skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. That is definitely crazy. At least in the end the serialization is fairly straightforward.

Some of the worst API's we've seen are definitely due to lack of proper documentation (or completely undocumented features). Hopefully we can start to fill the information void with the help of the Google Bot's indexing prowess.
That is an interesting pattern. There are a few projects doing similar things: https://github.com/tblobaum/nodeQuery

I imagine there is enough content for a series like this to warrant guest posts (since we are biased towards paid SaaS web APIs).
This isn't really a concern for me, but I'd probably email Colin and ask for it. The tarsnap program is open-source, presumably if he stopped hosting it the server-side component could be replaced. The client does all the work.
The last person I trust with valuable files like family photos is myself.

I am a bad sysadmin, bad at back-ups, bad at security, bad at redundancy. And I would guess that describes 99.99% of people who care about family photos.
There are degrees of OK. It would be much more OK than if the government is doing it. Why? Chances are if private parties are doing it, there is some third-party that isn't, if you're willing to pay.
Wow. It's finally clear. Content creators are against phase-shifting because it threatens their distribution mechanisms. Consumers want phase-shifting because it makes consuming media an order of magnitude better.

The ideal solution would be for content creators to offer a DRM-free copy of their wares, and for consumers to not abuse this open-ness. But, it seems that consumers will abuse it: given a choice between a $30 BluRay of "The Avengers" and torrenting it for $0, lots choose the later (not the least of which is to avoid the pain of ripping the movie later).

I wonder, though, how bad the abuse would be if the service was really easy to use, and priced correctly? Why would I bother with bittorent if I had a really nice service that let me stream/download movies for a few bucks apiece?

Additionally, I personally wouldn't mind one bit if a subset of the data was encrypted with my public key, making it hard (but not impossible, of course) to share it. Combined with a some creative steganography to identify the targeted user, you have about a secure, enforceable system as is humanly possible.

There is a privacy concern here, of course - the seller can individually identify people who've bought their movie. But that's going to be a problem whenever information is bought and sold. Note that this privacy protection is relatively easy to get around even today, as law-enforcement can request credit card records and itemized purchase information from the retailer. The difference is that now you would require a target and to make effort to get at this data, whereas in this new system, it's right there. If this worries you, either don't purchase data or purchase it in person with cash.
The nexus 10 wasn't even rumoured until a couple days ago. I'm sure work on this started before that.
> Steve Yegge's well-known advice:

He says:

Don't say "choo choo choo" when you're "thinking".

God damn it. Now I'm going to have to fight the urge to do that during interviews!
That is already about five times the identifiable storage capacity of the human brain!
You can say that about any service--what if Crashplan's data center caught fire tomorrow? Tarsnap might be run by a single guy (I think?) but saying S3 is "more" or "less" reliable than any other private company isn't a great comparison. In any case a massive company like Amazon is the most likely to be reliable in these cases, I imagine.
Power vs. Energy
Reuse: A spoon rest becomes a soldering iron holder
It seems the 4% commission on the money they raise is the most controversial aspect of this arrangement for those with experience in this area, which is not what I had anticipated. I could certainly see how investors might be troubled by that though. Thanks for the feedback!
Has anyone read the book put out by the blog post author? I thought the post was well written, and would like to know if the book is worth getting as well...
And if content creators can't win a steganography war on a 2 gigabyte battlefield, then they deserve to lose.
Yeah, the fee was what I focused on most in my decision to decline, as it just seemed like I would be making it too easy for them to screw us.

Note to Hisoka: looks like you've been ninja banned.
DIY HTML-based prototyping for microcontrollers open source project
What do you think of my DIY HTML-based prototyping for microcontrollers open source project?

https://github.com/Agilart/Agilart-Run-Time

Do you think the documentation is ok?
That's my first real Github project, any suggestions, comments, advices, best practises are very welcome!
What are those "attacks" that Akamai reports?
Ask PG: Is Founders at Work 2 still pending?
The Mixergy interview with PG (Feb 2010) mentions Jessica working on a second edition of Founders at Work.

PG: "You know, that is her deepest wish. If she is watching this, she’ll be laughing so much at this point because that’s what she would like the most too to be able to spend more time on the new version of Founders at Work. There’s a new, she’s working on a new edition, with a bunch of new interviews."

Any updates on this?

[1]: http://mixergy.com/y-combinator-paul-graham/
Well, that's why I trust two other companies, plus myself.

I don't know, doing basic backups aren't super-hard for someone who's reading HN. My setup is really just a regular Linux box with a 1TB HDD sitting in a closet of mine, with dynamic dns pointing to my own domain (not even a strict necessity), and I rsync it whenever I have new data like photos. That box in turn syncs to Crashplan and Dropbox, which is automatic.

