Four short links: 4 April 2019
Language Creators, Undersea Cable, Open Source Trends, Making Math Questions
- A Conversation with Language Creators: Guido, James, Anders, and Larry (YouTube) — A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that languages move at the same speed as hardware or all of the other technologies we live with. But languages are much more like math and much more like the human brain, and they all have evolved slowly. And we’re still programming in languages that were invented 50 years ago. All the principles of functional programming were thought of more than 50 years ago.
- Undersea Internet Cables and Big Internet Companies (APNIC) — interesting numbers. Between 2016 and 2020, about 100 new cables have been laid or planned. […] The unit cost is cheaper for new cables than old cables whose lit capacity is increased. […] In the last five years, the cables that are partly owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have risen eight-fold, and there are more such cables in the pipeline. These content providers also consume over 50% of all international bandwidth, and TeleGeography projects that by 2027, they could consume over 80%.
- Making Sense of a Crazy Year in Open Source — if you haven’t kept your eye on the latest weirdness in open source licensing (as companies attempt to squeeze commercial leverage from licenses), this is a great intro. Elastic CEO Shay Banon summed it up, saying: “We now have three tiers: open source and free, free but under a proprietary license, and paid under a proprietary license.”
- Mathematics Data Set (GitHub) — This data set code generates mathematical question and answer pairs, from a range of question types at roughly school-level difficulty. This is designed to test the mathematical learning and algebraic reasoning skills of learning models. Not what Dan Meyer would call good problems, mind you!
