AmiMoJo writes: Mozilla's engineers have announced the removal of Firefox complete themes as a way to lighten the browser core and remove a feature they don't see as heavily used any more. "Personas", or lightweight themes that are basically just wallpaper images, will remain. The Firefox community did not respond well to this piece of news, most seeing it as the engineers "chromifying Firefox." The change is part of Mozilla's Great-or-Dead initiative, which plans to simplify the Firefox codebase and remove features that are not popular.

Jeff Atwood is an author, entrepreneur, and software developer. He runs the popular programming blog Coding Horror and is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. In early 2012 he decided to leave Stack Exchange so he could spend more time with his family. A year later he announced his new company the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. and the Discourse open-source discussion platform which aims to improve conversations on the internet. Jeff has agreed to give some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

smaxp writes: Google has announced the open source release of TensorFlow, its machine learning software library. "TensorFlow has extensive built-in support for deep learning, but is far more general than that -- any computation that you can express as a computational flow graph, you can compute with TensorFlow (see some examples). Any gradient-based machine learning algorithm will benefit from TensorFlow’s auto-differentiation and suite of first-rate optimizers. And it’s easy to express your new ideas in TensorFlow via the flexible Python interface." This comes alongside some dramatic speed increases (PDF). The code is available at GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. "Deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are all some of Google's core competencies, where the company leads Apple and Microsoft. If successful, Google's strategy is to maintain this lead by putting its technology out in the open to improve it based on large-scale adoption and code contributions from the community at large.

New submitter shakah writes: The NY Times has a straightforward summary of how the H-1B Visa system is being gamed by companies inside and outside of the United States. Particularly interesting for me was their clarification on the argument that "VISA holders have to make prevailing wages, so they won't depress wages." Quoting: "Under federal rules, employers like TCS, Infosys and Wipro that have large numbers of H-1B workers in the United States are required to declare that they will not displace American workers. But the companies are exempt from that requirement if the H-1B workers are paid at least $60,000 a year. H-1B workers at outsourcing firms often receive wages at or slightly above $60,000, below what skilled American technology professionals tend to earn, so those firms can offer services to American companies at a lower cost, undercutting American workers."

digitalPhant0m writes: Six years ago today the Go language was released as an open source project. Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the project's 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories. And, offline, we see new Go events and user groups pop up around the world with regularity And Opensource.com notes that Mozilla Firefox has just hit 11 years of age, too.

theodp writes: "Mnemonic operators," writes SAS's Rick Wicklin as he weighs the pros-and-cons of Symbolic Versus Mnemonic Logical Operators, "tend to appear in older languages like FORTRAN, whereas symbolic operators are common in more recent languages like C/C++, although some relatively recent scripting languages like Perl, PHP, and Windows PowerShell also support mnemonic operators. SAS software has supported both operators in the DATA step since the very earliest days, but the SAS/IML language, which is more mathematically oriented, supports only the symbolic operators. Functionally, the operators are equivalent, so which ones you use is largely a matter of personal preference. Since consistency and standards are essential when writing computer programming, which operators should you choose?"

An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Breen from the FoxGlove Security team is calling attention to what he calls the "most underrated, underhyped vulnerability of 2015." It's a remote code execution exploit that affects the latest versions of WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, and OpenMMS, and many other pieces of software. How? An extremely common Java library. He says, "No one gave it a fancy name, there were no press releases, nobody called Mandiant to come put out the fires. In fact, even though proof of concept code was released over 9 months ago, none of the products mentioned in the title of the blog post have been patched, along with many more. In fact no patch is available for the Java library containing the vulnerability. In addition to any commercial products that are vulnerable, this also affects many custom applications.

