Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Toys on my desk (June 2014)
We all have mobile phones or tablets with lightning or micro-USB plugs, and we all have laptops with USB ports. Sure, you can easily find a USB-to-micro-USB cable...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Software performance is… counterintuitive
There is a long tradition among computer scientists of counting the number of operations as a way to estimate the running cost of an algorithm. Many computer scientists...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Books on my desk (May 2014)
Manning sent me the second edition of their Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners. At less than $25 on Amazon, this 450-page color book...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work (I mean it)
I envy economists. Unlike computer scientists, they seem to be able to publish best-seller books with innovative research. One such book is Piketty’s Capital. The...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I still play video games
Video games are getting flashier, faster, shinier. It has gotten to the point that many of these games make me nauseous—literally. I honestly do not care very much...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Decoding over 4 billion integers per second in C
Programmers routinely work with lists of integers. We recently showed how to compress such lists of integers close to their entropy, while being able to decompress...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Does moving to a better university make you a better researcher?
Deville et al. studied the performance of physics professors as they moved from one job to another. They found that moving to a lesser school lowered the impact...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Have Americans reached peak scholarship?
Bryan Alexander conjectured that Americans might be reaching peak scholarship. That is, whereas we are used to science as an ever expanding industry… it could be...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Seth Roberts and research
Seth Roberts was one of my favourite bloggers. He recently passed away. Seth was an original fellow. He completed his PhD and went on to secure a job at a leading...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How are the bees doing?
Last year, I wrote a controversial opinion piece to reassure my readers: bees are not going extinct. At the time, the European Union had banned neonicotinoid insecticides...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do you realize that you are using random hashing?
Hashing is a common concept in programming. It is the process of mapping any object to an integer. It is used in fast search algorithms (like Rabin-Karp) and in...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science: ideals vs. reality
Fernando Pérez gave a talk at Pycon 2014 with a brilliant slide: The ideals reality of science: The pursuit of verifiable answers highly cited papers for your c...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The financial value of open source software
We all rely daily on free and open source software, whether we know it or not. The entire Internet is held together by open source software. The cheap router that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Probabilities and the C++ standard
The new C++ standard introduced hash functions and hash tables in the language (as “unordered maps”). As every good programmer should know, hash tables only work...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t study latin if you want to become a better programmer
I used to think that knowledge was strongly transferable. I believed that learning physics could make you a better mechanic. I believed that learning mathematics...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Technology sets the bar higher
I am old enough that, as a kid, I did not have access to a calculator. My mother, a teacher, had an electronic calculator that you had to plug in the wall. She...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Should you get a PhD?
Most people like to learn, some like it more than others… and they decide to focus their life on learning. They become scholars. I think it is a mistake to pursue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Elegance as a luxury
As a young student, I was undisciplined. Though I did well in mathematics, I often couldn’t be bothered to write down clean computations. I would do the work mostly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Probabilities in computing: they may not mean what you think they mean
I like to throw off my academic colleagues outside of computer science by pointing out that much of our software relies on probabilities… down to the ubiquitous...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog