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Last year, a longtime engineer at Facebook Inc. gathered data that revealed a controversial finding: Code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues, according to people familiar with the matter and screenshots of internal discussions viewed by The Wall Street Journal. For many female engineers at Facebook, the finding confirmed long-held suspicions that their coding faced more scrutiny than men’s. The results touched off a debate within Facebook over alleged gender bias among some of its most-valued employees: the engineers who build the features used by nearly two billion people every month....

20 Best Programming Languages In 2017 Over the years, hundreds of programming languages have come into existence. And, with the revolution of internet and the technological advances that come with it show no sign of slowing down. As a result, there are lots of companies who are on the lookout for people with right skills so that they can get the most from the digital economy and single market. It has also created promising careers for technical professionals who are looking for long-term opportunities in the software development industry.However, the digital age brings its own challenges, and not least the...

The bootcamps promise 12-week immersive training programs, but critics say high job placement numbers may not be credible. Will federal loans help or undermine credibility and costs? To many students and career-changers hoping to gain programming skills and break into the lucrative tech world, coding bootcamps can seem like a promising option. Since 2012, such bootcamps have offered hands-on, intensive technical training in as little as 12 weeks, boasting job placements as high as 98 or 99 percent once students complete the program. But while advocates pitch them as an alternative to a traditional degree program, critics point to their...

The results of Stack Overflow’s annual survey show the most popular programming languages among developers. Stack Overflow recently published the results of its annual developer survey, revealing its findings on the most popular programming languages.Over 50,000 developers from 173 countries responded to the survey.Stack Overflow said it also augmented some of the results with insights from the activity of its 40 million monthly visitors.It found that JavaScript remains the most popular technology among developers, with SQL and SQL Server a close second.“PHP appears to be falling out of favour as Node and Angular emerge,” said Stack Overflow. Most popular tech...

across the UK today as part of digital literacy initiative Almost one million school children across the UK will today receive their very own micro computer thanks to a “landmark” BBC initiative. Every Year 7 student in England and Wales, Year 8 student in Northern Ireland and S1 student in Scotland will be handed, for free, a BBC micro:bit computer specially designed to help pupils learn to code. The pocket-sized micro:bit is part of the BBC’s Make it Digital initiative, and aims to get schoolchildren and teachers alike of all abilities learn the basics of making computer programs by teaching...

I have an idea for a brilliant, sarcastic Conservative phone app called "Happy Safe Space Filter" that would be a wonderfully hot ticket with Conservatives, and/or Sarcastic Teenagers. It could either be a freebie for the Cause, or in true Capitalist fashion, would probably sell well at 99 cents. (The joke works I a lot of ways, but would include a little body copy crediting Conservatives.) I claim the idea and would be willing to give it up for 10% of gross. It is a pretty simple thing. If you have App writing experience, please message me here on Free...

The Python Programming Language is rising in popularity in Tiobe's monthly language index, reaching an all-time high of fourth place this month, up from fifth place last month. The language now has a rating of 4.429 percent, an increase of more than 2 percent from a year ago, when it was ranked eighth. "[Python is] easy to learn, available everywhere, and embraced by industry. Python is the current standard in scripting," a report accompanying the index said. Tiobe uses a formula involving searches on popular search engines to gauge language popularity. In an email, Paul Jansen, managing director at Tiobe,...

C# is making its way past Java as the most popular programming language in the workplace, according to SD Times readers.While Java sits on top of the TIOBE Programming Community index for August 2015, with C# coming in at No. 4, our latest poll shows C# is the No. 1 language used in the workplace, with Java and C/C++ following.Out of 1,166 votes, 37% of developers voted for C#, 20% voted for Java, and 17% voted for C/C++. The least-popular programming languages used at work, according to the poll, included Python/Ruby/Perl and Objective-C/Swift.A more detailed breakdown of the poll...

