lurker14

22 ms·

61.
by lurker14 14y ago
But you could become a preacher and wander over to another town to start over.
62.
by lurker14 14y ago
Since this seems to be so unclear: Facebook has a feature (and apparently there is no way to opt-out), wherein anyone you are friends with can post a tweet-sized message to all your friend walls by creating an appropriately group and addi
63.
by lurker14 14y ago
I was looking for this recently! There is a photo, either form this artist or someone else, that was taken at some sort of festival, a photo of all the people walking by. It was featured in some website that made the rounds on reddit or sla
64.
by lurker14 14y ago
Good point. I'd hope the study would control for this by locking you in a room for 15 minutes regardless of marshmallow logistics.
65.
by lurker14 14y ago
It would be delightful if the secret undercurrent of that game is that *someone always eats the marshmallow", and the importance of the exercise is in who eats the marshmallow, when it is eaten, and how everyone reacts.
66.
by lurker14 14y ago
Yeah, why do people read "newspapers" and "encyclopedias" that are full of of rehashed information available as primary sources elsewhere?
67.
by lurker14 14y ago
> The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household. I just want to thank the author for separating the 1% form the 0.01% The 1% is the upper middle class, the actua
68.
by lurker14 14y ago
That's optimal for 100% accuracy. You can get much lower memory usage using Bloom filters (basically, hashing words into a small range of hashcodes, expecting collisions, and storing a mask of all the hashcodes that correspond to words), at
69.
by lurker14 14y ago
That assumes that memory bandwidth grows faster than sqrt(#pages)...
70.
by lurker14 14y ago
Let's not store the whole file in memory at once!
71.
by lurker14 14y ago
The advent of mobile computing has finally reverted the myth that processor speed solves all known problems. maximizing idle time still matters.
72.
by lurker14 14y ago
Fair enough, but Kolmogorov randomness is an existence concept, not a constructive concept, so I find it weird to talk about having such a string in this case where a real person sets about to generate a concrete file. Can you generate a Ko
73.
by lurker14 14y ago
The rules were certainly unclear on that point. Mike didn't guarantee to preserve the file metadata. It seems eminently defensible for him to say that he was dealing in files, not filesystems, so he could rename the file upon receipt. In fa
74.
by lurker14 14y ago
I was slightly vague in my oroginal post. I didn't mean "match completely the soruce data", I meant "match a part of the source data", as a standard rsync/Exchange-style block-deduplicator would do. Per the challenge, it need not work on ev
75.
by lurker14 14y ago
This was a great social engineering hack: The original challenge, poorly stated as it was, was not beaten. Craig started up a conversation with Mike, and tricked him into changing the rules. If Mike were careful, he would have paused to thi
76.
by lurker14 14y ago
Eh, it's a grinding game with intentional randomness added on top of a low-skill base for Skinner-box purposes. It's not pay-to-win like Zynga games, but it is intentionally addictive to play.
77.
by lurker14 14y ago
This was the day that Mike learned the difference between theory and practice: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is. When I read the challenge, and saw that arbitrary Unix programs were al
78.
by lurker14 14y ago
H&M is the fashion stop. B&N is the book stop. B&H is the tech stop.
79.
by lurker14 14y ago
nitpick: There is no such thing as a truly random piece of data. "Truly random" is only meaningful in the limit as the file size goes to infinity. The string "000000" could be generated by a truly random process just as well as any any othe
80.
by lurker14 14y ago
It's perfect. What could be a more fitting tribute to Steve Jobs than to put an elegant facade on someone else's work?
81.
by lurker14 14y ago
Yeah, so you could win a different incorrectly posed challenge from the original incorrectly posed challenge.
82.
by lurker14 14y ago
Amazing how drawing two biased samples from a population can result in differing observations!
83.
by lurker14 14y ago
Mike wrote a document (the challege), and offered a $5000 bug bounty. Patrick found a bug, Mike should have paid up and fixed the bug in the spec, just like Knuth pays for typos and Google pays for security bug reports.
84.
by lurker14 14y ago
"terawatts", not "terawatts".
85.
by lurker14 14y ago
OMGPOP being down 50% in 6 months makes it better performing than the rest of Zynga! They are dragging up the overall market cap!
86.
by lurker14 14y ago
The dealer gets paid by the manufacturer to perform warranty repairs. In these cases, it is the dealer and you vs the manufacturer, much like "pain doctors" and dentists who milk your insurance.
87.
by lurker14 14y ago
I am entertained that Firefox gave me a "Ghostery's tracker list has been updated." notice at the same time I read this article. Retargeting is one of the creepiest abuses of the web, chasing people across the Internet after visiting your s
88.
by lurker14 14y ago
Are you on paid support with an SLA? You can argue that the price of support is too high to be worthwhile, but that's different from saying they don't provide support.
89.
by lurker14 14y ago
As someone who used zsh for a while but got tired of setting it up everywhere I go and losing the "local community" bash stuff, I humbly request: someone please post a rebuttal showing how to do all this in bash with appropriate .bashrc/fun
90.
by lurker14 14y ago
So? It's a truth in advertising legislation. It's why you can't buy a piece of toast in a box labelled Pizza Napoletana, or (for HN) a Galaxy SIII in a gox labelled "iPhone 5"

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