Unless You Like to Draw’

Tuesday, June 27, 19:49 UTC @ Daring Fireball

“Imagine a computer, but everything works worse than you expect” is no more fair as criticism of the iPad than a statement like “Imagine an iPad but everything is more complicated and there’s always a jumble of dozens of overlapping windows cluttering the screen” would be as criticism of the Mac.

Moderate drinking associated with atrophy in brain related to memory, learning

Tuesday, June 27, 19:48 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://...

MIT’s gas-powered drone is able to stay in the air for five days at a time

Tuesday, June 27, 19:46 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 279# Comments: 166

Bloomberg Is Really Shitting the Bed Lately

Tuesday, June 27, 19:18 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Bloomberg caused a huge stir (Hertz stock shot to a two-year high on the “news”) with this report yesterday by Alex Webb and David Welch: Apple Inc. is leasing a small fleet of cars from Hertz Global Holdings Inc. to test self-driving technology, an agreement that echoes a larger deal between competitors Alphabet Inc. and Avis Budget Group Inc. Hertz shares soared the most in almost two years. A few hours later CNBC uncovered the scope of this lease:

European Commission Fines Google €2.42 Billion for Abuse of Web Search Monopoly

Tuesday, June 27, 18:57 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The European Commission: The European Commission has fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service. The company must now end the conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The euro and dollar rem

Using Today’s Web Without JavaScript

Tuesday, June 27, 18:47 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Sonniesedge turned off JavaScript completely in her browser and tested how a bunch of major websites looked. Many of them were simply blank. But The New York Times worked: The NY Times site loads in 561 ms and 957 KB without JavaScript. Holy crap, that’s what it should be like normally. For reference it took 12,000 ms (12 seconds) and 4000 KB (4 MB) to load with JavaScript. Oh, and as a bonus, you get a screenful of adverts. A lot of images are lazy loaded,

Effective sample size for MCMC

Tuesday, June 27, 18:30 UTC @ John D. Cook

In applications we’d like to draw independent random samples from complicated probability distributions, often the posterior distribution on parameters in a Bayesian analysis. Most of the time this is impractical. MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) gives us a way around this impasse. It lets us draw samples from practically any probability distribution. But there’s a […]

WWDC 2017’s Accessibility News

Tuesday, June 27, 18:23 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Steven Aquino, writing for TechCrunch: Enhanced Dynamic Type. As mentioned at the outset, Apple has put in a lot of work to optimize how Dynamic Type handles itself at its largest sizes. New this year are options for even larger sizes that smartly adapt to various user interfaces. The Dynamic Type API, available for third-party developers to hook up to their apps, has been updated to take advantage of this new capability. I can’t say enough good thi

Jean-Louis Gassée: ‘Apple Culture After Ten Years of iPhone’

Tuesday, June 27, 17:59 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jean-Louis Gassée: Let’s see if we can bring these unimaginable quantities into a manipulable picture. During the most recent Xmas quarter, Apple sold slightly fewer than 80 million iPhones, about 900,000 a day. Obligingly, a day has 86,400 seconds, so we round up to 90,000 to get a production yield of ten iPhones per second. But producing a phone isn’t instantaneous, it isn’t like the click of the shutter in a high-speed camera. Let’s assume that it ta

Kill Sticky Headers (a.k.a. Dickbars) Bookmarklet

Tuesday, June 27, 17:58 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Brilliantly simple bookmarklet by Alisdair McDiarmid: There is currently a trend for using sticky headers on websites. There’s even a sticky header web startup. I hate sticky headers. I want to kill sticky headers. So I made this bookmarklet. If you hate dickbars like I do, you should install this bookmarklet. Works great on both desktop and mobile. Here’s how it works: T

Dickbars Don’t Work

Tuesday, June 27, 17:21 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Josh Clark, back in March: Hey, please, under no circumstances should you pin social buttons to the top or bottom of mobile screens. In an effort to try to boost mobile use of share buttons, About.com experimented with fixing them to screen bottom and separately to screen top, so that the buttons were always visible when scrolling. While this did modestly increase share-button usage, it also caused overall session engagement to go down. You read that right: adding a locked

Aspects of Deep Learning: Activation Functions

Tuesday, June 27, 16:35 UTC @ x.ai

At x.ai, we have an organizational concept called “practices.” A practice is a group of people that come up with the best practices for a given area. Some of these … View Article The post Aspects of Deep Learning: Activation Functions appeared first on x.ai.

Planet Nine Is Put on Trial in Absentia

Tuesday, June 27, 15:36 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Breathless media coverage notwithstanding, the cases for and against a hypothetical Planet Nine in the outskirts of the solar system remain inconclusive.

Seven Things You Must Anticipate For The 2017 Solar Eclipse (Synopsis)

Tuesday, June 27, 15:04 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.” -Victor Hugo On August 21, 2017, the Moon will pass between the Earth and…

Scaling Wimbledon’s video production of highlight reels through AI technology

Tuesday, June 27, 13:05 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Demonstrating the continual innovation that takes place around its major sporting events, IBM Research and IBM iX are teaming up to provide “Cognitive Highlights” to The Championships, Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world, to demonstrate how AI technology can scale and accelerate the video production process for any media, sports or entertainment company. […] The post

A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World

Tuesday, June 27, 12:30 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

June Huh thought he had no talent for math until a chance meeting with a legendary mind. A decade later, his unorthodox approach to mathematical thinking has led to major breakthroughs.

Quicksort and prime numbers

Tuesday, June 27, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The average number of operations needed for quicksort to sort a list of n items is approximately 10 times the nth prime number. Here’s some data to illustrate this. |------+-----------------+---------| | n | avg. operations | 10*p(n) | |------+-----------------+---------| | 100 | 5200.2 | 5410 | | 200 | 12018.3 | 12230 | | 300 | 19446.9 […]

/u/d4rch0n on Idiomatic bindings to the Starcraft Broodwar

Tuesday, June 27, 06:12 UTC @ gilded : rust

I think this breaks the sidebar rule of No Zealotry. Remove the protoss bindings and resubmit.

This Week in Rust 188

Tuesday, June 27, 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?

The Talk Show: ‘I Do Like Throwing a Baby’

Tuesday, June 27, 00:54 UTC @ Daring Fireball

New episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest John Moltz. Topics include more follow-up from WWDC 2017, the iPad Pro models and ProMotion, Scott Forstall’s interview with John Markoff regarding the 10-year anniversary of the original iPhone, the ongoing shitshow at Uber, quick thoughts on the Nintendo Switch, and more. Also: guess which John enjoys throwing babies into the air. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Mak

Virgin Mobile Partners With Apple to Go iPhone-Only With $1 Service Monday, June 26, 23:51 UTC @ Daring Fireball Josh Centers, writing for TidBITS on Virgin Mobile’s intriguing decision to go iPhone-only: Pundits have long suspected that two roadblocks stood in the way of Apple becoming a carrier: the infrastructure is incredibly expensive, even if you lease it from the larger carriers, and Apple could limit the iPhone business if it were to compete with the major carriers. But Apple has sidestepped those concerns by essentially taking over a carrier (actually a carrier-owned MVNO & [Sponsor] Timing — Automatic Time Tracking for Mac Monday, June 26, 23:22 UTC @ Daring Fireball Time is your most precious resource. You need to know how you are spending it. But time tracking sucks. Big Time. (Pun intended.) The brand new Timing fixes that. It automatically tracks which apps, documents and websites you use — without start/stop timers. See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing. Mind you, this data is super sensitive, so Timing keeps it safe on your The Verge: ‘Apple’s AR Is Closer to Reality Than Google’s’ Monday, June 26, 23:02 UTC @ Daring Fireball Two great examples via the very fun Made With ARKit Twitter account: here and here. ★ Rene Ritchie’s First Look at the iOS 11 Public Beta Monday, June 26, 22:55 UTC @ Daring Fireball Rene Ritchie has a comprehensive look at the just-released public beta of iOS 11. Romain Dillet has a good preview at TechCrunch too. The gist of both previews: it’s the “I hope Apple truly focuses on the iPad this year” release of iOS that we’ve been waiting for. I’ve been using the developer betas on my 10.5-inch iPad Pro review unit and a sp Amazon’s New Echo Show Is Very Cool and a Little Creepy Monday, June 26, 22:08 UTC @ Daring Fireball Mat Honan, writing for BuzzFeed: It has this wild new feature called Drop In. Drop In lets you give people permission to automatically connect with your device. Here’s how it works. Let’s say my father has activated Drop In for me on his Echo Show. All I have to do is say, “Alexa, drop in on Dad.” It then turns on the microphone and camera on my father’s device and starts broadcasting that to me. For the several seconds of the call, my father’s video screen would appear fo Verizon to Block Email Addresses From Rival Carriers From Logging Into Yahoo or Tumblr Accounts Monday, June 26, 21:18 UTC @ Daring Fireball From a Tumblr help document euphemistically titled “Heads-Up for AT&T Customers”: Starting on June 30, 2017, att.net customers will no longer be able to log in to their Yahoo and Tumblr accounts through email addresses with the following domains: att.net, ameritech.net, bellsouth.net, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, and wans.net. The sheer egregiousness of this is outrageous on its face, but it& Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List Monday, June 26, 21:08 UTC @ Daring Fireball Copiously documented and perfectly presented. Looked striking in the print edition, too. ★ watchOS 3.2.3 beta 4 (14V5751a) Now Available Monday, June 26, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer watchOS 3.2.3 beta 4 (14V5751a) Now Available How quickly are the Pillars of Creation being destroyed? (Synopsis) Monday, June 26, 14:49 UTC @ Starts With A Bang “There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything.” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyways.” Either way, nothing happens.” -Yvon Chouinard Are the beautiful and iconic Pillars of Creation, located deep within the Eagle Nebula, still around today?… Checking UIViewController Deallocation Monday, June 26, 13:40 UTC @ Arek Holko One of the well-known techniques for finding memory leaks caused by retain cycles is checking if all view controllers get deallocated when they’re not on screen anymore. This is a process that should be manually repeated before each release but it’s both unpleasant and error-prone. Wouldn Best. STOC. Ever. Monday, June 26, 13:24 UTC @ Computational Complexity Dear Dr B: Is science democratic? Monday, June 26, 10:34 UTC @ Backreaction “Hi Bee, One of the often repeated phrases here in Italy by so called “science enthusiasts” is that “science is not democratic”, which to me sounds like an excuse for someone to justify some authoritarian or semi-fascist fantasy. We see this on countless “Science pages”, one very popular example being Fare Serata Con Galileo. It's not a bad page per se, quite the contrary, but the level of Dear Dr B: Is science democratic? Monday, June 26, 10:34 UTC @ Backreaction “Hi Bee, One of the often repeated phrases here in Italy by so called “science enthusiasts” is that “science is not democratic”, which to me sounds like an excuse for someone to justify some authoritarian or semi-fascist fantasy. We see this on countless “Science pages”, one very popular example being Fare Serata Con Galileo. It's not a bad page per se, quite the contrary, but the level of Safe Area Layout Guide Monday, June 26, 08:55 UTC @ Use Your Loaf Apple introduced the topLayoutGuide and bottomLayoutGuide as properties of UIViewController way back in iOS 7. They allowed you to create constraints to keep your content from being hidden by UIKit bars like the status, navigation or tab bar. These layout guides are deprecated in iOS 11 and replaced by a single safe area layout guide. Top and Bottom Layouts Guides - A Recap An example of using the IBM Fellow Heike Riel awarded prestigious prize for women Monday, June 26, 06:55 UTC @ IBM Blog Research What inventions are indispensable to you? What innovations have revolutionized your life? We are looking for 25 women whose inventions change our world. These questions were posed to the Internet earlier this year by EDITION F, a German news and lifestyle website for women, with cooperation by some of Germany’s leading news outlets including Zeit […] The post IBM Fellow Heik Why do linear prediction confidence regions flare out? Monday, June 26, 01:57 UTC @ John D. Cook Suppose you’re tracking some object based on its initial position x0 and initial velocity v0. The initial position and initial velocity are estimated from normal distributions with standard deviations σx and σv. (To keep things simple, let’s assume our object is moving in only one dimension and that the distributions around initial position and velocity […] Asset Catalog Changes in Xcode 9 Monday, June 26, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate Apple announced the newest version of Xcode, Xcode 9, at WWDC ’17. There’s a ton of new features in the latest version, but I wanted to highlight one of these features that stuck out to me as being a huge time saver for designers and developers alike, and that’s the changes to asset catalogs. Asset catalogs have grown to be a highly utilized feature for us, and I’m excited about two of the new features: “Preserve Vector Data” and color assets. Let’s take a deeper look at these two n Comments of the Week #166: from expanding faster than light to periodic mass extinctions Sunday, June 25, 22:11 UTC @ Starts With A Bang “Already in my original paper I stressed the circumstance that I was unable to give a logical reason for the exclusion principle or to deduce it from more general assumptions. I had always the feeling, and I still have it today, that this is a deficiency.” -Wolfgang Pauli There’s never a shortage of scientific topics… Delta Updates and App Thinning Do Not Solve the Apps-Are-Too-Damn-Big Problem Sunday, June 25, 15:31 UTC @ Daring Fireball Matt Birchler: “App thinning” is not a magic bullet that erases this problem though, as Facebook Messenger, which shows as being 154 MB, still downloaded 99 MB of data for its update. […] So are giant app sizes a problem? Yes. Do delta updates allow these updates to use less data? Yes. Do delta updates make these large apps a non-issue? Hell no! Wisdom from a brain-inspired computing researcher to the class of 2017 Sunday, June 25, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computing at IBM Research. Following is a transcript of the keynote speech he delivered to the graduating class of the University of California at San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering on June 17, 2017. Congratulations class of 2017! I am honored […] The post Wisdom from a brain-inspired computing researc Two decades of Amazon.com recommendations Saturday, June 24, 23:00 UTC @ Geeking with Greg IEEE Internet Computing Ask Ethan: Can Failed Stars Eventually Succeed? (Synopsis) Saturday, June 24, 14:23 UTC @ Starts With A Bang “[Brown dwarfs] appear to live a more exciting life than we presumed. They are too big to be planets and two small to be stars, but it does appear that if you watch one it has very active events… there is action going on.” -Lars Bildsten For every star that’s out there in the Universe, for… Work culture — important things you can learn from my salon Saturday, June 24, 14:02 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium Joan Clarke (1917-1996) Saturday, June 24, 13:44 UTC @ Computational Complexity I'm in San Francisco for the ACM conference celebrating 50 years of the Turing Award. I'll post on STOC and the Turing award celebration next week. Today though we remember another member of Bletchley Park, Joan Clarke, born one hundred years ago today, five years and a day after Turing. Clarke became one of the l FreeBSD 11.1-BETA3 Available Saturday, June 24, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash The third BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, aarch64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. TheoryFest Day 3: Plenaries Friday, June 23, 19:28 UTC @ The Geomblog I was the chair of the plenary session on Wednesday, so was too focused on keeping track of time and such to pay full attention to the talks. Having said that, all the speakers we've had so far have done a bang-up job of keeping within their time window without much prompting at all. So I can only give my very brief thoughts on the talks. For more information, go here. Atri Rudra was up first with a neat way to generalize j Minority Report and Predictive Policing Friday, June 23, 19:16 UTC @ The Geomblog Minority report (the movie) is 15 years old. Who knew! Well I certainly didn't, till I was called by a reporter from CNN who wanted to talk about the legacy of the movie. Here's the link to the story. It was a depressing conversation. We went over some of the main themes from the movie, and I realized to my horrow how many of them are now part of our reality. Precogs are TheoryFest Day 3: Streaming symmetric norms. Friday, June 23, 18:58 UTC @ The Geomblog There's a weird phenomenon in the world of streaming norm estimation: For$\ell_0, \ell_1, \ell_2$norm estimation, there are polylog (or less)-space streaming approximation algorithms. But once you get to$\ell_p, p \ge 3$, the required space suddenly jumps to polynomial in$n$. What's worse is that if you change norms you need a new algorithm and have to prove all your results all over again. This paper gives a universal algorithm for estimating Scott Galloway on Amazon and Whole Foods Friday, June 23, 18:45 UTC @ Daring Fireball Scott Galloway: Amazon / Whole Foods will be the fourth-largest grocer in the US, and will likely post growth rates no$10B+ retailer, sans Amazon, has registered. The Seattle firm will apply its operational chops and lower (zero) profit hurdle to the Whole Foods business model and bring prices (way) down. If you wish you could shop at Whole Foods more often, but it’s too expensive, your prayers have been answered. Whole Foods will become the grocery equivalent of a Mercedes for the

