"Static vs dynamic typing is always one of those topics that attracts passionately held positions," writes the Morning Paper -- reporting on an "encouraging" study that attempted to empirically evaluate the efficacy of statically-typed systems on mature, real-world code bases. The study was conducted by Christian Bird at Microsoft's "Research in Software Engineering" group with two researchers from University College London. Long-time Slashdot reader phantomfive writes: This study looked at bugs found in open source Javascript code. Looking through the commit history, they enumerated the bugs that would have been caught if a more strongly typed language (like Typescript) had been used. They found that a strongly typed language would have reduced bugs by 15%. Does this make you want to avoid Python?

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I got back from a long bike ride around Manhattan to the news that Melo has been traded from the Knicks to the Thunder.

I like the deal.

Melo gets a fresh start, and has two all-star team-mates, Paul George and Russell Westbrook, who also happens to be last year's MVP.

Westbrook gets an outside shooter in Melo.

Melo will not be the alpha guy on this team. It's Westbrook's team. It'll be interesting to watch him make the adjustment.

The Knicks like it because they get to start over and they didn't have to give up a first round draft pick (rebuilding teams have valuable draft picks) and they got the Thunder to take the remaining two years on Melo's contract, and free up a huge amount of cap space for the Knicks, who can now invest it in younger players more suited for their young team. (They should also get some veterans to school them.)

Melo leaves with the affection of the fans. He will be cheered when he returns in his OKC uniform. It wasn't what we all hoped it would be with Melo, but he stayed cool at times when he didn't really have to, and in NY sports that's always appreciated.

It's a fair, competent deal, and makes sense for both teams.

And as a Melo fan I'm glad to see he'll get a shot at the post-season. I don't think the Thunder are championship contenders, not enough depth in the lineup, but it should be some good basketball.

Pentagon says the flight was aimed at demonstrating Washington's military options available to 'defeat any threat'.

An anonymous reader quotes Popular Mechanics: Microsoft, Facebook and global telecommunication infrastructure company Telxius have completed the Marea subsea cable, the world's most technologically advanced undersea cable. The Marea crosses the Atlantic Ocean over 17,000 feet below the ocean's surface, connecting Virginia Beach with Bilbao, Spain. Over 4,000 miles (6,600 kilometers) long and weighing nearly 10.25 million pounds (4.65 million kilograms), the Marea can transmit up to 160 terabits of data per second, which Microsoft notes is "more than 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection, making it capable of streaming 71 million high-definition videos simultaneously." The undersea cable -- about 1.5 times the diameter of a garden hose -- contains eight pairs of fiber optic cables encircled by copper, a protective layer of hard plastic, and then waterproof coating. Its 4,000-mile route had to avoid everything from earthquake zones to active volcanoes. Cables under the Atlantic Ocean carry 55% more data than cables under the Pacific, Microsoft writes, adding that "the project highlights the increasing role of private companies in building the infrastructure of the future."

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Coercing

Various tools for understanding and manipulating the underlying IEEE-754 representation of floating point values

React when users root around inside your objects

Read/write Brotli buffers/streams

Create PDF files.

I just scored a 3-point CitiBike-angel load-balance!

Maintenance update fixes a number of customer-reported issues. ($64.99 new, free update, 48.6 MB)

 

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An anonymous reader writes: SafeBrowse, a Chrome extension with more than 140,000 users, contains an embedded JavaScript library in the extension's code that mines for the Monero cryptocurrency using users' computers and without getting their consent. The additional code drives CPU usage through the roof, making users' computers sluggish and hard to use. Looking at the SafeBrowse extension's source code, anyone can easily spot the embedded Coinhive JavaScript Miner, an in-browser implementation of the CryptoNight mining algorithm used by CryptoNote-based currencies, such as Monero, Dashcoin, DarkNetCoin, and others. This is the same technology that The Pirate Bay experimented with as an alternative to showing ads on its site. The extension's author claims he was "hacked" and the code added without his knowledge.

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Trampolining functions with async/await syntax

Police arrest 70-year-old Kaushlendra Prapannacharya Falahari Maharaja for allegedly sexually assaulting 21-year-old.