vieiro.net

Monday, May 21, 08:41 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 07:50 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 07:00 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Las ecuaciones de Einstein de la relatividad general tienen soluciones matemáticas que no describen sistemas físicos observables (por ejemplo, que presentan curvas espaciotemporales cerradas). Para seleccionar las soluciones físicas entre las soluciones matemáticas se recurre a las llamadas conjeturas […]

Monday, May 21, 05:41 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 02:50 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 02:49 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 02:44 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Quad VDW Theorem: For all c there exists W=W(c) such that for all c-colorings of {1,...,W} there exists a,d such that a and a+d2 are the same color. What is known about W(c)? The first proof of Quad VDW was nonconstructive. The second proof was constructive but used VDW's theorem and gave terrible bounds, even for W(2). EASY: Show W(2)=5 ON A HS MATH COMP: Show that for all 3-colorings of {1,...,2003} there exists two numbers

Monday, May 21, 02:08 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The classical stable marriage problem asks for a matching between a set of men and a set of women with no blocking pairs, which are pairs formed by a man and a woman who would both prefer switching from their current status to be paired up together. When both men and women have strict preferences over the opposite group, all stable matchings have the same cardinality, and the famous Gale-Shapley algorithm can be used to find one. Differently, if we allow ties in the preference lists, finding a stable mat

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

This article answers an important theoretical question: How many different subdivisions of the hexahedron into tetrahedra are there? It is well known that a cube has five subdivisions into 6 tetrahedra and one subdivision into 5 tetrahedra. However, all hexahedra are not cubes and moving vertex positions increases the number of subdivisions. Recent hexahedral dominant meshing methods try to take these configurations into account for combining tetrahedra into hexahedra, but fail to enumerate them all: the

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CG updates on arXiv.org

Hybrid manufacturing (HM) technologies combine additive and subtractive manufacturing (AM/SM) capabilities, leveraging AM's strengths in fabricating complex geometries and SM's precision and quality to produce finished parts. We present a systematic approach to automated computer-aided process planning (CAPP) for HM that can identify non-trivial, qualitatively distinct, and cost-optimal combinations of AM/SM modalities. A multimodal HM process plan is represented by a finite Boolean expression of AM and

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The (\textsc{Weighted}) \textsc{Subset Feedback Vertex Set} problem is a generalization of the classical \textsc{Feedback Vertex Set} problem and asks for a vertex set of minimum (weighted) size that intersects all cycles containing a vertex of a predescribed set of vertices. Although the two problems exhibit different computational complexity on split graphs, no similar characterization is known on other classes of graphs. Towards the understanding of the complexity difference between the two problems,

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The triad census is an important approach to understand local structure in network science, providing comprehensive assessments of the observed relational configurations between triples of actors in a network. However, researchers are often interested in combinations of relational and categorical nodal attributes. In this case, it is desirable to account for the label, or color, of the nodes in the triad census. In this paper, we describe an efficient algorithm for constructing the colored triad census,

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

The optimization of submodular functions on the integer lattice has received much attention recently, but the objective functions of many applications are non-submodular. We provide two approximation algorithms for maximizing a non-submodular function on the integer lattice subject to a cardinality constraint; these are the first algorithms for this purpose that have polynomial query complexity. We propose a general framework for influence maximization on the integer lattice that generalizes prior works

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We present an efficient coresets-based neural network compression algorithm that provably sparsifies the parameters of a trained fully-connected neural network in a manner that approximately preserves the network's output. Our approach is based on an importance sampling scheme that judiciously defines a sampling distribution over the neural network parameters, and as a result, retains parameters of high importance while discarding redundant ones. We leverage a novel, empirical notion of sensitivity and e

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We show that the eccentricities, diameter, radius, and Wiener index of an undirected $n$-vertex graph with nonnegative edge lengths can be computed in time $O(n\cdot \binom{k+\lceil\log n\rceil}{k} \cdot 2^k k^2 \log n)$, where $k$ is the treewidth of the graph. For every $\epsilon>0$, this bound is $n^{1+\epsilon}\exp O(k)$, which matches a hardness result of Abboud, Vassilevska Williams, and Wang (SODA 2015) and closes an open problem in the multivariate analysis of polynomial-time computation. To t

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

An $(\alpha,\beta)$-ruling set of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a set $R\subseteq V$ such that for any node $v\in V$ there is a node $u\in R$ in distance at most $\beta$ from $v$ and such that any two nodes in $R$ are at distance at least $\alpha$ from each other. The concept of ruling sets can naturally be extended to edges, i.e., a subset $F\subseteq E$ is an $(\alpha,\beta)$-ruling edge set of a graph $G=(V,E)$ if the corresponding nodes form an $(\alpha,\beta)$-ruling set in the line graph of $G$. This paper

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

We show that the eccentricities (and thus the centrality indices) of all vertices of a $\delta$-hyperbolic graph $G=(V,E)$ can be computed in linear time with an additive one-sided error of at most $c\delta$, i.e., after a linear time preprocessing, for every vertex $v$ of $G$ one can compute in $O(1)$ time an estimate $\hat{e}(v)$ of its eccentricity $ecc_G(v)$ such that $ecc_G(v)\leq \hat{e}(v)\leq ecc_G(v)+ c\delta$ for a small constant $c$. We prove that every $\delta$-hyperbolic graph $G$ has a shor

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.DS updates on arXiv.org

In this paper, we present a fixed-quantum circuit design for the simulation of the Hamiltonian dynamics, $\mathcal{H}(t)$, through the truncated Taylor series method described by Berry et al. [1]. The circuit is general and can be used to simulate any given matrix in the phase estimation algorithm by only changing the angle values of the quantum gates implementing the time variable $t$ in the series. In addition, a simple divide and conquer method is presented for mapping the Hamiltonians which are not g

Monday, May 21, 01:30 UTC @ cs.CC updates on arXiv.org

We present a blended conditional gradient approach for minimizing a smooth convex function over a polytope $P$, that combines the Frank--Wolfe algorithm (also called conditional gradient) with gradient-based steps different from away steps and pairwise steps, however, still achieving linear convergence for strongly convex functions and good practical performance. Our approach retains all favorable properties of conditional gradient algorithms, most notably avoidance of projections onto $P$ and maintenanc

Sunday, May 20, 22:53 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 20:06 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 18:55 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

EMDrive es un troncocono metálico completamente cerrado con un magnetrón de microondas en su interior. En una balanza de torsión se mide un empuje de unos micronewtons cuando se enchufa el magnetrón. Martin Tajmar, Technische Universität Dresden, ha presentado […] Leer más

Sunday, May 20, 15:21 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 15:17 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 13:53 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 11:34 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Sunday, May 20, 02:34 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Should we expect simplicity in a theory named for complexity? Amer. Phy. Soc. interview source Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies who works on quantum gravity. She is also noted for her BackRe(Action) blog. She has a forthcoming book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Its thesis […]

Sunday, May 20, 00:11 UTC @ John D. Cook

A new video from 3Blue1Brown is about visualizing derivatives as stretching and shrinking factors. Along the way they consider the function f(x) = 1 + 1/x. Iterations of f converge on the golden ratio, no matter where you start (with one exception). The video creates a graph where they connect values of x on one […]

Saturday, May 19, 23:51 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 23:38 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 21:32 UTC @ Azimuth

  My student Brandon Coya finished his thesis, and successfully defended it last Tuesday! • Brandon Coya, Circuits, Bond Graphs, and Signal-Flow Diagrams: A Categorical Perspective, Ph.D. thesis, U. C. Riverside, 2018. It’s about networks in engineering. He uses category theory to study the diagrams engineers like to draw, and functors to understand how these […]

Saturday, May 19, 19:19 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 15:37 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 15:12 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 13:44 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

Congratulations to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry on what is undoubtedly the most energetic Royal Wedding! In other news, following on from Aubrey de Grey’s 5-chromatic unit-distance graph, there has been an effort to study the algebraic structure of the … Continue reading →

Saturday, May 19, 13:04 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 13:01 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 10:37 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Saturday, May 19, 08:35 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La desintegración doble beta sin neutrinos (0νββ) es el proceso por el cual dos neutrones en un núcleo se transforman en dos protones emitiendo dos electrones sin ningún neutrino; este proceso requiere la aniquilación mutua de los dos (anti)neutrinos, […]

Saturday, May 19, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Saturday, May 19, 06:16 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La aniquilación mutua de dos partículas de materia oscura puede producir fotones. Gracias a ello los telescopios de rayos gamma pueden realizar búsquedas indirectas de la materia oscura. La Colaboración H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) ha buscado estas señales […]

Saturday, May 19, 01:13 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 23:40 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Devin Coldewey, writing for TechCrunch: “It may be possible with careful design to extract the features you need without keeping the original, in a way where it’s mathematically impossible to recreate the recording,” Kortz said. If that process is verifiable and there’s no possibility of eavesdropping — no chance any Google employee, law enforcement officer, or hacker could get into the system and intercept or collect that data — then potentially Duplex coul

Friday, May 18, 21:27 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Rebecca Solnit, in a compelling essay for Literary Hub: The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than

Friday, May 18, 21:24 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Nick Miroff and Paul Sonne, reporting for The Washington Post this week: The Trump administration is making preparations to hold immigrant children on military bases, according to Defense Department communications, the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families who cross the border illegally. According to an email notification sent to Pentagon staffers, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make site visits at four military ins

Friday, May 18, 21:10 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Two thoughts on this Samsung ad trying to get iPhone 6 users to upgrade to a Galaxy S9: I’m glad they’re making fun of the notch rather than copying it, like every other Android maker. Samsung should go all-in on anti-notch-ism. It’ll make them stand out not just compared to the iPhone, but to their Android competitors. I don’t think this weird haircut is the way to do it, though. I’m curious about the legality of using the Apple logo on the shirts wo

Friday, May 18, 18:50 UTC @ Daring Fireball

This is really an extraordinary report for Slate by Mark Joseph Stern: On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez shot down the federal government’s efforts to strip Daniel Ramirez Medina of his DACA status. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had arrested and detained Ramirez last year, then falsely claimed that he was affiliated with a gang and attempted to deport him. He filed suit, alleging that ICE had violated his due process rights. Martinez agreed. His order barred

Friday, May 18, 18:38 UTC @ Miguel de Icaza

With Xamarin.Forms 3.0 in addition to the many new feature work that we did, we have been doing some general optimizations across the board, from compile times to startup times and wanted to share some recent results on the net effect on one of our larger sample apps. These are the results when doing a cold start for the SmartHotel360 application on Android when compiled for 32bits (armeabi-v7a) on a Google

Friday, May 18, 17:17 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 17:14 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 17:13 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 16:55 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 16:14 UTC @ Hacker News: Newest

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Friday, May 18, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Karthi Thyagarajan, Solutions Architect Cloud Spanner was designed from the ground up to offer horizontal scalability and a developer-friendly SQL interface. As a managed service, Google Cloud handles most database management tasks, but it’s up to you to ensure that there are no hotspots, as described in Schema Design Best Practices and

Friday, May 18, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Sandeep Dinesh, Developer Advocate Editor’s note: Today is the second installment in a seven-part video and blog series from Google Developer Advocate

Friday, May 18, 12:42 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Hey, Friday: we've had a productive week in ApacheLand! Let's take a look at our achievements: ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 20 June. Board calendar and minutes http://... ApacheCon™ –the ASF's official global conference series. - Apache Roadshow Eu

Friday, May 18, 12:34 UTC @ Backreaction

[Image: Everett Collection] In the years of World War II, National Socialists executed about six million Jews. The events did not have a single cause, but most historians agree that a major reason was social reinforcement, more widely known as “group think.” The Germans who went along with the Nazis’ organized mass murder were not psychopaths. By all accounts they were “normal people.” They

Friday, May 18, 12:34 UTC @ Backreaction

[Image: Everett Collection] In the years of World War II, National Socialists executed about six million Jews. The events did not have a single cause, but most historians agree that a major reason was social reinforcement, more widely known as “group think.” The Germans who went along with the Nazis’ organized mass murder were not psychopaths. By all accounts they were “normal people.” They

Friday, May 18, 12:19 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Ya está disponible el podcast #17 de La Traca (de la Ciencia), mi sección en el programa de radio Luciérnagas de Dante Cáceres. Divulgación científica en la Radiotelevisión Diocesana, en el canal de Radio Santa María de Toledo. Se […] Leer más

Friday, May 18, 10:54 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

He participado en la primera hora del episodio 163 del podcast Coffee Break: Señal y Ruido [iVoox, iTunes], titulado “Feynman; Europa; Experimento Big Bell Test; NBA; Una Galaxia muy Lejana;” 10 May 2018. “La tertulia semanal ha repasado las […] Leer más

Friday, May 18, 08:43 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Friday, May 18, 03:59 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jack Morse at Mashable, following up on DF reader Jay P’s deduction of the actual restaurant where Google claims two of its employees enjoyed a meal booked via Google Duplex: And sure, this could be some kind of coincidence. There could be two noodle places, both within a short drive of the Googleplex, that both have booths, salmon colored walls, and that same painting and frame. That’s why I call

Friday, May 18, 02:36 UTC @ Daring Fireball

The fact that I had an answer to my question in just 22 minutes shows that having a large follower count on Twitter is a bit of a super power.

Thursday, May 17, 22:09 UTC @ joe cieplinski

I’m not particularly interested in whether or not the Google Duplex demo was faked. (The fact that Google didn’t even think to address the ethics of the technology was far more interesting—and frightning—to me.) But if I had to guess: Google made a real phone call,

Thursday, May 17, 21:44 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Hello there, it has been a very long time since I posted here, but most recently, thanks to a couple of pesky bug reports on HEΛP by Mirko Vukovic, and because I had a couple of days relatively free, I was able to go back to do some programming, fix (some of) the bugs and post here. Here is the story. There were two bugs which I had to deal with (there are more, of course). A bug tr

Thursday, May 17, 20:38 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Avery Anapol, reporting for The Hill: A Republican lawmaker on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee said Thursday that rocks from the White Cliffs of Dover and the California coastline, as well as silt from rivers tumbling into the ocean, are contributing to high sea levels globally. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) made the comment during a hearing on technology and the changing climate, which largely turned into a Q&A on the basics of climate research.

Thursday, May 17, 19:59 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Thursday, May 17, 19:18 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Dan Primack, reporting for Axios: When you call a business, the person picking up the phone almost always identifies the business itself (and sometimes gives their own name as well). But that didn’t happen when the Google assistant called these “real” businesses: When the hair salon picks up, a woman says: “Hello, how can I help you?” When the restaurant picks up, a woman says: “Hi, may I help you?” Axios called over two d

Thursday, May 17, 18:34 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Longstanding Mac editor Espresso (mentioned here at DF numerous times over the years) is changing hands to the newly-founded Warewolf, and Espresso creator Jan Van Boghout is closing shop at MacRabbit to join the team at Framer. There are a lot of very talented people who’ve built many great apps over the years

Thursday, May 17, 16:05 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Mathematicians have disproved the strong cosmic censorship conjecture. Their work answers one of the most important questions in the study of general relativity and changes the way we think about space-time.

