hawk

Orca is a fast crossword grid filler written in Rust that can efficiently fill gnarly, unconstrained grids. The link explains the algorithm in detail.

As a crossword constructor myself, I'm fascinated by wide open grids with very few black squares. But filling them is computationally difficult - almost intractable on existing software. Orca is multiple orders of magnitude faster in many such cases.

I've been in this position and for me the motivation to keep pressing on came from still staying out there and at least hanging out and talking with like-minded friends in the tech space. Without that my tendency would be to wallow and do nothing. With that being said... lots of people are hiring -- share a resume!

Groupon is a fairly complex promotion, and the best way to use it isn't really that obvious. Also, groupon has limited itself to the specific promotion that is most profitable for themselves. (You could imagine that in an alternate world they might want to expand to a broader set of offerings.)

Although, I have no intuition for what percent of Groupon's revenue comes from customers in which groupon is taking the entire surplus, half the surplus, etc

anybody else think its hilarious that this comment gets downvoted to oblivion?

quantum computers are not KNOWN to be better than classical ones for NP-complete problems (although many believe that no form of computation available in this universe can solve NP-hard problems in polynomial times)

These proofs aren't really that interesting, it's more of an exercise really... most solitaire games with certain properties are NP-complete and most 2-player games are PSPACE-complete.

In particular, markets with several large, slow-moving, and undifferentiated competitors (e.g. telecom).

for 7, not sure what you mean by your "simpler sequence" obeying this - i don't see how that's the case. you can do this problem with elementary knowledge, however. as you imply, first transform it into an addition problem from a multiplicative one by taking logs. then just write out the sequence: a, b, a+b, a+2b, 2a+3b, 3a+5b,... and note that the ratio between the coefficients tends to phi alternating above and below.

I disagree, this is a great puzzle and is pretty well specified.

There were 5 violins, 2 of which were fungus violins, one of those in particular received a staggering 60% of the votes. Not sure what the best conclusion to draw is but it's certainly believable that one day you'll be able to get a cheap violin with incredible tone quality.

what you mean is that nature is interesting. here's a clip to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhh32JYkQPk

one reason facebook is so viral is that it largely implements this naturally by its decomposition. that is, randomly choose seeds within a dense section of the graph (an island, or in facebook lingo, a network). it will quickly spread to the whole island, and you can grow virally island by island. this is a decent approximation under certain assumptions to an optimal centrality metric.

you are an entp presumably?

these two types are actually relatively similar (negatives of each other); they perceive and judge in the same manners but emphasize their parts in opposite orders