MetaFilter posts tagged with programming

Woo, microcontrollers.

Evernix — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:36:38 -0800

Liquid Lifebar, an Arduino project. (SLYT)

"I'm yours again. I always enjoy seeing what happens to me."

Rory Marinich — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:23:50 -0800

After years of silence, enigmatic programmer/musician/surrealist why the lucky stiff is publishing to the web again (temporarily). Five days ago he released a number of short collages; today, his site is outputting a number of stories and essays, which are being collected in several Scribd repositories. _why writes about a strange old Oprah show starring guests who've removed themselves from society [parts 2 3 4 5 6], discussing M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening with a friend [2 3 4 5 6], and suffering a personal crisis after reading the complete works of Kafka [2 3 4 5 6 7]. (One final story, "Dentist", has been uploaded to a public Dropbox account [2 3 4 5 6 7 8].) There's also this somewhat ominous web site. In the past, _why wrote a poignant guide to Ruby, created some music that sounds kind of Neutral Milk Hotel in its mixture of quirk and melancholy, made a philosophy one time just for fun, and also wrote a bunch of poems and poems and stories and stories. His complete estate has been archived, to some extent, here.

This is about Reflection

titus-g — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:59:55 -0800

The elephant and the... six wise men?

CS in VN

kliuless — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:49:31 -0800

Kids In Vietnam Are Crazy Good At Programming - '11th graders in Vietnam are so good at programming that they could easily pass an interview at Google' (via)

Mesmerizing visualizations of genetic algorithms

Foci for Analysis — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:04:41 -0800

Genetic algorithms are useful for solving all kinds of problems and their implementations can be quite mesmerizing to watch. Re-producing Mona Lisa, a human face or bull cave painting. Playing Super Mario, Tetris and more Tetris. Simulating a soccer team, fishes, ant colony or Santa's flight path. A documentary about using genetic algorithms in design, e.g. deciding the optimal antenna placement on a Humvee, creating search and destroy behavior for UAVs and designing more efficient wind turbine blades. Should probably learn how to stand and jump and stand again before driving.

This looks like a job for...

Artw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:28:54 -0800

SUPERHERO.JS - Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.

Debugging

amitai — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:20:38 -0800

Every programmer knows that debugging is hard. Great debuggers, though, can make the job look simple. " That attitude is illustrated in an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. A programmer had recently installed a new workstation. All was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was one hundred percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and never when standing." "Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story. How could that workstation know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though, know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to hypothesize. Was there a loose wire under the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical problems are rarely one-hundred-percent consistent. An alert colleague finally asked the right question: how did the programmer log in when he was sitting and when he was standing? Hold your hands out and try it yourself. The problem was in the keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and pecking. With this hint and a convenient screwdriver, the expert debugger swapped the two wandering keytops and all was well. ""

Computerized Math, Formal Proofs and Alternative Logic

kliuless — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:33:01 -0800

Using computer systems for doing mathematical proofs - "With the proliferation of computer-assisted proofs that are all but impossible to check by hand, Hales thinks computers must become the judge."

Three years ago, Vladimir Voevodsky, one of the organizers of a new program on the foundations of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., discovered that a formal logic system that was developed by computer scientists, called "type theory" could be used to re-create the entire mathematical universe from scratch. Type theory is consistent with the mathematical axioms, but couched in the language of computers. Voevodsky believes this alternative way to formalize mathematics, which he has renamed the univalent foundations of mathematics, will streamline the process of formal theorem proving. Voevodsky and his team are adapting a program named Coq, which was designed to formally verify computer algorithms, for use in abstract mathematics.

also btw, speaking of mathematical revolutions, from a historical perspective, check out The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution - "Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in Europe, which revolutionized not only mathematics but commerce and trade as well. How did the system spread from the Arab world to Europe, and what would our lives be without it?"

800+ days of Minecraft in 8 minutes

brundlefly — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:18:35 -0800

A visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, shown in 8~ minutes. From the YouTube description:

Each dot represents a unique file, and its colour represents a different file type. Links between files are folders. Whenever someone flies by and "zaps" a file, it means they did something with it in real life. You can see as people work on new features or bugs, as they'll fly past certain files and zap them as they go. This was made using a slightly customized version of Gource, available at https://code.google.com/p/gource/.

The archaeology of Photoshop

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:48:53 -0800

But like anything, the original Photoshop was a product of its time. Knoll’s foundations grew to support functionality he’d never imagined; as the features piled on, more staff was added. What started as mostly a photography tool turned quickly into a graphic design powerhouse. And when a port to Windows became inevitable, things started to really get messy.

Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app.

Interview with Eleanor Kolchin

infini — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 08:27:34 -0800

The Face Of A 'Computer' From 1946

No, we can only take on clients who know how to drive the cars we stock

curious nu — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:25:17 -0800

If cars were rented like we hire programmers.

You seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness.

23 — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 06:03:40 -0800

enchantMOON is a "Hypertext Authoring Tablet" featuring hardware design by Yoshitoshi ABe. For CES the company behind the tablet, Ubiquitous Entertainment, created a series of shorts directed by Evangelion veteran Shinji Higuchi. Some more details about the tablet can be found here and on the official Facebook page. Current details about the UI suggest it takes inspiration from Hypercard and Alan Kay's Dynabook. Physically the device is unusual for a tablet in that it has a handle that can be used as a stand as well as an included smart pen. A lengthy article (Japanese-only) has more pictures as well as a video of the user interface in action; handwriting recognition is used to find a picture of the moon and bring it on to the main screen. The "enchant" part of the name comes from Ubiquitous Entertainment's EnchantJS library for making HTML5 games.

