There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with.

Read more...

If someone were to ask me what I think is the most important sonic attribute in sound quality, my answer wouldn’t be imaging or soundstaging, it would be volume. More than anything else, volume determines if the listening experience turns out to be a wow or a meh. I’m not just talking about the overall loudness but also how it fluctuates from moment to moment, which is called dynamics. And the practice of reducing dynamics is called compression.

It feels like everything these days needs you to create an account and log in to use them. Philips Hue announced you need to plug your home’s light automation to their cloud, even if you just use it locally. They claim it’s for security.

Read more...

Reinforcement Learning (RL) should be better seen as a “fine-tuning” paradigm that can add capabilities to general-purpose pretrained models, rather than a paradigm that can bootstrap intelligence from scratch.

Finally it's here!! :-)
Probably the feature that I was missing more since I started using Telegram!!!

It deserves a mention here :-)

Journal entry from 20 August 1999, introducing his new blog about The Lord of the Rings.

Facebook AI has developed the first neural network that uses symbolic reasoning to solve advanced mathematics problems.

You may have heard about Bandersnatch, an interactive film released on Netflix as part of the Black Mirror series. I’ve heard about it when it was released, but didn’t get around to watch it until recently, and I was surprised at how deep and thorough the implementation is.

Analysis and numbers of the Bandersnatch interactive film.

A vegetable-picking robot that uses machine learning to identify and harvest a commonplace, but challenging, agricultural crop has been developed by engineers.

Learn from Docker experts to simplify and advance your app development and management with Docker. Stay up to date on Docker events and new version announcements!

Tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.

So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.

What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.

We often have to write code using  permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications. Thankfully, many compilers offer “sanitizers”. I discussed them in my post No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang. I strongly encourage the use of sanitizers as I think it is the modern way to write C and C++. When many people describe how impossibly difficult it is to build good software in C and C++, they often think about old-school bare metal C and C++ where the code do all sorts of mysterious things without any protection. Then they feel compelled to run their code in a debugger and to manually run through it. You should not write code this way! Get some tools! Sanitizers can catch undefined behaviour, memory leaks, buffer overflows, data races, and so forth.

Have you ever been in a situation where you are presenting to your manager or your manager's manager and you completely flub the opportunity by saying all the wrong things? Me too. It is from such encounters that I started to put together design patterns for handling these difficult situations. I like to think in systems and patterns, so applying this way of thinking to communication just makes sense. I have also found that these rules of thumb are useful to others, so I would like to share them here.

When you can spot the patterns, you can use some of the ideas presented here as guidelines to navigate these tricky, high-stress scenarios. This way you can feel confident and capable as a leader because you will know what to do: how to solve the problem and what steps to follow next.

Here are some of the most common challenging situations you may run into at work and how you can handle them.

1. Someone asks you something you don't know
2. There is a problem that is your fault or responsibility
3. There is a decision that you don't agree with
4. Your manager gives you negative feedback

Have you ever been in a situation where you are presenting to your manager or your manager's manager and you completely flub the opportunity by saying all the wrong things? Me too. It is from such encounters that I started to put together design patterns for handling these difficult situations. I like to think in systems and patterns, so applying this way of thinking to communication just makes sense. I have also found that these rules of thumb are useful to others, so I would like to share them here.

When you can spot the patterns, you can use some of the ideas presented here as guidelines to navigate these tricky, high-stress scenarios. This way you can feel confident and capable as a leader because you will know what to do: how to solve the problem and what steps to follow next.

Here are some of the most common challenging situations you may run into at work and how you can handle them.

1. Someone asks you something you don't know
2. There is a problem that is your fault or responsibility
3. There is a decision that you don't agree with
4. Your manager gives you negative feedback

I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.

It is based on the work of people, and we should not erase those people.

Unfortunately (and it is by design), most of the licences and the vocabulary around it are focused on the software’s user. After all, they work by reducing the creator’s right to empower the user.

As examples of this vocabulary, we have the distinction between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” to show that the “free” word in “free software” has more to do with freedom and people’s rights to use, study, modify and share a program, than its actual price. Although, in practice, the overwhelming majority of FOSS will not cost you anything.

The author tried to edit data in spreadsheet programs.

This post illustrate ho to use Vim to edit tabular data, although there are a few things that will make it more pleasant. It is assumed that editing files are in tab-separated value format (TSV).

"But what about CSV files?" Just. Don't.

Do: convert your CSV to TSV and back for editing.