vieiro.net

Wednesday, August 16, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

With some random number generators, it’s possible to select the seed carefully to manipulate the output. Sometimes this is easy to do. Sometimes it’s hard but doable. Sometimes it’s theoretically possible but practically impossible. In my recent correspondence with Melissa O’Neill, she gave me an example that seeds a random number generator so that the […]

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We present a Las Vegas algorithm for dynamically maintaining a minimum spanning forest of an $n$-node graph undergoing edge insertions and deletions. Our algorithm guarantees an $O(n^{o(1)})$ worst-case update time with high probability. This significantly improves the two recent Las Vegas algorithms by Wulff-Nilsen [STOC'17] with update time $O(n^{0.5-\epsilon})$ for some constant $\epsilon>0$ and, independently, by Nanongkai and Saranurak [STOC'17] with update time $O(n^{0.494})$ (the latter works o

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

Bipartite matching, where agents on one side of a market are matched to agents or items on the other, is a classical problem in computer science and economics, with widespread application in healthcare, education, advertising, and general resource allocation. A practitioner's goal is typically to maximize a matching market's economic efficiency, possibly subject to some fairness requirements that promote equal access to resources. A natural balancing act exists between fairness and efficiency in matching

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

A classical difficult isomorphism testing problem is to test isomorphism of p-groups of class 2 and exponent p in time polynomial in the group order. It is known that this problem can be reduced to solving the alternating matrix space isometry problem over a finite field in time polynomial in the underlying vector space size. We propose a venue of attack for the latter problem by viewing it as a linear algebraic analogue of the graph isomorphism problem. This viewpoint leads us to explore the possibility

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

A central problem in scheduling is to schedule $n$ unit size jobs with precedence constraints on $m$ identical machines so as to minimize the makespan. For $m=3$, it is not even known if the problem is NP-hard and this is one of the last open problems from the book of Garey and Johnson. We show that for fixed $m$ and $\epsilon$, $(\log n)^{O(1)}$ rounds of Sherali-Adams hierarchy applied to a natural LP of the problem provides a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm running in quasi-polynomial t

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

The grid obstacle representation of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is an injective function $f:V \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}^2$ and a set of point obstacles $\mathcal{O}$ on the grid points of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ (where $V$ has not been mapped) such that $uv$ is an edge in $G$ if and only if there exists a Manhattan path between $f(u)$ and $f(v)$ in $\mathbb{Z}^2$ avoiding the obstacles of $\mathcal{O}$. The grid obstacle number of a graph is the smallest number of obstacles needed for the grid obstacle representation of $G$.

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The complexity of distributed edge coloring depends heavily on the palette size as a function of the maximum degree $\Delta$. In this paper we explore the complexity of edge coloring in the LOCAL model in different palette size regimes. 1. We simplify the \emph{round elimination} technique of Brandt et al. and prove that $(2\Delta-2)$-edge coloring requires $\Omega(\log_\Delta \log n)$ time w.h.p. and $\Omega(\log_\Delta n)$ time deterministically, even on trees. The simplified technique is based

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The problem of computing the Fourier Transform of a signal whose spectrum is dominated by a small number $k$ of frequencies quickly and using a small number of samples of the signal in time domain (the Sparse FFT problem) has received significant attention recently. It is known how to approximately compute the $k$-sparse Fourier transform in $\approx k\log^2 n$ time [Hassanieh et al'STOC'12], or using the optimal number $O(k\log n)$ of samples [Indyk et al'FOCS'14] in time domain, or come within $(\log\l

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

An efficient pairwise Boolean matching algorithm to solve the problem of matching single-output specified Boolean functions under input negation and/or input permutation and/or output negation (NPN) is proposed in this paper. We present the Structural Signature (SS) vector, which is composed of a 1st signature value, two symmetry marks, and a group mark. As a necessary condition for NPN Boolean matching, the structural signature is more effective than is the traditional signature. Two Boolean functions,

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

Graphlets are small connected induced subgraphs of a larger graph $G$. Graphlets are now commonly used to quantify local and global topology of networks in the field. Methods exist to exhaustively enumerate all graphlets (and their orbits) in large networks as efficiently as possible using orbit counting equations. However, the number of graphlets in $G$ is exponential in both the number of nodes and edges in $G$. Enumerating them all is already unacceptably expensive on existing large networks, and the

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We give the first polynomial-time algorithms on graphs of bounded maximum induced matching width (mim-width) for problems that are not locally checkable. In particular, we give $n^{\mathcal{O}(w)}$-time algorithms on graphs of mim-width at most $w$, when given a decomposition, for the following problems: Longest Induced Path, Induced Disjoint Paths and $H$-Induced Topological Minor for fixed $H$. Our results imply that the following graph classes have polynomial-time algorithms for these three problems:

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The advent of special-purpose hardware such as FPGA- or ASIC-based annealers and quantum processors has shown potential in solving certain families of complex combinatorial optimization problems more efficiently than conventional CPUs. We show that to address an industrial optimization problem, a hybrid architecture of CPUs and non-CPU devices is inevitable. In this paper, we propose problem decomposition as an effective method for designing a hybrid CPU--non-CPU optimization problem solver. We introduce

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We study the problem of finding all $k$-periods of a length-$n$ string $S$, presented as a data stream. $S$ is said to have $k$-period $p$ if its prefix of length $n-p$ differs from its suffix of length $n-p$ in at most $k$ locations. We give a one-pass streaming algorithm that computes the $k$-periods of a string $S$ using $\text{poly}(k, \log n)$ bits of space, for $k$-periods of length at most $\frac{n}{2}$. We also present a two-pass streaming algorithm that computes $k$-periods of $S$ using

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In this paper we propose a branch, price and remember algorithm to solve the U shaped assembly line balancing problem. Our proposed algorithm uses a column generation approach to obtain tight lower bounds for this problem. It also stores generated columns in memory to enhance the speed of column generation approach. We also develop a modification of Hoffman algorithm to obtain high quality upper bounds. Our computational results show that our proposed algorithm is able to optimally solve 255 of Scholl's

Wednesday, August 16, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

A \emph{$k$-track} layout of a graph consists of a vertex $k$ colouring, and a total order of each vertex colour class, such that between each pair of colour classes no two edges cross. A \emph{$k$-queue} layout of a graph consists of a total order of the vertices, and a partition of the edges into $k$ sets such that no two edges that are in the same set are nested with respect to the vertex ordering. The \emph{track number} (\emph{queue number}) of a graph $G$, is the minimum $k$ such that $G$ has a $k$

Tuesday, August 15, 23:41 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 21:02 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 19:19 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 18:06 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 16:38 UTC @ Backreaction

Not how it works. It’s tough to wrap your head around four dimensions. We have known that the universe expands since the 1930s, but whether we expand with it is still one of the questions I am asked most frequently. The less self-conscious simply inform me that the universe doesn’t expand but everything in it shrinks – because how could we tell the difference? The best answer to these

Tuesday, August 15, 16:38 UTC @ Backreaction

Not how it works. It’s tough to wrap your head around four dimensions. We have known that the universe expands since the 1930s, but whether we expand with it is still one of the questions I am asked most frequently. The less self-conscious simply inform me that the universe doesn’t expand but everything in it shrinks – because how could we tell the difference? The best answer to these

Tuesday, August 15, 16:01 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, August 15, 15:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 230# Comments: 218 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude,

Tuesday, August 15, 13:55 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Everyone knows that cycling is an excellent aerobic sport, but its benefits are less clear when cyclists are riding and exposed to polluted air in dense urban environments. But what if a cognitive technology could help by decreasing the amount of pollution they breathe in? A project led by Professors David Timoney and Professor Robert […] The post Hacking an e-bike to help cyclists avoid breathing in pollu

Tuesday, August 15, 13:32 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

I would like to know if HN thinks it is worth to go through Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science.https://... is basically an online program of academic education in CS planned to be taken while working, costing around USD7,000 to complete.My context: I am brazilian, living in Brazil, 37 yo, graduated in Economics and just recently made the career transition to become a developer. I basically studied more practical things about software development (web, mo

Tuesday, August 15, 12:45 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a nucleotide.” -Alexei A. Sharov & Richard Gordon We talk about the origin of life on Earth with bated breath,…

Tuesday, August 15, 12:44 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Now here is a reading list. We asked this year’s Business of Software Conference USA speakers… Please don’t think about it too hard, just reply with the first one that comes to mind: What book has had the biggest influence on your business life? As you know, they are a smart bunch of folks so […] The post The Business of Software Conference Summer Reading List ap

Tuesday, August 15, 12:26 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 12:25 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

It’s “a definitive study for all time, like writing the final book,” says one researcher who’s mapping out new classes of geometric structures.

Tuesday, August 15, 11:36 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 11:15 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 10:27 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Norbert Blum (Univ. Bonn, Alemania) acaba de publicar una posible demostración de P≠NP. Su idea es extender un teorema de Razborov (1985) para circuitos booleanos monótonos (que solo usan operadores AND y OR) a circuitos no monótonos (que además […] Leer más

Tuesday, August 15, 10:15 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 09:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: http://... URL: https://... 282# Comments: 356 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude,

Tuesday, August 15, 06:47 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 05:58 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 04:40 UTC @ Azimuth

There’s a new paper on the arXiv that claims to solve a hard problem: • Norbert Blum, A solution of the P versus NP problem. Most papers that claim to solve hard math problems are wrong: that’s why these problems are considered hard. But these papers can still be fun to look at, at least […]

Tuesday, August 15, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

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

Tuesday, August 15, 03:19 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Tuesday, August 15, 01:58 UTC @ John D. Cook

PractRand is a random number generator test suite, somewhat like the DIEHARDER and NIST tests I’ve written about before, but more demanding. Rather than running to completion, it runs until it a test fails with an infinitesimally small p-value. It runs all tests at a given sample size, then doubles the sample and runs the tests again. […]

Tuesday, August 15, 01:16 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

Article URL: https://... URL: https://... 238# Comments: 78 hnrss is a labor of love, but if the project has made your job or hobby project easier and you want to show some gratitude,

Tuesday, August 15, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

MartianCraft has always been a remote company; it’s something we have both embraced and struggled against. Since our earliest beginnings in 2004 we have almost unknowingly been running a modern experiment on creating a successful remote workplace. No one ever told us that remote wasn’t supposed to work, at least not until we were well underway. We have found a way to make remote work, and work well. Our team is consistently highly productive and has time and time again delivered where others have com

Monday, August 14, 22:52 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, August 14, 22:03 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Radical quality clothing. Obsessively sourced raw materials. Designed for performance, durability, and movement. Do more and own less. WWW.OUTLIER.NYC ★

Monday, August 14, 21:04 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, August 14, 21:04 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, August 14, 20:22 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, August 14, 19:49 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Monday, August 14, 17:37 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Prime numbers are endlessly fascinating to number theorists and math enthusiasts. This month’s puzzle explores primes by cooking up a whimsical dish of grilled snake ribs.

Monday, August 14, 17:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Test your apps with the latest beta release of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.macOS High Sierra 10.13 beta 6 (17A344b)iOS 11 beta 6 (15A5354b)watchOS 4 beta 6 (15R5357b)tvOS 11 beta 6 (15J5360b)View all downloads.

Monday, August 14, 16:59 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Designing for JDK9 is going to be more and more important when JDK9 is finally about to be released. However the modular design of Jigsaw brings in new challenges. Hear my story where I tried

Monday, August 14, 15:00 UTC @ x.ai

This past week, we added an additional $10M in financing to our ~$23M Series B financing from last year. To date, we’ve invested less than a third of the Series … View Article The post x.ai secures an additional $10M in financing for its meeting scheduling AI assistant appeared first on x.ai.

