There is also this video about Qanats in Iran: https://www.facebook.com/32848633159/videos/1015351116587816...

Sorry for the fb link, could not find it in YouTube

The section of the wikipedia article on qanat's in Iran is huge (3700 words) in general, and especially compared to the sections about qanats in other countries. Between that and this video on qanats in Iran; what makes them so much more important/studied/etc.? Is it just that they were invented there?

> Is it just that they were invented there?

Well probably not just, but Qanats are persian tech and spread from there, even today the majority of qanats (both historical and extant) is in Iran, with still-active qanats more than 2000 years old. So it makes sense that this is where they have the largest cultural presence, and understanding.

Looking at the article's history it seems to have been a one-time contribution by an editor.

Nope! We need reform

They tried that recently. Sadly it ended with many students in prison :(

Unfortunately Iran is going to have to go through a slow revolution. Where the elders die off and the young take power. In some ways this is better than a Big Bang revolution like we want - it lets them gradually establish the system they want. Even if it's not the system we wish they had.

Nope! This is recipe for disaster. We need people like Mandela to do what he did with his prison guard :)

Eye for an eye, makes the whole world blind.

What are the pros/cons of using FireQoS vs. OpenWRT's SQM?

I don't know. I have never used SQM. I guess, FireQOS can work on your servers too. Read the article pointed by this post.

This is awesome. Would be great if it gets OpenWRT integration as well.

Oops, never mind: http://firehol.org/installing/openwrt/

I'm curious to know how Pinterest or Instagram decide about what goes inside each shard? Do they shard by user ids or something else? Secondly, would like to know if a shard gets more data than other shard, how do they load balance?

Question from Githubbers:

Have considered using cluster file systems such as GlusterFS or Ceph?

I looked into GlusterFS at one point. GlusterFS is a no-go for static file serving in hostile environments. It asks every node to look for a file, even if it's not there. You can imagine the DDoS attacks you could build here using a bunch of 404 requests for files that don't exist.

One story I heard from a PHP dev is that it would take 30 seconds to load a page while it looked for all the files needed to run it.

Yea, GlusterFS is terrible at PHP, or anything involving lots of small files. Like, static sites or say git repos.

I don't know if it has been considered, however we do have a strong pattern for using DRDB.

Well, all the kudos should go to Bandwidth.com the primary carrier of of Twilio, Plivo, Google Voice, etc ...

Cool, next time you spend three years and literally thousands of hours bringing a product to market, I'll be sure to assign the credit to someone else

Can you elaborate on the relationship between Twilio and Bandwidth.com? I actually have very little understanding of what happens once Twilio receives an API request.

Bandwidth are indeed a bunch of bright folks that do good work and we work with them on a number of products, but to be clear we are not reselling their messaging.

Lot of effort by a large crew of committed developers and the helpful participation of our carrier partners are what brought Twilio MMS to market on US phone numbers. Were MMS as easy as wrapping another product in a HTTP request, I imagine it would be a more common offering.

Want to make sure the effort of the Twilio engineering crew is given its due.

Don't forget Republic Wireless as well.

"Begin with the end in mind"

-- Stephen Covey (Habit 2, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Above rule has helped me a lot throughout my personal and professional life.

Your [2] link is awesome :)