Gooooooood morning, Public!!! 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
- In Aging Singapore, 65-Year-Olds Are Learning How to Code
- The ‘last Botticelli’?
- Machine-learning Mendeleevs have rediscovered the periodic table
- Neural Modules (NeMo): A toolkit for conversational AI
Neural Modules: a toolkit for conversational AI. Contribute to NVIDIA/NeMo development by creating an account on GitHub. - Attention Mechanism in Deep Learning
What is Attention, and why is it used in state-of-the-art models? This article discusses the types of Attention and walks you through their implementations. - Comprehensive Guide on Data Visualization with Pandas
- Bottled Water Is Sucking Florida Dry
The state’s aquifers are shrinking, yet corporations want to appropriate even more of them. - Researchers build microscopic biohybrid robots propelled by muscles, nerves
- Malware botnet Emotet awakes and resumes its global spamming campaign
- Open sourcing crypto-arbitrage bot in Python – back to the dawn of crypto hype
- A neural network to auto-complete your thoughts
- Language Both Enraptures and Deceives Us
- Project Ihmehimmeli: Temporal Coding in Spiking Neural Networks
- Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cause, study suggests
- AI competitions don’t produce useful models
- The BeagleBone AI is Available
- Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
- Bots Help Moderate Stack Overflow
Blockchain and decentralization
- Announcing Yugabyte DB 2.0 GA: Jepsen Tested, High-Performance Distributed SQL
- Tildamail – Private Email with Decentralized Storage (Your Desktop, S3, IPFS)
Woman computer scientist of the week
Radhika Nagpal is an American computer scientist and researcher in the fields of self-organising computer systems, biologically-inspired robotics, and biological multi-agent systems. She is the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is also a Core Faculty Member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2017, Nagpal co-founded a robotics company under the name of Root Robotics. This educational company works to create many different opportunities for those unable to code to learn how.
Cloud and architecture
- Modern Applications at AWS
- Understanding Data Transfer in AWS (infographic)
- AWS Fargate Deep Dive: What it is, when to use it
- For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable AWS Truth to the thread
âFor every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable @awscloud Truth to the thread.â - Purdue Pharma Files for Bankruptcy to Wipe Out 2k Lawsuits
- United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden
- US Files Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden for Violation of CIA and NSA NDAs
The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA. - Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated
- Interpreting Rope Channels: The Birth of Greek Monumental Architecture
- Dust cloud sparked explosion in primitive life on Earth, say scientists
- The C4 model for visualising software architecture
Development and languages
- Z – A dynamic functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript
- Maintaining the Kernel’s Web of Trust
- “DataGlyph” Embedded Digital Data
- AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android
- How two dead accounts allowed remote crash of any Instagram Android user
- Schism, a self-hosting Scheme to WebAssembly compiler
- Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) Entirely with C# and .NET
- Statistical tool for analyzing a Git repository
- Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO
GitLab’s CEO says he’s going public on November 18, 2020. Investors love it, pouring in $268 million at a $2.75 billion valuation. - Pain Points of Web Development with WordPress
- Create and apply simple filters to an image using OpenCV and Python
- Python Tests That Write Themselves
- Git Blame-Someone-Else
- The cost of parsing JSON
- Welcoming Semmle to the GitHub Family
Today weâre announcing a big step in securing the open source supply chain: weâre welcoming Semmle to the GitHub family. - Python Is Eating the World
Frustrated by programming language shortcomings, Guido van Rossum created Python. With the language now used by millions, Nick Heath talks to van Rossum about Python’s past and explores what’s next. - Requests moved to Python Software Foundation
- The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
- Wikipedia’s JavaScript Initialisation on a Budget
- Why I Prefer Functional Programming
- Working with GitHub Actions
- Game Programming Vexations Part 4: High Level vs. Low Level
- Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python
- Cascadia Code, a Font for Windows Terminal and VSCode
- French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games
- Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
- Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah
Quote of the week
We have persistant(sic) objects, they’re called files.
— Ken Thompson
Enterprises
- Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon
And the shopping platform has plans to take on Amazon next. - Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech
- Tesla’s a Game Changer When It Comes to Windshield Wipers
- Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation
- Google ML/AI Comic
- The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone. We Went There to See for Ourselves.
- Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
The e-commerce giant overcame internal dissent from engineers and lawyers, people familiar with the move say. - Netflix acquires the global streaming rights to ‘Seinfeld’
- What the Ctenophore says about the evolution of intelligence
- Anti-intellectualism in American Life
- WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources
WeWork owner The We Company has postponed its initial public offering (IPO), wal… - Google Fi Unlimited Plan
- Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook
- How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters
- Microsoft AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles
Open source simulator for autonomous vehicles built on Unreal Engine / Unity, from Microsoft AI & Research – microsoft/AirSim - Andrew Mason’s Descript raises $15M and acquires Lyrebird
- Cisco offered DataDog more than $7B before IPO
- 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week
While New Yorkers repelled the ecommerce giant’s expansion plans, job applications are flying in from other places - Tesla earns its first-ever safety award from IIHS for Model 3
- Huawei Mate 30 phones launch without Google apps
- Amazon Signs Climate Pledge to Advance Paris Climate Accords Goals by 10 Years
- Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
Amazon will be stepping up its efforts to reduce its climate impact, CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday. The company will be ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks from Michigan’s Rivian as part of this commitment, Bezos said. The commerce giant will seek to meet its goal of becoming car⦠- Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
Stripe’s latest funding round values the company at $35 billion, putting the financial technology firm above Airbnb and Palantir. - Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens
- Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe
- Twitter discloses 10k accounts suspended for fomenting political discord
- Edward Snowden says he didn’t cooperate with Russian intelligence services
- Google announces €3B EU data centre investment
Sundar Pichai has said Google plans to invest 3 billion euros (£2.6 billion) to expand its data centres across Europe in the next two years. - Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
Google announced today that it was investing â¬3 billion (approximately US$3.3 billion) to expand its data center presence in Europe. What’s more, the company pledged the data centers would be environmentally friendly. This new investment is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invest⦠- How the “grassroots” campaign against Amazon is funded by its rivals
Walmart, Oracle and mall owner Simon Property Group are secret funders behind a nonprofit that has been highly critical of the e-commerce giant. - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel
Other news
- How kiteboarding was invented
- Ransomware hackers are targeting managed service providers for local governments
- Linux Kernel Fastboot
- How do wombats make cubed poo?
- PineTime Is a $25 Smartwatch / Companion for PinePhone Linux Phone
We’ve recently seen Linux smartphones are coming in a few weeks or months, but the $150 PinePhone may not come alone, and soon be joined by a $25 - Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties
- An important quantum algorithm may be a property of nature
Evidence that quantum searches are an ordinary feature of electron behavior may explain the genetic code, one of the greatest puzzles in biology. - Women make up 54% of new students entering Iranian universities
- A small programming course for everyone
- Crash course into Elm, and how to compare it with React
A complete guide on how to use Elm with React: If you’ve ever worked with Redux â in the context of a React application or not â you may have heard numerous times that it was inspired not only by Flux (which it followed) but also by the Elm architecture…. - Banks Warm to Mortgage Bonds That Burned Them in 2008
- Linux Kernel 5.3 Released
Now that Linux kernel 5.3 is officially released we take a quick look at the new and notable changes this kernel update brings.
Linux 5.3 was announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing L… - Linux Kernel 5.3
- Square Wants to Be a Bank but Doesn’t Want to Be Taxed Like One
Square has lent billions to small businesses and consumers and applied for a banking license, but it says it isn’t a financial company. - A basement hacker transformed Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600
Garry Kitchen’s unlikely story is told in this excerpt from the book Arcade Perfect. - Brain may not need body movements to learn virtual spaces
- Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don’t Matter
- Study suggest Neolithic Britons processed raw milk to reduce its lactose content
- GoCardless launches US debit payments solution
- IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer
- Our Journey to the First Paying Customer
- Linux Terminal Goods
- Advanced hackers are infecting IT providers in hopes of hitting their customers
- Team closes in on “holy grail” of room temperature quantum computing chips
- The Mysterious Death of the Hacker Who Turned in Chelsea Manning
- Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
- EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers
- Scotland’s minimum unit pricing may have reduced Glasgow drinking deaths
Minimum unit pricing may have contributed to the number of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow falling by more than a fifth, according to new research. - What’s new in civic tech: National Day of Civic Hacking
Functional languages such as Clojure and Haskell can often represent the complexity with cleaner code thatâs closer to the mathematics of the model.
