Tubi, a leader in the fast-growing free ad-supported streaming category, is being purchased by Fox for about $440 million. It's paying for the acquisition using cash from the sale of a minority stake in Roku. Deadline reports: Tubi brings Fox an expanded consumer offering with a sizable, younger-skewing and directly connected user base that spends over 160 million hours per month watching content on the service. Tubi is available on more than 25 digital platforms in the U.S. with some 20,000 titles and 56,000 hours of film and episodic television programming from over 250 content partners. Fox plans to continue to run Tubi as an independent service and said it will evaluate opportunities to expand its offering -- not through original content but in a "more cost-effective manner by leveraging our expertise in national and local news and sports programming." Tubi founder and CEO Farhad Massoudi will continue to lead the service. "Tubi will immediately expand our direct-to-consumer audience and capabilities and will provide our advertising partners with more opportunities to reach audiences at scale. Importantly, coupled with the combined power of Fox's existing networks, Tubi provides a substantial base from which we will drive long-term growth in the direct-to-consumer arena," said Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch.

Nat Friedman: npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

The tech jobs marketplace at Hired.com crunched their data on more than 400,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year to produce their annual "State of Software Engineers" report. Among its surprising insights: software engineers with more than 10 years of experience get 20% fewere interview requests than engineers with 4 to 10 years of experience.

Other insights: Demand for AR/VR talent is up by 1400%, mirroring blockchain's 517% demand growth last year... In large U.S. tech hubs AR/VR engineer salaries range from $135k - $150k... 46% of software engineers rank AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they'd like to learn in 2020... If you work in AR/VR, you may want to move to San Francisco, where they pay $150k/year on average.
The next-highest growth in demand came for "gaming engineers" and "computer vision engineers" -- with both positions seeing a 146% increase in demand over 2018. The next-highest demand growth was for "search engineers" (increasing 137%) and for "machine learning engineers" (increasing 89%). Demand for "blockchain engineers" increased by just 9%.

But they also report that demand for frontend and backend engineers "grew steadily by 17%, which shows that all companies -- not just Silicon Valley tech giants -- are evolving into being tech companies..." The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company. Whether the company is Bank of America, Alaska Airlines, Sainsbury's, or Tesla, investment in top software engineering talent isn't a future ambition, it's a matter of survival.
And the #1 most-desired coding skill was Go (for the second year in a row), "garnering an average of 9.2 interview requests for every Go-skilled candidate..." But there may be a larger trend. All told, the number of interview requests across all languages remained nearly constant year-over-year, with only minor fluctuations in average requests, and zero change in how each language ranked against others. This could suggest that supply for these skills has not yet caught up with demand...

According to Robert Half, 67% of IT managers plan to expand their teams in areas such as security, cloud computing and business intelligence, but 89% reported challenges in recruiting that talent. Those challenges in hiring are even greater for roles related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.
Their analysis concludes the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python -- though Python, JavaScript, and Java are engineers' favorite coding languages, "largely because of their useful and well-maintained libraries and packages..."

"Ruby, PHP and Objective C are ranked the least favorite (and least fun) languages for software engineers."

Microsoft said this week that it will support Visual Basic on .NET 5.0 but will no longer add new features or evolve the language. From a report: "Starting with .NET 5, Visual Basic will support Class Library, Console, Windows Forms, WPF, Worker Service, [and] ASP.NET Core Web API ... to provide a good path forward for the existing VB customer who want [sic] to migrate their applications to .NET Core," the .NET team wrote in a post to the Microsoft DevBlogs. "Going forward, we do not plan to evolve Visual Basic as a language ... The future of Visual Basic ... will focus on stability, the application types listed above, and compatibility between the .NET Core and .NET Framework versions of Visual Basic."

When Microsoft released the .NET version of Visual Basic, originally called Visual Basic .NET, alongside C# at the beginning of the .NET era, the two languages were evolved together and had roughly identical feature sets. But this changed over time, with professional developers adopting C# and many fans of classic VB simply giving up on the more complex but powerful .NET versions of the environment. Today, virtually all of Microsoft's relevant developer documentation is in C# only, with VB source code examples ever harder to find.

