Disagree. Somewhat strongly. The last thing we need are more nerds in the pejorative sense that can't see past their particular electrons in their favorite elements in the dirt. You gotta at some point lift your gaze. A major issue at offices for team and divisional level roi and competitiveness is silos and the wrong assumption that everything is technical or should be. Anything to pursuade the pendulum to the middle is a benefit. Anything that helps identify and compose parts into a better whole is good.Specialization and narrow focus are good but only when mediated and integrated. It takes both.
According to Stanford prof who launched ramcloud Facebook indeed uses MySQL. But MySQL by itself was hopelessly slow. That's why Facebook has over 4000 memcache servers (this as of 2009). By the time you add ram underlying disks he estimated 75pct of all Facebook data is cached in memory. That's why it works.
And yes, they certainly cache data in multiple layers using different technologies but from all I as an outsider can see MySQL still seems to be their source of truth for most services. Meaning all writes go to MySQL and at least when going deep in history or doing searches (which typically can't be served from a cache) hit MySQL.
memcached + rdbms is really super cheap and effective. Properly architected it can be tolerant of all sorts of latency/failure/CAP issues, up to some limits of course.
there was a variant library that allowed you to replace memcached servers on the fly without worrying about the size of the cluster list or having to recache.
You're confusing cause and effect. The goal of the south was slavery and leave if they did not get it - cause. The north was then handed a problem to which civil war. Effect. The south lost. Lincoln was trying to avoid bloodshed by arguing that the union could not be recinded unless all agreed. As such he was arguing for a third way to resolve the issue. The south didn't find third way. It got the problem it wanted and paid the price for it.
Wrong. Absolutely wrong. The continued divisive nature of American politics is not because of enemies or the two party system. It's incompetence and lack of backbone. Neither political party has had the conviction of enlightened reason whence backbone comes to do the right thing. Instead Washington DC ineptitude of politicization of what matters whether in practical administration, or basic fiduciary responsibility has been done. As the problems go from bad to worse DC instead aggravates it in two basic ways:
- plays victim in units of outrage. Knock it of NRA groupies: the Dems aren't gonna take your guns. And on the left: the political correctness of victimization isn't helping the underlying injustice where it rests. The American public has bought into this. Shame on us.
- DC but most especially the US Congress has no agency anymore. They gave up. Politicians do not do today but instead are constantly uttering cheap symbolism about what they will do next time.
Op - thanks for finding and posting. I enjoyed reading it, and was pleased to see evidence intelligent rhetoric with heart. Now at this point Lincoln said he would not stop slavery -- that would change though.
I do not object to publishing a better result. Like the paper said serious craft goes into that and there's nothing wrong with typing it up and having it published. But it's not science; one day one time some how some way the black boxes have got to open up to address why. This is a very valid question and on point criticism. Even in basic software development why (eg requirements) should be known. It's not consequence free free to proceed otherwise.
That's just not true. We are probing a novel domain.
In fact how else would you expect this to proceed? We've discovered a new phenomenon, which likely requires novel mathematics, yet through this exact kind of experimentation we are building the intuition that will guide more rigorous formalization later.
Sure, I get it, the quality on arxiv isn't the same as some physics journal; but to dismiss this as unscientific is not only wrong but very much unfair. I'm working the cutting edge at work, and we're documenting our discoveries as we map the structure of a new frontier - if that isn't science, I don't know what is.
tldr this is how science progresses in new domains before novel mathematics and formalisms are developed to address the new class of problems. This is a really exciting time if neural nets don't hit any serious blocks.
Edit: and by the way, my coworkers are all graduated educated scientists from various backgrounds. What else are they doing if not science?
