Hackerschool: Introduction to Haskell

Date/Time: 31st October, Saturday, 1.00 PM to 4.00 PM
Venue: Online on Zoom
Sign-up link: http://bit.ly/intro-to-haskell

The lazy, functional language, Miranda was released during 1985, which gathered interest. However it was proprietary and after FPCA ’87, there was a movement to form a committee to define an open standard for such languages. Haskell 1.0 emerged a few years after in 1990, has been in active development since GHC 9.0.1-alpha1 released (https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2020-September/019286.html).

Many modern languages nowadays bear some similarity to Haskell. Python recently included type signatures, Javascript has currying support, pattern matching, many of which we can see in Haskell. Many languages (Racket, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, OCaml, …) support functional programming as well. To understand why these are useful, we will explore 2 areas which Haskell excels at: types and functional programming.

This session aims to expose participants to new tools and abstractions they can use to tame complexity and gain confidence in their programs, to offer a different perspective on why learning these can be useful.

Basic knowledge in programming is required.

Please setup the Haskell toolchain and clone the repository for the workshop:

- Install haskell toolchain:
https://www.haskell.org/platform/

- Clone the project:
git clone git@github.com:kwannoel/haskell-workshop.git

Hacker Tools: LaTeX

Date/Time: Tuesday, 3 Nov 2020, 18:30 to 20:30
Venue: Online on Zoom
📝 Sign-up Here 📝

This week, we’ll be introducing the well-known LaTeX document preparation system used widely across fields to prepare high-quality documents, papers, notes, journals, books, slides, cheatsheets, resumes, and so on. Come learn this invaluable tool that will let you create beautiful documents and impress your readers.

Please have TeX and TeXstudio installed before the workshop. You can install either MiKTeX or TeX Live, depending on your OS. If in doubt:

- On Windows, MiKTeX is easier to install: https://miktex.org/download#win
- On Linux, install TeX Live using your package manager.
- On macOS, install MacTeX, a version of TeX Live for macOS: http://tug.org/mactex/

TeXstudio:

- On Windows and macOS: https://www.texstudio.org/#download
- On Linux, install TeXstudio using your package manager.

For security and safety reasons, the Zoom link will not be published publicly. Please register at the sign-up link to attend this workshop

This workshop is largely based on the Missing Semester of Your CS Education lecture series conducted in MIT. This week’s topic is our own addition, not based on any topic in the original series.

Just a reminder that Hacker Tools: LaTeX is happening later today. If you've already signed up, please check your mailbox for the Zoom link; otherwise, it's not too late to do so.

Friday Hacks #197: Resurgence of AI in the future of travel and tourism, and Stream Processing with Kafka Stream

Date/Time: November 6, 7.00PM
Venue: Online on Zoom
Zoom link: https://www.nushackers.org/fh197zoom

Talk #1: Resurgence of AI in the future of travel and tourism

Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was emerging to be a very pivotal component of the travel and tourism industry. But with recent developments around the world, the travel and tourism industry has taken a backseat. In this talk, the speaker would like to share his views on:

How the travel and tourism industry will adapt to this changing climate?
How AI will be pivotal for Travel and Tourism in the future?
Latest developments in AI for this industry

Speaker Profile

Desmond graduated from NUS with a Masters of Knowledge Engineering, has more than 8 years of experience in the industry and is passionate about enabling the next wave of tech disruptions such as Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality to hit the traditional industries. Having been involved in various projects, he has experienced the full spectrum of architecting, designing, development and maintenance of enterprise systems which are both web and mobile based systems. He is experienced in merging traditional software engineering and the cutting-edge developments in business intelligence, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

As a Co-Founder of Xaltius Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, he is spearheading new products surrounding Travel and Healthcare using AI/AR technologies.

Talk #2: Stream Processing with Kafka Stream: How we handle 2 billions triggers a day

Description

A trigger is a business rule defined to automatically perform some actions when specified conditions are satisfied. In this talk, we will present how we develop a new service with Kafka Stream handling 2 billion triggers a day.

Speaker Profile

Nguyen Truong Khanh is a staff software engineer at Zendesk, building reliable, scalable chat platform. Previously, he worked at Teralytics, Shopee, and Autodesk. Khanh holds a BS from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology and did his PhD in Computer Science at NUS.
See you there!

Hackerschool: Advanced Git

Date/Time: 7 Nov, 1-4pm
Venue: Online on Zoom
Sign Up Here!

Git is a very well-known and widely-used distributed version control system with a simple graph-based model. If you are already proficient with the basic usage of Git, come take your knowledge a few steps further. Learn how to fix and clean up any commit history, no matter how messy it is; how to restore lost commits; how to purge unintentionally-commited files (e.g. secrets) completely from a repository; how to include other Git repositories in a repository; how to work with multiple branches simultaneously; and finally look into the on-disk format, or in other words, the contents of the .git directory.

Please ensure you can use the actual Git tool on the command line. Wrappers and GUIs will not suffice for this workshop. Basic Git command-line knowledge, at least to the level of Hackerschool: Introduction to Git, is required and will be assumed.

Here are the slides and recording of Hacker Tools: LaTeX:
- Recording
- Slides

Thank you!

