Tech

Free Wolfram Engine for Developers

Wolfram have launched their Wolfram Engine as a free package for developers. Described by Stephen Wolfram himself on his blog, the Wolfram engine implements the Wolfram Language, which in turn offers a huge range of computational intelligence and algorithmic processing, access to the Wolfram Knowledgebase as well as over 5000 abstracted functions like machine learning, visualisation and image computation.

Facial Recognition System for $60

The New York Times ran an experiment using a public video stream from Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. They collected publicly available photos of people that worked near the park and then ran one day's worth of footage from the public video stream through Amazon's commercial facial recognition service at the cost of approx $60. Over a nine hour period it detected 2,750 faces, including an 89% match of a college professor from his employer's website headshot.

The Problems With Software Hiring

Nikita Prokopov has a superb blog post about how a lot of tech companies approach the hiring of software engineers incorrectly. He pulls no punches in describing how impractical it is to write code on a whiteboard, not being able to run and test interview code, the irrelevance of puzzles and the missed opportunities when not customising interviews to the interviewee. I could not agree more with everything in this post!

Generative Aphex Twin

Alex Bainter has a good explainer post on Medium about how he used Markov Chains to generate a much longer version of Aphex Twin's aisatasana. Using a JSON representation of a MIDI file of the track, he built a Markov Chain system to generate over four million unique phrases which can play for over 451 days without repetition of a phrase. The result is available to listen to on generative.fm.

Wia Dot One

Dublin IoT company Wia have released their first physical product, the Dot One. The IoT maker board is designed to help people discover the world of electronics and engineering using plug and play modules like buttons and sensors, without needing any programming experience. The Dot One board has built in WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.2 and a dual core 32-bit processor. It is available to pre-order at €24.99 on the Wia website.

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