skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They don't have to if you use Basic or Manual Scaling (Then they can run up to 24 hours).

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/modules/#Java_I...

If you run multiple modules at once (some serving the frontend, some for longer tasks w/task queues), you can have the best of both worlds and use different scaling options for each.

(I also work at Google, but also not on App Engine)
> I have no idea why you would think otherwise

It might be due to better NLP, but it may also be due to the rise of blogging-style personal content where authors say things using that phrase. For example, "I was wondering how to start up my own Ubuntu server on AWS and thought I'd write a tutorial while I was at it." contains "how to start up . . . Ubuntu server on AWS"
Does Google Cloud offer an equivalent to AWS Direct Connect?
Did anyone from IBM actually WATCH SAO? I mean, it ended so well the last time...
It does, but as I understand it, you still choose where you want to apply for a patent (and consequently, how many fees you have to pay).

I have a number of patents. For my earliest ones, the lawyer suggested filing in the US, and in any country where a competitor was located. Later we started filing in US, EU, and in some cases Japan. Today, China is on the list, but not India.
We host a lot of our applications on Google Compute Engine but have had many issues with even simple features available from other cloud providers. For example, Google's HTTP(S) Load Balancer offering does not support SNI [1], HTTP to HTTPS forwarding [2], or sticky sessions [3], making it unusable for us. The support we pay for has been pretty helpful, but all we hear is "we have a feature request for this but I cannot provide an ETA on when and if this will be implemented". Many of the issues in the Compute Engine public issue tracker [4] haven't been updated in many months or over a year in some cases. Additionally, it can be very confusing finding out which beta services can only be accessed via the gcloud tool and not the web console. Without the ability to even schedule a window for maintenance on our VMs, we often feel like we do not have the control we need over our hosting environment. Please increase your transparency around addressing Google Cloud issues, all the Docker updates have been great, but many of these issues are over a year old and still show-stoppers for some users. Thanks again for churning out new features/services constantly, but please help close out some of these older feature requests!

[1] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai...
[2] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai...
[3] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai...
[4] https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/list
Standing ovation.

People think accounting is just sums -- it's not. It's the interpretation of sums. Balance sheets and P&L statements don't follow some law of nature; they are careful crafts that try to convey specific concepts about how a company views itself and how it thinks other people should view it. Like all things written by humans, these documents can lie, misdirect, and bend the truth to an agenda. It takes skills to craft them and to decipher them.

Accounting is "just sums" in the same way being a playwright is "just writing". It's a shame that formal education seems to fail at communicating this to the general public; Western society is based on capital but few people understand where and how this capital actually is.
That wasn't the case for me when I experimented with that in high school years ago. Definitely no hallucinations or anything really close to that, though the extracts will put you in a weird (and very uncomfortable - it is not fun; about as fun as being tickled against your will) world for a brief period of time. Really the only thing that makes Salvia Divinorum worth trying is the "after glow" affect that lasts a couple weeks that can alleviate depression.
I'm on a beefy 12-core 'nix box with 64 GB of RAM, and this emulator is extremely sluggish for me.

Perhaps because it doesn't run well for everyone?
It does sound like stereotyping. It also sounds very hostile to new ideas. You're essentially telling "javascript developers" to get off of your lawn.

I do actually agree with your point about compliance. It would be really cool if we had a POSIX-conformant set of shell commands written purely in JS, as an alternative to having to find and install compiled binary ports that run on our particular non-Unix systems. At least, it's an interesting idea.

Instead whenever something like this comes up, we see a bunch of grumpy systems programmers waving their fists in the air, as if C is the only language powerful enough to manipulate basic strings in the shell. Seems a bit silly to me when you think about it.
> I guess they are not entirely on Google Cloud but rather their data warehousing / big data stuff is now?/going? to be on GCP.

I don't know why you would guess that: the Google announcement indicates that the migration has both a "services" track and a "data" track. And Spotify's announcement certainly seems to indicate that they are moving off of their own datacenters, onto Google Cloud Platform, and not in a limited way.
Somewhat infamously, GRUB failed on Intel Macs (in 2006?) because it tried to use the A20 gate, and Apple refused to emulate it. It's fixed now, though.
When exactly was "end of day"? I tried submitting at 4:50pm PST, February 23 and it said that applications had closed...

edit: also, the event page says sign up by "Wednesday, February 24".
Thanks for the article, but as a person that knows next to nothing about the logistics, I'd like to read more about the topic. For example, what kind/types of software company such as DHL uses? What are the biggest problems (I guess complexity is high on the list) in improving its software side? What could be some creative solutions to this 'software fail'?
" Most solutions have been attempts to move people to work, but I’m proposing an alternate solution: moving the work to the workers."

Holy crap! That's revolutionary! Letting people work from home! How groundbreaking!!!

