It turns out that Ethereum’s Solidity takes the top spot, followed by JavaScript and Java in second and third spot respectively, according to the most common blockchain-related questions on StackOverflow. To reach this conclusion, Hard Fork searched StackOverflow for entries tagged with the term “blockchain.” In 2,724 questions referencing “blockchain,” Solidity appeared a total of 259 times. JavaScript was mentioned in 130 questions, followed by Java with 71 mentions. Python and Google’s Go complete the top five, with 66 and 58 mentions respectively....

With the start of a new year, everyone is reflecting on how to make their 2021 more productive and fulfilling than the last 12 months. Since we’ve all got an elite-level camera with us at all times, that pursuit is leading many to focus on improving their photography skills. Maybe you can talk a walk each morning and snap images of what you see. Or maybe you can take a self-portrait every day to chart your year....

Superman and Lex Luthor. Cain and Abel. UI and UX. Some push-pull relationships remain eternally strained. While user experience designers (UX) try to approach web and app creation from a user’s perspective, user interface experts (UI) focus on a product’s aesthetic look and feel as well as its interactivity. In a perfect world, these two equally critical schools of thought find a happy balance somewhere in the middle. In less than perfect worlds, they…well, don’t....

The system uses AI to distinguish between legitimate reports and bot-generated messages in real-time to create a stream of only genuine information. It was created by researchers from the University of Adelaide and Aussie analytics agency Data61. The team had initially been building an algorithm that searches social media for signals that a major event is unfolding. But they discovered that the genuine voices on Twitter were being drowned out by false information....

Meet Moflin, an AI pet with “emotional capabilities that evolve like living animals.” The creature, which looks like a cross between a hamster and a slipper, won the Best of Innovation Award in Robotics at CES 2021 this week. [Read: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data] Moflin uses a nature-inspired algorithm to learn and grow from patterns it detects through its sensors, according to its creators at Vanguard Industries: The robot’s behavior is determined by its environment and the way in which it’s treated....

We will have to also develop open and curious mindsets. Focus on transferable skills which will be relevant for the entirety of people’s lives. And preferably do all of this in a fun and playful way. So that we will all be able to enjoy the journey that is life at its best. Learn to look at skills in a flexible way From my 10 years of experience with innovation, I’ve seen a number of times people stop evolving....

These are just some of the fast-changing stories that journalists across Europe are striving to cover — at times finding themselves at the center of that story. Europe’s newsrooms are facing multiple challenges as they adjust to a more populist environment, greater competition from digital rivals, and continued financial constraints. For the sake of citizens, societies, and world order, journalists and publishers must now navigate an ever more complex landscape to hold power accountable....

Twitter has been a primary means by which the president has sought to set the agenda. Since he first took office, many people have speculated that some of Trump’s tweets were deployed to distract from negative media coverage. For example, when the press reported on the US$25m Trump University settlement, he tweeted about the Hamilton play controversy. When COVID-19 failed to “just go away” but instead took a stranglehold on the US, he tweeted about the “OBAMAGATE!...

Unlike Facebook, Twitter didn’t make a policy change specifically for Holocaust denial. Indeed, its hateful conduct policy doesn’t mention Holocaust denial, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg that the topic is implied in the policy. Specifically, they said: “We strongly condemn anti-semitism, and hateful conduct has absolutely no place on our service. We also have a robust ‘glorification of violence’ policy in place and take action against content that glorifies or praises historical acts of violence and genocide, including the Holocaust....

The pandemic has led tons of people online to constantly abuse the country and its citizens, even spitting racial slurs. A report from L1ght, a company that specializes in measuring online toxicity, suggests there has been a 900% growth in hate speech towards China and Chinese people on Twitter. Plus, a lot of users are using discriminatory hashtags such as #chinaliedpeopledied, #Chinavirus, and #Kungflu to tweet about the disease. [Read: Europol is chasing hackers exploiting the coronavirus pandemic] L1ght’s study also highlights that there have been 200% increase in traffic to sites and posts that targets Asians....