Yeah rsync and the concept of a backup PC is beyond mere mortals, but for those of us here--if Dropbox (or any service) is your only backup, I think you can only blame yourself.
IMO, I don't mind the 'new links' section. Seems like spam will naturally filter out anyway, since it would probably not get any upvotes.
Remotely controlled Malware as Browser extensions
The site looks great. One piece of feedback: middle-clicking using Chrome a project name in the home page browses to it in the same page; the expected behavior is to be open in a separate tab. Other links (such as the ones in the footer) behave normally.
Tarsnap is great and secure. Not just any HN user, Colin Percival, security officer for Freebsd and a Putnam fellow. It's a very practical and well priced option.
How to install and configure the Jira Git plugin with Gitlab
How to create a custom Filter with AngularJS v1.0
Matt,

Thanks for posting here. The reason I'm confident that this bug is not due to filesystem errors on my machine's part is because Dropbox's version history for these files has become corrupted. If you read over the details and correspondence, you'll see that Dropbox engineers were able to recover two of my files that Dropbox's version history had reported as only having a 0-byte version. These files were edited recently, within the 30-day window that all Dropbox users, Packrat or not, have version control for.

The files had clearly been whole when first synced to Dropbox, but that version was not listed in Dropbox's history, and so I had no power to restore them. Even if my own disk had spontaneously 0-byte'd those files, this should not have caused Dropbox to lose the ability to restore it to its original version.

More circumstantially, others are reporting similar issues:

https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/261921738441515009 - https://twitter.com/pc1oad1etter/status/261957001234505728 - https://twitter.com/frr149/status/261957708746469378 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704236 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704178 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704063 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704485

It's tough to tell from these small updates whether these users had their files 0-byte'd only locally, possibly by the ext4 bug, or whether they've also verified that it's not recoverable from Dropbox.

In addressing this bug report, please specifically address Dropbox's loss of version history. The two files that Dropbox engineers recovered had their version history wiped within the 30 day window.
> I'd rather target 4 cores with 16-way SIMD than 64 cores each with scalar

You're assuming problems that are suitable for SIMD. If you have problems suitable for SIMD, use a GPU. Lots of problems are NOT suitable for SIMD.

If those 64 data streams all happen to require branches regularly, for example, your 4x 16-way SIMD is going to be fucked.

> Besides, this is 28 nm technology and 15x15 mm, no?

Where did you get that idea? Their site states 2.05mm^2 at 28nm for the 16 core version. 0.5mm^2 per core.

So by your math, more like ~26M transistors, or ~1.6M per core. Your estimated die size is 70% larger than what they project for their future 1024 core version...

Source: http://www.adapteva.com/products/epiphany-ip/epiphany-archit...

> it'll get smashed by Amdahl's Law

This is a ludicrous argument when arguing for a GPU architecture instead. A GPU architecture gets affected far worse for many types of problems, because what is parallelizable on a system with 64 general purpose may degenerate to 4 parallel streams on your example 4 core 16-way SIMD.

There are plenty of problems that do really badly on GPU's because of data dependencies.

> when I can have ~900 brawny cores

Except you can't. Not at that transistor count, and die size, anyway.

> NVIDIA and AMD have been exploring this space for almost a decade now and to start over without considering what they may have gotten right and what they have learned while doing so seems a little daft to me.

Have they? Really? They've targeted the embarrassingly parallel problems with their GPU's, rather than even try to address the multitude of problems that their GPU's simply will run mostly idle on, leaving that to CPU's with massive, power hungry cores and low core count. I see no evidence they've tried to address the type of problems this architecture is trying to accelerate.

Myabe the type of problem this architecture is trying to accelerate will turn out to be better served by traditional CPU's after all, but we know that problems that don't execute the same operations on a wide data path very often are not well served by GPUs.
> you're committed to a single-vendor API as well as their infrastructure.

Not quite. You can roll out your own App Engine platform with AppScale:

http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/

Sadly, TyphoonAE (http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/) seems abandoned.
Look at git-annex, it works on top of git and is good at handling large files, and will not require twice the space.

If you use plain git, you'll probably need twice the space. Files stored in git are compressed, but music is already compressed, so there will be little savings. You'll also need a lot of memory if you want to copy files VIA git.
I'm afraid you have simply failed to grasp the meaning of syncing. The whole point of Dropbox is to have a folder which always has exactly the same contents on all your Dropbox installations, and the copy on their servers.
Are those Pokemon in the first figure? If so, I have severely underestimated the coolness of next-generation Pokemon.
A lot more has been raised in a lot less time. Lockitron comes to mind.

As of now, with 23 hours left to go, they are only short $25K, so it seems almost inevitable that the target will be met.
Yes yes, of course.

