Sorry about missing last week, but my birthday won out over working: 

 

Ouch! @john_overholt: My actual life is now a science exhibit about the primitive conditions of the past.

• 1PB: SSD in 1U chassis; 90%: savings using EC2 Spot for containers; 16: forms of inertia; $2.1B: Alibaba’s profit; 22.6B: app downloads in Q2; 25%: Google generated internet traffic; 20 by 20 micrometers: quantum random number generators; 16: lectures on Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition; 25,000: digitized gramophone records; 280%: increase in IoT attacks; 6.5%: world's GDP goes to subsidizing fossil fuel; 832 TB: ZFS on Linux;  $250,000: weekly take from breaking slot machines; 30: galatic message exchanges using artificial megastructures in 100,000 years; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @chris__martin: ALIENS: we bring you a gift of reliable computing technol--
    HUMANS: oh no we have that already but JS is easier to hire for
  • @rakyll: "You woman, you like intern." I interned on F-16's flight computer. Even my internship was 100x more legit than any job you will have.
  • @CodeWisdom: "Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer." - Filipe Fortes
  • William Gibson: what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase “the 22nd century.” Almost never. Compare this with the frequency with which the 21st century was evoked in popular culture during, say, the 1920s.
  • Arador: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges. Every one of the big three has massive buying power yet between them their average bandwidth price is 3.4x higher than colocation facilities.
  • @mattklein123: Good thread: my view: 1) most infra startups will fail. It's an awful business to be in (sorry all, much ❤️).
  • Jean-Louis Gassée: With Services, Apple enjoys the benefits of a virtuous circle: Hardware sales create Services revenue opportunities; Services makes hardware more attractive and “stickier”. Like Apple Stores, Services are part of the ecosystem. Such is the satisfying simplicity and robustness of Apple’s business model.
  • cardine: The price difference between Hetzner and AWS is large enough that it could pay for 4x as much computational power (as much redundancy as you'd ever need), three full time system admins (not that you'd ever need them), and our office lease... with plenty of money left over!
  • Brujo Benavides: Communication is Key: Have you ever watched a movie or a soap opera and thought “If you would’ve just told her that, we would’ve avoided 3 entire episodes, you moron!”. Happens to me all the time. At Inaka we learned that the hard way.
  • @f3ew: Doesn't matter how many layers of stateless services you have in the middle, the interesting ends have state.
  • brianwawok: My cloud cost is less than 5% of my bussiness costs using GCE. Would be foolish to move it to lower my costs 2%.
  • @f3ew: Stateless services are as relevant as routers. Pattern match, compute, push to next layer.
  • Horace Dediu~ when you outsource you're taking knowledge out of your company, which ends up gutting it in terms of the value that is added 
  • Jason Calacanis: Google was the twelfth search engine. Facebook was the tenth social network. iPad was the twentieth tablet. It’s not who gets there first. It’s who gets there first when the market’s ready.
  • puzzle: The B4 paper states multiple times that Google runs links at almost 100% saturation, versus the standard 30-40%. That's accomplished through the use of SDN technology and, even before that, through strict application of QoS.
  • @stu: Serverless has in many ways eclipsed the containers discussion for the hot buzz in the industry
  • @mjpt777: GC is a wonderful thing but I cannot help but feel it leaves the typical developer even less prepared for distributed resource management.
  • joaodlf: Spark works and does a good job, it has many features that I can see us use in the future too. With that said, it's yet another piece of tech that bloats our stack. I would love to reduce our tech debt: We are much more familiar with relational databases like MySQL and Postgres, but we fear they won't answer the analytics problems we have, hence Cassandra and Spark. We use these technologies out of necessity, not love for them.
  • tobyjsullivan: No, dear author. Setting up the AWS billing alarm was the smartest thing you ever did. It probably saved you tens of thousands of dollars (or at least the headache associated with fighting Amazon over the bill). Developers make mistakes. It's part of the job. It's not unusual or bad in any way. A bad developer is one who denies that fact and fails to prepare for it. A great developer is one like the author.
  • Geoff Wozniak: Regardless of whether I find that stored procedures aren't actually that evil or whether I keep using templated SQL, I do know one thing: I won't fall into the "ORMs make it easy" trap.
  • @BenedictEvans: Part of what distinguishes today’s big tech companies is a continual push against complacency. They saw the last 20 years and read the books
  • John Patrick Pullen: In the upcoming fall issue of Porter magazine, the 21-yer-old X-Men: Apocalypse star said, "I auditioned for a project and it was between me and another girl who is a far better actress than I am, far better, but I had the followers, so I got the job," according to The Telegraph. "It’s not right, but it is part of the movie industry now."
  • Rachel Adler: Naturally, faster prints drove up demand for paper, and soon traditional methods of paper production couldn’t keep up. The paper machine, invented in France in 1799 at the Didot family’s paper mill, could make 40 times as much paper per day as the traditional method, which involved pounding rags into pulp by hand using a mortar and pestle.
  • pawelkomarnicki: As a person that can get the product from scratch to production and scale it, I can say I'm a full-stack developer. Can I feel mythical now?
  • Risto: Before integrating any payment flow make sure you understand the whole flow and the different payment states trialing -> active -> unpaid -> cancelled. For Braintree there is a flow chart. For Stripe there is one too. Both payment providers have REST API’s so make sure to play through the payment flows before starting actual coding.
