skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I've learned with Google is that they don't give a rat's ass if you're a paying customer or not.

Khan Academy may have it easier, I'm sure Google won't let them down

Really, go somewhere else, spend less money and have better support.

(At the expense of, if you're lucky, Google will give you almost zero headaches)
I'd really invest and help Vijay Kumar's team that made Autonomous Quadcopters http://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_coo...

Given 5 years time and a few hundred million dollars, I would heavily support them. As a software developer I don't know much about robotics in general but I think a simple step on moving forward is if there was a way to create a friendly abstraction on top of the quadcopters.
Exactly. It should just teach the industry standard, which in this case is MS Office. It's not the education systems' role to push for open source solutions.
So basically you want to earn money without paying anything back to the people that allowed to you to buy food?!

Good decision!
Only one other comment mentioned the problem with HRD as the datastore.
You should include some examples of those emails in the website so people can find out if they like what you are sending or not. :)
Speaking of support, Google recently announced support packages for the Cloud Platform group of services.

https://cloud.google.com/support/packages
It was a competition to receive a spot. Coming in second would have meant losing that spot.
I'm sorry, but this is the price you pay for running your business that is dependent TOTALLY on a 3rd party service. Forget Google, everyone out there is most likely the same, that's why it's important for you to run your 'apps' on something you have control over - Like Linode, AWS, Rackspace, Openshift, etc. and also have back-up nodes from other providers for redundancy, for emergency situations, incase of
storms, etc.

I would recommend trying your apps on OpenStack (Openshift in particular), which doesn't have the vendor lock-in, which you face right now.
I'm currently in medical school, so I think my opinion might provide another perspective on this.

As others have pointed out in this thread, the incentives behind folks pushing the "learn to code" idea are varied: some people want more engineers to hire and some people want to sell to those learning to code. These seem like reasonable criticisms, but I think they miss the point.

Many of you, if not most, are in the software industry. You try to solve interesting problems every day, or, at least, you'd like to. Every industry and every field has the need to solve them, at least with my definition of 'interesting'.

Solving such a problem is difficult. It requires knowing very clearly about the rules of engagement, and mapping out strategies for tackling the issue. It requires an understanding of the lay of the land, but also the capacity to think outside the box. In short, it is exactly what all of you would expect from a 'good' programmer - the ability to think actively.

You'll notice that I make no claims of this sort about physicians. The best doctors may do these things, but most doctors don't. And at the very least, doctors certainly are not trained in ways of solving problems effectively. Instead, we are mostly trained in pattern recognition.

So what? Do I think a doctor would benefit from learning to program? Yes. Because figuring out how to writing a complex program is not so different from doing a complex surgery. Understanding algorithms is not so different from producing a good differential diagnosis. Most importantly, if we want to solve big problems we can't always rely on an engineer from the outside looking in and solving it for us.

Programming forces you to explain your understanding to something that is very stupid (in a way). If you don't understand what you're doing, your program doesn't work. That basic check doesn't exist for doctors. Ask your doctor what a graph of y = 1/x looks like. Then ask him to graph alveolar CO2 vs ventilation. You should be really afraid of how many doctors only know the latter. I would guess some of them even wouldn't know that! (but they probably know what to do with a patient who's hyperventilating, because they'd memorized it)

Programming is the means to the end, not the end. All this talk of APIs and IDEs and C vs Python vs Javascript really seem to miss the bigger picture here. The best way we have of teaching thinking is with programming (IMHO) and there has to be a way of teaching programming by getting all of the annoying crap out of the way. And we desperately do need more people who have the capacity to think and solve problems. Maybe not will.i.am or Chris Bosh or even software junkies in the valley, but definitely in every other industry.

EDIT: small grammar edit, no content change.
"No support" > not exactly true:
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2013/02/google-cloud-pla...
I wonder how compatible the Photoshop 1.0 code is with this and how much effort it would take to get it vaguely working. I recall there being a shedload of assembly which would obviously need ported/rewritten and presumably there'd be old MacOS API calls which would need to be handled so I'd suspect a fair amount of work there. However does anyone know if the rest of the code would be fine?
I may be misunderstanding GAE, but isn't the reporter's 'StayUp' servlet a minimal test case? Without any dependence on other datastores or processes, it seems to be showing that something is seriously amiss when handling trivial requests. It's like a demo "Hello World" app... that stops working in a certain time range each day.
Thanks Adriano. (I put the conference together). A good summary of what we try to do at Business of Software. :-)
Robot to care for elderly made at University of Salford
Having never used GAE, it would nice if someone could expand M/S and HRD for me.

It looks like OP of the bug-report is using a depreciated feature/program which according to the Project Member is causing latency issues at a specific time daily. But that could not be the real issue since another commentator who is using the new HRD is also having the same problem. It is even frustrating for people who are reading this. All it implies is the lack of communication from Google when something goes awry. Come on Google, stop reinforcing my stereotypes about your customer support!

Selling to a customer is different than selling to a business, you may have a great product at a great price but if you offer terrible CS, in the B2B world everyone is going to avoid you. It is a place where support is valued more than the product itself.

Therefore, unless you start offering a decent CS, you can lower your price all you want, I will be sticking with AWS.
So returning to the statement "...you can get a job just fine without a degree..." comes with an important caveat.

Namely, that you can get a job "just fine" if you're a programmer of sufficient talent and knowledge to be able to be a net-positive influence on a company's financials.

YMMW, but that's a relatively high bar. Higher, at least, than the ease that "just fine" (IMHO) implies.

It's certainly possible, but non-trivial.
Statistics about the most popular Java environments
It took me a few reads to see what you meant. I had taken Beamr to be about optimizing things like which what size blocks to use, how often to put i frames, and so on, which means better perceived quality at some bitrate. If it's always using the same settings and the only smartness is about what framerate to pick, then you would be correct.
I used to have same reaction regarding greylisting, but changed my mind around 5 years ago. Have yet to see any issue with it, and I assume this is because homebrew email servers are no longer common or even uncommonly in use. I guess it could happen, but I have yet to find this at work for those I host email for, and same goes for all my private emails. It can be that because many commercial email providers uses greylisting, users of homebrew mail servers has either fixed it or gone over to postfix/exim/sendmail by now.
Let's not forget that the most important number in solar cell technology is, not maximum cell efficiency, but watts per dollar expended on installed capacity (i.e. W/$). Measured that way, competing technologies shake out differently, and the most efficient cells aren't necessarily in the running.

But for the future, as the most promising technologies gain an advantage because of volume production, the relationship changes and the most efficient cells may become contenders in the more fundamental W/$ competition.
Smalltalk is like Objective C without the C part.

But seriously, things going for smalltalk: (a) a huge library of very extensive code, (b) a nice programming experience (though getting rid of images and adding files back would destroy that), and (c) it has a unique design that some prefer.

I think everyone should be exposed Smalltalk. It was my real intro to OO programming. It really is the pure OO language, where you can see objects unencumbered from all the non-object crud in more pragmatic OO languages.
Interesting comment. When AWS went down in the US, devops rightly said "we told you to run your apps on something you have control over."
You didn't mentioned packaging and installation.
For native code you will need to create OS-specific packages.

Different Python versions are included in various OS and in my opinion, Python packaging system pip is not as robust as Ruby gems or Node's npm.

Anything JVM-based is out, because of long startup times.
Right. Any others?

Point being that this is an unconventional fee model with very little real-world adoption, except for the enterprise market, where it's a norm. So trying to use it outside of that niche is risky. For every person who says that they would pay for the maintenance, there will be a dozen who will be completely pissed by it and won't hesitate to trash the product.
The Case for Static Site Generators
what should I say?
I think having strong programming foundations is very important. And learning any one language C++ or JAVA is enough to do it. Once you have strong foundations, then you should learn languages that you want to use to develop something. Otherwise I think learning for the sake of learning is useless.
working fine for me. I think it might just be an issue with ubuntu.
There's nothing about Khan Academy's application (or any other customer's) that would somehow immunize it from platform-wide serving issues.
A fighting game is an exercise in balancing the mechanics of multiple characters to one another. It's a bit like a rock-paper-scissors in realtime with a lot more combinations. So besides the animation, which is equivalent to that of a cartoon (and skullgirls has some quite excellent animation standards) there is a lot of balancing and fine tuning of the various move characteristics.
Why would anyone expect customer support from Google?
They have made it clear time and time again that they don't provide it.
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer-contempt-co...
I feel I have to agree with argonaut.

Even if OP is a student there must a be a project he wants to work on. Whatever it is, it can probably be done in java, and it's worth doing it to learn.

Trying to learn a language without actively using it to build something on which you can experiment more than just the examples of some book is really really important and you will learn way faster.
If anyone has an extra invite, can you please send me one at duncallmeeel@gmail.com. Thank you~
randomized blind A/B testing really can make all the difference. they did the same on the Hydrogen forums, for testing lossy audio codecs, and if there was only a hint of information which bit was which, results would be heavily biased.

crazy, but that's how human perception seems to work. it also raises the question whether, at some point, this placebo effect might not be way stronger, than any actual perceptual differences left over after correcting for biases.

and if that's the case, maybe we don't need better codecs, but shinier TVs, and better people to convince us that video quality is better and more enjoyable. like snake-oil salesmen. or like that high end electronics brand that put a weight in their remote controls, just so it feels more 'solid' and high quality (brilliant idea, I forgot what brand, might've been Scandinavian).
But an Israeli fascist state having them is okay?
The Openshift looks quite promising as a PaaS. If anything goes wrong with RH you can just move your app to other host or even your own hardware.
The biggest innovation health care needs is not technology. It's psychology - persuading people to incorporate vastly healthier diet and exercise habits into their daily lives.

The first 'innovator' to beat the junk food industrial complex at its own marketing game will change the world.

No CRUD or SAAS app for health care can manipulate people's psychology. What health care really needs is a habit-changing algorithm.
I wanted to know this too. I recently contacted Wells Fargo, and they said it would be 12$ per month for a basic business account. Please do suggest what options are there for non-us residents to open up a bank account with minimum charges possible.
I don't want immortality. And I'd suggest that anyone that does has not properly considered the consequences.
Ok, so here's the deal. If your app runs exclusively on GAE you've essentially tied yourself to one cloud vendor. Now disregarding the respective benefits and drawbacks of google as a hosting company for your app (I would never do that), being dependent on one cloud provider is a very bad idea. No matter if you run on EC2, Azure or GAE, if you can't seamlessly switch to another provider, you're screwed. These all go down regularly and have issues. They're big companies, you're a small company, you have no such thing as "recourse". The court of public opinion will not save your company.
Free for a year. If you register it from an iDevice or some hardware bought from Apple.

And then next year to keep iCloud "free", you need to buy more overpriced goods from Apple.
It would be great if you could let users indicate preferences between answers so that you could produce an ordered graph of which answers are better than others. I'm thinking of something similar to the less wrong textbook recommendations[1] with it's rules:

1. Post the title of your favorite textbook on a given subject.
2. You must have read at least two other textbooks on that same subject.
3. You must briefly name the other books you've read on the subject and explain
why you think your chosen textbook is superior to them.

Rules #2 and #3 are to protect against recommending a bad book that only seems
impressive because it's the only book you've read on the subject.

AFTER EDIT: I'm thinking this would be particularly useful if you've narrowed your choice down to a few options and wanted to see comparisons between those options.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subj...
Chase has solid online tools, and lots of branches in the U.S. If you keep at least $7500 in your account (check this figure...it has been changing, but I think this is right), there is no monthly fee. They also offer solid business credit cards and other services that will scale with your business.

I don't know about offshore. One of the advantages of using them in the U.S. is that there are lots of branches to cash checks and meet with your banker if you so desire. If I was offshore, I might go for something that has a local branch, but also is a big name (i.e. HSBC, etc).
Remember the old "thundering herd" problem with Apache children and things of that nature? You'd basically have a whole bunch of processes which had a listening fd from an earlier call to listen(). When a new connection would come in, the kernel would wake all of them, even though only one of them would actually have something to get. The others would go through the process for nothing. It caused a big performance hit back in the day.

Well, imagine now that you have a directory or lock service where you can store things and perform atomic updates. When you do a write to something in it, it fans out to all of its clients, and they all wake up (nearly) simultaneously and receive the update. They then have to do whatever processing you do with new data of that type.

If they all do this at the same time, then you have no processes left to service incoming requests. They're all identically busy with whatever mutexes held in order to apply those config changes safely, so no other work happens on those clients while they load in the new data.

It's not so much that it's taking a mutex and is getting stuck for a little bit, since that's going to happen no matter what. It's that all of the children do it at the same time, so there's nobody to service your hit, and you're guaranteed to get stuck. If it was spread out, then only some percentage of incoming requests would get stuck behind this. The others would get lucky and would hit another instance which either had already run it or hadn't yet run it.

I'm not saying this is what's going on here, but it sure sounds familiar.
Nothing silent about it, in my experience, at least. I was trying to send a self-extracting encrypted archive (full of documents) to my tax guy. Google wouldn't accept the .exe attachment until I added .remove to the end of the name.

The intent is to require the receiver to take some affirmative action (e.g. deleting the .remove) before blindly running the attachment and getting pwned. Seems perfectly reasonable.

Unlike what Apple just got caught doing. I'm ripe for a new phone. I don't think it's going to be an iPhone ...
Gae is cool but its not worth the money. I shouldn't be out of beta.
Mediterranean diet benefits overall health of an individual. A major advantage of Mediterranean diet is that it is heart healthy. Read more.. http://goo.gl/JM9xi
Growing user signups via data and analytical thinking
No, I don't think this is simple for non IT people. Same goes for my web site code, or my python projects, or my shell scripts. If I gave either of those to an non IT person, they would have no clue what is going on.

This is as expected, as most people require some expertise to do technical work. I would have no idea how to fix the electrical system in a car, but I do expect that the mechanic knows how to figure it out if it one broke. Same, I expect a sysadmin or a programmer has the expertise to follow single steps installation guides.
Of course not, like when AWS fails Netflix stops working like every customer.

But you can bet that if Khan Academy has a problem it will be looked into with extra attention.
A very interesting eBook on growing user numbers. Warning: First you'll need a product and a trickle of signups to actually optimize.
I assume the only overhead will be how much they weight in your DOM (this is inevitable anyway) and whatever time it takes to clone the element. So probably it will be actually faster than compiling server-side and XHR-ing on-demand because you don't touch the network.
More relevant would be "where's your DR site?"
I think Unicorn kills off old workers and spawns new regularly.
I misread the poster's question. Yes, this video does answer his/her question as stated. I thought s/he meant why signal shape and frequency variations at very high frequencies don't matter, which I answered. At 20khz you'd have an extremely hard time noticing any difference between a sine or square wave, or the different tone of 20.5khz vs 20.1 khz. Even though as the video shows, the wave retains full fidelity and detail at 20khz, he's zooming in to show that. Our ears can't "zoom", they hear it at the super high, tightly packed shape. The logical extension of this is why a square wave at 30khz sounds exactly the same as a sine wave: it's silence to us, thus the same.
The following article by Patrick Miller "The educated gentlepersons fighting game primer" presents quite well the challenges and mechanics of a fighting game, if you wish to understand a bit more why designing a character is so expensive:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/127524225/The-Educated-Gentleperso...

I uploaded it to scribd without the writer's permission, because insert credit hasn't solved their recurrent problem with malware on wordpress. The original article is at:

http://insertcredit.com/2013/01/14/the-educated-gentleperson...
Prehistoric teeth healthier than today's (high-carbs are to blame)
HCESAR: a keyboard layout without 0
This is really insightful.

Productivity is usually a relative measure to gauge the profit margin of a nation / company ie. hours worked against earnings. But as you say, a relative measure will not catch any across the board increase.

The corollary of this is that almost the entirety of the worth is ascribed to the comparatively minor differences which produce relative gains. Anything which does not produce relative gains, but which 'simply' helps the human race at large is ignored or disparaged by the market. ie. if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.

While I can kind of see the thinking behind your argument about the rise of the financial sector being driven by demands of growth from politics and policies.. i think this is very much the wrong way of looking at it. The rise of the financial sector was a power grab.. a con, pure and simple. They bought up all our debt, devalued it and then sold us more. That is to say, they bought all our shares in the future and with a bit of hocus-pocus, pulled a bunch more out of thin air and diluted our stake.
If you were a VPS customer, you'd be less locked in and can just walk to another vendor so they actually are shit hot with support usually.

It was obvious when I first tried it that GAE has crappy support.
M/S is Master/Slave: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastor...

HRD is High Replication Datastore: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/adminconsole/mi...

M/S is deprecated, and HRD is the new hotness (and it conveniently costs more).
Context menu is an old topic now. There is no point writing about it again and again.
A GAE user sees a problem of his service being slow, writes a frantic bug report with caps and exclamation marks and threatens to leave GAE. As a GAE user myself, two questions come to mind:

1. Is GAE outside of their .9995 SLA* uptime? If they aren't, then it probably isn't important enough spend time looking into it. Customers cannot expect better than the agreed upon uptime percent, and hosting companies are obligated to reimburse customers if they go below SLA. Both of these are covered in the SLA doc.

2. Is it reproducible? So far, the bug report mentions 2 people out of GAE users. Is 2 people enough to say its a problem with GAE? One person is panicked, and the other provides few details for the bug report.

*https://developers.google.com/appengine/sla
I would venture to say that launching the iMac was turning point A, the iPod was turning point B, and the iPhone was turning point C.

The TiBook was also quite nice, though I wouldn't call it as significant as the iMac in pushing Apple toward stylish and well designed consumer devices.
Regarding memory, I think you can do something like this in your Unicorn config:

after_fork do |server, worker|
size_in_bytes = 60010241024 # megabytes
Process.setrlimit(Process::RLIMIT_AS, size_in_bytes)
We filed a more concise bug report too: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=8...

This is a daily outage that affects all our master/slave appengine applications. We know these applications are 'deprecated', but we're still paying significant money for the service and therefore hadn't expected 'deprecated' to mean 'won't be fixed when there are problems'.

Migration to HRD is not trivial even with the tool provided by Google. HRD has a different consistency model, blob keys and associated image serving URLs will change by migrating, and last time we checked any deletes that happen during migration (which can take days) will not make it into the migrated app.