skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google has gone through extensive restructuring over the last year with one or two top execs having almost complete control over their devision. I believe Google is broken down into six devisions including ads, search, social, mobile, business, and local. There might be another couple I'm missing or some of those might have been combined.
I signed up:

> Sorry to be so mysterious about what Stacy is, it's not on purpose! The site's barely a few days old because we just landed an interview with the Ycombinator startup incubator for their summer 2011 session.

This doesn't inspire confidence that you are going to launch any time soon
Show HN: Zero Escort - my "built recently in spare time" strategy game
This would be great; but ANYTHING other than a signup form on the front page would be a huge improvement.
I am really confused by your Heroku comparison.

The blobstore is basically S3, and the CDN for the blobstore is basically CloudFront. Both S3 and CF seem to me to have really simple APIs, plugins to Rails and other common frameworks, and are almost certainly battle tested by an order of magnitude more companies than the blobstore. What am I missing?

As far as I can tell, of your list, Heroku has all of the things you describe, with the possible exception of XMPP. Task queues (workers, SimpleWorker), many flavors of high availability data stores, memcache (or even better, Redis as a service), multitenancy, multiple versions of apps (git, releases).

Is there something bad about RDS that I don't know about? I had always assumed you just spun it up and could optionally replicate a MySQL instance a few times in different zones.

More broadly, it sounds like you had a really bad experience with Heroku. If so, what was it? I'm a bit curious because we are rather dependent on it.
He seems to still be doing iOS stuff, and is active on stackoverflow.
Not trying to piss all over this, since I thought you might have been saying something I didn't know. But I have worked at Google for a long time and basically everything you wrote is incorrect and has been since at least 2005 before App Engine even existed (why would a paper written in 1998 be relevant?).

Without going into too much detail, it shouldn't surprise anyone that physical machines are interchangeable via cluster management software, so application front end and back end software all end up running on the same machines. They aren't addressed through DNS but by another mechanism. There is no special system administration for application-specific front ends vs back ends. Spinning up more instances of a particular server is a 1 line change. Reverse proxies (i.e. a non-app-specific front end) are also involved but they're not a bottleneck AFAIK (this problem is well "commoditized" in open source whereas other parts of Google's stack are not).

I would be curious to see a comparison with competitors like Heroku, which I've heard are pretty expensive too. Theoretically Google should be cheaper because Heroku runs on AWS and thus is paying for Amazon's profits (I have no idea how they compare.)
>It's also worth noting that learning new ways to solve problems is fun; learning reams of new syntax is not.

This is very true. Clojure was the first functional language I learned, and it was actually a ton of fun have to figure out basic things (like writing the fibonacci sequence) in a functional style. Also, Clojure introduced me to concepts I hadn't learned about with my bit of Java experience and moderate Python experience, such as lazy sequences, tail call recursion (and way more recursion in general), STM, and macros. Even though I don't write clojure very often (and not as much as I would like to), I'm still glad I took the time to learn the language just because it introduced me to so many new concepts.
I wish that were true. Could there be some huge fuckup on the part of the kid programming the chart? I'm just going to keep clicking my heels and pretend that Google doesn't really want to take my monthly cost and charge me that per day.
Offline Google - Gmail, Calender, Docs
If you think that most of Google’s products only work online, then you’re probably right.. until now. As of the moment, they’re launching a GMail app, as well as updates to their Calendar and Docs that will maximize productivity even when the user is offline. As told by Google’s Group Product Manager Rajen Sheth, the problem lies that when people need to access their calendar and mail offline, they really have to.

Read more: http://www.newtechie.com/2011/09/google-launches-offline-gmail-calendar.html
beautiful website. I see an font error here though. on chrome in lion

http://imgur.com/CS6C8
Personally I only use autorelease when I create an object I'm not responsible for. For example, if I create a view somewhere for another object to utilize. I also like knowing that as soon as I'm done with an object that it gets killed and the system can reclaim the memory.
Well, I never really used the iPad as a consumption device. Of course I loaded it with movies, e-books and pdf papers, but it gets old fast. I still buy 4 books a month and watch Netflix on the living room exclusively... =\

However it instantly became my go-to e-mail client at work, reminds me of appointments (integrates with Exchange), holds my to-do list, has my personal issue-tracking database (Bento), browses trough our github projects, syncs with Dropbox, allows me to connect to SQL Server, is on Skype all day long and I even did some (simple) presentations on Keynote for our meetings.

I also use it for online banking when I'm not home and I have Amplitube and iRig to play guitar trough it on weekends.

I also know some people who use it in college, my sister borrows mine sometimes when she's in town and her classmate also owns one.

Granted, I'm a developer, not a manager, so those apps aren't critical to my work... but I LOVE having only two apps on my Windows Workstation: Firefox and Visual Studio. Talk about focus!

