dcosson

46 ms·

391.
by dcosson 15y ago
Now if only everyone's mom understood the concept of a linear set operation... :) A good example that would also help someone appreciate the power of map/reduce might be something like "how many times does each letter of the alphabet appear
392.
by dcosson 15y ago
I think your last sentence explains why it will never happen - if one guy will be left making a killing by supporting IE6, why would everyone else have gotten out of the game? Certainly the ridiculous hourly rate he charges will offset the
393.
by dcosson 15y ago
Maybe I'd buy this if you used Google+ as an example instead. As far as I'm concerned I get many times more spam on Facebook than through email - only once every few months does a message from a Nigerian prince slip through gmail's spa
394.
by dcosson 15y ago
Imagine the waveform of a sound wave - there is an amplitude for each point in time, which you can easily take a FT of. This waveform could also be, say, a vibrating guitar string at a fixed moment in time, in which case the units are ampl
395.
by dcosson 15y ago
Love the vonnegut-esque prose. So it goes.
396.
by dcosson 15y ago
Looks like they didn't really get enough traffic to do this (and idk how easy it is to do with FB and google analytics) but it would have been interesting and probably smarter to also measure each ad's effectiveness by how many conversions
397.
by dcosson 15y ago
Well I definitely know how that is. Looks great, overall.
398.
by dcosson 15y ago
Looks awesome! Though by my calculations, the counter will get to 0 days 0 hrs 0 min 0 sec just before midnight EDT on July 16, which is a full 14 hours before the event (but the jquery countdown they're using is probably using the browser
399.
by dcosson 15y ago
I'm sure neither of you intended to come off as racist here, but I'm not sure this helped...how is assuming that Asians have no genuine interests (read: that they're unmotivated and don't think for themselves) any better than assuming they'
400.
by dcosson 15y ago
Good point - my first reaction was just do two one-way trips, but I imagine a lot of the sight-seeing that people want to do isn't within easy walking distance of a zip-car lot.
401.
by dcosson 15y ago
I don't know how common it really is for someone to casually teach him/herself CS. Sure, a lot of people teach themselves to build websites or mobile apps, but ask them to, say, search/filter their results and it's pretty easy to see there
402.
by dcosson 15y ago
I would guess this is what a lot of people do and it's certainly what keeps me from giving up entirely on Yelp/Urbanspoon. But the downside is that ranking results by average review becomes useless; you have to dig pretty deep to find the
403.
by dcosson 15y ago
I'm sure there are multiple alternative solutions, but hnsearch.com is a pretty good one. Written by the Octopart guys and runs off of ThriftDB, the search and database backend that they wrote for their site.
404.
by dcosson 15y ago
Have you been on craigslist? I fully expect to be spammed about anything I post on the site, it seems like a natural price to pay for being able to get the attention of hundreds of interested buyers instantly. And at least in this case the
405.
by dcosson 15y ago
I agree - maybe I'm just drinking the YC gatorade here, but to me it shows scrappiness and dedication and does not seem especially immoral. Who did it hurt? For the people who were annoyed by the spam, it took 30 seconds out of their life
406.
by dcosson 15y ago
Any economists out there who can explain what this would mean? I imagine that China selling 2/3 of their USD reserves would devalue the dollar pretty significantly.
407.
by dcosson 15y ago
I just happened to google this question and now this post is the first result, so I'd say there was no harm in him asking.
408.
by dcosson 15y ago
I like the idea of a list like this, he's written so many essays at this point it'd be good to have a starting point to approach them. Perhaps to iron it out an Ask HN post would be in order? (though I wouldn't be surprised if that's alrea
409.
by dcosson 16y ago
That's almost exactly one of the parables between Achilles and the Tortoise that Hofstadter gives in Godel, Escher, Bach , where the Tortoise keeps breaking Achilles' record player by playing records of the machine's resonant frequency. H
410.
by dcosson 16y ago
I'm curious what Grooveshark does that allows it to be legal, where as p2p networks, youtube, megavideo, etc. routinely have to take down their copyrighted content. Anyone know?
411.
by dcosson 16y ago
But entrepreneurs are dreamers - you have an idea that you think is awesome, even if it doesn't currently fit in with a normal person's day-to-day behavior. But you're convinced that if it does catch on, even the people who were at first s
412.
by dcosson 16y ago
This is how I'd solve it too. Plus, with a username like that and a LaTex formatted answer, I'm already inclined to trust your math skills :)
413.
by dcosson 16y ago
multiplication and division have the same precedence, and division (like most operations) is left-associative. For example, exponentiation is right-associative, so 2^3^2 = 2^9 = 512, not 64.
414.
by dcosson 16y ago
I really like the variation offered by IraCooper on that page, 1. Write down the problem 2. Become convinced it's very important, then think about it 3. Write down the answer My own problem solving attempts are often thwarted
415.
by dcosson 16y ago
I normally do too, but if there's a cool prize at stake I'll happily drag in 3 people on a splash page. Dropbox's +250MB incentive probably got me to invite more friends than I have to anything else (although they do have a great product
416.
by dcosson 16y ago
Thanks for posting the link. The GHZ state they created is technically entangled (in the way that Einstein was worried about entanglement, where if you took one of the 14 qubits far away from the rest, you could measure it and instantly ha
417.
by dcosson 16y ago
> So a quantum calculation is more a probabilistic restriction on which state you want, rather than a direct calculation. Not necessarily, some quantum algorithms give an answer with 100% probability (like the Deutch-Josza algorithm).
418.
by dcosson 16y ago
Are copyright laws more strict in Canada? Or are royalties a lot higher? There seem to be primarily music/video content services on the list.
419.
by dcosson 16y ago
Fork.ly had an awesome splash page before they launched, it was kind of pyramid-scheme-like where the more friends you got to sign up, the higher your priority on their invite list. They talk about it in their blog[1] LaunchRock[2] looks a
420.
by dcosson 16y ago
I saw this graphic the other day that puts into perspective various sources of radiation exposure (from xkcd, but it's not a joke...) I didn't realize that the lowest levels clearly linked to increased risk of cancer were so high. http://

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