skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical Dropbox...

I've been bugging them about a solution to the file limit for at least a year with no response. I finally got a (public) response by tweeting at them. They said they would follow up with me and they never did. Even a "we can't fix this" would be better than the dead air I've received.

I really don't know how they intend to compete with the software giant's similar offerings if it's not via superior customer service.

For anyone not aware of the file count issue you cannot have more than ~300,000 files on dropbox before it totally falls apart. I was paying for 1TB of storage and using about 3% of it when it totally stopped syncing.
This is a very interesting discussion, but I'd like to ask a question about this in particular:

> The short of it is, arrays are king. No two ways about it - following pointers is a losing strategy when there's an alternative.

Why is following pointers a losing strategy? If you have a contiguous array (a vector), then the pre-fetcher can do its magic and give you a psuedo-cache level. (I may be wrong about this assumption).
Athletic budgets are usually completely separate from the rest of the school.
I have had problems on the Mac and to some extent Windows as well. Generally the fix has been to totally close Dropbox, clear out the Dropbox cache, which is a set of hidden files somewhere (look in their support pages or Google for it) and then re-install the Dropbox application. It more than likely will do a full re-index and this is an absolute pain and CPU hog when it happens. If you have a lot of files, it can day half a day to a full day.

I'm not sure exactly what happens, but my guess is that somehow an index in it's internal database gets corrupted and then it sits in a loop there for some reason whenever it hits that file/folder.

We have used Dropbox extensively in our office across Windows & OSX for at least 2 years and have had this periodically (and randomly) happen on some machines. Although I can't recall it happening in the last 6 months or so.

There was a period where it happened almost fortnightly to someone in the office and we almost swore off Dropbox to something else.

The above has always fixed the issue for us. YMMV.
The British government gave Charles Babbage the 1830s equivalent of 2.4 million USD to come up with a more efficient way of making printed logarithmic tables, which Babbage never managed to accomplish.
> Nontraditional students add minimal administrative overhead.

Do you have any evidence either way? Both sides are just claiming this as a fact. The actual numbers can decide this.

(Even if the non-trad students do cost more, there may be good reasons to spend the money. I'm not arguing either way. I just want to see these opposing claims supported).
So it didn't save you a click after all; you still had to do additional research because the snippet doesn't give you all the background information. You've just validated the very point I was making.

The snippet doesn't mention the changing relationship between the FTC and FCC. Or how the senate is getting involved. The article nicely packages up all this related information and more into a narrative that is easy to read, so why not just read it?
Interfaces will end up like debuggers. Functional folds over explicit sophisticated state.
Using Wayland from Rust, Part 1
Is it the most common scenario in development? Seems to me you've got it backwards. You've confused consumers of websites with numbers of developers.

For example I see far more job adverts for internal tools developers, which are going to be by and large desktop only, than mobile-first website developers.

So I'd have thought the number of desktop only web app developers vastly outnumber the number of mobile-first web developers. I think you're wrong with the word 'some'. Most is the word you should be looking for.

Don't forget you're emulating a phone without touch. It's useful, but it's only part of a mobile testing process. So you're making what is a fairly broken process the 'focus', which seems pretty odd.

Mobile is also feature poor compared to desktop so generally needs less testing. It's the less intense part of any site because of the form factor. That's why you're not playing Fallout 4 on your mobile, you've got a little companion app for it instead.

Finally, for most mobile websites there will be a desktop only admin section. And it's desktop only because it has huge tables, with lots of sortable columns. On multiple pages. Common admin interfaces found in any website or app. So while a desktop site can often exist without a mobile component, it's rare for a website to exist without a desktop component.
Give accreditation for MOOCs. Many are well designed (more so than community college and often regular college) and provide a far more social experience than showing up to class and not asking questions (which is the case 99% of the time).
> nobody has ever thought that coverage alone is a good guarantee of test quality

Wrong. I could name three managers who have from personal experience.

> it is however very obviously a useful metric.

Disagree. I think it's an actively counterproductive metric, and one is better off not measuring it at all.
Ramsey Theory in the Dining Room
Potoooooooo
The high price of cheap domains
icheckmovies is a reasonably successful website, where the core feature is lists.
Dropbox's energy performance vs. Google Drive:

http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png

I only keep Dropbox because they automatically stick my screenshots in a folder and sync it.
It'll likely be part of a cross generational compromise. So due to educational debt the kids can't buy their ancestors overpriced real estate or pay SS taxes sufficient to keep SS afloat. The solution is government education loan jubilee day paired with an increase in SS taxes such that the kids end up paying as much as before, but now their balance sheet is more mortgage positive. Meanwhile the old people keep running the SS ponzi for a couple more years.
Engineering success through failure – James Dyson
And they're still the only one that works worth a damn on Linux and Windows. So sadly, I'm still using them.

Though, I've never, ever had a perf problem with it.
You just (partially) answered your own question. Imagine something like a binary search tree. With all the pointer chasing you'll be doing, the poor pre-fetcher doesn't stand a chance.
I'm missing how your first sentence is connected to your second (are you suggesting a contiguous array of pointers?) but I believe the generalized disadvantage of pointers is poor locality of memory access, cache misses, etc.
Do any good people even work at Dropbox?

I submitted my resume years ago and never heard back. I wonder who they hired instead..

Other than Guido, of course :)
Show HN: Cleven – a Common Lisp experimental volume graphics game engine
+1 to this... on the effects existing on a continuum.

There was a great cartoon that the farnam street brain food blog sent out which illustrates this quite well.

http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
I tend to agree with verisimilidude that that's mostly driven by those students being the type of person who goes to Tumbleweed Community College, and that if you expelled everyone from Tumbleweed Community College and conscripted a bunch of students from, say, UNC Chapel Hill, they'd be fine.

In other words, while CC students are a very low-quality population, your personal outcomes are unlikely to be dramatically affected by where you choose to go. The bad outcomes of CC students reflect selection bias, not a treatment effect of the community colleges.
(tongue only partially in cheek) They're only cutting costs in areas that potential students can't observe / don't care about, like teaching. They won't cut costs in important areas like admissions staff, gym facilities, football stadiums, and fancy architecture because students see those things on tours.
I should have looked it up first, but I'm surprised that so much time elapsed between the 2 actions. Maybe some other reason is the root cause of this decision then (some people use this port for other purposes for example).
The killer list app will appear when AI is better. Lists are very personal things. They can cause stress, they can be important or not so much depending on the context. They intersect work and home life. The killer list app for executives is their executive assistant. Once we have a little machine implanted in our skulls that is smart enough to make fun of its wearer, ala KSR's 2312 qubit, the killer list app will remain elusive.
Experimental Simulation of Closed Timelike Curves
1) Audio over bluetooth offers mediocre sound quality at best. It's really not ideal.

2) So....I'm on my bed, 3% of battery left, and I want to watch something on YT on my phone. Right now, I simply connect the power cable to it + my headphones. With wireless charging I can't be watching anything because the phone has to stay on the charging cradle. Or if I connect the cable, then I can't connect headphones.
An interesting article, and clearly it's right that wind and solar (at least in Europe) need backup from other sources that can be spun up for a few days when it's not windy across the continent. Now, if we factored in hydro (not pumped storage, which is mostly good for short term daily patterns, but conventional hydro), and reserved a significant part of it for these few days, perhaps adding additional turbines to existing dams to increase peak hydro power, how much difference would that make? Can we store enough water to fill in the gaps?
Please don't make blanket statements that discredit the work of an entire engineering team that you have little insight into. I'm sure there are strong engineers at Dropbox, the same as there are anywhere else. Statements like that are not what HackerNews is for.
Time to Bring Cuba Online
I Rented Apartments to Rent Out on Airbnb for Profit
I think you're both right: the best employees are the ones who have other options, but choose not to exercise them. Don't pine for the great employees you've lost to the Bay Area titans, seek out the great employees who could find jobs in those places but choose not to for one of the many good reasons.
Why does it need a mobile phone to work at all?!
It seems to me that you're ignoring some of what they're doing. For example, the latest version of Final Cut Pro is a big step away from the tradition of track-based video editing. As for developer tools, they've invested a lot in clang and even created a new language (Swift). Even Safari was aimed at cutting out the cruft from the browser (originally) to make it more streamlined and standards-compliant.
Professors are not rewarded for doing a good job at teaching. They are rewarded for paying for their own salary using government research grants. Universities have their priorities badly misplaced from what I have seen.
The only thing I can assume is that people like you haven't ever really used Apples full line of products and seen how seamless the experience is in comparison to anything else on the market. Or used one phone for 2-3 years and not felt completely crippled in that time. I have rarely used an Android device that didn't feel sluggish.
Well, New York is a special case in that its climate is within a certain "sweet spot" (warm but not hot in the summer, not too far below freezing in the winter) and the fact that its emergence as a major financial center is a historical relic of the fact that it has been the "gateway to America" for over 150 years.

