"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.

"The life blood of the community can be slowed or halted by any hardening of these arteries - any congestion which effects the movement of goods and people is hardening of the traffic
arteries."

The simple programming language demonstrated in this article is the untyped lambda calculus, and the implementations of datatypes are Church encodings. The lambda calculus is powerful because it’s Turing complete.

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.

I've been hearing Kafka mentioned more often recently so I was sniffing around it. This design doc is a good lesson on everything from page read/write metrics, concurrency, and persistence. This is how design docs should be written.

In this article, I consider how we organise our time, and reflect on how calendars are designed and used.

Life's a lot like that. From time to time we all fall down and hurt our foo-foos. If only we could deal with it as simply and bravely and honestly as Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo. And what did Chuckles ask in return? Not much. In his own words, 'A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.'

"The tragedy is that online profiles are becoming so efficient at conveying personal stories that there's nothing left to talk about face to face.
"I had a wonderful time at Yellowsto--"
"I know."

"We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonderful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure."

We consider the problem of migrating user data between data centers. We introduce distributed storage
overlays, a simple abstraction that represents data as
stacked layers in different places. Overlays can be readily
used to cache data objects, migrate these caches, and migrate the home of data objects. We implement overlays as
part of a key-value object store called Nomad, designed to
span many data centers. Using Nomad, we compare overlays against common migration approaches and show that
overlays are more flexible and impose less overhead. To
drive migration decisions, we propose policies for predicting the location of future accesses, focusing on a web
mail application. We evaluate the migration policies using
real traces of user activity from Hotmail.

"Turns out we have a large index of the web, so we cranked through 20 terabytes..."

"On a side note, I think continual simplification is vital to maintaining a healthy, long-lived codebase."

If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot.

Two things:
1) This is an interesting look on how to move lots of data with no downtime.
2) The data infrastructure team looks to be 2x as large as the entire Flickr backend team. I know Facebook is a lot bigger, but, still...

"Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.

Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions."

"From that moment, I realized, a lot of things were going to have to work perfectly and fast if my next few days were not going to be a nightmare of credit card cancelling, driver's license replacing, and other tedious identity-theft avoidance activities. No a single thing must go wrong. And I had only a few minutes."

- A pretty fun little story on a usually esoteric linguistics blog

" I have done other things. For better money. In the sunshine. But long before those jobs withered — and they did, as all things planted in the Rust Belt inevitably do — I had a hunch I'd end up on the dark side. Actually, I knew."

Important thoughts about URL preservation.

"To the extent the data is immutable, there is little harm that can come of providing access, other than that someone could come to depend upon something that might change. Well, okay, people do that all the time in real life, and when things change, they adapt. And if they are rational, they know when they make a decision based upon something that can change that they might in the future need to adapt. So, it’s a risk management decision, one I think programmers should be free to make."

--Rich Hickey seems to possess that rare and fantastic combination of being very intelligent but still extremely pragmatic while still shipping high quality code.

"Many people feel distinctly uncomfortable about a site like Facebook learning what they look like, and using that information without their permission."

But they still won't turn off their Facebook accounts.

About a year's worth of reading on distributed systems here.

"Detecting failures is a fundamental issue for fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Recently, many people have
come to realize that failure detection ought to be provided as some form of generic service, similar to IP address
lookup or time synchronization. However, this has not been successful so far. One of the reasons is the difficulty
to satisfy several application requirements simultaneously when using classical failure detectors."

"In our attempts to imbue that nostalgic warmth, we miss the real reason we treasure our old photos: they’re artefacts, hard-copy memories of our lives."

Twenty bucks says Twitter will never have its CNN moment...

"The most important contribution of SEDA, I think, was the fact that we made load and resource bottlenecks explicit in the application programming model."

When your systems are distributed, with varying throughput and resiliency, you can't treat pieces of your architecture as function calls, returning data instantly, consistently, and reliably. The "load and resource bottlenecks" are integral parts of the logic of your software and contracts have to be written and programmed against.

I fucking love this comment from the guy whose tweet kicked off the whole thing (evidently a Y! guy):

"My wedding and baby photosets are on flickr, whereas my last instagram was a sepia-toned perspective shot of a pour-over coffee setup that caught my eye."

"It is not about solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win. The only weapons we have are simplicity and convention. Tattoo that on your forehead in reverse so that you always see it reflected in the screen. What is truly decisive on the battlefield are attitudes: hard work, responsibility, and paying attention to reality instead of the voiceover in your head."