Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

• 28.5 billion: PornHub visitors; 3 billion: computer chips have Spectre security hole; 75.8%: people incorrectly think private browsing is actually private; 380,000: streams needed to make minimum wage on Spotify; 30Gbps: throughput for servers in Azure using new network interface cards packing field-programmable gate arrays; 8 quadrillion calculations per second: new NOAA supercomputer; $2 billion: market cap for parody cryptocurrency dogecoin; $1 trillion: IoT spending by 2035; 100,000: IoT sensors monitor canal in China; 1,204: definitions for emo; 23 million: digits in largest prime number; 2.8%: decline in PC shipments; 


• Quoteable Quotes:
  • @Lee_Holmes: We owe a debt of gratitude to the unsung heroes of Spectre and Meltdown: the thousands of engineers that spent their holidays working on OS patches, browser patches, cloud roll-outs, and more. Thank you.
  • Geoff Huston: While a small number of providers have made significant progress in public IPv6 deployments for their respective customer base, the overall majority of the Internet is still exclusively using IPv4. This is despite the fact that among that small set of networks that have deployed IPv6 are some of the largest ISPs in the Internet! 
  • Robert Sapolsky: But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.
  • Simon Wardley: As for losers — I’m sorry to say that one set of losers will be those who hold on to DevOps practices.
  • StackOverflow: Angular and React are by far the most popular across the board, no matter the technology used. It makes sense that they are the clear frontrunners, supported by two of the biggest and most influential companies in tech. Just looking at those two frameworks, Angular is more visited amongst C#, Java, and (to a degree) PHP developers, whereas React is more popular with Rails, Node.js, and Python developers.
  • Matthew Green: due to flaws in both Signal and WhatsApp (which I single out because I use them), it’s theoretically possible for strangers to add themselves to an encrypted group chat. However, the caveat is that these attacks are extremely difficult to pull off in practice, so nobody needs to panic. But both issues are very avoidable, and tend to undermine the logic of having an end-to-end encryption protocol in the first place. 
  • Taylor Lorenz: The data shows that despite its perception as a nascent social platform, Snapchat is much more of a chat app. And key features like Snap Maps have yet to gain widespread adoption among the app’s user base.
  • FittedCloud: In summary, converting C4/M4 instances may not be a trial task. But for those that are able to go through the analysis and convert could save significantly and improve application performance. At the pace with which AWS moves it is likely that next generation instances will continue to be available in the coming years so the sooner you upgrade the better prepared you are for the future generation instances.
  • Sridhar Rajagopalan: When we moved the Sense analytics chain to GCP, the data coverage metric went from below 80% to roughly 99.8% for one of our toughest customer use cases. Put another way, our data litter decreased from over 20%, or one in five, to approximately one in five hundred. That’s a decrease of a factor of approximately 100, or two orders of magnitude!
  • Simon Wardley: We have to be very, very careful on this point. Because people think “reduced waste” means “reduced IT spend”. And it certainly does not. We’ll see more efficiency and rapid development of higher order systems. But in terms of reducing IT spend, people said the same thing about EC2 in 2007, 2008. And they quickly learned about something called Jevons’ Paradox. What happens is that as we make something more efficient, we wind up consuming vastly more of that thing. So when people say “Oh, we’re going to spend so much less money with serverless!” nah — forget it. We’re just going to do more stuff.
  • Stephen Cass: 5G is likely to become the glue that binds many of our critical technologies together, which will put mobile carriers at the center of modern global civilization in a big way.
  • @SGgrc: The General Law of Cross-Task Information Leakage: “In any setting where short-term performance optimizations have global effect, a sufficiently clever task can infer the recent history of other tasks by observing its own performance.”
  • Quincy Larson: It turns out a LOT of developers got their first tech job in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.
  • @mjpt777: The approach of not caring about software performance because processors keep getting faster seems to be a bit broken right now.
  • Bill Joy: We sought “grand challenge” breakthroughs because they can lead to a cascade of positive effects and transformations far beyond their initial applications. The grand challenge approach works — dramatic improvements reducing energy, materials and food impact are possible. If we widely deploy such breakthrough innovations, we will take big steps toward a sustainable future.
  • @cocoaphony: I have made some snarky comments about "serverless" (since it…you know…runs on servers). And I have flailed around quite a bit trying to understand that world. But as it comes into focus, wow, oh my goodness, it really is quite amazing what I'm able to do with so little code.
  • More. There are more quotes. More stuff. More. More. More. Who can resist more?

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