Unfortunately, there is no technical content (which seems endemic to the recent storm of Go articles). Is it faster because is a static language producing machine code? Was their choice of Python packages wrong? How much are the performance improvements caused by knowing better where the bottlenecks are? Were other languages with larger ecosystems considered?
How does GC impact that? What about C to Go inter-op. Is there a latency penalty?
Please note that it's not for every application. It is not a client/server architecture. It simply a tightly optimized piece of C code that interacts with a file (or RAM) to create a lightning fast approximation of a SQL server that is ACID compliant.
One thing I've used it for the most, is for small, ad-hoc internal web applications. With the webserver as its "single user", it is incredibly speedy and reliable and holds a shockingly large amount of data (still works pretty well when data gets up into the Terabytes).
The operating system must have a unified buffer cache in order for the memory-mapped I/O extension to work correctly, especially in situations where two processes are accessing the same database file and one process is using memory-mapped I/O while the other is not. Not all operating systems have a unified buffer cache. In some operating systems that claim to have a unified buffer cache, the implementation is buggy and can lead to corrupt databases.
Which commonly-used operating systems lack a bug-free unified buffer cache?
1. For CSS, honestly for any project it'd be hard for me not to simply use Bootstrap and be done with it and then do the minimum CSS possible (I say this as someone who has been doing CSS for years). Bootstrap really is the de facto CSS for the modern Web;
2. Organization: I agree the angular-seed project (which I started with and still use) isn't suited to organizing large projects and I agree separating into functional modules is the way to go;
3. Directives are awesome but to get all the two way data binding working requires a fairly deep understanding of how they work (to get the correct combination of scopes, transclusion, etc);
4. Directives also have limits that are sometimes annoying. You still can't generate definition list items with an ng-repeat, for example (a template has to have one top-level element). A solution to this is coming;
5. There's no good way of both just including code and using the parent scope plus some extras. This is done for reasons of code separation but there really is a use case (IMHO) for includes vs imports for templates;
6. $resource has no HTTP PUT method;
7. I'd probably avoid $resource altogether although it looks attractive. Use rich objects [2] instead;
8. Angular allows you to use a bunch of different other frameworks but it doesn't always play completely nice with them. Take the popover in Bootstrap. The way this works is by moving an element around in the DOM. This doesn't lend itself to a "nice" Angular directive (my version at least is kind of a hack).
9. Underscore.js is awesome. Use it;
10. Try to limit yourself to using jqLite that Angular comes with rather than full jQuery. This isn't really possibly with any reasonable part of Bootstrap however;
11. Isolate scopes in directives results some weird and unexpected behaviour. For example, if you reference something with an attribute, it'll work if it's an object (including an array) but won't with a simple value, requiring you to put such values in objects just so the directive can get a reference to it. This tripped me up a few times;
12. Scopes aren't always truly isolated either. For example, you can get tripped up by this if you have two attribute directives on the same element.
[1]: for those who follow IO, I am the Tech Lead of the Open Bidder project at Google (http://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/2013/05/announcing-op...)
You will still use all your JS tools, it is your server tools that will get lighter-weight as page flow and layout are (exclusively sometimes) moved to the client. Ideally your server logic returns only JSON and otherwise your server is a file host for HTML, JS, CSS.
Edit: my comment is in response to some other comments I've seen, not the OP.
There's so much I love about libraries like angular and ember, but I'd love it if someone was working on a way to allow additional templating languages. I don't know how it would work, but you could possible compile other templates down to angular templates.
I've been thinking of a way to convert simple templates in angular's style, so that you can do all the cool auto-updating features. If there was a standard for this, templates like mustache, etc could compile a subset down to it.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of nunjucks https://github.com/jlongster/nunjucks.
For example, I'm at the 50k mark on the frontend and I found angular's basic building blocks to be too restrictive in terms of organizing things into reusable components. I had to answer questions like "can views do I/O", "does a view own his model", "how deeply should views nest", "should my models be tree-like or rectangular", "can my contracted designer write arbitrary markup with arbitrary UI widgets or does the framework not like that". Angular's way of doing controllers with dependency injection got in my way of answering these questions. I would love to read someone's opinions on this, especially if I'm wrong, but nobody (including me) has time to write a well thought out essay on this.
I would add that the Yeoman build manager is an absolute delight to structuring and managing your project. It was so slick that when making my first Angular app, I also ended up learning CoffeeScript to kill two birds at once...Yeoman made this otherwise prickly situation as smooth as possible.
And I also would agree that directives are Angular's killer feature...and unfortunately for me at the time, one of the hardest to grok because of their magic. Anyone writing an Angular tutorial would do a great service to emphasize the power and use cases for directives.
Show me any code that cannot be written faster and shorter using only jQuery, Underscore templates and a CommonJS compiler. Does not exist. You are writing enormous amounts of glue code to please AngularJS and getting lost in your obsession with tools, imagined reusability and over-complicated testing procedures.
In a recent rewrite of one of our applications into Angular we had huge issues with it consuming memory. I think our use case is quite distinct, we have a telephony component that needs to stay loaded so single page app really does mean single page app for us, but even so I would expect to see memory mentioned every now and then.
Keep your controllers lean and mean. Put more of the UI logic into services. This makes testing a lot easier.
Only use routing ($route, $routeProvider) if your app has very little UI state and could reasonably thought of as several totally independent pages. I switched to managing $location.path() explicitly and haven't looked back.
