Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

--- Linux wants some hugs, and everyone gives a hug about it! ---

After the CoC controversy revolving around the Linux Kernel project, a change introduced by the CoC is being put into practice:
Jarkko Sakkinen, from Intel, started replacing words comments containing "fuck" with their "hug" variant. This means comments such as
/* master list of VME vectors -- don't fuck with this */
might look a bit different in the future:
/* master list of VME vectors -- don't hug with this */

People that oppose this change criticize that the comments will make much less sense to people that aren't fluent in English yet. They also do not like the redundant censoring - the actual meaning is still implied, just no longer included as clear text. It might also cause misunderstandings to people working with the code.

Those supporting this change, aside from jokingly mentioning that this change will save one character per f-word comment, note that this can give the Linux Kernel project a more positive feeling with anyone who works with the code, with "fuck" mostly associated with bad feelings, while "hug" is indeed mostly going to call positive feelings in our subconscious minds.

Who doesn't like a good hug? :)

What is your opinion on this rather controversial topic? Feel free to let us know in the comments, as we are very interested in your stances and arguments on this!

Sources:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/1/105
Several comment sections, IRC chats, and other places for people to express their opinions. Too many to list them all.

--- URGENT: Major security flaw in Kubernetes: Update Kubernetes at all costs! ---
Detailed info: https://github.com/kubernetes/...

If you are running any unpatched versions of Kubernetes, you must update now. Anyone might be able to send commands directly to your backend through a forged network request, without even triggering a single line in the log, making their attack practically invisible!

If you are running a version of Kubernetes below 1.10... there is no help for you. Upgrade to a newer version, e.g. 1.12.3.

--- NVIDIA announces PhysX SDK 4.0, open-sources 3.4 under modified BSD license ---

NVIDIA has announced a new version, 4.0, of PhysX, their physics simulation engine.
Its new features include:

- A "Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS)", an algorithm used in this SDK to make things such as robots, character arms, etc. more robust to move around. NVIDIA demonstrates this in the video by making their old version of PhysX, 3.4, seem like an unpredictable mess, the robot demonstrating that version smashing a game of chess.
- New filtering rules for supposedly easier scalability in scenes containing lots of both moving and static objects.
- Faster queries in scenes with actors that have a lot of shapes attached to them, improving performance.
- PhysX can now be more easily used with Cmake-based projects.

In essence, better control over scenes and actors as well as performance improvements are what's new.

Furthermore, NVIDIA has released PhysX version 3.4 under the 3-Clause-BSD-license, except for game console platforms.
As NVIDIA will release the new version on December 20th, it will also be released under the same modified BSD license as PhysX 3.4 is now.

What are your thoughts on NVIDIA making a big move towards the open-source community by releasing PhysX under the BSD license? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

Sources:
https://news.developer.nvidia.com/a...
https://developer.nvidia.com/physx-...
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/...

Seems like the "creator of the internet" is working together with MIT to create a new version of it.

Check it out yourselves.:
https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/...
https://solid.inrupt.com/

https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/...

Chaotic Evil: Some dude 'hacked' 50k printers that were open to the public and printed a message that the owner should subscribe to PewDiPie.

Alot of youngster still give absolute Zero fuck though

https://patents.google.com/patent/...

Want to keep up to date with news:
https://legionfront.me/pages/news
https://legion.media

To those of you who want to remember things longer and faster. Especially for students. There is an efficient solution to this pain. It is free, btw.

"Sans Forgetica".

There's now a new font which is created by "a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists from RMIT University".

This font uses "the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember your study notes".

Editor's note: Yes, I was too lazy to write it on my own. The more you know ;)

Links:
http://sansforgetica.rmit/
https://t3n.de/news/...

Hacker News Redesign with React.

In an effort to learn react I created a hacker news redesign clone from total scratch.
Reviews are welcome.

Live Demo: https://bit.ly/2Yqm5L4
Repo: https://bit.ly/2Ynhh9q

Leave a star if you like it 😇

*News for the users here that deal with web hosting here*

Hey there anyone that vaguely remembers me, so have been busy with my network lately dont have much time to get back here, I dont know if someone has already reported this new, I found it while I was scooting for news to share on my site (shameless plug: https://legionfront.me/pages/news)
Its about our loved /s and highly used Wordpress and its lovely code /ss
https://thehackernews.com/2018/02/...
Short story short if, there is an exploit (of the many) to DDoS a network of worpress sites that has been present since almost literally forever, the code to fix it is in the article