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IBM Creates First 2nm Chip

Every decade is the decade that tests the limits of Moore’s Law, and this decade is no different. With the arrival of Extreme Ultra...

LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online | Tech News | Startups News

LiveLeak, a popular British video sharing website known for footage of war, politics, and many other world events usually censored on other video websites, like YouTube, abruptly shuts down today after 15 years online. LiveLeak joins thousands of other failed …

HTML Sanitizer API - Web APIs | MDN

The HTML Sanitizer API allow developers to take untrusted strings of HTML, and sanitize them for safe insertion into a document’s DOM.

Catala: A Programming Language for the Law

Law at large underpins modern society, codifying and governing many aspects of citizens' daily lives. Oftentimes, law is subject to interpretation, debate and challenges throughout various courts and jurisdictions. But in some other areas, law leaves little room for interpretation, and essentially aims to rigorously describe a computation, a decision procedure or, simply said, an algorithm. Unfortunately, prose remains a woefully inadequate tool for the job. The lack of formalism leaves room for ambiguities; the structure of legal statutes, with many paragraphs and sub-sections spread across multiple pages, makes it hard to compute the intended outcome of the algorithm underlying a given text; and, as with any other piece of poorly-specified critical software, the use of informal language leaves corner cases unaddressed. We introduce Catala, a new programming language that we specifically designed to allow a straightforward and systematic translation of statutory law into an executable implementation. Catala aims to bring together lawyers and programmers through a shared medium, which together they can understand, edit and evolve, bridging a gap that often results in dramatically incorrect implementations of the law. We have implemented a compiler for Catala, and have proven the correctness of its core compilation steps using the F* proof assistant. We evaluate Catala on several legal texts that are algorithms in disguise, notably section 121 of the US federal income tax and the byzantine French family benefits; in doing so, we uncover a bug in the official implementation. We observe as a consequence of the formalization process that using Catala enables rich interactions between lawyers and programmers, leading to a greater understanding of the original legislative intent, while producing a correct-by-construction executable specification reusable by the greater software ecosystem.

Pyston v2.2: faster and open source

We are proud to announce Pyston v2.2, the latest version of our faster implementation of the Python programming language. This version is significantly faster than previous ones, and importantly is…

The Case of the 50ms request

Six years of professional Clojure development

Sysinternals/ProcMon-for-Linux

Procmon is a Linux reimagining of the classic Procmon tool from the Sysinternals suite of tools for Windows. Procmon provides a convenient and efficient way for Linux developers to trace the syscal...

Deep Diving Into the Strengths of FreeBSD

Read about the strengths of FreeBSD and find out what are the features that make FreeBSD the right choice of operating system for developing products on top of it, or simply using it as your infrastructure OS.

From Rust to SPARK: Formally Proven Bip-Buffers

From Rust to SPARK: Formally Proven Bip-Buffers