- Elasticsearch SQL — Query elasticsearch using familiar SQL syntax. You can also use ES functions in SQL. Apache2-licensed.
- In Communist China, Tinder Screws You — Chinese Tinder clone Tantan is endangering young women and men by failing to use encryption and exposing private data like that made public in the Ashley Madison hack.
- The Advertising Bubble (Maciej Ceglowski) — This is an article-length ad (1) targeted at companies selling software (2) to advertising startups (3) sellling their own ads (4) God knows where, possibly to some publishing startup burning through your grandmother’s pension fund (5,6,7,8). There’s an ad bubble. It’s gonna blow.
- Fortran for LLVM — The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its three national labs today announced they have reached an agreement with NVIDIA’s PGI® software to create an open source Fortran compiler designed for integration with the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure. Rumor has it the nuclear labs will defer implementation of READ DRUM to later generations.
"llvm" entries
Four short links: 23 November 2015
Elasticsearch SQL, App Privacy, Ad Bubble, and LLVM Fortran
.NET open source
Microsoft .Net Team Program Manager, Beth Massi, on the open source .NET Core.
You might have heard the news that .NET is open source. In this post I’m going to explain what exactly we open sourced, why we did it, and how you can get involved.
Defining .NET
If you’re not familiar with .NET, it’s a managed execution environment that provides a variety of services to its running applications including things like automatic memory management, type safety, native interop, and multiple modern programming languages that make it easier to build all kinds of apps, for nearly any device, quickly. The first version of .NET was initially released in 2002 and quickly picked up steam in many businesses. Today there are over 1.8 billion active installs of the .NET Framework and 6 million .NET developers in the world.
The .NET Framework consists of these major components: the common language runtime (CLR), which is the execution engine that handles running applications; the .NET Framework Base Class Libraries (BCL), which provides a library of tested, reusable code that developers can call from their own applications; and the managed languages and compilers for C#, F#, and Visual Basic. Application models extend the common libraries of the .NET Framework to provide additional libraries that developers can use to build specific types of applications, like web, desktop, mobile device apps, etc. For more information on all the components in .NET 2015 see: Understanding .NET 2015.
There are multiple implementations of .NET, some from Microsoft and others from other companies or open source projects. In this post, I’ll focus on .NET Core from Microsoft.
Four short links: 25 March 2014
Super Gamers, Game Developers, Erlang+LLVM, and Git Visualised
- Meet the Super-Taskers (Psychology Today) — As part of the Nissan GT Academy challenge, the top 10 players of the car-racing game Gran Turismo are given the chance to race real automobiles in competition. They’re very good—too good, in fact. A graduate racing a real car in the British GT in 2012 was so fast that he could keep up with the professionals in what was supposed to be an amateur event. In 2013, GT Academy graduates were banned from such races in the UK. Instead, they have to compete against the pros.
- A View of Game Developers From The Future (Ian Bogost) — A new arms race commenced—for virtual attention, which the Patrons converted into financial instrument. While historians agree that ancient works like Civilization and chess still provided inspiration, games primarily became a specialized form of banking. As long as there has been advertising, there has been an attention economy: you advertise where people pay attention—whether it’s on the walls of buildings or above urinals.
- ErLLVM — providing multiple back ends for the High Performance Erlang (HiPE) with the use of the LLVM infastructure. Making the very-lightweight-multithreading Erlang less of a closed world fruitcake deployment can only be good.
- Explain Git with D3 (GitHub) — visualisations of common git operations.
Four short links: 31 May 2012
Internet Trends, LLVM Guts, DNA Font, and Self Control
- Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2012 (PDF) — what caught my eye: a Japanese games company with USD418 ARPU via in-game currency sales; she has a fantastic array of “technology has changed everything” slides topped by a sharp “and that’s just the beginning” slide; she’s bearish on US and global economies.
- The Design of LLVM (Dr Dobbs) — nifty technical introduction to an amazing but under-praised piece of technology. (via Hacker News)
- DNA Sans — writing 100nm tall, in DNA. There’s even a font sample. This is so cool. (via Ed Yong)
- New Digital Divide = Wasting Time Online (NY Times) — “Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.” Self-control and internal discipline is just as important in kids as adults: success in school and in life only comes with the ability to say “no” to Facebook, porn sites, endless IM, and all the other distractions that the Internet offers.
Four short links: 2 December 2011
Changing Education, Netflix Open Source, LLVM3, and Open Sourced Transcription Tool
- Challenges in Teaching Biology — everything that Alison says about teaching biology is true of teaching computer science. Read, learn, evolve.
- First Open Source Netflix Projects Released — Curator makes Apache Zookeeper easier to use. (via Ian Kallen)
- LLVM3 Released — these are key tools for reliable development of fast systems. I think of it as JVM without the bloat, though undoubtedly that’s unfair to both Java and LLVM. (via Hacker News)
- Scribe — Zooniverse tool for crowdsourcing transcriptions. (via Tim Sherratt)
Four short links: 27 December 2010
Compiling to Javascript, Lessons Learned, Idle Insights, and Visualizing Competition
- emscripten — LLVM to Javascript compiler. Any code that compiles to LLVM can run in the browser (Python, Lua, C++). LLVM is open source virtual machine that Apple bought into (literally, they hired the developer).
- 30 Lessons Learned in Computing Over The Last 10 Years — Backup every day at the minimum, and test restores every week. I don’t think I’ve worked at an organisation that didn’t discover at one point that they couldn’t restore from their backups. Many other words of wisdom, and this one rang particularly true: all code turns into shit given enough time and hands. (via Hacker News)
- What Your Computer Does While You Wait — top-to-bottom understanding of your system makes you a better programmer.
- How to Visualize the Competition — elegant graphing of strategy. (via Dave Moskovitz on Twitter)