- Computational Journalism — Google awards to projects around computational journalism. Sample: The goal of the project is to automatically build topic “event threads” that will help journalists and citizens decode claims made by public figures, in order to distinguish between personal opinion, communication tools, and voluntary distortions of the reality.
- Editing the Software of Life — research yielding the ability to edit DNA has spawned a new set of biotech startups, and a patent morass. Zhang already holds the first of several vital and broad patents covering cas9 genome editing. Yet, Doudna and Charpentier had filed patent applications covering similar ground earlier than Zhang.
- Ad Blocker-Stopping Software — the evolutionary battle between ads and blockers is about to get gunpowder. As Ethan Zuckerman said, advertising is the original sin of the Internet.
- The Night Watch (PDF) — There is nothing funny to print when you have a misaligned memory access, because your machine is dead and there are no printers in the spirit world.
"programming" entries
Four short links: 19 June 2015
Computational Journalism, Bio Startups & Patents, Ad Blocker Wars, and The Night Watch
The art of design patterns
Communicate more efficiently, concisely, and accurately.
Download a free copy of An Engineering Manager’s Guide to Design Patterns, a brain-friendly report that shows you how object-oriented design patterns are ideal for solving specific problems in application design.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of viewing Hal Abelson & Gerald Sussman’s 1986 MIT introductory computer science course, you owe it to yourself to set aside a few hours to view it. “1986?”, you say — “Could that really be relevant to my work today?” Unless you came through MIT or a similar program that teaches from their seminal book The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, I’d bet you are most likely going to learn a few new things (even if you consider yourself a seasoned software developer).
Play the video, and right away you might be surprised, as Abelson, in the first five minutes of the class, states that not only is computer science not a science, it doesn’t have all that much to do with computers. Rather, Abelson suggests, computer science is more of an engineering discipline, or perhaps even an art; and, rather than being concerned with computers, computer science is more an exercise in creating imperative knowledge and managing complexity.
Anyone who has ever been late on a software development project (who hasn’t?) can relate to this. Software development starts to feel more like an art or craft when the best you can do is roughly estimate the size and scope of a job and then cross your fingers and hope for the best — certainly, it is at times like these when our field doesn’t feel like much of a science. And, for anyone who has worked on a project of moderate size, at some point you find complexity staring you in the face. All too often our first designs, and our code, turn into the dreaded big ball of mud (yes, that is a technical term).
Read more…
Four short links: 17 June 2015
Academic Publishing Concentration, Hardware Independence, Exception Monitoring, and Negotiating Tactics
- The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era (PLoSone) — Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. (via CBC)
- LLVM Bitcode Gives Apple Hardware Independence (Medium) — Bob [Mansfield] has been quietly building a silicon team with the skills to rival all other players in the industry. Bob works for one of 15 companies with an ARM architecture license, giving his team carte blanche to modify and extend ARM in any way they see fit. And Bob’s CPUs only have to satisfy a single customer.
- Github Exception Monitoring and Response — I need another word than “porn” to describe something that makes me sigh fervently with desire to achieve at that level.
- 31 Negotiation Tactics (Nick Kolenda) — he mysteriously omitted my power tactics of (a) crying, (b) greeting my opposite number with the wrong name, and (c) passing a napkin covered with random scrawls as I say, “what do you make of this?”
Four short links: 12 June 2015
OLAP Datastores, Timely Dataflow, Paul Ford is God, and Static Analysis
- pinot — a realtime distributed OLAP datastore, which is used at LinkedIn to deliver scalable real time analytics with low latency. It can ingest data from offline data sources (such as Hadoop and flat files) as well as online sources (such as Kafka). Pinot is designed to scale horizontally.
- Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System — in Timely Dataflow, the first two features are needed to execute iterative and incremental computations with low latency. The third feature makes it possible to produce consistent results, at both outputs and intermediate stages of computations, in the presence of streaming or iteration.
- What is Code (Paul Ford) — What the coders aren’t seeing, you have come to believe, is that the staid enterprise world that they fear isn’t the consequence of dead-eyed apathy but rather détente. Words and feels.
- Facebook Infer Opensourced — the static analyzer I linked to yesterday, released as open source today.
Four short links: 3 June 2015
Filter Design, Real-Time Analytics, Neural Turing Machines, and Evaluating Subjective Opinions
- How to Design Applied Filters — The most frequently observed issue during usability testing were filtering values changing placement when the user applied them – either to another position in the list of filtering values (typically the top) or to an “Applied filters” summary overview. During testing, the subjects were often confounded as they noticed that the filtering value they just clicked was suddenly “no longer there.”
- Twitter Heron — a real-time analytics platform that is fully API-compatible with Storm […] At Twitter, Heron is used as our primary streaming system, running hundreds of development and production topologies. Since Heron is efficient in terms of resource usage, after migrating all Twitter’s topologies to it we’ve seen an overall 3x reduction in hardware, causing a significant improvement in our infrastructure efficiency.
