Plurrrr

David Beazley thought that “JavaScript versus Data Science” would be a better title for this book. While that one word sums up how many people view the language, we hope we can convince you that modern JavaScript is usable as well as useful. Scientists and engineers are who we were thinking of when we wrote this book but we hope that these lessons will also help librarians, digital humanists, and everyone else who uses computing in their research.

Git was created by Linus Torvalds out of a need. At the time the Linux Kernel team was using a proprietary Distributed Source Control Management (DSCM) system. However, due to licensing issues the Linux Kernel team could no longer use this proprietary DSCM system. Therefore, Linus decided to build Git as the DSCM system he always wished they had.

You might also know Linus as the creator of Linux. In fact, Linus still manages the Linux Kernel today. As of 2020, the Linux kernel had over 27.8 million lines of code spread across ~66 thousand files from ~21 thousand different contributors. It has continued to be successfully developed, maintained, and extended since it was publicly announced in 1991. It is also worth noting that Git itself, another large, successful open source project, is managed in the same way.

So there must be some useful insights around long term software development and maintenance practices we can glean by looking at how Linus and his team use Git for their development and peer review workflows.

Storing timestamps instead of booleans, however, is one of those things I can go out on a limb and say it doesn’t really depend all that much. You might as well timestamp it. There are plenty of times in my career when I’ve stored a boolean and later wished I’d had a timestamp. There are zero times when I’ve stored a timestamp and regretted that decision.

Unit tests are unbelievably important to us as developers because they allow us to demonstrate the correctness of the code we’ve written. More importantly, unit tests allow us to make updates to our code base with the confidence that we haven’t broken anything. In our eagerness to get 100% code coverage, however, we often write tests for logic that perhaps we have no business testing. I’m here to assert that creating mock database abstractions in order to write unit tests is a bad idea almost all of the time.

Most deep neural networks are trained by stochastic gradient descent. Now “stochastic” is a fancy Greek word for “random”; it means that the training data are fed into the model in random order.

So what happens if the bad guys can cause the order to be not random? You guessed it – all bets are off. Suppose for example a company or a country wanted to have a credit-scoring system that’s secretly sexist, but still be able to pretend that its training was actually fair. Well, they could assemble a set of financial data that was representative of the whole population, but start the model’s training on ten rich men and ten poor women drawn from that set – then let initialisation bias do the rest of the work.

AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a royalty-free image format that usually performs better than other popular alternatives (JPEG, PNG, WebP). With Chrome 85+ and Firefox 86+ (behind a feature flag) the browser support is getting better, so it is now worth including AVIF images on web pages.

Apple may have launched a new MacBook Pro last night, but if there’s one figure in Apple’s announcements that has ‘pros’ scratching their heads, it’s the tight limit on memory in these new machines.

The technological advancements and developments in machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks have led to a revolutionary era. Creating and replicating photos, texts, images, and pictures based on only a collection of examples can be considered shocking to some, and marvelous to others.

We are now at a point where technology is so advanced that deep learning and neural networks can even generate realistic human faces from scratch. The faces generated do not belong to any person, alive or dead, yet they are astoundingly realistic.

One special deep learning network we have to thank for these achievements is the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which is the topic of this article. Let's briefly explore our table of contents to understand the main topics we'll cover.

Iterated Local Search is a stochastic global optimization algorithm.

It involves the repeated using of a local search algorithm to modified versions of a good solution found previously. In this way, it is like a clever version of the stochastic hill climbing with random restarts algorithm.

A way of analyzing the performance of any given function or program is to use profilers during its execution. Profilers can help us understand timing, memory usage, and other pertinent information about code. The key to using profilers is to determine which portion of the code is slow or computationally expensive and assist the process of catching errors for optimization.

You know that question you can get asked casually by a person you’ve never met before or even by someone you’ve known for a long time but haven’t really talked to about this before. Perhaps at a social event. Perhaps at a family dinner.

– So what do you do?

Welcome to the world of Git. I hope this document will help to advance your understanding of this powerful content tracking system, and reveal a bit of the simplicity underlying it — however dizzying its array of options may seem from the outside.

In this article, we’ll develop a Haskell library for continued fractions. Continued fractions are a different representation for real numbers, besides the fractions and decimals we all learned about in grade school. In the process, we’ll build correct and performant software using ideas that are central to the Haskell programming language community: equational reasoning, property testing, and term rewriting.

At the beginning of Soroco’s journey, we had to answer a question that many engineering organizations have had to answer before.

What programming language were we going to use when building and scaling our products?

or better or worse, extruded text was a staple of the mid-90s desktop publishing design landscape. It was rare for a party invitation or gaming fanzine not to be blessed by this 3D text effect on its way out the printer.

As design was increasingly destined for screen rather than page, extrusion fell out of favour. But recently, I've noticed a quiet revival.

Accessibility is a critical skill for developers doing work at any point in the stack. For front-end tasks, modern CSS provides capabilities we can leverage to make layouts more accessibly inclusive for users of all abilities across any device.

I’m a self-taught guitarist of many years, and like a lot of self-taught musicians, am woefully inept at (Western) music theory.

So naturally, I decided to write some code.

This article explains the very basics of Western music theory in around 200 lines of Python.

Over time, I developed a certain google-fu and expertise in finding references, papers, and books online. Some of these tricks are not well-known, like checking the Internet Archive (IA) for books.

Usually when I start a new project, I either copy the HTML structure of the last site I built or I head over to HTML5 Boilerplate and copy their boilerplate. Recently I didn’t start a new project, but I had to document the structure we use at work for the sites we build. So, simply copying and pasting wasn’t an option, I had to understand the choices that have been made. Since I spent quite some time researching and putting the structure together, I decided to share it with you.