The Uncensored Library — Reporters Without Borders built a library in Minecraft, in which you can read banned books. (via Gizmodo) Shmoocon 2020 Talk Recordings — everything from email addresses to Verilog by way of Zero Trust, social media, and choose-your-own-adventure ransomware. Differential Privacy: A Comparison of Libraries — We will have a look at […]

How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers — really interesting CCC talk from a few years ago. The Challenge of Software Liability — Liability for insecure software is already a reality. The question is whether Congress will step in to give it shape and a coherent legal structure. XOXO Talks — video archive of […]

Inklewriter — open source interactive text adventure game creator. (Fun for adults, but also great to give to kids who love to read) (via Andy Baio) The Virus Survival Strategy Guide for Your Startup (Steve Blank) — Unfortunately, it’s no longer a normal market. All your assumptions about customers; sales cycle; and, most importantly, revenue, […]

Last year, when we felt interest in artificial intelligence (AI) was approaching a fever pitch, we created a survey to ask about AI adoption. When we analyzed the results, we determined the AI space was in a state of rapid change, so we eagerly commissioned a follow-up survey to help find out where AI stands […]

Even with a stellar crisis plan, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a set of challenges unprecedented in our lifetimes. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’re dealing with something growing exponentially, creating uncertainty on a global scale. I managed a team of 40 in Singapore during SARS. That crisis was different, hitting Singapore and […]

Dos and Don’ts in Open Source (Olaf Geirsson) — really useful advice to would-be contributors and project owners. It’s tempting to respond to a welcome contribution with a quick, “This looks amazing, I will review tomorrow!” Consider giving a thumbs-up reaction instead and wait with commenting until you complete the review. Promises are estimates and […]

O’Reilly online learning is a trove of information about the trends, topics, and issues tech leaders need to know about to do their jobs. We use it as a data source for our annual platform analysis, and we’re using it as the basis for this report, where we take a close look at the most-used […]

NASCAR Replaces Canceled Races with Esports Featuring Pro Drivers (Engadget) — the world is getting weirder. Firebase Scrutinized By Antitrust Regulators — Firebase tools give Google, the internet’s top ad seller, information on what consumers are doing inside apps that it can exploit to target ads to users, according to makers of Firebase alternatives. Journey […]

Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages — Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. Code and models available for 66 languages. Dropbear SSH — Dropbear is a relatively small SSH […]

Rita J. King, co-director and EVP for business development at Science House, recently conducted a series of interviews with business leaders, exploring the challenges and hurdles companies face in evolving business landscapes. In this interview, King chats with Craig Lemasters, CEO of Global Executive Group, about what companies face when navigating the digital transformation. They […]

Rita J. King, co-director and EVP for business development at Science House, recently conducted a series of interviews with business leaders, exploring the challenges and hurdles companies face in evolving business landscapes. In this interview, King chats with James Jorasch, founding CEO of Science House, about the importance of innovation and how to inspire and […]

Rita J. King, co-director and EVP for business development at Science House, recently conducted a series of interviews with business leaders, exploring the challenges and hurdles companies face in evolving business landscapes. In this interview, King chats with Jen Bruno, SVP of culture and human capital at LPL Financial, about mobilizing a change-ready workforce, leadership […]

Rita J. King, co-director and EVP for business development at Science House, recently conducted a series of interviews with business leaders, exploring the challenges and hurdles companies face in evolving business landscapes. In this interview, King chats with Dana Codispoti, head of HR Transformation at AIG, about how to address the human factor in business […]

I interviewed four business leaders in late 2019 to get their perspectives on the biggest obstacles and opportunities organizations are facing. Craig Lemasters was the president and CEO of Assurant Solutions. Under his leadership, Assurant Solutions doubled in size to $4B, underwent a digital transformation to expand an offering of risk management solutions in the […]

Potential Distributed Reading Group on Distributed Systems — for some folks, this will be a great time to start reading groups to work through papers. You’ll never get a time with less physical distraction. (Just remember to ration your socials time or you and your time will vanish into the maelstrom.) Jitsi Meet — open […]

In a world focused on buzzword-driven models and algorithms, you’d be forgiven for forgetting about the unreasonable importance of data preparation and quality: your models are only as good as the data you feed them. This is the garbage in, garbage out principle: flawed data going in leads to flawed results, algorithms, and business decisions. […]

If you’re already a software product manager (PM), you have a head start on becoming a PM for artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). You already know the game and how it is played: you’re the coordinator who ties everything together, from the developers and designers to the executives. You’re responsible for the design, […]

