News

How the Internet Spans the Globe

Undersea cables are responsible for moving data between countries and continents at high speeds, making everything from photo sharing to financial transactions possible. These cables use fiber optics to move data at high speeds to land, where the data is then conveyed via fiber optics to homes and businesses. Yet, despite the billions of people relying on the data moved by undersea cables, there are only about 380 of them worldwide as of 2019, according to CNN estimates, though they span more than 745,000 miles—or more than three times the distance to the moon.

How to verify that quantum chips are computing correctly

A new method determines whether circuits are accurately executing complex operations that classical computers can’t tackle. Researchers from MIT, Google, and elsewhere have designed a protocol called Variational Quantum Unsampling, based on a novel quantum neural network, that verifies when photonic Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) chips have accurately performed complex computations using light.

Lyft’s Journey through Mobile Networking

In 5 years, the number of endpoints consumed by Lyft’s mobile apps grew to over 500, and the size of our mobile engineering team increased by more than 15x. To scale with this growth, our infrastructure had to evolve dramatically to utilize new advances in modern networking in order to continue to provide benefits for our users. This post describes the journey through the evolution of Lyft’s mobile networking: how it’s changed, what we’ve learned, and why it’s important for us as a growing business.

How we built the good first issues feature

We’ve recently launched good first issues recommendations to help new contributors find easy gateways into open source projects. Read about the machine learning engine behind these recommendations. GitHub is leveraging machine learning (ML) to help more people contribute to open source.

Facebook Invented a New Language for Machines to Solve Complex Math Equations

Most lidars today have between 1 and 128 lasers—this one has 11,000

Intelligent DNS based load balancing at Dropbox

The Dropbox Traffic team is charged with innovating our application networking stack to improve the experience for every one of our users—over half a billion of them. This article describes our work with NS1 to optimize our intelligent DNS-based global load balancing for corner cases that we uncovered while improving our point of presence (PoP) selection automation for our edge network. By co-developing the platform capabilities with NS1 to handle these outliers, we deliver positive Dropbox experiences to more users, more consistently.

The Status of HTTP/3

HTTP/3 promises to make Internet connections faster, more reliable, and more secure. Born as ‘HTTP over QUIC’, an effort to adapt the HTTP protocol to run on top of Google’s own transport layer protocol, QUIC, it was later proposed as an IETF standard and it is currently an Internet Draft. In October 2018, IETF HTTP & QUIC Working Groups co-chair Mark Nottingham proposed to rename HTTP over QUIC as HTTP/3 to clarify its true nature and its independence from QUIC.

Introducing the AI Index 2019 Report

The AI Index 2019 Report takes an interdisciplinary approach by design, analyzing and distilling patterns about AI’s broad global impact on everything from national economies to job growth, research and public perception. We’re excited to release the AI Index 2019 Report, one of the most comprehensive studies about AI to date. Because AI touches so many aspects of society, the Index takes an interdisciplinary approach by design, analyzing and distilling patterns about AI’s broad global impact on everything from national economies to job growth, research and public perception.

Why everyone is talking about WebAssembly

If you haven’t heard of WebAssembly yet, then you will soon. It’s one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, but it’s everywhere. It’s supported by all the major browsers, and it’s coming to the server-side, too.