skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a django developer and I received one of these as part of the pilot program. I tried to use it as my main machine for a while, it does have a very limited terminal, so I was able to SSH into my servers and do stuff that way, but overall I just found myself too restricted to really get things done like I could on my normal workstation. ChromeOS itself is pretty slick, although the CR48 pilot chromebooks were a bit slow for some things, general browsing was fine. I won't be using one for my development machine any time soon, although if they get the HTML5 Netflix player working we may end up with a few more of these in our household.
Other posters have already mentioned the urban legend that this comprises.. but on a slight rant, I hate it when this anecdote gets rolled out because this is the sort of short-sighted thinking that gets interesting research canned.

One person felt long ago(can't find the exact quote) that there was once a world market for maybe five computers, and others thought that lasers and x-rays would be nothing more than a sham.

To put it another way: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2088#c...
Facebook's face recognition strategy may be just the ticket
Agree its posible. Robots don't need to teach kids alot. The ship could have a HD with the hole human knowlage on it. Like wikipedia on speed. Everything with videos (or directly to the brain?) from basic english to quantum phisiks. The robots have to feed them and stuff like that. Sperm and eggs are small enough that the can send them in big numbers.

Desing whan ship that can do that for 20 people and then just keep sending them.
I swagged this out a couple years ago on a lark for Ruby/EventMachine:

https://github.com/tqbf/asymy

I have a much more mature version internally, and my understanding is that you can get gem-ified libraries that do async database stuff for EventMachine today.

I lost interest in this pretty quickly once I added Redis to my stack. Redis is trivial to talk to asynchronously, and by sticking a queue in between your async components and your database layer, it becomes easy to implement the half-async model --- plus you get very smart caching and another layer of indexing "for free".
Work remotely, building a CoffeeScript/Backbone mobile application
Taking a cold shower _because_ it's unpleasant makes as much sense as cutting yourself.
Whoever shot that video had no idea what they were doing. Get a lav mike or boom mike, for a start, so that your primary narration track doesn't pick up all the reverb from the room. It was definitely amateurish - not only would Apple not do such a crappy job, I doubt most startups would, either.

You can have an outsourced service make a demo video with proper voiceover for less than $1,000. That video from Microsoft is just sloppy, not frugal or homespun.
With all due respect to some awesome people who built online IDEs, editors, etc, they are still not there yet.

With a chromebook you can't have an editor of your choice. What about a source control? How do you run locally your app? There are other problems still not solved with a developer stack in the cloud.
Personally, I still can't imagine my dev environment without a great editor and a shell. And no online solution comes near that.

With that said, just a couple of years back, I couldn't imagine having my email in the cloud, so I believe in the future someone more imaginative than me could revolutionize development. I just hope they port Vim to the cloud :)
Also, making everything non-blocking will not necessarily make the user experience better. It will just allow you to have more users concurrently, all waiting for your slow queries. In other words, user A no longer has to wait on users B, C, and D, but still has to wait on his/her own slow query. Depending on your application usage patterns, this could be enough to go from unusable to awesome. Or it could be that your just need to add a ton of indecies.
The "production environment" is obviously not a "live production environment"; it's some kind of development environment.

And mostly, I made my comment in the hopes that people here wouldn't go, "Oh, Apple tests against a copy of the live database. I should do that, too!" I'm sure Apple is smarter about it than my comment indicated.

My point was simply to be careful with the live database. Investing in state-of-the-art protection and auditing in your live environment can be trivially defeated by simply copying the live database to an insecure environment. So don't do it.
Hmm, it seems like the research is pretty thin at present. I'm going to file this under "slightly more likely to be true than not" until I see more information.
You appear only to have read the first graf of this post, as the whole point of eventing the database access layer is to eliminate the "slow query blocks" problem.

But that's not why I'm commenting. Rather:

You're able to make that last assertion only by shifting the meaning of the word "shared" and denuding it of all its concurrency implications. Yes, event systems "share" the event loop, in all the glory of the word "shared". However, no two contexts in an evented system ever step on each other for access to a shared resource.
His work is based off 5.3.x, there is probably a branch for it in the official SVN repo. As one commenter noted, the github mirror is stale so he'd need to fork it and then update it with the official svn to find the branch.

It may make sense to rebase it off of trunk of svn.
Fake Comments on HackerNews
For Twisted, there's https://github.com/hybridlogic/txMySQL, or the standard adbapi, which runs queries in a thread pool.

