mshron

Maybe Google will be smart enough to let people through in groups that they believe to be socially linked by their online exhaust. They've got a decent sense of these things already.

Otherwise, it's really not the same thing at all.

I've never lived in Amsterdam, but I have spent time there as a tourist (and not in the Center, where you expect people to interact with tourists all day long). Everyone spoke excellent English, even older and crustier looking Dutch whose English was obviously rusty.

The only time I needed to use any of the Dutch I had learned before coming was with some immigrants for whom English would be their third language.

Got it, thank you. I'd love to see a good pointer to worked out examples of natural selection happening at non-organism levels if you have one handy. It sounds pretty fascinating.

What does it mean to say that natural selection is observed at the level of an organism? I'm not a biologist, but I was under the impression that natural selection on all of the 'levels' of biology all shook out to being natural selection of snippets of DNA.

ITA are actually the technology behind Orbitz, Kayak, and various airlines' own search technology. IIRC one of the few (and proud) Lisp shops making money hand over fist.

Here you go - bicameralism on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Interesting, I've had exactly the opposite re: black beans and chickpeas. White beans have caused me far less gas. Perhaps we have different intestinal flora?

I believe OP is not concerned about bogus chains, but imbalances in computing power. This is not a serious problem but it looks like one on the face of it. If a massive amount of computation suddenly went into computing bitcoins there are two issues you could be worried about.

The first is that it isn't very fair. The reply to this is that the current balance of money isn't fair either, we just didn't get to watch it happen. And as people have said elsewhere, it's not reasonable to expect a currency to solve social inequality.

The second is that, if the cost of mining a bitcoin goes through the roof but there is not enough economy to make money on transaction fees, then people will drop out of mining. However: difficulty is not automatically increasing, it's proportionally increased or decreased relative to the difficulty of the past two weeks. If it becomes prohibitively expensive for Amazon to mine for bitcoins and they drop out, the threshold will fall again. Either way there's always an incentive to keep it running, until the system is out of coins.

(edit for clarity)

Thanks for the link, and well said that anonymity is basically always proportional to sophistication. What worries me is that other, related systems people will have experience with (like anonymous file-sharing, public-key encryption, onion routing) have many fewer hoops to jump through to feel confident that they're working correctly. Apples to oranges, but expectations work like that.

If I throw a disk containing my 2048-bit private key into a fire, I can be confident that nobody is ever going to decrypt my files. Getting the same level of confidence for Bitcoin anonymity is a lot tougher.

Here are instructions for turning Blender files into RepRap instructions. I would pay to hang something like this on my wall.

http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_prin...

As far as I can tell, the only way to actually stay anonymous and have a foothold in the bitcoin economy would be to exchange bitcoins for cash in person with someone.

Even then, once you tried to combine that account with any other you owned that was traceable to you (record in an exchange, email sent to a client containing your bitcoin address) it would be easy to link them together, since the entire ledger is public.

I guess what I'm saying is that your level of sophistication to stay anonymous would have to rise along with the sophistication of an attacker, which is not immediately obvious from these glowing articles on Bitcoin.

What about an experiment? PG could take a few dozen people he wants to be exemplars for the community, pick some semi-popular articles before and after the change, and ask the test subjects to rate which article had better comments. For best results, only pair people with articles they haven't read.

Myself, I didn't even realize how strong the group-think effect was until the comments were turned off. It feels like there's more substance now, but I might just be reading more closely in the absence of loud communal signals.

"Without," because the lack of points on this comment has led me to have to think through my objections to it. Rather than, e.g., noting that it has a smallish number of points and so therefore my opinion is already shared by the community and I don't need to say anything.

Friendly (non-technical) introduction to bitcoins:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo&feature=playe...

We do and we don't. Knowing how to look closed off is very helpful for dealing with people trying to hand you things, but smiling at wait staff has always seemed to help me.

Then again, very few people I interact with in New York are actually originally from New York, so I suppose it's hard to get a clean signal on how "New Yorkers" behave.

AppEngine offers memcached support baked in.

https://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/memcache/using...

That's exactly right. I did a similar quiz for my current job, and now I administer something similar when I look for new hires. It's amazing how many people with solid-looking resumes flub basic questions once you ask to see actual code they wrote.

Citation? I haven't seen this before.

Thankfully, the original study (linked to below) gives a summary.

The diet was composed for each kid individually, but the basic "few-foods" diet was rice, meat, vegetables, pears, and water. Potatoes, fruits and wheat were added for some kids, at prescribed intervals.

They were following this protocol: http://www.springerlink.com/content/k7444741381w544k/fulltex...

The conclusion of the original study is that it isn't an allergic reaction that is causing the symptoms, but that somehow restricted diets still work.

Their "few-foods diet" was rice, meat, vegetables, pears and water. Then, based on the needs of the individual kids, likes and dislikes (and maybe their known susceptibility to various allergens?), etc, potatoes, fruit and wheat were added.

You could try just sticking with the reduced few-foods diet for a month and see if symptoms improve.

It may be too late for this to be seen, but there's another point I expected to see somewhere on here that should be said.

Read other people's code. Find small pieces of software that do the kind of thing you would want to do that are written by people you know are talented and see how all the parts fit together. Maybe there's one at your job, or a well-polished but small open source project.

Run it through a call graph generator. See what they encapsulated and what they didn't. Look at any unit tests, if they're there. Most of the real software that I've looked at is much more about knowing how to lay out logic than it is about particularly advanced algorithms.

Algorithms are certainly good to know, but there's a reason why computer science and software engineering have two different names.

I would buy this argument if it wasn't for the fact that he managed to not only correctly call the timing but also the cause of the recession.

It sounds to me like he's a good person to listen to for potential trouble spots. The economy is very path-dependent; just because someone is good at pointing out potential issues doesn't mean they're going to know how it turns out.

Thanks. I actually teared up a bit towards the end. A good reminder of some perspective when you're knee deep in a project.

I am continually pleased with the quality of the work coming out of New York hackathons. Here's to keeping this quality of work going for a long time!

The copy doesn't make it clear enough, but we're actually doing our best to adjust for small samples with a little empirical Bayesian magic. As the number of samples (inspections) goes down, the result is closer to the mean for the whole city.

Had to go back and check this. It varies from place to place, but for the site as a whole it's about 55% men, 45% women.

Sure.

Men: 90% straight, 6% gay, 4% bi.

Women: 85% straight, 5% gay, 10% bi.

-Max Shron (Data Scientist, OkCupid)

I'll check it out. Thanks!

Max Shron, OkCupid Data Scientist here.

In an older version of the post, we did have the actual numbers, but they didn't seem to add much. Black women use "soul food" 20 times (!) more frequently than the site-wide average; for black men, "soul food" is 11 times as frequent.

AFAIK, nothing we put up for this article is less than twice as frequent for that group as it is for the general (OkC) population.

I will definitely be using this. The most crucial part is in place, namely the ability to use sparklines within a line of text. Now I will be able to seamlessly blend context and data everywhere I go.