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nickbon Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting

Does that account for 6 hours of downtime with minimal information as to what's going on? Good luck with that!

nickbon Google App Engine Broken For 4 Hours And Counting

Nice analogy but like all analogies, it's too simplistic and flawed. You left out one important and critical part: the hypothetical passenger in your example is tied to a specific plane/airline. If you don't like your pilot or plane type, you cannot move to a different airline or request a different plane or a different pilot since you're chained to the specific plane.

Due to Google App Engine's API lock-in, you're stuck with them as a provider... quite possibly forever due to heavy BigTable dependency.

Even though I'm a huge fan of cloud computing, I'd rather use a strategy that uses platforms/planes that are built from reusable parts and allow you to switch your plane/airline provider as you please. Don't like Delta? Just go to AA counter and you don't have to change your luggage, clothing etc.

Until there's a second, GAE-compatible, ISV provider that offers full compatibility with GAE, I'd avoid GAE like a plague.

nickbon How Clemson manipulates their US News ranking

As if they're not using the same techniques... The 'outrage' is probably just a façade. You can bet that they took notes and will be using some of the same strategies when they get back and start having meetings.

nickbon Ask HN: Would you pay for these services I'm thinking of building?

#1 will never work well for the simple fact that when people know that they are being asked to pick something without actually going through the mental process of evaluating options and picking a goal, they will not pick in a way that correlates with a larger population that doesn't know it's being tested.

The best way to test something is to try it on people that actually want something and voluntarily are picking something and going towards a goal... and don't know they're being tested. The proof is in the pudding: if the copy works better than a control, it should produce a sale/signup/whatever.

Asking a bunch of people who are working for pennies if they want to buy some product that they have no clue about and are not in the market for, based on a copy they don't even understand well, is a waste of money and would even do you some damage since your customers might be more sophisticated.

Now, if you positioned it for simple, general websites, it might work better. But then again, those sites are not high paying customers.

PS: Look into Google Optimizer: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

nickbon Bypass the internet for large transfers: AWS Import/Export

About 3 months ago, I needed >50Gb of data uploaded to AWS and I asked a friend of mine who works at Amazon for help. He asked around and told me to mail the external storage to Amazon with keys/bucket info and a special code. I UPSed the stuff and within 2 days of arrival, I received an email with a notification that the transfer was done. Later on, I got the storage back. Everything worked as advertised!

I guess there's so much demand for this sneakernet that they made an official service. I wonder how many other people asked for transfer help before today's announcement...

nickbon Ever notice how the page refreshes every time you highlight something on posterous?

Get rid of it.

   sudo echo "127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com" >> /etc/hosts

nickbon The First Digg Developer Dispels the Myths Surrounding Digg & Startups in General

Excellent interview! Congrats Owen.

nickbon Ask HN: Free Monitoring tools other than Pingdom?

Give this a try: http://mon.itor.us/

nickbon Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages

Grady's a smart guy but UML has been an utter failure.

Here's a good summary as to why: http://littletutorials.com/2008/05/15/13-reasons-for-umls-de...

nickbon Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages

or Ruby. Some of the smartest hackers now use Ruby.

nickbon The Code Even the CIA Can't Crack

That's because CIA sucks at cryptanalysis. NSA on the other hand...

nickbon Ask HN: best file manager for OS X?

Try these and see what you like.

PathFinder - http://cocoatech.com/

ForkLift - http://www.binarynights.com/

MacExplorer - http://www.ragesw.com/products/explorer.html (if you like Windows Explorer)

nickbon FireDiff - track changes to a page's DOM and CSS

It's cool but I can't think of a case to use it for. What problem does this solve?

nickbon Update: DiggBar will only be shown to logged-in Digg users

Good one!

What boggles my mind is that they didn't care at all about the user experience when they introduced this monstrosity. Not seeing URLs when browsing Digg completely destroyed my user experience.

I'm guessing more and more people will log out and browse it that way.

nickbon Luke Wrobleski's 1h talk about Web Form Design at MIX09 [mp4]

http://mschannel9.vo.msecnd.net/o9/mix/09/wmv-hq/c17f.wmv

nickbon Google Update Goes Open Source

It's very simple: Google update takes away control from users. This is absolutely the wrong way to handle this.

Say I'm at a coffee shop with wi-fi or using my notebook through a cellular 3G/EDGE network and this update starts downloading a large Google Earth update that I never asked for. Why should I be paying for the charges because Google wants to update their software without telling me?

Another issue is versioning. If I'm working in one version of the software and don't want to use the newer version until others thoroughly test it and fix the critical bugs, why should i be forced to upgrade? I've used a lot of newer versions of software and many were actually worse than their older versions. Again, why should they force users to upgrade? Why not ask?

This Google Update is bad news all around. It installed itself like a virus rootkit on my machine with Google Earth installation and I was never notified (yeah, a note is probably buried deep in a TOC somewhere). Luckily, LittleSnitch told me about it and I removed it from the Launch Daemons... and I also removed Google Earth because of it.

Finally, why should Google get updates about my location at all times? Every time this thing pings their server, my IP is inevitably transmitted to them.

