On a more serious note, The New York Times has a chilling interactive data-vis showing how the recent Boeing 737-Max crashes were caused by faulty software and an over-reliance on a single angle of attack sensor.
In anticipation of the final season of Game of Thrones, The Washington Post has updated its fabulous data-vis of all the deaths in Game of Thrones, included the most proficient killers! Winter is nearly here.
Stack Overflow have published the results of their 2019 developer survey. Javascript remains king of the languages, and VBA is the most dreaded language!
Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first ever picture of a black hole this week! Using a data from an array of telescopes around the globe, the team combined the massive amounts of data to create the image of M87. Dr. Katie Bouman created the machine learning interferometry algorithm used to combine the data and produce the image of the event horizon.
Pete Warden from the Tensorflow Lite team has published a post on his blog about using Tensorflow Lite on a microcontroller board to do voice recognition. The machine learning model in this case uses 20KB of flash storage with Tensorflow light using 25KB and needing 30K of RAM to run.
The seven Irish universities published a report this week on the impact of graduates on the Irish economy. It turns out, university graduates contribute €8.9 billion each year! You can read the full report on saveourspark.ie.
Boston Dynamics released footage of its Handle robot moving boxes around on a factory floor. The robot uses a counter weight to balance boxes up to 15KG similar to how a T-Rex used its tail while in motion. I also think it does a mean Ostrich impression, however it's no Colin Stiles!
The Tencent Keen Security Lab have published a paper on successful hacks they have carried out on a Tesla Model S 75. Some of the attacks described in the paper can be used to gain remote control of the car's steering or to trick the windscreen wiper system into activating.
Ken Bellows has a nice introduction to semantic HTML over on dev.to. While reading it, I realised that I started learning HTML 20 years ago this year! I've come along way since framesets, but not far enough apparently, time to break out some more of these fancy new tags! (Although, I do find it difficult to use <strong> instead of <b>, <b> is so much faster to type!)
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!
