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UUID, serial or identity columns for PostgreSQL auto-generated primary keys?
How to decide what to use for autogenerated primary keys: UUID, serial or identity column? Recommendations are given!
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Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)
When people undergo a great trauma or other unsettling event—they have lost a job or a loved one dies, for example—their understanding of themselves or of
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Buildpacks vs. Dockerfiles
Exploring the tradeoffs of building container images at scale
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The Achilles Heel of the Coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 is critically dependent on a special mechanism for the production of its proteins. A collaborative team led by a research group at ETH Zurich obtained molecular insights into this process and demonstrated that it can be inhibited by chemical compounds, thereby significantly reducing viral replication in…
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Ideas in statistics that have powered AI
Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia, and Aki Vehtari, a computer science professor at Finland’s Aalto University, recently published a list of the most important statistical ideas in the last 50 years. Here, they break it down in easy-to-understand terms.
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Engineers grow pancreatic organoids that mimic the real thing
MIT engineers developed a way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer.
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Nim 1.6.2
The Nim team is happy to announce version 1.6.2, our first patch release for Nim 1.6.
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Multitasking Doesn't Work
When we think we’re multitasking, most often we aren’t really doing two things at once, but instead, individual actions in rapid succession.
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Internet disrupted in Myanmar amid military coup
Network data from the NetBlocks Internet Observatory indicate the onset of widespread internet disruptions in Myanmar on Sunday 31 January 2021 (UTC) amid reports of a military uprising and the ...
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Game theory as an engine for large-scale data analysis
Modern AI systems approach tasks like recognising objects in images and predicting the 3D structure of proteins as a diligent student would prepare for an exam. By training on many example problems, they minimise their mistakes over time until they achieve success. But this is a solitary endeavour and only one of the…
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Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly
Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.
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Relational databases aren’t dinosaurs, they’re sharks
Oh relational databases, that tired old relic of another age. Codd and friends were great in their time, but serious software engineers need to move on. People building Web Scale™ software You’ve probably heard a similar sentiment at some point. That relational databases were great, but they are dinosaurs that are…
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What we learned doing Fast Grants
We launched an abnormally fast source of emergency science funding during COVID-19. The results revealed flaws in current science funding models.
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For First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan If China Invades
2021 Chicago Council Survey data show a majority of Americans support a range of US policies towards Taiwan: recognition as an independent country, inclusion in international organizations, and a US-Taiwan free trade agreement.
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An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions a Year (2014)
Millions of Americans struggle to get by on low wages, often without any benefits such as paid sick leave, a pension, or even health insurance. Their difficult lives are made immeasurably harder when they do the work they have been hired to do, but their employers refuse to pay, pay for some hours but not…
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Machine learning saves us $1.7M a year on document previews
Recently, we translated the predictive power of machine learning (ML) into $1.7 million a year in infrastructure cost savings by optimizing how Dropbox generates and caches document previews. Machine learning at Dropbox already powers commonly-used features such as search , file and folder suggestions , and OCR in…
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Your product is a joke: lessons from improv to build better product
The rules that help make good improv comedy can surprisingly help make good product too. Let's run through interesting parallels between the two, and how you can apply some lessons from improv to build better product.
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New PostgreSQL Interface for Cloud Spanner
Start building on Google Cloud with $300 in free credits and 20+ always free products.
1103
The Wendelstein 7-X concept proves its efficiency
One of the most important optimisation goals underlying the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald has now been confirmed. An analysis by IPP scientists in the journal Nature shows: In the optimised magnetic field cage, the energy losses of the plasma are reduced in the…
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The world’s biggest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 2, generates first power
When fully operational, Hornsea 2’s 165 8 MW Siemens Gamesa wind turbines will be capable of generating 1.32 GW of clean electricity – taking the title of ‘world’s largest operating offshore wind farm’ from its sibling project Hornsea 1. Together, the two projects will be capable of providing enough power for well…
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Northvolt assembles first lithium-ion battery cell at Swedish gigafactory
The cell is the first to have been fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company.
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A critique of Safari's influence on the web
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how "Safari is the new IE" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I don't want to rehash the basics of that, but I have seen some...
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Element Matrix Services Launches Bridging for Microsoft Teams
After offering bridges to Discord, Slack and Telegram, Element Matrix Services (EMS) is now launching Microsoft Teams Bridging.