Friday, June 23, 18:32 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Who Americans Spend Their Time With

Friday, June 23, 18:13 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Via Jim Coudal, who summarizes this perfectly: “Poetry, in data”. ★

Kevin Drum’s Thoughtful Critique of Trumpcare

Friday, June 23, 17:58 UTC @ Daring Fireball

A succinct rundown of what’s wrong with the Senate Republicans’ “health care” bill. ★

Nintendo: Switch Shortages Are ‘Definitely Not Intentional’

Friday, June 23, 17:46 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica: Since the days of the NES, people have accused Nintendo of intentionally underproducing hardware in order to drive an artificial feeding frenzy of demand in the marketplace. With the Nintendo Switch remaining nearly impossible to find at retailers nationwide, those same accusations of “false scarcity” have been bubbling up in certain corners. Nintendo Senior Director of Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta wants to push

What’s in My Bag: 2017

Friday, June 23, 17:36 UTC @ tecosystems

As someone who travels a fair amount, I’m always curious to see how other people who travel – particularly those who travel more – do things. Which is why I’ve always enjoyed reading Matt Mullenweg’s “What’s in My Bag” posts. These are useful not just for the ideas you pick up, but also as a

What’s in My Bag: 2017

Friday, June 23, 17:36 UTC @ tecosystems

As someone who travels a fair amount, I’m always curious to see how other people who travel – particularly those who travel more – do things. Which is why I’ve always enjoyed reading Matt Mullenweg’s “What’s in My Bag” posts. These are useful not just for the ideas you pick up, but also as a

A new supercomputing-powered weather model may ready us for Exascale

Friday, June 23, 16:19 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

In the U.S. alone, extreme weather caused some 297 deaths and $53.5 billion in economic damage in 2016. Globally, natural disasters caused$175 billion in damage. It’s essential for governments, business and people to receive advance warning of wild weather in order to minimize its impact, yet today the information we get is limited. Current […] The post A new supercomputing-powered w

Member of the Band – Gorilla John Gorman

Friday, June 23, 16:13 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 talent! Are you Gorilla material? Join the band today! John Gorman

Are Mass Extinctions Periodic, And Are We Due For One? (Synopsis)

Friday, June 23, 14:01 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” -Christopher Hitchens 65 million years ago, a catastrophic impact from outer space caused the last great mass extinction on Earth, destroying 30% of the species that lived on our world at the time. These mass extinction events happened many times in Earth’s past,…

Juan Maldacena, Pondering Quantum Gravity by the Pond

Friday, June 23, 14:00 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

One of the world’s preeminent theoretical physicists seeks a quiet place to think.

Dock vs Dock

Friday, June 23, 13:36 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I joked on Twitter the other day that I was going to have to write up an email to send to my less tech savvy family members explaining the differences between the macOS and iOS Docks this Fall. I wasn’t really joking. I predict a lot of us who

Why TED takes two weeks off every summer

Friday, June 23, 11:30 UTC @ TED Blog

TED.com is about to go quiet for two weeks. No new TED Talks will be posted on the web until Monday, July 10, 2017, while most of the TED staff takes our annual two-week vacation. Yes, we all (or almost all) go on vacation at the same time. No, we don’t all go to the same place. We’ve been doing it this […]

How to Build Smaller Apps

Thursday, June 22, 23:03 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Ben Sandofsky: Popular social networking apps are over 400 megs. With weekly releases, over one year you’ll download twenty gigs of data. Since we launched Halide, the most unexpected compliment we’ve heard is about its size. At 11 megs, we’ll push less data in one year than a social network pushes in a single update. “So you aren’t using Swift,” asked a friend. After all, Swift bundles its standard libraries into you

Thursday, June 22, 22:51 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jon Darke: This got me thinking — as a user who has a lot of apps installed, how much bandwidth does my phone use to keep my apps updated? […] One Friday I turned off auto-update for apps and let the update queue build up for a week. The results shocked me. It’s getting to the point where most apps can’t be updated over cellular because they’re all over 100 MB. This is madness. Update: Many readers have

More Than 1,000 Uber Employees Ask for Travis Kalanick to Return

Thursday, June 22, 22:24 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Dan Primack, reporting for Axios: More than one thousand current Uber employees have signed a letter to the company’s board of directors, asking for the return of deposed CEO Travis Kalanick “in an operational role.” One of its venture capital investors also is chiming in, with a similar message. Not surprising to me at all — Uber was made in Kalanick’s image.

Podcast CB S&R 116: Más allá del modelo estándar con Quim Matías

Thursday, June 22, 22:02 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

He participado en el episodio 116 del podcast Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido [iVoox, iTunes], titulado “Especial Nueva Física, más allá del Modelo Estándar; Tertulia con Joaquim Matías”, 22 Jun 2017. “La tertulia semanal ha repasado las últimas noticias […]

Kara Swisher: ‘Susan Fowler Proved That One Person Can Make a Difference’

Thursday, June 22, 20:15 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Kara Swisher: It was Lao Tzu who said that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” In the case of complete and utter change reeling through Uber right now — culminating in the resignation of its once untouchable CEO Travis Kalanick — it turns out that it began with one of the most epic blog posts to be written about what happens when a hot company becomes hostage to its increasingly dysfunctional and toxic behaviors. It was clear from

Gizmodo Investigation Exposes Websites Collecting Form Data Before You Hit ‘Submit’

Thursday, June 22, 19:54 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Great investigative work by Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu for Gizmodo: During a recent investigation into how a drug-trial recruitment company called Acurian Health tracks down people who look online for information about their medical conditions, we discovered NaviStone’s code on sites run by Acurian, Quicken Loans, a continuing education center, a clothing store for plus-sized women, and a host of other retailers. Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from peo

TheoryFest Day 3: "I forgot to talk about Kant"

Thursday, June 22, 19:19 UTC @ The Geomblog

The above is an actual quote from Oded Goldreich in his hilarious speech accepting the Knuth Prize for 2017. This speech was highly anticipated, because most of us have spent years reading and marvelling at Oded's opinions (he addressed the elephant in the room very promptly) As the title suggests, t

TheoryFest Day 3: Panels and Lunches

Thursday, June 22, 19:06 UTC @ The Geomblog

(for various reasons, I don't have wifi access at my Airbnb, so my posts are delayed. But it's not like you're hanging on my every word...... are you?) Day 3 started off with a panel moderated by Anna Karlin, starring Cynthia Dwork, Russell Impagliazzo, Ankur Moitra, Tim Roughgarden, Dan Spielman and Andy Yao. I personally like panels to have a bit of an edge and controversy, and there wasn't that much of it here, but there was some good discussion about various aspects of TCS, as w

Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes: Different Tools

Thursday, June 22, 19:01 UTC @ tecosystems

One of the most common questions being asked at the Cloud Foundry Summit last week – in my appearance on The Cube here, for example – was a predictable one: what about Kubernetes? The seriousness and intent of the question varied: some were genuinely curious as to how the two projects conflict and coexist. Others

Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes: Different Tools

Thursday, June 22, 19:01 UTC @ tecosystems

One of the most common questions being asked at the Cloud Foundry Summit last week – in my appearance on The Cube here, for example – was a predictable one: what about Kubernetes? The seriousness and intent of the question varied: some were genuinely curious as to how the two projects conflict and coexist. Others

Uber’s Biggest Problem: Its Business Model

Thursday, June 22, 18:54 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Christopher Mims, in his column for The Wall Street Journal: But even when it steers through that thicket of crises, Uber will have to come to grips with a fundamental vulnerability that is increasingly apparent in the company’s business model. Uber may be great at technology, but unlike the businesses of Google, Facebook, Apple or Amazon, technology hasn’t proven to be a significant barrier to new entrants in ride-sharing. Across the globe, Uber has dozens of competitors, and in

Chris Lattner on His Stint at Tesla

Thursday, June 22, 18:26 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Chris Lattner has updated his resume with his accomplishments at Tesla. Unsurprisingly, it sounds like he got a lot done in just five months — including, ironically, addressing an engineering talent retention problem. ★

Inside Travis Kalanick’s Resignation

Thursday, June 22, 18:07 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times: Travis Kalanick’s final hours as Uber’s chief executive played out in a private room in a downtown Chicago hotel on Tuesday. There, Mr. Kalanick, who was on a trip to interview executive candidates for Uber, was paid a surprise visit. Two venture capitalists — Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton of the Silicon Valley firm Benchmark, which is one of Uber’s biggest shareholders — presented Mr. Kalanick with a list of demand

Oded Wins The Knuth Prize

Thursday, June 22, 17:52 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Just announced Oded Goldreich is one of the top researchers in cryptography, randomness, and complexity theory. Today Ken and I wish to thank the Knuth Prize Committee for selecting Oded as the winner of the 2017 Knuth Prize. It is no doubt a wonderful choice, a choice that rewards many great results, and a choice […]

Narrative Maps for ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Books

Thursday, June 22, 17:50 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Sarah Laskow, writing for Atlas Obscura: The last installment of the original “Choose Your Own Adventure” series came out in 1998, but since 2004, Chooseco, founded by one of the series’ original authors, R.A. Montgomery, has been republishing classic volumes, as well as new riffs on the form of interactive fiction that seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and ’90s. The new editions also carry an additional feature — maps of the hidden struc

John Markoff’s Interview With Scott Forstall and Members of the Original iPhone Team

Thursday, June 22, 17:45 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The Computer History Museum (now on YouTube): Museum Historian John Markoff moderates a discussion with former iPhone team members Hugo Fiennes, Nitin Ganatra and Scott Herz, followed by a conversation with Scott Forstall. Fascinating stories. Forstall was great. It’s hard to believe he’s been out of Apple and out of the limelight for 5 years — watching him on stage with Markoff it feels like he never left.

tvOS 10.2.2 beta 4 (14W5751b) Now Available

Thursday, June 22, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

tvOS 10.2.2 beta 4 (14W5751b) Now Available

WWDC Highlights Part 2 – Drag and Drop

Thursday, June 22, 16:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

In my first WWDC post, I mentioned an overview of the highlights from WWDC 2017. In this post, I dive into the new drag and drop API and demonstrate how to create a drop zone app.  *Note: This app was written using iOS 11 beta 1. It is possible that the implementation may change by the time iOS 11 is officially released. Drag and Drop Productivity was one of the highlights of iOS 11 changes introduced at WW

An updated design for TED Talks

Thursday, June 22, 14:38 UTC @ TED Blog

It’s been a few years since the TED Talks video page was last updated, but a new design begins rolling out this week. The update aims to provide a more straightforward viewing experience for mobile devices, improve performance, and surface more ideas we think you'll like.

LIGO’s Successor Approved; Will Discover Incredible New Sources Of Gravitational Waves (Synopsis)

Thursday, June 22, 14:02 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Einstein’s gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.” -Richard Feynman There’s no doubt that LIGO has given us one of the most incredible breakthroughs of the 21st century: the direct detection…

As the Turing Award turns 50, honoring recipient Ted Codd

Thursday, June 22, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The Association for Computer Machinery’s (ACM) Turing Award is given annually for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. It’s become the most prestigious technical award in the field, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of computing.” This week, both the ACM and IBM are celebrating 50 years of the Turing Award and its […] The post As the Turing Award turns 50, honori

La gravedad de Hořava es asintóticamente libre en 2+1 dimensiones

Thursday, June 22, 12:31 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

En 2009 el físico Petr Hořava introdujo una gravedad cuántica no relativista (que no es invariante Lorentz). En el caso proyectable es una teoría renormalizable en 3+1 dimensiones; de hecho, la primera teoría cuántica de la gravedad que lo […] Leer más

A New Side Project

Thursday, June 22, 11:02 UTC @ Dan Counsell

I'm starting a new side project. It's been fun writing here, but I think it's time to try something a little different.Earlier this week I quietly launched minimalpath.net. It's a microblogging site that was designed to be minimal from the outset. No ads, no categories, no comments, no images, no mailing lists, no pop-ups, no junk. Just shorter, more regular content.Here's a e

This Week’s Hype

Thursday, June 22, 08:59 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I’m on vacation in Europe, not in any mood to spend more time on this than just to point out that it’s the same usual tedious string theory promotional operation from the same people who have been at this for … Continue reading →

Los puentes rotos: un contraejemplo a la conjetura ER=EPR

Thursday, June 22, 08:29 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La conjetura ER=EPR fue propuesta en 2013 por Maldacena y Susskind (ya se sabía que ER⇒EPR y se conjeturó que EPR⇒ER). Su idea era resolver la paradoja de Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski y Sully (AMPS) asociada a la existencia de […] Leer más

Polynomials evaluated at integers

Thursday, June 22, 01:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Let p(x) = a0 + a1x + a2x2 + … + anxn and suppose at least one of the coefficients ai is irrational for some i ≥ 1. Then a theorem by Weyl says that the fractional parts of p(n) are equidistributed as n varies over the integers. That is, the proportion of values that land in some interval […]

‘Four Things in Those Two Sentences’

Wednesday, June 21, 16:55 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Kara Swisher on Travis Kalanick: Uber confirmed the resignation, and the company’s board issued a statement that said, in part: “Travis has always put Uber first. This is a bold decision and a sign of his devotion and love for Uber.” (For those who don’t speak fluent tech director, there are four things in those two sentences that are not true.)

Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

Wednesday, June 21, 16:53 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times: In the letter, titled “Moving Uber Forward” and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership. Mr. Kalanick, 40, consulted with at least one Uber board member, and after long discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down. He will remain on Uber’s board of directors. “I love Uber more than anything in the w

Duro varapalo al supuesto noveno planeta del Sistema Solar

Wednesday, June 21, 15:27 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

No sabemos aún si existe un noveno planeta, una supertierra, en el Sistema Solar. Pero el OSSOS (Outer Solar System Origins Survey) acaba de refutar los indicios que apuntaban a su existencia. Las resonancias orbitales observadas por el famoso […] Leer más

TheoryFest Day 2: Directed Spectral methods

Wednesday, June 21, 14:44 UTC @ The Geomblog

There was an interesting talk on developing spectral tools for directed graphs. The magic of spectral methods for undirected graphs comes from the interpretation of the graph as a Markov chain, and then using spectral properties of the Laplacian (which is symmetric and positive semidefinite) to reason about a host of properties like conductance, mixing times, sparsification, and others. But for directed graphs none of this works as st

Uber’s CEO is out because of pressure, not some ethical epiphany from the board

Wednesday, June 21, 14:33 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Statements, messages and reducers

Wednesday, June 21, 14:14 UTC @ Cocoa with Love on Cocoa with Love

Common advice when improving the design of a program is to break the programs into small isolated units of functionality so that we can consider the behavior within each component separately to the connections between components. If that’s the only advice you’re given though, it can be difficult to work out how to apply it in practice. In this article, I’ll show how this advice can be followed through the simple evolution of a piece of code, arriving at a pattern that i

TheoryFest: Avi Wigderson's plenary talk.

