kennystone

They shot a live torpedo at FDR. Not the usual.

Really smart from Mozilla; they leverage trust in their brand with a product for which trust is the most important feature. Making a VPN is a non-trivial technology project, but it's pretty straightforward how to do it well.

George Pullman made a town outside of Chicago for workers to build his railcars. It didn't end well:

"the town and its design were... a paternalistic system that took away men's rights as citizens, including the right to control their own domestic environment"

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1030.html

Happy that google is making this investment; it's worth a shot even if it is far the ideal way to build housing. Hopefully the NIMBYism that defines this area won't kill it.

The queues at stores have always been the worst part of the experience. You put stuff in a bag, which is effectively a queue, then you wait in a line - a human queue, then you de-queue your cart on a belt, which is another queue, it gets scanned item by item and then placed right back into a similar bag to where it started. Good job Amazon for finally working to eliminate the queues.

Many of the staples of the Western diet simply haven't been around for longer than 15,000 years (agriculture), many in fact less than 100 years (heavily processed foods). It's not about ancestors all eating the same thing; it's about the fact we've introduced tons of new things, some we can handle and some we can't (and it probably varies per person).

This is not true at all. Apps on Heroku are built on open source software (Rails, Postgres, etc). You can always decide to host it all yourself without too many issues.

checkout wellnessfx... affordable, nice design, pretty easy (although they use a big needle), and they track results over time.

San Francisco, CA; PlanGrid (YC W12); Looking for engineers in SF

We’re a small team of construction engineers, software engineers, and ex-rocket scientists, building intuitive, beautiful tablet apps for construction. We love disrupting an industry that makes up 11% of Global GDP because no one ever cared to do so (for comparison, defense is only 2.5% of global GDP). Our users are project engineers, architects, superintendents, and electricians, and they love our app (because it helps them build real things more efficiently). We're looking for front-end engineers with a passion for making beautiful intuitive products. Our front-end tech is iOS, Android, and backbone.js. You will be our twelfth team member and sixth member of engineering.

We've been around for a year and we're growing fast. Unlike a lot of early stage startups, we measure our growth in revenue, not users, and it's been exponential since the day we launched.

Competitive salary, equity, company engineering retreats to Mexico (this years location:http://i.imgur.com/kEiI2ej.jpg), and an office next to a beer garden (Hayes Valley, SF).

Send your info to: jobs@plangrid.com

"deliver by" would be even better

If you have 2 unicorn servers and you happen to get 3 slow requests routed to it, you are still screwed, right? Seems to me like it will still queue on that dyno.

The bug has been there for 6 years and is present in virtually ALL deployed versions of Rails. Bugs happen (and they are certainly more common in dynamic frameworks like Rails)

foursquare pretty famously uses Mongo, and they handle a ton of data.

Beautiful app. They've clearly been working on this a long time.

Pretty awesome, seems Minefold is evolving from a Minecraft specific service to a heroku-like platform for games (and Heroku started with just Rails, of course).

Eating isn't the problem. The problem is making decisions throughout the day. It takes willpower to say no and ask tough questions, and your willpower gets drained through the day.

It's not simple if your friends aren't already in your social network. The link will work for anyone you send it to.

Between Mongo and Heroku, we've been able to stay small and super focused on functionality, which is by far the best use of our time. Paying these guys a few hundred$ a month is just way cheaper than my engineering team spending mind share on being good database admins.

Being able to write files to a filepicker url - which ends up in a users cloud account - is very powerful stuff. We're using it to automatically sync zip files that take a long time for us to process. Having a very easy to use layer of abstraction for all these cloud APIs is brilliant.

the products were front and center in the video

Looking up state and dealing with race conditions is way more complex than fire and forget, imo.

This is so much more easily solved by just sending the JSON document of the user in the message to the worker. A database look is not necessary, a transactional record lookup based on ID is overkill.

Getting customer data into your system is harder than it looks. Flash uploaders are pretty crappy, but you need them for IE users and direct to S3. Flash is broken for mobile, of course, as is the whole 'upload from computer' concept. Box, DropBox, Google Drive, flickr, and everything else is extremely popular, so if you start implementing all those yourself it adds significant development time and code to maintain. Filepicker has been a huge win for us at PlanGrid.

It won so many adopters because it was simple and pretty. The advanced features are great, but TM won because it didn't have Emacs/Vim learning curve, and it mostly just worked.

Beautiful UI and a great opportunity. The iPad demands to be taken everywhere, and Apple has proven with iWork - Keynote especially - that office apps can be awesome on a tablet. Google's Spreadsheet webapp, on the other hand, is completely unusable on touch devices.

What does the flexibility of the backend file stores buy me? It doesn't seem like I should care as long as it's easy to install.

The tech is funny and most failed at this - we all know small batches or private twitters isn't that hard to do - they won with hustle and sales (and good tech probably).

Quite a few Erlang gotchas in those notes. Fault tolerant systems are really hard to design even when you know what you're doing and are using the best language for it (Erlang). Erlang aside, it seems the higher level architecture may need a rethink if one bad record can bring down the whole thing.

Heroku is really good. You will probably have more downtime than them unless you hire a whole team of operations and admins and pay a lot of money for hosting. It may also take a while to build out the deployment and development tools they have.

Yeah it suits Harvest perfectly but as a general purpose library is has some big limitations.

Most of that graphic is about a classic web stack - only one branch is rails. Still, a nice visual representation of how hard the job is.