hs

i did something like it 6-7 years ago with friendster when it got 'who looked at me' new feature then. i scrapped million ids of teenagers to below-age-30 women. my friend list went from below hundred to full 3000 (the max at the time) in a week or two. facebook was not popular in my country (not usa)

the scrapper was written in newlisp (save search result pages with curl, use regex to match and collect the ids). it's probably easier to write in other languages, but that's what i knew.

i used wget and curl to loop over the ids but it's too slow because they download the whole page. later i found out about 'curl -i' (header only) and a million ids was done in about hour or two (i moved my operation from my home's 64kbps to my colo datacenter mbps internet).

my account is no longer exist (probably banned); however, i do still have a screenshot of me having 3000 female-only-friends and 70000 non-hidden-females 'look back at my profile'

initially, i talked to any interesting woman; however, later i made a strict rule to only respond to women who wrote at me. there were just too many fake female-accounts.

i got a couple of dates from this feat; however, i met my wife in a traditional catholic youth retreat. when i let her know about this friendster thingy, she just laughed. now i'm happily married with a 15-months-old boy.

ember -- flame that burns bugs

there is trend in the 'key cause of cancer' down in the article, throat and colon cancer follow power distribution, while breat cancer kinda follows uniform dist

for breast cancer: the highest offender = obesity is 8.7%, only a multiple of two to the mean <4%

to me it only means that the cause of throat and colon cancer is relatively known (smoke and meat) while it's gray area for breast cancer

smoke -> throat kinda makes sense meat -> bowel? (turns out meat contains no fiber, and lack of fiber accounts for 12.2% so lumping meat and lack of fiber equal a whopping 33.3%) ... makes sense?

i find it interesting that 'meat' is not written (thus not searchable) in the main article (it's down there in 'key causes of cancer' as icon)

FTA (scroll down): Colorectal / Bowel : meat 21.1%, obesity 13%, lack-of-fibre 12.2%

it's not surprising meat and lack-of-fibre are correlated (meat contains no fibre)

what happens when luxury becomes comodity?

i'm actually switching to archlinux after using mint for a year or so

or what if there exist many goods with same unique barcode, scattered around the world.

this requires a mean to identify where the unique good is (if it exists at all). would rfid fix this? hmmm shrug

for you who don't have flash and don't feel like clicking to download, you can download an xml format file from http://metated.petarmaric.com/metalinks/TED-talks-grouped-by...

then we can script to extract the xml file get the ted videos, like:

wget -c -O "1984/Nicholas Negroponte in 1984 makes 5 predictions.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4837/talk/230 wget -c -O "1990/Frank Gehry as a young rebel.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4047/talk/231 wget -c -O "1998/Aimee Mullins on running.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/5996/talk/443

...

wget -c -O "2011/Wadah Khanfar - A historic moment in the Arab world.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11071/talk/1084 wget -c -O "2011/Wael Ghonim - Inside the Egyptian revolution.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11086/talk/1086

Can OpenBSD use Android USB tether? (I use Android Wifi Tether but my milestone battery runs too hot)

of the three countries that have highest (and surprisingly parallel) slope: japan, south kore, mexico ... it suggests that #visit correlates with LE ... and health coverage is unimportant

but there are countries that have less #visit but more expensive (it suggests patients go to doctor not only for consultation) ... so #visit is an unreliable predictor so is cost

to me it seems the most predictive is location (yes, the country names are data points too) ... if i want to live long, i'll settle in japan and do what the average japanese for their healthy lifestyle

the graph gives an important ratio that's hard to capture in scatter plot

age/cost (the slope)

also, how do you identify your datapoints in scatter-plot neatly?

to me this graph gives surprisingly rich information packed

it's because the y axis is linear ... i don't sense any overdoing

i always ask myself, "would woz (or any other heroes) better off using these luxuries 'back then' when he first did apple ?"

i wrote about masturbation back in high school. i got 4/10 mark with a big red X across the page corners :D

your china emperor story only suggests that the parent post's averaging scoring scheme consist of reviewers who dream about a 'test-taker' and then give a score (repeat as many as test takers there is) ... if they have access to takers' answers and keys, then averaging could be done much more objectively

the china emperor: that's maybe because there's no photograph of the emperor circulating. if there is, one can make comparison to eyes, age, coin, ground-legal-measure etc and clean out the outlier data. averaging the rest can give good enough estimate but not super accurate.

using chickenfoot in firefox:

//begin include('~/jquery/jquery.js'); b=new Button('hide comment heads', function() { $('.comhead').hide(); }); insert(after('add comment button'), b)); //end

click the new button injected to hide comments. can be automatically triggered whenever ff opens http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=*

you can make it fancy like toggling instead of hiding, or showing only points or authors, but it's sufficient for me (actually i use auto-hide-trigger-with-no-button which is simpler)

these great doers who shape the world don't seem to like unit testing. i'll follow them, at least because they are smarter than those bloggers.

