News

Exploring AlphaGo Teach   Wednesday 13 December

DeepMind has released AlphaGo Teach, an interactive tool that can be used to explore the opening moves of a game of Go. It lets you try  out alternative moves and shows the probabilities of a win for black for each and the moves that AlphaGo would take in response.

Donald Knuth's Christmas Tree Lecture 2017   Wednesday 13 December

This year's Donald Knuth annual Christmas lecture is on a brand new problem that doesn't have a long history and this is the point. He shows that math is a lively and exciting subject. The video is well worth seeing.

Microsoft Q# Quantum Language And Toolkit   Wednesday 13 December

Microsoft has released a preview version of Q#, its new programming language for quantum computing. The language is included as part of the Quantum Development Kit, alongside a quantum computing simulator and other resources designed to help developers get started writing applications for a quantum computer. 

Mozilla Launches WebXRViewer For iOS   Tuesday 12 December

Mozilla has launched an augmented reality app for iOS as part of its push to establish its recently proposed WebXR standard and persuade developers to build augmented reality experiences using open web technologies, WebVR, and Apple’s ARKit framework.

Top 10 From Around the Web: More About Rails   Tuesday 12 December

This round up of interesting posts from external sites has hints, tips and recommendations for working with the Rails framework. We've also slipped in one on writing a command-line app in Ruby.

Amazon Starting To Monetize Alexa Skills   Monday 11 December

The influence of Amazon's Alexa is spreading. As well as moving into the workplace, Echo devices can now be shipped to eighty countries. This promises an expanded market for Alexa skills, so Amazon's announcement of two new monetization methods is welcome.

Apache Bigtop Adds OpenJDK 8 Support   Monday 11 December

Apache has released Bigtop 1.2.1 with support for OpenJDK 8, and a new sandbox feature that lets you run big data pseudo clusters on Docker. Bigtop is an Apache Foundation project that you can use for packaging, testing, and configuration of the big name open source big data components that make up the Hadoop infrastructure.

Worm Balances A Pole On Its Tail   Sunday 10 December

C. elegans is quickly becoming the mascot of AI. We have a complete circuit for its neurons and this has already resulted in some impressive achievements including building an artificial version of the worm's brain. Now we are moving into an era of using the circuits we have discovered creatively.

Free Software Foundation Fun For Xmas   Saturday 09 December

If you're looking for festive presents for programmers, the Free Software Foundation has some options that combine open software street cred with supporting open source and the GNU philosophy.

Grace Hopper & Computer Science Education Week   Friday 08 December

Tomorrow marks the 111th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Considered "the first lady of software" she is the figurehead chosen for Computer Science Education Week, which is timed to coincide with her birthday. To celebrate the date we have an "Amazing Grace" cartoon comic that summarizes her story.

MyRocks For Percona Server   Friday 08 December

There's an experimental release of MyRocks in Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, with packages. MyRocks is open source software that was developed at Facebook to provide a way to use MySQL features with Facebook's RocksDB. It is also used in MariaDB as a storage engine.

DeepMind's AlphaZero Triumphs At Chess   Thursday 07 December

DeepMind's latest program, AlphaZero, has used reinforcement learning from playing against itself to master the game of chess. Given the important role that chess has occupied in computer science, this is a big breakthrough for neural networks.

Intellij IDEA Improves Coding Assistance   Thursday 07 December

There's a major update of Intellij IDEA, with smarter coding assistance, a better debugger, and a Run Dashboard that lets you rerun, stop and terminate applications. The Intellij IDEA is a well-known Java IDE. There are quite a few changes to the new version, spread across the various elements of the IDE. 

Get To Grips With Blockchain   Thursday 07 December

If you want to know about Blockchain, a 6-week course created by IBM  and designed for developers who are new to Blockchain began on December 4 on the Coursera Platform. 

Professional Programmer

The Real Reason To Learn To Program - The Power   Friday 08 December

It's that time of the year again - The Hour of Code. Why should so many people bother to learn to code? There has been a lot of discussion of why people should learn to code, or more accurately to program. Yes, it is good for them because it teaches how to think and how to plan. But the real reason for learning to program is known all too well to all us programmers although we try hard not to mention it in such discussions - P O W E R!

The Core

JavaScript Async - Promises, The Revealing Constructor Pattern   Monday 11 December

There is something mysterious inside a Promise, object that is. You may think that you have Promises mastered but do you really know how they work? The whole security of the Promise is based on the revealing constructor pattern which is useful in its own right. This is an extract from Ian Elliot's recently published book, JavaScript Async: Events Callbacks, Promises & Async/Await