CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed

Heaven on a grill

"In my opinion the Go designers have done an excellent job of blending the flexibility and convenience of a scripting language with the performance and safety of a strongly typed compiled language. Coupled with its special support for concurrency and excellent standard library this makes Go a great language to work with. The amazing speed of the compiler"means the development cycle is a fast as a scripting language even though full optimizations are always switched on.

"Those results come two weeks to the day after Keith Judd, a convicted felon incarcerated in Texas, won 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia primary."

"Yeah. We went through John Varley to William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; we looked inward. We looked inward at hacking the body, inward at hacking the brain. We dove into cyberspace. We got into the micro rather than the macro. We tunneled down into the code, into the dysgenic spiral, into the cells. And there are great questions there of identity, of the soul, of what's biological real, what the nature of humanity is precisely. But we lose the scale of the space opera that preceded it."

Given that integers are read from a data stream. Find median of elements read so for in efficient way.

"A Javascript library that makes working with the HTML5 Canvas element easy."

"Another interesting finding is likely to annoy some developers. When asked “What is the most common problem you’ve encountered accessing websites or applications on your mobile phone?”, respondants answered “Slow to load” (38%), “Crashed/froze received an error” (18%), “Formatting made it difficult to read and use” (15%).

This tells us that speed is more important than aesthetics. So perhaps some of the time and effort put into media queries, viewports, avoiding scrolling, line length would actually be better employed reducing HTTP requests and optimising so that websites are perceived to render faster.

Certainly, if you’re using gigantic libraries and frameworks to speed up your development, you might pause to wonder whether trading off faster development for slower loading is a trade-off you want to make, given that most users find speed to be the main problem – and problems drive consumers away and potentially into the arms of competitors."

Adding mongo's API to a postgres db with a few functions because why not.

3 TIPS FROM ETSY ON ADOPTING A BLAMELESS CULTURE:
Assume good will.  "Employees are making decisions based on what they think is right for the company," said Allspaw.
Identify causes, not culprits. Accountability happens naturally as people learn the facts. Focus on exploring what happened—and recognize that in complex systems, there's rarely one root cause.
Take your time. People used to blaming cultures may take time to come out of their shell and share mistakes and learnings freely.

"And repairing a vacuum cleaner is a good feeling.”

"For some reason, I told Kyle about how I'd asked my daughter recently what she wanted to be for Halloween, and she'd said "a confused chicken." This apparently meant dressing up like a chicken but pretending not to know what she was. I couldn't help thinking she'd hit upon a deep ontological truth: the idea that who you were would be obvious to everyone else but yourself."

"in California, the Placer County Courthouse accidentally summoned 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning. Taking their duty seriously, residents tried to be on time but the traffic jam was too much."

"Well, the first tenet of Chipmunk sportswriting is that you hype what's interesting, not what's hyped."

“If I could do it,” Agee declares, “I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game… “

"To create js.js, we ran Emscripten on SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript engine used in Firefox. SpiderMonkey comprises about 300,000 lines of C and C++ code. Much of our effort was spent patching SpiderMonkey to get it to compile in Emscripten’s environment, a limited subset of libc. We also had to disable all assembly routines and just-in-time (JIT) compiling features of SpiderMonkey, since assembler is not available in JavaScript."

Conor Friedersdorf's annual collection of the very best that journalism has to offer.

"If anything, it speaks to strong feelings between a map of place and our ownership of place. What’s on that map becomes sacred, with map names taking on our allegiance, experience and emotions about a place."

"When I teach freshman writing, my first job is to destroy my students' illusions. TV shows and films give them the dangerous idea that great authors just wait to get inspired, and then genius pours out of their pens in an unstoppable flood. The reality is different. Writers—especially the great ones—mostly sit at desks feeling rotten, struggling to write crumpled sentences that they can smooth into something acceptable."

"Remember, the only kind of criticism that doesn’t make you a better writer is dishonest criticism. That, and someone telling you that you have weird shoulders.

...

A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants."

"Trio was lovingly handcrafted by a team of artisinal craftsmen in San Francisco's vibrantly gritty Mission District.

We are a team of makers, Lakers, and shakers. We build apps that make people cry. Hold onto your butts.

— the Team"

"This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity."

"A war is the spasmodic uprising of old savage instincts against the slow and gradual humanising of the animal called man It emanates from restless and so called virile natures fundamentally intolerant of men's progress towards the understanding of each other natures that often profess a blasphemous belief in art a blasphemous alliance with God It still apparently suffices for a knot of such natures to get together and play on mass fears and loyalties to set a continent on fire. And at the end Those of us at the rate we are going we may not be many who are able to look back from thirty years hence on this tornado of death will conclude with a dreadful laugh that if it had never come the state of the world would be very much the same."