An anonymous reader writes: Ian Cordasco, a prolific open source developer, wrote a lengthy post about his experiences working on code that gets used by companies as part of their business. His basic thesis is that the open source development process is not particularly compatible with for-profit corporations, and having them involved frequently makes progress more difficult. "As soon as a bug affects them, they want it fixed immediately. If you don't fix it in 24 hours (because maybe you have a real life or a family or you're sick or any number of other very valid reasons) then the threats start." He adds, "When companies do 'contribute,' it's often not in the best interest of the community, it isn't enough, or it's thoroughly misguided." Cordasco is quick to note that there are exceptions, but he has an idea why the majority behave that way: "I don't have the complete answer, but one important point is that there is toxicity in the community, its leaders, and or its contributors, and the companies have learned their behavior from this toxicity." He provides a list of suggestions both for companies using open source software, and also some further reading on the subject from Ashe Dryden, David MacIver, and Cory Benfield.

An anonymous reader writes: A couple weeks ago we discussed a project from a software team within the U.S. General Services Administration. Its goal was to set up a portal to let developers bid on the creation of open source code needed by the government. From the beginning, they said it was an experiment, and now the results are in from their first project. The project was quickly bid all the way down to $1, and on Wednesday, the winner delivered a functional solution that met their criteria. They say, "When we received the $1 bid, we immediately tried to figure out whether it was intentional, whether it was from a properly registered company, and whether we could award $1. We contacted the bidder and we confirmed that the bid was valid, that the registration on SAM.gov was current, and that the bid would be the winning bid. It was a plot twist that no one here at 18F expected. This unexpected development will no doubt force us to rethink some of our assumptions about the reverse-auction model." Despite their surprise, the team feels this is proof that the system can succeed. They're now working to refine the process.

An anonymous reader writes: A new piece of ransomware has been discovered that targets Linux servers, looking to encrypt only files that are related to Web hosting, Web servers, MySQL, Subversion, Git, and other technologies used in Web development and HTTP servers. Weirdly, despite targeting business environments, the ransomware only asks for 1 Bitcoin, a fairly low amount compared to other ransomware.

SpacemanukBEJY.53u writes: A Denver-based mobile app development company, Possible Mobile, had a tough time figuring out why Apple recently rejected its app from the App Store. After a lot of head scratching, it eventually found the XcodeGhost malware hidden in an unlikely place — a third-party framework that it had wrapped into its own app. Their experience shows that the efforts of malware writers can have far-ranging effects on the mobile app component supply chain.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Ah, the famous "Google-style" algorithmic coding interview. If you've never had one of these interviews before, the idea is to see if you can write code that's not only correct, but efficient, too. You can expect to spend lots of time diagramming data structures and talking about big O notation. Popular hits include "reverse a linked list in place," "balance a binary search tree," and "find the missing number in an array." Like it or not, a "Google-style" coding interview may stand between you and your next job, so it's in your interest to figure out how to deal with it. Parker Phinney, founder of Interview Cake, uses a Dice column to break down a variety of example problems and then solve them. But it's not just about mastering the most common kinds of problems by rote memorization; it's also about recognizing the patterns that underlie those problems.

New submitter nervouscat writes: Game designer Ian Bogost argues that programmers shouldn't use the term "engineer" to describe themselves. He says the tech industry has "cheapened" the title, and that it's more aspirational than anything else. Quoting: "Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver. ... Today’s computer systems pose individual and communal dangers that we’d never accept in more concrete structures like bridges, skyscrapers, power plants, and missile-defense systems. Apple’s iOS 9 update reportedly “bricked” certain phones, making them unusable. Services like Google Docs go down for mysterious reasons, leaving those whose work depends on them in a lurch. ... When it comes to skyscrapers and bridges and power plants and elevators and the like, engineering has been, and will continue to be, managed partly by professional standards, and partly by regulation around the expertise and duties of engineers. But fifty years’ worth of attempts to turn software development into a legitimate engineering practice have failed."

HughPickens.com writes: We've all read about standing desks and treadmill desks but now Rachel Gillet reports at Business Insider about the Altwork Station, a workstation that allows users to sit, stand, and recline while they work on their computers. Designed to accomodate two computer screens, the manufacturer says their new product is the ultimate combination for workplace productivity. "Most experts agree that humans should change positions and move throughout the day. We believe movement throughout the day is important," says the company who targets "high intensity" computer users, which it defines as people who spend at least four hours a day in front of a computer and are required to focus on complex tasks for extended periods of time. If the $5,900 ($3,900, if you pre-order) reclining workstation is not for you, there are other options you may want to consider including the scooter desk, bicycle desk, and hamster wheel desk.

