Gooooooood morning, Readers!!! 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
- Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning
- 311 years ago, Alexander Selkirk was rescued on a desert island
- Leila Janah, CEO and entrepreneur who wanted to end global poverty, dies at 37
- Game AI Pro
- Collected Papers of Alexander A. Stepanov
- Reconfigurable Robot Can Climb Up Its Own Track
- Using neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality
- Yann LeCun on Causality and Explainability in AI
- Technology where one robot helps another robot
- SurfingAttack: New Attack on Voice Assistants Using Ultrasonic Guided Wave
- The AI delusion: why humans trump machines
- Building an open-source language-learning platform
Blockchain and decentralization
- Deadcoins
- Gini coefficient – a measure of wealth distribution
- What Is Bitcoin: Internet’s Native Money or Asset for Speculation?
- YaCy: Decentralized Web Search
- The world’s first Bitcoin-settled index futures
Woman computer scientist of the week
Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Cloud and architecture
- Artists who paint with their feet have unique brain patterns
- I made a site that helps you find LGBT+ Travel Rankings and Gay Laws
- Architect of His Own Downfall
- Cronyo – A simple CLI to manage your cron jobs on AWS
- C# Pattern Matching
Learn about pattern matching expressions in C# - Crema Coffee in San Jose Closes Due to ADA Lawsuit
- Peerd: an AWS VPC peering connection management tool
- The T2D3 Path to SaaS Growth and $1B Valuation
- Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate
- Lessons from growing a SaaS from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic
Want to learn how to grow your blog from 0 to 200K monthly visitors in under 2 years? Check out our SEO case study on helping Tallyfy. - Dynamic Route53 records for AWS auto scaling groups with Terraform
Development and languages
- Bumblebees may prefer nectar that has less sugar but is easier to regurgitate
- Wenyan-lang: Classical Chinese Programming Language
- Rule of Three (Computer Programming)
- Challenging the myth of individual programmer productivity
- Branch Prediction – Fundamentals Every Programmer Need Not Know
A walk-through of Branch Prediction - New Intel Microcodes for Windows 10 Released to Fix CPU Bugs
- Expanding the Attack Surface: React Native Android Applications
- Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python
- Digital publishing is beginning to make money
- Programming an HP-15C
- /Dev/Null: Anti-Cheat Kernel Driver
- F# Pipeline Operator in JavaScript with Babel
Introduction Writing readable and declarative code in JavaScript, how nice it would be! :lol:I know, readable and declarative don’t go in the same sentence when talking about JavaScript, but … - Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code
Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight - Occam programming language
- Opnieuw: A simple and intuitive retrying library for Python
- Unix System Programming with Standard ML
- Mint: The programming language for writing single page applications
- Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android
- macOS Kernel Extensions are officially deprecated
- Writing a triple polyglot script (valid Python, Ruby and Perl)
- Europe Just Voted in Favor of Making iPhone and Android Use the Same Charger
- JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed
- Python dicts are now ordered
- Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure
Quote of the week
There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.
Enterprises
- Netflix original series no longer get time to breathe
- Amazon has 150M Prime members
- Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on Alt Twitter
- AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
- Tinygo is now officially a Google sponsored project
- Google Maps Hacks
- “Google Drive” would like to receive keystrokes from any application
- Creating a virtual traffic jam on Google Maps with 99 phones and a wagon
- Behind Amazon’s HQ2 fiasco
- Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate
- Microsoft’s Three Browsers
- Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Results
- Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources
Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state … - Netflix’s Junk Bonds Explain How We Are in a Corporate Debt Bubble
- Twitter says an attacker used its API to match usernames to phone numbers
Twitter discloses security incident involving the abuse of one of its official API features. - AMD 64 Core Threadripper 3990X Seen Crushing $20K Xeon Platinum CPUs
- Google admits it sent private videos in Google Photos to strangers
- Some Google Photos videos in backups were sent to strangers in November
- Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
Goedenavond TAG! This is not your typical spec review, and is highly related to #320. But, because @torgo asked nicely, I'm opening up a review for a specific application of UA-CH as a replacem… - Nvidia Geforce Now launches at $5 a month
- Intel axes Nervana just two months after launch
Intel axes Nervana in favor of Habana. - Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media
- What to know before you buy or install an Amazon Ring camera
- Casper lowers IPO price range, implying valuation of just over $500M
- Twitter: “An Incident Impacting Your Account Identity”
- The mysterious disappearance of Google’s click metric
Google makes less money per click every quarter. Now, we won’t know how much less. Is there trouble ahead in online advertising? - “Hey Google, stop tracking me”
It’s common knowledge that Google has used their political, marketing and technical prowess to stop and co-opt effective ad blocking on the web. What hasn’t been clear until recently is how Google is using the Chrome web browser to track individuals, even when ad blocking and in-built tracking prevention is enabled.