Monday, August 14, 14:57 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Blogging will be light to non-existent for the next ten days or so, as I head out west on a road trip to see next Monday’s solar eclipse. Current plan is to fly to Denver tomorrow, pick up a vehicle, … Continue reading →

Monday, August 14, 14:18 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Yes, I am well aware that nature — or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us — is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.” -Octavio Paz For most of us heading to the path of totality, we’re in for an incredible…

Monday, August 14, 11:52 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El experimento de doble rendija ilustra la dualidad onda-partícula. El patrón de interferencia desaparece al colocar un detector en una de las rendijas. ¿Qué pasa si se coloca un segundo detector en la otra? Según la regla de Born […] Leer más

Monday, August 14, 10:09 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

This installment of Research for Practice features a special curated selection from John Regehr, who takes us on a tour of great debates in academic computer science research. In case you thought flame wars were reserved for Usenet mailing lists and Twitter, think again: the academic literature is full of dramatic, spectacular, and vigorous debates spanning file systems, operating system kernel design, and formal verification.

Monday, August 14, 10:03 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Using a custom font with dynamic type has always been possible but it took some effort to get it to scale for each text style as the user changed the dynamic type size. Apple introduced a new font metrics class in iOS 11 that makes it much less painful. Dynamic Type Apple introduced dynamic type back in iOS 7 to give the user a system wide mechanism to change their preferred text size from the system settings.

Monday, August 14, 01:45 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(Thanks to Rachel Folowoshele for bringing this to my attention) John Urschel is a grad student in applied math at MIT. His webpage is here. Some students go straight from ugrad to grad (I did that.) Others take a job of some sort and then after a few years go to grad school. That's what John did; however, his prior job was unusual among applied math grad students

Sunday, August 13, 17:19 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the Earth.” ―Harold Urey It’s been yet another fascinating week of scientific stories here at Starts With A Bang! But as of the last 48 hours, there’s something I absolutely have…

Sunday, August 13, 15:09 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Matt Schudel, reporting for The Washington Post: Blanche Blackwell’s romantic life inspired one of Noël Coward’s plays about an upper-crust love triangle, and swashbuckling Hollywood star Errol Flynn wanted to marry her. She was a member of one of Jamaica’s richest families but was best known as the mistress and muse of Ian Fleming, the rakish author who was the creator of James Bond. Mrs. Blackwell died Aug. 8 in London at 104. Her death was confirmed by Andrew Lycett,

Sunday, August 13, 11:58 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

En el verano de 1963 el físico André Petermann fue postdoc en la División Teórica del CERN junto al doctorando George Zweig de Murray Gell-Mann. El 30 de diciembre de 1963 llegó a la revista Nuclear Physics un artículo […] Leer más<

Sunday, August 13, 08:33 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

In the previous blog post I've tried to show that Keynesian beauty contest — which is a terrible name; I will call it "infinite mirrors model" henceforth — is a more general mechanism than it seems to be at the first sight. I've shown how it applies to pricing in general (not just pricing of stocks) and to natural language ("arbitrariness of the sign"). I've hinted at how it may be applied to politica

Saturday, August 12, 14:14 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.” -Richard K. Morgan It’s absolutely true that, in quantum mechanics, there are certain pairs of properties that we simply can’t measure simultaneously. Measure the position…

Saturday, August 12, 14:06 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Saturday, August 12, 12:22 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

In 1930's John Maynard Keynes was thinking about operation of stock markets. It was not long after Black Tuesday after all and understanding why the stock prices may not reflect the true value of the underlying enterprise and why they can swing rapidly was of utmost interest. He came up with the simile that is today known as "Keynesian beauty contest": Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competi

Saturday, August 12, 00:23 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Saturday, August 12, 00:08 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Re: yesterday’s piece arguing that Safari should display favicons in its browser tabs, I’ve gotten dozens of emails and tweets pointing out that Safari does show favicons, albeit in monochrome, for pinned tabs. First, so what? That’s great for pinned tabs but it’s not a solution in any way, shape, or form for regular tabs. Second, they’re not even really favicons. They&#

Friday, August 11, 21:05 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jack Baer, reporting for MLB.com: MLB Network insider Ken Rosenthal reported — as did the Miami Herald earlier — that the Sherman-Jeter group won the bidding, with Sherman holding the controlling interest and plans for Jeter to be the team’s CEO. Serious question for Yankees fans: does this preclude Jeter from playing on Old Timer’s Day? And can you even imagine what anot

Friday, August 11, 19:04 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has canceled the company’s much-anticipated meeting to talk about gender issues today. The move came after some of its employees expressed concern over online harassment they had begun to receive after their questions and names have been published outside the company on a variety of largely alt-right sites. “We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward.

Friday, August 11, 18:19 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Whether you think this feature is a good idea or not, why the fuck would they put this button on top of the text of the article you’re trying to read? I’m starting to think Medium is just fucking with me at this point. ★

Friday, August 11, 16:45 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! Diego Castro

Friday, August 11, 14:00 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Honestly, if you’re given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don’t say ‘what kind of tea?” -Neil Gaiman Enjoying the Perseid meteor shower this year, as perhaps you do every August? As you look up, the great cosmic show might have a lot more to offer than mere streaks of light, due to cometary…

Friday, August 11, 13:14 UTC @ NSBlog

In order to work with C APIs, we sometimes need to convert Swift object references to and from raw pointers. Swift's Unmanaged struct is the standard API for handling this. Today, I'd like to talk about what it does and how to use it. (Read More)

Friday, August 11, 11:11 UTC @ joe cieplinski

Before getting into details, though, you should know that this switch was neither a quick decision, nor did we take it easily. We have been talking about it for over 2 years now. We’ve had uncountable discussions, and the topic came up at least once every month — yet we

Friday, August 11, 10:11 UTC @ gilded : rust

For the last eight months, we've been hard at work on a project that we're thrilled to be able to share with the wider Rust community. We know it as Gotham and today we're releasing 0.1. Gotham is a flexible web framework that does not sacrifice safety, security or speed. The Gotham core team loves many of the elegant concepts that are found in dynamically typed web application frameworks, such as Rails/Phoenix/Djan

Friday, August 11, 09:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Since 2009, on 18 July the world recognizes Mandela Day, to honor Nelson Mandela on his birthday. Part of Mandela’s huge legacy includes community service and volunteerism and IBM’s newest research lab in Johannesburg did its part to contribute with local start-ups. A few weeks ago IBM scientists and local design consultants spent the day […] The post

Friday, August 11, 01:27 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

In recent years a hot topic in some theoretical physics circles has been the 2013 “ER=EPR” conjecture first discussed by Maldacena and Susskind here. Every so often I try and read something explaining what this is about, but all such … Continue reading →

Thursday, August 10, 23:10 UTC @ Daring Fireball

It might sound silly if you’re not a heavy user of browser tabs, but I am convinced that the lack of favicons is holding back Safari’s market share.

Thursday, August 10, 21:24 UTC @ TED Blog

Documentary filmmakers Beverly and Dereck Joubert have worked to conserve wildlife in Africa for more than 30 years. Last year, I visited the Jouberts in one of the Great Plains safari camps and preserves they founded: Great Plains Conservation, launched a few years ago in Botswana and Kenya. You can read about my 2016 visit and […]

Thursday, August 10, 19:40 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Here are the raw download stats for the top 100 projects in Quicklisp for July: 11470 alexandria 8732 babel 8521 closer-mop 7779 split-sequence 7534 trivial-features 7197 cffi 7170

Thursday, August 10, 19:17 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Thursday, August 10, 18:58 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Here’s the actual post from Consumer Reports regarding Surface hardware reliability: A number of survey respondents said they experienced problems with their devices during startup. A few commented that their machines froze or shut down unexpectedly, and several others told CR that the touch screens weren’t responsive enough. The new studies of laptop and tablet reliability leverage data on 90,741 tablets and laptops that subscribers bought new between 2014 and the begi

Thursday, August 10, 18:35 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook’s 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users’ privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on

Thursday, August 10, 18:12 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Max Seelemann, development lead for Ulysses: Before getting into details, though, you should know that this switch was neither a quick decision, nor did we take it easily. We have been talking about it for over 2 years now. We’ve had uncountable discussions, and the topic came up at least once every month — yet we always postponed a decision. The sheer complexity and far reach of this change were too intimidating. I am not exaggerating

Thursday, August 10, 17:57 UTC @ x.ai

A recent Gallup study found that only one in 10 people possess the skills to be effective managers. That’s bad news because AI is about to make everyone a manager. That’s right: … View Article The post How AI agents are making everyone managers appeared first on x.ai.

Thursday, August 10, 17:44 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Paul Thurrott: According to a Consumer Reports survey of over 90,000 tablet and laptop owners, an estimated 25 percent of those with Microsoft Surface devices will experience “problems by the end of the second year of ownership.” This failure rate is the worst in the industry by far among mainstream PC makers, the publication says, and as a result, it is pulling its “recommended” designation for all Surface products. Apple led the industry by a long shot.

Thursday, August 10, 17:11 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Troy Gaul: As had happened in the past, I became annoyed by the bar and floating button at the bottom of the Medium page, which on such a small screen used up a not-insignificant amount of the vertical space. John Gruber had recently written about this in his post Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars on Daring Fireball. However, this time, something occurred t

Thursday, August 10, 16:51 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Thursday, August 10, 16:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

A small band of Gorillas created a three-week iBeacons and Hue Lights project using different technologies. In this four-part series we will elaborate on the three main goals of this project and provide a tutorial along the way: 1. Implement Beacon SDK to connect the iPhone to beacon devices through Bluetooth. 2. Implement a NodeJS Server to manage and handle a Philips Hue Bridge with Hue Lights.

Thursday, August 10, 15:02 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“I’m old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn’t been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.” -Pat Cadigan When it comes to health, safety, and how we interact with the world around us, pretty much everyone recognizes the…

Thursday, August 10, 12:15 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Even in the age of sun-observing satellites, astronomers like Jay Pasachoff still seek out total solar eclipses for the tales they can tell about our sun.

Thursday, August 10, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This article authored by Myung-hee Na, Senior Technical Staff Member, Semiconductor Technology Research, IBM Research; Karim El Sayed, Director of R&D, Synopsys; Victor Moroz, Synopsys Fellow, Synopsys The number of variables in semiconductor development seem to be inversely proportional to a chip’s dimensions – the smaller our chips get, the more complicated they are to build. […] The post Future semicon

Thursday, August 10, 11:22 UTC @ gilded : rust

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Thursday, August 10, 11:12 UTC @ Business of Software USA

What can SaaS CEOs who have led businesses for over a Decade Teach You? Mimecast Founder & CEO Peter Bauer has been named one of the top ten most influential figures in the world of cybersecurity and has run Mimecast for over 14 years. Peter spoke at Business of Software Conference USA in 2012, soon after […] The post What can SaaS CEOs who have led busi

Thursday, August 10, 11:09 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Remember the Bluetooth craze where it seemed half of all people walked around with a headset in their ear. Now you rarely do. Remember Google Glass. That didn't last long. I remember having a conversation with someone and all of sudden they would say something nonsensical and you'd realize they are on the phone talking to someone else. Just by wearing a Bluetooth headset you felt that they cared more about a potential caller than the conversation they were currently having with you

Thursday, August 10, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Thursday, August 10, 07:57 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Mozi, el satélite de comunicaciones cuánticas chino logró el “récord de distancia en la distribución de fotones entrelazados vía satélite” (LCMF, 15 Jun 2017). También conocido como QSS (Quantum Science Satellite), sus siguientes pasos eran obvios, demostrar el teletransporte […]

Thursday, August 10, 07:36 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Jason Fried, CEO, Basecamp Since Basecamp was founded in 1999, it has pioneered a different way of doing things, a different way of working, a different approach to doing business. Started with four people, today Basecamp has about 50 employees across 32 different cities across the world. Everyone at Basecamp is free to live and […] The post Your Company Should

Wednesday, August 09, 22:27 UTC @ Daring Fireball

This is a goddamn disgrace. The Boss would not have stood for this. ★

Wednesday, August 09, 21:53 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Ben Kronengold, writing for McSweeney’s: I, a manufacturing robot at Google Factory C4.7, value diversity and inclusion. I also do not deny that machines are sometimes given preference to humans in the workplace. All I’m suggesting in this document is that humans’ underrepresentation in tech is not due to discrimination. Rather, it is a result of biological differences. Specifically, humans have a biology.

