jamie

(Hi - I'm an engineer at Slack -- reposting from our chief product officer Rob Seaman):

"This was a mistake. We're fixing it. We appreciate you, Hack Club, along with all of you that are Slack users following along :heart:."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45291980

Worth following the development of cockroachdb https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach

The long term goals of that project seem to align.

Interesting when read right after this from another z16z partner: http://bhorowitz.com/2013/10/08/cash-flow-and-destiny/

The folks behind this project know Django really well - I've recommended this to people a number of times.

That's true; there are lots of different paths people can take into PM, and you'll find all types.

Like engineers, there is such a thing as a 10x product manager. I hope everyone at some point gets to work with an outstanding product manager.

Maybe the original poster will make an outstanding product manager. It's certainly worth exploring.

+1 on this one. The best product managers I've ever met were former engineers who were good developers, but wanted something broader. That background (and a true love of technology) will make you a stellar product manager. But, be sure you really love the technology industry and are ready to give up day-to-day coding.

Product management, when done right, complements development and is a great career path for well-rounded individuals.

Inflation since 1999 should easily tip you over the $1B mark :-)

It's even worse than that:

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2005/corp_011205.html

Airespace wireless for $450MM.

Same here - I'll never recommend them, and have actively discouraged people from using or investigating them.

They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.

That sound you hear is a giant checkbook opening in the direction of Pintrest. The parallels with Google Video and Youtube shouldn't be lost on anyone.

FB has been doing cool type/print related projects for awhile. They've been showing up on For Print Only for a couple of years. Very cool stuff:

http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2009/12/faceb... http://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2011/05/presi...

You might like tastypie: https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie

I think that's a different project; probably this: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76191543919

I think you're thinking of this: http://haystacksearch.org/

I think both of these links illustrate that errors happen, mistakes happen, software has bugs, and murphy's law always strikes. The question is, when it strikes, do you have enough control to fix the problem? If you've outsourced the solution, does the provider have enough control/knowledge to fix the problem?

These things will get much worse before they get better, and it's best to think of all these abstractions as being a double edge sword.

Don't forget about this: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/15/joyen...

This is fantastic news. I worked at IronPort prior to the Cisco acquisition, and Scott was a very effective CEO. IronPort was a significantly under-reported success story in the Valley, and a tremendous place to work. There was a huge emphasis on building out not just a great technology company, but a great company culture.

This sounds like an excellent addition to AH!

Slow is being charitable. It's molasses.

This is what the docs say:

About emulator performance

Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer and the WXGA screen is significantly larger than what the emulator normally handles, emulator performance is much slower than usual.

In particular, initializing the emulator can be slow and can take several minutes, depending on your hardware. When the emulator is booting there is limited user feedback, so please be patient and continue waiting until you see the home screen appear.

We're working hard to resolve the performance issues in the emulator and it will improve in future releases. In the meantime, we wanted to give developers access to new APIs and an basic test environment as early as possible.

Keeping in mind that performance on the emulator does not reflect the speed or performance of apps on actual devices running Android 3.0, developing and testing on the emulator is still an important tool in evaluating your application's appearance and functionality on the new platform.

I actually think there's quite a bit of potential for the Kinect, but it's really hampered by one giant bug:

It's an xbox.

The whole experience still screams "I'm a hardcore game device". Hell, it's called an "XBOX" for crying out loud. That doesn't sound warm and fuzzy. When you unbox it, you still need to use the xbox controller with it's intimidating array of input buttons, pads, triggers, and sticks. Most people are going to be scared and intimidated by that.

If you power it up, you're going to be confused by xbox live. You're going to be confused by how many accounts you need to create. You're going to be confused by the number of options.

You're going to be intimidated by ads for Call Of Duty.

You're going to be confused what is an arcade game and what is a demo.