  • Seyi Fabode: I have 3 neighbors in close proximity who also have solar panels on their roofs. And a couple of other neighbors with electric cars. What says we can’t start our own mini-grid system between ourselves?
  • pixl97: Muscles/limbs are only 'vastly' more efficient if you consider they have large numbers of nano scale support systems constantly rebuilding them. Since we don't have nanobots, gears will be better for machines. Also, nature didn't naturally develop a axle.
  • Brave New Greek: I sympathize with the Go team’s desire to keep the overall surface area of the language small and the complexity low, but I have a hard time reconciling this with the existing built-in generics and continued use of interface{} in the standard library.
  • @jeffhollan: Agree to a point. But where does PaaS become “serverless”? Feel should be ‘infinite’ scale of dynamic allocation of resources + micro bill
  • @kcimc: common tempos in 1M songs, 1959-2011: 120 bpm takes over in the late 80s, and bpms at multiples of 10 emerge in the mid 90s
  • How to Map the Circuits That Define Us: If neural circuits can teach one lesson, it is that no network is too small to yield surprises — or to frustrate attempts at comprehension.
  • @orskov: In Q2, The Wall Street Journal had 1,270,000 daily digital-only subscribers, a 34% increase compared to last year
  • Thrust Zone: A panel including tech billionaire Elon Musk is discussing the fact that technology has progressed so much that it may soon destroy us and they have to pass microphones to talk.
  • @damonedwards: When we are all running containers in public clouds, I’m really going to miss datacenter folks one-upping each other on hardware specs.
  • @BenedictEvans: 186 page telecoms report from 1994. 5 pages on ‘videophones’: no mention of internet. 10 pages saying web will lose to VR. Nothing on mobile
  • Thomas Metzinger: The superintelligence concludes that non-existence is in the own best interest of all future self-conscious beings on this planet. Empirically, it knows that naturally evolved biological creatures are unable to realize this fact because of their firmly anchored existence bias. The superintelligence decides to act benevolently.
  • Jeremy Eder: As with all public cloud, you can do whatever you want…for a price.  BurstBalance is the creation of folks who want you to get hooked on great performance (gp2 can run at 3000+ IOPS), but then when you start doing something more than dev/test and run into these weird issues, you’re already hooked and you have no choice but to pay more for a service that is actually usable.
  • Katz and Fan: After all, the important thing for anyone looking to launder money through a casino isn’t to win. It’s to exchange millions of dollars for chips you can swap for cool, untraceable cash at the end of the night.
  • Caitie McCaffrey: Verification in industry generally consists of unit tests, monitoring, and canaries. While this provides some confidence in the system's correctness, it is not sufficient. More exhaustive unit and integration tests should be written. Tools such as random model checkers should be used to test a large subset of the state space. In addition, forcing a system to fail via fault injection should be more widely used. Even simple tests such as running kill −9 on a primary node have found catastrophic bugs.
  • Zupa: FPGAs give you most of the benefits of special-purpose processors, for a fraction of the cost. They are about 10x slower, but that means an FPGA based bitcoin miner is still 100k times faster than a processor based one
  • menge101work: I'm not sure if the implication is that our CPUs will have gate arrays on chip with the generic CPU, that is an interesting idea. But if they are not on chip, the gate array will never be doing anything in a few clock cycles. It'll be more akin to going out to memory, the latency between a real memory load and an L1 or L2 cache hit is huge. (reference)
    Not to say that being able to do complex work on dedicated hardware won't still be fast, but the difference between on-die and off-die is a huge difference in how big of a change this could be.
  • Animats: This article [Why Many Smart Contract Use Cases Are Simply Impossible] outlines the basic problem. If you want smart contracts that do anything off chain, there have to be connections to trusted services that provide information and take actions. If you have trusted services available, you may not need a blockchain.The article points out that you can't construct an ordinary loan on chain, because you have no way to enforce paying it back short of tying up the loaned funds tor the duration of the loan. Useful credit fundamentally requires some way of making debtors pay up later. It's possible to construct various speculative financial products entirely on chain, and that's been done, but it's mostly useful for gambling, broadly defined.
  • curun1r: Your characterization of startup cloud costs is laughably outdated. With credits for startups and the ability to go serverless, I've known startups that didn't pay a dime for hosting their entire first year despite reaching the threshold of hundreds of customers and over $1m ARR. One of my friends actually started doing some ML stuff on AWS because he wanted to use his remaining credits before they expired and his production and staging workloads weren't going to get him there. I'd say it makes no sense to buy your 32gb, 16-core single point of fail, waste $40/mo and half a day setting it up and then have to keep it running yourself when you can easily spin up an API in API Gateway/Lambda that dumps data into dynamo/simpledb and front it with a static site in S3. That setup scales well enough to be mentioned on HN without getting hugged to death and is kept running by someone else. And if it is, literally, free for the first year, how is that not a no brainer?
  • Neil Irwin: In this way of thinking about productivity, inventors and business innovators are always cooking up better ways to do things, but it takes a labor shortage and high wages to coax firms to deploy the investment it takes to actually put those innovations into widespread use. In other words, instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for the robots to even get a chance.

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