The guy who made a tool to track women in porn videos is sorry - MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613607/facial-recognition-porn-database-privacy-gdpr-data-collection-poli
An anonymous programmer based in Germany caused outrage this week for supposedly using face-recognition technology to “catch” women who had appeared in porn. He says he’s since deleted the project and all its data, but that’s not an act of altruism. Such a project would have violated European privacy law anyway, though it would have been okay elsewhere.
There is still no proof that the global system—which allegedly matched women’s social-media photos with images from sites like Pornhub—actually worked, or even existed. Still, the technology is possible and would have had awful consequences. “It’s going to kill people,” says Carrie A. Goldberg, an attorney who specializes in sexual privacy violations and author of the forthcoming book Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls. “Some of my most viciously harassed clients have been people who did porn, oftentimes one time in their life and sometimes nonconsensually [because] they were duped into it. Their lives have been ruined because there’s this whole culture of incels that for a hobby expose women who’ve done porn and post about them online and dox them.” (Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” are a misogynistic online subculture of men who claim they are denied sex by women.)
The European Union’s GDPR privacy law prevents this kind of situation. Though the programmer—who posted about the project on the Chinese social network Weibo—originally insisted everything was fine because he didn’t make the information public, just collecting the data is illegal if the women didn’t consent, according to Börge Seeger, a data protection expert and partner at German law firm Neuwerk. These laws apply to any information from EU residents, so they would have held even if the programmer weren’t living in the EU.
Under GDPR, personal data (and especially sensitive biometric data) needs to be collected for specific and legitimate purposes. Scraping data to figure out if someone once appeared in porn is not that. And if the programmer had charged money to access this information, he could have faced up to three years in prison under German criminal law, adds Seeger.
Et toujours cette logique de l’excuse qui semble Zurkerbériser un grand nombre de programmeurs.
Reached last night via Weibo, the programmer (who did not give his real name) insisted that the technology was real, but acknowledged that it raised legal issues. He’s sorry to have caused trouble. But he’s not the only one able to build this technology, or the only one interested in using it for dangerous purposes. Policymakers concerned with global privacy law need to start thinking ahead.
]]>Python’s creator thinks it has a diversity problem — Quartz
▻https://qz.com/1624252/pythons-creator-thinks-it-has-a-diversity-problem
In a rare interview with the programmer in October last year, which was recently published on YouTube, he was asked about the lack of diversity among the people working on open-source programming languages. He noted that it was an issue, and said that those who ignore it, because open-source projects are available for anyone to contribute, are not seeing the full picture.
“It’s not just joining a project that’s the problem, it’s staying in the project, which means you have to feel comfortable exchanging emails and code reviews… with people that you don’t know personally but you communicate frequently with online,” he said. Van Rossum thinks that these exchanges can be difficult for women because of unconscious bias and male-driven cultural norms within open-source communities.
“It’s not just about writing the code, but you have stand up for your code and defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude that is endemic in many projects where a woman would just not feel comfortable claiming that she is right,” he explained. “A guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe [he is right], so they present a much more confident image.” In his experience, van Rossum sees incompetent men’s ideas gaining acceptance more often than merited because they are more forceful in how they present them.
Van Rossum believes that the different attitudes of women and men in programming communities is due to wider societal problems that we need to fix from the bottom up. “I’ve always felt that feminism was right and we need to change the whole society,” he said. In the meantime, he feels a responsibility to act in the places he has influence, like in the Python community.
He believes the key to making open-source communities more inclusive is establishing (and enforcing) codes of conduct and mentoring. Van Rossum says that he now mentors women and underrepresented minority programmers. “But white guys can forget it,” he said. “They are not the ones who need it most.” (In typical programmer speak, he calls mentoring a “completely distributed, democratic approach.”)
Rather, he thinks it’s important that men are educated about their biases. “[There are] some guys who are super defensive when you tell about this shit, but the majority of guys just don’t know any better,” he said. “The first time I heard the term unconscious bias was maybe five years ago and it was an eye opener.” It’s changed him, and he thinks it could change others.
]]>One secret to becoming a great software engineer: read code
▻https://hackernoon.com/one-secret-to-becoming-a-great-software-engineer-read-code-467e31f243b0?
Become a better programmer by building a routine and habit for reading codeThis is a post in my occasional series, Notes to a Young Software Engineer. Sign up here.A code snippet from RedisIf you woke up one day resolved to be a great writer, you’d hear two simple pieces of feedback: write a lot, and read even more.In software, plenty of people write code, but precious few spend time reading it — especially code outside their day to day work. That is a mistake. Early in your career, act like an aspiring writer and embrace reading diverse code.Read widely and read often. It could be the difference between being a decent software engineer and a great one.Why should I read code?Great writers are a function of the writers they’ve read. Think of Joan Didion, who typed out Hemingway’s sentences at 16, (...)
#read-code #learning-to-code #software-development #programming #hackernoon-top-story
]]>8 Top Programming Languages & Frameworks of 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/8-top-programming-languages-frameworks-of-2019-2f08d2d21a1?source=rss---
Here is the list of 8 best programming languages and frameworks that you should look for in the year 2019 based in various and stats & facts.In the contemporary world of constant advancements in technology, computers have reached everywhere. Writing programs for computers is one of the most crucial work profiles in the current IT market.Have you ever wondered what is an even more hectic task than this? It’s selecting an appropriate programmer to develop software for your company. For a non-technical person, it’s not easy to choose the best programmer out of the ocean of developers.Here is an image which shows the characteristics on the basis of which you should hire a software development company.After selecting the best developer, the next step is to choose the language which you (...)
