Gooooooood morning, Rank and file!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- Relearning to Type
- Deep Learning with PyTorch: A 60 Minute Blitz
- Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don’t Work in Blackouts
- Learning Wi-Fi Connection Loss Predictions for Seamless Handovers
- Association of Neurocognitive and Physical Function with Gait Speed in Midlife
- Learning to Simulate
- Solving the Rubik’s cube with a robot hand
- One Way to Keep the Sidewalk Clear: Remote-Controlled Scooter-Bots
- The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt
- Scientists pinpoint neural activity’s role in human longevity
- AI Detects Heart Failure from One Heartbeat: Study
- TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free
Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise. - Cortex: Deploy machine learning models in production
- Machine learning in UK financial services
- Mathematics for Machine Learning
- Builders Ditch Nest After Google Ties Devices to Digital Assistant
- Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy
Blockchain and decentralization
- SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now
Telegram’s whole scheme was to skin precisely the retail buyers who securities registration is meant to protect from being ripped off. - The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s
- Coinexchange.io is closing down on 01Dec2019
- LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed Operating System
- US Law Enforcement Traces Bitcoin Transfers to Nab ‘Largest’ Child Porn Site
- Bitcoin uses 625kWh of power and 95g of e-waste per transaction
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network. - The Fallacy That Is Cryptocurrency
- Catalan separatists have tooled up with decentralized app for civil disobedience
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to w…
Woman computer scientist of the week
Carla Schlatter Ellis is an American computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She is known for her work in energy management on mobile devices as well as for her dedication to increasing the number of women in the field of computer science. She is one of the founding members of Systers, an international email list of female computer scientists that was founded in 1987. Systers, which was initiated by Ellis and 12 other female computer scientists who met at a Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), has since grown to over 3000 members.
Cloud and architecture
- Cassandra as a Service on AWS/GCP
- Shareable Jupyter Notebooks That Run on Free Cloud GPUs
- A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket
- I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot - NASA engineer’s ‘helical engine’ may violate the laws of physics
- AWS’ Sponsorship of the Rust Project
We’re really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language! Rust is designed for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. It has seen considerable uptake since its first stable release four years ago, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all using Rust. Rust has also seen lots of growth […] - AWS’ Sponsorship of the Rust Project
- Policy_sentry, an AWS IAM Least Privilege Policy Generator
- The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i… - Docker containers in space
- Booste – a cloud-hosted desktop for developers
Development and languages
- Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a Git repo
- Python is not a great programming language
Python Is Not A Great Programming Language. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. - Object-Oriented Programming and Essential State
- Notice of Retraction due to a programming error
- Solving the Megaron Cube with Python
- The state of Android updates is still dire
- JavaScript Image Compress Using HTML5 Canvas and File API Before Upload
- Watt: A runtime for executing Rust procedural macros compiled as WebAssembly
- GitHub is going after the software security market
- What’s New in Python 3.8
- macOS windows-switcher (Windows 10 style)
- .NET Core 3.0 Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project
We started in .NET Core 1.0 with a very minimal API set that only included ~18K of the .NET Framework APIs. With .NET Standard 2.0, we tried to make it much more viable to share code between .NET F… - Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor
- Raising severity to serious for some Python 2 leaf packages with no Python 3
- My 2019 Mathematics a to Z: Linear Programming
- A tool to make all data more useful
- Let’s Write an LLVM Specializer for Python
- Change Python code while it’s running using a reloading loop
- Gitlab: don’t discuss politics at work
Code-hosting biz also bans staff from talking politics at work - Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm?
- The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways
Quote of the week
Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.
— Bertrand Meyer
Enterprises
- The end of uBlock origin for Google chrome
- Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications
- Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?