Thursday, May 17, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Amit Litsur, Product Manager, Google Maps Platform Thirteen years ago, the first Google Maps mashup combined Craigslist housing data on top of our map tiles—before there was even an API to access them. Today, Google Maps APIs are some of the most popular on the internet, powering millions of websites and apps generating billions of requests per day.

Thursday, May 17, 14:43 UTC @ John D. Cook

I just made one of those O’Reilly parody book covers.     It’s a joke on Judea Pearl, expert in causal inference, and the Perl programming language, known for its unusual, terse syntax. Related:

Thursday, May 17, 14:25 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El 16 de mayo de 2018 se celebró el Día Internacional de la Luz en la Facultad de Ciencias Físicas de Madrid [programa en LCMF 14 May 2018]. La jornada fue todo un éxito y se retransmitió en directo […] Leer más

Thursday, May 17, 14:16 UTC @ John D. Cook

When I was a teenager, my uncle gave me a calculus book and told me that mastering calculus was the most important thing I could do for starting out in math. So I learned the basics of calculus from that book. Later I read Michael Spivak’s two calculus books. I took courses that built on […]

Thursday, May 17, 12:37 UTC @ Computational Complexity

In 1937, a year after Turing had his seminal paper, Ronald Coase published a paper The Nature of the Firm to give a framework to why we have companies and how large they become. In a perfect market economy we shouldn't need a firm at all, everyone is just an independent contractor and market pricing will drive efficient use of labor. Coase notes there are costs to creating contracts and on

Thursday, May 17, 11:00 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Walk on Music. Let’s play, match the speaker to the walk-on music. Each speaker at BoS Conference gets to choose their own walk on music unless they are brave enough to leave it to us… Here is the walk on music for this year’s Business of Software Conference Europe. Can you match the music to […] The post Speaker Walk on Music, BoS Conference Europe 2018. app

Thursday, May 17, 10:50 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Community-driven conference series to gather dozens of Apache projects and their communities in Montréal to share and learn about the latest Open Source innovations in Big Data, Cloud, Finance, IoT, Machine Learning, Search, Servers, and more in a collaborative, vendor-neutral environment Wakefield, MA —17 May 2018— The Apache® Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and

Thursday, May 17, 07:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Mary Koes, Product Manager, and Bryan Moyles, Software Engineer Logs contain some of the most valuable data available to developers, DevOps practitioners, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and security teams, particularly when troubleshooting an incident. It’s not always easy to extract and use, though. One common challenge is that many log entries are blobs of unstructured text, making it difficult to extract the relevant information when you need it. Bu

Thursday, May 17, 05:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

IBM built the first vacuum tube “supercomputer” in 1944, the Mark I. The first digital mainframe, the IBM 1401, came along 15 years later in 1959. The IBM 360 mainframe made history when it was released in 1964 but it would be another 17 years before the PC arrived – a computer that people could […] The post First IBM Q Hub in Asia to Spur Academic, Commercial Quantum Ecosystem appeared first on

Wednesday, May 16, 22:43 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Twitter may not care about a native Mac client, but the users of these apps, and the developers who make them, certainly do.

Wednesday, May 16, 22:03 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I had no idea staffers at The Simpsons were such sharp dressers. ★

Wednesday, May 16, 21:41 UTC @ Daring Fireball

From developer Jeff Johnson: StopTheMadness is a Safari extension for Mac that stops web sites from making Safari harder to use. Some web sites disable Mac user interface features in Safari that you normally expect to work. For example: password autocomplete ⌘-click to open a link in a new tab ⌘-key keyboard shortcuts selecting, copying, cutting, and pasting of text drag and drop opening contextual menus StopT

Wednesday, May 16, 15:33 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

About one-third of the total disease burden in developing countries results from brain disorders such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and depression. These neuropsychiatric disorders are prevalent in low- to middle-income countries due to various factors, e.g. difficult births, malnutrition, and exposure to infectious diseases and toxins. Around 80 percent of the world’s epilepsy occurs in low- […] The post

Wednesday, May 16, 14:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

The two-sample t-test is a way to test whether two data sets come from distributions with the same mean. I wrote a few days ago about how the test performs under ideal circumstances, as well as less than ideal circumstances. This is an analogous post for testing whether two data sets come from distributions with the same […]

Wednesday, May 16, 13:53 UTC @ x.ai

Doubling down on our pro-disclosure stance in the wake of Google’s AI reveal.  Google made a splash last week when an assistant feature called Duplex successfully set up a haircut appointment. Doesn’t sound so impressive in writing, until you consider that the assistant managed the task over the phone. The headlines came fast and furious: “Google’s… The post Our response to Google Duplex appeared firs

Wednesday, May 16, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Neha Pattan, Staff Software Engineer; Ines Envid, Product Manager High availability and redundancy are essential features for a cloud deployment. On Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Alias IPs allow you to configure secondary IPs or IP ranges on your virtual machine (VM) instances, for a secure and highly scalable way to deliver traffi

Wednesday, May 16, 09:30 UTC @ Y Combinator

John Preskill is a theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. In this episode we cover what John’s been focusing on for years: quantum information, quantum computing, and quantum error correction.

Wednesday, May 16, 01:16 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Very impressive-looking successor to the current Surface Hub. I particularly like the way you can tile up to 4 of them next to each other. No pricing details yet, and it’s not shipping until sometime next year. ★

Wednesday, May 16, 00:00 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Astronomers argue that there’s an undiscovered giant planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune. A newly discovered rocky body has added evidence to the circumstantial case for it.

Tuesday, May 15, 19:05 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Alex Hern and Olivia Solon, reporting for The Guardian: In its first quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said the overwhelming majority of moderation action was against spam posts and fake accounts: it took action on 837m pieces of spam, and shut down a further 583m fake accounts on the site in the three months. But Facebook also moderated 2.5m pieces of hate speech, 1.9m pieces of terrorist propaganda, 3.4m pieces of graphic violence and 21m pieces of content f

Tuesday, May 15, 18:37 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, May 15, 16:10 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, May 15, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Hanan Youssef, Product Manager Today we are excited to announce beta availability of a new family of Google Compute Engine machine types. The n1-ultramem family of memory-optimized virtual machine (VM) instances come with more memory—a lot more! In fact, these machine types offer more compute resources and more memory than any other VM instance that we offer, making Compute Engine a great opt

Tuesday, May 15, 13:45 UTC @ Planet Lisp

See: http://... You join a team of developers, scientists, engineers and business developers that develop, operate and commercialize SynaptiQ worldwide. You work in a Linux-based Java, Clojure and Common Lisp environment. Your focus is on the development, maintenance, design and unit testing of SynaptiQ's real-time aggregation and alerting engine that proc

Tuesday, May 15, 13:23 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Judea Pearl, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut. His prescription for progress? Teach machines to understand the question why.

Tuesday, May 15, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Steren Giannini, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform One of the main benefits of Google App Engine is automatic scaling of your applications. Behind the scenes, App Engine continually monitors your instance capacity and traffic to ensure the appropriate number of instances are running. Today, we are rolling out the next generation scheduler for App Engine standard environment. Our tests sh

Tuesday, May 15, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

To first approximation, Earth is a sphere. A more accurate description is that the earth is an oblate spheroid, the polar axis being a little shorter than the equatorial diameter. See details here. Other planets are also oblate spheroids as well. Jupiter is further from spherical than the earth is more oblate. The general equation […]

Tuesday, May 15, 11:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

One of the largest growing demographics in the EU is individuals aged 65 and over, and two thirds of this group are in situation of multimorbidity, i.e., perons who suffer from two or more chronic diseases. The ineffective treatment of multimorbidity has been pointed out as an urgent problem to address by the Academy of […] The post Using IoT, AI and cloud technologies to advance home-based inte

Tuesday, May 15, 08:05 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

La búsqueda directa de partículas de materia oscura tipo WIMP se ha centrado en la escala GeV, la más sencilla de explorar porque es la escala de la masa atómica. La escala MeV ha sido muy poco explorada, pues […] Leer más

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

Tuesday, May 15, 06:11 UTC @ Backreaction

I have a new paper out today and it wouldn’t have happened without this blog. A year ago, I wrote a blogpost declaring that “academia is fucked up,” to quote myself because my words are the best words. In that blogpost, I had some suggestions how to improve the situation, for example by offering ways to quantify scientific activity other than counting papers and citations. But ranting on a

Tuesday, May 15, 06:11 UTC @ Backreaction

I have a new paper out today and it wouldn’t have happened without this blog. A year ago, I wrote a blogpost declaring that “academia is fucked up,” to quote myself because my words are the best words. In that blogpost, I had some suggestions how to improve the situation, for example by offering ways to quantify scientific activity other than counting papers and citations. But ranting on a

Tuesday, May 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, May 15, 03:47 UTC @ Computational Complexity

On my final in Aut Theory I wanted to ask a TRUE/FALSE/UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE question but did not want them to guess. Hence I had +4 for a right answer, -3 for a wrong answer. Here is the question: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For each of the following say if its TRUE, FALSE, or UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE. No Proof Required BUT you get +4 for every right answer and -3 for every wrong answer and 0 for an answer left blank. So

Tuesday, May 15, 00:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Dave Stiver, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform When we opened the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Singapore region last year, it launched with two zones. Today, we’re happy to announce a third zone (asia-southeast1-c) and a few new services. This expansion will make it easier for customers, especially in Southeast Asia, to build highl

Tuesday, May 15, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

“Most writing about app architecture tries to sell you on a specific solution. We believe almost any architecture can work well, if applied correctly.” — Chris Eidhof 📗   App Architecture We’re very happy to announce the full release of our new book,

Monday, May 14, 23:52 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Last year, Netflix blogged about a great internal tool called Stethoscope which helped their security team communicate the key settings they expect their employees to manage instead of relying on intrusive enforcement. They coined this concept, “User Focused Security”. We recently released Kolide Cloud which enables you to roll out this User Focused Security strategy and effectively communicate your

Monday, May 14, 23:34 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

There’s a HEPAP meeting today, with news about the US HEP budget situation, presentations here. Since the 2016 election physicists have been worried about how the Republican Congress and Trump administration will treat scientific research in general and physics research … Continue reading →

Monday, May 14, 23:19 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Shannon Liao, writing for The Verge: Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB won’t see any changes. Google will also make the plan shareable within a family of up to five members, and give users access to live chat support even if you’re on the cheapest p

Monday, May 14, 20:57 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I got a lot of email and Twitter feedback regarding my skepticism regarding Google’s Duplex over the weekend. Here’s a point: Google has a history of making product announcements that they claim are imminent but aren’t. One example: they announced this seemingly-magical photo-editing feature last year, convinced the press it was coming “soon” — that’s The Verge’s word, not mine 

Monday, May 14, 20:34 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Casey Johnston, writing at The Outline: Late Friday night, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit over the finicky butterfly-switch keyboards that have plagued its customers since they were released in 2015. The suit, filed in the Northern District Court of California, cites forum complaints going back to 2015, and substantially describes the difficulties of two named plaintiffs, one of whom exp

Monday, May 14, 20:22 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Fantastic piece for New York Magazine by Olivia Nuzzi: The call to the White House comes after ten o’clock most weeknights, when Hannity is over. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Sean Hannity broadcasts live at 9 p.m. on Fox News, usually from Studio J in midtown, where the network is headquartered, but sometimes from a remote studio on Long Island, where he was raised and now lives. All White House phone numbers begin with the same six digits: 202-456. Hannity calls

Monday, May 14, 20:11 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Some great anecdotes here, but it breaks my heart that he posted them on Facebook, of all places. Update: Here’s a copy of the story posted to Hacker News. ★

Monday, May 14, 19:09 UTC @ Sean Carroll

In completely separate video news, someone has (I don’t know how) found videos of lectures I gave a CERN several years ago: “Cosmology for Particle Physicists.” (2005, maybe?) These are slightly technical — at the very least they presume you … Continue reading →

Monday, May 14, 16:04 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Paul Williams, Strategic Cloud Engineer When preparing to migrate a legacy system to a cloud-based data analytics solution, as engineers we often focus on the technical benefits: Queries will run faster, more data can be processed and storage no longer has limits. For IT teams, these are significant, positive developments for the business. End users, though, may not immediately see the benefits of this technology (and internal culture) change. For your end

Monday, May 14, 14:06 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

This article takes a closer look at two storage system design approaches used in a majority of modern databases (read-optimized B-trees and write-optimized LSM (log-structured merge)-trees) and describes their use cases and tradeoffs.

Monday, May 14, 11:05 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

El próximo miércoles 16 de mayo de 2018 se celebra el Día Internacional de la Luz (DIL). El Comité Español del DIL me ha seleccionado como maestro de ceremonias del acto central organizado en el Aula Magna de la […] Leer más

Monday, May 14, 06:30 UTC @ La Ciencia de la Mula Francis

Pint of Science España retorna a Málaga. Pint of Science 2018 Málaga te ofrece ocho charlas de divulgación científica los próximos 14, 15 y 16 de mayo desde las 19:30 en The Shakespeare Bar, C/ Muro de Puerta Nueva, […] Leer más<

Monday, May 14, 05:05 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.

