Brian Merchant, writing for The Atlantic (condensed for space): In 2016, an anonymous confession appeared on Reddit: "From around six years ago up until now, I have done nothing at work." As far as office confessions go, that might seem pretty tepid. But this coder, posting as FiletOFish1066, said he worked for a well-known tech company, and he really meant nothing. He wrote that within eight months of arriving on the quality assurance job, he had fully automated his entire workload. When his bosses realized that he'd worked less in half a decade than most Silicon Valley programmers do in a week, they fired him. [...]

About a year later, someone calling himself or herself Etherable posted a query to Workplace on Stack Exchange, one of the web's most important forums for programmers: "Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I've automated my job?" The conflicted coder described accepting a programming gig that had turned out to be "glorified data entry" -- and, six months ago, writing scripts that put the entire job on autopilot. After that, "what used to take the last guy like a month, now takes maybe 10 minutes." The job was full-time, with benefits, and allowed Etherable to work from home. The program produced near-perfect results; for all management knew, their employee simply did flawless work.

The post proved unusually divisive, and comments flooded in. Reactions split between those who felt Etherable was cheating, or at least deceiving, the employer, and those who thought the coder had simply found a clever way to perform the job at hand. [...] Call it self-automation, or auto-automation. At a moment when the specter of mass automation haunts workers, rogue programmers demonstrate how the threat can become a godsend when taken into coders' hands, with or without their employers' knowledge. Since both FiletOFish1066 and Etherable posted anonymously and promptly disappeared, neither were able to be reached for comment. But their stories show that workplace automation can come in many forms and be led by people other than executives.

Last year, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak announced a coding program called Woz U that's designed with the goal of offering an affordable education. "Our goal is to educate and train people in employable digital skills without putting them into years of debt," Wozniak said last fall. "People often are afraid to choose a technology-based career because they think they can't do it. I know they can, and I want to show them how."

Now that a round of students have been through the 33-week program, a number of problems have appeared. Former student, Bill Duerr, called the program "broken," and that "lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia." 9to5Mac reports: "Duerr said typos in course content were one of many problems. So-called 'live lectures' were pre-recorded and out of date, student mentors were unqualified, and at one point, one of his courses didn't even have an instructor," reports CBS. CBS heard from over 24 current and former students and employees that reiterated Duerr's experiences. Instead of a quality program, Duerr said Woz U was comparable to an ultra expensive e-book: "'I feel like this is a $13,000 e-book,' Duerr said. While it was supposed to be a program written by one of the greatest tech minds of all time, 'it's broken, it's not working in places, lots of times there's just hyperlinks to Microsoft documents, to Wikipedia,' he said."

A former Woz U enrollment counselor said that at times he had to do things that didn't feel right: "Asked whether he regrets working for Woz U, Mionske said, 'I regret in the aspect to where they're spending this money for, it's like rolling the dice. [...] But on the reverse side, I have to support my family.'" According to Business Insider, Steve Wozniak said that he's "not involved" in the "operational aspects" of Woz U and doesn't know anything about the report this morning.

Jeremy Horwitz, writing for VentureBeat: An obscure feature in Apple's Xcode development software enabled Apple Watch apps to make an instant transition from 32-bit to 64-bit last month, an unheralded win for Apple Watch developers inside and outside the company. The "Enable Bitcode" feature was introduced to developers three years ago, but the Accidental Tech Podcast suggests that it was quietly responsible for the smooth launch of software for the Apple Watch Series 4 last month.

Support for Bitcode was originally added to Xcode 7 in November 2015, subsequently becoming optional for iOS apps but mandatory for watchOS and tvOS apps. Bitcode is an "intermediate representation" halfway between human-written app code and machine code. Rather than the developer sending a completely compiled app to the App Store, enabling Bitcode provides Apple with a partially compiled app that it can then finish compiling for whatever processors it wants to support. The report suggests that this change allowed Apple to avoid the great "appocalypse" which occurred when it decided to kill support for 32-bit apps on iOS.

