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Grafana, data visualization & analytics platform, released the beta version of Grafana 6.0, last week. Grafana 6.0 beta explores new features such as Explore, Grafana Loki, Gauge Panel, New panel editor UX, and Google stackdriver datasource among others. Grafana is an open source data visualization and monitoring tool that can be used on top of a variety of different data stores but is commonly used together with Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and Logz.io. Let’s discuss the key highlights in Grafana 6.0 beta. Explore Explore is a new feature in Grafana 6.0 beta that allows you to create a new interactive debugging workflow and helps integrate metrics and logs. The Prometheus query editor in Explore has improved autocomplete, metric tree selector, and integrations with the Explore table view. This allows easy label filtering and offers useful query hints that can automatically apply functions to your query. Also, there is no need to switch to other tools for debugging purposes, since Explore allows you to dig deeper into your metrics and logs to find the bug related cause. Grafana’s new logging datasource, called, Loki is also tightly integrated into Explore, enabling you to correlate metrics and logs by viewing them side-by-side. Explore supports splitting the view, allowing you to easily compare different queries, datasources, metrics and logs. Grafana Loki The log exploration and visualization features in Explore are available in any data source but have been currently implemented only by the new open source log aggregation system from Grafana Lab, called Grafana Loki. Grafana Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, and multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is very cost effective as it does not index the contents of the logs but a set of labels for each log stream. The logs from Loki gets queried in a similar way to querying with label selectors in Prometheus. Loki makes use of labels to group log streams which can be made to match up with your Prometheus labels. New Panel Editor Grafana beta 6.0 has a new, redesigned UX around editing panels. The new panel editor lets you resize the visualization area in case the user wants more space for queries and options. It also allows you to change visualization (panel type) from within the new panel edit mode, hence, eliminating the need to add a new panel to try out different visualizations. Azure Monitor Datasource The Grafana team worked on developing an external plugin for Azure Monitor last year and it is now being moved into Grafana to be one of the built-in datasources. As a core datasource, the Azure Monitor datasource will be getting the alerting support for the official Grafana 6.0 release. The Azure Monitor datasource integrates four different Azure services with Grafana, namely, Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights, and Azure Application Insights Analytics. Other changes Grafana 6.0 beta comes with a new and separate Gauge panel. Gauge Panel contains a new threshold editor that the team plans to refine and use in other panels. Built-in support for Google Stackdriver has been officially released in Grafana 6.0 beta. Grafana 6.0 beta comes with newly added support for provisioning alert notifiers from configuration files. This feature allows operators to provision notifiers without using the UI or the API. A new field called uid (string identifier) has been added that the administrator can set themselves. The ElasticSearch datasource in Grafana 6.0 beta now supports bucket script pipeline aggregations. This allows it to do per bucket computations such as the difference or ratio between two metrics. The color picker has been updated in Grafana to show named colors and primary colors. This will improve accessibility and will make colors more consistent across dashboards. For more information, check out the official Grafana 6.0 beta release notes. Grafana 5.3 is now stable, comes with Google Stackdriver built-in support, a new Postgres query builder Cortex, an open source, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant Prometheus-as-a-service becomes a CNCF Sandbox project Tumblr open sources its Kubernetes tools for better workflow integration

This Saturday, the Golang team released the State of Go February 2019 outlining the developments in the programming language and showing its current state. Since Golang 1.11, changes have been made to the standard library, tooling, and the community. Changes in the standard library html/template The behavior when an interface is typed to an implicit escaper function is changed. It was previously <nil> and is now ignored. Changes under bufio, NewReader The UnreadRune and UnreadByte methods from Reader will return an error if they are called after Peek. new ReplaceAll function There is a new ReplaceAll function where the value passed can be bytes or strings. Changes under builtin: maps printed sorted To print a map sorted by keys, developers can just print the map. However, note that iteration will be done randomly. TLS 1.3 Using TLS 1.3 in Go helps by causing one fewer round trip, securing only cipher suites, and provides support in all major browsers. Tooling changes The following commands now work: go run pkg go run dir Functions can now be run in the debugger. The godoc CLI is now deprecated. The go vet tool is deprecated in Go 1.12. It detects wrapped fmt.Printf errors. modules modules is an alternative to GOPATH. It has integrated versioning and package distribution. runtime/trace Now there are custom events to runtime traces. webassembly Go can now compile to WebAssembly (wasm files) Ports You need Go 1.11 and later for OpenBSD 6.4 arm64 runtime is now faster Windows/arm now has support for Raspberry Pi3 These were a select few important updates from the presentation, for more details you can view The State of Go: Feb 2019. The Golang team has started working on Go 2 proposals Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary GoCity: Turn your Golang program into a 3D city

