Month: May 2012

Links: Youporn, Cycling, Music and time

  1. Building a Website to 200 Million pageviews and beyond. – ( slides and video ) Very interesting talk about youporn.com migrating to a new architecture. The main link is too a summary on highscalability.com
  2. Why Jonny can’t ride – Why biking to school is banned at many US schools.
  3. Meet the New Boss, Worse than the old boss – Musician David Lowery compares economics of music now and in the past
  4. A ticking time-bomb – How the lack of time-synchronisation of medical devices can kill
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Links: Scaling Pinterest, NYT and SF charts, Flickr

  1. How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Could yahoo have grown the flickr community from 2005 and beaten out facebook.
  2. A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time
  3. Amanda Cox and countrymen chart the Facebook I.P.O – Serious cool behind the scenes on the charts in the New York Times
  4. Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data
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Links: safecrackers, media, olympics, biography, singularity

  1. Interviews With People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Ken Doyle, Safecracker
  2. Fungible A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
  3. Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How About Some Sensible Digital Subscription Pricing?
  4. Can London Afford the $14.5 Billion Price Tag of the Summer 2012 Olympic Games? I think Vanity Fair gets a bad rap, it has good articles and lots of pictures of pretty people
  5. I the multi-volume biography dead I’ll admit I have attempted the 8-part Winston Churchill biography but ran out of stream with a couple of parts to go.
  6. Welcome to Life « Tom Scott A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.
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Links: China vs UK, glasses, unlimited flying & Online Ed.

  1. What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education
  2. Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money If nothing else I need to pay less when I get some new glasses.
  3. A Tale of Two Terminals comparison between the launches of Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport and Heathrow Terminal 5 from the perspective of someone used to handling complex software implementations
  4. The frequent fliers who flew too much This reminds me a lot of Internet (especially ISP) based unlimited accounts that fail to take account of people’s usage patterns when additional usage is free
  5. When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed Has the death toll from the drug Vioxx been greatly underestimated?
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Interesting links for May 5th 2012

  1. A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Overview on how early search engine Inktomi was knocked out by Google. The Hacker News discussion is quite good and includes a link to a video talk by Inktomi’s co-founder.
  2. Reddit interview  – IAmA Part Time Hooker in New Zealand – Raw Interview or Summary of Q/A . Prostitution is legal in New Zealand so some people in other countries find it interesting how it works. NSFW obviously.
  3. Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi? – YouTube . The full text is in the text section of the page.
  4. Gather – Auckland BarCamp has decided to rebrand itself as “Gather”. Not sure of the point especially since they don’t even own gather.co.nz (or gathernz.com or something). Anyway it’s a pretty good unconference that happens each year. This year it is one June 30th
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