Wednesday, June 21, 14:08 UTC @ The Geomblog

The plenary talk on Tuesday morning was by Avi Wigderson, on the nature of TCS. Now if you haven't attended an Avi Wigderson plenary before, you should imagine yourself lying in a nice warm tub of water with soothing bath salts massaging your aching limbs. Avi's talks are balm for the poor persecuted theoretician who comes to STOC to remember that there people in the world who don't insist on demanding practical value for every darn theorem you prove. His talk was not technical, and

TheoryFest: Attack of the talks

Wednesday, June 21, 14:07 UTC @ The Geomblog

Day 2 at TheoryFest, and people are still attending talks. Ok maybe I shouldn't be that surprised. But it's kind of nice to see anyway. The lounge area is deserted during the sessions and full during the breaks. The TheoryFest organizing committee (as represented by Ryan Williams) has organized lunch time meetups for senior and junior people (where junior means grad students and postdocs, not assistant profs — sorry, assistant profs). The idea is that the senior people sign up and the junior p

Goodbye, Planet Nine! New And Better Data Disfavors A Giant World Beyond Neptune (Synopsis)

Wednesday, June 21, 14:00 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there.” -Konstantin Batygin Last year, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown made a huge splash when they announced that…

CMS no observa el efecto magnético quiral sugerido por STAR y ALICE

Wednesday, June 21, 12:31 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Ciertas correlaciones entre partículas cargadas observadas en colisiones periféricas de iones pesados en los detectores STAR del RHIC y ALICE del LHC se han interpretado como resultado del efecto magnético quiral (CME). Se publica un artículo del detector CMS […] Leer más

Swift Package Manager Manifest API Redesign

Wednesday, June 21, 09:45 UTC @ Swift.org

The Package Manager in Swift 4 includes the redesigned Package.swift manifest API. The new API is easier to use and follows the design guidelines. The target inference rules in Swift 3 Package Manager were a common source of confusion. We revised these rules and removed most of the inference, favoring the practice of explicitly specifying package structure in the manifest. Swift 3 packages w

Wednesday, June 21, 08:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

A new beta of Xcode 9 is now available, and includes Swift 4 and SDKs used to build apps with the latest innovations and powerful capabilities in macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Xcode 9 beta 2 (9M137d)macOS 10.13 beta 2 (17A291j)iOS 11 beta 2 (15A5304i)watchOS 4 beta 2 (15R5307f)tvOS 11 beta 2 (15J5310e)View all downloads.

Micro-DataCenter from IBM Research and ASTRON Wins HPC Vendor Innovation Award

Wednesday, June 21, 07:30 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Nearly a decade ago IBM electrical engineer and weekend glider pilot Ronald Luijten had a vision to build a data centre the size of a shoe box. “As we know today, the volume of unstructured data and the need to compute it are severely mismatched due in part to the power to energy consumption ratio. I saw an opportunity to address […] The post Micro-Da

[Sponsor] MNML: A macOS Writing App for Medium.com

Wednesday, June 21, 03:12 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Created for discerning Medium.com writers and publishers, it’s the first dedicated desktop publishing client on the Mac App Store. Featured Worldwide on release, it’s the last writing, blogging, and note-taking app you’ll need. Functional and fun yet mnml af. 🤔 😆 🔥

Chris Lattner Out at Tesla

Wednesday, June 21, 01:52 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Chris Lattner: Turns out that Tesla isn’t a good fit for me after all. I’m interested to hear about interesting roles for a seasoned engineering leader! That was quick — he was only hired 5 months ago. ★

Harvard revokes admission of students based on what was said in a private(?) chat room

Tuesday, June 20, 20:21 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Harvard revoked the admission of 10 students (see here) based on what the students said in a private (can't have been too private) chat room.

The Outline: ‘Inside Apple’s Global War on Leakers’

Tuesday, June 20, 18:22 UTC @ Daring Fireball

William Turton has quite a scoop for The Outline: A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products. […] The briefing, which offers a revealing window into the company’s obsession with secrecy, was the first of many Apple is planning to host for employees. In it, Rice and Freedman speak candidly about Apple’s efforts to pr

Trade shows — Tips from our first effort

Tuesday, June 20, 16:15 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

The Boss You Don’t Want to Be

Tuesday, June 20, 15:14 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

The Theory of Devices

Tuesday, June 20, 14:45 UTC @ Azimuth

I’m visiting the University of Genoa and talking to two category theorists: Marco Grandis and Giuseppe Rosolini. Grandis works on algebraic topology and higher categories, while Rosolini works on the categorical semantics of programming languages. Yesterday, Marco Grandis showed me a fascinating paper by his thesis advisor: • Gabriele Darbo, Aspetti algebrico-categoriali della teoria dei […]

Enter the dot matrix

Tuesday, June 20, 14:16 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

From Wartime Devastation To Academic Discrimination, Cecile DeWitt-Morette Overcame It All (Synopsis)

Tuesday, June 20, 14:01 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Chapel Hill is a beautiful place, and I was wanting to get out of Livermore for an academic position, so we went there, both of us, as visiting research professors. After a few years I was given a regular professorship and Cecile was demoted to a lecturer.” -Bryce DeWitt “Without being told it was a…

TheoryFest: Short Takes

Tuesday, June 20, 13:02 UTC @ The Geomblog

So far, the tutorials appear to have been well attended, The DL tutorial had a full house in a big room, but the other two tutorials did pretty well to. The plenary talks (the reason I'm here) start today and it will be interesting to see what kind of attendance we see. The business meeting will reveal the official numbers: indications are that they will be quite good especially considering we're not in the US. Montreal is a nice town. My AirBnB is right next to Chinatown a

TheoryFest I: Deep Learning

Tuesday, June 20, 12:55 UTC @ The Geomblog

(ed: I'm guessing you never thought those words would appear together in the same phrase) Ruslan Salakhutdinov gave a tutorial on deep learning today. Now deep learning is a tricky topic for theory (more on that below), but I thought he did a nice job in his two hours of explaining the basics of how a neural net works and how it's trained, without getting too far into engineering weeds, but also being able to explain

Leading digits of powers of 2

Tuesday, June 20, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The first digit of a power of 2 is a 1 more often than any other digit. Powers of 2 begin with 1 about 30% of the time. This is because powers of 2 follow Benford’s law. We’ll prove this below. When is the first digit of 2n equal to k? When 2n is between […]

If tensions in cosmological data are not measurement problems, they probably mean dark energy changes

Tuesday, June 20, 11:42 UTC @ Backreaction

Galaxy pumpkin.Src: The Swell Designer According to physics, the universe and everything in it can be explained by but a handful of equations. They’re difficult equations, all right, but their simplest feature is also the most mysterious one. The equations contain a few dozen parameters that are – for all we presently know – unchanging, and yet these numbers determine everything about the

If tensions in cosmological data are not measurement problems, they probably mean dark energy changes

Tuesday, June 20, 11:42 UTC @ Backreaction

Galaxy pumpkin.Src: The Swell Designer According to physics, the universe and everything in it can be explained by but a handful of equations. They’re difficult equations, all right, but their simplest feature is also the most mysterious one. The equations contain a few dozen parameters that are – for all we presently know – unchanging, and yet these numbers determine everything about the

La respuesta oficiosa de LIGO a las críticas a su análisis de GW150914

Tuesday, June 20, 10:59 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La trampa del análisis de Fourier enventanado. Una señal de espectro finito es infinita en tiempo. El análisis de Fourier de una serie temporal usando una ventana en tiempo requiere un filtro de bordes suaves para la ventana; en […] Leer más

La paleogenética desvela cómo los gatos dominaron el mundo

Tuesday, June 20, 08:50 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Eva-Maria Geigl, del Instituto Jacques Monod, París (Francia) y sus colegas han analizado el ADN mitocondrial de 209 gatos que han vivido desde hace unos 8000 años ANE hasta el siglo XX. Según su análisis paleogenético los gatos actuales […] Leer más

Processing a generic Data.Array matrix

Tuesday, June 20, 08:08 UTC @ Emilian Bold's blog

I had an interesting Haskell problem the other week: work on columns and rows of a Data.Array i e. You only have the Ix i, Ord e class constraints, which make sense because the index must be a Data.Ix. The elements also must be

This Week in Rust 187

Tuesday, June 20, 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?

The Talk Show: ‘Egg Freckles’

Tuesday, June 20, 02:02 UTC @ Daring Fireball

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with special guest Serenity Caldwell. We look back at WWDC 2017 — iOS 11, the new iPad Pro models, MacOS 10.13 “High Sierra”, updated Mac hardware and a tease at the upcoming iMac Pro, where Apple might go with VR and AR, San Jose as the venue for the event itself, and more. Sponsored by: Warby Parker: Boutique-quality, vintage-inspired glasses at a revolutionary price. Try up to five pair

Extreme beta distributions

Tuesday, June 20, 01:52 UTC @ John D. Cook

A beta probability distribution has two parameters, a and b. You can think of these as the number of successes and failures out of a+b trials. The PDF of a beta distribution is approximately normal if a and b are approximately equal and a + b is large. If a and b are close, they don’t have to be very large for the beta […]

★ Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars

Tuesday, June 20, 00:22 UTC @ Daring Fireball

When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”

Microsoft Surface Laptop Teardown

Monday, June 19, 19:43 UTC @ Daring Fireball

iFixit gave the Surface Laptop a 0 out of 10 on their “Repairability Score”. The lowest anything from Apple has ever gotten is a 1, I believe. Verdict: The Surface Laptop is not a laptop. It’s a glue-filled monstrosity. There is nothing about it that is upgradable or long-lasting, and it literally can’t be opened without destroying it. (Show us the procedure, Microsoft, we’d love to be wrong.) iFixit’s point of view on this is logical, and

Standard Ebooks

Monday, June 19, 19:40 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Standard Ebooks: Standard Ebooks is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit project that produces lovingly formatted, open source, and free public domain ebooks. Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style guide, lightly

The Size of iPhone’s Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000 Percent in Four Years

Monday, June 19, 19:23 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Randy Nelson, writing for the Sensor Tower blog: According to Sensor Tower’s analysis of App Intelligence, the total space required by the top 10 most installed U.S. iPhone apps has grown from 164 MB in May 2013 to about 1.8 GB last month, an 11× or approximately 1,000 percent increase in just four years. In the following report, we delve deeper into which apps have grown the most. Apple reall

Microsoft AI Team Achieves Perfect Score on Atari 2600 Ms. Pac-Man

Monday, June 19, 19:14 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Dani Deahl writing for The Verge: At long last, the perfect score for arcade classic Ms. Pac-Man has been achieved, though not by a human. Maluuba — a deep learning team acquired by Microsoft in January — has created an AI system that’s learned how to reach the game’s maximum point value of 999,900 on Atari 2600, using a unique combination of reinforcement learning with a divide-and-conquer method. Unlike the

The Geometric McKay Correspondence (Part 1)

Monday, June 19, 18:03 UTC @ Azimuth

The ‘geometric McKay correspondence’, actually discovered by Patrick du Val in 1934, is a wonderful relation between the Platonic solids and the ADE Dynkin diagrams. In particular, it sets up a connection between two of my favorite things, the icosahedron: and the Dynkin diagram: When I recently gave a talk on this topic, I realized […]

Three Spectacular Nebulae Caught Together, Revealing Stunning Details About Star Birth (Synopsis)

Monday, June 19, 14:00 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light.” -Benjamin Disraeli From here on Earth, most of the stars we see in the night sky are ancient, having departed from the…

iPad Pro 10.5 Early Impressions

Monday, June 19, 12:12 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I was genuinely torn on size this time. It took me a while to warm up to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro when I got it in the Fall of 2015, but eventually I learned to appreciate it. I still very much like the 12.9-inch size, especially for stage

Staccato

Monday, June 19, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

Paso. Paso. Paso. Paso. Tiro de mi maleta. Paso. Paso. Paso. Paso. Llego a la parada. Ni treinta segundos. Para el autobús (chirrido). Pido al conductor que abra el maletero. Arrojo mi maleta dentro. Sin pensarlo mucho (la pierdo de vista). Dos saltos. Billete. Mirada de soslayo al pasillo. Me deslizo. Hueco. El autobús arranca. … Continúa leyendo Staccato

A Response to “On the time lags of the LIGO signals” (Guest Post)

Sunday, June 18, 21:18 UTC @ Sean Carroll

This is a special guest post by Ian Harry, postdoctoral physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam-Golm. You may have seen stories about a paper that recently appeared, which called into question whether the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory … Continue reading →

Fractional parts, invariant measures, and simulation

Sunday, June 18, 20:49 UTC @ John D. Cook

A function f: X → X is measure-preserving if for each iteration of f sends the same amount of stuff into a given set. To be more precise, given a measure μ and any μ-measurable set E with μ(E) > 0, we have μ( E ) = μ( f –1(E) ). You can read the right side of […]

TEDWomen update: Black Lives Matter wins Sydney Peace Prize

Sunday, June 18, 16:22 UTC @ TED Blog

Cross-posted from TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell’s blog on the Huffington Post. Last month, the Black Lives Matter movement was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, a global prize that honors those who pursue “peace with justice.” Past honorees include South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Irish President Mary Robinson. The prize “recognizes the vital contributions of [

Off to TheoryFest 2017

Sunday, June 18, 12:34 UTC @ The Geomblog

I'm at the airport getting ready to board my flight for Montreal to attend TheoryFest 2017. And much to my amazement, I discover that STOC has its own event mobile app. Who knows, maybe this means that by next decade theory conferences will do double blind review? (ed: stop it, now that's crazy talk!) Snark aside, I'm very excited to see how the new format for STOC works. This is an experimen

Francis en El Método: Comunicación cuántica vía satélite

Sunday, June 18, 10:15 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

He intervenido en el podcast El Método de Luis Quevedo, @Luis_Quevedo, hablando de “Comunicación cuántica”, El Método, 16 Jun 2017 [iVoox, iTunes]. “Una conversación que empezó con la excusa de un artículo aparecido en Science…” (Juan Yin, Yuan Cao, […]

Paul Khuong: Chubanov's Projection Methods for 0/1 Programming

Saturday, June 17, 19:24 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I’ve long felt that compilers (and symbolic processing in general) would benefit from embedding integer programming solvers. However, I was never comfortable with actually doing so for a production system that others would have to run: industrial strength integer linear programming solvers are large systems with complex runtime behaviour, and that’s not the kind of black box you want to impose on people who just want to build their project. (That’s also true of SAT solvers, though, so

Co-hygiene and quantum gravity

Saturday, June 17, 15:11 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Co-hygiene and quantum gravity. Some light weekend reading by John Shutt. The post starts with a dazzling proposition: Gravity corresponds to pure function-application, and the other fundamental forces correspond to side-effects. ... quantum non-locality ("spooky action at a distance") is part of the analog to side-effects ... I can't do it

Kotlin: It’s the little things

Saturday, June 17, 12:50 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

FreeBSD 11.1-BETA2 Available

Saturday, June 17, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, aarch64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Virgo se une a LIGO en la búsqueda de ondas gravitacionales

Saturday, June 17, 06:16 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Hoy el detector de ondas gravitacionales Virgo (Italia) ha iniciado su toma de datos junto a los dos detectores de LIGO en Hanford (US-WA) y Livingston (US-LA). Ahora mismo LIGO se encuentra en la fase de pruebas de ingeniería […] Leer más

My thoughts on using React Native

Saturday, June 17, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

We hear a lot about React Native these days. More companies are trying it out and building small features in their apps. They can iterate and prototype faster without having to compile large codebases in their development cycles. For those who don’t know about RN, it’s a native/javascript framework for Android and iOS that provides you a Javascript layer for coding your apps. It converts your code into a native representation. In other words, you code like if you were coding a website, but the DOM, i

5 TED Radio Hour episodes that explore what it’s like to be human

Friday, June 16, 23:35 UTC @ TED Blog

TED Radio Hour started in 2013, and while I’ve only been working on the show for about a year, it’s one of my favorite parts of my job. We work with an incredibly creative team over at NPR, and helping them weave different ideas into a narrative each week adds a whole new dimension to […]

A noninvasive method for deep brain stimulation, a new class of Emerging Explorers, and much more

Friday, June 16, 21:46 UTC @ TED Blog

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Surface-level brain stimulation. The delivery of an electric current to the part of the brain involved in movement control, known as deep brain stimulation, is sometimes used to treat people with Parkinson’s disease, depression, epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Blog: Why not to use Rust

Friday, June 16, 20:28 UTC @ gilded : rust

El espín del nucleón explicado gracias a la QCD en el retículo

Friday, June 16, 18:11 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Los hadrones que forman los núcleos atómicos, el protón y el neutrón, se llaman nucleones. El nucleón es un fermión de espín JN = 1/2. El problema del espín del nucleón consiste en determinar la contribución a dicho espín […] Leer más

Member of the Band – Gorilla Juan Diego Garita Segura

Friday, June 16, 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 talent! Are you Gorilla material? Join the band today! Juan Diego Garita Segura

Don't Push and Pull!

Friday, June 16, 13:54 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

It is hard to push and pull at once in real life and people tend to know it. Yet I have witnessed many attempts that try to put both approaches into the same API at the same time and pretend those are equal. Small advice from a

Interview or Interrogation?