Wednesday, August 09, 21:48 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Geraldine DeRuiter: Last week, I decided to try Soylent. For those unfamiliar with this “food” product, Soylent is a high-protein drink designed to appeal to lifehackers, dieters, and doomsday cult members who are maybe a little shy and don’t want to come out of their bunker for communal meals. It has an incredibly long shelf-life, and provides you nutrition without all the pesky side-effects that food usually has, like chewing, tasting like something, and being an excuse

Wednesday, August 09, 19:44 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jonathan Hoefler: Nº was the number sign before # became a number sign, and it refreshingly serves this one and only purpose. Compare the #, which when preceding a number is read as “number” (“#1 in my class”), but when following a number means “pound” or “pounds”. If you’re curious what the # symbol has to do with the abbreviation lbs., here’s one possible missing link. (“70# uncoated paper”), leading to printshop pile-ups like “#10 envelope, 24# b

Wednesday, August 09, 17:52 UTC @ John D. Cook

I just ran across a post by John Baez pointing to an article by Alan Frieze on random minimum spanning trees. Here’s the problem. Create a complete graph with n nodes, i.e. connect every node to every other node. Assign each edge a uniform random weight between 0 and 1. Find the minimum spanning tree. Add up […]

Wednesday, August 09, 16:56 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

A surprising theorem about differential equations Composite of src1, src2. Olivier Bournez and Amaury Pouly have proved an interesting theorem about modeling physical systems. They presented their paper at ICALP 2017 last month in Warsaw. Today Ken and I wish to explain their theorem and its possible connections to complexity theory. Of course as theorists […]

Wednesday, August 09, 16:47 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jason Snell: When I mention that I write a lot on the iPad these days, I’m often asked what iOS apps I’m using to write. The truth is, the story keeps shifting — I’ve never really settled on a single app, because none of them give me everything that I want. These days I’m using Editorial most of the time. It’s got full Markdown support and syncs with Dropbox, but those feature

Wednesday, August 09, 16:33 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: Essential Products Inc., the smartphone maker founded by the creator of Google’s Android mobile software, confirmed it has a new $300 million war chest as it prepares for the seemingly insurmountable task of taking on Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Inc. The startup on Wednesday unveiled the large roster of investors taking a chance on it, including Chinese internet company Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Amazon Inc.’s Alex

Wednesday, August 09, 16:27 UTC @ John D. Cook

You can select blocks of text in Emacs just as you would in most other environments. You could, for example, drag your mouse over a region. You could also hold down the Shift key and use arrow keys. But Emacs also has a number of commands that let you work in larger semantic units. That […]

Wednesday, August 09, 16:25 UTC @ TED Blog

Please enjoy your roundup of TED-related news: This one’s for the boys. Mark Ronson takes a break from making music to have some fun in Charli XCX’s video for “Boys.” You’ll find him (suavely) combing his hair, amid scenes of other male celebs, such as Wiz Khalifa, Riz Ahmed and Joe Jonas having a pillow […

Wednesday, August 09, 15:34 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Las órbitas de las estrellas más cercanas a Sagitario A*, el agujero negro supermasivo de la Vía Láctea, indican que su masa es de 4,15 ± 0,13 millones de masas solares y se encuentra a una distancia de la […] Leer más

Wednesday, August 09, 14:50 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

To create a good living replica of the human brain, your best hope may be to let “organoid” components assemble it for you.

Wednesday, August 09, 13:52 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The opioid epidemic has become one of the worst health crises in US history.  In 2015, more than 90 Americans died every day from opioid overdoses, a number comparable to deaths in car accidents and projected to have risen further in 2016 and 2017. 1,2 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate the […] The post Combating the Opioid Epidemic with Machine

Wednesday, August 09, 13:38 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

From non-stick coatings on cookware to waterproof outdoor clothing, many of the things we use in our everyday lives rely on water-resistant or hydrophobic materials to function. In many cases, their ability to resist the absorption of water is due to their high fluorine content. An excellent example of this is Teflon®, a highly fluorinated […] The post New discovery: Rapid preparation of

Wednesday, August 09, 13:02 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“Our first priority was making sure we weren’t fooling ourselves.” -Keith Riles, LIGO team member When LIGO announced their first discovery of a black hole-black hole merger, it came as a surprise to almost everyone. The shocking part wasn’t that LIGO had seen merging black holes, but that they were discovered to be so massive.…

Wednesday, August 09, 09:32 UTC @ Backreaction

Chairs. [Image: Verco] That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one shouldn’t expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of the whole population? Well, that was a pretty dumb thing to write. But not because it’s wrong. Dumb is that Damore thought he could have a reasoned discussion about this. In the USA, out of all places. The version of

Wednesday, August 09, 09:32 UTC @ Backreaction

Chairs. [Image: Verco] That leaked internal memo from James Damore at Google? The one that says one shouldn’t expect employees in all professions to reflect the demographics of the whole population? Well, that was a pretty dumb thing to write. But not because it’s wrong. Dumb is that Damore thought he could have a reasoned discussion about this. In the USA, out of all places. The version of

Wednesday, August 09, 01:36 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

There’s a new college-level textbook out, Cosmology for the Curious, targeted at physics courses designed to explain basics of cosmology to non-physics majors. The authors are Delia Perlov and Alex Vilenkin. Back in 2006 Vilenkin published a popular book promoting … Continue reading →

Tuesday, August 08, 23:50 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac: We’ve received a couple of photos from Apple tipster Sonny Dickson this morning that depict a dummy model for the ‘iPhone 7s Plus’, one of three new phones Apple is said to be launching this year. Although marketing branding is unknown, the ‘7s’ devices are expected to iterate on the current iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus chassis. One distinction will be the introduction of glass backs (rat

Tuesday, August 08, 21:21 UTC @ Daring Fireball

This summer I started selling my own display ads on Daring Fireball. If you’re reading this on the website, you can see one of them right now over on the left. For now I’m limiting them to five spots per month, and I’ve still got one open for the remainder of August. September is wide open, and is generally the highest-traffic month of the year on DF, because that’s the month when new iPhones tend to be announced. If you’ve got a product or service you want to promote

Tuesday, August 08, 21:13 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Michelle Castillo, reporting for CNBC: CEO Bob Iger told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin Disney had a “good relationship” with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar’s titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain. The new platform will be the home for all Disney movies going f

Tuesday, August 08, 19:48 UTC @ TED Blog

When great minds meet, everybody benefits. So, when meetings are good, they’re great. But if they’re bad (as most office meetings are, be honest with yourself), they’re anything but beneficial. You may say to yourself, or quietly argue to this article during your sad desk lunch: “But I am doing work. I’m sitting and talking […]

Tuesday, August 08, 19:32 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Create a website with Squarespace, and feel confident knowing your site’s covered by the best. Think of Squarespace as your very own IT department, with free, unlimited hosting, top-of-the-line security, an enterprise-grade infrastructure, and around-the-clock support. Try Squarespace for free. When you’re ready to subscribe, get 10% off at squarespace.com with offer code DARING17.

Tuesday, August 08, 17:02 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, August 08, 16:01 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Cynthia Littleton, reporting for Variety: “I feel excited and lucky to be working on this project for Netflix,” Letterman said. “Here’s what I have learned, if you retire to spend more time with your family, check with your family first. Thanks for watching, drive safely.” This is the best news I’ve seen all year.

Tuesday, August 08, 15:12 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Two “rare jewels” have illuminated a mysterious multidimensional object that connects a huge variety of mathematical work.

Tuesday, August 08, 15:00 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

The 10X Engineer. Some call them unicorns. Some call them purple squirrels. Some call them the Space Cowboy. Some call them the Gangster of Love. In this series, we will explore what a 10X Engineer is, how to become one, and how to find one. Steve Miller and mythical creatures aside, the 10X Engineer is so rare to find. There’s no wonder all you have to do is Google the term, and you can find a plethora of material talking about them. Yet, I know there are engineers, managers, and all in between

Tuesday, August 08, 14:01 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“To be on my very first spacewalk, to be outside, and to have contamination in my suit to the point that I couldn’t see in either eye – that, I think, would cause some people to lose control.” -Chris Hadfield Sure, you probably laughed about it when you first heard that NASA had a Planetary…

Tuesday, August 08, 12:45 UTC @ Quality Coding

The “Single Responsibility Principle” (SRP) sounds so noble. But I’m afraid it’s misunderstood and misapplied. Ask your teammates: “What is the Single Responsibility Principle?” Go ahead, ask them. Then ask if the SRP is a good thing or a bad thing. I’d bet many of them will say something like this: “In principle, it’s a […]

Tuesday, August 08, 09:00 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Los mamíferos tienen tamaños y formas muy diferentes, como sus heces, pero parece que defecan en un tiempo similar. Vídeos de 23 animales, desde gatos a elefantes, indican que la duración de la defecación es de 12 ± 7 […] Leer más

Tuesday, August 08, 05:08 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Proteins are one of the most important classes of biomarkers – biological molecules indicative of a disease or health of an individual. The detection of proteins is critical in a variety of tests; from the diagnosis of malaria, through the detection of  heart attacks, to cancer screening and monitoring.  The most common way to detect […] The post

Tuesday, August 08, 04:01 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Summary: IBM Research publishes in arXiv close to ideal scaling with new distributed deep learning software which achieved record communication overhead and 95% scaling efficiency on the Caffe deep learning framework over 256 NVIDIA GPUs in 64 IBM Power systems. Previous best scaling was demonstrated by Facebook AI Research of 89% for a training run on […] The post IBM Research achieves record dee

Tuesday, August 08, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

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

Tuesday, August 08, 01:50 UTC @ Azimuth

In the comments on this blog post I’m taking some notes on this conference: • Applied Algebraic Topology 2017, August 8-12, 2017, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. Unfortunately these notes will not give you a good summary of the talks—and almost nothing about applications of algebraic topology. Instead, I seem to be jotting down random cool […]

Monday, August 07, 15:57 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Paul Hammant shines a light on Test Impact Analysis: a modern way of speeding up the test automation phase of a build. It works by analyzing the call-graph of the source code to work out which tests should be run after a change to production code

Monday, August 07, 15:18 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“I’d rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you.” -Tom Watson The solar eclipse we’ve all been waiting for is just two weeks away. Yet even though you’ve got your…

Monday, August 07, 15:04 UTC @ brucknerite

Hoy, a las 2:12 de mi huso horario, se han cumplido cinco años del exitoso aterrizaje en Marte de Curiosity. Es un buen momento para recordar dos artículos de 2012 a los que tengo particular cariño: «Curiosity: ¿por qué un sistema de aterrizaje tan complejo?» y, sobre todo «Curiosity, corazón de plutonio». ¡Brindemos por muchos … Continúa leyendo Cinco años «c

Monday, August 07, 09:09 UTC @ brucknerite

Sobrevivir a largo plazo como especie es, como las infames resoluciones de año nuevo, uno de esos objetivos que nadie persigue pero que todos aceptamos como evidente en sí mismo. Lo cierto es que hay muchas formas de plantearlo: ¿qué consideramos «largo plazo»? ¿Tiene que importarnos, necesariamente, lo que pueda ocurrirles a unos Homo sapiens … Continúa leyendo

Monday, August 07, 09:03 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Los resultados del primer año del proyecto Dark Energy Survey (DES) son espectaculares. Se han estudiado unos 26 millones de galaxias desplazadas al rojo entre 0,2 < z < 1,3 (cuya luz nos ha llegado tras recorrer entre 2,5 […] Leer más

Monday, August 07, 01:49 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Phillip Rogaway's article on the The Moral character of Cryptographic Work (see here) brings up so many issues that it could be the topics for at least 5 blog posts. I've already done one here, and today I'll do another. As I said in the first post I urge you to read it even if you disagree with it, in fact, esp

Sunday, August 06, 22:17 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show. Topics include China forcing Apple to remove VPN apps from the Chinese App Store, Wi-Fi vs. LTE networking, the open workspaces in Apple Park, Glenn’s new letterpress project, the HomePod OS leak and iPhone D22, and more. Sponsored by: Eero: Finally, Wi-Fi that works. Use code thetalkshow for free overnight shipping. Squarespace

Sunday, August 06, 20:35 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Vic Gundotra (yes, that Vic Gundotra): Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don’t mind being a few years behind, buy an Android. The cognitive dissonance of the Android fans in the comments on this post is something to behold.

