Ask HN: What is the most technically interesting thing you've learned recently? - crcl
======
johnnyRose
I recently read about Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme, created by Adi Shamir,
one of the creators of RSA. I've been fascinated by its elegance and
simplicity.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing)

------
crcl
I write JavaScript for my day job, but I only recently started learning how
engines optimize it. I had a ton of fun reading this article:
[https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shapes-
ics](https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shapes-ics) (which I discovered in another
HN post somewhere)

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random_moonwalk
The fundamentals of Information Theory via (the late) David Mackay's lectures
and textbook (homepage with links to the videos and free online textbook here:
[http://www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/](http://www.inference.org.uk/itprnn/)).

~~~
shoo
Mackay's information theory text book is wonderful.

------
johnh2o2
Edward [http://edwardlib.org/](http://edwardlib.org/)

An amazing Python library built atop Keras and Tensorflow for composing and
training probabilistic models in just a few lines. If you're interested in
machine learning and/or Bayesian statistics and modeling, you owe it to
yourself to check this library out. The webpage has several different
tutorials that are all super interesting.

I don't know too much, but I believe this library will be superseded by
Tensorflow Probability (Dustin Tran, who writes & maintains Edward is also on
the TF Probability team).

[https://medium.com/tensorflow/introducing-tensorflow-
probabi...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/introducing-tensorflow-probability-
dca4c304e245)

Either one of these are super super valuable if you're looking to play around
with and invent new ML algorithms, since you can do in 5 lines what would have
taken you 1,000 lines and 4 days of debugging to do without these libraries.

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Fsp2WFuH
When creating spacial geography point in sql server, the longitude comes first
(lng, lat). I always thought it would be latitude then longitude.

Interestingly, some points that I've inserted passed the validation, but later
I realized the values were swapped when I tried to query nearest neighbor and
the points were no where near.

~~~
NicoJuicy
There is a geography data type

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/spatial-
geography...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/spatial-
geography/spatial-types-geography?view=sql-server-2017)

------
phyalow
That hedge funds use something called twisted light to get speed advantages on
the network stack to the exchange. This essentially lets them change orders
(via bit flipping) when they are already on the wire making their way to the
matching engine.

------
mabynogy
Someone showed me "ii" today. It's an IRC client only accessible with the
filesystem (each channel is a file...).

[https://tools.suckless.org/ii/](https://tools.suckless.org/ii/)

~~~
matt_the_bass
Can you explain the use case for this please?

~~~
jrowley
I could see this being useful if you lived in a text based editor like emacs.

~~~
mabynogy
Indeed. The person who showed me ii mentionned vim too.

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NicoJuicy
Actually, fsm while working with GOAP. It's practical to use and didn't
encountered it before

~~~
kennytilton
FSMs are amazing, and are the one thing I learned from a programming book. I
could not resist teaching it to an interviewer during a coding challenge...
don't they cover FSMs in code camps?

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Jtsummers
Idris and dependent types via _Type-Driven Development_. It's an excellent
book, very clearly written and approachable. May be a bit more challenging if
you haven't used Haskell/SML/OCaml or similar languages before.

------
zygotic12
[https://github.com/polterguy/phosphorusfive](https://github.com/polterguy/phosphorusfive)

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SkyLinx
I learnt about GraphQL and have started to use it instead of REST. I am liking
it a lot.

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rasmus1610
If it counts, I read an introduction to the Fourier transformation and was
blown away by its idea.

~~~
trues
Is it online? Can you please share the link, if it is?

------
togusa2017
ways to send traffic between two data centers over public and private network
and their options and pros and cons