- Why Google Might Prefer Dropping a $22B Business
- Musk’s SpaceX Plans a Spinoff, IPO for Starlink Business
- Tesla remotely removed autopilot features from used Tesla without notice
- Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
- On Resigning from Google
- AMD Threadripper Outperforms $20k Enterprise CPUs
Other news
- Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine
- Not for sale: Luxury groups ponder ways to get rid of their unsold inventory
- Educated Fools
- Stanford’s free course on higher mathematical thinking is about to start soon
- HTTP 402: Payment Required
The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use. - Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
- Python Tutorial: Learn Python for Free
- The Wall Street Journal’s Fake and Distorted News
- Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development
- German Banks Are Hoarding So Many Euros They Need More Vaults
- The missing semester of CS education
- Quantumly Generated Random Bytes in Racket
- I found a WhatsApp security flaw that allowed hackers to read the file system
Critical Security Flaw Found in WhatsApp Desktop Platform Allowing Cybercriminals Read From The File System Access - Learn X in Y minutes Where X=Prolog
- University of Texas fights colony collapse disorder with new bacteria
- Jeffrey Epstein’s mystery bank came alive after his death
- What Scarlett Howard Learns from the Bees She Teaches
- End-of-Life Announcement for CoreOS Container Linux
- Tool to Help Journalists Spot Doctored Images Is Unveiled by Jigsaw
- Even with a $199 Laptop, Clear Linux Can Offer Superior Performance
- Gitlab Saleswomen “told to wear short skirts, heels and ‘step it up’”
- Does Consciousness Cause Quantum Collapse?
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Offers Incredible Linux Performance
On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s…
Researchers at the University of B.C. have found a link between living near highways and an increased risk of several major neurological disorders, including dementia and Parkinson’s disease.…
The glial cells of the nervous system have been eclipsed in importance by neurons for decades. But glia are turning out to be central to many neurological functions, including pain perception.
In this article, I cover the theory behind receipt digitization and implement an end-to-end pipeline using OpenCV and Tesseract. I also review a few important papers that do Receipt Digitization using Deep Learning.
One of Clearview AI’s investors defended the company, “We do not have to be hidden to be free.”
We are standardizing OpenAI’s deep learning framework on PyTorch. In the past, we implemented projects in many frameworks depending on their relative strengths. We’ve now chosen to standardize to make it easier for our team to create and share optimized implementations of our models. As part of this
Apple was reportedly working on the encryption feature two years ago but the FBI objected.
The U.S. government on Tuesday sued five U.S. companies and three individuals, a…
A set of Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud: email, calendar, contacts, file sync, IRC bouncer, VPN, and more. – sovereign/sovereign
A survey of existing designs and implementations for automatic conversion and verification of units of measurement in computer programs.
In a previous post we outlined the basics of supply and demand in the world of air freight forwarding, and described the difficult problem…
The C# Language Integrated Queries ported for Javascript for amazing performance – Siderite/LInQer
My three year old niece jumbled up the order of alphabets yet again while singing them. I giggled and corrected her but she wasn’t convinced. With a puzzled look, she asked me ‘Why?’
A source code analyzer built for surfacing features of interest and other characteristics to answer the question 'what's in it' using static analysis with a json based rules engine. Ide…
The Ring app sends a range of personal information to marketing companies, a study suggests.
The vegan diet is low in – or, in some cases, entirely devoid of – several important brain nutrients. Could these shortcomings be affecting vegans’ abilities to think?
