Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 3 of top 5: Stackoverflow questions are about Git; 3,000: four-passenger cars could serve 98 percent of NYC taxi demand; 44%: US population lives within 20 miles of Amazon fulfillment center; 72%: Amazon customers shopped using mobile device; 110%: increase in industrial control system attacks; 455: Number of scripted television series aired this year; $28.5 billion/yr: App downloads on iOS;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @ValaAfshar: Number of robots working in Amazon warehouses: 2016: 45,000 / 2015: 30,000 2014: 15,000 / 2013: 1,000 — @JonErlichman
  • @jason_kint: updated duopoly #s. new IAB data came out yesterday. easy to run vs earnings for goog and fb, it's evident everyone else is zero sum game. 
  • rb2k_: I also haven't seen one [company in Germany] that isn't riddled with MBA grads that mainly push Jira tickets around.
  • Joe McCann: The best software developers I know are always hacking over the holidays. True story.
  • @kaffeecoder: Sigh. Async vs blocking protocol is irrelevant. What matters is communicating with other services outside your own req/response cycle.
  • Eric Jang: It's not a coincidence that Nvidia, the literal arms-dealer of deep learning, has had a good year in the stock market.
  • @markimbriaco: Just read a comment that said "Any good codebase has every part perfectly isolated". Oh, to be young and optimistic about software again.
  • @swardley: Asked "What do I think is the biggest impact AI would have?" ... hmmm, the largest erosion of social mobility in human history?
  • The Attention Merchants: It is therefore more effective for the State to intervene before options are seen to exist. This creates less friction with the State but requires a larger effort: total attention control.
  • StorageMojo: The cloud’s collateral damage to the legacy IT vendors continues to spread. A few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
  • Janakiram MSV: The key takeaway is that Amazon wants enterprises to consume EC2 while it is pushing startups and developers towards Lambda. This move from Amazon will fuel the growth of serverless computing in the industry. 
  • Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert: Edsger Dijkstra famously said, “The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
  • @karlseguin: Microservices without asynchronous messaging (queues) is actually a monolith with really slow and error prone method invocation.
  • AshleysBrain: We've been using WebRTC Datachannels for multiplayer gaming in the browser in our game editor Construct 2 (www.scirra.com) for a couple of years now. Generally they work great! However the main problem we have is switching tab suspends the game, which if you're acting as the host, freezes the game for everybody. This is really inconvenient. 
  • @lstoll: 2017: Year of the return of three tier architecture.
  • @tealtan: “I will never make a racial profiling database!” *continues working on social networks, analytics, ad tech*
  • @abt_programming: Inverse bus factor: "how many developers have to be hit by a bus before a project starts to proceed smoothly?” - @gasproni
  • M.G. Siegler: The numbers speak for themselves. 2 billion words written on Medium in the last year. 7.5 million posts during that time. 60 million monthly readers now. Pageviews galore. So step 2 is simply to slap some banner ads on the site, while step 3 is to profit, right?
  • snarf21: Writing software is hard but to me the hardest part is always taking a random abstract concept from someone's mind (or worse, several people) and converting that into something "real" in a fixed timeline and budget. There will have to be lots of tradeoffs and miscues by definition. We are always making something that doesn't already exist, it is creation and creation is hard.
  • @Pinboard: Who could have foreseen the always-on home microphone might be of interest to the cops?
  • @ThePracticalDev: I heard a rumor that Santa moved over to AWS this year. Big if true.
  • Drew Purves~ “intelligence” extends beyond brains; something as simple as self-replicating RNA exhibit intelligent behavior at the evolutionary scale. The natural world is fractal, cyclic, and fuzzy...in a biosphere, every organism is a resource to another organism. That is, learning and adaptation of each organism is not independent of other organisms
  • @meatcomputer: System clocks are always accurate and increase monotonically. Timestamps from remote machines are reliable
  • pjmlp: Everything on web development feels like an hack.
  • @kelseyhightower: In my opinion Serverless does not mean FaaS. I consider any platform that hides the management of servers from the user to be Serverless.
  • Amit: one of the lessons I learned from this journey was that the tutorials work best when I've needed that technology for a real project
  • @Carnage4Life: Snapchat' copied all the worst parts of Apple's culture & seen success. More copycats to come
  • ch: So all that's missing with the decentralized web is a centralized service to aggregate the decentralized streams?
  • @mathiasverraes: "Separation of intent and implementation" is probably a much more useful programming principle than all of SOLID combined.
  • doh: We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent.
  • Exponential Laws: We have argued that exponential growth would not have succeeded without sustained exponential growth at three levels of the computing ecosystem—chip, system, and adopting community. Growth (progress) feeds on itself up to the inflection point.


• Measuring a gnat's eyebrow at a billion miles. Ivan Linscott tells the thrilling story behind the development of the New Horizons probe to Pluto. a16z Podcast: New Year, New Horizons — Pluto!  Completing the probe was a close thing. Finding enough plutonium to power system almost didn't happen. Enough wasn't found so the probe had a much lower power budget than originally spec'ed, which caused the communication system to use one FPGA instead of two. You have to use radiation hardened parts. The chips sit right next to a pile of plutonium pumping out gamma rays and neutrons. The FPGA's had a capacity of a million gates, were hardened by design, and had triple redundancy. Each gate in the array is implemented in threes. They are voted in pairs. If three agree then fine. If two agree that's the value used. They fit all the code with 5 gates margin. They also had a hero's journey sourcing a high precision oscillator. And then the frightening story of when the watchdog timer timedout and put the probe in safe mode. It turned out the JPEG compression algorithm took too long to compress an image of Pluto and that caused the timeout to fire. The reason is one of those crazy testing stories. When this feature was tested the picture of the sky was darker so it took less time to compress!


• The impulse for folks at Twitter to delay Trump's tweets and insider trade on that information must be overwhelming.


• 33C3 (Chaos Computer Congress) videos are now available. Great overview by Chris Hager. Lots of interesting talks. You might like: Dissecting modern (3G/4G) cellular modems; Edible Soft Robotics - An exploration of candy as an engineered material; Software Defined Emissions - A hacker’s review of Dieselgate; Rebel Cities - Towards A Global Network Of Neighbourhoods And Cities Rejecting Surveillance.


• A compelling break down of the DNC phishing attack. Making everything viewable through a generic UI and everything programmable through a scriptable API has interesting consequences @pwnallthethings: Could have hacked? Sure. Did hack? No. Let me go through why not..The hackers weren't hacking one-by-one; so URL contraction wasn't done manually. It was done via the Bitly API...Why did the hackers include this info? Same reason they contracted links via API. Because they're not hacking 1-by-1. Are hacking at scale...When hackers hack at scale, they reuse infrastructure. They make mistakes. This isn't unusual. You can piece the bits together.


• In the game of data you want to be at the top of the data gravity well. When your are down well nothing escapes without great cost. AWS Snowball. 

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