Embrace promises throughout your app. Angular templates can now render promises naturally but I've found that I prefer to be more explicit:
$http.get(url).then(function(response) { $scope.something = response.data; }, function(error) { $scope.$emit('error', error); });The Angular Bootstrap project is trying to create directives that avoid jquery and could be bound (with different templates) to other UI frameworks. What I really want is a core set of UI widget directives and then separate (bootstrap or foundation inspired or not) CSS libraries for styling them.
Right now, we don't pull in any other libraries aside from Angular. We've found we don't need jQuery anymore, and are able to build up re-useable widgets with directives and use them across projects.
// String#toLowerCase and String#toUpperCase don't produce correct results in browsers with Turkish // locale, for this reason we need to detect this case and redefine lowercase/uppercase methods // with correct but slower alternatives. if ('i' !== 'I'.toLowerCase()) { lowercase = manualLowercase; uppercase = manualUppercase; }I didn't see any mention of your backend for the project, but I did get the impression it was something Java (why else would you be using Maven?). I'm looking to be writing angular templates on top of a django backend (supplying a RESTful api for data access). I'd love to read more about integrating Angular with RESTful backends.
Not all of the advice applies, of course, but there's a lot of good advice on making a good workspace and keeping yourself motivated. I've certainly noticed after working alone that there's a lot of implicit encouragement merely from working near other people, and this makes working at home harder than the same work might otherwise be. That's part of the reason why many prefer to work from cafes or worker/hacker-spaces, I think. Motivation is contagious.
(The positive flip side is that working from home removes a certain set of distractions that might otherwise be bothersome, and gives you more fine-grained control over the distractions you have in general).
Lots of authors use funny setups to transition from home-mode to work-mode. Some people build extra doors in their house so they can "leave" their house and "enter" an office that is sealed off from their house, but is otherwise the same building. One author (Roald Dahl?) worked from a bunker.
That being said, its probably a bad idea to get hung up on the idea of perfect working-from-home conditions. Per E. B. White:
"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper."
Some similar important words from Tchaikovsky, which I found especially relevant to working from home:
Do not believe those who try to persuade you that composition is only a cold exercise of the intellect. The only music capable of moving and touching us is that which flows from the depths of a composers soul when he is stirred by inspiration. There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.
I think motivation is under-stated in its importance when it comes to working from home. Even if our work demands little distraction, we're social creatures, and we've probably all had days where its hard to even open up the editor.
It's important to stay positive and stay at it. As Joel said, "We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor."[1]
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Joking aside, I've reached burnout by driving myself hard to get 8 billable hours each day (plus communication, writing proposals etc on top), and apart from lunch don't step away from the computer even when tired and procrastinating. Because if I'm sat there working on a problem I can bill the client, if I step away (even though I'll be more productive when I come back) I can't.
I know it's a matter of perspective on how I define 'honest' and 'billable', but I cannot make the mental leap needed!
How does that work out financially? I imagine they aren't too pleased if you just buy a coffee and then occupy space for 5 hours.
But I don't really want to spend a fortune on excessive caffeine consumption and $5 bagels.
Let me offer a counter-example, for what it's worth, which perhaps isn't a whole lot. I've been working at home for almost a year, after being in the office for six. It's very simple. In the morning, I start working, sitting on my couch, using my laptop. Eight hours later, I sign out. Obviously eating some time in the middle there. That's it. Nothing to it, really.
Be careful who you do it for. When he talks about all the communication tools you need to use in order to be successful at it, make sure they already have a bunch of those already set up, unless you're in a position to make sure they set them up and use them.
In particular, the company I was working for had no company-wide chat system at all, and clearly didn't feel they needed it since most of their employees were in-office or only temporarily remote. Various attempts at getting one going were hampered by lack of support from above. They'd get maybe 5 random people using them off the bat and it'd dwindle from there. At various times there were competing solutions active.
In the end I gave up, they gave up, and it just didn't work out and was frustrating for everyone involved.
My commute is still short (I often do it on a Segway), and our company is still virtual (with both staff and contractors working from their own spaces -- which we don't plan to change), but don't underestimate the value of a separate, outside, workspace.
Sometimes its faster to come up with a solution without setting hard time limits, and just let your mind churn passively on a concept. I've always found a certain amount of anxiety associated with feeling like I have to complete a task in a predetermined amount of time.
You should always have (and try to meet) deadlines, but the micromanagement of 25 mins per hour (example from the article) is just stressful.
Time Zone issues: If you work in a different time zone, then adjust to it to lessen the difference. This only works if you are from 1-4 hours away. Your team will appreciate the effort.
Try splitting the work day into shifts. One of the issues I had was working non-stop (as in an office job) for 8 hours. Reason was that I felt jailed into my house. So I splitastwer my work day into two shifts. One during the daylight, and one during the night (once my family has gone to sleep). I work better, and faster.
Get a hobby. When you work in an office, you have little hobbies that you do without ever noticing. Maybe its talking with another employee, or cleaning your desk, or anything. When you are home, you feel like you are in the office 24 hours a day. So get a hobby (preferably outside the house), so you feel like your life is not all about work.
Also, I pretty much have my headphones on all the time, which is not so different from when I worked in a real office.