Teaching Computers to Hear Emotions

Evernix — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:52:42 -0800

New research can detect five different emotions with 81 percent accuracy. [Additional project information].

"The data that we actually used."

lizarrd — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:24:47 -0800

Rosalind.info is a website with bioinformatics problems inspired by Project Euler (previously, previouslier.) From the about page: "We hope that Rosalind will inspire a new generation of bioinformatics students by attracting biologists who want to develop vital programming skills at their own pace in a unique environment as well as programmers who have never been exposed to some of the stimulating computational problems generated by molecular biology." It is named after Rosalind Franklin because of her work on X-ray crystallography with Raymond Gosling that helped the Watson and Crick discover the DNA double helix. "Rosalind is a joint project between the University of California at San Diego and Saint Petersburg Academic University along with the Russian Academy of Sciences." Once you have downloaded a dataset you have five minutes to upload your solution. This forces your solutions to be efficient as well as not be random chance. Y combinator had a post about it recently as well.

Making things with Maths

Evernix — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 07:37:32 -0800

Making things with Maths (sic)

Measure 4 times, cut once.

Brandon Blatcher — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:19:57 -0800

"We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."

weee eigenvectors

Evernix — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:25:58 -0800

Eigenfaces for facial recognition. (This post assumes familiarity with the terminology and notation of linear algebra, particularly inner product spaces.)

You got your type annotations in my javascript!

Jpfed — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:36:22 -0800

TypeScript is Microsoft's new open source programming language. Designed by Anders Hejlsberg (of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and C# fame), it is a strict superset of (and compiles to) javascript. TypeScript adds optional static types and a module system, using ECMAScript 6 "Harmony" syntax for new features whenever possible. Reactions have been mixed. But don't take their word for it- try it out for yourself.

Being broken pays

the man of twists and turns — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 22:36:06 -0800

Broken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right - 'It doesn’t end with Facebook, either. Being broken pays off, so social media is often deliberately broken. In fact, nearly every major social network, site or app has greedily pursued this logic.' How To Read A Blog: 'When you see a blog being with "According to a tipster... ," know that the tipster was someone like me tricking the blogger into writing what I wanted.'

Learnable Programming

AceRock — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 07:17:49 -0800

Bret Victor: We often think of a programming environment or language in terms of its features -- this one "has code folding", that one "has type inference". This is like thinking about a book in terms of its words -- this book has a "fortuitous", that one has a "munificent". What matters is not individual words, but how the words together convey a message. Likewise, a well-designed programing system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose.

use value vs. exchange value

kliuless — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:12:16 -0800

What Is Value? What Is Money? (via via)

What is value about? and how do we measure value? Traditionally, the way of measuring value has been not been through measures of value, but actually through measures of appropriation: measures of the amount of money that you can appropriate through that business, not the value that it generates in society. We're starting to see this difference.

Reinventing Society In The Wake Of Big Data

With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire -- it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big Data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society.

more on 'data science' -No, Really, Some of My Best Friends Are Data Scientists -Data Science: The Problem Isn't Statisticians, It's Too Many Poseurs more on 'big data' -Moving from Big Data to Smart Data -Top 10 categories for Big Data sources and mining technologies -Hadoop 2.0 -Grid computing -NSA Overview of Cloud Computing When Central Is Essential - "economist Glen Weyl* views changes in technology as leveling the playing field between central governments and free markets"

In his famous 1945 article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," F. A. Hayek argued that despite their inequity and inefficiency, free markets were necessary in order to allow the incorporation of information held by dispersed individuals into social decisions. No central planner could hope to collect and process all the information necessary for social decisions; only markets allowed and provided the incentives for disaggregated information processing. Yet, increasingly, information technology is leading individuals to delegate their most "private" decisions to automated processing systems... While these information systems are [currently] mostly nongovernmental, they are sufficiently centralized that it is increasingly hard to see how dispersed information poses the challenge it once did to centralized planning.

The Optimist's Case For Information Technology

Schools have poured a ton of money into ICT and tech-focused startups are circling the education sector aiming to disrupt it. Something's going to change here. IBM built a supercomputer that can win at Jeopardy which is cool but useless and now they're trying to turn it into a medical diagnostic engine. Computer-driven cars are already a real thing. Right now, price is a big barrier to adoption but if there's anything we know about ICT hardware it's that the price will fall... I don't know that doing a medical consult with your home computer and then having your prescription automatically disatched by autonomous vehicle equals a change comparable to indoor plumbing, but it's a big deal.

Two Types of Knowledge: Human Capital and Information - "Human capital is knowledge that is hard to transfer. Information is knowledge that is easy to transfer." Desire Modification: the ultimate technology - "With humanity divided into clades by motivation and personality type, evolution would be very important." [1,2] --- *The Situation Bears Watching - "Hermann Weyl, the mathematician who was Einstein's friend, was a great uncle."

An Operating System for Songs from God.

dmd — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:56:57 -0800

LoseThos is an operating system written by a schizophrenic programmer. A narrated demo and many "songs by God and me" (the apparently primary use of the OS) are available to view.

Cats Who Code

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:06:51 -0800

Khan Academy unveils its new interactive Computer Science learning platform. More coder resources: Free Tech Books, WiBit.net, Google Code University, the W3C's Web Standards Curriculum, a Beginner's Guide to HTML & CSS, and codepen.io, a social sandbox for web design.

Huge, Creaky Applications

xenophile — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:11:10 -0800

The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good. James Kwak writes in The Atlantic about the economic risks of bad software. Angry mob comments.