May 2013
The Phosphorous Atom Quantum Computing Machine |... →
An Australian team unveils the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer that could be embedded in today’s silicon chips.
Google may chuck Spanner into Datastore • The... →
The Spanner database* is the successor to the BigTable/Megastore architecture on which Google’s just-announced Cloud Datastore is built, and has some more-advanced features, such as snappy access from anywhere in the world for replicated datasets due to its ability to write locally and sync globally without being crushed by latency.
Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons... →
Now they’re just messing with us. Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or “state,” of another particle—even if it’s light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two...
Inside Google's Secret Lab - Businessweek →
Page approved Google X’s acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. “He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this,” Teller says, “but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”
High Scalability - High Scalability - Strategy:... →
Big-O notations tells nothing about how one (data structure with algorithm) fare against another. Big-O will only tell you how performance will degrade as n increases. So comparing one a data structure that is RAM intensive to another data structure that is cache friendly from an abstract Big-O point-of-view is just pointless.
Quantum Or Not, New Supercomputer Is Certainly... →
The quantum computer is a giant black box, or more precisely, a black cube approximately 10 feet on a side. Inside is a refrigeration system that chills the guts to near absolute zero, and shields the workings to protect them from external radiation.
Google's Impressive "Conversational Search" Goes... →
Actually, both Google and Bing do have some “history smarts.” Google has been doing “Previous Query” since 2008; Bing has been doing “Adaptive Search” since 2011. With both, what you searched for before is sometimes effectively added to your subsequent search. For example, a search for “new york” followed by a search for “travel” might cause some of the searches for travel to be about New York...
UnQLite - An Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine →
UnQLite is a in-process software library which implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL database engine. UnQLite is a document store database similar to MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB etc. as well a standard Key/Value store similar to BerkeleyDB, LevelDB, etc.
An Unheralded Breakthrough: The Rosetta Stone of... →
The Weil conjectures did for mathematics what quantum theory and Einstein’s relativity did for physics, and what the discovery of DNA did for biology. Alas, we don’t hear much about this story or about the fascinating drama of ideas unfolding in modern math. Mathematics remains, in the words of poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “a blind spot in our culture—alien territory, in which only the elite,...
Voice command recognition using Levenshtein... →
However, the speech recognition doesn’t have that much of an accuracy. In order to address that - we compare the recognized text with each of available commands using Levenshtein distance. By doing this and increasing distance threshold, we’re able to significantly increase the command recognition accuracy. Try moving the slider in order to change the threshold on the demo page and see...
solovyov.net: Go Replace! →
Long story short: it’s easy to write in Go, applications are fast and beautiful. :) Other things being equal it’s usually around 1.5x-2x slower than GNU grep (it’s not recent test but I’m not really worried about such speed difference). But it uses patterns from .hgignore and .gitignore of your repository to skip files and skips binaries, so usually it’s faster. :) And you get normal regexp syntax...
Heinrich Rohrer, Nobel Prize-winning physicist,... →
The device Dr. Rohrer created at an IBM laboratory in 1981 with Gerd Binnig was called the scanning tunneling microscope, and they shared half of the physics Nobel in 1986. (German scientist Ernst Ruska also received a physics prize that year for unrelated work on the electron microscope.)
Brrr: The chilly conditions that quantum computers... →
Quantum computers, which have recently been bought by Google and Lockheed Martin, aren’t just sophisticated computers, they need to operate at near absolute zero temperatures to deliver their quantum effects, and that’s a tricky problem.
M.I.T. Scholar’s 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is... →
The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire.
Gimme the cache! memcached turns 10 years old |... →
This week, memcached, a piece of software that prevents much of the Internet from melting down, turns 10 years old. Despite its age, memcached is still the go-to solution for many programmers and sysadmins managing heavy workloads. Without memcached, Ars Technica would likely be unable to serve this article to you at all.
Func →
Func is a secure, scriptable remote control framework and API. It is intended to replace SSH scripted infrastructure for a variety of datacenter automation tasks (such as taking hardware inventory, running queries, or executing remote commands) that are run against a large amount of systems at the same time. Func provides both a command line tool and a simple and powerful Python API. It is also...
High Scalability - High Scalability - The Tumblr... →
One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty...
Probabilistic Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods for... →
If you think this way, then congratulations, you already are a Bayesian practitioner! Bayesian inference is simply updating your beliefs after considering new evidence. A Bayesian can rarely be certain about a result, but he or she can be very confident. Just like in the example above, we can never be 100% sure that our code is bug-free unless we test it on every possible problem; something rarely...
IBM's Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming... →
Starting in the next few months, IBM will be rolling out with several key customers an “Ask Watson” feature that will greet and offer help through various channels: Web chats, email, smartphone apps and SMS. Some customers will eventually equip the service with voice recognition from a partner such as Siri or Nuance. The guinea pigs include Australia’s ANZ Bank, Nielsen, Celcom, IHS, and Royal...
Google shows developers how to hack Glass and run... →
After all of this, running Linux is as easy as installing the Android Terminal Emulator and Complete Linux Installer apps, the combination of which allows you to download and then boot any Linux distribution on the Glass. Google showcased the process by booting up glass into Ubuntu.
