In a world where artificial intelligence is no longer just a Spielberg-Kubrick collaboration, could algorithms be better at picking the next big blockbuster than studio execs? From a report: "Filmmakers are getting closer to understanding what moviegoers go to theaters to see thanks to neural networks fed off of data from previous box office hits," says Landon Starr, the head of data science at Clearlink, which uses machine learning to help companies understand consumer behavior. "Although this technology isn't spot-on quite yet, AI-powered predictions are likely stronger than the human calculations used in the past." And they're advancing quickly. Vault, an Israeli startup founded in 2015, is developing a neural-network algorithm based on 30 years of box office data, nearly 400,000 story features found in scripts, and data like film budgets and audience demographics to estimate a movie's opening weekend. The company is only a couple years in, but founder David Stiff recently said that roughly 75 percent of Vault's predictions "come 'pretty close'" to films' actual opening grosses. Scriptbook takes a similar approach, using its own AI platform to predict a movie's success based on the screenplay only. The Antwerp startup's AI analyzed 62 movies from 2015 and 2016, and claims it was able to successfully predict the box office failure or success of 52 of them, judging 30 movies correctly as profitable and 22 movies correctly as not profitable.

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Fifty years since the May 1968 student uprising, Al Jazeera explores the movement's legacy for protesters today.

Britain's ambassador to the UN calls for a 'proper investigation' into alleged crimes against Rohingya in Myanmar.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The team behind secure messaging app Signal says Amazon has threatened to kick the app off its CloudFront web service unless Signal drops the anti-censorship practice known as domain-fronting. Google recently banned the practice, which lets developers disguise web traffic to look like it's coming from a different source, allowing apps like Signal to evade country-level bans. As a result, Signal moved from Google to the Amazon-owned Souq content delivery network. But Amazon implemented its own ban on Friday. In an email that Moxie Marlinspike -- founder of Signal developer Open Whisper Systems -- posted today, Amazon orders the organization to immediately stop using domain-fronting or find another web services provider. Signal used the system to provide service in Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it's officially banned. It got around filters by making traffic appear to come from a huge platform, since countries weren't willing to ban the entirety of a site like Google to shut down Signal. "The idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you'd have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn't like that plan," Marlinspike writes. "We are considering ideas for a more robust system, but these ecosystem changes have happened very suddenly. [...] In the meantime, the censors in these countries will have (at least temporarily) achieved their goals. Sadly, they didn't have to do anything but wait."

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Here’s what was really positive about Michelle Wolf at the dinner on Saturday, she knocked Trump off the air. Anything less and we’d be talking about the outrageous shit he said, but who cares? His jokes aren’t as funny as hers, and she said the truth and he lies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, a NASA spacecraft will launch into space from the coast of Florida, headed for the sun. After making several flybys of Venus to slow itself down, the Parker Solar Probe will come within 4 million miles of the sun's scorching surface, closer than any spacecraft in history. NASA is never one to miss an opportunity to drum up publicity for upcoming space missions, especially the less flashy ones. Sending something to study the star we see every day may sound less thrilling, for example, than launching a mission to find exoplanets around 200,000 stars. So in March, the space agency announced a little campaign to promote the Parker Solar Probe: Send us your names and we'll put them on a microchip inside a spacecraft bound for the sun. (They even got Star Trek actor William Shatner to help promote it.) The call for names, which closed at the end of last week, received more than 1.1 million submissions, according to a spokesperson at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed and built the Parker Solar Probe. On the surface, the campaign was little more than a quirky act to get the public interested in space exploration. But considered more deeply, it represents the human desire to find ways to outlive ourselves and our bodies, to be remembered once our time here on Earth is up.

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With the recent talk about Electron and “Marzipan” — or maybe Amber or something, according to Mark Gurman — I’m reminded of a thing I think about kind of often: that making iOS and macOS apps is way harder than it needs to be.

For most apps (except games, I suppose), a huge percentage of the code might as well be written in a scripting language. We absolutely do not need to be writing everything in Swift, Objective-C, C++, or C.

“But Brent,” you say, “what about performance?”

Consider the case where you set up an animation and then run the animation. The system does that animation. Or consider Core Data — your choice of language doesn’t affect how fast it can read from SQLite. Or think of networking — it’s bound by the connection, not the speed of your code. Or think of pushing a view controller onto the current navigation view controller. Or setting up view constraints. And so on.

All this code might as well be Ruby — or, preferably, a scripting language designed for app making. (I would have liked an Objective-C-without-the-C.)

And the thing that would make it all so worthwhile is editing the code while the app is running. You could go all day without an explicit build step!

Sure, some of your code would still have to be written in Swift or whatever. The part that really does have to be fast. I’m a performance junkie myself, so I get this. (Evergreen’s RSS parser is fast, and I wouldn’t switch to a scripting language.)

But most of most apps (again, probably besides games, about which I know nothing) could be written using a scripting language.

PS Yes, I’m quite aware that we used to have Fix & Continue. And WebScript.

Rwanda's most popular form of transportation recently saw its first female drivers, changing the perception of women.

Vote to replace former PM Serzh Sargsyan follows a mass outpouring of anger by protesters.

AppDynamics AnyEvent Friendly REST Client

Map::Tube::Nuremberg - interface to the Nuremberg U-Bahn map

JSON Web Token the Mojo way

verify solutions for solitaire games.

A less opinionated, minimal featured way to serve static files.

Collection of useful functions and classes with Perl and C interface.