Nice words, but wrong.

"Streeton aimed to produce "military still life", capturing the everyday moments of the war. Streeton observed that, "True pictures of battlefields are very quiet looking things. There's nothing much to be seen, everybody and thing is hidden and camouflaged."

"Did it work? Dazzle and the convoy system were implemented about the same time, so it is hard to say. However, crews on dazzle ships were very proud of the bedazzled camouflage. It was definitely a morale booster. The British and the Americans fully adopted dazzle because at the time they found it to be effective and inexpensive."

"September had 40mm of rain and was much sunnier so the ground dried quickly, becoming hard enough in places for shells to ricochet and for dust to blow in the breeze. In October 107mm of rain fell, compared to the 1914—1916 average of 44mm and from 1—9 November there was 7.5mm of rain but only 9 hours of sunshine so little of the water dried; 13.4mm of rain fell on 10 November."

Nightmarish, indeed.

"In military terms, a salient is a battlefield feature that projects into enemy territory. Therefore, the salient is surrounded by the enemy on three sides, making the troops occupying the salient vulnerable. The enemy's line facing a salient is referred to as a re-entrant (an angle pointing inwards). A deep salient is vulnerable to being "pinched out" across the base, forming a "pocket", in which the defenders of the salient become trapped, isolated and easier to overcome. This gives attackers an overwhelming advantage: defenders can be attacked from all sides with artillery and/or machinegun fire. Also, since the defenders are surrounded, they cannot easily be re-supplied (with food, ammunition and medical supplies etc.) or escape. The "pocket" progressively reduces in size as the defenders are worn down and the attackers advance. The decreasing size of the pocket allows even more concentrated gunfire to be aimed at the defenders. Eventually, the defenders are overwhelmed by this onslaught and the pocket collapses."

Camouflage (from Fr. camoufler, to blind or veil; It. camuffare, to make up), a French word which came into use, and was adopted into English, at the opening of the World War, to express deceptive concealment, with all that it implies.

"The parade commemorates an Ypres tradition from the Middle Ages in which cats were thrown from the belfry tower of the Cloth Hall to the town square below. Symbolically reviving this practice for the parade festivities, a jester tosses plush cats from the Cloth Hall belfry down to the crowd, which awaits with outstretched arms to catch one. The throwing of the cats from the belfry is followed by a mock witch burning."

While determining the power of explosions is difficult, the 1917 Messines mines detonation was probably the largest planned explosion in history prior to the Trinity atomic weapon test in July 1945 and the largest non-nuclear planned explosion before the British explosive efforts on the Heligoland Islands in April 1947. With approximately 10,000 killed, the Messines detonation is history's deadliest non-nuclear man-made explosion.

"We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté."

"PHP also has some affirmative virtues. The programming model is more productive than that of compiled languages, and even many interpreted languages; save/reload the web page is just a better, tighter loop to get work done in than save/compile/restart my server/reload the web page. I'm actually a fan of PHP's concurrency model, which naifs often mistake as "no concurrency allowed"; PHP's concurrency primitive is curl[1], and if you wrap a tiny bit of library around it, you can make it behave like actors.

[1] Seriously. curl provides a shared-nothing way to asynchronously run code, and has the virtue of not caring what language the other side is written in to boot."

"Developers want to build a great user experience on mobile. They want the experience to be fast, easy, and rewarding for the user. However, because of a mix of performance issues, broken features, or worse—missing features, this is quite difficult with the current state of the mobile web.

The best way to fix this is by focusing on those features that will actually help developers build high-quality apps.

And since the web is constantly evolving, we're taking a versioned approach to this effort, starting from the basics and building up, as illustrated by “Rings”."

"Systems have a tendency to self synchronize as operations line up and try to destroy themselves. Fascinating to watch."

"No people like you. Try favoriting more businesses!"

In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service.

"...because I have a theory that media are elevated to the status of captial-A art when they are no longer commercially viable. The history of print-making is a good example of this."

This is fairly far from the center of Aaron's post but this may be a chunk I've missed on a bigger thing I've been thinking about.

"I dug up a list I wrote over a year ago that was a sort of personal set of principles for my own writing on the web, to see how well I'd met my own standards."