Sunday, August 06, 16:02 UTC @ Starts With A Bang

“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.” ―Gene Roddenberry Well, it happened, everyone! I flew out to the official…

Sunday, August 06, 00:33 UTC @ Daring Fireball

My thanks to DuckDuckGo for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. DuckDuckGo is the search engine that doesn’t track you. DuckDuckGo and Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention together solve the top three private browsing misconceptions: 41% of users believe private browsing prevents websites tracking them. 39% of users believe private browsing prevents ads from tracking them. 35% of use

Saturday, August 05, 17:51 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

It has become apparent how critical frameworks and standards are for development teams when using microservices. People often mistake the flexibility microservices provide with a requirement to use different technologies for each service. Like all development teams, we still need to keep the number of technologies we use to a minimum so we can easily train new people, maintain our code, support moves between teams, and the like.

Saturday, August 05, 15:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous post was a riff on a tweet asking what you’d get if you extracted all the i‘s, j‘s, and k‘s from Finnegans Wake and multiplied them as quaternions. This post is a probabilistic variation on the previous one. If you randomly select a piece of English prose, extract the i‘s, j‘s, and k‘s, and multiply them together as quaternions, what […]

Saturday, August 05, 07:53 UTC @ Azimuth

People have been using algebraic topology in data analysis these days, so we’re starting to see conferences like this: • Applied Algebraic Topology 2017, August 8-12, 2017, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. I’m giving the first talk at this one. I’ve done a lot of work on applied category theory, but only a bit on on […]

Saturday, August 05, 05:49 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I have a highly-educated guess as to the dimensions of the display in D22: 5.8 inches, 2436 x 1125, 462 PPI, true @3x retina with no scaling.

Saturday, August 05, 00:09 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Friday, August 04, 22:07 UTC @ Daring Fireball

If this is legit, this is amazing. Update: Looks like it’s a hoax. ★

Friday, August 04, 20:49 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Mark Gurman, Scott Moritz, and Ian King, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc. is planning to release a version of its smartwatch later this year that can connect directly to cellular networks, a move designed to reduce the device’s reliance on the iPhone, people familiar with the matter said. Currently, Apple requires its smartwatch to be connected wirelessly to an iPhone to stream music, download directions in maps, and send messages while on the go. Equipped with LTE chips,

Friday, August 04, 20:44 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Charlie Deets: I’ve been using the Switch for a few months and I can’t stop thinking about its user interface. Nintendo’s newest console is in the golden era of its UI. The base features you would expect out of a game system are covered, but cruft has not yet been added to the experience. I’ve heard a lot of people say they long for more from the Switch’s UI, but I love the bare bones simplicity. Nintendo was dealt a somewhat unique interface problem for a gaming cons

Friday, August 04, 19:29 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

For representation theory aficionados, George Lusztig has put on the arXiv a long document with comments on his papers (for a bit more about him, see this). For a new idea exemplifying the potential grand unification of mathematics and physics, … Continue reading →

Friday, August 04, 18:39 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Today is Barack Obama’s birthday. Perhaps you’d like to celebrate by buying one of these sweet new t-shirts from my pal Brian Jaramillo. (Brian has handled the printing and shipping of all DF t-shirts for the last 10 years or so — he’s the best screen-printer I know.) $5 for each T-shirt ordered will go to ProPublica, supporting great journalism in the public interest.

Friday, August 04, 18:27 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Marques Brownlee has a great video showing what Red intends their upcoming Hydrogen phone to look like. Some thoughts: It’s big. That’s a 5.7-inch display, and side-by-side it dwarfs an iPhone 7 Plus. It’s clearly designed not to be used in case. The Kevlar frame, with finger-sized ridges for gripping, looks like it is a protective case. Camera makers know how to make expensive gear that can take a beating in use. Brownlee wasn’t al

Friday, August 04, 18:14 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La oscilación de los neutrinos y de los antineutrinos será diferente si su física viola la simetría CP (posible origen de la asimetría primordial entre materia y antimateria). Tras analizar el doble de sucesos en 2017 que en 2016, […] Leer más

Friday, August 04, 17:39 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac earlier this week: Apple today has announced that it is expanding the tester limits in its TestFlight program. Whereas developers were previously limited to inviting 2,000 users to beta test an application, they can now invite up to 10,000 external testers. This might be purely coincidental timing with regard to the controversy over VPN apps being removed from the

Friday, August 04, 16:58 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Lovely profile of the engineering team still working to control Voyager I and II: Fortunately, the malfunctioning backup receiver was still drawing current. They guessed that its oscillator, which allows it to accept a wide range of frequencies, had quit, essentially shrinking the target for transmissions from Earth. Assuming a much narrower bandwidth, and manually subtracting the Doppler effect, they recalibrated their signal. It worked — but to this day, the same calculation m

Friday, August 04, 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 Montenegro

Friday, August 04, 10:47 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Un neutrino puede colisionar de forma elástica (sin pérdida de energía) contra un núcleo completo (de forma coherente) vía el intercambio de una corriente débil neutra (un bosón Z) si su longitud de onda es comparable al tamaño del […]

Thursday, August 03, 19:27 UTC @ gilded : rust

Just had to figure this out and hadn't seen all the steps posted in one place, so I figured I would post it here in case anyone needed it. The package installation is for arch, but should be similar for other distros. First install rust normally with rustup. The next step will install the windows toolchain. rustup target add x86_64-pc-windows-gnu Then set up the target in ~/.cargo/config [target.x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

Thursday, August 03, 18:27 UTC @ brucknerite

Cuando me enteré de que Elon Musk, no contento con traer de vuelta del mundo de los muertos al coche eléctrico, conquistar el espacio —primero la órbita baja, después Marte— y regalar al mundo la idea de transportarnos en cápsulas flotantes dentro de tubos de vacío como si fuéramos la recaudación de un supermercado, iba … Continúa leyendo «T

Thursday, August 03, 16:56 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Quienes han leído la “Guía del autoestopista galáctico” de Douglas Adams (1979) saben que la respuesta a la «Pregunta definitiva» es 42. El editor de Nature bromea en un editorial sobre este tema y nos propone que la respuesta […] Leer más

Thursday, August 03, 15:54 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Thursday, August 03, 14:25 UTC @ Backreaction

Cables under my desk. One of the unlikelier fights I picked while blogging was with an MIT group that aimed to wirelessly power devices – by tunneling: “If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,” said Professor Soljacic. [Source: BBC] They had proposed a new method for

Thursday, August 03, 14:25 UTC @ Backreaction

Cables under my desk. One of the unlikelier fights I picked while blogging was with an MIT group that aimed to wirelessly power devices – by tunneling: “If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,” said Professor Soljacic. [Source: BBC] They had proposed a new method for

Thursday, August 03, 12:15 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Too often we see bad definitions, a convoluted mess carefully crafted to make a theorem true. A student asked me though what makes for a great definition in theoretical computer science. The right definition can start a research area, where a bad definition can take research down the wrong path. Some goals of a definition: A great definition should capture some phenomenon, like computation (Turing machines), efficient computation (P), efficient quantum computation (BQP). C

Thursday, August 03, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

On February 7, 2009, scorching temperatures baked southeastern Australia, while a strong, northerly wind shaped a head-high swell rolling into the southern coast. The surf was excellent and I was thankful to cool off in the Southern Ocean waters near Melbourne, Victoria, but it was a different story inland, where more than 400 bushfires raged. […] The post Storm in a log file: A one-man weather station ap

Wednesday, August 02, 23:25 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Back in January I made a YouTube video showing how best to remove AirPods from their case: As of a few weeks ago that video had over 100,000 views, and while I hadn’t posted any other videos since then, I had a bunch of subscribers to my channel. Yesterday I spent a few hours tightening the security of my various Google accounts (adding two-step secur

Wednesday, August 02, 22:04 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Steven Levy: My conversation with Mathias Bahnmueller started as pretty much all my phone interviews do. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and I replied affirmatively. Then I asked him the same question. His answer was yes — he could hear me very clearly. And this was a tiny miracle. That’s because Bahnmueller suffers from hearing loss so severe that a year ago he underwent surgery to install a cochlear implant — an electronic device in the inner ear that replaces

Wednesday, August 02, 16:27 UTC @ x.ai

Recently, an entrepreneur asked me whether I thought investors would be put off by an early-stage startup founder arranging meetings through an AI assistant like Amy or Andrew. He worried … View Article The post How to use an AI assistant for important meetings appeared first on x.ai.

Wednesday, August 02, 15:53 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Steven Troughton-Smith has been at the forefront of iOS spelunking for the last decade. He pokes and prods at iOS and has an uncanny ability to find and identify interesting stuff (including a bunch of things just this week in Apple’s prematurely released image of the HomePod version of iOS). We, outside Apple, know far more about how iOS works thanks to him. He’s both extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily

Wednesday, August 02, 15:33 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Wednesday, August 02, 15:08 UTC @ Cocoa with Love on Cocoa with Love

Cocoa’s Auto Layout is an effective constraints system but as an API for “layout”, it leaves a lot to be desired. In most respects, Auto Layout is a constraints API upon which we can build a layout system but is not itself an API that offers layout. In this article, I’m going to look at why using Auto Layout directly can be frustrating or limiting, before showing my own CwlLayout code which is a thin layer over Auto Layout (for either iOS or macOS) that I use to

Wednesday, August 02, 13:29 UTC @ John D. Cook

I stumbled on a Twitter account yesterday called Wolfram|Alpha Can’t. It posts bizarre queries that Wolfram Alpha can’t answer. Here’s one that caught my eye. result of extracting the i’s, j’s, and k’s in order from Finnegans Wake and interpreting as a quaternion product — Wolfram|Alpha Can’t (@wacnt) May 17, 2017 Suppose you did extract […]

Wednesday, August 02, 12:08 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Two years ago I asked whether I can design Truffle API without being Domain Expert in the area of partial evaluation. Time has come to

Wednesday, August 02, 00:07 UTC @ Daring Fireball

AppleInsider, back in December 2016: Surfaced by a Sina Weibo user known for leaking information from Apple’s East Asian supply chain, the supposed documentation suggests Apple plans to market three iPhone models designated D20, D21 and D22 in 2017, reports Chinese blog cnBeta. Apple’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were codenamed D10 and — confusingly — D20 during development, the report said. A three-model l

Tuesday, August 01, 23:41 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jason Snell, collecting a story revealed in a series of tweets over the weekend: Nobody digs into Apple software releases like Steve Troughton-Smith. And this is a big one. Apparently Apple released a firmware download for the HomePod (not due until the end of the year!) on its servers, and inside that firmware there’s information about future iPhone hardware and support for an infrared face unlock feature code-named Pearl I

Tuesday, August 01, 21:20 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Apple: Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2017 third quarter ended July 1, 2017. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $45.4 billion and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.67. These results compare to revenue of $42.4 billion and earnings per diluted share of $1.42 in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue. When you look at the

Tuesday, August 01, 21:05 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Ashlee Vance, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek: One way to justify the number: Stripe’s new partnership with Amazon.com Inc., the largest and most sought-after customer on the internet. Over the past couple of weeks, Stripe began handling a large, though undisclosed, portion of Amazon’s transactions. Neither company will address the scope of the deal — which was only revealed by Stripe’s addition of Amazon’s logo to its website — but it could help Stripe greatly

Tuesday, August 01, 21:03 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Senator Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona: Michael Gerson, a conservative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.” For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered i

Tuesday, August 01, 19:32 UTC @ tecosystems

While it was once a controversial statement, more and more software projects are acknowledging that their primary competition is not another software project, but cloud platforms offering similar functionality as a service. The directness of the threat varies, depending on whether a major cloud vendor has targeted a given market yet, but it’s rare that

Tuesday, August 01, 19:32 UTC @ tecosystems

While it was once a controversial statement, more and more software projects are acknowledging that their primary competition is not another software project, but cloud platforms offering similar functionality as a service. The directness of the threat varies, depending on whether a major cloud vendor has targeted a given market yet, but it’s rare that

Tuesday, August 01, 16:42 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Our first experiences cement what becomes normal for us. Students should start off seeing a well-run system, dissect it, learn its parts, progressively dig down into the details. Don't let them see what a badly run system looks like until they have experienced one that is well run. A badly run system should then disgust them.

