Scaling from 2k to 25,000 engineers on GitHub at Microsoft

Scaling from 2k to 25,000 engineers on GitHub at Microsoft

We have engineers who are busy contributing to projects all over GitHub, donating their time and code or entire projects, many I am sure enjoy working with open source in an official capacity, others after hours, or just hacking away. I’m so excited to see where we are at in another few years, and encouraged by the collaboration happening on open source projects across the industry, the developing communities around specific Microsoft technologies, and all the random contributions that Microsoft engineers are making to open source all over GitHub as their teams take dependencies on and get involved in the associated communities. Across Microsoft’s open source projects, however, we have a need to be able to slice and dice data looking for trends over time, analyzing investments at scale, and so realized early on that we needed to import all of the available data we can from our GitHub open source releases into our own big data systems such as Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Explorer.

Source: jeffwilcox.blog

Interactive Zebrafish Brain

Interactive Zebrafish Brain

Michael Kunst and his colleagues used a genetic trick to randomly label individual neurons among the 100,000 nerve cells in the brain of zebrafish larvae. Gradually, the information from hundreds of zebrafish larvae were combined and used to generate a nerve cell atlas: a “standard brain” with over 2,000 neurons from 72 brain regions. VIDEO

Anna Kramer and Michael Kunst summarize their studies about the flow of movement information through the zebrafish brain and the zebrafish brain atlas in this video.

Source: medicalxpress.com

Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

Just a simple question, I have seen stories of people who were hired based on the job postings threads. Never once have I heard of anyone getting anything other than recruiter spam from the Ask HN: Who wants to be Hired threads. I think it might be useful to hear stories either way.

Source: news.ycombinator.com

Deserts Greening from Rising CO2

Deserts Greening from Rising CO2

In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue. The fertilisation effect occurs where elevated CO enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both. “On the face of it, elevated CO boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.

Source: www.csiro.au

Decoded: GNU Coreutils

Decoded: GNU Coreutils

I’d categorize the variants in three groups: trivial, wrappers, and full utilities

Trivial utilities

Trivial utilities have a unique set up phase which defines a macro in a couple lines. Examples include: arch, dir, and vdir

Wrapper utilities

Wrappers perform setup and parse command line options which are passed directly as arguments to a syscall. The following code lines occur in most non-trivial utilities:

This header defines system-dependent marcos, variables, and functions.

Source: www.maizure.org

Oakland’s Pothole Vigilantes address gaping problem, one road crater at a time

Oakland’s Pothole Vigilantes address gaping problem, one road crater at a time

After patching five potholes on Perkins Street on Wednesday night, they drove to the Oakland hills to fix pavement for a donor who’d chipped in $500. Bad street conditions affect just about everyone in a starkly divided city — rich and poor residents all cope with tattered roads that wind up the hills and down through the flatlands as Oakland grapples with a $500 million maintenance backlog and more than 7,000 requests to patch pothole. With frustrations mounting over the glacial pace of street paving, people across the city embrace the Pothole Vigilantes’ go-it-alone spirit.

Source: www.sfchronicle.com

Sysop Chat

Sysop Chat

Phone calls were expensive, so I wanted a way to chat for free, and to this end I started my own system so that people would call me instead of me having to call other boards. It’s a bit silly to think about now, as instead of typing we could have just picked up our phones and talked to each other directly by voice, but somehow typing made it easier to open up and talk without reservation. Another thing I really liked was that it had a feature current chats are missing: when the other person typed you didn’t need to wait for them to hit “send”, rather you would see their typing immediately.

Source: www.bemmu.com

Germany records hottest June temperature

Germany records hottest June temperature

Germany set its all-time highest June temperature on Sunday, with 38.9 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The country has been baking in an early summer heat wave; however, Germany’s all-time high of 40.3 degrees Celsius still stands. Temperatures in the country’s central Rhine-Main region and into eastern Germany were expected to reach up to 39 degrees on Sunday, according to the German Weather Service (DWD).

Source: www.dw.com

Huawei’s HQ Campus in Shenzhen

Huawei’s HQ Campus in Shenzhen

Asia Times was given an exclusive tour of Chinese tech behemoth Huawei’s corporate headquarters in Shenzhen this week, a campus featuring a pond, natural landscaping and verdant greenery that occupies an area of more than two square kilometers. A black swan by a pond on Huawei’s corporate campus in Shenzhen. Photo: Asia Times
At the center of Zone A, a pond adds to the tranquility of the scenery, where a dozen black swans are being raised under the direction of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei.

Source: www.asiatimes.com

Tesla has a lab trying to build its own battery cells

Tesla has a lab trying to build its own battery cells

Tesla is developing the means to manufacture its own battery cells, according to five current and recent employees, something that the electric vehicle maker has relied on Panasonic to do since the companies signed an extensive partnership deal in 2014. Even if Tesla’s effort to start making battery cells is successful, the company is not likely to cut ties with Panasonic and other battery suppliers any time soon. Tesla employees familiar with cell supplier negotiations said the company is most likely to work with Panasonic and LG to provide the cells that go into the initial Model 3 vehicles produced in its Shanghai factory.

Source: www.cnbc.com