#top-language-2019 #top-coding-languages #best-programming-language #top-programming-languages #top-frameworks-2019
]]>Microsoft Calculator
▻https://hownot2code.com/2019/03/12/microsoft-calculator
Incorrect string comparison V547 Expression ‘m_resolvedName == L”en-US”‘ is always false. To compare strings you should use wcscmp() function. Calculator LocalizationSettings.h 180 wchar_t m_resolvedName[LOCALE_NAME_MAX_LENGTH]; Platform::String^ GetEnglishValueFromLocalizedDigits(....) const if (m_resolvedName == L"en-US") return ref new Platform::String(localizedString.c_str()); .... The example above shows incorrect comparison of strings. The programmer is in fact comparing pointers … Continue reading Microsoft Calculator
►https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/a7fa0bb4ebff5650d2c83cb2596ad2aa?s=96&d=identicon&r=G
Today I Learned: Pass By Reference on Interface Parameter in #golang
▻https://hackernoon.com/today-i-learned-pass-by-reference-on-interface-parameter-in-golang-35ee8
Pass Interface Parameters by Reference in GolangA simple diary about a simple thing that I learned about Pass By Reference in Golangpass by reference on interface parameter in GolangBack to the college days, I remember there are 2 ways to pass a parameter to a function. One passes by value, and the other one passes by reference. Both of these ways have a different concept and sometimes it brings confusion to the programmer.In simple terms, pass by value is when we pass the parameter without a pointer to that origin address of the value. And pass by reference is when we pass the parameter with a pointer to the given parameter.In Golang, we can see these two in this example below.func passByValue(item string)func passByReference(item *string)Pass By Reference and Pass By Value in (...)
]]>How Failing With #pomodoro Technique Made Me 2x Better Programmer
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-failing-with-pomodoro-technique-made-me-2x-better-programmer-aaa72a6
My first attempts to make the Pomodoro Technique work for me were quite a struggle. But that taught me a lot! And eventually led to building great habits around coding, journaling, eating healthier and many-many more. Surprisingly, Pomodoro even muscled me up! These are the topics I am covering in my Pomodoro Series. You can check them out to steal my experience.For now I am going to share my first experience following the Pomodoro Technique. And in the beginning it was not great. At all.My shortened list of struggles with PomodoroStruggle to stopThe main problem was to stop whatever I was doing. «Hey, I’m in the middle of something! How on Earth should I make a break if I am trying to focus?». It did not feel right to take a break while being in the middle of doing something. The break was (...)
#pomodoro-technique #productivity #programming #pomodoro-programming
]]>Women Once Ruled Computers. When Did the Valley Become Brotopia? - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-01/women-once-ruled-computers-when-did-the-valley-become-brotopia
Lena Söderberg started out as just another Playboy centerfold. The 21-year-old Swedish model left her native Stockholm for Chicago because, as she would later say, she’d been swept up in “America fever.” In November 1972, Playboy returned her enthusiasm by featuring her under the name Lenna Sjööblom, in its signature spread. If Söderberg had followed the path of her predecessors, her image would have been briefly famous before gathering dust under the beds of teenage boys. But that particular photo of Lena would not fade into obscurity. Instead, her face would become as famous and recognizable as Mona Lisa’s—at least to everyone studying computer science.
In engineering circles, some refer to Lena as “the first lady of the internet.” Others see her as the industry’s original sin, the first step in Silicon Valley’s exclusion of women. Both views stem from an event that took place in 1973 at a University of Southern California computer lab, where a team of researchers was trying to turn physical photographs into digital bits. Their work would serve as a precursor to the JPEG, a widely used compression standard that allows large image files to be efficiently transferred between devices. The USC team needed to test their algorithms on suitable photos, and their search for the ideal test photo led them to Lena.
0718P_FEATURE_BROTOPIA_01
Lena
According to William Pratt, the lab’s co-founder, the group chose Lena’s portrait from a copy of Playboy that a student had brought into the lab. Pratt, now 80, tells me he saw nothing out of the ordinary about having a soft porn magazine in a university computer lab in 1973. “I said, ‘There are some pretty nice-looking pictures in there,’ ” he says. “And the grad students picked the one that was in the centerfold.” Lena’s spread, which featured the model wearing boots, a boa, a feathered hat, and nothing else, was attractive from a technical perspective because the photo included, according to Pratt, “lots of high-frequency detail that is difficult to code.”
Over the course of several years, Pratt’s team amassed a library of digital images; not all of them, of course, were from Playboy. The data set also included photos of a brightly colored mandrill, a rainbow of bell peppers, and several photos, all titled “Girl,” of fully clothed women. But the Lena photo was the one that researchers most frequently used. Over the next 45 years, her face and bare shoulder would serve as a benchmark for image-processing quality for the teams working on Apple Inc.’s iPhone camera, Google Images, and pretty much every other tech product having anything to do with photos. To this day, some engineers joke that if you want your image compression algorithm to make the grade, it had better perform well on Lena.
“We didn’t even think about those things at all when we were doing this,” Pratt says. “It was not sexist.” After all, he continues, no one could have been offended because there were no women in the classroom at the time. And thus began a half-century’s worth of buck-passing in which powerful men in the tech industry defended or ignored the exclusion of women on the grounds that they were already excluded .