Thursday, June 15, 19:43 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

How to be original

Thursday, June 15, 16:10 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

From garbage to gold: How advances in plastic recycling can help save the environment

Thursday, June 15, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Growing up in Seattle made me aware and interested in the environment and its conservation, particularly through recycling. I wanted to help develop technologies that would protect the unique and delicate ecosystem that I saw around me. To channel this interest, I got my PhD. in organic synthesis and catalysis — focusing on small-molecule bond […] The post From garbage to gold: How

/u/rgdmarshall on Poll: What do you think of Tokio's future?

Thursday, June 15, 12:08 UTC @ gilded : rust

We're not JavaScript where people dealt with Promise.then for years because they had to. The space is crowded and there are plenty of alternatives. Uncharitably, this could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive exhortation to rapidly adopt some kind, any kind, of async/await support or face irrelevance. Maybe all the pleas for HKT, keyword arguments, and other popular wishlist items, made in the similar vein, have made me

/u/ksion on Poll: What do you think of Tokio's future?

Thursday, June 15, 06:52 UTC @ gilded : rust

I'm not sure if this is just one big pun or if it's serious :) But if it's the latter, the problem Tokio faces is lack of necessary support on the language side. Without some async-related ergonomics, it will remain quite painful to develop bigger application in a Future style. The worst thing that could happen here is everyone betting on Tokio anyway (like Hyper did), and then finding out it has hamstrung the adoption of Rust as a l

This Time It’s Really for Real

Thursday, June 15, 01:37 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Twice now I’ve thought I had a finished version of the book I’ve been writing forever (see here and here). Each time it turned out that, the way the publishing process was going, I ended up having more time to … Continue reading →

New: Know Your Company + Slack

Wednesday, June 14, 17:46 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

WWDC Highlights Part 1 – An Overview

Wednesday, June 14, 16:19 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

My first WWDC as an attendee has come and gone, but the fun doesn’t stop there. There are plenty of changes and new APIs to keep developers busy.   The keynote set the tone, packed with content and minimal filler. Still not sure at this point how High Sierra being a “totally baked” OS wasn’t simply a joke before announcing the real name, but I digress. As far as OS updates go, improvements in iOS 11 specifically for i

The Power of Economic Inefficiency

Wednesday, June 14, 13:23 UTC @ Computational Complexity

I grew up in a time when long distance domestic phone calls from AT&T costed $0.20/minute off peak ($1.30 in today's dollars). I also grew up close to AT&T Bell Labs, a mecca that claimed more PhDs than any university many doing independent research. Now I get all the phone minutes I can use and Bell Labs is a tiny fraction of what it once was. Was it a good trade? Technology has helped eliminate many of the economic inefficiencies. Usually for the better but sometimes these inefficienc

What’s new in high energy physics? Clockworks.

Wednesday, June 14, 11:14 UTC @ Backreaction

Clockworks. [Img via dwan1509]. High energy physics has phases. I don’t mean phases like matter has – solid, liquid, gaseous and so on. I mean phases like cranky toddlers have: One week they eat nothing but noodles, the next week anything as long as it’s white, then toast with butter but it must be cut into triangles. High energy physics is like this. Twenty years ago, it was extra

What’s new in high energy physics? Clockworks.

Wednesday, June 14, 11:14 UTC @ Backreaction

Clockworks. [Img via dwan1509]. High energy physics has phases. I don’t mean phases like matter has – solid, liquid, gaseous and so on. I mean phases like cranky toddlers have: One week they eat nothing but noodles, the next week anything as long as it’s white, then toast with butter but it must be cut into triangles. High energy physics is like this. Twenty years ago, it was extra

★ iPad Pro Review Roundup

Wednesday, June 14, 03:59 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Highlights from the best of yesterday’s iPad Pro reviews.

★ The Knives Come Out for Phil Schiller in Brian Merchant’s ‘The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone’

Tuesday, June 13, 20:46 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I do know that Schiller’s hard-charging, brusque style and his obvious political acumen have made him a lot of enemies over the years. It sounds like Fadell is one of them.

More Advanced Swift Workshop, and Blog and Book Updates

Tuesday, June 13, 16:11 UTC @ NSBlog

I'm hoping to resume a regular posting schedule soon, and I wanted to give everybody some updates. (Read More)

Sneak preview lineup unveiled for Africa’s next TED Conference

Tuesday, June 13, 15:06 UTC @ TED Blog

On August 27, an extraordinary group of people will gather in Arusha, Tanzania, for TEDGlobal 2017, a four-day TED Conference for “those with a genuine interest in the betterment of the continent,” says curator Emeka Okafor. As Okafor puts it: “Africa has an opportunity to reframe the future of work, cultural production, entrepreneurship, agribusiness. We [

Most popular posts this year so far

Tuesday, June 13, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

These have been the most popular posts for the first half of 2017. Golden powers are nearly integers How efficient is Morse code? Putting SHA1 in perspective Improving on the Unix shell Three proofs that 2017 is prime How areas of math are connected

Automating low-level tasks for data scientists

Tuesday, June 13, 08:43 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Data scientists are among the most sought after professionals in the IT industry. In 2012, Harvard Business Review called data scientist “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” The professionals turn raw data into actionable insights that help drive business value or, sometimes, even disrupt industries or create entirely new ones. Surprisingly, however, data scientists […] The post

Information Processing in Chemical Networks (Part 2)

Tuesday, June 13, 07:00 UTC @ Azimuth

I’m in Luxembourg, and I’ll be blogging a bit about this workshop: • Dynamics, Thermodynamics and Information Processing in Chemical Networks, 13-16 June 2017, Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics Group, University of Luxembourg. Organized by Massimiliano Esposito and Matteo Polettini. I’ll do it in the comments! I explained the idea of this workshop here: • […]

This Week in Rust 186

Tuesday, June 13, 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?

★ The 2017 iPad Pros

Monday, June 12, 22:33 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The new iPad Pro hardware is almost too good to be true, but the real iPad story Apple unveiled last week is iOS 11.

The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory

Monday, June 12, 18:40 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current state of string theory, but to the possibility … Continue reading →

Optimizing Collections

Monday, June 12, 18:37 UTC @ Ole Begemann

A new Swift book is out: Optimzing Collections by Károly Lőrentey. I had a small part in this as the bookʼs te

WWDC 2017 Viewing Guide

Monday, June 12, 18:22 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Another year, another WWDC and yet more session videos to catch up on. Here is my guide to the sessions I found most interesting this year. Machine Learning, Drag and Drop and Xcode 9 The platform state of the union is always a good place to start: Platforms State of the Union If you did not watch it yet start here for an overview of the changes acro

TOC In The Future

Monday, June 12, 18:14 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Results of the panel at the Theory Fest Géraud Sénizergues proved in 1997 that equivalence of deterministic pushdown automata (DPDAs) is decidable. Solving this decades-open problem won him the 2002 Gödel Prize. Today Ken and I want to ponder how theory of computing (TOC) has changed over the years and where it is headed. Of […]

Here We Go Again With iPad

Monday, June 12, 17:33 UTC @ joe cieplinski

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPad in 2010, he described the tablet as a product that sat somewhere between the laptop and the smartphone, excelling at tasks like browsing the web, reviewing photos and watching videos. Five years later, Mr. Jobs’s successor, Timothy D. Cook, took the iPad

Climate Change: The Evolution of the Deniers/Does Paul Ryan Hate His Grandchildren?

Monday, June 12, 15:29 UTC @ Computational Complexity

I went to the Mach for Science and then Drumpf pulled out of the Paris Accords. Causation or Correlation? I then posted about climate change (CC). That's caustation. 1) Deniers: The deniers have gone through several phases: There is no CC There is CC but its not caused by humans. There is CC and its caused by humans but since China and India and other countries aren't doing anything about it, if only we do it will have no effect excep

McCLIM: Progress report #8

Monday, June 12, 01:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Dear Community, During this iteration we had many valuable contributions. It's a joy to see how McCLIM gains more mindshare and people are willing to put their time and wallet in fixing issues and writing applications in McCLIM. Some highlights for this iteration: many Listener fixes, major tab layout extension refactor, new extension for Bezier curves (based on older internal implementation), interactor improvements, layo

Exploration Day — Solutions for Blind and Visually Impaired

Monday, June 12, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

(To get an understanding of what Exploration Day is, take a look at our first post here.) The Theme - “In the Land of the Blind the One IDE is King” Described as, “Design, Build, or Conceptualize a mobile app (iOS, Android, TV, Mobile Web, Watch) to aid in the daily life of those afflicted by loss of vision (total blindness or severe vision i

Sunday, June 11, 18:42 UTC @ Geeking with Greg

Some of the tech news I found interesting lately, and you might too: Jeff Bezos: "Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? .... If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure." ([1]) Jeff Bezos: "I would say, a lot of the value that we’re gett

ABCL Dev: ABCL 1.5.0

Sunday, June 11, 10:41 UTC @ Planet Lisp

We are pleased to announce that we have released the Sixth Edition of the Armed Bear Common Lisp implementation as ABCL 1.5.0. Due to the lack of a publicly available Java 5 implementation, with this release we drop support for that platform, and henceforth support running on Java 6, Java 7, and Java 8. In addition to consolidating eight months of bug fixes, the following notable features are now also present in the implementation. The compiler now records m

Information Density and the New App Store Design

Saturday, June 10, 15:22 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I’ve heard rumblings from some in the iOS community about the new App Store design regarding density of information. “There are fewer things on screen, so there’s less being featured” is the gist of the argument. Uh, no. By definition, to feature something is to make it stand

photostream 109

Saturday, June 10, 13:48 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Rhine Valley, Germany

Nicolas Hafner: Trial "Study Session" Next Saturday, 17th of June

Saturday, June 10, 09:10 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Next Saturday, the 17th of June, there is going to be a live "study session" about Shirakumo's game engine Trial. The intention of this event is to get people acquainted with the internal structure and features of Trial, so that they may work on it by themselves, and thus help improve it in the future. The study session is going to be held on my

FreeBSD 11.1-BETA1 Available

Saturday, June 10, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, aarch64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

"Parallelizing Julia with a Non-invasive DSL" will appear at ECOOP 2017

Friday, June 09, 20:28 UTC @ composition.al

I’m very happy to announce that “Parallelizing Julia with a Non-invasive DSL”, by Todd Anderson, Paul Liu, Ehsan Totoni, Jan Vitek, Tatiana Shpeisman, and me, will appear at ECOOP 2017

Two surprising strategies for effective innovation

Friday, June 09, 15:07 UTC @ TED Blog

Picture this: Three kids are given a LEGO set with the pieces to build a fire department. All of them want to build as many new toys as possible. The first kid goes straight for the easy wins. He puts a tiny red hat on a tiny minifig: presto, a firefighter! In this way, he […]

One practical application of functional programming

Friday, June 09, 15:02 UTC @ John D. Cook

Arguments in favor of functional programming are often unconvincing. For example, the most common argument is that functional programming makes it easier to “reason about your code.” That’s true to some extent. All other things being equal, it’s easier to understand a function if all its inputs and outputs are explicit. But all other things […]

Member of the Band – Gorilla Sol Lam

Friday, June 09, 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 talent! Are you Gorilla material? Join the band today! Sol Lam

Lispjobs: Lisp programmer, Keepit.com, Lviv, Ukraine

Friday, June 09, 13:24 UTC @ Planet Lisp

(See also: https://... Keepit.com is expanding and we are looking for candidates to join our strong cloud software development team. We use Lisp systems to implement business logic operations such as resource accounting, data mining, billing, automated operations (AI), full system test suites and more. We wish to extend our team with another skilled colleague, to work with us in this area. We expect a strong technical mind coupled with a v

Does Logic Apply To Hearings?

Thursday, June 08, 21:15 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

The problem of mining text for implications 2016 RSA Conference bio, speech Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee the other day about President Donald Trump. He was jointed by other heads of other intelligence agencies who also testified. Their comments were, as one would expect, widely […]

The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2017

Thursday, June 08, 15:00 UTC @ tecosystems

Article about Lua in The Hosting Blog

Thursday, June 08, 14:39 UTC @ Lua: news

An article about Lua has appeared in The Hosting Blog: "Lua Founding Developer Shares the Scripting Language's Journey and Advantages for App Configuration and Data Management"

Theory Jobs 2017

Thursday, June 08, 12:17 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In the fall we point to theory jobs, in the spring we see who got them. Like last year and years past I created a fully editable Google Spreadsheet to crowd source who is going where. Ground rules: I set up sepa

The Mathematics of Open Reaction Networks

Thursday, June 08, 10:34 UTC @ Azimuth

Next week, Blake Pollard and I will talk about our work on reaction networks. We’ll do this at Dynamics, Thermodynamics and Information Processing in Chemical Networks, a workshop at the University of Luxembourg organized by Massimiliano Esposito and Matteo Polettini. We’ll do it on Tuesday, 13 June 2017, from 11:00 to 13:00, in room BSC […]

2017 Apple Design Award Winners

Wednesday, June 07, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

The Apple Design Awards recognize state-of-the-art apps that reflect the very best in design, innovation, and technology on Apple platforms. Learn about these winning apps and the talented developers behind them. See the winners.

Gorilla Guide: Essential Steps for IoT Success Part 2

Wednesday, June 07, 15:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

** Note: This post was written by Gorilla Fabian Montealegre and former Gorilla Christopher Valerio. Internet of Things (IoT) connects every aspect of our lives to the cloud. We don’t just share cat pictures and baby videos anymore, we live like the Jetsons! To demonstrate our IoT skills, a small band of Gorillas took on a simple problem: What is the most effective way to heat or cool a room based on current ambient temperature? In our

Xcode GitHub Integration

Wednesday, June 07, 14:34 UTC @ Indie Stack

Apple’s beta release of Xcode 9 features impressive improvements to its source control features, including streamlined integration with GitHub. There’s even a fancy “Open in Xcode” button when you go to clone a project: This integration is amazing. You just click the button, specify a save folder in Xcode, and boom! You’re off and … … Continue reading

Dear Dr B: What are the chances of the universe ending out of nowhere due to vacuum decay?

Wednesday, June 07, 13:08 UTC @ Backreaction

“Dear Sabine, my names [-------]. I'm an anxiety sufferer of the unknown and have been for 4 years. I've recently came across some articles saying that the universe could just end out of no where either through false vacuum/vacuum bubbles or just ending and I'm just wondering what the chances of this are occurring anytime soon. I know it sounds silly but I'd be dearly greatful for your reply

Dear Dr B: What are the chances of the universe ending out of nowhere due to vacuum decay?

Wednesday, June 07, 13:08 UTC @ Backreaction

“Dear Sabine, my names [-------]. I'm an anxiety sufferer of the unknown and have been for 4 years. I've recently came across some articles saying that the universe could just end out of no where either through false vacuum/vacuum bubbles or just ending and I'm just wondering what the chances of this are occurring anytime soon. I know it sounds silly but I'd be dearly greatful for your reply

ABCL Dev: ABCL 1.5.0-rc-0 draft of upcoming User Manual

Wednesday, June 07, 12:11 UTC @ Planet Lisp

An unsigned ABCL 1.5.0-rc-0 release now available to test the distributions mechanisms for the upcoming ABCL-1.5.0 release. http://... http://... Draft of upcoming User Manual to which corrections are solicited. http://...

The Cary Institute teams with IBM Research to address Zika

Wednesday, June 07, 11:58 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

When the Zika virus arrived in Brazil, it went largely unnoticed until infected infants were born with microcephaly, a neurological disorder marked by a small head caused by severe underdevelopment of brain tissue in utero. As the number of Zika-affected babies grew, the World Health Organization moved quickly to declare Zika virus a public health […] The post The Cary Institut

Dividing projects into math, statistics, and computing

Wednesday, June 07, 11:50 UTC @ John D. Cook

If you’ve read this blog for long, you know that my work is a combination of math, statistics, and computing. I was looking over my records and tried to see how my work divides into these three areas. In short, it doesn’t. The boundaries between these areas are fuzzy or arbitrary to begin with, but […]

New committer: Ryan Libby (src)

Wednesday, June 07, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

2018 US HEP Budget

Tuesday, June 06, 22:44 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

HEPAP has been meeting the past couple days, with presentations available here. Much of the discussion is about the President’s 2018 budget proposal recently submitted to Congress, which contains drastic cuts to all sorts of programs, including for support of … Continue reading →

Updated Guidelines Now Available

Tuesday, June 06, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - 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.See the App Store Review Guidelines.