My current job is a lot more flexible for remote working than any other I've had before. I don't work remotely all of the time, but at least 33%. For me, I found a bit of self-discipline is essential, as is being able to "train" others. I'm living with my parents at the moment and had to get my mum to realise she couldn't just pop into the room at any moment to chat - I could be in a call with my boss/a client, or trying to focus on a task... anything really.
Another anecdotal observation I've had - once you've trained yourself to work from home, you'll often find you're at your most productive there. I know I do. Partly it's the more comfortable/relaxed setting, and partly it's guilt of being caught "goofing off". Scott Hanselman mentions the guilt aspect in his reaction to the Yahoo! ban on remote working[1].
If I ever lost the ability to work remotely I don't know what I'd do. Nowadays I can't go more than a few days at the office without feeling completely drained, demotivated and demoralised. The flip-side is working from home for an extended period can leave you wanting to go into the office to see real people again, not just a Office Communicator window.
[0]http://chrismcleod.me/2005/06/15/six-tips-for-working-from-h...[1]http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BeingARemoteWorkerSucksLongLiv...
How do you work without common everyday routine in the team etc.?
I would add that it is really really important to occasionally do something different. If you you usually work from home, go to a coffee shop, sit in a restaurant for a few hours on a laptop.
You will be amazed how much of a difference that one day outside your office will make you excited about the same work that the day before seemed like a boring slog.
As far as coffee shops go, I think the criteria for a good place to work from are as follow:
- how is the coffee, and do they have refills
- how good is the wifi: speed, quality of signal, ... also whether they use tickets. I find tickets irritating, I keep forgetting about the limit and having remote shells disconnecting and whatnot.
- how good are the seats: comfortable as well as good for your back
- how good are the tables: I tend to prefer individual tables to large, collective tables, possibly because it feels more like a desk. You also want the height of the table to be good in relation to your seat
- do they have a lot of power outlets throughout the place
- what's the atmosphere like: I've been to places that turn into pubs half-way through the afternoon, even with headphones it's really not conducive to work, particularly when lots of people walk right around you.
- how good is their food: if I find a good coffee shop with bad food, that's not a deal-breaker and I just won't eat there, but good food does help
Surprisingly, I haven't found that many places ticking all the boxes. I actually wonder why there aren't more places dedicating themselves to providing this sort of environment (at least in SF and Vancouver).
I believe that not having a place would help in keeping the blood pumping and staying proactive, yet it would probably be hard during crunch times if the correct workspace cannot be found. Would it be worth giving a shot?
Does anyone have any links to articles that talk more about the tool for collaborating and developing remotely? With existing tools I find it pretty easy to get code written and coordinate remotely, but it it still seems very difficult to actively collaborate in real time remotely. I'm a little surprised at how hard it is still to do some white boarding with someone else remotely or just share my desktop with them so they can see a prototype easily. Gotomeeting and Webex are ok but cost money and are more geared to showing presentations than anything else.
The one thing I'd add is that working remotely means working away from machines as well as people - test machines, internal websites, etc. Even companies that are generally supportive of remote workers (like mine) often scatter essential information and resources across an annoying variety of machines that are not accessible from outside. Then they give you a VPN that's utter crap (usually because it's overloaded) or ssh to a bastion host so you have to tunnel/forward anywhere else. It's really worth the effort to make sure you use every trick in the book to get networking on your home machines and/or laptops set up in a way that actually allows you to get work done. I'm pretty darn good at that kind of stuff, but even so it took me several experiments over a period of weeks to get something I was happy with - and BTW it bears no resemblance at all to what the IT group thought would suffice. Similarly, it pays to make sure that using test machines is as friction-free as possible, and that common tasks are automated as much as possible so that you don't have to keep watching/tweaking things from afar. All good sense even if you're not remote, but even more important when you are.
"From the employers perspective, youre risking burning yourself out if you work 50-60 hours a week"
mmm... 50 hours is pretty common in the software industry, and being remote makes it easier not to burn out in fact because you're not losing time in commutes and in loud open spaces where you can't hear yourself coding.
In any case it's quite hard to define a number of hours per weeks. Building software is done by waves. You can spend a 70h week because of a production push that goes wrong, then a very calm week. So don't take those numbers/week too seriously imo.
Hopefully more people in a position to do something will reach out to more girls to get them involved in science. They shouldn't have to be wronged horribly by the adults in the community to deserve some attention.
Also Space Camp is sweet, I spent a week there as a kid. I didn't go through the official program but I saw and experienced a lot of it and it's one of the most unique and fun youth programs in the world.
But in all likelihood she built a Drano bomb, probably after watching one of the millions of YouTube videos on the subject, and blew it up on school property. She's not a martyr for science, nor a role model for girls in STEM, and frankly it is a little offensive that's the line people are sticking with.
Now I am not so sure. If she purposely made a drano bomb (google it) it's not exactly a "science experiment".
Still, she had good grades supposedly and had never been in trouble before, so expulsion was extreme until proven otherwise I guess.
So maybe she can make something good happen from this offer.
Just let's hope this doesn't happen: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091993/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
http://unboundformac.com/dropbox.html
I'm interested to see where they go with it and how they approach the problem differently.
If Excel is the optimal spreadsheet, work at Microsoft.
If hotels are pretty good, work at Hilton.
If airlines just need some tweaking around the edges, go work at American Air. (Yikes!)
One can argue exactly how bold these places were in their contrarianism, but they still bucked the status quo. I couldn't have dreamed that AirBnB would have pulled it off.
AirBnB: normal people would never be willing to rent out their place--or a single room in their place--to strangers.
B&Bs have been around forever. Roomsharing, Couchsurfing, etc. The idea has been around for a long time, just not as a scalable platform.
Tutorspree: Having a human being on the other end radically reduced the time needed to set up tutoring
Well sure, maybe it is by now "contrariant" for tech companies that a decent phone support can resolve problems quicker and is better for customer retention than online support ticket systems...
FlightCar: Travelers get a free car wash, and don't have to pay $18/day for airport parking.
I like the idea, but it seems to me just a frequent flier version of similar peer-to-peer car sharing systems (RelayRides, Getaround, etc).
All it does say is that you can sometimes be successful by doing things other people are not doing... not exactly a breakthrough. :)
I'm not saying it's a bad thing -- in some, perhaps many, cases I'd say it's pretty useful -- just that it's not a necessary or sufficient thing for this kind of success.
When iPhone launched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)
For instance, it's not like everybody in the world was thinking "a clean and concise search engine will never work" or "a social network catered towards college students will never work."
Perhaps people thought "we don't need another search engine" or "we don't need another social network," but those thoughts do not necessarily make Google and Facebook "Not X" ideas. Both fixed very specific weaknesses with the then current solutions and have since evolved.
Airbnb is different than Google and Facebook in that they created a market. But like I mentioned earlier, I don't think the world was thinking "I will never rent out a room in my house, if given the opportunity." More likely that thought had never crossed their mind prior to Airbnb.
I have ditched iPhoto as my archiving software and moved my +150GB of photos and videos to Flickr. I couldn't be happier. I'd also like to note that I share zero photos with the public, all my photos are 100% private or shared with family members/close friends.
Having said that there is plenty of improvement to go:
- iOS app (maybe it is also the case for the Android app) needs to improve (auto upload, better integration with iOS, etc). Recently I went on holiday and only used my iPhone to take pictures (over 5GB), it would be nice for an easier way to tag + create/add to set + upload photos and videos. By the way, where is the tablet app?
- Video is really really bad. Apparently Flickr doesn't support long video playback (and by long I mean 10 seconds or more - i think). Now a days (specially with smartphones) video is a big part of albums/experiences. Video needs to be permitted and nicely integrated within photo albums.
- Upload via web is nice, but a better Mac/Windows/Linux native app would go a long way for power users. Better upload resume, tagging, etc.
- Map view. Something is wrong with the new Flickr, it has a world map view, but it doesn't read/process any geo location from my pictures - unlike iPhoto which does this flawlessly. I need to drop one by one the photos into the map for these to be processed. I also have to say that the Nokia map could be better, I'd love to see Flickr using Google Maps. Has someone experienced this same thing?
- Better album sharing, a la Dropbox, would be great (e.g. allow friends and family to download an album as *.zip)
These are just a few things I would like to see in the coming updates.
- Your updates and activity entries are now mixed with other people's photos. That the photos are humongous and your updates are tiny one-liners doesn't help. You have to eye-grep and scroll the infinite image feed all the way to the bottom.
- At the same time, the right bar is occupied with such immensely useful things as "Flickr Blog", "People you may know" and a patch of empty space.
- Portrait orientation photos are disadvantaged in the feed layout.
- The documentation is not updated! It took me some time to find how to share BBCode in the new layout.
- Flickr is no longer Safe for Work! If any of your contacts posts a nude image, instead of tiny thumbnail it gets blown into all its high res goodness.
I am happy this still works. If Flickr gets more popular with photographers, there will be even more photos available to Wikipedia and other free content projects.
And I'm using a 8GB RAM, i7 laptop.
I registered my URL in high school, and now I'm starting my masters. My photos have improved, and so has my online identity.
I'm considering just switching to a new account, but the situation gave me no faith that Flickr was worth the effort. I look forward to a similar post when Flickr overhauls the backend.
- The lines and colors are harsh
- The grids on the single image view separate the page in non-equal thirds which feels awkward
- A lot of the data elements just run together without labels or any indication that they're links: http://i.imgur.com/Szy3Y7Z.png
- In 2013, I'm a bit shocked that the site isn't responsive, even if they do have a good mobile app: http://i.imgur.com/OMiqoZs.png
Everything else is okay, but only because they didn't actually redesign the majority of the site. Go to your groups, stats, etc. and you still see the nicely organized old Flickr. I'm a fairly active user and usually a big fan of redesigns and changes, but I don't see myself using it much now.
- More clutter
- Less clean
- Congested, as in a little border would have done no harm.
- Looks loud but maybe that's just Instagrammatical.
- For me, at least, the home page takes longer to load.
- Maybe earlier they had the site built for photographers and now they have made it for everyone
- just like lady Mayer said.
Still very nice all in all though and a terabyte of free space makes it an easy choice for the default place to store all your photos. Goodbye iCloud for me.
A convenient way to store online and share selected photos and videos would be good. I don't trust FB/Google with images of myself and my family or my geo-tags. I would automatically be similarly sceptical of Yahoo bet a quick glance at the main TOS didn't show anything obviously objectionable.
I was a paid up Flickr Pro user for a while, and I actually let it expire this year as I'd decided it wasn't going anywhere but this has really got me interested again. Seems like Yahoo understands the potential value of Flickr, it might not compete against Facebook in terms of raw numbers and standard phone camera photos but there's potential to get the serious enthusiasts back.
Facebook is already good because everyone uses Facebook. It's a convenient way to tag, share, and comment on your photos of your friends.
Google+ has a great Communities section where people share and post photos to other people. Also, a lot of photographers hang out there.
Dropbox is great if you want people to download your photos. They automatically zip the photos up. Or if they have a dropbox account, you can share your folder with them.
I do like they give us a TB of space. I think if they make a way for Flickr to sync my Lightroom catalogue and all my RAWs, I think that would be a good use of that TB of space.
What I don't like is the single photo page. The photo itself is nice and big, which I like. But once you scroll past it it's pretty much a cluster fuck of information that looks very much out of place. It looks like they didn't even bother to make it blend well with the page.
Anyway, needs lots of improvements.
On an unrelated note, I am planning to make a backup of all my ebooks there, by storing them as pictures (something like https://github.com/meltingice/flickr-store, but better).
Facebook's dominance may mean its too little too late except for the crowd who detest using Facebook (myself included).
Retail shopping has also changed. Malls are being replaced by power centers and urban core retail is being revitalized. And there's Walmart for household items and Home Depot for white goods and Dicks for athletic equimpment etc.
One of the biggest changes is the way in which stores are placed relative to catchment. Driving patterns have changed and interstate access is more important than a high traffic corner for big box retail. Sears locations were based on the old model.
That said, their locations on older arterials tends to correlate with high levels of utility infrastructure. A collapsing retail micro-environment may mean surplus utility capacity. Which reminds me that another trend making Sears commercial buildings obsolescent is the radically improved energy efficiency of modern retail design - big boxes have skylights, etc.
[edit] A bit more about power supply. Local power companies sell power. That's how they make money. Like the Sears stores are surplus retail space, they often have capacity in the wrong places. They will cut deals in exchange for a long term return - it's why they run lines to a site in the first place.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/realestate/commercial/rack...
I wonder if they will consider covering excess space with solar PV panels? They could become a massive distributed power source, which would contribute somewhat towards the power requirements of the data centre below.
It's amazing to think of how the internet is changing cities and buildings. Reminds me of phone boxes that are being converted into other uses (such as electric vehicle recharging stations, mini-libraries and Wi-Fi hotspots) since they've been made obsolete by mobile phones.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/10/spectrum-interactive-wifi...
http://phys.org/news192197933.html
http://www.gadling.com/2012/08/19/british-phoneboxes-convert...
Sears does have some amazing infrastructure (lots of square footage, locations at key transportation points in densely populated areas throughout the country, huge parking lots) but those aren't really the kind of features that data centers are usually optimizing for. I'm sure they're finding creative uses for this infrastructure, but I doubt it's anything like a data center as we think of one.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/30/lifel...
A parking lot is better than an empty lot. A warehouse is better than a parking lot. And a data center is better than a warehouse :)
The good news for us consumers is that as the supply steadily ticks up, pricing will come down (at least for space - who's to say where bandwidth costs go).
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2013/03/21/stormi...
Instead of selling floor space, they could subdivide the space like the "storage building" units. The customers could pay for a rack, and they would need a key to access it. Legally the hardware, software and data would be owned by the owner, and not the government. Anyone else would need a warrant to come in and rape your data, software, and hardware just like if the server was next to my bed.
Part of the reason why I have all my servers in places I own is because of this problem. This is a brief opportunity to explore cloud computing and give the communists and socialists who want everyone to share a common purse on the computing front a black eye.
My pain point is "I want boat loads of CPU cycles and Internet connection speeds, and I want physical legal ownership of the rack space, hardware, software, AND data, and I don't want to have to buy a building that I have to air condition, power, internet connect, secure, and pay taxes on.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/09/amazo...
However, many blogs don't attract comments in their hundreds. For me, disabling comments would feel like saying to blog readers that I'm not interested in what they think about my blog post (and I am). You might write for yourself as you compose posts, but when you publish your post you want others to read it. Are there blog authors who can honestly say they aren't interested in the views of their readers about what they've written?
I would rather a conversation take place on my blog than telling users to take the discussion elsewhere. (You can't really discuss things in a 140 character tweet).
Related to this discussion is another viewpoint about getting rid of social media buttonshttp://ia.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/
Matt comes very close to one of my beliefs about writing... Creative writing is a way to give yourself an opportunity to think through an topic or story and give the rest of us an insight into how your mind works. That's the kind of writing I love -- the kind where I can see the gears moving to a certain degree and I know the author is honestly putting an effort into analyzing a subject or putting something difficult into words.
As an example, I think this is why the recent "Hyperbole and a Half" (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par...) about Allie's experiences with depression is so valuable and compelling.
And it's why I find listicles and articles that purport to be delivering glorious nuggets of truth from the top of Mount Bullshit to be boring, frustrating, and obnoxious. (If you look at my comment history, you'll probably find a fair amount of bitching about articles that are nothing but (often wrong or over-simplified) conclusions with no evident thought process behind them.)
I think it's actually something that's hard to fake. Like Matt says, your personality and opinions are integral. And it almost forces you to start writing about something you're not so sure about, which can seem uncomfortable. Because you might come to wrong conclusions. But if you write to edify yourself and to give yourself the chance to meditate and process the world around you, then suddenly sheer audience count will matter much less and (if you're a good thinker) you might find yourself writing much more compelling pieces, anyway, since, like I said, I think people appreciate being able to see the mental processes of another person at work.
So. I've diverged a bit from Matt's initial point, but his words made me think of this so I thought I'd share...
(Before someone else says it: No, I'm not talking about technical or instructional writing. That's different.)
People generally don't put as much work into their comments as you did into your blog post, so the comment section is a tangible dive in written quality. And they tend to be quite "fire and forget", because although somebody might disagree with something in the five seconds after reading a post, they are unlikely to remember that disagreement two days later and return to see if anyone responded.
Personally, if somebody felt strongly enough about something I wrote to want to say something to me something about it, I'd prefer an email anyway.
1. Comments are still necessary. Tweeting a link and a short comment doesn't cut it; not everyone has a blog (or wants to make a public post to a different audience about another blogger's post) just to respond - to assume people will blog about you is sheer arrogance. Maybe Matt doesn't care what others think, or want a discussion and discourse, but I certainly do.
2. Opening links in new windows or tabs is OK if your blog has a very non-technical audience. Most people don't know the keyboard shortcuts for opening in a new tab, and even though they can right click... don't. It's always fun to see people's enthusiasm when I show them the shortcuts, and to watch them start opening links in multiple tabs!
What are good options for presenting significantly longer works? For example, a 30-page paper, or a 100-page book?
Is it best for readability / usability to break things out into short blog posts? Or ditch the blog format altogether and just upload some HTML files that use a totally different style? Or something else?
I decided even to dispatch with the header bar, putting navigation at the bottom of the main page; presumably, people will only care to see more of my writing if they've read the article. Not as good for people revisiting the page, but they can likely remember http://jmoiron.net/blog or bookmark it in order to get to the search.
My fonts are slightly smaller and slightly less contrast, and after looking at Gemmell's blog I wonder if I should change that decision. I wanted to have emphasized elements of the text easily distinguishable from the body while not distracting.
Also, I agree with Gemmell's "The basic tenets of hypertext should be left alone". One of these basic tenets, to me, are the semantic meanings of Blue, Purple, and Red text for normal, :visited, and :active hyperlinks. If you want to chose a link color, do not invert or violate these classical meanings.
Now I'm happy with just single columns...much less work to maintain, much more readable for users, and more time to think about the actual words rather than CSS.
Moving to Markdown helped expedite my preference for simplicity, too.
As our viewing surfaces only get more diverse, I hope single columns are a long lasting trend
The one thing I disagree with is comments. Comments are hard to get right, but they're not replaceable by social media alone.
In addition it has an Android app which is done very well. About 80% of the posts that I see here on HN, I simply safe for later and read at home in the garden with this app.
Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense of quotes, images, supporting items - that are called left, right, or full width.
Using your site as an example and lets pretend its 12 columns with 3 empty, 6 for the blog, 3 empty. That space could be well served with links, resources, images, quotes that serve to enhance the writing. These resources could stretch into the 6 for the blog or remain isolated in their sidebars.
Here is the direct link to the notebook:https://www.wakari.io/sharing/bundle/aron/Accelerating_Pytho...
Update:
Well this is interesting ;D
time python test.py
real0m11.169s
user0m11.141s
sys0m0.022s
time pypy test.py
real0m0.259s
user0m0.239s
sys0m0.018s
cat test.py def python_sum(y): N = len(y) x = y[0] for i in xrange(1,N): x += y[i] return x
python_sum(xrange(100000000))
The most expensive part of a cab ride is the labor. That labor is uneccesary for people who know how to drive and haven't been drinking. Car2Go fixes that problem handily.
I imagine a similar issue for Dallas, Atlanta, etc. would transpire.
Does Yahoo have the engineering prowess to pull off this Multi-faceted hydra strategy? Do they have the management?
It seems news will play a very prominent role in the new Yahoo, but, to my knowledge, this is the first gaming acquisition in a long time.
Whatever happens, perhaps the most interesting thing is that we're talking about Yahoo again. 3-5 years ago many of us had written them off, but at least for the time being they've caught my attention.
So it will be interesting to see where Yahoo goes with this.
Lets ask Greece how not having control over its currency is going...
Bitcoin is a primitive financial system wrapped up in a high tech envelope.
The description of Bitcoin as "untraceable" makes my close-tab reflex trigger like a doctor bumping my knee. Seems like describing a human as invincible because the bodies will forever persist as some configuration of mass and energy.
In some ways, but when we're talking about the reversability of transactions we're really just putting trust in different places. I trust the bank waaaaaaay more than I trust any online vendor. Particularly one with whom I don't have an existing relationship, but even then. For the folks that love BTC at the moment that seems to be reversed.
--edit-- I'm also not sure how doing two trades on an international currency transfer is supposed to be cheaper than one....
I think this is important because it may be transpiring a very bad image to the less informed, because i see Bitcoin as a tool, which will be used for wrong doing as any other. Wish i had the link to a recent article that bashed Bitcoin into oblivion.
Here's the first thing built off of it (it lets you make a notebook public): http://pensieve.housejeffries.com/
I love Evernote and think it's a great service, but there should be a simpler way to get most of the same functionality. MultiMarkdown files let you do this while still being able to use vim, grep, etc.