Also, I work on a university, and we're in the process of buying tablets for the whole staff. Probably not iPads, idk.

Of course, it's a weird use case, but well, it is possible...
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I wrote an app from scratch for GAE. Its cost is increasing 5000%. In fact the increase seems more than people who just slapped django on it.
From the about page[1]: "For every click you send, we will send you back up to 200% the amount of traffic you sent".

That line is misleading, agreed.

[1] http://www.kiveve.com/webmasters/about/
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But we already have that. Why woud you buy it? Is it just that it's cheaper? Are developers going to want to build apps for it?

I think breaking away to complete Android incompatibility is a huge mistake.
Socrates as a mentor?
Oh, ok, I did know about that one.

Why I use NotScripts: the extension lets you enable JS temporarily or permanently for a particular website with just a mouse click. As well, at the same time, you can do the same thing for any third-party JS because it presents you with a list of them. So you can enable jsquery and disable google-tracker at the same time.

It's much easier than navigating the menu system to add an exception to the list of blocked sites for each time you just want to read a PDF, for example. That's the main use-case for me.
There's also always Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance by Robert Pirsig, which at least i still find quite amazing.

I also totally agree on the thing with working with your hands – it turns out we at least partially think with our bodies. Howard Gardner also made an interesting case for that in his book the Seven Intelligences, but okay – the source much matter who wrote about it: I've experienced it first-hand.

Doing yoga when I've been strained about something often results in what can only be described as a stream of insight and ideas. The same thing with running. We (i) have so much to learn.
Good points. Sometimes it's nice to be able to visualize an explicit directed graph of states (vertices) and events (edges), though. It helps identify inescapable states and unhandled events.
Amazon Kindle Tablet Photo
Can't you have much the same environment today in a commuter train with assigned seats and WiFi, at least in terms of ability to get work done?
There's a face remarkably like that one in the SNES game Starfox. It spits blocks at you.
Exactly. UI distances are indeed a function of resolution, but a user's hand is not so scalable.
"After nearly a month of beating my head against the wall that is hosted node.js stacks — with their fake beta invites and non-existent support ..."

It would be interesting to know what kind of experiences other people have had with the various Node.js platforms.
the new prices aren't too bad at all.

c1.xlarge on EC2 is $1.16/hour. How many of the $0.08 GAE units does it take to match one of those? How many of those GAE units can run optimized SSE4/AVX? (Answer: none of them). I've run 250 c1.xlarge units at a time. GAE wasn't even possible, let alone affordable.
Me too but those fonts should be embedded.
Fucking fantastic! I'm buying one. Now please re-issue the HP-16c programmers calculator.
I appreciate the sentiment, but that seems unnecessarily expensive with modern hardware.
The first two sentences I read ended in ", huh?" It's very disorienting and feels unprofessional.
It does sound like a Ponzi scheme, but even then, not even Madoff could do 200% so kudos if that's for real.
Playing with socket.io and Node (chat roulette wannabe)
Im really like playing with Node. Only been a couple of weeks so be gentle :)
One reason for the popularity of these devices is that people are producing more content. Folks aren't watching CNN/BBC on an iPad but self produced Youtube videos and they're reading more than NY times bestsellers on a Kindle.

There is an assumption here that people with a PC will automatically become producers which I think is wrong. For people to become producers they need incentive and opportunity. These devices and the ease of content creation is means the opportunity bar is much lower (e.g. you don't need to get a publisher to agree on a manuscript to publish); and the incentive is higher (you can monetize content you produce whether its apps, books or videos much more easily).
Agreed. There's something about his bravado that screams to me "full of shit." From the inane I-banking references to the needless jab at Indian developers, I just have a hard time buying it.

I hope they do well, but I'm predicting a future HN post "How I achieved a real $30k profit by creating an attention-grabbing series of blog posts about how I bootstrapped to a fake $30k profit."
It sounds plausible that "on demand" instances i.e. search servers are a bottleneck, while bulk offline processing (in the back-end) i.e. PageRank calculations is not such a constraint.

Yes, those offline processing instances could be suspended while dealing with a traffic peak, but peak traffic is still often a challenge, especially now that Google is pushing more and more stuff onto the web servers (Instant).

That might be what he meant.

Disclaimer - I don't work for Google, it's just a guess.
The desing is only good in the home page.

http://www.kiveve.com/webmasters/start/ have Times New Roman in one side and Arial in the other and Helvetica in the title; that doesn't match.

The FAQ is in another website and it haves very different colors with wierd line-heights.

Oh yeah, and the login button doesn't work.
Thanks for catching that text!