Sunday, May 13, 20:00 UTC @ composition.al

Friends, I have some big news! After defending my Ph.D. in 2014, I joined Intel Labs as a research scientist. While at Intel, I’ve gotten to work on some really

Sunday, May 13, 19:49 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Timothy B. Lee, reporting four short days ago for Ars Technica: Last year, ZTE admitted to an elaborate multi-year scheme to sell US-made technology to Iran and North Korea in violation of US sanctions laws. ZTE paid $890 million in penalties and said it was in the process of disciplining dozens of senior company officials who had orchestrated a scheme to violate US sanctions laws. But last month the Trump administration accused ZTE of continuing to lie to the US government eve

Saturday, May 12, 10:07 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

Scott Aaronson, in his blog post about common knowledge, writes: If you read accounts of Nazi Germany, or the USSR, or North Korea or other despotic regimes today, you can easily be overwhelmed by this sense of, “so why didn’t all the sane people just rise up and overthrow the totalitarian monsters? Surely there were more sane peop

Saturday, May 12, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Saturday, May 12, 02:23 UTC @ Azimuth

guest post by Christian Williams Mike Stay has been doing some really cool stuff since earning his doctorate. He’s been collaborating with Greg Meredith, who studied the π-calculus with Abramsky, and then conducted impactful research and design in the software industry before some big ideas led him into the new frontier of decentralization. They and a great […]

Saturday, May 12, 01:16 UTC @ Azimuth

  My course on applied category theory is continuing! After a two-week break where the students did exercises, I’m back to lecturing about Fong and Spivak’s book Seven Sketches. Now we’re talking about “resource theories”. Resource theories help us answer questions like this: Given what I have, is it possible to get what I want? […]

Friday, May 11, 22:50 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I’ve been thinking about this Google Duplex thing — the AI assistant that can, according to Google, make phone calls on your behalf such as the one that the company played a video of on stage during Sundar Pichai’s I/O keynote. Why not demo it live? Why only play recordings? When is it rolling out to actual customers? Was there a hands-on after the event where members of the media or conference attendees could talk to Duplex? It’s totally credible that Google would be the f

Friday, May 11, 19:33 UTC @ tecosystems

Particularly for those who have been in the industry long enough to remember when it was compared to cancer, we live in a veritable golden age for open source software. Once a bizarre, improbable model for generating commercial returns if not building software, it is increasingly and overwhelmingly the default approach. As Cloudera’s Mike Olson

Friday, May 11, 19:33 UTC @ tecosystems

Particularly for those who have been in the industry long enough to remember when it was compared to cancer, we live in a veritable golden age for open source software. Once a bizarre, improbable model for generating commercial returns if not building software, it is increasingly and overwhelmingly the default approach. As Cloudera’s Mike Olson

Friday, May 11, 19:26 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

The Gentle Art of Levitation 2010 by James Chapman, Pierre-Evariste Dagand, Conor McBride, Peter Morrisy We present a closed dependent type theory whose inductive types are given not by a scheme for generative declarations, but by encoding in a universe. Each inductive datatype arises by interpreting its description—a first-class value in a datatype of descriptions. Moreover, the latter itself has a description. Datatype-

Friday, May 11, 16:45 UTC @ John D. Cook

A two-sample t-test is intended to determine whether there’s evidence that two samples have come from distributions with different means. The test assumes that both samples come from normal distributions. Robust to non-normality, not to asymmetry It is fairly well known that the t-test is robust to departures from a normal distribution, as long as the actual […]

Friday, May 11, 16:40 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

And Friday is back! Let's review our weekly activities... Success at Apache –a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". - Dip into the Apache Way by Nick Couchman https://... ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 16 May. Board calendar and minutes

Friday, May 11, 16:14 UTC @ Backreaction

Strings. [image: freeimages.com] “Greetings Dr. Hossenfelder! I am a Princeton physics major who regularly reads your wonderful blog. I recently came across a curious passage in Brian Greene’s introduction to a reprint edition of Einstein's Meaning of Relativity which claims that: “Superstring theory successfully merges general relativity and quantum mechanics [...] Moreover, not only

Friday, May 11, 16:14 UTC @ Backreaction

Strings. [image: freeimages.com] “Greetings Dr. Hossenfelder! I am a Princeton physics major who regularly reads your wonderful blog. I recently came across a curious passage in Brian Greene’s introduction to a reprint edition of Einstein's Meaning of Relativity which claims that: “Superstring theory successfully merges general relativity and quantum mechanics [...] Moreover, not only

Friday, May 11, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Tim Allclair, Software Engineer, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager, Security & Privacy Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of blog posts on container security at Google. To conclude our blog series on container security, today’s post covers isola

Friday, May 11, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Sandeep Dinesh, Developer Advocate Editor’s note: Today is the fourth installment in a seven-part video and blog series from Google Developer Advocate

Friday, May 11, 10:00 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Friday, May 11, 09:29 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Thursday, May 10, 23:40 UTC @ John D. Cook

The latest episode of My Favorite theorem features John Urschel, former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens and current math graduate student. His favorite theorem is a result on graph approximation: for every weighted graph, no matter how densely connected, it is possible to find a sparse graph whose Laplacian approximates that of the original […]

Thursday, May 10, 21:39 UTC @ Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

Recently, I saw a post from Dave DeLong and knowing his history with the framework I read it with extreme curiosity. Unfortunately, that read led to this post as I disagree strongly with a number of the laws he has laid down. Since I know people are going to be asking me about this post […]

Thursday, May 10, 17:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Vic Iglesias, Cloud Solutions Architect Continuous integration has become a standard practice across a lot of software development organizations, automatically detecting changes that were committed to your software repositories, running them through unit, integration and functional tests, and finally creating an artifact (JAR, Docker image, or binary). Among continuous integr

Thursday, May 10, 14:57 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Want to know what the smart people are reading? Of course you do. it is one of the things that makes them smart! We asked the speakers from Business of Software Conference Europe 2018, (May 21-22nd, London), what book has had the biggest influence on their career and what they’re reading now. Here’s what they […] The post Business of Software Conference Europe 2018 Speaker

Thursday, May 10, 14:48 UTC @ Sean Carroll

Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around … Continue reading →

Thursday, May 10, 13:44 UTC @ Quanta Magazine

Just as antibiotics have bred resistance in bacteria, vaccines can potentially lose their effectiveness over diseases they controlled. Researchers are working to head off the evolution of new threats.

Thursday, May 10, 12:02 UTC @ John D. Cook

Here’s an interesting little tidbit: For any prime p except 2 and 5, the decimal expansion of 1/p repeats with a period that divides p-1. The period could be as large as p-1, but no larger. If it’s less than p-1, then it’s a divisor of p-1. Here are a few examples. 1/3 = 0.33… […]

Thursday, May 10, 10:00 UTC @ Swift.org

The Swift community is growing and Swift Forums are growing with it. The number of projects in the Swift ecosystem keeps expanding and developers are using them more and more to help build their apps. While not officially a part of the language, they exist to provide a leg up on development with optimizations to accomplish specific sets of tasks. As a developer, there are times when you want to interact with like-minded people who are working with or e

Wednesday, May 09, 21:48 UTC @ x.ai

Original illustration by Dylan Agar for Verge Digital. AI’s future is often discussed in idealistic terms, but the current landscape presents more complexity. x.ai’s Non-Binary series explores the social implications of AI from some of journalism’s most vital voices. First up, an examination of racial bias in AI from David Dennis, Jr. I was at… The post AI lacks intelligence without different voi

Wednesday, May 09, 19:26 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jony Ive, in an interview with Hodinkee’s Ben Clymer: I don’t look at watches for their relationship to popular culture, which I know is so much of the fun — but rather as somehow the distillation of craft, ingenuity, miniaturization, and of the art of making. ★

Wednesday, May 09, 18:14 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Owen Grover, the new post-acquisition CEO of Pocket Casts: We’re a private and separate company and our privacy policy remains unchanged. We can’t and won’t share any of your personal data with NPR, WNYC, WBEZ or This American Life. They didn’t buy Pocket Casts for that reason. It’s also worth pointing out that we’ve spent 8 years caring about the kind of data we do and don’t store about you, it’s literally the minimum amount required to run our sync service. If

Wednesday, May 09, 17:17 UTC @ Daring Fireball

James Vincent, writing for The Verge: It came as a total surprise: the most impressive demonstration at Google’s I/O conference yesterday was a phone call to book a haircut. Of course, this was a phone call with a difference. It wasn’t made by a human, but by the Google Assistant, which did an uncannily good job of asking the right questions, pausing in the right places,

Wednesday, May 09, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Gopal Ashok, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform At Redisconf 2018 in San Francisco last month, we announced the public beta of Cloud Memorystore for Redis, a fully-managed in-memory data store service. Today, the public beta is available for everyone to try. Cloud Memorystore provides a scalable, more secure and highly available Redis service fully managed by Google. It’s fully compat

Wednesday, May 09, 12:25 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(Don't forget to vote for SIGACT posistions:here 9th workshop on Flexible network design, May 22-25 at College Park, here.) My first poston G4G13 is arguably here. To see why its debatable, see that post. FOXTROT HALF-EMPTY, HALF-FULL PROBLEM, INCLUDING 13 by Thoma

Wednesday, May 09, 09:30 UTC @ Y Combinator

Carola Schönlieb is an applied mathematician at the University of Cambridge. She’s also a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and the head of the Image Analysis group at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Tuesday, May 08, 22:37 UTC @ Daring Fireball

With over 4 million members and more than 20,000 classes, Skillshare is basically Netflix for online learning. Interested in web development or data science? How about UX design or SEO? Mobile photography, film making, creative writing, even coffee brewing? Skillshare truly has it all. And for this week only, Skillshare is offering the first 1,000 Daring Fireball readers two free months of Skillshare Premium. Whether you’re looking to gain

Tuesday, May 08, 22:11 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s quarterly results, the discontinuation of Apple’s AirPort product line, and more. Brought to you by these fine sponsors: Tres Pontas: Freshly-roasted coffee from a single farm in Brazil, shipped directly to you. Use code THETALKSHOW at checkout and save an extra 10 percent on any subscription. RXBar: Whole-food

Tuesday, May 08, 19:17 UTC @ Planet Lisp

I presented some of the work on teaching algorithms and data structures at the 2018 European Lisp Symposium Given that I wanted to go to the symposium (and I'm glad I did!), the most economical method for going was if I presented research work - because then there was a reasonable chance that my employer wo

Tuesday, May 08, 18:40 UTC @ Y Combinator

We believe creating a platform where successful women can share their stories and advice with founders who are just getting started is one way to bring about even more successful women-led companies. If you’d like to attend in New York, sign up by June 8, 2018.

Tuesday, May 08, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Seth Vargo, Staff Developer Advocate and Liz Fong-Jones, Site Reliability Engineer Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps are two trending disciplines with quite a bit of overlap. In the past, some have called SRE a competing set of practices to DevOps. But we think they're not so different after all. What exactly is SRE and how does it relate to DevOps? Earlier this year, we (Liz

Tuesday, May 08, 14:10 UTC @ John D. Cook

This morning I ran across the following graph via Horace Dediu. I developed Windows software during the fattest part of the Windows curve. That was a great time to be in the Windows ecosystem. Before that I was in an academic bubble. My world consisted primarily of Macs and various flavors of Unix. I had […]

Tuesday, May 08, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By John La Barge, Google Cloud Solution Architect When it comes to mobile applications, automating app distribution helps ensure hardening and consistent delivery and speeds testing. But mobile application delivery pipelines can be challenging to build, because mobile development environments require you to install specific SDKs. Even distributing beta versions requires specific secrets and signing credentials. Containers are a great way to distri

Tuesday, May 08, 11:46 UTC @ John D. Cook

P. J. Huber gives three desiderata for a statistical method in his book Robust Statistics: It should have a reasonably good (optimal or nearly optimal) efficiency at the assumed model. It should be robust in the sense that small deviations from the model assumptions should impair the performance only slightly. Somewhat larger deviations from the […]

Tuesday, May 08, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Tuesday, May 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, May 08, 00:40 UTC @ Azimuth

guest post by Matteo Polettini Suppose you receive an email from someone who claims “here is the project of a machine that runs forever and ever and produces energy for free!” Obviously he must be a crackpot. But he may be well-intentioned. You opt for not being rude, roll your sleeves, and put your hands […]

Tuesday, May 08, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

Since the first public release of Swift (4 years ago in June!), there’s been much debate about whether Swift is a functional language. Rather than engaging in that discussion, we believe it’s more productive to explore useful techniques from functional programming that you can use today. In Episode 19 of Swift Talk, we looked into replacing NSSortDescriptor with a function:

Monday, May 07, 20:57 UTC @ The Search for Planet Nine

Hi, everyone! I’m Tali, an undergrad at the University of Michigan. Last summer, I worked on a Planet Nine project with Konstantin and Mike, and although we didn’t find Planet Nine (yet!), we did look further into the stability of objects in the presence of Planet Nine. Turns out, not everything is stable! I

Monday, May 07, 20:00 UTC @ Indie Stack

In some scenarios it might be useful to declare a typealias internally to a module, to make it easier to implement the functionality of the module itself, but less useful to export that typealias to clients of the module. For example, consider an image manipulation framework that can work with NSImage or UIImage instances, depending … Continue reading Internal Typealias Promotion

Monday, May 07, 18:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

iOS 11 delivers innovative features and the redesigned App Store to hundreds of millions of customers around the world. Your apps can deliver more intelligent, unified, and immersive experiences with Core ML, ARKit, new camera APIs, new SiriKit domains, Apple Music integration, drag and drop for iPad, and more. Starting July 2018, all iOS app updates submitted to the App Store must be built with the iOS 11 SDK and must support the Super Retina display of iPhone X.Learn more about submitting iOS apps to the

Monday, May 07, 15:30 UTC @ Y Combinator

In running our Series A program, we uncovered a way to materially influence the leverage a founder has in any round: process. Process is important because it gives founders the best opportunity to create a market for startups that favors the founders in the most important aspect of raising money: getting the right investor.

Monday, May 07, 14:49 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Clearly, your management has never heard the phrase, "You get what you pay for." Or perhaps they heard it and didn't realize it applied to them. The savings in cloud computing comes at the expense of a loss of control over your systems, which is summed up best in the popular nerd sticker that says, "The Cloud is Just Other People's Computers." Some providers now have something called Metal-as-a-Service, which I really think ought to mean that an '80s metal band shows up at your office, plays a gig, smashes

Monday, May 07, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Robert van Gent, Customer Reliability Engineer and Cody Smith, Site Reliability Engineer In a previous episode of CRE Life Lessons, we discussed how service level objectives (SLOs) are an important tool for defining and measuring the reliability of your se

Monday, May 07, 12:17 UTC @ John D. Cook

Matrix compression Suppose you have an m by n matrix A, where m and n are very large, that you’d like to compress. That is, you’d like to come up with an approximation of A that takes less data to describe. For example, consider a high resolution photo that as a matrix of gray scale values. An approximation to the matrix […]

Monday, May 07, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

User interfaces to artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly using natural language. But while today’s chatbots and AI agents can recognize natural language, like English or Spanish, they still cannot engage with humans in natural conversation. For example, virtual agents often give away the punchline of their own jokes. Today’s Chatbot 1 Human: Tell me […] The post

Monday, May 07, 10:59 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

by Nick Couchman Like other recent contributors to this blog, I am not a developer by trade. My day job is as a Linux Systems Engineer and team manager, and, truth be told, my programming skills are not something I would rely on to make a living. Despite these facts, I've found something beyond acceptance in being a part of the Apache Guacamole project: mentoring. Most of my experience with The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) ha

Monday, May 07, 10:57 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Seen this post mentioned several times on Twitter, but not on Planet Lisp yet. So, here it is: A new way of blogging about Common Lisp by Yehonathan Sharvit (@viebel).

