Professional Programmer

Choosing The Right R Book   Monday 14 January

R is a language that is mostly used for statistical computing and any book on the subject has an important choice to make about whether or not to include teaching statistics. Some of the books here concentrate solely on the language, others try to cover some of the statistical techniques as well.  

Babbage's Bag

Principles Of Execution - The CPU   Thursday 10 January

The real complexity of any computer system resides in the processor, but do you know how it works? I mean how it really works? How does the code that you write turn into something that does something? When you know how, it's not magic - just a matter of "fetch" and "execute".

News

Android Studio 3.3 - Trying Harder?  
Wednesday 16 January

Another decimal point upgrade to Android Studio and more hope for the future. I really wanted to like this one but, as with other recent upgrades, it introduces a lot of churn and my existing projects won't work with it. 

Proposed New Patent Office Guidance Could Promote Absurd Software Patents  
Wednesday 16 January

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is working on revised guidance for distinguishing between patent-eligible and patent-ineligible subject matter. It has called for comments by March 8, 2019 but I doubt it would want to hear ours. 

Machine Learning For .NET  
Tuesday 15 January

Microsoft has released an updated version of ML.NET, its a cross-platform, open source machine learning framework for .NET developers. The updated version has API improvements, better explanations of models, and support for GPU when scoring ONNX models. 

Improbable, Epic and Dis-Unity  
Tuesday 15 January

A dispute between Unity and Improbable over violations of terms and condition by the cloud-based game development platform, Spatial OS, was played out in a series of blog posts. It also led to a $25 million fund being set up to help devs move to more "open" game engines. 

Google Kills Webmaster Central Comments  
Monday 14 January

This isn't "big" news but it is ironic. Google has few enough ways of engaging with the public - could it be that closing down comments is just another way to avoid having to deal with complaints and questions? 

Amazon Ditches MongoDB, Launches Rival  
Monday 14 January

Amazon has launched a database that's compatible with the MongoDB API, but doesn't use any MongoDB code. The move is being seen as a counter-move to MongoDB's attempt to make Amazon pay up for using its open source software. 

Solving Archaeological Jigsaw Puzzles  
Sunday 13 January

Archaeological artifacts are usually found in bits - and the broken fragments suffer from all sorts of degradation that makes it difficult to reassemble them. Recent research has come up with a novel algorithm for automatic reassembly that performed remarkably well on broken artifacts and frescoes. 

Crowd Sourcing And GPUs Bring 3Km Weather Forecasts   Saturday 12 January

Weather forecasts are always wrong, but with more data they could be right. Not only more accurate, but also more specific. How to get the data and how to process it? The Weather Company might have an answer and it is a surprising one. 

Neural Networks In JavaScript With Brain.js  
Friday 11 January

A fun and practical introduction to the underpinnings of AI, delivered as 19 short focused and practical videos which make the acquaintance with neural networks very pleasant experience, in contrast to ones wanting you buried underneath a ton of mathematics. 

Bash 5 Adds New Shell Variables  
Friday 11 January

The fifth major version of Bash, the UNIX/Linux scripting shell has arrived. The new release has fixed a variety of bugs from the previous version, and has also added new features and improvements to better conform to POSIX specifications. 

Better ASync From V8 JavaScript Engine  
Thursday 10 January

The developers of V8, Google's JavaScript engine, have expanded on how the latest release improves async functions and promises, as well as making it easier to debug async code. 

Coursera and SAS Offer Specialization  
Thursday 10 January

A new specialization that seeks to address the shortage of professionals with data analytical skills has just launched on the Coursera platform. It comprises three courses from SAS taking students from complete beginner to being ready to earn a SAS credential that is recognized across many industries. 

NSA Will Release Free Reverse Engineering Tool  
Thursday 10 January

The National Security Agency will give a session at the RSA security conference in March in San Francisco at which it will release a free version of GHIDRA, its reverse engineering tool.