Artificial neural networks explained in simple words

When I used to start a conversation about neural networks over a bottle of beer, people were casting glances at me of what seemed to be fear; they grew sad, sometimes with their eyelid twitching. In rare cases, they were even eager to take refuge under the table. Why? These networks are simple and instinctive, actually. Yes, believe me, they are! Just let me prove this is true!
Suppose there are two things I’m aware of about the girl: she looks pretty to my taste or not, and I have lots to talk about with her or I haven’t. True and false will be one and zero respectively. We’ll take similar principle for appearance. The question is: “What girl I’ll fall in love with, and why?”
We also can think it straight and uncompromisingly: “If she looks pretty and there’s plenty to talk about, then I will fall in love. If neither is true, then I quit”.
But what if I like the lady but there’s nothing to talk about with her? Or vice versa?
Microsoft Edge for macOS
Last month, we announced the first preview builds of the next version of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10. Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Edge Canary channel for macOS. You can now install preview builds from the Microsoft Edge Insider site for your macOS or Windows 10 PC, with more Windows version support coming soon.
ANPR using RoR & React Native

Abstract
Due to the never-ending increase in volume of vehicles surrounding our daily lives, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), has become an evolving solution for managing and monitoring vehicles worldwide to enforce rules and prevent criminal activities, such as parking violation, red light violation, speeding, and vehicle theft. Although there is already a variety of public and private methods and libraries that have been developed and are used to achieve the automatic recognition of car license plate numbers around the world, there has not been much focus on making advancements toward a cross platform ANPR solution that supports all vehicle license plates worldwide. This paper introduces the Plate Vision project, a web and mobile application built on Ruby on Rails and React Native, which aims to serve as an alternative ANPR platform that supports detection of all license plates worldwide by utilizing various open source optical character recognition (OCR) libraries and making efficiency optimizations.
Key words and phrases: ruby, rails, react native, license plate recognition, plate region extraction, optical character recognition (OCR), ANPR.
From High Ceph Latency to Kernel Patch with eBPF/BCC

There are a lot of tools for debugging kernel and userspace programs in Linux. Most of them have performance impact and cannot easily be run in production environments. A few years ago, eBPF was developed, which provides the ability to trace the kernel and userspace with low overhead, without needing to recompile programs or load kernel modules.
There are now plenty of tools that use eBPF and in this article, we’ll explain how to write your own profiling tool using the PythonBCC library. This article is based on a real issue from the production environment. We’ll walk you through solving the problem and show how existing bcc tools could be used in some cases.
Setting up network sales channels for DO-RA gadgets

Introduction
In early March 2019, Intersoft Eurasia team completed work on a test batch of DO-RA gadgets — personal, cross-platform dosimeters-radiometers to monitor the radiation situation at the measurement site, compatible with iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.
By buying such a device, the user receives the following: reliable electronics which have undergone radiation testing in the factory laboratory, stylish colored case in the spirit of Malevich ;) for every taste, gift packaging, color insert instructions in Russian and English, special USB charging cable, a free updateable DO-RA.Pro application from the App Store and Google Play.
The next step in our project implementation is to find the best sales channels for Made in Russia products in the challenging environment of stagnant purchasing power.
How to build a brand?
Brand building is a long process. Be prepared that it will take not one, not two, or even 6 months — you must be ready to work on it all the time.
Automatically obtaining SSL certificates by Let's Encrypt using DNS-01 challenge and AWS
This post describes the steps needed for setting up automatic SSL certificates creation and renewal, using Let's Encrypt as the automated Certificate Authority, which provides a well-maintained API.
acme-dns-route53
is the tool to obtain SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt using DNS-01 challenge with Route53 and Amazon Certificate Manager by AWS. acme-dns-route53
also has the built-in functionality for using this tool inside AWS Lambda, and this is what we are going to do.
How to Develop A User-Friendly Application

Mobile apps are necessary for every business today. They are the tools that bridges the gap between consumers and business, makes it easier for clients to view the trends, and offers an easy chance to the consumers to know the business in person. Having so many advantages already, why it is important to keep app’s user-friendliness as one of the most important points?
There are a number of reasons for developing a user-friendly mobile application. The users today are more eager to have a superb experience while browsing through the application. And for the same reason the UI and the app UX holds prominence for every mobile app development company. No matter how successfully your app has been designed, it is important to offer a unique browsing experience to the users.
Version 12 Launches Today! (And It’s a Big Jump for Wolfram Language and Mathematica)
Quick links
— The Road to Version 12
— First, Some Math
— The Calculus of Uncertainty
— Classic Math, Elementary and Advanced
— More with Polygons
— Computing with Polyhedra
— Euclid-Style Geometry Made Computable
— Going Super-Symbolic with Axiomatic Theories
— The n-Body Problem
— Language Extensions & Conveniences
— More Machine Learning Superfunctions
— The Latest in Neural Networks
— Computing with Images
— Speech Recognition & More with Audio
— Natural Language Processing
— Computational Chemistry
— Geographic Computing Extended
— Lots of Little Visualization Enhancements
— Tightening Knowledgebase Integration
— Integrating Big Data from External Databases
— RDF, SPARQL and All That
— Numerical Optimization
— Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis
— New, Sophisticated Compiler
— Calling Python & Other Languages
— More for the Wolfram “Super Shell”
— Puppeting a Web Browser
— Standalone Microcontrollers
— Calling the Wolfram Language from Python & Other Places
— Linking to the Unity Universe
— Simulated Environments for Machine Learning
— Blockchain (and CryptoKitty) Computation
— And Ordinary Crypto as Well
— Connecting to Financial Data Feeds
— Software Engineering & Platform Updates
— And a Lot Else…
What happens behind the scenes C#: the basics of working with the stack
Disclaimer
Before proceeding with the story, I strongly recommend you to read the first post about StructLayout, there is an example that will be used in this article.
All code behind the high-level one is presented for the debug mode, because it shows the conceptual basis. JIT optimization is a separate big topic that will not be covered here.
I would also like to warn that this article does not contain material that should be used in real projects.
First — theory
Any code eventually becomes a set of machine commands. Most understandable is their representation in the form of Assembly language instructions that directly correspond to one (or several) machine instructions.

