Gooooooood morning, Herd!!! 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 applications in drug discovery and protein structure analysis
- A captcha so fiendish only a robot could solve it
- An AI Whose Performance Increases If They Let It Sleep and Dream
- Can a robot pick a strawberry better, faster, and cheaper than a human?
- Drug Combo Creates New Neurons from Neighboring Cells
A simple drug cocktail that converts cells neighboring damaged neurons into functional new neurons could potentially be used to treat stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injuries. - Underactuated Robotics
- Deep learning may need a new programming language
- Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
- Machine Learning Data Set Preparation
- Machine Learning Data Set Preparation
- Neuroscientists Say They’ve Found an Entirely New Form of Neural Communication
- Sphero RVR – The Go Anywhere, Do Anything Programmable Robot
- Robots Track Moving Objects with Unprecedented Precision
- Growing a Compiler: Getting to Machine Learning from a General Purpose Compiler
- Reflections on Learning Rust by Building Punchtop
- Simple Webapp to Play with Open AI Transformer (Smaller Version)
- QuillBot: Free Paraphrasing Tool
- PlotNeuralNet: Latex Code for Drawing Neural Networks
- Crazy Circuits: An Open Source Electronics Learning System
- Deep Learning on the GPU in Clojure from Scratch: Sharing Memory
- Structuring Legal Documents with Deep Learning
- Don’t Let Robots Pull the Trigger
Blockchain and decentralization
- First impressions of Filecoin
- A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
Design reduces by 99 percent the data users need to join the network and verify transactions. - Decentralized Clearing Network: A Protocol for Hybrid Decentralized Exchanges
- Samsung Galaxy S10 Features Cryptocurrency Storage
- Ramses – A Distributed 3D Rendering System Open-Sourced by BMW
A distributed system for rendering 3D content with focus on bandwidth and resource efficiency – GENIVI/ramses - You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work
People are resorting to blockchain for all kinds of reasons these days. Ever since I started doing smart contract security audits in…
Woman computer scientist of the week
Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff was an American physical chemist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF) where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM). The one-letter code used for amino acids was developed by her, reflecting an attempt to reduce the size of the data files used to describe amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
Cloud and architecture
- AAAS: Machine learning ‘causing science crisis’
Techniques used to analyse data are producing misleading and often wrong results, critics say. - AWS Nitro System
- Save $69K Using On-Prem Server vs. AWS P3dn.24xlarge
A TCO comparison between the Lambda Hyperplane 8 x V100 Server and the AWS p3dn.24xlarge instance. The Hyperplane cost comparison is very similar to that of the DGX-1. - Honda Plans to Leave Britain as Brexit Draws Close
The Japanese automaker, which employs 3,500 at its Swindon, England, plant, is set to close the site by 2021. - Comparing the Network Performance of AWS, Azure and GCP
- Announcing Cloudflare Workers.dev
- Build and Deploy Serverless React Apps with Next.js 8 and Zeit Now
- Yelp Fired Manager After He Didn’t Take Calls, Check Email 24/7, Lawsuit Claims
Boss sent Mark Weathers a work email on Good Friday, then called him in church during Easter weekend to make him work, religious-discrimination suit alleges. - Nginx Is Giving Away a Free O’Reilly Book on Cloud Native Devops with Kubernetes
Development and languages
- Men fighting Florida’s Python epidemic
- Losing Your Privacy in the Digital Age: Share Your Stories
- Western Digital’s RISC-V “SweRV” Core Design Released for Free
- Builder vs. Programmer Perspective
- GitHub censors deepfake source code for non logged in users? (Try incognito)
GitHub is where people build software. More than 31 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 100 million projects. - The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Parent
- Git-signatures – Multiple PGP signatures for your commits
Git extensions for m-of-n signing and verification on commits/tags. – hashbang/git-signatures - Awesome Python
- Warning: debian stable kernel upgrade breaks most ARM SBC
- Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news
Company broke privacy and competition law and should be regulated urgently, say MPs - Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes
tl;dr Programming interview questions can feel unnecessarily difficult. Sometimes they actually are. And this isn’t just because they make interviews excessively stressful. Our data shows that harder programming questions actually do a worse job of predicting final outcomes than easier ones. - Facebook Has Behaved Like ‘Digital Gangsters,’ U.K. Parliament Report Says
- Building a Kotlin Native App on iOS/Android
- Block Ads in Apps on Android (Including Video Ads)
Learn how to block in-app and video ads on Android, without root. - XFiles – FOSS File Manager and Archiver with Root Support for Android
- A Curated List of Falsehoods Programmers Believe In
- Forecasting in Python with Prophet
- Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier
- Gitlab 11.8 Released
- Why Language-Oriented Programming? Why Racket?
- Facebook Planned to Spy on Android Phone Users, Internal Emails Reveal
Quote of the week
A fool with a tool is a more dangerous fool.
— u.