“Please share this as widely as possible. Why should we have to police Amazon? This problem is ongoing since 2017. These counterfeits are shipped and sold by AMAZON, NOT A THIRD PARTY. This is not Marketplace. https://t.co/QSP65CWJ7O” - My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe
My Google account got suspended yesterday, I was like what the heck is going on. First I got an email from Google saying that I was using 3rd party app outside of Play Store to go around Youtube ad… - Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save Millions, but It Will Kill Some People First
- Flash Memory Wear Killing Older Tesla’s Due to Excessive Data Logging: Report
- Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use what they […] - Google Announces Nest WiFi
- Twitter says it will restrict retweeting world leaders who break rules
Twitter said it will restrict how users can interact with tweets from world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinion… - Amazon sells a kit for a 2600 sqft house
- Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links
- AndOTP Removed from the Google Play Store Due to Donation Link
- Extinction Rebellion Blockade Google HQ
- Improving Form Controls in Microsoft Edge and Chromium
- Jacobian/notamazon: Turns out The Everything Store is kinda full of crap
- Google and Ambient Computing
Google presented a vision of ambient computing that goes beyond the smartphone. The company is well-placed, but faces challenges both in the marketplace and in the mirror. - Amazon Has Transformed the Hasidic Economy
Amazon has become a lucrative place to do business for many Hasidic Jews, offering anonymity to a largely insular community and allowing women to work from home. - Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices
Microsoft today announced two new open-source projects: Dapr, a portable, event-driven runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, and the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kube… - AMD Lists Threadripper 3000 CPU with 32 Cores, Possible New Socket
- Google exec: Nest owners should warn guests that conversations are recorded
Google devices chief Rick Osterloh said he believes anyone “in proximity” of a microphone-fitted smart device like Google Nest or Amazon Echo should be informed the devices are in use. - Google chief: I’d disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home
- Intel Shooting Star Drones
- The outcry over deaths on Amazon’s warehouse floor
- Microsoft’s visual data explorer SandDance open sourced
Microsoft just open sourced their data exploration tool known as SandDance: For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting dat… - Mac Pro Puts the Pedal to Metal in Apple’s Race with Nvidia
The new Mac Pro is a long-anticipated development for Apple’s high end pro users, but it sure looks as if the company also created the machine for its own strategic benefit — specifically to help make its Metal API become a dominant standard for GPU-intensive software. That could have big implications for Macs, iOS devices, and Apple GPUs going forward, with history providing some insight into why this matters. - Alphabet’s Wing begins making commercial drone deliveries in the US
Alphabet -owned drone delivery spin-out Wing is starting to service U.S. customers, after becoming the first drone delivery company to get the federal go-ahead to do so earlier this year. Wing is working with FedEx Express and Walgreens on this pilot, and their first customers are Michael and Kelly…
Other news
- The Profitability Challenge for Challenger Banks
- Relativistic Quantum Chemistry
- Monolinux – A tiny embedded Linux distro
- How to make Linux run fast again on Intel CPUs
- Lessons Learned from Building an AI Writing App
- SoftBank Seeking to Take Control of WeWork Through Financing Package
- In praise of dissenters: It pays to encourage a variety of opinions
- Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit
- Peter Ratcliffe’s Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
- Building China’s Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
One of China’s most brazen hacking sprees involved intelligence officers, hackers, security researchers, and company insiders. - YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
- Learn How to Raise a Seed Round
- Lambda School is SV big bet on reinventing education but students say is a cult
- I created the same app with React and Redux. Here’s the differences
- Kparc/kcc: k crash course
- Sears Hasn’t Fared Better After Bankruptcy as Another 100 Stores Will Soon Close
Sears’s bankruptcy filing was supposed to give the troubled retailer a fresh start. But a year later, the chain is still struggling with many of the same problems it faced before it sought court protection. - What IBM Pays H-1B Software Engineers and Developers
- Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan Divide
There’s a language for talking about hot-button issues. And we’re not learning it. - Common Voice – Mozilla’s initiative to help teach machines how real people speak
- In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course
- DoNoPay calls for you to get a human on the line quickly
- Mozilla’s initiative to help teach machines how real people speak
- Remove my password from lists so hackers won’t be able to hack me
- Revisiting the BlackHat Hack: How a Security Conference Was Pwned
Does anyone remember the Black Hat BCard hack in 2018? This hack has been documented extensively, most notoriously by [NinjaStyle] in his original blog post revealing the circumstances around disco…
Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learn
In 2020, we will celebrate that many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our “Annus Mirabilis” 1990-1991
Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started. 
