jaylevitt

Interestingly, this does not seem to be how Google does their spelling correction. Everything I've read implies that Google looks for human corrections in search queries, and then extrapolates those into suggestions. in other words, "People who searched for 'speling' often click no results, but search for 'spelling' instead.

Comp sci folks: Is predicting whether a compressed file will produce a finite (or, better, reasonably-sized) output roughly equivalent to the halting problem?

Well, we don't have any A/B tests, and we don't have any statistics, so all we have are anecdotes.

That said, my last job was at an angel-funded company, though these were atypical angels - all billionaires, some well-known names. The CEO was not only fat (330 pounds), but old (46), brash, loud, opinionated, and the kind of guy who would say "You know what we need on the landing page? Smokin' hot broads!" In the movie version, he will be played by a taller Danny DeVito.

But he was a good guy and a great salesman, and had no trouble raising multiple multi-million dollar rounds, even while pivoting completely - several times. His investors trusted him to treat their money with respect, and knowing his history, I would too.

Fascinating... I knew * plonk * made a sound, but by 1994 I had always heard it retronymmed to "put loser on newsgroup killfile", which wasn't quite satisfying - Why the awkward phrasing?

Now I know the truth. You can't stop the signal.

This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out of a basic sense of fairness.

By "by hand". I assume you mean using some sort of Intuos tablet with various pen and brush tips and some sort of curve-smoothing software so you can trace over the output of GNUplot, yes?

If this is FUD, please downvote me into grayness, but I remember an article - or maybe even a book - proving that exception-safety in C++ was impossible. I remember nothing else about this; it was probably around 1999-2000.

Am I completely making that up? Or did we discover ways around the "impossible" part? I haven't coded in C++ since, uh, gcc 2.97 or so.

He's at @mynameisjeff... looks pretty safe and alive to me.

If you haven't already, you should pick up Tom Mabe's CD, where he does some serious improv comedy with the telemarketers.

Go back and check the email confirmation you got for these messages.. did it say "...wrote on your Wall?"

Likewise, consistency's more important in facebook-y scenarios than you'd think. The canonical example I've heard is that "defriend my boss" MUST always be seen before "post 'I'm quitting!'"

Is that really allowed in CA? I know that in both NYC and Boston/Cambridge, a hailed cab can't refuse a destination. In fact, after being stranded in uptown Manhattan for an hour, I now make a point of not declaring my destination till I'm in the cab.

No. Moving violations are not necessarily crimes. In Massachusetts, I think that reckless driving is a crime (usually interpreted as 20MPH), but I know that plain ol' speeding is not. If you contest, you see a magistrate; if you appeal the magistrate's decision, you do get a trial with a judge, but the ticket itself is considered evidence of your speeding.

They did, in fact, talk to DC government several times before the first attempt to ban them (this is take 3):

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/14/ubercommissioner/

It's theoretically possible with deconvolution, but I don't know that anyone's had much success there without a bunch of MATLAB coding and a perfect impulse of the room.

There's a newish plugin called Zynaptiq Unveil that claims to do "blind" reverb removal, that is, without having an impulse response. I haven't tried it, but there's a demo version:

http://www.zynaptiq.com/unveil/

Other interesting conversations about de-reverberation:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.music-dsp/775 http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/60299-convolu...

Then you'll be surprised to learn that these were once trademarks:

- Aspirin - Escalator - Yo-yo - Zipper

President John Tyler was born in 1790; his grandsons are still alive:

http://kottke.org/12/01/president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-...

Web startups can become enterprises. Today's enterprises were car factories, farms, and accountants.

No, a hack would be doing all that while building an abstraction layer around Google Calculator to act as a primitive CPU to do the GIF encode.

I read "raising insects for human consumption" in the same sense as "growing bacteria for consuming oil spills". That'd be an 8 or a 9...

I can verify this - on my Fedora 12 box, I accidentally set up a test MySQL database into /tmp. The test database grew into my blog, and it worked great till I rebooted. Then I learned lots about recovering data. (I make regular backups, of coures, but who backs up /tmp?)

That's easy. I just say to myself, "Think of a random number between 1 and X.", and then I do. I see magicians do this all the time.

If it's hot out, I remove the undergarment.

As one of the main contribs noted in a previous HN article, the important part was to get JSON conversion into core, full stop - because extensions (like hstore) can't declare dependencies on other extensions. Having JSON in/out in core is an enabling feature for all the rest.

Yep. It's called "drill-down teams" or "tiger teams", and it works.. use your back channels to discover what's wrong with your front channels.

I've seen it work. Hell, I've helped it work. This is a good sign.

I was thinking we could prove this with a blinded quiz: show you a post with no date or author, ask you to rate the quality, aggregate the results.

But it'd probably be too difficult to truly blind it; posts would reference startups or frameworks that didn't exist five years ago, or Obama, or other anachronistic events.

It'll save you a few more keystrokes if you do

    cat !$ | less

!$ is "the last argument to the previous command".

The network graph fails to render at all most of the time I want it. I suspect it's heavily cached, takes a long time to initially compute, and I'm only looking at graphs to see if a seemingly-abandoned project got forked and picked up elsewhere - which means I'm never seeing the cached version.

It also is (or used to be) possible for a particular graph to get into a wedged state; github support can fix that if you report the repo, but it's often not worth the effort for me.

Having just read "Willpower" last week: Yes, ego depletion stems from energy depletion. They did a series of experiments showing that exercising willpower consumes glucose, AND that the higher your blood glucose, the more willpower you had.

The "ego" in "ego depletion" has nothing to do with Freudian ego, except as an homage.

I wonder if you'll have problems with SNI as IPv4 exhaustion runs out. XP can't - ever - access SNI-protected SSL sites.

My usual answer: "Only Broccoli Fish."

When they ask what a Broccoli Fish is, I explain patiently that there's no such thing.