Medtronic Releases Ventilator Designs — not open source, as the license is a limited-time limited-purpose license that retains rights. I imagine some corporate lawyers have done some frantic Googling for open meditech licensing clauses. dolt — version history for tabular data. Compare to sno, which is version control for geospatial and tabular data. Toast UI […]

Replaying Traffic to Test Proprietary Systems — using Wiresham to replay traffic to test blackbox proprietary systems. Outlaw Innovations — This paper will explore how the often illegal activities of hackers (in the original usage of the term to refer to individuals who modify computer hardware and software) may produce valuable innovations. It will explore […]

Imperial College’s COVID19 Model — in github, in R, MIT-licensed. This repository has code for replication purposes. The bleeding edge code and advancements are done in a private repository. Readings on Time — I bumped on this idea while reading Alan Kay’s writing about making the difference between mutable and immutable data “moot” in the […]

The Zero Trust Learning Curve (Palo Alto Networks) — don’t learn with the Crown Jewels. The trouble with starting with the most sensitive protect surfaces is that they’re often too fragile and many people don’t know how they work. Starting there with Zero Trust frequently results in failures. Too often, when this happens, organizations blame […]

Rufus — Create bootable USB drives the easy way. Improving Audio Quality in Duo with WaveNetEQ — Google filling in missing packets in voice calls using deep learning. CRN++ — language for programming deterministic (mass-action) chemical kinetics to perform computation. Crafting Crafting Interpreters — story behind the writing of the Crafting Interpreters book.

locust — open source load testing tool: define user behaviour with Python code, and swarm your system with millions of simultaneous users. (via @nzigel) Background Matting — a method for creating a matte – the per-pixel foreground color and alpha – of a person by taking photos or videos in an everyday setting with a […]

System Design for Advanced Beginners — a friendly explanation of the what and why of systems, with acknowledgement of the real world like There are many tools out there, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and many ways to build a technology company. The real, honest reasons that we will make many of our technological […]

The Fuzzy Edges of Character Encoding — the history, politics, and computational basics of text-based character encoding and digital representations of text, from Morse Code to ASCII to Unicode (and emoji), as well as alternative text encoding schemes. (via Everest Pipkin) AutoHotkey — an automation scripting language for Windows. The Electronic Nose and its Applications: […]

FairMOT — one-shot multi-object tracking that remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the MOT challenge datasets at 30 FPS. pipedream — IFTTT for coders. Compiler Explorer — an interactive tool that lets you type code in one window and see the results of its compilation in another window. Using the site should be pretty self-explanatory: by […]

Introduction to COBOL — a 1999 web site (!) with slides from a University of Limerick course. IBM will offer free (presumably more modern) training. zoombot — a highly advanced AI to handle Zoom calls. storybook.js — open source toolkit and sandbox to build UI components in isolation so you can develop hard-to-reach states and […]

Since early in March, technology news has been all Coronavirus, all the time. That’s a trend we expect to continue through April and probably beyond. So let’s start with Coronavirus news, and hope that we have something different for next month. Coronavirus The Coronavirus pandemic is forcing reconsideration of how private data is used.  Maciej […]

The Science of Happiness — free enrolment in Berkeley’s MOOC to teach positive psychology. Learn science-based principles and practices for a happy, meaningful life. The New Business of AI (A16Z) — many AI companies have: Lower gross margins due to heavy cloud infrastructure usage and ongoing human support; Scaling challenges due to the thorny problem […]

Coding vs Programming (John Gruber) — I’d noticed this linguistic change too. See also Engineering vs Programming vs Computer Science. Coding is shorter so it’s probably gaining in popularity because shorter is easier to say and thus more convenient. micrograd (Andre Karpathy) — A tiny Autograd engine (with a bite! :D). Implements backpropagation (reverse-mode autodiff) […]

Kanboard — free and open source Trello-like Kanban boards. Remote Work Playbook — really useful advice on the actual mechanics of working remotely, not just which tools to use but how to use them. E.g., As an individual contributor, is there something you just did that you think a colleague would have to do at […]

Nebula —open source distributed, scalable, lightning-fast graph database. COBOL Programming Course — from the Open Mainframe Project. Serverless Handbook — a resource teaching frontend engineers everything they need to know to dive into backend. Novel Annealing Processor Is the Best Ever at Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (IEEE Spectrum) — Dubbed STATICA (Stochastic Cellular Automata Annealer […]

CastleDB — a structured static database […]. CastleDB looks like any spreadsheet editor, except that each sheet has a data model. […] stores both its data model and the data contained in the rows into an easily readable JSON file. […] allows efficient collaboration on data editing. Mainframes Are Having a Moment (IEEE Spectrum) — […]

