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albertyw

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Albert Wang (hn at albertyw.com)

https://github.com/albertyw/ https://www.albertyw.com/

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Disclosure: I'm working on a video delivery network company called Dendrio (www.dendr.io).

You're pretty spot on about AWS. Storage is super cheap, but data transfer can be really expensive. Also, depending on your users' habits, you'll likely want a CDN to serve your files, especially if you want to serve international markets, and I can tell you that most CDNs are very expensive for video hosting. Third party hosting like Youtube and Vimeo have limits for how you can use them which are easy to go over while full-service video hosting/analytics/monetization like Brightcove and Ooyala will cost you a house.

Shameless self-promotion: you should check us out at dendr.io. We're working on a peer to peer CDN that runs on top of your existing hosting provider (whether you do it yourself, or a CDN) to decrease your costs and give you other benefits. Feel free to email me at "albert@" our domain.

Brainfuck is just a set of symbols that map to the actions a Turing machine can make. I believe that the symbols themselves were chosen to make it difficult to read and write much like Whitespace. As for Turing machines, I'm sure there are programming books about them but I'm pretty sure their point is about studying computational theory rather than practical use.

From the article they published in Advanced Materials, it seems the ink actually contains silver (the element) nanoparticles in a colloid. I'm surprised that the resistance is still that high.

Making some overgeneralizations here, software written by scientists aren't going to be as good as software written by software engineers. Their usual purpose (and their training/background) is to publish papers and writing code is just a means to an end.

Anybody wondering how long it will take for Bitcoin to gain enough respectability for the FBI or Secret Service to get involved after hacks like this? If the same amount of money was stolen from a normal bank, it'd likely be covered by every news outlet.

My guess is that Dell laptops have incorrectly vulcanized rubber. During vulcanization, sulfur compounds are added to rubber to make it more elastic. Cat urine also contains a high amount of sulfur compounds. If Dell's suppliers got the vulcanization process wrong, sulfur could be leeching out of the laptop's rubber components.

Sorry to be pedantic, but the US dollar is not backed by US government taxation. A dollar is still quite valuable outside the US because people and institutions attach a value to the US dollar, mostly because the US economy has been the largest and most open economy in the world for several decades. Taxes set by the Treasury, like all other market forces, change and are changed by the rest of the economy.

Your example is a classic example of exchange rate problems surrounding floating currencies. Since both the USD and bitcoins are free-floating (though there are powerful institutions stabilizing the USD such as the Fed and IMF), there would be an onus to convert USD into Bitcoin until the relative value of USD was high enough to offset the conversion deficit. That, or there would need to be equally powerful institutions behind Bitcoin to buy other currencies, but it would be very hard given that there is a practical limit to the total number of Bitcoins in and out of circulation.

Code at 30,000 feet 13 years ago

Yep, I find coding on planes to be pretty productive too, if only for the fact that it's not like you have anything better to do. The only hard part is looking stuff up, like APIs. I find airplanes really useful for code reviews though. I often end up with less code after a flight than before.

I wonder how long it'll take College Board to move to a more expressive language like Python or Ruby. The basicness of AP CS (learning loops, recursion, and simple OO) means students don't learn enough about programming for the benefits of Java to be apparent. I knew a lot of classmates who were put off of programming by APCS, not least because of the verbosity and density of Java.

Not to sound self-righteous, but the HN audience (or more plausibly, some subset within) has a high influence on what the rest of the world sees and wants.

Any Dropbox employees read HN?

I hope all they've discovered is a technicality allowing for partial decoding. If they can break PGP/SSL in a way that isn't just brute forcing the hashing algorithm, then we'll have a lot more trouble than just the government(s) spying on us.