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Andrey Zolotov, Gideon Low present their journey of transition to distributed data processing using GemFire and the challenges faced along the way. Source: infoq.com

Kubernetes, Istio, knative and an internally developed specification for “hardening” containers are now the default software development platform across the military. Just like almost everything else, military organizations increasingly depend on software, and they are turning to an array of open source cloud tools like Kubernetes and Istio to get the job done, according to a presentation delivered by Nicholas Chaillan, chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, at KubeCon 2019 in San Diego.

The traditional answer is that hash tables are designed to be efficient when storing data in memory, while B-Trees are designed for slower storage that is accessed in blocks. However, this is not a fundamental property of these data structures. There are hash tables designed to be used on disk (e.g. MySQL’s hash index), many in-memory trees (e.g. Java’s TreeMap, C++’s map), and even in-memory B-Trees. I think the most important answer is that B-Trees are more ‘general purpose,’ which results in lower ‘total cost’ for very large persistent data.

Undersea cables are responsible for moving data between countries and continents at high speeds, making everything from photo sharing to financial transactions possible. These cables use fiber optics to move data at high speeds to land, where the data is then conveyed via fiber optics to homes and businesses. Yet, despite the billions of people relying on the data moved by undersea cables, there are only about 380 of them worldwide as of 2019, according to CNN estimates, though they span more than 745,000 miles—or more than three times the distance to the moon.

A new method determines whether circuits are accurately executing complex operations that classical computers can’t tackle. Researchers from MIT, Google, and elsewhere have designed a protocol called Variational Quantum Unsampling, based on a novel quantum neural network, that verifies when photonic Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) chips have accurately performed complex computations using light. Source: mit.edu

In 5 years, the number of endpoints consumed by Lyft’s mobile apps grew to over 500, and the size of our mobile engineering team increased by more than 15x. To scale with this growth, our infrastructure had to evolve dramatically to utilize new advances in modern networking in order to continue to provide benefits for our users. This post describes the journey through the evolution of Lyft’s mobile networking: how it’s changed, what we’ve learned, and why it’s important for us as a growing business.

Using the same kind of technology that translates English into Mandarin, the neural network translates problems into solutions Despite being built by calculus, linear algebra, and an army of statisticians around the world, neural networks have trouble understanding math. Or at least, they have trouble understanding how humanity writes math equations. Facebook’s AI research team, however, claims to have developed a new approach to turn complex math problems into machine-readable data.

Lidar sensors work by bouncing laser light off surrounding objects to produce a three-dimensional ‘point cloud.’ The first modern three-dimensional lidar was created for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a pivotal self-driving car competition. Today, many experts continue to see lidar as a key enabling technology for self-driving cars. That original 2005 lidar, made by a company called Velodyne, contained a vertical array of 64 lasers that spun around 360 degrees.

The Dropbox Traffic team is charged with innovating our application networking stack to improve the experience for every one of our users—over half a billion of them. This article describes our work with NS1 to optimize our intelligent DNS-based global load balancing for corner cases that we uncovered while improving our point of presence (PoP) selection automation for our edge network. By co-developing the platform capabilities with NS1 to handle these outliers, we deliver positive Dropbox experiences to more users, more consistently.

HTTP/3 promises to make Internet connections faster, more reliable, and more secure. Born as ‘HTTP over QUIC’, an effort to adapt the HTTP protocol to run on top of Google’s own transport layer protocol, QUIC, it was later proposed as an IETF standard and it is currently an Internet Draft. In October 2018, IETF HTTP & QUIC Working Groups co-chair Mark Nottingham proposed to rename HTTP over QUIC as HTTP/3 to clarify its true nature and its independence from QUIC.