Apple will move its annual developers conference, WWDC, online instead of hosting an in-person event, the company announced Friday. From a report: WWDC is Apple's annual developer's conference. The company typically announces new software features and sometimes hardware products as thousands of people travel around the world to San Jose, California for workshops about building software for iPhones, iPads, and Macs hosted by Apple employees. Apple said it would donate $1 million to organizations in San Jose to help with expected losses now that the event won't be held in the city.

theodp writes: We fundamentally believe that coding is a language and that just like other languages are required in school, coding should be required in school," Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in 2016 as Apple coincidentally prepared to launch its Swift Playgrounds app to teach kids to code. Cook later touted Swift as the first programming language that wasn't "too geeky" for students. As such, Cook must be delighted that the West Virginia Dept. of Education (WVDE) has turned to Apple to provide WV teachers with free Professional Development in computer science in order to bring CS to every K-12 student in every WV school as part of its CodeWV initiative. Not too surprisingly, the Apple "Everyone Can Code" curriculum that teachers will be taught to teach requires up-to-date Apple devices and Swift.

Apple's efforts to sell WV on Swift date back to at least 2017, when an Apple lobbyist and Apple employees who refused to disclose their names pitched their wares to WVDE Board members in a controversial closed-door meeting. Teachers seeking an alternative to Apple's professional development do have the option of attending a "$3,000 professional learning program [curriculum] at no cost to them or their school/district thanks to the generous support from [tech-bankrolled and led] Code.org and the West Virginia Department of Education." Like Apple, Code.org has a registered WV education lobbyist.

So, will tech's race to make U.S. kids CS savvy go to the Swift?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Lambda School, the controversial coding bootcamp, is threatening a former employee for speaking out about problems at the school. In an article published on February 11th, Sabrina Baez, Lambda's former head of career services, told The Verge that she was called a "feisty Latina" and a "bulldog" when she pushed for a diversity initiative at the school. Baez had signed a severance agreement when she left Lambda after the incidents; the school sent her a letter claiming she violated that agreement by speaking to reporters and is demanding the return of her severance money (roughly $36,000). The Verge has seen that letter, which also says Lambda is prepared to file a lawsuit to collect.

Baez claims that Lambda tried to fire her in 2018 for not living up to a performance plan. When she told her manager she hadn't received any documentation about this plan, she claims he walked back his comments and said she could stay. Baez says she decided to leave anyway because she no longer felt supported in her role. She was five months pregnant at the time and signed a nondisclosure agreement to get severance. Because of this agreement, The Verge agreed not to use Baez's name in the article. She has decided to come forward publicly in this piece since the school is threatening legal action. [...] The Verge's reporting went beyond Baez's experience, detailing ongoing issues Lambda faces with unhappy students and regulatory hurdles. In January, students from the school's User Experience Design program wrote a letter to the school calling the program "a very bad experience" and "not worth the money." They asked to get out of their income sharing agreements (ISAs), which are the bedrock of Lambda's program. The school is also operating without state approval in California, meaning the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education cannot step in to help students if there is a dispute with the school. In the case of the User Experience program, the agency didn't have to: Lambda let the students out of their ISAs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: A federal jury couldn't reach a verdict on whether a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for leaking a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks, convicting him instead on lesser charges stemming from the leak (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). Joshua Schulte, 31 years old, was convicted of making false statements and contempt of court -- charges that related to Mr. Schulte's conduct after the March 7, 2017 publication of the CIA materials, dubbed Vault 7 by WikiLeaks. The jury said Monday they were deadlocked on the remaining eight counts, including the illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information. The hung jury, following a week of jury deliberations, marks a blow to the Justice Department in its crackdown on government leaks. One former top CIA official who testified called the leak "the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor." The government could choose to prosecute Mr. Schulte again on the deadlocked charges.

Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven't found a reason to switch back to Google. I combed through my browser's history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn't find what I wanted on Google either. Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I'll admit that I'm a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I'm not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don't know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me.

There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.

An anonymous reader quotes SD Times: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced plans to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform ("forge") this year. Members of the FSF tech team are currently reviewing ethical web-based software that will help teams work on their projects, with features like merge requests, bug tracking, and other common tools.

"Infrastructure is very important for free software, and it's unfortunate that so much free software development currently relies on sites that don't publish their source code, and require or encourage the use of proprietary software," FSF wrote in a blog post. "Our GNU ethical repository criteria aim to set a high standard for free software code hosting, and we hope to meet that with our new forge."

