Programmer Puzzles

Self-Descriptive Arrays   Thursday 20 July

Put on your thinking cap for another set of conundrums that will exercise your coding skills. This time Melvin Frammis introduces his junior partner Bugsy Cottman to some classic number puzzles that can be solved with arrays.

News

Flash Finally Declared Dead - It Was Murder   Wednesday 26 July

Adobe has finally announced that Flash will be no more after 2020. If you are one of the many programmers who thought that Flash was already dead this will come as a surprise, but presumably not an unwelcome one. People have had it in for Flash for many years and this is the final act in an orchestrated tragedy.

Curie and Arduino 101 Abandoned By Intel   Wednesday 26 July

Intel is discontinuing the Curie and the Curie-enabled 101. This has devastated developers who have based products on the Curie, but others are still unaware of the news, which has been released via obscure channels.

Apache Hive Adds Support For Set Operations   Wednesday 26 July

There's a new release of Apache Hive with new features including support for Set operations and a JDBC Storage Handler. 

More Cash For Internet Bug Bounty   Tuesday 25 July

The Internet Bug Bounty, a program that exists to make the internet safer by catching more vulnerabilities in internet infrastructure and open source software has received $300,000 in new funding.

Wireshark 2.4 Increases Protocol Coverage   Tuesday 25 July

There's a new release of Wireshark, the network protocol analyzer, with more protocols supported and experimental support for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows installer packages.

Slack - Where Work Happens   Monday 24 July

Looking to be recognized as more than a messaging platform and shifting the focus to workflow, Slack is also putting new emphasis on its developers.

RethinkDB Moves On Under Community Governance   Monday 24 July

The team behind RethinkDB has released the first version since it was taken under community governance. The main changes to this version are bug fixes and stability improvements, but it shows that the team is moving forward.

AI Applied To Cookies   Sunday 23 July

Are you one of those people who, when eating an unfamiliar dish, attempts to work out its ingredients in order to re-create it at home? It's something programmers are particularly prone to and now researchers at CSAIL are giving it a deep learning makeover.

Bitcoin Averts A Split   Saturday 22 July

The big problem with Bitcoin is that it has been far too successful. The algorithm it uses is a brilliant, if slightly unworkable, solution to the problem of distributed trust. It works, but it is slow by design. Now there are moves to improve the algorithm and this has nearly split Bitcoin into two different cryptocurrencies.

Intel Divests Itself of Wearables   Friday 21 July

According to a report that originated with CNBC and has been widely circulated, Intel completely eliminated the group concerned with wearables earlier this month.

Apache Spark With Structured Streaming   Friday 21 July

Apache Spark 2.2 has been released with Structured Streaming no longer experimental. The accompanying release of PySpark is also available in pypi.

Stack Overflow Channels In Beta   Friday 21 July

Stack Overflow is launching a new product. Stack Overflow Channels is targeted at teams of developers within companies who want a secure, private space to ask and answer proprietary questions.

Rider IDE Improves Webstorm Support   Thursday 20 July

There's a Release Candidate of Rider, JetBrains' new cross-platform .NET IDE based on the IntelliJ platform and ReSharper.

Mozilla Wants Your Voice   Thursday 20 July

Mozilla has launched Project Common Voice to crowdsource speech recognition. Once a massive amount of audio data has been captured, it will be made available for others to use in their own applications.

The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - The Class & The Object   Monday 24 July

Kotlin is a class-based, object-oriented language and it works in a way that is compatible with Java objects. This doesn't mean that Kotlin does classes in exactly the same way as Java or any other language. In fact. part of the problem in getting to grips with Kotlin classes is that initially they look as if they are just like Java classes - but they aren't.