"bitrot" entries

Four short links: 5 September 2014

Four short links: 5 September 2014

Pragmatic Ventures?, Pictures Vanishing, Vertical Progress, and Visualising Distributed Consensus

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 5, 2014
  1. Intellectual Ventures Making Things (Bloomberg) — Having earned billions in payouts from powerful technology companies, IV is setting out to build things on its own. Rather than keeping its IP under lock and key, the company is looking to see if its ideas can be turned into products and the basis for new companies. Crazy idea. Madness. Building things never works.
  2. Twitpic Shutting Down — I guess we know what Jason Scott will be doing for the next three weeks.
  3. Thiel’s Contrarian Strategy (Fortune) — the distinction Thiel draws between transformative, “vertical” change—going from zero to one—and incremental, “horizontal” change—going from one to n. “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress,” he explains in the book’s first chapter. “If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
  4. Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus — making sense of something that’s useful but not intuitive. Awesome.
Four short links: 1 September 2014

Four short links: 1 September 2014

Sibyl, Bitrot, Estimation, and ssh

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 1, 2014
  1. Sibyl: Google’s System for Large Scale Machine Learning (YouTube) — keynote at DSN2014 acting as an intro to Sibyl. (via KD Nuggets)
  2. Bitrot from 1997 — That’s 205 failures, an actual link rot figure of 91%, not 57%. That leaves only 21 URLs as 200 OK and containing effectively the same content.
  3. What We Do And Don’t Know About Software Effort Estimation — nice rundown of research in the field.
  4. fabric — simple yet powerful ssh library for Python.