tybris

Why? There are people who might enjoy this. How does this bother you?

Interesting, but a big risk is that generic interfaces/software will limit functionality and lead to suboptimal performance. Amazon can roll out a new kind of hyper-advanced SSD-based database with some awkard custom interface any day of the week because they control the hardware, software, and API. You just cannot do that if your software runs in hundreds of different environments you cannot control.

Maybe I can't tell whether the author is being ironic, or maybe I'm just old, but this is what we did in the past (10-15 years ago). Turned out to be noisy, unreliable, more expensive than you might think, and generally inconvenient, so hosting companies grew.

Once you master GWT you can really be very productive in it, while allowing you to:

-Write statically-typed code

-Maintain large projects using packages and OOP

-Use unit testing, code generation, and refactoring tools

-Use many Java libraries out-of-the-box or with minor modifications (this part I often find mind-boggling)

-Write code that works on server and client (also mind-boggling)

-Ignore the DOM, just use widgets

-Ignore the vast majority of cross-browser issues

-Get great IDE support

-Readily deploy apps in servlet containers like GAE or Elastic Beanstalk

-Get very performant, minimized production code

-Get help implementing best practices such as safehtml

-Interleave with JavaScript

Main drawbacks are that there are few well-maintained widget libraries, compiler takes forever, Google has been a bit reluctant to expand JRE emulation, and the script format is a bit annoying. Java is also not a great asynchronous language since it lacks anonymous functions. However, if slightly uglier looking code really concerns you, you probably don't have your priorities straight.

I don't really know what the point of Dart is. I suspect it is being promoted more out of legal concerns over Oracle than out of technical merit.

That dashboard sucks, but Twitter being a faster, more reliable source of news is true for most things now.

So my brain uses base64 encoding? Didn't see that coming.

When did Unix stop being a product of Bell Labs?

Apple should really use their vast piles of cash to buy one of the major carriers.

Why? These robots look pretty simple and have no problem going up stairs.

The only purpose I can see for this is another advertising channel.

No different from C / Java / most others.

You generally don't delete files from a CDN. They just get evicted when they are the least recently used, which may never happen if the URL is still in circulation.

Facebook may have set near-infinite Expires/Cache-control headers on their static content, since it never gets overwritten. In that case, the CDN never goes back to the origin to check if the file is still there. The CDN they are using probably does have the ability to explicitly remove files (e.g., to respond to DMCA take-down notices), but probably doesn't have the ability to do this at Facebook picture deletion scale.

In other words, Facebook probably can't do much about it unless they get the CDN provider to make a big investment, build their own CDN, or switch to another provider that does support it (usually a costly decision).

This sounds bold, but I think the success of Khan academy is simply due the fact that Sal Khan is a brilliant man, and so is Sebastian Thrun. The best teachers provide the best teaching experience, and the Internet allows everyone to have this experience.

What if our entire view of history today is misguided or very much incomplete because of similar events that occurred in the past when there was hardly any redundancy of information?

Big Data, yes. Big Conclusions, no.

Stanford.

Respond to what? The ramblings of an employee who left over 5 years ago? That hardly seems necessary.

Yegge in 2006: "I was at Amazon for just under seven years, incidentally. Great place to work. I recommend it."

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/blog-rants

Funny that he's praising IBM for something as meaningless as a YTD stock price change, and then goes on to complain about Amazon and conveniently ignores that its stock price outperforms IBM at every level.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ibm+vs+aapl+vs+amzn

Larry's on a spending spree.

Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge left centuries ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in. You should base your decision on your internship.

By good, you mean a lot of Chinese that made the Tibetans a discriminated minority in their own country? Look! We built you a railroad! Oh, you don't have money to use it because we have all the jobs? Too bad!

The reason the West likes Tibet is that for the brief moment of clarity that the end of World War 2 brought (that also led to the EU, the UN, welfare, etc.), we saw that Tibet was the one place that had found the right culture to avoid the horrors that were bestowed upon Europe. Then China came in and destroyed that culture and went on to inflict horrors of similar magnitude.

In general, everything is getting X. By some definition of X.

Best is a term that suggests there is no subjectivity to preference.

I don't know of it's so huge for corps. They tend to not mind spending the extra money to get EC2 + RDS in return for reduced lock-in, an environment you can control, and serious SLAs.

> I don't agree, I believe the compuation is straightforward

That is, until you do them in parallel...

You don't patent something because you built it. You patent something because you think someone else might build it, or because you don't want someone else to prevent you from building it.

My uncle's Google account was just shut down after they asked his age (for "personalization") and he filled in 1-1-2000, which is under 18. He had to send them a copy of his passport to reopen the account.

Glad to know the over 5000 fictional insect species I've drawn over the years were not completely useless. However, I find talking to myself / a figment of my imagination is even more effective at keeping me concentrated. Unfortunately, there are not many places where that is appropriate.

Though strangely enough, the per-capita contribution of Germany is lower than that of Ireland.

It seems that things always get pretty dirty when Oracle is involved, but maybe they're just being honest.