Four Short Links

Four short links: 17 April 2020

Graph Database, COBOL Course, Serverless Handbook, and New Annealing Processor

1. Nebula —open source distributed, scalable, lightning-fast graph database.
2. COBOL Programming Course — from the Open Mainframe Project.
3. Serverless Handbook — a resource teaching frontend engineers everything they need to know to dive into backend.
4. Novel Annealing Processor Is the Best Ever at Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (IEEE Spectrum) — Dubbed STATICA (Stochastic Cellular Automata Annealer Architecture), the processor is designed to take on challenges such as portfolio, logistic, and traffic flow optimization when they are expressed in the form of Ising models.

Four short links: 16 April 2020

Kanban Board, Remote Work Playbook, Deep Faked Avatars, and Database Testing Tool

1. Kanboard — free and open source Trello-like Kanban boards.
2. 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 some point in the future, would this have been easier and faster if you had a document to consult? If your answer to both questions is yes, write documentation for the thing and store in a common place where your team can access. Notion is a great place to store this. You should also share the link in your instant communication channel so your colleagues are aware.
3. avatarify — deep fake technology used to give you avatars of your choice for use in Zoom and Skype.
4. pstress — Database concurrency and crash recovery testing tool. (via Percona blog)

Four short links: 15 April 2020

Coders, Tiny Neural Net, Hardware Cheating, and Radar Trends

1. 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.
2. micrograd (Andre Karpathy) — A tiny Autograd engine (with a bite! :D). Implements backpropagation (reverse-mode autodiff) over a dynamically built DAG and a small neural networks library on top of it with a PyTorch-like API. Both are currently about 50 lines of code each.
3. Game Cheating in Hardware — pcileech WebRadar is a browser based radar cheat for CS:GO that can be run on a different PC, connected to a PCIe card providing direct memory access to the target computer. It’s like doping for e-sports. (via Luke Weston)
4. Radar Trends to Watch: April 2020 — early weak signals of interesting developments in Ops & Infrastructure, Software Development, AI & ML, and Quantum Computing. Plus the unavoidable Coronavirus-driven changes.

Four short links: 14 April 2020

Science of Happiness, Business of AI, Against Group Chat, and Human Standards Project

1. 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.
2. 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 of edge cases; Weaker defensive moats due to the commoditization of AI models and challenges with data network effects.
3. Group Chat: The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team — Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda.
4. Human Standards Project — p2p-shared international and device manufacturer standards to assist diy ventilator and masks teams.

Four short links: 13 April 2020

COBOL, Zoombot, UI Sandboxing, and Fantasy Computer

1. Introduction to COBOL — a 1999 web site (!) with slides from a University of Limerick course. IBM will offer free (presumably more modern) training.
2. zoombot — a highly advanced AI to handle Zoom calls.
3. storybook.js — open source toolkit and sandbox to build UI components in isolation so you can develop hard-to-reach states and edge cases.
4. tic-80 — a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.

Four short links: 10 April 2020

Object Tracking, IFTT For Coders, Compiler Explorer, and Mac Window Management

1. FairMOT — one-shot multi-object tracking that remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the MOT challenge datasets at 30 FPS.
2. pipedream — IFTTT for coders.
3. 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 default the left hand pane is the source window and the right hand has the assembly output. (via Tim Westbrook)
4. MOOM — move and zoom windows on a Mac. See also Magnet. (via Ben Gracewood and @kylehqcom)

Four short links: 9 April 2020

Character Encoding, Windows Automation, Electronic Noses, Fake Scanned PDFs

1. 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)
2. AutoHotkey — an automation scripting language for Windows.
3. The Electronic Nose and its Applications: A Survey — very good summary of tech, limitations, and applications of “electronic noses” aka multiple chemical sensors plus some machine learning/statistics.
4. falsisign — Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned.

Four short links: 8 April 2020

System Design, RPG for Teleconferencing, Desktop Automation, and Logical Verification

1. 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 choices will be “we chose X because Sara knows a lot about X” and “we chose Y on the spur of the moment when it didn’t seem like a big decision and we never found the time to re-evaluate.”
2. Lozya — Teleconferencing with an RPG map. Walk around, talk to folks, have private conversations by huddling in a corner, or drop in on other conversations. Ideal for meetups!
3. Hammerspoon — desktop automation framework for macOS. It lets you write Lua scripts that hook into operating system functionality, allowing you to interact with the keyboard/mouse, windows, displays, filesystem, and much more. (via CSAIL’s Missing Semester Potpourri)
4. The Hitchiker’s Guide to Logical Verification (PDF) — book for a course, using Microsoft Research’s Lean theorem prover.

Four short links: 7 April 2020

Load Testing, Background Matting, Removing Visual Obstructions, and Algorithmic Summarisation

1. locust — open source load testing tool: define user behaviour with Python code, and swarm your system with millions of simultaneous users. (via @nzigel)
2. 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 handheld camera. Most existing matting methods require a green screen background or a manually created trimap to produce a good matte. With source.
3. Learning to See Through Obstructions — a learning-based approach for removing unwanted obstructions, such as window reflections, fence occlusions or raindrops, from a short sequence of images captured by a moving camera.
4. Covid-19 Primer — algorithmic summaries of Covid-19 research, updated every 24h. (via Sean Gourley)

Four short links: 6 April 2020

Bootable USB Drives, Patching Voice Calls, Molecular Programming, and Crafting Interpreters

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

Four short links: 3 April 2020

Zero Trust Learning Curve, Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems, Decompiled Person-Tracker, and Tiny Tools

1. 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 these failures on Zero Trust. In fact, the problem is that no one in the organization has experience building Zero Trust environments.
2. Software Engineering Advice from Building Large-Scale Distributed Systems (Jeff Dean) — slide deck from a Stanford talk he gave.
3. gorkiy — decompilation of Russia’s COVID-19 person tracker.
4. Open Source, Experimental, and Tiny Tools Roundup — tons of tools for games, graphics, sounds, live coding, zines, and more.

