skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mike Goldman originally wrote the challenge such that it calls for one file and one decompressor.

However, when subsequently asked whether there can be multiple files, he agreed; thereby he was arguably duped. He didn't say "okay, but there will be a 256 byte size penalty per additional file", he just plainly agreed.

This means that the original formula for adding the size of the solution applies: just the file sizes added together.

Goldman should accept that he foolishly rushed into a careless amendment of his original challenge and pay the money.

That said, it obviously is cheating to have the archive format or file system hide the representation of where the removed bytes are! If a single file is produced, it has to include a table of where to insert the bytes that were taken out. If multiple files are produced, the archive format or file system stores that information for you at considerable expense.

If both people are wrong, the contest should be declared invalid and Goldman should return the $100.

If only Goldman is wrong, he should pay $5000.

Under no interpretation is Goldman strictly right and the contestant strictly wrong.

So he is wrong to keep the $100 in any case.
Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier
HN breaks that link — the trailing period is part of the URL. The path is “/wiki/Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._v._Accolade,_Inc.”
That would probably give the police enough reason to arrest you. I prefer feeding a disjoint set of movements made by random people.
There's a real glitch version? What's the background?
Like some others on this thread I loved from Cubase to Ableton some years ago because of the UX, non-linear workflow, and friendlier licensing. All the controller action around it makes it even more awesome.
I wonder how you got a downvote for that, it's quite accurate. A version of simplistic token replacement even has a wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_pair_encoding
Could be this http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
I can't recall any occasional where I have done that.
They work in lower Manhattan, not Yonkers.
Of course. It implies "vim or emacs users".
I'm too busy listening to it defrag this thing.
> (assuming the blockchain doesn't lie)

Well, the blockchian lying is one thing -- another thing is if it tells the truth about lies ("it" has been lied to).

I suppose my confusion stemmed from the fact that dnschain is two things: a way to secure data, and an infrastructure for registering data. Apparently there's no trust at the point of registration, which means the whole thing is entirely untrustworthy from a certain point of view (I don't necessarily thing this is a bad thing/feature -- it's just that without any form of vetting, there can be only a certain "kind" of trust), on the other hand if you trust the registration, you can trust your queries to return data that has been registered.

With the/a CA system, you can trace trust trough keys back to organizations/individuals (that either act in bad faith, or has been compromised) -- but detecting such bad behaviour is out of scope of the CA system.
AFAIK, information theory requires the _Expected_ size of a 'compressed' file be at least as large as the original.

So we could create an encoding that compressed N/50 of the strings with lg(N/50)=lg(N)-lg(50) bits. That would save us lg(50) > 5 bits with 2% chance. In this game we have 50 tries (5000$/100$) so we'd be pretty sure to win.

The correct price for this game is probably closer to 200$.
I would strongly agree that having this on Twitter is making it more confusing than, say, a blog post would be. The replies & conversation on her Google+ thread from other people at Google makes me believe that the context supports the more negative take.
No, 900$ per ounce still... But it would take up a larger volume so you'd need less mass per watch.
The EOF is not at a cost of zero bytes; it costs as much as storing the length of each constituent file. The extra space used is in the file system accounting.
The failure of Amazon's phone is largely attributable to the fact they designed a phone _for Amazon_ and not for end users. They became too enthralled with the buy from Amazon experience. Anyway I don't think anything Amazon did is useful in terms of this discussion.
I think SwellJoe's thought might be that knowing Mandarin doesn't so much add value, but that it's a hygenie factor, just like literacy. Literacy is the norm, and people without are seriously disadvantaged.
Snopes is just a couple with no investigative or journalistic training, who google stuff and express their own biases.
Making a DIY knife
They still have to sell the watch itself with their margins however. There's nothing stopping you from buying an aftermarket strap, and if they require you to purchase a strap with the watch -- well then it doesn't matter how they split the price up.
See also: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/05/371894919/what-he...
I've just never encountered that use case in Ruby code, and to me it feels like really bad style. You can use .find to find the first element that matches a block, then return that item (if one exists).
FYI, that's a 404 link to Wikipedia. You're missing a period at the end:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Enterprises_Ltd._v._Accolade,_Inc.

Perhaps it's just HN screwing up the autolinking
i don't have a cs degree and I consider both 2 and 3 to be a core beliefs
How to Install and Run Ubuntu Server GUI?
A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers and there's a dozen startups trying to replace them with computers.

Pixar disagrees that people won't accept computer-generated entertainment.