A bot written in Scala 3 to stress test text-based MMORPGs (MUDs). – ryanberckmans/noric-bot
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is interested in gathering information on patent-related issues regarding artificial intelligence inventions for purposes of evaluating whether further examination guidance is needed to promote the reliability and predictability of patenting…
It was the âsummer of crypto loveâ â private Telegram groups were ablaze with altcoin (every cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin) chatter, Bitcoin whales were breaching…
âð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
A bill will drive a national debate over how to reshape labor laws so that workers get their fair share in a service and knowledge economy.
The official home of the Python Programming Language
Experimental C# Playstation Emulator. Contribute to BluestormDNA/ProjectPSX development by creating an account on GitHub.
On August 26, 2019, the GitHub application was deployed to production with 100% of traffic on the newest Rails version: 6.0. Read more about our process for upgrading, what we learned, and whatâs next.
The Ada programming language was born in the mid-1970s, when the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the UK’s Ministry Of Defence sought to replace the hundreds of specialized programming langâ¦
The Nissan LEAF certainly doesn’t have a reputation as a serious performance car. With far less power than any Tesla, «semi-independent» rear suspension like you’d find under a Chevy Cavalier, and many similarities with the Versa, the LEAF is widely regarded as an economy car, not a luxury or sports car. It certainly isn’t seen as a real competitor to a Tesla, even an older Model S.
California’s a huge market for Tesla, the Netherlands loves Tesla, Switzerland loves Tesla, but no state or country is as Tesla obsessed as Norway.
Four years after selling his company to Microsoft, 6Wunderkinder cofounder Christian Reber wants to buy the product back from the software giant. 
A new type of arms race could be on the cards
We recently upgraded Google to use TypeScript 3.5. Here is some feedback on the upgrade. (For background, recall that Google is a monorepo of billions of lines of code. We use a single version of T…
Set custom spending controls, reconcile expenses automatically with software like Expensify, and earn extra cash back where you spend the most each month.
The pledge follows investigations into deaths from an unknown lung illness linked to vaping.
Most low cost (sub $100) single board computers are based on Arm processors because Intel processors are normally more expensive, but there are some
William Moldt went missing in mysterious circumstances 22 years ago after a night out in Florida.
Google agreed to pay close to 1 billion euros ($1.10 billion) to French authorit…
Google makes ranking changes to highlight original reporting.
WeWork owner The We Company may seek a valuation in its upcoming initial public …
This is yet another example of in-your-face medical pricing that often reflects not what things really cost but what healthcare businesses think they can get away with.
Over six years, the public institution took people to court more than 36,000 times, an analysis finds.
Hackers have been targeting regular people and celebrities with the attack. Last week, it was used to hijack the Twitter account of Twitterâs C.E.O.
In a rare feat, French police have hijacked and neutralized a massive cryptocurrency mining botnet controlling close to a million infected computers. The notorious Retadup malware infects computers and starts mining cryptocurrency by sapping power from a computer’s processor. Although the malâ¦
Traffic apps turned the city’s neighborhoods into «shortcuts.» Now furious residents are attempting to take them back, street by street
New weapons like hypersonic missiles are potentially reducing the amount of time that nuclear decision makers have to respond to an attack. Two US deterrence experts are proposing an artificial intelligence-based nuclear command, control, and communications system to ease this time pressure. It’s a risky solution.
With a precise, controlled movement, microrobots cleared a glass plate of a biofilm, as shown in this time-lapse image. Credit:
As states push to criminalize the sharing of intimate photos to get revenge on former sex partners, Texas is teaming with Bumble to crack down on people who send unsolicited nude images on dating apps and elsewhere in cyberspace.
A primordial developmental toolkit shared by all vertebrates, and described by a theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, sets the growth pattern for all types of skin structures.
An alternative BEAM implementation, designed for WebAssembly – lumen/lumen
The accounts were purchased because of their large follower count, and then used to spam Twitter with information about the Hong Kong protests.