Funny story - we've been focused on other related projects this summer because we launched part of the underlying tech as an API (called EmailYak) just to get it out of the way so we could start prepping for the YC interview. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, it was getting paid customers and we probably interviewed for the wrong thing! It's even had an acquisition offer. Craziness.

Now we're circling back around to building several apps on top of the API (including Stacy) to show what it can really do. Here's a few sneak previews:

* GitDash - instant mailing lists for GitHub collaborators - http://alabut.com/projects/gitdash/

* Messagify - it's like a private Disqus. Or something. More like Facebook Messages or Twitter DMs, actually. http://messagify.com

The new EmailYak site will also have a bunch more documentation and blog posts describing all kinds of use cases for receiving email:

http://alabut.com/projects/emailyak/home.png

Sorry for all the plugging, we're just pumped about turning in our YC applications in a few days.
That's awesome! Bizzare correlation, but awesome.

How did you graph the data? Did you enter the time series data manually?
GIFs are coming back. I believe it is because the huge popularity of GIF flooded Tumblrs of teenagers:
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:4voTkH47-...

Also, it is nice to see summer related results:
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:Rhcg3luEC...
Spider Vein, according to Wikipedia, may be caused by "environmental damage such as that caused by sun or cold exposure". And Asiatic Lily is a flower that grows on July.
If you're actually interested in what Arthur C. Clarke thought about the future, may i suggest his book "Profiles of The Future", from whence we get Clarke's 3 laws, including the well-worn "any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic."

Not only does it contain lots of predictions like the ones in this video, but also fascinating analysis about the whole future-predicting business, including gems like this:

"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough."
Lots of typos on the front page.

Also, bad math. 28638 received over 23634 sent is a 200.03% return rate? No. "Sent" and "received" are already very ambiguous - is "sent" what I sent you or what you sent me? But either way, it doesn't work out to a two-fold return.
Was that also the inspiration for the flat screen used to watch the BBC in 2001?
The problem is blogs are in reverse chronological order, but I want to read it chapter-by-chapter like a story.
Hi team,

What's in Unity that makes it cool?

Cheers
Apple has had a very large number of not-amazing products that never made it out the door. Apple has a significantly smaller number of not-amazing products that people outside One Infinite Loop know about.

The difference is that Apple tests indoors; Google tests outdoors.
Why do I picture Dilbert's boss when I read that statement?
Android Tricorder app DMCA'd by CBS
Didn't he report some alleged collusion last year among some silicon valley angels? Perhaps he feels this is his way of competing and creating a true angel market. I'm interested to see where this goes, more startup money can only be good for us!
Could whoever downvoted parent explain why? I don't want to start an argument or berate you; just curious.

Do you object because it puts East Coast VC in a negative light?
Completely agreed - that was my first reaction also, but I would give them a little slack because my guess is that they aren't the greatest at English because they are in Paraguay
Am I the only one that would prefer a HP 42s? $300 on ebay? are you kidding me? I know, I've got "RPN Calculator" on my android phone, but it's just not the same.
Actually, used HP-15Cs can sell for hundreds of dollars since they are highly sought after. So $100 for a limited edition run is not too crazy.

Although purists may still want the original since the new HP-15C appears to be using an ARM processor to emulate the older Voyager hardware.

BTW, HP is also releasing a HP12C 30th Anniversary edition.

http://www.techpoweredmath.com/hp-12c-special-edition-hp-15c...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-10C_series#HP-15C

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/hpcalc/voyager/variants.html
People who are downvoting me don't really understand what I'm saying. I'm finishing up my internship at Google now. This is a nomenclature problem -- what ChuckMcM is properly referring to is front-facing backend vs "back" facing backend. They're really just two different types of backend servers. SREs manage both and they are installed similarly. It could be argued that Google perhaps has certain weaknesses in frontend (i.e., UI/UX design), but this is clearly a case where engineering talent is not lacking -- they're the same engineers as the ones working on private servers.
On the bottom of the page, below the signup form: FAQ. It answers questions like, "What is readfa.st?", "How much does readfa.st cost?", and, "How does readfa.st work?"
Police Assisted Apple Investigators in Search of SF Man's Home
True, www.hp.shopping.com lists 15c at the same price as the TouchPad.
Even so, I am thrilled.
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Thank goodness photovine isn't in that list
This X 1000. When we decided to take NextProof from a US-only service to international, it was impossible to find a multi-currency merchant that allowed third-party payment aggregation. PayPal was out only choice that didn't require us keeping a physical office in Australia/Europe.

If you can crack that for just a dozen or so Latin American markets + US/Canada, you'd be huge.
Well this is cool. It really seems pointless, though. There's already the 35s, and the 48gII is a much better calculator at a lower price, and anybody with a phone can get a far superior graphing calculator. It doesn't even come with wifi.
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I think this is a bit misleading. They say it "is being used at", but that could easily mean that an external consultant or contractor is the one paying for the product and then adding a Fortune 500 guy to the project. Basecamp is nice for running smaller projects (maybe up to 50 people) and for sharing between employees from different companies. But it is too simple and un-extendable for running larger Fortune 500 projects.
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I think I know what he's talking about. My LDAP is the same as the email in my profile. I'll wager a guess at what the real problem is.
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Overall, it's enjoyable. Sometimes your wording can be a little awkward. Keep it up.
Where can you get testing like this? Is there a site or service available?
Discussion when news first broke: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955087

New information:

San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

...plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5.
Won't be as successful as the Kindle, because the kindle is exceptionally tailored to its usage of buying and reading books - whereas this is android dragged half-way there. And android tablets haven't been doing well anyway (20:80), even the very best of them. The 3G kindle's tailoring is:

- free 3G (yes, free), to buy amazon books

- black and white E-Ink which is much closer to paper than colour displays.

- much lighter and slimmer (241grams; 8.5oz)

- long battery life (2 months - about x60 longer than a tablet), though this probably overshoots the need. i.e. they'd be better off using a smaller battery (or even AA batteries).

I'm so impressed with the Kindle because it resists trying to be the best at everything, but instead makes comprises that optimize it for its purpose. Whereas the Android tablet described here is much worse on all fronts and half-hearted as Android: neither fish nor fowl.
Awesome take – it seems to suggest that what we're seeing is the creation of a new mobile nexus for people's work, slowly replacing the desktop as the center of our 'tool lives'.

EDIT: Replacing the desktop – AND drawing plenty of other old technologies into this new one.
It doesn't need to be any more than my opinion: my point was that some people (myself and probably the poster included) will never be satisfied by just web programming or just iPhone development. bad_user attempted to say that he should work on "real" projects that are "fun" like web dev and mobile dev, but we don't and won't find those fun.
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Science left the limitations of the pocket calculator behind, ages ago. Any field of analytic research, be it science, engineering, finance, etc. the values you manipulate on a day to day basis are no longer scalars, but tend to be matrices, often very large ones.

TI got this part right, sort of: the TI calculators while clumsy for data entry have 2D screens and make apparent the various interpretations of mathematical objects, as equations, matrices, and graphs.
I'd recommend GAE to people who are prototyping - it's easy to do simple stuff in.

But mostly, GAE doesn't make sense for larger apps. You can't buy your way out of trouble, by putting your db on a dedicated server with fast drives and tonnes of RAM. You can't really use relational data without performance and reliability issues.

It's not just about the "app engine way". It's not like learning C or Haskell, and having to find a new way to write the code. You fundamentally cannot do big ad-hoc database operations.

And consider this - it was July last year that they introduced the MapperAPI. Before then, I don't think you could do Map-Reduce without manually re-implementing it yourself (on top of the cantankerous Appengine Datastore). Just think about that for a minute - how were you meant to do stuff the Appengine way without map-reduce?

Anyway, I don't think your credibility was "utterly destroyed". It was really hard to know whether or not the learning curve was worth climbing until you had tried. You just had to judge the book by its cover, and the "Google" brand is pretty compelling to an engineer. It's not the first time someone has been fooled into buying something because the provider has a good reputation.
It's not just cheaper--it's 50% less than the price of a new iPad. That's a substantial difference.
> C#, however, has many language features Scala doesn't, like dynamic blocks, unsafe code, unsigned arithmetic, a built-in events system, built-in LINQ syntax, real reified generics, and so on. Yet no one complains about C# being a kitchen sink language!

Actually they do, and exactly for the reasons you just said. C# is one of the largest mainstream languages in terms of syntax. It's definitely a "kitchen sink" language.

Which is not to say it is a bad language. It has its uses like every language out there.
That doesn't mean I'll get any more enjoyment out of it. My parents are both physicians -- I know their job is very difficult. Medicine, however, doesn't appeal to me. What does is hard technical problems.
Login link is broken. Good luck with the project, though! I'm viewing in Chrome and there are a lot of font spacing issues, and the "About" page looks like Times New Roman which I am assuming is unintentional.
You underestimate the value of a polished, direct user interface that users have been familiar with for decades. My father has an HP-11c that he still uses on a daily basis, and he can operate it without looking at the keypad.

...And what on earth would you need wifi for on a pocket calculator?
The AMA is on reddit, not HN.
This was just previously posted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2956268
How to track thumbs or buttons with Google Analytics or other analytics tool?
Hi!
I have a website like youtube and I would like to track the thumbs or buttons.
I'm currently using Google Analytics but it only tracks pages not the buttons inside the page, I can't install a tracking code to each button because there are over 300,000 thumbs I would like to track. What can I do?

:D