Gooooooood morning, Humans!!! 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
- Deep Learning in TensorFlow – The Roadmap for Study and Learning
- Gatwick airport trial for valet-parking robots
- Machine Learning Feynman Experience: build models from scratch on Google Colab
- Humanity Has Hope: Pro-Gamers Win 1 of 11 StarCraft Matches Against DeepMind AI
- The AI Threat to Open Societies
In an age of populist nationalism, open societies have increasingly come under strain. But the threat of atavistic ideological movements pales in comparison to that posed by powerful new technologies in the hands of authoritarians. - Rustic Shelters Called Bothies
- Can a Machine Learning Model Predict the SP500 by Looking at Candlesticks?
- A BlockTogether list for election propaganda bots on Twitter
- Deep Learning GUI to Create, Train and Visualize Models in a Browser
- My journey applying AI to horse racing
- A Self-Learning, Modern Computer Science Curriculum
- A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities
In a health system riddled with inequity, we risk making dangerous biases automated and invisible. - Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel’s Zero to One
I. Zero To One might be the first best-selling business book based on a Tumblr. Stanford student Blake Masters took Peter Thiel’s class on startups. He posted his notes on Tumblr after each l⦠- Pandas extension arrays
- Applied Machine Learning Is a Meritocracy
When making a start in a new field it is common to feel overwhelmed. You may lack confidence or feel as though you are not good enough or that you are lacking some prerequisite. You will explore these issues in this post and learn that such feelings can lead to actions that can consume a … - Counting solar panels in the U.S. with machine learning and satellite images
- Browse State-of-the-Art Machine Learning Papers with Code
518 leaderboards ⢠966 tasks ⢠706 datasets ⢠9193 papers with code.
Blockchain and decentralization
- Fescar: High-performance, Java-based, OSS distributed transaction solution
- Iran to Launch State-Backed Cryptocurrency to Counter SWIFT and US Regulations
- Anonymous web authentication with Stellar blockchain
- Specifying and Verifying a Distributed System with TLA+
In the last post , we described a protocol that should satisfy the requirements and invariants established in the first post . Today we will look at formal verification with TLA+. Formal verification is just another (niche) tool in the toolbox. Some tools require more skill than others to use. So - Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) Is Now Live on Ethereum
- Amazon Corretto: No-Cost, Multiplatform Distribution of OpenJDK
- Apple redistributes more wealth upward than any corporation or country on earth
- Buckaroo – A decentralized C++ package manager
Woman computer scientist of the week
Janet L. Kolodner is an American cognitive scientist and learning scientist and a retired Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was Founding Editor in Chief of The Journal of the Learning Sciences and served in that role for 18 years. She was Founding Executive Officer of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). From August, 2010 through July, 2014, she was a program officer at the National Science Foundation and headed up the Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program. Since finishing at NSF, she is working toward a set of projects that will integrate learning technologies coherently to support disciplinary and everyday learning, support project-based pedagogy that works, and connect to the best in curriculum for active learning. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.
Cloud and architecture
- How to Setup Your Own PaaS with Dokku and Node and React and Mongodb and Nginx
- Cloudflare’s open source QUIC implementation in Rust
- Kite launches line-of-code completions, goes cloudless, secures $17M in funding
- A simple debugging module for AWS Lambda timeout
- Cloudflare.design/color
- A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture
Innovations like domain-specific hardware, enhanced security, open instruction sets, and agile chip development will lead the way.
- Rigetti launches the public beta of its Quantum Cloud Services
- “I, Robot” – the 3 laws considered harmful
- Google Cloud Firestore NoSQL database is in GA
The Cloud Firestore database is a NoSQL, serverless solution for mobile and web application development — now generally available globally. - Google Cloud Firestore Is Now Generally Available
- Microsoft Azure data deleted because of DNS outage
- AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon’s Operating Income
While Amazon’s cloud business was only 11% of its overall sales last year, it delivered more operating income than all other business units combined.
Development and languages
- Fossil vs Git
- Memory usage of a toy C# server and client with 500K concurrent connections on
Random investigations. A very low level tech blog. – kjpgit/techdemo - Verilog sources for Western Digital’s open source RISC-V core
A directory of Western Digitalâs RISC-V SweRV Cores – westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1 - Future JavaScript: what is still missing?
- Solve/generate Mazes with JavaScript on HTML Canvas
Solve and generate mazes in JS. Contribute to dmaydan/Maze_Solver_Generator development by creating an account on GitHub. - Google Easter Egg- Translating Monty Python’s “funniest Joke Ever” from German
- Outperforming everything with anything Python? Sure, why not?
