During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden "suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to 'jobs of the future,'" reports Newsweek: "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said... "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake..."

Many Twitter users criticized Biden's comments as reductive. "Telling people to find other work without a firm plan to help them succeed will never be popular," communications professional Frank Lutz wrote... Congressional candidate Brianna Wu tweeted that she was "glad to see the recognition that you don't need to be in your 20s to do this as a profession," but also called Biden's suggestion "tone-deaf and unhelpful."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the response this speech got from New York magazine's Sarah Jones: "Please Stop Telling Miners To Learn To Code." And in comments on the original submission, at least two Slashdot readers seemed to agree. "Not everyone can code and certainly not every coal miner or coal worker," wrote Slashdot reader I75BJC. "Vastly different skills."

Slashdot reader Iwastheone even shared a Fox News article in which rival presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued "Maybe Americans don't all want to learn how to code... Let them do the kind of work they actually want to do, instead of saying to a group of people that you all need to become coders."

But is there something elitist in thinking that coal miners couldn't learn to do what coders learned to do? It seems like an interesting question for discussion -- so leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Should coal miners be encouraged to learn to code?

Apple has signed HBO's former chief executive Richard Plepler for a five-year exclusive deal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to produce feature films, documentaries and original series for Apple TV+. The New York Times reports: The gregarious executive, a quintessential New York power player who spent 27 years at HBO and left eight months after AT&T became its owner, is rebooting himself as a producer. And he will do it with Apple. In a recently signed five-year deal, Mr. Plepler's new company, Eden Productions, will make television series, documentaries and feature films exclusively for Apple TV Plus, the streaming platform that started in November. The arrangement gives Mr. Plepler a significant role in an expanding streaming universe soon to include HBO Max, a supersize platform that has been a focus of his former corporate home since he departed in February after having lost some of his autonomy.

"It was instantaneously clear to me that I had a wonderful and very privileged run at HBO and I wasn't going to be able to duplicate that again," Mr. Plepler said in his first interview since leaving the network. "And I didn't want to try to duplicate that again. It felt very clear to me that I just wanted to do my own thing." Mr. Plepler, 61, was a key figure in helping make HBO into an original-programming powerhouse. In the years he was in charge, the network won more than 160 Emmys, including for series like "Game of Thrones," "Big Little Lies" and "Veep." Apple is hopeful he still has the magic touch, this time as a producer. The company has not yet disclosed the number of Apple TV Plus subscribers or how many people have watched its series. [...] A New Yorker through and through, Mr. Plepler intends to provide series and movies for the Cupertino, Calif., company from the second floor of a townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, which he has been using as his office since August.

The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. From a report: Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher. [...] Compulsory public education has brought the nation's adult literacy rate up to nearly 99 percent, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territorial fishing rights accounting for the biggest chunk of its GNI at an estimated $19 million in license fees in 2018. But another sizable portion stems directly from its licensing of its .tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites. As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu's domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.

Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation's Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment. "[.tv] has provided a certain, sure income," said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu's Minister of Finance. "It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to our communities." To monetize .tv, the government of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial use. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around $5 million per year for the right to administer .tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million, this is a substantial benefit.

An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle: Once the most highly coveted game developer -- a hit-maker with the Midas touch -- he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the "worst" video game in history. But Howard Scott Warshaw's story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality... His first game, Yars' Revenge -- a story about mutated houseflies under siege -- took him 7 months to develop, and went through another 5 months of rigorous play-testing. When it hit the shelves in May of 1982, it became Atari's biggest 2600 game of all time, selling more than 1m copies.

The success of this game netted Warshaw a high-profile follow-up assignment: the video game adaptation of the Steven Speilberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Released in November of 1982 after 10 months of development, this, too, was a 1m-copy seller. Warshaw soon became known as the game designer with the golden touch -- and his success earned him rockstar status. According to press reports, he purportedly pulled in $1m a year and was "hounded for autographs by a devoted cult following of teenagers."

But in mid-1982, Atari had also begun to shift its business strategy in the games department. In its earlier days, Atari gave programmers ample time (5-10 months) to create and develop innovative games. But that window closed when the company realized that the real road to riches was in licensing the rights to films.... The typical game took 1k hours' worth of work over 6 months. Warshaw had less than 36 hours to come up with a concept [for his E.T. game] to present to Hollywood's hottest director. Worse yet, he had just 5 weeks to finish the game... Warshaw's only option was to create a small, simple, replayable game -- something with few moving parts that he could implement quickly. Less than 2 days later, he was standing in a conference room in Burbank, pitching his design to Spielberg: The player would guide E.T. through a landscape filled with pits, and collect pieces of a phone while evading FBI agents.

