albertni

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, and cross-reference to find an overlap. In this case it seems pretty reasonable that such a sophisticated machine could break the problem down to "classic candy bar" and "female Supreme Court justice", combined with the knowledge that they share a word this would actually become "straightforward".

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.

meh they went to MIT, I'm really not surprised

Just as a sidenote, there really aren't that many tech startups started by MIT people, at least relative to say Stanford or Harvard.

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 for the remaining letters (many of which appear at approximately equal frequency)

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 out to them?

I've Googled in the past but haven't found too many great reviews comparing some of these choices side-by-side - most seem to regurgitate the feature sets as opposed to going into the level of detail that would be most helpful for a developer.

I don't understand how they can block a site this big and this heavily trafficked without even making an attempt to contact anyone.

Should say "planned update" - it's not out yet (we're working on it!)

It is what it is.

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, even in the past 15 years).

But, we've also got the huge difference that China, and Chinese people, are simply different. I don't even know where to begin in describing how different Chinese people in China fundamentally are from Americans in America. It's like when I see comments made by people such as "I wonder how the Chinese people can stand <insert thing here>", I immediately think to myself that it's a complete non-issue, just an accepted fact of life, for all of my Chinese relatives living in China. Also, things such as the one child act don't help - you've literally got an entire generation of spoiled only childs, and let me tell you, many of them are remarkably spoiled in the cities. You've got this feeling of collectivism which still very much exists, the "we" taking precedence over the "I", not in the oversimplified hive-mind way that most Westerners perceive it as, but rather something more inbetween. It always amazes me that people in China can feel such a sense of duty to their country (such as a student feeling it's his/her duty to the country to do well in school, something that pretty much never happens in the USA), but yet also feel such apathy for other people around them (to a degree that also doesn't happen in the USA ... not saying we're saints here who never pass by homeless people on the streets without even looking at them by any means, but the degree is still different).

And the list goes on and on, I still don't know where to begin or where to end. I know I'm not comparing China to Yugoslavia or Hungary here, but the perception gap even to this day between China and the USA is so great (and more importantly, so much greater than what most people think it is) that I can't imagine it being much less for China and other situations. Point being, a revolution might be peaceful, or it might be violent, or it might be somewhere inbetween, but none of these outcomes would have anything to do with the situations that led to Hungary's outcome being the way it was, or Yugoslavia's being the way it was.

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.

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.

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 and grab someone's attention. For those people who power down their computers and start them up again for whatever reason, it'll be extremely noticeable every single time, both when they start up their own 10.04 machines, and when they go to non-10.04 machines that start up way more slowly. This seems like one of those things that will serve a specific group of people very very well, and doesn't hurt for everyone else. As long as they're not sacrificing too much effort for this, it seems like it could be a good use of effort.

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 people is actually being considered a singular entity. Whether or not this is actually grammatically correct, I don't know, though intuitively it seems quite reasonable to me (which is generally a good first approximation of grammatical accuracy for native speakers).

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.

Let's not forget our old friend "getfirefox.com" =)

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.

There are a variety of things that can be used to define "active user". Logically, the point of defining "active user" is to differentiate between users who have a good chance of using a product/service again or on a regular basis or something like that (depends on the nature of your service), and users who almost certainly won't and are just taking up space in your user registry (or in our case, space on our servers as well). I won't go into any further details, but the number of people who do a file sync at least once a week is much higher than the number of people who do a file sync every day, and the number of people who do a file sync at least once a month is much higher than that. In addition, there are people who don't add or edit new files very often, but do frequently access their existing files, who aren't being counted in the approximate numbers I gave above. Anyway, going off of this qualitative "definition" of activity, I consider much, much more than 10% of our users to be active users.

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.

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 completely irrelevant" isn't completely right. This question would be completely irrelevant if they were exclusively looking for a "fancy" square root finding technique. However, binary search is a pretty basic algorithm - the trick here is to recognize that such a basic algorithm can be applied to a seemingly unrelated problem. If Facebook is testing to see if people can connect different parts of their knowledge (square root function is strictly increasing, something that everyone knows to be true at least intuitively, combined with the fact that binary search can then be used in such a situation), then it's a reasonable question to ask. Maybe not for a front-end developer though.

This is getting silly, and even more annoying than it already was.

I hate counterproductive articles like this which make it that much harder for legitimate gripes about the iPhone to be taken seriously.

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 doing, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck with a more optimized flow.

Personally (and without knowing more about what you guys are doing), I'd spend the $2k exploring different avenues to get a better idea of what kinds of things do and do not work. It's hard to know what may or may not work sometimes without trying it, at least a little bit. Seemingly similar startups may have very different levels of success with things like untargeted Google Adwords, targeted Google adwords, other methods of product placement, etc., and while you can't always get conclusive evidence from $2k, it's a start.

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 first step back and then recalculate and realize that the fly ball was shallow, it's easier to make up more ground and run forward. If you were to take your first step inward only to realize that the ball is going over your head, it's much harder to turn around and pursue it (yes, that fraction of a second adds up to a lot in baseball).

Also, if you mistakenly take a step back and it turns out the ball is going to fall in front of you, that means it was hit less hard than expected, which means it's more likely that the ball will be taking a friendlier trajectory (in other words, less of a line drive), and so you'll have more time to make up for your misread. In the opposite case, that means the ball was hit harder than expected, making it even less likely for you to recover. Additionally, if you make a mistake and let a ball drop in front of you, that's a single, and a relatively contained one at that as you'll be charging the ball when it lands and have the momentum to make a good throw (to nail a runner at the plate, for instance). However, if you make a mistake and a let a ball get over your head, that's a double minimum, and you'll be running away from the bases to pursue the ball, making a throw that much harder (and of course you'll be farther from the infield as well, but that was by definition).

A simplification of the problem would be to assume that you have a 50/50 chance of guessing right on whether to move in or out on a fly. If that were the case, the potential loss in mistakenly taking the first step inward is much greater than the potential loss in mistakenly taking the first step outward. In practice, there are many other factors that shape this "decision" (or developed instinct). One such thing is the sound made when the bat hits the ball (hard to explain this one if you haven't played baseball, though suffice it to say it has something to do with how loud the sound is). Another is the depth you're playing at originally. On many high school fields, which are smaller than major league parks, it's quite plausible to play at a depth where if you take your first step back, you'll catch all but the hardest hit drives, some of which are home runs anyway, and still be able to recover on misreads and catch all but the luckiest of bloopers.

There's a reason why the motto of any outfield is "FIRST STEP BACK!"

"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 article through the Techcrunch filter in my brain had already produced the mapping "late stage" -> "early stage or not at all".

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 when I almost feel like having language rules (such as "End If", though not as ugly hopefully) solely for the purpose of making my editor more helpful would be a worthwhile tradeoff. Emphasis on "almost", but still.

Just as intelligent programming language design saves time, intelligent syntax highlighting and other editor provided assistance does too (and a non-negligible amount at that).

"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 headlines are followed up by the first line or two actually describing what the post is about. It's a good one-two combo.

Not everyone here goes to Reddit. This was actually a really good read and I'm glad it was posted.

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 basically never go to the site!

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-mails which apparently got triggered too many times and caused a temp shutdown) but was still able to send e-mails to myself.

Lesson here is, if you use GMail, don't e-mail yourself to check if sending works at the moment.