AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Forecast, which enables developers to build applications with the same machine learning technology used by Amazon.com for forecasting business conditions. 

According to the company, Amazon Forecast automatically discovers how variables such as product features, seasonality and store locations affect each other and can make predictions that are up to 50 percent more accurate than traditional forecasting methods. Amazon Forecast automatically sets up a data pipeline, ingests data, trains a model, provides accuracy metrics and performs forecasts. In addition, developers don’t need to have any expertise in machine learning to use Amazon Forecast.

“Amazon Forecast now offers the forecasting expertise from Amazon’s first 25 years of building the world’s largest ecommerce business in a managed service for any company to leverage,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of Amazon Machine Learning.

GitHub supports WebAuthn for security keys
GitHub announced that it now supports Web Authentication (WebAuthn) for security keys as a supplemental factor, but is working to make it a primary second factor as more platforms support them. 

Security keys are the new standard for secure authentication on the web, according to GitHub. Previously, GitHub supported physical security keys using the experimental U2F API for Chrome. 

“GitHub’s move toward WebAuthn makes it possible to use your laptop or phone as a security key without carrying a separate physical key,” GitHub stated in a post. “And as new browsers and devices support WebAuthn, you’ll have even more choices for secure authentication that automatically work with GitHub.”

Qt for MCUs
Cross-platform software framework provider Qt introduced Qt for MCUs, a comprehensive toolkit to deliver smartphone-like user experience on displays powered by microcontrollers. 

Qt for MCUs makes use of Qt Quick for creating user interfaces with QML and C++ APIs for extending the user interface with C++ code. In addition, an application on Qt for MCUs is rendered using a new runtime – that now allows applications to run directly on the processor without an operating system – delivering high performance with low memory consumption, according to the company.

“Designing and developing applications is fairly straight-forward with Qt’s design and development tools – Qt Design Studio and Qt Creator,” Qt said in a blog post.

HackerRank announces new features to CodePair
Technical hiring platform HackerRank announced the addition of new features that will help CodePair customer conduct more effective interview without any additional burden on the interviewer. 

The new features include integration of the CodeScreen and CodePair solutions, read-eval-print-loop support to easily evaluate the correctness of a block of code and a redesigned user interface. 

“In today’s tight labor market, there is a massive opportunity for companies to improve the recruiting process for their hiring managers and potential candidates,” said Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder and CEO of HackerRank. “CodePair helps enterprises make better insight-driven hiring decisions based on skill, while at the same time improving the candidate experience.”