Hey, it's HighScalability time:

• 1.8x: faster code on iPad MacBook Pro; 1 billion: WhatsApp daily active users; 100 milliamps: heart stopping current; $25m: surprisingly low take from ransomware; 2,700x: improvement in throughput with TCP BBR; 620: Uber locations; $35.5 billion: Facebook's cash hoard; 2 billion: Facebook monthly active users; #1: Apple is the world's most profitable [legal] company; 500,000x: return on destroying an arms depot with a drone; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Alasdair Allan: Jeff Bezos’ statement that “there’s not that much interesting about CubeSats” may well turn out to be the twenty first century’s “nobody needs more than 640kb.”
  • @hardmaru: Decoding the Enigma with RNNs. They trained a LSTM with 3000 hidden units to decode ciphertext with 96%+ accuracy. 
  • @tj_waldorf: Morningstar achieved 97% cost reduction by moving to AWS. #AWSSummit Chicago
  • Ed Sperling: Moore’s Law is alive and well, but it is no longer the only approach. And depending on the market or slice of a market, it may no longer be the best approach.
  • @asymco: With the end of Shuffle and Nano iPods Apple now sells only Unix-enabled products. Amazing how far that Bell Labs invention has come.
  • @peteskomoroch: 2017: RAM is the new Hadoop
  • Carlo Pescio: What if focusing on the problem domain, while still understanding the machine that will execute your code, could improve maintainability and collaterally speed up execution by a factor of over 100x compared to popular hipster code?
  • @stevesi: Something ppl forget: moving products to cloud, margins go down due to costs to operate scale services—costs move from Customer to vendor.
  • @brianalvey: The most popular software for writing fiction isn't Word. It's Excel.
  • @pczarkowski: How to make a monolithic app cloud native: 1) run it in a docker 2) change the url from .com to .io
  • @tj_waldorf: Morningstar achieved 97% cost reduction by moving to AWS. #AWSSummit Chicago
  • drinkzima: There is a huge general misunderstanding in the profitability of directing hotel bookings vs flight bookings or other types of travel consumables. Rate parity and high commission rates mean that directing hotel rooms is hugely profitable and Expedia (hotels.com, trivago, expedia) and Priceline (booking.com) operate as a duopoly in most markets. They are both marketing machines that turn brand + paid traffic into highly profitable room nights.
  • Animats: This is a classic problem with AI researchers. Somebody gets a good result, and then they start thinking strong human-level AI is right around the corner. AI went through this with search, planning, the General Problem Solver, perceptrons, the first generation of neural networks, and expert systems. Then came the "AI winter", late 1980s to early 2000s, when almost all the AI startups went bust. We're seeing some of it again in the machine learning / deep neural net era.
  • Charity Majors: So no, ops isn't going anywhere. It just doesn't look like it used to. Soon it might even look like a software engineer.
  • @mthenw: As long as I need to pay for idle it’s not “serverless”. Pricing is different because in Lambda you pay for invocation not for the runtime.
  • Kelly Shortridge: The goal is to make the attacker uncertain of your defensive environment and profile. So you really want to mess with their ability to profile where their target is
  • @CompSciFact: 'About 1,000 instructions is a reasonable upper limit for the complexity of problems now envisioned.' -- John von Neumann, 1946
  • hn_throwaway_99: Few barriers to entry, really?? Sorry, but this sounds a bit like an inexperienced developer saying "Hey, I could build most of Facebook's functionality in 2 weeks." Booking.com is THE largest spender of advertising on Google. They have giant teams that A/B test the living shite out of every pixel on their screens, and huge teams of data scientists squeezing out every last bit of optimization on their site. It's a huge barrier to entry. 
  • callahad: It's real [performance improvements]. We've [Firefox] landed enormous performance improvements this year, including migrating most Firefox users to a full multi-process architecture, as well as integrating parts of the Servo parallel browser engine project into Firefox. There are still many improvements yet-to-land, but in most cases we're on track for Firefox 57 in November.
  • Samer Buna: One important threat that GraphQL makes easier is resource exhaustion attacks (AKA Denial of Service attacks). A GraphQL server can be attacked with overly complex queries that will consume all the resources of the server.
  • wheaties: This is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?
  • platz: Apparently deep-learning and algae are the same thing.
  • @CompSciFact: "If you don't run experiments before you start designing a new system, your entire system will be an experiment." -- Mike Williams
  • Scott Aaronson: our laws of physics are structured in such a way that even pure information often has “nowhere to hide”: if the bits are there at all in the abstract machinery of the world, then they’re forced to pipe up and have a measurable effect. 
  • The Internet said many more interesting things this week. To read them all please click through to the full article.


• Cool interview with Margaret Hamilton--NASA's First Software Engineer--on Makers. Programmers, you'll love this. One of the stories she tells is how her daughter was playing around and selected the prelaunch program during flight. That crashed the simulator. So like a good programmer she wanted to prevent this from happening. She tried to get a protection put in because an astronaut could actually do this during flight. Management would certainly allow this, right? She was denied. They said astronauts are trained never to make a mistake so it could never happen. Eventually she won the argument and was able to add code to protect against human error. So little has changed :-)

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