Monday, May 07, 09:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure Click

Monday, May 07, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

Introduction “What time is it?” has been an important question to humans for quite some time. For most of history, we only cared what time it was here: When will it get dark? When will it get light? When will this woolly mammoth fall into my cunning spike trap? Then, things got more complicated. I’ve sailed halfway around the world, and the people here think it’s the year 4567, not 1800, what’s up with that? I have a teleconference next week with my client,

Sunday, May 06, 20:51 UTC @ John D. Cook

If often happens in applications that a linear system of equations Ax = b either does not have a solution or has infinitely many solutions. Applications often use least squares to create a problem that has a unique solution. Overdetermined systems Suppose the matrix A has dimensions m by n and the right hand side vector b has dimension m. Then the […]

Sunday, May 06, 19:09 UTC @ Daring Fireball

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their new Kolide Cloud “User Focused Security” concept. Last year, Netflix blogged about a great internal tool called Stethoscope which helped their security team communicate the key settings they expect their employees to manage instead of relying on intrusive enforcement. They termed this concept “User Focused Security�

Sunday, May 06, 17:03 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Jason Snell: It’s hard to believe today that a Steve Jobs product presentation would be met with indifference, but there was a huge amount of skepticism about Apple’s product announcements back in early 1998. Though there were definitely signs that the company was turning it around, I also recall being summoned to Apple product events where nothing much at all was announced. Regardless, only the editor in chief of Macworld, Andy Gore, even bothered to go to the announcement at the

Sunday, May 06, 13:32 UTC @ Azimuth

A new journal! We’ve been working on it for a long time, but we finished sorting out some details at ACT2018, and now we’re ready to tell the world! It’s free to read, free to publish in, and it’s about building big things from smaller parts. Here’s the top of the journal’s home page right […]

Saturday, May 05, 20:37 UTC @ John D. Cook

In a nutshell, given the singular decomposition of a matrix A, the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse is given by This post will explain what the terms above mean, and how to compute them in Python and in Matheamtica. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) The singular value decomposition of a matrix is a sort of change of coordinates that makes […]

Saturday, May 05, 17:56 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Triangulating proofs to seek a shorter path Cropped from 2016 Newsday source Mehtaab Sawhney is an undergraduate student at MIT. His work caught my eye on finding his recent paper with David Stoner about permutations that map all three-term arithmetic progressions mod to non-progressions. Here a progression is an ordered triple where . The paper […]

Saturday, May 05, 13:09 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous post looked at how probability predictions from a logistic regression model vary as a function of the fitted parameters. This post goes through the same exercise for probit regression and compares the two kinds of nonlinear regression. Generalized linear models and link functions Logistic and probit regression are minor variations on a theme. […]

Saturday, May 05, 02:59 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Comprehending Ringads 2016 by Jeremy Gibbons Ringad comprehensions represent a convenient notation for expressing database queries. The ringad structure alone does not provide a good explanation or an efficient implementation of relational joins; but by allowing heterogeneous comprehensions, involving both bag and indexed table ringads, we show how to accommodate these too. Indexed/parametric/gra

Friday, May 04, 22:20 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 […] The post Member of the Band – Backend Engineer Ruben Jimenez appeared first

Friday, May 04, 21:13 UTC @ Daring Fireball

This is the final word on the IMHO matter as far as I’m concerned. ★

Friday, May 04, 20:46 UTC @ Daring Fireball

This exemplifies the power of blogging — Jane Kim was able to get ahead of an attempted hit piece seemingly based on opposition research from her leading opponent. Just read it. (The Chronicle has responded with an editor’s note, acknowledging that the questions were flawed.)

Friday, May 04, 20:38 UTC @ Daring Fireball

You can’t make stuff like this up. HTC probably can’t show their own components because they’re a mess. ★

Friday, May 04, 19:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Gabe Weiss, Developer Advocate One of the best parts about working at Google is the incredible diversity of interests. By day, I’m a Developer Advocate focused on IoT paid to write code to show you how easy it is to develop solutions with Google technology. By night, I’m an amateur musician. This is the true story of how I combined those two interests. It turns out I’m not unique; a lot of folks here at Google play music on top of their d

Friday, May 04, 18:31 UTC @ John D. Cook

The output of a logistic regression model is a function that predicts the probability of an event as a function of the input parameter. This post will only look at a simple logistic regression model with one predictor, but similar analysis applies to multiple regression with several predictors. Here’s a plot of such a curve […]

Friday, May 04, 15:51 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

It's time for our weekly review of the Apache community's activities. Here we go, and "May the 4th" be with you! The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes 51 New Members https://... ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 16 May. Board calendar and minutes

Friday, May 04, 15:18 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

The ability to infer abstract high-level concepts from raw sensory inputs is a key part of human intelligence. Developing models that recapitulate this ability is an important goal in AI research. A fundamental challenge in this respect is disentangling the underlying factors of variation that give rise to the observed data. For example, factors of […] The post Disentanglement of Latent Factors

Friday, May 04, 13:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Sandeep Dinesh, Developer Advocate Editor’s note: Today is the third installment in a seven-part video and blog series from Google Developer Advocate Sandeep Dinesh on how to get the most out of your Kubernetes environment. Distributed systems can be hard t

Friday, May 04, 10:54 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Turns out that one gets very useful MultiGitRepository#Appendix_A:_Local_Collaboration_Area: the master branch in each slave repository of the MultiGitRepository setup is in fact the best place for team members to collaborate without publishing the changes to the final integr

Friday, May 04, 09:50 UTC @ Azimuth

As I type this, sitting in a lecture hall at the Lorentz Center, Jamie Vicary, University of Birmingham and University of Oxford, is announcing a new series of meetings: • Symposium on Compositional Structures. The website, which will probably change, currently says this: Symposium on Compositional Structures (SYCO) The Symposium on Compositional Structures is a […]

Friday, May 04, 09:30 UTC @ Y Combinator

Sean Mitchell is the cofounder and CEO of Rezi (YC W17). REZI helps landlords find high quality, long-term tenants in 48 hours.

Friday, May 04, 09:29 UTC @ Planet Lisp

A few weeks ago, I attended the 2018 European Lisp Symposium. If you were at the 2017 iteration, you might (as I do) have been left with an abiding image of greyness. That was not at all to fault the location (Brussels) or the organization (co-located with ) of the symposium; however, the weather

Friday, May 04, 08:15 UTC @ Azimuth

David Wolpert of the Santa Fe Institute has set up a website on the thermodynamics of computation: • Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki. Here’s the idea: This website is the result of a successful meeting at SFI which brought together researchers from diverse disciplines including biology, computer science, physics, bioinformatics, and chemistry to discuss overlapping interesting […]

Friday, May 04, 00:34 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Speaking of popular podcast players and invasive user tracking, the latest update to Marco Arment’s Overcast has gone in the opposite direction: In most podcast apps, podcasts are downloaded automatically in the background. The only data sent to a podcast’s publisher about you or your behavior is your IP address and the app’s name. The IP address lets them derive your approximate region, but not much else. They don’t know exactly who you are, whether you listened, w

Friday, May 04, 00:30 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge: Pocket Casts, widely considered to be one of the best mobile apps for podcast listening, has been acquired by a collective group that includes NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago, and This American Life. […] Moving forward, Pocket Casts will operate as a joint venture between the new owners. Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic, who formed Shifty Jelly (Pocket Cast’

Friday, May 04, 00:22 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Shara Tibken, reporting last week for CNet: The company is working on a headset capable of running both AR and VR technology, according to a person familiar with Apple’s plans. Plans so far call for an 8K display for each eye — higher resolution than today’s best TVs — that would be untethered from a computer or smartphone, the person said. The project, codenamed T288, is still in its early stages but is slated for release in 2020. Apple still could chan

Thursday, May 03, 23:15 UTC @ Daring Fireball

MG Siegler on Apple’s decision to discontinue its AirPort product line: If Apple wants to get out of the wireless router business — a business they helped kickstart — fine. The problem is that they could have — and I’d argue, should have — been fundamentally changing this business for the better, in a way basically no other company can. I’ve written i

Thursday, May 03, 21:48 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Fantastic story in Businessweek by Kit Chellel: Veteran gamblers know you can’t beat the horses. There are too many variables and too many possible outcomes. Front-runners break a leg. Jockeys fall. Champion thoroughbreds decide, for no apparent reason, that they’re simply not in the mood. The American sportswriter Roger Kahn once called the sport “animated roulette.” Play for long enough, and failure isn’t just likely but inevitable — so the wisdom goes. “If you bet

Thursday, May 03, 20:17 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Thoroughly interesting and delightful, as usual. ★

Thursday, May 03, 17:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Nelly Porter, Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud; Jason Garms, Engineering Director, Google Cloud Security; Sergey Simakov, Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Security Protecting data is the number one consideration when running workloads in the cloud. While cloud infrastructures offer numerous security controls, some enterprises want additional verifiable

Thursday, May 03, 16:16 UTC @ x.ai

Amy + Andrew have always been effective gatekeepers of their bosses’ schedules. That said, if we’re being honest, sometimes the experience for their bosses’ meeting guests hasn’t been as smooth. Our automated scheduling has always saved our users significant amounts of time and money. Problem was, non-users were still ending up entangled in some back-and-forth.… The post A better AI scheduling experie

Thursday, May 03, 13:30 UTC @ Journal of Computational Geometry

Consider the following problem: Given a planar graph $G$, what is the maximum number $p$ such that $G$ has a planar straight-line drawing with $p$ collinear vertices? This problem resides at the core of several graph drawing problems, including universal point subsets, untangling, and column planarity. The following results are known for it: Every $n$-vertex planar graph has a planar straight-line drawing with $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ collinear vertices; for every $n$, there is an $n$-vertex planar graph whose

Thursday, May 03, 11:28 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

I come from Slovakia. Despite being a programer, I grew up and lived in the artist community of Bratislava. Nowadays, though, I am living in Switzerland. I knew that some of the artists from my home city have established ateliers in the old thread factory. Actually, I've spent quite a few days on the premises. But since I moved away, I've heard that the artists haven't managed to make a deal with the owner of the building and that they had to move away. I've also h

Thursday, May 03, 11:12 UTC @ Computational Complexity

The ACM Future of Computing Academy suggests that "peer reviewers should require that papers and proposals rigorously consider all reasonable broader impacts, both positive and negative." Here is the broader impacts section of a future imagined grant proposal. My latest cryptocurrency paper will allow people to sell all sorts of paraphernalia, illegal, immoral and fattening, while avoiding paying taxes. D

Thursday, May 03, 10:30 UTC @ Backreaction

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club By Eileen Pollack Beacon Press (15 Sep 2015) Eileen Pollack set out to become an astrophysicist but switched to a career in writing after completing her undergraduate degree. In “The Only Woman In The Room” she explores the difficulties she faced that eventually led her to abandon science as a profession. Pollack’s book is mostly

Thursday, May 03, 10:30 UTC @ Backreaction

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club By Eileen Pollack Beacon Press (15 Sep 2015) Eileen Pollack set out to become an astrophysicist but switched to a career in writing after completing her undergraduate degree. In “The Only Woman In The Room” she explores the difficulties she faced that eventually led her to abandon science as a profession. Pollack’s book is mostly

Thursday, May 03, 09:00 UTC @ Swift.org

We are delighted to announce a significant expansion of our Swift.org continuous integration testing system. Members of the Swift community have been hard at work to support Swift on a number of new platforms, and we have extended the Swift CI system to support community-hosted nodes for testing additional platforms. Community members can volunteer to host nodes for additional platforms and are responsible for maintaining the host system. New nodes can be initiated by creating a pull request at: <

Thursday, May 03, 07:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager, Security & Privacy; and Andy Chang, Product Manager, Security & Privacy Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of blog posts on container security at Google. If you suspect that a container has been compromised, what do you do? In today’s

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

Lobe is to CoreML what Illustrator was to PostScript — a profoundly powerful tool that exposes the underlying technology to non-experts through an intuitive visual interface.

Wednesday, May 02, 19:39 UTC @ Hacker Noon - Medium

Wednesday, May 02, 19:12 UTC @ Daring Fireball

I point this out from time to time, but the way most websites’ CMSes work is that an article’s URL slug — like the “juiced_headline_of_the_week” segment in this very post’s URL — are derived from the article’s original headline. But when a headline changes, the URL shouldn’t change unless you have a way to redirect traffic going to the old URL to the new one. Most websites don’t do that. So when they change a headline, you can still tell what th

Wednesday, May 02, 17:44 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

The usual hype machine is at work this week, with the usual mechanism: University press offices and grant agencies put out irresponsible hype about the work of one their faculty or grantees. In this case, it’s Taming the multiverse: Stephen … Continue reading →

Wednesday, May 02, 17:37 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Daniel Eran Dilger, last week at AppleInsider: Samsung didn’t say that its Display Panel segment turned in weaker results due to iPhone X. What the company actually reported in its earnings statement for the March quarter was that its DP “OLED Earnings declined due to weak demand and rising competition between Rigid OLED and LTPS LCD.” It also state

Wednesday, May 02, 14:32 UTC @ Indie Stack

Recently, as a consequence of working with the CGImageSource API, I found myself in a situation where I had hold of a CFNumber and wanted to get its value, as a CGFloat, in Swift. CFNumber wraps numeric values in such a way that, to get the value out, you have to specify both the desired … Continue reading Getting a CFNumber’s Value in Swift

Wednesday, May 02, 14:06 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) welcomes the following new Members who were elected during the annual ASF Members' Meeting on 20-22 March 2018: Anthony Baker, Bryan Bende, Steve Blackmon, Karsten Braeckelmann, Mark Bretl, Jesús Camacho Rodríguez, Jason Dai, Wido den Hollander, Deepak Dixit, Jonathan Eagles, Stefan Eissing, Deron Eriksson, Joey Frazee, Fabian Hueske, Furkan Kamaci, Holden Ka

Wednesday, May 02, 13:17 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Machine learning is transforming myriad aspects of our lives: our personal assistants, our shopping habits, our daily commutes—even our financial and healthcare systems. But AI models are not infallible: they may be vulnerable to adversarial attack, raising security concerns and potentially compromising people’s confidence in them. Just how vulnerable are they? Until recently, there was […] The post

Wednesday, May 02, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Researchers to study climate, environmental sciences I’m delighted to announce that Emory University, Far Eastern Federal University and Delft University have received grants to use the IBM World Community Grid to study research problems in climate and environmental sciences. Emory University Researchers from Emory University will investigate the impact of climate change on public health.  While the relationship […] The post

Wednesday, May 02, 10:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By JD Velásquez, Product Manager If you use Kubernetes, you know how much easier it makes it to build and deploy container-based applications. But that’s only one part of the challenge: you need to be able to inspect your application and underlying infrastructure to understand complex system interactions and debug failures, bottlenecks and other abnormal behavior—to ensure your application is always available, running fast, and doing w

Wednesday, May 02, 09:59 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Nicolas Lacasse, Software Engineer Containers have revolutionized how we develop, package, and deploy applications. However, the system surface exposed to containers is broad enough that many security experts don't recommend them for running untrusted or potentially malicious applications. A growing desire to run more heterogenous and less trusted workloa

Wednesday, May 02, 09:58 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Ed Anuff, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud APIs are the de-facto standard for building and connecting modern applications. But securely delivering, managing and analyzing APIs, data and services, both inside and outside an organization, is complex. And it’s getting even more challenging as enterprise IT environments grow dependent on combinations of public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. Choosing the right APIs can be

Wednesday, May 02, 09:25 UTC @ Y Combinator

Linda Xie is the cofounder of Scalar Capital, which is a cryptoasset management firm. Avichal Garg is a Managing Partner at Electric Capital, a digital asset management firm.