Facebook is facing seven separate data protection investigations in Ireland, as reported by Bloomberg. Facebook’s investigations are a part of 16 cases which major tech companies like Twitter, Apple, LinkedIn, and also Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram, are facing. The main aim of these probes is to scale up the level of fines that regulator’s issue under GDPR. Currently, GDPR allows penalties as large as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue. According to Ireland’s data protection commissioner, Helen Dixon, “These data protection probes are centered on the activities of very big internet companies with tens and hundreds of millions of users.” The first EU probe against Facebook was opened by Ireland following a security breach that compromised 50M accounts in October last year. This security breach has not only affected user’s Facebook accounts but also impacted other accounts linked to Facebook. This means that a hacker could have accessed any account of yours that you log into using Facebook. That second probe was initiated by Dixon’s office in December when a photo API bug affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos. This bug gave outside developers broader access to users’ photos affecting up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers. Per Dixon, “Other breach notifications received in my office since May 25 are related to coding errors, which leads to posts being made public that should have been private, or in a major breach. No company seems to be immune from this.” Dixon mentions that the deciding cases are not trivial “We’re at various concrete stages in all of them, but they’re all substantially advanced,” she said. “The soonest I am going to see an investigation report on my desk, which is when my role kicks in” The final decisions on these sanctions are likely to be made in June or July. Last week, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria overruled Facebook’s argument that it cannot be sued for letting third parties access users’ private data because no “real world” harm has resulted from the conduct. Last month, Russia’s popular watchdog, Roskomnadzor said that it opened a civil case against Twitter and Facebook for failing to explain how they plan to comply with local data laws. At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials also planned to impose a fine of over $22.5 billion on Facebook post a year of data breaches and revelations of illegal data sharing.  A U.S. Senator also introduced a bill titled ‘American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act’ for creating federal standards of privacy protection for big companies like Facebook. “Companies are lawyering up and we’re typically dealing with more litigators and lawyers on the side of any inquiry that we conduct,” Dixon said. “It does show the power that they have in terms of the size. But we have all the cards in terms of the powers to investigate, to compel and ultimately to conclude and make findings.” Apple revoked Facebook developer certificates due to misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program. Stanford experiment results on how deactivating Facebook affects social welfare measures Facebook has blocked 3rd party ad monitoring plugin tools from the likes of ProPublica and Mozilla that let users see how they’re being targeted by advertisers

Researchers at Columbia University have carried out a successful experiment where they translated brain activity into words using deep learning and speech synthesizer. They made use of the Auditory stimulus reconstruction technique which combines the recent advances in deep learning with the latest innovations in speech synthesis technologies to reconstruct closed-set intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. They temporarily placed five electrodes in the brains of five people who were about to undergo a brain surgery for epilepsy. These five were asked to listen to recordings of sentences, and their brain activity was used to train deep-learning-based speech recognition software. Post this they were made to listen to 40 numbers being spoken. The AI then tried decoding what they heard based on the brain activity and spoke out the results in a robotic voice. According to the ones who heard the robot voice, the voice synthesizer produced was understandable as the right word 75% of the time.   Source: Nature.com According to the Technology Review, “At the moment the technology can only reproduce words that these five patients have heard—and it wouldn't work on anyone else.” However, the researchers believe  that such a technology could help people who have been paralyzed communicate with their family and friends, despite losing the ability to speak. Dr. Nima Mesgarani, an associate professor at Columbia University, said “One of the motivations of this work…is for alternative human-computer interaction methods, such as a possible interface between a user and a smartphone.” According to the report, “Our approach takes a step toward the next generation of human-computer interaction systems and more natural communication channels for patients suffering from paralysis and locked-in syndromes.” To know more about this experiment, head over to the complete report. Using deep learning methods to detect malware in Android Applications Researchers introduce a deep learning method that converts mono audio recordings into 3D sounds using video scenes IEEE Computer Society predicts top ten tech trends for 2019: assisted transportation, chatbots, and deep learning accelerators among others