Tuesday, August 01, 16:07 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I hadn’t really given this any thought, but now that I’ve seen this comic, I realize this is very much true for me as well. The reliability of Wi-Fi dropped beneath that of cellular a few years ago. ★

Tuesday, August 01, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

While most of today’s question answering (QA) systems have proven adept at responding to simple questions about specific domains or topics, there’s a growing demand for systems that are able to answer questions across multiple, inexact domains and entities. New research from IBM Research’s AI Foundations team proposes how to overcome this challenge by creating […] The post

Tuesday, August 01, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

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

Monday, July 31, 22:11 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The real issues are two-fold: Should Apple being doing business in China at all? Should the App Store remain the only way to install apps on iOS devices?

Monday, July 31, 22:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Now you can gain even more valuable feedback by inviting up to 10,000 users to beta test your apps before you release them on the App Store. TestFlight makes it simple to invite testers using just their email address and lets testers quickly provide feedback within the TestFlight app.Learn more about TestFlight.

Monday, July 31, 21:23 UTC @ TED Blog

Five mini-documentary films captivated the TEDWomen 2016 audience — directed, written and produced by female filmmakers whose work embodies today’s best and most innovative storytelling. In a partnership between Lifetime and Chicken & Egg Pictures, these short films are artful in the ways their storytelling catalyzes social change and the TEDWomen 2016 theme, “It’s About

Monday, July 31, 21:03 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Monday, July 31, 18:05 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know about the 5-qubit quantum computer that we put online last year, which you and general public are free to access through the IBM Cloud. Maybe you didn’t think much of it, given that lots of cutting edge technology is now accessible through the cloud. But […] The post Increase your quantum IQ appeared first on

Monday, July 31, 13:22 UTC @ Ole Begemann

I recently read Don Normanʼs classic The Design of Everyday Things. The book is primarily about product design, but some of the principles Norman mentions are just as applicable to API design.

Monday, July 31, 12:02 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Over at the blog Bits and Pieces my adviser Harry Lewis (is he still my adviser 32 years after I got my PhD? Yes) has written many posts about Harvard's decision to ban people who belong to same-sex organizations from being approved for Rhodes Fellowships and other things. He is against it. Not just that, he gives history, context, etc. While originally intended to stop some excesses of some male clubs, the ban also punishes all-female clubs. But that's not the only reason the punishment is idiotic

Monday, July 31, 10:06 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

If you rely on hiding the status bar to avoid conflicting with system gestures at the screen edges you will need to make some changes when updating for iOS 11. Apple no longer assumes your app wants to override system gestures at the edges when you hide the status bar. Instead you need to tell the system directly which edges you want first shot at handling gestures for. The Problem with Gestures at the Screen Edges A quick reca

Monday, July 31, 06:43 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Nanotechnology is a term which applied to a variety of fields from clothing and automotive paints to sporting equipment and electronics. In the end it’s all referring to a size, the nanometer (nm), and humankind’s ability to understand, control and manipulate the unique phenomena which occur at this dimension. For perspective, a sheet of paper […] The post Using Angles to Improve

Monday, July 31, 00:20 UTC @ Terra Incognita

* This is a critical article regarding the presence of historicism in modern AI predictions for the future. Perhaps you already read about the Technological Singularity, since it is one of the hottest predictions for the future (there is even a university with that name), especially after the past years’ development of AI, more precisely,...

Monday, July 31, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

In the first part of this article, we discussed what certificates and profiles are and how they are used for Apple platform development. In the second part of this article, we will be wrapping up the discussion by actually signing an app by creating all of the necessary signing assets inside of the developer portal and then placing them inside of Xcode. The tasks that we will cover in this article are:

Monday, July 31, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

Today I’m pleased to announce a new open source project I’ve been working on for the last few months, xcodeproj. Xcodeproj is a library written in Swift that allows you interact with your Xcode projects from Swift. It provides a foundational API to build up your scripts and tools on top of it. It’s entirely written in Swift, documented and ready to be used. In this post, I’ll explain the motivation behind working on xcodeproj, show you the �

Sunday, July 30, 21:36 UTC @ John D. Cook

There are five regular solids in three dimensions: tetrahedron octahedron (pictured above) hexahedron (cube) dodecahedron icosahedron. I give a proof here that these are the only five. The first three of these regular solids generalize to all dimensions, and these generalizations are the only regular solids in dimensions 5 and higher. (There are six regular […]

Sunday, July 30, 15:22 UTC @ Azimuth

For a long time Blake Pollard and I have been working on ‘open’ chemical reaction networks: that is, networks of chemical reactions where some chemicals can flow in from an outside source, or flow out. The picture to keep in mind is something like this: where the yellow circles are different kinds of chemicals and […]

Saturday, July 29, 18:47 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Hi everyone, it's been a while! I bet you forgot this blog even existed. I happen to be a big supporter of quality over quantity, so while my work on parsing Japanese counters earlier this year was pretty interesting, I already wrote

Saturday, July 29, 01:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Dear Community, McCLIM code is getting better on a weekly basis depending on developer time. We are happy to see the project moving forward. Some highlights for this iteration: Scigraph code cleanup and bug fixes, Bezier curves improvements, PostScript and PDF improvements, CLX-fb and mcclim-renderer speed improvements and refactor, various code cleanups from unused and broken constructs, editorial corrections to

Friday, July 28, 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! Maria Rosales

Friday, July 28, 14:12 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Including debt to Marina Ratner, 1938-2017 By joint permission of Assad Binakhahi, artist, and Radio Farda (source)      Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal in 2014. We and the whole community are grieving after losing her to breast cancer two weeks ago. She made several breakthroughs in the geometric understanding of dynamical systems. Who knows what […]

Friday, July 28, 13:05 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The ability to predict the properties of materials before they are fabricated, or to explore their behavior under conditions which are impractical to replicate under laboratory conditions (eg extreme temperatures or pressures) is critical for next generation materials design. Improving the predictive power of materials modelling guides planning and design, saves money, and can accelerate […] The post

Friday, July 28, 12:52 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Peter Wegner

Friday, July 28, 12:44 UTC @ NSBlog

In my last article I discussed the basics of Swift's new Codable protocol, briefly discussed how to implement your own encoder and decoder, and promised another article about a custom binary coder I've been working on. Today, I'm going to present that binary coder. (Read More)

Friday, July 28, 11:43 UTC @ Backreaction

Fluorescence image of Bose-Einstein-Condensate. Image Credits: Stefan Kuhr and Immanuel Bloch, MPQ String theory is infamously detached from experiment. But in a new paper, a group from Mexico put forward a proposal to change that String theory phenomenology and quantum many–body systems Sergio Gutiérrez, Abel Camacho, Héctor Hernández arXiv:1707.07757 [gr-qc] Ahead, let me be clear they don

Friday, July 28, 11:43 UTC @ Backreaction

Fluorescence image of Bose-Einstein-Condensate. Image Credits: Stefan Kuhr and Immanuel Bloch, MPQ String theory is infamously detached from experiment. But in a new paper, a group from Mexico put forward a proposal to change that String theory phenomenology and quantum many–body systems Sergio Gutiérrez, Abel Camacho, Héctor Hernández arXiv:1707.07757 [gr-qc] Ahead, let me be clear they

Friday, July 28, 05:48 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Seventeen years ago to the day, LtU was born. I guess it's about time I stop opening these birthday messages by saying how remarkable this longevity is (this being the fate of Hollywood actresses over 25). Still, I cannot resist mentioning that 17 is "good" (טוב) in gematria, which after all is one of the oldest codes there are. It's is very cool that the last couple of weeks had a

Thursday, July 27, 18:01 UTC @ absorptions

"I am the atomic powered robot. Please give my best wishes to everybody!" Those are the words uttered by Tommy, a childhood toy robot of mine. I've taken a look at his miniature vinyl record sound mechanism a few times before (#1, #2<

Thursday, July 27, 17:20 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Laura Roeder, CEO, MeetEdgar Almost everyone running a consulting, training or agency business, however successful, will admit at some point that they wish they could run a product business. Why don’t they? Turns out it is quite hard – many of the skills required are complementary but stopping taking on paid clients to allow a […] The post

Thursday, July 27, 13:50 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Implementing Algebraic Effects in C by Daan Leijen: We describe a full implementation of algebraic effects and handlers as a library in standard and portable C99, where effect operations can be used just like regular C functions. We use a formal operational semantics to guide the C implementation at every step where an evaluation context corresponds directly to a particular C executi

Thursday, July 27, 13:11 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Project Snowflake: Non-blocking safe manual memory management in .NET by Matthew Parkinson, Kapil Vaswani, Manuel Costa, Pantazis Deligiannis, Aaron Blankstein, Dylan McDermott, Jonathan Balkind, Dimitrios Vytiniotis: Garbage collection greatly improves programmer productivity and ensures memory safety. Manual memory management on the other hand often

Thursday, July 27, 11:53 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Thanks to IBM scientists, replacing copper wires with light to transfer data at improved speeds and with optimal energy efficiency is within reach. At the recent 2017 Symposia on VSLI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto Japan, IBM researchers presented their groundbreaking work on an in expensive 60-Gigabits per second (Gb/s) optical receiver. Having lower power […] The post Low Pow

Thursday, July 27, 11:42 UTC @ Computational Complexity

For the last two weeks, the wife and I took a vacation to beautiful Norway to see the fjords and the North Cape, effectively the northernmost point in Europe. It was a visit though to the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger that inspired this post. The discovery of oil in the waters off Norway in 1969 completely changed the Norwegian economy, changing the way of life from a difficult agriculture and fishing society to

Thursday, July 27, 10:12 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Rather than tell you how great our talks are, and how many cool people you’ll share space with (as all conferences do, let’s be honest), we’d rather let our attendees speak for us. “Do yourself a favour, get to the next BoS if you want to learn how to run your business better.” Steve McLeod, Barbary […] The post Come to #BoSBecause… appeared first on

Thursday, July 27, 10:08 UTC @ Business of Software USA

One of the things which makes us different from other events is the type of people you’ll meet at BoS. We are for people who are building long-term sustainable businesses; people who aren’t about short-term hacks and flipping, but who are looking to grow something durable. 57% of BoS USA attendees are C Level, VPs […] The post Who comes to Business of Software? appeared first on

Wednesday, July 26, 17:50 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I’ve always been curious which punctuation character people prefer for unordered lists in Markdown, so I asked on Twitter.

Wednesday, July 26, 12:39 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The other day my son asked me to explain what I do at work. I told him that our team builds technology that can answer your questions just by pointing your phone at what you’re trying to fix or understand. The augmented reality we’re developing will know what it is, and what to do – […] The post Cognitive AR to give you superhero vision appeared first on

Wednesday, July 26, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 11.1. More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.