Long time reader theodp writes: Facebook last week announced the launch of CodeFWD, "a free online education program created in partnership with [robotic toy maker] Sphero to increase the amount of underrepresented and female students interested in studying computer science." Sphero and CodeFWD are offering a free Sphero BOLT Power Pack (a classroom set of 15 robots valued at $2,499) for a select number of accepted applicants through the program. So, what do you need to begin CodeFWD by Facebook? "No experience necessary. No experience preferred ," explains the website. However, that's not to say CodeFWD is for all. "CodeFWD is intended for educators who are credentialed K-12 teachers or 501(c)(3) non-profit staff members in the United States," the website makes clear, adding that "given the limited supply of robots, we will evaluate the information you've provided and prioritize those applications that help us achieve the goal of expanding access to computer programming opportunities." And Facebook, being Facebook, adds that it wants some data out of the deal: "Please note that Facebook will have access to aggregate, anonymous usage data from Sphero, but will not have access to user-identifiable data collected by Sphero."

Shadma Shaikh, reporting for FactorDaily: Chetan Gowda, 27, was speaking to a room full of students in IIIT Hyderabad for a workshop on OpenStreetMap for beginners organized by Swecha, a non-profit organization to support free software movement last month. There were close to 40 students in the room. Beginners often ask him: Why use open source maps when we already have Google Maps? For Gowda, it was the fact that Google Maps is a global, commercial product and did not capture local detail. Like the old banyan tree that was a major landmark in his hometown Hassan or public benches just outside the town where pedestrians could stop to catch a break or fire catchment areas in Bellandur lake in Bengaluru, India.

"It was fascinating to add little but important details of my town to open maps," says Gowda who was introduced in 2013 to OSM or OpenStreetMap, a global community of mappers formed as a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world in 2004. Since then he has been an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and has conducted many workshops in colleges and institutes to induct more people in the community. Gowda has made 8500 edits in the OpenStreetMap, mainly covering areas in Bengaluru, Hassan and Hyderabad. Gowda and a few other contributors from India are part of a tiny yet growing resistance movement which doesn't want giant corporations to own all the mapping data. For the average consumer, this may not seem like a big deal. But mapping is big business.

The market opportunity for suppliers of mapping to the autonomous car industry is going to be worth over $24 billion by 2050, according to one estimate [PDF]. And that's just one industry. A study commissioned by Google in 2015 estimated that industries that run on top of the Global Positioning Satellite Systems and mapping generate nearly $73 billion in annual revenue. Worldwide, that industry is was estimated to generate $150- $270 billion in revenues. Although new research isn't available, with growing smartphone usage and the birth of companies such as Uber and many others it is safe to assume that the industry has only grown bigger. All the more reason why map data can't be held by only a few companies. With Google Maps beginning to charge small and medium-sized businesses and indie developers more for access to its platform, many have started to explore and switch to open source alternatives of Maps, and commercial services such as Here Maps.

Further reading: What OpenStreetMap Can Be, and Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth.

"There is a kind of programming trap I occasionally fall into that is so damn irritating that it needs a name," writes Eric S. Raymond, in a new blog post: The task is easy to specify and apparently easy to write tests for. The code can be instrumented so that you can see exactly what is going on during every run. You think you have a complete grasp on the theory. It's the kind of thing you think you're normally good at, and ought to be able to polish off in 20 LOC and 45 minutes.

And yet, success eludes you for an insanely long time. Edge cases spring up out of nowhere to mug you. Every fix you try drags you further off into the weeds. You stare at dumps from the instrumentation until you're dizzy and numb, and no enlightenment occurs. Even as you are bashing your head against a wall of incomprehension, consciousness grows that when you find the solution, it will be damningly simple and you will feel utterly moronic, like you should have gotten there days ago.

