ENTRIES TAGGED "scaling"

Top Stories: April 9-13, 2012

Top Stories: April 9-13, 2012

Carsharing boosts city governments, why complex systems fail, and what web ops teams could do with big data.

This week on O'Reilly: How Zipcar's technology is saving big money for U.S. city governments, why scalable clouds need simple parts, and pondering the possibilities of web ops and machine learning.

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Four short links: 20 December 2011

Four short links: 20 December 2011

Maximum MySQL, Digital News, Unbiased Mining, and Congressional Clue

  1. How Twitter Stores 250M Tweets a Day Using MySQL (High Scalability) — notes from a talk at the MySQL conference on how Twitter built a high-volume MySQL store.
  2. How The Atlantic Got Profitable With Digital First (Mashable) — Lauf says his team has focused on putting together premium advertising experiences that span print, digital, events and (increasingly) mobile.
  3. Data Mining Without Prejudice — an attempt to measure fit without pre-favouring one type of curve over another.
  4. It Is No Longer OK Not To Know How Congress Works (Clay Johnson) — looking for a specific innovation to try and change the way Washington works by the time Congress votes on SOPA is about as foolish as Steve Jobs trying to diet his way out of having pancreatic cancer.
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The Meat to Math ratio

The ability to augment people (meat) with data and processes (math) is a key to success.

Successful companies find ways to augment their employees, allowing them to operate at scale with customers. Big data, machine learning, and an iterative, experimental mindset are essential — and increasingly, company valuations are tied to the efficiency with which firms put information to work.

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Four short links: 12 July 2011

Four short links: 12 July 2011

Rare Visualization, Google+ Tech, Scala+Erlang, and In-Database Analytics

  1. Slopegraphs — a nifty Tufte visualization which conveys rank, value, and delta over time. Includes pointers to how to make them, and guidelines for when and how they work. (via Avi Bryant)
  2. Ask Me Anything: A Technical Lead on the Google+ Team — lots of juicy details about technology and dev process. A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you’re on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don’t run into this in practice). (via Nahum Wild)
  3. scalang (github) — a Scala wrapper that makes it easy to interface with Erlang, so you can use two hipster-compliant built-to-scale technologies in the same project. (via Justin Sheehy)
  4. Madliban open-source library for scalable in-database analytics. It provides data-parallel implementations of mathematical, statistical and machine learning methods for structured and unstructured data. (via Mike Loukides)
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