oakenshield

I started enjoying Netflix more when I realized I shouldn't be looking for stuff I knew of from elsewhere, but rather explore titles, rate, and help their algorithm to suggest things to me. Has been working out well so far - I got into an area I didn't think I was interested so far (superhero series).

Likely they're holding their cards close to the chest as it's a competitive market.

My 2 cents: many file systems do not have a file locking feature that can enforce file locking. In unix-like systems, file locks (e.g., lockf(3)) are "advisory" rather than mandatory, meaning it's up to the higher-layer apps to check whether another program has locked a file and voluntarily stop.

Any apps that do implement this feature likely do so by making the original file read-only and having the first app that opens the file work on a copy. However, I think Windows may have a mandatory file locking mechanism.

Congrats Navneet, Mehul, & team!

Speed is one concern but far from the main reason. You couldn't use a typical-length RSA key to encrypt a large chunk of data because there's a max input size for any given RSA key size. Standard block/stream cipher modes of operation are defined only for symmetric key ciphers.

alt+. does the same thing as well, and is slightly easier to type.

Speaking for the Bay area, public transportation here is shockingly bad, even for something as routine as getting to the airport. For someone living in the valley to get to SFO (about 40 miles), a taxi can cost anywhere from $50-$80, and the public transportation alternative takes anything between 2-2.5 hours, 1 bus, 3 trains, some distance walking with your luggage, and about 15 bucks. Oh, I forgot to mention that trains are once an hour, and there are a total of 3 distinct operators for the bus and train systems who are totally uncoordinated with each other.

Not surprisingly, most people who value their time prefer making a 35-minute drive at their convenience, and paying about $12-$18 per day of parking.

For HTTP clients and servers, I've not had too much trouble with cpp-netlib. It's heavily boost-based, and it uses Boost::Asio for concurrency and SSL handling, but if you're familiar with Boost, you can be up and running in no time. IIRC, this library is considered for official inclusion to Boost as well. I use cpp-netlib + RapidJSON for my REST API handling needs.

http://cpp-netlib.org/0.9.4/index.html

https://code.google.com/p/rapidjson/

I have no recommendations for writing REST services, however.

Which book did you get? Curious to find out what's in it.

> ... so disadvantageous in an evolutionary sense? Environmental factors (such as staring at a computer screen...)

Well if you're arguing that it's a nurture thing, there are plenty of us who had bad vision at childhood, right from before the dawn of the computer age. You could say that it was not computer screens but books that caused it, but how far back can you make this argument? Any sources for this claim?

Correct. I didn't mean slow implementation, I meant slow enough on modern hardware using the fastest implementaiton.

I may not understand the whole context, but if you're using PBKDF2 for key derivation, you don't want to use something that works "fast". You want whatever algorithm/iteration combination that is as slow as possible [1], but not too slow that it annoys the user.

[1] on modern hardware, that is.

> I wonder if the C implementation is much faster

Very likely -- Run this on your machine and see if it improves things http://stackoverflow.com/a/9781943. I got about 18.6s for your python code while this one with a 16 byte salt and 250k iterations runs in 0.6s.

OWASP recommends over 100k iterations too: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet...

I've been thinking about this very problem---recovering a forgotten encryption password without trusting a third party. The state of the art seems to be

1. Print it out on paper and put it in a safe. This is somewhat annoying and inconvenient for the vast majority of users, and if you lose or don't have access to the paper, you're screwed.

2. Encrypt the password using answers to some security questions and store it with an online provider you marginally trust. This has the problem of reducing the security to the strength of your answers (which may be known to any number of people close to you), and people might even forget the spelling of their answers which puts them in the same pickle.

I feel what would be ideal is some sort of a question/challenge that evokes a consistent, unique, high-entropy response from the user but the response is not based on a fact... sort of like a Rorschach test, perhaps, but one where each user would have a unique response. Is anyone aware of some system/research like this?