As speech synthesis technology has advanced a lot in recent years and with neural networks from DeepMind creating realistic, human-like voices, Google is working in the same direction to advance state-of-the-art research on fake audio detection. Google Maps and Google Home use Google's speech synthesis, or text-to-speech (TTS) technology. The Google News Initiative (GNI) announced last year that it wanted to tackle “deep fakes” and other systems that try to bypass voice authentication systems. Yesterday, Google AI and Google News Initiative (GNI) partnered together for creating a body of synthetic speech containing thousands of phrases spoken by its deep learning text-to-speech (TTS) models. It contains 68 synthetic voices from a large variety of regional accents from English newspaper articles. Malicious actors can synthesize speech in order to fool voice authentication systems, or they can even create forged audio recordings to defame public figures. Deep fakes, audio or video clips generated by deep learning models can be exploited for manipulating trust in media. It then becomes difficult to distinguish real from tampered content. And the bad actors can also claim that authentic data is fake. Because of this issue, there was a need for synthetic speech database. This effort is also in the direction of Google’s AI Principles to ensure “strong safety practices to avoid unintended results that create risks of harm.” Currently, this dataset is available for participants of the 2019 ASVspoof challenge for creating countermeasures against fake speech. The aim is to make the automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems more secure. ASVspoof participants can develop systems that learn to distinguish between the real and computer-generated speech by training models on both. The results for this challenge will be announced in September at the 2019 Interspeech conference in Graz, Austria. Google Cloud Firestore, the serverless, NoSQL document database, is now generally available You can now publish PWAs in the Google Play Store as Chrome 72 for Android ships with Trusted Web Activity feature Former Google Cloud CEO joins Stripe board just as Stripe joins the global Unicorn Club

In recent years, hackers have breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn by stealing 71 million and 117 million passwords, respectively. This month, Troy Hunt, security researcher identified the first portion of the data dump, named Collection #1, which has a set of breached databases. He represented 773 million unique usernames and passwords. Other researchers have now obtained and analyzed an additional vast database called Collections #2–5. It has 845 gigabytes of stolen data and 25 billion records in all. https://twitter.com/SeanWrightSec/status/1091262248914505730 German news site Heise reported that Collection of 2.2 billion unique usernames and associated passwords has been distributed on hacker forums and torrents. According to the researchers at the Hasso Plattner Institute, 611 million credentials in Collections #2–5 weren’t included in the Collection #1 database. Chris Rouland, a cybersecurity researcher and founder of the IoT security firm Phosphorus.io, who also pulled Collections #1–5 from torrented files, said, "This is the biggest collection of breaches we’ve ever seen." According to Rouland, as the collection has already been circulated amongst hackers, the tracker file which he downloaded was being seeded by more than 130 people who possessed the data dump. It has also been downloaded more than 1,000 times. In a statement to WIRED, Rouland said, "It's an unprecedented amount of information and credentials that will eventually get out into the public domain." According to WIRED, most of the stolen data appears to come from previous thefts, like the breaches of LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Dropbox. WIRED has examined a sample of the data and further confirmed that the credentials are valid, but mostly represent passwords from the previous years’ data leaks. This collection could be used as a powerful tool for unskilled hackers as they can try a technique called credential stuffing. With this technique, users can try previously leaked usernames and passwords on any website with the hope that people have reused passwords. Rouland said, "For the internet as a whole, this is still very impactful." Who knows if we are targeted too? What should one do? Users can check for their usernames in the breach using Hasso Plattner Institute's tool. This identity leak checker asks for users’ email address then uses that email ID to generate a list of information including users’ name, IP address, and password, if applicable. It tells the users if a password has been matched to their email address. It can also tell how recent that password actually is. One should change passwords for any breached sites it flags. It is advisable to not reuse passwords, and use a password manager. A password manager can automatically generate unique, secure passwords for the services a user uses. Users should turn on the two-factor authentication wherever possible. Though the two-factor authentication isn’t foolproof, it provides a layer of security.   Troy Hunt's service HaveIBeenPwned helps in checking if the passwords have been compromised, though it doesn't yet include Collections #2-5. Internal memo reveals NASA suffered a data breach compromising employees social security numbers Former Senior VP’s take on the Mariott data breach; NYT reports suspects Chinese hacking ties Equifax data breach could have been “entirely preventable”, says House oversight and government reform committee staff report

