"trends" entries

Four short links: 26 February 2015

Four short links: 26 February 2015

Autocompletion, Colliding Trends, Microservices, and Writing Useful Code

  1. awesomplete — MIT-licensed ultra lightweight, usable, beautiful autocomplete with zero dependencies in Javascript.
  2. How to Seize the Opportunities when Megatrends Collide — excuse the cheesy title, the chart from PwC showing pairwise combination of trends, is interesting.
  3. Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Designyou want to think of servers like cattle, not pets. If you have a machine in production that performs a specialized function, and you know it by name, and everyone gets sad when it goes down, it’s a pet. Instead you should think of your servers like a herd of cows. What you care about is how many gallons of milk you get. If one day you notice you’re getting less milk than usual, you find out which cows aren’t producing well and replace them. People for Ethical Treatment of Iron, your time has come!
  4. Your Job is Not to Write Code (Laura Klein) — I know what you’re thinking. This will all take so long! I’ll be so much less effective! This isn’t true. You’ll be far more effective because you will actually be doing your job. Amen to it all.
Four short links: 3 February 2015

Four short links: 3 February 2015

Product Trends, Writing Code, Simple Testing, and Quantum Gotchas

  1. Frog Design Predictions (Wired) — designers pick product trends, arrayed from probable to speculative.
  2. Making Wrong Code Look Wrong (Joel Spolsky) — This makes mistakes even more visible. Your eyes will learn to “see” smelly code, and this will help you find obscure security bugs just through the normal process of writing code and reading code.
  3. Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical FailuresWe found the majority of catastrophic failures could easily have been prevented by performing simple testing on error handling code – the last line of defense – even without an understanding of the software design. We extracted three simple rules from the bugs that have lead to some of the catastrophic failures, and developed a static [Java] checker, Aspirator, capable of locating these bugs. One of the tests is a FIXME or TODO in an exception handler.
  4. Quantum Machine Learning Algorithms: Read the Fine Print (Scott Aaronson) — In the years since HHL, quantum algorithms achieving “exponential speedups over classical algorithms” have been proposed for other major application areas […]. With each of them, one faces the problem of how to load a large amount of classical data into a quantum computer (or else compute the data “on-the-fly”), in a way that is efficient enough to preserve the quantum speedup.
Four short links: 9 October 2014

Four short links: 9 October 2014

API Docs, Top Trends, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, and Devops in Practice

  1. dashoffline access to API documentation. Useful for those long-haul flights without wifi …
  2. Gartner’s Top Trends for 2015 — ubicomp, IoT, 3d printing, pervasive analytics, context, smart machines, cloud computing, software-defined everything, web-scale IT, and security. Still not the year of the Linux desktop.
  3. Byzantine Fault Tolerance — Wikipedia’s readable introduction to the basic challenge in distributed systems.
  4. Move Fast, Break Nothing (Zach Holman) — Gartner talks about “web-scale IT”, but I think the processes and tools for putting code into product (devops) are far more transformative than the technology that scales the product delivery.
Four short links: 5 June 2013

Four short links: 5 June 2013

Interesting Themes, Distributed Systems Failure Modes, Gesture Sensing Through Wifi, and Bad Taste Agile

  1. OATV Fund III Pitch Deck (Slideshare) — contains a list of what they were investing in, and what they want to invest in with the new round. Then: Quantified self; Internet subsystems; Smart networks of things; Manipulation and visualization of big data; sustainability; Maker movement. Now: Quantified Self Pro; Maker Pro; Hacking Education; Hidden Economies; Operations as Competitive Advantage; A Router in Every Pocket; The Internet Operating System. The move to “Pro” interests me, too. (via Bryce Roberts)
  2. The Network is ReliableMany applications silently degrade when the network fails, and resulting problems may not be understood for some time—if they are understood at all. […] much of what we know about the failure modes of real-world distributed systems is founded on guesswork and rumor. […] In this post, we’d like to bring a few of these stories together. We believe this is a first step towards a more open and honest discussion of real-world partition behavior, and, ultimately, more robust distributed systems design.
  3. Wisee (PDF) — recognising gestures using disturbances in the (wifi) force. Our results show that WiSee can identify and classify a set of nine gestures with an average accuracy of 94%. (via BoingBoing)
  4. Why Your Users Hate Agile Development (IT World) — What developers see as iterative and flexible, users see as disorganized and never-ending. Here’s how some experienced developers have changed that perception. (via Slashdot)
Four short links: 4 January 2013

