News

Embracing failures and cutting infrastructure costs: Spot instances in Kubernetes

GraphQL: A success story for PayPal Checkout

At PayPal, we recently introduced GraphQL to our technology stack. At PayPal, GraphQL has been a complete game changer to the way we think about data, fetch data and build applications. This blog post takes a close look at PayPal Checkout and explains our journey from REST to Batch REST to GraphQL and lessons learned along the way.

Cross shard transactions at 10 million requests per second

Dropbox stores petabytes of metadata to support user-facing features and to power our production infrastructure. The primary system we use to store this metadata is named Edgestore and is described in a previous blog post, (Re)Introducing Edgestore. In simple terms, Edgestore is a service and abstraction over thousands of MySQL nodes that provides users with strongly consistent, transactional reads and writes at low latency.

Learning Concepts with Energy Functions

We’ve developed an energy-based model that can quickly learn to identify and generate instances of concepts, such as near, above, between, closest, and furthest, expressed as sets of 2d points. Our model learns these concepts after only five demonstrations.

Mystery particle spotted? Discovery would require physics so weird that nobody has even thought of it

20 Best YouTube channels for AI and machine learning

What are the most interesting and informative YouTube channels about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning? Subscribe to these 20 high-quality channels today to stay up to date with the latest AI and machine learning breakthroughs. Siraj Raval:

Why Chinese Artificial Intelligence Will Run The World

With Chinese tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent focused on developing sophisticated AI-driven systems in the coming decade, the rest of the world can only watch while China builds the computer systems that will run our world in the decades to come. If you’ve been paying attention in the past year, it seems that all anyone can talk about is the coming artificial intelligence boom on the horizon. Whether it’s the Amazon, Google, or Facebook, everyone seems to be getting in on the AI game as fast as they can.

EPO Issues First Guidelines on AI Patents

The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued official guidelines on the patenting of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The guidelines became valid on November 1st, 2018. When determining whether the claimed subject-matter satisfies this condition, the guidelines note that expressions such as “support vector machine,” “reasoning engine” or “neural network” may not qualify, as these are regarded as terms for mathematical methods which do not have a unique technical character of their own.

A Netflix Web Performance Case Study

Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services. Since launching globally in 2016, the company has found that many new users are not only signing up on mobile devices but are also using less-than-ideal connections to do so. By refining the JavaScript used for Netflix.com’s sign-up process and using prefetching techniques, the developer team was able to provide a better user experience for both mobile and desktop users and offer several improvements.

Store solar energy as liquid

A research group from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has made great, rapid strides towards the development of a specially designed molecule which can store solar energy for later use. These advances have been presented in four scientific articles this year, with the most recent being pub