Wednesday, May 02, 01:00 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon from 2000 to 2011, has a new book. FierceWireless has an excerpt, ostensibly explaining why AT&T launched the original iPhone and Verizon didn’t. Spoiler: Apple was committed to GSM, and Verizon’s network was CDMA. Not that interesting a story, really. What is very interesting to me is this anecdote: Seidenberg was attending the annual media conference sponsored by the investment banking firm Allen & Co. in July 2006 when he

Wednesday, May 02, 00:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

10 years ago, I published a short blog entitled "Lisp, Jazz, Aikido", barely scratching the surface of what I found to be commonalities between the 3 disciplines. At the time, I had the intuition that those ideas were the tip of a potentially big iceberg, and I ended the blog with the following sentence: "I'd like to write a proper essay about these things when I find the time... someday." Well, 10 yea

Tuesday, May 01, 18:20 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

We are excited to announce that Gorilla Logic has joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) as a Consulting Partner. With a long history of successful AWS web services implementations, we are looking forward to working even more closely with AWS as an Amazon Web Services Partner. Being an APN member gives us an […] The post Gorilla Logic Joins Amazon Web Services

Tuesday, May 01, 17:30 UTC @ gilded : rust

Have you tried rewriting it in rust? Well I didn't expect the bloody Rust Evangelism Strike Force. bursts through conveniently placed door NOBODY EXPECTS THE RUST EVANGELISM STRIKE FORCE! Our chief feature is safety. Safety and speed. Our two main features are safety and speed. And fearless concurrency. Three! Our three main features are safety, speed, and fearless concurrency. And

Tuesday, May 01, 17:01 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, May 01, 16:12 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

HPC Deployment of QISKit The recent surge of interest in quantum computing is largely due to the approach of “quantum advantage,” a point at which quantum computers will exceed the capabilities of the largest classical supercomputers when applied to a relevant and important application use case. Conversely, quantum computing simulation is a vital component in […] The post An Open High-Performance Simula

Tuesday, May 01, 16:00 UTC @ Google Cloud Platform Blog

By Misha Brukman, Product Manager, Cloud Bigtable Today, we are introducing regional replication for Google Cloud Bigtable, our low latency, massively scalable NoSQL database for analytical and operational workloads. You can now easily replicate your Cloud Bigtable data set asynchronously across zones within a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reg

Tuesday, May 01, 14:45 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, May 01, 08:14 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Company Culture is your organisation’s operating system. Good company culture is more than a ping-pong table or beers on a Friday – it’s about creating an environment for your employees to thrive in. But how do you build that? And how do you scale it? This Business of Software Playlist is here to help answer […] The post How To Build Great Company Culture: A BoS Playlist a

Tuesday, May 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?

Tuesday, May 01, 01:55 UTC @ Planet Lisp

Matt Emerson opened the conference keynote talk on Clozure CL. He also touched on using and celebrating CL. It provided a jolt of enthusiasm and positivity to kick off a fun conference. And it made me want to use Clozure CL more often and learn how to effectively hack on and with it.Nicolas Hafner's talk on shaders was interesting, but partway through the talk he revealed that the slideshow system itself was an interactive Common Lisp program. Along with standard slideshow behavior, it displayed a

Tuesday, May 01, 00:53 UTC @ Daring Fireball

It’s no longer called “Marzipan”, almost certainly isn’t coming this year, and is probably a declarative user interface API.

Tuesday, May 01, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

In our latest Swift Talk series, Building a Form Library, we refactor a hand-coded settings form into a reusable, declarative library. In Episode 98, we carry out a refactoring that has often proved useful. Given multiple functions with the same set of parameters, we can extract those parameters into a separate type

Monday, April 30, 21:36 UTC @ Ole Begemann

Swift 4.1 has been out for a month, so I’m late to the party with this, but I wanted to point out what a significant step forward this release is for Swift. Conditional conformance Even if you never write a conditional protocol conformance yourself, having a more powerful type system is a huge deal for the standard library and other librarie

Monday, April 30, 19:47 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Various physics-related news: The LHC is back in business doing physics, with intensity ramp-up for the 2018 run ongoing. Today the machine is colliding 1551 bunches of protons, ultimate goal is to get to 2556 bunches. They are at least … Continue reading →

Monday, April 30, 18:32 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are made possible by blockchain technology but banking and payments aren’t the only industries that could be changed; a medium of exchange is only one of many possible applications. Simply explained, a blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger used to record transactions across a peer-to-peer network.  This may […] The post

Monday, April 30, 17:50 UTC @ Planet Lisp

New projects: bst — Binary search tree — GPL-3cl-colors2 — Simple color library for Common Lisp — Boost Software License - Version 1.0cl-env — Easily parse .env files. That's it! — MITcl-gopher — Gopher protocol library &mdas

Monday, April 30, 17:36 UTC @ John D. Cook

Tridiagonal matrices A tridiagonal matrix is a matrix that has nonzero entries only on the main diagonal and on the adjacent off-diagonals. This special structure comes up frequently in applications. For example, the finite difference numerical solution to the heat equation leads to a tridiagonal system. Another application, the one we’ll look at in detail […]

Monday, April 30, 16:59 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

IBM Research is a pioneer across many aspects of AI. At the 6th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2018), our team will share recent discoveries in learning data representations, techniques that are key to the success of machine learning algorithms. These techniques enable machine learning systems to automatically discover how to represent raw data […] The post Exploring Frontiers of AI

Monday, April 30, 15:52 UTC @ Backreaction

I spoke with Iulia Georgescu, who writes for the Nature Physics blog, about my upcoming book “Lost in Math.” The German version of the book now also has an Amazon page. It sells me as “Ketzer,” meaning “heretic.” Well, I guess I indeed make some blasphemous remarks about other people’s beliefs. Chris Lee has reviewed my book for Ars Technica. He bemoans it’s lacking dramatic turns of plot. Let

Monday, April 30, 15:52 UTC @ Backreaction

I spoke with Iulia Georgescu, who writes for the Nature Physics blog, about my upcoming book “Lost in Math.” The German version of the book now also has an Amazon page. It sells me as “Ketzer,” meaning “heretic.” Well, I guess I indeed make some blasphemous remarks about other people’s beliefs. Chris Lee has reviewed my book for Ars Technica. He bemoans it’s lacking dramatic turns of plot. Let

Monday, April 30, 15:18 UTC @ ACM Queue - Programming Languages

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case fo

Monday, April 30, 15:18 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case fo

Monday, April 30, 13:52 UTC @ John D. Cook

The latest blog post from Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP looks at the problem of finding relatively prime pairs of large numbers. In particular, they want a deterministic algorithm. They mention in passing that the probability of a set of k large integers being relatively prime (coprime) is 1/ζ(k) where ζ is the Riemann zeta function. This […]

Monday, April 30, 13:03 UTC @ Computational Complexity

I attended G4G13 (Gathering for Gardner- meeting 13). Martin Gardner was the Scientific American Mathematical Recreations columnist from 1956 until 1981. He had a great influence on many math-people of my generation. Most of the talks were 5 minutes so they could tell you a problem or thought of interest but not much more. This is GOOD in that I UNDERSTOOD most of the talks! There were also some talks on Magic and on science literacy (or perhaps science illiteracy) which were also interests

Monday, April 30, 09:13 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

The delegation pattern is common in many of Apple’s Cocoa API’s. When using it with Swift you create a class-only protocol that the delegate adopts. What I had not noticed was a subtle change in the way you declare a class-only protocol in Swift 4. Class-Only Protocols If you want a recap on using the delegate pattern see Quick Guide to Swift Delegates. Since Swift 4

Monday, April 30, 08:23 UTC @ Azimuth

Some of the talks at Applied Category Theory 2018 were videotaped by the Statebox team. You can watch them on YouTube: • David Spivak, A higher-order temporal logic for dynamical systems. Book available here and slides here. • Fabio Zanasi and Bart Jacobs, Categories in Bayesian networks. Paper available here. (Some sound missing; when you […]

Monday, April 30, 06:35 UTC @ composition.al

This year, I’m again serving as a co-chair of the Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation workshop, together with my friend Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. DSLDI will be held in Boston this November as part of SPLASH 2018. At last year’s DSLDI

Monday, April 30, 04:44 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Deferring or avoiding randomization Great Discoveries in STEM source Claude Bachet de Méziriac was a French mathematician of the early 1600s. He is the first person we know to have posed and solved the problem, given relatively prime (also called coprime) integers and , of finding integers and such that . Today we revisit some […]

Sunday, April 29, 11:37 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

The goal People who helped Jews during WWII are intriguing. They appear to be some kind of moral supermen. Observe how they had almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. Jewish property was confiscated early on and any portable assets Jews may have had have evaporated quickly. Helping Jews, after a short initial period, wasn't a way to get rich. Hoping for compensation after the war didn't work either. At the time it was not obvious that Nazis will los

Sunday, April 29, 10:28 UTC @ gilded : rust

I already know what a screwdriver can do that a hammer won't though. I don't know what python can do that rust won't.

Sunday, April 29, 00:00 UTC @ TED Blog

Thursday marked the first-ever TED en Español speaker event hosted by TED in its New York City office. The all-Spanish daytime event featured eight speakers, a musical performance, five short films and fifteen one-minute talks given by members of the audience. The New York event is just the latest addition to TED’s sweeping new Spanish-language […]

Sunday, April 29, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

I’ve been wondering how many things that I do, I do them because everyone does them. With everyone sharing how they do things, and pitching us their library, their work-style, or even their tools I think software engineers are strongly biased by external opinions, including me. Are you using VIPER because it’s a good fit for your project’s needs or because you saw a few companies using it? Are you using that library because it’s saving you time, or because you saw an example of how to use it and

Saturday, April 28, 16:36 UTC @ John D. Cook

What could be interesting about the lowly quadratic formula? It’s a formula after all. You just stick numbers into it. Well, there’s an interesting wrinkle. When the linear coefficient b is large relative to the other coefficients, the quadratic formula can give wrong results when implemented in floating point arithmetic. Quadratic formula and loss of precision The […]

Saturday, April 28, 08:36 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

Introduction I've recently stumbled upon Nathaniel Smith's article about structured concurrency. It's very nice, very readable and explains the entire problem from the basics, so if you have no idea what structured concurrency is go and read it. I've been dealing with the problem for many years and addressed it in several

Saturday, April 28, 01:27 UTC @ NSBlog

Markov chains make for a simple way to generate realistic looking but nonsensical text. Today, I'm going to use that technique to build a text generator based on this blog's contents, an idea suggested/inspired by reader Jordan Pittman. (Read More)

Saturday, April 28, 00:00 UTC @ Planet Lisp

My second video where I explain CLIM gadget abstraction. This is a live coding session which takes around 1h30m. Enjoy! If you like it - let me know. If you hate it - let me know. :-)

Friday, April 27, 19:07 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Sequential decision-making usually involves planning, acting, and learning about temporally extended courses of actions over different time scales. In the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, “options” (which represent pre-planned sequences of primitive actions) can accelerate learning and planning. But autonomously identifying good options, or “option discovery,” is still an open problem. “Eigenoptions” (which build upon representations […] The post

Friday, April 27, 16:29 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Farewell, April. Let's review what the Apache community has accomplished this past week: ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 16 May. Board calendar and minutes http://... ApacheCon™ –the ASF's official global conference series. - Join us at Apache Roadshow Eu

Friday, April 27, 15:38 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

A graph structure is extremely useful for predicting properties of its constituents. The most successful way of performing this prediction is to map each entity to a vector through the use of deep neural networks. One may infer the similarity of two entities based on the vector closeness. A challenge for deep learning, however, is […] The post A Scalable Deep Learning Approach for Massive Graphs app

Friday, April 27, 15:24 UTC @ Azimuth

Long before the invention of Feynman diagrams, engineers were using similar diagrams to reason about electrical circuits and more general networks containing mechanical, hydraulic, thermodynamic and chemical components. We can formalize this reasoning using ‘props’: a certain kind of categories whose objects are natural numbers, with the tensor product of objects given by addition. In […]

Friday, April 27, 11:18 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Vince Darley, VP of Growth, Deliveroo Vince drew on his significant experience as a data junkie to argue that we need to switch the obsession for seeking the coolest, newest predictive/learning models for an obsession with finding (usually simple) things that improve your business. There is, of course, a time and a place for fantastic, sophisticated models, but […] The post

Friday, April 27, 07:01 UTC @ Y Combinator

Patrick Moberg is the cofounder of Playdots, which is a mobile game studio in New York. Holly Liu is is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before that she cofounded the gaming company Kabam.

Thursday, April 26, 21:57 UTC @ John D. Cook

There was a discussion on Twitter today about a mistake calculus students make: I pointed out that it’s only off by one character: The first equation is simply wrong. The second is correct, but a gross violation of convention, using x as a constant and e as a variable.  

Thursday, April 26, 21:24 UTC @ joe cieplinski

A new version of Fin is now available from the App Store. It includes the usual set of bug fixes and enhancements, as well as a few new features centered around the end of timers. When a timer runs out in Fin, an animation sequence begins, with the screen fading

Thursday, April 26, 14:58 UTC @ Y Combinator

Y Combinator is heading to China for the first time with a live Startup School conference on May 19, 2018 at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Applications are open today.

Thursday, April 26, 14:11 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(On June 29th, co-located with STOC, there will be a workshop to celebrate Vijay Vazarani's 60th birthday. See here. As computer scientists shouldn't we use 64 as the milestone?) At Gathering for Gardner 13 Peter Winkler gave a great talk entitled Problems that Solve Themselves. (The title kind-of gives away how to solve it. And its just the kind of thing Peter Winkler would talk about. Hence I om

Thursday, April 26, 13:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

I’ve started a new Twitter account: @BasicStatistics. The new account is for people who are curious about statistics. It’s meant to be accessible to a wider audience than @DataSciFact. More Twitter accounts here.

