Category: programming

This looks super impressive and is potentially game-changing. Auto-completion has been around for ages, since the early days of Visual Assist, to Visual Studio Autocomplete. This is another level. It works like GPT-3 in that it tries to suggest whole section of code or a complete function based on comments and other signals. This will be something that companies will pay for. Based on HN comments, alpha testers gave it rave reviews. It’s currently in technical preview. Can’t wait for general availability.

GitHub Copilot works alongside you directly in your editor, suggesting whole lines or entire functions for you.

Source: GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer

ARM-based Graviton2 consistently outperforms Intel x86-based processors in PostgreSQL test by Percona, and it’s 25% cheaper. If your workload is not x86-specific there’s no reason not to switch.

The rise of ARM-based processor is gaining momentum and it seems like Intel is seriously playing catch-up here.

With the second gen of Graviton2 instances announced, we decided to take a look at the price/performance from the standpoint of running PostgreSQL.

Source: PostgreSQL on ARM-based AWS EC2 Instances: Is It Any Good? – Percona Database Performance Blog

A break from the usual articles on cybersecurity. This is a good article that talks about the problems of software development and some strategies for mitigating them:

• starting simple
• focussing on the problem
• iteration
• spending time between expanding features and reducing complexity

Software has characteristics that make it hard to build with traditional management techniques; effective development requires a different, more exploratory and iterative approach.

Source: How to Build Good Software

Unicorn as in the mythical creature, not what VC’s think about.

Like every sentence that has the word “just”, this is at best horribly simplistic but mostly plain wrong. Let’s dive in more detail into this. If you look up simple Makefiles on the Internet, you might find something like this page. It starts with a very simple (but useless) Makefile and eventually improves it to this:

Source: Nibble Stew – a gathering of development thoughts: “A simple makefile” is a unicorn

At the current stage it could help front-end developers in some of the grunt work in converting design templates into code. Some would go further to think that it will eliminate web development jobs. That is certainly not the case, as modern websites are not static “pages” but more like applications. Someone will still need to design the behaviour and logic.

In this post, we’ll teach a neural network how to code a basic a HTML and CSS website based on a picture of a design mockup. Here’s a quick overview of the process:

Turning Design Mockups Into Code With Deep Learning

See how closed API reverse engineering typically happens.

Now that I was able to sign and fingerprint my login requests, I combined everything into a small Node.js module that allows some basic Starbucks API functions. The good news is that it’s (mostly) hosted here on GitHub!

Voilà! Programmatic coffee.

Source: Starbucks should really make their APIs public. – Tendigi