I’ve been typing for 20+ years and this is one of my favorite general purpose / programming keyboards when factoring in a few things.
Brave presents new RTB evidence, and has uncovered a mechanism by which Google appears to be circumventing its purported GDPR privacy protections.
Evidence submitted to Irish regulator accuses tech giant of ‘exploiting personal data’
Access the funds you need to grow your business. Stripe Capital provides access to fast financing with one flat fee and flexible payments.
Le fondateur du mouvement des logiciels libres a été invité chez Microsoft, où il a donné une conférence.
Windows system utilities to maximize productivity. Contribute to microsoft/PowerToys development by creating an account on GitHub.
In an attempt to dispel the idea that if you have to google stuff you’re not a proper engineer, this is a list of nearly everything I googled in a week at work, where I’m a software engineer with several years’ experience.
Throughout my schooling and career, Iâve impressed people over and over again with how quickly I pick up things, especially hard things. For instance, exactly 4y ago I did my first ever interview, got a simple question and failed miserably after… | Pranay Prakash | I care about tech and work on reference implementations for idealistic projects
Learn how Linux/FFmpeg C partial codebase is organized to be extensible and act as if it were meant to have “polymorphism”. Specifically, we’re going to briefly explore how Linux â¦
Cassava is very dangerous if not prepared properly, so how did people develop and share that knowledge?
Sugar Labs contributes to and helps maintain the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform, which promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities.
a distributed PGP keyserver project based on the dat protocol – tdjsnelling/dat-keyserver
Software Architecture is the important aspects of a software system’s internal design, usually its major components and aspects that are hard to change.
Learn how to setup your own, free image hosting using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare Workers.
Forty years after Life of Brian was first released, Nicholas Barber looks at why the Monty Python film was banned â and went on to become a box office hit.
Git Source Code Mirror – This is a publish-only repository and all pull requests are ignored. Please follow Documentation/SubmittingPatches procedure for any of your improvements. – git/git
google@play-store: sudo rm -rf org.mtransit.android*
Modern web applications load and execute a lot more JavaScript code than they did just a few years ago. While JIT (just-in-time) compilers have been very successful in making JavaScript …
Thousands of fires are ravaging the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. How bad are they?
The news is full of the surge in deforestation and fires in the Amazon rainforest, and and I have been fielding various media enquiries about what is causing this rise and what it means for our…
âWhat happens when you launch Google Chrome for the first time on a Windows 10 machine?
When I launched Google Chrome for the first time (and let it sit for a minute), 32 requests were made, and 7.26 MB of data downloaded.â
Publishers say it is a ‘quintessential’ violation of copyright law
Amazon deforestation is 75% below its 2004 high. Fires are up just 7% higher than their 10-year average. And fires in the forest itself aren’t increasing. Here’s why everyone got it wrong.
If you have a Tesla Roadster and you live in the Pacific Northwest, you probably know Carl Medlock.
Anthony Levandowski, one of Silicon Valley’s foremost technologists on autonomous cars, was charged with theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google.
Another reverse location search warrant
Companies like Google have waged war on virtual cards and left Apple Card users without service.
For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don’t know there’s anything wrong with it.
I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Hereâs what I learnt.
Firefox Developer Edition is the blazing fast browser that offers cutting edge developer tools and latest features like CSS Grid support and framework debugging
In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the…
Weâre pleased to announce that Microsoft is supporting the addition of Microsoftâs exFAT technology to the Linux kernel.
It’s the latest tactic the wealthy use to game the system.
âWith great power comes great responsibility.â â Uncle Ben Remember PowerPC? Nah, me neither. But now it can be yours. For free. Srsly. IBM has released the Power Architecture instruction set to tâ¦
We hear lots of noise about ârevolutionaryâ new products in cycling. They are essentially never revolutionary, and frequently arenât even new. But when Trek starts teasing a new product with the tag, “A change like this happens once every 30 years,â weâre pretty sure itâs a big deal. Speculation started. Was the lime green material …
On the heels of a driver-led protest outside Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, where drivers showed their support for gig worker protections legislation (via Assembly Bill 5) and demanded a union, Uber is circulating a petition urging people to “protect ridesharing in California.”â¦
Mr. Dorseyâs account began posting racial epithets, profanities and bomb threats on Friday afternoon. A company spokesman confirmed it was hacked.