Also, some Twisted documentation was improved after Tornado was released; there's now "Twisted.Web in 60 seconds": http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/11.0.0/web/howto/web-in-6...
I agree. My main intention was to inform would-be copy-cats that they shouldn't play fast and loose with copies of their live database. I'm sure (or at least, I hope) that Apple is smarter about sensitive data than that.
Isn't it only potentially a hell of a lot more, if Groupon stock holds its value, as opposed to cash/GOOG?
This is shameless self promotion (at least of an open position) but we really are doing great and fun stuff with Backbone, CoffeeScript and for mobile. Plus we support remote working.
Germans were traditionally known for beer, singing, and culture. It was the Prussians who were known for their militarism.
I don't think the issue here is that Jobs looks frail while Ballmer looks like he's been eating for two. People aren't buying tens of millions of iPhones out of pity.

Apple has made its recent success off developing and marketing products that consumers want to buy and that make them happy to use (look at how many people by an iPod or iPhone and go on to become Mac owners.) Microsoft mostly makes it way off of enterprise sales and bundling with PCs. That's fine, but it doesn't tend to lead to a culture that creates products that end consumers get really juiced about.
The only thing i still use my google account for is GoogleReader. I have looked around a bit but never found a good replacement for it
Redditor Explains Why Apple Continue Making Frail Power Cables
Multiple sexual partners aren't the issue. When one uses the term "harem" it paints a different picture - the casual disregard for half the human race. Perhaps that contributes to "The female-participation rate in the workforce is 46%, the lowest in western Europe."

I'm loathe to use "litmus test" type analogies, but I believe this behavior is telling.
Cannot wait for the IPO.
Really? I've never scaled up a consumer web app this way, but is it really considered sound to insert blocking database calls in async web apps? This sounds wrong to me.
Why are you offering it for free? I'd gladly pay for this. Feature request: I'd like to be able to subscribe to podcasts too.
I tend to agree that "It's not possession of secret information that is criminalized; it is misuse of that information to take advantage of the ignorance of others." However, as with insider trading, it will be very difficult to demonstrate harm.
Full text, in case Apple catch wind of the comment:

> I used to work for Apple and interfaced with every division in the company, and I know EXACTLY why this happened. It has nothing to do with trying to get customers to buy more replacement adapters, but rather with the hierarchy of power at Apple.

>

> But before I go into this, let me explain the engineering of a power cable. If you look at a power adapter cable for any non-Apple product, you'll notice some plastic "rings" where the plug transitions to the cable. These rings are called a strain relief. The purpose of a strain relief is to prevent the cable from bending at a severe angle if you bend the cable at the base. The strain relief allows the cable to have a nice, gentle curvature if you tweak the cable instead of bending at a severe 90 degree angle. This gentle curvature prevents the cable from being broken through repeated use.

>

> Now let's look at the hierarchy of power at Apple. As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple's products. And when I say "the most powerful", I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service.

>

> Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it's pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I'm sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn't like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.
Chrome Extension APIs For contentSettings
No. This is a completely from scratch implementation of a semantically sound and complete query language that is built right on top of the Neo4j kernel. It is implemented in Scala, for what is worth it.
If you have any projects you've done or an online code-repository, you should link it. Also, search for the who's hiring thread for June, which has a robust list.

If you are just burning time, head over to pier 38 (SF) and talk to the several startups that operate from there. I would also venture to say there are a bunch of startups working out of the 500 startups space at any given time.
Could you explain why? Do you use them for completely different purposes? Don't trust the system at some point or another? Don't want to bloat either service?
Awesome. Did she pay for your lunch?
Online Banking begins to crumble
This goes to show that a good designer or engineer is not just someone who "solves the problem", but someone who considers alternate solutions and solves the problem in the most efficient way that is practically feasible.

Unfortunately, it's often the case that no one thinks about it until the "default" way of solving the problem becomes pretty much impossible to use.
> You appear only to have read the first graf of this post

I read a little more than that, but I commented on what was interesting to me. If I'm reading the rest of it right, it's basically a tutorial on making a python extension for two specific mysql API functions. That's fine, but it's not that interesting (to me).

> However, no two contexts in an evented system ever step on each other for access to a shared resource.

Isn't that exactly what is happening when other requests are blocked by a blocking mysql call? They are stepping on each other for access to the shared event thread resource, which they need concurrent access to. Is this not the case? Please help me understand if I am misreading you.
That was a good story. I have some 'interesting' WMS and inventory control stories.

What WMS were you using?
You will have a chance to pay for it... there are going to be some in-app-purchase upgrades coming soon! Podcasts would be interesting... let me figure out how best to integrate that...
This should be called "not-as-blocking" MySQL queries. As they say in the blog post, the calls to send and read still block, but they've made it so you don't call read until there is at least something to read. I imagine this will be an improvement over many setups.

To add to the list of truly non-blocking MySQL libraries, check out Erlang's MySQL driver: https://github.com/Eonblast/Emysql
Whoops, I meant an electron microscope, not a mass spec!
I'm quite impressed that your suggestion was accepted, in the company where I work this would never happen.

An example: I was asked to build a system to keep track of daily tasks of one of our teams, and to make sure all scheduled tasks were assigned to someone. As I was listening to them, I suddenly realized that the magnetic white-board on the meeting room wall was all they needed. I drew a table with team-members names and weekdays and used the magnets as tasks.

After some silence the team supervisor said it would work, but would not be used because:
a) it looks 'unprofessional';
b) it's 'insecure' because someone could mess up the magnets by accident

After some emails between my manager and them my colleague was ordered to build the system, he ended up spending about 3 weeks on it :)
it's basically a KDE Kompare clone. The most innovative thing they've done is to provide native integration with new distributed source control environments.
Awesome.

$8 million versus $20.
Boom. roasted
Spain arrests 3 Anons for Sony, bank hacks; AnonOps vows revenge
This is true, unless the move to technology was a way to control the results of the poll...
That's interesting. I didn't think about cold showers as a way to reduce inflammation but it's possible that the cold water acts as a mild anti-inflammatory.

I was a gymnast for 16 years but alas my "beat the crap out of myself" days are over for now and I don't need to multiple parts of my body before walking out of the gym. I guess part of the reason why I like cold showers is that I miss the opportunity to struggle with and overcome strong feelings of discomfort.
I just ran it, fib is roughly six times faster
This doesn't concern me as much, so long as he has a note saying "compiled onto commit hash blah". Cherry-picking would be a pain, but doable at that point.
Back of the envelope calculation -

A passenger instance for a typical small app takes 30-40 MB. You will be able to run 4-5 passenger instances on a small 512 MB slice.

Assuming that the slowest request in your app takes 100 ms, one passenger instance can handle 10 requests/sec. 5 instances can handle 50 requests/sec.

Tweak the numbers according to your app and get a rough idea of the hardware requirements.

A 512 MB VPS on Linode costs 20 dollars.
Sure, but it doesn't seem like your company's offering solves any of these problems _well_. Smartphone solve this problem already by letting one send contact point (such as a location from the Maps app on iPhone) over mms.

For a majority of messages it seems like your product mostly eliminates remaining characters.
Climate shift implies a necessary change to infrastructure: cities that once did not have to deal with flash floods will, for example. Municipal trees will die. Areas that grow colder will have non-insulated water pipes burst. There is no need to form greater bureaucratic nightmares to adapt for such problems, only a general willingness to remake our urban environments before it becomes dreadfully expensive. Note the work Chicago is doing, as a function of it's normal maintenance; anticipating a hotter and wetter climate alleys and sidewalks become water permeable, tree species are changed.

> Then you do cost benefit analysis and decide the best course of action. THEN you try to talk everybody else into it.

This is overly simplistic. Who is the decision maker? Democracies function as distributed consensus makers--very little _can_ or _should_ be dictated by some benevolent cabal. Moreover, for the rather complex problem of adapting _human civilization itself_ it is hard, if not impossible, to perform a cost benefit analysis. Where do you even get the possible solutions from if:

* no one but a few know about the problem and
* domain experts you consult with might have implicit
biases against the problem without significant
preparation and
* the hypothetical cabal is composes of like minded
(hence like-blinded) individuals?

> Hell, I was one of the first people I know to understand and accept that. I just haven't seen the follow up yet. It's always "Yep, got yourself a problem there",

It's entirely possible we've gone past the point of short-term return. Still, the follow up, as you put it, has been to reduce or eliminate the primary sources of the problem:

* decrease the reliance of Heavy and Light industries on coal/oil
* decrease and reverse global deforestation
* decrease and reverse water vapor production from urban areas

Each one of these points has large cultural and economic implications. It is, however, very difficult to discuss them when so many deny the premise, or have a vested interest in convincing others of the invalidity of the premise. It is entirely wrong to assert that the follow up, as you put it, has been absent from the discussion; mostly it's drowned out. Communicating complex ideas is difficult in a culture with strong debate traditions; God have mercy on us for our Shouting Heads.

> but no solution offered other than "buy a Prius".

I think that's willfully cynical of you, or uninformed. Even ignoring the obvious vested interest car manufactures have in misinforming us that a _different_ kind of car is a viable solution, the perverse effects a Car Culture has on an Urban environment--heavily paved, strongly lateral development--is likely unsustainable in the long-term.
The cost is the feeling you get when you bring up a Bing search that doesn't have what you're looking for and thinking that Google probably had exactly what you wanted. It's the unknown factor: what am I missing by not using Google?

To overcome this psychological disadvantage a search engine has to do a significantly better job. Here's how they could succeed: if you search for "Italian restaurant" and the first result becomes your favorite restaurant. Then your search for "indie music" introduces you to a new site that you visit daily. If you can provide the user with 3 or 4 of those types of wow experiences it can have the effect of changing the psychology of "yeah, but what does Google return?".

Here's the wrong approach: Blekko. Blekko's basically saying "we give up, we can't interpret your query so we're going to ask you to do the heavy lifting for us. We'll index and rank your opinions". You're not going to convert people by making it harder to do searches.
SWITL
MS Dynamics + lots of customization.
Every comment this account has made had been related to groupon. I think the tech giants are out bastetdize its IPO. The company is a top line revenue behemoth, unlike LinkedIn. Seems to have a lot of potential if they increase profit margins. A lot.
If you think the moral of the story is that $8M were wasted due to bad management or whatever you'd be wrong. The scales were a success because they enabled the desk fan solution. Manufacturing line operators are very clever but they don't necessarily have the right incentive. The loss to the company wasn't visible but the horns and flashing lights were.

I used to build inspection systems for manufacturing lines and we'd frequently build expensive (not $8M, though) vision systems, E-Testers, etc. just to uninstall them a year or two later when the process or automation guys had found a way to prevent problems from happening in the first place.
master would always contain the php-base+the octopus merge. So if the php-base was 5.3.6, it would be 5.3.6+patches. Tomorrow PHP 5.3.7 comes out, and then master would be 5.3.7+patches.
I wish I had read the FAQs properly, didn't realise you couldn't send international! I signed up for your beta though, I want to do SMS messaging from the app but I have always found other services so expensive, I used to use Esendex in the UK but the plans drain cash so quickly.

I just wanted to send despatch confirmations through an ecommerce application. If you could do it for 3-4p GBP that would still be very cheap.

Signed up and ready to go on the beta though
I am Italian and I dislike Berlusconi. That said it must be recognized that all of Italy's issues were already there before him. We can't really say that Italy has worsened with him but we can surely say that it hasn't got any better. There were a lot of expectations in 1994 that he was going to change Italy and bring the liberal revolution it sorely needs. Alas, none of them were met.
Just imagine what MS and Google could do with knowledge of Darth Tater.
It was a relatively small company and people really tried their best to solve problems in efficient ways. I think they missed the obvious solution purely by chance.
Although the browser bundling is what people remember there was much more to it than that - just ask Be and Hitachi. At the time the consensus was that Microsoft got off lightly after being found guilty of abuse (although the EU was much stricter).

But yes - it takes generations to change a corporate culture, so it may only just starting to change.
You forget that many people are breathing incorrectly.

See e.g. http://www.normalbreathing.com/
Certify (http://www.certify.com) Turns mobile captured receipts into easy to manage expense reports.
> Where there are hot springs, there are happy, relaxed locals.

Some people feel they work better and are more motivated when they're not in a state of happy relaxation. Comfortable and focused perhaps.

> "Reaching down and turning a knob, then telling yourself that you're building character? Odd."

The detail that is important is not the knob, but the endurance of a blast of cold water. (Note: the following is a ridiculous stretch) Saying the issue is 'turning a knob' reminds me of pundits and Senators saying that waterboarding is "pouring water over someone's nose". Standing under coldish water on purpose is a spartan message to your subconscious.
That's one of the worst valuation strategies I've ever heard of; reading that part actually made me angry.
I suspect he means both. Apple turns off their store (i.e. puts up the "We'll be right back" post it) and prevents orders when there is a major product announcement. They turn it back on (with new products) after the announcement is over. I bet there's one hell of a traffic spike after those keynotes.
I enjoy Newsblur, http://www.newsblur.com/ , and paid for it to support Samuel
Miura-ori
Not an uncommon view. There are people who believe that no competent developer uses Windows machines for development, for example
Any chance you could do something like the Microsoft Tags/ HCCB's[1][2] without having to route through Microsoft's analytics program?

[1] http://cdn.pocketnow.com/html/portal/news/0000007349/NewsIma...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Capacity_Color_Barcode
Just Works (tm), until you have to search something in it, or make a copy to your friend, or backup, or write down things from an electronic medium.

That being said, there's nothing better than paper & pencil for note taking.
Most people wouldn't consider conferences or online video lectures to be "startups". Just like most people wouldn't consider a blog a startup. They're also not product based and certainly not webapps.
Oregonian here - all our voting is by mail, no technology needed to route voters.
Indeed, it depends on the weather. When it's warm summer weather here, I take lukewarm showers. When I was in Italy, I took cold showers. What a relief!