- Compile Ruby into WebAssembly
- Detecting Kernel Memory Disclosure with x86 Emulation and Taint Tracking
- X-spreadsheet – A JavaScript (canvas) spreadsheet for web
a javascript spreadsheet for web. Contribute to myliang/x-spreadsheet development by creating an account on GitHub. - I Am Not a Real Programmer
- Swizzle Inventor: Data Movement Synthesis for GPU Kernels
- Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Upgrade Warning
- Digitized minutes of Royal Society meetings taken between 1686 and 1711
- Vulnerability Spotlight: Python.org certificate parsing denial-of-service
- Visual Programming Doesn’t Suck
I’m here to tell you that visual programming, and diagrammatic reasoning in particular, is a formidable tool-set if used the right way… - Advice to new programmers
Itâs not every day where students new to programming get to ask 709 software developers for advice. Overview There is a school here in Malmö, Sweden called The Game Assembly. This school focuses on teaching students game production. Everything from programming to art and design. This is a three year… - Serve Static GitHub Pages Locally
- Amiga Music Tracker in JavaScript Works with Amiga Mod and FastTracker XM Files
- A Image Editor in JavaScript Canvas
- Add limits to amount of JavaScript that can be loaded by a website
- Canonical’s Web and Design team use GitHub to agree on team standards
Quote of the week
No code is faster than no code.
— merb motto
Enterprises
- Amazon’s Power Reviewers
- Microsoft’s fonts catch out another fraudster–this time in Canada
- Microsoft engineer on Mozilla
- Sony is making the same mistake that hobbled Microsoft and almost killed Xbox
- What happened to the people in Microsoft’s iconic 1978 company photo
- Netflix Flexes
Netflix is an Aggregator, with a value chain that lets it drive demand, raise prices, and dismiss competition. - “This is it.” Alien contact – a Twitter thread
- Google accused of ongoing “massive leakage of highly intimate data”
Male impotence, substance abuse, right-wing politics, left-wing politics, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, mental health. Those are just a few of the advertising labels that Google’s adtech infrastructure routinely sticks to Internet users as it watches and tracks what they do online in⦠- TSMC Nanke 14 Factory Production Interruption Could Affect NVIDIA and Others
According to reports, the TSMC Nanke 14 Factory has experienced a production shutdown after substandard chemicals used in the manufacturing process ruined tens of thousands of wafers. These defects in the silicon wafers are not able to be detected until after the production run. Companies affected include industry heavyweights such as NVIDIA, MediaTek, Huawei Hisilicon, and some ARM server processors. The 16/12nm process is one of TSMC’s main sources of revenue. TSMC does not know the financial impact of the loss at this time, but it is expected to be extremely high due to the advanced technology that uses these chips such as NVIDIA GPUs.
More detailed information said that the wafer contamination incident occurred at the Fab 14 fab of Nanke Technology Park. This fab was also one of the affected factories in the virus incident last year. Wafer manufacturing is a very demanding process that requires the use of a wide variety of chemical materials and requires high purity. This accident stems from the fact that imported chemical materials do not meet the requirements, resulting in flaws in the wafers produced.
Discussion
- Microsoft decides IE 10 has had its fun: Termination set for Jan 2020
- Google: Oracle Java win will kill software development, so SCOTUS must rule
- Goodbye Big Five: Google
- What If Google Doesn’t Reward White Hat SEO
I wonder what will happen if Google isn’t able to reward good actors at the expense of bad ones. Maybe something good. - Google Takes Its First Steps Toward Killing the URL
Google wants to get rid of URLs. But first, it needs to show you why. - Reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex
- Microsoft Dev Implores Mozilla to Surrender and Bring Firefox to Chromium
- Intel Open Image Denoise: High-Performance Denoising Library for Ray Tracing
- Amazon has forced attrition rates (someone has to go every year)
- New research says intelligent people are messy, stay up late, and curse a lot
- Google’s also peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door
It looks like Facebook was not the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users. Google has been running an app called Screenwise Meter, which bears a strong resemblance to the app distributed by Facebook Res⦠- Google Feels the Brunt of GDPR Enforcement
- Tesla Q4 2018 Earnings Letter
- Google is discontinuing their free weather API
- Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd
- Mozilla developer fixes Chromium bug caused by Google breaking the spec
- Shutting down Google+ for consumer (personal) accounts on April 2, 2019
- Elon Musk’s Surprise Pick for Tesla CFO Is a Relative Unknown
- amazon.com announces 4th quarter sales up 20% to $72.4B
- Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps
Google joins Facebook in Apple’s banning spree - Apple restores Google’s internal iOS apps after certificate misuse punishment
Apple has blocked Google from distributing its internal-only iOS apps on its corporate network after a TechCrunch investigation found the search giant abusing the certificates. “Weâre working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be r⦠- CBC head warns Netflix poses cultural threat to Canada
- New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking
- It’s Time to Ditch Google Analytics
- Microsoft’s Resurgence Under Satya Nadella
In Davos, the CEO reflects on his tenure, dealing with competitors and the tech industry’s image problem - The IPO of Virgin Trains U.S.A.
