Quotations in 2017
Filters: Type: quotation × Year: 2017 × Sorted by date
First King Tut went to the British Museum in 1972, where over 1.7 million people went to see him. Then in June 1974, with the threat of Watergate and impeachment hanging over him, Richard Nixon signed a bilateral trade agreement that Henry Kissinger had negotiated with President Sadat of Egypt. One of its terms: that King Tut would come to America. Two years later, with Nixon gone under the darkest of clouds, he did.
— Chris Michaels # 26th December 2017, 9:08 am
Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the position of a record within a sorted array [...] Our initial results show, that by using neural nets we are able to outperform cache-optimized B-Trees by up to 70% in speed while saving an order-of-magnitude in memory over several real-world data sets.
— The Case for Learned Index Structures # 11th December 2017, 6:25 am
Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox is that significantly advanced civilizations discover crypto currencies and then furiously burn through all available energy sources until they go extinct
— Me # 6th December 2017, 2:44 am
Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world’s population, available on-demand, for “coffee money” not “university money.”
— Patrick McKenzie # 2nd December 2017, 3:17 pm
For most books, the review is a bell-shaped curve of star ratings; this one has a peak at 1, a peak at 5, and very little in between. How could this be? I think it is because SICP is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist (or willing to become one).
— Peter Norvig # 28th November 2017, 6:38 pm
“Just” makes me feel like an idiot. “Just” presumes I come from a specific background, studied certain courses in university, am fluent in certain technologies, and have read all the right books, articles, and resources. “Just” is a dangerous word.
— Brad Frost # 24th November 2017, 5:07 pm
If you’re a public data provider—and many large NGOs, government organizations, cultural organizations, historical archives, media organizations, medical orgs, and academic institutions are exactly that—you can publish gigabytes of data, and make it available as an API, and make it easy to browse on the web, too, with extremely low effort. Put it into SQLite, point this little guy at it, and you’ve just radically increased the accessibility and utility of your data. Because messing around in SQL from a web browser is orders of magnitude more immediately useful than downloading a CSV, processing it, and figuring out what comes next.
— Paul Ford # 17th November 2017, 1:10 am
We are actively developing cross datacenter replication (internally we are calling it “cross cluster replication” so you will likely see it referred to this in the future but of course this is subject to change). I can not give a timeframe, but it is one of the top features on the Elasticsearch roadmap.
— Jason Tedor # 14th November 2017, 10:40 pm
Anyone that has me on too high of a pedestal should see me fumbling around with git.
— John Carmack # 12th November 2017, 3:50 pm
Any engineer who observes a bias in a system and chooses not to pro-actively correct for it is either a bad engineer or they stand to benefit from the bias. So much of engineering is about compensating, trimming, and equalizing imperfections out of real systems: wrap a feedback loop around it, and force the error function to zero.
— Bunnie Huang # 12th November 2017, 3:48 pm
I’ve seen two different start-ups now, who hold personal data about customers in their “immutable log”. “How are you planning to handle GDPR requirements and removal of data?” – turns out the answer is often “Er – we haven’t thought about that.” Cue a sad face when I tell them that if they don’t modify their immutable log they’re automatically out of compliance.
— Alex Hudson # 11th November 2017, 8:57 pm
[On a startup using machine learning to encourage people to get addicted to apps] This technology is so unethical it needs to be criminalized globally, before it evolves into a Fermi Paradox solution... and I generally DON’T think banning technologies is a good idea. But this is like a neuroscience homebrew dirty nuke.
— Charlie Stross # 9th November 2017, 10:50 pm
When you’ve written the same code 3 times, write a function. When you’ve given the same in-person advice 3 times, write a blog post.
— David Robinson # 9th November 2017, 7:10 am
For Redis 4.2 I’m moving Disque as a Redis module. To do this, Redis modules are getting a fully featured Cluster API. This means that it will be possible, for instance, to write a Redis module that orchestrates N Redis masters, using Raft or any other consensus algorithm, as a single distributed system. This will allow to also model strong guarantees easily.
— Salvatore Sanfilippo # 8th November 2017, 10:51 pm
Redis streams aren’t exciting for their innovativeness, but rather than they bring building a unified log architecture within reach of a small and/or inexpensive app. Kafka is infamously difficult to configure and get running, and is expensive to operate once you do. [...] Redis on the other hand is probably already in your stack.
