ICT news

• Coding Boot Gamp Graduates Find tough Prospects In an AI-Powered World

  24-11-2024 23:04 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:Between the time [construction worker Florencio] Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Mr. Rendon imagined as a "golden ticket" to a better life had expired. About 135,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI, which could be used as coding assistants, we
  
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• Unpublished Slashdot Submission Dragged Into Reddit Drama About C++ Paper's Title

  24-11-2024 21:56 via meta.slashdot.org
  
  Reddit's moderators drew some criticism after "locking" a discussion about C++ paper/proposal author Andrew Tomazos. The URL (in the post with the locked discussion) had led to a submission for Slashdot's queue of potential (but unpublished) stories, which nevertheless attracted 178 upvotes on Reddit and another 85 comments. That unpublished Slashdot submission was also submitted to Hacker News, where it drew another 38 upvotes but was also eventually flagged.
  Back on Reddit's C++ subreddit (whi
  
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• Is There New Evidence in the D.B. Cooper Case?

  24-11-2024 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  On November 24th, 1971 — 53 years ago today — a mysterious man jumped out of an airplane clutching $200,000 in ransom money. (He'd extorted it from the airline by claiming he had a bomb, and it's still "the only unsolved case of air piracy in the history of commercial aviation," according to Wikipedia.) Will modern technology finally let us solve the case — or just turn it into a miniseries on Netflix? And have online researchers finally discovered the definitive clue?
  The FBI
  
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• MacFORTH Code for 1984 Robot-Coding Game 'ChipWits' from 1984 is Now Open Source

  24-11-2024 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Back in the mid-1980s Mark Roth was in 5th grade when the game ChipWits "helped kindle his interest in coding," according to an online biography. ("By middle school, he wrote his first Commodore 64 assembler and by high school he authored a 3D Graphics library for DOS.")
  And 40 years later, Slashdot reader markroth8 writes that the programming puzzle/logic game "inspired many people to become professional coders":ChipWits was first released for Mac in 1984, and was later ported to Commodore 64 a
  
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• GitHub Announces New Open Source Fund with Security Mentoring

  24-11-2024 17:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund launched this week with an initial commitment of $1.25 million, reports TechCrunch, using "capital from contributors including American Express, 1Password, Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub's own parent company Microsoft."
  GitHub briefly teased the new initiative at its annual GitHub Universe developer conference last month, but Tuesday it announced full details and formally opened the program for applicants, which will be reviewed "on a rolling basis" through the cl
  
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• America's DEA Ordered to Stop Searching Random Travellers at Airports - and Seizing Their Cash

  24-11-2024 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  America's Justice Department "has ordered all consensual searches by drug enforcement agents conducted at the nation's airports stopped," reports Georgia's local TV station Atlanta News First — after their series of investigations "uncovered how the agents often search innocent passengers at airport gates, looking for cash."
  On Thursday, the department made public a November 12, 2024, directive from the deputy attorney general to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that it suspe
  
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• Mars Meteorite Reveals New Evidence That Hot Water Flowed on Ancient Mars

  24-11-2024 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Scientists have found what seems to be the oldest direct evidence of hot water flowing on Mars during its ancient past," reports Space.com.
  "The discovery could further indicate that the Red Planet, despite its arid and desolate appearance today, may have been capable of supporting life long ago."The evidence was delivered to Earth and sealed within the well-known Martian meteorite NWA7034, found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. Due to its black, highly polished appearance, the Martian rock is als
  
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• Bank Employees Resign After Executive Demands Return to Offices Without Space for Everyone

  24-11-2024 09:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the Guardian:
  Staff have resigned at Starling Bank after its new chief executive demanded thousands of workers attend its offices more frequently, despite lacking enough space to host them.
  In his first major policy change since taking over from the UK digital bank's founder, Anne Boden, in March, Raman Bhatia has ordered all hybrid staff — many of whom were in the office only one or two days a week, or on an ad-hoc basis — to travel
  
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• 'Potentially Toxic' Chemical Byproduct May Be Present in 1/3 of US Drinking Water

  24-11-2024 06:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NBC News reports that a newly identified chemical byproduct "may be present in drinking water in about a third of U.S. homes, a study found."
  "Scientists do not yet know whether the byproduct is dangerous. But some are worried that it could have toxic properties because of similarities to other chemicals of concern."The newly identified substance, named "chloronitramide anion," is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is ofte
  
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• Verify the Rust's Standard Library's 7,500 Unsafe Functions - and Win 'Financial Rewards'

  24-11-2024 03:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  The Rust community has "recognized the unsafety of Rust (if used incorrectly)," according to a blog post by Amazon Web Services.So now AWS and the Rust Foundation are "crowdsourcing an effort to verify the Rust standard library," according to an article at DevClass.com, "by setting out a series of challenges for devs and offering financial rewards for solutions..."Rust includes ways to bypass its safety guarantees though, with the use of the "unsafe" keyword... The issue AWS highlights is that e
  
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• Does GitHub Copilot Improve Code Quality?

  24-11-2024 00:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft-owned GitHub published a blog post asking "Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality? Here's what the data says."
  Its first paragraph includes statistics from past studies — that GitHub Copilot has helped developers code up to 55% faster, leaving 88% of developers feeling more "in the flow" and 85% feeling more confident in their code.But does it improve code quality?[W]e recruited 202 [Python] developers with at least five years of experience. Half were randomly assigned GitHub C
  
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