Seriously, it's great to see another CEO encourage this trend, but the way it's presented in this post as a brand new thing he just invented over the weekend is a bit ridiculous.
Novelty in the US is largely decided by the courts after patents are granted, and it's very expensive.

India is saying software patents are not novel enough to protect, and directing its patent examiners not to grant them.

Our examiners grant patents left and right with little consideration for if they're novel.
Ugh, I hate that area with a passion. You get stuck in that mess even if you're not going to the Bay Bridge.

It blocks all lanes of traffic until the exit, because people try to skip ahead of the line by using the far left lane until the last second. And then they try to merge in which blocks the lane. Once you get past the bridge exit, then 101 is usually clear. So frustrating.
The FBI likely doesn’t need Apple’s help to break into an iPhone
The authors should get an Ig Nobel award for this. I mean, out of all the things to research... how to communicate secretly with someone who uses a decoding tool of a heavy psychedelic drug (instead of a decoder ring)...
The Latest Generation Atlas Humanoid Robot Is Absolutely Incredible
A huge reason anything accepting network (or other potentially hostile input) should use parser generators and validate the entire input before using any of it is security. Additionally, all of those grammars should, whenever possible, be no more complex than deterministic context-free.

As Meredith and Sergey explain in their talk[1] at 28c3, Turing complete input and parsers that don't validate the input are creating a "weird machine" just waiting to be programmed in malicious and unexpected ways.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-the_science_of_insecurit...
Boston Dynamics presents the 'next generation' Atlas robot
If you think it's hard to live on $50K salary in San Francisco you should think about how everyone else in the service industry supporting all those tech workers manage to live on minimum wage or barely above that. Think about the people serving lunch, or making coffee, or cleaning offices, etc. Where do they live and how can they afford to be in the city every day at less than half of $50K per year? Working remotely isn't an option for them either.

If it's truly prohibitive for a single person to live in SF for $50K per year then we should be really concerned about the families that earn $50K from two minimum wage jobs, and need to support 1 to 2 children on top of it.
Most adults do not consider having a "room in a shared apartment" to be adequate. A living wage allows you to rent/mortgage a place of your own. What I'm hearing is that $50k is not a living wage.
You can also just shutdown (ie click start and then select shutdown) that caused a BSOD for me.

I found this very ironic.. It died while trying to die.
I don't get your last sentence. What does taking 5 drops of blood have to do with ex-generals or war criminals?
This is great, but I fear trying to compete directly against software like Kubernetes and Mesos, Docker isn't going to have a ton of luck.
JSON Web Tokens
Most enterprise projects fail, either in terms of budget, time or functionality.

Pretty much any telephone billing system is late or shelved, for example.

In this case, you have a shipping conglomerate with divisions that can't talk to each other.
Yes. We have both "Carrier Interconnect" (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/) and "Direct Peering" (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/direct-peering).
I'm both fascinated and very scared of DMT. As I get older and my want to experiment with unfamiliar substances wanes, I'm pretty confident that I'll probably never try DMT, but I wish I had when I was younger and more brash. I've had friends who have taken too much and went down the DMT-hole, and their description of it (as best they can recollect anyways) is absolutely terrifying. One example was a friend who felt he spent years in a completely different world, with completely different laws of physics - he had to literally give up his idea of how the world worked in order to embrace what he thought at the time was his new world/being. Once he accepted it, apparently he started to come out of it.
If the patent office can't usefully determine novelty (needing to defer to the courts) then why have a patent office at all?

The same problems affecting software continually affect every other industry. Software is more visible than other R&D but if software needs to be excised from patents then everything probably should.
For what do people use parser generators, besides writing new programming languages? I'm very curious to know about the use cases.
Atlas, the Next Generation, Walking Robot [video]
I largely agree. However, I'm not sure I agree with you that it's infeasible to prevent pure software patents since folks will just include the entire computer in a description of software. If there's nothing new about the hardware, that part of the patent can just be rejected. If I submit a patent for a better mousetrap that includes a description of the house, won't the patent examiner just reject the application, or instruct that that part be ignore, or whatever the procedure is?
> we know will be abused (performance! performance!)

None of the programs (or at least most, I only checked the first 5) in which Rust is faster than C use unsafe directly. It's in the libraries they use, but safe Rust is very performant.

We'll have to agree to disagree about the rest. :)
> I wish they had the same exuberance about their support tickets :(

Is there a particular ticket (or tickets) you ran into trouble with? I can try to follow up.
This is no surprise whatsoever to anyone (e.g., diabetics) who uses glucose test strips. Small sample + cheap small battery-powered measuring device = high variation.

Is it good science? The study had a mere 11 "donors"! I know Rice is a small school, but there are plenty of people around the university to volunteer. Its within throwing distance of Houston's Medical Center!
How is "just being better than the rest" not a good enough answer? Better marketing, better features, better marketing, better marketing(!!!). Better than the rest, but what more do you need to be better at than convincing more people to use it? That's what makes a monopoly.
For YC companies, which also benefit from a Bay Area premium. Up here in Seattle, 5MM is not a discounted, seed stage, pre-money valuation.
Apple blames FBI misstep for inability to access terrorist’s iPhone data
It's called the Design District for a reason: large furniture stores don't usually make for beautiful architecture. It felt pretty safe to me on several visits, and definitely up-and-coming a few years ago.

If you ignore the homeless problem (which is actually in busy areas like Tenderloin), there are no real "sketchy" areas in SF. You have to cross the bay for that.
Theranos reference
No.

It's important to your customers that you make it clear that their data is safe.

If it isn't, you need to make that clear, too.

Right now, I have no basis to extend trust to you, and no desire to do so.
I like the idea of the Holocene Calendar, but there were already archaeological sites known to be older than twelve thousand years when it was devised. As archaeologists find older developed structures and dating methods get more precise, negative HC dates get pretty likely.
Not in the same way that it is protected by patents! Copyright protects the expression, not the idea. If the idea isn't patented, then someone else can implement it from scratch using their own copyrighted code.

Hardware blueprints are also copyrighted; and that also doesn't protect the inherent idea.

Nete that this new rejection in the Indian patent system is not only of software patents but in general "mathematical methods".

If you come up with some amazing new crypto after 25 years of painstaking research, India says that you cannot patent the idea, and so anyone who learns about it can write implementations of it in code and distribute them in India without having to license anything from you.

Of course, most software patents are garbage, but that's because they are for trivial things which anyone could come up with easily and/or have tons of prior art that the lazy slobs at the USPTO didn't bother hunting down, or are so broad that they apply to anything. (E.g. "some processing method for converting one file to another" or whatever).

It's not so clear cut that that, say, RSA should not have been patented.
Sounds good, where do I sign up?
Adding to what dragonwriter said, we now have an IaaS offering (Compute Engine) that launched publicly in 2013. You get raw virtual machines letting you be agnostic of Google Cloud's particular offerings.

If you're looking for "just run my app" but with a bit more customization / flexibility than App Engine (like running your own RabbitMQ) then yes, Container Engine (https://cloud.google.com/container-engine) is our hosted Kubernetes offering. You don't need to manage with the VMs yourself, just choose a cluster size and go.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not really App Engine or Container Engine (but I'm familiar with them all).
Not sure if this has changed in the last few years, but Khan Academy heavily invested in App Engine: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkb...
If the monopoly on violence applies to information technology as well as physics technology, then the second amendment and similar doctrines also apply. The whole Apple case could also be interpreted as the US government attempting to get around that by taxing, legislating, and undercutting the ammunition manufacturing industry out of existence.
Uhm, this sounds a lot like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr

Which is essential the beginning of patents, in the US. Basically, the software has to run on a hardware device.

How is it different? (IANAL)
$50k is livable, but on the other hand you have to live In a city full of people who don't shut up about the Internet. I'd say that's a definite net loss.
So... basically nothing is live yet? Are you from Google? Is anything live. I admit I got confused by the OP title: "Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud".
Seth Meyers takes a closer look at Apple’s public war with the FBI
Fun fact: The CEO of Zynga founded EA Burnaby, in my hometown.
Fun article, and one which shows the dark side of gamification. If you provide points, levels, and leaderboards, people will sacrifice their lives to leveling up for stupid little perks like jumping the line, slightly larger seats, and liquor and snacks that you probably shouldn't have anyway.

I was one of these people years ago. I was doing a lot of international business class flights on behalf of a public software company, and had 1k and global services status. Then I burned out and quit, and spent the next several years barely making premier silver. It's no big deal once you get over your sense of entitlement. And United has put all the perks up for sale anyway, so you can now buy whatever perk that you can't live without.

A couple of months ago, I finally made million miler status, which is a kind of "emeritus" status: you (and a designated companion) get star alliance gold status for life. This is actually kind of awesome since now I don't have to worry about getting miles every year to make premier. I still accumulate points so that I can get free tickets, but being retired from the elite status rat race is very relaxing.
Yes you can use exceptions to handle errors in the constructor, but you can just as easily do:

guard x();
if (!x) {
// an error occurred
return x.error_code();
}

x->do_stuff();

You don't have exceptions so of course you're now required to check for errors explicitly.
"The company then spent another $1 billion in a failed attempt to build a unified IT backbone to tie together the acquisitions. Late last year the company killed the project, known as New Forwarding Environment, deciding to stick with its legacy systems."

A similar thing happened when DHL acquired Airborne.

http://www.informationweek.com/dhl-airborne-didnt-take-the-e...

After the smoke cleared, Infosys had the most understanding of the systems (along with solution support) but domain knowledge and software expertise slipped away. If I had to describe the atmosphere, it could be summed up by Nicholas Carr's article "IT doesn't matter"

https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter

Eventually, DHL terminated US domestic shipping

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/dhl-reboot...
This is great. I don't have to frequently opened Fabric.io page to see the stats anymore.
I have to agree. The problem isn't so much that software should be inherently unpatentable, but that there's been such a flood of patented ideas that pretty clearly are independently discoverable by numerous people working on the problem (or worse, are patents of an end rather than a means e.g. the one-click patent) and which keep getting passed through, which results in a patent database that's a minefield rather than a mine of useful ideas.
+1

App Engine Product Manager here
Which Professions Have the Longest Commutes?
It is probably because of the $80M fund (http://slackhq.com/post/134878632730/launch-platform) Slack set up for developing apps on their platform.
Show HN: Realtime audio analysis of YouTube videos using Watson services
Why it hasn't been solved ? Little political will arriving just recently(mostly due to economics i think). Further more many of the energy technologies have slow improvement trends, we didn't work until recently on nuclear innovations due to political and economic reasons, and even with that replacing everything that emits co2 is a huge project.
Question for Sam -- How do you raise the first 200K at a different valuation without significant extra cost and hassle? I'm guessing it would be a SAFE or convertible note, in order to avoid issuing such a small amount of equity.
Perhaps 'recreational' rather than 'toy' is a better word. :) The analogy with yoga is good, or plenty of programming languages. They make you better as a person, stretch you, widen your knowledge, and expand your mind, without necessarily being directly useful. For me it is enjoyable, definitely poetry. Though the opportunities to actually speak it is very limited.

sina sona ala sona e toki pona? (do you know it?) ... if so: sina kama sona tan seme?
That's not how type 2 works. The resistance is developed for unknown reasons and it continues to build over time. For a while, your body can compensate by producing more insulin to overcome the insulin resistance of your cells. You don't become symptomatic until your cells are almost completely insulin resistant. Your pancreas will continue to make insulin at crazy high rates, but eventually the cells that make insulin will die off (presumably from hyperactivity). This is the point at which type 2 diabetics need insulin.

As far as cutting sugar out of your blood - you can't. Your body tries to maintain 80-110 mg/dL of sugar in your blood. You NEED sugar. It's energy. In fact, sugar is the ONLY energy source your brain can use. The problem is when you're a diabetic, your body's cells can't take that sugar out of the blood to use it for energy. That's when you try to minimize your sugar intake, because if you don't, you can do irreversible damage to your nerves and vasculature.
The supposed benefit to society from granting a monopoly on an idea is that it encourages people to invent new ideas and disclose their inventions. Neither ideas or disclosure of ideas are in short supply in the computer world today. Software patents provide no benefit to society.
It shields people from losing personal assets that aren't tied up in the business. It isn't a get-out-of-anything card, though, and I see no evidence that corporations as a concept allow people to be personally unaccountable for actions.

When people complain about corporations as evil in the abstract, I can only assume they don't understand the nature of the exercise of power, or are unwilling to examine it closely due to "down with corporations" being emotionally resonant for them.
Leaving GitHub
Isn't that the same as "cloud vs physical"? If you plan to use a lot of resources consistently for several years, physical is cheaper; if your workload is more transient, you choose virtual.

(The main difference being that real estate can even increase in value, so it is an investment as much as a cost; whereas computers invariably depreciate to 0 in the end.)
This is a great article (I haven't written a compiler in years but was still able to follow along) that can easily suck up an evening of descending his explanatory links. That's a good thing.

Favorite new trivia bit:

"C++ has an even more extreme version of this problem since type/variable disambiguation could require arbitrary amounts of template instantiation, and therefore just parsing C++ is technically undecidable (!!)"
How is it different from Europe?
According to Wikipedia [0]: "Under the EPC, and in particular its Article 52, "programs for computers" are not regarded as inventions for the purpose of granting European patents"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...
Mogul Seeks $30M from California to Give Beach Access
This also used to be the Macromedia headquarters (before we moved across the street to the Baker Hamilton building). Here are some pictures of it on the inside, from around 2000 - 2001.

The merry-go-round was given to us by Apple:

http://radio-weblogs.com/0106797/picts/MacromediaFlashOffice...
Bill Gates: Microsoft would backdoor its products in a heartbeat
Obviously if you can pull it off then you're golden.

But we're discussing the early pitch here. It's not enough to say We'll do the same as product X but BETTER. That's totally generic and not a plan.

So there has to be SOME insight at least on what might constitute "better," and then how to translate that into market dominance.