Featured Articles 

JavaScript Canvas Transformations
Ian Elliot

Canvas provides a full transformation facility that allows you to use any co-ordinate system you want to. Alternatively you can view it as a way of drawing paths at the location and scale that you require. In this extract from a chapter in my new book on JavaScript Graphics we look at how to use transforms.

One of the most unlikely events in the history of computing is the involvement of a UK company better known for its tea rooms.

News

Who Are The Hackers and Why
04 Mar | Janet Swift

In its 2020 annual report HackerOne disclosed that it paid out $40 million in bounties in 2019, roughly equal to the total for all previous years combined. It also has information about who the hackers are, what motivates them and how they think other people perceive hackers.

It is a long held belief that math and programming go hand in hand, but what if this is wrong? New research suggests that it is natural language aptitude that matters.

Google Summer of Code is now in its 16th Year of providing an opportunity for students to spend their summer break getting hand-on experience of contributing to open source projects with a stipend provided by Google. It can be a win-win situation for both open source organizations and students looking for a programming career.

Microsoft has announced an upgrade to Visual Studio Online, its browser-based code editor that can also be accessed using either Visual Studio Code or the Visual Studio IDE, though that is currently only available in private preview.  The update improves environment configuration with custom Dockerfile support.

Microsoft is retiring its remaining exams for its MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications on June 30, 2020. Meanwhile it has announced two exams that expand its Data and AI role-based certification portfolio.

There's a major new release of Apache CouchDB, with improvements including live shard splitting, user-defined partitioned databases for faster querying, and an automatic view index warmer.

In an attempt to put an end to musicians being sued for infringement of copyright, lawyer/musician/programmer Damien Riehl teamed up with musician/programmer Noah Rubin to create a melody database which has been released using a Creative Commons Zero license.

Isabelle Guyon, Bernhard Schölkopf and Vladimir Vapnik, are the recipients of this year's ICT Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the Spanish bank group BBVA for their 'fundamental contributions to machine learning'.

Open source programming language Ballerina has been updated with improvements including an enhanced IDE.

GitHub has updated a tool that identifies areas for work on open source projects that are relatively easy and would be a good place to start contributing. The tool uses a combination of a machine learning model that has been trained to identify easy issues, and an associated list put together by project maintainers.

The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge was launched in 2006. The challenge then was to find a better compression for a 100Mb sample of Wikipedia. Now Marcus Hutter has increased the sizes of both the task and the reward by a factor of ten.

A "hands-off data wrangling" tool has been launched by The Data Value Factory, a spin-out company from the University of Manchester. The developers say The Data Preparer system is designed to minimise the time spent to prepare data for analysis.

Books of the Week

Full Review

• Foundations of Deep Reinforcement Learning
  Rating: 5 (out of 5)
  Describing this book as "Excellent", Mike James advises:

if you have any interest in reinforcement learning just buy it, read it and learn.

Added to Book Watch

• Deep Learning with JavaScript (Manning)
• Practical C Programming (Packt)
• SQL Database Programming 5th Ed (Questing Vole Press)