"He just looked at me and said, 'Can't you just do something like Pac-Man?'" recalls Warshaw. "But eventually, he approved it."
Warshaw then put in 500 hours over the next 5 weeks, "doing everything he could to make something halfway decent in the time he was given," the site reports.

"Unfortunately for Warshaw, the flop of E.T. coincided with a much graver event: The video game crash of 1983. A flood of low-quality, hastily created games, coupled with the rise of the personal computer, led to a moment of reckoning: In the 2 years following the release of E.T., the video game industry saw its revenue fall from $3.2B to just $100m -- a 97% decline..."

Warshaw gave up programming and became a real estate broker, and then a psychotherapist, the article concludes. "But true insiders knew that E.T. was merely a symptom -- not the cause -- of the crash."

Mazda says "incorrect programming" in its Smart Braking System (SBS) can make fourth-generation Mazda 3 vehicles falsely detect on object in their path while driving and automatically apply the brakes while driving. "The problem affects 35,390 2019 and 2020 model year cars in the U.S., but Mazda says it is not aware of any injuries or deaths as a result of the defect," reports Engadget. From the report: If the issue occurs, the driver will notice because their car has suddenly stopped, and also as an alarm sounds and a message is displayed on the in-car warning screen. Some Reddit posters report experiencing situations of the system activating while driving with nothing around, and note that while the system can be disabled, it appears to re-enable itself every time the car starts.

Autoblog reports that while some vehicles will simply need to have the system updated or reprogrammed, certain cars with early build dates might need to have their entire instrument cluster replaced or reprogrammed. It's a scary issue, but we've seen Mazda update its cars software to deal with real-life bugs, and the newly-redesigned Mazda3 has already seen a recall to make sure its wheels don't fall off.

Over 20,000 developers have shared what are their favorite JavaScript features, front-end frameworks and back-end frameworks in a new annual survey. The figures come from the fourth State of JavaScript survey, which included responses from 21,717 developers around the world. On the flavors front -- languages that compile to JavaScript -- most developers were satisfied with Microsoft-backed open-source JavaScript superset, TypeScript, followed by Reason, Elm, ClosureScript, and PureScript. But TypeScript also came out on top when ranking developers' interest as well as awareness. Some 58% of developers reported having used TypeScript and that they would use it again, compared to less than 5% for all other flavors of JavaScript.

Over the past decade, Netflix and its rivals have come to rely heavily on the power of algorithms, those top-secret computer programs designed to connect audiences with the programming they're most likely to enjoy based on what they've previously watched. But as Peak TV gives way to the era of Too Much TV and an even more ridiculous amount of content spreads across a rapidly multiplying number of services, platforms are supplementing that sophisticated software with a more low-tech method of helping subscribers find their next favorite show: human beings. From a report: While computer-generated suggestions aren't going away, companies are increasingly looking for other means to help viewers discover shows and movies they might otherwise have missed in a world where something significant premieres almost every day. The industry calls this "human curation," which is basically a fancy phrase for describing nonautomated ways of hyping specific content. AT&T-owned WarnerMedia's upcoming HBO Max service, for example, plans to expand its sister cable network's "Recommended by Humans" promotional campaign by having the stars and producers of its shows, as well as other celebrities, make short videos to highlight particular projects. Those videos will be embedded directly on the service in the hopes that, say, a testimonial from Zac Efron might prompt a young millennial to watch The Exorcist for the first time.

Meanwhile, Netflix, the platform known for its "Because You Watched ..." algorithmic suggestions, is currently beta testing something called "Collections," which are thematic playlists made by company staffers instead of its computers. Netflix isn't saying yet whether it plans to expand the test beyond a select pool of Apple iOS users or make it a permanent feature. Platforms are turning to human curation because of what they see as the limits of reactive recommendation algorithms: They can predict what you might like based on what you've watched in the past, but they can't forecast how your tastes might change or how you're feeling physically and mentally.

Kubernetes (originally designed by Google) is a prominent open-source container-orchestration system for cloud computing with over 4.3 million lines of Go source code. Over 700,000 lines of that code are comments.