As of now, the team said it has been researching a list of candidate programs and analyzing them in terms of ethical and practical criteria.
The FSF blog post adds that "We plan on contributing improvements upstream for the new forge software we choose, to boost its score on those criteria...

"We'll communicate with the upstream developers to request improvements and help clarify any questions related to the ethical repository criteria."

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Python is tying with Java as the second most popular programming language behind JavaScript, according to developer analyst RedMonk's latest ranking.

The second spot for Python is the highest position it's ever attained in RedMonk's list of top programming languages, which is based on an analysis of GitHub and Stack Overflow data. Historically, Python has been steady in fourth position but it rose to third spot three years ago in RedMonk's tables... Python has been rising across several programming language popularity indexes, including Tiobe and IEEE Spectrum.

Microsoft-maintained TypeScript for large-scale JavaScript projects has also risen one place to ninth position along with C... Rust is a popular language among developers who discuss technical challenges on StackOverflow, but it hasn't moved from its spot at 21.

Quibi, a streaming service that has already raised more than $1.6 billion, is finally almost here, and in an effort to entice people who are probably already spending too much on content every month, the short form video streaming service is giving people a 90-day free trial for a limited time. From a report: The company is also planning to pump an impressive amount of content into the app within that time. Quibi is set to launch on April 6th with 50 shows and movies, half of which consists of "daily essential" programming that's constantly being updated. More will be released throughout the first month and beyond. After the 90-day trial, Quibi will cost $4.99 with ads, and $7.99 without. That's more expensive than Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus, both of which run ad-free.

Dan Luu, writing in a blog post: The sleight of hand that's happening when someone says that we can keep software simple and compatible by making everything handle text is the pretense that text data doesn't have a structure that needs to be parsed4. In some cases, we can just think of everything as a single space separated line, or maybe a table with some row and column separators that we specify (with some behavior that isn't consistent across tools, of course). That adds some hassle when it works, and then there are the cases where serializing data to a flat text format adds considerable complexity since the structure of data means that simple flattening requires significant parsing work to re-ingest the data in a meaningful way. Another reason commands now have more options is that people have added convenience flags for functionality that could have been done by cobbling together a series of commands. These go all the way back to v7 unix, where ls has an option to reverse the sort order (which could have been done by passing the output to tac).

[...] Over time, more convenience options have been added. For example, to pick a command that originally has zero options, mv can move and create a backup (three options; two are different ways to specify a backup, one of which takes an argument and the other of which takes zero explicit arguments and reads an implicit argument from the VERSION_CONTROL environment variable; one option allows overriding the default backup suffix). mv now also has options to never overwrite and to only overwrite if the file is newer. mkdir is another program that used to have no options where, excluding security things for SELinux or SMACK as well as help and version options, the added options are convenience flags: setting the permissions of the new directory and making parent directories if they don't exist. If we look at tail, which originally had one option (-number, telling tail where to start), it's added both formatting and convenience options For formatting, it has -z, which makes the line delimiter null instead of a newline. Some examples of convenience options are -f to print when there are new changes, -s to set the sleep interval between checking for -f changes, --retry to retry if the file isn't accessible.

AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pull metadata from Freedb to save the user having to type it in manually, but the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz. This wouldn't be the first time Freedb shut down. In 2006, the site shut down due to a disagreement among its developers, only to be brought back to life a few months later.

It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.

To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network's chat feature into a stand-alone experience. [...] Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world's most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users' iPhones. That's about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.

But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. By rewriting it from scratch, it's shrunk Messenger's footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it's replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users. As a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction.

Leading CIOs, CTOs and technology executives on the "Forbes Technology Council" just made some predictions for the future: Now that the business world has seen the power of automation, the question has become, "What's next?" The members of Forbes Technology Council are constantly looking out for new tech trends, and they believe the next jobs to be impacted by automation might not be the ones people expect...

#1. Reminders, Notifications And Reporting
Christy Johnson, AchieveIt: I think as workflow technology expands, any kind of oversight-related job will be delegated to the bots. No human will be taking the time to manually build reports, see who they're missing data from and send those employees a reminder email/plea for a status update. The tech is already around, but I think it still has a long way to go to reach human-level logic and function....