I agree that there's zero (maybe even negative) social capital for programmers but as teachers have found out, one well-funded PR campaign can undo even the best social capital.
I am a current CS student and everything I know is self taught.
Europe (especially Poland) has lots of shale oil and gas. They just don't have the regulation to get it out. (Because of geology the technology needed is also a bit different than in the US, so needs some investment.)
Right. But eg: .no domains are linked to a tax/org [ed:code/registration number] (or used to be, anyway). And generally you can't just go and claim to be "The Norwegian Parliament".no (or whitehouse.gov). So a registry that's strictly first come, first serve, does not work like DNS (or the CA system for that matter, despite all it's flaws).
You would probably get a better deal selling the watch as a watch itself than melting it down for its raw gold.

Apple has let you bring you old devices in to be recycled in the past however; Maybe they could extend this to buy back old watches? People have envisioned some upgrade program, though I'm doubtful Apple would be too concerned with melting down old watches for their gold.
I like Bolt too. It was my first choice :). Using it for read-only partitions sounds like a great idea. I think the current implementation looks like a tree if you "squint" a bit. There's a hierarchy of metrics and sources, and the arrays of points are like the leaf nodes.

You're very correct about B+trees being efficient with sequential reads. We use MySQL with InnoDB for all of our time series where I work[0]. I started this way just to get a good understanding of what works and what doesn't. I think I'm on track to implementing something like a B+tree by using smaller extents of points.

[0] http://www.slideshare.net/vividcortex/vividcortex-building-a...
There are some women developers in the video, for one.

Two, I imagine the number of non-white software developers in Germany is very, very small.
> Fuck off.

That is totally out of line. Please re-read the rules and follow them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Show HN: Enclosure.js, an IoC container and module loader for Node.js
But where are the shells coming from?
>you'd need a method that can compress a random file with at least 2% ($100/5000) probability

No, you'd need to be able to create a custom algo for that file with that probability. Quite a difference.
It's at a cost of 0 competition score bytes. Mike screwed up by allowing an alphabet of 257 symbols and then only counting 256 of them. Pretty much any compression or repacking algorithm could have been used at that point.
I don't know how you can get one but you shouldn't get it. Do you really want to give all your fingerprints and retina scans to the government when you know how it can be misused in a country like India which is a police state? I bet there is no oversight in getting access to your information and there are tons of ways in which your information can be misused/exploited.
> Have you ever tried to explain to someone non-tech who Xiaomi is?

Why would that be difficult? "They're a Chinese phone company, they're quite big in China but not really in the West for now."
It's kind of hilarious that their certificate is signed by "Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilizers Company Ltd."
It's especially amazing when compared to the other audio programs that try to mimic the hardware, literally, down to having a physics engine drive the UI and making users drag cables around.

I agree. Live blows Reason out of the water in terms of workflow. However, I've always this aspect of sound design in Reason. I enjoy dragging the cables around, controlling what flows where and modulates what in a physical way - even if its only superficial. Essentially, I just view Reason as fantastic instrument rack.
The point is not that computers will do the job "as well". A full AI available means that computers will do the job better, and not only slightly better either, but much better.

Imagine having the best hair dresser | artist | nurse | etc of the world completely focused on you, 24 hours a day, for everybody.
I can't disagree with you, these haven't gone out into the wild yet - but I will say I've seen some truly gifted piano players / keyboardists take to this without any mention of strange finger/hand issues with the layout.

I'll be honest, I'm not a keyboard player. I designed this to be truly mobile and portable without making compromises on the key size, which my theory is that having a full scale keyboard is more important than the traditional design of the keys. The former makes the device useful, and the later makes it familiar but also prevents it from being very portable without shrinking the keys or otherwise compromising on other dimensions.

I've seen people shred on Keys, it's pretty awesome to see, since I can barely play Yankee Doodle - but I'm getting a lot better!
These are so good. Thank you! Any advice on how I can immerse myself in resources like this short of stumbling across them on HN?
Most universities don't have a software engineering program, just a CS program. Typically it's one that's heavier on the software aspects than the mathematical part of things.
It doesn't look like fantastic Ruby code, you're right. I just wouldn't agree that JS "works well" when it comes to their somewhat afterthought functional iterators.
MIT graduate stipend is currently around 2800 / month, at least for physics. Also, grad students don't pay payroll taxes and it's relatively easy to make extra money by signing up to grade things or to help at conferences.
Gizmodo talking up the Vivaldi browser
Will prefix this with the necessary disclaimer that there are exceptions to this on both sides, and by generalising I'm necessarily going to get it wrong for some specific cases. One of the best devs I know dropped out of CS in the first few months, contributed to opensource projects (particularly in OS X stuff), got recruited by Apple, has been with them for some 6-7 years since on a product you all know.

Caveat over, onto the generalization: From having done a few dozen interviews now, the self-taught applicants are more likely to have holes in their knowledge that they don't know about. That is, CS grads have (hopefully) gone through a broad and formal program so they have a more complete mental map of the knowledge space and their own weaknesses. The self-taughts don't know what it is they don't know.

