Page 12 - Simon Willison News Today

An emerging set of vendors is trying to simplify the job of web development, again. Is this the next generation of platform as a service, or something completely different?

Back in the mid-2000s, the software industry and the venture capitalists funding software startups became interested in the idea of platform as a service (PaaS), promising a simple, one-stop-shop platform for software developers to take their ideas from source code to production. Despite the early success of some of these platforms—most notably Heroku, which is

Teaching Tech Together and build a teaching community around them who taught hundreds of children to read and to believe in themselves. And for my brother Jeff, who did not live to see it finished. "Remember, you still have a lot of good times in front of you." All royalties from the sale of this book are being donated to the Carpentries, foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. Reme...

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has long argued it needs to control app distribution on iPhones, otherwise the App Store would turn into ’a flea market.’ But among the 1.8 million apps on the App Store, scams are hiding in plain sight.

The App Store is crawling with scams, despite Apple's best efforts. That's why you should delete these dangerous apps from your iPhone ASAP.

Apple claims its App Store is carefully curated so that only the best apps get through. The truth is, the App Store is littered with scams and "fleeceware," which uses fake user ratings to trick customers into paying for something they don't want.

Thousands of incarcerated people in Arizona have been kept behind bars by a software glitch, according to a report by KJZZ broadcast Monday. Anonymous whistleblowers from the Arizona Department of Corrections whistleblowers leaked details about the situation to the Phoenix NPR member station. Arizona has the fifth highest imprisonment rate in the country, and its incarcerated people are mostly nonviolent drug offenders. In 2019, the state Legislature passed a law aiming to change that by...

Litestream 6 min read tl;dr—Despite an exponential increase in computing power, our applications require more machines than ever because of architectural decisions made 25 years ago. You can eliminate much of your complexity and cost by using SQLite & Litestream for your production applications. When I was your age… I can tell I’m getting old because I talk about the “good old days” of computing. Back when knowing a single programming language and SQL was good enough to work at mo...