Welcome to programmer hell. This is your shtoopid problem.... If you ever find yourself staring at your instrumentation results and thinking "It...can't...possibly...be...doing...that", welcome to shtoopidland. Here's your mallet, have fun pounding your own head. (Cue cartoon sound effects.)
Raymond's latest experience in shtoopidland came while working on a Python-translating tool, and left him analyzing why there's some programming conundrums that repel solutions. "You're not defeated by what you don't know so much as by what you think you do know," he concludes. So how do you escape?

"[I]nstrument everything. I mean EVERYTHING, especially the places where you think you are sure what is going on. Your assumptions are your enemy; printf-equivalents are your friend. If you track every state change in the your code down to a sufficient level of detail, you will eventually have that forehead-slapping moment of why didn't-I-see-this-sooner that is the terminal characteristic of a shtoopid problem."

Share your own stories in the comments. Are there any programmers on Slashdot who've experienced their own shtoopid problems?

Mads Torgersen, the lead designer of C# at Microsoft, remembers "Project Roslyn," which built an open-source, cross-platform compiler for C# and Visual Basic.NET "in the deepest darkness of last decade's corporate Microsoft: We would build a language engine! A unified, public API to C# code: We would redefine the meaning of "compiler". Of course, once you are building an API for the broad C# community, it is kind of a slam-dunk that it should be a .NET API, implemented in C#. So, the old dream of "bootstrapping" C# in C# was fulfilled almost as an accidental side benefit. Roslyn was thus born out of an openness mindset: sharing the inner workings of the C# language for the world to programmatically consume.

This in and of itself was a bit of a bold proposition in what was still a pervasively closed culture at Microsoft: We would share this intellectual property for free? We would empower tool builders that weren't us to better compete with us? The arguments that won the day for us here were about strengthening the ecosystem and becoming the best tooled language on the planet. They were about long-term growth of C# and .NET, versus short term monetization and protection of assets for Microsoft. So even without having mentioned open source, signing up for the cost and risk of the Roslyn project was a big and bold step for Microsoft....

F# released already in 2010 with an open source license and its own foundation -- the F# Software Foundation. The vibrant community that grew up around it soon became the envy of us all. Our team pushed strongly to have an open source production license for Roslyn, and finally a company-wide infrastructure emerged to make it real. By 2012, Microsoft had created Microsoft Open Tech; an organization specifically focused on open source projects. Roslyn moved under Microsoft Open Tech and officially became open source... C# language design and compiler implementation are now completely open processes, with lots of non-Microsoft participation, including whole language features being built by external contributors.
Torgersen's article says C# now enjoys "the scaling of effort via contribution of features and bug fixes, but also the insight and course correction we get through the instant, daily feedback loop that open source provides.

"It's been a long and wild journey, and one that to me is symbolic of the massive changes that Microsoft has undergone over the last decade."

This week InfoWorld unveiled their annual list of "the leading open source projects for software development, cloud computing, big data, and machine learning." [E]ven as we grapple with the likes of microservice architecture, distributed data processing frameworks, deep neural networks, and "dapps," we remain steadfast in our commitment to bring you -- this year and every year -- the best that open source has to offer.

In this year's edition, you'll find our picks for the best open source software development tools, cloud computing platforms, databases and data analytics tools, and machine learning and deep learning libraries. From Kubernetes and Docker to TensorFlow and PyTorch (49 projects in all), these are the projects that are ushering in the next stage of enterprise computing.
An anonymous reader writes: Their choices for the best open source software for software development include .NET Core, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, and Jenkins, as well as programming languages like Kotlin, Julia, and Rust. ("By now it's something of a cliche to talk about Rust as the next step beyond C and C++. So be it...") And their final award for best open source development software went, surprisingly, to Vanilla JS.

