skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Just look at the Techcrunch Deadpool and you'll see many examples of companies that have "Featured in Techcrunch, NY Times, etc" in their homepage, yet managed to fail. Winning a popularity contest isn't what it's all about. Boosts your ego, sure, but not necessarily revenue. If you get featured in a publication, great, if not don't fret about it. Maybe <1% of people who find you thru Techcrunch will become loyal customers.
I don't think it's a small minority of apps. 100% of the people I know who are using GAE are seeing the minimum of a 4x price increase for their app (before the 50% discount). The price increase would actually prevent some small ISVs from reaching ramen profitability. There's a thread somewhere on the GAE google groups containing many angry users.
What's most interesting to me about this article is that the management of GAE seems to actually be getting worse over time.

GAE has always had two main disadvantages. First, there is vendor lock-in because you code specifically to the data store, worker API, and so on (though arguably there are alternative platforms that implement the GAE API). Second, you cannot run custom code (custom C in some virtual machine) or have a custom architecture (if, say, Redis might be useful to have around). These disadvantages probably aren't changing and are probably necessary for auto-scaling, security of Google's infrastructure, and so on.

However, there are lots of little things that GAE has been getting wrong for a while that are totally unnecessary. Lack of hosted SQL support. Lack of SSL for custom domains. Just little things that are probably annoying to implement and boring, but totally necessary for real websites or websites just gaining traction. (I know these are in varying stages of early support at the moment.)

But now, the GAE team almost seems to want to actively disappoint users. With hosted SQL being a request for years, Guido appears to have spent a bunch of time re-architecting the API for the datastore instead. With this pricing increase, they're pushing the many developers who came to their platform based on price (due to the very interesting scaling properties of the Google front-end) off the platform.

Overall, I'm very confused.
Can someone please explain frontend versus backend instance processing? Does backend here mean processing that takes place in data storage systems?
Unless you're doing regular integration testing on an alternative platform, you're bound to inadvertently introduce some painful GAE-specific dependencies.
Oh, first Visual Studio Python integration and now this. I really have no excuse not to learn Python. Honestly, I've been meaning to learn it for a while, but Haskell sucked out all of my "goofing around with programming" time and I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy it.

Time to put the "rapid prototyping" claim to the ultimate test, I guess. Even better, I have no idea what I'll be prototyping - just going to wing it all the way through. It should prove interesting.
The point was that what's happening with FCP closely tracks the problem history of Vista, not that the problems are of the same scope. If you reread the parent comment, you will not find him calling this "a Vista moment".
Elementary OS Jupiter might seem more 'natural' until Unity configuration is sorted
I think the distinction is between getting some eyeballs who are easy to convert into customers, like Balsamiq or SEOMoz, and something like BCC, where the publicity is less obviously useful, because no one at HN would buy it. LiberWriter is definitely in the latter category.
Something like 28800 pixels on typical monitors these days?
It's still an issue -- you have all this data that you have to migrate off of app engine. Some of my friends who migrated on to GAE said it took them almost 2 full weeks to load data into GAE, and now I'm sure it would cost them at least a full month to load data off GAE. The code changes are probably the easy part of the migration.
Thanks. I am hoping that there is a solution that does not require me to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text, though.
Potentially. A full sleep cycle is approximately ninety minutes in length. If you wake in the middle of the cycle, you take a cognitive performance hit for the rest of the day. So, in some cases, sleeping for thirty fewer minutes can lead to higher subsequent alertness. This is a crucial consideration when you're only allowed to get a few hours of sleep at a time.

Case in point: I've known a number of individuals with highly variable sleep schedules imposed by their work who performed this calculation manually. I imagine that they would find an application or a cycle-aware alarm clock on their phones to be quite handy.

Aside from that, calling someone's work the "dumbest thing you've ever seen" is both unnecessary and probably untrue. Please don't be uncivil.
5 Tips for Raising a Venture Round
There's a great book by Steven Johnson called "Where Good Ideas Come From" that talks about a lot about new ideas being the logical next step or a combination of ideas that have just been discovered/talked about. I'd highly recommend it.
Use skype (w/ video) on android.

I fully expect Microsoft to drop Skype support for Linux .. or atleast give a seriously stunted binary to get around anti-trust, that I am using Android as my full-on communication tool, including video conferencing.

