drostie

148 ms·

871.
by drostie 15y ago
Let's talk about security and free-riders. Many varieties of fraud are free-riding: you don't actually do the hard work you need to do, but merely say you did it , for your own personal profit. You're saying, "oh, your regulations didn't
872.
by drostie 15y ago
I have a little git project called 'cetis' where I throw cute/dangerous ideas for a next-gen language, and actually the idea of eval/apply as the "Maxwell's equations of software" is in there due to a talk by Gerald Jay Sussman which is tra
873.
by drostie 15y ago
I mean "when presented with a bill, how much to tip." It's just not the sort of thing which mathematicians are ever expected to do. There is no math journal where you can publish the tips you calculated. It's not their job, there are no the
874.
by drostie 15y ago
The only reason I'd add the layer of indirection is "they've already done it for me, but they didn't expose the API." I would also be interested in training a Bayes classifier or a neural network, but again, those aren't as easy to do as ju
875.
by drostie 15y ago
You've gotten a lot of comments on this, mostly because you've asked a very open-ended question. Let me try to offer my interpretation to the question. There are a bunch of active parts on the mainboard even when the power is off -- for exa
876.
by drostie 15y ago
I really like to put it this way: "Of the several professional mathematicians I have known, only one of them could calculate a 15% tip in her head." Now, mind you, all of them know that, in order to get the right overall tip, every person c
877.
by drostie 15y ago
Well, no. In "password" you have one common word -- let's say 1,000 options, 2^10. You have two spaces which can go in any of 9 places, for 9 * 8 / 2 = 36 different places, plus I suppose the 1 and 9 for zero and one places. 46,000 options
878.
by drostie 15y ago
I actually had a problem with this at a web dev job I did, where I wanted a JS entropy estimator and coded one in maybe half an hour (though it was a bit of unexpected time to debug it). Mine was considerably simpler than the above and woul
879.
by drostie 15y ago
That's probably the wrong way to think about it, and might -- as it does in this case -- lead to a ridiculously oversized password-guessing implementation which tries to do too much fancy business. The most obvious way to do password streng
880.
by drostie 15y ago
The ampersand (& symbol) might make sense due to the following fact: a form is usually submitted as urlencoded: name=drostie&password=wining%20%26%20dining%20the%20suckas!&language=en-US and they might be worried about
881.
by drostie 15y ago
Correct. (And it is the contrapositive of this statement which allows us to know that they did not purge them.) But they are not required to collect arbitrary data for later supplying to law enforcement -- law enforcement can subpoena you w
882.
by drostie 15y ago
I would agree that there are privacy concerns whenever you back up user data. It's something of an interesting question because users could also be held responsible for creating their own backups, especially if you made it extremely easy fo
883.
by drostie 15y ago
Like I said, normal practice is to make "delete" reversible, which means that you must add something as opposed to subtracting something. But in principle there is probably some duty of privacy that when you say "I've deleted X," then you a
884.
by drostie 15y ago
I would be surprised if that passed federal rule of evidence 404(a), which is a part of U.S. law which says "Evidence of a person’s character or character trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in ac
885.
by drostie 15y ago
Well, there is one thing "terribly damning," and that's the "Deleted Wall Posts" bit. This was also discovered when someone in Europe requested all of the data that Facebook has on him: that stuff which he had deleted had never actually b
886.
by drostie 15y ago
I only wish he had expanded on this with similar negative statements, like "I did not invent the trollface character." and "I do not like gore images." I think there are a lot of things which he does not do, and all of these might be intere
887.
by drostie 15y ago
True. Lisps are much like snowflakes. Their uniqueness and pervasive symmetry are so important that surely, you cannot Truly Appreciate the snow if you do not examine each flake as if under a microscope to directly apprehend its beautiful s
888.
by drostie 15y ago
At the risk of coming off as one of the maligned "personal opinion" people, I have to object a little to (2). That may be the general issue, I could agree, but it's not my issue. Because my issue is the sheer length and complexity o
889.
by drostie 15y ago
I would like to add that one of the points in the discussion was a simple application of a much broader point. Chen says, "It's bad enough that your own marketing efforts drive down channel performance, but usually once your marketing effor
890.
by drostie 15y ago
That sounds pretty nice; I hope you wouldn't have to fuss too much with it to implement video seeking.
891.
by drostie 15y ago
Yeah, I should expand on this and say that, if you want your page to be bilingual, it helps to have a central gateway through which your data will pass. If you know that you're going to want to request X, Y, and Z as JSON later, then there
892.
by drostie 15y ago
Do whatever is easiest first. JS can be pretty, but hard -- at least, the DOM is much harder than HTML. Get an HTML serialization of your data working first, before you try to use client-side JS to write this data dynamically into a form --
893.
by drostie 15y ago
The big example usually given is France. Under French law there are several "moral rights" like anthologizing. Here's the best way I can express this: when _why left the Ruby community and deleted his online presence, several people created
894.
by drostie 15y ago
I guess that's fair enough. I'm mostly here to see interesting discussions in the comment threads and you're right, we can't have much of an interesting discussion on this one.
895.
by drostie 15y ago
No, see, the question is precisely "why the hell is an emulated programmable 16bit CPU newsworthy?" Hey, I know an MMO with an emulated programmable 32bit CPU; it's called Browser Quest, and was recently released by Mozilla; you can acces
896.
by drostie 15y ago
Well I'd say the same thing about Notch's 0x10c -- that there are many games on the Internet, why is this one newsworthy? -- but I think in both cases it comes down to the reputation of the person providing it. In the one case it is a promi
897.
by drostie 15y ago
NBC'S NBC.COM HEADLINES STEP TOWARDS REVIVING INTEREST ON NBC IN SHOUTING ON INTERNET April 5, 2012 10:10 AM Tags: NBC, Shouting, Internet, Website NBC's "NBC.com" - the highly acclaimed website with impressive ratings and critical acclaim
898.
by drostie 15y ago
How do you solve the most obvious problems of focus? Is there a really strong lens on the front of this thing? I keep thinking of this problem when I hear about things like heads-up contact lenses and so on. It is a tremendous eyestrain for
899.
by drostie 15y ago
PHP is not particularly known for fast and no, you wouldn't expect PHP to move petabytes of data. The normal approach for moving data with PHP is to readfile() the whole file into a byte string in memory before echo()ing it to the user; doi
900.
by drostie 15y ago
Not a bad idea. I found the Unicode glyphs for "Squared Plus" and "Squared Minus" and used them instead. They needed to be scaled up a bit but after that it was fine. This latest version of Hacker News Comment Hiding is available at the sam

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