Wednesday, July 26, 03:50 UTC @ Azimuth

Who do you trust: the liar or the hypocrite? Some people like to accuse those are worried about climate change of being “hypocrites”. Why? Because we still fly around in planes, drive cars and so on. What’s the argument? Could it be this? “If even those folks who claim there’s a problem aren’t willing to […]

Tuesday, July 25, 21:17 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

In my first post in the automation series, I explained a simple three-step process to start any automation testing. In this post, we will dig into REST API testing, its importance, how to create tests using Rest-Assured and how to integrate them with your ongoing development efforts. In the next post, I will discuss UI testing best practices and principles for mobile applications using Appium.    Overview

Tuesday, July 25, 20:44 UTC @ x.ai

Amy and Andrew are performing in ways that even the best human assistant can’t match: they don’t sleep, they don’t take breaks, they never take a day off. x.ai’s approach … View Article The post Amy now responds to your emails 2x faster appeared first on x.ai.

Tuesday, July 25, 19:13 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Here are the raw download stats for the top 100 projects in Quicklisp for June: 9081 alexandria 7797 closer-mop 7437 split-sequence 6863 cl-ppcre 6790 babel 6498 trivial-features

Tuesday, July 25, 18:13 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Just a few items: The Simons Foundation has announced a new Origins of the Universe initiative, which will fund efforts to “develop testable predictions about string theory, quantum gravity and a cosmological ‘Big Bounce.'” I don’t think even all of … Continue reading →

Tuesday, July 25, 17:28 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

The Syntax and Semantics of Quantitative Type Theory by Robert Atkey: Type Theory offers a tantalising promise: that we can program and reason within a single unified system. However, this promise slips away when we try to produce efficient programs. Type Theory offers little control over the intensional aspect of programs: how are computational resources used, and when can they be reused. Tracking resource usage via typ

Tuesday, July 25, 16:51 UTC @ John D. Cook

From Nick Patterson’s interview on Talking Machines: GCHQ in the ’70s, we thought of ourselves as completely Bayesian statisticians. All our data analysis was completely Bayesian, and that was a direct inheritance from Alan Turing. I’m not sure this has ever really been published, but Turing, almost as a sideline during his cryptoanalytic work, reinvented […]

Tuesday, July 25, 16:26 UTC @ Planet Lisp

New projects: 3bgl-shader — CL-hosted CL-like DSL for generating GLSL — MITcl-forms — A web forms handling library — MITcl-ksuid — K-sortable unique identifiers — GPLv3cl-pixman — Low-level p

Tuesday, July 25, 10:16 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Great to see Mikey Trafton is coming to Business of Software Conference this year. One of the things we love about BoS is that speakers come back to be in the audience. Just registered for @bosconference. Can’t wait to hang with @peldi, @asmartbear, @MarkLittlewood and my other BOS peeps. — Michael Trafton (@mikeytrafton) July 25, […] The post Mikey Traf

Tuesday, July 25, 08:59 UTC @ Business of Software USA

There’s a new coffee machine in town. It’s a bit intimidating. One of the great things about working at Redgate is the coffee. The company is spread out over three floors and they have one single place on the ground floor where everyone has to go for their daily fix of caffeine, (or a bewildering array […] The post Coffee, Software and Intimidating Tools appeared first on <

Tuesday, July 25, 04:00 UTC @ This Week in Rust

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

Monday, July 24, 21:46 UTC @ joe cieplinski

Back in 2013, while reviewing one of the ill-fated movies made at the time about the life of Steve Jobs, I suggested that Job’s life lent itself better to a classical 5-act play structure, or even Opera. A 2-hour pop movie about Jobs was simply the wrong format. Well,

Monday, July 24, 16:34 UTC @ Lua: news

The Lua Workshop 2017 will be held in San Francisco, CA, on Oct 16-17, cortesy of Mashape.

Monday, July 24, 16:06 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Programmers must be able to tell a story with their code, explaining how they solved a particular problem. Like writers, programmers must know their metaphors. Many metaphors will be able to explain a concept, but you must have enough skill to choose the right one that's able to convey your ideas to future programmers who will read the code. Thus, you cannot use every metaphor you know. You must master the art of metaphor selection, of meaning amplification. You must know when to add and when to subtract. Y

Monday, July 24, 13:54 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous couple blog posts touched on a special case of sphere packing. We looked at the proportion of volume contained near the corners of a hypercube. If you take the set of points within a distance 1/2 of a corner of a hypercube, you could rearrange these points to form a full ball centered […]

Monday, July 24, 13:50 UTC @ John D. Cook

I’ve written a couple blog posts that may seem to contradict each other. Given a high-dimensional cube, is most of the volume in the corners or not? I recently wrote that the corners of a cube stick out more in high dimensions. You can quantify this by centering a ball at a corner and looking […]

Monday, July 24, 09:38 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Some Swift language features take a while to sink in and become natural. One such feature that I need to remind myself about is that you do not need to set the value of a let constant at the point you declare it in a function as long as you do it before first use. From the Swift Programming Language: When a constant declaration occurs

Monday, July 24, 07:57 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

In Dublin, like many cities globally, public transportation is promoted as the preferred mode of travel to address growing traffic and congestion problems. The bus network is the work horse of the transportation system, facilitating mass movement of people across the city. To facilitate this, many bus service providers operate routes with a high frequency […] The post Using predictive analy

Monday, July 24, 02:54 UTC @ Azimuth

Erica Klarreich is one of the few science journalists who explains interesting things I don’t already know clearly enough so I can understand them. I recommend her latest article: • Erica Klarreich, In game theory, no clear path to equilibrium, Quanta, 18 July 2017. Economists like the concept of ‘Nash equilibrium’, but it’s problematic in […]

Sunday, July 23, 18:39 UTC @ Computational Complexity

What are the top Computer Science Programs for Women? How would one even answer the question? Some people did a study based on National Center for Education Statistics and Payscale. The results are here. 1) While I believe the top X school listed are pretty good for women in computing I don't believe that (say) the Yth school is better than th

Saturday, July 22, 23:55 UTC @ bit-player

Today, I’m told, is Rational Approximation Day. It’s 22/7 (for those who write dates in little-endian format), which differs from π by about 0.04 percent. (The big-endians among us are welcome to approximate 1/π.) Given the present state of life … Continue reading →

Saturday, July 22, 19:31 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I’ve looked at the talks from a few of the HEP experiment and phenomenology summer conferences. If anyone can point me to anything interesting that I’ve missed, please do so. The lack of new physics beyond the Higgs at the … Continue reading →

Friday, July 21, 21:39 UTC @ TED Blog

Please enjoy your roundup of TED-related news: Prosthetics that feel more natural. A study in Science Robotics lays out a surgical technique developed by Shriya Srinivasan, Hugh Herr and others that may help prosthetics feel more like natural limbs. During an amputation, the muscle pairs that allow our brains to sense how much force is […]

Friday, July 21, 19:56 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I’ve finally found some time to look around the web to see what has been happening at conferences this summer. In this blog post I’ll point to a few on the math/physics interface featuring interesting talks. This area now (I … Continue reading →

Friday, July 21, 18:48 UTC @ TED Blog

What if one person could change the world? What if we could harness our collective talent, insight and wisdom? And what if, together, we could spark a movement with positive impact far into the future? For a third year, UPS has partnered with TED to bring experts in business, logistics, design and technology to the stage […]

Friday, July 21, 16:43 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! Dennis Zamora

Friday, July 21, 15:17 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Event-based computation is a biologically-inspired paradigm for representing data as asynchronous events, much like neuron spikes in the brain. The Brain-Inspired Computing group at IBM Research – Almaden has built the first gesture-recognition system implemented end-to-end on event-based hardware. Combining the IBM TrueNorth neurosynaptic processor with an iniLabs Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), we trained a […] The post

Friday, July 21, 12:54 UTC @ TED Blog

Last year, TED and Audible co-produced a new audio series that invited speakers to share ideas—anonymously. Our goal was to make room for an entirely new trove of ideas: those that could only be broadcast publicly if the speaker’s identity remained private. The series debuted with a number of powerful stories, and we learned a […]

Thursday, July 20, 22:35 UTC @ TED Blog

The intimacy of listening: Producer Cloe Shasha shares a few surprising insights that her team learned while producing TED and Audible's audio series, "Sincerely, X."

Thursday, July 20, 21:47 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Here is a game (Darling says I only blog about non-fun games. This post will NOT prove her wrong.) Let D be a domain, d ≥ 1 and 0 ≠ a0 ∈ D. There are two players Wanda (for Wants root) and Nora (for No root). One of the players is Player I, the other Player II. (1) Player I and II alternate (with Player I going first) choosing the coefficients in D of a polynomial of degree d with the constant term preset to a0. (2) When they are done, if

Thursday, July 20, 18:58 UTC @ Ole Begemann

I’m not a fan of the default file header comment Xcode adds to new source files. I’d argue that most of the information in the file header is either irrelevant or better tracked through source control. Moreover, these comments can quickly become outdated as files and projects get renamed.

Thursday, July 20, 18:53 UTC @ TED Blog

TEDGlobal 2017 kicks off August 27–30, 2017, in Arusha, Tanzania. Ten years after the last TEDGlobal in Arusha, we’ll again gather a community from across the continent and around the world to explore ideas that may propel Africa’s next leap — in business, politics and justice, creativity and entrepreneurship, science and tech. Today, we’re thrilled

Thursday, July 20, 17:43 UTC @ tecosystems

For those that have been in the technology industry for some time, there is a tendency to compare or even equate the current microservices phenomenon with the more archaic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. This is done implicitly in many cases, but also quite explicitly with statements such as “microservices is nothing more than the

Thursday, July 20, 17:43 UTC @ tecosystems

For those that have been in the technology industry for some time, there is a tendency to compare or even equate the current microservices phenomenon with the more archaic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. This is done implicitly in many cases, but also quite explicitly with statements such as “microservices is nothing more than the

Thursday, July 20, 13:52 UTC @ joe cieplinski

Apple has been playing around with the iPad keyboard again in iOS 11. And I think this time the changes are mainly an improvement. Although my muscle memory is driving me nuts right now. What am I talking about? Long time iPad users likely know the old swipe up on

Wednesday, July 19, 23:57 UTC @ TED Blog

There’s no doubt that the speakers we invite to TEDWomen each year have amazing stories to tell. And many of them are published authors (or about to be!) whose work is worth exploring beyond their brief moments in the TED spotlight. So, if you’re looking for some inspiring, instructive and provocative books to add to your […]

Wednesday, July 19, 22:47 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The single biggest misconception about iOS is that it’s good digital hygiene to force quit apps that you aren’t using.

Wednesday, July 19, 21:15 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Commenter CIP pointed out that today’s New York Times has one of the worst examples of string theory hype I’ve seen in a while. Based on this observation of an expected QFT anomaly effect in a condensed matter system, the … Continue reading →

Wednesday, July 19, 18:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Modern physics has accustomed us to strange and counterintuitive notions of reality — especially quantum physics which is famous for leaving physical objects in strange states of superposition. For example, Schrödinger’s cat, who finds itself unable to decide if it is dead or alive. Sometimes however quantum mechanics is more decisive and even destructive. Symmetries are the holy […] The post

Wednesday, July 19, 15:48 UTC @ Backreaction

Noise is the physicists’ biggest enemy. Unless you are a theorist whose pet idea masquerades as noise. Then you are best friends with noise. Like Roger Penrose. Correlated "noise" in LIGO gravitational wave signals: an implication of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Roger Penrose arXiv:1707.04169 [gr-qc] Roger Penrose made his name with the Penrose-Hawking theorems and twistor theory. He is also

Wednesday, July 19, 15:48 UTC @ Backreaction

Noise is the physicists’ biggest enemy. Unless you are a theorist whose pet idea masquerades as noise. Then you are best friends with noise. Like Roger Penrose. Correlated "noise" in LIGO gravitational wave signals: an implication of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Roger Penrose arXiv:1707.04169 [gr-qc] Roger Penrose made his name with the Penrose-Hawking theorems and twistor theory. He is also

Wednesday, July 19, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This week IBM Research will be participating at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Honolulu, Hawaii from July 21 –25. As a major computer vision event, it’s a place for researchers, academics, students, and even investors to learn about the latest advances in the field. IBM’s presence this year includes multiple […] The post IBM Research at CVPR 2017: Helping

Wednesday, July 19, 12:31 UTC @ John D. Cook

High-dimensional geometry is full of surprises. For example, nearly all the area of a high-dimensional sphere is near the equator, and by symmetry it doesn’t matter which equator you take. Here’s another surprise: corners stick out more in high dimensions. Hypercubes, for example, become pointier as dimension increases. How might we quantify this? Think of […]

Wednesday, July 19, 07:14 UTC @ brucknerite

Hay estaciones de metro en las que cualquiera diría que las escaleras mecánicas están puestas a pares por una cuestión de redundancia y no de movilidad. Ocurre con mucha frecuencia: una de las dos, parada por mantenimiento —y así se mantiene día tras día, y a veces semana tras semana— mientras la otra da servicio … Continúa leyendo «Metro: más limpio es má

Wednesday, July 19, 00:09 UTC @ Daring Fireball

In a broad sense, that’s my idea for the iPhone Pro — a premium-priced product that offers us early access to technologies and components that will be (or even just might be) in all iPhones in another year or two.