In short, as much polish there is on the Kinect, it can't overcome the fact that it's a bolt-on product for an Xbox. If it was a brand-new, $199 device it would fly off the shelves. What it needs is a 60 second demo: when you have a friend over, you need to be able to turn on the device and be playing Kinect 60 seconds later without ever seeing the xbox controller.

  build software that people want to use instead of 
  software that managers want to buy

It seems that people have learned this lesson. Marketing folks even have a term for it: The Consumerization of IT. Spend some time around Gartner reading folk, and you'll hear it incessantly. http://www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_138285_11.html

Of course, now we have real success stories to point to. The iPhone's enterprise adoption is generally driven by normal folks, and the blackberry driven by managers.

I thought this was Saul Griffith's startup, but I see no mention of him on the about page. At his Long Now talk last year, I recall him talking about Makani as being his new effort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Griffith

Saul seems totally awesome; his Long Now talk "Climate Change Revisited" was a fantastic survey of alternative energy solutions, and how no one was the answer, but that a cocktail of solutions is. His ability to put big numbers in context was stunning, especially his equating of industrial output in the US pre-WWII to the effort required to build wind turbines to cover half the usage of the current US electricity grid.

Here's the video of the talk: http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...

Yea, and I doubt that the footers lawyers append to every email mean much in terms of disclosure, but that doesn't stop law firms from trying it anyway.

I think read receipts fall into the category of "good faith effort", and not much more.

Excluding the graphics company, it sounds like they're trying to build out an application suite that makes it easy to keep firing up new vmware nodes as you grow.

My guess is what you're seeing is the slow buildout of a platform to provide the enterprise with it's own app store.

Think about it this way: what's a huge risk to VMWare's business? Customers deciding that moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud because the scaling and uptime requirements are too expensive to do in house.

Every company that moves their Exchange mailboxes to Google Apps is a lost VMWare customer.

This is in the Summer Of Code roadmap:

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in-google-summe...

My guess is that a lot of this infrastructure is to support them moving to new technologies while the old ones are in place. Changing the engine while the car is in motion requires a lot of piecemeal engineering work, and I think you're seeing that effort here.

Yes, but more importantly, this should allow concurrency to the database. You can now have multiple writers to the same underlying database.

Previously, I believe SQLITE would lock the entire database any time you accessed it.

It's roughly comparable to innodb in that it's ACID compliant.

MyISAM doesn't support transactions or transaction logging, so it's not as durable as INNODB or BDB.

This is an awesome shootout! Be careful with BDB, its default tuning is geared more towards an embedded environment then a modern web-app. That's not to say it can't go fast!

I took a look at your BDB demo and saw that you weren't creating the DBs in an environment, which meant every operation was straight to disk, and also meant that you weren't running with write-ahead logs (which will give you durability). I didn't look too closely to see if the other databases had caching enabled or not (or what their defaults were).

On my macbook air, configuring with caching (and no logging) yielded this from your benchmark:

Air:kvtest jamie$ ./bdb-test Running test ``test test'' PASS Running test ``write test'' Ran 284669 operations in 5s (56933 ops/s) PASS

Of course, page caching makes all the difference :-)

BDB has some great sample code, I'd recommend taking a look at: examples_c/ex_env.c (http://www.fiveanddime.net/berkeley-db/db-4.3.28/examples_c/...)

I really wish BDB had more sensible defaults, I think it unfairly gets a black-eye in performance shootouts.

Also, it would be a throwback to how people worked before laptops. If you've ever been in a meeting where 20 people sit around a conference table and talk over their laptops, you'll recognize that as much value the laptop brings to the meeting; it's distracting having a physical object that's 11" tall blocking your body and attention.

I liked it better when people showed up to meetings with paper notebooks.

Surprisingly, it sounds like some of the guesses aren't too far off from the Microsoft Courier concept. I have to say, some of the ideas in that concept of a persistent, everyday computing device sound compelling. Something half way between an interactive moleskin and a kindle.

http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsof...

I wouldn't be surprised to see apple co-opt some of the interactions of a physical notebook. It would fold up in fit in a small messenger bag pretty easily.

Talk about burying the lede! From the last paragraph of the article:

"The issue became pressing to me personally when I nearly mowed down, in my car, a teenage boy crossing West End Avenue."