sonoffett

> As a wise man once said, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein... and they laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Exactly, "they" can't tell the difference between Bozo the Clown and Einstein. It's very hard to predict what ideas or technologies will be adopted in the future. I don't think it's wise to quickly dismiss one that's already progressed this far (the DHS isn't laughing).

If a technology could self-proclaim anything then that would be pretty game changing :). Your point is well taken though (most technologies don't change anything). However I think Bitcoin _has_ already changed more than most.

I misread the FAQ, it's the institution and not the degree that they care is accredited.

> Why would I care about ABET accreditation for a CS program? I'm not sure why someone would care (some people do though). ABET does not offer accreditation to history departments (now there's a controversial idea). I found the fact that these institutions do not have them as an interesting curiosity.

I think you'll be surprised about what degrees are actually "accredited" and what ones are not. For example, UCSD, Princeton and Cal Tech do not have ABET accredited C{S,E} degrees.

%s/{Bitcoin,finance}/{Internet,communication}/g . Not to say you're wrong, but the same rhetoric is used for every "game" changing technology.

Right, because only the employees are purchasing the product.

Me too. I consider myself technically well versed and I have setup mail servers before. Whenever I send an important email with an attachment I always include the phrase "Please reply on receipt" just to ensure that the other end gets it. The mail server can be unreliable by ignoring the message if it thinks its spam, especially so when you have attachments (every mail sever has it's own file size/extension limitations). You would think that there would be a notification if the message was ignored or not delivered but notifying by default can be a bad idea since attackers can easily spoof (I'm ignoring SPF TXT records) the sender's address and then use your mail sever to DDoS someone else. Also, due to the sheer volume of SPAM you would tie up considerable resources responding to legitimate senders.

Used ebP963yNKtKhTBG5, thanks!

The relevant paper, "Skip Lists: A Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees": http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...

I could definitely see it not as a replacement for a physician, but as sort of a safeguard to check if the physician's decision regarding treatment for a particular set of symptoms matches up watson's previously learned data. Watson wouldn't preempt the physician, but rather raise an alarm if something looks out of the ordinary.

The OP has since changed the article but IIRC `buffer` was an array of `int`s, in which case the `sizeof` operator would return 512. Generally you'd want `(i >= sizeof(buffer)/sizeof(buffer[0]))`.

I'm so glad they mentioned Philz, some of the best coffee I can find in the bay area and filled with hackers.

Interestingly, this is still relevant today when doing large data transfers between hosts with long RTTs using TCP: the typical TCP congestion control implementations (i.e. bic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIC_TCP)) use ACKs to update their window size (which come back one RTT later) and hence their windows grow much slower than two hosts with the same capacity but a smaller RTT.

Cubic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUBIC_TCP) and htcp (http://smakd.potaroo.net/ietf/all-ids/draft-leith-tcp-htcp-0...) are two congestion control methods which avoid this by not increasing the congestion window size by a function of the RTT (and are recommended if doing large data transfers across high capacity links with high RTT). In linux you can typically check your TCP congestion control algorithm by: "sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control".

I found the article to be interesting and relevant--ad hominem attacks don't contribute to the discussion and I hope HN will eventually get over its self serving bias and discuss self critical issues at the same level as any other conversation.

I mentioned this in another article, but I have yet to see evidence that demonstrates that bing is parsing google's queries either from a) the url of the referrer, or b) directly on the google results page, yet many people on HN have asserted as such, generally exhibiting a false dilemma fallacy.

An alternative is that the bing toolbar is collecting 2-tuples "<search_string_in_toolbar, next_href_clicked>" and sending these back to microsoft (regardless of the search provider selected). I would consider this "click stream data" and seems to agree with statements in the above article. Additionally, since it doesn't involve parsing hrefs it seems like the easier solution (and the one I'm going to tentatively assume by Occam's razor).

Just to be clear, it does not have to be the case that the bing toolbar is collecting data entered directly into the google search box. Indeed, google could have tested for this by having a control group where they entered search queries without using the toolbar search box, however from the details released so far we cannot conclude they did this (read: google hasn't released enough specifics about the test they conducted, and it's far from being reproducible with the current details).