Thursday, April 26, 11:08 UTC @ Business of Software USA

We hosted Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product Group last night in London for a talk based around the new edition of his book, Inspired: How to Make Tech Products Customers Love. Originally meant to be a slight update, Marty soon realized that the evolution of Product Management in the past 10 years called […] The post Marty Cagan on making better use of engineering

Thursday, April 26, 09:00 UTC @ Swift.org

A new implementation of implicitly unwrapped optionals (IUOs) landed in the Swift compiler earlier this year and is available to try in recent Swift snapshots. This completes the implementation of SE-0054 - Abolish ImplicitlyUnwrappedOptional Type. This is an important change to the language that eliminated some inconsistencies in type checking and clarified

Thursday, April 26, 07:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Five years ago, 1 February 2013, the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre was formally opened, bringing together a critical mass of computational scientists and engineers from STFC and IBM to reap economic benefits from advanced computer architectures and address important challenges for commercial businesses. Kirk E. Jordan, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief […] The post

Wednesday, April 25, 19:57 UTC @ TED Blog

Creating wide-scale change isn’t easy. It takes incredible passion around an issue, and smart ideas on how to move the needle and, hopefully, improve people’s lives. It requires bottomless energy, a dedicated team, an extraordinary amount of hope. And, of course, it demands real resources. TED would like to help, on the last part at […]

Wednesday, April 25, 15:23 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Wednesday, April 25, 15:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

Customers can provide ratings and reviews on the App Store to give feedback on their user experience and help others decide which apps to try. Tinybop, Zynga, Hopscotch, Tone It Up, 1 Second Everyday, and Pocket share how having a direct dialogue with customers on the App Store helps them improve their apps’ discoverability, encourage downloads, and build rapport with users.Watch the film

Wednesday, April 25, 14:29 UTC @ John D. Cook

Bernstein’s Matrix Mathematics is impressive. It’s over 1500 pages and weighs 5.3 pounds (2.4 kg). It’s a reference book, not the kind of book you just sit down to read. (Actually, I have sat down to read parts of it.) I’d used a library copy of the first edition, and so when Princeton University Press […]

Wednesday, April 25, 14:21 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

This installment of Research for Practice features a curated selection from Dan Crankshaw and Joey Gonzalez, who provide an overview of machine learning serving systems. What happens when we wish to actually deploy a machine learning model to production, and how do we serve predictions with high accuracy and high computational efficiency? Dan and Joey's selection provides a thoughtful selection of cutting-edge techniques spanning database-level integration, video processing, and prediction middleware. Given

Wednesday, April 25, 13:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

At IBM Research, we are using deep learning to explore new solutions for a range of health care challenges. One such challenge is emergency room (ER) overcrowding, which can lead to long wait times for treatment. Overcrowding results in part from people visiting the ER for non-emergency conditions rather than relying on primary physicians. Patients […] The post Using Deep Le

Wednesday, April 25, 08:14 UTC @ Y Combinator

Miles Brundage is an AI Policy Research Fellow with the Strategic AI Research Center at the Future of Humanity Institute. Tim Hwang is the Director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative.

Wednesday, April 25, 07:40 UTC @ Backreaction

For my 40th birthday I got a special gift: 2.5 σ evidence for quantum gravity. It came courtesy of Niayesh Afshordi, Professor of astrophysics at Perimeter Institute, and in contrast to what you might think he didn’t get the 2.5 σ on Ebay. No, he got it from a LIGO-data analysis, results of which he presented at the 2016 conference on “Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity.” Frankly I

Wednesday, April 25, 07:40 UTC @ Backreaction

For my 40th birthday I got a special gift: 2.5 σ evidence for quantum gravity. It came courtesy of Niayesh Afshordi, Professor of astrophysics at Perimeter Institute, and in contrast to what you might think he didn’t get the 2.5 σ on Ebay. No, he got it from a LIGO-data analysis, results of which he presented at the 2016 conference on “Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity.” Frankly I

Wednesday, April 25, 01:53 UTC @ John D. Cook

The Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse of a matrix is a way of coming up with something like an inverse for a matrix that doesn’t have an inverse. If a matrix does have an inverse, then the pseudoinverse is in fact the inverse. The Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse is also called a generalized inverse for this reason: it’s not just […]

Tuesday, April 24, 18:31 UTC @ John D. Cook

One of my complaints about math writing is that definitions are hardly ever subtractive, even if that’s how people think of them. For example, a monoid is a group except without inverses. But that’s not how you’ll see it defined. Instead you’ll read that it’s a set with an associative binary operation and an identity […]

Tuesday, April 24, 17:41 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

I’ve been trying to teach my computer to play Gin Rummy. Actually, it’s a simplified version of rummy that uses 7-card hands to simply race to “gin”. For the rules, see below. My hope is to learn more about machine learning, a long-time interest of mine that has recently become accessible to duffers like myself through […] The post Learning Machine Learning with Gin Rummy appeared f

Tuesday, April 24, 13:53 UTC @ Martin Fowler

As monolithic systems become too large to deal with, many enterprises are drawn to breaking them down into the microservices architectural style. It is a worthwhile journey, but not an easy one. My colleague Zhamak Dehghani has trod this

Tuesday, April 24, 12:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Farmers worldwide face mounting pressure to increase agricultural yields to keep up with human population growth. Consequently, chemical use is on the rise – in many cases a cocktail of chemicals, from fertilizers to herbicides to insecticides. But in countries where human population growth is highest, including China, South East Asia and South America, these […] The post New research sh

Tuesday, April 24, 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, April 24, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

In the Model-View-ViewModel chapter of our new book, App Architecture, we use RxSwift to create data transformation pipelines and bindings to UI elements. However, not everyone can, or wants to use a full reactive framework. With this in mind, we added an example to demonstrate how to create lightweight UI bindings using Key-Value-Observing and Swift’s key paths. First, we create a wrapper around the KVO API tailored to our use cas

Monday, April 23, 15:56 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(June 29th, co-located with STOC, will be a workshop to celebrate Vijay Vazarani's 60th birthday. As computer scientists shouldn't we use 64 as the milestone? See here for details about the workshop, not about 60 vs 64.) I will likely post a lot about Gathering For Gardner 13, but for now I will just give one problem I saw there. I will not say the speaker or the title of the talk as that might be a clue. I'll give the answer in my nex

Monday, April 23, 15:20 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Let me introduces MultiGitRepository - aka Git on steroids to you. I have seen a lot of confusion when it comes to working with multiple repositories and keeping them in orchestration, but I believe it is not that complex. Everything we learned about distributed version controls applies. However this time it has to be applied on a completely new level!

Monday, April 23, 11:59 UTC @ John D. Cook

A probability distribution is called “fat tailed” if its probability density goes to zero slowly. Slowly relative to what? That is often implicit and left up to context, but generally speaking the exponential distribution is the dividing line. Probability densities that decay faster than the exponential distribution are called “thin” or “light,” and densities that […]

Monday, April 23, 07:51 UTC @ Backreaction

I am giving (another) seminar in Heidelberg on Wednesday (April 25th), this time about my upcoming book. May 1st is a national holiday in Germany (labor day) and I’ll be off-grid due to family affairs for some days. May 7th to 9th I am in Stockholm to get yelled at (it’s complicated). On May 26th I am in Hay-on-Wye which is a village someplace UK that hosts an event called How The Light Gets

Monday, April 23, 07:51 UTC @ Backreaction

I am giving (another) seminar in Heidelberg on Wednesday (April 25th), this time about my upcoming book. May 1st is a national holiday in Germany (labor day) and I’ll be off-grid due to family affairs for some days. May 7th to 9th I am in Stockholm to get yelled at (it’s complicated). On May 26th I am in Hay-on-Wye which is a village someplace UK that hosts an event called How The Light Gets

Monday, April 23, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

There’s nothing more distracting than a push notification in the middle of a call, interview, or a pitch. Once you see it, even if you don’t know its content, you’ve lost your train of thought. You’ve likely also lost some respect amongst those with whom you were engaged before the notification, or at least shown them what is more important to you. Most apps give you one option: allow or disallow notifications. A few of the better apps offer quiet hours — time when the app won’t send

Sunday, April 22, 20:29 UTC @ John D. Cook

The Duffing equation is an ordinary differential equation describing a nonlinear damped driven oscillator. If the parameter μ were zero, this would be a damped driven linear oscillator. It’s the nonlinear x³ term that makes things nonlinear and interesting. Using an analog computer in 1961, Youshisuke Ueda discovered that this system was chaotic. It was […]

Sunday, April 22, 13:12 UTC @ x.ai

Editor’s note: this guest post is from our friends at Mailshake. Like us, they value maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of emails. Enjoy their list on the essential parts of your sales process you should automate to kill your team’s outdated sales rituals. Stay tuned for our follow up on their blog in May.   Research from… The post 7 parts of your sales process you should aut

Sunday, April 22, 11:27 UTC @ Recent commits to luajit-2.0

Contributed by Javier Guerra Giraldez.

Saturday, April 21, 16:57 UTC @ TED Blog

Earlier this week, I had the privilege and honor to plant trees with the daughter and granddaughter of environmentalist Wangari Maathai. In recognition of her life’s work promoting “sustainable development, democracy and peace,” Maathai received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. She was a lifelong activist who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977. At that […]

Saturday, April 21, 06:06 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

Some time ago I've written a blog post about modeling tradition. What I described, naively assuming it's something new, is an established concept of "common knowledge". It turns out that among game theorists the concept was, well, a common knowledge. The term was coined in 1969 by

Friday, April 20, 21:35 UTC @ John D. Cook

The first post in this series looked at a possible formula for the shape of an egg, how to fit the parameters of the formula, and the curvature of the shape at each end of the egg. The second post looked at the volume. This post looks at the surface area. If you rotate the […]

Friday, April 20, 17:34 UTC @ tecosystems

The last time we hired an analyst at RedMonk, we got an interesting question from one of our interviewees: interview question this morning: “you guys are redmonk: why don’t you simply require X years of analyst experience on the job application?” — steve o'grady (@sogrady) May 22, 2015 It’s an understandable question. Certainly restricting ourselves

Friday, April 20, 17:34 UTC @ tecosystems

The last time we hired an analyst at RedMonk, we got an interesting question from one of our interviewees: interview question this morning: “you guys are redmonk: why don’t you simply require X years of analyst experience on the job application?” — steve o'grady (@sogrady) May 22, 2015 It’s an understandable question. Certainly restricting ourselves

Friday, April 20, 12:53 UTC @ Y Combinator

Claire McDonnell is cofounder and COO of True Link Financial (YC S13). Jennifer Kim is currently advising startups. Prior to that she was the Head of Employee Experience and Development at Lever (YC S12). Kat Manalac is a partner at YC.

Friday, April 20, 11:51 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Happy Friday! Activities from the Apache community over the past week include: ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 16 May. Board calendar and minutes http://... ApacheCon™ –the ASF's official global conference series. - Join us at Apache Roadshow Europe/Berlin 11

Friday, April 20, 07:02 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

More than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live off the energy grid and 80 percent of Africa is un-electrified, according to the South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI). Similar to how Africa has leapt over telephone lines directly to mobile phones and are jumping over physical money to digital, the continent also has […] The post New IBM Research App Shines a Light on So

Friday, April 20, 02:06 UTC @ John D. Cook

The previous post looked at an equation to fit the shape of an egg. In two dimensions we had In this post, we’ll rotate that curve around the x-axis to find the volume. Then we’ll see how it compares to that of an ellipsoid. If we rotate the graph of a function f(x) around the x-axis with x ranging […]

Thursday, April 19, 23:03 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Thursday, April 19, 21:43 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My Nobel Dream Bit the Dust. Some reviews … Continue reading →

Thursday, April 19, 15:46 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Anil Dash, CEO, Fog Creek Anil discusses the challenges of stepping into a leadership role in what is perhaps one of the best-known software companies the public probably haven’t heard of. FogBugz, Stack Overflow and Trello are all products that have come out of the Fog Creek stable. This year, they unleashed Glitch to the […] The post Evolving a Mature Softwa

Thursday, April 19, 11:42 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Thursday, April 19, 08:30 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

In today’s interconnected world, an incredible amount of data is being sensed, uploaded and stored for analysis. While the resulting enormous data sets are a valuable engine of innovation, they also present new challenges to data analysis for researchers and businesses. It is critical that data privacy is maintained and that a framework is in place to […] The post Data privacy frame

Thursday, April 19, 06:49 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Using Default Listener Methods is perfectly fine! Those who remember my recent arguments against using DefaultMethods in APIs maybe the surprised by this statement, but it has to be made. Looks like using

Wednesday, April 18, 16:55 UTC @ Backreaction

My editor always said “Don’t read reviews”... But given that I’ve received some pretty amazing reviews lately, how bad could it be? Nature even made a delightfully whimsical custom-illustration of my conjecture: that some of my fellow astronomers look to the skies for the Nobel Prize: Illustration by Stephan Schmitz for Nature. When I saw Sabine had finally gotten round to reading my book,

Wednesday, April 18, 16:55 UTC @ Backreaction

My editor always said “Don’t read reviews”... But given that I’ve received some pretty amazing reviews lately, how bad could it be? Nature even made a delightfully whimsical custom-illustration of my conjecture: that some of my fellow astronomers look to the skies for the Nobel Prize: Illustration by Stephan Schmitz for Nature. When I saw Sabine had finally gotten round to reading my book,

Wednesday, April 18, 14:06 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Open Source workflow scheduler for Apache Hadoop used to build complex Big Data transformations. Wakefield, MA —18 April 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® OozieTM v5.0.0, the workflow scheduler for Apache Hadoop. Apache Oozie is a sc

Wednesday, April 18, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

How would you fit an equation to the shape of an egg? This site suggests an equation of the form Note that if k = 0 we get an ellipse. The larger the parameter k is, the more asymmetric the shape is about the y-axis. Let’s try that out in Mathematica: ContourPlot[ x^2/16 + y^2 (1 + 0.1 […]

Wednesday, April 18, 10:45 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

** Note: The development team was also formed by Andres Palavicini and Luis Diego Carvajal. In today’s world, AWS is becoming an essential development skill. If you already know a little about it, you can identify its biggest advantage: you do what’s important for your business while we take care of where and how it […] The post In Search of Happiness: A Quick ETL Us

Wednesday, April 18, 07:25 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Late last year Nairobi-based Twiga Foods, a business-to-business logistics platform for kiosks and food stalls in Africa, was looking to expand its logistic services into a total market ecosystem by adding financial services for its clients. Grant Brooke, co-founder the $13 million start-up explains, “Previously, we were focused on helping farmers distribute bananas, tomatoes, onions and […] The post IBM

Wednesday, April 18, 05:47 UTC @ Azimuth

Here are links to the slides and videos for most of the talks from this workshop: • Applied Category Theory: Bridging Theory & Practice, March 15–16, 2018, NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. Organized by Spencer Breiner and Eswaran Subrahmanian. They give a pretty good picture of what went on. Spencer Breiner put them up here; what […]

Wednesday, April 18, 01:00 UTC @ Daring Fireball

There’s a difference between copying an idea and copying an implementation of that idea.