0) no test is perfect

car insurance doesn't automagically make you accident-proof.

driving defensively is a better approach -- you probably will never need insurance. that's why insurance companies give discounts to those who took defensive-driving course.

i'm delighted to see that solidworks (cheap) was used while other unis were still using pro-e/i-deas/catias (expensive)

maybe it's a stretch to say that schools which use cheaper, alternative resource tend to be of better quality compared to those which use more expensive, 'proven/best practice' resource

activating from preferences doesn't always work, i ended up installing tightvncserver. eventually i'm frustrated with ubuntu (i needed to use bluetooth) and goes back to openbsd.

but maybe the article is intended for enabling remote desktop on remote ubuntu (like sftp the code, ssh to remote ubuntu, execute vnc viewer) ... but that requires ssh server (ubuntu doesn't have by default, only ssh client -- more secure but less usable)

no

have you read the china study yet? if you haven't, please restrain from commenting, thx

i'm more impressed with how much conflicting misinformations floating around while seemingly scientific

claims like x improves y are abundant. sadly we don't often see the %quantitative improvements and fall into "every little bit helps"

then we get another claim like "a prevents b", then blindly follows. while a and x are good in its own rights, the 'interaction' effect is so complicated that taking them will become net negative

no discussion about cancer is complete without mentioning "the china study" by Collin Campbell

conclusion? eat whole food, plant-based diet

and we don't need labels like vegetarian/vegan. why? because eating fried fries, potatoe chips, smoking, drinking, sodas, candies ... while correctly not including animals ... are not healthy

i used math notations <for intro> when i applied to grad school

something like ... there exist <my-name> such that bla <insert math mumbo-jumbo describing me as a unique subset of engineers>

result? i got in and studied there

what's refreshing is that each OpenBSD release has its own theme, song and artworks

it seems they really are having fun !!!

"A perfect 800 on GRE math is just 87th percentile."

percentile of what? of general population or of those who took GRE?

i assume the latter is much more accurate, a perfect 800 on GRE math equals to 87th percentile only means that test is way too easy for most engineers

maybe a perfect 800 on GMAT math is 99th, i don't know, but if so, that only means the test is way too hard for most business-guys (assumption: GMAT percentile is based on GMAT takers)

anyway it's hard to imagine that tests for engineer is easier than tests for business-guys. i have my own bias of course.

it's affected by dietary factor: cancers are caused by animal-based protein such as meat, fish, milk, and egg

cancers are not only preventable, but also reversible -- see ch3 turning off cancer, especially starting from the indian report on rat studies given aflatoxin in 'the china study' by collin campbels, hosted on google books for reference: http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&lpg=PA74&#...

solution? whole-plant-based diet, no, not vegetarian nor vegan diet. basically non-processed food (marketing does play trick saying, correctly, sugar/hfcs is natural plant-based because it's made from cane/corn -- but we know it's harmful)

why whole-plant and not vegan? because one can eat fried potatoe, chewing candies, drinking sodas, sipping alcohol, smoking cigarretes ... and still claim (validly) to be vegan, but s/he probably isn't healthy

when i ride a motorcycle, i rarely use turn sign ... i literally use my head to turn

i don't even use the mirrors because turning my head eliminates blind spots

car and bike riders here understand (and accustomed to) what it means when an object in front of them slows down while its rider's helmet turn to left/right

but of course it's not safe :( so maybe a better solution is a bike with accelerometer built in (like in iPhone) so the sign flashes whenever i tilt my bike accordingly

another disadvantage for homeowner:

in unstable countries, the new government that replace its old one will try to steal the land from owners

if the new gov is democratic, it only honors those who can show certificate on ownership (even the ones granted from old foreign govt -- the countries that gain independence from colonial in ww2 show this trend)

if the new gov is communist, it will simply take the land (worse, the big owners will be labeled capitalist and shot to dead -- happened in china, see the movie 'to live' by zhang yi mou for ref)

those are best and worst case, of course, america is far too remote from civil war or foreign invasion

the renters can just walk away; however, the old money will be of no value ... so it's better to diversify to foreign currencies or precious metal ... or tools

my grandparents actually buried a minivan when the japanese invaded us. once the new govt is set, they resumed the transportation business. it could be more optimal than currencies/metal because ... after a war, the survivor is the only pioneer, no competition -- sufficiently a monopoly by event