Category: Uncategorized

COMPUTER ERRORS can be serious. “Knight Capital Group, a market-making firm that until August 2012 had a stellar reputation in its industry, blew all of that in about 30 minutes. Between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST on August 1, the company’s trading algorithms got a little buggy and decided to buy high and sell low on 150 different stocks. By the time the bleeding had stopped, KCG had lost $440 million on trades.” https://lnkd.in/dAbKmAG View in LinkedIn

HONEYBEE. "An excellent example of gene–environment coevolution is the honeybee, in which the origin of its eusociality probably lay in the high degree of relatedness fostered by haplodiploidy, but which persists in modern species despite the fact that relatedness in the hive is generally quite low, due to multiple queen matings, multiple queens, queen deaths and the like." http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1566/878 View in LinkedIn

SIGNAL NOISE. "Many communication channels are subject to channel noise, and thus errors may be introduced during transmission from the source to a receiver. Error detection techniques allow detecting such errors, while error correction enables reconstruction of the original data in many cases." https://lnkd.in/dA7ruzn View in LinkedIn

ERROR CORRECTION. "Within the equations of supersymmetry he has found, quite unexpectedly, what are called “doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block codes.” That’s a long-winded label for codes that are commonly used to remove errors in computer transmissions, for example to correct errors in a sequence of bits representing text that has been sent across a wire." https://lnkd.in/d9hDGKw View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL MUTATIONS. "Some mutations, however, can have a huge affect on coding for amino acids, which can in turn affect what proteins are produced, which can have a profound effect on cellular and organismal function." http://www.sparknotes.com/biology/molecular/geneticcode/section3.rhtml View in LinkedIn

THE GIST. "There is a difference between 100 million lines of code that no one person understands... and 10 lines of code no one can understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

HUGE AND MESSY. "Poorly defined criteria are already the bane of any programmer's existence. Does anyone in the world, outside of a few aerospace projects, have a 100% consistent and unambiguous specification to work from? A Boeing 787 has around 10 million lines of code. A modern car, around 100 million. Do you think anyone at Ford understand all 100 million lines? Do you think they have complete specifications for all that code?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

JERRY RIGGED CODE. "Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a working whole. It would be like taking apart a brand-new 747 and discovering that the fuel line is held in place by a coat-hanger and the landing gear is attached with duct tape.”  (Ben Cherry). https://lnkd.in/dKSjpup View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF HUMAN COMPREHENSION. "Does anyone still really believe that all computer systems they use today are perfectly comprehensible to the humans who work on them?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

LOGICAL BREAKDOWNS. "Everybody who learns concurrency thinks they understand it, ends up finding mysterious races they thought weren’t possible, and discovers that they didn’t actually understand it yet after all." (Herb Sutter, chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, Microsoft). View in LinkedIn