News

Untold History of AI: When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk

Sonic, the lightweight search engine backend is an alternative to Elasticsearch

Anatomy of CVE-2019-5736: A runc container escape!

On Monday, February 11, CVE-2019-5736 was disclosed. This vulnerability is a flaw in runc, which can be exploited to escape Linux containers launched with Docker, containerd, CRI-O, or any other user of runc. But how does it work?

An ML showdown in search of the best tool

Ever burgeoning digital data combined with impressive research has lead to a rising interest in Machine Learning or ML, which has further powered a vibrant ecosystem of technologies, frameworks, and libraries in the space. Scikit-learn sees high adoption from the tech community. The most probable reason is a powerful Python interface that allows tweaking of models across multiple parameters.

Effective Secrets with Vault and Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration and Vault by HashiCorp is the de facto standard for secrets management. Now the question is: how do you combine those technologies so that you can use secrets from your central Vault instance in your Kubernetes applications? One solution would be to use the AppRole auth method.

Creating Bitcoin trading bots that don’t lose money

In this article we are going to create deep reinforcement learning agents that learn to make money trading Bitcoin. In this tutorial we will be using OpenAI’s gym and the PPO agent from the stable-baselines library, a fork of OpenAI’s baselines library. If you are not already familiar with how to create a gym environment from scratch, or how to render simple visualizations of those environments, I have just written articles on both of those topics.

Packets-per-second limits in EC2

While evaluating the performance of a server application, we eventually (and hopefully) run up against the most fundamental constraining factor: the network. Cloud providers tend to offer somewhat handwavy guidance on networking constraints, especially when compared to the exhaustive literature explaining the quotas for RAM, CPU, and I/O. While working on an unrelated stress test in EC2, we were surprised by some results that led us down the path of investigating EC2 network capacity claims, resulting in this writeup. EC2 documentation describes network performance in terms of maximum available bandwidth.

Tinder’s move to Kubernetes

Almost two years ago, Tinder decided to move its platform to Kubernetes. Kubernetes afforded us an opportunity to drive Tinder Engineering toward containerization and low-touch operation through immutable deployment. Application build, deployment, and infrastructure would be defined as code.

New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall

UCLA researchers and colleagues have designed a first-of-its-kind nanogenerator that can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries. It also acts as a weather station. The researchers call it a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG.

DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: “So today I’m going to be talking about different approaches to building…” He stalled, as though just realising that he was stating his momentous ambition out loud.