larubbio

I think you are confusing "demand for cars" with "demand for what a car provides", i.e. transportation from one location to another.

A driverless car isn't necessarily "making cars better" but rather making transportation easier. So the demand for transport may increase while demand for individual car ownership may decrease.

Personally I don't think I'm in favor of a driverless car, and I certainly can't imagine the impact it they will have.

I don't think he said it would reduce the demand for cars, instead his theory is that it would reduce the demand for individual ownership of cars. The demand would probably increase, but be serviced by fewer cars because of more efficient use.

I don't think the situations you put forward and the conclusions you are drawing from them necessarily follow.

In the first example, how often is it that you must communicate with someone far away in an hour without any prior coordination? Assuming that is the case, then wouldn't the NSA also have to intercept, decode, translate and mobilise within less than an hour? In that case using those systems may be fine. Or perhaps use those systems to point your cousin to cryptocat or redphone. Anyway I think there is a difference between what might be used for long term planning vs. the immediate communication scenario you outline.

In the second example, another poster on a different thread worded it much better than I will here, but I don't think it has to be 4+ million people working towards a conspiracy. I think intelligence work is hard. I think people with the best of intentions will always look for a way to make their job easier. Each individual incremental step may seem small and inconsequential, but over time it leads to a massive overreach. One person then looked up to see the forest instead of the trees and felt it was wrong and spoke out. In that scenario it isn't 4+ million in on a conspiracy or one person wanting to see the world burn it's what I think is typical human nature in large organizations over time.

While this is off topic from the NSA story, and the article I'm linking to is from 2009, the conditions for tomato pickers in Florida could be described as slavery with slave masters in the United States. I don't believe things have gotten substantially better for them.

http://boingboing.net/2009/02/26/slavery-among-florid.html

While I didn't work directly on this project, I do work at Grameen Foundation on the open source maternal health system mentioned at the end of the article. (https://code.google.com/p/motech/ and http://www.motechsuite.org/)

I think it is an interesting story about unintended outcomes, the need to experiment, measure and stop when things aren't proceeding as expected. I'd also personally like to see and hear more on hacker news about the use of technology and open source in the non-profit sector so I figured I'd post an article.

Vittana works in a very similar way except they are focused exclusively on helping to fund education.

http://www.vittana.org/

King County is very large and a lot of it is rural or forest service land. I know Seattle owns a lot of land in the Cedar river watershed since that is the city's water supply. I'd guess somewhere out there is the farthest spot.

I wish I could track down the source for this, I think I heard it once at a conference. In regards to Coke vs. Pepsi, Pepsi is sweeter so when tasted in a small amount people tended to choose the sweeter drink. However when people have a full can the extra sweetness was a turn off.

Full disclosure, I'm heading up the backend development for Zipline Games Moai Cloud (http://getmoai.com/). We're targeting game developers so that lead us to some different use cases and language choices (like Lua).

Thanks for sharing this, at first read through it sounds a lot like the architecture mongrel2 provides (which we use). If you were to swap out the node.js dispatcher with mongrel2 and the redis queue with ZeroMQ.

Have you run into any issues using redis as a queue? If it were replicated across machines I wonder if you could have multiple workers dequeuing the request. If it's on a single server wouldn't the blocking operation on the list become a bottleneck?

Again, thanks for sharing, the offering looks great.

Additionally you can look at Moai. (http://getmoai.com) It allows you to write your game logic in Lua and compiles to Android, Native Client and iOS. There also is a hosted cloud that allows you to write your game's backend logic in Lua (I work for Zipline Games and head up the cloud development team)

I work at Zipline Games and we're building out a server side hosted lua system. We're targeting it at game developers, but there is nothing game specific about the lua handlers you can write. You can find out more about it at http://getmoai.com

If you don't want a hosted solution you can look into mongrel2 and tir http://tir.mongrel2.org/

Disclosure: I work at Zipline Games building out our cloud platform. We also have a cross platform game engine that lets you develop in lua. The engine is focused on mobile games so it runs on android, iOs and Chrome native client.

The cloud portion would make an excellent compliment to this since we host a mongo database for you, allow you to write and run your own lua code so you can develop your backend logic in the same language you build your game in. We also provide a set of RESTfull services for common game needs.

Check it out at http://getmoai.com/

Disclosure, I work for Zipline Games on Moai Cloud.

Moai Cloud (http://getmoai.com), while focused on enabling backends for mobile games provides some of what you describe. We use mongo on the backend to provide schemaless storage and are building out a set of RESTful apis. Additionally if you need to you can write and run your own custom code on the server.

Same for me. I then opened facebook in a tab, reran it and it said I had visited every site except facebook.

If you want to run lua in the cloud you can look at moai cloud http://getmoai.com/moai/moai-cloud/ it is targeted at game devs but the cloud piece is straight lua I believe.