"We've been working on a project that surfaces TODO comments in a codebase to help developers do basic project management workflows within that codebase," reads a new essay on Medium. So what did the software learn from over 2,000 TODO comments on Kubernetes? Slashdot reader patrickdevivo writes: It finds that most TODOs are quite old (average age of 2+ years) and about a quarter of them have an assignee (so they're kind of like a ticket?)

The tool used to surface the information is called tickgit, and it looks for "project management metadata" in a codebase.

The data confirms what most developers intuitively understand -- many TODO comments are forgotten and typically not addressed in a reasonable amount of time. This also appears to be the case in Kubernetes, just on a larger scale.

At its developer conference in June this year, Apple introduced Project Catalyst that aims to help developers swiftly bring their iOS apps to Macs. Developers have had more than half a year to play with Catalyst. Here's where things stand currently: The crux of the issue in my mind is that iOS and Mac OS are so fundamentally different that the whole notion of getting a cohesive experience through porting apps with minimal effort becomes absurd. The problem goes beyond touch vs pointer UX into how apps exist and interact within their wider OSes. While both Mac OS and iOS are easy to use, their ease stem from very different conventions. The more complicated Mac builds ease almost entirely through cohesion. Wherever possible, Mac applications are expected to share the same shortcuts, controls, windowing behavior, etc... so users can immediately find their bearings regardless of the application. This also means that several applications existing in the same space largely share the same visual and UX language. Having Finder, Safari, BBEdit and Transmit open on the same desktop looks and feels natural.

By comparison, the bulk of iOS's simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side. Columnist John Gruber of DaringFireball adds: I think part of the problem is Catalyst itself -- it just doesn't feel like nearly a full-fledged framework for creating proper Mac apps yet. But I think another problem is the culture of doing a lot of nonstandard custom UI on iOS. As Wellborn points out, that flies on iOS -- we UI curmudgeons may not like it, but it flies -- because you're only ever using one app at a time on iOS. It cracks a bit with split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, but I've found that a lot of the iPad apps with the least-standard UIs don't even support split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, so the incongruities -- or incoherences, to borrow Wellborn's well-chosen word -- don't matter as much. But try moving these apps to the Mac and the nonstandard UIs stick out like a sore thumb, and whatever work the Catalyst frameworks do to support Mac conventions automatically doesn't kick in if the apps aren't even using the standard UIKit controls to start with. E.g. scrolling a view with Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End. Further reading: Apple's Merged iPad, Mac Apps Leave Developers Uneasy, Users Paying Twice (October 2019).

Starting today, you can now stream more than 100 local PBS stations on YouTube TV by way of dedicated live channels for both PBS and PBS Kids, as well though on-demand programming. More stations are expected to be added in 2020, PBS notes. TechCrunch reports: PBS service is available to 75% of U.S. households via YouTube TV, significantly broadening PBS' reach among cord-cutters. Before today, PBS programming has been available through the PBS.org and PBSKids.org websites, as well as the PBS Video app and PBS Kids app for iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV and Chromecast. Some of its programming has also been available on-demand via channels offered by Amazon and Apple, as well as through popular on-demand streaming services like Netflix. And of course, U.S. households can also pick up their local PBS station's signal for free via their digital antenna, or subscribe to cable or satellite TV to access PBS channels. But YouTube TV is the first live TV service to offer PBS stations directly in its app.

In a clear signal of its ambitions for the estimated $91.18 billion AI chip market, Intel this morning announced that it has acquired Habana Labs, an Israel-based developer of programmable AI and machine learning accelerators for cloud data centers. From a report: The deal is worth approximately $2 billion, and Intel says it'll strengthen its AI strategy as Habana begins to sample its proprietary silicon to customers. Habana -- which previously raised $75 million in venture capital last November -- will remain an independent business unit and will continue to be led by its current management team, and it'll report to Intel's data platforms group. Chairman Avigdor Willenz will serve as senior adviser to the business unit as well as to Intel.

"This acquisition advances our AI strategy, which is to provide customers with solutions to fit every performance need -- from the intelligent edge to the data center," said executive vice president and general manager of the data platforms group at Intel Navin Shenoy. "More specifically, Habana turbo-charges our AI offerings for the data center with a high-performance training processor family and a standards-based programming environment to address evolving AI [compute requirements]." Habana offers two silicon products targeting workloads in AI and machine learning: the Gaudi AI Training Processor and the Goya AI Inference Processor.