Buffalo and Pittsburgh are experiencing a resurgence only because when you fall as far as those cities have, there has to be a bottom somewhere. But residents of places like that are looking at a lot of problems in the future: they have less than half the population they did 50 years ago, so there is a lot of urban blight (and the other problems that come along with it) to clean up and a very small tax base to pay for it. So while they may see a resurgence, they're still not out of the woods yet.
Investing in Energy Innovation
Yeah, I'm not convinced anymore either. Specifically, I think that the assumption that R < A and A < B are independent events is incorrect, which means that P(R < A < B) = P(R < A)*P(A < B) is not necessarily true. I'll have to think on it more and maybe email Mark about it.
The USD has gone from 41.9 to 41.73% in the SDR basket. So, no change in the Dollar status. The Euro has gone down the most from 37.4% to 30.93%. The importance of SDR as a reserve currency is not accurate.

http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/sdr.htm
Ignoring accumulated customer complaints is not good customer service, regardless of what you imagine their misconceptions may be.
Dropbox also ruined one of my favorite mail client on Mac: Mailbox. Somehow they did an update from 0.4x to 0.7x which made the client orders of magnitude uglier, crash more often, have dozens of rendering issues which never happened in 0.4x. They did this without communicating anything in their blog[0], and meanwhile totally ignores all the complaints in Dropbox forum[1].

[0]: https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/

[1]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/20021...
Yes.It is time for Cubans to have access to internet.
> They did so primarily by making the tech industry much less about engineering and much more about lawyering and deal making.

This is my take home for everything. Lawyers are the ones in congress. Who ultimately benefits from the arrangements we have now? Lawyers and pretty much no one else.

Simplistic? Yes. However, if you play the 'follow the money' game I'm not sure who else benefits, because I'm fairly certain it isn't the landlords.
"If the answer is "no", then it's probably a money-losing business."

There a numerous businesses that make plenty of money that don't fit that scenario. They're just ones that are often dismissed as "lifestyle businesses".
I've had a similar experience.

I've never noticed a problem with Dropbox. Of course, I'm not running tools that show me battery consumption of apps and such on my Mac. Battery lasts long enough that it's never been a problem to look into.

I also had trouble with early versions of Google Drive. Maybe it's time to give it a try again. The problem I had was that drive thought all of my files had changed every day and started syncing the entire Google Drive folder again. I removed it and haven't tried it again since.
Ah, ok. A black hole with the mass of a proton would have a horizon radius of about 10^-54 meters, i.e., about 19 orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length. Of course, that is a classical calculation; when quantum gravity effects are taken into account, it's quite possible that a black hole with a horizon radius of less than one Planck length could not exist.
You're right, I should have mentioned that, as I actually had a similar experience. A lot of the comments I received were also along the lines of "that's great" (when I knew it wasn't and I was actually looking forward to some constructive criticism from someone better than me) or, as you mentioned, the classic "I don't know enough to help you".

Paying for qualified feedback would have made it better, although I still felt like I took a lot away from the taught content.
Why would you put your git repo in DropBox? That seems counter-intuitive to me. I specifically keep anything in a VCS out of DropBox since then you're versioning stuff twice....

I have just under 150,000 files in DropBox and haven't noticed any performance issues. DropBox rarely shows up in Activity Monitor's first 20 CPU users (unlike MediaFire which is usually burning CPU for no reason and only managing 200 files).

Perhaps it's an OS difference? I am on OS X 10.11.1.
They are correct that you can't pick the integer uniformly at random over the real line. But you can pick it randomly with a different distribution (e.g. the normal distribution) that meets the criteria of being positive everywhere.
I read the text of the first comment as a warning to be prepared that the world is full of people who aren't part of the "code of conduct" culture wars, and so it's best to know that assholes may just come down on you.

Taking that comment as a sign of combativeness is definitely a signal of thin skin. Does that count as irony? Probably not.
My preference in the last ~2, 3 years is rule out language contribution. Because I am not familiar with compiler and language design, when I make comments I feel like people just think "this guy is stupid." This negativity is so strong I feel depressed. Actually, Python mailing list is a really good example how the community discussions are both fruitful and disastrous at the same time. One question can go into so several sub topics into 200 replies and just more tangential talks. At some point people don't reply to comments you make (but you made that same damn comment before the other person did!), and you feel like like a victim of "you are not one of us."

I am pretty permissive about contributing to big projects. I feel like an outcast. So I choose to spend my time working on private projects whenever I get a minute. I guess I am just one of the few cynical negative developers out there.
Apple designs its own microprocessors, numerous sophisticated connectors, extremely small speakers, clicking hardware, touch sensors, metal plating processes, etc.