This gap can be overcome, but the pattern I've often seen is the knowledge gap and disadvantage is compounded by the first jobs the self-taught tend to end up in. Rejected from graduate programs in larger firms where they'll be exposed to a wider range of talent, they often end up in smaller shops where they work in a niche where they're not challenged to keep growing (just as often due to the nature of the business. Smaller shops tend to be contract businesses, and contract work doesn't provide much opportunity to go deep on problems in the way that will stretch and grow you). And because they don't know what they don't know, they don't realise the gap between their skillset and their contemporaries who went the formal CS track.

Frequently I've interviewed developers who've done this for 5-10 years and decided they wanted to try working in a larger company. And they're hard interviews. I hate it when an earnest applicant is an obvious 'no' in the first few minutes, and it's because they've specialised into a low-level dead-end, and they didn't realise it.

Having said that, I think we're at a point where it's easier for a self-teaching programmer to overcome this. Even compared to when I went through uni in the mid-2000s, it's ridiculously easy to get the material that would cover an undergrad's CS education. There's no need for a self-taught person to be caught short in an interview on not knowing what a linked list is, or the basics of algorithmic complexity. I could probably put together a list of 10-20 Wikipedia articles and Khan videos that, if you were to read and watch until you understood, would cover you for the vast bulk of CS-related questions you're likely to hit in an interview.
In theory, I quite like the solution mentioned in the earlier threads: request a file that's a few kilobytes, then get two or three different hashes of the file, and write a "decompressor" that generates random files and checks the hashes.

It's just a shame that the heat death of the universe will probably occur before your program finishes.
This article from berkeley is super relevant, it was published just a few days ago:
https://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2015/03/05/distant-supernova...

We can see a supernova 4 different times using gravitational lensing.
Ah ok, so some obvious things left to optimize then :) Thanks for the explanations!

As far as I know, none of the Prometheus core developers will be at Monitorama this year. But we'll be at SRECon Dublin, DevOpsCon Berlin, GopherCon Denver, and hopefully also at one (or both) of the VelocityConfs later this year.

Indeed, it would be great to catch up in person if you're at any of these.
Donald Knuth's 40 page CV [pdf]
Related conversation about his PhD General Exam at Princeton, which I believe he took when he was 19:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2771031

A direct link to the notes:

http://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence
I don't follow you - can you elaborate?
crossorigin.me
This is going to be a highly biased answer, and will probably be downvoted. I don't think there is any difference between a "good" programmer that was self-taught or one that had a degree in CS/SE. The reason I put "good" is because, at least in my field, there are a lot of terrible programmers/coders/developers/etc that come from all backgrounds - be it self-taught or with a degree (I work in a local market for .NET). I think a persons background is a terrible starting point to determine their competence. I personally am self-taught, having started "coding" when I was about 8. I have a colleague who didn't start coding until he was in college, and I think him and I are about the same skill level. We have different strengths: he is more architecturally minded, while I am more of a "hacker" (I can figure any technical problem out though it may not be pretty). In the course of my career though, I have met many self-taught coders and university trained ones, and to me it makes almost no difference. What it comes down to is passion, and that can be extremely hard to quantify. For me personally, having been doing this for almost two decades, you just have to feel the person out. If you are passionate, you should be able to tell if they are as well.
You can, and I say that hesitantly because there is no official seller of the product, and as such, one can quickly become a victim of fraud if they aren't careful. For the same reason you can't purchase RayBans on AliExpress, I'm assuming the same holds true for mobile phones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_snail
Can't he just send you a Kolmogorov-random file? The definition of randomness (in Kolmogorov sense) basically corresponds directly to his challenge.

Also, Kolmogorov-random sequences vastly outnumber non-random sequences in general, so with a long-enough file, I wonder how certain he can be that he has generated such a file.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Kolmogoro...
EFI isn't about 2+TB drives. That's just GPT, which could have been implemented in a traditional BIOS. EFI was created because Intel needed something for the Itanium chips to run, and they didn't want to implement OpenFirmware.

EFI came to the PC because Apple wasn't interested in starting a 16-bit 8086 programming division, and the rest of the industry followed suit because it was easier than squeezing more things into the 16-bit BIOS. Now that we've got both EFI and GPT widely available, we can have machines that can do things like fetch and install their own firmware updates and we can have sane dual-booting.
Hacking DNA of Kick-Ass Companies
> A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers

The same faction -- and in many case the same individuals -- that portray teachers as lazy overcompensated government workers today have been doing so for decades. Conversely, the same people that have seen them as selfless nurturers have been doing that for just as long. Nothing has changed in the last "few years" in that regard.
Self-taught programmers tend to be more practical, while CS graduates (and worse, Doctorates) value theory over experience.

