/ on Instagram http://instagr.am/p/hHJz_/
Zoe wondering at her legs / on Instagram http://instagr.am/p/hG6Cq/
Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick, a.k.a. Moby-Cock.
Some of our specific challenges of the denormalization process were:
1. Dozens of legacy data formats that evolved over years. Peter Ondruška, a Facebook summer intern, defined a custom language to concisely express our data format conversion rules and wrote a compiler to turn this into runnable PHP. Three “data archeologists” wrote the conversion rules.
2. Non-recent activity data had been moved to slow network storage. We hacked a read-only build of MySQL and deployed hundreds of servers to exert maximum IO pressure and copy this data out in weeks instead of months.
3. Massive join queries that did tons of random IO. We consolidated join tables into a tier of flash-only databases. Traditionally PHP can perform database queries on only one server at a time, so we wrote a parallelizing query proxy that allowed us to query the entire join tier in parallel.
(via BLACK : CASE STUDIES)
It now costs over a billion dollars a year to run Facebook, and delivering ads is how Facebook pays for this.
To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.
Hugo, though a bit long at times, is a beautiful automaton, I mean movie
The automaton, a complex work of art and science designed to do one thing, or communicate one message, in this case, is an ingenious metaphor for movies themselves. Moreso, the automaton would not reveal its purpose or message until a heart-shaped key was inserted; nor will a movie reveal its deeper meaning without the viewer using their mind (as key) and heart to engage with the movie and unlock its mystery. My favorite part of this construct is the boy’s belief that the automaton produce a message from his dead father. By extension, then, a movie reveals a message from, in some kind of spiritual collective manner, our shared origin or what binds us all together. Beautiful.
Another thread through the movie is that of finding one’s purpose, and being free to do the work that serves one’s purpose in life. Do not live at the Paris train station of life where people merely come and go, but stop and take hold of your purpose, whatever it may be. For Scorsese, that purpose is art through movies which in the library are found “on the top shelf”. Beautiful.
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