The package manager for JavaScript npm reached version 5.0 this week. It includes some new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes that aim to make life easier for users.
“This release marks months of hard work for the young, scrappy, and hungry CLI team, and includes some changes we’ve been hoping to do for literally years. npm@5 takes npm a pretty big step forward, significantly improving its performance in almost all common situations, fixing a bunch of old errors due to the architecture, and just generally making it more robust and fault-tolerant,” the npm team wrote in a post.
Features include a new, standardized lockfile feature; improvements to saves and installs capabilities; two new scripts; Git dependencies enhancements; and a cache rewrite.
OpenAI open sources Baselines
OpenAI is releasing its implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms into open source this week, OpenAI Baselines. To start, the organization is making its Deep Q-Learning solution and three of its variants available. The algorithms are an internal effort to help the research community replicate, refine, and identify new ideas as well as create a good baseline on top of it.
“Reinforcement learning results are tricky to reproduce: performance is very noisy, algorithms have many moving parts which allow for subtle bugs, and many papers don’t report all the required tricks. By releasing known-good implementations (and best practices for creating them), we’d like to ensure that apparent RL advances never are due to comparison with buggy or untuned versions of existing algorithms,” OpenAI researchers Szymon Sidor and John Schulman wrote in a post.
Twilio releases new serverless environment
Twilio launched Functions, a new serverless environment for building and running communication apps on the Twilio platform. According to the company, this will remove the complexity of setting up, configuring, managing and scaling web infrastructure.
“Writing code is a creative endeavor,” said Patrick Malatack, Twilio VP of product. “The developers and businesses building cloud communications apps should be focusing on the customer experience, not managing servers. Fueling the future of communications starts with unleashing developer creativity, and that’s exactly what Twilio Functions was designed to do. We can’t wait to see what developers build next!”
Features include: A complete runtime environment, zero operational burden, and automatic scaling.
Two foundations team up to make technology education more accessible
The Raspberry Pi Foundation and the CoderDojo Foundation are teaming up to give more people worldwide more opportunities to learn and be creative with technology. CoderDojo was first founded in 2011 as a coding club for kids. Since then, the foundation has featured more than 1,250 code clubs in 69 continues. Together, the foundations hope to bring CoderDojo’s number to 5,000 worldwide by 2020.
CoderDojo will continue as an independent charity and remain platform neural. The Raspberry Pi Foundation will join the CoderDojo as a corporate member and CEO Philip Colligan will join the board.
