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Showing posts from July, 2019

Enrollment Open for New Java Developer Nanodegree

Java? I hear you say. Does this old horse stand a chance in the era of cool programming languages? The short answer is yes and Udacity is just launching a Nanodegree to help devs get up to speed with it. Old but timeless, is the answer. Java has always been the favorite - enterprises talked and still talk Java. Look no further than the Fortune 500 list of companies reliance on it. Yes, Blue Chips love it. The reasons are plenty. The one that enterprises value most is backwards compatibility, being notoriously allergic to radical updates and upgrades. Systems that worked 20 years ago, written in Java 5, should be able to compile and run under version 8. Stability is what matters. full article on i-programmer

How AI Discriminates

“Survival of the Best Fit” is a game developed by New York University that demonstrates practically how Machine Learning algorithms can make decisions based on bias.  The game gives you the role of a CEO of a newly funded company which has secured funding and is in the phase of recruiting personnel to staff it. In the beginning you screen the submitted CV's alone. Your screening is based on the criteria of Skill, School Privilege, Work Experience and Ambition and since you do that yourself you can judge applicants according to your experiences and values. In my case I was hiring people with 14% more work experience than the average applicant. full article on i-programmer

Refactoring to Kotlin Codelab

Learn how to convert Java to Kotlin by following Kotlin's idioms with Google Developers Codelabs. Refactoring to Kotlin, which is available in English, Brazilian and Chinese, provides a guided, hands-on coding experience in a running time of just less than an hour. While the latest IDE's do a good job in automatically converting Java code into Kotlin, this doesn't preclude that you also understood the mapping from the one code base to the other.Further you are naturally predisposed to continue writing Kotlin under Java's mentality, following Java's practices and idioms. The  Refactoring to Kotlin Codelab  aims to change that. full article on i-programmer

State of AI 2019 Report

An insightful report  on the future of AI has recently been published on SlideShare. It consists of 130 slides covering the most important machine learning research, industry and political developments over the past 12 months and includes a new section on China and here we look at its most important points. full article on i-programmer

Hasura's Guide to GraphQL

Hausura has provided a mini course on the basics of GraphQL which will be of interest to anyone who want to get to grips with the open source Graph QL engine. Hasura's main product is its Postgres backed GraphQL server, which sports features such as webhook triggers on database events and remote schemas. (As a side note if you are interested in the concept of database events, then you might want to check out  Connecting To The Outside World with Perl and Database Events .)  The topics covered are : GraphQL vs REST GraphQL queries, mutations, subscriptions Setting up a GraphQL client with Apollo Integrating GraphQL queries in your react native app Integrating GraphQL mutations in your app to change data on the server Updating local state after a GraphQL mutation (TextInput) using Apollo cache Automatic updates to local state and UI after mutations Using subscriptions with subscription components Building a real-time feed with notifications using mutations and subsc

Finland's "Full Stack Open" Now Available in English

Written by Nikos Vaggalis    Tuesday, 16 July 2019 Finland's educational system is famous for three reasons: its pedagogical outlook, its technological excellence and its openness to the world.  Sticking to the latter, University of Helsinki's "Full Stack Open 2019" which familiarizes students with the basics of modern web application development, initialy taken in Finish only, has been made available in English too, under the permissive Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license: “We wanted to make the course available in English as a way to offer Finnish university education for free to an international audience” full article on i-programmer

GANPaint: Using AI For Art

What if tools powered by Neural Networks could save artists considerable amounts of time, or even enrich their work?   GANPaint Studio offers a glimpse into the creative tools of the future: The tool takes a natural image of a specific category, e.g. churches or kitchen, and allows modifications with brushes that do not just draw simple strokes, but actually draw semantically meaningful units – such as trees, brick-texture, or domes The innovation lies in that its paint tools/brushes don't paint with pixels but are object aware and instead paint those objects into the picture.A brush is associated with a group of neurons which themselves are associated with trees therefore using this brush paints trees; others can do doors or windows. full article on i-programmer

PyRobot - Python for Robotics

We've grown accustomed to hearing about Python being used for pretty much everything, albeit mostly for data science. It's time to consider it for robotics too.  The same way Python provides a higher level of abstraction over programming concepts, so does PyRobot but for robotics; abstracting away the low-level controls from the high-level motion generation. It's an open source framework springing out of the collaboration of Facebook's AI Research and the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, which aims to make researching for robotics a much easier proposition by providing a much more accessible software development environment. full article on i-programmer

Fuchsia Casts Shadow on Future of Android and Chrome

Fushia's existence was akin to a conspiracy theory until Google finally confirmed it at I/O 2019 in May. What does it mean for the rest of Google's operating systems?  It's not a secret that despite its omnipresence at the mobile devices front, Android OS has its own share of problems, both as an end user but also as a developer platform. Fragmentation of version releases and their cumbersome updating, instability, security and privacy are the concerns plaguing the end user. Developing for the platform is not a smooth operation either. full article on i-programmer