Research for Practice: Technology for UnderservedCommunities; Personal Fabrication

Tuesday, June 06, 13:40 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

This installment of Research for Practice provides curated reading guides to technology for underserved communities and to new developments in personal fabrication. First, Tawanna Dillahunt describes design considerations and technology for underserved and impoverished communities. Designing for the more than 1.6 billion impoverished individuals worldwide requires special consideration of community needs, constraints, and context. Tawanna's selections span protocols for poor-quality communication networks,

x.ai Teams & How They Do It: Groundwork Ventures

Tuesday, June 06, 13:13 UTC @ x.ai

Today’s post is the first installment in our new series profiling teams that use x.ai’s Business edition. We chatted with Jason Towns to hear how the Groundwork Ventures team hands their meetings … View Article The post x.ai Teams & How They Do It: Groundwork Ventures appeared first on x

Using an air cavity to boost the performance of a 5G antenna module

Tuesday, June 06, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This week the International Microwave Symposium kicks off as part of Microwave Week 2017, where I am giving a talk on new phased array packaging developments for 5G communications. I am part of the RF Circuits and Systems Group at IBM Research which has been actively working on developing new 5G millimeterWave (mmWave) phased array […] The post Using an air cavity to boos

Just Code

Tuesday, June 06, 08:54 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Is it JustCode that matters in a project or do projects need more? Is it necessary to have a bug tracking system or can we embed everything in the code? Is it better to keep snapshot of an API in the code or track it independently with additional tools? Check my

This Week in Rust 185

Tuesday, June 06, 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?

Gaussian correlation inequality

Tuesday, June 06, 00:41 UTC @ John D. Cook

The Gaussian correlation inequality was proven in 2014, but the proof only became widely known this year. You can find Thomas Royan’s remarkably short proof here. Let X be a multivariate Gaussian random variable with mean zero and let E and F be two symmetric convex sets, both centered at the origin. The Gaussian correlation inequality says that Prob(X in E […]

Big News on W(3,r) !

Monday, June 05, 22:09 UTC @ Computational Complexity

This is a JOINT POST with Evangelos Georgiadis who brought this problem to my attention.) In 2010 I posted about how dense a set of integers has to be before you know there is a 3-AP in it (a 3-AP is a set of three numbers equally spaced). Such results were motivated by and are applied to getting upper bounds on W(3,r) = the least W such that any r-coloring of {1,...,W} has a monochromatic 3-AP. That blog, which also has history and context, is

Build More Intelligent Apps with Core ML

Monday, June 05, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Now you can bring intelligent features, such as face tracking, text detection, language identification, and much more into your apps with the new foundational machine learning technology that is used across Apple products. Core ML delivers blazingly fast performance with easy integration of machine learning models.Learn more about Core ML.

Get Ready for the All-New App Store

Monday, June 05, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

The App Store first launched nine years ago. And today, with over two million apps that transform the way we work, learn, and play, it’s the best app platform in the world. Now the App Store has been redesigned from the ground up to provide a beautiful place to showcase amazing apps and to help customers discover new favorites with the new Today tab, dedicated tabs for games and apps, a deeper product page experience, promoted in-app purchases, and enhanced search.In addition, starting today you can relea

Create Augmented Reality Experiences with ARKit

Monday, June 05, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

iOS 11 introduces ARKit, a new framework that allows you to easily create unparalleled augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad. ARKit takes apps beyond the screen, freeing them to interact with the real world in entirely new ways.Learn more about ARKit.

WWDC17. Now Live Streaming

Monday, June 05, 19:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

See the latest advancements in macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS with over 100 sessions presented by Apple engineers at this year’s conference. We’re live streaming all sessions daily and posting videos and related sample code throughout the week. Watch WWDC session videos.

Paul Khuong: Relaxed Revocable Locks: Mutual Exclusion Modulo Preemption

Monday, June 05, 04:25 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Update: there’s a way to detect “running” status even across cores. It’s not pretty. Search for /proc/sched_debug. The hard part about locking tends not to be the locking itself, but preemption. For example, if you structure a memory allocator like jemalloc, you want as few arenas as possible; one per CPU would be ideal, while one per thread would affect fragmentation and make some operations scale linearly with the number of threads. However, you

Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89

Monday, June 05, 02:45 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Obituary from NY Times. Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89. .... Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer at Sperry

WWDC 2017 Sale

Monday, June 05, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

Happy WWDC 2017 week! All of our eBooks are on sale during the whole week. Individual eBooks are off 25%, bundles are off 30%! Have a great week, Chris & Florian

/u/graydon2 on Question about Rust's odd Code of Conduct

Saturday, June 03, 20:24 UTC @ gilded : rust

For those following along: this user's behaviour is actually a good reference-example of the kind of rhetorical escalation one always encounters in these discussions (and which I refuse to engage with). Some points to note: Framing norms of behaviour as "arbitrary decisions", "politics" and "opinions" (i.e. trivial, particular, not worth respecting) Framing de-escalation of arguments and re

James Dempsey and the Breakpoints Benefit App Camp for Girls

Saturday, June 03, 05:05 UTC @ inessential.com

On Wednesday night I know where I’ll be — playing keyboard for a few songs at the James Dempsey and the Breakpoints concert benefitting App Camp for Girls. You should get tickets. It’s a fun time for a great cause. Bonus: James writes about how this concert is full circle for him. It’s a special night.

Listen in on couples therapy with Esther Perel, Tabby’s star dims again, and more

Friday, June 02, 21:04 UTC @ TED Blog

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: The truth about couples. Ever wonder what goes on in couples therapy? You may want to tune in to Esther Perel’s new podcast “Where Should We Begin?” Each episode invites the reader to listen to a real session with a real couple working out real issues, from a Christian […]

Friday, June 02, 20:03 UTC @ joe cieplinski

Some folks had a little fun with me yesterday, when I posted about not outsourcing your online presence to Facebook. Once the link was tweeted by Marco Arment (thanks, Marco!) my site promptly got bombarded. And because of poorly configured cache settings on my part after a recent update (long

Member of the Band – Gorilla Carlos Cordoba

Friday, June 02, 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 talent! Are you Gorilla material? Join the band today! Carlos Cordoba

DREAM Challenge results: Can machine learning help improve accuracy in breast cancer screening?

Friday, June 02, 12:59 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Breast Cancer is the most common cancer in women. It is estimated that one out of eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. The good news is that 99 percent of women whose breast cancer was detected early (stage 1 or 0) survive beyond five years after […] The post DREAM Challenge results: Can machine learning help improve accuracy in breast cancer

Irrational rotations are ergodic

Friday, June 02, 01:40 UTC @ John D. Cook

In a blog post yesterday, I mentioned that the golden angle is an irrational portion of a circle, and so a sequence of rotations by the golden angle will not repeat itself. We can say more: rotations by an irrational portion of a circle are ergodic. Roughly speaking, this means that not only does the […]

Evergreen Diary #1: Open Source

Friday, June 02, 00:27 UTC @ inessential.com

Evergreen is a new feed reader for Macs. It’s not actually done yet — in fact, it’s not even alpha yet, much less beta. It’s still in the painful-to-use stage, for sure. I’ve been working on it (among other things) on nights and weekends for a couple years. For much of the time I planned to make it a for-pay app — the plan was a free Lite version and a for-pay version. Bu

Announcing: Optimizing Collections

Friday, June 02, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

Dear all, We’re happy to introduce a new member in our book family: Optimizing Collections by Károly Lőrentey. When we started reading Károly’s book we were hooked immediately. We asked him to team up, and are very happy to share the result with you. In this book, we show how to write very efficient Swift collection code. Throughout the book, we benchmark everything —

Evergreen Images

Thursday, June 01, 16:47 UTC @ Indie Stack

Brent Simmons, the original developer of MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, is building a new feed reader app called Evergreen: Evergreen is an open source, productivity-style feed reader for Macs. It’s at a very early stage — we use it, but we don’t expect other people to use it yet. I’ve never been one to shy away from … Continue reading Evergreen Images U

Not Open, Not Closed: The Future of Hybrid Licenses

Thursday, June 01, 16:31 UTC @ tecosystems

(Photo credit) Not many remember it, because the technology industry tends to focus on its future at the expense of its past, but in the beginning software was free. In both senses of the word free; it was available at no cost, and the source typically came without restrictions. One of the earliest user groups

Not Open, Not Closed: The Future of Hybrid Licenses

Thursday, June 01, 16:31 UTC @ tecosystems

(Photo credit) Not many remember it, because the technology industry tends to focus on its future at the expense of its past, but in the beginning software was free. In both senses of the word free; it was available at no cost, and the source typically came without restrictions. One of the earliest user groups

Multiverse Politics

Thursday, June 01, 15:12 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based … Continue reading →

Outsourcing Your Online Presence

Thursday, June 01, 15:05 UTC @ joe cieplinski

The original post by Marc Haynes was public, which I know because I do not have a Facebook account, but here’s what it looks like for me without being a Facebook user — a full one-third of my window is covered by a pop-over trying to get me to sign

Who Sets Policy?

Thursday, June 01, 14:01 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In April the New York Times Magazine ran an article Is it O.K. to Tinker with the Environment to Fight Climate Change? The article asks about the ethics of even running tests on such methods and has this quote froms David Battisti, an atmospheric scientist at UW. Name a technology humans have developed that they haven't used. I can't think of any. So w

Building a Customer Driven Product Team | David Cancel, Drift | BoS USA 2016

Thursday, June 01, 10:52 UTC @ Business of Software USA

David Cancel, CEO & Founder, Drift David Cancel is a five-time entrepreneur, two-time CEO, angel investor, and currently the CEO at Drift, a startup that’s making it easier for businesses to talk to their customers. Previously, he was at HubSpot as Chief Product Officer after they acquired his company, Performable. Every company claims to be […] The post

IBM’s Spark scientists show off their latest code at Summit

Thursday, June 01, 10:26 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Since its inaugural event in 2013, thousands of developers, scientists, analysts, researchers and executives from around the globe have trekked to the Spark Summit to talk about how the open source processing engine known as Apache Spark can apply big data, machine learning and data science to deliver new insights. With more than 1,000 contributors […] The post IBM’s Spark

Saxophone with two octave keys

Wednesday, May 31, 21:33 UTC @ John D. Cook

Last year I wrote a post about saxophone octave keys. I was surprised to discover, after playing saxophone for most of my life, that a saxophone has not one but two octave holes. Modern saxophones have one octave key, but two octave holes. Originally saxophones had a separate octave key for each octave hole; you had to […]

Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they're supposed to: where we are, where we're going (part 2 of 2)

Wednesday, May 31, 20:47 UTC @ composition.al

A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs began sponsoring and collaborating with a team of researchers at Stanford who are extending the capabilities of automated verification tools to formally verify properties of deep neural networks used in safety-critical systems. This is the second in a series of two posts about that work. In the previous

A Few Quick Items

Wednesday, May 31, 19:26 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I’ve had little time for blogging, and coincidentally, there seems to be little to blog about recently. Here though are a few quick items: Several people had asked me about this paper about the CC, and I had to tell … Continue reading →

Data Sketching

Wednesday, May 31, 16:22 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by an unending stream of information? It can seem like a barrage of new email and text messages demands constant attention, and there are also phone calls to pick up, articles to read, and knocks on the door to answer. Putting these pieces together to keep track of what's important can be a real challenge. In response to this challenge, the model of streaming data processing has grown in popularity. The aim is no longer to capture, store, and index every minute event, but rathe

Avoiding Third-Party UI Libraries

Wednesday, May 31, 13:50 UTC @ Arek Holko

There’s been some discussion recently in the iOS community about pros and cons (OK, mostly cons) of using third-party dependencies. Many arguments I saw were rather generic — grouping all third-party libraries into one basket. As with most things, though, it’s not that simple. So, let’s try to focus on a single case today: should we avoid using third-party UI libraries?

Listening to golden angles

Wednesday, May 31, 11:59 UTC @ John D. Cook

The other day I wrote about the golden angle, a variation on the golden ratio. If φ is the golden ratio, then a golden angle is 1/φ2 of a circle, approximately 137.5°, a little over a third of a circle. Musical notes go around in a circle. After 12 half steps we’re back where we […]

Apple Podcasts Studio at WWDC - For Whom is this Designed?

Wednesday, May 31, 10:52 UTC @ joe cieplinski

So Apple has made a studio available during WWDC for people to record podcast episodes during WWDC. This is one of those things that sounds really cool when you first hear about it. But then you spend a few minutes thinking, and you start to wonder “What’s the point?

New committer: Richard Gallamore (ports)

Wednesday, May 31, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Does parametric resonance solve the cosmological constant problem?

Wednesday, May 31, 06:30 UTC @ Backreaction

An oscillator too.Source: Giphy. Tl;dr: Ask me again in ten years. A lot of people asked for my opinion about a paper by Wang, Zhu, and Unruh that recently got published in Physical Reviews D, one of the top journals in the field. How the huge energy of quantum vacuum gravitates to drive the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu, William G. UnruhPhys. Rev. D 95,

Does parametric resonance solve the cosmological constant problem?

Wednesday, May 31, 06:30 UTC @ Backreaction

An oscillator too.Source: Giphy. Tl;dr: Ask me again in ten years. A lot of people asked for my opinion about a paper by Wang, Zhu, and Unruh that recently got published in Physical Reviews D, one of the top journals in the field. How the huge energy of quantum vacuum gravitates to drive the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu, William G. UnruhPhys. Rev. D 95,

Maybe Skip SHA-3

Wednesday, May 31, 04:00 UTC @ ImperialViolet

In 2005 and 2006, a series of significant results were published against SHA-1 [1][2][3]. These repeated break-throughs caused something of a crisis of faith as cryptographers questioned whether we knew how to build hash functions at all. After all, many hash functions from th

Goldilocks Principle And P vs. NP

Wednesday, May 31, 03:55 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

The rule of three Wikimedia Commons source Robert Southey was the Poet Laureate of Britain from 1813 until his death in 1843. He published, anonymously, “The Story of the Three Bears” in 1837. Today Ken and I want to talk about the state of versus and the relationship to this story. The story, as I’m […]

Proving that safety-critical neural networks do what they're supposed to: where we are, where we're going (part 1 of 2)

Tuesday, May 30, 22:32 UTC @ composition.al

Neural networks are turning up everywhere these days, including in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving and flight control systems. When these systems fail, human lives are at risk. But it’s hard to provide formal guarantees about the behavior of neural networks — how can we know for sure that they won’t steer us the wrong way? A few months ago, my group at Intel Labs (including, among others, Tatiana Shpeisman, Justin Gottsch

Google Scholar thinks my Hilbert Number is 1

Tuesday, May 30, 15:33 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(I want to thank Lane Hemaspaandra for bringing this to my attention.) When I google: google scholar William Gasarch I get this (I wonder if what you get depends on who you are- I describe below what I get.) The first entry on it is Methods of Mathematical Physics by Courant and Hilbert. The first page page that Google brings up

Color theory questions

Tuesday, May 30, 11:03 UTC @ John D. Cook

Here’s a script I wanted to write: given a color c specified in RGB and an angle θ, rotate c on the color wheel by θ and return the RGB value of the result. You can’t rotate RGB values per se, but you can rotate hues. So my initial idea was to convert RGB to […]

Demystifying iOS Provisioning Part 1: Profiles, Certificates, and Xcode (oh my!)

Tuesday, May 30, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

If you’ve worked with Apple platform development (iOS, watchOS, tvOS, or macOS) long enough, then you’ve probably encountered this mystifying process known as app provisioning. This is the process by which you can get your apps outside of the iOS simulator and move them onto production devices through direct (or “development”) installation or App Store distribution. In this series of articles, I want to help demystify this process, bringing to light exactly what provisioning is, how it’

/u/sellibitze on Hey Rustaceans! Got an easy question? Ask here (22/2017)!

