skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They use Amazon's S3, so as far as not losing your files is concerned, you are as likely to lose files on dropbox as you are on any other services that relies on S3 for storage.

Personally, I am interested to know more about privacy. Can dropbox employees access any files anytime they want and look at any information from account? Reading some comments (last year) on their forum in reply to file deletion I got the impression that they have unlimited access to user files. I don't have any citation nor can I verify that assumption at the moment.
They also failed with the VLIW i860 RISC processor.

I think it's too early to count Larrabee out; it was a failure at hitting its market window for a stand along GPU, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually make it there or that it won't find other e.g. HPC uses. Although it is a x86_64 design.

ADDED: Larrabee is anything but dead:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392534

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/2010053...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=4413541

Their 48 cores of 32 bit x86s chip with no hardware cache coherency experiment might also bear fruit (ADDED: the follow on Knights Corner (22nm, > 50 cores and not all of them x86) to the above might incorporate some of its technology), but for now that's a Zero units project (i.e. they'll ship around 50 parts to various research labs to play with it).

And they did "break out" of the original x86 by moving to AMD's x86_64, which is wildly successful....
I still use dropbox + truecrypt, but it definitely does NOT work as mentioned. I just update the truecrypt volume so infrequently thats its not a huge deal to upload the whole thing (still cant complain about free cloud storage with no bandwidth costs)
I work at Twilio and this is an extremely common use case for our service. We have two recent blog posts that show how to do both SMS and phone-based verification:

http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-t...

http://blog.twilio.com/2010/05/simple-phone-verification-wit...
I imagine a good "bible" program involves not only the text, but commentaries, some system for taking notes, and links to further scholarship. Such would be useful for other types of books as well. Our e-readers are still in their infancy.
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I had similar problems, only to later realize that I closed my computer on one end before it finished syncing. Also some older dropbox clients was a bit buggy. I haven't had this problem for more than a year now. Using it across Linux, windows and Mac clients, even stored Virtual machine instances on dropbox and loaded them from virtual-box on all machines.
Until we can point to a data center that is built with them, that's only theoretical. It may happen soon as multi-core Cortex A9s hit the market.
A lack of food or sleep can also play havoc with 100m sprint results, but even the ideal amount of sleep and pasta wont make me beat Usain Bolt.
I don't think that's so weird or different. Laptops came out in the 80's and started becoming practical in the mid 90s and I dind't get one until until 2000.

That's longer than 6.5 years.
Circle of death
Low speed, incremental syncs, like my Macbook does with Time Machine, over wifi, would be great. I never even notice it unless I do something major file system-wise.
Good idea, and it would also need a little bit of Javascript. But wouldn't be a problem re-read/scan the text trying to find what became linked?
Have they tried Olive Tree software? I find it to be quite good.

http://www.olivetree.com/ipad/index.php
The rub is "search for hyphens": you have to look at every character until you find a hyphen; the point of Boyer-Moore is that you don't have to even look at most of the characters at all.
This seems more like a stunt. The device has no direct interface to human biology, nor does it seem very practical. The "officially recognized as a cyborg by a government" seems bit fishy too. It sounds like government recognized the device as prosthesis, which isn't that unusual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthetic is far more interesting imho, especially when a close friend of mine is losing his eyesight. To be actually able to tap into nervous system opens quite a lot of doors, both capturing data, and sending data.
You expect a nuke (of any size) to blow a hole through half a dozen _miles_ of rock?
I don't see a good reason why you'd want to make this into a web based application. I think you are making the right choice. I'd never upload my medical records to a third party website. Don't pull a Zuckerberg.

When I clicked on the "Go' button to compare to the Human Reference Genome, nothing happened.

I think the software might be more valuable if the user could get a quick overview of their personal risk factors for diseases. I didn't see a quick way to get that.

I'd make the software fun too - genes for eye color and so forth would be fun to compare with family members.

The ancestry report with the map overlay would be great if you could get it to work.
I want them to be standard complaint across the board, not just a single element of a future standard.
First of all, this article is three years old. Second of all, Marilee Jones blatantly lied about her credentials for 28 years. Yes, she did a fantastic job while she was at MIT, but that doesn't change the fact that she lied. This is not an issue of credentialism, it's an issue of trust and integrity. As far as I'm concerned, what she did is on par with the kid from Harvard who was recently charged with fabricating his life story...

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_gl...
Can you use it to pay by credit card and split bills in complicated ways? To me, that is by far the larger annoyance than menus and ordering from waitstaff.
If a Dropbox employee has access to the company's AWS account information, then yes; they can access any file in their bucket.
How to write a good CV
I've been studying this for a while and it seems to me that the RISC day in the sun was most especially dependent on memory getting faster (than core) and a lot less expensive and gates becoming extremely precious due to the premium on putting a whole CPU on a single die.

Now we don't know what to do with all the gates we can put on a die and once again memory is pretty slow compared to CPU speeds, so the CISC model of minimizing the size of the instruction stream is again a win due to the speed and latency from main memory and the limits on cache memory on the die.
Great description of what life is like as a "ground floor engineer". It's true, you work constantly and have to be a generalist. In exchange, you get an incredibly rewarding job where you get to watch the company grow up around you.
SQL queries are seldom considered examples of neatness, but the top solution (which is a good one, as far as my rusty TSQL allows me to judge) is a textbook example of a kludge.

Not that I think OFFSET and LIMIT belong in SQL (IIRC, ANSI folks agree). It's a query language, not a presentation one.
Triple Your Google AdWords CTR Overnight by Doing Nothing
This is a very curious phenomenon. Same everything, yet vastly different click through rate. Have any of you tried this?
I love mine. A few comments:

To the people comparing the features and price to a netbook and saying 'I just don't get it' - it's about the design i.e. how it works not just what it can do. I think that the crowd here owes it to themselves to take a close look at one, ideally find a friend who has one, and play with it in a relaxed environment. There is something quite different about the experience that you won't understand by comparing feature lists, and even if you dislike Apple and don't want to buy one, it's worth understanding this because it is a real change to how we interact with computers.

Secondly, I have found it to be a great device for traveling. I am visiting London at the moment and got a 10gb microsim for 15GBP. I get to use the thing all day and the battery and data supply is ample. I can catch up on tech news, read docs, read books, and watch movies etc. I could do these on my laptop, but this is way better, and I can carry it with me everywhere and even use it in public without being antisocial, whilst my laptop stays at our base for the odd moment of coding.

Finally, an obviously revolutionary moment came for me yesterday. I was looking up details of a medical center, and my father who is nearly 90, was asking me questions. At a certain point he just reached over and took the iPad from my hand and started reading the webpage and scrolling through the document himself. This was the first time he'd touched the thing, and he hasn't used a computer since he retired more than 20 years ago.

It might not seem like a big deal, but to me that signifies a profound step in terms of both usability and sociability of computing, not to mention the ubiquity of he web. Smartphones and laptops are both still very much personal computers. The iPad may be the first mass market interpersonal computer.
A more general solution might be something like Oilcan (which bills itself as Greasemonkey on
steroids) :

http://oilcan.jsharkey.org/
I have downloaded. More comments to follow, but a quick question. Who is your target audience? Based on the design and how the reports look, seems to be consumer focussed?
According to Wikipedia, 10 billion (thousand million) sold as of January 2008 and it's predicted that 5 billion will be sold in 2011. The current yearly rate broke 1 billion in 2005 or earlier.
Dropbox mentions that files get encrypted with AES, but I guess this only protects them from Amazon employees or from someone hacking Amazon, not from Dropbox employees (unless the AES password is generated from the user password and dropbox somehow doesn't have access to that (only a Hash? not sure how that could work).
Ben Dyer's Guide To Being A Player
But what is the major thing that replaces newspapers? An alternative form factor to carry around, or an alternative way to transport information? I'm sorry to say, but I think with or without the iPad, newspapers would have been toast. The iPad will just be another footnote in history.
Why wouldn't a compiler just abort if it runs out of memory? A compiler seems to be a short running program -- I wouldn't even bother too much freeing up allocated memory.
Lord of the Strings (Part 1)
Try this hack for the Pogo stylus that turns it into a very usable drawing tool: http://konigi.com/notebook/hacking-pogo-stylus-smoother-ipad...
Under Achievers
If we aren't entering a "new era" of computing every 5 years or so, then _that_ will be a change worth commenting on...

edit regarding printed media: If by "revolutionize" you mean "kill dead" well, yeah. And it's not just the tablet's thats doing that. Writing's been on the wall for, what, 30 to 40 years.
Ask HN: Contacts Importer - Any recommendations?
Have any of you ever used contacts importers? They seem to be a big growth driver for even big sites like Facebook. I was wondering where to look for one.
Regardless of the article itself, what do you call it when people persist in believing in the alleged link between MMR vaccine and autism, after the link has been thoroughly debunked? To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, those people have their feet wet and can see the pyramids really well, 'cause they're standing knee-deep in De Nile.
So for example a future image compression algorithm should define how to compress a single image, and how to compress a group of compressed images?

Interesting thought.

The downside of this coupling might be slower adoption of new cross-file compression algorithms if there is going to be a string of them, which empirically there seems to be. It's kind of funny that the de facto image compression algorithms haven't changed in ~10 years whereas video compression algorithms change flavors every two to four years.
Right. There are two discussions to have here.