Wednesday, April 18, 00:00 UTC @ Daring Fireball

Everyone does not do it, and the companies who do original design work are not ripped off in equal measure.

Tuesday, April 17, 22:04 UTC @ Ernie's 3D Pancakes

SAFETOC As promised, an ad-hoc committee of theoretical computer scientists has been formed to combat harassment and discrimination. Here is the committee's charter: "We are setting an ad-hoc committee to draft a proposal for joint ToC measures to combat discrimination,...

Tuesday, April 17, 21:37 UTC @ TED Blog

Cartier believes in the power of bold ideas to empower local initiatives to have global impact. To celebrate Cartier’s dedication to launching the ideas of female entrepreneurs into concrete change, TED has curated a special session of talks around the theme “Bold Alchemy” for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, featuring a selection of favorite TED speakers.

Tuesday, April 17, 19:35 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, April 17, 16:53 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Tuesday, April 17, 15:07 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Today, we are entering the era of cognitive computing, which holds great promise in deriving intelligence and knowledge from huge volumes of data. One of the biggest challenges in using these huge volumes of data is the fundamental design of today’s computers, which are based on the von Neumann architecture, requiring data to be shuttled […] The post

Tuesday, April 17, 12:00 UTC @ John D. Cook

I said something about Perl 6 the other day, and someone replied asking whether anyone actually uses Perl 6. My first thought was I bet more people use Perl 6 than Haskell, and it’s well known that people use Haskell. I looked at the TIOBE Index to see whether that’s true. I won’t argue how […]

Tuesday, April 17, 10:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Recent years have seen tremendous advances in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Modern AI systems achieve human-level performance on cognitive tasks such as recognizing objects in images, annotating videos, converting speech to text, or translating between different languages. Many of these breakthrough results are based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNNs are complex machine […] The post

Tuesday, April 17, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Tuesday, April 17, 07:00 UTC @ brucknerite

—Sol cuatrocientos setenta y nueve. Diez de marzo de dos mil cincuenta y ocho, domingo. Las veintitrés treinta y cuatro MTC. Soleado. Temperatura menos treinta y cuatro grados Celsius. Presión atmosférica, cuatro coma seis hectopascales. No está mal para un día de otoño tan avanzado. —Ordenador, pon otra vez el Kyrie de la misa en … Continúa leyendo Fin

Tuesday, April 17, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

When we find ourselves repeating code on both the left-hand and right-hand side of an assignment operator, it is often a hint that we could be using a mutating method instead (for example, we could use toggle on Bool). Consider the following example: struct User { var favorites: [String] } var users = [ "ida": User(favorites: ["https://... ]

Monday, April 16, 23:03 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(STOC 2018 will offer child care for the first time. I was emailed the following and asked to pass it on: We are pleased to announce that we will provide pooled, subsidized child care at STOC 2018. The cost will be $40 per day per child for regular conference attendees, and $20 per day per child for students. For more detailed information, including how to register for STOC 2018 childcare, see http://...

Monday, April 16, 16:57 UTC @ Planet Lisp

See: https://... As a Common Lisp Developer, you will be part of the Analytics team which is in charge of the development and maintenance of applications that, among other things, extract data from incoming news and deliver user and machine-friendly analytics to customers. You will be reporting directly to the Analytics Manager and will work with an international

Monday, April 16, 15:00 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Our understanding of single-molecule electronics has become clearer and the answer involved using a common household item – salt. Building off of a previous paper in 2009, where IBM scientists and collaborators demonstrated the ability to measure the charge state of individual atoms using noncontact atomic force microscopy (AFM), they have now taken it a […] The post IBM Scientists Measure the Ene

Monday, April 16, 12:35 UTC @ Backreaction

Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor Brian Keating W. W. Norton & Company (April 24, 2018) Brian Keating hasn’t won a Nobel Prize. Who doesn’t know the feeling? But Keating, professor of physics at UC San Diego, isn’t like you and I. He had a good shot at winning. Or at least he thought he had. And that’s what his book is about.

Monday, April 16, 12:35 UTC @ Backreaction

Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor Brian Keating W. W. Norton & Company (April 24, 2018) Brian Keating hasn’t won a Nobel Prize. Who doesn’t know the feeling? But Keating, professor of physics at UC San Diego, isn’t like you and I. He had a good shot at winning. Or at least he thought he had. And that’s what his book is about.

Monday, April 16, 10:27 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Stack views can save you a lot of time when creating constraints. Unfortunately they are not without problems especially when using multi-line labels. Here is one situation where I think you should skip stack views and create your own constraints. Take a look at this layout with a text label and a switch. In portrait on an iPhone the text wraps over several lines:

Monday, April 16, 10:00 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Open Source version control system ranked among leaders in $970MM+ market Wakefield, MA —16 April 2018— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® Subversion® v1.10.0, the popular centralized software version control system. With Apache Subversion, files and

Sunday, April 15, 21:38 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

This last week has been very exciting. On Thursday, I gave a talk in absentia at the 13th Gathering for Gardner on the topic of artificial life (thanks go to Dave Greene and Tom Rokicki for playing the slides and … Continue reading →

Sunday, April 15, 20:46 UTC @ John D. Cook

Researchers have discovered that for some problems, deep neural networks (DNNs) can get by with low precision weights. Using fewer bits to represent weights means that more weights can fit in memory at once. This, as well as embedded systems, has renewed interest in low-precision floating point. Microsoft mentioned its proprietary floating point formats ms-fp8 and […]

Sunday, April 15, 15:22 UTC @ joe cieplinski

While the toolset is inaccessible, its inclusion in watchOS 4.3.1 suggests Apple is at least considering opening that section of NanoTimeKit to outside app makers. Whether a full-featured watch face customization toolset will ship to developers in a future version of watchOS, perhaps watchOS 5, remains unknown. via

Saturday, April 14, 23:16 UTC @ TED Blog

More than 100 speakers — activists, scientists, adventurers, change-makers and more — took the stage to give the talk of their lives this week in Vancouver at TED2018. One blog post could never hope to hold all of the extraordinary wisdom they shared. Here’s a (shamelessly inexhaustive) list of the themes and highlights we heard […]

Saturday, April 14, 20:14 UTC @ TED Blog

What a week. We’ve heard so much, from dystopian warnings to bold visions for change. Our brains are full. Almost. In this session we pull back to the human stories that underpin everything we are, everything we want. From new ways to set goals and move business forward, to unabashed visions for joy and community, […]

Saturday, April 14, 17:18 UTC @ TED Blog

A monumental part of what brings the TED conference to life is the speakers and the amazing ideas they share on the TED stage. But here’s a riddle: What also shares the spotlight with each person who spends their 3 to 18 minutes speaking on the red dot? The magnificent session art, of course! TED […]

Saturday, April 14, 16:45 UTC @ Indie Stack

I was alerted by Christian Tietze of a pretty bad usability bug in macOS High Sierra. If you are running a Mac app, click the “Help” menu, and then dismiss it, whatever UI element you were focused on in the app loses its focus and does not regain it after dismissing the menu. The problem … Continue reading Helpless Help Menu →

Saturday, April 14, 14:30 UTC @ TED Blog

For the TED conference this year, we wanted to entertain attendees between talks — and support and encourage up-and-coming filmmakers. Meet TEDFilms, a new program for promoting the creation of original short films. Executive-produced by Sinéad McDevitt and led up by TED’s director of Production and Video Operations, Mina Sabet, the short films acted as a […

Saturday, April 14, 14:00 UTC @ TED Blog

Even in the Age of Amazement, sometimes you need a break between talks packed with fascinating science, tech, art and so much more. That’s where interstitials come in: short videos that entertain and intrigue, while allowing the brain a moment to reset and ready itself to absorb more information. For this year’s conference, TED commissioned […]

Saturday, April 14, 05:35 UTC @ TED Blog

Three sessions of memorable TED Talks covering life, death and the future of humanity made the penultimate day of TED2018 a remarkable space for tech breakthroughs and dispatches from the edges of culture. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the conference […]

Saturday, April 14, 05:03 UTC @ TED Blog

It’s only fitting that the chair which serves as the focal point of the Steelcase exhibit space at TED2018 was inspired, in part, by a TED Talk. Back at TED2009, Steelcase VP of Global Design and Product Engineering James Ludwig saw athlete and Paralympian Aimee Mullins speak about her different prostheses (TED Talk: My 12 […]

Saturday, April 14, 03:02 UTC @ TED Blog

​Sketches that speak volumes. When illustrator Christoph Niemann wakes up after falling asleep on an airplane, he says, “I have the most terrible taste in my mouth that cannot be described with words … But it can be drawn.” Then he shows a spot-on sketch of an outstretched tongue with a dead-fish-rat-hybrid creature on it. […]

Saturday, April 14, 01:26 UTC @ TED Blog

New York, NY (April 13, 2018)—TED announced today that its highly acclaimed Star Plus TV prime-time series TED Talks India: Nayi Soch, a Hindi-language TV and digital series hosted by Shah Rukh Khan which premiered last fall, has been renewed for three more seasons. The first season, which featured speakers delivering inspiring and informative talks

Friday, April 13, 22:27 UTC @ TED Blog

Here onstage at TED2018, futurist Ray Kurzweil has just formally announced a new way to query the text inside books using something called semantic search — which is a search on ideas and concepts, rather than specific words. Called TalkToBooks, the beta-stage product uses an experimental AI to query a database of 120,000 books in […]

Friday, April 13, 21:56 UTC @ TED Blog

“It’s my belief that trust is the foundation for everything we do,” says Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “and that if we can learn to trust on another more, we can have unprecedented human progress.” What to do, then, when trust is broken? In companies, there are many reasons that a rupture can happen. […]

Friday, April 13, 21:15 UTC @ TED Blog

During the week of TED, it’s tempting to feel like a brain in a jar — to think on a highly abstracted, intellectual, hypertechnical level about every single human issue. But the speakers in this session remind us that we’re still just made of meat. And that our carbon-based life forms aren’t problems to be […]

Friday, April 13, 19:53 UTC @ TED Blog

Back in 2014, Will Marshall took the TED stage to introduce us to his company, Planet, and their proposed fleet of tiny satellites. The goal: to image the planet every day, showing us how Earth changes in near-real time. In 2018, that vision has come good: Every day, a fleet of about 200 small satellites […]

Friday, April 13, 19:23 UTC @ TED Blog

The seven speakers lived up to the two words in the title of the session. Their talks showcased both our collective insanity — the algorithmically-assembled extremes of the Internet — and our humanity — the values and desires that extremists astutely tap into — along with some speakers combining the two into a glorious salad. […]

Friday, April 13, 18:38 UTC @ TED Blog

Assembled by our tech curator Alex Moura, six exhibits around the theater explore the hands-on, playful and human side of tech. Every exhibit is in some way touchable, relatable — not a piece of shiny gear in a plexiglas box but instead something to step into and be part of and play with. Meet our […]

Friday, April 13, 18:00 UTC @ TED Blog

What do you imagine your phone doing for you in the future? Sure, you can take calls, send texts, use apps and surf the internet. But according to Samsung, the next corner for mobile engagement could turn your cell phone into a superhero (of sorts) in industries like public safety and healthcare. 5G technology will […]

Friday, April 13, 15:52 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

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

Friday, April 13, 13:39 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Hello, Friday. Let's look back on our Apache activities over the past week: Success at Apache –a monthly blog series that focuses on the processes behind why the ASF "just works". - Am I there yet? A n00b's perspective by Charles Givre https://... ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 18 April. Boar

Friday, April 13, 12:01 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Every two years in Atlanta, recreational mathematicians gather to honor Martin Gardner, whose Scientific American column Mathematical Games through the 60's and the 70's. Those columns inspired budding mathematicians of a certain age including Bill and I. Bill came down to this years Gathering for Gardner 13. Talks are only six minutes long. Bill talked on the Muffin Problem right af

Thursday, April 12, 19:53 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

It’s no secret that Gorilla Logic provides the very best outsourced software development engineers.  Clients bring us their most complex IT projects, knowing that the average code slinger won’t be up to the task. How do we find the top talent to fit their needs?  Download the Infographic to see how our proven process and […] The post Providing the Best Outsourced Software De

Thursday, April 12, 16:22 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Half of IBM’s 2018 Fellows Hail from IBM Research For more than 70 years, IBM Research has defined the future of technology for IBM. Today, we lead the way forward in AI, blockchain, quantum computing and cybersecurity, thanks to critical foundational research conducted across our global labs. This defining moment in IBM’s transformation is made […] The post IBM Names 2018 Fellows, Including F

Thursday, April 12, 16:20 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Various mathematics-related news: The Perimeter Institute has been moving towards an increased engagement with mathematics and mathematicians in recent years. Matilde Marcolli and Ben Webster are now joining them as Associate Faculty. Quanta magazine has an excellent article by Kevin … Continue reading →

Thursday, April 12, 15:57 UTC @ tecosystems

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Cloudera held its annual gathering for industry analysts. The setting was lovely Santa Monica, though the packed schedule didn’t exactly accommodate time at the beach just outside. Over the course of two days, a room full of analysts covering the company were walked through the past, present and

Thursday, April 12, 15:57 UTC @ tecosystems

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Cloudera held its annual gathering for industry analysts. The setting was lovely Santa Monica, though the packed schedule didn’t exactly accommodate time at the beach just outside. Over the course of two days, a room full of analysts covering the company were walked through the past, present and

Thursday, April 12, 02:12 UTC @ Miguel de Icaza

My friend Aras recently wrote the same ray tracer in various languages, including C++, C# and the upcoming Unity Burst compiler. While it is natural to expect C# to be slower than C++, what was interesting to me was that Mono was so much slower than .NET Core. The numbers that he posted did not l

Thursday, April 12, 00:08 UTC @ Dr. Randal S. Olson

Last week, Antonio S. Chinchón made an interesting post showing how to create a traveling salesman portrait in R. Essentially, the idea is to sample a bunch of dark pixels in an image, solve the well-known traveling salesman problem for…Read more ›

Thursday, April 12, 00:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

With the recent release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, the first time users launch an app that does not support 64-bit they will see an alert that the app is not optimized for their Mac.As a reminder, new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must support 64-bit, and starting June 2018, app updates and existing apps must support 64-bit. If you distribute your apps outside the Mac App Store, we highly recommend distributing 64-bit binaries to make sure your users can continue to run your apps on future versions

Wednesday, April 11, 04:00 UTC @ ImperialViolet

In 2016, my colleague, Matt Braithwaite, ran an experiment in Google Chrome which integrated a post-quantum key-agreement primitive (NewHope) with a standard, elliptic-curve one (X25519). Since that time, the submissions for the 1st round of

Wednesday, April 11, 02:19 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

It makes a fellow proud to be a nerd Tasmanian Archive source Tom Lehrer is Emeritus Lecturer in Mathematics at Cowell College of the University of Santa Cruz. He is listed not in the Mathematics Department but in Humanities, for which he also lectured on musical theater. He was my first witness that effective input […]

Wednesday, April 11, 00:00 UTC @ Pedro Piñera

There’s something that has been happening to me lately, and that I’m struggling with: having focus. While this wasn’t a problem a few years ago, and I was able to sit down and work on one thing at a time without distractions, I can’t do that anymore. It might be that I’m getting older, or that I ambitiously pushed myself beyond my limits. The fact is that this started affecting me, losing motivation for things, and feeling exhausted with technology overall. I found mysel

Tuesday, April 10, 23:37 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

by Charles Givre Let me start out by saying that I am not a developer. I do have a technical background, but I hadn't coded in Java for at least 10 years before I got involved in the Apache Drill project. One has to wonder how, as a non-developer, I ended up as a committer for the Drill project. In this blog post, I'd like to share with you how I came to be involved with the Drill project. But first, why Drill?

