PostgreSQL 11 is here - well, it will be within days, and the release candidate is available for download now.

Hacktoberfest is an annual event sponsored by DigitalOcean in partnership with GitHub and Twilio and while "Hacktoberfest" might sound or give the impression of something doable only by very experienced hacker programmers, in essence, it's just a wrapper around having to submit 5 Pull Requests to any Github hosted repository and earn some swag in return. 

Lots of people worry about AI and the effect it is going to have on the economy and wider issues of society.  Blaise Agüera y Arcas of Google AI has made a short film explaining how AI might just cause a transition from a fact-based world to something much less certain. You can no longer believe your eyes.

I admit that this is about the video. To see Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot jumping around like it means it, is fascinating. How far have we come so quickly - but have we? Is this the robot you are looking for?

Catch up with everything that appeared on I Programmer last week. Our digest gives links to news coverage together with the week's book reviews and additions to Book Watch. The list finishes with two full length articles - an in-depth look at Bias and Chains in Android Studio's ConstraintLayout and an examination of the Storage Mapping Function.

The updated CodeLobster 1.3 has been released with multi-platform support. CodeLobster is a portable IDE that is free to use and offers highlighting and autocomplete for PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

In a move that consolidates its new relationship with open source and with Linux, Microsoft has announced that it is joining OIN - the Open Invention Network - a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk.

The latest version of RStudio has improved support with a number of programming languages and platforms, including SQL, D3, Python, Stan, and C++. The Python support comes via a reticulate package that provides an interface to Python.

Microsoft has made another of its products open source; this time its the Infer.NET machine learning network. Infer.NET is a framework for running Bayesian inference in graphical models that can also be used for probabilistic programming.

It almost sounds silly - train a neural network to generate random numbers - but it has more practical uses than you might imagine.

ReactProto is a rapid application prototyping tool that bridges the gap between developers and designers. Designers hand over their static mockups which developers feed into ReactProto to generate the corresponding boilerplate React components.

JetBrains is running a survey of Python Developers for the second time. The results of the first one provided a helpful overview of the Python landscape, so if you actively use Python it's worth spending ten minutes contributing your answers to a set of well constructed questions.

Google is always surprising and the latest turn of events is no exception. In an announcement about security problems and improvements, we learn that Google+ is closing. Most might agree that this is not surprising, although it is disappointing. Moreover, the reasons given are strange.

MS-DOS v1.25 and v2.0 are both now available on GitHub for anyone to fork - either for historical purposes or for practical application.

The Go Project wants to hear from you to find out how companies are using Go.

Since the demise of Windows Phone Microsoft-oriented programmers have been left to their own devices, literally, to work out what they should use - Android, iPhone, or something completely different? Perhaps some are still waiting for the reinvention of the Windows Phone - not Microsoft, it seems.

During his opening keynote at KotlinConf 2018, Andrey Breslav, Kotlin's lead language designer, announced the formation, jointly by JetBrains and Google, of the Kotlin Foundation. A new Kotlin portal on the Google Cloud has also been launched.

There's a new version of Azure Functions with a new, portable, cross-platform, and more efficient, host runtime.