Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…
Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2015 developer survey, which covers a wide range of topics including preferred programming languages, education, compensation, and even caffeine consumption. The 45-question survey ran for just two weeks in February and the site was able to collect results from more than 26,000 participants. Obviously, Stack Overflow survey…
The Blurst of Times A genetic algorithm experiment — @joshmillard This script creates a series of virtual monkeys, each with its own genetic pre-disposition to whack certain sets of keys on a typewriter in a certain order. Each generation of monkeys competes to see who can produce output closest to the target sentence;…
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern Web, he was chasing an idea from a 1966 science fiction novel called Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. At the book’s heart is an invented language of the same name…
A new wave of smart devices sensors and Internet of Things collecting data will make it hard to remain anonymous offline. Will the public wake up to the risks all of that data poses to their privacy? Image: iStock/maxkabakov Should we do something just because we can? That simple question has bedeviled many leaders over…
Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React’s composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It’s more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code. <br /> Flux applications have three major…
What began around 10 p.m. Eastern Wednesday was still underway on Monday morning, according to GitHub. GitHub is still battling what it says is the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in the service’s history. What began around 10 p.m. Eastern Wednesday was still underway on Monday morning, according to GitHub’s Twitter feed. The…
Credit Illustration by Javier Jaén Not long ago, our blockbuster business books spoke in unison: Trust your gut. The secret to decision-making lay outside our intellects, across the aisle in our loopy right brains, with their emo melodramas and surges of intuition. Linear thinking was suddenly the royal road to ruin. Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational”…
Choose easy to understand and short names for variables and functions. Bad variable names: Also bad variable names: incrementerForMainLoopWhichSpansFromTenToTwenty } createNewMemberIfAgeOverTwentyOneAndMoonIsFull Avoid describing a value with your variable or function name. Might not make sense in some countries: Works everywhere: Your code is a story – make your storyline easy to follow! Global variables are…
Beautiful Syntax A. Parens, Braces, Linebreaks // if/else/for/while/try always have spaces, braces and span multiple lines // this encourages readability // 2.A.1.1 // Examples of really cramped syntax if(condition) doSomething(); while(condition) iterating++; for(var i=0;i<100;i++) someIterativeFn(); // 2.A.1.1 // Use whitespace to promote readability if ( condition ) { // statements } while ( condition )…