- Google Play Store Now Open for Progressive Web Apps
- More Google Employees Are Losing Faith in Their CEO’s Vision
- Where do Google’s flaky tests come from?
Other news
- Lessons Learned from Kaggle’s Airbus Challenge
- Making C Less Dangerous in the Linux Kernel
- University of the Third Age
- An elementary introduction to the geometry of quantum states with a picture book
- Why Is It So Hard to Detect Keyup Event on Linux?
- Here are 588 women in the UK who could speak at your tech event
- We demand BuzzFeed pay out earned paid time off to its recent laid-off employees
- Hacking PostgreSQL
- Duke University professor removed over ‘Speak English’ email
A professor loses her job as programme director after urging Chinese students to speak â100% Englishâ. - Future of digital journalism as BuzzFeed and HuffPost lay off 1,000
- BuzzFeed employees demand it pay out earned PTO to all laid-off U.S. staffers
A group of current and former BuzzFeed employees are asking the company to pay out paid time off to all recently laid-off staff. In response, Lenke Taylor, BuzzFeedâs human resources lead, said it wants to meet with staff and is âopen to re-evaluatingâ its decision on PTO. In an open letter to Tayl⦠- U.S. Accuses Huawei of Stealing Trade Secrets, Defrauding Banks
- The PewDiePie Hackers: Could hacking printers ruin your life?
- Lessons learned scaling a PostgreSQL database to 1.2bn records/month
- Why women are outperforming men at the extremes of endurance
- PGPG&E E Files for Bankruptcy Following California Wildfires
- “Learn to Code”: The Meme Attacking Media
- I Tried Linux as My Main Dev Environment but Was Forced Back to Windows
- PG&E files for bankruptcy
- Instacart paying 80 cents an hour because worker received a large tip
Yep, thatâs right. Eighty cents. Thatâs what Instacart actually paid Tom, an Instacart worker, for 69 minutes of his time . - A Science Journal Funded by Peter Thiel Dismisses Climate Change and Evolution
- Facebook has been paying people to install a “Research” VPN
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed i⦠- Alpine Linux 3.9.0 Released
- The UAE’s hacking team of U.S. mercenaries
- ‘Karma’: A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes
A spying squad based in Abu Dhabi used a hacking tool called Karma to spy on iPhones of opponents. Reuters explains how the exploit worked. - India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers
India’s largest bank has secured an unprotected server that allowed anyone to access financial information on millions of its customers, like bank balances and recent transactions. The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based data center, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text mess⦠- Learn How to Listen. One of the Hardest Parts of Data Science
- Quid – try micropayments instead of ads or subscriptions
- Another Side of MeToo: Male Managers Fearful of Mentoring Women
- Freedom of speech memo, President of the university of Alaska, March 2001
- How to teach programming to your loved ones
- A Debt to Education
- ICE set up a fake university; 100s enrolled, not realizing it was a sting op
- Criminals Are Tapping into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts
- The UAE’s secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries
Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Nat… - Linux Fu: Easier File Watching
- Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
Google and Facebook should be allies of quality journalism, not its gravest threat. - Learn React fundamentals, just checkout and setup the app locally
Application that will help you learn React fundamentals. Install this application locally – there’s guided tutorial as well as guided exercises. – tyroprogrammer/learn-react-app - EU charges eight banks over alleged government bond cartel
The European Union’s antitrust authority has charged eight unnamed banks wi… - Self-driving cars will «cruise» to avoid paying to park
- Saudi Arabia runs online database of women to track them, stop them running away
- Full-system dynamic tracing on Linux using eBPF and bpftrace
