I’ve written something like this before on my old (defunct) blog before, but new thoughts and realizations required that I revisit it. The topic? Microservices.
The trend to build every single application as a series of tiny web services that talk to each other is growing in prominence, and starting to be picked up by a lot of new professional developers. The problem is, many people picking up this idea have not seen the times before and just assume this is a “best practice”.
Selecting embryos based on such screening is premature, other researchers warn
A California company says it can decipher almost all the DNA code of a days-old embryo created through in vitro fertilization (IVF)—a challenging feat because of the tiny volume of genetic material available for analysis. The advance depends on fully sequencing both parents’ DNA and “reconstructing” an embryo’s genome with the help of those data. And the company suggests it could make it possible to forecast risk for common diseases that develop decades down the line. Currently, such genetic risk prediction is being tested in adults, and sometimes offered clinically. The idea of applying it to IVF embryos has generated intense scientific and ethical controversy. But that hasn’t stopped the technology from galloping ahead.
GoBGP is an open source BGP implementation designed from scratch for modern environment and implemented in a modern programming language, the Go Programming Language.
Qualcomm is the world’s largest fabless semiconductor designer. The name Qualcomm is a mashup of Quality and Communications and communications has been a hallmark of the company since its founding. They began in satellite communications and today most every smartphone has a Qualcomm chip. The ubiquity of communications in our devices and everyday lives has allowed them a $182 billion market cap as of the time of this writing.
Qualcomm began with far humbler beginnings. They emerged out of a company called Linkabit in 1985. Linkabit was started by Irwin Jacobs, Leonard Kleinrock, and Andrew Viterbi – all three former graduate students at MIT.
The Inca are most often remembered not for what they had but for what they didn’t have: the wheel, iron, a written language. This third lack has given rise to a paradox, the Inca paradox. Could it be that the largest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas existed without a jot of linguistic notation? Could someone have created the magnificence of Machu Picchu without a single sign to describe its beauty?
The idea that a fuel-burning engine could drive a vehicle over land, through the water, or even into the sky, was already old by the time of Watt’s triumphs. Leibiniz, Huygens, and Papin had all dreamed of vehicles powered by gunpowder or steam. The horseless carriage was the most popular concept; machinery to turn wheels was already commonplace, after all. John Robison had proposed a steam-driven carriage to Watt himself in 1759. But steam locomotion first became practical in the water, not on land. There were several reasons for this, but the most fundamental was size: early steam engines were large and heavy machines, built atop a large and heavy boiler which sat atop a large and heavy furnace (typically of brick). To float of all this mass on water was a far easier matter than to set it on wheels (though the crushing weight of its machinery sent many a steamboat to the bottom nonetheless). Moreover, a ship of moderate size, unlike a road-bound vehicle of any reasonable dimensions, could hold all the workings and still have plenty of leftover room for paying cargo – human or otherwise. To make a much more compact engine would require high-pressure steam, but that raised many technical problems that would take decades to work out.
Pokete is a small terminal based game in the style of a very popular and old game by Gamefreak.
Robert Freitas shares the story behind the Xenology.
Robert Freitas was still in college when he started his now-legendary handbook to alien life. Published in 1979, Xenology offered some of the first — and still among the only — serious academic discussion of potential extraterrestrial biology, culture, and more, including, yes, ray guns and orgasms.
It wasn’t just errant musings. Freitas, who would later make his name as an emerging tech researcher, winning the 2009 Feynman Prize for his work in nanotechnology, included more than 4,000 scientific references and laid the groundwork for a quietly expanding field.
Xenology is “the most comprehensive and systematic study of extraterrestrial life, intelligence, and civilization I am aware of,” philosopher Clement Vidal wrote in The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective. “I consider it a rare scientific masterpiece.”
In an email with Inverse, Freitas took credit for laying out the first coherent discussions on various topics.
Every time you open the refrigerator, a heroic engineering effort looks back at you. The global market for plastic caps and closures is worth $40 billion per year–and growing. Sophisticated packaging keeps consumers safe from foodborne illness, reduces spoilage and waste, makes it possible to deliver food to faraway markets, and provides distinctive experiences for customers.
Behind each plastic bottle cap is a careful engineering process that balances cost, user experience, and manufacturability at massive scale. Let’s take a look at what goes into a few of these mechanical marvels with the help of our industrial CT scanner.
Kaitai Struct is a declarative language used to describe various binary data structures, laid out in files or in memory: i.e. binary file formats, network stream packet formats, etc.
The main idea is that a particular format is described in Kaitai Struct language (.ksy file) and then can be compiled with ksc into source files in one of the supported programming languages. These modules will include a generated code for a parser that can read the described data structure from a file or stream and give access to it in a nice, easy-to-comprehend API.
Random 101 