Monday, May 29, 15:56 UTC @ gilded : rust

str is like [u8] with the special guarantee that it's valid UTF-8. And [u8] is the type of an array of zero or more u8 values. The number is not known at compile-time. It is a "dynamically sized" type. This is why you can't do something like this: let x : str = ...; // never gonna work The compiler would need to know how much space x needs but this information

A new drawing for simple Venn diagrams based on algebraic construction

Monday, May 29, 14:02 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Venn diagrams are used to display all relations between a finite number of sets. Recent researches in this domain concern the mathematical aspects of these constructions, but are not directed towards the readability of the diagram. This article presents a new way to draw easy-to-read Venn diagrams, in which each region tends to be drawn with the same size when the number of sets grows, and tends to draw a grid. Finally, using linear algebra, we prove that this construction gives a simple Venn diagram for an

x2y 1.2 and iCloud Sync between macOS and iOS

Monday, May 29, 12:59 UTC @ joe cieplinski

When I created x2y for Mac, I had to decide, as you always do, which features would make it to version 1, and which would be pushed back until later. Very early in the process, I punted on iCloud sync of the common aspect ratios list. I had done sync

Warning Converting Optional to String

Monday, May 29, 10:21 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

If you have converted a project to Swift 3.1 you have no doubt come across the slightly annoying warning about String interpolation for an optional value. Converting an Optional to a String The warning comes anytime you rely on the default conversion of an optional value to a String: var optionalValue: Int? = 42 print("Value is

A sixth sense for category theory

Sunday, May 28, 13:24 UTC @ John D. Cook

From Paul Phillips: I see adjoint functors. How often do you see them? All the time. They’re everywhere. pic.twitter.com/6PkGJ9wP4A — Paul Phillips (@contrarivariant) May 27, 2017 Mashup of Saunders Mac Lane’s quip “Adjoint functors arise everywhere” and Haley Joel Osment’s famous line from Sixth Sense. Related: Applied category theory

Patrick Stein: Fog of Light - Starting to Add Star-Fields

Sunday, May 28, 05:49 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I have finally written my first OpenGL code using GLSL. Whew. That took way too long to get all working correctly. I promise, soon, I will upload some sample code so that others may not have to stumble as long as I did. For the star-field, I generate a few thousand 2-D points. Each point has its own radius, its own opacity, and its own color. I put these all into an OpenGL array buffer. Then, the vertex shader copies data out of my struct to set the color and the point size. Then, the f

Zach Beane: Roger Corman talk in the Bay Area

Saturday, May 27, 09:34 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Roger Corman talk in the Bay Area

«Conspiraciones y ciencia defectuosa» en el Cuaderno de Cultura Científica

Saturday, May 27, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

¿Existen las conspiraciones? ¡Preguntad por Julio César, por las tabaqueras o por los casos aislados de corrupción en política! Desde que Homo sapiens es Homo sapiens grupos de al menos dos personas han estado reuniéndose para planear actos en secreto —los grupos de uno, también llamados «personas solas», no pueden conspirar etimológicamente hablando: solo pueden …

“App: The Human Story” Screening in San Jose

Friday, May 26, 19:57 UTC @ inessential.com

Here’s the scoop. It’s Sunday, June 4 at 5 pm. There’s a panel afterward with a bunch of people from the movie (including me). You can get tickets. You should get tickets — the event benefits App Camp for Girls.

Resolving Modern Mac Alias Files

Friday, May 26, 16:54 UTC @ Indie Stack

When a user selects a file in the Mac Finder and chooses File -> Make Alias, the resulting “copy” is a kind of smart reference to the original. It is similar to a POSIX symbolic link, but whereas a symbolic link references the original by full path, an alias has historically stored additional information about … Continue reading Resolving Modern Mac Alias Files

Member of the Band – Gorilla Andrés Arcia

Friday, May 26, 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 talent! Are you Gorilla material? Join the band today! Andrés Arcia

The Software Business in 2017

Friday, May 26, 12:50 UTC @ Business of Software USA

This is a very interesting slide deck considering the software business and the long term future of the software industry. Two particularly useful sections: The five forces accelerating software’s growth. Considerations for the modern software CEO. Well worth looking through. Software 2017 – Where are we now and where are we going?  The post The Software Business in 2017 appeared first o

Can we probe the quantization of the black hole horizon with gravitational waves?

Friday, May 26, 12:09 UTC @ Backreaction

Tl;dr: Yes, but the testable cases aren’t the most plausible ones. It’s the year 2017, but we still don’t know how space and time get along with quantum mechanics. The best clue so far comes from Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein. They made one of the most surprising finds that theoretical physics saw in the 20th century: Black holes have entropy. It was a surprise because entropy is a

Can we probe the quantization of the black hole horizon with gravitational waves?

Friday, May 26, 12:09 UTC @ Backreaction

Tl;dr: Yes, but the testable cases aren’t the most plausible ones. It’s the year 2017, but we still don’t know how space and time get along with quantum mechanics. The best clue so far comes from Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein. They made one of the most surprising finds that theoretical physics saw in the 20th century: Black holes have entropy. It was a surprise because entropy is a

Upping the microservices game with Istio: A microservice mesh

Thursday, May 25, 21:21 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

In June last year I reported here the open sourcing of Amalgam8 – a microservice fabric first to provide a central control over layer 7 routing across a mesh of microservices that constitutes a cloud app. The value of Amalgam8 is in removing the burden and complexity of integrating the smaller microservices that comprise an […] The post Upping the microservices game with Istio: A microservice mesh appea

Imperative Functional Programs that Explain their Work

Thursday, May 25, 17:58 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Imperative Functional Programs that Explain their Work Wilmer Ricciotti, Jan Stolarek, Roly Perera, James Cheney submitted on arXiv on 22 May 2017 Program slicing provides explanations that illustrate how program outputs were produced from inputs. We build on an approach introduced in prior work by Perera et al., where dynamic slicing was defined for pure higher-order functiona

How to: Customize meeting titles from your AI assistants

Thursday, May 25, 14:51 UTC @ x.ai

What’s in a name? A ton of data. Your AI assistants Amy and Andrew automatically title the meetings they set up for you to give you as much information as … View Article The post How to: Customize meeting titles from your AI assistants appeared first on x.ai.

Graduation from the Other Side

Thursday, May 25, 12:31 UTC @ Computational Complexity

BoS Europe Scholarships Announced

Thursday, May 25, 10:34 UTC @ Business of Software USA

We had some fantastic applications for the scholarship places, and we’re delighted to announce that the BoS Europe 2017 scholars are: Sam Heter – Hoopfix Lucy Friedman – Switchmetrics Theo England – Cucumber Faisal Chohan – Cogilent Mohammed Al Rasbi – Research and Development George Bettany – Sanctus Stefan Magnusson – Mystery Applicant Seun Awoyele – […] The post

Del reciclaje en la ciencia ficción

Thursday, May 25, 08:00 UTC @ brucknerite

¿Una serie de televisión de Star Trek? Si tú, lector, eres un joven aficionado al nuevo Trek que arrancó en 2009 y que lleva ya tres películas —más una cuarta en preparación—, la idea de ver algo relacionado con Star Trek en formato serie puede resultarte algo ajena. Pero pocos universos ficticios tienen más pedigrí: … Continúa leyendo Del reciclaje en la

New app lets crowds use their phones to display a single message

Wednesday, May 24, 22:54 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

More than 4 million people, across every state in the US, participated in the January 22 Women’s March. And the recent Earth Day marches spanned six continents. The messages were clear – but there were hundreds if not thousands of them (from pink knitted caps, to “There’s No Planet B” scrawled on cardboard signs). I […] The post New app lets crowds use their phones to display a single message appear

The Architect Elevator — Visiting the upper floors

Wednesday, May 24, 17:22 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Gregor Hohpe has taken his experience with ThoughtWorks and Google to a traditional insurance company. As an enterprise architect he sees his role as riding the elevator between the exe

Student’s future, teacher’s past

Wednesday, May 24, 15:04 UTC @ John D. Cook

“Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.” — Richard Hamming I ran across the above quote from Hamming this morning. It made me wonder whether I tried to prepare students for my past when I used to teach college students. How do you prepare a student for the […]

Side Effects, Front and Center!

Wednesday, May 24, 14:51 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

We think of computation in terms of its consequences. The big MapReduce job returns a large result. Web interactions display information. Enterprise applications update the database and return an answer. These are the reasons we do our work. What we rarely discuss are the side effects of doing the work we intend. Side effects may be unwanted, or they may actually cause desired behavior at different layers of the system. This column points out some fun patterns to keep in mind as we build and use our systems

Five Things That Make Kotlin Interesting

Wednesday, May 24, 14:31 UTC @ tecosystems

It’s interesting to ponder whether this is where it all started for Google and Kotlin. As Tim Bray notes, it wouldn’t be the first time that Steve Yegge has moved the needle. Regardless, Google’s decision to anoint the language as a “first class citizen” for the Android platform is interesting news. For many, if not

Five Things That Make Kotlin Interesting

Wednesday, May 24, 14:31 UTC @ tecosystems

It’s interesting to ponder whether this is where it all started for Google and Kotlin. As Tim Bray notes, it wouldn’t be the first time that Steve Yegge has moved the needle. Regardless, Google’s decision to anoint the language as a “first class citizen” for the Android platform is interesting news. For many, if not

Here I Go Again. Why My Second Startup is Different. | Nick Halstead, Cognitive Logic | BoS Europe 2016

Wednesday, May 24, 09:10 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Nick Halstead, CEO & Founder, Cognitive Logic Nick is the Founder of Cognitive Logic Inc which is building unique technology to allow collaboration on corporate data between companies without data needing to be shared or transmitted. Nick discusses some of the things that he has learned at DataSift he is applying to his new startup, […] The post Here I

Databases from finite categories

Wednesday, May 24, 06:43 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Spivak and Kent (2011). Ologs: A categorical framework for knowledge representation: In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data

GAMBIT

Wednesday, May 24, 02:04 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

The LHCP 2017 conference was held this past week in Shanghai, and among the results announced there were new negative results about SUSY from ATLAS with both ATLAS and CMS now reporting for instance limits on gluino masses of around … Continue reading →

/u/perplexinglyemma on Rust support for KDevelop being worked on as a GSoC project

Tuesday, May 23, 23:27 UTC @ gilded : rust

Hahah. I know everyone loves Rust but I didn't expect to reach this subreddit within an hour of posting my blog on PlanetKDE. Anyway, I'm the one working on this, so please feel free to let me know any particular features you would really like to see. I have a couple of things in mind, but it's always good to get some more feedback :)

Stopped Watches and Data Analytics

Tuesday, May 23, 21:50 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Is this a new or old paradox? UK Independent source—and “a gentle irony” Roger Bannister is a British neurologist. He received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy for Neurology in 2005. Besides his extensive research and many papers in neurology, his 25 years of revising and expanding the bellwether text Clinical Neurology […]

Congratulations to Grant and Jason!

Tuesday, May 23, 20:41 UTC @ Sean Carroll

Advising graduate students as they make the journey from learners to working scientists is one of the great pleasures and privileges of academic life. Last week featured the Ph.D. thesis defenses of not one, but two students I’ve been working … Continue reading →

Thoughts on the passing of Sir Roger Moore

Tuesday, May 23, 16:32 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I was born in the 1970s. Thus, my conception of James Bond will always be embodied by Sir Roger Moore. While the popular opinion is that Sean Connery will always be the “definitive Bond”—whatever that means—to me, Sir Roger Moore is the essential Bond, if for no other

Meet the TEDGlobal 2017 Fellows

Tuesday, May 23, 13:00 UTC @ TED Blog

Meet the new class of TEDGlobal 2017 Fellows! Representing 18 countries — including, for the first time in our program, Somalia, Uruguay, Liberia and Zimbabwe — this class clears a high bar of talent, creativity and eccentricity. Among those selected, you’ll find a Somali computer scientist catalyzing the tech scene in Somalia and Somaliland; a […]

Rust and CSV parsing

Tuesday, May 23, 02:42 UTC @ gilded : rust

So You Want To Do Mobile Application Development?

Monday, May 22, 21:44 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Mobile application development has been a big deal for several years now. When we talk about it, we are not talking about anything new. Technologies, tools, frameworks, services and pretty much everything related to this subject are getting better and better every day. It is a great time to be a mobile developer because the most popular frameworks for mobile are so advanced. But even with the overwhelming amount of documentation, examples, and guides, I frequently hear questions and/or comme

TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak unearths ancient mysteries on “60 Minutes”

Monday, May 22, 19:17 UTC @ TED Blog

What’s the best way to find something lost on the ground, like a historical site from a civilization lost to time? For archaeologist Sarah Parcak, the answer’s obvious — from way up above, using satellites, of course. As a space archaeologist, she’s mapped the lost city of Tanis (of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark […]

The power of blockchain + Watson

Monday, May 22, 13:53 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The impact of disruptive digital technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain goes well beyond finance and payments, touching all aspects of the real economy. This is an underappreciated fact, and it’s what makes these technologies so exciting. Now, a new application developed by IBM Research that fuses artificial intelligence into blockchain opens up further possibilities […] The post

Stack View Baseline Alignment Issue

Monday, May 22, 12:21 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

A horizontal stack view can align text based views on the first or last baseline of the text. Unfortunately the stack view ends up with an incorrect height when the first text view is not the view that extends furthest above/below the baseline. Adding some extra constraints works around the problem. Baseline Alignment of Text Here is what I expect to happen. I have a horizontal stack view with three text labels. The second text label uses a font

Ideal background for algebraic geometry

Monday, May 22, 11:20 UTC @ John D. Cook

From Foundations of Algebraic Geometry: … in an ideal world, people would learn this material over many years, after having background courses in commutative algebra, algebraic topology, differential geometry, complex analysis, homological algebra, number theory, and French literature.

Going Without the Flow - Exploring Collection View Layouts

Monday, May 22, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

Introduction Collection views are extremely versatile - there’s even speculation that the venerable UITableView will be soft-deprecated in favour of its more flexible and powerful cousin. But this versatility comes with a price - collection views, and particularly collection view layouts, can become complicated, and the official documentation for some of the more interesting areas is a little

Sunday, May 21, 13:20 UTC @ John D. Cook

From Dorothy Sayers’ essay Why Work? It is always strange and painful to have to change a habit of mind; though, when we have made the effort, we may find a great relief, even a sense of adventure and delight, in getting rid of the false and returning to the true.

Quicklisp news: May 2017 Quicklisp dist update now available

Sunday, May 21, 00:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

New projects: cepl.glop — glop host for cepl — BSD 2 Clausecepl.sdl2-image — Some helper methods for using sdl2-image to load images to CEPL types — BSD 2 Clausecepl.sdl2-ttf — A few additional helpers for making working with sdl2-ttf even easier from CEPL — BSD 2 Clau

Viral

Saturday, May 20, 21:03 UTC @ brucknerite

El viernes pasado —mirad la fecha del artículo, no cuesta tanto— publiqué en Twitter un montaje que casi se ha hecho viral: ¿Ingenioso? No, no demasiado. Refleja, aprovechando un viral de verdad sobre la increíble etiqueta de cierta marca de ropa, mi impresión personal sobre el líder de Podemos, Pablo Iglesias: es más egocéntrico que yo, … Continúa leyendo Viral

El mejor consejo de salud posible

Saturday, May 20, 20:31 UTC @ brucknerite

Este artículo se publicó primero en Naukas («El mejor consejo de salud posible») el 17/05/2017. Seré breve. Es posible resumir todos los consejos de salud de médicos y nutricionistas en solo dos palabras mágicas: Sé rico. Ahí tenéis vuestro santo grial. Si tenéis prisa podéis dejar de leer ya. Sin embargo, si os apetece quedaros … Continúa leyendo El mejor co

/u/j_platte on [Help!] Variables + Closures = Headache

Saturday, May 20, 10:07 UTC @ gilded : rust

Aaahhh, that full error message was useful! It's not cookie that fails. The build fails in cursive actually. cargo probably compiles things in parallel, so the last message above the error the first time you got this error was Compiling cookie.... But the path of the file in which the error originates shows it is actually cursive. And they seem to have made a 0.5.1 release recently to fix this regression (nightly added

A funny thing happened on my way to Maker Faire

Friday, May 19, 20:25 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Normally on Friday mornings, I’d be winding my way up a canyon in the hills south of San Jose to IBM Research – Almaden, where I work as an advisory engineer and scientist for our research in magnetoelectonics, spintronics and related fields. Instead, thanks to an amazing confluence of my IBM work and my outside […] The post A funny thing happened on my way to Maker Faire appeared first on

Filmmaker Jen Brea gets a Sundance fellowship, Pamela Ronald makes the case for engineered rice, and more

Friday, May 19, 17:27 UTC @ TED Blog

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: A new Sundance grant helps indie films get seen. Making a film is hard enough — but getting the film seen by an audience can be just as difficult, especially in this era of non-stop media shifts. To help, Sundance just launched the Creative Distribution Fellowship — and among [̷

Computational Neuroscience

Friday, May 19, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

New Issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development   Understanding the brain’s dynamics is of central importance to neuroscience. Our ability to observe, model, and infer from neuroscientific data the principles and mechanisms of brain dynamics determines our ability to understand the brain’s unusual cognitive and behavioral capabilities. Our guest editors, James Kozloski, […] The post

Can we use gravitational waves to rule out extra dimensions – and string theory with it?

