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Data · Monday, 27 July 2026 · Issue 57 · 15 stories

Zero-copy isn't free: Inside Hotstar's real-time ad engine

Data Engineering

Inside Hotstar’s Real‑Time Ad Engine: How One Request Scales

Hotstar’s engineering team details the end‑to‑end pipeline that serves a single ad request, from real‑time bidding and audience targeting to the high‑throughput infrastructure that processes millions of requests per second. The post reveals the micro‑service architecture, latency budgets, and scaling tricks that keep ad delivery fast and reliable at Disney+ scale.

blog.hotstar.com ↗7 min read at source

Analytics & Visualization

ML & AI for Data

Airbnb uses a Transformer to turn years of guest actions into smarter search results

Airbnb replaced hand‑crafted ranking features with a sequence model that ingests every view, booking and cancellation a guest has ever made. By encoding this massive event stream in a Transformer, the platform surfaces listings that match a traveller’s evolving preferences, boosting relevance and conversion. The approach scales to millions of users and unlocks richer personalization across the search funnel.

medium.com ↗9 min read at source

Context engineering: the silent bottleneck slowing AI adoption

Stack Overflow’s data‑science lead explains that LLMs can draft replies or code, but the missing piece is the surrounding context, email threads, Slack chats, internal tools, and permissions. Without automated context engineering, humans must cobble together and validate inputs, turning a quick AI assist into a multi‑step chore.

stackoverflow.blog ↗21 min read at source

Databases & Storage

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY scales to 60K writes/sec with batching

DBOS re‑engineered Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY by buffering NOTIFY calls and adding a safety‑net poll, cracking 60 000 writes per second on a single server with millisecond latency. The trick sidesteps the global exclusive lock that traditionally throttles NOTIFY, proving the mechanism can serve high‑throughput, low‑latency streaming or pub/sub workloads without sacrificing durability.

dbos.dev ↗5 min read at source

Practice & Datasets

New OWID hub maps economic inequality data for practitioners

Our World in Data launched a dedicated topic page that consolidates all its economic inequality charts, datasets, and analysis in one place. It organizes the material around the World Bank Poverty & Inequality Platform, the Luxembourg Income Study, and the World Inequality Database, letting analysts quickly compare measures and see where policy can shift outcomes.

ourworldindata.org ↗36 min read at source

You’re caught up.

That was all 15 stories in the 27 July issue.