Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

 

Cassini's last image of Saturn, stitched together from 11 color composites, each a stack of three images taken in red, green, and blue channels. (Jason Major)

• 21 million: max bitcoins ever; #2: Alibaba's cloud?; 1M MWh: Amazon Wind Farm Texas with 100 Turbines is live; $1000: cost to track someone with mobile ads; 20%: ebook sales of total; 17: qubit chip; 30%: Uber deep learning speedup using RDMA; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • Tim O'Reilly: So what makes a real unicorn of this amazing kind? 1.  It seems unbelievable at first. 2.  It changes the way the world works. 3.  It results in an ecosystem of new services, jobs, business models, and industries.
  • @rajivpant: AlphaGo has already beaten two of the world's best players. But the new AlphaGo Zero began with a blank Go board and no data apart from the rules, and then played itself. Within 72 hours it was good enough to beat the original AlphaGo by 100 games to zero!
  • @swardley: Containers aka winning battle but losing the war. AMZN joining CNCF is misdirection. Lambda is given a free pass to entire software industry
  • vlucas: Event-Driven architecture sounds like somewhat of a panacea with no worries about hard-coded or circular dependencies, more de-coupling with no hard contracts, etc. but in practice it ends up being your worst debugging nightmare. I would much rather have a hard dependency fail fast and loudly than trigger an event that goes off into the ether silently.
  • @xaprb: Monitoring tells you whether the system works. Observability lets you ask why it's not working.
  • Brenon Daly: Startups are increasingly stuck. The well-worn path to riches – selling to an established tech giant – isn’t providing nearly as many exits as it once did. In fact, based on 451 Research calculations, 2017 will see roughly 100 fewer exits for VC-backed companies than any year over the past half-decade. This current crimp in startup deal flow, which is costing billions of dollars in VC distributions, could have implications well beyond Silicon Valley.
  • @krishnan: The battle lines are IaaS+ with Kubernetes vs Platforms like OpenShift or Pivotal CF Vs Serverless. No one is a winner yet
  • @fredwilson: "We now have 30,000 data scientists .... 100x more than any other hedge fund ... we are not yet two years old"
  • Elon Musk: Our goal is get you there and ensure the basic infrastructure for propellant production and survival is in place. A rough analogy is that we are trying to build the equivalent of the transcontinental railway. A vast amount of industry will need to be built on Mars by many other companies and millions of people.
  • Samburaj Das: ‘Dubai Blockchain Strategy’, which aims to record and process 100% of all documents and transactions on a blockchain by the year 2020. The sweeping blockchain mandate was announced by Hamdan bin Mohammed, the crown prince of Dubai, in October 2016.
  • @danielbryantuk: "Defence in depth can add 15% to dev cost. Some think this is a lot, but does it compare to data being exposed?" @eoinwoodz #OReillySACon
  • @cmeik: It's solving the issues around gossip floods, it's providing a more reliable infrastructure, it's alleviating head of line blocking.  These are the problems that when solved *enable* large clusters.
  • Benedict Evans: the four leading tech companies of the current cycle (outside China), Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, or ‘GAFA’, have together over three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined (‘Wintel’, the dominant partnership of the previous cycle), and close to six times that of IBM. They have far more employees, and they invest far more.
  • Alan Andersen: At Canopy Tax we have been using dockerized micro-serviced Java containers using vertx with RxJava and have found it to be highly performant and memory efficient.
  • David Gerard: as of June 2017 the Bitcoin network was running 5,500,000,000,000,000,000 (5.5×1018, or 5.5 quintillion) hashes per second, or 3.3×1021 (3.3 sextillion) per ten minutes
  • @CodeWisdom: "One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions." - Grace Hopper
  • Hiten Shah: if you wan’t to build the next $1B+ SaaS app, you have to remember to constantly evolve on top of your product. Don’t build around any one single feature that the competition can rip out. Alternatively, make that one single feature so deeply integrated into everyone else’s product that it’s pointless for anyone else to copycat it.
  • @fmanjoo: Every number in Netflix’s earnings report is just extraordinary. $8 billion on content, 80 movies by next year!
  • Bloomberg: self-driving technology is a huge power drain. Some of today’s prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity -- the equivalent of having 50 to 100 laptops continuously running in the trunk
  • @swardley: I view that once again, Amazon has been given too long to freely invade a space .. and Lambda is gunning for the entire software industry.
  • Greg Ferro: First, Just about everything in this submission [from Oracle] sounds self serving and protecting their own revenue. Its hard to see this as a genuine attempt to add value to the process. Second, the author of the letter has adopted a tone that is approximately like a father berating a child for uppity behaviour.
  • Daniel Lemire: What I am really looking forward, as the next step, is not human-level intelligence but bee-level intelligence. We are not there yet, I think.
  • Richard Branson: People used to raid banks and trains for smaller amounts - it’s frightening to think how easy it is becoming to pull off these crimes for larger amounts.
  • tbarbugli: Disclaimer: CTO of Stream here. We experimented writing Cython code to remove bottlenecks, it worked for some (eg. make UUID generation and parsing faster) and think that’s indeed good advice to try that before moving to a different language. We still decided to drop Python and use Go for some parts of our infrastructure 
  • Paul Johnston: The Serverless conversation is shifting from Functions to Analytics and Monitoring.
  • Gui Cavalcanti: Eagle Prime has modular weapons systems. The chainsaw is absolutely my favorite. I had no idea it could do as much damage as it does
  • @sheeshee: I have a web app with a postgres database running in a kubernetes cluster. I am very hip now.
  • There are so many more good quotes. Click to read more.

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