"Some clever wag created a website that promises that the Vanilla JS library will be the smallest JS framework you'll ever use and then delivers a zip file with zero bytes of code along with the suggestion that you should just use the built-in function calls in JavaScript to manipulate the DOM."

schwit1 shared an article from the New York Times: When investigative journalist Julia Angwin worked for ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization became known as "Big Tech's scariest watchdog." By partnering with programmers and data scientists, Angwin pioneered the work of studying Big Tech's algorithms -- the secret codes that have an enormous effect on everyday American life... Now, with a $20 million gift from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting the Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be the Markup's executive director. Angwin and Larson said that they would hire two dozen journalists for its New York office and that stories would start going up on the website in early 2019...

Angwin, who was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for coverage of corporate corruption, said the newsroom would be guided by the scientific method, and each story would begin with a hypothesis... At the Markup, journalists will be partnered with a programmer from a story's inception until its completion. "To investigate technology, you need to understand technology," said Angwin, 47... Newmark, who splits his time between San Francisco and New York, has for years kept a low profile. But he worries about what he sees as a lack of self-reflection among engineers. "Sometimes it takes an engineer a while to understand that we need help, then we get that help, and then we do a lot better," Newmark said. "We need the help that only investigative reporting with good data science can provide...."

Engineers being surprised by the tools they have made is, to the Markup team, part of the problem. "Part of the premise of the Markup is the level of understanding technology and its effects is very, very low, and we would all benefit from a broader understanding," Gardner said. "And I would include people who work for the companies."
Larson laments a world where programs handle crucial decisions, and "once they go into production, there's no oversight..." Or, as he says earlier, "Increasingly, algorithms are used as shorthand for passing the buck." The Markup's site promises " a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom" offering independent analysis of how technology is re-shaping everything from what we believe to "who goes to prison versus who remains free." The site's donations page adds that "We strive for fairness and independence and for us, the best way to achieve that is to operate without ads or a paywall."

Angwin tells Recode that she grew up in Steve Jobs' neighborhood in Palo Alto, and in a long interview reveals that she learned to program in a fifth grade class that a public-spirited Steve Jobs funded. Now the Times points out that the Markup "will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does."

After breaking into the top three most popular programming languages for the first time this month, behind C and Java, Python has also won the hearts of hackers and web nasties, according to attack statistics published this week by web security biz Imperva. From a report: The company says more than a third of daily attacks against sites the company protects come from a malicious or legitimate tool coded in Python. Imperva says that around 77 percent of all the sites the company protects, have been attacked by at least one Python-based tool. Furthermore, when the company looked at the list of tools that hackers used for their attacks, more than a quarter were coded in Python, by far the attackers' favorite tool. "Hackers, like developers, enjoy Python's advantages which makes it a popular hacking tool," the Imperva team says.

Xbox's Phil Spencer announced today that mouse and keyboard support is coming to Xbox One. Crytek's Warface will be the first game to test the feature when it becomes available in October via the Xbox Insider Program. IGN reports: The idea behind mouse and keyboard support will be as a tool for developers, so they can choose how they want the control style integrated, if they want it integrated at all. "If you're a dominant FPS player right now on controller and you're worried that all the sudden you're gonna get swamped because a bunch of mouse and keyboard players are gonna get flooded into your game, that's not what we're doing," said Spencer. "We're putting choice into the hands of the developers about the games that they want to bring." We can expect to hear more about mouse and keyboard support during the XO18 fan event in Mexico City on November 10.

