Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 99.9: Percent PCs cheaper than in 1980; 300x20 miles: California megaflood; 7.5 million: articles published on Medium; 1 million: Amazon paid eBook downloads per day; 121: pages on P vs. NP; 79%: Americans use Facebook; 1,600: SpaceX satellites to fund a city on Mars; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @GossiTheDog: How corporate security works: A) buy a firewall B) add a rule allowing all traffic C) the end How corporate security works:A) buy a firewall B) add a rule allowing all traffic C) the end
  • @caitie: Distributed Systems PSA: your regular reminder that the operational cost of a system should be included & considered when designing a system
  • @jimpjorps: 1998: the internet means you can "telecommute" to a tech job from anywhere on Earth 2017: everyone works in the same one square mile of SF
  • Jessi Hempel: [re: BitTorrent] Perhaps the lesson here is that sometimes technologies are not products. And they’re not companies. They’re just damn good technologies.
  • giltene: My new pet peeve: "how to make X faster: do less of X" recommendations.
  • peterwwillis: It used to be you had to actually break into a system to exfiltrate all its data. Now you just make an HTTP query.
  • Laralyn McWillams: Identify problems but focus on solutions. If you become more about problems than solutions, that negativity infects your work, your team, and how you think about your career.
  • Chris Fox: Apple is 100% a boutique retailer, meaning that a human chooses which books to promote. Without that, there was no organic discovery tool where readers could find your book.
  • vytah: In fact, the 1986 [Chernobyl] disaster happened because the engineers decided to get rid of safeguards and run tests.
  • Eric Elliott: Breaking into a user’s top 5 apps is like getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery. Don’t bank on it.
  • Peter: I say the super-intelligent aliens will be powered by hyper-computation, a technology that makes our concept of computation look like counting on your fingers; and they’ll have not only qualia, but hyper-qualia, experiential phenomenologica whose awesomeness we cannot even speak of.
  • SEJeff: LVS is pretty much the undisputed king for serious business load balancing. I've heard (anecdotally) that Uber uses gorb[1] and google has released seesaw, which are both fancy wrappers ontop of LVS for load balancing.
  • k__: I have the feeling this is haunting my life. Jobs, relationships, everything. When I got something, it didn't feel that hard to get it. When I try to get something it feels impossible.
  • Nelson Elhage: One of my favorite concepts when thinking about instrumenting a system to understand its overall performance and capacity is what I call “time utilization”. By this I mean: If you look at the behavior of a thread over some window of time, what fraction of its time is spent in each “kind” of work that it does?
  • Bart Sano (Google): I can say that we are committed to the choice of these different architectures, including X86 – and that includes AMD – as well as Power and ARM. The principle that we are investing in heavily is that competition breeds innovation, 
  • aaron-lebo: This is a larger issue with developer burnout I suspect. You master one thing and there's someone standing on the corner saying..."well, actually, I've got something better" and there's a very real anxiety in that evaluation process. Does object-oriented programming suck? Are functional languages the future? Do you really want an SPA? Should you replace your C codebase with Rust... or Go? Is Bitcoin worth getting in on? etc etc
  • StorageMojo: [re: Violin’s bankruptcy] The race is not always to the swift, nor riches to the wise. By starting with software, other companies built an early lead, and now have the money and time to optimize hardware for flash.
  • nocarrier: [Why no datacenters in India?] Cost was a smaller factor than politics; the Indian government wanted the private keys for our certs in order to let FB put a POP there. That was an absolute dealbreaker, so we served India from Singapore and other POPs in nearby countries.
  • RDX: So that original post, although long and full of real examples, was not about Javascript fatigue really. Its change fatigue. Let’s be clear, if you’re picking something new, you’re making a conscious choice to grow up with it.
  • @jamesurquhart: Amazing that emergent tech that’ll revolutionize software dev is already almost a commodity utility service. #streaming #serverless #events


• The Ethics of Autonomous Cars. The obvious revenue model is highest bidder lives. During the first few milliseconds of a crash response a real-time bidding session is created and the lowest bidder assumes the risk. That at least captures the zeitgeist of the times.


• First Go. Now poker. DeepStack: Expert-Level Artificial Intelligence in No-Limit Poker. Thank the force humans are still unbeatable at Sabacc. 


• Medium may be the first YA (Young Adult, think Hunger Games) style publishing outlet. YA is often written in first-person present. It's a good way to fake authenticity. Traditional publications use third-person past tense, but that's not what works best on Medium. What I learned from analyzing the top 252 Medium stories of 2016: The words “you” and “I” were by far the most common, which suggests that addressing the reader directly as an individual person is a better writing strategy than writing in third person.


• Ben Kehoe says AWS Step Functions is not the cheap, high-scale state machines using an event-driven paradigm he has been looking for. FaaS is stateless, and AWS Step Functions provides state as-a-Service: at $0.025 per 1,000 executions, it’s 125 times more expensive per invocation than Lambda; it’s not going to be cost-effective to replace existing roll-your-own Lambda solutions; the default throttling limit for a state machine is two executions per second...it’s not built to handle massively scaled but transient event scheduling.


• Ransomware has shifted to being a reproducible strategy. @SteveD3: Since I fist covered the MongoDB hacking on Jan 3, the number of compromised DBs has surpassed 32,000. Now possibly Elasticsearch. Anything you can find basically with Shodan. Which is why we now have @GossiTheDog: Found out today firms have started doing legal contracts which specifically rule out liability if they get hit by ransomware, naming it.

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