News

Firefox Developer Edition Adds Network Monitor   Wednesday 05 April

Firefox Developer Edition 54 has been released with improvements to CSS handling and the debugger, along with support for Network Monitor.

Evolution Is Better Than Backprop?   Wednesday 05 April

Yes, another neural network breakthrough. This one provides us with a way of training using reinforcement learning, but without the need for the biologically implausible and expensive back propagation method.

Tim Berners-Lee Awarded Turing Prize   Tuesday 04 April

The prestigious Turing Prize goes this year (2016) to Sir Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web. As this is the 50th year of the Turing Award, the ACM Awards Banquet on June 24, where the prize will be presented, is going to be a glittering occasion.

Does Python Smell Like Java?   Tuesday 04 April

A very interesting question. Python is so very different from Java but does it suffer from the same flaws?  New research from the University of Amsterdam and Raincode Labs Belgium looks into the question of whether or not Python has the same problem with code "smells" as Java.

Google Open Sources Earth Enterprise   Tuesday 04 April

Google has made its Google Earth Enterprise open source. Earth Enterprise was Google's product for businesses that wanted to create their own private geospatial apps rather than use Google Earth and Maps. The commercial service was shut down last month. 

Android Becomes World's Most Popular OS   Monday 03 April

The post PC era has arrived. You can no longer afford to dismiss Android as just a flakey smartform platform. Lamentably it is still flakey, but on a global basis it is the most popular operating system.

Microsoft CodePlex Is Shutting Down   Sunday 02 April

Microsoft has decided to shut down CodePlex, its open source project hosting web site and has published the shutdown timetable and a walkthrough on how to migrate projects to GitHub.

Robots Learn To Navigate Pedestrians   Sunday 02 April

Do you manage to walk a crowded street without bumping into people or having near misses as you try to pass? If so you probably learned how to do it in a very similar way to this socially aware robot, by reinforcement learning. 

A New Paradigm for Robotic Dust Collection   Saturday 01 April

Carnegie Mellon researchers have discovered a new paradigm for robot vacuums, or robot dust collectors and they are more technically termed. The breakthrough is to let the dust come to them rather than have them chase after it which is good news for anyone tired of untangling their robot vacuum or irritated by the noise it makes banging its head against the furniture. 

Open Source Time Series Database Released   Friday 31 March

A new, open-source time series database built with the Postgres engine has been released. TimeScaleDB is currently available in a single-node version, and is optimized for fast ingest and complex queries.

Developer Pay Satisfaction According To Stack Overflow   Friday 31 March

The results of the 2017 Stack Overflow survey are available. They cover many different aspects of the developer landscape and one that is of immediate interest is what we can expect to be paid and whether of not we are satisfied with our pay.

Orion 14 Gets Smarter Defaults   Thursday 30 March

The latest version of Orion has been released with improvements including smarter defaults. Orion is a browser based open tool integration platform aimed at web developers, that is managed by the Eclipse Foundation, who also provide the OrionHub, a service that lets you experiment with Orion.

This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real News   Thursday 30 March

Fake news, well you know it when you see it because it's news with its facts all wrong. Now researchers have concluded that this isn't the case. In fact fake news is more like satire than news in style and facts probably don't matter. 

Professional Programmer

In Praise of Top Down Programming   Thursday 30 March

These days, top-down modular programming is pushed aside by object-oriented programming when it comes to teaching how to program. But there is a place for both methodologies to co-exist and it solves the ever-present problem of how to begin.

The Core

JQuery 3 - Reinventing Events   Monday 03 April

JavaScript is an event driven language - which means you can't avoid dealing with events. jQuery doesn't just provide a browse-independent way of working with events, it reinvents the event system. With jQuery you really can write less and do more when it comes to events.