Random 101

Four Years On, New Experiment Sees No Sign of ‘Cosmic Dawn’

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, published in Nature, was heralded as a groundbreaking signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang — an event dubbed “cosmic dawn,” which should have stamped such a signature in the light.

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 men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats.

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 spider first arrived stateside around 2013 and has since spread across the state and Southeast. But new research from the University of Georgia suggests the invasive arachnids could spread through most of the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S.

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

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 Ruby backend and a single MySQL database.

After being on the journey for a decade, it feels like we’ve been tested in every way possible. We’ve seen consistent misuse, both intentional and unintentional, from external folks and ourselves. We’ve reached the scaling limits of our core technologies. We’ve found short-term partitioning strategies just to make it through. We’ve architected our way through scaling bottlenecks.

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 device is a nice and clean mainline U-Boot, in other cases it’s the U-Boot build provided by the manufacturer of the SoC.

One big difference between x86 computers and the ARM ecosystem is functionality that you’d expect from the bios/uefi in the hardware is actually in most cases part of the operating system that’s installed. This means there’s no consistency at all.

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 new practices and regulations, and one of the primary threads is around “reproducible builds.”

It’s one thing to talk about reproducible builds and how they strengthen software supply chain security, but it’s quite another to effectively configure a reproducible build. Concrete steps for specific languages are a far larger topic than can be covered in a single blog post, but today we’ll be talking about some guiding principles when designing 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 in print in 2010.1

A selling point of the U.S. News rankings is that they claim to be based largely on uniform, objective figures like graduation rates and test scores. Twenty percent of an institution’s ranking is based on a “peer assessment survey” in which college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans are asked to rate other institutions, but the remaining 80% is based entirely on numerical data collected by the institution itself. Some of this is reported by colleges and universities to the government under Federal law, some of it is voluntarily released by these institutions to the public, and some of it is provided directly to U.S. News.

Like other faculty members at Columbia University, I have followed Columbia’s position in the U.S. News ranking of National Universities with considerable interest. It has been gratifying to witness Columbia’s steady rise from 18th place, on its debut in 1988, to the lofty position of 2nd place which it attained this year, surpassed only by Princeton and tied with Harvard and MIT.

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.

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 us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous — and too busy to tweet.

Reality check: It turns out, you’re right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.