"I have now flown countless times … and I haven't kept that promise. Not even close. I sleep on planes. I work. I read. I watch videos. I play this stupid "Line Runner" iPhone game that, sooner or later, will break my spirit. Sometimes, I don't even lift the shade the whole flight. Somewhere along the way, flying went from modern miracle to mode of transportation. I don't regret that exactly -- you can't fake wonder."

"The implication: high performance equals high tolerances, which means your entire system must be designed to exacting standards."

"One of the best ways to learn about what folklore is and how folklorists do their work is to read the books folklorists have published. Though no one list can include all the many good books that have been and are still being published about folklore, or all the folk traditions that folklorists study, this list is a start. These books should be available through a good public or university library; many of them also can be purchased from the university press that published them, or at a good bookstore; and all should be available online.

To learn about current work in the field of folklore, you should also become familiar with the world's leading folklore journals, which contain articles, opinions, research reports, and reviews of folklorists' work of all kinds."

"And how torturous must it be to face at some point the realization that you are demonstrably not good enough at the thing you are best at?"

There's a whole lot in this that just seems right to me.

"For those of you more familiar with PHP, imagine a feature like register_globals, but instead of injecting arbitrary form data into the global namespace, it injects arbitrary form data into the database. It might as well be called opt-in SQL injection, but even that's being too generous, because this is much easier to exploit than an SQL injection vulnerability."

Sigh.

I love stories like this.

"Vtocc is already being used in a large scale production environment. It is the core of YouTube's new MySQL serving infrastructure."

"The WorldWideWeb application is now available as an alpha release in source and binary form from info.cern.ch. "

"It really just comes down to (the fact that) I’m a great player, and I feel like my mental state of mind has just been holding me back. I know I can be as great as I want to be. I feel like at times you all might not see it, but I show it in practice. Now I feel like I’m just being able to translate that to the games. I just feel like I’m having so much more fun. The team is really clicking, and I’m just glad to be a part of it. I’m so blessed."

"Take me. If I'd failed Spanish, I couldn't have gone to a good college, wouldn't have gotten into Princeton's Ph.D. program, and probably wouldn't be a professor. But since I've merely forgotten my Spanish, I'm sitting in my professorial office, loving life.

How about you? How would your life have been different if you had failed all the classes you've totally forgotten?"

"Politics have no place in health care," the mayor said in a written statement. "Breast cancer screening saves lives, and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care. We should be helping women access that care, not placing barriers in their way."

How to grammar gooder.

"Yet the Parkway landscape conceals the many elements of social conflict and disruption that have marked its history. "Driving through Time" allows students, researchers, and digital tourists to uncover hidden stories, hear forgotten voices, and understand the often wrenching choices that the construction and preservation of a scenic parkway in a populated region have necessarily entailed."

"Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability."

Every file is sacred (or something like that).

"The Maginot Line was a huge fortress that ran the length
of the Franco-German border and was constructed at great
expense between World War I and World War II. It
successfully kept the German army from directly crossing
the border between France and Germany. It was quickly
bypassed by the Germans in 1940 who invaded through
Belgium"

"The lyrics of this song convey the excitement of a hormonal lad driven mad by a girl who knows how to do the suggestive dance of the title, building themselves around the oft-repeated lyrical hook of "My baby does the hanky panky." The music is equally simple and infectious, building itself on simple verse and chorus melodies that bounce up and down in a pleasant, bouncy fashion."

Twitter's Storm seems like an interesting project and Marz seems like a smart guy.

"With The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto sought to make an in-game world that players would identify, a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer."[19] He drew his inspiration from his experiences as a boy around Kyoto, where he explored nearby fields, woods, and caves; each Zelda title embodies this sense of exploration.[19] "When I was a child," Miyamoto said, "I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this."[21] He recreated his memories of becoming lost amid the maze of sliding doors in his family home in Zelda's labyrinthine dungeons."

"The Yosemite Firefall was a summer time ritual that lasted from 1872 until 1968 in which burning hot embers were dropped a height of about 3000 feet from the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park down to the valley below, and from a distance looked similar to a glowing water fall because the people who dumped the embers made sure to do so in a uniform fashion."

"Then you build a third act that just is the train wreck of not really much fun, but it pays everything off, it leaves everybody feeling exactly the same way they left, that they felt before the show started. That’s what shows are meant to do, is leave on par and leave a few jokes behind, to be printed in Entertainment Weekly’s sound bites."

"There are two families of hash-functions, the fast ones, and the good ones, and the security advisories are about the fast ones."

interesting

McGrady's got a fire station now.