On Wednesday, the team behind Racket released Racket 7.2. Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on Scheme and Lisp that emphasizes on functional programming. Racket’s core is built on a lot of C code, which affects its portability to different systems, maintenance, and performance. Hence, back in 2017, the team decided to make the Racket distribution run on Chez Scheme. Racket on Chez Scheme (Racket CS) implementation has reached the almost complete status with all functionalities in place. Sharing the status of Racket CS, the blog post reads, “DrRacket CS works fully, the main Racket CS distribution can build itself, and 99.95% of the core Racket test suite passes”. Though the code runs fine, still some work needs to be done to ensure end-to-end performance to make Racket CS the default implementation of Racket. The following updates apply to both the implementations of Racket: Contract system:  The contract system, which guards one part of a program from another, now supports collapsible contracts. This will prevent repeated wrappers in certain pathological situations. Quickscript: Quickscript is a tool for DrRacket which allows you to quickly and easily extend DrRacket features. This scripting tool now comes bundled with the standard distribution. Web server configuration: The built-in configuration used for serving static files is updated to recognize the “.mjs” extension for JavaScript modules. The data/enumerate library: The library now supports an additional form of subtraction via but-not/e. The racklog library: A number of improvements are done such as fixing the logic variable binding, logic variables containing predicates being applicable, and the introduction of an %andmap higher-order predicate. Read the official announcement at Racket’s website. Racket v7.0 is out with overhauled internals, updates to DrRacket, TypedRacket among others Pharo 7.0 released with 64-bit support, a new build process and more PayPal replaces Flow with TypeScript as their type checker for every new web app

EuroPython Society (EPS) announced a new grant program yesterday for ‘Python core developers’ in place for the future EuroPython conferences, named “Guido Van Rossum Core Developer Grant”. The program has been named after Guido Van Rossum, Python Chief, in recognition of his dedication towards leading the team for almost 20 years, before he stepped down from his position as the ‘Benevolent dictator for life’ (BDFL), back in July last year. It has been designed to honor the ‘Python core developers’ who work in a small group, and work countless hours (even in free time), often coming close to burnout as not many new core developers join the team. Under the developer grant program, all core Python developers will be awarded a free entry to the future EuroPython conferences, starting with EuroPython 2019 in Basel, Switzerland, that takes place between 9th to 14th July every year. This, in turn, will help grow the team and will give them a place to meet, where they can demonstrate their work and invite new developers. Who are ‘Python Core Developers’? As far as eligibility is concerned, EPS states that developers falling under the term “Python Core Developer” are eligible. Python core developers are those who have been granted the commit rights to the CPython repository. Even if you give up the commit rights or go inactive, you still keep the status of a ‘Python core developer’. EPS has also provided the links to “Github Python core group members”, Python-Dev Guide Log, and Python Dev Guide Experts Index, where you can check your eligibility for the grant program. However, in case you are not listed on one of these but have contributed to the CPython repository, you can provide links to those patches to the Society. Also, EPS mentions that it reserves all the rights to remove the grant eligibility (despite him/her falling under the above-mentioned lists) of a developer in case he/she acts ‘without good faith’ or goes against the EPS Code of Conduct. “We all love Python..(and) believe it is important to give something back to the main team of developers who have contributed lots of their time and energy to make Python happen: the Python Core Developers”, states EPS. For complete information, check out the official Core Developer Grant website. “With Python, you can create self-explanatory, concise, and engaging data visuals, and present insights that impact your business” – Tim Großmann and Mario Döbler [Interview] Python serious about diversity, dumps offensive ‘master’, ‘slave’ terms in its documentation Top 7 Python programming books you need to read