The co-founder and CEO’s account was used to retweet a flurry of highly offensive messages.
Robust learning from untrusted sources Konstantinov & Lampert, ICML’19 Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! Just before the break we were looking at selected papers from ICMLââ¦
Artificial intelligence company Cerebras Systems is unveiling the largest semiconductor chip ever built — with 1.2 trillion transistors.
This post expands on the NAACL 2019 tutorial on Transfer Learning in NLP. It highlights key insights and takeaways and provides updates based on recent work.
Many thanks to Addison-Wesley Professional for providing the permissions to excerpt “Natural Language Processing” from the book, Deep Learning Illustrated by Krohn, Beyleveld, and Bassens. The excerpt covers how to create word vectors and utilize them as an input into a deep learning model. A complementary Domino project is available. Introduction While the field of […]
The worldâs best cryptographers meet this week to compete in a U.S.-sponsored challenge to create a quantum-resistant standard.
The authorities have begun to raise alarms about a steady uptick in the number of militant groups using the hard-to-trace digital currency.
Today we are announcing the distributed version of TimescaleDB, which is currently in private beta (public version slated for later this year).
Learn how you can migrate your Hugo static sites over to OpenFaaS including custom domains, TLS and CI/CD through OpenFaaS Cloud (or GitLab).
It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. But with a big injection of open source spirit from its
Air travel has been in existence for over one hundred years. Since its inception, thousands of airports runways have been built â each one of them designed site specifically, and according to landscape and natural conditions.
Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60% of this will be in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 20â¦
Data offered in court was flawed when technical errors linked some phones to the wrong towers or created a less-detailed picture of their locations, officials said.
Three years after closing a $9.3 billion deal to acquire NetSuite, several Oracle board members have written an extraordinary letter to the Delaware Court, approving a shareholder lawsuit against company executives Larry Ellison and Safra Catz over the 2016 deal. Reuters broke this story. Accordingâ¦
People are excited about running WebAssembly outside the browser. People are also excited about running WebAssembly from languages like Python, Ruby, and Rust. Lin Clark’s Code Cartoons are back, illustrating …
The WebAuthn standard for security keys is making authentication as easy as possible. Now you can use security keys for second-factor authentication on GitHub with many more browsers and devices.
Dear new developer, This came up in a Hacker News comment thread recently: I’ve been working since the 90s and I never attempted to do FizzBuzz. Is it really relevant? Maybe to screen junior â¦
In the last few months, I have learned a lot about modern JavaScript and CSS development with a local toolchain powered by Node 8, Webpack 4, and Babel 7. As part of that, I am doing my second âre-introduction to JavaScriptâ. I first learned JS in 1998. Then relearned it…
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It stopped shipping in 2009 on DVD. I …
The WeWork IPO is defined by audaciousness and excess, all of which is driven by unlimited access to capital.
Walmart Inc on Tuesday sued Tesla Inc, accusing it of «widespread negligenc…
Fires in the Amazon have risen 84% amid growing deforestation, Brazil’s space research agency says.
Cover image: Detail from Patroclus by Jacques Louis David, 1780. Courtesy Wikipedia Itâs tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. We experieâ¦
VMware today announced that it is acquiring Carbon Black, a publicly traded security company that focuses on securing modern cloud-native workloads. The price of the acquisition is about $2.1 billion. In addition, VMware also confirmed the acquisition of Pivotal, which will have a value of about $2â¦
Just like other tech companies that have struggled to tackle misinformation on their platforms, Amazon has proven unable or unwilling to effectively police third-party sellers on its site. A Wall Street Journal investigation found 4,152 items declared unsafe by federal agencies, deceptively labeled or banned by federal regulators.
Finland, which holds the European Union’s rotating chairmanship, called on …
Social media reflects and refracts a divided society, but eliminating the âlikeâ button could help bring us back together
When Ellie Pell took first overall, the surprised race organisers realised they had no trophy for the first place male.
Experts agree that paper ballots are needed, but eight American states will use completely paperless machines in the 2020 elections.