skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"I wonder what a managed or dedicated server would cost to perform the same calculations."

It wouldn't cost you any money (unless you have metered electricity), but rather just opportunity cost of being able to do other work with your resources.

Unless you only need a short-term lease on the equipment, cloud servers will be more expensive that dedicated/colocated servers.
s/sometimes/all the time/;

I honestly do not get why people are so fascinated with the cloud. It's a very expensive way to avoid having to know what you're doing.
You can edit your comment instead of replying to your own comment.
I don't think I had a satisfying solution to any of the puzzles in 3 hours. In the most extreme case, I saw some people spend a couple of weeks solving the two-time pad problem. Even after knowing how to cancel out the pad.
It's based on C3 Technologies' product, which was unfortunately acquired by Apple, so don't count on Nokia's contract being extended. It uses a custom aerial camera system and photogrammetry toolchain to create 3D data with minimal human intervention.

Australian company Nearmap started with exactly the same goals and have a similar product (custom aerial photography system with automated processing), but they don't seem to have figured the 3D photogrammetry part out yet.
Can you be more specific about what do you mean by personality and how do you measure?
As long as HBO GO still requires a cableTV subscription (and HBO subscription), Netflix has nothing to fear about.

While this is true, I have to think HBO has already built a payment system and is literally a flip the switch away from charging customers directly for streaming. Netflixs CEO is future looking if nothing else, and I'm sure he's come to the same conclusion.
I believe that $0.10 per 100k writes is what both Windows Azure Storage and Amazon S3 cost.

Correct. Of course, those are object writes -- Elastic Block Store disk I/O is 10x cheaper.
Did you turn multithreading on? It's helped on my sites somewhat.
If you look at the post in this thread I was responding too it had this text,

"He also doesn't note that, if we end up with "sea levels hundreds of feet higher and in general, GREEN from pole to pole" that a significant number of the world's cities would need to be moved or surrounded by monumental dikes because of the ~200' rise in sea level that would accompany the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice shelves."

I saw the '~200'' to mean 'on the order of 200 feet'. I've also heard the 200' number mentioned elsewhere [1][2] and it is complete fiction, there isn't enough water on the planet locked up in ice to raise the oceans 200', if there was we could see it by the way it protruded out of the atmosphere.

And sure if Manhattan flooded and we lost most or all of NY City that would be a huge hit to the country, and if we lost all of Bangledesh (estimates of 3M people living at 3' sea level) that would put a huge crimp on the rest of the India to absorb all those refuges and compensate for the lost arable land. Epic human tragedy.

My contribution here is simply a mathematical analysis of the more absurd numbers people use because humans have a hard time internalizing very large numbers (like 200 billion square miles of ocean surface).

[1] "What is very clear, however, is the importance of Antarctica's huge ice sheets remaining stable. The West Antarctic ice sheet is thought to be potentially unstable, and if it collapsed sea levels around the world would rise almost 20 feet. The melting of the larger and more stable East Antarctic ice sheet would raise Earth's sea levels another 200 feet." - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/03/020329072043.ht...

[2] " If all of the Antarctic ice melted, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 meters (200 feet). But the average temperature in Antarctica is -37°C, so the ice there is in no danger of melting. In fact in most parts of the continent it never gets above freezing." - http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophys...
I'll tell you why anyone would hire me if you can answer my simple question about the relative efficiencies of the top-down versus recursive solutions. You've already had an hour and claim to be familiar with the problem space, so I think it's a fair measure of your suitability in this space.

I'm going to go for coffee, but there's a whiteboard right there. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two.
That's a good article, thank you for the link. Is there any precedent for a law that involves coin flips (randomness)? My hunch is that while they sound great in an economy paper, they're too easy to shoot down politically.
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This makes sense, and I can see how you'd be able to crank out posts from it. How do you go about keeping track of any "excess topics"? Typically, whenever I find something I like and dive into it, my mind can diverge the post into a few separate posts, which helps keep them to a good size.

Thanks for the comment and insight!
I completely agree about projecting - going to paper and pencil after years of vim just feels absurd - but some people find it more invasive and/or high pressure.
And 3scale is listed on both.
I think some companies like Pivotal labs actually have you pair-program with your interviewer. I haven't applied there so all my knowledge is second-hand.

Would you like that sort of interview?
I just gave a try to their HBO GO Android App. I thought I could pay a subsccription directly to HBO but no... you need to have a cable subscription to use this app. Nevermind!!!!
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Wow, working through a mutually unknown problem is such a great idea and I had never heard or thought of it before. Thank you sir!
Hrm, I don't like this. I consider myself a pretty competent programmer, and I like doing programming puzzles for fun. I've spent a decent amount of time on 4clojure, project euler, and similar sites, and I can generally come up with solutions I'm happy with (elegant enough for my own liking).