— Brandur Leach # 8th November 2017, 4:23 pm
There’s also a huge population of “admins,” who as you might guess, administer an organization’s salesforce account & data. These folks often start out as office managers or other clerical types, who are handed this responsibility because nobody else wants to do it. Here’s where it gets interesting. Admin ➡️ WYSIWYG customizer ➡️ occasional coder ➡️ full time dev is a real pipeline into software development that folks often with just high school degrees are actually taking. This isn’t just a narrative pushed by salesforce marketing; I’m meeting these people. They say things like “I love salesforce, it changed my life” with disarming sincerity.
— Sarah Mei # 8th November 2017, 11:56 am
In the official timeline, Peppa is appropriately reassured by a kindly dentist. In the version above, she is basically tortured, before turning into a series of Iron Man robots and performing the Learn Colours dance. A search for “peppa pig dentist” returns the above video on the front page, and it only gets worse from here.
— James Bridle # 7th November 2017, 12:34 pm
The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn’t required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that’s all.
— Andrew S. Tanenbaum # 7th November 2017, 11:50 am
Skip the title text! Nobody uses them – they don’t work on touch screens and on desktop they require that the user hovers for a while over an image, which nobody does. Also, adding a title-text makes some screen readers both read the title-text and the alt-text, which becomes redundant.
— Daniel Göransson # 6th November 2017, 4:56 pm
Apple reserves new emojis for point releases, instead of major upgrades, to incentivize people to keep updating. Very smart strategy.
— SwiftOnSecurity # 4th November 2017, 4:15 pm
I’m concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance.
— Andrew West # 2nd November 2017, 4:45 pm
The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF POO?
— Michael Everson # 2nd November 2017, 4:41 pm
In the Bay Area, we have a collection of fiefdoms. Villages are parading as cities, addressing problems myopically. For example, Brisbane (a city of 5,000 people between San Francisco and SFO) is currently blocking a large housing development for local reasons. It’s NIMBY-ism on a broad scale – a regional tragedy of the commons.
— Justin Krause # 27th October 2017, 7:22 pm
I’ve heard managers and teams mandating 100% code coverage for applications. That’s a really bad idea. The problem is that you get diminishing returns on our tests as the coverage increases much beyond 70% (I made that number up… no science there). Why is that? Well, when you strive for 100% all the time, you find yourself spending time testing things that really don’t need to be tested. Things that really have no logic in them at all (so any bugs could be caught by ESLint and Flow). Maintaining tests like this actually really slow you and your team down.
— Kent C. Dodds # 27th October 2017, 6:20 am
Early this year, the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter.
— Twitter PublicPolicy # 26th October 2017, 2:38 pm
We made a sale for Appointment Reminder from someone whose only way of getting data into the system was to fax it to us. Guess the cheat. If you guess “CEO signs up for HelloFax, receives the fax, and types 600 patient names and phone numbers by hand” you have good instincts.
— Patrick McKenzie # 23rd October 2017, 5:45 pm
I am currently documenting a language called Seenku, spoken by fewer than 15,000 people in the rolling hills of southwestern Burkina Faso in West Africa. Like Chinese, it is a tonal language, meaning the pitch on which a word is pronounced can radically alter its meaning. For instance, tsu can mean “thatch” when pronounced with an extra low pitch, but “hippopotamus” when pronounced with falling pitch. In fact, pitch plays such a huge role in Seenku that it can be “spoken” through music alone, most notably on the traditional xylophone.
— Laura McPherson # 22nd October 2017, 12:49 pm
Goldberg’s machines are always described as useless and my machines are too. But they both made us enough money to live off, which is quite useful. Also making people laugh is useful, a lot more beneficial than many ‘serious’ advances in technology like yet another new computer operating system. My aunt Lis, who is very religious, describes my arcade as my ministry.
— Tim Hunkin # 21st October 2017, 2:39 pm
Serverless is a somewhat unhelpfully misleading term for “highly scalable stateless code”. All the times I’ve seen serverless stuff work really well it was workloads that were usually zero but occasionally 30k/sec without warning. I’ve run a company with that kind of workload and serverless stuff would have saved us a ton of money. Publishing to the [npm] registry could be done as a serverless app but there’s little benefit because we do not get huge spikes in publishing. We get huge spikes in *downloads* but serverless isn’t useful there because it’s a read-only case and very little processing is done. Serverless is a great solution to one type of problem. It’s very seldom the case that you can convert all your problems into that shape.
— Laurie Voss # 20th October 2017, 2:54 pm
By cutting out a hundred voices or fewer, things and people that everybody talks about became things and people that nobody talks about. The internet is a technology for creating small ponds for us to all be big fish in. But you change your perspective just slightly, move over just an inch, and suddenly you get a sense of just how few people know about you or could possibly care.
— Fredrik deBoer # 19th October 2017, 3:11 pm