It's back to the drawing board for a cannabis dispensary software company after an attempt to register the trademark "Potify" attracted the ire of music streaming platform Spotify. The number of independent UK contractors assessed with the government's controversial CEST tool has fallen, according to a survey published today. The survey of 3, contractors, conducted by tax advisors IR35 Shield in November , showed 49 per cent got their IR35 assessment using tax authority HMRC's recommended tool in that same month.
In April, the corresponding figure was 56 per cent. The new IR35 regime, introduced in April last year following a year's postponement , forces medium and large businesses in the UK to set the tax status of their contractors and freelancers. The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community.
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After completing his master's degree in , Ziv returned to the defense world, this time joining Israel's National Defense Research Laboratory now Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to develop electronic components for use in missiles and other military systems. The trouble was, Ziv recalls, that none of the engineers in the group, including himself, had more than a basic understanding of electronics. Their electrical engineering education had focused more on power systems. It wasn't enough.
The group's goal was to build a telemetry system using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. They needed not only knowledge, but parts. Ziv contacted Bell Telephone Laboratories and requested a free sample of its transistor; the company sent In , Ziv was selected as one of a handful of researchers from Israel's defense lab to study abroad.
That program, he says, transformed the evolution of science in Israel. Its organizers didn't steer the selected young engineers and scientists into particular fields.
Instead, they let them pursue any type of graduate studies in any Western nation. Ziv planned to continue working in communications, but he was no longer interested in just the hardware. He had recently read Information Theory Prentice-Hall, , one of the earliest books on the subject , by Stanford Goldman, and he decided to make information theory his focus.
And where else would one study information theory but MIT, where Claude Shannon, the field's pioneer, had started out? Ziv arrived in Cambridge, Mass. His Ph. So if you invest the computational effort, you can know you are approaching the best outcome possible. Ziv contrasts that certainty with the uncertainty of a deep-learning algorithm. It may be clear that the algorithm is working, but nobody really knows whether it is the best result possible.
He found this work less beautiful. That is why I didn't go into real computer science. Then in , with several other coworkers, he joined the faculty of Technion.
Jacob Ziv with glasses , who became chair of Technion's electrical engineering department in the s, worked earlier on information theory with Moshe Zakai. The two collaborated on a paper describing what became known as the Ziv-Zakai bound. The state of the art in lossless data compression at the time was Huffman coding. This approach starts by finding sequences of bits in a data file and then sorting them by the frequency with which they appear.
Then the encoder builds a dictionary in which the most common sequences are represented by the smallest number of bits. This is the same idea behind Morse code: The most frequent letter in the English language, e, is represented by a single dot, while rarer letters have more complex combinations of dots and dashes.
It requires two passes through a data file: one to calculate the statistical features of the file, and the second to encode the data. And storing the dictionary along with the encoded data adds to the size of the compressed file. Ziv and Lempel wondered if they could develop a lossless data-compression algorithm that would work on any kind of data, did not require preprocessing, and would achieve the best compression for that data, a target defined by something known as the Shannon entropy.
It was unclear if their goal was even possible. They decided to find out. The two came up with the idea of having the algorithm look for unique sequences of bits at the same time that it's compressing the data, using pointers to refer to previously seen sequences.
This approach requires only one pass through the file, so it's faster than Huffman coding. Let's say that first incoming bit is a 1. Now, since you have only one bit, you have never seen it in the past, so you have no choice but to transmit it as is. So you enter into your dictionary Say the next bit is a 0. So in your dictionary you now have and also Here's where the pointer comes in. The next time that the stream of bits includes a or a , the software doesn't transmit those bits.
Instead it sends a pointer to the location where that sequence first appeared, along with the length of the matched sequence. The number of bits that you need for that pointer is very small.
If the program appeared more than once, they didn't republish the synopsis. They just said, go back to page x. Decoding in this way is even simpler, because the decoder doesn't have to identify unique sequences. Instead it finds the locations of the sequences by following the pointers and then replaces each pointer with a copy of the relevant sequence.
The algorithm did everything Ziv and Lempel had set out to do—it proved that universally optimum lossless compression without preprocessing was possible. I have literally spent a week trying to figure out how to solve some of the more complicated Shenzhen problems and then I noticed the dev released an update that simplified those problems.
It's kinda ironic that I bought TIS when it first came out, played for a few hours, lost interest, and never really touched it since. But then, later I found great fun writing actual x assembler. This is the issue I have with Zachtronics games - while I like playing them, sooner or later I start feeling like I might as well be working on real code. RandomOpinion on May 14, parent prev next [—]. Amen to this. TIS is a puzzle game that happens to use assembly language as its means of expression.
The barriers it puts up are wholly unrealistic and therefore it can't really to be said to "teach assembly language" in any particularly meaningful way. TIS is a lot of fun. It's quite interesting what you can do on a limited architecture. Houshalter on May 13, prev next [—].
I've had some fun solving very simple problems in brainfuck. This would be an interesting choice for a programming game because how simple it is. You can learn it in like 5 minutes. And also it's very easy to visualize the state. You can watch the program move around the tape and increment and decrement cells. Try it yourself, write a program to reverse an input string.
Is there any benefit to learning assembly now, or is it just fun to see what it was like then? PeterisP on May 14, parent next [—]. It's a niche skill, there are applications in e. On the other hand, learning some assembly helps even when you're not using assembly - it increases the understanding of how things work under the hood and helps your reasoning about performance and security considerations even when working in much higher level languages. IMO, assembly will remain an optimal tool for writing simple programs for very small microcontrollers.
Consider the ATtiny4, for example, which has 32B ram and B of flash for code. Heck, you could run the thing off of a joule thief, and pot the entire assembly in epoxy. Fitting a pared down libC into that might be possible, but why bother?
The system is so small and simple, that the rationale for a high level language doesn't really apply. Most of your code will probably just be bitbanging and setting control registers anyway. But, most importantly, assembly is just plain fun, which is what will keep you coming back to the platform :.
Knowing what's going on at the very bottom is useful for thinking through performance issues. Huge datasets run into hardware constraints. Knowing what's going on at the bottom can be useful there too. It's not mandatory, but it can be useful. The 3rd differential equations class may not be mandatory for a career in physics but it can be useful to understanding the foundations of the field.
Learning Latin isn't mandatory for becoming an English teacher, but understanding the roots of words can be helpful. TIS looks cool but the keyboard didn't fit on my iPad. Downloaded a few other games from the provider and all has oAuth issues.
Too bad - they looked good. HRM was a lot of fun; I wrote an interpreter in C to test the scripts and test them on a pc; thought about creating a website where people could posts new challenges and create optimal solutions; some changes to hard levels take forever in the game; I could just edit a few things and have near instant results.
Any recommendations for games that teach other programming languages? Obviously there's Swift Playgrounds. I'm an adept programmer in several languages, but would love to learn some others, but find learning from documentation very tedious, and would much rather play games to learn.
Stop playing games and just write some damn assembly. TIS is a decent start as well. Hacker News new past comments ask show jobs submit. LanceH on May 14, root parent next [—] It also gets interesting when you start optimizing for time as you can get some parallel processing going and it's just a matter of syncing them for the output.
Houshalter on May 14, parent prev next [—] Not a parent, but I greatly enjoyed the computerCraft mod for minecraft. RandomOpinion on May 14, parent prev next [—] Amen to this. Houshalter on May 13, prev next [—] I've had some fun solving very simple problems in brainfuck.
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