London’s Hidden Tunnels Revealed In Amazing Cutaways | Londonist
these really are remarkable. I love the Renzo Picassos in particular
(tags: design history london 3d cutaways diagrams comics mid-century)
Kremlin info-ops measured to have a total reach of 340 million with dark, divisive ads
when the virality and resharing is measured, it’s far higher than previously estimated, according to this Washington Post article
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This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. […] Why branchless? Because high performance CPUs are pipelined. That is, a single instruction is executed over a series of stages, and many instructions are executed in overlapping time intervals, each at a different stage.
Neat hack (via Tony Finch)(tags: algorithms optimization unicode utf8 branchless coding c via:fanf)
Internet speed guarantees must be realistic, says Ofcom | Hacker News
Good news from the UK. Hope this comes to Ireland soon, too
“Why We Built Our Own Distributed Column Store” (video)
“Why We Built Our Own Distributed Column Store” by Sam Stokes of Honeycomb.io — Retriever, inspired by Facebook’s Scuba
(tags: scuba retriever storage data-stores columnar-storage honeycomb.io databases via:charitymajors)
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A deep dive on how we were using our existing databases revealed that they were frequently not used for their relational capabilities. About 70 percent of operations were of the key-value kind, where only a primary key was used and a single row would be returned. About 20 percent would return a set of rows, but still operate on only a single table. With these requirements in mind, and a willingness to question the status quo, a small group of distributed systems experts came together and designed a horizontally scalable distributed database that would scale out for both reads and writes to meet the long-term needs of our business. This was the genesis of the Amazon Dynamo database. The success of our early results with the Dynamo database encouraged us to write Amazon’s Dynamo whitepaper and share it at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP conference), so that others in the industry could benefit. The Dynamo paper was well-received and served as a catalyst to create the category of distributed database technologies commonly known today as “NoSQL.”
That’s not an exaggeration. Nice one Werner et al!(tags: dynamo history nosql storage databases distcomp amazon papers acm data-stores)