ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with The Frontier. I
The origins of big data infrastructure Many of today's most highly adopted open source “big data” infrastructure projects – like Cassandra, Kafka, Hadoop, etc. – follow a common story. A large company
I was doing some personal archeology recently and dug up the earliest available screenshot of a blog post that I wrote. Side note: This is an explanation of an 'SAT problem', part of a test highschool
Posted on March 13, 2024 Intro A little over a year ago I was working full time as a software engineer while finishing my PhD in physics (you're probably already questioning my judgement, please keep
Facebook Billing infrastructure has been a vexing issue for generations of software and Internet companies. It is mission critical infrastructure and as such, feels like a problem that should have bee
Enlarge Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband se
Mar 12, 2024 - Technology Ryan Heath, author of Axios AI+ Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky. Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for AWS Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky has more than 10,00
Having worked in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, there are some interesting points to consider with respect to a few topics you might think have already been well-covered: automatic memory management, the st
The relationship between people and their craft is such that you can tell by the path they have followed whether they are a master or an amateur. Robert Greene, most famous for his exposure of power,
It shouldn't shock you that we're lonely . We're years into a global pandemic, and even before so we were in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic." In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy so
Sometimes debuggers and profilers are obivously broken, sometimes it's subtle and hard to spot. From my flame graphs page: CPU flame graph (partly broken) (Click for original SVG.) This is pretty comm
In 1983, when Argentina held its first presidential election after seven years of military dictatorship, Raúl Alfonsín won with an optimistic slogan: “With democracy one eats, one is educated, one is
What came before? A few years ago we started using Vagrant with an Ubuntu virtual machine (VM) as the basis of our development environment. It served us well at the time, providing a good way to have
I am happy to announce that I got accepted into The Recurse Center for the Fall 1 ‘20 batch. It’s quite a life event because attending RC was one of my dreams for about a year and a half now. Trying t
When the global pandemic was first announced, it was a bewildering feeling. It was scary, and yet, somehow thrilling—a novel experience, to say the least. So throughout the rest of the year—and settin
Katja Grace’s apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinist’s factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impres
Most teens at least sometimes feel happy and peaceful when they don’t have their phone, but 44% say this makes them anxious. Half of parents say they have looked through their teen’s phone (FG Trade/G
Every day, the Telegram channel Gun Shop America posts a steady stream of photographs of illicit wares for sale to its near 26,000 subscribers. Recently these included a 9mm Glock with ammunition for
Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society. On Monday, a friend emailed to let me know that the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann had passed away overnight. While I may not ment
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