Despite its advanced age, Cobol is still the most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide. Software programmed in Cobol powers millions of banking transactions every day and underpins critical computer mainframes. WSJ: And Cobol isn't going away anytime soon. Banks and other companies have come to the uncomfortable realization that ripping out old mainframes is pricey and complicated. Transitioning to new systems is likely to take years, and besides, a lot of the older tech works just fine. The problem is that Cobol isn't popular with new programmers. So, with a generation of Cobol specialists retiring, there is a continuing hunt to find a new generation of programmers to service this technology. In Texas, Mr. Hinshaw's (an anecdote in the story) company, the Cobol Cowboys, a group of mostly older programmers, is training U.S. military veterans in the programming language. Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks. In Malaysia, one consultancy that provides engineers versed in Cobol for its clients, iTAc MSC Outsourcing, has adopted the slogan "Keeping the Dinosaurs Alive." A host of companies offer online courses in Cobol in places like South Africa, India and Bangladesh. Developing economies are key technology-outsourcing centers for banks. Further reading: Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On COBOL, Now Scrambling To Find IT 'Cowboys' To Keep Things Afloat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: [A] software remedy can't solve Subaru's issue with 293 of its 2019 Ascent SUVs. All 293 of the SUVs that were built in July will be scrapped because they are missing critical spot welds. According to Subaru's recall notice [PDF] filed with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the welding robots at the Subaru Indiana Automotive plant in Lafayette, Ind., were improperly coded, which meant the robots omitted the spot welds required on the Ascents' B-pillar. Consumer Reports states that the B-pillar holds the second-row door hinges. As a result, the strength of the affected Ascents' bodies may be reduced, increasing the possibility of passenger injuries in a crash. Subaru indicated in the recall that "there is no physical remedy available; therefore, any vehicles found with missing welds will be destroyed." Luckily, only nine Ascents had been sold, and those customers are going to receive new vehicles. The rest were on dealer lots or in transit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Computer historians have staged a re-enactment of World War Two code-cracking at Bletchley Park. A replica code-breaking computer called a Bombe was used to decipher a message scrambled by an Enigma machine. Held at the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC), the event honored Polish help with wartime code-cracking. Enigma machines were used extensively by the German army and navy during World War Two. This prompted a massive effort by the Allies to crack the complex method they employed to scramble messages. That effort was co-ordinated via Bletchley Park and resulted in the creation of the Bombe, said Paul Kellar who helps to keep a replica machine running at the museum. Renowned mathematician Alan Turing was instrumental in the creation of the original Bombe.

For its re-enactment, TNMOC recruited a team of 12 and used a replica Bombe that, until recently, had been on display at the Bletchley Park museum next door. The electro-mechanical Bombe was designed to discover which settings the German Enigma operators used to scramble their messages. As with World War Two messages, the TNMOC team began with a hint or educated guess about the content of the message, known as a "crib," which was used to set up the Bombe. The machine then cranked through the millions of possible combinations until it came to a "good stop," said Mr Kellar. This indicated that the Bombe had found key portions of the settings used to turn readable German into gobbledygook. After that, said Mr Kellar, it was just a matter of time before the 12-strong team cracked the message.

LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced Wednesday the official availability of LLVM 7.0 compiler stack as well as associated sub-projects including the Clang 7.0 C/C++ compiler front-end, Compiler-RT, libc++, libunwind, LLDB, and others. From a report: There is a lot of LLVM improvements ranging from CPU improvements for many different architectures, Vega 20 support among many other AMDGPU back-end improvements, the new machine code analyzer utility, and more. The notable Clang C/C++ compiler has picked up support for function multi-versioning (FMV), initial OpenCL C++ support, and many other additions. See my LLVM 7.0 / Clang 7.0 feature overview for more details on the changes with this six-month open-source compiler stack update. Wennborg's release statement can be read on the llvm-announce list.

Here's an analysis of the Linux kernel repository that attempts to find some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends. He writes: The kernel repository is at 782,487 commits in total from around 19.009 different authors. The repository is made up of 61,725 files and from there around 25,584,633 lines -- keep in mind there is also documentation, Kconfig build files, various helpers/utilities, etc. So far this year there has been 49,647 commits that added 2,229,836 lines of code while dropping 2,004,759 lines of code. Or a net gain of just 225,077 lines. Keep in mind there was the removal of some old CPU architectures and other code removed in kernels this year so while a lot of new functionality was added, thanks to some cleaning, the kernel didn't bloat up as much as one might have otherwise expected. In 2017 there were 80,603 commits with 3,911,061 additions and 1,385,507 deletions. Given just over one quarter to go, on a commit and line count 2018 might come in lower than the two previous years.