Tuesday, April 10, 17:59 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

  Introducing Gorilla Labs, an environment of discovery, research, risk-taking, and using Agile’s best practices to develop groundbreaking projects with the latest technology trends and delivering solutions with a marketable potential. At the Labs, Gorillas aren’t just between projects; they’ll be pushing themselves beyond their limits. I’ll give you a quick overview of 5 different projects […] The post

Tuesday, April 10, 16:03 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

Today, much of the knowledge we have in biology and medicine is derived from the ability to detect analytes from complex biological samples, such as blood and urine. This knowledge, in the form of data, is vital for patient diagnostics. For more than a decade, IBM scientists have taken their years of experience from the […] The post Mastering the Flow of Tiny Biological Liquids with Elect

Tuesday, April 10, 15:55 UTC @ Business of Software USA

What is an Inflection Point? And how can Software Companies take advantage of them? Yesterday’s hangout demonstrated that Rita Gunther McGrath and Michael Sikorsky are two of the smartest minds we’ve had at BoS. We had a fascinating discussion about Inflection points, and how software companies can take advantage of them to innovate and take the […] The post

Tuesday, April 10, 14:09 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

That a system can randomly jam doesn't just indicate a serious bug in the system; it is also a major source of risk. You don't say what your distributed job-control system controls, but let's just say I hope it's not something with significant, real-world side effects, like a power station, jet aircraft, or financial trading system. The risk, of course, is that the system will jam, not when it's convenient for someone to add a dummy job to clear the jam, but during some operation that could cause data loss

Tuesday, April 10, 13:32 UTC @ Backreaction

A smear with dots,  also known as NGC 5264-HST. Did you really have to ask? And if you had to ask, why did you have to ask me? You sent me like two million messages and comments and emails asking what I think about NGC 1052-DF2, that galaxy which supposedly doesn’t contain dark matter. Thanks. I am very flattered by your faith. But I’m not an astrophysicist, I’m a theorist. I invent

Tuesday, April 10, 13:32 UTC @ Backreaction

A smear with dots,  also known as NGC 5264-HST. Did you really have to ask? And if you had to ask, why did you have to ask me? You sent me like two million messages and comments and emails asking what I think about NGC 1052-DF2, that galaxy which supposedly doesn’t contain dark matter. Thanks. I am very flattered by your faith. But I’m not an astrophysicist, I’m a theorist. I invent

Tuesday, April 10, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

Sometimes we want to compute the same expression twice in a function. For example, here’s a simplified version of some XML parsing code we recently wrote: func parseElement(name: String, text: String) { if name == "trk" { let t = text.trimmingCharacters(in: .whitespaces) // process element } else if name == "ele" { let elevationText = text.trimmingCharacters(in: .whitespaces) guard let elevation = Int(elevationText) else { return }

Monday, April 09, 21:52 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

Previously, we discussed Homotopy Type Theory, which is an alternative foundation of mathematics with several advantages over ZFC, mainly for computer-assisted proofs. It is based on Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory, but with the idea that types are spaces, terms are … Continue reading →

Monday, April 09, 17:57 UTC @ x.ai

Thinking about using AI to solve a business problem? Follow our practical guide to get the best-possible value from any AI investment. With our AI scheduling assistants surpassing the 10M email mark back in mid-January, we know a thing or two about maximizing the value of our AI for the businesses we serve. A lot… The post Leveraging AI for Business appeared first on x.ai.

Monday, April 09, 05:26 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(An exposition of Nash-Williams's proof of the Kruskal Tree Theorem is here) Andrew Vazsonyi (the mathematician, see here, not the folklorist, see here for that folklorist's wife) conjectured that the set of trees, under the minor ordering, is a well quasi order. I do not know when he made

Monday, April 09, 04:05 UTC @ Complex Projective 4-Space

Tim Hutton recently presented me with a marvellous 3D-printed-graphite set of triakis truncated tetrahedra. These have a natural interpretation as the Voronoi cells of a diamond: the shapes that would form if you gradually enlarged the atoms until they tessellate … Continue reading →

Saturday, April 07, 15:40 UTC @ Indie Stack

Objective-C developers are comfortable with many idioms that fall out of the safety of messaging nil. For example, consider a chunk of Objective-C code that tests the “emptiness” of a UITextField string: if (myTextField.text.length == 0) { // Do something } If myTextField.text is nil, what happens? In Objective-C, a message sent to nil will … Continue reading Optional Emptiness

Saturday, April 07, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD News Flash

Friday, April 06, 18:18 UTC @ Martin Fowler

Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim have just published their book Accelerate. I think this will be the most important software book this year (yes more than

Friday, April 06, 13:27 UTC @ The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Here comes April with quite a few Apache activities: ASF Board –management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws. - Next Board Meeting: 18 April. Board calendar and minutes http://... ApacheCon™ –the ASF's official global conference series. - Three official Apache events will be taking place this year: 1) Apa

Friday, April 06, 10:27 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

What does term Frontend mean to you? Tell us! --JaroslavTulach 10:27, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Thursday, April 05, 21:44 UTC @ Gorilla Logic

The first part of this series introduced NFC Technology and current capabilities of mobile NFC on the two most used platforms, Android and iOS.  In this second part of the series, a proof of concept app has been built on Android to demonstrate possible usages of a mobile app NFC capable, as well review Android capabilities in […] The post Mobile NFC: A Practical Use Case Part II appeared fi

Thursday, April 05, 21:31 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Thursday, April 05, 17:59 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

Way back in 2005, soon after the emergence of the “String Landscape” and the ensuing debate over whether this made string theory untestable pseudo-science, Cumrun Vafa in response started writing about the “Swampland”. In contrast to the “Landscape” of effective … Continue reading →

Thursday, April 05, 14:49 UTC @ Computational Complexity

Recall that in a prior post I asked Is there an NFA for { ay : y ≠ 1000 } with substantially less than 1000 states. I will now show that any NFA for this set requires 999 states, so essntially 1000. The proof uses Ramsey Theory. I will tell you the little bit of Ramsey Theory that you need. NO- the above is false. There is an NFA with 60 states. I have a complete exposition

Thursday, April 05, 04:01 UTC @ IBM Blog Research

There’s no denying it – we’re approaching the dawn of the commercial quantum era – a formative period when quantum computing and its early use cases rapidly develop. Predictably, hype is setting in around the potential for quantum computing to impact our world, as media, VC firms, investors, and the general public continue to learn […] The post IBM Collaborating With T

Thursday, April 05, 01:44 UTC @ Miguel de Icaza

This was driving me insane. For years, I have been using Command-Shift-4 to take screenshots on my Mac. When you hit that keypress, you get to select a region of the screen, and the result gets placed on your ~/Desktop directory. Recently, the feature stopped working. I first blamed Dropbox settings, but that was not it. I read every article on the internet on how to change the default location, restart the SystemUIServer. The screencapture

Wednesday, April 04, 19:32 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

I noticed today that the final volume of Raoul Bott’s collected papers, which Loring Tu has been working on editing for quite a while, has finally appeared. The Springer webpage for the book is here, and its content is available … Continue reading →

Wednesday, April 04, 17:05 UTC @ Signal v. Noise - Medium

Wednesday, April 04, 15:00 UTC @ News - Apple Developer

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

Wednesday, April 04, 14:16 UTC @ APIDesign - Blogs

Recently I observed an incompatible API change and I received following explanation: Everything is OK, my ContinuousIntegration server is still green! In a shock I decided to write a philippic against ContinuousIntegration. If you have to fix your tests in a significant way after making a change to y

Wednesday, April 04, 13:00 UTC @ Business of Software USA

Josh Seiden is the co-author of Lean UX and Sense & Respond. Last Tuesday we sat down to discuss ‘Sense & Respond’, and how it can help product teams to produce better results. We had some great questions to discuss including: How Sense & Respond can be used in small companies (and why it’s different to Lean); […] The post Sense & Respond | Hangout with Josh

Wednesday, April 04, 12:55 UTC @ ACM Queue - All Queue Content

Most websites use JavaScript libraries, and many of them are known to be vulnerable. Understanding the scope of the problem, and the many unexpected ways that libraries are included, are only the first steps toward improving the situation. The goal here is that the information included in this article will help inform better tooling, development practices, and educational efforts for the community.

Wednesday, April 04, 12:55 UTC @ ACM Queue - Programming Languages

Most websites use JavaScript libraries, and many of them are known to be vulnerable. Understanding the scope of the problem, and the many unexpected ways that libraries are included, are only the first steps toward improving the situation. The goal here is that the information included in this article will help inform better tooling, development practices, and educational efforts for the community.

Wednesday, April 04, 10:29 UTC @ Backreaction

Collider quilt. By Kate Findlay. [Image: Symmetry Magazine] Nigel Lockyer, the director of Fermilab, recently spoke to BBC about the benefits of building a next larger particle collider, one that reaches energies higher than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Such a new collider could measure more precisely the properties of the Higgs-boson. But that’s not all, at least according to Lockyer.

Wednesday, April 04, 10:29 UTC @ Backreaction

Collider quilt. By Kate Findlay. [Image: Symmetry Magazine] Nigel Lockyer, the director of Fermilab, recently spoke to BBC about the benefits of building a next larger particle collider, one that reaches energies higher than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Such a new collider could measure more precisely the properties of the Higgs-boson. But that’s not all, at least according to Lockyer.

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

Wednesday, April 04, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Wednesday, April 04, 08:00 UTC @ FreeBSD Security Advisories

Tuesday, April 03, 18:00 UTC @ Computational Complexity

(Added later- a reader left a comment pointing to a paper with the answer and saying that the problem is not original. My apologies- upon rereading I can see why one would think I was claiming it was my problem. It is not. I had heard the result was folklore but now I have a source! So I thank the commenter and re-iterate that I am NOT claiming it is my problem.) Consider the language {L = ai : i ≠ 1000 } There is a DFA for L of size 1002

Tuesday, April 03, 11:45 UTC @ Quality Coding

When you refactor, do you have unit tests covering you? …If not, why not? …If so, how do you know? To me, it seems that the state of refactoring has gotten worse across the industry. Both managers and programmers and managers say the word “refactoring” more than ever. But they almost always mean, “I’m going […]

Tuesday, April 03, 11:31 UTC @ Backreaction

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth Jim Baggott Pegasus Books (1 Aug 2013) Not sure how I missed “Farewell to Reality” when it came out. Indeed, I didn’t take note of Jim Baggott’s writing until I was asked to review one of his more recent books for Physics World. And having enjoyed that, I had a look at his previous books. “Farewell to Reality

Tuesday, April 03, 11:31 UTC @ Backreaction

Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth Jim Baggott Pegasus Books (1 Aug 2013) Not sure how I missed “Farewell to Reality” when it came out. Indeed, I didn’t take note of Jim Baggott’s writing until I was asked to review one of his more recent books for Physics World. And having enjoyed that, I had a look at his previous books. “Farewell to Reality

Tuesday, April 03, 00:10 UTC @ Not Even Wrong

One of my graduate school classmates today sent around a link to a story about someone many of us remembered, Dragoljub Cetkovic. I somehow missed it last year when it appeared, it’s by Paul Halpern and entitled From Princeton to … Continue reading →

Tuesday, April 03, 00:00 UTC @ objc.io

Since Swift is a reference-counted language, we have to be careful not to create reference cycles — especially when we’re capturing self within a closure. Consider this code snippet, adapted from our new book, App Architecture: final class PlayViewController: UIViewController { let viewModel = PlayViewModel() var observation: NSKeyValueObservation? func viewDidLoad() { super.viewD

Monday, April 02, 17:06 UTC @ Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

Sequent Calculus as a Compiler Intermediate Language 2016 by Paul Downen, Luke Maurer, Zena M. Ariola, Simon Peyton Jones The typed λ-calculus arises canonically as the term language for a logic called natural deduction, using the Curry-Howard isomorphism: the pervasive connection between logic and programming languages asserting that propositions are types and proofs

Monday, April 02, 10:14 UTC @ Use Your Loaf

Swift 4.1 is available with Xcode 9.3 and brings a nice gift. The compiler can now automatically generate the code to make your types Equatable or Hashable. This only applies to structs and enums (not classes) and there are conditions but this can still save you from a lot of boring boilerplate code. Automatic Synthesis Of Equatable For a recap of how and when to make your types equatable see this

Monday, April 02, 06:49 UTC @ 250bpm-blogs

For a long time I've been interested in democratic schools. The idea of democratic schooling is not to treat the kids as some kind of untermenschen, as is the common practice nowadays, but as actual human beings with free will, capable of responsible behaviour and so on. In practical terms it means that children are allowed to do whatever they want unless it's against the rules. The rules themselves are established by a school legislative body consisting of all the

Monday, April 02, 04:39 UTC @ Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

The most shocking existential fact about the universe? Sports April Fools source George Ruth Jr., the “Babe,” may have thought he had cosmic significance but no one knew it until now. He would have said it was all a joke anyway. He certainly loved pranks. As an April Fool’s joke during Florida spring training, he […]

Monday, April 02, 00:00 UTC @ The Syndicate

The explosive demand for crypto currencies has led to a surge in speculative valuation. Most non-technical investors keep their funds within a crypto exchange  (such as Coinbase or Binance) that offers a web-accessible wallet. This arrangement is familiar, much like online banking offered by many reputable, financial institutions. The ‘wallet’ analogy works well for other types of digital assets. Apple Wallet keeps airline tickets, gift cards, and other important digital codes. In the software sense

Sunday, April 01, 15:16 UTC @ Martin Fowler

London, England (2014)