Stuff I'm reading, March Madness edition

My bracket is a shambles ... Mercer?

But here's some madness of a different sort:

• Brief History of Latency: Electric Telegraph

  Brief look at the history of the electric telegraph - how it came to be, how it was used, and the early problems it encountered. Namely, networking congestion, which was caused by routing and queuing delays!

• Denial of Service Attacks

  Over the last year, we have seen a large number and variety of denial of service attacks against various parts of the GitHub infrastructure. There are two broad types of attack that we think about when we're building our mitigation strategy: volumetric and complex.

  We have designed our DDoS mitigation capabilities to allow us to respond to both volumetric and complex attacks.

• Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines and cancellation

  Go's concurrency primitives make it easy to construct streaming data pipelines that make efficient use of I/O and multiple CPUs. This article presents examples of such pipelines, highlights subtleties that arise when operations fail, and introduces techniques for dealing with failures cleanly.

• Marginally Useful

  But while it may be wishful thinking to imagine Bitcoin as a true currency, it’s a highly functional and effective technology. Bitcoin’s “block chain protocol” is built atop well-understood, established cryptographic standards and allows perfect certainty about which transactions occurred when.

• Hack

  Hack is a programming language for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP. Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.

  Hack provides instantaneous type checking via a local server that watches the filesystem. It typically runs in less than 200 milliseconds, making it easy to integrate into your development workflow without introducing a noticeable delay.

• Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future

  Facebook engineers Bryan O’Sullivan, Julien Verlaguet, and Alok Menghrajani spent the last few years building a programming language unlike any other.

  Working alongside a handful of others inside the social networking giant, they fashioned a language that lets programmers build complex websites and other software at great speed while still ensuring that their software code is precisely organized and relatively free of flaws — a combination that few of today’s languages even approach. In typical Facebook fashion, the new language is called Hack, and it already drives almost all of the company’s website — a site that serves more than 1.2 billion people across the globe.

• Facebook VP of Engineering on Solving Hard Things Early

  Building great products is hard enough without allowing the ease of early management to fool founders into thinking they invented something new. Build great management, train new managers, and introduce sustainable, scalable structure now. Do not wait until world-class managers and radical re-orgs are needed to fix poor information flow or productivity problems.