#3. App Development

Katherine Kostereva, Creatio (formerly bpm'online): In the next five years, everyone will become a developer thanks to low-code/no-code technology. It allows users to build apps and processes in a visual integrated development environment with drag and drop features. Hand-coding isn't likely to become obsolete in five years, but we are moving towards a far future where little to no coding is involved in development.

news.com.au reports: The GitHub Arctic Vault program is part of the now Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub...aimed at preserving the information for generations to come...

"We chose to store GitHub's public repositories in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard [a Norwegian island] because it is one of the most remote and geopolitically stable places on Earth and is about a mile down the road from the famous Global Seed Vault," said GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke. Mr Dohmke said open source code in particular was worth preserving... "Ultimately, it's time to create multiple durable backups of the software our world depends on..." Other treasures include the original source code for MS-DOS (the precursor to Microsoft Windows), the open source code that powers Bitcoin, Facebook's React, and the publishing platform Wordpress...

"The Arctic Code Vault was just the beginning of the GitHub Archive Program's journey to secure the world's open source code," GitHub vice president of special projects Thomas Dohmke told news.com.au. "We've partnered with multiple organisations and advisers to help us maximise the GitHub Archive Program's value and preserve all open-source software for future generations." One of those partners is Norwegian archival experts Piql, who specialise in very-long-term data storage. The company uses around 200 silver halide and polyester film reels designed to last a thousand years to store the information...

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia."

ZDNet reports: The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been "focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance." It's not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and software...."

[One approach to training neural networks with very little labeled data] is part of the shift of computer programming from hard-coded to differentiable, in which code is learned on the fly, commonly referred to as "software 2.0." Liang's co-founders include Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, who says a programmable logic device similar to a field-programmable gate array could change its shape over and over to align its circuitry [to] that differentiated program, with the help of a smart compiler such as Spatial. [Spatial is "a computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into operations that can be run in parallel, for the purpose of making chips that can be 'reconfigurable,' able to change their circuitry on the fly."]

In an interview in his office last spring, Olukotun laid out a sketch of how all that might come together. In what he refers to as a "data flow," the computing paradigm is turned inside-out. Rather than stuffing a program's instructions into a fixed set of logic gates permanently etched into the processor, the processor re-arranges its circuits, perhaps every clock cycle, to variably manipulate large amounts of data that "flows" through the chip.... Today's chips execute instructions in an instruction "pipeline" that is fixed, he observed, "whereas in this reconfigurable data-flow architecture, it's not instructions that are flowing down the pipeline, it's data that's flowing down the pipeline, and the instructions are the configuration of the hardware that exists in place.

The new 1.14 release of the Go programming language "is dotted with performance and security improvements," reports the developer news site DevClass, "but also gives devs more flexibility when it comes to module use."

And they also give a nice overview of Go's development process: Go is the language most containerization projects are built with. The wide adoption of this approach is one of the reasons that made the Go team implement a new feedback-based system for language enhancements. In it, only a limited number of new features are proposed for an upcoming release, giving the community room to weigh in on them. If they decide a change will do more good than harm the feature will make it into the new version. However, since alterations affect a quite wide range of people, they are often heavily disputed. This already led to the abandoning of a proposal thought to improve the language's often discussed error handling. Currently, a couple of new vet checks and minor adjustments are discussed for the 1.15 release.

Updates in Go 1.14 mainly concern the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. The only change to the language allows for methods of embedded interfaces to have the same name and signature as those on the embedding interface. Supposedly to facilitate the creation of somewhat safer applications, version 1.14 includes a hash/maphash package. The hash functions on byte sequences contained in it are meant to help with the implementation of hash tables or similar data structures. The Go team warns though that "the hash functions are collision-resistant but not cryptographically secure...."

Go 1.14 is the last release to run on macOS 10.11 and support 32-bit binaries on Apple's operating system. Meanwhile binaries for Windows come with data execution prevention enabled, experimental support for 64-bit RISC-V on Linux is included, and v1.14 should work with 64-bit ARM architecture on FreeBSD 12.0 or later.

Facebook has canceled the in-person portion of F8, the company's annual developer conference, due to coronavirus concerns. F8 was originally scheduled to take place on May 5th and May 6th later this year. From a report: Instead, Facebook says that it will replace the main F8 conference with "locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content."