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
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
The myth of the scientist as a disinterested individual
We like to have an idealized view of the scientist. He or she is someone who chose against a high-paying career to pursue the ideals of science and academia. Unlike...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting good performance in Go by rewriting parts in C?
Go is a new programming language invented by Google engineers. Apparently, it came about because they were tired to wait for their C++ code to compile. To run Go...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The rise to power of computer scientists
Want to become CEO of a major technology company? Consider the background of the hot CEOs of the hour: Amazon: Jeff Bezos has a degree in electrical engineering...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compression is never worth slowing down your code?
Should you ever compress your data to reduce memory usage? We are in 2050. Nobody uses tapes or disks anymore. The NSA has 1 billion servers. It needs so many to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
To be smarter, try being crazier?
Many of us want to be original in our work. For researchers, it is a job requirement. For software programmers, it makes little sense to redo what others did. Many...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are C++ and Java declining?
In a recent Dr. Dobb’s article, Binstock announced the decline of Java and C++: By all measures, C++ use declined last year, demonstrating that C++11 was not enough...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why is the NSA grabbing all your private data?
Snowden revealed to the world that the NSA was systematically spying on all of us. Maybe more critically, we have learned that the NSA is spying on all American...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bad weather as evidence for global warming
First let us me run through the usual disclaimers. We are producing lots of greenhouse gases, and they tend to warm up the Earth. The last ten years have been warmer...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why are there so many science PhDs?
McArdle, an economist, recently wrote that a substantial fraction of PhD programs really shouldn’t exist. McGowan goes further by pointing out that there is little...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Life is sweeter than you think in 2014…
Jokingly, Rao pointed out that Americans are starting 2014 with an optimistic outlook: (…) it’s tough, but let’s just write off polar bears and groundwater pollution...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
When delegating… consider quality, maintenance and learning
John Cook provides some valuable advice today about when to delegate. An important point he raises is that doing a per-hour analysis makes little sense since human...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fastest way to compute the greatest common divisor
Given two positive integers x and y, the greatest common divisor (GCD) z is the largest number that divides both x and y. For example, given 64 and 32, the greatest...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog