Links voor 19 juni 2014

Moving product recommendations from Hadoop to Redshift saves us time and money | Monetate Engineering Blog
We’ve demonstrated the ease with which we can transition one of our legacy MR jobs to pure SQL running against Redshift. Not only was this a neat problem to solve, but it will end up lowering the cost of our backend services.

(2) More Details on Today’s Outage
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.

Mozilla to Develop Comments Platform for New York Times and Washington Post – NYTimes.com
Through the new platform, the news organizations said in a news release, “Readers will be able to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities.” The news outlets can then collect and use the reader content “for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions.”

The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds «
Before Risk, before Dungeons & Dragons, before Magic: The Gathering, there was Diplomacy. One writer enters international competition to play the world-conquering game that redefines what it means to be a geek (and a person).

Your Company Is Not a Family – Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh – Harvard Business Review
When CEOs describe their company as being “like family,” we think they mean well. They’re searching for a model that represents the kind of relationships they want to have with their employees—a lifetime relationship with a sense of belonging. But using the term family makes it easy for misunderstandings to arise. In a real family, parents can’t fire their children.

N-VA maakt vernedering voor Verhofstadt compleet – België – Knack.be
Ah well. Zou er al Verandering zijn ondertussen, eigenlijk? "De ECR, de European Conservatives and Reformists group of de Europese Conservatieven en Hervormers is de Eurosceptische fractie waar de Tories van de Britse premier David Cameron deel van uitmaken, maar ook de Deense Volkspartij, de Duitse anti-europartij Alternative für Deutschland en de Ware Finnen, partijen die aanleunen bij extreem-rechts. N-VA komt er ook de Poolse partij Recht en Rechtvaardigheid (PiS) tegen. De partij van ex-premier Jaroslaw Kaczynski is tegen de legalisering van abortus, euthanasie en het homohuwelijk."

Alien: Dan O’Bannon’s list of design requests for H.R. Giger
THE ALIEN, THIRD (MATURE) PHASE.  Having left its victim, the Alien promptly grows to man-size, whereupon it is terrifically dangerous. It is very mobile, strong, and capable of tearing a man to pieces. It feeds on human flesh. This creature should be a profane abomination. Our producers have suggested that something resembling an over-sized, deformed baby might be suffieciently loathsome. In any event, we wish you to feel free to create your own design.