Based on data they had gathered from the same sample of mostly male programmers, Cannon and Perry decided that happy software engineers shared one striking characteristic: They “don’t like people.” In their final report they concluded that programmers “dislike activities involving close personal interaction; they are generally more interested in things than in people.” There’s little evidence to suggest that antisocial people are more adept at math or computers. Unfortunately, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that if you set out to hire antisocial nerds, you’ll wind up hiring a lot more men than women.
Cannon and Perry’s work, as well as other personality tests that seem, in retrospect, designed to favor men over women, were used in large companies for decades, helping to create the pop culture trope of the male nerd and ensuring that computers wound up in the boys’ side of the toy aisle. They influenced not just the way companies hired programmers but also who was allowed to become a programmer in the first place.
In 1984, Apple released its iconic Super Bowl commercial showing a heroic young woman taking a sledgehammer to a depressing and dystopian world. It was a grand statement of resistance and freedom. Her image is accompanied by a voice-over intoning, “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” The creation of this mythical female heroine also coincided with an exodus of women from technology. In a sense, Apple’s vision was right: The technology industry would never be like 1984 again. That year was the high point for women earning degrees in computer science, which peaked at 37 percent. As the number of overall computer science degrees picked back up during the dot-com boom, far more men than women filled those coveted seats. The percentage of women in the field would dramatically decline for the next two and a half decades.
Despite having hired and empowered some of the most accomplished women in the industry, Google hasn’t turned out to be all that different from its peers when it comes to measures of equality—which is to say, it’s not very good at all. In July 2017 the search engine disclosed that women accounted for just 31 percent of employees, 25 percent of leadership roles, and 20 percent of technical roles. That makes Google depressingly average among tech companies.
Even so, exactly zero of the 13 Alphabet company heads are women. To top it off, representatives from several coding education and pipeline feeder groups have told me that Google’s efforts to improve diversity appear to be more about seeking good publicity than enacting change. One noted that Facebook has been successfully poaching Google’s female engineers because of an “increasingly chauvinistic environment.”
Last year, the personality tests that helped push women out of the technology industry in the first place were given a sort of reboot by a young Google engineer named James Damore. In a memo that was first distributed among Google employees and later leaked to the press, Damore claimed that Google’s tepid diversity efforts were in fact an overreach. He argued that “biological” reasons, rather than bias, had caused men to be more likely to be hired and promoted at Google than women.
]]>Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders
▻https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68
The software industry is overwhelmingly young. The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42. A 2018 Stack Overflow survey of 100,000 programmers around the world found that three-quarters of them were under 35. Periodic posts on Hacker News ask, “What happens to older developers?” Anxious developers in their late thirties chime in and identify themselves as among the “older.”
I turned 40 this October, and I have worked seven years in the same job at a database company called MongoDB in New York City. Many programmers my age have gone back to school to switch careers or have become managers. I am committed to a lifetime as a programmer, but my career path for the decades to come is not well-marked. I know disturbingly few engineers older than me whose examples I can follow. Where have all the older coders gone, and what are the career prospects for those of us who remain?
]]>Anyone can Cook. Anyone can Code. The Way of the Programmer
▻https://hackernoon.com/anyone-can-cook-anyone-can-code-the-way-of-the-programmer-2ebefc99692?so
How I Learn, How I Code- From a professional programmersource — ▻https://d23.com/anyone-can-cook-with-these-tips-from-ratatouille/I found that as a long time programmer I have developed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the Internet. I do my work with its help, firing tens or sometimes even hundreds of search queries in a day. You can call me a-Google based Programmer/a Stack Overflow programmer- but I don’t mean it the way to copy answers naively, post silly questions, get away with doing the bare minimum. No, I code with the help of the internet, and I try help it be a better helper- In small way’s, I add to the knowledge base via articles, answers, blogs, so that it becomes a little easier for someone else to follow. Nothing illustrates it better than sites like StackOverflow — the (...)
]]>soundtrack du 04/03
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-04-03
Tonight’s guest programmer is Vangelis Katsoulis.
Playlist of Vangelis Katsoulis work:
1. Shhhh (from the album IF NOT NOW WHEN)
2. Zarrin (from the album IF NOT NOW WHEN)
3. Whispers of secret words (from the album WHISPERS OF IMMORALITY)
4. All the blue skies (from the album IF NOT NOW WHEN)
5. Memories (from the album SILENT VOYAGE)
6. No sound but the wind (from the album AN UNBEARABLY SHORT GLANCE)
7. Only now (from the album AN UNBEARABLY SHORT GLANCE)
8. The final act (from the album THE EXILE OF DREAMS)
9. Pagan invocation (from the album PICTURES FROM INSIDE)
10. He said to me (from the album SILENT VOYAGE)
11. Foreboding (from the album PARA-PHRASES)
12. Tore (from the album IF NOT NOW WHEN)
13. In vain (from the album THE EXILE OF DREAMS)
14. Farewell (from the album (...)
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-04-03_06295__1.mp3
]]>4 Myths About Programmer Motivation
▻https://hackernoon.com/4-myths-about-programmer-motivation-5fc4d654fe14?source=rss----3a8144eab
I’m just not motivated to code today.Myth #1: Managers cannot (or should not) affect motivationWhen managers believe that people either have or do not have motivation, they feel powerless to affect motivation. In her book Mindset, Dr. Carol Dweck refers to this as the “fixed” mindset. The fixed mindset is the belief that people are born with unchangeable strengths and weaknesses and that people would do well to build on their strengths and avoid tasks at which they are weak. She contrasts this with the “growth” mindset, which is the belief that people grow and learn throughout their lives.In Mindset, Dweck explains how to break out of the fixed mindset and adopt the growth mindset. She also provides research supporting the belief that this change is possible (even for old guys like me!). But (...)