Stadia owners have taken to Reddit to voice their growing concerns over Google’s handling (or rather, lack thereof) of the game streaming platform.
Amazon’s profits rebounded during the quarter, proving its investments in one-day delivery paid off.
Retro Game Engine for Racket. Contribute to massung/r-cade development by creating an account on GitHub.
What do the digits of pi, colliding blocks and quantum search algorithms have in common? More than you might expect. Two playful papers, one from 2003 and one from December of 2019, provide…
UPDATED to include Sci-Hub data from six months: September 2015–February 2016, and correcting a coding error that inflated download counts. Well, they might not have lost the downloads, but t…
I built my last hackintosh in 2014 and it was overdue for an update. Since Apple recently updated their iMac with Core i9s and skipped the T2, this is probably the last time I’m building this…
It was another black mark on the privacy record of the social network, which also reported its quarterly earnings.
Imagine arriving at the airport just in time to catch a plane. Everything in your behavior betrays the heightened concentration of your attention. Your mind on alert, you look for the departures si…
OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall – evilsocket/opensnitch
by Carles Gelada and Jacob Buckman WARNING: This is an old version of this blogpost, and if you are a Bayesian, it might make you angry. Click here for an updated post with the same content. Context: About a month ago Carles asserted on Twitter that Bayesian Neural Networks make…
This Humans of Machine Learning interview covers Emil Wallner and his hero’s journey, self-taught approach to education, experience with AI, and path to Google.
Be it in research papers, legal documents or invoices and receipts, deep learning can be applied to automatically detect and extract information from tables. In this article, we will see how to do it and what to be cautious about.
Pet adoption ML coder apologizes and says desire to be ranked 
The company is focused on «infrastructure the Epic community uses today and is likely to use in the future,» according to a statement received by CNBC.
Attorneys for a former Apple Inc executive on Tuesday will try to convince a ske…
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m not the largest fan of centralisation, but rarely do I so swiftly and effectively feel the crushing weight of it. I happen to use a very nice Chromium-based web-browser which, when it opens has javascript disabled. Often I find… | Jan Harasym | Designing highly scalable/resilient infrastructure by day; running hacker communities by night.
The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism, instead turning citizens into suspects.
Amazon on Wednesday asked a U.S.
Secret Manager is a new GCP product that securely and conveniently stores API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data.
We are excited to give a sneak preview into an experimental feature we are working on, called I/O Devices!
Learn how to measure code execution time in Python reliably using a line fitting method that eliminates errors as suggested by Moreno and Fischmeister.
I often talk about how .NET Core is open source and runs ‘everywhere.’ MonoGame, Unity, Apple Watches, Raspberry Pi, …
Members of the iconic comedy group lead tributes to their «outrageously funny» co-star, who has died aged 77.
My wall clock in my house recently died, and with there being a running joke that I’m a time traveller thanks to my DeLorean, I thought I might as well build a replacement clock myself so it could be extra unique. Here’s what I came up with: a self-setting, self-correcting, self-adjusting wall clock/chronometer that tells …
As well documented elsewhere, in the past few years Amazon has been developing a slew of its own private brands for a wide variety of products. Now there is nothing wrong with a private label ̵…
Amazon.com Inc is planning to give more data on counterfeit goods to law enforce…
“There’s something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?”
PSL Features
Tesla Inc shares surged on Wednesday, and the company became the first publicly …
250 million leaked conversations between Microsoft customer support agents and customers were left exposed on the web, putting users at risk of phishing.
It’s a stealthy way to get more people to use Bing in businesses.
More and more companies are promising privacy online and an alternative to the big internet firms.
The streaming service has accepted nonprofessional and sometimes questionable content to build a video library that in Amazon’s style can dominate the competition through sheer volume.
Here are some terms to mute on Twitter to clean your timeline up a bit. – twittermute.txt
As a writer on physics, I’m always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and while…
Two United Nations officials called for further investigation into the alleged hacking of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ phone, suggesting it was an attempt to influence news coverage of Saudi Arabia.
A community where women are at the forefront.
Emacs
Works for lots of other foreign languages too!
