Arnie B.

Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture …

Titus, the Netflix container management platform, is now open source

by Amit Joshi, Andrew Leung, Corin Dwyer, Fabio Kung, Sargun Dhillon, Tomasz Bak, Andrew Spyker, Tim Bozarth<p>Today, we are open-sourcing Titus, our …

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Stop obsessing with how personally green you live – and start collectively taking on corporate power<p>Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out of sync with the nature of the …

Global Powers and Competing ‘Fixes’ in Central Asia

Thank you for the invitation, and I should also thank Sebastian as well, and it’s a shame that he couldn’t be here today. But thank you for the …

Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire

BOOKS AND ARTS<p>Andrew Robinson celebrates the high notes in the mathematician’s inimitable musical oeuvre.<p>Andrew Robinson<p>Andrew Robinson is the author …

The demise of the nation state

After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete – and spasms of resurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline. By Rana Dasgupta<p>What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and …

The Mystery of the Baklava Man

Streets, sweets and Syria meet in the story of an elusive Vancouver vendor and his fight for human rights and democracy in the Levant.

Richmond residents create counter-petition to support modular housing

<i>Initiative seeks to help 70 people within Richmond that lack a home</i>• Top news

Sheffield United 1-1 Cardiff recap

What the Facebook?! To Leave or not to Leave

Concerns over personal data collection and its use for profit and political control are not new. Iconic German band Kraftwerk sang about it back in …

Dynamic Programming (Python)

I recently encountered a difficult programming challenge which deals with getting the largest or smallest sum within a matrix. There are several …

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas …

Behind the Chat: How E-commerce Robot Assistant AliMe Works

<i>How can you tell whether your shop assistant is a person or a robot?</i><p>The most significant innovation in AI these recent years, smart chatbots, …

What happens when you mess with hashing in Python

<i>This post is based off a Jupyter notebook I made in 2013. You can download the original here. That notebook was based off a wiki page on the SymPy</i> …

Tech Envisions the Ultimate Start-Up: An Entire City

SAN FRANCISCO — For all the optimism, innovation and wealth that are produced here, the Bay Area can also feel like a place that doesn’t work quite right.<p>The cost of housing has priced out teachers and line cooks. Income inequality is among the widest in the nation. The homeless crisis never seems …

A Global Optimization Algorithm Worth Using

Here is a common problem: you have some machine learning algorithm you want to use but it has these damn <i>hyperparameters</i>. These are numbers like …

Fighting Financial Fraud with Targeted Friction

How Airbnb Battles Chargebacks while Minimizing Impact to Good Guests<p>On any given night, nearly two million people are staying in Airbnb listings in …

From imitation to innovation: How China became a tech superpower

In late October 2017, when I went to visit Kai-Fu Lee, China’s premiere artificial intelligence (AI)-focused venture capitalist, I entered his office …

Cheetahs' inner ear is one-of-a-kind, vital to high-speed hunting

Study finds that the distinct vestibular system of the world's fastest land animal only evolved recently<p>The world's fastest land animal, the cheetah, …

The Shallowness of Google Translate

The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it's a long way from real understanding.<p>One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, since his mother was Danish, and he, as a child, had …

Veto Viber? Tax Telegram? Such Are Tajikistan's Tech Company Conundrums

Cartoon by Hussam Al-Zahrani.In an attempt to stem a cash flow crisis, Tajikistan is taking up increasingly hostile postures towards digital …

Dushanbe Buses and What It Means to Live in a Capital City

<b>Author</b><p>Karolina Kluczewska<p>Karolina Kluczewska is a Maria Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow and a PhD student at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. …

Written Memories: Understanding, Deriving and Extending the LSTM

Architects are suffering from "originality syndrome" and should copy more, says Winy Maas

Architects and designers are too obsessed with being original and should get over their aversion to copying others, according to a new book …

The Aga Khan explained

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau found himself at the centre of an intensifying controversy in December when the departing ethics commissioner Mary …

Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say “tea” in the world. One is like the English term—<i>té</i> in Spanish and <i>tee</i> in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of <i>cha</i>, like <i>chay</i> in Hindi.<p>Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear …

The Twelve-Factor App

In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called <i>web apps</i>, or <i>software-as-a-service</i>. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for …

What did a T-Rex look like, how big were the Tyrannosaurus' arms and did the Jurassic Park dinosaur actually have feathers?

THE TYRANNOSAURUS Rex was the most feared and ruthless killing machines nature ever created.<p>But scientists have recently been debating if the …

The web's greatest minds explain how we can fix the internet

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, he designed it to be open. Anyone could use it to make a website, link to others and …

Physical Adversarial Examples Against Deep Neural Networks

Ivan Evtimov, Kevin Eykholt, Earlence Fernandes, and Bo Li Dec 30, 2017<p><i>This post is based on recent research by Ivan Evtimov, Kevin Eykholt, Earlence</i> …