#agile #programmer-motivation #developer-motivation #startup #software-development
]]>How to supercharge your bash workflows with GNU parallel
▻https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-supercharge-your-bash-workflows-with-gnu-parallel-53aab0
GNU parallel is a command line tool for running jobs in parallel.
parallel is awesome and belongs in the toolbox of every programmer. But I found the docs a bit overwhelming at first. Fortunately, you can start being useful with parallel with just a few basic commands.
]]>How I learned 15 #programming languages, and why your kids will too
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-i-learned-15-programming-languages-3017dd24e8a6?source=rss----3a8144
Crypterium presents you with a life story of our CTO #TechMind. A simple tale of a programmer yet a good intro read to the world of tech for regular readers. The story shows the importance of believing in your dreams and significance of strong family relations. Let’s go!When I was 12 years old, I got sick and had to go to the hospital for a check-up. No need to worry, turned out I only had angina. But a couple of hours I spent in the hospital back then did, in some way, predetermine my whole life.While I was waiting for the examination, someone gave me a book — just to cheer me up. #it turned out to be about BASIC, an early programming language that was and still is among the simplest and most popular programming languages. I loved the whole idea of creating new things from scratch so badly (...)
]]>The Secret History of Women in Coding | Clive Thompson
►https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html
Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? Source: The New York Times
]]>Most Productive Keyboard Shortcuts to Master in 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/most-productive-keyboard-shortcuts-to-master-in-2019-5d2c51df7e9b?source
We often find ourselves switching our hands between our mouse or a trackpad and our keyboard. This becomes quite cumbersome to handle if you are a programmer like me or if you spend most of your time on the machine.What if I shared some secret magic mantras (a word or sound that is believed to have a special spiritual power) with you which could transform you into a Keyboard Shortcut Wizard. Yeah, you would definitely need some practice but eventually, you would become great at it.Shortcuts were made for us to save our time and do tasks quicker than using our mouse or a trackpad. Now looking at the keyboard don’t you get curious about the random letters been placed all over your keyboard?Why are letters randomly placed on the keyboard?Let me tell you that the letters weren’t placed (...)
#learn-keyboard-shortcuts #best-keyboard-shortcuts #productivity #master-keyboard-shortcuts #keyboard-shortcuts
]]>Changemakers in #programming: Brendan Eich
▻https://hackernoon.com/changemakers-in-programming-brendan-eich-e43f2cc7d269?source=rss----3a81
Changemakers in Programming: this new blog series will be focusing on organizations, associations and people who have had and/or continue to have a positive impact on the tech world and the world of programming!For this second post, we will learn about the inventor of #javascript. This is the story of BrendanEich, a programmer with a long and growing list of accomplishments!Currently, Eich is the CEO of Brave, which has developed a new internet browser (called Brave) that promises its users more privacy, better security, and faster browsing speeds. But you may also know him as the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla (where he was also CTO and briefly CEO).In this blog post, we’ll explore how Eich got to where he is today and discuss his latest project (Brave) and how it might (...)
]]>soundtrack du 04/02
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-04-02
Guest playlist by Moonshine Maverick
AMM - What Is There In Uselessness To Cause You Distress? İlhan Mimaroğlu - Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe Oren Ambarchi - Girl With The Silver Eyes Christopher Gunning - Karaoke Suite (In Love with Sandra/Obsession/End Titles) Joseph Jarman - Non-Cognitive Aspects Of The City Annea Lockwood - Immersion Luc Ferrari - Untitled 1 & 2 (Cycle Des Souvenirs 1995-2000) Jim O’Rourke - He Who Laughs Eiko Ishibashi & Darin Gray - Ichida Part 1 (excerpt) Beth Orton - Rectify #2
Moonshine Maverick is a Finnish artist and musician currently residing in London. He was a longtime contributor and programmer for RTBF’s (now defunct) Musiq3 -show ‘Autour de Babel’, co-organised a tribute to filmmaker Harry Smith at Brussels’ Cinema Nova back in 2007 and (...)
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-04-02_06138__1.mp3
]]>Work Day Optimization: Write Code as Early as You Can
▻https://hackernoon.com/work-day-optimization-write-code-as-early-as-you-can-c6da1e57bafd?source
Do you dedicate your first working hour to code, or do you waste it reviewing your to-do list and responding to Slack messages?I often find that the longer it takes me to get to my most important tasks for the day, the less I accomplish by the end of the day.One of my favorite blog posts is “Fire and Motion” — an open admission by Joel Spolsky about days where he felt unproductive as a programmer. In his blog post, Spolsky writes:Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before getting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again (...)
#coding #self-improvement #write-code-early-in-day #productivity #software-development
]]>10 Essential VS Code Extensions for #javascript Developers in 2019
▻https://hackernoon.com/10-essential-vs-code-extensions-for-javascript-developers-in-2019-e8320e
Every programmer you’ll ever meet will have a slightly different opinion about what code editor is the best and what configuration is the most productive. Many of us have spent countless hours trying out different extensions for our code editor of choice, configuring settings, switching back and forth between code editors and trying to get the development environment just right for us.I’ve been an Atom fan for a couple of years, but I switched to VS Code last year and it felt strangely good. I like the performance better, for one, but I also think that VS Code’s marketplace is just as good as Atom’s marketplace. So here are my top extension picks that might help boost your productivity or just make your VS Code experience a little bit better.10. Quokka.jsCategory: debuggingQuokka.js is a (...)