Linus Torvalds remains the most frequent committer at just over 3% while the other top contributions to the kernel this year are the usual suspects: David S. Miller, Arnd Bergmann, Colin Ian King, Chris Wilson, and Christoph Hellwig. So far in 2018 there were commits from 3,320 different email addresses. This is actually significantly lower than in previous years.

An anonymous reader writes: On Apple's iPhone day this week, Google announced it is killing Inbox by Gmail. But that's not the only service that day the company confirmed it is shutting down: The mobile app development tool Fabric is also going away. Firebase, Google's mobile and web application development platform, is swallowing Fabric and all its features. Incidentally, both Fabric and Firebase were once separate companies: Google acquired Fabric from Twitter in January 2017 and bought Firebase in October 2014. Now the company is merging the former into the latter, ending support for Fabric in mid-2019.

Facebook is trying to speed up the time it takes to roll out new software updates and debug any issues in them with a new tool called SapFix that its engineers are building. From a report: SapFix, which is still under development, is designed to generate fixes automatically for specific bugs before sending them to human engineers for approval. Facebook, which announced the tool today ahead of its Scale conference in San Jose, California, for developers building large-scale systems and applications, calls SapFix an "AI hybrid tool." It uses artificial intelligence to automate the creation of fixes for bugs that have been identified by its software testing tool Sapienz, which is already being used in production. SapFix will eventually be able to operate independently from Sapienz, but for now it's still a proof-of-concept that relies on the latter tool to pinpoint bugs first of all. SapFix can fix bugs in a number of ways, depending on how complex they are, Facebook engineers Yue Jia, Ke Mao and Mark Harman wrote in a blog post announcing the tools. For simpler bugs, SapFix creates patches that revert the code submission that introduced them. In the case of more complicated bugs, SapFix uses a collection of "templated fixes" that were created by human engineers based on previous bug fixes.

Python creator Guido van Rossum retired in July, but he's been pulled back in to resolve a debate about politically incorrect language. The Register reports: Like other open source communities, Python's minders have been asked whether they really want to continue using the terms "master" and "slave" to describe technical operations and relationships, given that the words remind some people of America's peculiar institution, a historical legacy that fires political passions to this day. Last week Victor Stinner, a Python developer who works for Red Hat, published four pull requests seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne. "For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid 'master' and 'slave' terminology which can be associated to slavery," he explained in his bug report, noting that there have been complaints but they've been filed privately -- presumably to avoid being dragged into a fractious flame war. And when Python 3.8 is released, there will be fewer instances of these terms.

Microsoft Research has pre-published a new paper to be presented at the IEEE Cybersecurity Development Conference 2018 describing their progress on Checked C, "an extension to C designed to support spatial safety, implemented in Clang and LLVM."

From "Checked C: Making C Safe By Extension": Checked C's design is distinguished by its focus on backward-compatibility, incremental conversion, developer control, and enabling highly performant code... Any part of a program may contain, and benefit from, checked pointers. Such pointers are binary-compatible with legacy, unchecked pointers but have explicitly annotated and enforced bounds. Code units annotated as checked regions provide guaranteed safety: The code within may not use unchecked pointers or unsafe casts that could result in spatial safety violations.

Checked C's bounds-safe interfaces provide checked types to unchecked code, which is useful for retrofitting third party and standard libraries. Together, these features permit incrementally adding safety to a legacy program, rather than making it an all-or-nothing proposition. Our implementation of Checked C as an LLVM extension enjoys good performance, with relatively low run-time and compilation overheads. It is freely available at https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc and continues to be actively developed.
The extension is enabled as a flag passed to Clang -- the average run-time overhead introduced by adding dynamic checks was 8.6%, though in more than half of the benchmarks the overhead was less than 1%. They also note that from 2012 to 2018, buffer overruns were the leading single cause of CVEs.

Microsoft Research says they're now evaluating Checked C, formalizing a proof of its safety guarantee -- and developing a tool to semi-automatically rewrite legacy C programs.