Hey, it's HighScalability time:

In case you were wondering, the world is weird. Large Hadron Collider discovers new pentaquark particle.

• 3x: Uber bigger than taxi market; 250x: traffic in HotSchedules' DDoS attack; 92%: Apple’s share of the smartphone profit pie; 7: Airbnb rejections
• Quotable Quotes:
  • Netflix: A slow or unhealthy server is worse than a down server 
  • @inconshreveable: ngrok production servers, max GC pause: Go1.4 (top) vs Go1.5. Holy 85% reduction! /cc Go team
  • Nic Fleming: The fungal internet exemplifies one of the great lessons of ecology: seemingly separate organisms are often connected, and may depend on each other.
  • @IBMResearch: With 20+ billion transistors on new chip, that's a 50% scaling improvement over today’s tech #ibmresearch #7nm 


• Apple and Google Race to See Who Can Kill the App First. Honest question, how are people supposed to make money in this new world? Apps are quickly becoming just an identity that ties together 10 or so components that appear integrated as part of the OS, but don't look like your app at all. Reminds me of laminar flow. We are seeing a rebirth of CORBA, COM and OLE 2, this time the container is an app bound by deep linking and some ad hoc ways to push messages around. Show developers the money.


• The dark side of Google 10x: One former exec told Business Insider that the gospel of 10x, which is promoted by top execs including CEO Larry Page, has two sides. “It’s enormously energizing on one side, but on the other it can be totally paralyzing,”


• Wait, are we going all RAM or all flash? So confusing. MIT Develops Cheaper Supercomputer Clusters By Nixing Costly RAM In Favor Of Flash: researchers presented evidence at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture that if servers executing a distributed computation go to disk for data even just 5 percent of the time, performance takes a hit to where it's comparable with flash memory anyway. 40 servers with 10 terabytes of RAM wouldn't chew through a 10.5TB computation any better than 20 servers with 20TB of flash memory. What's involved here is moving a little computational power off of the servers and onto the chips that control the flash drives.


• Is disruption merely a Silicon Valley fantasy? Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted: the advantage enjoyed by incumbents, always substantial, has been growing in recent years...more Americans worked for big companies...Large companies are becoming more dominant in part by buying up their rivals...Consolidation could explain at least part of the rising failure rate among startups...The startup rate has declined in every major industry, every state and nearly every city, and the failure rate’s rise has been nearly as universal. 


• What's a unikernel and why should you care? Amir Chaudhry reveals all in his Unikernels talk given at PolyConf 15. And here's the supporting blog post. Why are we still applications on top of operating systems? Most applications are single purpose so why all the complexity? Why are we building software for the cloud the same way we build it for desktops? We can do better with Unikerels where every application is a single purpose VM with a single address space.

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