Enterprises
- Spoofing Google Search Results
- Closed-door meetings on unions preceded Amazon’s withdrawal
The prize was clear: A promised 25,000 jobs with an average salary of $150,000, but Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio were urging Amazon to hire a union workforce. - Google .dev domain early access
- Microsoft’s New MT-DNN Outperforms Google BERT
Multi-task learning and language model pre-training are popular approaches for many of today’s natural language understanding (NLU) tasks… - Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion
Antitrust agencies are concerned that the autonomous pricing algorithms increasingly used by online vendors may learn to collude. This column uses experiments with pricing algorithms powered by AI in - Google backtracks on Chrome modifications that would have crippled ad blockers
- Google.com Ranks Slow Using New Google PSI Speed Rank
- Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200M in profit for 2018
- Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11B in profit for 2018
- Bill de Blasio: The Path Amazon Rejected
- Amazon pays no 2018 federal income tax, report says
- How Badly Is Google Books Search Broken, and Why?
- Intellectual Control
- “Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
Police are increasingly using judge-approved «reverse location» search warrants to find cellphones near crime scenes. Civil liberties experts worry it’s a digital dragnet ripe for abuse. Authorities say it’s an important new crime fighting tool. - Vulnerability in Tesla Website Used to Find Details of 8500 Cars in US Inventory
- Amazon Caught Selling Counterfeits of Publisher’s Computer Books–Again
Bill Pollock says Amazon is printing them—and even the product photo is fake. - Google Teases a Big Gaming Announcement for March 19th
- Google says Nest’s built-in mic not listed in specs was not meant to be secret
- Microsoft Is Abandoning SHA-1 Hashes for Updates–But Why?
- Using Artificial Intelligence to Engineer Materials’ Properties
New system of “strain engineering” can change a material’s optical, electrical, and thermal properties. - Why Do Zebras Have Stripes? To Shoo Away Flies
- Tippin.me (Beta) – Micropayments on Twitter
Your digital tip jar, using Lightning Network and Bitcoin. - EU Countries Back Copyright Reforms Aimed at Google, Facebook
European Union countries on Wednesday endorsed an overhaul of the bloc’s co… - It Looks Like Ibera Is Gutting Travis CI Just a Few Weeks After Acquiring It
- Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1
- Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees
Google is finally ending forced arbitration for its employees. These changes will go into effect for both current and future Google employees on March 21. While Google won’t reopen settled claims, current employees can litigate past claims starting March 21. For the contractors Google works w⦠- Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet
Synthetic DNA seems to behave like the natural variety, suggesting that chemicals beyond natureâs four familiar bases could support life on Earth. - National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Open Source Software
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB Review
- Microsoft Workers Demand It Drop $450M U.S. Army Contract
Some Microsoft Corp employees on Friday demanded that the company cancel a $480 … - Amazon Is the Invisible Backbone Behind ICE’s Immigration Crackdown
- Bill Maher Tells Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to “Take One for the Team”
Other news
- How to Secure a Linux Server
An evolving how-to guide for securing a Linux server. – imthenachoman/How-To-Secure-A-Linux-Server - Classic Mathematics Books for Lifelong Learners
When I was a college student, I saw a list of essential math books on a blog. I promised to myself to read all those books in 10 years… - Nuclear Waste Dumpsters in Massachusettes Are Costing Taxpayers a Fortune
- Mother Learns the Identity of Child’s Grandmother. Sperm Bank Threatens to Sue
- Payless is closing all its 2,100 US stores
- Intel Starts Publishing Open-Source Linux Driver Code for Discrete GPUs
- What I learnt on a men-only retreat…
- The Book of Secret Knowledge – A collection of lists, blogs, hacks
:star: A collection of awesome lists, manuals, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more. – trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge - Etsy sellers say their bank accounts were emptied in major billing snafu
- EU cross-border payments outside Eurozone: MEPs scrap excessive fees
- Sheela-Na-Gigs: Women Adorning Britain’s Churches
Why are churches across Britain adorned with carvings of naked women exposing their genitalia? - Australian Political Parties Hit by ‘State Actor’ Hack
The «sophisticated» activity follows an intrusion on parliamentary servers, PM Scott Morrison says. - Password Managers: Under the Hood of Secrets Management
- Linux Kernel Through 4.20.10 Found Vulnerable to Arbitrary Code Execution
- CVE-2019-8912: Use After Free Vuln in All Linux Kernels Up to 4.20.10
- Python Scripting – Beginner to Advanced
- Norway Makes First Payment to Indonesia for Reducing Carbon Emissions
- STMicro STM32MP1 Cortex A7/M4 MPU Supports Linux and Android
- Teaching People to Trade Stocks Is Like Starting Them on Heroin – Munger
Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger has warned that teaching people to trade stocks is like starting them on heroin. - Cambridge University Launches Archive of Aerial Photos Going Back to 1945
- Apple Is Blocking Linux User-Agent on appleid.apple.com
I figured out the appleid.apple.com issue.
It sniffs your User-Agent.
If it says Linux, Bad Gateway error.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
IT WORKS WITH A WINDOWS UA
IT WORKS WITH A BSD UA
IT WORKS WITH A GOD DAMN OS/2 UA
NOT LINUX
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
- A Heavily-Commented Linux Kernel Source Code
- What Happens at a Firearms Training for Teachers
- Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers
When everything is quantified, power accrues to whoever is keeping score
