dave_au

Sorry to those who are curious, but I'm not going to state my reason - it's not all that personal but is still well with in the realm of "my own business". Surely it's not a prerequisite for deleting an account.

If I knew that there wasn't a standard way to delete accounts I probably wouldn't have signed up in the first place. It might help keep the number of temporary accounts, so there's a chance that it's a feature.

The current plan is to wait a while longer, then I'll send PG an email.

A point that I find interesting is that if I didn't care about the community at all I could probably exit the site very rapidly by way of a submission script - not my style, but does make me wonder if it's been tried before. I'm sure it's quicker than an exchange of emails :) And it remains an option if nothing else will do the trick.

I'll bite.

From the bottom of the summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#integrated_Symbian_plat...

We get: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/21/canalys_iphone...

Symbian OS had 50% of the smartphone market as of August 2009. And 50% of the market in that dataset is a majority - probably a good enough a citation for "C++ was the mobile world" when you consider what that would have looked like before the iPhone.

Maemo is a Debian based linux.

And if you like it check out boardgamegeek.com for more ideas :)

Dominion isn't really my thing, but there's masses of really good games around these days.

I tried "the" first, and then "friend".

It looks like it's generated from statistics plus a language model plus the contents of the web (possibly and/or google books).

If that's the goal it looks like they're doing some great work. If being a dictionary is the goal it looks like there are currently better solutions.

However a) give it a few years and b) if they're able to extract that amount of information from their corpus, just imagine how that could be applied to a search engine - I get the feeling that they're showing their hand a little in their progress on the natural language processing front.

If that's so then I can't wait to see them apply it to search.

I really liked "The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals"

From what I can remember, Schors algorithm gives you a polynomial speedup for factoring rather than putting it in polynomial time.

It's been a little while since I was up to speed on this though.

Not wanting to step into an argument here, but I'd like to tie it back to the climate thing.

I think it's cool that you'd go to an expert to see a reproducible experiment. I'm also going to assume that it goes without saying (could be putting words in your mouth but it seems to flow from your responses) that you'd ask a lot of questions if there was unfamiliar math or concepts and basically receive very narrowly focused training in the fields around the experiment.

It's interesting to consider the likelihood/prevalence of the casual commenters on climate change (ie the ones being referred to as idiots) reproducing the climate scientists experiments or coming up to speed on the maths/concepts behind the experiment to be able to critique the experiment in the way that an expert in the field with an opinion opposed to the prevailing thought could.

I know quite a few very vocal climate change skeptics and none of them have a science background or the willingness to attain one, and they seem very proud of that. Hopefully that's a local quirk of my small sample relative to the population.

As an aside, if you can find a set of experts with the time to spend (plus, you know, equipment and money) I'd bet a decent chunk of change that you could take the prevailing scientific opinion and ask for reproducible experiments - in this case a lot would involve analysis of data already given to explain why they want to test want they want to - then you'd end up if not agreeing with them then at seeing where they were coming from.

Nothing else? What about the other gods that will damn you for not following them? I'd say it's an even split between all religions with a positive afterlife. Better heavens and nastier hells might skew the distribution...

It's interesting to compare the results of the polls after they stabilise. I'm not sure if it fully accounts for selection bias, but it seems to be a better basis for comparison.

In terms of show stopping problems, Karmic is currently about the same as Jaunty with about 32% of people reporting they couldn't work around their issues, while for Intrepid it was 45%.

I can imagine there's selection bias at that level as well - the people who can't work around problems for one release aren't going to be involved in the poll for the next release.

Anecdotally, everyone that I've convinced to try Ubuntu has been badly burnt by upgrade issues - only my girlfriend has continued to use it since I do the upgrades for her. I'm sticking with it as I seem to be able to workaround or fix anything that comes up, although it feels like I'm rolling dice everytime.

It looked like the most recent wave of erlang threads - or the one around the time when _why disappeared - got deleted by the admins.

I was really disappointed by that, since it seems like it was the unofficial way for the community to signal large scale concern over the quality of the site.

It would be nice to have another channel to replace it.

C++ Coding Standard and C++ Common Knowledge are both pretty good in that regard.

Although once you know what's going on under the hood you should be fairly safe - it just takes a while, and probably a read of Modern C++ Design or something like it in order to provide the motivation for the effort requried :)

This bit struck me: "...the vehemence of the editors’ point of view caught me off guard."

I could be wrong, but is sounds like the editors of a publishing company were pushing for a negative article about a site that's having an effect on publishing companies. I always thought that kind of stuff happened indirectly, through assumptions and implications.