New submitter Andrey_Karpov writes: Cfront is a C++ compiler which came into existence in 1983 and was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup ("30 YEARS OF C++"). At that time it was known as "C with Classes". Cfront had a complete parser, symbol tables, and built a tree for each class, function, etc. Cfront was based on CPre. Cfront defined the language until circa 1990. Many of the obscure corner cases in C++ are related to the Cfront implementation limitations. The reason is that Cfront performed translation from C++ to C. In short, Cfront is a sacred artifact for a C++ programmer. So I just couldn't help checking such a project [for bugs].

theodp writes: As part of our Made with Code and media perception initiatives," wrote YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki over at the Official Google Blog, "I'm excited that we're supporting award-winning documentary filmmaker Lesley Chilcott — of An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman [and Code.org] fame — on her next film, CodeGirl. Until November 5 Lesley's film will be available for free on YouTube, before its theatrical debut in the next few weeks." Microsoft is pretty jazzed about the movie too, as is Al Gore. Decidedly less excited about CodeGirl is film critic Inkoo Kang, who writes, "CodeGirl, a chronicle of this year's Technovation contest, is just as well-intentioned as its subject. It coasts for as long as it can on the feel-good fuel of watching smart, earnest girls talk about creating an app, but with virtually no tension, context, narrative or characterization driving the story, the documentary grows to feel like a parent describing their daughter's involvement in an international competition. The girls' achievements are impressive, but you definitely don't want to hear about them for nearly two hours.

itwbennett writes: In September, more than 4,000 applications were found to have been modified with a counterfeit version of Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost. On Tuesday, FireEye said in a blog post that it has detected 210 enterprises that are still using infected apps, showing that the XcodeGhost malware 'is a persistent security risk.' In addition, whomever created XcodeGhost has also developed a new version that can target iOS 9, called XcodeGhost S, FireEye wrote.

An anonymous reader writes: Software engineer Adrian Courrèges posted on his blog a breakdown of the rendering of a frame in Grand Theft Auto: V. Each rendering pass is explained in detail, with all the techniques and the tricks Rockstar used to make the game run on 8-year-old consoles. It's a fascinating trip through the making of a frame and reminds us of how far GPU computing power has come. Here's a brief snippet from the beginning: "As a first step, the game renders a cubemap of the environment. This cubemap is generated in realtime at each frame, its purpose is to help render realistic reflections later. This part is forward-rendered. How is such cubemap rendered? For those not familiar with the technique, this is just like you would do in the real world when taking a panoramic picture: put the camera on a tripod, imagine you’re standing right in the middle of a big cube and shoot at the 6 faces of the cube, one by one, rotating by 90 degrees each time. This is exactly how the game does: each face is rendered into a 128x128 HDR texture."

An anonymous reader writes: Apple's new set top box is on sale now, and has launched with several high profile games in the new tvOS App Store, including Guitar Hero Live and PS4 hit Transistor. However, as one writer points out, the Apple TV is still not an adequate console replacement, and it's not because of the graphics. Instead, several software issues and restrictions issued by Apple itself prevent developers from creating blockbuster exclusives for the platform, including the requirement that all games be playable using the bundled remote, lack of support for four players, and the 200MB initial app download limit. If these remain in place, can the Apple TV become a viable games platform, where the Ouya and PlayStation TV have failed before?

LichtSpektren writes: Andrew Tanenbaum, author of MINIX, writes: 'MINIX has been around now for about 30 years so it is (finally) time for the MINIXers to have a conference to get together, just as Linuxers and BSDers have been doing for a long time. The idea is to exchange ideas and experiences among MINIX 3 developers and users as well as discussing possible paths forward now that the ERC funding is over. Future developments will now be done like in any other volunteer-based open-source project. Increasing community involvement is a key issue here. Attend or give a presentation.' The con will be held on 1 February 2016 at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.