263 karma · joined April 7, 2007
Maybe determine "popularity" first by number of articles and then again by score.
Shouldn't Amazon be providing customers with reports to this effect? It can't be that difficult to say that within each 10-minute interval i you got X_i% of a CPU, received N_i packets, etc.
This is the sort of data Amazon should collect themselves to analyze the systems within the cloud, so the customer never (OK, rarely) sees a problem.
The installer was happy finding Python 2.5.
Oh well, I should probably upgrade to 2.6 anyway ...
Of course there are open source implementations available for both. But I would guess it is easier to write your own hash function than learn to use somebody else's, and easier to learn somebody else's B-tree routines than to write your own.
So we live in a world with O(N) hash implementations and O(1) B-tree implementations, for N programmers.
It seems what we need is a very, very simple payment model. Suppose, for example, I tell my browser(s) that I am willing to pay up to one cent for an article from the Wall Street Journal. When somebody from HN posts a pointer to a Walt Mossberg review of Apple's latest gadget, the link appears in some distinctive format, like a green-colored link (or with a '$' suffix, etc.) When I click the link, my wallet is debited one cent and the article appears. There's no extra effort on my part, except for an occasional wallet reload.
This would seem like a technically feasible approach that avoids the mental effort of going through with a separate purchase step. OK, not everybody is going to be technically astute enough to set themselves up with whatever wallet technology is used...but this is just another problem to be solved. Maybe PCs and netbooks come with built-in wallets preloaded with a few dollars or euros. Maybe wallets are set up via multi-level-marketing, so the tech-savvy set up their friends and family. Maybe something else.
Point is, I don't think it's an impossible problem. We just don't have the right models yet.
The only difference with the leveraged instruments is the corresponding loss is greater. But that's the whole point of using leverage -- the gain is greater, too.
Many years ago (early 1990s) I generated a 1024-bit public key which was the limit at the time. A lot of Moores have passed since then. Since key generation and usage is no more than O(bits^2), possibly only O(bits log bits), I don't see why people aren't creating >= 8192-bit keys these days.
Or maybe they are. The MIT keyserver is down at the moment, at least if I ask it for anything.
This of course is by design. The state of Nebraska gets as many Senators as the state of California. Senators represent states, not people. Prior to the 17th Amendment, Senators were generally chosen by state legislatures.
Do farmers get federal pork? Sure, and it's just as wrong as populous states getting federal pork for mass transit. The real problem here is the concentration of power in the federal government, which is far removed from the intent of the Founding Fathers. See the 9th and 10th Amendments.
The case of sugar is particularly egregious as we are subsidizing growers who are destroying the Everglades. OK, maybe that's a bit of hype, but it's not that far from the truth.
Evidently Wikipedia is also not a repository for original artwork.
I suppose there's some sense to that, what with the high price of storage and countless contributors wishing to upload original works.
The last thing I want is additional startup latency, so I set my home page to about:blank. Am I missing something? Maybe this is fodder for Ask-HN.
For his part, pg is leading by example -- laughing all the way to the bank.
Seriously though, it seems wrong to put an .m4v file behind the "What is Skribit?" on the home page. None of my systems can play that. Is that an iTunes file? I don't 'do' iTunes, though I may be alone in that respect.
I am not making this up: Just yesterday I went to reorder checks on-line, and got told "FAIL" and to contact my bank. So I called the main branch in this state and a human being answered. I told her my tale and she said she could help me right then, which she did. Are banks again serving (as opposed to "servicing") their customers?
Does a programmer's spelling and grammar correlate with the quality of his[/her] code?
Not sure I approve of antiforensics because I suspect COFEE could help convict a lot of criminals. On the other hand it seems an invasion of privacy and the US 5th Amendment IMO.
Or is there already a website that specifically aggregates reports of the form "I moved from <X> to <Y> and found <Z1><Z2>...<Zn>"?
Yet we are to believe the AGW crowd zealously hoards their taxpayer-funded data sets because they fear this kind of work will result and it will engender bad publicity and tarnish all their efforts.
Or maybe they have something more solid to fear.
3 bits always suffice to indicate either (a) a pawn en prise (as it were) or (b) no en passant possible because there's no enemy pawn on the proper square for that file. (You can't have pawns on all 8 files and at the same time have one eligible for en passant capture, since you've got to have an opponent's pawn on an adjacent file. So in the usual case of no en passant you just pick a file not occupied by a pawn of the right color, alternatively one of the right color not adjacent to a pawn of the color to move. This is always possible).
Also missing: any interest in what's missing. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but if it's been thru Reddit already you'd think they would have a way to submit additional requests.
I'm willing to pay the high initial cost of LED lighting, assuming the light is of good quality (brightness AND color-with-lampshade) and the long-term savings are real. I suspect most HN readers come to the same conclusion.
Thereby guaranteeing iPhone (?iPorn?) supremacy, at least until it's ported to Droid.
Doesn't this also imply that looking backward tree rings might be untrustworthy any earlier than some starting date? That in fact tree rings might work for a while, then vary for a while, then work again? How can anybody honestly claim that SOME tree ring evidence is usable and SOME is not -- and they know exactly which is which?
My bet would be the thermometers are wrong and the tree rings right. See, e.g.,
Still, if inflation is your concern then better a halfhearted adjustment than none at all.
If it isn't caused by humans it's unlikely to be fixable by humans.