Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Elon Musk's presentation of the Tesla Model X had more in common with a new iPhone event than a traditional car demo.

• 1.4 billion: Android devices; 1000: # of qubits in Google's new quantum computer; 150Gbps: Linux botnet DDoS attack; 3,000: iPhones sold per minute; smith: the most common last name in the US; 50%: storage reduction by using erasure coding in Hadoop; 101: calories burned during sex.


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @peterseibel: How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good.
  • The Master Algorithm: Scientists make theories, and engineers make devices. Computer scientists make algorithms, which are both theories and devices
  • @immolations: Feudalism may not be perfect but it's the best system we've got. More of us have chainmail today than at any point in history
  • @mjpt777: We managed to transfer almost 10 GB/s worth of 1000 byte messages via Aeron IPC. That's more than a 100GigE network. Way to scale up on box!
  • @caitie: lol what my services do 1.5 billion writes per minute ~25 million writes per second
  • @mjpt777: Think of your QPI links in a multi-socket server as a fast network. Communicate to share memory; don't share memory to communicate.
  • @aalmiray: "you can't have a second CPU until you prove you can use the first one" - @mjpt777
  • Periscope: a hard drive is over 3x faster a than gigabit ethernet
  • thom: Any sufficiently complicated distributed architecture contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of SOAP.
  • @dabeaz: Instead of teaching everyone how to code, I wish we'd just focus on getting everyone's curiosity from kindergarten back.
  • Matthew Jones: It's a Catch-22. We need the metrics to choose the best architecture, but we need to actually implement the damn thing in order to get metrics, and implementation requires us to select an architecture. 
  • @jmwind: Today we built Shopify 500 times, deployed to prod 22 times, peaked at 700 build agents, spun 50k docker containers in test and 25k prod.
  • antirez: Redis, especially using pipelining, can serve an impressive amount of requests per second per thread (half a million is a common figure with very intensive pipelining. Without pipelining it is around 100,000 ops/sec). 
  • @jcox92: This is my invitation to you to start using languages that were discovered rather than languages that were invented." #strangeloop
  • @tyler_treat: "Measuring latency at saturation is like looking at your bumper after wrapping your car around a pole." —@giltene
  • There are a lot of great quotes this week. So to see all of the Quotable Quotes please see the full article.


• Another example of the diffusion of the software ethos. Elon Musk's presentation of the Tesla Model X had more in common with a new iPhone event than a traditional car demo. First, it was a livecast that started a touch late. Second, throngs of fanpeople clapped and whooped in all the appropriate places. Gone are the beauty shots of cars simply meant to stroke the lizard brain. Elon hit the use cases. He talked vision statement. He talked safety specs and features. He talked air quality in depth. He didn't wait for iFixit to do a tear down, he showed construction details and how they reinforced features and quality. He showed how the Falcon Wing door auto opened and closed; how the doors worked in a crowded parking lot; and how the door design also allowed passengers to easily access the third row of seats. This focus on the car as an engineered product for solving tangible problems in real life may be the lasting legacy of Tesla. 


• Tools are to programmers like shoes are to the mundane fashion world. Which is what makes this discussion of Why Fogbugz lost to Jira in the bug tool wars so fascinating. In one corner we have gecko with a nice analysis of the FogBugz side and we have carlfish with a quality response from the Atlassian perspective. It's painful to remember how convoluted product deployment was before software as a service. 


• How does the CIA provide advanced state-of-the-art analytics? On Amazon of course. Amazon birthed the CIA their own region in 9 months. The CIA decided the only way to reach commercial parity was to to stop trying to do it themselves and leverage those who already know how to do it. The CIA will have its own private version of the marketplace so they can transition tools as fast as possible into the hands of analysts. The CIA really likes themselves some Spark. Partnering for expertise is something the CIA is trying to learn how to do. Oh, the CIA is hiring. 


• Jeff Atwood has the sense of this. Learning to code is overrated: An accomplished programmer would rather his kids learn to read and reason. One caveat is understanding algorithms will be a necessary life skill now and certainly in the future. We'll need to see algorithms for what they are, biased tools that serve someone else's purpose. It's common even among the learned today to see algorithms as objective and benign. The easiest way of piercing the algorithm washing vale may be for people to learn a little programming. That may help demystify what's really going on.


• Embrace, extend and extinguish. Amazon Will Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices. This kind of cross division strategy tax often marks the beginning of the end. Amazon is no longer an everything store. Once we begin to not think of going to Amazon First when shopping then we may transition to Amazon Maybe and then to Amazon Never. 

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