Last week, the Indian government extended the lockdown by two weeks. However, it divided its 733 districts into Red, Orange, and Green zones to denote the severity of the spread of coronavirus in those areas (red being the worst affected). Currently, 130 districts are classified as Red, 284 as Orange, and 319 as Green. Earlier this morning, Uber said it’s resuming its services in Green and Orange zones. In Orange zones, it’ll work only outside containment areas....

Zomato’s co-founder and CEO, Deepinder Goyal, said the company will onboard all Uber Eats customers, restaurant partners, and driver-partners on its own platform: Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, said the company is proud of the Uber Eats team’s achievement in India, but it sounds like nothing more than lip service. Uber Eats bled a lot of money last year. People familiar with the matter told Financial Times that the service’s operations in India only represented 3 percent of Uber’s food business revenue globally, but contributed to 25 percent losses in 2019 — almost $500 million a year....

Mobile networks including EE, Vodafone, O2, and 3 are all said to be experiencing issues, just a day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advised the public to avoid workspaces. However, the operators don’t think the problem is due to the immense growth in remote working. “We don’t believe it is connected to the rise in home working [due to the coronavirus],” said EE. They are instead blaming the disruption on “interconnect issues” that originated at O2....

The Urban Transport Group is calling for a new national framework to give local transport authorities the option to regulate key aspects of micromobility services in line with their individual needs and circumstances. In a new report, the network of the UK’s major city region transport authorities says new powers could give them the option of regulating the number of escooter operators, the size of their fleets, their geographical coverage, and the location of their parking....

Alex Serdiuk has a unique understanding of both the opportunities and threats. As the co-founder and CEO of AI startup Respeecher, Serdiuk has won an Emmy for creating a deepfake Richard Nixon, developed voice clones for speech disabilities, and de-aged Mark Hamill’s vocal cords for The Mandalorian. Yet Serdiuk has also seen synthetic media at its worst. The CEO and his company are based in Ukraine, which has been the target of deepfake disinformation....

NHS England aims to build a COVID-19 data store aggregating all of its patient data. Neural’s Thomas Macaulay wrote about the original deal here, where he explained: Originally, the non-compete contract was framed in language that made it seem like Palantir would be figuring out simple logistics such as how many beds and ventilators the UK would need. But the scope of the project has apparently changed. According to New Statesmen editor Oscar Williams, who first broke the news yesterday, Palantir will be doing a lot more analysis than initially indicated....

We now have more than a dozen “subscription video on demand” services to choose from, with dozens of more options available worldwide to anyone with a VPN to get around geoblocks. But all this competition isn’t actually making things easier. It’s likely all this “choice” will see more of us turning to piracy to watch our favorite films and televisions shows. The problem is that services are competing (at least in part) through offering exclusive content and original programming....

The challenges long-duration space travellers experience are not foreign to regular folk, although to a lesser degree. Many Canadians experience isolation and loneliness, at least occasionally. The loneliness epidemic could be alleviated by an unlikely marriage between space research, virtual reality (VR) and the science of self-transcendent experiences. COVID-19 lockdowns have created an environment for the largest isolation study in research history. Stay-at-home orders have stopped us from meeting other people and experiencing nature, which has increased rates of loneliness and depression....

Look, you can laugh at the NFT movement all you want. You can laugh at what people are selling as non-fungible tokens and you can laugh even harder at how much people are spending on these digital-only creations. Is it a way for creators to finally gain a level of control and ownership over art, a meme, or another digital product that anyone used to be able to take for nothing?...

Though the company has long been focused on the camera accessory business, it’s recently expanded into the audio business in a big way, with a series of accessories aimed specifically at podcasters, YouTubers, streamers, and other creators. I’ve recently been able to spend time with the company’s desk microphone, the $99 Wavo Pod, and it strikes me as an excellent sound upgrade for beginners. Now, a disclaimer: I’ve tested a few different microphones throughout the years, but I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic....