Weekend reading

Happy Mother's Day weekend!

In between whatever else is going on in your life, if you're looking for some things to read, try some of these:

• My Mom told me that git doesn't scale. This is easily the best technical talk I've watched in 2013. A little bit of naughty language, but we're all grownups, yes?

  With over 2 million and a half repositories, GitHub is the world's largest source code host. Since day one, we've faced an unique engineering problem: making terabytes of Git data always available, either directly or through our website. This talk offers a hopefully insightful view into the internals of Git, the way its original design affects our scalable architecture, and the many things we've learnt while solving this fascinating problem.

• The Prophets of Oak Ridge

  When she and Michael retell their story, which they do often to eager foot soldiers of social justice groups, they put it in tidy parable form on PowerPoint: We saw injustice at Y-12, so we broke in to bring truth and attract the world’s attention, and here is the U.S. government’s seven-decade budget for nuclear-weapons infrastructure.

• WIRED 20th Anniversary

  On this, our 20th anniversary, the time has come to reflect on this generation of leaders, thinkers, and makers. These people, their companies, and their ideas have shaped the future we live in today. Below, we've gathered stories for, by, and about the people who have shaped the planet's past 20 years—and will continue driving the next.

• Depression Part Two. Amazing. There should be a Pulitzer Prize for web writing, and this article should win it.

  I'll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but — and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else — the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed.

• Historical maps overlaid on Google Maps

  View the maps from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection overlaid on their locations on Google Maps.

• How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity

  If you're considering launching a major rewrite, or find yourself as the tech lead on such a project in flight, or are merely toiling in the trenches of such a project, hoping against hope that it will someday end... this post is for you.

• Buridan's Principle

  I had no idea where to publish the paper, so I let it drop. In 2011, a reader, Thomas Ray, suggested submitting it to Foundations of Physics. I did, and it was accepted. For the published version, I added a concluding section mentioning some of the things that had happened in the 25 years since I wrote the original version and citing this entry as a source of information about the paper's history.

• How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion

  From examining the details of this incident, as well as those effecting the AP, Guardian and others, it’s clear that the SEA is not using complex methods of attack. All of the hacks so far have been a result of simple phishing, or possibly dictionary attacks—all of which are preventable with a few simple security measures.

• This Is What One Half Second of High Speed Trading Looks Like

  Each box represents one exchange. The SIP (CQS in this case) is the box at 6 o’clock. It shows the National Best Bid/Offer. Watch how much it changes in a fraction of a second. The shapes represent quote changes which are the result of a change to the top of the book at each exchange. The time at the bottom of the screen is Eastern Time HH:MM:SS:mmm (mmm = millisecond). We slow time down so you can see what goes on at the millisecond level. A millisecond (ms) is 1/1000th of a second.