Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural ordinary differential equations Chen et al., NeurIPS’18

‘Neural Ordinary Differential Equations’ won a best paper award at NeurIPS last month. It’s not an easy piece (at least not for me!), but in the spirit of ‘deliberate practice’ that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained from trying to understand as much as possible.

In addition to the paper itself, I found the following additional resources to be helpful:

Neural networks as differential equations

Consider a multi-layered neural network. We have an input layer and an output layer, and inbetween them, some number of hidden layers. As an input feeds forward through the network, it is progressively transformed, one layer at a time, from the input to the ultimate output. Each network layer is a step on that journey. If we take a small number of big steps, we end up with a rough approximation to the true transformation function we’d like to learn. If we take a much Continue reading

MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part II

In Part I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting and discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions. What is MySQL Semisynchronous Replication? Simply put, in a MySQL semisynchronous replication configuration, the master commits transactions to the storage engine only after receiving acknowledgement from at least one of the slaves. The slaves would provide acknowledgement only after the events are received and copied to the relay logs and also flushed to the disk. This guarantees that for all transactions committed and returned to the client, the data exists on at least 2 nodes. The term ‘semi’ in semisynchronous (replication) is due to the fact that the master commits the transactions once the events are received and flushed to relay log, but not necessarily committed to the data files on the slave. This is in contrast to Continue reading

Slow MySQL Start Time in GTID mode? Binary Log File Size May Be The Issue

Have you been experiencing slow MySQL startup times in GTID mode? We recently ran into this issue on one of our MySQL hosting deployments and set out to solve the problem. In this blog, we break down the issue that could be slowing down your MySQL restart times, how to debug for your deployment, and what you can do to decrease your start time and improve your understanding of GTID-based replication.

How We Found The Problem

Sponsored Post: Software Buyers Council, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr

Who's Hiring? 


  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

  • Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services


  • Shape the future of software in your industry. The Software Buyers Council is a panel of engineers and managers who want to share expert knowledge, contribute to improvement of software, and help startups in their industry. Receive occasional invitations to chat with for 30 minutes about your area of expertise and software usage. No obligations, no marketing emails or sales calls. Upcoming topics include infrastructure and application monitoring, AI/ML platforms, and more. Learn more and join today.

  • InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

IBM Refines Hardware for Commercial Quantum Computing

IBM has come up with its newest and most advanced quantum computer to date, which the company claims is “the world’s first integrated universal approximate quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use.” The system, known as IBM Q System One, was unveiled at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada this week. …

IBM Refines Hardware for Commercial Quantum Computing was written by Michael Feldman at .

Wi-Fi 6 with OFDMA opens a world of new wireless possibilities

Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, is viewed by many to be game changing, as it’s the first major architectural change to the wireless LAN since its inception. Unlike other standards, which were just faster versions of the previous incarnation, Wi-Fi 6 is built from the ground up to support a world that is hyper-connected over Wi-Fi. To accomplish this, Wi-Fi 6 includes several new features and design enhancements.OFDMA enables more clients to connect to access points Many industry people I have discussed Wi-Fi 6 with believe the most important new feature is something called orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), which allows multiple clients with varying bandwidth requirements to be connected to a single AP simultaneously.To read this article in full, please click here

Wi-Fi 6 with OFDMA opens a world of new wireless possibilities

Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, is viewed by many to be game changing, as it’s the first major architectural change to the wireless LAN since its inception. Unlike other standards, which were just faster versions of the previous incarnation, Wi-Fi 6 is built from the ground up to support a world that is hyper-connected over Wi-Fi. To accomplish this, Wi-Fi 6 includes several new features and design enhancements.OFDMA enables more clients to connect to access points Many industry people I have discussed Wi-Fi 6 with believe the most important new feature is something called orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), which allows multiple clients with varying bandwidth requirements to be connected to a single AP simultaneously.To read this article in full, please click here

South Africa Gauteng Community Outreach: Why Community Networks Matter

On 14 December 2018, the young and old people of Mamaila Tribal Authority convened at Wholesale Village in the Limpopo Province in South Africa to learn about community networks (CNs). The workshop, with the theme Why Community Networks Matter, took place at Moratabatho Missionary Church International, and was organized by the Internet Society South Africa Gauteng Chapter and supported by the Beyond the Net Funding Programme. The purpose was to create awareness about community networks as innovative solutions that contribute towards closing the digital divides experienced by communities that lack access to telecommunication infrastructure. The workshop was delivered in partnership with Soweto Wireless User Group (SOWUG) and the Zuri Foundation. Thato Mfikwe, the president of the South Africa Gauteng Chapter, introduced participants to the Internet ecosystem and the opportunities available within the Internet value chain. The presentation by Thato stimulated a conversation with participants curious to know how to:

  • Make money from the Internet, specifically how to monetize their content on YouTube
  • Participate in the Internet ecosystem
  • Contribute to policy making

The session introduced participants to cybersecurity, the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts, and the basic infrastructure required for setting up a community network. The presentation created curiosity among Continue reading

Cuba’s New 3G Service, Six Years After ALBA-1

Last month, ETECSA (Cuba’s state telecom) activated national 3G mobile service.  For the first time in the nation’s history, a very modest level of internet service is now available to anyone on the island with a 3G-capable device and the funds to pay for it (i.e., 45cuc per month or almost twice the monthly salary of a Cuban state worker).

The development was announced in a tweet from Cuba’s new president Miguel Díaz-Canel and came almost six years since the activation of the ALBA-1 submarine cable connecting Cuba to the global internet via Venezuela.

The activation of Cuba’s mobile internet service appeared in our Internet Intelligence Map as a dramatic increase in the number of authoritative DNS queries handled by Dyn’s servers, as we tweeted below.

Continue reading

1 … 1,354 1,355 1,356 1,357 1,358 … 3,841