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
It Is Not Where You Work, But Who You Work With
It is widely believed that intellectual productivity is tied to location. That is, if you work in a basement at Harvard like Walter Bishop in the TV show Fringe...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How Database Design Fails Us, and What to do About It
Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and — in turn — good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the right...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
True scientists are irreverent
Richard Hamming compared knowledge to compound interest: The more you know, the more you learn. Hence, progress tends to be exponential. Some innovations increase...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why aren
Bankers will tell you that to get rich, you should rely on compound interests. Save up a little bit of everything you earn, and you will soon be wealthy. What they...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where does innovation comes from?
I just finished Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Because I am an overly pessimistic individual, I expected to hate the book. I loved the book. I should point out...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Two 32-bit hash functions from a 64-bit hash function?
A few years ago, we worked on automatically removing boilerplate text from e-books taken from the Project Gutenberg. In this type of problem, you want to quickly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Emerging Knowledge Is a Private Business
Collaboration is often encouraged in science: it is viewed as an intrinsically good thing. Yet there are downsides to collaboration. The most obvious downside is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You Think That Users are Faceless Objects? You are Obsolete!
IT departments fail us because they are founded on the technocratic imperative. Users are faceless objects for which the system is designed (Iivari et al., 2009)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science is self-regulatory
Many systems are self-regulatory. For example, in a few market, prices will fluctuate until everyone gets a fair price. But free markets are a mathematical abstraction...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why can
One of the most common data structuring in Computer Science is the hash table. It is used to store key-value pairs. For example, it is a good data structure to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Linux and the financial crisis
On December 2007, the New York Stock Exchange adopted Linux. In late August 2008, we saw one of the worse worldwide stock market crash of the last hundred years...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Better job ads
Before writing your next job ad, look at what companies who recruit talented engineers do. According to a recent Google job posting, here are the requirements to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Web is killing database systems
A typical enterprise computing architecture relies on databases, professionally managed by DBAs. Developers grow applications which all update or query the same...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast computation of scalar products, and some lessons in optimization
Given two arrays, say (1,2,3,4) and (4,3,1,5), their scalar product is simply the sum of the products: 1
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Usury and the collapse of empires
The American government recently played Russian roulette with its economy by threatening to default on its debt. Of course, nobody actually thought that the Americans...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pick one: determinism or fairness
Computers changed our life drastically in the last few decades. Correspondingly, I view the world in terms of algorithms. When I think of how the government works...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Scientists are communists
Overconfident individuals often win by claiming more resources than they could defend (Johnson and Fowler). If nobody knows who is strongest, whoever thinks he...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the Internet wants me to read (summer 2011)
Last week, I asked on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus what I should read over the summer. Here is a quick summary of the recommendations I got: On Twitter: A...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sentience is indescribable
Arguably, one of the most nagging scientific question is the nature of sentience. Can we build sentient computers? Is my cat sentient? What does that mean? Will...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog