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So if I stop paying, the games I already bought are worthless, right? After all, the headline says "if you buy a game." Yech.

Wait...this sounded fantastic, but this isn't like a normal games console or even Steam. If OnLive folds or stops supporting older games, your console is worthless, right?

Why do you want to disable the locking of the exterior doors of your apartment building at night? You still can't legitimately enter your apartment without keys, but observant criminals can come in and force your interior door without worrying nearly as much about passersby.

Neither of these proposals is optimal; patio11's proposal takes linear time in the worst case.

IIRC, the correct solution to this is in sqrt(N) time; for a 100-floor building, you drop at floors 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100, in that order. In general, this is sqrt(N) floors, spaced sqrt(N) floors apart. The bulb will break at floor sqrt(N) * X [10X in this example]. Now, drop the bulb from the approximately sqrt(N) [10] floors between floor sqrt(N) * (X-1) [10 * (X-1)] and sqrt(N)* X - 1 [10 * X - 1], inclusive. When it breaks, you have the exact tolerance rounded down to the nearest floor, and you've done it with at worst 2 * sqrt(N) drops.

By the way, this is a great example of a dumb interview question; it's not particularly obvious that there is a solution in sqrt(N) worst case time, but once you're told that there is one (and, perhaps, that binary search + linear search is linear search in the worst case), it's not too difficult to get it in sqrt(N).

Also, note that average case running time analysis is meaningless if you don't have a distribution for the input; simply assuming that the tolerance is distributed uniformly at random from 1 to 100 just because you have a 100-floor building makes little sense.

Well, the first word is probably THE. I have doubts as to whether this is broken enough in practice if you follow standard cryptographic practice and remove spacing and punctuation; the key space size is still 26^17, assuming "random codeword" means a random string of letters and not a randomly selected string of one or more dictionary words.

I realized that; I was just hoping that this observation would lead to an attack, but it's not clear to me that there's a particularly easy/reliable extension of the Vigenere attacks...

This cipher is just 4 rounds of Vigenere with progressively shorter keys...

That's kind of a stretch of an interpretation, don't you think? I always thought that the Earth was still physical in the way that we usually think of it, and humans were just part of its physical operation rather than being simulations.

Yeah, and 2^32 computers should be enough for anybody. ;)

Given the nature of this comment, I feel that I am justified in commenting to inform you that the word you are looking for is "populace."

Title needs a colon or a comma after "New HN users." It looks like a story about how new HN users do not overlook the "Lists" feature.

I was focusing on the grilling about obscure acronym names.

What position was that for?

Just parallelize your algorithm and use n^5 machines ;)

It crashed Chrome on Linux after a while; I'm using the beta channel.

Your lines of code measurement would be more compelling if you used sloccount instead of wc -l. Also, are you counting the lines of code in directories with tests in the name for Mozilla? I don't grok that find(3) incantation fully.

I imagine 45 minutes of your time is worth at least 10% of the cost of a typical airplane ticket, and if you don't get the ticket and want to fly eventually, you have to make at least one additional round trip, so it's an hour and a half of your time.

I'm in Ann Arbor, where the only efficient way to get to DTW is by car, which means bribing a friend (still not free in terms of friend's time), taxi ($50), traditional airport shuttle (~$30-$40), or shorter taxi plus regularly-scheduled airport bus (~$25). All cited costs are one-way, and a one-way trip is at least half an hour.

I'd argue that this system is less efficient when considering the significant costs of getting to the airport in the first place.

Don't forget Microsoft. If you weren't convinced already, Breaking Windows makes it fairly clear that the company was a projection of Bill Gates.

Not really -- either the information should be revealed to the public (in which case you don't have to be distrustful of them) or it shouldn't (in which case you should prevent them from learning).

> If you think that crosses the line, then you just gave anyone with access to a small botnet (or who knows how to cleverly use Tor) an easy, cheap way to cut off the income of people who rely on AdSense. And there are a LOT of those.

No, he didn't. A "small botnet" or Tor is not particularly useful to force you to violate the Adsense ToS by telling your visitors to click on your ads.

If you want to increase your typing speed (or waste a lot of time) anyway, check out http://play.typeracer.com/ . In addition to popular works, you can configure it to make you type samples from open source projects in your language of choice.

This isn't really a post-mortem; they're still in progress on a fix.

Did some digging, and LoJack security vulnerabilities were detailed at BlackHat 2009:

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUS... https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/ORTEGA/BHUS...

This has been traditionally handled by linking to and quoting http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

This is old news; Hari Prasad visited the U.S. within the last month and gave a series of talks at universities around the country. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/us-prof-behind-evm-study-d... is the latest in the saga, but I have good reason to believe it's slightly inaccurate...

Not if you think that a lot of crap gets voted up and truly good stories are few and far between.

That developer switch (linked from http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...) is interesting. What I really want to know is whether the switch is one-way -- can I switch back out of developer mode without things breaking?

In particular, x86 or ARM?

A WakeMate. Here's hoping they ship before Christmas...