Month: April 2019

Stack Overflow's annual developer survey was published this week, giving an insight into the skills, experience, and opinions of a wide slice of the developer community. Since its launch in 2008, Stack Overflow has become an essential developer tool, offering copy/paste solutions to an ever-growing number of programming problems.

The Stack Overflow survey is particularly interesting, as Stack Overflow does not focus on any one kind of developer or development; is used by professionals, students, and hobbyists alike; and has substantial use across Europe, North America, and Asia, with respectable representation from South America, Africa, and Oceania. As such, it gives a view of the software development industry as a whole, across all fields and disciplines.

To the surprise of nobody, Web technology remains top of the usage chart: some 67.8 percent of developers use JavaScript, giving it the number one position; and 63.5 percent use HTML and CSS in second place. SQL once again takes the third slot, at 54.4 percent. The first change relative to last year's survey comes at the fourth spot, with Python pushing Java into fifth place and Bash/shell scripting into sixth. C#, PHP, and C++ retain their same relative ordering at the seventh, eighth, and ninth slots.

Enlarge / An F-35 fighter aircraft of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force was lost in the Pacific on Tuesday. (credit: KAZUHIRO NOGI / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, a Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) F-35A fighter disappeared from radars suddenly only 20 minutes after takeoff in reportedly clear weather, with no distress calls from the pilot. Today, after a search-and-rescue effort involving Japanese military and US Navy ships and aircraft, the wreckage of the aircraft was located. But the search continues for the pilot.

According to a JASDF spokesperson, the F-35A was lost from radar approximately 135 kilometers (about 84 miles) east of Misawa Air Base, a joint US-Japanese air base in Aomo prefecture—about 690 kilometers (430 miles) north of Tokyo.

This is only the second F-35 crash since the aircraft completed flight testing—a Marine Corps F-35B crashed in South Carolina in September of 2018. But there have been other safety incidents with the aircraft. In June of 2014, an Air Force F-35A caught fire before take-off because of an engine failure. And in June of 2017, the Air Force briefly grounded F-35As after five incidents in which pilots experienced the symptoms of hypoxia (oxygen deprivation).

Enlarge (credit: Warner Brothers)

A request from Warner Brothers Pictures has forced the takedown of a fan-created Trump 2020 video that the president tweeted out on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning, Trump's tweet showed the message "this video is not available in your location." Then the tweet disappeared altogether.

Warner Brothers objected to the video because it used music by Hans Zimmer from the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises. "The use of Warner Bros.' score from 'The Dark Knight Rises' in the campaign video was unauthorized," a Warner Brothers spokesperson told NBC News.

Versions of the video have been percolating among online Donald Trump supporters for several years. Slate's Aaron Mak did some sleuthing and discovered an earlier version created by visual effects artist Brandon Kachel.

Enlarge / Voter registration data was one of the targets of Russian hacking efforts in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election—which DHS and FBI analysts now say went after systems in every state. (credit: Getty Images)

A joint intelligence bulletin (JIB) has been issued by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation to state and local authorities regarding Russian hacking activities during the 2016 presidential election. While the bulletin contains no new technical information, it is the first official report to confirm that the Russian reconnaissance and hacking efforts in advance of the election went well beyond the 21 states confirmed in previous reports.

As reported by the intelligence newsletter OODA Loop, the JIB stated that, while the FBI and DHS "previously observed suspicious or malicious cyber activity against government networks in 21 states that we assessed was a Russian campaign seeking vulnerabilities and access to election infrastructure," new information obtained by the agencies "indicates that Russian government cyber actors engaged in research on—as well as direct visits to—election websites and networks in the majority of US states." While not providing specific details, the bulletin continued, "The FBI and DHS assess that Russian government cyber actors probably conducted research and reconnaissance against all US states’ election networks leading up to the 2016 Presidential elections."

Enlarge / Callao Cave in northern Luzon, where the fossils were found. (credit: Detroit et al. 2019)

Our picture of hominin evolution in Asia just got more complicated, thanks to the discovery of a previously unknown hominin species on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The new species, Homo luzonensis, lived at around the same time as the “Hobbits” of nearby Flores (Homo floresiensis).

The two species share a mix of modern and older traits. Homo luzonensis’ teeth look like those of more recent members of our genus, Homo, but the hand and foot bones look more like they could have belonged to an Australopithecine—an early human relative that evolved around 3 million years ago and spent as much time in the trees as on the ground, a group that includes the famous skeleton named Lucy.

The combination didn’t look like any other species anthropologists had seen before.