sketerpot

7 ms·

1.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Considering that "Fred" deliberately burned down a client's factory during payment negotiations, I think that "asshole" is quite an understatement.
2.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I was playing with FUSE, and had managed to mount a loopback filesystem. And then, for some ill-considered reason, I tried to delete the directory that I had mounted it inside. I managed to Ctrl-C it before it ate any files in /home, but I
3.
by sketerpot 16y ago
To anyone who learns the idiom, this code is fine, and perfectly readable. I don't even know Ruby yet, and it took me less than a minute to become fully comfortable with this kind of code. This isn't a huge barrier to "non-experts".
4.
by sketerpot 16y ago
A periodic table will make the atomic number and element type easy to look up. You can get it on coffee mugs. It'll be fun.
5.
by sketerpot 16y ago
This one isn't just a cache; it's a database with a simple key-value data model. It has very good clustering support. It can handle datasets too large for memory. It's fast, allegedly easy to set up (I haven't tried it), and you can communi
6.
by sketerpot 16y ago
To clients, it looks exactly like a memcached server.
7.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Saying "probably" is a way of avoiding dishonestly over-representing his confidence in the marriage lasting. Obviously you're offended, but don't let that be an excuse to let your reasoning slip.
8.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Why would any computer automatically run programs on USB sticks? It just seems like a really obvious security hole for negligible benefit.
9.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Of course, it makes sense if you interpret it right -- but it looks at first glance like it's comparing absolute sales figures, rather than change from baseline for each.
10.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I would actually really like for my search engine referrer headers to be blocked, even without the privacy concerns, for one simple reason: some web sites highlight the search terms they find in search engine referrer headers. That annoys t
11.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I guess people will just have to use one of the many other BitTorrent search sites with similar features and torrent coverage. This sucks for the IsoHunt folks, but for the people actually sharing files, it's more of an inconvenience than a
12.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Excellent basic guidelines. Some of these might overlap with yours: * Give the user content that they can see at a glance. If you can glance at your web site without seeing content, fix it. * Use readably large fonts. Even those of us who
13.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I just wanted to point out, that is a really misleading graph. All the lines start at "100%", so the scales aren't comparable at all.
14.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I remember the early 2000s. I devoutly hoped that Linux would get widely used in some way, even if it never really took off on the desktop. I wanted open source to be fairly common and well-accepted, and not just something that weird peop
15.
by sketerpot 16y ago
A good book for this sort of thing is Toby Segaran's excellent Programming Collective Intelligence. It walks you through this sort of fascinating thing with easy examples and clear explanations. It's sprinkled with simple Python code. http
16.
by sketerpot 16y ago
And there's the beauty of Aubrey de Gray's plan: it's not about finding a Cure for Aging. It's about finding a number of techniques that will allow us to extend people's life-spans long enough to find out how to extend their life-spans more
17.
by sketerpot 16y ago
This isn't surprising, but is is disappointing -- and perfectly understandable, considering the devout wishes of the people at Facebook to avoid being killed by religious nuts. The real solution here is to decentralize to the point where Fa
18.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I don't know what kind of books you're writing, but 100,000 pages is too many pages. Did you mean 100,000 words? I've only ever written 50,000 word NaNoWriMo stuff, but I've had a lot of success with text files, simply marked-up, in emacs
19.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I couldn't find any, but here's an explanation of the input format, with some example snippets: http://code.google.com/apis/predict/docs/developer-guide.htm... It's pretty straightforward.
20.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Directed Edge, a promising YC startup, makes recommendation engines surprisingly easy: http://www.directededge.com/ It's quite a bit higher-level than what Google is offering here, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.
21.
by sketerpot 16y ago
There's also Weka, which can use almost exactly the same file format that Google is using, and do the same kind of things (though perhaps with different algorithms). It's pretty pleasant. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
22.
by sketerpot 16y ago
A fun thing about the VP8 patent situation: any company which attacks VP8 with a patent lawsuit has their license to use VP8 automatically terminated. From the license: > If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or
23.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Naturally, the most insightful comment so far is a reply to a massively-downvoted "wake up sheeple" post.
24.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Directed Edge is a lot higher-level than this, and more focused on making it easy for their users to make good recommendation engines. Prediction API is focused on more general tasks, and for that reason I predict that it'll have trouble co
25.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Download Weka. The file format is almost identical, and it has a nice GUI to get you started fast. Google's algorithms and infrastructure may be more sophisticated and scalable, but if you want something a lot like this for a side-project,
26.
by sketerpot 16y ago
It can be used as a text classifier. It takes as input a collection of (output, input1, input2, ..., input_n) tuples, stored in the newly-announced Google Storage, and then uses a variety of machine learning algorithms (which I would bet in
27.
by sketerpot 16y ago
That's a dangerous road to go down, though. Nobody should try to be the inferior option that piggy-backs on other, more competitive products.
28.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I wanted to check it out at their web site, but it insisted that I upgrade to the latest version of Silverlight before they would deign to show my any of their content. Some people spend hours trying to get page-glances turned into users wi
29.
by sketerpot 16y ago
They usually have a lot more than 15 words to choose from, though.
30.
by sketerpot 16y ago
As I said, I'm fine with a filter that has poor accuracy, as long as it makes twitter marginally better.

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