Reinforcement learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks
Our primary mission at DeepMind is to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how. Our reinforcement learning agents have achieved breakthroughs in Atari 2600 games and the game of Go. Such systems, however, can require a lot of data and a…
LLVM's New Versioning Scheme
Historically, LLVM's major releases always added "0.1" to the version number, producing major versions like 3.8, 3.9, and 4.0 (expected by March 2017). With our next release though, we're changing this.
Challenges of micro-service deployments
I recently took part in a panel discussion discussing continuous delivery of micro-services hosted by ElectricCloud with Daniel Rolnick, Darko Fabijan and An...
How to accept Bitcoin payments without running a full node
Accepting Bitcoin payments for an online service can be daunting at first (I worked out how to do it, for SMS Privacy , a couple of months ago). What I describe is not the only way to accept Bitcoin payments - it's not even the best way to accept Bitcoin payments - but it works for me. And it might work for you, too.
Introduction to Metaprogramming in Nim
Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs with the ability to treat programs as their data. It means that a program could be designed to read, generate, analyse and/or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running.
How undefined signed overflow enables optimizations in GCC
Signed integers are not allowed to overflow in C and C++, and this helps compilers generate better code. I was interested in how GCC is tak...
AWS Lambda: a few years of advancement and we are back to stored procedures
Serverless computing is the new buzzword. AWS describes Lambda (their implementation of Serverless) as the way how you’ll do things post containers. Go figure …
Blazing Fast HTML: Elm vs. React vs. Angular vs. Ember
A delightful language with friendly error messages, great performance, small assets, and no runtime exceptions.
X86 Register Encoding
If you've ever look at the disassembly output for C or C++ code, you'll probably notice that there are a lot of push/pop instructions. And if you pay close enough attention, you'll notice that the compiler prefers to use certain registers over others. In particular, compilers will prefer pushing "old" registers like…
Self Healing Code with clojure.spec
Works On My Machine is the place where Cognitects reflect on tech, culture, and the work we do. The views expressed on Works On My Machine are those of the a...
In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to…
Building the Gyroscope App with React Native
Losing twenty pounds while building our HealthKit app
NET Core and ASP.NET Core RC2 Released
Free downloads for building and running .NET apps on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Runtimes, SDKs, and developer packs for .NET Framework, .NET, and ASP.NET.
Writing a compiler in Ruby, bottom up (2008)
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
Technical Issues of Separation in Lisp Function Cells and Value Cells (1988)
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
Feature Toggles
Feature Flags can be categorized into several buckets; manage each appropriately. Smart implementation can help constrain complexity.
Merging vs. Rebasing
Compare git rebase with the related git merge command and identify all of the potential opportunities to incorporate rebasing into the typical Git workflow
Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006)
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
Rescuing REST from the API Winter
Simple AJAX using HTML attributes
Why ContentEditable is Terrible
Or: How the Medium Editor Works
How Hacker News ranking algorithm works
In this post I’ll try to explain how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works and how you can reuse it in your own applications. It’s a very…