]]>soundtrack du 21/01
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-21-01
Tonight’s guest programmer is Otto Lindholm.
Playlist:
Chrysenthemum - Jean-Luc Fafchamps Un Saltador - Rafael Anton Irisarri Alive & Ready (feat. Merlin Nova) - Ben Vince Epure - Eliane Radigue No Ceiling In The Mansion - Brett Naucke Boletus Felleus - Jonny Greenwood Mono No Aware - William Basinski & Lawrence English Altra - Lucrecia Dalt CNN Predicts a Monster Storm - Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet Abiquiu - Félicia Atkinson Fly - Low Sleep like it’s winter - Jim O’Rourke Homage to Dick Raaijmakers - Thomas Ankersmit Saboten - Susumu Yokota Gloaming - Sarah Davachi Some absolute means - Ian William Craig Odi et Amo - bis - Johan Johansson Feel Fist Life - Jon Hopkins 3/4 Basta Contrabass - Otto Lindholm Connector - Penelope Trappes Upon (...)
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-21-01_06049__1.mp3
]]>Top 10 Trending Artificial Intelligence Frameworks and Libraries
▻https://hackernoon.com/top-10-trending-artificial-intelligence-frameworks-and-libraries-69ba590
Artificial Intelligence is the future of the programming world. More and more developers, seeing the growing demand for #ai technologies, familiarize themselves with this science. And when you start learning AI and how it can be implemented in programming, the first question which comes to mind is “What are the best languages/frameworks/libraries to use?” That’s exactly what we will cover today in this review of the top 10 AI frameworks and libraries every programmer must know.Let’s be honest, some languages are just not well fit for AI. For example, many Ruby developers who are into AI abandon their most beloved language and switch to Python because the latter is better suited for this purpose. However, the languages which are quite AI-friendly such as C++ offer an abundance of frameworks (...)
#ai-framework #machine-learning #ai-libraries #artificial-intelligence
]]>Want to become a Happy and Productive Programmer? Use these 5 techniques from #psychology
▻https://hackernoon.com/want-to-become-a-happy-and-productive-programmer-use-these-5-techniques-
How Ideas from Human Psychology can help Programmers?Do you want to program at your peak performance? Do you want to enjoy #programming job? What are the tricks to get unstuck from hard problems? How can you push your cognitive capabilities? Turning into Psychology can tell us answers.Like a hero of a movie, the programmer’s life has villains, diversions, fights, and emotions. Are you ready to become a programming hero?1. Achieve Flow StateIn the famous book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reveals that the secret for achieving Peak Performance is doing work in an optimal state called flow.Flow is optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and capable of performing at top level. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, (...)
]]>A realistic roadmap to becoming a #python developer
▻https://hackernoon.com/a-realistic-roadmap-to-becoming-a-python-developer-ab5872959509?source=r
This is a highly opinionated, pseudo-motivational, unconventional and almost rant-like developer roadmap article.This article is more than a compilation of best books/videos/courses to learn Python and covers the bigger issues that a beginner/early-intermediate faces on their journey. These are the undocumented problems Stack Overflow does not solve.Why Python ?Why should you learn Python anyway? Why not one of the 20 other languages trending right now? As you’re beginning your journey, this questions crops up multiple times (a day).Picking your first #programming language is a lot like picking a starter pokemon.The inherent capabilities of a language are less significant than the skill of the programmer in using said language and their grit to make it into the big league.If you want to (...)
]]>Thousands of users on day 1, prototype to production in the Javascript world
▻https://hackernoon.com/thousands-of-users-on-day-1-prototype-to-production-in-the-javascript-wo
Thousands of users on day 1: Prototype to Production in the Javascript orldRecently, my friend talked to me about a golden startup opportunity that he was considering. His client was ready to advance the cost of the development for an app that my friend would build but would also keep ownership. That is simply the perfect starter for SaaS business.Unfortunately, my friend isn’t a programmer and he was looking for advice to build a development team. My first reaction was to tell him that he probably only require an MVP and that I can definitely do it for him. That will buy him some time to build a team and he will already get the ball rolling with users and (potentially) revenue from the app. Best of both worlds, right?After years of building hundreds of side projects, here’s how I (...)
#graphql #prototype-to-production #ruby-on-rails #react #apollo
]]>A Machine Learning Approach to IBM Employee Attrition and Performance
▻https://hackernoon.com/a-machine-learning-approach-to-ibm-employee-attrition-and-performance-b5
Predicting the Attrition of Valuable Employees…..In an IT firm, there are many Employee Architectures available. Some IT firms or at particular departments or certain levels follow the chief programmer structure, in which there is a “star” organisation around a “chief” position designated to the Engineer who best understands the system requirements.Chief Programmer ArchitectureWhile, some follow an egoless (democratic) structure, where all the Engineers are at the same level designated for different jobs like Front-End Design, Back-End Coding, Software Testing etc. But, this architecture is not followed by very big or Multi-National Software Giants. But all in all, this is a very successful and working environment-friendly architecture.Egoless (Democratic) Architecture3rd Type of (...)
#feature-extraction #ibm-employee-attrition #data-analysis #machine-learning #data-visualization
]]>Top 5 Free #linux Courses for Programmers
▻https://hackernoon.com/top-5-free-linux-courses-for-programmers-4a433b4edade?source=rss----3a81
A curated list of some of the best free online courses to learn Linux in 2019There is no doubt that Linux is one of the most popular operating systems to run server-side applications. I have seen almost all Java applications running on Linux barring a couple of them which runs on Windows as service.If you take out standalone apps like IDEs or tools, most of the real world Java applications run on Linux e.g. payment gateways, trading systems, and other financial applications.That’s why it’s very important for any programmer, IT professional, or a developer to learn and understand Linux, both operating system, as well as command line. Linux as one of the most important skill because it serves you for a long time. It not only makes you productive and teaches a lot of automation by (...)
