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A data visualization project has mapped every structure in Los Angeles as a 3D box color-coded by the decade it was constructed. Users can pan, rotate and tilt the view to watch the city's growth unfold chronologically from 1880 through 2026.
A Tinybird engineer who has operated ClickHouse clusters since version 18.4 nearly six years ago published a detailed retrospective on running the database at petabyte scale. The post walks through the standard shard-and-replica architecture ClickHouse recommends and highlights the operational pitfalls that only surface once a cluster is running in production. Tinybird notes it is an independent contributor to the open-source project and unaffiliated with ClickHouse, Inc.
BZip3, an open-source successor to BZip2, combines a Burrows-Wheeler transform with suffix arrays, an LZ77/PPM-style matching pass, and an order-0 context-mixing entropy coder to boost both compression ratio and speed. In a benchmark compressing every historical Perl 5 release bundled into one tar file, BZip3 with a large block size produced a much smaller output than bzip2, xz, and zstd, while also decompressing faster than the other tools tested.
US safety regulators have opened an investigation into how Tesla self-certified its Cybercab, a robotaxi that notably lacks a steering wheel and pedals. The probe examines whether Tesla's internal approval process for this unconventional vehicle design met required safety standards before deployment.
The Economist reports that despite fears of AI-driven job destruction, US employment data shows no broad downturn: unemployment sits at 4.1% and young workers' job prospects remain strong. While companies like Microsoft, Meta, Block and Intuit have cut roles tied to automation—averaging about 16,000 AI-related layoffs monthly—the publication estimates AI has simultaneously generated roughly 1 million new jobs through data-center construction, startup hiring and new corporate AI roles, dwarfing the roughly 200,000 layoffs attributed to the technology since mid-2023.
A developer found that CodePen's updated editor sends everything typed into its code fields to codepen.dev within one to two seconds, even without saving. Using a unique test marker in an HTML file, they confirmed CodePen triggered a build with save disabled and the marker still appeared verbatim in the generated preview page served from a codepen.dev subdomain.
A June fire at the unfinished Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, left local firefighters battling smoke from unidentified chemicals with no working alarms, no suppression system, and three dry hydrants. TeraWulf, which owns and operates the site under a complex arrangement involving Fluidstack, Google, and Anthropic, said the required safety documents were destroyed in the blaze. Months later, the fire chief said promised fixes like functioning hydrants still had not been completed.
Mathspace, an online maths learning platform used in thousands of schools, revealed that hackers breached its self-hosted Metabase reporting tool and stole personal data on students, parents, guardians and staff. The company said attackers first gained access on August 10, extracted data on August 27, and the breach was confirmed on September 3, affecting 1,079,819 people in Australia and New Zealand. Mathspace stated that passwords, academic records and authentication credentials were not compromised.
Trezor has revised the scope of its August data breach, now saying 81,000 customers were affected instead of the roughly 14,000 first reported. The increase stems from logistics partner ShipMonk failing to delete older records as its contract required, exposing details of 67,000 additional U.S. customers who ordered between November 2019 and August 2021.
A viral video shows a large data center in Denver's Elyria-Swansea neighborhood running sprinklers heavily on its grounds while residents face stage-one drought restrictions limiting lawn watering to two days a week. The facility is believed to be an 18-megawatt, 170,000-square-foot site owned by cloud provider CoreSite, though the tenants using the space haven't been confirmed.
The Internet Archive is asking supporters to start recurring monthly donations of $25 or more in September, with each new gift matched 2:1 during the campaign. The nonprofit says it relies on donor funding to maintain its own servers and infrastructure, which store 210 petabytes of freely accessible material without ads or paid subscriptions.
The creators of the original Dataflow Model paper—Tyler Akidau, Rafael Fernández-Moctezuma, Reuven Lax and Daniel Mills—revisited their influential streaming framework eleven years after publication, on the occasion of its VLDB Test of Time award. They conclude that its core ideas, such as prioritizing event time and abandoning the wait for complete data, held up well, but admit that windowing, triggers, and a stream-first worldview were overengineered or misguided compared to database-style approaches like SQL and materialized views.