Criticism would be very welcome. So far this has just been a fun practice project, but would anyone find it useful if it was more developed?
For example, my impression was that Evernote was about being able to store all of your memories, files, photos, etc. for future reference. But then the biggest use case highlighted by this video is for teams working on task lists together... Seem like very different use cases. I can't be simple to design for that unfocused of a goal, and it shows.
In all seriousness, this was a feature that I've been waiting on for a while--without reminders, I've had to go back-and-forth between the native OS X Reminders app and Evernote. In a way, this has sculpted my relationships with the two apps: I use Reminders for anything short-term (even things that might be considered 'Notes') and Evernote for anything long-term. Maybe that will change.
I'm not fond of PHP, but I don't know it as well as Ruby and Python. Still, I like to read about new technologies concerning PHP. I use HN to discover new stuff, but HN is a poor resource concerning PHP. HN has tremendous vocal disdain for PHP. Every PHP thread transforms into "Why I like or dislike PHP" instead of actual discussion regarding new technologies or libraries. What's worse is the debates feel like I've warped 10 years past because there is nothing ever new to them. People complain about the old things of PHP and never talk about the new things.
Put simply, even though I don't know PHP that well I feel like maybe it has potential and can actually do good in the right hands, but HN brainwashes you into thinking PHP is the worst.
Anyone notice the duplicate topic under Tutorials and Talks "Offline Processing in PHP with Advanced Queuing," just gave me a little chuckle when one of the articles is dealing with duplicated code.
Aside from this, I LOVE PHP. A prospective employer was asking if I would be open to learning RoR. Anyone who is experienced on Rails, could you let me know if it's a similar structure as PHP (which I'm great at)? Thanks.
http://www.phpweekly.com/archive/latest.html
larger, and expand the width of the layout some. If you're going to leverage a simple layout like that in which the text is the sole focus, you might as well go a bit larger font size.
IPv6 is like a breath of fresh air when it comes to setting up address spaces. For the past 10 years as a network engineer, three overriding issues have existed when setting up new networks. (1) Begging ARIN for a /19 or /20 when setting up a major new network, (2) Constantly having to have a CIDR calculator running in my head when trying to figure out where the usable hosts/broadcast/network/gw live for the various /29s, /28s, /27s/ /26s, (3) Dreading having to communicate with a new partner or customer also in RFC 1918 space (because of the odds of an address conflict), and/or adding NATing so that we can do a hand off in public space.
With IPV6 - all of those issues are gone. Every subnetwork is always a /64 - CIDR is basically gone. Also, because RFC 4193 is so large (FC::/7, though, for local assignment, it's always FD::/8) - we for all practical purposes never have to worry about negotiating with partners.
Our "Addressing Strategy" is as follows:
For a new customer, Randomly generate, following the guidance of RFC 4193, a /48. Then, for all of their subnetworks, just increment by one. I.E. A customer might get FDC2:D343:107F::/48, and their first subnetwork in that range would be, FDC2:D343:107F:1::/64
For our own IPv6 space, we occasionally play stupid aggregation games, just to keep our routing tables a little more dense - aggregate on ::/56 boundaries - I.E. If we have a new data center with a bunch of subnetworks in our FD1B:D2C5:6AB3::/48 space, we might assign it to be FD1B:D2C5:6AB3:0100::/56, and then we have 255 subnetworks, FD1B:D2C5:6AB3:0100::/64 - FD1B:D2C5:6AB3:01FF::/64) that we work with.
About the only problem with IPv6, is that they make it difficult for you to get your own provider independent globally routable address space that you can advertise out via BGP. So, for instance, a company can't just (easily) get some address space and advertise it out through the internet - the powers that be want you to get a subnetwork out of your ISPs /32. As a result, we ended up just doing everything in RFC 4193, and, using a relative handful of "globally routable" IPv6 hosts for communicating on the internet from our ISPs /32 space. Our ISP gave us a globally routable /48, and we use about 12 hosts addresses from its possible 2^80 possible addresses. Talk about sparse utilization!
Eventually, as more IPv6 hosts land on the internet, and we want to communicate to them from inside our network, we'll probably just add a IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Prefix Translation (NPTv6), or, more likely, an IPv6 NAT system.
NAT has become so embedded in the Enterprise, and provider independent globally routable addresses assigned to companies so difficult to get, that, the globally routable space will ironically be used for fewer IPv6 hosts in many cases, than it was for IPv4 hosts in many cases.
I realize that this is very controversial, and contrary to what every IPv6 IETF network designer/architect/RFC writer wants to hear, but, in talking with the dozen or so colleagues that I have who are also deploying IPv6, it's seems to be the consensus. NAT has been used for so long, by so many network engineers, that non-routability internal space has become our "goto" strategy for the second layer of defense. (With stateful firewalls, of course, always, always being the first layer)
Indeed, when we tried to move a bunch of our applications to Amazon, they indicated that they were only supporting IPv6 for limited interaction on the internet, and that they weren't supporting IPv6 for their internal networks - really embedding the Proxy/NAT concept for AWS applications. Which is a shame, because we'd love to move a lot of our IPv6 applications into AWS.
But it reads juuuuust slightly more complex than IPv4 does... it's just that side of difficult to comprehend. I think this is the true human factor behind the lack of adoption.