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials... An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and Jetflix, a large illegal TV streaming service, federal officials said Friday.

With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.

An anonymous reader quotes Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: WebAssembly is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine and this week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) dubbed it an official web standard and the fourth language for the Web that allows code to run in the browser, joining HTML, CSS and JavaScript... With this week's news, WebAssembly has officially reached version 1.0 and is supported in the browser engines for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer, and the Bytecode Alliance launched last month to help ensure "a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default" and for bringing WebAssembly to outside-the-browser use.

Of course, not everything is 100% rosy. As pointed out by an article in The Register, WebAssembly also brings with it an increased level of obfuscation of what exactly is going on, giving it an increased ability to perform some surreptitious actions. For example, they cite one study that "found 'over 50 percent of all sites using WebAssembly apply it for malicious deeds, such as [crypto] mining and obfuscation.'" Nonetheless, with WebAssembly gaining this designation by W3C, it is, indeed, time to pay closer attention to the newly nominated Web language standard.

Cade Metz from The New York Times pays tribute to Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world's first commercial computer. Brooker died on Nov. 20 at the age of 94. From the report: Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its computer lab, which was among the first of its kind. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab's deputy director. When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, "Well, we can always employ someone like you." Soon they were colleagues.

Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 "usable." Mr. Turing had written a user's manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them. It was "extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly," Mr. Brooker said. In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine -- not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware. This marked the beginning of what were later called "high-level" programming languages -- languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.

WireGuard has now been committed to the mainline Linux kernel. "While there are still tests to be made and hoops to be jumped through, it should be released in the next major Linux kernel release, 5.6, in the first or second quarter of 2020," reports ZDNet. From the report: WireGuard has been in development for some time. It is a layer 3 secure VPN. Unlike its older rivals, which it's meant to replace, its code is much cleaner and simple. The result is a fast, easy-to-deploy VPN. While it started as a Linux project, WireGuard code is now cross-platform, and its code is now available on Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, and Android. It took longer to arrive than many wished because WireGuard's principal designer, Jason Donenfeld, disliked Linux's built-in cryptographic subsystem on the grounds its application programming interface (API) was too complex and difficult. He suggested it be supplemented with a new cryptographic subsystem: His own Zinc library. Many developers didn't like this. They saw this as wasting time reinventing the cryptographic well.

But Donenfeld had an important ally. Torvalds wrote, "I'm 1000% with Jason on this. The crypto/ model is hard to use, inefficient, and completely pointless when you know what your cipher or hash algorithm is, and your CPU just does it well directly." In the end, Donenfeld compromised. "WireGuard will get ported to the existing crypto API. So it's probably better that we just fully embrace it, and afterward work evolutionarily to get Zinc into Linux piecemeal." That's exactly what happened. Some Zine elements have been imported into the legacy crypto code in the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel. This laid the foundation for WireGuard to finally ship in Linux early next year.

In 1962, 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming -- and 57 years later, he's still working on it. But he's finally released The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 5: Mathematical Preliminaries Redux; Introduction to Backtracking; Dancing Links.

An anonymous reader writes: On his personal site at Stanford, 81-year-old Donald Knuth promised this newly-released section "will feature more than 650 exercises and their answers, designed for self-study," and he shared an excerpt from "the hype on its back cover":

This fascicle, brimming with lively examples, forms the first third of what will eventually become hardcover Volume 4B. It begins with a 27-page tutorial on the major advances in probabilistic methods that have been made during the past 50 years, since those theories are the key to so many modern algorithms. Then it introduces the fundamental principles of efficient backtrack programming, a family of techniques that have been a mainstay of combinatorial computing since the beginning.

This introductory material is followed by an extensive exploration of important data structures whose links perform delightful dances. That section unifies a vast number of combinatorial algorithms by showing that they are special cases of the general XCC problem --- "exact covering with colors." The first fruits of the author's decades-old experiments with XCC solving are presented here for the first time, with dozens of applications to a dazzling array of questions that arise in amazingly diverse contexts...

Knuth is still offering his famous hexadecimal reward checks (now referred to as "reward certificates," since they're drawn on the imaginary Bank of San Serriffe) to any reader who finds a technical (or typographical) error. "Of course those exercises, like those in Fascicle 6, include many cutting-edge topics that weren't easy for me to boil down into their essentials. So again I'm hoping to receive 'Dear Don' letters...either confirming that at least somebody besides me believes that I did my job properly, or pointing out what I should really have said...."