Some real life examples:

- The algorithm is tight enough that the choice of programming language doesn't matter. Also phrased at least once as "the constants in big-O notations just don't matter".

- No, you can't install a configuration management tool on the web server; the web server must be completely isolated to protect our network.

- If I'm using a programming language with so much power, why would I ever want my configuration files to have any less power?

- If only there was a programming language where the (type system / memory management / homoiconicity) was more powerful, we could solve every problem automatically.

Of course, on the other side of the fence, there's these pearls of wisdom:

- Of course C++ is memory safe, if you follow these few hundred best practices...

- (Ruby / Python / Perl) is fast enough to solve every problem.

- If I can use Javascript on the server and the browser, why would I want to use anything else?

- Why would I ever care what the Big-O complexity is for this algorithm?

It makes for an interesting comparison and contrast. And since I come from the self-taught angle, a couple of the second group of quotes are my own.
There's a really major difference between the Windows/PC argument and the Android/HW one. It's important to remember because without it you end up describing symptoms as causes and not the other way around. Phones are much more of a fashion/status/tribe statement for better or worse than your desktop or laptop was and you use them way more in social settings than you do a laptop or desktop. So while this is true "PC OEMs mostly failed to differentiate in design" it's because that's not what drove sales. Corporate PC buyers didn't care and personal buyers really didn't care enough to spend $200 for better design because no one saw it (or if you did care you went with a Mac).

Same goes with "Second, PC OEMs never managed to create any meaningful differentiation in software" - Even if you had it's unlikely to have made much of a difference unless it had productivity differences. Because that's why you cared - you were (are) on these things for 8 - 10 hours a day trying to make a living vs 1 - 3 hours on your phone for work/social blend. We're not arguing that Xiamoni's suite of software makes the user more productive. It's just a "feel good" thing tied up in "Well I can't afford Apple but this thing is actually pretty sweet too" and/or "I'm not going with stock Android because that's too boring/crowdlike" Whatever the exact reasons they're emotional not productivity driven.

The reason this all matters is that the argument appears to be that Xiamoni may not be Dell - destined to rise and flame out in a commodity hell - but something that's neither Apple nor Dell but a third way. However, if the things it's differentiating on are different to what PC manufacturers differentiated but only because of unique aspects to this vertical then they're different barbarians but nevertheless still just barbarians.
> CS students participate in open source more.

I'd disagree on this one. From my admittedly anecdotal experience, all the people I know who are heavily self-taught (myself included) have participated more in open source. Most of these people are driven by a passion for software, rather than a need to sell something.
India's Daughter BBC Documentary Exposes the Views of Men in India Towards Women
The problem is that even the most trivial linux-compatible decompressor will add a few bytes, and there's almost no chance of saving that many bytes. But sure it wouldn't hurt to require it be 100+ bytes smaller.
So by "gap" you mean unable to answer some trivial questions during an interview that don't pertain to the job at all?

While I agree self-taught developers may lack knowledge in certain areas, they compensate by being able to learn quickly and efficiently for the job at hand. School taught, though not always, will lack that discipline and/or efficiency. At least in my experience, so take what I said with a grain of salt.
I'm a current CS student, finishing this year. I work with both people who are self taught and people who have degrees. I think pretty highly of those I work with who are self taught. All in all the differences are minimal when getting the job done.

CS emphasizes theory and mathematics. Programming and coding is usually discussed in the introductory courses, but from there students are expected to teach themselves to keep up.
As a current graduate school applicant with a couple of admits to top 10 programs I can confirm this.

My GPA looks "low" around a 3.3 cumulative (I have lots of C's in things I deemed unimportant) but I have a relatively high CS GPA (3.8-3.9), took many graduate classes during undergrad, worked at startups, consulted, did multiple years of research resulting in two publications with 2-3 more in the pipeline, worked on open source, gave talks at workshops and software engineering conferences, TAed, constructed two student led courses, etc.

It seems the most important thing is to demonstrate your ability to work as a researcher (your primary role as a CS graduate student) trumps all in graduate admissions, but that is just my 2 cents.
It's not so much that it's difficult to explain, it's just tough to explain the credibility that this company has when someone hasn't heard of them. Like I originally mentioned, this dialogue is typically only from someone that likely doesn't frequent HN either.

A similar scenario might be how some people construed open-source products to be lesser than their paid counterparts (e.g. Ubuntu vs Windows). Similarly, those who haven't heard of Xiaomi, might consider it inferior to their iPhone, since they're well aware of Apple's brand, identity, and product line.