icedpulleys

Binary search is a pretty obvious algorithm.

While translocation is cool, this certainly isn't a novel case and Robertsonian translocations are covered in undergrad genetics courses. Well written if not for the way that it starts off, making it sound like the doctor in China has made a unique discovery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robertsonian_translocation

Open an incognito window in Chrome, don't log in to your google account, and search there.

I've yet to hear someone define what useful, diverse set of results is that has been filtered from them; they simply state that the sites that they see on Google, FB, et al. are filtered and that some other filtered pages could hypothetically be useful.

What diverse results do you want to see that you aren't seeing now, and how could they potentially be useful?

This is an easy experiment. Submit a google query while logged in, and open an incognito Chrome window and submit the same query there. Compare the search results. What would have been helpful that you didn't see in your filter "bubble"?

You don't have to put quotation marks around hard; one of its definitions is an adjective meaning painful or difficult to endure.

I've never stopped reading something faster than I did after I got to "'Feels like' is an important disclaimer here." and glanced up to see that it was written by Sarah Lacy.

Dear Sarah: don't worry, I think that London will not be that pissed.

I've heard that larger banks and brokerages (not the underwriters) will start making shares available for shorting as early as Tuesday, which should help ease the share price down.

> Is it my lack of energy or the piece does not read well. I had to backtrack a few times to see what she's talking about.

That phenomena is endemic to TC posts.

I haven't been able to follow the story as closely as I would have liked. Did TEPCO actively deny meltdowns and leakages, or did they just not confirm them? I thought that it was the latter, but could have missed overt denials.

As someone who has had research written about in popular media, I would bet an enormous amount of money at very unfavorable odds that the words "it couldn't be done" were not uttered by the CS researchers but instead are the voice of the New Yorker author.

My tl;dr reads differently: "we lacked appropriate congestion control in our EBS recovery algorithms."

The trigger was a bad and unexpected network configuration change, but the error was that the attempted recovery by the stuck volumes was that it was uncontrolled.

I don't think that anyone is knocking the intelligence of the AWS engineers, or saying that anyone else could do it better. Just like NASA engineers and scientists are incredibly intelligent and good at what they do, systems can become complicated enough that unexpected errors creep into the system, and not any particular component.

Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing it, I appreciate it.

It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.

> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.

Regardless of how you want to parse a company's public statements and written policies, it's the height of naivete to think that a data host (ANY host) wouldn't share your data with law enforcement or has encrypted data in such a way that they guarantee that no one can access it.

If you have sensitive data, encrypt it yourself. Encrypt it on your local drive, back up encrypted data, encrypt it before uploading it to Dropbox. Doing otherwise is akin to not having a proper backup process: it's either because of laziness or ignorance.

There's a considerable difference between having a sense of entitlement and being rational.

Maybe I'm missing the point too, because I don't understand why he's arguing that Python and R should cater to people that don't want to use a programming language. Isn't that akin to arguing that C is too complicated because it allows you to directly access memory rather than abstracting that away?

MBA- and business types have Excel. As a researcher, I flex both Python and R regulary -- but I want the full power of a programming language, not a couple of macros to generate a pivot table.

Maybe tomorrow's? Today's revolutions are already organized on Facebook.

It was the first site blocked in our office yesterday when we installed the chrome extension!

In case anyone missed it the first time around, the nytimes mag had a pretty good writeup on Watson back in June -- might be worth instapapering and reading later if you're going to catch the broadcast this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html...

As an AI researcher I'm excited to watch this week. Even if it's not the most elegant artificial Jeopardy player imaginable, it raises the public profile of a lot of AI & ML topics and might encourage and inspire other groups to tackle ambitious projects.

I have nothing against security firms or their work, but

> At the heart of the matter, we are scientists investigating the truth.

No, you're not. You're consultants doing analytical work. I'm not arguing that one is intrinsically more worthwhile or valuable than the other, but post-hoc security analysis is not science.

In this particular case, anonymous is implicitly raising the question that if a security firm can't even secure their own web presence, their internal emails, and the data that they've gathered on an FBI contract, then how could their data and conclusions be trusted? Regardless of whether the employees of any particular security firm are sympathetic individuals, and whether being hacked would incur significant financial loss, you'd hope that a security firm would be, you know, secure.

> there is absolutly NO reason why bing should have linked to those documents

There is absolutely a reason. A user queried for a string, then followed a link. Biasing Bing's search results towards the followed links is a signal that improves their search.

> When students do this, it is called plagiarizing. The smoke getting thrown by MS is just to distract and divert while they scramble to hide what they did.

When I took exams, I wasn't allowed to consult with fellow students, read the internet, or open a textbook. My life as a developer would certainly be a lot different if I wasn't able to do any of those things now because it was "cheating" back when I was in school. It's an awful analogy and, as you've regurgitated it here, seems to be an effective smokescreen on Google's end.