, 4 min read
In 2016, we saw a wide range of breakthroughs having to do with artificial intelligence and deep learning in particular. Google, Facebook, and Baidu announced several breakthroughs using deep learning. Google also defeated Go. Deep learning is one specific class of machine learning algorithms. It…
, 2 min read
If you are using a modern C++ (C++11 or better), you have access to set data structures (unordered_set) which have the characteristics of a hash set. The standard does not provide us with built-in functions to compute the union and the intersection of such sets, but we can make our own. For…
, 1 min read
Resizing arrays can be slow in Swift
, 2 min read
Swift a recent high-performance programming language. It is still primarily used develop iOS applications, but it has the potential to be a general-purpose language. The lack of maturity of the language is still apparent. For example, it is almost trivially easy to create source code that the Swift…
, 4 min read
Sometimes programmers want to prune out characters from a string of characters. For example, maybe you want to remove all line-ending characters from a piece of text. Let me consider the problem where I want to remove all spaces (‘ ‘) and linefeed characters (‘\n’ and ‘\r’). How would…
, 5 min read
I keep hoping that the field of programming language will evolve. I am a bit tired to program in Java and C… I’d like better languages. I am particularly interested in what I generally call “high-performance programming”. I want to pick languages where I can get the most out of my hardware.…
, 2 min read
People spend a lot of time worrying that robots and computers are going to wipe out all jobs. My belief is that the job market is a lot more complex and simplistic reasonings (“better robots means fewer jobs”) are likely misleading. I recently observed that despite the widespread introduction…
, 6 min read
There are millions of truck drivers in the US today. In particular, there are about 1.7 million tractor-trailer (human) drivers. There are many more professional truck drivers in the US, but tractor-trailer drivers are the “archetypal truck drivers”. In 2016, we had several demonstrations of…
, 3 min read
If you have spent any time at all on college-level mathematics, you have probably heard of the scalar product: float scalarproduct(float * array1, float * array2, size_t length) { float sum = 0.0f; for (size_t i = 0; i < length; ++i) { sum += array1[i] * array2[i]; } return…
, 6 min read
There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new… In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term “technological unemployment”… We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the…
, 8 min read
We know more than we can tell. We all know what a democracy is… We know that France, Canada, the USA, Japan… are democracies… Russia and China are not democracies. However, I have never seen a definition of “democracy” that fits the actual use of the term. One formal definition is…
, 2 min read
The Go language allows you to call C functions and to rewrite entire functions in assembly. As I have previously documented, calling C functions from Go comes with a significant overhead. It still makes sense, but only for sizeable functions, or when performance is irrelevant. What about functions…
, 5 min read
I was an adept, as a teenager and a young adult, of thinkism. Thinkism is the idea that intelligence alone can solve problems. I thought I was smart so that I could just sit down and solve important problems. One after the other. Whatever contributions I ended up making had little to do with…
, 8 min read
This year, you are able to buy CRISPR-based gene editing toolkits for $150 on the Internet as well as autonomous drones, and you can ask your Amazon Echo to play your favorite music or give you a traffic report. You can buy a fully functional Android tablet for $40 on Amazon. If you have made it to…
, 2 min read
Millions of little things go wrong in your body every minute. Your brain processes the data in a noisy manner. Even trained mathematicians can’t think logically most of the time. In our economy, most companies fail within a decade. Most products are flawed. Over a million people die every year in…
, 5 min read
Most modern languages try to be “safer” by checking runtime values in the hope of producing more secure and less buggy software. Sadly, it makes it harder to reason about the performance of the code. And, sometimes, the cost can be far from negligible. Let me illustrate it through a story using…
, 1 min read
Getting a job in the software industry
, 3 min read
I am routinely asked about how to break into the software industry as a programmer. It is true that there is high demand for qualified programmers, but not all jobs are equal. There are good and bad tracks. And most jobs aren’t that good. How do you get a good job as a programmer? Here is my…
, 2 min read
Software evolves by natural selection, not by intelligent design. It is a massive trial-and-error process. There are many thousands of programmers working every day to build new things in the hope of replacing the old… From time to time, you will hear about a new fantastic piece of computer…
, 1 min read
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