As humans, we make intuitive choices every day about how to empty the bin, sort laundry or the best way to get to work.  But robots have a far more difficult time choosing from a never-ending list of possible actions.  To make robots respond in a more human-like way to tasks, researchers have developed an algorithm and are teaching machines to use it through an unlikely source - playing Minecraft. The algorithm was developed by computer scientists at Brown University.  It is designed to help robots better plan their actions in complex environments and use these skills in the real...

The apps and games you use every day don't exist in a vacuum — someone, somewhere, wrote the code. That also goes for the underlying platforms and hardware that those apps run on. And the web. And the entire Internet itself. Even the programming languages that people use to build this stuff first had to be written by somebody else. So who's at the top of the programming pyramid? 1) Linus Torvalds created Linux, a free operating system, in his dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux is the operating system of choice for data centers, supercomputers, and...

Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude. Over at Google, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor. Here’s part of the exchange, as related in a paper presented this week: Human: Tell me the definition of morality. Machine: I don’t have ethics. Human: Look, I need help; I need to know...

"Software is eating the world," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously declared. Someone has to write that software. Why not you? There are thousands of programming languages, but some are far more popular than others. When a company goes out to find new programming talent, they're looking for people familiar with the languages and systems they already use — and they don't always want to experiment with newcomers like Google Go or Apple Swift. Here are the programming languages you should learn if you always want to have a job, as suggested by the popular TIOBE Index and Redmonk Programming Language...

Menuet's kernel includes pre-emptive multitasking support and the super-compact operating system includes an impressive GUI MenuetOS, a GUI-toting, x86-based operating system written entirely in assembly language, has hit version 1.0. The milestone comes after almost a decade and a half of development for the operating system, which despite having an impressive graphical user interface is still compact enough to fit on a floppy disk (assuming you can find one). The 32-bit version of the system is released as open source until the GPL, while the 64-bit version is free for personal and educational use (commercial use requires negotiating with the...

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

An Oprah-inspired program in public schools described by critics as an intrusive, emotionally manipulative effort with the laudable goal of ending bullying, cliques, gossip and other such behaviors, has been presented to a million students in 400 cities in 47 states. Challenge Day, the subject of the 2010 MTV series, “If You Really Knew Me,” promises to provide schools and communities with “experiential programs that demonstrate the possibility of love and connection through the celebration of diversity, truth, and full expression.” But critics contend Challenge Day, an independent, nonprofit program, can do more harm than good and pose a danger...

Apple's new programming language Swift promises to be easier and faster to code with and more secure. Swift promises to blaze past Objective-C and Python, with complex object sort 3.9 times faster and RC4 encryption 220 times faster than Python. Federighi promised that developers simply won't be able to make entire classes of errors that currently plague them, even though code written in Swift will be able to run alongside current Objective-C code.

Snip What You Can Do It is important that people give Mozilla pushback--and a lot of it--because the less people suffer the consequences of this kind of behavior, the more it will be invited in the future. You want Christians to experience a new and even worse persecution than what they're facing now? Do nothing. You want to fight back? Here's what you can do . . .   1) Mozilla has a web page where you can leave feedback on its Firefox browser. THAT WEB PAGE IS HERE. At the time of this writing, the feedback in the last...

Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback. Have mercy: It looks like C# is staging a comeback.CodeEval has named its top coding languages for 2014, and we see a couple of interesting surprises. Year-over-year, C# was the second-fastest growing language. And Internet powerhouse PHP was the biggest loser, down 55 percent from 2012.We took a look at the trends from 2011 through 2013, and here’s what we found:By volume, Python and Java reigned supreme. But Java, as you can see, is something of an ailing giant despite the popularity of Android with consumers.When you look at...

Members of the University of Michigan Black Student Union said they would have to resort to “physical action” if a list of seven demands issued on Martin Luther King Day are not met within seven days, The Ann Arbor News reported. “If negotiations are not complete we will be forced to do more, beginning to increase valiantly our activism for social progress and take physical actions on the University of Michigan’s campus,” said senior Shayla Scales to a group of students gathered on campus, according to the Ann Arbor News. The seven demands, read aloud by an activist associated with...