That said, from the stress free environment of my couch, some of these puzzles take me quite a while. I'm fairly confident that if asked to hash out a solution to this on a whiteboard in an interview situation, the stress of being put on the spot would impede my ability to perform up to par, and I'd probably come across as inept.

Ironically, I'm one of the principal interviewers at the medium-sized company I work at. Many of the interviews I conduct delve into fairly technical discussions of previous projects the candidate has worked on, and I can generally walk away with a fairly firm gut feeling of how competent someone is.

Candidates that give a solid initial impression are always asked to submit additional code samples (sometimes several rounds thereof), and occasionally asked back for one additional followup interview if we need any additional details.

Through this gradual feeling out process, I feel like we've acquired some very excellent hires that we may have otherwise looked over if we based our process strictly on brain teaser type screenings.
Yeah, I finished the article still wondering when he was going to get to one of the good solutions. A programmer with good math should be able to write a nice linear time solution right away.

And that's one more reason why it's a terrible question. If you're looking for good programmers and not math whizzes then the solutions in the article tell you more. But they're all badly suboptimal if you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, the best answer is that you'd Google for it on Wikipedia.
Absolutely. At my last C++ job, I did a lot of interviews and a lot of people claimed to know the STL. I left the low-level compiler questions to my colleagues for the most part, but I would ask a few key questions.

My favourite STL-related question to ask is simple and can be done on a whiteboard in minutes: if you didn't have std::set<class T>, but you had everything else in the STL, how might you implement a set<class T> class?

There's an ideal answer[1], and then there's people who start thinking about low-level implementations. The ones who I don't want are the ones who don't have any answer at all. I'll continue to be interested in anyone who starts talking about the way to solve the problem. What matters to me is not any code that you write (although that's interesting) but your thought process. After the candidate has worked through this, if they haven't gotten the ideal answer I always give it to them: this isn't some national secret, and seeing them process the ideal answer and realize that yes, it really would work is a pleasure.

Sadly, there are cases where it doesn't work. I had one candidate who did very well on the phone screen, but didn't know the STL. I looked up what he claimed to know (Qt) and reframed the question in terms of Qt's classes—and he still couldn't come up with any answer whatsoever.

-a

[1] The ideal answer is precisely such because you're writing much less code and using stuff that people smarter than you have written. It's to use a std::map<class T, bool>.
We wrote some App Engine code to do geospatial lookups.

Before anyone gets the idea that the links in the parent are worth trying, they're not: the performance is absolutely atrocious – on our data set, 13 seconds per lookup.

We wrote our own approach on App Engine and now get stable performance on our datasets at ~300ms per lookup.

(We're doing Foursquare-type lookups.)
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"(And I don't see how refusing to negotiate a DVD rental deal helps that goal at all.)"

If Netflix hemorrhages subscribers and loses it's value proposition vs cable that's clearly good for HBO/Time Warner/Turner.

Giving your competition a discount is what doesn't make sense and that's why HBO decided to stop doing it.
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For those questioning the use of Google App engine as a serious platform for applications, we at Pulse use Google App Engine: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/11/scaling-with-kin...

So, yes you can build serious applications on GAE but like everything else it boils down to, it depends on what you really need.
I like the spot price idea (in the comments
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/msg/fe9a05c6...). It's similar to adwords' automatic auction for how close to the top your ad is, with the same benefits of getting the best market price (for buyers and sellers) of a limited resource. If no one else is using it, it could become close to free.

It also casts the other users as the opponent, instead of google.
I learnt hard work the easy way.

Through Olympic weightlifting.

All through primary and secondary school, and through most of university, I have scraped by on brute intelligence and my efficient memory. Like a lot of HNers, I suspect. But that began to leave me behind. I failed algorithms. I jokingly said to my professor a year later "I'm not smart enough for algo".

"You're plenty smart", he said. "You just didn't do any work".

I took up Olympic-style weightlifting ("Oly" to friends) about 3 years ago. It taught me the most important lesson of my working and studying life:

You cannot cram for a competition.

No one training session makes for success on the platform. Success comes from months of work. A few hours, every day or two. Each session is hard, sure, but by itself does not seem like much. But the cumulative effect can be amazing.

By my third year in computer science I was becoming more methodical about studying. My scores improved and my professors accepted me for honours. Thanks to the learned ability to stick to a project for months on end, I completed my degree last year with first class honours.

I wish I'd known earlier that consistency, and not flashes of brilliance, is what would get people to think of me as truly capable.
So despite the post title, it's not really a direct Dropbox competitor, since it won't support realtime syncing, right?

Btw, since one "donates" disk space in exchange for free service, I assume that will contain data from other people; is that protected (encrypted) or could I just peruse through your photos if I happened to be a peer chosen to seed them?
A small press kit with some screenshot of the app that you can send to blogs and biking websites. I would use your promo codes with bloggers rather than bike businesses, unless they have large followings like the courier company.
This one is great as well:

"I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today."

When someone makes that claim, they ignore the thousands upon thousands of pieces of original music, film and pictures that artists, normal people, make available for free to everyone on the Internet every day.
Actually, I think its great for startups. If you're a small team trying to work out what your product is, how to sell it and who is going to buy it, you have more important things to do than learn how to set up and run a server.

Once you've worked out you have a product that people want you can start thinking about managing your own servers.

People complain about migration, but its really not that big a deal.
Who said it was supposed to be easy?
This kind of trolling should not be on Hacker News, and I definitely can't believe it got 70 points. Might be time for some more Erlang articles...
To add to this, it also feels as that in most cases, for every topic that a niche subreddit (or multiple similar subreddits) covers, there usually exist better online communities dealing with the same topic elsewhere on the Web.

For example, let's say you're interested in airplanes and aviation. Relevant subreddits such as r/aviation just doesn't compare to communities like airliners.net with its sheer amount and high quality of content.

Quality of content aside, other communities in such instances also seem to have better organization, more strict moderation (although some subreddits do have very good, dedicated moderators), and certain culture that's not prevalent on Reddit (e.g. compared to some other communities that I visit, there doesn't seem to be a culture of searching before posting on Reddit, ultimately resulting in a lot of reposts), leading me to go to those places rather than the subreddits that cover the same topic.
I can't imagine how an indexed query on a List<String> of ~10 items takes 13 seconds.

'We wrote our own approach on App Engine'

Hmm... details?
But the copyright monopoly is given to the creators. Tell me, who holds the copyright to the book you are writing?

The problem is that the distributors (formerly) had tremendous leverage over the creators because they controlled the distribution (access to paying customers). Through the monopoly of the distribution channels, they were able to coerce the creators to reassign or license at a pittance their copyrights to them.

The "new media" (e.g. internet) is allowing direct distribution from the creator to the customer, squeezing out the "old guild" distributors. Disrupting the distribution monopoly of the "old guild" distributors is a Good Thing and is happening right now, and with the copyright monopoly still in place.

Disposing of copyright entirely as advocated by the article would cause horrible "collateral damage" to creators.
I don't understand....what is the point of doing this?
Sometimes I wonder if all the posters are people who are just going through the same patterns of behaviors like discussion memes. And then I wonder what if the majority of comments are bots programmed to social network and collect karma/reputation points for SEO and future YCombinator funding?
I moved this summer. I still haven't resumed cable service. Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime, and Hulu are more than enough for me.

The only reason I'd resume cable service, incidentally, would be for Game of Thrones season 2. Since I travel so much its likely I would just wait for other options. I don't download torrents.

HBO is a golden goose. Its an exception. They produce exceptionally high quality shows. The things that will work for HBO won't work for the other guys. HBO may be able to sell subscriptions directly to users. Their HBO Go app is exceptional, better than Netflix's to a degree.

When I travel and sit in a hotel room I wonder why any of us ever paid for this garbage. The amount of advertising sandwiched in to amateur level programming is akin to a 1998 porn site full of pop ups. Its not pretty.

Golden geese can become arrogant. If I owned a cable company, any exec who blamed the economy on a drop in subscriptions would be immediately fired.

Home Box Office, Inc is owned by Time Warner. Because of that, I have a feeling the golden goose will ultimately end up going down with the ship it is caged in.
I am not sure what you mean by "properly concurrent", but I am guessing that you are referring to the fact that Python code cannot use more than one core because of the GIL. This limitation also applies to Twisted applications.

For high volume apps, it often makes sense to run multiple instances of the app behind a reverse proxy. That's the only way to make full use the CPU when running Python.

What is "socket lockup"? The word "lockup" is nowhere to be found on the page you references.
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It looks like the GoPro and the remnants of the balloon helped it. The extra mass of the GroPro body allowed it to fall flat with the camera and ballon allowing it to spin on it's way down, like a maple seed. Also it looks like it landed on the aluminum side facing down with GroPro body hitting the ground first.

