News

Firefox 58 - Tab Throttling, WebAssembly, Promise Finally And Progressive Web Apps   Wednesday 24 January

Firefox 58 has just been released to end users, but it has some interesting changes for programmers as well Mozilla really does seem to be bringing Firefox into the 21st century, leaving its legacy architectural, XUL and XCOM well behind while completely re-engineering the browser.

Never Too Early To Code According to HackerRank   Wednesday 24 January

When and how did today's developers learn to code? The answers differ by generation and by goegraphy according to the results of a new survey from, HackerRank.

Donald Knuth At 80 Still Improving TAOCP   Wednesday 24 January

Donald Knuth, author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming, has celebrated his 80th birthday and is still working on improving his monumental work. He's also still hoping people will check out the hard exercises of TAOCP to make sure they're correct.

Facebook Open Sources Detectron Object Detection   Tuesday 23 January

The way big companies are open sourcing significant AI is both gratifying and slightly worrying. AI is the biggest revolution since we discovered fire and started making tools. FaceBook AI Research has added to the list of what is available by open sourcing its Detectron project.

Open Media Alliance AV1 Is Better Than JPEG   Tuesday 23 January

The Alliance for Open Media's work on an alternative video codec is making progress with tests in a trial version of Firefox showing that the Alliance's AV1 video compression technology produces video files that are a third smaller than those compressed by rival options.

Frontiers Of Knowledge Award   Monday 22 January

The 10th Edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category goes to Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir for their “fundamental contributions to modern cryptology, an area of a tremendous impact on our everyday life.” 

Hash Code 2018 Registration Opens   Monday 22 January

Registration has opened for Hash Code 2018, Google's team programming competition for students and professionals in  Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. This is the fifth edition of Hash Code which has grown from 200 participants in 2014 to last year's figure of 26,000 developers.

Software Developer Rated Best Job Of 2018   Monday 22 January

Software Developer has the distinction of coming top not only as Best Technology Job and Best STEM Job in the U.S. News ranking, but also as the best job overall for 2018. CNNMoney which also compiles a list  of the 100 best jobs, placed Mobile Developer in the top position for 2017.

Describe It And AI Will Draw It For You   Sunday 21 January

Neural Networks do seem to be able to keep on impressing us with their ability to do different tasks better than we thought possible. The latest in a trio of networks from Microsoft has the ability to draw what you describe.

Fear And Loathing In The App Store 19 - Apple Rejects Net Neutrality App   Saturday 20 January

UPDATE   Apple bowed to concerted pressure and the Wehe App has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store. Initially the app, which tests to see if your ISP is applying throttling to your data according to its type - aka a net neutrality detector - was been rejected from the App Store for some very strange reasons.

Growing Demand For Data Visualization   Friday 19 January

A new survey of Trends in Web Technologies confirms that web technology is now the backbone of application development for most companies  and reveals that data visualization is one of the most important capabilities in web application development.

HHVM Improves Type Inference   Friday 19 January

There's a new version of Hip Hop Virtual Machine, an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP.  HHVM was originally developed at Facebook to provide a way to convert PHP script to C++ so it could be compiled and run on web servers.

MIT Self-Driving Car - Do The Free Course, Purchase the T-Shirt   Thursday 18 January

MIT has made an intensive short course on the practice of deep learning freely available to all - both in person on campus and online. It even has a course t-shirt, but hurry to claim one as the offer ends in three days.

Oracle Holds On To Java EE Brand   Thursday 18 January

Despite Oracle recently agreeing to hand over control of Java Enterprise Edition to the Eclipse Foundation, it seems that the situation isn't as clear cut as it originally seemed.

The Core

Just JavaScript - Function Object Self Reference   Monday 22 January

Functions are objects, but we tend to forget that they are. Just like all objects in JavaScript, functions are anonymous and unlike other languages don't have immutable names. This isn't a huge problem,. but how can you write a Function that references its own properties without a fixed name? We need the self reference pattern.

Babbage's Bag

Finite State Machines   Thursday 18 January

Finite state machines may sound like a very dry and boring topic but they reveal a lot about the power of different types of computing machine.  Every Turing machine includes a finite state machine so there is a sense in which they come first. They also turn out to be very useful in practice.