Hey everyone, a reminder that we have a Friday Hacks session tonight at 7PM. Do join us if you're interested!

Hi everyone! We have just started a small group chat for discussion about Advent of Code problems. Feel free to join us by clicking on this link here. Feel free to also add any of your friends who might be interested! This group is non-competitive! We are focused on learning and on cool solutions.

What is Advent of Code? tldr: 25 days of fun programming problems of increasing difficulty, one a day until Christmas. Starts today.

Save the date! Singapore's largest student-run hackathon is back!

Hack&Roll 2021 will be held virtually on 8–9 Jan, and will be filled with lots of free food, games, prizes, and most importantly, lots of FUN!

Registration will be open soon so stay tuned for updates!

📝 Registrations are now OPEN! 📝

The same fun-filled hackathon hackathon, now held online 🌐

Registration is FREE and open to ALL STUDENTS!

There will be free food, swag, lots of fun games and prizes to be won!

What are you waiting for? SIGN UP NOW!

For more info, please visit our website at https://hacknroll.nushackers.org

Hi everyone!

Do you have a project that you have spent many long hours working on, or a topic in Computer Science that you are passionate about? If so, we would like to invite you to speak at our Friday Hacks series this coming semester! Friday Hacks is a weekly meetup which includes one or two technical talks and occasionally a hacking session. Here at NUS Hackers, we are committed to spreading the hacker culture, so we welcome speakers to share their hacks, research, or technical knowledge with the NUS community.

Next semester, beginning 22 Jan, we’ll be hosting talks virtually via Zoom. If you are interested in speaking, please indicate your interest at https://forms.gle/5UTY133FMszqXEj56.

Thank you!

Friday Hacks #198: How Fluminu(r)s was Built, and URA - Space Out Project

Date/Time: 22 January 2021, 7pm
Venue: Online on Zoom
Zoom Link: https://nushackers.org/fh198zoom

Talk #1: How Fluminu(r)s was Built

Description
Fluminus and Fluminurs are CLI tools to automate downloading files from LumiNUS, the new learning management system that NUS uses to replace IVLE. Unlike IVLE, there is no open, easily accessible API available to students. This talk will describe how I built Fluminus and Fluminurs in spite of this limitation.

Speaker Profile
Julius is a recently graduated Computer Science undergrad and an NUS Hackers coreteam member for the past 3 years. His interests include functional programming and distributed systems. Outside of computer science, he also enjoys Space Exploration, History, and Music Theory (reflected in his favourite games: Kerbal Space Program and Europa Universalis IV)

Talk #2: URA - Space Out Project

Description
Space Out is a map-based website that provides the public with regular updates on the crowd levels in malls, supermarkets, and other public facilities across Singapore. Space Out seeks to provide timely information and past trends on crowd levels to assist people in choosing where to go for a variety of retail and recreation purposes, so as to promote safe distancing amidsts the Covid-19 situation. This was also to support operators in better managing the crowd levels at their premises, as well as to facilitate more evenly-distributed crowds across different facilities.

Speaker Profile
Ms Jazreel Siew is a Systems Analyst in Digital Planning Lab, Information Systems and Geospatial Group. Her interests include software development, DevOps, and geospatial systems.

Hey everyone, just a reminder that we're having Friday Hacks #198 later at 7pm. Please join our Zoom link if you're interested in Fluminu(r)s, or Space out by URA! 🙂

Friday Hacks #199: Relational Programming in miniKanren, and Implementing a Kanren from the Ground Up

Date/Time: 5 February 2021 at 7pm
Venue: Online on Zoom
Zoom Link: https://nushackers.org/fh199zoom

Talk #1: Relational Programming in miniKanren

Description
Relational programming is a paradigm in which programs are written as mathematical relations, with no distinction between "inputs" and "outputs". Relational programs are extremely flexible---in effect, every use of a relational program is equivalent to a synthesis problem. I will introduce the idea of relational programming, give examples of interesting relational programs in the miniKanren language, and show how this very small language can be used to implement interesting program synthesis tools, such as Barliman.

Speaker Profile
Will Byrd is a scientist at the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is co-author of both editions of 'The Reasoned Schemer', and one of the creators of the miniKanren relational programming language. He is also co-running this year's Scheme and Functional Programming Workshop--please submit a paper! :)

Talk #2: Implementing a Kanren from the Ground Up

Description
Logic programming is a technique applicable to solving a wide variety of tasks in an elegant fashion and makes an attractive addition to any programmer's toolbox. But what if logic programming isn't available in your favorite language? In this talk I will show how to implement a relational-programming DSL in about 50 lines and discuss the extension to additional constraints.

Speaker Profile
Jason Hemann is a lecturer in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Hemann’s research interests include functional and logic programming. He focuses on embeddings and extensions to support logic programming in numerous host languages and transforming functional programs to relational ones. His research questions tend to emerge from his teaching, and his results make it back into the classroom. An example of this approach can be found in his recently published textbook “The Reasoned Schemer, 2nd Edition”. He has been teaching in various capacities for over 15 years, including pre-college STEM programs, private professional training programs, and university courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.