Reply to Aphyr attack to Sentinel - Antirez weblog →
In a great series of articles Kyle Kingsbury, aka @aphyr on Twitter, attacked a number of data stores: [1] http://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen Postgress, Redis Sentinel, MongoDB, and Riak are audited to find what happens during network partitions and how these systems can provide the claimed guarantees.
Making quantum encryption practical - MIT News... →
One of the many promising applications of quantum mechanics in the information sciences is quantum key distribution (QKD), in which the counterintuitive behavior of quantum particles guarantees that no one can eavesdrop on a private exchange of data without detection.
Musings: If Google Wallet owns the pipes it’ll be... →
If Google can sidestep the existing payments infrastructure for Wallet, like they did with the telcos for Fiber, they’ll end up redefining how digital payments work.
$99 HDMI stick turns displays into virtual... →
Ceptor’s embedded computer is based on a dual-core i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 SOC, clocked at 1GHz and backed with up to 1GB RAM and up to 32GB internal flash (depending on its shipped configuration). The device plugs directly into a display’s HDMI input port and accesses its enabling cloud service via built-in 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi. User input is accomplished with Bluetooth or USB keyboards and pointing...
UCI Machine Learning Repository →
We currently maintain 239 data sets as a service to the machine learning community. You may view all data sets through our searchable interface. Our old web site is still available, for those who prefer the old format. For a general overview of the Repository, please visit our About page. For information about citing data sets in publications, please read our citation policy. If you wish to donate...
High Scalability - High Scalability - Tumblr... →
Tumblr started as a fairly typical large LAMP application. The direction they are moving in now is towards a distributed services model built around Scala, HBase, Redis, Kafka, Finagle, and an intriguing cell based architecture for powering their Dashboard. Effort is now going into fixing short term problems in their PHP application, pulling things out, and doing it right using services.
One-Time Pad Reinvented To Make Electronic Copying... →
The ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack.
Go 1.1 performance improvements | Dave Cheney →
It has been reported (here, and here) that performance improvements of 30-40% are available simply by recompiling your code under Go 1.1. For linux/amd64 this holds true for a wide spectrum of benchmarks. For platforms like linux/386 and linux/arm the results are even more impressive, but I’m putting the cart before the horse.
Modern GPU →
Modern GPU is code and commentary intended to promote new and productive ways of thinking about GPU computing. This project is a library, an algorithms book, a tutorial, and a best-practices guide. If you are new to CUDA, start here. If you’re already familiar with CUDA, are ready for a challenge, and want to learn design patterns for parallel programming, enjoy this series.
Cloudstacks | Leanstack - Find the best cloud... →
See what the best startups in the world are using
A better way to manage the Rails secret token -... →
Dotenv is an excellent gem for managing an application’s environment.
Inside AT&T’s 83GB/hour mobile cell tower or why... →
Carried a combined 6,054 GB (or more than 6 terabytes) of data on our in-event network during the two weekends of the music festival (24-hour traffic totals, Friday-Sunday for two weekends).
“Using Shor to factor 200 digits requires 3500 perfect qubits, 100,000 if error...”
– Rob Pike
Techu Search Server v0.1-beta →
Techu exposes a RESTful API for realtime indexing and searching with the Sphinx full-text search engine. We leverage Redis, Nginx and the Python Django framework to make searching easy to handle & flexible.
Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the... →
For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell.
Google's Scaled Trunk Based Development |... →
They have a “Distributed Builds” capability that’s shared by all of those. In layman’s terms it is effectively a supercomputer for the compilation (and unit-test execution) phases. It features and “Object Cache” and an “Action Cache” that can leverage someone else previously doing the same thing(s) so that results of the build are pulled in quicker. Time is saved for the developer in question, but...
[quant-ph/0001106v1] Quantum Computation by... →
We give a quantum algorithm for solving instances of the satisfiability problem, based on adiabatic evolution. The evolution of the quantum state is governed by a time-dependent Hamiltonian that interpolates between an initial Hamiltonian, whose ground state is easy to construct, and a final Hamiltonian, whose ground state encodes the satisfying assignment. To ensure that the system evolves to the...
Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap? |... →
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n,...
A Quantum Leap in Computing? : The New Yorker →
As Rivka Galchen explained in a 2011 article for the magazine, “Dream Machine,” quantum computation begins from the fact that a single particle can be in two places at one time, a quality known as superposition. Whereas conventional computers compute solutions one at a time (or, in the case of a multi-core computer, one per core at a time), quantum computers can use a mind-bending process called...
Shadow DOM →
This specification describes a method of establishing and maintaining functional boundaries between DOM trees and how these trees interact with each other within a document, thus enabling better functional encapsulation within the DOM.
FAQ - Polymer & X-tags →
x-tags is a cool project that Mozilla is working on, and it’s not directly affiliated with Polymer. However, both Polymer and x-tags build on the emerging Custom Elements standard, which means their components are interoperable by default. Both Google and Mozilla offer polyfills for the Custom Element spec. X-Tag works on top of either, so you can use X-Tag custom elements alongside your Polymer...