I've read a few bits and they're all great one way or the other, primarily because chapters on specific projects are written by their primary authors. A couple of good ones

Nginx: http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html LLVM: http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html Sendmail: http://www.aosabook.org/en/sendmail.html

Although this means there's no consistent style across chapters, it's really something else to hear about the architectural and design decisions that the author made, and how they look back at those decisions now (esp. in the Sendmail article).

What you're speaking about seems similar to what most people on the Leangains [1] diet follow.

In looking around for healthy diet + exercise patterns for predominantly sedentary lifestyles (such as the HN crowd), there seem to be two main styles: (1) eat 6 small meals a day spaced out over your waking period, and (2) eat only 8 hours a day, and fast for 16, a form of intermittent fasting (IF) as is recommended by Leangains. Having tried both, I find that IF is vastly easier to adhere to, and more importantly, much easier to maintain your weight loss (or muscle gain) goals as you have only so much time in a day to stuff yourself.

In both schemes however, most of your calories are supposed to come post exercise. In my case, this is the traditional "dinner" time, but like the article says, for pre-electricity ages, this meal may very well have been around noon.

[1] http://examine.com/leangains-faq/#summary2

YC Winter 2012 security startup (stealth) - Palo Alto, CA - First Hire

We are building a multi-platform security application + SaaS that solves a big problem for businesses and end-users in the domain of cloud storage and sharing. Our product is in late alpha, has users, and we are currently ramping up to support more platforms over the next 3 months.

We are looking for a strong generalist hacker who is comfortable mucking around systems code but can also work on front-end and UI as required.

What we're looking for:

* Plenty of C++ programming experience, especially systems code. Any platform is okay (Windows / Mac / Linux), as long as you are not biased against working on another platforms if required.

* Great object oriented design and API design skills.

* A security mindset (see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_m...)

* Bonuses: Windows low-level expertise, JS wizardry, iOS (or Android) experience

Apply with links to stuff you've done or built to oakenthrones@gmail.com.

While you have a valid point, Flutter has some pretty deep and well-trained computer vision code that can't be replicated in a month or two. In addition, even if one app (say iTunes) builds this functionality, users would still want gestures for other apps, which is why a separate gesture-recognition-focused product makes sense. I can see Flutter's core tech being useful (e.g., as an API) for a wide variety of uses beyond video consumption.

Yet another satisfied customer here, and to me, one of the huge advantages of YM is that the mechanic comes to you... no more worrying about how to get your vehicle to a shop, whether you will make it there by closing to pick it back up, which of your friends to bug to give you a ride, etc.

Any shell script can be made one line with enough semicolons.

It's on LWN. 90% of programmers who go there really do need to know memory in the detail Drepper talks about. I see your point though - I fully expected the title to be linkbait to a hastily written article.

This article, however, is the real deal. Drepper's site (http://www.akkadia.org/drepper/) won't win any design competitions but is a goldmine of systems programming wisdom.

Stealth startup (YC W12) - Mountain View, CA - Paid INTERN (local)

We are building a secure Platform-as-a-Service that is more secure and compliant than existing PaaS systems. Existing PaaS offerings cannot support applications that need to comply with regulations such as HIPAA or PCI-DSS, and we are building a PaaS based on public cloud infrastructures (AWS, Rackspace) that can do exactly this.

You will be working with the founding team and get valuable experience in working in a startup environment. 12-14 week internships typically starting in early May. Competitive pay.

What we're looking for

* A great programmer with a solid CS background. We want someone that spends time hacking outside work and has fun doing it. Ideal candidates would have deep experience in Web programming with some popular framework. Ruby on Rails / Django or a Java-based framework is good, but knowledge of multiple frameworks is a plus.

* Reasonable AWS (or Rackspace) experience. This includes using EC2/EBS/S3/RDS/IAM including the API, automation using Chef (or Puppet), managing and monitoring instances, etc.

* Some systems programming experience including a reasonable understanding of OSes, networking, and crypto / security. It would be a huge plus if you have substantial experience with C/C++ and systems programming on Linux.

* Above all, a fast learner. We don't care if you don't know a technology, as long as you have the desire to learn.