Two days ago Apple revoked Facebook’s Developer Certificate that barred Facebook employees from using the early versions of Facebook apps such as Instagram and Messenger, and other day-to-day activities on their iPhones. However, yesterday Apple announced that it has restored Facebook’s enterprise certificates. A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge, “We have had our Enterprise Certification, which enables our internal employee applications, restored. We are in the process of getting our internal apps up and running. To be clear, this didn’t have an impact on our consumer-facing services.” Apple also blocked Google’s developer certificates after it got to know of a similar data-collection drill via Google’s Screenwise Meter app. Early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps stopped functioning. Also, employee-only apps such as the Gbus app for transportation and Google’s internal cafe app stopped working.. However, the Google services and apps were restored later yesterday. Google also announced that it had disabled the app a day before their certificates were blocked. Prior to revoking Facebook’s Developer Certificates, Apple had warned in a statement, “any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked.” Alex Fajkowski, an iOS developer, discovered that other companies including Amazon, DoorDash, and Sonos all distribute beta versions of their apps to non-employees. Following this, “Apple may be forced to take action against these apps, or to even revamp its entire enterprise program in the future”, The Verge reports. https://twitter.com/thefaj/status/1091087789704105984 Read more about this news on The Verge. Firefox now comes with a Facebook Container extension to prevent Facebook from tracking user’s web activity Facebook researchers show random methods without any training can outperform modern sentence embeddings models for sentence classification Stanford experiment results on how deactivating Facebook affects social welfare measures

Rigetti Computing, a popular startup within the quantum computing space, launched the public beta of its Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform. It was last year in September when Rigetti had announced the details regarding its first Quantum Cloud Services platform. “Quantum Cloud Services platform is the fastest quantum computing platform available today. We’ve eliminated much of the overhead associated with the exchange between quantum and classical compute, resulting in up to a 30x improvement in program runtime over web API models”, says Peter Karalekas, Quantum Software Engineer at Rigetti Computing. The new QCS platform comes with an all-new access model for quantum programming which is centered around an integrated cloud architecture. QCS offers developers access to Rigetti’s quantum processors and the classical computing resources that are necessary for building and testing the quantum algorithms on the platform. Once users have registered on the platform, they can access their own dedicated Quantum Machine Image that comes with preloaded tools necessary to build quantum programs (such as pyQuil and quantum simulator). Rigetti team has also deployed two Aspen QPUs to the QCS platform that can be booked via an online reservation system available in the new QCS web dashboard. Moreover, all Beta users will receive $5,000 in credits for running programs on the QPU during their first month. According to Betsy Masiello, VP Product at Rigetti, the company is not only making QCS available but are also opening up access to QCS Developer Partner applications i.e. the first set of applications built by Rigetti’s Developer Partners. These applications include QCompress, QClassify, QuantumFreeze, and Quantum Feature Detector. Apart from QCS developer partners, there are more than 30 leading scientists from around the world who have signed on themselves as QCS Research Partners. These scientists have worked across different domains such as characterizing and benchmarking quantum hardware, along with computational research across biology, chemistry, and machine learning. Moreover, these research partners get to publish their results, share their data, code, as well as open-source the tools and libraries that they create on the QCS platform. For more details, check out the Rigetti Computing official website. Quantum Computing is poised to take a quantum leap with industries and governments on its side. Did quantum computing just take a quantum leap? A two-qubit chip by UK researchers makes controlled quantum entanglements possible The US to invest over $1B in quantum computing, President Trump signs a law

