“Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you’ve got to do is call
And I’ll be there, ye, ye, ye
You’ve got a friend”
-James Taylor

Bill Campbell passed away last week. Honestly, I've never heard of this name before but the "Coach" has deeply influenced the Silicon Valley, tutoring Steve Jobs, Jeff Beros, Google founders, Ben Horowitz and countless others. Ben Horowitz expressed his sorrows starting with the above poem.

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Let's start this week.

Streaming

• End-to-end “Exactly-Once” with Apache Apex explains how Apex delivers exactly-once semantics through Kafka connector (with window id to offset tracking), state checkpointing at window boundary and JDBC transaction to make atomic write.

• Windowing and State checkpointing in Apache Storm explores support for windowing operations and stateful processing in Storm 1.0.0. Storm now tracks event time and deals with out-of-order tuples with watermark, and state snapshot with checkpoint stream.

Machine Learning

• New tutorials from Machine Learning Mastery

  • Support Vector Machines for Machine Learning
  • Bagging and Random Forest Ensemble Algorithms for Machine Learning

• Deep Learning is Easy - Learn Something Harder reminds deep learning newcomers of the complexity beyond the surface if they are going to take the field seriously.

• The amazing power of word vectors introduces "word2vec" work of Mikolov et al. at Google. Word vector are very good at answering analogy questions like "man is to woman as uncle is to ? (aunt)". This post is from one of my favorite blogs, the morning paper.

  an interesting/influential/important paper from the world of CS every weekday morning, as selected by Adrian Colyer

JVM

• Chris Newland discusses performance-boosting techniques used by the JVM’s JIT and introduces JITWatch, a tool helping to get the best JVM performance for a code. Understanding HotSpot JVM Performance with JITWatch . Yet Another.

Scala

• Academese to English: A Practical Tour of Scala’s Type System takes an tour of Scala's type system with rich examples. For those from Java world, you will find it make much sense since finally a list of dogs can be a list of animals. This talk doesn't, however, touch the complex stuff like type-level programming, higher-kinded types and path-dependent types.

Industry

• Another nice write-up from the morning paper, Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research .

  Because of the time-frame and effort involved, Google’s approach to research is iterative and usually involves writing production, or near-production, code from day one

• How Twitter Handles 3,000 Images Per Second from High Scalability. This blog is full of good stuff on distributed systems, highly recommended.

Others

• The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Public Service is awarded to Associated Press.

For an investigation of severe labor abuses tied to the supply of seafood to American supermarkets and restaurants, reporting that freed 2,000 slaves, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms.

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I'd like to end this week with Horowitz's

The worst thing about today is that I can’t call Bill. I miss him so much.