gxti

If a "license file" is acceptable, this works great -- you can use a human-readable text file describing the license (expiration, features, etc.) and sign it inline with PGP. I've seen Citrix XenServer use this approach, for example. However, even just the signature is really too big to use as a serial number replacement. ECC might work.

I've often considered open source voting software and hardware as a possible startup idea, but frankly I don't have the balls to go through with it. I'm not an entrepreneur, and it is a legal minefield besides, so I stay away. Still, I have some neat (IMHO) ideas, so maybe I should find a venue in which to express them.

I've never thought of it as a market failure and certainly never framed the holy war as ultimately signaling economics beliefs. It's just a marginally lower local optima with a gargantuan switching cost. The benefits of having a standard layout far outweigh the costs of using a less optimal layout. On the other hand, it would take an Act of Government to make something else the standard (e.g. the DoD buying millions of Dvorak keyboards) and that is a typical symptom of market failure.

Odd, I must be the only person on the planet who actually likes JIRA. Probably because my point of reference is Bugzilla.

It would have to be pretty damn buggy and underdeveloped to lose to Flash in that department. Until just now I wasn't aware there even was a Linux plugin.

Why do you think that?

If the voting on your post is any indication, HNers are also eager to demonstrate their willingness to self-deprecate, even in total anonymity. Reddit also has this to a very high degree, but samples are rarer on HN so it is difficult to compare that aspect directly.

Stackoverflow does exactly that. They have big buttons for all the major identity providers, including Google, Facebook, etc. and a text field at the bottom for manual openid login.

"It was a labor of love for no external gain"

Actually it was a commission, although he made one for himself as well.

The author also complained about free designs:

"not merely because designs are being “shared” (read “pirated”), but because people are downloading free charts rather than paying for a designer’s work."

At least, that's how I read it.

I've been running it for two months and haven't had a single Oops yet. That said, it is an experimental filesystem and you should be prepared to restore everything from (non-btrfs) backup.

The btrfs code in 2.6.35 finally fixes something that's annoyed me for years about ext3/4 -- fsync heavy programs blocking everybody else's IO. Vmware workstation used to be insufferable because it and firefox would get into pissing matches over who could use fsync more and my system would grind to a halt. Writeback mode helped a little, but btrfs seems to fix it for good. Yay, btrfs!

I haven't worked with mainframes, and I frequently chortle every time someone mentions one even though deep down I know the article is right. But still, lack of experience has never stopped me from making stuff up before, so:

I imagine that the primary reason companies buy mainframes is that their monolithic architecture abstracts away a lot of the hard thinking that goes into a clustered system by putting it all in one chassis. If my 2000 CPUs are on separate machines then I have to write code to coordinate them and move data between them. If there's a super-fast bus connecting them and they can work with shared address space and let the OS deal with scheduling and data flow then even the average corporate code monkey can write naive large-scale apps that run a little slower but get the job done well enough to please their corporate overlords. And maybe the cost of developing a "proper" architecture for these sorts of business jobs is too high compared to the cost of a few hundred thousand in rent-a-mainframes.

It doesn't make a copy. It creates a special object (which you don't see unless you're digging in the internals) called a "cell" which holds a reference to the object for as long as the function exists. To see for yourself, look at `somefunc.func_closure` -- it'll be `None` on regular functions, and a tuple of cells on a closure function.

MSSQL supports it because it was inherited from Sybase. SQLite also supports it as well. You're right that it's a feature, but frankly I can't live without it -- there's no way to write safe schema migrations!

If I'm not mistaken, there are quite a few futures-backed ETFs that roll continuously -- VXX perhaps? So it's not like it's not possible. It's baffling to me that fund managers are either oblivious to how much they're moving the market, or that they don't care.

You can do that in vanilla Firefox 3.6 and I'm pretty sure it's worked since at least 2.x

discover.com -- there's a "log in" link at the top that takes you to a secure page, though.

You're technically correct (the best kind of correct!) -- it's not inserting NULL. But it is inserting a value it pulled out of its ass, which I posit is actually worse. For text types it uses the empty string, for numbers it uses 0, etc. It seems to flag this as a "warning" but said warning does not appear in my terminal or in the mysqld logs, so I have no idea what it says.

There can be only one because it exists solely to be the "last updated" field. There's no point in having more than one. In MySQL, it simply only updates the first -- so you get a sometimes magic field.

The post is from 2008, and this seems to be the follow-up: http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/02/pysec-monadic-combinato...

Lower tier FX brokers pretty much are bucket shops.

See here for an explanation of some of the things that bad shops do: http://nondealingdesk.blogspot.com/2006/04/non-dealing-desk-...

As long as it doesn't end in -ly or -ing, I'm pretty much happy.