I see skype-video on the S5PV210 Samsung chipset android tablets already (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA). Atleast in Asia, you can get resistive 8 inchers with Gingerbread for sub-$200.
Budidaya & Pemeliharaan Anggrek Dendrobium
This post compares Octave, not MATLAB. Similar languages, but completely different implementations. I'd bet that if it were tested in MATLAB, it'd be much faster.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

http://wiredcontroller.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/196903...
I believe frontend means requests handled through normal frontend hits from end users, while backend instances are for longer running background processes.
when you autorelease, the reference goes into an autorelease pool that is drained later. So you will likely end up using much more memory than you need to. Since iOS runs on memory constrained devices, this could mean the difference between running smoothly and crashing due to memory warnings all the time.
The controversy.
FAA slaps $175,000 fine on MIT for batteries that caught fire at FedEx
Inspiring talk: Why Program by Hand when you can Automate it?
Why you should be begging Netflix to take your money
I've observed (when doing Computer Vision algorithms) that MATLAB can be 10-times faster, in certain very tight loop calculations even more than 100-times faster than Octave.

So I don't think those are really representative of MATLAB performance.
Please elaborate on how it's easier on the user. I agree it's easier on the designer (though I disagree that that's a good enough reason NOT to use a fluid layout in this day and age), but I fail to see how a design that refuses to conform to my monitor size is any easier for me.
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Yeah, the hard limitation to request duration is pretty nasty too. It's a pretty limited platform overall, and never took aoff, so maybe they are trying to push people off it so they can eventually sunset it?
The thinking bike
Gartner, IDC: Windows Phone To Steal Second Place From iOS By 2015
That's completely true, but I think you missed the point. Most startups still focus on finding funding. People seem to think that's the right way to do it, maybe because that's all you read about on tech blogs.
Heh. TL;DR version - Google starts recovering their costs, hits people in unexpected places.

So back when I worked there Google had no clue what it cost to run their infrastructure at a fine grain level. Sure they knew the aggregate cost, that was easy, but knowing on an application level didn't exist. This was a problem since as more and more things were using the machines, how did you "bill" a department for their machine usage? That really crystallized when the bottom fell out in 2008 and suddenly there was going to be no more new machines/data centers for a while and everyone had to 'make do.'

They mobilized an effort to figure this out, its not like it isn't knowable, and ever the data driven company the first signs of light were appearing just as I was leaving. It should not be a surprise but they discovered many things they did not previously believe was true, and I don't doubt it has driven a lot of change going forward. One of the more interesting outcomes was that projects/products were actually getting cancelled if they cost more to run than they could generate in revenue (I'm looking at you Goog-411)

So this knowledge is being applied to GAE, which is great, its also another way to back compute some of their operational efficiencies.

But that it costs money to run stuff? Well that isn't really news is it? That it costs that much? Well there is the whole if it doesn't make money it will get cancelled threat.

And the kicker is pricing out the scarce resource. It looks (and I've been gone over a year and half so I am speculating based on this move on their part) like their 'scarce' resource is web server front ends. (the labeled "Frontend instance") Traditionally they've been like most multi-tier web properties split between front end machines which host the web facing stuff, and back end machines that do the heaving lifting and storing. And by this change one can reason that residency on the 'front end' is more valuable than crunching in the 'back end.'

I'm guessing PlusFeed gets a lot of web traffic. So they spend a lot of time 'actively' on the front side, and from their numbers they do practically nothing on the back side. This fits well with the sudden massive price increase.

This gives you an insight into Google's business dynamics as well. Where page-views are the limiting resource, and computation is not. When you look at it that way, you can see that most of their 'revenue' has to be delivered through their front end services, and so consuming that resource reduces (potentially) their income. Hence the charge inconsistency.

Now contrast that to Billy-Bob's Web Farm (fictitious service) where every machine in their data center can be a web server, and front end serving is trivial, its all about the bandwidth. Their pricing would probably be more gigabytes transferred.

I would not be surprised at all if it is impractical to run such 'translation' services (basically all web traffic very little compute) on a hosted environment like Google's.
Because Java shops/developers were their initial target customer, and Java is decidedly uncool among the current crop of startup kiddos. Additionally, there's not a significant social or mobile aspect to what they do.
Why do you need to know the exact distance? If the aspect ratio is fixed, it seems like exact distance is just a function of resolution. But you can define things exactly where you want them stil..
I'd say if you think a country is "right", you're getting it wrong. This is not an endorsement of "jews control the world" conspiracy theories.
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The YC 09 startup WakeMate (http://wakemate.com/) took this much further: (Edit - Took down my run-on sentence describing them, here's their pitch)

The WakeMate is a comfortable wristband that you wear when you sleep. It measures subtle body movements—a scientifically proven method (Actigraphy) to map dips and peaks in your sleep cycle. The wristband communicates directly with your mobile phone to calculate the ideal wake time closest to your alarm setting. When you wake up, your night's sleep data is automatically uploaded to Wakelytics™, our online analytics platform.

Their blog (http://blog.wakemate.com/) and live support seem to be down at the moment. Anyone know how they're doing?
Until a feature-complete NoScript alternative exists for Google Chrome or Opera, it's hard for me to switch. I like the security it provides, which is much more than blocking JavaScript nowadays.
How desktop virtualization survived the recession
It is news, and I'd love to read about those kinds of businesses. Someone should start a blog about that.
Yeah I had a reaction like this in the past, but I got to meet the people who worked on a similar project as mine and they did their thing completely independently. I can't say the same of another group who took my css files for their site. Can't be anymore obvious than that. I'm pretty sure they died off anyway.
How to get Approved with CPA Networks
So what are your predictions for 2050?
"Mike is and always has been a Source that Goes Direct. You can say whatever you want about his personality, I don't think that's particularly relevant (and I speak as someone who has been blasted personally and publicly by Mike). There's no doubt that he has access to ideas and information that the rest of us want, with or without conflicts."

I think this hits it on the head. "access to ideas and information"

Ultimately, conflict or not, the question is, is an Arrington, Wilson or Cuban giving us information that they correctly believe and benefit by. The fact that they stand to gain is not relevant. Actually that they stand to gain and lose is what's important. A "journalist" has conflicts and stands to gain personally. But they don't have the same downside that someone who believes in an idea and invests in it does.
no problem & agreed about what probably happened - my point was more that knowing they had that sample size (n=40), someone could have told them that even if Kahn academy was extraordinarily effective, there was almost no chance they'd detect statistically significant effect. If they knew that, they might have pursued a more qualitative approach rather than have people see the take-away as "no effect."
LinkedIn's Analysis of Startup Founder Profiles
I say call a spade a spade. This is dumb and perhaps only useful to obsessive compulsive individuals who feel some need to micromanage every aspect of their life.
One thing that makes great leaders is to understand your value in an organization. Some founders are better suited to run an agile below 100 startups but dont have the capacity to deal with the ops complexities that come with scaling a business.

If you look closely, the successful founder CEOs had a strong ops person by their side helping them scale. Understanding yourself and your weaknesses earlier on and enlisting people that would complement you is the key. Otherwise, even your passion, vision and right incentives won't help you be a great leader.
I love using GAE and got 8 apps running currently. At first the new pricing model shocked me. But please take a 2nd look. Sure it's more expensive than the old model. But you can set the maximum number of idle instances in your Application Settings page. Just set it down so no more that X instances get spun up:

> The Idle Instances slider allows you to control the number of idle instances available to your application at any given time. Idle Instances are pre-loaded with your application code, so when a new Instance is needed, it can serve traffic immediately. You will not be charged for instances over the specified maximum. A smaller number of idle Instances means your application costs less to run, but may encounter more startup latency during load spikes.

There is another setting for latency:

> The Pending Latency slider controls how long requests spend in the pending queue before being served by an Instance. If the minimum pending latency is high App Engine will allow requests to wait rather than start new Instances to process them. This can reduce the number of instance hours your application uses, but can result in more user-visible latency.

So if you are fine with a little higher latency for your app then you can reduce your bill by a great deal. If you want all that GAE can offer with max. instances available and lowest latency you gotta pay - as you would when you run n instances at another cloud provider.
Congrats! Seems like a really interesting concept!

The one thing that I immediately noticed was that there's a countdown on your homepage but it's not immediately apparent what it's counting down to.
Wouldn't a better (read less link baiting) title be. What one country got right in one example of funding start-ups?
The article basically describes a bunch of different business models and then hails the Yozma program. I don't know anything about it and maybe it's been immensely successful but I would have thought it would be far more interesting if it told me why and how it had been successful.
To be honest I would have thought a better explanation of the success of entrepreneurs in Israel would be the large number of highly skilled/motivated first/second/third generation immigrants moving into the country.
I wouldn't want mine to be bigger and I never heard anyone say they did. Is this a common complaint?
Apple's margins and revenue are much better for consumer technologies (iOS) than for their pro lines (which certainly explains at least some of their reasoning behind all but outright abandoning the Pro market).

Source: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/26/apple-has-moved-on/
Curated Interviews From Quants, Part 3
> Let’s just say that 2011 is looking like a pretty great year for Tumblr.

perhaps it would look even better if they actually made some money.
2 minute video on working @ Bump: http://db.tt/P4ecIIm
Building for Uptime, Expecting Failure
This is so true. The first step to correcting a problem is admitting you have one, and everyone on App Engine clearly does (locked-in). What I'm doing about it? Moving to Tornado/MongoDB/EC2 as quickly as possible.
Deploying Node.js on Amazon EC2
A bleak forecast for books, and other literary humiliations
What I Learned After 3 Years Mentoring Over 80 Startups
That's why the patent system doesn't really account for real world business, either. In the real world when you have a "product category" you will have competitors that copy each other's features and try to do them better.

This happens everywhere, in every single product category. Yet, if the patent system was actually enforced for every infringed patent, you wouldn't be able to do that at all, which would dramatically slow down competition in each product category.

Having a "product category" by default means that 80% of the product is similar between competitors, otherwise if it were 100% original you'd have completely different products not in the same product category.

And the patent system doesn't account for that all, and acts as if it's ok to not let anyone do something remotely similar (see Apple vs Samsung case in Europe) for 17 years.
That pur ad on the side was so annoying I hit the back button.
Zawinski's law of software envelopment at it again..

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
Briefly: this reads like Steve Blank is wandering the Earth trying to get companies to legislatively promote venture capital as the preferred vector for starting companies.
ah. maybe i misread the article. where it says antennas i assumed they were active. but if they're just passive (conductive) elements then you're right. i guess that is more likely :o(

[edit:] that would certainly explain why they only mentioned silly mirrors!
Looks less cluttered? It is a design decision so you're not going to get a universally accepted answer.
Fair point about 37signals, but remember they didn't start with the popular blog, books, and framework. it took years to get to that point. Everyone starts somewhere.

That said, I've noticed some of the advice (mostly about marketing) doesn't really apply when you're just starting out.
Curry can make or break your health
Consultant CVs - Useful tips
"Last week, two ads appeared from the other side of the fence: a programmer-for-hire looking for something to build who claimed to have built a Facebook clone in four days, a Flickr clone in three days and a Google clone in two weeks. He noted that he’d also created a Craigslist clone, adding, 'but no one visits it so we are posting this ad to Craigslist.'"

The former ad is Ted Dziuba's troll post, so not serious: http://teddziuba.com/2011/07/the-craigslist-reverse-programm...

Someone might want to let the journalist know that he got trolled. :)
Why is a used Python book on Amazon cost over $200?
The Process is not the Point
Everything Google does, they do in a half-assed sort of way. And it's getting really annoying. Even their core business of search is showing signs of neglect. SEO experts have learned to game the system such that the quality of search results is pretty abysmal now.

GAE is a half baked AWS. Google+ is a half baked Facebook. Google Docs is a half baked MSOffice. They have no blood in these projects and don't really care whether they succeed or not, which coincidentaly means they probably won't.

Google is getting absolutely clobbered in every category other than search advertising dollars. Their products wreak of ambivilence and neglect, and I'm surprised anyone expected GAE to be a good platform.
Were talking about iOS and the Interface Builder, not MacOS. I do not develop apps for the Mac, but I agree using Interface Builder would make sense for "larger" screens with more ui elements. To be clear I used Interface Builder for over a year until I decided it was better for ME to programmatically add ui elements.
I think the main reason to share numbers is to encourage others starting businesses. I don't care at all when someone says they make millions. But when I see someone who started out by making $100 a month and grew from there, I can learn from what they did. Others can do it too.