Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Spying on an ant holding its favorite microchip. (@SciencePorn)

• 1,425%: malware attack ROI; 33333/sec: BP oil well datapoints generated; 8 million: mumified dogs; 5 billion: Apple map requests per week; 10 billion: parameter neural net in your basement; 1 trillion: records in Yahoo's Sherpa.
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @warriors: "It's ironic but what the unexpected thing was that everything went exactly as we hoped. That never happens." 
  • @georgeblazer: At scale, architecture dominates material. Alan Kay #gophercon
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb: How unpredictability rises faster and faster with dimensionality: add one variable to 100 and error doubles.
  • Elon Musk~ one of the biggest challenges in the CRS-7 event is matching events to the exact time. When you are talking a matter of milliseconds it's hard to match the ground track video to the sensors
  • @MeltingIce: NYSE halted, United grounds flights due to computer glitch, WSJ website is down. This is how it starts.
  • The Shut-In Economy: They end up asking each other which apps they work for: Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com
  • @aphyr: At a Devops Chicago meetup I asked how many people had experienced partitions in their datacenters, and over half the room raised hands.
  • @mjpt777: Simplifying code rocks. @toddlmontgomery and I are seeing new throughput highs on Aeron after simplifying and cutting indirection.
  • aphyr: Real software is fuzzier: our processes are usually not realtime, which means the network effectively extends within the node. Garbage collection, in particular, is a notorious cause of “network” partitions, because it delays messages.
  • @fgens: 2 key msgs at #AWSSummit : "Developers, we love you (IaaS is so yesterday)!" and "Go 'server-less' -- deploy code as Lambda microservices"
  • @BenedictEvans: @Jim_Edwards but the boom is caused by having 3bn people online and a generational change in the tech platform from PC to mobile.
  • @Obdurodon: "Our distributed file system doesn't work quite right and performs like crap." "OK, we'll just call it an object store then."
  • @viktorklang: Suspected main causes for slow programs: A) Doing unnecessary work B) Waiting for unnecessary work to be done
  • @jasongorman: There are only so many times one can re-learn the same patterns for remote procedure calls before one gets mightily sick of it
  • @BenedictEvans: Devices in use, end of 2014:  ~1.5bn PCs 7-800m consumer PCs 1.2-1.3bn closed Android 4-500m open Android 650-675m iOS 80m Macs, ~75m Linux.
  • vardump: When performance matters, don't chase pointers (references) and don't ever do random memory accesses if you can avoid it. Ensure variables needed about same time are near each other, so that a single cache line fill will get all. Except when other threads/cores frequently update a variable, try to keep those separately to reduce false sharing.
  • @JZdziarski: Quantum entanglement dictates if one programmer is writing productive good code, another somewhere is inexplicably porting to JavaScript.
  • There are even more quotes for your perusal, please click through to the full article.


• Love this! jamiesonbecker: AMAZON DEPRECATES EC2 November 3, 2017, SEATTLE At the AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas today, Amazon Web Services today announced the deprecation of Elastic Compute Cloud as it shifts toward lighter-weight, more horizontally scalable services. Amazon announced that it was giving customers the opportunity to migrate toward what it claims are lower cost "containers" and "Lambda processes".


• Horace Dediu with an interesting view of Humanism++. This time it's preferring humans over algorithms instead of humans over faith. Curate, don't automate...or sermonize. Also interesting was the discussion on functional vs divisional organizations. Apple is the largest functional org outside of the army. Functional orgs prevent cross divisional fights for resources and power.


• OK, this is funny: Using locks to solve your concurrency problems.


• Do we have a precedence for the rise of walled gardens? 1492: The Year the World Began: shift of initiative—the upset in the normal state of the world—started in 1492, when the resources of the Americas began to be accessible to Westerners while remaining beyond the reach of other rival or potentially rival civilizations.


• Here's how the new StackExchange blog was rebuilt. Pretty radical. They got rid of WordPress for a static blog built on Jekyll. While there was some contention with the move on HackerNews, jonhmchan set the record straight: Performance also wasn't the only plus here. Closing major security holes, making more of our content and technology more open, and moving to a platform that our devs liked working in are just some of the other wins. It's too early to say definitively now, but we think the change is probably a good one.


• Should Uber be the new McDonalds? While I viscerally agree with the following statement, the idea that every place in the world must have the same laws is equally obviously wrong. Vive la difference! @paulg: Uber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...