Cosmonaut Aleksandr Laveykin about the best space movie, G-force of 20g, and soft landing
Up to now, the Q&A had not been translated into English. We post them for upcoming International Day of Human Space Flight (or Cosmonautics Day in Russia).
Aleksandr Laveykin flew to space in 1987 and worked as a flight engineer on board the Mir Space Station, orbiting the Earth for six months. He completed three spacewalks lasting a total of eight hours and 48 minutes.

Image: TASS
Live Share now included with Visual Studio 2019
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Visual Studio Live Share, and that it is now included with Visual Studio 2019! In the year since Live Share began its public preview, we’ve been working to enhance the many ways you collaborate with your team. This release is the culmination of that work, and all the things we’ve learned from you along the way.
If you haven’t heard of Live Share, it’s a tool that enables real-time collaborative development with your teammates from the comfort of your own tools. You’re able to share your code, and collaboratively edit and debug, without needing to clone repos or set up environments. It’s easy to get started with Live Share.

Memory and Span pt.3
Memory<T> and ReadOnlyMemory<T>
There are two visual differences between Memory<T>
and Span<T>
. The first one is that Memory<T>
type doesn’t contain ref
modifier in the header of the type. In other words, the Memory<T>
type can be allocated both on the stack while being either a local variable, or a method parameter, or its returned value and on the heap, referencing some data in memory from there. However, this small difference creates a huge distinction in the behavior and capabilities of Memory<T>
compared to Span<T>
. Unlike Span<T>
that is an instrument for some methods to use some data buffer, the Memory<T>
type is designed to store information about the buffer, but not to handle it. Thus, there is the difference in API.
Memory<T>
doesn’t have methods to access the data that it is responsible for. Instead, it has theSpan
property and theSlice
method that return an instance of theSpan
type.- Additionally,
Memory<T>
contains thePin()
method used for scenarios when a stored buffer data should be passed tounsafe
code. If this method is called when memory is allocated in .NET, the buffer will be pinned and will not move when GC is active. This method will return an instance of theMemoryHandle
structure, which encapsulatesGCHandle
to indicate a segment of a lifetime and to pin array buffer in memory.
This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.
Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repositorygithub/sidristij/dotnetbook.
Windows Virtual Desktop now in public preview on Azure
We recently shared the public preview of the Windows Virtual Desktop service on Azure. Now customers can access the only service that delivers simplified management, multi-session Windows 10, optimizations for Office 365 ProPlus, and support for Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps. With Windows Virtual Desktop, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure in minutes, while enjoying built-in security and compliance.
Indexes in PostgreSQL — 3 (Hash)
Hash
Structure
General theory
Plenty of modern programming languages include hash tables as the base data type. On the outside, a hash table looks like a regular array that is indexed with any data type (for example, string) rather than with an integer number. Hash index in PostgreSQL is structured in a similar way. How does this work?
As a rule, data types have very large ranges of permissible values: how many different strings can we potentially envisage in a column of type «text»? At the same time, how many different values are actually stored in a text column of some table? Usually, not so many of them.
The idea of hashing is to associate a small number (from 0 to N−1, N values in total) with a value of any data type. Association like this is called a hash function. The number obtained can be used as an index of a regular array where references to table rows (TIDs) will be stored. Elements of this array are called hash table buckets — one bucket can store several TIDs if the same indexed value appears in different rows.
The more uniformly a hash function distributes source values by buckets, the better it is. But even a good hash function will sometimes produce equal results for different source values — this is called a collision. So, one bucket can store TIDs corresponding to different keys, and therefore, TIDs obtained from the index need to be rechecked.
What determines the Revenue of Miners?
How to promote an incremental game? Free of charge, fast and effective*
Top 10 Mobile App Development Companies for Enterprise & Startups
The mobile app developers are exceptionally intrigued by conveying 100% fulfillment outcome for the entrepreneurs. By having top 10 mobile app development companies, it is crucial for working with an effective outcome and does the worldwide system. In this way, get assistance from the professional mobile app developers and grow the business in like manner.