A Note on LSTM

LSTM, or long short term memory, seemingly paradoxically named, was co-invented by German computer scientist Sepp Hochreiter, who incubated it in his 1991 diploma thesis leading to its main publication in 1997. 

LSTM addresses the problem of numerical instability in training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that prevent them from learning long sequences (the so-called vanishing gradient problem).

In 2007, he and others applied LSTM, optimizing the architecture, to very fast protein homology detection without requiring sequence alignment.

Protein homology detection is the process of identifying whether two proteins share a common evolutionary origin - one of the core problems in computational biology.  Homology implies shared structure and shared function.

Agentic Coding, IDE Debugging

You've built your software agentically. Now you want to (need to) debug it in an IDE.

You may need to add some extra settings.

OpenAI's Astra Solves More Maths Problems

Astra has solved 10 hard maths problems (published 1 August 2026) following on from its disproof of the Erdös unit distance conjecture (from combinatorial geometry) in May 2026.

A paper of almost 250 pages (inclusive of references) is available from OpenAI's website.

Defensive Perl

Perl is less fashionable than Python these days, but it is a very flexible language which excels in text processing.

Its flexibility allows a myriad of programming styles, however, so having a set of defensive techniques helps.

Here are some top tips:

• Switch warnings on - use the minus-w command line flag -  #! perl -w
• Learn and use perlpod - it looks a bit like this at the start of your file  =head1 NAME  myscript =cut
• Always use strict; at the start of your program (this pragma restricts expressions that are hard to debug)
• Qualify your variables with type prefixes (similar to "Hungarian" notation) e.g. my $sHeader for strings, my @aCodes for arrays, my %hCodesToDescriptors, and appropriate equivalents for common custom types

Recap on pragmas: A pragma is a module which influences some aspect of the compile time or run time behaviour of Perl, such as strict or warnings. From Perl 5.10 onward - custom pragmata are supported.

Happy Perling!

How Imports Work in Python

The syntax for import is as follows (keywords in quotes):

"import"  module [ "as" identifier ]

There is also a variation to use when testing proposed changes to Python:

"from " "__future__" "import" feature [ "as" identifier ]

The first thing import does is find an load the module. It then initialises the module.

Frozen Frames when Debugging Python

When running pdb, you will notice certain debugging frames as frozen.  This is typically when:

• code is compiled C-extension code (e.g. importlib, asyncio, threading internals)
• the debugger cannot step in or modify them
• they are part of Python's frozen importlib bootstrap

For example, in the following:

<frozen importlib._bootstrap>

<frozen importlib._bootstrap_external>

The modules are embedded in the Python binary.

If you try ll in the Python debugger when compiled code is being processed, you will get the error: *** could not get source code.

Understanding HTTP State Management

HTTP state management is covered in RFC6265.  

Python's request module however refers to its predecessor RFC2965 within the class DefaultCookiePolicy in cookiejar.py. Some programmers say the implementation is quite strict.

One difference in the RFCs is the use of Augmented Backus-Naur form (ABNF) in the latter, not used in the former. ABNF for specifications is formalised in RFC5234 (an Internet standard, proposed to be augmented by RFC7405).