Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• > 5 9s: Spanner availability; 200MB: random access from DNA storage; 215 Pbytes/gram: DNA storage; 287,024: Google commits to open source; 42: hours of audio gold; 33: minutes to get back into programming after interruption; 12K: Chinese startups started per day; 35 million: tons of good shipped under Golden Gate Bridge; 209: mph all-electric Corvette; 500: Disney projects in the cloud; 40%: rise in CO2; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • Marc Rogers: Anything man can make man can break
  • @manupaisable: 10% of machines @spotify rebooted every hour because of defunct #docker - war stories by @i_maravic @qconlondon
  • @robertcottrell: “the energy cost of each bitcoin transaction is enough to power 3.17 US households for a day”
  • Eric Schmidt: We put $30 billion into this platform. I know this because I approved it. Why replicate that?
  • dim: It uses p30 technology. Just basic things, gliders and lightweight spaceships. Basically, the design goes top-down: At the very top, there's the clock. It is a 11520 period clock. Note that you need about 10.000 generations to ensure the display is updated appropriately, but the design should still be stable with a clock of smaller period (about 5.000 or so - the clock needs to be multiple of 60).
  • Luke de Oliveira: Most people in AI forget that the hardest part of building a new AI solution or product is not the AI or algorithms — it’s the data collection and labeling. Standard datasets can be used as validation or a good starting point for building a more tailored solution.
  • @violetblue: Did a lot of people not know that the CIA is a spy agency?
  • @viktorklang: Async is not about *performance*—it is about *scalability*. Let your friends know
  • stillsut: The difference is in the old days, you adapted to computer. Now, computer must adapt to you.
  • Eric Brewer: Spanner uses two-phase commit to achieve serializability, but it uses TrueTime for external consistency, consistent reads without locking, and consistent snapshots.
  • Emily Waltz: Nomura’s molecular robot differs in that it is composed entirely of biological and chemical components, moves like a cell, and is controlled by DNA.
  • Chris Anderson: Most of the devices in our life, from our cars to our homes, are “entropic,” which is to say they get worse over time. Every day they become more outmoded. But phones and drones are “negentropic” devices. Because they are connected, they get better, because the value comes from the software, not hardware
  • William Dutton: Most people using the internet are actually more social than those who are not using the internet
  • @swardley:  ... by 2016, you should have dabbled / learn / tested serverless.  "Go IaaS" or "build our biz as a cloud" in 2017 is #facepalm
  • Bradford Cross: The incompetent segment: the incompetent segment isn’t going to get machine learning to work by using APIs. They are going to buy applications that solve much higher level problems. Machine learning will just be part of how they solve the problems.
  • @denormalize: What do we want? Machine readable metadata! When do we want it? ERROR Line 1: Unexpected token `
  • @Ocramius: "And we should get rid of users: users are not pure, since they modify the state of our system" #confoo
  • Morning Paper: The most important overarching lesson from our study is this: a single file-system fault can induce catastrophic outcomes in most modern distributed storage systems. 
  • Linus Torvalds: And if the DRM "maintenance" is about sending me random half-arsed crap in one big pull, I'm just not willing to deal with it. This is like the crazy ARM tree used to be.
  • Shaun McCormick: Technical Debt is a Positive and Necessary Step in software engineering
  • @tdierks: Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string.
  • @codinghorror: I colocated a $600 Ali Express mini pc for $15/month and it is 2x faster than "the cloud"
  • @antirez: "Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda".
  • @sriramhere: Wise man once wrote "As flexible as it is, compute in AWS is optimized for the old capex world." @sallamar
  • @wattersjames: AI will come to your company carefully disguised as a lot of ETL and data-pipeline work...
  • ceejayoz: Lambda's billed in 100 millisecond increments. EC2 servers are billed in one hour increments. If you need short tasks that run in bursty workloads, Lambda's (potentially) a no-brainer.
  • @codinghorror: we have not found bare metal colocation to be difficult, with one exception: persistent file storage. That part, strangely, is quite hard.
  • @jbeda: Lesson from 10 years at Google: this is true until it isn't. Sometimes you *can* build a better mouse trap.
  • jfoutz: I agree. It's genius in a Lex Luthor kind of way. If I understood the full scope of the application, I like to think i'd decline to work on that. It's easy to imagine engineers working on small parts of the system, and never really connecting the dots that the whole point is to evade law enforcement.
  • dsr_:  It's harder (but not impossible) to have complete service lossage like this [Slack] in a federated protocol. That's why you didn't hear about the great email collapse of 2006.
  • throw_away_777: I agree that neural nets are state-of-the-art and do quite well on certain types of problems (NLP and vision, which are important problems). But a lot of data is structured (sales, churn, recommendations, etc), and it is so much easier to train an xgboost model than a neural net model. 
  • @GossiTheDog: #Vault7 CIA - Wiki that Wikileaks released is/was on hosted on DEVLAN, the CIA's "dirty" development network - a major architecture error.
  • Alison Gopnik: new studies suggest that both the young and the old may be especially adapted to receive and transmit wisdom. We may have a wider focus and a greater openness to experience when we are young or old than we do in the hurly-burly of feeding, fighting and reproduction that preoccupies our middle years.
  • @pierre: Wow, audacious to say the least. Intentionally flagging authorities to mislead them. It's like the VW emissions code
  • Joan Gamell: Starting with the obvious: the CIA uses JIRA, Confluence and git. Yes, the very same tools you use every day and love/hate. 
  • Chris Baraniuk: The networks of genes in each animal is a bit like the network of neurons in our brains, which suggests they might be "learning" as they go
  • futurePrimitive: Managers seem to think that programming is typing. No. Programming is *thinking*. The stuff that *looks* like work to a manager (energetic typing) only happens after the hard work is done silently in your head.
  • @danielbryantuk: "There is no such thing as a 'stateless' architecture. It's just someone else's problem" @jboner #qconlondon
  • Platypus: There's no panacea for vendor lock-in. Not even open source, but open source alone gets you further than any number of standards that don't cover what really matters or vendor-provided tools that might go away at any moment. It's the first and best tool for dealing with lock-in, even if it's not perfect. 
  • @tpuddle: @cliff_click talk at #qconlondon about fraud detection in financial trades. Searching 1 billion trades a day "is not that big". !
  • @charleshumble: "Something I see in about 95% of the trading data sets is there are a small number of bad guys hammering it." Cliff Click #qconlondon


• You may not be able to hear doves cry, but you can listen to machines talk. Elevators to be precise. Watch them chat away as they selflessly shuttle to and fro. Yes, it is as exciting as you might imagine. Though probably not very different than the interior dialogue of your average tool.


• It used to be that winners wrote history. Now victors destroy data. Terabytes of Government Data Copied


• Battling legacy code seems to be the number one issue on Stack Overflow, as determined by top books mentioned on Stack Overflow. Not surprising. What was surprising is what's not on the list: algorithm books. Books on the craft of programming took top honors. Gratifying, but at odds with current interviewing dogma. The top 10 books: Working Effectively with Legacy Code; Design Patterns; Clean Code; Java concurrency in practice; Domain-driven Design; JavaScript; Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture;  Code Complete; Refactoring; Head First Design Patterns.

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