So beautiful.
In honor of Thing Explainer, my current job description:
I find and fix bad things that might happen to your computer when trying to see, hear, and talk to people very far away using your computer.
When Microsoft introduced the Cortana digital personal assistant last year at the company's Build developer conference, the company already left hints of its future ambitions for the technology. Cortana was built largely on Microsoft's Bing service, and the Cortana team indicated those services would eventually be accessible to Web and application developers.
As it turns out, eventually is now.
That's what friends are — people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world… Friendship is an island you retreat to, and you're all on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies who don't have enough brains to have your good taste.
— Ray Bradbury
The leader election and failure detection mechanisms are fairly mature, and typically just work… until they don't. How can this be? Well, after a lengthy investigation, we managed to uncover four different bugs coming together to conspire against us, resulting in random cluster-wide lockups. Two of those bugs lay in ZooKeeper, and the other two were lurking in the Linux kernel. This is our story.
I love reading bug investigation write-ups like this.
The tobacco industry might once have funded a study that says that smoking is less dangerous than coal mining, but here we have a study about coal miners smoking. Probably while they are in the coal mine. What I mean to say is that there is no scenario in which "user choices" vs. "the algorithm" can be traded off, because they happen together.
Facebook probably just needs to stop publishing research on their data if they're going to continue to do it incorrectly.
The National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata collection program exposed by Edward Snowden is not authorized by the Patriot Act, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
Hallelujah!
At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give the authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.
The money quote from the discussion of how the (lack of) oversight works:
While in theory, the prime minister would act independently, it would probably be difficult for him or her to oppose the intelligence services, because they would most likely be supplying information about possible terrorist or criminal targets.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
— "Self-Reliance", Ralph Waldo Emerson
Naturally, I want them to learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale. But I want them to confront something more painful and more dangerous: I want them to see humanity and what we are capable of.