#online-courses #software-development #programming #technology
]]>soundtrack du 17/12
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-17-12
Tonight’s guest Programmer is Antonis Pantazis, a journalist, regular contributor at La Vita Radio and once contributor of RTBF’s Musiq 3 Autour de Babel ... Is this a reincarnation? Maybe, why not!
His playlist is as follows:
Parrots (field recording) by AITNA Rio by Ryuichi Sakamoto O Sonho (Moon Dream) by Airto Moreira Sabiá by Morelenbaum2, Sakamoto Juntos (We Love) by Airto Moreira Coisa (incl. touchassembly__vinyl-static1) by Bola Sete Falta-Me Você by Francis Hime E Olivia Hime Passaro De Luz by Bacamarte Vento De Maio by Elis Regina & Lô Borges Uri (Wind) by Airto Moreira El dia que me quieras – Oblivion by Orchestre National de Jazz Slowly by Amon Tobin Imbassai by Arto Lindsay Mahamuni by Aquarela Carioca A Outra by Maria João Amore (...)
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-17-12_05888__1.mp3
]]>PEP 8016 — The Steering Council Model | Python.org
▻https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016
This PEP proposes a model of Python governance based around a steering council. The council has broad authority, which they seek to exercise as rarely as possible; instead, they use this power to establish standard processes, like those proposed in the other 801x-series PEPs. This follows the general philosophy that it’s better to split up large changes into a series of small changes that can be reviewed independently: instead of trying to do everything in one PEP, we focus on providing a minimal-but-solid foundation for further governance decisions.
Après la démission en juillet de son inventeur Guido van Rossum du poste de #dictateur_bienveillant_à_vie*, #Python vient de se doter d’une sorte de constitution, décidée par un vote Condorcet
▻https://discuss.python.org/t/python-governance-vote-december-2018-results/546
* C’est de l’humour d’informaticien mais avec un fond de vérité, et comme tout leadership de fondateur cela finit par s’avérer plus ou moins toxique.
]]>Are You Trying to Become a Programmer?
▻https://hackernoon.com/are-you-trying-to-become-a-programmer-a42a97b38c49?source=rss----3a8144e
It seems that everyone is trying to learn how to #code these days. But where can you go to get some #programming help? We’ll help by giving you reasons why programming is beneficial to your career and provide advice on where you can get the assistance you need.Learning the basics of coding a computer is a popular topic that spans across multiple industries. Children as young as four are being taught on how to program computers and adults are encouraged to pick up the coding skills regardless of your career.Steve Jobs states, “I think that everyone in the country should know how to program because it will teach everyone how you think.”The government is also doing a bit as well. Even children as young as 11 years old are starting to learn how to code. So the question is, why is there a rush to (...)
]]>Hiring Across Time Zones: Leveraging tech to manage remote #software teams
▻https://hackernoon.com/hiring-across-time-zones-leveraging-tech-to-manage-remote-software-teams
By Isaac Kohen, Teramind“For programmers, the ultimate office perk is avoiding the office entirely.” — 2017 Quartz PollWhile remote work in all sectors has increased, the number of distributed development teams is growing at an incredible rate, outpacing other industries by a wide margin. In fact, in a survey investigating the needs and desires of computer programmers, remote work ranked as the second highest priority.There are many ideal factors to this setup. For instance, remote work can boost productivity while reducing the costs of office space and other accouterments. As a study on the habits of computer programmers revealed, “a programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day.” As a result, for many development teams, remote work is an unquestioned reality, but (...)
#remote-working #software-development #technology #employee-engagement
]]>10 Reasons to Learn #python in 2018
▻https://hackernoon.com/10-reasons-to-learn-python-in-2018-f473dc35e2ee?source=rss----3a8144eabf
Who wants to become a Python Programmer?If you follow my blog regularly then you may be wondering that why am I writing an article to tell people to learn Python? Didn’t I asked you to prefer Java over Python a couple of years ago?Well, things have changed a lot since then. In 2016, Python replaced Java as the most popular language in colleges and Universities and since then it has never looked back.Python is growing and growing big time. If you read #programming and technology news or blog post then you might have noticed the rise of Python as many popular developer communities including StackOverFlow and CodeAcademy has mentioned the rise of Python as a major programming language. But, the biggest question is why should a programmer learn Python? Python is growing Ok, that’s great, but (...)
]]>PANE - Programming with visible data
▻http://joshuahhh.com/projects/pane
PANE is a prototype live, functional programming environment built around data-visibility. In PANE, all intermediate values are visible by default, and you construct a program by acting on these concrete values.
PANE has invited comparison to notebooks, especially live, reactive notebooks like Observable. But so far, the visibility that Observable offers programmers has not been fine-grained enough to create the sort of experience that PANE aims for. As a simple example: the moment you take a block of code in Observable and make it into a function, or put it in a loop, its internals become completely invisible. It remains to be seen if the Observable developers will try to push past these limitations.