To apply, please send a github/stackoverflow/whatever profile or links to other stuff you've done (and a resume if you must) to oakenthrones@gmail.com.

Cool implementation. Were you inspired by the Google 2-factor approach to log in to Goog websites that was pulled?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_qr_code...

As others said, I'd love to see an android version. However, before I use it for my important Web service accounts, I'd like the ability to encrypt my passwords both on the phone app and the browser plugin with a key known only to me so I don't have to trust your service with my cleartext passwords.

Marissa Mayer is hardly the best role model out there for computer scientists, in the classical sense of the word "scientist". There's a very clear distinction between programmer, hacker, and scientist which the author may not be aware of (or has completely forgot to mention).

IMO, role models for female computer scientists would be Grace Hopper [1], in whose name there is now a scholarship for graduate students, or someone like Barbara Liskov [2], who won the Turing award recently. Though perhaps less popular than Marissa Mayer, I feel these are the role models that should be better known among young women about to choose a career path.

/pedantry

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

Quite easy to find online, but...

http://ycombinator.com/apply.html, point #1.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804408

While it may be tempting to look to nature to draw inspiration for engineering, realize that nature/evolution often makes horrendous engineering "decisions" precisely because it is not intelligently engineered. The most often cited example is the inferior laryngeal nerve in mammals, which is 15 feet longer than necessary for giraffes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve#Evide...

This is awesome! I had never thought of commissioning artwork previously, but checking out some of the already commissioned postapocalyptic artwork made me realize I'd love to recreate custom-made versions of scenes from my favorite science fiction or graphic novels for not much more than some random painting I could buy at Target. I'll definitely be using EveryArt in the near future!

Is there a way a user could suggest / recommend an artist for EveryArt to source? I personally follow several digital artists on DeviantArt and similar, and would love to have artists in those available to work with me through EveryArt.

I don't find #1 very good advice. The "celebrities" are the ones who you most need in your network, and you need to bite the bullet, navigate the crowd, and get at least a few minutes of facetime with them so they know who you are. Sending a cold email without having introduced yourself is going to get near-zero responses. Working a huge room may be overwhelming the first few times, but it gets much easier the more events you go to. Also disagree on #3 - sending very similar follow-up emails to a bunch of people is not too much effort and you need to do it within 24 hours so they don't forget you.

Agree on preferring 1-on-1s as opposed to group events, but most conferences / networking events offer exactly this kind of setting.

The FAQ mainly complains about multi-statement macros that use conditionals or loops (among some sillier criticism). For a one-statement expression such as the above, I would use a macro because it's so much easier to define than a (potentially templatized) inline function.

Also, to answer your "how much is done for you by the compiler" question, gcc has a few builtins: __builtin_clz (count leading 0 bits), __builtin_popcount (number of 1 bits), etc. but it's not nearly enough for most common bit twiddling use-cases.

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html

Stealth security startup (YC Winter '12)

Mountain View, Full-time. Interns also considered

We are looking for our first employee in a kernel / systems / generalist hacker role. We are solving a high-impact problem in data security. Our product is based on patent-pending research. You will be involved in all major company decisions, and you will own significant portions of the codebase.

Skills:

* Significant Linux kernel hacking experience. VMM hacking expertise (Xen, etc.) also good.

* Good understanding of protocols, RPCs, distributed systems, message passing, etc.

* Also comfortable working on back-end Web-based services in dynamic programming languages. Experience with front-end code or design would be awesome but is not essential.

* Team player and has experience working in dynamic teams before. Previous experience at startups or security companies is great!

* Some experience with product development schedules and pipelines.

You can reach us at kernelhackerswanted@gmail.com. Please include your resume or links to Github/Linkedin.

> It is the best PDF viewing solution out there. If you read CS papers in PDF format, it's great.

Unfortunately true, despite having a heavily crippled PDF reader. The zoom is completely broken (100%-150%-200% only?), and there's no scroll function whatsoever -- I don't think this is an oversight; it seems to have been deliberately crippled so people consume Kindle books and not their own PDFs.