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
Open Science: Why Is It So Hard?
Open access is the idea that scholarship should be accessible to all. Many believe that we should require publicly funded researchers to make their work available...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do we need patents?
Whenever I suggest that patents are harmful, people point to the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated. Marketing a new drug...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are you a gold prospector, or a construction worker?
Most work is akin to construction jobs: you work until the house is built. You just have to keep the servers running day after day. You keep writing code day after...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My favorite posts from 2011
January: Innovating without permission Not even eventually consistent February: Taking scientific publishing to the next level Ten things Computer Science tells...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressing document-oriented databases by rewriting your documents
The space utilization of relational databases can be estimated quickly. If you create a table made of three columns, each containing an integer, you can expect...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Dealing with harsh criticism
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, once told how Dilbert fared poorly initially. His critics objected that Dilbert was hardly ever funny, except when he appeared at...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
3 surprising facts about the computation of scalar products
The speed of many algorithms depends on how quickly you can multiply matrices or compute distances. In turn, these computations depend on the scalar product. Given...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where does debt, credit and currencies come from?
We often believe that primitive cultures lacked currencies and so they engaged in barter. Barter is awfully inconvenient and simply cannot sustain a non-trivial...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Real scientists never report fraud
Diederik Stapel has been a psychology professor at major universities for the last ten years. He published well over 100 research papers in prestigious journals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My favorite LaTeX editor for MacOS: Texpad
I always found word processors distracting. I hate to copy and paste text only to find that the text formatting was copied as well. When I write, I do not want...
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