]]>6 Hobbies Programmers Can Participate in to Promote Relaxation
▻https://hackernoon.com/6-hobbies-programmers-can-participate-in-to-promote-relaxation-d87a34643
Pexels.comProgramming can be exciting and it can also be stressful. As a programmer you spend a lot of time in front of a computer. To help with stress and relaxation, here are six hobbies you can participate in that will help you relax.1. Take music lessonsLearning to play a musical instrument can be both relaxing and rewarding. It will help keep your fingers nimble and your brain agile. Not only will you have fun learning something new, you could join a band or an orchestra and enjoy time with other people who like music. Playing a musical instrument will help with stress relief. You can escape your stress by getting into the music you are playing.2. CookingTake time to learn how to cook. Cooking can be a major stress release. You are involved in creating something from scratch that (...)
#developer #stress-relief #relax #programming #self-improvement
]]>Top 5 Free Courses to Learn #git and Github — Best of Lot
▻https://hackernoon.com/top-5-free-courses-to-learn-git-and-github-best-of-lot-2f394c6533b0?sour
Top 5 Free Courses to Learn Git and Github — Best of Lot5 Free Courses to Learn Git and GithubOne of the important skill for a programmer is to learn and master Git and I have been searching some good tutorials and courses to start with. The Internet is full of git tutorials and a simple Google search will leave you thousands of tutorials but the big question mark is where do you start?It’s easy to pick a tutorial or a blog post if you have some background about what is Git, what it does? and how to use it but if you don’t have much background then you need a course which can tell you all the information from the ground up.I personally like learning from a book or an online course before moving to blog posts as they were often well structured.When you search for Git courses in popular online (...)
]]>Top 5 #kotlin #programming Courses for #java and #android Programmers
▻https://hackernoon.com/top-5-kotlin-programming-courses-for-java-and-android-programmers-49e842
Kotlin vs Java (▻https://kotlinlang.org)If you don’t know Kotlin, it’s a relatively new programming language that makes programming on Android and Java easy. It’s Android’s official Application development language and 100% compatible with Java and removes some of the pain points of Java.Ever since Google announced Kotlin as the official language for Android Development, I received a lot of queries from my readers about whether Java developers should learn Kotlin now? Or, which one is better to start with Android development, — Kotlin or Java?I have answered that question in my last article, but I am still receiving a lot of queries about learning Kotlin and whether a Java developer should learn Kotlin or not?Well, to be honest with you, being a Polyglot programmer, i.e. a programmer who knows (...)
]]>Civil Time in Abseil
▻https://abseil.io/blog/20181010-civil-time
By Greg Miller, Bradley White, and Shaindel Schwartz
Almost every spring and fall there are news headlines about software that misbehaved during a daylight-saving transition. In much of the world, DST transitions occur multiple times per year, yet it is still a veritable minefield of latent bugs due to the complexities inherent in reasoning about civil-time discontinuities. To avoid these problems, a civil-time library must present the programmer with a correct — yet simplified — model that makes expressing the desired intent easy and writing bugs more obvious.
To that end, we are very pleased to introduce a new feature for the Abseil time library — civil time support. This update adds a set of constructs and functions that are used to represent and perform computations with civil times. (...)
]]>Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam
▻https://medium.com/s/powertrip/universal-basic-income-is-silicon-valleys-latest-scam-fd3e130b69a0
▻https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/focal/1200/632/51/47/0*pksYF4nMsS3aKrtD
Par Douglas Rushkoff
To my surprise, the audience seemed to share my concerns. They’re not idiots, and the negative effects of their operations were visible everywhere they looked. Then an employee piped up with a surprising question: “What about UBI?”
Wait a minute, I thought. That’s my line.
Up until that moment, I had been an ardent supporter of universal basic income (UBI), that is, government cash payments to people whose employment would no longer be required in a digital economy. Contrary to expectations, UBI doesn’t make people lazy. Study after study shows that the added security actually enables people to take greater risks, become more entrepreneurial, or dedicate more time and energy to improving their communities.
So what’s not to like?
Shouldn’t we applaud the developers at Uber — as well as other prominent Silicon Valley titans like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, bond investor Bill Gross, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman — for coming to their senses and proposing we provide money for the masses to spend? Maybe not. Because to them, UBI is really just a way for them to keep doing business as usual.
Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.
Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps.
Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely. Instead of merely rewriting the law like colonial corporations did or utilizing the power of capital like retail conglomerates do, digital companies are using code. Amazon’s control over the retail market and increasingly the production of the goods it sells, has created an automated wealth-extraction platform that the slave drivers who ran the Dutch East India Company couldn’t have even imagined.
Of course, it all comes at a price: Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.
To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.
Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.
To venture capitalists seeking to guarantee their fortunes for generations, such economic equality sounds like a nightmare and unending, unnerving disruption. Why create a monopoly just to give others the opportunity to break it or, worse, turn all these painstakingly privatized assets back into a public commons?
The answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is because all those assets are actually of diminishing value to the few ultra-wealthy capitalists who have accumulated them. Return on assets for American corporations has been steadily declining for the last 75 years. It’s like a form of corporate obesity. The rich have been great at taking all the assets off the table but really bad at deploying them. They’re so bad at investing or building or doing anything that puts money back into the system that they are asking governments to do this for them — even though the corporations are the ones holding all the real assets.
Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running. They don’t see the economic operating system beneath their programs, and so they are not in a position to challenge its embedded biases much less rewrite that code.
Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.
written by
Douglas Rushkoff
#Revenu_de_base #Revenu_universel #Disruption #Economie_numérique #Uberisation
]]>Modern C++ Features – Quality-of-Life Features—Arne Mertz
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2
Some to help, some to enable.