It's huge, like looking at all the stars in the sky, but bigger. Just the switch from numbers between 1-255 to hex codes and the more of them... it's that much more of a barrier to use and adoption.
Any ideas to simplify my own understanding of IPv6? I took the HE.net certification courses, which are excellent, but it's hard to make it stick. How do we make this intelligible so that everyone can be comfortable using itand ideally, more comfortable than IPv4, so that it becomes preferable? That's the challenge.
TSLA rose on the news despite diluting shareholders is because coupled with the announcement, Elon Musk mentions that he will personally put an additional 100mil into the secondary offer; and general exuberance that TSLA will use the cash for more infrastructure build-out, a la Google, Yahoo during their heyday's. Make no mistake, this is as much a PR ploy by Tesla to pump up their offering.
It's incredibly smart for Musk and company to raise money in a very favorable environment as TSLA climbed from 45 to 90 after earnings. However, it remains to be seen if they can be still profitable. Note that they are still selling each car at a material loss; and only managed to show a profitable quarter by trading green credits they gained from their manufacturing. To truly scale, they need to either drive down the production cost of their cars down and broaden their market as there are only so much supply of carbon-emission credits on the market.
Disclosure: I trade TSLA options on volatility, without any directional bias.
The DOE loan was an attractive low-interest loan. Why would they repay it early?Because the DOE loan had restrictive agreements that prevented Tesla to stay competitive.
From page 44 of their May 10th Quarterly Report SEC Filing:
"Our DOE Loan Facility documents contain customary covenants that include, among others, a requirement that the project be conducted in accordance with the business plan for such project, compliance with all requirements of the ATVM Program, and limitations on our and our subsidiaries ability to incur indebtedness, incur liens, make investments or loans, enter into mergers or acquisitions, dispose of assets, pay dividends or make distributions on capital stock, prepay indebtedness, pay management, advisory or similar fees to affiliates, enter into certain affiliate transactions, enter into new lines of business and enter into certain restrictive agreements. These restrictions may limit our ability to operate our business and may cause us to take actions or prevent us from taking actions we believe are necessary from a competitive standpoint or that we otherwise believe are necessary to grow our business. In addition, our DOE Loan Facility also contains a variety of customary financial covenants, including covenants related to current ratio, leverage ratio, interest coverage ratio and fixed charge coverage ratio. We modified certain of these covenants in February 2012, September 2012, and again in March 2013."
"ONLY AMERICAN CAR COMPANY TO HAVE PAID BACK GOVERNMENT"
I'm not so sure Elon isn't writing his own copy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/us-tesla-stock-idU...
I'm not a market economics kind of guy but I don't see how this is any kind of special achievement. Surely any other car manufacturer could have done precisely this?
If the government had not provided this loan Tesla would have gone bankrupt and the US would have lost a significant high-tech asset. 99% of the time the market is more efficient than government, but that other 1% counts for a lot.
Regardless of how they raised the money the had a debt that they needed to pay and they did which is more then i can say about most companies."Tesla will be the only American car company to have fully repaid the government."
All other companies only care about their stock and how to make more money the last thing on their mind is paying back their debts and the government lets them get away with it because their "too big to fail".
Let me tell you something ...there's no such thing that is the result of their bad decisions and if they don't fail they will repeat the same mistakes again and again because they can.
On the other hand, when brand value (save Ford) for the domestics is strikingly low, maybe he's throwing punches exactly when he needs to.
Unlimited. Hu keep hu-sing tha word. I do-na think it mean wha you think it mean.
Its looks nice and all, but these kind of WebGL demos arent all that impressive anymore now that we have seen things like the unreal engine running in the browser. http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/
There isnt really alot you cannot do with WebGL today. If i showed you this as a compiled C++ demo, most probably wouldnt be impressed.
Minor feedback, it seemed like the instructions would disappear before I had a chance to read them...maybe just me. Quick enough to figure out though.
Graphics look great and everything feels smooth, hope they make a game out of it.
Granted, I'm on 11.10, so perhaps my browser is a bit out of date... still, though, it's kind of nice to see what all the fuss is about. The game played very smoothly for me.
Consider signing up for the alpha, we hope we can let in another round of users soon !
Have any of you tried running it on iPhone 5? I wonder if there were any performance issues (if it worked at all!;).
The link in the upper right corner gives a Drupal PDOException error, though.
I am on the latest version of Opera which I guess is not a modern browser. Perhaps turning down the condescension a notch and changing that "Upgrade" message to "Best works in Chrome" will be a good move. You're a second class citizen on HN if you use anything but Chrome.
This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way?
And the diagonal is larger, nowhere did they mention that larger display means larger display area. So at best the used metric is unintuitive, meaningless and/or underspecified, but that's far from lying. Welcome to the world of advertising.
Their claim is technically true, if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally (this is how TVs are advertised after all), and also pretty meaningless and disingenuous. What I find interesting is that Apple on the other hand rarely seems to focus the message on numbers, even when they have a real numerical advantage.
Frankly between their "Scroogled" campaign and all of their other advertisements, I'm starting to lose a lot of what respect I had for MSFT.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17744.The_Visual_Display_...
I know that sounds a bit snarky, but it sure sounds and feels better than fuzzy math.
You need to make a new account.
Is this some sort of odd way of saying that Microsoft isn't lying in their advertising?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vjl/1806100984/