And to make it easier he's even shared a list of the exercises where he's still "seeking help and reassurance" about the correctness of his answers. "Let me reiterate that you don't have to work the exericse first. You're allowed to peek at the answer; indeed, you're encouraged to do so, in order to verify that the answer is 100% correct."

"Users of an old version of the popular Python language face a reckoning at the end of the year," reports Wired, calling it a programmer's "own version of update hell." The developers who maintain Python, who work for a variety of organizations or simply volunteer their time, say they will stop supporting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 -- more than a decade after the introduction of Python 3 in December 2008. That means no more security fixes or other updates, at least for the official version of Python.

The Python team extended the initial deadline in 2015, after it became apparent that developers needed more time to make the switch.

It's hard to say how many organizations still haven't made the transition. A survey of developers last year by programming toolmaker JetBrains found that 75 percent of respondents use Python 3, up from 53 percent the year before. But data scientist Vicki Boykis points out in an article for StackOverflow that about 40 percent of software packages downloaded from the Python code management system PyPI in September were written in Python 2.7. For many companies, the transition remains incomplete. Even Dropbox, which employed Python creator Guido van Rossum until his retirement last month, still has some Python 2 code to update. Dropbox engineer Max Belanger says shifting the company's core desktop application from Python 2 to Python 3 took three years. "It wasn't a lot of absolute engineering work," Belanger says. "But it took a long time because stability is so important. We wanted to make sure our users didn't feel any effects of the transition."

The transition from Python 2 to 3 is challenging in part because of the number and complexity of other tools that programmers use. Programmers often rely on open source bundles of code known as "libraries" that handle common tasks, such as connecting to databases or verifying passwords. These libraries spare developers from having to rewrite these features from scratch. But if you want to update your code from Python 2 to Python 3, you need to make sure all the libraries you use also have made the switch. "It isn't all happening in isolation," Belanger says. "Everyone has to do it."

Today, the 360 most popular Python packages are all Python 3-compatible, according to the site Python 3 Readiness. But even one obscure library that hasn't updated can cause headaches.
Python's core team is now prioritizing smaller (but more frequent) updates to make it easier to migrate to newer versions, according to the article, noting that Guido Van Rossum "wrote last month that there might not ever be a Python 4. The team could just add features to Python 3 indefinitely that don't break backward compatibility."

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser. From a report: WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A .wasm resource is analogous to a Java .class file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust.

WebAssembly Web API defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a .wasm resource. The structure of a .wasm resource is optimized to allow execution to begin before the entire resource has been retrieved, which further enhances responsiveness of WebAssembly applications.

WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides a JavaScript API for invoking and passing parameters to WebAssembly functions. In Web browsers, WebAssembly's interactions with the host environment are all managed through JavaScript, which means that WebAssembly relies on JavaScript's highly-engineered security model.

The admission comes from the author of the snippet itself, Andreas Lundblad, a Java developer at Palantir, and one of the highest-ranked contributors to StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programming-related topics. From a report: An academic paper [PDF] published in 2018 identified a code snippet Lundblad posted on the site as the most copied Java code taken from StackOverflow and then re-used in open source projects. The code snippet was provided as an answer to a StackOverflow question posted in September 2010. The code snippet printed byte counts (123,456,789 bytes) in a human-readable format, like 123.5 MB. Academics found that this code had been copied and embedded in more than 6,000 GitHub Java projects, more than any other StackOverflow Java snippet. In a blog post published last week, Lundblad said that the code had a flaw as it incorrectly converted byte counts into human-readable formats. Lundblad said he revisited the code after learning of the academic paper and its results. He looked at the code again and published a corrected version on his blog.

Amazon is leveraging machine learning to fight fraud, audit code, transcribe calls, and index enterprise data. From a report: Today during a keynote at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant debuted Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully managed service that detects anomalies in transactions, and CodeGuru, which automates code review while identifying the most "expensive" lines of code. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. With Fraud Detector (in preview), AWS customers provide email addresses, IP addressees, and other historical transaction and account registration data, along with markers indicating which transactions are fraudulent and which are legitimate. Amazon takes that information and uses algorithms -- along with data detectors developed on the consumer business of Amazon's business -- to build bespoke models that recognize things like potentially malicious email domains and IP address formation. After the model is created, customers can create, view, and update rules to enable actions based on model predictions without relying on others.