Four short links: 2 April 2020

COVID19 Model, Readings on Time, Language Censorship, and Haxx0r vim

1. 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.
2. 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 context of FP vs. OOP by bringing in the concept of managed time. Since then I have been on the look out for material that helps develop my understanding on this subject. It is a fertile area with a lot of open problems for research and bringing back the fruits of these labour as an interactive system will unlock new pathways in computing. Here I present a collection of some of the resources that have helped me in charting my journey.
3. Douyin Suspending Cantonese Livestreamers — you might dislike Facebook’s privacy settings but they don’t tell people they can’t speak their own language.
4. vim cubed — awful to use, but it looks GREAT.

Four short links: 1 April 2020

Replaying Traffic for Tests, Outlaw Innovations, Poking at Algorithms, and Oculus Terminal Emulator

1. Replaying Traffic to Test Proprietary Systems — using Wiresham to replay traffic to test blackbox proprietary systems.
2. 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 how these innovations, termed Outlaw Innovations, may be appropriated by firms and provide case studies where this has taken place. The paper will seek to locate this phenomenon in the existing innovation literature, and explore the implications for firm innovation processes.
3. Testing TikTok Algorithm Theories — I’m fascinated by people reverse-engineering algorithms like this. It’s kinda like people trying to figure out what the gods want.
4. riftty — Terminal emulator meant for use with the Oculus Rift headseat. I used to dream of lying in bed with a split keyboard and a headset, never needing to even get vertical. Now I’m in my 40s, I acknowledge that removing the only movement I get in my working life (walking to the desk and sitting) would probably a step in the wrong direction. But still, this feels nerd-important.

Four short links: 31 March 2020

Ventilator Designs, Versioning Tabular Data, WYSIWYG Markdown, and How To Be Curious

1. 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.
2. dolt — version history for tabular data. Compare to sno, which is version control for geospatial and tabular data.
3. Toast UI Editor — extensible WYSIWYG Markdown editor.
4. How to be Curious Instead of Contrarian — it’s about Coronavirus/Covid-19 but could apply equally well to any topic. 1) Care about the answer to a question; 2) Post a question and propose a research design that could answer it; 3) Use failures of your predictions to revise your mode; 4) Form meaningful prior beliefs with a thorough literature review; 5) Don’t form strong prior beliefs based on cherry-picked data; 6) Be specific and concrete about your theory; 7) Choose enough cases to actually test your theory; 8) Convey uncertainty with specificity not doublespeak.

Four short links: 24 March 2020

Paper Study Groups, Open Source Videoconferencing, Embedded Modules, and Build System

1. 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.)
2. Jitsi Meet — open source videoconferencing.
3. Pigweed — open source collection of […] modules built to enable faster and more reliable development on 32-bit microcontrollers. See also Google Open Source blog)
4. FASTBuild — a high-performance, open source build system for Windows, Linux, and OS X. It supports highly scalable compilation, caching, and network distribution. From the largest studios in the world to the smallest independent developers, FASTBuild is used in production every day to develop for PC/Mac/Linux, Consoles, Smartphones, and retro systems.

Four short links: 23 March 2020

NLP, SSH, Privacy, and History

1. 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.
2. Dropbear SSH — Dropbear is a relatively small SSH server and client. It runs on a variety of POSIX-based platforms. Dropbear is open source software, distributed under an MIT-style license. Dropbear is particularly useful for “embedded”-type Linux (or other Unix) systems, such as wireless routers.
3. Private Kit — an open source privacy preserving system for logging locations and sharing with researchers on your own terms—e.g., to track contact in coronavirus without losing control.
4. Why the EAX Register is Called That — some neat history, showing how deep the roots of backward compatibility are.

Four short links: 20 March 2020

Esports, Antitrust, Observability, and Socializing Online

1. NASCAR Replaces Canceled Races with Esports Featuring Pro Drivers (Engadget) — the world is getting weirder.
2. 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.
3. Journey into Observability: Glitch’s Story (Mads Hartmann) — an easy-to-follow and honest recap of their journey from lots of logging to being able to look at heatmaps and resolve more problems.
4. Hyphal Mesh — 30 mins. 2 convos, 1-on-1. Nifty idea for connecting people in these weird times.

Four short links: 19 March 2020

Open Source, Content Moderation, Community Calls, and Self-Isolation

1. 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 estimates are hard. Unless I’m bound by a paid contract, I try to avoid promising my future time no matter how confident I am about delivering on the promise.
2. Thread on AI Content Moderation (Sarah T. Roberts) — content moderators can’t work from home (she explains why), so Facebook is leaning hard on its AI systems, which are triggering false positives (censoring things it shouldn’t) and people are noticing. It will be interesting to see how the systems improve, how people react, and whether we go back to human teams of moderators at the same scale we had before (with the accompanying mental damage to them).
3. Zoom Community Calls (Alex L. Miller) — how to configure your Zoom session for maximum audience fun but minimal exposure to trolling.
4. How to Survive Self-Isolating Without Losing It (Kate Montgomery) — from someone with years of experience. There are now many of these guides to maintaining mental health during isolation, and you should read a few (before the isolation starts, if you’re in a position to do so, to prep for it). They’re also worth reading if you now work from home, because it can end up being remarkably similar.