Steve Huffman Lessons Learned While at Reddit (SlideShare) — uptime and scale. It’s interesting that most everyone reinvents tuples as a way to scale databases, hence the popularity of NoSQL systems.
Hernando de Soto: Shadow Economies — de Soto is an economist, and this ends up talking about the need for transparency and open data. As long as you don’t know who owns the greatest amount of your assets, there’s no info as to who owns what, who is related to what, you have a shadow economy. We live in one, and it has as a characteristic a permanent credit crunch. We know more about it than you do. Credit crunch is where you don’t know who you’d be lending to, so you don’t lend. It’s permanent, we live with it, and now you’re going to have to learn to live with it too, because until you know who is solvent how can you give anybody credit? You’re flying blind. (via Jon Udell)