That's obviously wrong. The Chrome beta was over two years ago, and you can bet V8 didn't just appear overnight. Chrome is older than its 1.0. Not to mention that it's based on WebKit, which has been in development for a decade (if you start from KHTML).

"Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school. Rejection sucked.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."

That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come. This wasn't some magic island in a beer commercial where all the ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.

"Try again, man," Curtis urged. "C'mon. Don't give up so easily." "

She hadn't realized the sheer amount of rejection most men experience on a day-to-day basis in interacting with women. I suspect most women don't; I also suspect that most men don't understand how many implicit or explicit sexual offers many women get every day, and how that can become wearying too. In dealing with what I'd call the facts of dating life, Vincent says this:

"How do you handle all this fucking rejection?" I asked Curtis when we sat back down for a postmortem.

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn't particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. 'How do you get so many girls to go out "with you?' He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: 'I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it's that ten percent.'"

And this isn't true only of dating life, but of startup life and many other fields (including my own: writing). I actually teach a chapter of Self-Made Man to my freshmen (I'm a grad student in English at the U of Arizona), and part of the reason I do it is for what she says about rejection (and about empathy).

Most of the comparisons between men and women in startups, ability, and so forth are, I think, complete bullshit. But I do wonder if men don't have an advantage in persistence because of early dating experiences, where if they're to have any success whatsoever they must learn to accept and cope with rejection. This isn't because men are somehow born to be more persistent, but I think that, by the time they've been through at least a couple of relationships in which they have to be the ones who make the first move, they begin to get the idea that a) rejection is okay and b) they need a thick skin.

(See the Amazon link to Self-Made Man if you're curious: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year-Disguised/dp... . If you want the chapter I teach to my freshmen, from which the above quotes are drawn, send me an e-mail -- seligerj [at] gmail [....dot...] com)

"SQL (the language) and SQL RDBMS implementations (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc) have been the one-size-fits-all solution for data persistence and retrieval for decades."

This is completely untrue.

For instance some RDBMS systems are purely in-memory. Some are optimized for SSDs. Some are forced persistence, where durability is job #1.

With an RDBMS you have the option to use bounding (and expensive) transactions. Or you might not.

You have the option to normalize. Or to denormalize. Or to store all of your data in a giant table that is nothing but a varchar. Or to find some balance in between.

RDBMS systems have supported loose replication for many years -- see replication in SQL Server, with multiple masters, conflict resolution, and as much decoupling as you'd like.

You have always had the option of choosing and picking your style of ACID with the classic RDBMS.

The RDBMS solution was never a one-sized fits all solution. Some would then argue that either you use them as a fully-transaction, ACID, fully-normalized stack or you're "effectively using NoSQL", which is utter bunk that defies reason.

That particular bit of NoSQL advocacy has always derailed the conversation because it isn't factually correct and turns it into a religious argument.

Then there's the RDBMS are some rusty, approach-

"The SQL databases we’re using today were designed over a decade ago. They were written with the constraints of 1990s hardware in mind: storage is cheap, memory and cpu are expensive."

This, and the conclusions drawn out of this, are so extraordinarily wrong that I don't even know where to begin. It's yet another example of trying to twist reality show how the RDBMS has rusted, but it's completely in defiance of reality.

The weak point of the RDBMS chain has virtually always been I/O -- getting lots of IOPS has always been a problem, and it is virtually always the weak link in most database operations. IOPS to the disk matter because most database systems don't consider the job of a transaction done until the operations have been confirmed completed to the disk.

Storage has never been cheap (despite the absurd claims in this article). It has always been the most expensive part of the equation! To get a decent platform to run a moderate sized database on is almost always the most prohibitive part of the equation, with ridiculously expensive rigs from high end SAN providers.

But of course we now have SSDs. Limited IOPS have been the Achilles heal of the RDBMS, especially for those who heavily normalize (it's an option in some scenarios), but SSDs move us from 100 IOPS per disk to 15000+ IOPS. If anything, the RDBMS was designed for tomorrow's computer.

And for the record, at this very moment -- when I pulled up HN for a distraction -- I'm working on a MongoDB solution. Despite my appreciation of the product, I have a strong, very strong, dislike for misleading propaganda. The RDBMS has some serious downsides, but manufacturing a new reality to sell alternatives isn't the best approach.

The entire project is based on Apple's WebKit, which was a cross-platform, arguably best-of-breed browser toolkit on the day they started.

Lars Bak, the architect of V8, has been working on language technologies since the early 90s, including Smalltalk.

A key Chrome team member, Ben Goodger, had already been working on browsers since the Netscape era, and was an early participant in Firefox.

There really are no miracles in software. People used to talk about "Netscape time" or marvel at how Google seemed to come out of nowhere. But even in those cases you can see how prior to those projects becoming household words, they had a long gestation period, during which time they were protected from competition. Netscape included a lot of people from the earlier NCSA Mosaic effort. Google was an academic project that, as an economic entity, grew up in the sheltering shadow of Yahoo.

I'm not saying these people didn't work hard, or aren't brilliant, or don't deserve their success. It's just that whenever you see someone moving much faster than is normally considered possible, don't assume that it's only due to skill. It's far more likely that they had some history of working on the problem, for far longer than you think.