?Fast State-of-the-Art Tokenizers optimized for Research and Production – huggingface/tokenizers
Daniel Kahneman is winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for his integration of economic science with the psychology of human behavior, judgment and decision-making. He is the author of the popular book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that summarizes in an accessible way his research of several decades, often in collaboration with Amos Tversky, on cognitive biases, prospect theory, and happiness. The central thesis of this work is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each ty
Google Cloud Run is the perfect deployment system for all your side projects. It is dirt cheap, fully managed serverless and scalable.
JavaScript framework for visual programming and creating node editor – retejs/rete
Github Based Jobs Listings. Contribute to zcor/githubjobs development by creating an account on GitHub.
DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing. Contribute to magenta/ddsp development by creating an account on GitHub.
We tested Firefox Preview, the new Firefox experience for Android, together with our users for 6 months. Now it’s coming to Firefox for Android Nightly.
Research programming language for concurrent ownership – microsoft/verona
Micro Kernel / Bootloader for Ben Eater’s 6502 Computer – janroesner/sixty5o2
Super Easy All-In-One DevOps Platform. Contribute to theonedev/onedev development by creating an account on GitHub.
When I read that Google is forcing developers to migrate from Google Sheets API v3 to v4, I was mad. Here’s why.
They’ll stop working on Windows, macOS, and Linux first.
Google’s parent company joins Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as the only companies to hit a $1 trillion valuation, highlighting the technology sector’s steady market leadership.
Grow with Google announces IT Automation with Python Professional Certificate and new Google.org scholarships.
The CEO alleged a pattern of over-the-phone threats. 
We should look at individuals—not national averages—as the unit of analysis, and ask: Are wages adequate for full-time workers?
Reverse engineering course by Z0F. Focuses on x64 Windows. – 0xZ0F/Z0FCourse_ReverseEngineering
Latest launch includes ‘DarkSat’ prototype to reduce reflection from fleets of broadband Internet satellites.
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to start your argument with ‘everyone knows,’ but in this case, I think we ought to make an…
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to start your argument with ‘everyone knows,’ but in this case, I think we ought to make an…
The proposal would only apply to companies that post at least $10 million of taxable income from business conducted in California.
The author of This Is Your Brain on Music talks about the very human ways the mind and body keep the beat.
The laws of physics stay the same no matter oneâs perspective. Now this idea is allowing computers to detect features in curved and higher-dimensional space.
? A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES – 0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email
The latest Goldman Sachs IT survey of 100 execs at big companies showed that 56 executives are using Azure for cloud infrastructure, versus 48 using AWS. Microsoft’s lead has been increasing since December 2017, according to the analysts.
:floppy_disk: hobby x86 kernel zig. Contribute to jzck/kernel-zig development by creating an account on GitHub.
Realizing the promise of digital lidar: Announcing a new family of 128 channel lidar sensors available in long-range, mid-range, and ultra-wide view.
Intel tipped its hand that PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs are already sampling
Jan 1, 2020 Cost-efficiency and performance are critical for big data analytics. For this reason a recent blog post from ScyllaDB guys caught our attention. They collected over 500 billion data points and were able to query it with 1B rows/sec query scan performance. The test rig was a beefy and
We’re asking the Supreme Court to reaffirm the importance of the software interoperability that has allowed developers to write millions of applications for billions of devices.
Apple’s AirPods have become a global hit since their launch in late 2016. But what can investors learn from their success? Are they just an iPhone accessory? Or the formation of a new app ecosystem?
_The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed._ 
Disaster loomed for the hard-pressed U.S. Strategic Command team and the nascent U.S. Space Force. Negotiators toiled to maintain an international
It keeps bailing on deals, leaving companies in the lurch.
The changes come after ProPublica’s reporting showed how TurboTax maker Intuit tricked customers into paying for tax prep they could have gotten for free.
An artificial intelligence (AI) system performs as well as or better than radiologists at detecting breast cancer from mammograms, and using a combination of AI and human inputs could help to improve screening efficiency.
breeding bugs in the latent space
Also: The IRS is no longer banned from creating its own online filing system.
Cory Doctorow looks at the reactionary tendencies of modern artificial intelligence and algorithm-based systems.