Chrome 72 for Android now comes with the Trusted Web Activity feature. This means that PWAs can now be distributed in the Google Play Store. The Trusted Web Activity feature is a way to open Chrome in standalone mode (without any toolbar or Chrome UI) within the scope of our Google’s native Android package. This will allow publishing your PWA in the Google Play store, and from the browser. PWA in Google Play Store offers the following features: Home Screen Widget Wear OS companion app or Android Auto extension Background services accessing native features Limited monetization of the App The possibility of having some native screens mixed with PWA content Distribute more than one PWA icon in the Launcher and/or home screen pointing to different URLs (within the same host) Better internationalization support However, PWA in the store is an opt-in operation. The PWA won’t be listed in the store if users don’t compile their own APK, and publish it. Maximiliano Firtman, a mobile and web developer has written a tutorial showing how users can create an Android Package using TWA, the limitations of using this platform, and how to create a PWApk. He talks about the publishing process saying that it is not straightforward. For publishing, you use a Java API that communicates through services with Chrome which requires manual work. He has shared his experiences trying to make it work in his blog post. Overall he says that “The idea that we can now publish PWAs in the Google Play Store is really a game changer. It seems we are in the early stages of the API right now and we definitely need a higher level solution for this. I really want to see a tool to enter our PWA’s URL and get an APK from it.” Top frameworks for building your Progressive Web Apps (PWA) 5 reasons why your next app should be a PWA (progressive web app) Build powerful progressive web apps with Firebase

If you are worried about Facebook tracking your web activities outside Facebook, you can now prevent it from doing so using the Facebook Container extension for Firefox, that Mozilla launched on Wednesday. This extension is supported in Firefox 57 and higher on Desktop but does not work on other browsers and Firefox for mobile. https://twitter.com/firefox/status/1090680882401341440 Facebook Container extension, which goes by the tagline “What happens outside Facebook stays outside of Facebook”, isolates your Facebook identity into a separate container. And, hence makes it difficult for Facebook from tracking your activities outside the social media platform with third-party cookies. Facebook Container extension will close your Facebook tabs, delete your Facebook cookies, and log you out of Facebook. All the non-Facebook links you click on or non-Facebook websites you navigate to will be loaded outside of the container. To prevent Facebook from associating information about user activity on websites outside of Facebook to their Facebook identity, embedded Facebook comments and like buttons in tabs outside the Facebook Container will not work. Additionally, the “directly sign-in with Facebook credentials” option on other websites will not work properly, as it is designed to separate Facebook use from use of other websites. The extension is not meant for stopping Facebook advertisements and recommendations on their site. But, this will surely limit Facebook to use your activity collected off Facebook to send you ads and other targeted messages. To read more in detail, check out Mozilla’s website. Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more! Mozilla disables the by default Adobe Flash plugin support in Firefox Nightly 69 Mozilla releases Firefox 64 and Firefox 65 beta

Google’s Cloud Firestore is Google’s serverless NoSQL document database used for storing, syncing, and querying data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. It is integrated with both Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform. It is now generally available. Apart from this, Cloud Firestore is now available in 10 new locations, making the total region count as 13 with a significant price reduction for regional instances. Firestore had a single location when it was launched and added two more during the beta. Cloud Firestore is now available in 13 regions When in beta, Cloud Firestore allowed developers to only use multi-region instances, which were sometimes more expensive and not required by every app. With this launch, Google is giving developers the option to run their databases in a single region. There is a significant price reduction with as low as 50% of multi-region instance prices. New Cloud Firestore pricing takes effect from March 3, 2019, for most regional instances. Cloud Firestore’s SLA (Service Level Agreement) is also available. 99.999% is available for multi-region instances and 99.99% is available for regional instances. With Stackdriver integration (in beta), Cloud Firestore users can monitor read, write and delete operations in near-real time with a new "Usage" tab in the Firebase console. For the next release, Google is working on adding new features including querying for documents across collections and incrementing database values without needing a transaction. Existing Cloud Datastore users will be live-upgraded to Cloud Firestore automatically later in 2019. Netizens are generally happy about this release. https://twitter.com/puf/status/1091030237117206529 A comment on hacker news reads, “Been loving Firestore! It has been my first real experience w/ NoSQL in an MVP to production-ready quickly. It's been SO easy to experiment with and learn. Community has been great.” Google Cloud releases a beta version of SparkR job types in Cloud Dataproc 4 key benefits of using Firebase for mobile app development Build powerful progressive web apps with Firebase