Four short links: 4 January 2013

SSH/L Multiplexer, GitHub Bots, Test Your Assumptions, and Tech Trends

  1. sslh — ssh/ssl multiplexer.
  2. Github Says No to Bots (Wired) — what’s interesting is that bots augmenting photos is awesome in Flickr: take a photo of the sky and you’ll find your photo annotated with stars and whatnot. What can GitHub learn from Flickr?
  3. Four Assumptions of Multiple Regression That Researchers Should Always Test — “but I found the answer I wanted! What do you mean, it might be wrong?!”
  4. Tenth Grade Tech Trends (Medium) — if you want to know what will have mass success, talk to early adopters in the mass market. We alpha geeks aren’t that any more.
Four short links: 29 August 2012

Four short links: 29 August 2012

NeoVictorian Computing, Participatory Budgeting, Micro Thrusters, and Geopositioning Accuracy

  1. NeoVictorian Computing (Mark Bernstein) — read this! I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. […] The Arts & Crafts movement failed in consumer goods, but it could succeed in software. (via James Governor)
  2. Participatory Budgetingresearch shows participation is more effective than penalties in taxation compliance. Participation is more effective than penalties in almost everything.
  3. MIT-Developed Microthrustersa flat, compact square — much like a computer chip — covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward. You say satellite, but it’s only a matter of time until this powers a DIY RC rocket with a camera payload. (via Hacker News)
  4. Yelp Checkins to Measure Geopositioning Accuracy Across PhonesBy analyzing millions of data points, we can easily see how, on average, different platforms perform. iPhones consistently have the most accurate positioning, with a fairly small accuracy radius. Android phones are often inaccurate, but reliably reported that inaccuracy. And finally, iPods using Wi-Fi positioning proved the least accurate and usually reported incorrect accuracy radii.
Four short links: 31 May 2012

Four short links: 31 May 2012

Internet Trends, LLVM Guts, DNA Font, and Self Control

  1. 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.
  2. The Design of LLVM (Dr Dobbs) — nifty technical introduction to an amazing but under-praised piece of technology. (via Hacker News)
  3. DNA Sans — writing 100nm tall, in DNA. There’s even a font sample. This is so cool. (via Ed Yong)
  4. 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: 21 September 2011

Four short links: 21 September 2011

Unregulated Printing, Mobile Data, Open Source ERP, and Future Technology

  1. Gun Part on Thingiverse — we’re used to thinking of the legal problems caused by cheap and decentralized copies of digital works. Now the problems we had with pipe bombs (designs are free on the net, the parts are cheap) are just as applicable to every type of restricted object (in this case, a gun). The difference between regulating speech (design of an object) and regulating possession of objects is blurring and it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. (via Jesse Robbins)
  2. Mobile Data (Luke Wrobewski) — Mobile data traffic is now outpacing fixed broadband traffic. Last year, it grew 4.2 times as fast. The entire list of interesting numbers repays reading.
  3. ERPnext — open source (Python/Javascript) ERP system. Yet another example of open source climbing up the business stack.
  4. Technology Time Out (Slideshare) — my presentation to employees embarking on a hackathon, about future trends, the role of software developers, and the need to work on meaningful stuff.
Four short link: 4 January 2011

Four short link: 4 January 2011

100 Trends, Mobile to Web, Geometry Fun, and C# NLP Tools

  1. 100 Things to Watch in 2011 — people who consider tech trends without considering social trends are betting on the atom bomb without considering the Summer of Love. (via Fred Wilson)
  2. Mobile Economics will Trend Towards Web Economics (Fred Wilson) — A central issue with the Internet, no matter what device and presentation layer you use to access it, is that there is an unlimited amount of content available. Evan Williams calls it “a web of infinite information” in this chat with Om Malik. What is valuable is filtering and curation. Restricting access to content doesn’t work. Someone else’s content will get filtered and curated instead of yours. Scarcity is not a viable business model on the Internet.
  3. Magic Tilegeometric and topological analogues of Rubik’s Cube. Mindblowing fun with math.
  4. SharpNLP — open source C# NLP tools.
Four short links: 19 August 2010

Four short links: 19 August 2010

Satellite-based Forecasting, Design Book, Submarine Cable Map, Brain Science

  1. New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images — using satellite images of Wal-Mart and Target parking lots to predict quarterly returns. (via Hacker News)
  2. Form and Code — beautiful book on the intersection of code, design, architecture, form, and function. One of the authors is Casey Reas who was also one of the people behind Processing. (via RandomEtc on Twitter)
  3. Cable Map — major underwater communications cables around the world. (via berkun on Twitter)
  4. Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand The Brain (Pharyngula) — To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it’s the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism. He doesn’t even comprehend the nature of the problem, and here he is pontificating on magic solutions completely free of facts and reason.