The U.S. government widened its trade blacklist to include some of China’s …
Since deep learning regained prominence in 2012, many machine learning frameworks have clamored to become the new favorite among researchers and industry practitioners. From the early academic outputs Caffe and Theano to the massive industry-backed PyTorch and TensorFlow, this deluge of options makes it difficult to keep track of what
Conducting a Twitter network analysis uncovers a widespread bot network targeting West Papua with pro-Indonesian Government content on major social platforms.
Distributed virtual private networks (dVPNs) are a new form of VPN with no central authority. In a dVPN, users are both VPN clients and relay/exit nodes as in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. While dVPNs make strong privacy claims, they also carry the risk that a user will inadvertently have their machine used to transmit potentially harmful or illegal network traffic. Several incidents have been reported [2] where unaware dVPN users have been (ab)used as exit nodes.
As a reminder, Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run on macOS Catalina. To make this transition easier and to protect users on macOS Catalina who continue to use older versions of software, we’ve adjusted the notarization prerequisites until January 2020.
IR-2019-167, October 9, 2019
I’m currently working on a logging project that was initially implemented using AWS Elasticsearch. Having worked with large-scale mainline Elasticsearch clusters for several years, I’m absolutely stunned at how poor Amazon’s implementation is and I can’t fathom why they’re unable to fix or at least
Introducing Streamlit, an app framework built for ML engineers
Billions of people worldwide access the internet only through their phones. But using a cheap smartphone comes with some serious trade-offs.
Google warns that some of the world’s most popular Android phones are vulnerable, including its own Pixel 2. An Israeli spyware dealer, NSO Group, is believed to have developed the hack.
Timsort: A very fast , O(n log n), stable sorting algorithm built for the real world — not constructed in academia.
At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the world and not just internally with employees.
Ontario-based company brings specialist battery manufacturing expertise to global EV giant amid talk of “Tesla’s secret battery lab”
Researchers at Googleâs security group Project Zero have found an active vulnerability in Android that affects several popular devices including the Pixel 2, Huawei P20 Pro, and Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. A post from the security group suggests it found the bug last week, and attackers were exploiting it at that moment. The post notes …
Normally Norway is the biggest Tesla market in Europe. When the Dutch market absorbs nearly three times the Norwegian number of Model 3s, that is crazy.
Over the past year, I’ve built and grown 3 marketplaces in the event sector, all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid…
Can you smell the doom and gloom?
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Turkey has blocked access to social media and messaging platforms in the southern cities of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Hatay, as the …
One week after PayPal left the project
A 2017 cartoon from this post. For my fellow combinatorialists here is the link to the previous post on Kahn-Park’s result, isoperimetry, Talagrand, nice figures and links. Quick update (Sep…
Could you survive for an entire year without access to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram or any other app?
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform such numbers into indexes no larger than N? Suppose you have a hash table with a capacity N. Again, you need to transform your hash values (typically 32-bit … Continue reading A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
The 400 wealthiest Americans now pay a lower rate than the middle class.
System76, the Denver-based Linux PC manufacturer and developer of Pop OS, has some stellar news for those of us who prefer our laptops a little more open.
Fancy trackers and headbands are all part of a growing sleep-tech industry. I decided to put them to the test.
Researchers want to pave their own path. But the growing industry is still dependent on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.
PayPal was one of several corporate backers of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project.
At its annual Surface hardware event in New York, Microsoft today announced the expected set of updates to its existing hardware lineup. The biggest surprise, though, was surely the announcement of the company’s dual-screen Surface Neo, which will go on sale before the 2020 holiday season. To…
Amazon’s new Sidewalk protocol and Apple’s experiments with ultra-wideband signal a new battleground that gets Amazon out of the house and Apple inside it
DNS over HTTPS will make it harder for ISPs to monitor or modify DNS queries.
Remote teams configuration and combination. Learn the caveats and nuances of running a remote team and why internal communication is paramount to success.