Still pretty cool though.
Yeah, or some crappy vc-funded startup that will "change the world" by socializing pictures of your pets and allowing the pets themselves to "like" on each other's pictures...
a) it takes a longer relationship where I'm treated with respect before I trust a site. I'd have to know they weren't going to spam me or my friends, they weren't going to store tons of data, things like that.
b) most of the info I put on FB is fake, I only keep it to untag photos. FB doesn't fit criteria a, haha
c) pretty much everyone trying to get at my social graph
This is incorrect for several reasons.

First off, they mention that when the initial design decision was made, a similar operation cost ~$160, which is tenable for an operation that only happens once in a while. This is in fact a case of them getting bitten by the pricing structure changing after a reasonable design decision (at the time) was implemented.

Secondly, they mention that this is part of a larger issue:
"In our most common case we might have to add and delete
a couple items to the list property every once in a while. That would
still cost us well over $1,000 each time.
Most of the reasons for this type of data in our product is to
compensate for the fact that there isn't full text search yet. I know
they are beta testing full text, but I'm still worried that that also
might be too expensive per write."

This is a real problem that GAE needs to solve.

Finally, their problem doesn't seem to be that they need arbitrary precision, its that they seem to need fast location centric queries of a large database.

Geoboxes allow you to solve this problem correctly (and quickly), returning the results in the database that are closest to you. Matching on a geohash can end up serving the incorrect data unless you resort to hacks involving a number of queries.
"SOPA has whatever momentum it does have precisely because many people do feel it is a problem that creative content can be copied at will and without compensation in so many ways across the web."

Except for the distributors of such content and the politicians they've bought, I haven't heard of "many" people who like SOPA. Outside of their world, the momentum of SOPA barely exists. If you've read the news lately, you'd see that if anything, there's a huge momentum _against_ SOPA.
Curiously, Time Warner Cable customers do not have access to their streaming service HBO Go. I have a feeling they might be working on a little trick to pull the carpet out from underneath their competitors.
I think in the end, most people just want to have their abilities evaluated fairly. And even if I'm not a total puzzle freak, I do love to code, and given time I can figure most of these puzzles out. So if I were looking for a job at your (former) company, this would not constitute a barrier for me. On the other hand, if I were verbally asked a question and told to work it out on a whiteboard, this would not be an accurate indicator of my abilities or my potential. Add to that the fact that my handwriting is poor, and I would be nervous, and I'm quite sure a verbal description of pascal's triangle would almost certainly elude me, whereas if I were shown a document with the written output, I think I could come up with a naive solution in 5-10 mins. I'm good at sitting down by myself with a written problem and working it out. As a result, I've always done well on standardized tests. In fact, I suspect this is the reason for some of the indignation at the whiteboard testing. People who have always gotten good grades, coded well, done well on standardized tests are suddenly told that they're not smart enough. I can understand how it would rankle.

Note: edited typos.
Yes. That's it exactly. Thanks!
Then tell me why is coffeescript good. Because I fail to see it
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What about infra-structure? That SPDY gateway will have to handle a hell lot of load. Will we really need that extreme optimization in 2 years?
That is some really fantastic front end design.
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This sounds pretty easy to avoid by moderating to keep focus and prevent drifting. "This subreddit is for media discussion only. Irrelevant links will be banned."
You don't have that former employees contact info? Or is it that they're unwilling to help you?

They just have to add your facebook login email address to the admin page.
You're in a room with these people having a conversation. A simple "Hey what level of engineering are you looking for in this solution?" would do nicely. Maybe some people will say that it has to be unit tested, rigorously documented, and proven correct, all on a whiteboard, and that would be really dumb. But nobody is going to say that, they're going to say "Give us a sketch - we're just looking for your thought process". The whole thing about misunderstandings and misinterpretations is just really silly when you're sitting there in a room with them. It also isn't just your code that is being judged - if you can't pose a simple question to some people sitting across a desk from you, or if you're too stodgy to ever under any circumstances write pseudocode or a piece of code that you aren't sure works yet, or make up a reasonable API that you don't remember the exact incantation for, maybe because you're too honorable or something, then I don't think you're a culture fit.
I understand you're angry, but did you really just post that same thing twice in this thread and twice in the linked thread??
You don't need to support CoffeeScript natively. The answer is simple and is called source mapping: the output code carries comments that map each line to a line in the source file. This will also work for LESS and any other transpilers.

Work is underway since August to implement it in WebKit (http://peter.sh/2012/01/css-selector-profiler-source-mapping...) and Gecko (https://wiki.mozilla.org/DevTools/Features/SourceMap - the intern has gone back to school, really?)
Along with this, does anyone use OpenBravoERP? Intriguingly, it has always been one of the top SourceForge projects.