Hey, it's HighScalability time:

Hands down the best ever 25,000 year old selfie from Pech Merle cave in southern France. (The Ice Age)

• 35%: US traffic is now IPV6; 10^161: decision points in no-limit Texas hold’em; 4.5 billion: Facebook translations per day; 90%: savings by moving to Lambda; 330TB: IBM's tiny tape cartridge, enough to store 330 million books; $108.9 billion: game revenues in 2017; 85%: of all research papers are on Sci-Hub; 1270x: iPhone 5 vs Apollo guidance computer; 16 zettabytes: 2017 growth in digital universe; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Andrew Roberts: [On Napoleon] No aspect of his command was too small to escape notice.
  • Jason Calacanis: The world has trillions of dollars sitting in bonds, cash, stocks, and real estate, which is all really “dead money.” It sits there and grows slowly and safely, taking no risk and not changing the world at all. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if we put that money to work on crazy experiments like the next Tesla, Google, Uber, Cafe X, or SpaceX?
  • @icecrime: The plural of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” is “it’s not a bug tracker, it’s a backlog”.
  • Jeff Darcy: When greater redundancy drives greater dependency, it’s time to take a good hard look at whether the net result is still a good one.
  • uhnuhnuhn: "They ran their business into the ground, but they did it with such great tech!"
  • Anglés-Alcázar: It’s very interesting to think of our galaxy not as some isolated entity, but to think of the galaxy as being surrounded by gas which may come from many different sources. We are connected to other galaxies via these galactic winds.
  • @ojiidotch: Main app now running Python 3.6 (was 2.7 until yesterday). CPU usage 40% down, avg latency 30% down, p95 60% down.
  • Nemanja Mijailovic: It’s really difficult to catch all bugs without fuzzing, no matter how hard you try to test your software. 
  • SandwichTeeth: a lot of companies have security teams solely to meet audit requirements. If you find yourself on a team like that, you'll be spending a lot of time just gathering evidence for audits, remediating findings and writing policy. I really loved security intellectually, but in practice, the blue-team side of things wasn't my cup of tea.
  • jph: security is needed to gradually escalate a user's own identity verification -- think of things like two-factor auth and multi-factor auth, that can phase in (or ramp up) when a user's actions enter a gray area of risk. Some examples: when a user signs in from a new location, or a user does an especially large money transfer, or a user resumes an account that's been dormant for years, etc.
  • @hichaelmart: So while Google is doubling down on gRPC it seems that Amazon is going all in with CBOR. DDB DAX uses some sort of CBOR-over-sockets AFAICT
  • Wysopal: I’d like to see someone fixing this broken market [insecure software and hardware market]. Profiting off of that fix seems like the best approach for a capitalism-based economy.
  • Matthias Käppler: Microservices are often intermediate nodes in a graph of services, acting as façades where an incoming request translates to N outgoing requests upstream, the responses to which are then combined into a single response back downstream to the client.
  • Jack Fennimore: EA Play 2017 was watchable the same way Olive Garden is edible.
  • erikb: [On SoundCloud] TL;DR Top Management started too late to think about making actual money. They also hired an asshole for their US offices. When they got an opportunity to be bought by Twitter they asked for way too much money. And the CEO is basically on a constant holidays trip since 2014, while not failing to rub it in everybody's face via Instagram photos.
  • Jennifer Mendez: If you don’t have the games people want to play, you can wave goodbye to return on investment on a powerful console. Does hardware matter? Of course it does! But it doesn’t matter if you don’t have anything to play on it.
  • Alex Miller: The utility of a blockchain breaks down in a private or consortium setting and should, in my opinion, be replaced by a more performant engine like Apache Kafka.
  • Krish: most of the multi-cloud usecases I am seeing are about using different cloud for different workloads. It could change and I would expect them to embrace the eventual consistency model initially
  • Ian Cutress: Then there is the Ryzen 3 1300X. Compared to the Core i3-7300/7320 and the Core i5-7400, it clearly wins on performance per dollar all around. Compared to the Core i3-7100 though, it offers almost 5% more performance for around $10-15 more, which is just under 10% of the cost.
  • throw2016: Just from an year ago the cpu market has changed completely. The sheer amount of choice at all levels is staggering. For the mid level user the 1600 especially is a formidable offering, and the 1700 with 8 cores just ups the ante.
  • danmaz74: the main reason Rails is declining in relevance isn't microservices or the productivity (!) of Java, but the fact that more and more development effort for web applications is moving into JS front-end coding.
  • Rohit Karlupia: we can deal with [S3] eventual consistency in file listing operations by repeating the listing operation, detecting ghost and conceived files and modifying our work queues to take our new knowledge about the listing status into account.
  • tboyd47: It's the end of an era. From 2005 to 2007, the "Web 2.0" craze, the release of Ruby on Rails, and the rise of Agile methods all happened at once. These ideas all fed into and supported each other, resulting in a cohesive movement with a lot of momentum. The long-term fact turned out to be that this movement didn't benefit large corporations that have always been and usually still are the main source of employment for software developers. So we have returned to our pre-Rails, pre-agile world of high specialization and high bureaucratic control, even if Rails and "Agile" still exist with some popularity.
  • @reneritchie: Only beginning to see the advantages of Apple making everything from atom to bit. Everything will be computational.
  • Vasiliy Zukanov: switching to Kotlin will NOT have any appreciable positive gains on the cost, the effort or the schedule of software projects
  • visarga: Over the years I have seen astronomy become more like biology - diverse both in the kinds of objects it describes and their behavior.
  • Jaana B. Dogan: I think the industry needs a breakdown between product and infra engineering and start talking how we staff infra teams and support product development teams with SRE. The “DevOps” conversation is often not complete without this breakdown and assuming everyone is self serving their infra and ops all the times.
  • David Rosenthal~ Does anybody believe we'll be using Bitcoin or Ethereum 80 years from now?
  • Richard Jones: There is a physical lower limit on how much energy it takes to carry out a computation – the Landauer limit. The plot above shows that our current technology for computing consumes energy at a rate which is many orders of magnitude greater than this theoretical limit (and for that matter, it is much more energy intensive than biological computing). There is huge room for improvement – the only question is whether we can deploy R&D resources to pursue this goal on the scale that’s gone into computing as we know it today.

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