eatitraw

> Just reading the description of the question, writing the code and compiling will take me more than that.

I am pretty sure he skipped compiling! I am being serious here.

Honestly, I am not sure why you are surprised. Competitive programming is different from regular programming, and like every other field it require years of training and experience to become good.

After a while you just learn to recognize patterns and common topics.

I think your comparison to chess is a good one. Both chess and competitive programming require years of deliberate practice to become good.

Source: done both. Though I was only somewhat good at chess, I was fairly successful at programming contests a few years ago(not this guy's level good though).

> Is that person simply a genius? My ego is shattered beyond recognition. (Instead of being happy that I solved my first competition problem...)

Don't feel bad about yourself! Imagine a Java programmer writing their first haskell program and being surprised at how quickly haskell programmers are able to write code in haskell. That's how your post looks to me.

This is really interesting, but not all examples are convincing. For example, this one:

> With huge front page traffic, it’s hard to believe that a good story would only get 4 or 5 up votes in its 3 hour window on the front page, therefore, it makes the first 3 upvotes look very suspicious.

Sounds like a typical 5-10 point story that didn't go anywhere? I feel like I see lots of them on HN. Is the described story _that_ abnormal?

The front page and /new are very different, and I'd say that when browse /new (which happens rarely), I focus on giving upvotes to stories that deserve them.

I have an online friend who contributes to firefox. They are fairly beginner-friendly, though you probably need to have some C++ skills.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

> and there is potential for a pharmaceutical company to patent and profit from it, then you can generally rest assured that it will be scheduled to require a doctor's prescription

Guess what? Belgian company did this, it is sold under brand name Nootropil in many countries. The patent is already expired, so there is probably little benefit in bringing it to the US market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam#History

> For the non-technical, can you explain the search engine you are building.

It is a search engine for one subreddit(/r/learnprogramming).

> so, what is your interest?

I know about search engines, and I wanted to share my knowledge with people(personally, I think there isn't much info on the web, compared to e.g. operating systems). I also wanted to start live streaming, so I started this.

> are you looking for ideas or do you have other pet projects you want to work on?

Suggestions are always welcome! I have a couple of ideas for side projects(and I sometimes stream building them).

> My suggestion, if you are trying to build an audience, crowd source your next project idea.

We tried something like this in /r/WatchPeopleCode, and it doesn't worked very well(for some reason). Although the subreddit was 10x less popular then(and maybe implementation wasn't that good).

I am curious about your project idea though!

That's true about audio quality. Do you have suggestion for a good mic?

Oh hi! I am the guy that codes a search engine. Just wanted to say thank you for posting the link, and join the discussion.

If you have questions, I'll be glad to answer them!

ukd1 is right, it is to repost it. I hope I didn't break the rule about reposts(1.5 years ago may qualify as "last year or so") but I figured it is very relevant to the eigenfaces tinder story.

Thanks! This is interesting, although it looks like there is/was an issue with autoplay attribute. I'm going to test this tomorrow.

Thank you! I'm going to investigate this. I have OS X(although 10.10.1), but I'll I can update my Mac OS X'.

I hope there is a way to force youtube to have full screen option.

Yes, definitely, we'll add support for this.

(Also, it is very likely that we were having issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018638 , I guess loading players for 5-10 streams shouldn't hurt that bad)

Sorry about that, we were probably having some issues with twitch streams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9018638

> Side question: I'd like to stream some audio content to a few 1000 people (24/7)

Hm... If you don't want to build your own streaming infrastructure, then it looks like you can have a 24/7 youtube live stream: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853700?hl=en

"End times are not needed for 24/7 streams."

I guess youtube isn't very suitable for audio, but maybe it is an option for you.

What stream were/are you watching? Also, what is your OS/browser? I checked "Instruction Set Development - Part 5" and there is full screen button(Mac OS X, chrome/firefox).

After ~60 minutes of random debugging in production. If anyone noticed any weirdness(like a lot of repeated streams / streams disappearing) -- we're sorry. Looks like everything should work now.

Just a bit of technical details for curious: twitch streams are painful to deal with. Twitch channel != youtube channel. Twitch channel is akin youtube video(or stream) but with offline/online status. Mapping "online/offline" statuses into proper upcoming/live/completed statuses isn't straightforward. Differentiating between different "streams" is also difficult(i.e. user streams twice on two different days, but the link stays the same).

Also, twitch api often returns 5XX errors.

Bug reports are welcome here: avp-13@yandex.ru

Also, if you want to be notified about upcoming streams, then you can subscribe to subreddit(http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode), subscribe on the website, or follow https://twitter.com/WatchPeopleCode.

Stupid law in Germany(regarding broadcasting): https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/qLbjw...

Other people in this comment thread made good point about value for viewers, so I'm not going to focus on streamers in my response.

> blog, tutorial video, stackoverflow post, book, etc

Well, how does one records a tutorial video? It is not that easy, there are a lot of details: language, library, length of video, format(i.e. what things to explain, in what order, etc, etc). Streaming is straightforward, you code as you normally would and explain stuff as you go. As for information density, I think it is possible to speed up "boring" parts(e.g. silent thinking) in recorded videos. We aren't 100% sure, but we're coding a prototype.

> There seem to be legal problems with them in Germany or is it some European law and other countries are also blocked?

It is a stupid law in Germany. :(

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/qLbjw...

"Because of the German law (RStV), you must have a broadcast licence from the media authorities when you make a live stream that can reach more than 500 people at the same time. Not getting one would result in a fine of up to 500 000€. However, even if you would have one, Google might need one as well (because they somewhat are the "television channel") and they don't have one (if you do stuff that is against German law in your live stream, Google would lose its licence because of you)."

> I'm more concerned that twitch.tv is already good and has it's own culture developed for this.

Twitch is ok, but it is against ToS to stream non-gamedev programming. These rules aren't enforced strictly though.

VOD support for twitch sucks. Personally, I prefer my videos not getting deleted after 14 days. So that's why I stream on youtube.

As for the other stuff, we have a few ideas(most of them vague). One of them: auto speeding up "boring" parts of videos(e.g. silent thinking) in recorded videos.

What should they do in Russia? Help the second biggest player, which is Google? :)

Although TBH, in Russia there are mail.ru(with their search engine) and sputnik.ru (a search engine funded by company called Rostelekom. The majority of it is owned by state/government).

Surprisingly interesting to play and watch. I would like more tools to add cells(mspaint-like)

Tip: you can get advice posted on dead blogs(e.g. posterous) by using the wayback machine: http://archive.org/web/

I guess YC will put them online on their youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg

For previous startup schools they released videos after a few weeks.

I think it is a joke. The authors are probably anarchists.

Russian native speaker here. I too never think of keywords as words in english language.

As for function/variable/type/etc names and comments -- in Russia english is the standard. Russian is rarely used in comments, and using russian in code is frowned upon, so it (almost) never happens.

> But I'm wondering how it's interpreted from the point of view of a native speaker.

In Russia, we have company called 1C. One of the software products of this company is "1C: Enterprise". This product has some built-in language(for automatizing common accountant tasks or something like that). And keywords in this language are russian words.

I've never programmed in this language. And code in it looks really horrible to me, to the point of being repulsive. Here is hello world program, in case anyone is interested:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Встроенный_язык_программирован...

(I am the other creator of this website)

> The idea is just that I want to know right away whether or not there is someone who I can help, and someone who can help me. Ok, this makes it much more clear! We'll definitely improve search experience for unregistered users. Thanks for the link, btw, the lib looks very useful.

> Otherwise, it's a waste of time for me to register. It's like a dating site... Yeah, I do agree that the site would be attractive with more users. However, you can register, type in some tags and receive occasional notifications when someone with the same tags signs up.

I am the other creator of this website and I am curious: would you sign up if it had nice design and everything? We plan to switch to some nice theme, it just isn't our top priority.

(I am the other creator of this website). Thanks! We will be happy to see you on our website!

We created a platform for finding mentors. You can find js mentor there: http://www.perunity.com/?src=hn2

It could be that HN mods altered the headline by the time you saw it.