Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-13

• How Apple created OS X | News | TechRadar

  From the outset Apple had one goal in mind when OS X was designed, and that was to make the next great personal computer operating system.

  The company wanted it to be the kind of operating system with which a beginner could feel intuitively at home, and a pro user could be taken to places they'd never thought they'd be. That's a tall order, but eight major versions, millions of sales and a decade later, we think Apple did it.

• High Scalability - High Scalability - The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars

  Instagram uses a pastiche of different technologies and strategies. The team is small yet has experienced rapid growth riding the crest of a rising social and mobile wave, it uses a hybrid of SQL and NoSQL, it uses a ton of open source projects, they chose the cloud over colo, Amazon services are highly leveraged rather than building their own, reliability is through availability zones, async work scheduling links components together, the system is composed as much as possible of services exposing an API and external services they don't have to build, data is stored in-memory and in the cloud, most code is in a dynamic language, custom bits have been coded to link everything together, and they have gone fast and kept small. A very modern construction.

• Mosh: the mobile shell

  Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

  Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links.

• FreakoStats: Chess, intelligence and winning arguments

  Sometimes the facts aren’t so easily checked because they are difficult to understand but the problem is clear and objective. One famous example is the Monty Hall dilemma. In a certain game show a contestant is presented with three doors, behind one of which is a really desirable main prize and behind the other two are booby prizes. The contestant is asked to choose the door he thinks the main prize is behind. The game show host, who knows where the prize is, then opens a booby prize door. He can do that even if you picked the main prize door. The contestant is now offered the chance to change his choice to the other closed door. The question is – should he? The correct answer is that he should because it would double his chances of winning the main prize. This fact proved so hard to grasp that only 8% of the laymen and 35% of academics who tried it, got it right initially. Many of them damned Marilyn vos Savant for misleading the public with her answer in her Parade column Ask Marilyn. Among those academics getting it wrong, were a fair number of senior professional mathematicians and statisticians, including the great Paul Erdos. After a great deal of explanation, the proportion of people who accept the correct answer increased to 56% of laymen and 71% of academics. The figure is more like 97-100% for those who carried out an experiment or simulation, so in essence a large proportion of those approaching the problem through pure logic continue to fail to grasp it.

• Fabric — Fabric 1.3.3 documentation

  Fabric is a Python (2.5 or higher) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.

  It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

• nerdsonwallstreet.typepad.com/files/bigdataannotated-3a.pdf

  Two recent talks had the arguably overly broad title of “Big Data in Financial Markets”. It is overly broad by a factor of two, because markets have two Big Data revolutions underway at the same time.

• Instagram Engineering • What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

  What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

  One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future. This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year.

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