Friday, May 19, 10:47 UTC @ Backreaction

Gravitational Waves, Computer simulation. Credits: Henze, NASA Tl;dr: Probably not. Last week I learned from New Scientist that “Gravitational waves could show hints of extra dimensions.” The article is about a paper which recently appeared on the arxiv: Signatures of extra dimensions in gravitational waves David Andriot and Gustavo Lucena Gómez arXiv:1704.07392 [hep-th] The claim in this

Can we use gravitational waves to rule out extra dimensions – and string theory with it?

Friday, May 19, 10:47 UTC @ Backreaction

Gravitational Waves, Computer simulation. Credits: Henze, NASA Tl;dr: Probably not. Last week I learned from New Scientist that “Gravitational waves could show hints of extra dimensions.” The article is about a paper which recently appeared on the arxiv: Signatures of extra dimensions in gravitational waves David Andriot and Gustavo Lucena Gómez arXiv:1704.07392 [hep-th] The claim in this

A quantum experience at Maker Faire

Friday, May 19, 01:41 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Replay: A Beginner’s Guide to Quantum Computing Dr. Talia Gershon at Maker Faire Bay Area 2017 ###This article was updated on May 31, 2017### We are taking our new 16 qubit quantum processor on the road, to the Bay Area Maker Faire, from May 19-21. I’ll be there, along with 15-20 other IBMers from our […] The post A quantum experience at Maker Faire appeared first on

Playground: Whatʼs new in Swift 4

Thursday, May 18, 18:32 UTC @ Ole Begemann

I made an Xcode playground that lets you try out many of the new features coming in Swift 4. You can download it on GitHub. The cool thing is that you can run the playground right now in Xcode 8.3; you donʼt have to wait for the first official Swift 4.0 beta, which will probably come as part of Xcode 9 at WWDC. All you need to do is install the latest Swift snapshot from swift.org (donʼt

Training Watson to see what’s on your plate

Thursday, May 18, 14:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Today, we’re introducing our latest AI research in the form of a new beta feature: the IBM Watson Visual Recognition food model. This feature provides a built-in capability for recognizing 2,000+ different foods within images, providing enhanced specificity and accuracy in this content domain compared to Visual Recognition’s general tagging feature. Using the food model, […] The post Trai

The Optimizers

Thursday, May 18, 12:42 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Last week the Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering honored the 80th birthday of George Nemhauser and

Volume of a rose-shaped torus

Thursday, May 18, 10:50 UTC @ John D. Cook

Start with a rose, as described in the previous post: Now spin that rose around a vertical line a distance R from the center of the rose. This makes a torus (doughnut) shape whose cross sections look like the rose above. You could think of having a cutout shaped like the rose above and extruding Play-Doh […]

JSON Feed

Wednesday, May 17, 20:22 UTC @ inessential.com

I was hesitant, even up to this morning, to publish the JSON Feed spec. If you read Dave Winer’s Rules for standards-makers, you’ll see that we did a decent job with some of the rules — the spec is written in plain English, for example — but a strict application of the rules would have meant not publishing at all, since “Fewer formats is better.” I agree com

Apple Pay Has Expanded to Italy

Wednesday, May 17, 15:30 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

You can now support Apple Pay for your customers in Italy, providing an easy and secure way for them to pay within your apps and websites with a single touch.Learn more about Apple Pay.

The Calculus of Service Availability

Wednesday, May 17, 14:45 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Most services offered by Google aim to offer 99.99 percent (sometimes referred to as the "four 9s") availability to users. Some services contractually commit to a lower figure externally but set a 99.99 percent target internally. This more stringent target accounts for situations in which users become unhappy with service performance well before a contract violation occurs, as the number one aim of an SRE team is to keep users happy. For many services, a 99.99 percent internal target represents the sweet sp

Length of a rose

Wednesday, May 17, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The polar graph of r = cos(kθ) is called a rose. If k is even, the curve will trace out 2k petals as θ runs between 0 and 2π. If k is odd, it will trace out k petals, tracing each one twice. For example, here’s a rose with k = 5. (I rotated the […]

We asked 3 experts: How will AI change our lives in the near future?

Wednesday, May 17, 11:43 UTC @ TED Blog

Imagine a world where your car drives itself, your fridge does the grocery shopping, and robots work alongside you. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are turning that world into a near-future possibility. But what will that future really look like, and how will it change our lives? We spoke with three artificial intelligence experts at […]

Growing Profitable Businesses in the Second Machine Age | Stephen Allott, Pebble Code | BoS Europe 2016

Wednesday, May 17, 09:00 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Stephen Allott spoke at Bos Europe 2016 – just one example of the smart software people we bring to our events. View our BoS Europe 2017 agenda for more information about this year’s speakers. Stephen Allott, Chairman, Pebble Code We’re in the Second Machine Age, demand for software is rocketing. Large enterprises and governments are […] The post

New Beyond WWDC Events Added

Tuesday, May 16, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

In addition to WWDC, a variety of other exciting developer events will take place throughout the week in San Jose — and more have just been added. You can connect with a talented, international developer community, whether you’re attending the conference or visiting San Jose to experience these incredible events. Find out how you can be a part of this inspiring week.Learn more about the events.

The Big Picture: Paperback Day

Tuesday, May 16, 15:53 UTC @ Sean Carroll

I presume most readers of this blog have already purchased their copy of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. If you’re really dedicated, you have the hardback version and the ebook and the … Continue reading →

This Month’s Hype

Tuesday, May 16, 15:28 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

It seems that a couple of the authors of the recent Cosmic Controversy letter (discussed here) are going on a campaign to embarrass the 29 physicists who were convinced to sign their letter. Andrei Linde has gone to Lubos Motl’s … Continue reading →

“Not a Toy” - New Video about Symmetry Breaking

Tuesday, May 16, 15:25 UTC @ Backreaction

Here is the third and last of the music videos I produced together with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, sponsored by FQXi. The first two are here and here. In this video, I am be-singing a virtual particle pair that tries to separate, and quite literally reflect on the inevitable imperfection of reality. The lyrics of this song went through an estimated ten thousand iterations until we

“Not a Toy” - New Video about Symmetry Breaking

Tuesday, May 16, 15:25 UTC @ Backreaction

Here is the third and last of the music videos I produced together with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, sponsored by FQXi. The first two are here and here. In this video, I am be-singing a virtual particle pair that tries to separate, and quite literally reflect on the inevitable imperfection of reality. The lyrics of this song went through an estimated ten thousand iterations until we

If an ugrad asks is field X worth studying' the answer is almost always yes

Tuesday, May 16, 13:28 UTC @ Computational Complexity

An undergraduate Freshman recently emailed me that he was very interested in Quantum Computing and wanted to know 1) Who on the fCS aculty works in QC (Answer: Andrew Childs though you should ask him about postdocs, grad students, and Physics faulty in the area.) 2) What are good books on QC for a bright ugrad. I said the following: QC since Democritus by Aaronson QC-A gentle introduction by Rieffel and Polak QC for CS by Yanofsy and Mannucci QC and Q

Facilitating peer review with cognitive computing

Tuesday, May 16, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Applying for or allocating funding for scientific research takes up a significant amount of time and energy, both from the scientists and the national foundations that evaluate the science itself. Almost 10 percent of the NSF budget is allocated to the review and management of awards, and this figure is nearly 20 percent for the […] The post Facilitating peer review with cognitive computing appeare

The Dodecahedron, the Icosahedron and E8

Tuesday, May 16, 09:39 UTC @ Azimuth

Here you can see the slides of a talk I’m giving: • The dodecahedron, the icosahedron and E8, Annual General Meeting of the Hong Kong Mathematical Society, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It’ll take place on 10:50 am Saturday May 20th in Lecture Theatre G. You can see the program for the whole […]

New committer: Jochen Neumeister (ports)

Tuesday, May 16, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

When length equals area

Tuesday, May 16, 02:39 UTC @ John D. Cook

The graph of hyperbolic cosine is called a catenary. A catenary has the following curious property: the length of a catenary between two points equals the area under the catenary between those two points. The proof is surprisingly simple. Start with the following: Now integrate the first and last expressions between two points a and […]

Lejos de aquí

Monday, May 15, 20:01 UTC @ brucknerite

Tenía ocho años y ya se había dado cuenta de que el sueño de su vida, viajar entre las estrellas a bordo de una nave espacial, sería imposible. Odió a la persona que se lo hizo entender desde la ventana rectangular del televisor en color nuevo de su casa, una noche de finales de verano. Lo … Continúa leyendo Lejos de aquí

Monday, May 15, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Test your apps with the latest release of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F73)iOS 10.3.2 (14F89 | 14F90)watchOS 3.2.2 (14V485)tvOS 10.2.1 (14W585a)View all downloads.

Under pressure: New ptychography technique examines stressed atoms in 3D

Monday, May 15, 15:51 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

In a small lead hutch-protected chamber at Argonne National Labs is a nano-probe that bombards nano-sized electronic devices, like a transistor, for example, with x-rays. Think of it as a CT scan. But for atoms. It’s building a 3D model of that device’s atomic structure, for which we can examine the amount of strain it […] The post Under pressure: New ptychography technique examines stressed atoms in 3D

Podcast with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock on Agility and Architecture

Monday, May 15, 13:32 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Ryan Lockard (Agile Uprising) invited me to join Rebecca Wirfs-Brock for a podcast

Competitive local routing with constraints

Monday, May 15, 10:44 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Let $P$ be a set of $n$ vertices in the plane and $S$ a set of non-crossing line segments between vertices in $P$, called constraints. Two vertices are visible if the straight line segment connecting them does not properly intersect any constraints. The constrained $\Theta_m$-graph is constructed by partitioning the plane around each vertex into $m$ disjoint cones, each with aperture $\theta = 2 \pi/m$, and adding an edge to the closest' visible vertex in each cone. We consider how to route on the constrai

Moving Core Data Files

Monday, May 15, 08:40 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Using Core Data with an SQLite database and need to move the location of the store or replace the contents? Resist the temptation to use direct file operations and use the persistent store coordinator to do the job for you. There are at least a couple of common situations when you may need to move a Core Data store: You decided to add an App Extension and need to move your store into a shared AppGroup directory. You need to populate or reset a store to a default da

January-March 2017 Status Report

Monday, May 15, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The January to March 2017 Status Report is now available.

A Mother’s Day Cryptogram?

Monday, May 15, 04:59 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Or just human ingenuity at finding patterns in ‘random’ data? Cropped from source Bill Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States. He came close to becoming the first First Gentleman—or whatever we will call the husband of a female president. He is also a fan of crossword puzzles, and co-authored with Victor Fleming […]

information.subscribe(next)

Monday, May 15, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

I woke up this morning thinking about the parallelism that we could establish between what programmers know as reactive paradigm, and how we’re hooked to the information around us. In the past, there wasn’t that much information and most of the access to it was in a “pull” manner. Only if you were interested in reading or knowing about something, you found the information by yourself. That allowed us to have more control over the consumption of the information. When we wanted to g

Express Yourself Swift Style

Monday, May 15, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

The deeper parts of a language are typically hidden away from the user; only accessible to the inner machinations of the linker, lexer and loader. However, The Swift Standard Library exposes language features we take for granted in the form of protocols. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the “ExpressibleBy___” family of protocols. This power is not without great responsibility, as we’ve seen with custom operators, “too much of a good thing” can harm readability and maintenance. Sinc

William Tutte (1917-2002)

Sunday, May 14, 13:18 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Today we celebrate ou

AES-GCM-SIV

Sunday, May 14, 04:00 UTC @ ImperialViolet

AEADs combine encryption and authentication in a way that provides the properties that people generally expect when they “encrypt” something. This is great because, historically, handing people a block cipher and a hash function has resulted in a lot of bad and broken constructions. Standardising AEADs avoids this. Common AEADs have a sharp edge though: you must never encrypt two different messages with the same key and nonce. Doing so generally violates the confidentiality of the two m

Solving systems of polynomial equations

Saturday, May 13, 15:48 UTC @ John D. Cook

In a high school algebra class, you learn how to solve polynomial equations in one variable, and systems of linear equations. You might reasonably ask “So when do we combine these and learn to solve systems of polynomial equations?” The answer would be “Maybe years from now, but most likely never.” There are systematic ways to […]

Subscription Based Pricing is not the Answer

Friday, May 12, 18:00 UTC @ Dan Counsell

The real push towards subscription based apps started in June 2016 when Apple announced that subscription pricing was available for regular apps. I'm noticing more and more indie developers considering the move, and some have already made the jump to this new pricing model.

Better GitHub Searching

Friday, May 12, 14:10 UTC @ Indie Stack

Sometimes when I’m searching a GitHub repository, I end up with a ton of uninteresting results because there are, for example, tests or documentation in the repository that are not pertinent to what I’m searching for. For example, in the Apple Swift repository, searching for “struct String” currently yields 22 results, many of which are … Continue reading Better G

Guest Post: Nathan Moynihan on Amplitudes for Astrophysicists

Thursday, May 11, 22:40 UTC @ Sean Carroll

As someone who sits at Richard Feynman’s old desk, I take Feynman diagrams very seriously. They are a very convenient and powerful way of answering a certain kind of important physical question: given some set of particles coming together to … Continue reading →

Keynote on Event-Driven Architecture

Thursday, May 11, 19:00 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Last week I gave the opening keynote at goto Chicago. For a topic, I decided to go into the results of ThoughtWorks's Event-Driven architecture summit that I wrote some notes on earlier this year.

How to Solve It

Thursday, May 11, 13:07 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Today a guest post from Periklis Papakonstantinou, coincidentally not unrelated to Bill's post earlier this week. I'll be back with a special post on Sunday. I'm teaching in an undergrad program that is half computer science and half business at Rutgers, but the CS part taught there is the real thing (I assume for Business too). This

A Philosopher Tries to Understand the Black Hole Information Paradox

Thursday, May 11, 12:33 UTC @ Backreaction

Is the black hole information loss paradox really a paradox? Tim Maudlin, a philosopher from NYU and occasional reader of this blog, doesn’t think so. Today, he has a paper on the arXiv in which he complains that the so-called paradox isn’t and physicists don’t understand what they are talking about. (Information) Paradox Lost Tim Maudlin arXiv:1705.03541 [physics.hist-ph] So is the paradox a

A Philosopher Tries to Understand the Black Hole Information Paradox

Thursday, May 11, 12:33 UTC @ Backreaction

Is the black hole information loss paradox really a paradox? Tim Maudlin, a philosopher from NYU and occasional reader of this blog, doesn’t think so. Today, he has a paper on the arXiv in which he complains that the so-called paradox isn’t and physicists don’t understand what they are talking about. (Information) Paradox Lost Tim Maudlin arXiv:1705.03541 [physics.hist-ph] So is the paradox a

On blockchain and leaning in with new IBM Distinguished Engineer Vita Bortnikov

Thursday, May 11, 07:50 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Vita Bortnikov has had to cross quite a few bridges – from her childhood in Ukraine, to choosing a career path after only two years in Israel, and through her years at IBM. What seemed like a cut-and-dried choice to 18-year-old Vita – mathematics or computers – has led to a successful and satisfying professional […] The post On blockchain and leaning in with new IBM Distinguis

A Cosmic Controversy

Wednesday, May 10, 22:01 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

A couple months ago Scientific American published an article by Ijjas, Steinhardt and Loeb (also available here), which I discussed a bit here. One aspect of the article was its strong challenge to multiverse mania, calling it the “multimess” and … Continue reading →

Some Quick Items

Wednesday, May 10, 21:40 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

A few quick items, I may use this posting to add a couple more later, the next posting will discuss today’s letter to Scientific American about inflation. Today’s LHCC meeting at CERN had reports from the LHC machine and experiments. … Continue reading →

Conversations with Technology Leaders: Erik Meijer

Wednesday, May 10, 16:53 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Whether you are a leader, a programmer, or just someone aspiring to be better, I am sure there are some smart takeaways from our conversation that will help you grow in your role. Oh, and if you read to the end, you can find out what his favorite job interview question is - and see if you would be able to pass his test.