Company Success: Apple is clearly successful with those sales #s.

OS Success: It remains to be seen if the ugly/fragmented OS being sold by 20 different companies will kick the ass of the prettier/walled-garden OS sold by one company like it did with Computer OS's. If it does, it'd be sad to see it happen to Apple a second time.

I'd personally prefer to see Apple license the heck out of their OS's with stringent hardware requirements.
I don't buy this argument. I have no trouble reading fresh, interesting content without feeling the need to jump away on an embedded link.

The reason that I click a link is that I've lost interest, or have found new interest, in something that the author is referring to. Why is this a bad thing?

Context-switching on the web is cheap enough that I shouldn't have to scroll to the end of an article to find a link to something more interesting than what I'm reading right now.

Meanwhile, the links at the end of this article are not helpful. They have no context, and require me to think back through the article to decide if I want to read them.
It is an issue of trust...trust in college credentials. If you ask me, overpriced colleges and forcing degrees on the art, history, etc. majors of the world is a far greater swindle and far more damaging on the economy.

Colleges have conditioned the public to think if there are two similar people, the one with the degree is much better than the one without. Degree requirements on many jobs have increased from bachelors, to masters and even PhDs over the years.

People like Marilee put these claims in doubt and show that degrees are a poor predictor of capability; something that employers over-rely on these days.
Versioning systems do something like this already. Most store old versions of files as diffs against new versions (or this may be reversed); git stores files as diffs against similarly sized files of I think similar age (which are most likely older/newer versions of the same file).

There's also a fingerprinting algorithm that's basically to divide your file into chunks based on a fixed short string or rolling-checksum value and then hash each chunk, which can be used to find good candidates for storing as diffs against eachother. Unfortunately I don't recall what name this goes by or where I ran across it, or what system actually uses it.
If you want to build a model on English text, you have terabytes of webpages to use.
Exposing sensitive information (like, the phrase "Adam, I'm sorry your cat has feline AIDS" compresses via LZ to position 1230352024, so your account has 1.950001GB free instead of 1.949999GB free) is the wrong way to squeeze a few more bits out; make sure you don't break through the ACL of each document.

Another feature to be mindful of is how much power you'll need for the text model; larger models compress better, but need more time and space.
The story with your father underlines what's really amazing about the iPad:

It's visceral computing.

It brings the data "in there" to a place where we can handle it "out here." It really is the web, in your hands, where you can pass it around, and that's a very different experience than on a laptop screen.

Being able to reach out and touch data and objects on the screen -- like we can do with EVERY real life object we interact with in the world, that we evolved with -- is totally transformative.

Laptops are like feedbags -- they're glued to your face, meant for an audience of one. The iPad is like a plate of hors d'ouevres, finger food for everyone.
However, hasn't anyone learned yet not to buy the first Apple implementation of anything?

I don't know what you're talking about. I bought the first iPhone model, and while it was a deeply flawed device in several ways, the overall ownership experience was amazing. Besides being the most solid example of "1.0" hardware I'd purchased in a long time, it just kept getting better after the sale, with various new features and performance improvements coming out every few weeks. Almost every complaint I had, from stability to the lack of an SDK, was eventually remedied. Apple seemed to be committed to the overall ownership experience to an extent that was unlike any other hardware vendor I'd ever dealt with.

It was only much later that they started removing features, enforcing absurd contract terms, micromanaging the scope of the user's experience, and generally acting like a company run by Mormons and led by Tipper Gore. I'd say the early iPhone ownership experience was a solid 9/10 on the warm-fuzziness scale, and now it's a 4 at best.

For its part, the first-gen iPad contains no revolutionary or untried technologies that weren't already shipped in the iPhone, and its only real problem is inadequate WiFi reception. There have been some complaints about the iPad's charger damaging iPhones as well. Other than that, the iPad delivers exactly what it says on the box. It doesn't really need a faster processor, but I imagine a lot of people will find a front-facing camera useful.
Infuriating. When a piece of content doesn't make supplementary, albeit secondary content, easily accessible, it ruins part of the readability and relevance of the article.
From 3 years ago but it certainly still holds true. As mentioned in the comments, many PPC'ers use http://www.splittester.com to help determine if there's enough data to determine a winner.

SEOBook recently opened another site focused primarily on PPC at PPCBlog.com and this was a recent discussion in the forums.
'...365 days at the very least for the first year.' I guess the second year must be a leap year :-)

Seriously though, this is a great article and I admire anyone who is able to provide this level of commitment and passion.
You can make it more touch friendly by making the whole title area (li element) clickable, perhaps with a square button floating to the right for comments.
Hope you read this: http://www.veerwest.com/blog/jobs/how-to-apply-for-a-job-at-... ;-)
It's borrowed from the javadoc syntax, unfortunately.
EU parliament wants to store all Internet searches
This campaign needs a better logo/central figure. Perhaps Mr. Splashy Pants can do the world another favor. :)
I think Andreessen's words should be taken with a grain of salt. His underlying premise is that a startup's ultimate goal is to get really big. This may make sense for a guy who has his own VC fund, but I'm not sure it makes sense for every entrepeneur.

While having a market is certainly important, I don't think someone should disregard the niches that are out there. Is a large market more important than the product? While I agree with Marc on iteration and speed of execution, I can't quite convince myself that I would take a large market over a solid product and team. I'd love to see a response from DHH.
Wow, if that airbag goes off, the EMTs are going to have a real WTF moment. "What's that thing around his neck?"
Similar story here - I had no work ethic at all until I failed my first year at University. (I had excellent school results, five unconditional offers of places at University etc.).

I went back, worked very hard, passed the exam I failed (maths) and after that graduated with a 1st.

I also got a stupidly high mark in an IQ test when I was 16 - largely as we had an educational psychologist in the family who had bombarded me with tests since I was about 4. There is no way that stuff actually makes you smarter but it sure does make you better at passing silly tests.
From the end of TFA: Bill Gates could never have been the Dean of Admissions at Stanford, but the Computer Science building at Stanford carries his name.

sigh, i wish people would stop using Gates, Zuckerberg, and other drop-outs from elite colleges to rally up salt-of-the-earth populist propaganda like "oh you can come from humble down-to-earth roots and be a college drop-out and still be a billionaire!" many of these guys came from highly-educated, upper-middle-class families and went to elite private high schools and colleges. the true populist heroes are lurking here amongst the HN readership ... people who have successful autonomous small businesses that are making a good living.
For those interested - I wrote a series on how to make HDR photos and mentioned using CHDK to do that with RAW files: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-get-started-with-hdr-photogr...
My own opinions are irrelevant--the flotilla didn't comply with the IDF's instructions and instead attempted to run the blockade; the IDF boarded the ships and had them towed to an Israeli port. Both sides accuse the other of initiating violence, with reports that the flotilla passengers attacked the troops and tried to grab for their weapons. The IDF also seems to be claiming to have discovered weapons aboard the flotilla.

So you have one side possibly murdering civilians in international waters, or possibly maintaining in conjunction with one of its neighbors a blockade in order to protect their own people from the terrorists who control Gaza; you have another side openly defying this blockade and intentionally running it just to create this kind of confrontation in the name of civil disobedience. Does it still sound like I'm "justifying" one side over the other? This blockade has been up for three years and the full context behind today's events stretches back to decades of conflict; it's difficult to give an impartial account of things. I only ask that you take my attempts in good faith and add whatever information you have in similar good faith, instead of just collapsing everything down to "IDF are murderers and Phil is justifying it".
Incidentally, that is exactly what they are threatening him with... :-/
The storage cost for all jpeg files in the world probably doesn't justify a major standards effort. The effort behind converting most of the world from gif to png must have been millions of man hours.
...and the server storage that can help out while cutting storage costs to a half is http://moolave.tk
Everyone makes mistakes - this was certainly worse than some but really, I don't see how she would ever have had an opportunity to honestly correct the mistake after getting hired without this happening, so she had little choice but to live with it. It does raise the issue of why she had to fake her credentials - or even feel pressured to - to be considered for the job if she was a good candidate without them.
Hah, great idea! Reminds me of Dramatica, Contour, Hollywood scriptmaker etc. for scriptwriting.. and they all work.
Slightly off-topic, but one of the comments mentions FairSoftware, which I can't believe I hadn't heard of until now. Anyone have any experience with the community there? It looks like a potentially great way to find some like-minded hackers to get a project off the ground.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
19087 scschnei 25 0 412m 333m 5480 R 100 16.6 0:07.62 cc1plus

Your C++ compiler would be unusable for some modern C++ programs. You're judging how you expect a compiler to behave based on how you've used them in the past. C++ with heavy template meta-programming (like what I was compiling there) can take an enormous amount of memory and CPU time to finish.
I've been wondering for a long time why nothing better than JPEG seems to be catching on for lossy photo compression. It seems like it would be possible to trade CPU cycles for file-size (in the same way that h.264 vs MPEG2 does), but I suppose it's really hard to get critical mass with anything that isn't backwards compatible...
Here's a good overview paper: http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix04/tech/general/full_paper...
How in the world do callables replace closures? Closures can have arguments, callables can't. You cannot pass a ruby lambda expecting arguments to Clojure.