After releasing TypeScript 3.3 RC, two weeks ago, yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of TypeScript 3.3. TypeScript 3.3 contains no breaking changes and is a comparatively smaller release than usual. What’s new in Typescript 3.3 Better behavior when calling union types When there is a union type A | B, TypeScript now allows users to access all of the properties common to both A and B. For example, the intersection of members. You can get a property from a union type only if it’s known to be present in every union type. When every type has only one signature with identical parameters, things work. Such a restriction was too much and have errors in some areas. So, in TypeScript 3.3, the following code as shown in the blog will work: type Fruit = "apple" | "orange"; type Color = "red" | "orange"; type FruitEater = (fruit: Fruit) => number;     // eats and ranks the fruit type ColorConsumer = (color: Color) => string;  // consumes and describes the colors declare let f: FruitEater | ColorConsumer; f("orange"); // It works! Returns a 'number | string'. f("apple");  // error - Argument of type '"apple"' is not assignable to parameter of type '"orange"'. f("red");    // error - Argument of type '"red"' is not assignable to parameter of type '"orange"'. The parameters of the above signatures are ‘intersected’ to create a new signature. When the impossible intersections are gone, what remains is “orange” & “orange” which is just “orange”. That is not to say there are no restrictions. The new behavior is active only when only one type in the union has multiple overloads and a generic signature. The forEach method will now be callable, but there may be some issues under noImplicitAny. --build --watch use incremental file watching In TypeScript 3.3, --build mode’s --watch flag leverage incremental file watching. This results in significantly faster builds with a reduction of 50% to 75% in build times of the original --build --watch times. Sublime Text supports JavaScript editing The TypeScript plugin for Sublime Text now supports editing in JavaScript files. Users will now get more accurate completions, rename, go-to-definition, and more in JavaScript code that utilizes JSDoc and interoperates with TypeScript code. Typescript recently announced the ‘TypeScript Roadmap’ for January 2019- June 2019 which outlines the priorities that the team will be focussing on, over the next 6 months. Future of ESLint support in TypeScript PayPal replaces Flow with TypeScript as their type checker for every new web app npm JavaScript predictions for 2019: React, GraphQL, and TypeScript are three technologies to learn

Stripe, the payments infrastructure company, has received a whopping $100 million in funding from Tiger Global Management and now its valuation stands at $22.5 billion as reported by The Information on Tuesday. Last year in September, it also secured $245 million through its funding round, also led by Tiger Global Management. Founded in 2010 by the Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collision, Stripe has now become one of the most valuable “unicorns”, a term used for firms worth more than $1 billion, in the U.S. The company also boasts an impressive list of clients, recently adding Google and Uber to its stable users. The company is now planning to expand its platform by launching a point-of-sale payments terminal package targeted at online retailers making the jump to offline. A Stripe spokesperson told CNBC, “Stripe is rapidly scaling internationally, as well as extending our platform into issuing, global fraud prevention, and physical stores with Stripe Terminal. The follow-on funding gives us more leverage in these strategic areas.” The company is also expanding its team. On Tuesday, Patrick Collision announced that Diane Greene, who is an Alphabet board of directors member will be joining the Stripe’s board of directors. Along with Greene, joining the team are Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, Michelle Wilson, former general counsel at Amazon, and Jonathan Chadwick, former CFO of VMware, McAfee, and Skype. https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1090386301642141696 In addition to Tiger Global Management, the start-up has also being supported by various other investors including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk. For more details, read the full story on The Information website. PayPal replaces Flow with TypeScript as their type checker for every new web app After BitPay, Coinbase bans Gab accounts and its founder, Andrew Torba Social media platforms, Twitter and Gab.com, accused of facilitating recent domestic terrorism in the U.S.