News

CDC: Outbreak of E. coli Infections Linked to Romaine Lettuce

Observability at Scale: Building Uber’s Alerting Ecosystem

Uber’s software architectures consists of thousands of microservices that empower teams to iterate quickly and support our company’s global growth. These microservices support a variety of solutions, such as mobile applications, internal and infrastructure services, and products along with complex configurations that affect these products at city and sub-city levels. To maintain our growth and architecture, Uber’s Observability team built a robust, scalable metrics and alerting pipeline responsible for detecting, mitigating, and notifying engineers of issues with their services as soon as they occur.

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking such Experiences will all produce logging events that will be processed by our stream processing framework. Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations.

The dark side of YouTube

The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the hundreds of millions. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.

Dual-action cancer-killing virus developed by Oxford scientists

Scientists have equipped a virus that kills carcinoma cells with a protein so it can also target and kill adjacent cells that are tricked into shielding the cancer from the immune syste The virus targets carcinomas, which are the most common type of cancer and start in cells in the skin or tissues that line or cover internal organs. A microscope image of a human colorectal adenocarcinoma showing the fibroblasts (brown) surrounding the cancer cells (blue), protecting them from the immune system (PA/Medical Research Council).

Some notes about HTTP/3

HTTP/3 is going to be standardized. As an old protocol guy, I thought I’d write up some comments. Google (pbuh) has both the most popular web browser (Chrome) and the two most popular websites (#1 Google.com #2 Youtube.com).

“Schrödinger’s Bacterium” Could Be a Quantum Biology Milestone

The quantum world is a weird one. In theory and to some extent in practice its tenets demand that a particle can appear to be in two places at once—a paradoxical phenomenon known as superposition—and that two particles can become “entangled,” sharing information across arbitrarily large distances through some still-unknown mechanism. Perhaps the most famous example of quantum weirdness is Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.

Alphabet unit halts glucose-detecting contact lens project

Alphabet Inc’s life sciences division Verily said on Friday that it was putting on hold one of its oldest and highest-profile projects, a smart contact lens designed to help monitor sugar levels. The project, started in 2014, aimed to help diabetics better manage their blood sugar levels by embedding sensors on a contact lens to monitor the glucose levels in their tears. In a blog update, Verily cited here insufficient consistency in the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device.

The technology enabling Alibaba to sell $30.8 billion in Double 11 goods

Python Data Visualization 2018: Why So Many Libraries?

This post is the first in a three-part series on the state of Python data visualization tools and the trends that emerged from SciPy 2018.By James A. BednarAt a special session of SciPy 2018 in Austin, representatives of a wide range of open-source Python visualization tools shared their visions for the future of data visualization in Python. We heard updates on Matplotlib, Plotly, VisPy, and many more. I attended SciPy 2018 as a representative of PyViz, GeoViews, Datashader, Panel, hvPlot and Bokeh, and my Anaconda colleague Jean-Luc Stevens attended representing HoloViews.