Modern C++ Features – Quality-of-Life Features by Arne Mertz
From the article:
With the new C++ standards, we got a lot of features that feel like “quality-of-life” features. They make things easier for the programmer but do not add functionality that wasn’t already there. Except, some of those features do add functionality we couldn’t implement manually. Some of those quality-of-life features are really exactly that. The standard often describes them as being equivalent to some alternative code we can actually type. Others are mostly quality-of-life, but there are edge cases where we can not get the effect by hand, or the feature is slightly superior to the manual implementation. I will concentrate on core language features here, since (...)
#News,Articles&_Books,
]]>Melinda Gates’ New Research Reveals Alarming Diversity Numbers | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/melinda-gates-mckinsey-diversity-research-alarming
Point de vue de milliardaire : Nous sommes en mal d’ engineers (à l’américaine) pour nos boîtes et mes copines n’arrivent toujours qu’avec les armes d’une femme traditionnelle à contrôler les affaires de leurs maris. En plus nous rendons les system instable qui nous nourrit si nous acceptons que les différences de race freinent la promotion des êtres les plus doués.
C’est très bien si MG met à disposition une petite partie de ses milliards pou aider les femmes défavorisées. C’est déjà moins bien quand c’est fait dans la perspective de pouvoir encore mieux nous contrôler et exploiter. Elle est peut-être en train de préparer le chemin pour la première femme présidente des États Unis qui ne sera toujours que la représentante d’une association de malfaiteurs et de ses bandes armées.
Alors que faire pour récupérer sa fondation afin de former les révolutionnaires dont nous, les petits gens avons besoin ? Il ne faut pas se contenter d’une part de gateau. Il faut mettre la main sur la pâtisserie entière ;-)
The report arrives two years after Melinda Gates announced plans to build up a personal office, Pivotal Ventures, to dedicate resources and attention to supporting women in tech.
EXECUTIVES AT TECH companies say gender diversity matters. They opine that there aren’t enough women in tech, and express outrage and frustration that just 11 percent of senior tech leaders are women. But in reality they spend very little of their philanthropic dollars attempting to close this gender and race gap, according to new research released today by Melinda Gates in partnership with McKinsey & Company.
Last year, according to the report, only 5 percent of companies’ philanthropic giving went to programs that focused explicitly on women and girls in tech. And less than 0.1 percent of their grants went to programming for women of color—a group whose representation in tech is getting worse. Over the past decade, the ratio of black, Latina, and Native American women receiving computing degrees has dropped by a third, from 6 percent to just four percent.
The companies investigated found that last figure so alarming that twelve of the 32 participants are taking immediate action. They’re uniting to form the Reboot Recognition Tech Coalition, a joint effort by companies like Microsoft, Qualcomm, and LinkedIn to close the gender gap for women of color in tech. They aim to double the number of underrepresented women of color graduating with computer science degrees by 2025, and they’re collectively pledging $12 million toward this goal over three years. This group will coordinate to direct their giving collectively, with the twin goals of creating a set of guidelines that will revamp the computer science major to appeal more to women of color and while building dedicated communities that will support these women within the industry, among other things.
Gates has long contended that collecting data is critical to addressing the social challenges she has spent the second part of her career tackling as a philanthropist; companies may say they care deeply about problems, but until the research exists to show them exactly what the problem looks like, how it’s changing, and what measures have been shown to be effective in addressing it, not much changes. It’s the same insight Tracy Chou had when, as a programmer at Pinterest in 2013, she published a Medium post asking her peers to contribute the number and percentage of female engineers they employed.
The report arrives two years after Gates announced plans to build up a personal office, Pivotal Ventures, to dedicate resources and attention to supporting women in tech—in addition to the work she does with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. When we spoke about it then, she voiced the need for more research. “I can’t go convince governments to work on female issues unless I have data,” she said, adding, “Transparency is one of the first things that makes change.”
Entitled “Reboot Representation: Using CSR and Philanthropy to Close the Gender Gap in Tech,” the report reviews how 32 large tech companies, including Google, eBay and Salesforce have worked internally to support women and close the gender gap. Taken together, these companies brought in $500 billion in sales last year, and they spent more than $500 million on philanthropy. Of that, $24 million went to support programming for women and girls and just $335,000 targeted at programs aimed at women of color.
In addition to surveying companies about their existing strategies, researchers spoke with more than 100 leaders in the field to determine what strategies were proving effective. The resulting research forms a playbook for companies interested in promoting and supporting gender diversity more effectively. It includes tips for what makes programs successful, advice on how to pick and set a strategy that is in line with a company’s business objectives, and a self-assessment to help companies figure out whether their efforts are working.
Researchers discovered that companies often didn’t spend their money in data-driven research-underlined ways: Two-thirds of the the companies surveyed concentrated their funding on programs for kids between kindergarten and 12th grade, while research suggests that programs targeting college-age women to bolster their enthusiasm for the field before they choose majors and commit to a career, were more effective. “Few invest philanthropically earlier in higher education to build the cohort they will ultimately recruit from,” write the reports’ authors.
What’s more, companies rarely coordinate these philanthropic efforts. Within an institution, there are often multiple people working on gender and racial parity, within in human resources, diversity and inclusion teams, or as part of a corporate social responsibility strategy. Yet there’s rarely one person overseeing it all.
The most important things companies can do, according to Gates, is coordinate these efforts. That’s why she’s excited about the potential of the coalition. As she blogged today, “By working together, they will be able to reach more young women.” The answer to the everyone-in-hoodies problem is not a silver bullet, but a concentrated, industry-wide effort to solve problems the way computer scientists solve problems: methodically, by collecting data, understanding the issues, and testing strategies until the problem is solved.
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