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory show that Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social and messaging apps have been blocked in Iraq by multiple internet providers as of …
The fashion and lifestyle site had something that Vice lacked: an audience made up largely of women.
They need facial scans of people with darker skin
Posted by Sara M. Butler; 17 August, 2018. Setting the Scene The period leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in July of 1290 was a time of mounting uncertainty for the Anglo Jewry. …
How is Python 2 supported in RHEL after 2020? How long will Python 2.7 be supported within Red Hat products? As per https://pythonclock.org the Python project is retiring development on Python 2 Jan 1st, 2020. What happens after this date? Python2 is available in an Application stream in RHEL8. Can you let me know what that means for the Python 2 lifecycle within RHEL8? Will Python 2 be available for the entire life of RHEL 8? Will Red Hat continue to provide bugfix/security errata to Python 2 after the EOL of the language?
In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that testosterone administration did not affect cognitive empathy, a measure of the ability to recognize another’s feelings and motivations. The finding calls into question the theory that the symptoms of autism are caused by a hyper-masculinized brain.
Lawyers representing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes said she hasn’t paid them for more than a year and probably never will, according to court records.
After working for weeks with Pythonâs data science stack and R I started to ask my self if there could not be a common intermediateâ¦
Guard is an AI that reads privacy policies for you and uncovers their hidden, filthy secrets.
“Estonian is popularly known as a difficult language to learn. The only other national languages it’s related to are Finnish and Hungarian.”
The image of bottle water as clean and pure is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic.
Gary Marcus, a leader in the field, discusses how we could achieve general intelligence—and why that might make machines safer.
Tax forms filed by OpenAI provide insight into the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to artificial intelligence specialists across the world.
TON will be the largest blockchain ever when it launches next month, but it’s not on regulators’ radars.
Weâre announcing the CodeSearchNet Challenge and releasing a large dataset for natural language processing and machine learning.
Carmen and Jon talk with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer (the creators of Go) about its origins, growth, influence, and future. This an epic episode that dives deep into the history and details of the how’s and why’s of Go, and the choices they’ve made along the way in creating this awesome programing language. 
Code, test & deploy with GitLab. Everyone can contribute!
Police used drones to track down a man who evaded detection for almost two decades.
Last month, more than 66 percent of Google tech contractors signed cards to hold a vote on whether to create a labor union at HCL…
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
A leaked document highlights stories of abuse and retaliation against Google employees, told by the employees themselves.
Electric vehicle startup to raise $200m from chairman and Tencent
Reports that some AVID Users Macs would no longer boot. It now may be that a Google Chrome Keystone update modifies /var on NON SIP Protected Macs.
It’s here. Software Version 10.0 – our biggest software update ever. We’re raising the bar for what people have come to expect from their cars with new entertainment, gaming, music, and convenience features designed to make your car much more capable, as well as making time spent in your car more fun.
Alphabet Inc’s Google will stop showing news snippets from European publish…
A Financial Times report revealed that Google achieved quantum supremacy. Is it now time to panic about encryption being broken, or do we have nothing to worry about?
WeWork’s parent The We Company on Monday filed to withdraw its initial publ…
Critics claim they try to suppress anti-Chinese views to keep lucrative Chinese students happy
(Adds CEO quote, background)
Rui Pinto ran a website called Football Leaks and won praise as a whistle-blower. Portugal’s authorities consider him a criminal.
In
The 178-year-old tour operator failed to secure a £200 million rescue on Sunday, leading it to suspend its flights and bookings.
A game for learning CSS grid layout
As WeWork investors jousted over Adam Neumannâs future at the company he built, a parallel debate by WeWork executives and bankers has centered on just how deeply WeWork should cut costs to save its business.In recent days, a group of executives from WeWorkâs parent company and bankers have been …
:mortar_board: Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science! – ossu/computer-science
A.I. research is becoming increasingly expensive, leaving few people with easy access to the computing firepower necessary to develop the technology.
The retailer fell victim to the eroding power of shopping malls and said it would cease operations in 40 countries and close up to 178 stores in the U.S.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into the accounts of some 6,000 Yahoo users in search of sexual photos and videos.