Additionally, why do many in the HN community think this google specific? I understand that google isn't claiming "bing copied just google" but that seems to be the consensus within HN and the arguments of foul play (see the countless posts asking if there exists code that specifies google: "if string contains 'google' then..."). I'd like to see a test where users entered a pathological string in the toolbar with an alternative search provider specified (EDIT: not bing or google), clicked on a low ranking result (low ranking, or not appearing at all on bing for those keywords), and see if it pops up higher on bing at a later time.

I'm not sure why you are being voted down, the situation could be this. Also, Bing toolbar could simply be collecting tuples "(search_string_entered_in_toolbar, subsequent_href_clicked)" regardless of the search engine the user has specified and phoning these home... this seems like the easiest implementation (no parsing nonsense) and does not target google in particular.

Cperciva is right, but I think you're mistaken when you say "many problems harder than NP are NP complete", NP complete problems are both NP and NP hard. NP hard is a class of problems such that every problem in NP can be reduced to any problem in NP hard. Meaning if P=NP then every problem in NP(including the NP complete problems) can be solved in polynomial time; all it takes is one algorithm that solves an NP complete problem in polynomial time (note that this does not show that P=NP hard, a much stronger claim).

Perhaps you're right regarding the first point, I'm just going off what he states in the OP: "Also two independent versions of the algorithm in programming languages have been implemented."

My point is that a constructivist proof that P=NP along with working code (again I'm assuming it's implemented correctly, as it appears vetted by Romanov) is easier to prove incorrect as it's easier for someone who perhaps doesn't have the theoretical background to find pathological examples where it breaks down (and a much wider audience fits in this category, including most of HN).

I agree with your point about the false sense of security however--an inability to find such pathological cases is not sufficient to prove P=NP. In order to truly verify the claim a rigorous analysis of the proof will be necessary--but in this situation it's much easier to show what this guy is saying is false than in the Deolalikar case.

If this were the situation I would agree with you, however an independent programmer has implemented his algorithm and posted it on github with instructions (https://github.com/anjlab/sat3) on how to run it on k-SAT instances. Because of this, I believe it increases the claim's reputability; it is easier to confirm or reject his algorithm and claim.

Yes, higher is better because it gives you a tighter bound when searching for Big-Theta: ie. if your algorithm is in O(2^n) and the previous lower bound was Omega(n^2), and someone proves a lower bound of Omega(2^n) then you know the problem is in Theta(2^n) and you can stop looking for a faster algorithm.

It's worse in the sense that the problem takes more time to solve than if someone had found an algorithm in O(n^2).

EDIT: spelling

I'm pretty sure your second definition is an upper bound (big-O) and the first definition is a lower bound (big-Omega).

EDIT: adding a link to the wikipedia article defining Big-O and Big-Omega: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation

Coffee in the mornings, I've started mixing a pinch of mate to add some extra flavor.

Alcohol of choice is russian river's pliny the elder if I can find it--or stone brewery's russian imperial stout.

I've also seen this named "ssl offloading" and anecdotally I found responsiveness to greatly increase on my zimbra webmail server once I placed an nginx web proxy ahead of it just to do decryption (this wasn't through AWS).

the angry mob demanding the end to all patents championing the protection of small inventors is noticeably silent

I have found it very useful when writing unit tests for a particular method. I don't have to instantiate the class for which the method is a member of; instead I can easily pass a mock object as self that only contains the properties the method is supposed to test.

Furthermore the claim that python doesn't support objects cleanly or easily is unfounded: 1) everything is an object in python (http://diveintopython.org/getting_to_know_python/everything_...), including classes. 2) properties of an object are accessed in just the same way as in Java (obj.property), I don't understand where the confusion lies.

one possible solution is the one Mozilla Bespin went with where there's a hovering translucent scroll bar which varies in opacity depending on whether you're hovered over it.