Prediction markets. They're like an elaborate, worldwide bet. Shame they're not government-sanctioned; a world with ubiquitous prediction markets would be interesting indeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

It's a sliding scale. For example, compare to the audiophile cult^Wcommunity. Most people don't know what good headphones are until they put on their first pair, but then they do there is no going back to the old, muddy $10 pair from Target. But then a select few take it to ridiculous levels and spend thousands of dollars on de-oxygenated, cryo-treated ethernet cables with electron flow arrows and ceramic ground plane spacing pylons. Don't let the fact that these weirdos exist (and the businesses willing to bilk them) fool you into thinking that most people couldn't tell the difference at the low end of the scale though, where each additional dollar goes the furthest. But most people never buy any headphones other than at the low end, so they don't realize that a modest increase in price can provide a substantial gain in quality.

The same thing is true about coffee -- supermarket beans are cheap and stale. Starbucks is substantially more expensive (mostly because it's sold by the cup) and significantly better (mostly because of copious quantities of sugar), but still not that great. Beans fresh from a local roaster sit on a critical point where more money creates a similar increase in quality. Below that point, a dollar produces many dollars in value. Above that point, a dollar produces less than a dollar in value. Putting a three-stage reverse osmosis water filter on your $4000 double-boiler, gold-plated, hand-operated espresso machine is way off into "pleasant waste of money" territory.

As for hot water specifically: hot water does in fact change taste because A) hot water dissolves things faster (like the insides of your pipes) and B) tanks tend to concentrate and add to the impurities. See http://everything2.com/title/Never+drink+or+cook+with+hot+ta... for some examples. Whether your hot water has perceptible taste differences depends on your hot water heater and the piping around it. Cold water is best not because it is cold but because it has less crud in it. Of course, the cold water may need filtering too if it doesn't taste relatively neutral out of the tap, like many municipal supplies.

One does indeed get sludge using a blade grinder, but it's not nearly as unpleasant an experience if the coffee is good. That said, Kitchenaid makes a great burr grinder for drip or press use. Low-end burr grinders are also pretty cheap. There are of course many very expensive espresso grinders, but they are best at making an espresso grind (very fine) and may not be good at medium or coarse settings, or may not have them at all.

Thanks for the reply.

Models may have fundamental value, but wisdom on model valuations is a little sparse at this point in history. Same for people in general -- there just aren't more than a few people (and I'm giving a benefit of a doubt that they exist at all) out there making a living by estimating the future earnings potential of an individual. Valuating corporations, on the other hand, is quite popular and there are many thousands of highly-paid analysts who sit around and talk about how much a company is worth, then sell that information to their clients. Actuaries are sort of in the same ballpark and society already frowns on them enough as it is, so while this might be a market ripe for the taking I suppose there needs to be a really compelling reason to pay for the service first. It would make more sense if one could purchase an individual -- I know I've seen Robin Hanson talk about the concept of a society where parents sell shares in the future earnings of their children to finance their education.

But for the moment, even if there were "model analysts" who published estimates on how much a model is worth, it would have little impact on their popularity. Models don't get popular because they have earning potential so much as the other way around. A model who is popular will command higher rates and more frequent appearances. If she is diagnosed with cancer and has 6 months to live then her potential is greatly diminished, but she can leverage it for charity purposes and get even higher rates. Valuation is interesting an academic sense, but for the time being it is a very useless thing to have in the fashion market. This effectively leaves the idea of a model's fundamental value even less tangible than that of a corporation.

Considering the extent to which bubbles form even with the possibility of valuation, the only way that a model popularity market could be analogous to an equity market is if it lives in a perpetual bubble, effectively negating the relevance of the fundamental value. "Reckoning" in the equity markets might be rare, but it does in fact happen. The career of a model, on the other hand, has zero empirical effect by their fundamental value.

It's not just "nobody knows" -- it's "there isn't a reason". Big difference. It is impossible to reason about what intrinsic values cause one model to be more highly touted than another because there aren't any. The value ascribed is entirely extrinsic.

This is the obvious way in which markets are different: even though prices get way overinflated from speculators chasing trends, there is in fact a real fundamental value buried in the noise and sooner or later the people who are good at finding that value will outweigh the noise traders and trend chasers. Then the momentum turns into fear (because none of the speculators knew what they were doing) and we have a lovely crash. It's painful and irrational but eventually enough people wake up and realize that prices are nowhere near valuation.

Models don't crash. They disappear, but there's no "reckoning" in which their popularity is brought back to true values of beauty. The momentum is the only source of value.

Not exactly -- the reactor did shut down "safely", just not fast enough to avoid a steam explosion. Chernobyl was dangerous because it had a positive "void coefficient": the more the coolant boils, the more reactive the core becomes. It's easy to see why this is a bad thing.

SL-1 had a negative void coefficient: as the coolant boils off, fewer neutrons are slowed down to speeds where they can be readily captured by fuel and the reaction slows down, creating a negative feedback loop. This type of passive safety is all but mandatory in modern reactor designs. SL-1 blew up because the feedback loop lagged behind the pressure buildup by a few milliseconds, and it spontaneously disassembled (kaboom). No meltdown, no china syndrome -- just a bunch of fuel all over the place and a guy impaled on the ceiling.

Lest you become a crazy cat lady. I like this metaphor.

For what it's worth, the "caching" is critical for cross compiles because you can't test for functionality using binaries that don't run on your system. But that's not really caching -- that's preconfiguration. I don't see much point in actually caching things on a native system.