But the answer most certainly isn't "Well I don't know _exactly_ how python does dictionaries, but I would implement them with a prefix tree and there is nothing better". Which is roughly the answer I gave, in different settings. To five interviewers.
As someone who at one point enrolled in too many classes and failed all but one of them, I have to say "so what?" I learned a valuable lesson about both my limitations and motivations. Why are we so afraid of letting students fail a little bit once in a while?
Somewhere between 2000-2892 Files...

I'm turning Dropbox off now and disabling it on startup.

I'm thankful for this post, now to figure out what's going on.
This sounds awesome but I can't get to the page from my phone. You should delete this submission and resubmit it as a link with 'Show HN' at the beginning of the title.
> Looks like Paypal will also asks for your bank username and password for instant verification and has the same fallback option of 2 Random deposits.

That has not been my experience; the 2 random deposits are the first option, not the last resort. Paypal has never asked me for a user/pass.
It's actually not nearly as efficient as being able to select your seat when you purchase your ticket.
Man, I wouldn't do well in these interviews except for the tinyurl.com question. Who thinks at the level of binary tree implementations? I know what they are and how to use them and I had to could remember and implement one, but I don't remember having ever needed to implement one from scratch.

The interview questions I ask are more around problem solving and thinking out of the box but I deal at the web application level not building compilers, databases, etc.
When watching TV ads it's easy to spot the products that people don't really need to continuously buy month after month, but the company trying to sell it continually tries to ram it down our throats anyway.

Any ad for a toothbrush, razor, shampoo, sweeping device, detergent etc. will use the words "New", "Improved", "Re-Designed", "Bigger/Better/Faster" many times throughout the ad, often using the name of the product only once.

In order to sell a razor, they don't spend time telling people it's a razor, or what it can do, they spend time saying over and over how "New and Improved" it is, often leaving me guessing through the ad as to what they are actually selling.

tldr; Consumers don't care what a product is or what it does, they just want "NEW".
If you look at the picture, they SHOW the actual byte in binary!

looks like it is 236 or 11101100
Not really. They're saying that this position is so extreme that not even the RIAA agrees with it. That's a far cry from saying they're always right.
While we prise Alan Turing, we should not forget the efforts of Rejewski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski Różycki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Różycki and Zygalski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_Zygalski
If I'm not mistaken you're referring to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone question why I couldn't do something when Google seemed perfectly capable of it. Do I look like I have a couple datacenters and an elite math squad in my pants?
> torrenting sites are by and large against the laws of the US

Right. We have free speech as long as it's legal. Just like the Chinese.
> You also did not wear a pink and blue striped hat, and did not get an offer.

I don't understand the point of this quibbling.

Say I was asked 30 questions; I missed 3 of them and didn't get hired. It's a reasonable to assume that these 3 questions were considered important in the general assessment.

> You have to do better than the majority of candidates (maybe ~80% of candidates).

I know, I said I read your book. ;-)

But that doesn't substantially change the story, it means it's likely other candidates got the optimal solution or got closer to it.

Of course this is all based on my self-assessment, since Google doesn't provide any sort of feedback post-interview. But I'm pretty confident that I went well in the other questions. 4 out of 5 interviewers were pretty nice in giving feedback during the interview, even if indirectly. E.g. they'd ask progressively more involved questions on the same topic, so I more or less knew when I had answered the previous questions correctly.

> Additionally, you seem to assume that since (according to you) getting the optimal answer is necessary, that it must also be a sufficient condition. That's obviously false.

No, I haven't made any such assumption. I only assume that getting the optimal answer was the "high bit" in my case.

Apparently this works for Google, and unlike other people who have failed to get the grapes, I don't call them sour.
Updated that as well.

We're rolling out a re-design soon.
Yeah, just reversing back and forth is the poor man's version of cinematographs.

http://technostreak.com/news/cinematographs-a-new-dimention-...

I feel they could've done this better. Still an impeccable jobs. The best team page I've seen so far.
Man, they've been pushing this hard and it looks like it will pay off. They'll make the 750.

Raising 750k in 30 days is no small feat and is awesome market validation. This should really help them raise more investment and keep growing.
"I vaguely recall counting lattice paths in 3-space being a wickedly hard problem with no known polynomial time solution."

I think you can easily write the recursion:

p(x,y,z) = p(x-1,y,z) + p(x,y-1,z) + p(x,y,z-1)

Leave out the term with x-1, y-1, or z-1 for the edge cases for x, y, and/or z equal to zero.

With that in hand, it is easy to compute all values bottom up, starting with those where x+y+z = 0, 1, 2, etc.

Definitely fewer than (x+y+z)^3 values to compute, all of them in O(1) (disregarding cases where the numbers become bignums)

Generalization to any number of dimensions seems easy, too.

A closed form solution, that might be harder.
Are you sure those files were actually truncated? Because the command will simply show files of 0 bytes, which is not necessarily an indication of a bug, only if the file was supposed to contain something.
Why is the spread so high on the buy/sell orders? Mt.Gox currently has Ask: $9.99 Bid: $9.92 while Coinbase has Ask: $11.27 Bid: $10.05. This is an effective 12% fee on purchases in addition to the 1% fee you already charge.
Well, Myna https://mynaweb.com/ uses multi-armed bandit algorithms for A/B testing (or A/B/../N testing if you prefer).

An n-armed bandit problem is a type of reinforcement learning problem, and the associated algorithms for solving these problems are considered machine learning.
My favorite (not most enlightening but just my favorite) article to date is Yvain's Eight Short Studies on Excuses: http://lesswrong.com/lw/24o/eight_short_studies_on_excuses/
But time shifting is fair use and as considered has always required space shifting so space shifting itself is compatible with fair use. I think the question is always about the eventual playback.
I'm not sure why you were down voted for that. It's obviously just an opinion, but you acknowledged that. It certainly wasn't unrelated, disrespectful or inappropriate.

My only argument against that would be to point out that a great many things have no basis in science or mathematics but are still considered to have value. For example philosophy or art.

While the test might have no logical basis, it does form a base line, in the same way that the a unit of measurement (the kilogram for example) may have no other logical basis, it is something which can can be agreed on and thus compared against.
Thanks for the suggestion - it also led me to some other cool projects like git-media.

If git doesn't keep its own copy of the data, a Dropbox "failure" would still be unrecoverable, right?
If you use a balanced tree instead of chaining or probing, sure. But, of course, nobody ever does that in practice, because the complexity isn't justified by the theoretical gains.

Point was, worst-case time complexity isn't constant. I'd be happy to see more people get that right in interviews.
+1 on Postgres. But JEE ? I'd prefer Tomcat anytime over JEE (even if they became "simpler") in the past.

Apache, Tomcat, mod-jk, JSON/REST and loads of freedom...
That's why I cobbled together a poor man's cloud RAID :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4689238

My earlier point was that I think data is stored on Colin Percival's S3 account (he is the creator of Tarsnap) and therefore you might lose access to the data (if he couldn't pay the bills or got hit by a bus) even though S3 itself is fine.
Well, I'm 25. But I'm also a well paid developer (early six-figures in Melbourne, Australia) who would be pretty hopeless in these interviews.
According to the article, content creators are fine with phase shifting.

"And the RIAA and the MPAA agree with you. In 2005, their lawyer (now the Solicitor General of the United States) assured the Supreme Court that “The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their Website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.""
"New York City Police Department: Riding a bike outside of a bike lane is illegal."

Just because some unelected government bureaucracy believes something doesn't make it a law. Who has gone to jail for ripping a Blu-Ray to their iPad? Nobody. Therefore, we don't really know if it's illegal or not. The copyright office has an opinion and have decided not to specifically make the act legal (which is the only authority they have). Fair use, copyright law, "the right of the people to be secure in their ... effects against unreasonable searches..." are all part of the legality equation here, and until this is tested in court, we won't know what is or is not legal.

As far as I can see, the cat is already out of the bag and people don't care what the law is. They can space shift, and will. End of story. (Incidentally, it seems that it's perfectly legal to space-shift pirated media. So maybe just get that instead?)

(It's kind of like how pot is illegal federally, but many states allow people to grow, buy, and sell it. Yup, it's illegal. Too bad nobody cares.)
Or to make assumptions about what you may have done in an imagined past.
Hi Nathan, perhaps this book isn't for me as a designer as much as it is for developers to ensure everything that needs to be there is there, but the modal popup having the action buttons before the messaging doesn't seem to make any sense from a UX perspective.
> Some choices of hash functions are actual O(n) instead of O(1)

I think you're getting your n's confused. O(n) in the context of a collection applies to the size of the collection, not the size of the keys. Nearly all hash functions for strings are O(n) in the size of the string. This doesn't mean the hash table is O(n) for lookups.
The first thing I thought was , this may be a trick question, since there are an infinite number of paths from the center to the surface. I think the problem statement needs a bit more detail.
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I've worked in close proximity to these guys, but the math behind their business still boggles me.

There are about 10 slots in their largest box, and they are charging $4 per slot. The average package will occupy the slot for a day before it is picked up. This gives a max revenue of $40/day/box, or $1200/month/box. Slash that figure in half because it is impossible to have all slots occupied simultaneously all the time, and you get $600/month/box.

If they can turn this into a profitable business, they are truly visionaries that see what others cannot.
So if I rip a DVD to another DVD, but don't use CSS on the second, is that legal?
I think not reading tech news is a good one.

I've felt a bit of envy when it comes to posts declaring how easily somebody has cashed in. But at the end of the day it's usually because the work behind the overnight success has been glossed over.

Until you read between the lines and understand the amount of work and "faking it til you make it" behind the scenes that has gone on give tech news a swerve.