ProLinks #23

Why programmers never agree, why audience matters and about learning. More inside.

IT

Stolen Bitcoin Tracing - Computerphile - When bitcoin is spent, remainders are re-encoded & combined - how do you separate out any ill-gotten gains from the legitimate hard-earned lucre?

Why Do Some Programmers Never Agree? - Why does it seem like no matter how strong your argument, some programmers never agree with you?

Your audience matters the most - Don’t fish out for email addresses, we’re humans you know.

Why German companies fail at digital innovation - (No) thanks to hierarchical managers, obsolete tools and daft politics, Germany risks being left in the digital dark age.

World Models - Can agents learn inside of their own dreams?

Science

All Models Are Wrong - Every scientific model or representation of something in nature is simplified, reduced, in order to make them useful.

Miscellaneous

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Comments

ProLinks #65 - North Korea, Cryptocurrencies, Propaganda and more

Tech The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army He was right. As the newspapers soon reported, more than sixteen million dollars was withdrawn from roughly seventeen hundred 7-Eleven A.T.M.s across Japan that morning, using data stolen from South Africa’s Standard Bank. The newspapers surmised that 7-Elevens had been targeted because they were the only convenience stores in Japan whose cash terminals all accepted foreign cards. Soon after the raids, the withdrawal limit for many A.T.M.s in the country was reduced to fifty thousand yen Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud ❧ Current Affairs Schweikert is partly right: “selling it as a revolution” is a hugely important part of why cryptocurrency is succeeding. But as is generally the case when someone is trying to sell you something, the whole thing should seem extremely fishy. In fact, much of the cryptocurrency pitch is worse than fishy. It’s downright fraudulent, promising people benefits that they will not get and trying

ProLinks #11

First ProLinks edition in 2018 brings a lot of links for IT professionals including solid Ruby criticism. Also interesting links about society, science and more inside. IT Managing Engineers with Ron Lichty The Problem Solver - Good developers are good problem solvers. They turn each task into a series of problems they have to solve. Energy Efficiency: A New Concern for Application Software Developers - The prevalence and ubiquity of mobile computing platforms, such as smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and smart glasses, have changed the way people use and interact with software. Clever ideas that failed - The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. SSH Security and You - /bin/false is *not* security - I thought to myself, "Fine, no shell for me. I wonder if port forwarding works?" The 100x Engineer - If we want to be 100x engineers — engineers who have 100x the impact of ye’ old 1x engineer—how do we accomplish tha

ProLinks Biometrics #49 - How biometrics is making spying hard

In this edition the highlight for me is an article from Yahoo news about the trouble spy agencies are in because of biometrics and surveillance (I love irony). Other than that, you can read about reducing friction or using biometrics to track police (again, I love irony). Enjoy! Biometrics How biometrics has changed spying Biometrics at borders control, using it to issue documents or checking at hotels is making work of spies using fake identities hard to impossible, depending on a state. For example, Singapore will alert security forces if somebody is taking too long to check into a hotel . Read the linked article to find out much more. Source: privateinternetaccess.com Reducing friction Nowadays is all about the user experience and friction or the lack of it. User do not like to make unnecessary actions to accomplish something . Reducing friction is mostly great, but there are also downsides, as overusing social networks. Making sure that policemen are working Pol

Are there types of programmers?

As a response to my previous post about why there is so many programming languages I got very interesting answer about types of programmers. Than I have read linked article about Mort, Elvis, Einstein, and You and subsequently post The Two Types of Programmers which lead me to The Fourteen Types of Programmers . As you have probably realized, there are many different opinions on this topic. So what is the reality? Let me add to the pile of opinions. It always comes down to this - How do we set the criteria on which we want to categorize. Based on these criteria we can form clusters. These clusters of programmers are than our categories. You could probably do this with clustering algorithm if you can form reasonable dataset. So basically the question how many types of programmers are there cannot be answered without specifying your criteria. And from this misunderstanding of how the question works comes discussions about how many categories there is. There

ProLinks #62 - AI, Statistics, Tarkovsky and more

Tech Are Deep Neural Networks Dramatically Overfitted? The fundamental idea in MDL is to view learning as data compression. By compressing the data, we need to discover regularity or patterns in the data with the high potentiality to generalize to unseen samples. Information bottleneck theory believes that a deep neural network is trained first to represent the data by minimizing the generalization error and then learn to compress this representation by trimming noise. The Therapy-App Fantasy “It would clearly be naïve for psychotherapists to turn a blind eye to science, or to be ‘against’ scientific methodology,” he wrote. “But the attempt to present psychotherapy as a hard science is merely an attempt to make it a convincing competitor in the marketplace. It is a sign, in other words, of a misguided wish to make psychotherapy both respectable and servile to the very consumerism it is supposed to help people deal with.” (Psychotherapy, he points out, emerges historically just as “t

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