- ntm — an implementation of neural Turing machines. (via @fastml_extra)
- Bayesian Truth Serum — a scoring system for eliciting and evaluating subjective opinions from a group of respondents, in situations where the user of the method has no independent means of evaluating respondents’ honesty or their ability. It leverages respondents’ predictions about how other respondents will answer the same questions. Through these predictions, respondents reveal their meta-knowledge, which is knowledge of what other people know.
Four short links: 2 June 2015
Toyota Code, Sapir-Wharf-Emoji, Crowdsourcing Formal Proof, and Safety-Critical Code
- Toyota’s Spaghetti Code — Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables. And he was critical of Toyota watchdog supervisor — software to detect the death of a task — design. He testified that Toyota’s watchdog supervisor ‘is incapable of ever detecting the death of a major task. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t do it. It’s not designed to do it.’ (via @qrush)
- Google’s Design Icons (Kevin Marks) — Google’s design icons distinguish eight kinds of airline seats but has none for trains or buses.
- Verigames — DARPA-funded game to crowdsource elements of formal proofs. (via Network World)
- 10 Rules for Writing Safety-Critical Code — which I can loosely summarize as “simple = safer, use the built-in checks, don’t play with fire.”
Four short links: 1 June 2015
AI Drives, Decent Screencaps, HTTP/2 Antipatterns, Time Series
- The Basic AI Drives (PDF) — Surely, no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper, we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal-driven systems.
- PreTTY — how to take a good-looking screencap of your terminal app in action.
- Why Some of Yesterday’s HTTP Best Practices are HTTP/2 Antipatterns — also functions as an overview of HTTP/2 for those of us who didn’t keep up with the standardization efforts.
- Tisean — a software project for the analysis of time series with methods based on the theory of nonlinear deterministic dynamical systems. (via @aphyr)
Four short links: 26 May 2015
Keyboard Programming, Oblique Strategies, Engineering Ethics, and Visualisation Gallery
- Introduction to Keyboard Programming — what happens when you press a key. (hint: a lot)
- Oblique Strategies: Prompts for Programmers — Do it both ways. Very often doing it both ways is faster than analyzing which is best. Now you also have experimental data instead of just theoretical. Add a toggle if possible. This will let you choose later. Some mistakes are cheaper to make than to avoid.
- The Responsibility We Have as Software Engineers — Where’s our Hippocratic Oath, our “First, Do No Harm?” Remember that moment when Google went from “amazing wonderful thing we didn’t have before, which makes our lives so much better” to “another big scary company and holy shit it knows a lot about us!”? That’s coming for our industry and the software engineering profession in particular.
- Gallery of Concept Visualisation — plenty I hadn’t seen before.
Four short links: 25 May 2015
8 (Bits) Is Enough, Second Machine Age, LLVM OpenMP, and Javascript Graphs
- Why Are Eight Bits Enough for Deep Neural Networks? (Pete Warden) — It turns out that neural networks are different. You can run them with eight-bit parameters and intermediate buffers, and suffer no noticeable loss in the final results. This was astonishing to me, but it’s something that’s been re-discovered over and over again.
- The Great Decoupling (HBR) — The Second Machine Age is playing out differently than the First Machine Age, continuing the long-term trend of material abundance but not of ever-greater labor demand.
- OpenMP Support in LLVM — OpenMP enables Clang users to harness full power of modern multi-core processors with vector units. Pragmas from OpenMP 3.1 provide an industry standard way to employ task parallelism, while ‘#pragma omp simd’ is a simple yet flexible way to enable data parallelism (aka vectorization).
- JS Graphs — a visual catalogue (with search) of Javascript graphing libraries.
Four short links: 22 May 2015
Automobile Ownership, Architectural Robots, UX Psychology, Go Packages
- GM: That Car You Bought, We’re Really the Ones Who Own It — GM’s claim is all about copyright and software code, and it’s the same claim John Deere is making about their tractors. The TL;DR version of the argument goes something like this: cars work because software tells all the parts how to operate; the software that tells all the parts to operate is customized code; that code is subject to copyright; GM owns the copyright on that code and that software; a modern car cannot run without that software; it is integral to all systems; therefore, the purchase or use of that car is a licensing agreement; and since it is subject to a licensing agreement, GM is the owner and can allow/disallow certain uses or access. In the future, manufacturers own the secondary market.
- Architectural Robots (Robohub) — The concept is named ‘Minibuilders.’ This is a group of robots each performing a specific task. The first robot layers a 15 cm (6 in) footprint or foundation, while a second and a third robot print the rest of the building by climbing over the structures they already printed and laying more material over them. This design is only possible at construction scale where printed layers are solid enough to support a robotic print head.
- The Psychology of UX — digging into 10 things about human psychology that should inform UX.
- gigo — Fetching packages in golang can be difficult, especially when juggling multiple packages and private repositories. GIGO (Gigo Installer for Go) tries to solve that problem, effectively being the golang equivalent of Python’s pip.