I've been using App Engine for many projects since 2008. Like any tool, it's not the right tool for every job, but for its intended use cases, it's great. Being able to click Deploy, and not have to deal with sys admin is really convenient.
The one area where App Engine falls a bit short is lack of support for some widely used libraries like Numpy. It would be nice if The Google would add support for those (support for some transcoding libraries would be nice as well). Even better would be an interface to TensorFlow.
Brian - the new "Flexible Environments" (aka Docker aka Managed VMs) give you Numpy, python3, native libraries and more. I took my latest project into production with it, and it's been pretty painless.
Great movie, novel and series. The terms in the movie are either rebirth, the promise of being reborn as a machine raised baby (a belief) or winning renewal when you touch the rainbow unharmed, extra time to your life. Rebirth is an eufemism for being obligatory zapped (or obligatory dying by a pleasurable gas in the novel), can you even win renewal in the deadly carrousel?
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/22080/what-did-the-...
They should probably rebrand as SpammedIn. The only people I hear from there are recruiters, and not very good ones as they don't even seem to bother to read my profile. I occasionally find its useful for tracking down people I want to get in touch with, though I can usually find their email pretty easily via other means. It's sad, because it could have been a really useful tool for networking and exchanging information.
What really gets me are the people who complain about being able to fly across an entire continent within five hours in near perfect safety for a few hundred dollars.
I remember being trapped next to a loud woman on one flight where she proceeded to complain about every minor insult (slow drink service, so so food, etc). When we got to the Sierra Nevada, I pointed out the Donner Pass to her, and suggested she look it up. "It'll give you some perspective on your trip".
I once had an acquaintance who was a doctor on the psych ward at a public hospital. He got off on having power over patients and would talk about how he liked locking them up. He also had no respect at all for medical confidentiality and would gossip about patients. Fortunately, he got fired from that job and no longer works with patients.
A modest proposal: if you are a Googler, lobby to have the clocks on Android phones display local time with UTC in small print below (or wherever makes sense in the UI). A political solution is a non-starter, but if this change can be quietly pushed out to millions of users, people will get used to the idea of UTC.
IMHO, UTC = "Business Time", so if people just got in the habit of using UTC for conference calls, travel, etc, that would be a win. Local time will probably never go away, we are too used to the idea of solar time.
This times 100. A bad tenant can cost you tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention peace of mind. I once had one who lied about owning my property to have a 60 year old tree cut down. It was a nightmare (it turned out he had sued his previous landlord in a bogus sexual harrassment and basically extorted a hundred grand from an elderly woman).
I would much rather have someone who pays less, but is financially and mentally stable. So yeah, rents will drop pretty fast once the market softens.
SF in particular is a unique market because you have one population that is hell bent on staying here, and another that is primarily here for work opportunities. The latter population will clear out pretty quick once the work starts to dry up.
Licensed pilot here (learned to fly in 1987). People need to look at self-driving cars in the way pilots use an auto-pilot.
Auto-pilot is most useful in two situations. 1) long cross country legs where there is not much flying to do (just maintain heading and altitude), so A/P frees the pilot up to manage other systems, enjoy the view, etc, and alleviates fatigue, 2) flying a precision instrument approach, reducing the risk that the pilot will succumb to spatial disorientation in the setup for (usually manual) landing.
With cars, auto-drive capability will be useful in reducing accidents in two modes: 1) long duration highway driving where fatigue is a big issue, 2) intervening to prevent a distracted driver from causing an accident (rear end collision etc).
I'd be perfectly happy with a car that can drive itself in cruise mode on the interstate, but requires an alert driver on local roads (with the added bonus that if I am about to slam into something, it will brake to avoid or lessen the impact).
Something for the liability crowd to consider, self driving cars won't be able to avoid every potential mishap, but they will be able to reduce their severity. A car that can automatically brake to reduce its speed by 25% just before impact, will reduce its kinetic energy by roughly half, and the potential for injury by more still.
This is a very insightful comment, from a person who has first hand user experience with self-navigation systems. Sadly, if you dare utter blafphemy against the Almighty God of Technology, bad karma will happen to you.
This is even against the hacker spirit. We loathe IDEs and cherish emacs/vi close to our hearths because what we want from automation is augmentation of human capabilities, not self mutilation + prostaethics. How can people not accept that the same formula can work best for cars?
Your comment made me think: Could driverless cars kill the domestic airline industry?
If I could get from NY to Florida in less than a day in my driverless car, and at sub-$2-gas, who would want to do the security check-in, luggage ripoff, flight delay thing when going less than 1000 miles?
The fact is that auto-pilot cars, as you describe them, won't be nearly as revolutionary as self-diriving cars. The latter would allow people to put to good use the time to commute to work; they would improve car-sharing to the point that people would not need a personal car and parking could become a problem of the past; they would allow you to get back home safely after some drinks; eventually people would not need to learn to drive at all. The mere augmentation of human drivers, as useful as it would be, would not change much in our habits
I made a similar comment elsewhere in the thread before reading yours.
I think the evolution of self-driving cars will be through the gradual improvement of auto-pilot cars until the human just has to sit there and do nothing 99% of the time (but still be legally in control).
