Maciej Cegłowski: Scott and Scurvy
Time Bandits: What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Ryan Dahl: Node.js – slides from jsconf (pdf)
Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig & Fernando Pereira: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data (pdf)
The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of Google introduces the notion of WSC’s (warehouse-scale computers); an Internet service that spans thousands of computing nodes and the associated hardware that goes along with it as a single computing unit.
The book goes into the architecture of such WSC’s, workloads & software infrastructure, hardware building blocks, datacenter basics, energy & power efficiency, costs, dealing with failures & repairs and the challenges in designing such machines.
Some interesting points from the book:
- programmers must be aware of the relatively scarce cluster-level bandwidth resources and try to exploit rack-level networking locality
- distribution of peak power usage – CPU’s 33%, DRAM 30%
- cost-efficiency metrics for a large SMP server and a low-end, PC-class server
- At the moment, the sweet spot for many large-scale services seems to be at the low-end range of server-class machines
- Energy management being a key issue. Focus on reducing all energy-related costs capital, operating expenses, and environmental impacts.
- The average real-world datacenter and the average server are far too inefficient, mostly because efficiency has historically been neglected and has taken a backseat relative to reliability, performance, and capital expenditures. As a result, the average WSC wastes two thirds or more of its energy
- As a rule of thumb, most large datacenters probably cost around $12–15/W to build and smaller ones cost more
- The total cost of a server will be primarily a function of the power it consumes, and the server’s purchase price will matter less. In other words, over the long term, the datacenter facility costs (which are proportional to power consumption) will become a larger and larger fraction of total cost
You can download the book here.
Financial Edition.
Bill Gross: How a global debt crisis trickles down to investors
Stanford Law: Q & A with Charlie Munger (pdf)
Farnam Street: The forgotten lessons of 2008
Interesting Interview with Jim Rickards, former general counsel of LTCM
Video edition.
reddit.com Interviews Peter Norvig
Anand Rajaraman: What lies beneath: harnessing the deep web
Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?
Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory
Gabriel Weinberg interviews Garry Tan of Posterous
Weaponizing Mozart: How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control
Pete Michaud: Achievement Porn
Patrick McKenzie: Lesson from Madlibs Signup Fad: Do Your Own Tests
The Diamond Formation: Making sure your side wins the sound-byte battle
An Excerpt on Dr. Michael Burry from Michael Lewis’s new book: Betting on the Blind Side
Gabriel Weinberg: Are you building an empire, sparking a powder keg, or starting a movement?
Caterina Fake: Getting the Startup Equation Right
Tony Wright: Considering Y Combinator (or any seed funding)?
Rand Fishkin: SEO for startups
From this image, a comment on reddit on the speed of the Antelope
There are good reasons for saying hello
Steve Blank: No Accounting For Startups
Steve Yegge: Ten Challenges/ Books
Jason Cohen: Enough with the “expert” guilt
Jesse Schell’s talk on the future of games (video)
Mike Maples Talks Venture Capital And Thunder Lizards (video)
Anton Kovalyov: Making Disqus faster
Jason Sobel: Making Facebook 2x Faster
Max Ventilla: The idea was that we should add value to people’s existing habits not try to change them.
Jimmy Wales on Getting Traction for wikipedia & wikia
Panjiva: PageRank for shipping (interesting startup)
Arthur De Vany: From chaos, order
What’s a Dress Worth? The online retailer Gilt Groupe offers a great deal: Buy designer clothes at deep discounts.
Interesting use of data aggregation: Please Rob me
Alexis Ohanian: Reasons to self publish books & Step by step guide on how to publish a book
Jared Dudley – Most Athletic Hands in History (video)
Paolo Pellegrini’s PSQR Capital Annual Letter
Interesting startup:ChartBeat is slick! Welcome to the world of Real Time Analytics.
Rebekah Cox: Early Quora Design Notes
The deepest point in the ocean:Marian Trench
The technical details regarding Siri
Paul Graham interview with How Y Combinator Helped 172 Startups Take Off. Helpful follow up on Hacker News with answers from Paul Graham.
The Human Shuffle: Is ChatRoulette the future of the Internet or its distant past?
Chatroulette’s mysterious creator is Andrey Ternovskiy
NYT: Luge Crash at the Olympics (viz.)