Contrary to common belief, blue light may not be as disruptive to our sleep patterns as originally thought – according to University of Manchester scientists.
Certain bacteria can override a defence mechanism of the immune system, so called programmed cell death, through inhibition of death effector molecules by their outer membranes components. Shigella bacteria, which cause diarrhoea, use lipopolysaccharides (LPS) on their surface to block the effector caspases. Lipopolysaccharides are a component of the bacterial outer membrane. This strategy enables the bacteria to multiply within the cell. This is the result of a study conducted by the molecular immunologist Professor Hamid Kashkar and his team in the institute for Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Aging
Python bindings for FFmpeg – with complex filtering support – kkroening/ffmpeg-python
A isometric city builder in JavaScript. Contribute to victorqribeiro/isocity development by creating an account on GitHub.
Android is one of Google’s most important tools for collecting data on users. This guide will help you improve your privacy on Android devices.
Python library to interact with Google Sheets V4 API – socialpoint-labs/sheetfu
Simple job queues for Python. Contribute to rq/rq development by creating an account on GitHub.
Amazon Kinesis Video Streams Webrtc SDK is for developers to install and customize realtime communication between devices and enable secure streaming of video, audio to Kinesis Video Streams. – aws…
Microsoft Japan’s experimentation with a four-day workweek has proved to be a huge boon to employee productivity.
Around 2,300 contracted workers who serve meals to Google employees in the San Francisco Bay Area have unionized, saying they’re overworked and underpaid.
The Trump administration took measures on Friday to crimp exports of artificial …
This spring marked the 30th anniversary of the public uncovering of the so-called KGB Hack, bringing with it a number of new articles rem…
In this post and those to follow, I will be walking through the creation and training of recommendation systems, as I am currently working on this topic for my Master Thesis. Part 2 provides a nice review of the ongoing research initiatives with regard to the strengths, weaknesses, and application s
Hedge funds are paying top dollar to bring in new employees with quantitative skills, underscoring the desperation some funds face to bulk up their abilities around big data and algorithms.
This blog post is one of those things that just blew up. From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successf…
Redux greatly shaped how we develop modern JavaScript applications nowadays. Here I want to give a walkthrough on all the mindset changes we went through as JavaScript developers …
Good friends, finally after some time without being able to play Battlefield V for Linux, this week I was using lutris-4.21, I was having fun when my anti-cheat, FairFight, blew me out of the game, so I was banned. As I was not using any cheating, I think the anti-cheat considered dxvk or the table layer that used at the time as cheating, I sent an email to EA, is the alert.
USC researchers analyzed thousands of tweets and found that social bots frequently shared false information about cannabis’s health benefits.
Courses on deep learning, deep reinforcement learning (deep RL), and artificial intelligence (AI) organized by Lex Fridman at MIT. Lectures, introductory tutorials, and TensorFlow code (GitHub) open to all.
A band of large drones appears to be flying nighttime search patterns over northeast Colorado and local authorities say they don’t know who’s behind the mysterious aircraft.
Repository demonstrating the Capital One breach on your AWS account – avishayil/caponeme
Build system in D, Python, Ruby, Javascript or Lua – atilaneves/reggae
Exploring Python through counter-intuitive snippets. If you think you know Python, think once more! – satwikkansal/wtfpython
“@McFunkypants Whenever I see hot takes like this (pops up a lot with music) I always think of this quote.
“Not everything was perfect in 1995, but I think we’ve lost something on the way. Some remarks:
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
Hey everyone, new vlog for this morning. I was in Seattle last week and it made me nostalgic. When I lived there, I made a career decision that cost me a lot, so I wanted to share it with you with…
I write a weekly email called the Monday Musings . The most popular part of the newsletter is a section called “Coolest Things I Learned This Week.” It’s fun and eclectic, interesting and intriguing. This is a collection of the most popular ideas I shared in 2019. Note: I’ve lost some of the s
A collection of various awesome lists for hackers, pentesters and security researchers – Hack-with-Github/Awesome-Hacking
A union-backed police charity spends just a sliver of its money on those it purports to serve
Linux i386 tool to load and execute ME modules. Contribute to peterbjornx/meloader development by creating an account on GitHub.