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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,763 posts.
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Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
963
DragonflyBSD 5.0
DragonFly version 5.0 brings the first bootable release of HAMMER2, DragonFly's next generation file system.
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Perceptually uniform color spaces
Programming Design Systems is a free digital book that teaches a practical introduction to the new foundations of graphic design.
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966
ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source
ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae …
967
Is Haskell the right language for teaching functional programming principles?
The “park bench” panel at the Haskell eXchange last week talked about a lot of things, but some of them can be summarised by the question ...
968
ESO (European Southern Observatory) Announcing Unprecedented Discovery
Media Advisory: Press Conference at ESO HQ Announcing Unprecedented Discovery
969
The Mathematical Genius of Auto-Tune
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
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You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy
I recently read a story here titled “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.”
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Infineon RSA Key Generation Issue
Learn more about what's happening within the tech and cybersecurity industry and the developments in our business and security keys within our Yubico Blog.
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Gender Distribution in North Korean Posters
A brief analysis of gender distribution in visual representations of everyday life in North Korea using facial recognition algorithms and transfer learning applied to convolutional neural networks.
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977
Efficient pagination of a SQL table with 100M records
Compilation of my favorite SQL queries after a decade of dealing with relational databases. Today we talk about scanning a table with 100 million records.
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DAG Rosenstein’s “Responsible Encryption” Demand Is Bad
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls “responsible encryption” today. It misses the mark, by far. Rosenstein starts with a fallacy, attempting to convince you that encryption is unprecedented: Our society has never had a system where evidence of...
980
What is Nix and why you should try it
Normally our Unix systems organise the file system in a structure called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Installing into an FHS has limitations, what would happen if we want to install, for example, two different versions of ruby at the same time? Typically this isn't possible without explicitly specifying a…
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Switching from Common Lisp to Julia
I have written this post for developers in the Common Lisp community who asked why I am switching to Julia. It may only be relevant for the small set of people who use Common Lisp for scientific computing.
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Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)
“I don’t know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.” – Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, circa 1982 Fortran is rarely used today in industry — one ranking ranks it behind 29 other languages. However, Fortran is still a dominant language for the large scale…
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Unbalanced reads from SSDs in software RAID mirrors in Linux
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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US telcos appear to be selling non-anonymized access to consumer telephone data
https://bit.ly/crazymobiledemo
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Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
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My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies
Sapiens and Collective Fictions Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that …
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How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human
Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every…
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Cognitive Biases in Programming
As developers, we’re familiar with the various problems that interfere with our productivity. But often we overlook the broad picture. Some…