Sparkle does this perfectly. You can completely disable update checking or allow it to check on periodic intervals. And when it finds an update, it informs you with an update window and shows you exactly why it is updating and what was fixed and what more you get. This Ohama thing gives you none of these options and it also runs at all times like a virus.

If MS did this, people would be all over MS. But when Google does it, people defend them.

Any software that adopts this Omaha crap will be blocked from my machine as well.

nickbon Google Update Goes Open Source

Omaha checks for updates in the background, when it won't interfere with the user, even if an application isn't running.

They do the same thing on a Mac and this is why I've blocked it and removed the daemon. Google's explanation for doing it is complete BS. They should do what every other app does: check for updates when you start the app.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/why-googles-sof.html

nickbon Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help

Very cool but the first thought that came to my mind when I saw the video was: 'it's amazing that a bomb squad wasn't called in.'

There is hope!

nickbon John Carmack surprises fans (and his CEO) with Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone

"which makes it "2.5D""

You wasted all those words to say what I said... it's not 3D. :)

PS: I know very well how 3D games work since I co-wrote a commercial 3D engine in 2002-3 and used to teach computer graphics course at a university.

nickbon John Carmack surprises fans (and his CEO) with Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone

People thought you couldn’t do 3D games on the iPhone but here it is running.

Who thought that? Todd never looked at Apple's App Store.

PS: Wolfenstein 3D doesn't have a real 3D engine anyway.

nickbon Daring Fireball: Complex

Simplicity and sophistication of the UI/UX has nothing to do with the simplicity of the overall system. Underlying system is probably more complex because the UI/UX is simpler.

So maybe Gruber should have said that UI is simpler, but not the iPhone. If iPhone is so simple, why aren't other big companies as successful at creating new phones? Clearly, things are not as simple as some people would make you believe.

Also, a jump from Razr or Palm (for example) to iPhone is much bigger than that of iPhone 1.0 to 3.0.

Had Apple released a Razor-like iPhone and then iterated to iPhone 1.0 system over a year or two, I'd buy Gruber's argument. But iPhone was clearly 'from the future' when Apple presented it and everyone else was scrambling to catch up. So Gruber's argument is not really serious.

nickbon Daring Fireball: Complex

>Do you seriously think the iPhone would have been better if Apple had asked people what they wanted?

That has nothing to do with the article's argument that Apple's secret is evolution of simple systems.

As for your point, each approach has its virtues. What works for Apple probably won't work for the rest of us. Apple has hundreds of brilliant designers that create three different pixel perfect designs for each piece of new UI. Three different teams (and all brilliant at what they do) working against each other... how many of us can afford something like that?!

I still contend that Gruber's argument about Apple's secret being simplicity and evolution is bullshit. He probably came across Gall's law and decided to spin it into an article about Apple.

nickbon Daring Fireball: Complex

Initial iPhone was anything but simple! First gen iPhone was YEARS in the making and rests upon decades of Cocoa engineering. Gruber is completely off the mark in that regard and is overplaying his hand. Every company iterates. Even MS iterates and evolves an initial product and you can see that with Windows 7.

There are lots of reasons for success of Apple but the thing he stated isn't one of the major ones. Apple loves to work in vacuum with no user feedback whatsoever since SJ likes to say that 'people don't know what they want until they see it.' To have a truly evolving system, you need to have a user feedback loop and Apple has one of the worst feedback loops in the industry since they almost never act on feedback and when they do, it takes them years.

nickbon Why I Never Let Employees Negotiate a Raise

You've completely misunderstood my point. I'm talking about individual productivity, not a group one.

nickbon Why I Never Let Employees Negotiate a Raise

What a silly rule. This 'equality rule' is why union shops have some of the worst productivity levels in the industry and why union workers have zero incentives to innovate and become more productive. Under this plan, people have no incentives to give more and work harder. Inevitably, the equilibrium for this type of a system is the productivity of the weakest worker.

Sorry but communism just doesn't work.

nickbon At Last: 10x better Electric Sheep client for Mac

These fractals are absolutely stunning! Who created them and where can I find the equations?

nickbon Are You a Seesmic or Balsamiq Entrepreneur?

Most people don't bother about video comments since most of them are by people who are promoting themselves and they're also very low on info density. You can read a paragraph in few seconds and it takes you minutes to get the same thing from a video comment. Video is perfect for teaching but I don't think it's great for quick bursts of communication.

I think video comments are going to be irrelevant in the long run. It's interesting to make a parallel with video phone. Video phone never took off because people didn't want to be bothered with checking how they look before they answer a phone. Fixing hair, shaving, etc... why bother with that?

nickbon Dino Dai Zovi on Mac OS X Eploitation [pdf]

Well, HN has changed over the past 6 months or so. Highly technical stuff doesn't rise up to front page as it used to. My suggestion is to monitor user submission feeds of people you like or share similar interests with. That way you will have a more customized experience and won't be disappointed by some of the front page stories.

But this is a superb presentation about how security in an OS works. I enjoyed it a lot.

nickbon Nginx vs Apache performance

There's no need for Lighttpd when you use Nginx. It can do everything that Lighttpd can do and more (and has no memory leaks).

nickbon [dead]

It's probably a controller for the new press-control surfaces on the cord.

Third parties are already working on iPod shuffle compatible earbuds: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10194769-1.html

PS: Flagged.