Tuesday, July 18, 21:40 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Now you can receive server notifications of key events and get enhanced receipts with real-time information about the status of auto-renewable subscriptions. You can use this information to resolve billing issues and engage customers by displaying relevant messaging.Learn more about server notifications for subscriptions.

Tuesday, July 18, 17:53 UTC @ joe cieplinski

As expected, I’ve been loving Touch Bar on my new MacBook Pro. I do find, however, that some app developers are doing a better job than others of taking advantage of this new input device. When I shipped x2y on the Mac last year, I didn’t have a

Tuesday, July 18, 13:16 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Of course, there is no right way to do an interview, but you can always be better. Make an effort to make your candidates as comfortable as possible so they have the greatest chance for success.

Tuesday, July 18, 13:00 UTC @ TED Blog

TED is looking for early-career, visionary thinkers from around the world to join the Fellows program at the upcoming TED2018 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Do you have an original approach to your work that’s worth sharing with the world? Are you working to uplift and empower your local community through innovative science, art or […]

Tuesday, July 18, 12:45 UTC @ Quality Coding

Those of you who are regular visitors to qualitycoding.org may have already read Jon’s article outlining the life cycle of XCTestCase objects during the execution of a test suite. If you haven’t, or you want to refresh your memory, take a moment to read the original article. Jon discusses the importance of the setUp and […]

Tuesday, July 18, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Tuesday, July 18, 07:00 UTC @ brucknerite

Estos catorce segundos condensan, en la boca más autorizada, las raíces de nuestra actual legitimidad democrática. No olvidaremos.

Tuesday, July 18, 00:00 UTC @ News and Updates - Apple Developer

Now you can let your customer support experts respond to reviews on the App Store. Simply assign them the Customer Support role in iTunes Connect, and they’ll get access to everything they need to respond to reviews. Learn more about the new role.

Tuesday, July 18, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

On January 2017 I moved to Budapest. My girlfriend was living there, and the distance was very hard. I had been in Berlin for approximately two years, and although I loved the city, I thought that moving to Budapest was the right call to make. I liked, and like my company, SoundCloud, so I wanted to continue working for it. I appreciate a lot the opportunity that I was given by them, working remotely supporting the team and the project from there. I was very excited; new working setup, new city and life

Monday, July 17, 15:50 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

When Apple introduced layout margins in iOS 8 they made the decision to have the system manage the margins of a view controller’s root view. This allowed them to vary the left/right margins depending on the size class (16 points for compact width and 20 points for regular). The downside was that you could not alter these margins. That changed in iOS 11. Layout Margins - A recap The layoutMargins property of a UIView is

Monday, July 17, 13:26 UTC @ Computational Complexity

I've blogged about different hat problems a few times (see here). The question arises: How many hat problems are there? The answer is really infinite (literally) but I will list some parameters and bound them reasonably to get an upper bound. Some of the combinations don't make sense, but we'll live with that. (I am also working on a website of hat problem papers. Its nowhere near finished yet and maybe never will be, but its

Monday, July 17, 12:36 UTC @ absorptions

A little music project I was writing required a melody be played on a music box. However, the paper-programmable music box I had (pictured) could only play notes on the C major scale. I couldn't easily find a realistic-sounding synthesizer version either. They all seemed to be missing something. Maybe they were too perfectly tuned? I wasn't sure. Perhaps, if I digitized the sound myself, I could build a flexible virtual instrument to generate just the perfect sample for the piece!

Monday, July 17, 11:50 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

In the previous post I have argued that reputation engineering can be done in any system with tokens that allow for accumulation of reputation. The example given were Twitter accounts that can be used for accumulating followers. In this post I want to dig deeper into the nature of reputation and reputation tokens. Let me start with the trademark law. There are several advantages to it: It was created specifically to deal with reputa

Monday, July 17, 09:02 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

NOTE: This is an article I've published more that a decade ago. From my today's point of view it may be a bit naive but it still makes a valid and interesting proposal. Sadly though, nobody have taken the challenge in the meantime. Can it be a time to do so now? I am republishing it here as is, with no modifications whatsover. It is quite common to use computers to analyse natural languages. Although we are not yet able to accomplish the task plausibly, the problem is bei

Monday, July 17, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

Xcode 9, introduced at WWDC 2017 contains a plethora of new features, from it’s new editor to the inclusion of Xcode Server, and even changes to Asset Catalogs that improve image handling and the ability to add color assets. With this new release, Apple has paid a lot of attention to every developer’s favorite pastime: Provisioning. Last year with Xcode 8, Apple unveiled a revamped provisioning setup that included the ability to automatically sign and manage provisioning profiles, entitlement

Sunday, July 16, 21:06 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I’ve got a new feature request for iOS 12. In iOS 11, we’re getting Do Not Disturb While Driving, which turns off all notifications and other distractions automatically when the phone detects you are driving a car. A great feature that will very likely save lives. For iOS

Sunday, July 16, 17:53 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

All tessellating convex polygons found Cropped and combined from src1, src2. Michaël Rao and Marjorie Rice are linked in this month’s news. Rao has just released a paper (see also slides and code here) completing the catalog of convex polygons that tile the plane. Rice, who passed away on July 2 (obit), had expanded the […]

Sunday, July 16, 15:34 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Over the last few years, I have been developing hobbes -- a programming language, JIT compiler, and database system -- as part of my work for Morgan Stanley. It has become a critical piece of infrastructure in our low-latency, high-volume trading applications, and we have decided to release the source code to the public on github (currently can be built for recent Linux and macOS platforms): github.com/Morgan-Stanley/hobbes The data

Saturday, July 15, 22:19 UTC @ John D. Cook

I updated several of the math diagrams on this site today. They’re SVG now, so they resize nicely if you want to zoom in our out. Special functions Topological vector spaces Category theory concepts General topology Gamma function identities

Saturday, July 15, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The third RC 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.

Saturday, July 15, 01:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

--> --> --> Lisp and QML on Android --> --> --> --> --> --> (please note that I'm assuming a Linux/64 bit platform or VirtualBox image) Preamble:

Friday, July 14, 17:19 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Business of Software Conference – Code of Conduct Always worth reminding people that this is important for us all. We expect everyone who attends our events in any capacity to treat other human beings well whoever they may be. All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our conference are required to agree with the following code […] The post Business of Software Conferenc

Friday, July 14, 16:20 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! Gaudy Blanco

Friday, July 14, 15:46 UTC @ tecosystems

In March of this year, Cloudera, the company best known for large scale data products like Hadoop, Impala and Spark, introduced a product called Altus. Billed as a PaaS, a term that has gone out of fashion amongst the companies that have pioneered it, it’s essentially a specialized environment that abstracts the underlying infrastructure and

Friday, July 14, 15:46 UTC @ tecosystems

In March of this year, Cloudera, the company best known for large scale data products like Hadoop, Impala and Spark, introduced a product called Altus. Billed as a PaaS, a term that has gone out of fashion amongst the companies that have pioneered it, it’s essentially a specialized environment that abstracts the underlying infrastructure and

Friday, July 14, 13:57 UTC @ NSBlog

One of the interesting additions to Swift 4 is the Codable protocol and the machinery around it. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I want to discuss what it is and how it works today. (Read More)

Friday, July 14, 12:34 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Social media is great for shouting. Less good for nuanced debate. It rarely changes mass opinions. If people don’t share your view, you’re unlikely to change their mind by being outraged and emotional on social media. It might feel like you are making well received points, but only other people like you are listening.. Interesting […] The post Social Media and the Deat

Friday, July 14, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous post looked at a continuous example of concentration of measure. As you move away from a thin band around the equator, the remaining area in the rest of the sphere decreases as an exponential function of the dimension and the distance from the equator. This post will show a very similar result for […]

Thursday, July 13, 19:50 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In my last blog here I asked three (known) hat problems since they may be new to you (one of them I just learned last week) and I had a point to make about them. I have WRITTEN UP the proofs here since html is clumsy with math (or I'm clumsy with html-math), so this post is mostly about the points to make about these problems. I would

Thursday, July 13, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

Nearly all the area of a high-dimensional sphere is near the equator.  And by symmetry, it doesn’t matter which equator you take. Draw any great circle and nearly all of the area will be near that circle.  This is the canonical example of “concentration of measure.” What exactly do we mean by “nearly all the […]

Thursday, July 13, 11:17 UTC @ Backreaction

I have a headache andblame Nature magazine for it. For about 15 years, I have worked on quantum gravity phenomenology, which means I study ways to experimentally test the quantum properties of space and time. Since 2007, my research area has its own conference series, “Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity,” which took place most recently September 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany. Extrapolating

Thursday, July 13, 11:17 UTC @ Backreaction

I have a headache andblame Nature magazine for it. For about 15 years, I have worked on quantum gravity phenomenology, which means I study ways to experimentally test the quantum properties of space and time. Since 2007, my research area has its own conference series, “Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity,” which took place most recently September 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany. Extrapolating

Thursday, July 13, 08:07 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

S. R. Nandakumar, a graduate student in electrical engineering, has won a coveted IBM Ph.D. fellowship to support his work on computer systems that mimic the architecture of the human brain. He is currently interning at IBM’s Zurich Lab and we had the chance to ask him a few questions. Q. Last August IBM scientists published […] The post

Thursday, July 13, 05:49 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

NOTE: Since the previous Romeo & Juliet post, I have written a little note on anthropology of hacker culture. Eric Raymond have replied here. It's great that this discussion is happening because, in the end, we'll need to understand how industries with huge upfront cost and close to zero per-piece cost could possibly work. If you think about it, eventually most of what we do will fall into t

Wednesday, July 12, 14:38 UTC @ x.ai

In the classic 1980s dystopian sci-fi movie RoboCop, mortally wounded Detroit police officer Alex Murphy is reborn as a cyborg when his brain is implanted in a fully mechanical body. … View Article The post We’re all cyborgs, and AI assistants will make us more human appeared first on <

Wednesday, July 12, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Wednesday, July 12, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Tuesday, July 11, 20:05 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This spring I was invited to a global meeting about cancer research – how tumor data should be gathered, integrated and interpreted.  It brought together specialists from medicine, biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science for an extensive multi-disciplinary exploration. On the long trans-Atlantic flight back, to distract myself, I casually pulled out a movie from […] The post Brainiacs: Ap

Tuesday, July 11, 19:14 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

p5.js is a JavaScript library inspired by Processing. Seems it could be a fun way to introduce non-CS types to programming. The demo is particularly well done; check it out first. The actual home of the project is here.

