I live in Cyprus for many years now. It is a beautiful little island in Mediterranean Sea. It features warm weather for most of the year, sea, very kind and hospital people, plenty of jobs in IT industry, good food and plenty of alcohol, stable currency, and more. It’s really a nice place to live if you can handle small towns and villages. It’s also a great place to raise the kids.
Not much happens here. It is a quiet and simple place. Yet, when something happens or when I write about it, I post it to Cyprus category.
A while back I’ve blogged already about the changing face of Limassol. Cyprus Beat has a post with the 10 upcoming real estate projects in Limassol, that overlaps the previous blog post of mine, as well as provides some updated pictures.
Limassol is truly becoming an iconic city of the Mediterranean (even being mentioned in The New York Times). Hopefully, the trend continue…
The New York Times runs “36 Hours in Cyprus” article, which introduces the rest of the world into the good side of Cyprus. Particularly cool of them to mention “To Theatraki” cafe, which is one of the many places where I consumed numerous pints. Happy hours indeed!
Oh. My. God. The future is here. Hellenic Bank is (finally!) introducing an API. Not sure yet what exactly one would be able to do with it, but even if it’s just to check an account balance, it’s progress already.
I vaguely remember being part of the effort to convince Hellenic Bank (or any Cyprus bank for that matter) to provide an API to my then employer … erm … about 10 years ago. The effort was beyond describable at the time. But I knew the day would come, and it’s finally here.
These are probably the biggest technology news since the time PrimeTel became an ISP with its own submarine cables.
CNA shares some interesting news:
A proposal promoting startups visa, aiming to attract entrepreneurs from non-EU countries will be submitted to the next meeting of the Council of Ministers for approval, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades has said.
Addressing a graduation ceremony of IDEA, a starup programme co-founded by Bank of Cyprus and CIIM, the President also announced that a proposal from the legal framework for university spinoffs, liking academic research with entrepreneurship will be tabled within the next three months.
“We believe that the Cypriot startup visa will be one of the most competitive and will bring multiple benefits in the medium-term both as regards new jobs as well as promoting innovation and research and the boosting the competitiveness of our economy,” the President said.
Of course, knowing how long things take in this country (especially if the government is involved) and how twisted they get by the implementation time, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath. But there’s hope, if nothing else…
This GitHub repository contains a list of the 10,000 most common English words, sorted by frequency, as seen by the Google Machine Translation Team.
Here at Google Research we have been using word n-gram models for a variety of R&D projects, such as statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, information extraction, and others. While such models have usually been estimated from training corpora containing at most a few billion words, we have been harnessing the vast power of Google’s datacenters and distributed processing infrastructure to process larger and larger training corpora. We found that there’s no data like more data, and scaled up the size of our data by one order of magnitude, and then another, and then one more – resulting in a training corpus of one trillion words from public Web pages.
We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That’s why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.
There are a few variations of the list – with and without the swear words and such. I took a quick look at it and was surprised to find that “cyprus” is at position 4,993 (pretty high), immediately after the word “emails“. Weird!
(found via the link from this article)