While they partner with folks like Samsung, I don't think its fair to say that they only design "some" components. They are industry leading in many areas, including batteries.
Crusader Chic
I wouldn't say so:

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22use+v6%3B%22&t...
How to Send a Fax from Your Smartphone
The prefetcher works only if it can predict what you're going to access next. Chasing pointers means essentially jumping to random addresses in a given memory region.
That's pretty much the worst situation from a caching point of view, what the prefetcher loves is linear traversal.

Of course things become more complicated when you start having larger amounts of data, and you want to skip over most of it, but still keep the cache happy.
Millions if not billions of users, a dozen comments on a forum. Looks like an anecdotal thing more than a widespread issue.
Cool! I'm trying to do something similar. I really think the time is ripe for a lisp-based game engine.

I'll have more time to look into your work later, but I wanted to say (a) very cool! Keep it up! (b) check out Lumen (https://github.com/sctb/lumen). It compiles into Lua, and can be powered by LuaJIT. The benchmark performance is off the charts, on par with LuaJIT itself, because it compiles to code that mimics the way you'd write in Lua without any of the hassle.

My current plan is to add support for running Lumen via luvit, which provides many libraries for LuaJIT, some of them useful for gamedev. If you're interested in some kind of a collaboration, shoot me an email or something. But regardless, best wishes and good luck!

By the way, thanks for making this available under a permissive license. It's not always an easy decision, but the gamedev industry in particular will be improved by choices like this.
Of course if those hashes are also served via plaintext, then comparing them also doesn't matter, and using them as verification is akin to praying to not be compromised
They were injecting code in to the Finder too. No doubt this is why Finder Sync Extensions[1] were created, because it's a support nightmare. (Well, and also because that code injection vector was eliminated in El Capitan.)

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Genera...
Considering the massive environmental cost of making these electronic devices I think it is absolutely in the consumer, the manufacturer and society's interests to ensure the products are not made more difficult to repair than they need to be.

There are significant externalities behind every iPhone most of which are borne by manufacturing and recycling plants in India and China. The more a manufacturer can do to ensure their product stays out of landfill and in use the better off we all will be.
Microservice Style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
Will your company ever run 100% of its IT in the cloud?
I've known several Chinese students with very low SAT scores (because of the English sections). Your advice for international students is reasonable but possibly not necessary. Of the best three that I knew well:

- One had her heart set on attending a UC school. I particularly recommended applying to a california community college because of their low standards and strong UC admissions preference. Her SAT scores were somewhere in the 1400s (out of 2400), but she was admitted to UC Davis directly.

- One had an SAT score in the 1700s, far and away the best of her cohort. She applied (and was accepted) to University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is quite happy there.

- One had an SAT score in the 1300s (in my opinion the smartest of the three), and, in what was to me a shocking move, applied to and enrolled at a University of Alabama (I don't know which one -- USNews lists several). But she transferred from there to Georgia Tech.

Universities seem to be aware that SAT verbal scores are poorly reflective of foreign students' actual abilities, and they really like the inflated international tuition.
inotify has a limit on how many watches can be held. I don't think that 300k limit is particular to Dropbox, any tool working on the same principle will hit that limit.
I think Google is faster at file sync than Dropbox. "Best in class sync" may have been true a few years ago.

Then again no one is perfect. I've seen the green check mark missing from all my files in Google Drive at different times.

Most of us are complaining about services we use for free.
On my macbook pro Google Drive has improved but still causes trouble and generally runs much slower than dropbox, which has always run flawlessly.
Benchmarking a Go AI in Ruby: CRuby vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffle/Graal
Somewhat agree with comments on TFA that 500 is in a sense more rude than 400. The point stands, however, that one owes no details to obnoxious requests.
Segment actually provides you access to the raw data so if you can layer a BI tool on top of it, then you have solved your main pain point.
I'm hijacking the top comment here to link directly to the ACLU donation page. You should do a one-time donation or become a member, if you care about this stuff. The ACLU is on the front lines of this war every day.

https://action.aclu.org/secure/our-civil-liberties-are-under...

(I have no affiliation with the ACLU other than having been a member for some years now.)
I don't think that Apple makes a lot of money from repairs, as claimed by this (rather silly) article. It's more a case that iPhones, MacBooks, etc are designed and manufactured for thinness, irregular battery shapes, etc, so that they don't lend themselves well to end user repair. There are many other device options out there for people who don't like this approach.
The context of the proposed data structure is more important for evaluating how effective it is at maximizing performance.

This context includes not only the characteristics of the (typical) systems using the data layout, but also the typical use of that structure (read heavy, write heavy, some mix). The cost of memory is also an issue. For a typical end user program the bottleneck is almost always going to be the user. For larger scale programs or more performance intensive areas of a program (E.G. graphics languages or other large data operations) different tradeoffs should be evaluated.