The Insider News

Scott Smith[^]:

ScriptCS allows you to use C# as a scripting language. It harnesses the power of Roslyn and NuGet to enable you to write .NET applications with your favorite editor.... ScriptCS also offers its own REPL providing an interactive experience. You can install nuget packages, type some code, and have it execute instantly! As of writing this post, this functionality is in the dev branch and not yet available on the master branch.

Forecast Blog[^]:

Removing noise from radar images has turned out to be one of the biggest technical challenges we’ve faced while developing Dark Sky’s forecasting system. We generate our short-term rain predictions using data from the National Weather Service’s network of 150 NEXRAD radar stations, spread across the US. This data comes in as a raw data format, and the very first thing we do after grabbing it is convert it to images. The problem is that the data is filled with noise — false data that looks like rain, but is really something else.

Brain Dump[^]:

There's a secret for Perl being so good at code golf, and this secret is clever use of regexp. The regexps from Posix are just finite automata, but the Perl engine is much more powerful than that. Naturally, I became tempted to check what are the computational limits of Perl's regexp. For example, can we do arithmetic with regexps? After thinking I while, I concluded that yes, we can do arithmetic with regexps!

Andrew Cooke: C[omp]ute[^]:

Python is about to get an Enum. And it's sad. It's not awful. It just fails to do anything particularly well - it's an awkward compromise whose only real achievement is not doing anything new.

Nettuts+[^]:

A bright star in the JavaScript community, Addy Osmani has skyrocketed to prominence not only for his fabulous JavaScript articles and open source contributions but for also being one of the friendliest and approachable developers around. His blog is a treasture trove of front-end knowledge and well-worth the visit. In this post, we'll chat with Addy about how he got his feet wet in JS and bring up some tough topics relating to his work in developer relations at Google.

StraussBlog[^]:

Spear phising is an extremely potent hacking vector that combines social engineering with phishing. Basically, an attacker tries to learn enough about a specific victim to inform the design of a fake email that the victim is more likely to think is legitimate and thus open and engage with.... Over the last several months, I have been the target of what might be a new, more scalable, approach to spear phishing. I have been receiving phishing emails that are sent using the names of people I know but not their email addresses...

Zorinaq[^]:

I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a fantastic and honest response acknowledging this problem and explaining its cause. His post has been deleted! Why the censorship? I am reposting it here. This is too insightful to be lost.

Project Wordsworth[^]:

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet. The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades. Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.

Vinicius Vacanti[^]:

The funny thing is that within a few months of our launch, several competitors emerged and they all had crawlers. But, from our users’s perspective, we were more advanced since we had categorization which was definitely no easily automated task. We didn’t actually build a real crawler for the first 9 months and just kept scaling manually by hiring more data entry professionals. Instead, we were able to focus our resources on improving the product and user acquisition. It’s now clear to me that not building that crawling technology early on was one of the reasons our startup succeeded.

Brian Harry's blog[^]:

Yes, Update 3 is likely the last of the updates to the VS 2012 line. Of course, we'll still continue to fix any critical issues people find but we are winding it down and focusing on VS V.Next. I'd like to think many of the issues you refer to will get addressed there and, if not, I hope we'll get to them in the V.Next update train. Referring to the above - Update 3 is the update where we slow down the churn, address remaining high impact customer issues and any regressions introduced in Update 2.

Computational Complexity[^]:

Following the cupholder principle, GPUs began to evolve to allow easier to access APIs from more common programming languages becoming General Purpose GPU or GPGPUs. Several systems researchers at Georgia Tech and elsewhere are now redesigning chip layouts to make the best most efficient uses of CPUs and GPGPUs. The theory community hasn't seem to catch on yet. There should be some nice theoretical model that captures the vector and other operations of a GPGPU and then we should search for algorithms that make the best use of the hardware.

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

As a fair warning to the reader, these primers are a bit more terse than what you’d find in your average textbook. I only introduce the bare minimum required to understand the main content posts, so there are carefully chosen gaps whose exclusion is necessary for time’s sake. If the reader is confused about something, or wants a deeper explanation of a concept we deliberately leave out, feel free to leave a comment asking about it and we will do our best to fill in the gaps.

Channel 9[^]:

In this episode Nick Harris and Nathan Totten are joined by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Windows Azure, who introduces us to the new Windows Azure SDK 2.0. Scott shows off a few of the many new features in SDK 2.0 including the new Table Explorer and Query Builder. He demonstrates several of the new diagnostics features for Cloud Services and Web Sites, and he deploys a Cloud Service using the new parallel upgrade.

Ars Technica[^]:

Unveiled in 2005, Arduino boards don't have the CPU horsepower of a Raspberry Pi. They don't run a full PC operating system either. Arduino isn't obsolete, though—in fact, its plethora of connectivity options makes it the better choice for many electronics projects.... Last December, we featured 10 of the most amazing Raspberry Pi projects, including arcade cabinets, robotics, and a wearable computer. This one goes to 11—as in, we'll show you 11 awesome things hackers and electronics enthusiasts have created with the Arduino.

iFixit[^]:

Discover the Ouya: "a new kind of game console." This Android-powered system is the first of its kind. It's specifically designed to be open to professional and amateur game designers alike, with free software development tools included with every console. Full disclosure: The folks at Ouya tout this to be "the first totally open video game console." They have so much confidence in the Ouya, in fact, that they sent us a retail unit to take apart. Game on, folks.

Onion Inc.'s Tech Blog[^]:

After discovering that at least one account had been compromised, we sent a company-wide email to change email passwords immediately. The attacker used their access to a different, undiscovered compromised account to send a duplicate email which included a link to the phishing page disguised as a password-reset link. This dupe email was not sent to any member of the tech or IT teams, so it went undetected. This third and final phishing attack compromised at least 2 more accounts. One of these accounts was used to continue owning our Twitter account.

paidContent[^]:

Microsoft, which already has a stake in Barnes & Noble’s Nook and college bookstore businesses, is offering to buy them outright for $1 billion, according to a report in TechCrunch, based on leaked internal documents. The documents also reportedly say that Barnes & Noble plans to discontinue its line of Nook tablets by the end of fiscal year 2014, while letting the e-readers stick around for awhile longer.