Is Inflationary Cosmology Science?

Wednesday, May 10, 15:06 UTC @ Sean Carroll

[tl;dr: Check out this article in Scientific American by Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb suggesting that inflation isn’t science; this response by Guth, Kaiser, Linde, and Nomura that was co-signed by a bunch of people including me; and this counter-response by … Continue reading →

From Happy Consultant Developer to Unhappy Product CEO | Peter Coppinger, Teamwork | BoS Europe 2016

Wednesday, May 10, 12:42 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Peter Coppinger has cited BoS talks as “changing his company”. He made the leap from BoS regular attendee to BoS speaker in 2016. Check out the BoS Europe  2017 agenda for more “company changing” talks. Peter Coppinger, Co-founder & CEO, Teamwork Peter has done a few uncommon things in his career. He built a product […] The post

In memory of Benjamin Barber

Tuesday, May 09, 19:11 UTC @ TED Blog

Nation states are failing miserably on some of the more urgent global challenges of the modern age — especially climate change, predatory capitalism, terrorism and forced migration. Nations are increasingly closed, parochial and outdated, slow to respond to the pressures of a fast changing world. The three and a half long century experiment is rapidly coming […]

IBMer supports Africa’s future innovators and entrepreneurs

Tuesday, May 09, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

A few weeks ago Lola Aleru, who is based at IBM’s Africa research lab in Nairobi, Kenya, was presented with an incredible opportunity by her colleague and IBM scientist David Moinina Sengeh. She explains, “David is on the board of directors of the Global Minimum Inc (GMin), a non-profit that encourages young innovators and leaders in […] The post IBMer supports Africa’s fut

Yo fui tertuliano en Intereconomía, y puedo demostrarlo

Tuesday, May 09, 11:14 UTC @ brucknerite

Era el año del apocalipsis que no fue. Y escribía: Estaba esperando a algo para publicar esta pequeña historia. No sé muy bien a qué: quizá a tener en mis manos la prueba del crimen. O a que Intereconomía, ventilador afanoso para la hez mental de una mínima caterva de iluminados, concluyera su existencia en … Continúa leyendo Yo fui tertulian

Generating pink noise

Monday, May 08, 20:08 UTC @ John D. Cook

Different colors of noise are named by analogy with colors of light. Pink noise is between white noise and red noise. White noise has equal power at all frequencies, just as white light is a combination of all the frequencies of the visible spectrum. The components of red noise are weighted toward low frequencies, just […]

Students try to memorize rather than understand! Who knew! (everyone)

Monday, May 08, 01:38 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Discrete Math. Required for CS majors, taken mostly by Sophmores. Goal is to teach them how to think rigorously. Topics are logic, number theory (not much), induction, sets, functions, relations, combinatorics (includes Pigeon hole prin, henceoforth PNP), prob, countability, uncountability. We taught the Pigeon Hole Principle and gave MANY examples and HW of the following type: Let A be a subset of {1,...,50} of size 10. Show there are two subsets of A that have the same s

Exploration Day — Words Can't Explain

Monday, May 08, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

MartianCraft has a strong tradition of exploration through pushing the boundaries of mobile software. We are always looking for ways to keep our team members sharp and creative. MartianCraft’s answer to this dilemma is “Exploration Day”, which is modeled after many other hackathon type models — an experience designed to allow our team to attack challenging, and unorthodox problems in a highly compressed timeline. This type of event reinforces the notion that we don’t ne

Planned Reading: The Trick for Reading Nonfiction

Saturday, May 06, 16:51 UTC @ Code Capsule

I am always on the lookout for unusual and interesting books, from which I hope to learn new ideas. But time becomes an issue, as I have to prioritize which books and articles to read first. About a year ago, I wrote an article about the industry standards for nonfiction books, and why such books […]

Away Note

Saturday, May 06, 05:13 UTC @ Backreaction

I'm in Munich next week, playing with the philosophers. Be good while I'm away, back soon. (Below, the girls, missing a few teeth.)

Away Note

Saturday, May 06, 05:13 UTC @ Backreaction

I'm in Munich next week, playing with the philosophers. Be good while I'm away, back soon. (Below, the girls, missing a few teeth.)

Phosphorus Sulfides

Friday, May 05, 22:46 UTC @ Azimuth

I think of sulfur and phosphorus as clever chameleons of the periodic table: both come in many different forms, called allotropes. There’s white phosphorus, red phosphorus, violet phosphorus and black phosphorus: and there are about two dozen allotropes of sulfur, with a phase diagram like this: So I should have guessed that sulfur and phosphorus […]

A celebrated building turns 50…and other TED news

Friday, May 05, 21:02 UTC @ TED Blog

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Habitat turns 50! First conceptualized in 1961 as part of architect Moshe Safdie’s thesis at McGill University, Habitat 67 has gone on to inspire several generations of architects. Combining high-rise living with community connection, Habitat’s concrete cluster of homes challenged the contemporary notions of apartment complexes and Brutalist architecture.

The Meal is Not the Product

Friday, May 05, 19:05 UTC @ tecosystems

There are many reasons that people go out to eat. Some of those reasons involve food; many do not. If you’re going out to watch a game with friends, for example, the number and size of TVs is at least as important as the menu. For a date, the chef is generally important, but so

The Meal is Not the Product

Friday, May 05, 19:05 UTC @ tecosystems

There are many reasons that people go out to eat. Some of those reasons involve food; many do not. If you’re going out to watch a game with friends, for example, the number and size of TVs is at least as important as the menu. For a date, the chef is generally important, but so

Midlife Crisis of an API Designer

Friday, May 05, 16:08 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

I have to admit I am currently at a midlife crisis. I dedicated my last twenty years to promotion of a proper API design. I wrote TheAPIBook, I tried to propagate the principles of good

Q&A with the Great Nephew of Alan Turing

Friday, May 05, 15:47 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Carrying on the legacy of a famous relative is a no easy task, particularly for someone as renown as Alan Turing, who is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. But this hasn’t stopped his great nephew James Turing and his parents from giving it a go. Several years ago […] The post Q&A with the Great Nephew of Alan Tu

Building software the right way

Friday, May 05, 11:17 UTC @ John D. Cook

Yesterday a friend told me about a software project whose owners said “We’re going to do this the right way.” I told him I have two opposite reactions when I hear that: Ooh, that sounds like fun! Run away! I’ve been on several projects where the sponsors have identified some aspect of the status quo […]

Planet Nine: the score card

Friday, May 05, 00:17 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

In which I sing about Schrödinger’s cat

Thursday, May 04, 15:18 UTC @ Backreaction

You have all been waiting for this. The first ever song about quantum entanglement, Boltzmann brains, and the multiverse: This is the second music video produced in collaboration with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, supported by FQXi. (The first is here.) I think these two young artists are awesomely talented! Just by sharing this video you can greatly support them. In this video too,

In which I sing about Schrödinger’s cat

Thursday, May 04, 15:18 UTC @ Backreaction

You have all been waiting for this. The first ever song about quantum entanglement, Boltzmann brains, and the multiverse: This is the second music video produced in collaboration with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, supported by FQXi. (The first is here.) I think these two young artists are awesomely talented! Just by sharing this video you can greatly support them. In this video too,

5 of the Best Mac & iOS Dev Conferences in 2017

Thursday, May 04, 15:00 UTC @ Dan Counsell

Early last year I wrote an article on the 7 best dev conferences in 2016. I had planned to do something similar at the start of this year, however, time marched on and it’s now little later than I anticipated.

Summer Conferences

Thursday, May 04, 12:12 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Ahh summer. No Classes. Baseball. Opera Festivals. Time to focus on research and starting a new book. But, of course, many computer scientists travel the world to various conferences. I went to too many last year and trying to cut down but many great options abound. The STOC 2017 Theory Fest, June 19-23 in Montreal, five days of conference talks, tutorials, invited lectures and so much more. Sanjeev Arora

Announcing Second Stage

Thursday, May 04, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

Today we announce a little project we have been working on — we are calling it Second Stage. Second Stage is a one day workshop where we share the knowledge gained working with a wide variety of companies over the last several years. Our plan is to host these events all over the world, to spread and share what we know, as we roll out Second Stage. For now, we are starting small — on June 1st 2017 we will be hosting our first Secondary Stage workshop in Denver, Colorado at the Warwick Hotel. F

App Store Sources and App Referrer Data Now Available

Wednesday, May 03, 22:49 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

App Analytics in iTunes Connect now provides insight on where customers discover your app, including App Store browsing and search, within other apps, or on the web. With key metrics based on source types, you can see your top referring apps and websites, making it easier to optimize your marketing campaigns.Learn more about App Analytics.

The 3n+1 problem and Benford’s law

Wednesday, May 03, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

This is the third, and last, of a series of posts on Benford’s law, this time looking at a famous open problem in computer science, the 3n + 1 problem, also known as the Collatz conjecture. Start with a positive integer n. Compute 3n + 1 and divide by 2 repeatedly until you get an odd […]

The IDAR Graph

Wednesday, May 03, 11:46 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

UML is the de facto standard for representing object-oriented designs. It does a fine job of recording designs, but it has a severe problem: its diagrams don't convey what humans need to know, making them hard to understand. This is why most software developers use UML only when forced to. People understand an organization, such as a corporation, in terms of a control hierarchy. When faced with an organization of people or objects, the first question usually is, "What's controlling all this?" Surprisingly,

Proven, Honest, Ways to Make Software Sales – Even if you are a Single Developer | Steli Efti, Close.io | BoS Europe 2016

Wednesday, May 03, 08:49 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Steli Efti, Co-founder & CEO, Close.io Steli Efti is the co-founder and CEO of Close.io. He’s Silicon Valley’s most prominent sales hustler, a YC alumni, advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs and the author of The Ultimate Startup Guide To Outbound Sales. Steli shares some of the tips and tricks he has learned as one […] The post

New committer: Danilo G. Baio (ports)

Wednesday, May 03, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Cauchy, Benford, and a problem with NHST

Tuesday, May 02, 15:41 UTC @ John D. Cook

Introduction Samples from a Cauchy distribution nearly follow Benford’s law. I’ll demonstrate this below. The more data you see, the more confident you should be of this. But with a typical statistical approach, crudely applied NHST (null hypothesis significance testing), the more data you see, the less convinced you are. This post assumes you’ve read the […]

Millennial IBM scientists revolutionize cyber security operations from idea to product

Tuesday, May 02, 15:08 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Every year, CareerCast publishes a widely-reported list of the top 10 most stressful jobs. The 2017 list includes some obvious careers including military service, firefighter, and police officer, who risk their lives every day. The list also includes several less life-threatening jobs including TV news broadcaster and taxi driver. But what if you had the […] The post Millennial IBM sc

Weibull distribution and Benford’s law

Tuesday, May 02, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Introduction to Benford’s law In 1881, Simon Newcomb noticed that the edges of the first pages in a book of logarithms were dirty while the edges of the later pages were clean. From this he concluded that people were far more likely to look up the logarithms of numbers with leading digit 1 than of […]

Diamondoids

Tuesday, May 02, 05:00 UTC @ Azimuth

I have a new favorite molecule: adamantane. As you probably know, someone is said to be ‘adamant’ if they are unshakeable, immovable, inflexible, unwavering, uncompromising, resolute, resolved, determined, firm, rigid, or steadfast. But ‘adamant’ is also a legendary mineral, and the etymology is the same as that for ‘diamond’. The molecule adamantane, shown above, features […]

Frontier Diary #8: When Worlds Collide

Monday, May 01, 20:34 UTC @ inessential.com

I spent the weekend making a bunch of progress on the compiler. It has two pieces: a tokenizer, which I created by rewriting the original C code (langscan.c) in Swift, and a parser. The parser in OrigFrontier was generated by MacYacc, which is similar to Yacc, which is similar to <

A Celebration of Computer Science at Harvard in Honor of Harry Lewis's 70th Bday

Monday, May 01, 18:31 UTC @ Computational Complexity

My adviser Harry Lewis turned 70 recently. I blogged about how things have changed since I got my Phd in this post. I now post on A celebration of Computer Science at Harvard in Honor of Harry Lewis's 70th Birthday (for video of all talks in order see:

Update changelog.

Monday, May 01, 18:01 UTC @ Recent commits to luajit-2.0

Time-space trade-offs for triangulating a simple polygon

Monday, May 01, 17:32 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

An $s$-workspace algorithm is an algorithm that has read-only access to the values of the input, write-only access to the output, and only uses $O(s)$ additional words of space. We present a randomized $s$-workspace algorithm for triangulating a simple polygon $P$ of $n$ vertices that runs in $O(n^2/s+n \log n \log^{5} (n/s))$ expected time using $O(s)$ variables, for any $s \leq n$. In particular, when $s \leq \frac{n}{\log n\log^{5}\log n}$ the algorithm runs in $O(n^2/s)$ expected time.

The projection median as a weighted average

Monday, May 01, 17:30 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

The projection median of a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is a robust geometric generalization of the notion of univariate median to higher dimensions. In its original definition, the projection median is expressed as a normalized integral of the medians of the projections of $P$ onto all lines through the origin. We introduce a new definition in which the projection median is expressed as a weighted mean of $P$, and show the equivalence of the two definitions. In addition to providing a definition

Easy memory aides

Monday, May 01, 15:44 UTC @ The Geomblog

Certain memory aides are so ... well.. memorable that they stick in your mind exactly the way they should. Here are three that I've heard of: Keeping track of the Baltic states: I think I heard this from +Fernando Pereira - They are alphabetical in order from north to south. So it's Estonia, Latvia and then Lithuania. Converting between miles and kilometers: This is a

Common Lisp Standard Draft

Monday, May 01, 13:10 UTC @ Zach Beane Common Lisp

Common Lisp Standard Draft: This is a nice PDF version of the CL spec built from the final draft TeX sources. There’s also a gitlab repo that can be used to reproduce the PDF locally. (Thanks to Rainer Joswig for sharing this on twitter.)

May-day Pope-hope

Monday, May 01, 07:40 UTC @ Backreaction

Pope Francis meets Stephen Hawking.[Photo: Piximus.] My husband is a Roman Catholic, so is his whole family. I’m a heathen. We’re both atheists, but dear husband has steadfastly refused to leave the church. That he throws out money with the annual “church tax” (imo a great failure of secularization) has been a recurring point of friction between us. But as of recently I’ve stopped bitching

May-day Pope-hope

Monday, May 01, 07:40 UTC @ Backreaction

Pope Francis meets Stephen Hawking.[Photo: Piximus.] My husband is a Roman Catholic, so is his whole family. I’m a heathen. We’re both atheists, but dear husband has steadfastly refused to leave the church. That he throws out money with the annual “church tax” (imo a great failure of secularization) has been a recurring point of friction between us. But as of recently I’ve stopped bitching

A Great Solution

Monday, May 01, 03:23 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

A great conjecture too Alternate photo by Quanta Thomas Royen is a retired professor of statistics in Schwalbach am Taunus near Frankfurt, Germany. In July 2014 he had a one-minute insight about how to prove the famous Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI) conjecture. It took one day for him to draft a full proof of the […]

What isn't a high-performance DSL?

Monday, May 01, 01:45 UTC @ composition.al

At work, I’ve been participating in a series of long-running, broad-ranging discussions about the role that domain-specific languages, or DSLs, can play in helping programmers exploit high-performance parallel hardware. One thing that’s interesting about these discussions is that they reveal what people’s assumptions are about what “DSL” means. For instance, one question that’s come up repeatedly in our discussions is “Is

The Good, the Bad, and the Clients

Monday, May 01, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

The client vetting process is the most important step in business. Not only can a failed project leave your business in the red, it also wastes time, resources, and hurts future prospects. But it is a paradox that the most important step in business be conducted in an expedient manner. The time spent evaluating a client costs time, money and is not directly billable. But what are the best questions to pre-qualify a client? The key to effective client evaluation is identifying the perfect buyer f