In 2016, I wrote about how frustrated developers, exasperated by the company’s ignorance of their pleas to build better tools, took to the platform to write an open letter, a final attempt at getting someone to care. The letter, “Dear GitHub,” was a brutal look at how little the company had done to foster the giant, open community, and was opaque about what it paid attention to:

Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. They’re designed to help make GitHub a better place to work, and contribute to the open source community as a whole.

Ironically, at a time when computing is almost the definition of innovation, research in both software and hardware at universities and much of industry is becoming insular, ossified, and irrelevant. If systems research was relevant, we’d see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the ’70s and ’80s. Linux’s success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.

Here’s what I don’t get about the iPhone’s Safari and memory management. And they tell us that it’s because the iPhone has limited memory and when other apps need it, it has to free it. My photos and videos don’t get destroyed when the phone is low on memory, why webpages should?

High-speed cameras capture frames on light sensors composed of semiconductors. Such cameras typically save each frame of a sequence on a separate area of the sensor. Feng Chen of Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi, China, Lidai Wang at the City University of Hong Kong and their colleagues instead expose each frame on separate but overlapping areas of the camera sensor.

In 2016, I wrote about how frustrated developers, exasperated by the company’s ignorance of their pleas to build better tools, took to the platform to write an open letter, a final attempt at getting someone to care. The letter, “Dear GitHub,” was a brutal look at how little the company had done to foster the giant, open community, and was opaque about what it paid attention to:

Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. They’re designed to help make GitHub a better place to work, and contribute to the open source community as a whole.

When training is initiated using a large learning rate, the loss doesn’t improve (and sometimes even increases) during the first few iterations. To investigate whether the learning rate is too large or too low, diagnostic plots such as the line plot of loss over training epochs can be used. The most basic example is to make the learning rate smaller once the performance of the model reaches a plateau, such as by decreasing the learning rate by a factor of two or an order of magnitude.

It didn’t take long for me to set up timers to narrow down out which part of the code was causing the slowdown, but I was pretty surprised when I found the culprit:

In order to allow tests to be written using simple commands like instead of CSS or XPATH selectors , UI-licious works using dynamic code analysis to analyse the DOM tree to determine what and how to test your website based on semantics, accessibility attributes, and popular but non-standard patterns. Several in fact, plus a comparison with lodash’s :

👉 Link to the test on JsPerf

Let’s talk about the first set of naive implementation:

As you can see, the only difference between the two is that the implementation modifies the first array directly. Under the hood, the UI-licious test engine scans the DOM tree of the target application, evaluating the semantics, accessible attributes and other common patterns to determine what is the target element and how to test it.

In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 12 in your database systems to help us eliminate any bugs or other issues that may exist. The amount of write-ahead log (WAL) overhead generated when creating a GiST, GIN, or SP-GiST index is also significantly reduced in PostgreSQL 12, which provides several benefits to the disk utilization of a PostgreSQL cluster and features such as continuous archiving and streaming replication. This removes an “optimization fence” that has existed since the introduction of the clause in PostgreSQL 8.4

If need be, you can force a query to materialize using the clause, e.g.

WITH c AS MATERIALIZED ( SELECT * FROM a WHERE a.x % 4 = 0 ) SELECT * FROM c JOIN d ON d.y = a.x;

PostgreSQL 12 improves on the performance when processing tables with thousands of partitions for operations that only need to use a small number of partitions.

“Using computer simulations of the transport of these gases through the atmosphere we can start to put numbers on emissions from different regions and that’s where we come up with this number of around 7,000 tonnes of extra CFC-11 emissions coming out of China compared to before 2012. Chat to our climate change bot on Facebook Messenger

“If we look at these extra emissions that we’ve identified from eastern China, it equates to about 35 million tonnes of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere every year, that’s equivalent to about 10% of UK emissions, or similar to the whole of London.” “I think with this study, it is beyond doubt that China is the source of these unexpected emissions, and we would hope that China is leaving no stone unturned to discover the source of the CFC-11 production.

I am delighted to share with folks the results of a project I have been helping out on for the last few months: implementation of “BigInt” in Firefox, which is finally shipping in Firefox 68 (beta). As a new kind of primitive value, bigint values have their own :

Besides allowing for more kinds of math to be easily and efficiently expressed, BigInt also allows for better interoperability with systems that use 64-bit numbers, such as “inodes” in file systems, WebAssembly i64 values, high-precision timers, and so on. I must mention that my role in the BigInt work was relatively small; my Igalia colleague Robin Templeton did the bulk of the BigInt implementation work in Firefox, so large ups to them.