When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing. In 2018, astronomers operating an antenna called EDGES in the Australian outback reported that radio waves of a particular frequency were significantly dimmer than other waves coming from the night sky. The finding, publishedContinue reading “Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of ‘Cosmic Dawn’”
Author Archives: gx
Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic
Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his menContinue reading “Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic”
Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia
New research suggests the spiders could colonize the entire East Coast If you live in Georgia, it’s hard not to notice the state’s latest resident. The bright yellow, blue-black and red spiders’ golden webs will be all over power lines, in trees around town and even on your front porch come summer. The Joro spiderContinue reading “Joro spiders likely to spread beyond Georgia”
Blender 3.1
Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.1, a solid update to an already outstanding release Read more…
ZEN and the art of Reliability
Zendesk handles approximately 250,000 requests per second at daily peak into our infrastructure, with over ½ of those requests needing to read or write to a database. At our core we’re a humble Ruby on Rails application that is partitioned and heavily sharded. Our infrastructure was simple 10 years ago — Nginx with a RubyContinue reading “ZEN and the art of Reliability”
Booting ARM Linux the standard way
Tow-Boot is a relatively new project for bringing some consistency to the way we boot Linux on ARM. This is both aimed at the Linux single board computers but also the new wave of Linux phones. On these devices the most common platform firmware is U-Boot. In some cases the U-Boot provided with the deviceContinue reading “Booting ARM Linux the standard way”
The Three Pillars of Reproducible Builds
Over the past year, software engineers have lived through the shock of infiltrated or intentionally broken NPM packages, supply chain attacks, long-unnoticed backdoors, and more. This has created a firestorm of activity around how to securely build software. Many organizations, from the Linux Foundation to the United States government, are calling for and building newContinue reading “The Three Pillars of Reproducible Builds”
An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking
Nearly forty years after their inception, the U.S. News rankings of colleges and universities continue to fascinate students, parents, and alumni. They receive millions of views annually, have spawned numerous imitators, spark ardent discussions on web forums like Quora, and have even outlived their namesake magazine, U.S. News & World Report, which last appeared inContinue reading “An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia’s U.S. News Ranking”
QuickJS Javascript Engine
QuickJS is a small and embeddable Javascript engine. It supports the ES2020 specification including modules, asynchronous generators, proxies and BigInt. It optionally supports mathematical extensions such as big decimal floating point numbers (BigDecimal), big binary floating point numbers (BigFloat) and operator overloading. Read more…
The new silent majority: People who don’t tweet
Most people you meet in everyday life — at work, in the neighborhood — are decent and normal. Even nice. But hit Twitter or watch the news, and you’d think we were all nuts and nasty. Why it matters: The rising power and prominence of the nation’s loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of usContinue reading “The new silent majority: People who don’t tweet”
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