Then again it could just be that they were just excited about an idea for a story.

I can think of about 10-15 people worldwide who might be interested in my thesis, and since 3 of them are going to be examiners and all of them know each other it seems like a pretty quick way to disseminate the information. Well, except for the writing time... :)

Now replace "touching my laptop" with "urinating in my car".

It won't ruin the car. And it's just an object after all.

If you urinated in someones car and they were upset, would you tell them they were being irrational or to get over it? Maybe tell them they should keep a towel in the car in case the passengers urinate? I mean, if you think it's ok to urinate in a car then it's not really your problem if they seem annoyed by it...

For me, that attitude is heading beyond rude and into the realm of sociopathic.

Seriously, are you really saying that you think it's irrational to try to set the boundaries on how other people interact with your own personal property?

Free e-copy of Red Mars at the same link.

I've got the series in dead tree form already, but may as well grab it while it's there.

I know it's been mentioned before, but the leechblock extension for firefox is pretty good for that kind of thing:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

It lets you specify rules for different groups of sites. I have HN in a group of sites which I can view for 15 minutes every 2 hours. You can add time windows to that, so you can set up things like "15 minutes every 2 hours between 9-5" or "blocked between 9-5, otherwise 15 minutes every 2 hours".

If you're like me notice that every now and then you change your settings to give yourself "just another 5 minutes", there's also the option to have leechblock make you type a 64 character randomly generated string before you can use the settings. That's enough to remind me that I was meant to be doing other things.

The downside is that every now and then it'll kick in while I'm typing something on a webpage and the comment will be lost (like with v1 of this comment for instance). If there's a way to stop that from happening then it's pretty much ideal for what I want.

Fab@Home dream project: chocolate easter bunnies with anatomically correct frosting organs.

I'm hoping that he's turning into a Bond villian, considering the alternatives. He's been building terminator-style arms for a while now, out in the open, hiding in plain sight.

I'd be interested in knowing how many of the safety razor using folk in here made the switch after this

http://www.shaveblog.com/2006/03/welcome-new-york-times-read...

did a lap of the internet a little while back.

I made the switch after coming across it, haven't looked back.

"If you're into it" is also pretty sweet. For several meanings of the word. Kind of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8jaGs7xJ0

You could potentially use a run (or runs) through the O(n^100) problem to optimize approaches for smaller problems. If you were lucky that would ammortize the cost of the first run.

With a bit of luck you might also be able to come up with a scheme to generate optimal nonuniform circuits for smaller problem sizes, which would ammortize nicely if you had enough of the smaller instances to solve.

The quote is about the consequences of P = NP.

NP is the set of problems with solutions that are verifiable in polynomial time. If the problem size is n, imagine a non-deterministic Turing machine that can make one of 2 choices at each step. After n steps there are 2^n possible configurations of the machine, and your polynomial time verifier can check each of these configurations (in parallel, thanks to the non-determinism).

So there's n steps for the guessing and O(n^k) steps for the verification, so you've just been through an exponential search space in polynomial time.

That's why exponential search spaces are the bread and butter of NP. And also why many view P = NP as unlikely.

Excellent advice. It has hidden bonuses as well - if you schedule your workouts for the mornings it might bias you towards getting a little more sleep at least 3 times a week.

Never underestimate the effects of being fit and well rested on your ability to think clearly.

If any one of you get paid for journalistic writing and at any time need a pseudonym for your byline, I beg of you, use Wolfram Alpha.

I made something like this myself a while ago, albeit much simpler, for some crazy project. Generated a couple of CDs of data in not very long - the RS232 link was the bootleneck.

A couple of good links for those that want to give it a try:

http://robseward.com/misc/RNG2/

http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/rng/

I lost track of the actual links that I used but it's all roughly the same principle. One of the links I lost track of had a paper describing how random avalanche noise is, had some favourable things to say.

Aaaargh - I don't want to give away the punchline but I also don't like the idea of some people becoming horribly confused.

If only HN has spoiler tags...

I noticed significant improvements searching for "qt" and for "boost".

I had to write a freeciv patch for my girlfriend which adds a daily move and/or time limit to the game.

It was much appreciated, still have a couple of odd behaviours that I'd have to iron out before letting it out into the wild.

There's always a small chance that they're not billion dollar genius' but are instead people who have had a pretty good idea at exactly the right time.

If the right time is just after a step forward step in some seemingly tangentially related field and just before everyone else spots the connection then it more about luck than genius.

Of course, this doesn't apply to people with ideas that are trivially easy to shoot down but won't listen :)