News

Online Master's Degree in Complexity   Wednesday 13 September

The Santa Fe Institute is partnering with Arizona State University to offer the world’s first comprehensive online master’s degree in complexity science. It builds on the free online courses already offered on the Complexity Explorer. 

AI Learns To Program Super Mario Bros.   Wednesday 13 September

This sounds like another thing to be worried about, if that is, you are worried about AI taking over the world. We might be getting used to AI learning to beat humans at arcade games and even Chess and Go, but now it is learning to program games just by watching. 

Facebook Announces Yarn 1.0   Tuesday 12 September

There's a new version of the Yarn open source JavaScript Package Manager launched last year by Facebook, Google, Expononet and Tilde.  

Eclipse Preferred IDE For Java   Tuesday 12 September

Two recent polls from Opensource.com asked Java and Python developers respectively to cast their votes for their favorite open source IDE. Eclipse emerged as the clear winner for Java and was in second place for Python after PyCharm.  

Rust 1.20 Adds Associated Contents   Monday 11 September

Systems programming language Rust has been updated again to add support for associated constants. The Cargo features have also been improved. 

Google Offers More Udacity Scholarships   Monday 11 September

In a new initiative to bridge the digital skills gap in the EMEA region Google is offering 60,000 Scholarships for both absolute beginners and existing programmers for Udacity Android and Web development courses. 

ONNX For AI Model Interoperability   Monday 11 September

Unlikely as the collaboration seems, Microsoft and Facebook have co-developed the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format as an open source project. 

AsciiDots - A Language Like A Racetrack   Sunday 10 September

It looks different - ASCII art that computes! AsciiDots is a fun language that might just have something interesting to show us. 

Jerboas, Information & Hopping   Saturday 09 September

If you have wheels then getting stuck in desert sand is easy, but bipedal rodents have an interesting approach to the problem. 

New MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab   Friday 08 September

IBM and MIT are partnering to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab which will carry out fundamental artificial intelligence research and seek to unlock the potential of AI. 

GnuCOBOL 2.0 Adds VS Build Support   Friday 08 September

There's a new stable release of GnuCOBOL. The new release adds support for COBOL 2014, new system functions and more intrinsic functions, as well as Visual Studio build support. 

Fluid Passwords - Never The Same Password   Friday 08 September

Despite lots of predictions that passwords are on their way out, they still form the basis of most security. The problem is that even with strict rules about changing them, passwords tend to persist for too long. Now a clever idea makes it possible to keep passwords fluid. 

New Ontologies For OWL   Thursday 07 September

There are two new proposals for changes to OWL, the Web Ontology Language. The new proposals are for an update to the Time ontology and for a Semantic Sensor Network ontology. 

Chrome 61 Ready To Introduce New Features   Thursday 07 September

Chrome 61, the latest release of the dominant browser both on the desktop and on mobiles, is about to start being rolled out. Its twin highlights are native support for JavaScript modules and the inclusion of the WebUSB API. In addition the Web Share API is available on Android.

The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin: Advanced Functions   Monday 11 September

Although we have had a brief look at functions in an earlier chapter, functions are so central to what makes Kotlin special they deserve a chapter to themselves. In this chapter we look at how functions make Kotlin more powerful and easier to use. 

jQuery 3 - Promises, Deferred & WebWorkers   Thursday 07 September

It is fairly easy to consume promises returned by asynchronous functions that other programmers have put together for you. It is only a little more difficult to use promises to create your own asynchronous functions that run in parallel a non-UI thread.