Tuesday, July 11, 15:52 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

The Industrial Internet Consortium predicts the IoT (Internet of Things) will become the third technological revolution after the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution. Its impact across all industries and businesses can hardly be imagined. Existing software (business, telecom, aerospace, defense, etc.) is expected to be modified or redesigned, and a huge amount of new software, solving new problems, will have to be developed. As a consequence, the software industry should welcome new and better

Tuesday, July 11, 00:44 UTC @ John D. Cook

A few days ago I wrote about testing the PCG random number generator using the DIEHARDER test suite. In this post I’ll go into a little more background on this random number generator test suite. I’ll also show that like M. E. O’Neill’s PCG (“permuted congruential generator”), George Marsaglia’s MWC (“multiply with carry”) generator does quite […]

Monday, July 10, 15:14 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

RustBelt: Securing the Foundations of the Rust Programming Language by Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer: Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust’s safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reas

Monday, July 10, 11:34 UTC @ joe cieplinski

If Apple wants the iPad to start making serious inroads into the pro market, and I believe they do, then they are going to need to release even bigger iPads. That may sound crazy, but hear me out. (via minimalpath) I don’t think this sounds crazy at all. I

Sunday, July 09, 21:32 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Hat problems are fun and often require clever solutions. I have posted about one type of hat problem here. In this post I ask three. For two of them I have a point to make which I will make when I post the answer later in the week. Feel free to post your thoughts and answers, BUT be war

Sunday, July 09, 13:27 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

This version of Bck2Brwsr VM is called Radtouren 2017 version, as it has been prepared and released while our gang was bicycling in Korutany. Sleeping in a tent in camps, bicycling whole day, coding in a morning. What can be more fun? Support for

Sunday, July 09, 11:09 UTC @ Backreaction

I’m back from Cambridge, where I attended the conference “Gravity and Black Holes” in honor of Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday. First things first, the image on the conference poster, website, banner, etc is not a psychedelic banana, but gravitational wave emission in a black hole merger. It’s a still from a numerical simulation done by a Cambridge group that you can watch in full on YouTube.

Sunday, July 09, 11:09 UTC @ Backreaction

I’m back from Cambridge, where I attended the conference “Gravity and Black Holes” in honor of Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday. First things first, the image on the conference poster, website, banner, etc is not a psychedelic banana, but gravitational wave emission in a black hole merger. It’s a still from a numerical simulation done by a Cambridge group that you can watch in full on YouTube.

Saturday, July 08, 18:56 UTC @ John D. Cook

The chaos game is played as follows. Pick a starting point at random. Then at each subsequent step, pick a triangle vertex at random and move half way from the current position to that vertex. The result looks like a fractal called the Sierpinski triangle or Sierpinski gasket. Here’s an example: If the random number […]

Saturday, July 08, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The second RC 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.

Saturday, July 08, 00:07 UTC @ Azimuth

My students are trying to piece together general theory of networks, inspired by many examples. A good general theory should clarify and unify these examples. What some people call network theory, I’d just call ‘applied graph invariant theory’: they come up with a way to calculate numbers from graphs, they calculate these numbers for graphs […]

Friday, July 07, 23:07 UTC @ John D. Cook

M. E. O’Neill’s PCG family of random number generators looks very promising. It appears to have excellent statistical and cryptographic properties. And it takes remarkably little code to implement. (PCG stands for Permuted Congruential Generator.) The journal article announcing PCG gives the results of testing it with the TestU01 test suite. I wanted to try it out […]

Friday, July 07, 19:40 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

This post originally appeared on EE Times I love my work in lithography and sharing my experiences with young people, hoping to inspire them when they realize the fun and art behind science. At a young age, I was very curious about how things worked. Much to the surprise and encouragement of my two parents […] The post Sharing the Art and Science of Lithography appeared first on

Friday, July 07, 17:02 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Exhaustive review of Undefined Behaviors in C and C++ in 2017 by Pascal Cuoq and John Regehr. Recently we’ve heard a few people imply that problems stemming from undefined behaviors (UB) in C and C++ are largely solved due to ubiquitous availability of dynamic checking tools such as ASan, UBSan, MSan, and TSan. We are here to state the obvious — that, despite the many excellent advances in tooling over the last few years, UB-r

Friday, July 07, 16:00 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! Daniel Ching

Thursday, July 06, 23:01 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Some links to things that may be of interest: There’s an excellent article at FiveThirtyEight about the issue of publicizing math research, taking as example the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations project (which will soon be having a workshop). … Continue reading →

Thursday, July 06, 18:55 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Now back from vacation, more regular blogging should resume imminently. While away, lots of press stories about claims that LIGO could be used to get “evidence for string theory”. As usual, these things can be traced back to misleading statements … Continue reading →

Thursday, July 06, 16:15 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

It is true that many security-focused engineers can sound like Chicken Little, running around announcing that the sky is falling, but, unless you've been living under a rock, you will notice that, indeed, the sky IS falling. Not a day goes by without a significant attack against networked systems making the news, and the Internet of Terror is leading the charge in taking distributed systems down the road to hell - a road that you wish to pave with your good intentions.

Thursday, July 06, 15:30 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

This  WWDC series  highlights new technologies and insights I took away from WWDC 2017.  My second post explored new drag and drop API. In this post, I demonstrate how easy it is to use the new Core ML framework. 

Thursday, July 06, 14:59 UTC @ Azimuth

The editors of the journal Entropy are organizing this conference: • Entropy 2018 — From Physics to Information Sciences and Geometry, 14–16 May 2018, Auditorium Enric Casassas, Faculty of Chemistry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. They write: One of the most frequently used scientific words is the word “entropy”. The reason is that it is […]

Wednesday, July 05, 22:00 UTC @ bit-player

It started with a brief story in the New York Times about Luke Robitaille, a 13-year-old student from Euless, Texas, who won the Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition by correctly answering the following question: In a barn, 100 chicks sit peacefully … Continue reading →

Wednesday, July 05, 18:32 UTC @ gilded : rust

https://... ^ If you find this page useful, bookmark it. It's almost impossible to find again!

Wednesday, July 05, 18:07 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Birthday workshop at Rutgers last January Combined from source Eric Allender and Michael Saks have been leading lights in computing theory for four decades. They have both turned 60 this year. I greatly enjoyed the commemorative workshop held in their honor last January 28–29 at DIMACS on the Rutgers campus. Today Dick and I salute […]

Wednesday, July 05, 17:44 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) appeal to the semiconductor industry because they’re superior electrical conductors compared to silicon with a mere 1 nanometer body thickness. So why don’t we have CNT chips in everything from mainframes to mobile devices, yet? Scalability of the transistor and large-scale integration are still big challenges. But two papers my colleagues and […] The post Recent papers detail ca

Wednesday, July 05, 13:50 UTC @ Lua: news

The Lua web site now includes a page that highlights some products that use Lua.

Wednesday, July 05, 12:09 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In my book I use

Wednesday, July 05, 11:21 UTC @ John D. Cook

I was running the NIST statistical test suite recently. I wanted an example of a random number generator where the tests failed, and so I used a simple generator, a linear congruence generator. But to my surprise, the generator passed nearly all the tests, even though some more sophisticated generators failed some of the same […]

Wednesday, July 05, 05:56 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

I've been re-reading "Homesteading the Noosphere" and came upon the chapter about gift culture. I've remembered how it rang false even when I read it for the first time, years ago. This time I've decided to write this short note to explain what's wrong with it. Now, don't get me wrong. Homesteading the Noosphere is a great piece of writing and deserves recognition, if for nothi

Wednesday, July 05, 03:19 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Let $T(d,r) = (r-1)(d+1)+1$ be the parameter in Tverberg's theorem, and call a partition $\mathcal I$ of $\{1,2,\ldots,T(d,r)\}$ into $r$ parts a Tverberg type. We say that $\mathcal I$ occurs in an ordered point sequence $P$ if $P$ contains a subsequence $P'$ of $T(d,r)$ points such that the partition of $P'$ that is order-isomorphic to $\mathcal I$ is a Tverberg partition. We say that $\mathcal I$ is unavoidable if it occurs in every sufficiently long point sequence.

Wednesday, July 05, 01:29 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Why FP still matters (video)... 27 years ago I published “Why Functional Programming Matters”, a manifesto for FP–but the subject is much older than that! In this talk I’ll take a deep dive into its history, highlighting some of the classic papers of the subject, personal favourites, and some of my own work. At the end of the day, four themes emerge that characterize what I love about the subject.

Wednesday, July 05, 01:23 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Via HN: The APL Idiom List – Alan Perlis, Spencer Rubager (1977)

Wednesday, July 05, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

At MartianCraft, we are big believers in sharing our knowledge. As such, we’re always eager to explore new possibilities about how to educate. And since many of us have children, teaching kids about programming is an area of special interest. Swift Playgrounds sets the stage to be an educational force, lowering the barrier to entry for software engineering. At WWDC 2017, Playgrounds was greatly expanded, and is a tool which is likely to be quickly adopted in many educational settings.

Tuesday, July 04, 19:02 UTC @ inessential.com

I keep thinking that the election of Trump has turned us all into conservatives. I mean “conservative” in a more old-fashioned (and I think truer) sense than what is generally thought. I don’t mean Republican — the Republican party is a radical reactionary party, not at all conservative. I mean that we liberals and progressives have learned that national respect for truth, expertise, and empiricism is something we’re in danger of losing. It’s not a given. We can’t take rule

Monday, July 03, 10:14 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

When Apple introduced stack views in iOS 9 they made it much easier to use Auto Layout by reducing the number of constraints you needed to create yourself for many common layouts. One edge case that was not well covered was the need for custom spacing between views. You could do it by nesting stack views but that always seemed an unnecessary complication. In iOS 11 you can create stack views with custom spacing between views. The Problem Here is the example lay

Sunday, July 02, 21:54 UTC @ Azimuth

Last time I sketched how the Dynkin diagram arises from the icosahedron. This time I’m fill in some details. I won’t fill in all the details, because I don’t know how! Working them out is the goal of this series, and I’d like to enlist your help. (In fact, I’m running this series of posts […]

Sunday, July 02, 17:39 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

I ended the last post by pointing out that the Planet Nine hypothesis, as currently formulated, entails a theoretical solution to five seemingly-unrelated observational puzzles: (i) orbital clustering of a>250AU KBOs, (ii) dynamical detachment of KBO perihelia from Neptune, (iii) generation of perpendicular large-semi-maj

Sunday, July 02, 14:17 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

For those not familiar with Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet is about two young people from two powerful renaissance families that happen to be engaged in a feud. Romeo and Juliet fall in love. A sequence of unfortunate events results in suicide of both protagonists. The families, shocked by death of their offspring, finally decide to end the feud. Now, let's imagine that patriarchs of house Montague and house Capulet were already fed up with the feud. It hurt their e

Sunday, July 02, 06:25 UTC @ Mike Swanson's Blog

About a week ago, the prolific Marc Edwards tweeted: Seems like a simple question, but I can’t find an answer: Is there a single shortcut to duplicate an object in Illustrator? Like ⌘J in Ps.— Marc Edwards (@marcedwards)

Saturday, July 01, 18:54 UTC @ Planet Lisp

New projects: cepl.spaces — Adds abstractions over vector spaces to CEPL — BSD 2 Clausecl-cpus — Get number of CPUs — ISCcl-diskspace — List disks, get disk total/free/usable space information. — ISCcl-fixtures

Saturday, July 01, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The first RC 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.

Saturday, July 01, 04:23 UTC @ NSBlog

We're back! During the week of WWDC, I spoke at CocoaConf Next Door, and one of my talks involved a dissection of objc_msgSend's ARM64 implementation. I thought that turning it into an article would make for a nice return to blogging for Friday Q&A. (Read More)

Saturday, July 01, 01:28 UTC @ composition.al

Every spring, I help review talk proposals for !!Con, a conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement and surprise of computing. Because distilling an interesting topic into ten minutes of material is hard, we ask prospective speakers to provide a timeline as part of their talk proposal, explaining how they plan to use their ten minutes of stage time. The timeline helps us make sure that the speaker understands the talk format, and that they’ve put s

Saturday, July 01, 01:28 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

It has been an exciting and turbulent couple of weeks in Planet Nine land. The OSSOS survey has released their full data set, which in addition to over 800 garden-variety Kuiper belt objects, contains four little worlds with semi-major axes beyond 250AU. Together with the previously published data, this brings the cou