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chesh

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My passions are: APIs, startups, stock investing, travel, skiing, Barcelona, my wife and three kids.

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We love Nginx for its incredible performance and resilience. It is the core technology for the API Gateway as part of 3scale's API Management platform. The base performance is amazing. For high end throughput scenarios companies often scale by adding more servers rather than by performance tuning. In our experience the ROI is dramatically higher in the latter. Amplify is a critical tool to view visibility into the bottlenecks and which parameters can be tuned.

I don't have a view one way or another on the scientific accuracy of the report. Anecdotally though I live in Europe and gluten intolerance seems just a fraction of the issue it is in the USA. Just look at the gluten-free section in any supermarket, or ask in any restaurant for a gluten-free dish.

This topic surely deserves an extensive scientific investigation to 1) identify any statistically significant difference in gluten-free intolerance, 2) what root causes can explain the difference.

I was so embarrassed at the time of Aaron Swartz that the MIT that had been so good to me, was doing so much evil. They allowed a culture of bureaucracy and rules to dominate the values of innovation and principles.

I am pleased that under Reif real changes have been made that seem to be seeing the light with cases like Tidbit. No doubt this was part PR exercise. But behind every PR campaign is also a public affirmation to stake a new path.

Let's hope MIT can continue to return to its roots and set a great example to the tech community.

Why would I believe that any of LogMein's other services like join.me or Cubby will remain free. Join.me is no problem because there is no switching cost. However I would never entrust my files to Cubby because of the risk they pull a fast one like they are doing with LogMein remote access.

They really should have thought this through and figured a way to allow low intensity users (I use it maybe once a quarter) to continue for free.

If you do want to depend on free services be ready to switch easily, or check to make sure that the vendor offers free-for-life.

Nice article with a concise overview of PubSubHubbub and HTTP Subscription Specification. It would be really nice if you could complement it with pointers to some real example of interfaces using one or the other approach. This could help practitioners identify is the better fit for their use case.

Thanks for asking because it reminded me to cross this migration off my ToDo list.

Before checking this I was convinced I would be going with NewsBlur. Based on the positive feedback on Feedly I decided to check that out.

For me Feedly wins hands down. Winning points:

- instant Google Reader import (wow!)

- list view is very similar to the plain GR view

- social rank for URLs based on G+ and FB (I have been looking for a PostRank replacement ever since Google killed my second favorite app)

What I would love to see in future enhancements:

- extend social rank to filter the views (more like Postrank)

- search within posts that I have read

Just by change I had to contact Google Support for a Gmail problem in Google Apps for Business. The initial time to response was more than 24 hours. But after that the support was super proactive and helpful. The agent even phoned me after I emailed to say the ticket could be closed. He explained that the initial 24 hour delay was not normal, and he would flag that.

Overall it seems they are really taking some concrete steps to improve things. It seems from the thread to be patchy depending on what business unit. For example Google Apps has more competition so they cannot afford to be slack.

Sublime Text 3 13 years ago

I love the new ST3. The speed improvements are really compelling. I use it as my default editor for simple text and HTML editing. The stability seems great, so I would not let the beta tag put you off trying the new version. I keep ST2 handy for the more complex tasks.

The main hurdle before I complete the switch is to see all the plugins available for ST3. At the moment using Package Control it is still too much guesswork to figure which plugins are ST3 compatible or not, and many plugins (including Package Control) have to be installed manually. For me the following plugins are still broken (errors on loading the scripts at startup): Http Requester, Tag, SublimeCodeIntel, BracketHighlighter, SublimeLinter, FileDiffs, Alignment, Theme - Soda

ST3 itself is great, I just hope the 3rd party plugins get on board quickly.

I agree completely with the general proposition that APIs are similar to patents in the incentives it creates to open up data (similar to opening up knowledge) while retaining control through the T&Cs (similar to the monopoly granted through patent). The result is also similar in that APIs are spurring a wave of innovation just like we saw in the industrial revolution.

A few points worth bearing in mind: 1) There is no monopoly, so ultimately no API provider can abuse their power without limit 2) This is reinforced by the fact that the API interface itself cannot be patented (though some have tired and disputed it in courts), so one provider can be replaced by another 3) Nevertheless some API providers with strong market power (e.g. Twitter) have trampled on the rights of API consumers (even if they were legally within their rights as described in the T&Cs)

Ultimately it is up to us in the API community to recognize good API practices, and to bring down those API providers who abuse their power.

Extending REST APIs 13 years ago

This is particularly useful you want to encourage mobile developers to adopt your API, and you want to keep the chattiness of calls down.

I recommend this approach to sync config files over Dropbox to get exactly the same editing environment from Win, Mac, and Linux:

1) move the /User folder under "Sublime Text 2/Packages" over to Dropbox/ST2/User

2) in Win goto CMD and from the %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages folder enter: mklink /D "User" "path to\My Dropbox\ST2\User"

3) in Mac OSX/Linux goto the Packages folder (you can find the location under >Preferences>Browse Preferences) and enter: ln -s pathto/Dropbox/Sublime\ Text\ 2/User ./User

The fantastic thing with this setup is that in any new machines, Package Control will automatically take care of installing any missing plugins.

For me the dream team was GReader combined with the PostRank (Chrome Extension) to filter based on social metrics. Unfortunately PostRank was the second most important product that Google is its wisdom (and evilness) decided to shut down. For an idea of the power see: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=tWri7T3f4.... Each row of the GReader would be lighter or darker based on the PostRank or you could simply filter based on minimum PR rating.

The one and only enhancement beyond this would be to integrate an Instapaper-type functionality so I have all my content in one place, whether fed by RSS, or random pages that I tag to read later as I come across them.

Digg is one of the few companies that I could see pull off the social dimension successfully.

Thanks, this is one of the best one-page workflow examples I have seen for Git and Github. Sometimes all the docs are so focused on the power of each command, that they neglect the big picture of how to apply them in real world workflows.

I was a Microsoft Live Mesh user. After the idiotic decision to shut that down in favor of SkyDrive, I decided to just drop Microsoft completely. I had been using Dropbox and Mesh side-by-side. Mesh was unique for syncing files and folders in place, without having to move them to a new place.

Overall I always found Dropbox to be faster and more reliable.

This is missing the most amazing tutorial of the lot, Michael Hartl's http://ruby.railstutorial.org/.

The tutorial itself is a great hands on experience. What really distinguishes it though is the authors embrace of open source. The entire tutorial is available completely FREE in HTML version. I wanted to encourage this forward thinking business model, so I paid for the full eBook/screencast bundle (of course completely DRM-free).

The author continues tirelessly keeping the tutorial up to date with latest versions and security fixes, and also releases those free. The one exception was when he did a second edition. He offered a nice discount for the upgrade, but I was a bit miffed to see early promos matching the upgrade discount. Michael was such a star though, after seeing comments on Hacker News he emailed customers to put things right. He offered a special extra discount, but I was so bowled over by this customer service, and because I wanted to support his wonderful project that I did not take him up on the offer.

Why I love ST2: multi-platform, fuzzy search, plugins, multiple cursors, JSON config files.

My setup:

- Package Control plugin: the very first thing you should setup after installing ST2 (it should really be a part of ST2)

- Next step sync config files over Dropbox to get exactly the same editing environment from Win, Mac, and Linux

  - move the /User folder under "Sublime Text 2/Packages" over to Dropbox/ST2/User

  - in Win goto CMD and from the %APPDATA%\Sublime Text 2\Packages folder enter: mklink /D "User" "path to\My Dropbox\ST2\User"

  - in Mac OSX/Linux goto the Packages folder (you can find the location under >Preferences>Browse Preferences) and enter: ln -s pathto/Dropbox/Sublime\ Text\ 2/User ./User

  - the fantastic thing with this setup is that in any new machines, Package Control will automatically take care of installing any missing plugins
- Keybindings: tons of customizations to suit what I am used to and work across all OS's

- Theme: Soda Dark

- Colors: Made of Code

- My favorite plugins: Alignment, Bracket Highlighter, Emmett, FileDiffs, SublimeCodeIntel, SublimeLinter, Tag

ST2 is the best investment I have made in software apart from open source.

The main reason is that paper money is the biggest ponzi scheme the world has every seen. Every government in the world is coming round to printing more and more of the stuff. We just don't realize how bad the situation is because we are used to comparing the value of our paper dollar with a paper Euro or Yen, and they have all been devalued.

Gold cannot be printed ad infinitum. Each year roughly 2500 tons of the stuff is mined, which adds around 1.5% to the global above ground stock of gold. This 1.5% growth rate is declining, while the amount of new paper money that is created each year is increasing.

Bottom line is it the only real measure of value left in the world.