albertni

7 ms·

1.
by albertni 16y ago
It said in the article that the machine analyzes the category. My speculation is that if it correctly deduces that the category is one of those "answer-hybrid" ones, then it can try to break down the question into two parts, answer each, an
2.
by albertni 16y ago
Notice how even when they screwed up, they were still bailed out. Obviously I'm not thrilled that any bank would screw up in the first place, but no one's bailing out BankSimple if they do too.
3.
by albertni 17y ago
meh they went to MIT, I'm really not surprised
4.
by albertni 17y ago
Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.
5.
by albertni 17y ago
I wonder which would actually faster - binary search on the standard ordered alphabet or going linearly in order of letter frequency. Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters then goes into binary search
6.
by albertni 17y ago
Maybe this is asking too much, but I'm seeing a ton of different recommendations in the comments - anyone have experience with many (or at least more than one) of these options and wouldn't mind going into some of the differences that stood
7.
by albertni 17y ago
I don't understand how they can block a site this big and this heavily trafficked without even making an attempt to contact anyone.
8.
by albertni 17y ago
Should say "planned update" - it's not out yet (we're working on it!)
9.
by albertni 17y ago
It is what it is.
10.
by albertni 17y ago
Neither of those comparisons make any sense, in my opinion. We've got the standard differences of country size (both in terms of land area and population) and time (a lot has changed about the world, especially in terms of communication, ev
11.
by albertni 17y ago
I hope this was a joke. Concepts like a "mandate of Heaven" are completely irrelevant in modern China. Also as a side note, China really hasn't had disproportionately more "revolutions" than any other nation with such a long history.
12.
by albertni 17y ago
Solving problems 1-4 on each day of the Putnam with an "unlimited" amount of time is not a ridiculous expectation. Putnam's difficulty is partly due to its time format.
13.
by albertni 17y ago
Overall I agree with you, but usability and user interface don't do anything for someone who doesn't even consider using Ubuntu. Boot time is one of those things that, if you get it beyond a certain threshold of speed, can really jump out a
14.
by albertni 17y ago
If you take each group of people in the New World to be an item, then the title is essentially saying "why didn't the various different groups of people in the New World invent the wheel" - it's trying to emphasize that each of group of peo
15.
by albertni 17y ago
I don't want to get into the details (for obvious reasons) but we are quite lenient about public link usage! We're mostly interested in cutting off the potentially expensive long tail, which can get very, very long.
16.
by albertni 17y ago
Let's not forget our old friend "getfirefox.com" =)
17.
by albertni 17y ago
I think your question is phrased in a somewhat misleading way. For starters, I gave 10% as a loose lower bound, not as the actual number. More importantly, the question implies that a user is active if and only if he/she syncs a file today
18.
by albertni 17y ago
You're right that accounts are abandoned or go idle. It's substantially less than 75% though =) Also, well over 100K users actively sync a file each and every day.
19.
by albertni 17y ago
In Facebook's defense (I have no affiliation with FB, and in general am not a big fan of them), they probably weren't looking for somebody to whip out Newton's method, but rather just binary search. Everyone who says "this question is compl
20.
by albertni 17y ago
This is getting silly, and even more annoying than it already was.
21.
by albertni 17y ago
I hate counterproductive articles like this which make it that much harder for legitimate gripes about the iPhone to be taken seriously.
22.
by albertni 17y ago
While there are always exceptions, I'm guessing most startups that are around the 10k user mark have plenty of free low hanging fruit left in terms of improving a user's experience or getting more traffic in general. Whatever you end up d
23.
by albertni 17y ago
The motto exists because our basic reactionary instinct on a fly ball is to run inward, which is supported by the finding in this article. But running inward is not a better choice from a baseball standpoint. For one thing, if you take your
24.
by albertni 17y ago
There's a reason why the motto of any outfield is "FIRST STEP BACK!"
25.
by albertni 17y ago
"Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine." Why am I not surprised. Translating the original
26.
by albertni 17y ago
This was a nice read and I learned a thing or two, thanks. Hopefully progress continues to be made in the area of things like better parsing for more helpful coding environments, because while it feels incredibly "impure", there are times w
27.
by albertni 17y ago
"Cash on hand is just one important variable in a startup’s life, but it’s not necessarily the most important. What matters most is the number of iterations the company has left." Gotta admit, I appreciate it when attention-grabbing headlin
28.
by albertni 17y ago
Not everyone here goes to Reddit. This was actually a really good read and I'm glad it was posted.
29.
by albertni 17y ago
In general, it's hard to look at web traffic statistics alone for a product like Dropbox because in some use cases, it can be doing its job perfectly without you ever needing to go to the website. A surprising percentage of our active users
30.
by albertni 18y ago
Yep, in fact this is especially noticeable in situations when your GMail is not working for whatever reason. Once, I had my GMail account temporarily disabled for a day (I set up some filter that immediately deleted and forwarded certain e-

More ›