It’s Time to Learn (Scott Berkun) — a strong response to Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build. It feels like we are in a disrupted time when anything is possible, and folks are wondering where the levers are to pull. pygraphistry — a library to extract, transform, and visually explore big graphs. Desert Island Devops […]

Posthog — open source product analytics. Into the Mainframe (Recurse) — the interviews with two mainframe programmers are a great reminder of how much things have changed. And how they haven’t. For instance, later in my career I kept a weighted punching clown in my office. As programmers, we liked our users, but we also […]

Three months ago, Apple released a new credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs that aimed to disrupt the highly regulated world of consumer finance. However, a well-known software developer tweeted that he was given 20x the credit line offered to his wife, despite the fact that they have been filing joint tax returns and […]

Moloch — Large scale, open source, indexed packet capture and search. 3Dify Instagram Photos — open source toolset for adding a 3d effect to photos on Instagram’s web site. It uses 3d-photo-inpainting running in Colab (free GPU) and Cloud pubsub/storage for communication. A glimpse of the future: we could augment all our apps with deep […]

The Suddenly Remote Playbook — I just want to note that if you have to look after kids when you’re supposed to be working, you’re not working from home. Not everyone’s getting a glorious introduction to the delights of working from home. taichi — a programming language designed for high-performance computer graphics. It is deeply […]

Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer — a working proof of concept (I just don’t replicate tricky things so that I could keep it simple, meaning it’s just a fun tech demo you probably shouldn’t use for anything real) of a telefork() function call that spawns a process on another machine and returns the […]

Learning a Language — this list of questions facing anyone taking a new language for a test run just burns with truth. (Also: encouraging to see how many of these questions are answered by the Cookbook format) OpenVAS — Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner, aka “what a cheap external security assessment vendor will run and then […]

podpaperscissors — From the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” to more obscure coördination games, Pod Paper Scissors takes game theory out of the dry textbook and into the real world. … Each episode will feature different kinds of games and situations. Experts in a variety of fields will casually converse with the hosts about how the particular […]

To Microservices and Back Again: Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith — microservices came with increased operational overhead and problems around code reuse. … If microservices are implemented incorrectly or used as a band-aid without addressing some of the root flaws in your system, you’ll be unable to do new product development because you’re […]

Tasmota — Alternative firmware for ESP8266 with easy configuration using webUI, OTA updates, automation using timers or rules, expandability and entirely local control over MQTT, HTTP, Serial or KNX. Selfie 2 Waifu — deep learning constructs an anime character from your photo. Paper for the underlying technique. (via @tkasasagi) The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming […]

Popcorn Linux — exploring how to improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware, in particular, those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores, from node-scale (e.g., Xeon/Xeon-Phi, ARM/x86, CPU/GPU/FPGAs) to rack-scale (e.g., Scale-out processors, Firebox, The Machine), in both native and virtualized settings. Additionally, the project is exploring how to automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware. […]

Leaving Amazon (Tim Bray) — May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. Observability is a Many-Splendoured Thing (Charity Majors) […]

Raman Spectroscopy — Low Cost, High Performances, 100% Open Source Raman Spectrometer. […] We currently offer the spectrometer in a Starter Edition version designed for teaching Raman spectroscopy and we will soon release a Performance Edition version which achieves a tested 12 cm-1 resolution at low costs. Great to see this getting into the hands […]

Super Bootable 64 — Super Mario 64 shipped before the SDK was finalised, and it had to be compiled with optimisations turned off. This meant the binary was easily reversed to source code, and now the unportable has been ported. This site probably won’t last long, because DMCA, but it’s technically a sweet feat. (via […]

After last month’s “all coronavirus, all the time” report, I was concerned that this month would be more of the same.  And there is, indeed, a lot of coronavirus. But there are many other trends and interesting items to look at–possibly a sign that people are working effectively from home. Coronavirus Coronavirus prompts serious discussion […]

Mathematics for Machine Learning — We wrote a book on Mathematics for Machine Learning that motivates people to learn mathematical concepts. The book is not intended to cover advanced machine learning techniques because there are already plenty of books doing this. Instead, we aim to provide the necessary mathematical skills to read those other books. […]

Nicholas Love's Penguin Classics cover generator lets you upload an image and set type in humorous imitation of the label. It can also do the similar but inverted Oxford World Classics look. But sadly not the classic classics look.

Many excellent designs in this twitter thread; embedded here is my contribution. Read the rest