It is essential that computer programming to be taught in schools will lead to improving children’s ability to think logically and creatively.

Source: Plan to make programming mandatory at schools a step to foster creativity – The Japan News

Today I upgraded my kernel to 4.6 and I have to admit I can really few a small improvement in the performance this time, possibly due to the fact I’m using ext4. Here is the release announcement. Here is the full list of features that landed!

uname -a

Linux ubuntumate 4.6.0-040600rc5-generic #201604242031 SMP Mon Apr 25 00:34:15 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

If you don’t believe me here are some benchmarks

And here is how you can get it installed in your system if you also want to try it:

mkdir kernel

cd kernel

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-headers-4.6.0-040600_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_all.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-headers-4.6.0-040600-generic_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_amd64.deb

wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.6-yakkety/linux-image-4.6.0-040600-generic_4.6.0-040600.201606100558_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Cheers!

Sources:

How to Install Linux Kernel 4.6 in Ubuntu 16.04

Create a file at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/postgresql.list with the following command:

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/postgresql.list

Add the following line according to your distribution (xenial, utopic, trusty, jessie, wheezy and etc):

deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ xenial-pgdg main

Save it and Close it! Now you just have to do:

wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.6

Enjoy it! 😀

Source: Google I/O 2016 – Keynote – YouTube

Scientists must publish less, says Daniel Sarewitz, or good research will be swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work.

Source: The pressure to publish pushes down quality : Nature News & Comment

Deep Gate Recurrent Neural Network

This paper introduces two recurrent neural network structures called Simple Gated Unit (SGU) and Deep Simple Gated Unit (DSGU), which are general structures for learning long term dependencies. Compared to traditional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), both structures require fewer parameters and less computation time in sequence classification tasks. Unlike GRU and LSTM, which require more than one gates to control information flow in the network, SGU and DSGU only use one multiplicative gate to control the flow of information. We show that this difference can accelerate the learning speed in tasks that require long dependency information. We also show that DSGU is more numerically stable than SGU. In addition, we also propose a standard way of representing inner structure of RNN called RNN Conventional Graph (RCG), which helps analyzing the relationship between input units and hidden units of RNN.

Source: [1604.02910v3] Deep Gate Recurrent Neural Network

We, as an industry, are going to a dangerous place when we don’t just expect, but require people to keep working after work.

Neglecting candidates for a position because they don’t contribute to open-source projects; choosing who to fire on the basis of who has a pet project and who doesn’t; expecting employees to keep up with new technologies, frameworks and languages entirely on their own; etc.

The problem

This happens because somehow the belief that only people who code (for free) after work are passionate and/or good developers has become a “truth”.

Here are more realistic truths, however:

• Only a very specific demographic can afford to work for free after work.
• It’s in the interest of companies that their employees keep learning and are up-to-date. Companies should provide resources for this to happen.
• There are excellent developers who have a life outside work.
• There are excellent developers who have responsibilites outside work.
• There are excellent developers who didn’t teach themselves programming when they were 12 years old.

Life happens. People meet other people who become partners. People have kids. People build families. Developers are people.

One could think that having kids or building a family is a choice. Even assuming this is true (it really isn’t), life still happens. A parent grows old and needs daily care. You might develop a mental illness, like depression, and have zero energy after a long day at work to do more work. You might suffer a traffic accident and must spend 2 hours a day on rehab for a year.

Who can afford to keep coding after an 8-hour work day of coding? Who doesn’t get harassed in the open-source community? 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to “buy” more free time (i.e: nannies, cleaners, good healthcare, a car to commute, etc.).

And this leads to the question…

How can I be a good developer without coding 24/7?

Source: Top developers can have a life outside coding

Bill Gates reviews the book “The Vital Question” by author Nick Lane

Source: This Biology Book Blew Me Away | Bill Gates

In this short article I share with you some of the experiences, challenges and achievements of this PhD journey. I’m hoping this article will somehow help, motivate or inspire you or someone out there to do a part-time MSc or PhD besides all your/their other commitments. It’s not easy and the journey is not without difficulties, but if you have the passion about what you are going to research, then it’s doable and fun.

Source: How I Satisfied My Passion for Software Development and Open-Source by Doing a Part-Time PhD | IT with Passion