Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Shozoku and ninjato are encouraged, but not strictly required, in order to compete. (credit: RunCode)

Annual programming competition Runcode.ninja is back again in its fourth year, beginning Friday, November 6. RunCode is a nonprofit organization staffed by volunteers working in their spare time and focused on providing educational opportunities for coders and infosec folks. The online event allows programmers of all experience levels to tackle a wide array of challenges, using any of 14 supported programming languages.

This year, the competition theme is "all things web"—which means that most challenges will have something to do with websites; although the "something" can vary pretty drastically, from user interaction to server log analysis. The event will have more than 30 available challenges, grouped into easy, intermediate, and hard, for competitors to find and upload solutions for.

For each challenge, competitors will be given a problem description, a sample data set, and an expected output to make the desired order and formatting clear. Competitors are expected to generate more test data of their own and thoroughly verify the correctness of their code against all the corner cases they can think of; solutions tested against only the sample data provided will likely fail the challenge. Uploaded code is run in a sandboxed Docker container and its output tested for correctness.

Enlarge / Halloween weekend is the perfect time to check out some of the best horror films released in October. (credit: Photo collage by Aurich Lawson)

It's Halloween weekend, and with the ongoing pandemic putting a kibosh on the usual large parties and gatherings, it's the perfect opportunity to order in and binge-watch horror movies. There are plenty of classic films to choose from, but if you're keen to discover something new, October has been a remarkably good month for solidly entertaining indie horror comedies, along with a handful of films that fall under a rubric I'd call "prestige horror." And for once there's not a zombie in sight; we've got vampires, werewolves, and mutant monsters running amok instead, along with some really bad hair.

(Some mild spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Love and Monsters

Enlarge / YouTuber Brandon M captured this drone footage of his Tesla steering toward a parked car. "Oh Jeeeesus," he said as he grabbed the steering wheel. (credit: Brandon M)

Last week, Tesla released an early version of its long-awaited "full self-driving" software to a limited number of customers. It was arguably Tesla's biggest Autopilot update ever. The software enables Tesla vehicles to autonomously navigate the vast majority of common roadway situations and complete many trips from start to finish.

Tesla considers it to be beta software and says it's not intended for fully autonomous operation. Drivers are expected to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel at all times.

To understand the new software, I watched more than three hours of driving footage from three Tesla owners who got the FSD update. These YouTube videos underscored how important it is for drivers to actively supervise Tesla's new software. Over the course of three hours, the drivers took control more than a dozen times, including at least two cases when the car seemed to be on the verge of crashing into another vehicle.

Enlarge / The "In Focus" mission takes to the skies this week. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 3.22 of the Rocket Report! After a spate of recent scrubs, the Cape gets down to business in the coming week with back-to-back government launches, one by United Launch Alliance and the other by SpaceX. Fingers (and toes) are crossed.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab orbits its 15th mission. Rocket Lab successfully launched its 15th Electron mission and deployed Earth-imaging satellites for Planet and Spaceflight Inc. customer Canon Electronics, the company said. The "In Focus" mission launched from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand's Māhia Peninsula at 21:21 UTC Wednesday.