The title is not clickbait or hyperbole. I intend to prove that by virtue of both design and implementation that PostgreSQL is objectively and measurably a better database than anything currently available, with or without money considerations.

He goes on to detail 15(ish) reasons why Postgres stands out from the crowd. A compelling argument. I’d love to see similar write-ups by people who disagree.

Access data on COVID19 through an easy API for free. Build dashboards, mobile apps or integrate in to other applications.

Thanks to Johns Hopkins CSSE for making the data available.

Put your hacker skills (and your new-found free time) to good use by digging in to one of these (370+) projects and helping out.

This calculator lets you tweak things like R0, incubation time, and hospitalization rate to see how affect the results. From the author:

At the time of writing, the coronavirus disease of 2019 remains a global health crisis of grave and uncertain magnitude. To the non-expert (such as myself), contextualizing the numbers, forecasts and epidemiological parameters described in the media and literature can be challenging. I created this calculator as an attempt to address this gap in understanding.

Hey folks! Feross from JS Party here. I taught a course on web security last quarter at Stanford. All the course materials, slides, and videos are freely available online and I wanted to share with the broader community, in case anyone is interested in learning more about secure web programming.

The course goal is to build an understanding of the most common web attacks and their countermeasures. Given the pervasive insecurity of the modern web landscape, there is a pressing need for programmers and system designers improve their understanding of web security issues. We’ll be covering the fundamentals as well as the state-of-the-art in web security.

If you pair this with Jure’s Comprehensive Linux cheatsheet and his 25 greatest songs of all time, then you’ve got yourself one awesome day of coding up new things.

This does not mean curl can fetch some JSON and print it to STDOUT. That would not be new. What it means is that the --write-out option now supports JSON as an output format. Pipe that output to a tool like jq and you get something like this:

{
  "url_effective": "https://example.com/",
  "http_code": 200,
  "response_code": 200,
  [lots more but I snipped them for length]
}

Which is pretty cool, if you ask me.

I used multilingual unsupervised methods (MUSE) to train cross-lingual word embeddings for over 500 languages. I then used these embeddings to extract components of the phrase “wash your hands” from existing target language documents. This resulted in translations of “wash your hands” in 510 languages not currently supported in any public translation platform.

Eric Meyer says…

If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static.

…too many sites are already crashing because their CMSes can’t keep up with the traffic surges. And too many sites are using dynamic frameworks that drain mobile batteries and shut out people with older browsers. That’s annoying and counter-productive in the best of times, but right now, it’s unacceptable.

In this post Carmen Andoh, Russ Cox, and Steve Francia share important notes about how the pandemic is affecting the Go community, what they’re doing to help, what you can do to help, and upcoming plans for Go itself.

Go always comes second to more basic concerns like personal and family health and safety. Around the world, the past couple months have been terrible, and we are still at the start of this awful pandemic. There are days when it seems like working on anything related to Go should be considered a serious priority inversion.

But after we’ve done all we can to prepare ourselves and our families for whatever is coming, getting back to some approximation of a familiar routine and normal work is a helpful coping mechanism. In that spirit, we intend to keep working on Go and trying to help the Go community as much as we can.

A nifty tool (Ruby gem) from the folks at Instacart. Designed for:

• speed - up to 4x faster than traditional tools on a 4-core machine
• security - built-in methods to prevent sensitive data from ever leaving the server
• convenience - sync partial tables, groups of tables, and related records

Have you ever posted an image on the public internet and thought, “What if someone used this for something?” Thomas Smith did and what he discovered about Clearview AI is disturbing…

Someone really has been monitoring nearly everything you post to the public internet. And they genuinely are doing “something” with it.

The someone is Clearview AI. And the something is this: building a detailed profile about you from the photos you post online, making it searchable using only your face, and then selling it to government agencies and police departments who use it to help track you, identify your face in a crowd, and investigate you — even if you’ve been accused of no crime.

I realize that this sounds like a bunch of conspiracy theory baloney. But it’s not. Clearview AI’s tech is very real, and it’s already in use.

How do I know? Because Clearview has a profile on me. And today I got my hands on it.

Export as a video or animated gif. Try it here.

Dear New Developer,

You know that there’s a chasm between your skill level and that of the mythical “senior software developer”.

If you build a list of topics you encounter on your job that, if learned to a deep enough level, would put you on the same level as a senior developer, you’ll end up even more demoralized than before compiling that list.

No need to assemble this list yourself! I’ve done it for you.

I’ve heard many people recommend Deep Work over the years. Add this one to the list.

(I like this style of writing where you imagine a hypothetical new developer –knowing full well they real thing is out there– and tell them things you wish you’d known when starting your career as a dev.)

MixAudit provides a mix deps.audit task to scan Mix dependencies for security vulnerabilities. It draw its inspiration from tools like npm audit and bundler-audit.

Vulns sourced from the community-maintained elixir-security-advisories.

From Laura Baldwin (President, O’Reilly Media):

Today, we’re sharing the news that we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel all future O’Reilly in-person conferences and close down this portion of our business. Without understanding when this global health emergency may come to an end, we can’t plan for or execute on a business that will be forever changed as a result of this crisis.

…and they are making the move to online-only.

…we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events. We also know we are poised to accept that challenge, having already delivered a version of our Strata event on-line to over 4600 participants last week. With over 5000 companies and 2.5 million users on our learning platform, we look forward to innovating and bringing together the technology communities and businesses we serve in new and creative ways.