Instead of fantasizing about future worlds, Gibson sets his novels in the ongoing, alarming realm of the present. Photograph by Benoit Paillé for The New Yorker Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated…

Credit Photo illustration by Matt Dorfman Skip to contentSkip to site index Feature Malfunctions caused two deadly crashes. But an industry that puts unprepared pilots in the cockpit is just as guilty. Credit Photo illustration by Matt Dorfman O n Oct., 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 taxied toward…

One day in March of 2000, six of Google’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. The company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. In October, its core systems, which crawled the Web to build an “index” of it, had stopped working. Although users could still type in queries at…

By Kenton Varda - 30 Sep 2016 A month or two ago, we started seeing a mysterious problem in production: every now and then, one of our Node.js web server processes supporting Sandstorm Oasis would suddenly jump to 100% CPU usage (of one core) and stay there until it was killed. The problem wasn’t an…

This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are multiple levels of cache instead of having just one larger level. In other words, let’s say the L1 cache is 32K,…

Lynn Scurfield T here were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he…

I struggled with how to think about complexity through much of my career, especially during the ten years I spent leading Office development. Modeling complexity impacted how we planned major releases, our technical strategy as we moved to new platforms, how we thought about the impact of new…

People sometimes use ‘parenting’ just to describe what parents actually do, but more often, especially now, ‘parenting’ means something that parents should do. Photo: Gallery Stock A strange thing happened to mothers and fathers and children at the end of the 20th century. It was called “parenting.”…

Alvaro Dominguez My mother’s address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced…

Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the acronym GLIPAR ( Guide…

Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark It Was 20 Years Ago Today… On April 4th, 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation was officially incorporated as a going concern. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because the company would eventually change its name to Netscape Communications Corporation when the…

It seemed like a foregone conclusion that the 10-inch tablet market was done for, with all interest and excitement shifting to smaller, but equally capable 7 or 8-inch tablets instead. It also seemed like 15-inch notebook computers were done for a couple of years ago, then Apple launched the MacBook…

From Tim Cook’s letter announcing the latest reorganization at Apple last week: Jony Ive will provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his longtime role as the leader of Industrial Design. Jony has an incredible design aesthetic and has been the…