Elfan

Cassandra user in production here. Could you elaborate a little bit on what was messed up (size, false positives etc.) and which version this was? Did you have trouble with Cassandra itself that you tracked down to the bloom filters or trying to re-use the bloom filters in another project?

The fake letter doesn't separate them:

> Members can log into both sites using the same login. This will allow streaming-only members to add DVD by mail, and DVD-only members to upgrade to streaming, at any time. The websites, however, will remain separate, so that we can start giving these different worlds the unique attention they deserve.

Note that the word closure has meaning in set theory and other areas of mathematics relevant to computer science. SICP explicitly avoids using what wikipedia calls a 'computer science closure' for this reason.

How many lint-like tools use a full AST? pylint yes, but I doubt the original did.

Using this code on the code here (except for processing.js): http://github.com/cburroughs/minification-compare/tree/maste...

Latest full release of yuicompressor vs closure at SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS level:

  ----- TOTALS -----
  base:  yui-compressor-2.4.2
  ('abs diff:', '768050', 'gz: ', '184071')
  ('% change: ', -0.56976157623774126, 'gz: ',   -0.51009685330672982)
  challenger: closure-compiler
  ('abs diff:', '814830', 'gz: ', '193817')
  ('% change: ', -0.60446432545511197, 'gz: ', -0.53710493134361448)

All of the IPCC reports are available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report#E...

Ah my apologies. I meant (fire)watir. http://wtr.rubyforge.org/ http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/FireWatir

You may find this page useful: http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy

I find nose particularly useful both for running tests (including unit). I have also found (fire)wait to be useful for driving a browser.

And unlike email there is no way to automatically filter most of it.

From a Student's Guide to Startups back in 2006:

"Speaking of cool places to work, there is of course Google. But I notice something slightly frightening about Google: zero startups come out of there. In that respect it's a black hole. People seem to like working at Google too much to leave. So if you hope to start a startup one day, the evidence so far suggests you shouldn't work there."

    "Is it true, Dr. Chandra, that you chose the name HAL to be one step ahead of IBM?"

    "Utter nonsense! Half of us come from IBM and we've been trying to stamp out that story for years. I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic." 

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7

Do you have a source for this? Every analysis of exit polls I have seen (for example: http://www.fairvote.org/plurality/perot.htm) shows that Perot split the votes fairly evenly.

I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from those mistakes.

The Copenhagen Consensus looked only at a 5 year window. Since most of the likely costs of climate change take place farther in the future it is unsurprising that they found so little benefit for mitigation.

While economic analysis is very important in this case it is also very difficult. You can get any result you want be fiddling with the discount rate.

How quickly have you been able to move through Concrete Mathematics? It looks like the sort of thing you might be able to do 1-2 problems a day.

Another closely related post is Math Every Day: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/math-every-day

Since most here are of a programing bent Project Euler (projecteuler.net) may be of help in that quest.

Could we have a way to flag headlines with an un-needed editorial?

Boring Stevey Status Update

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/boring-stevey-status...

A few minor corrections. First, most chess programs don't literally "brute force" the problem. A lot of work goes into pruning the search tree and only looking along the most promising paths. Second, humans can actually think many moves ahead along certain paths.

As other's have stated in this thread chess is particularly well suited to be played well by a computer program, but that does not make it trivial.

Figuring out pot odds is an elementary part of poker. Most who play poker well can do that correctly, that is just as well as a computer. On the other hand combining those odds with an estimate of what other players and how they may react is a damn interesting problem for a human player or a computer programmer.

Isn't strategy the hard part of chess after all?

That is an interesting situation where a group of users might opt in and HTML could be a useful thing.

Are you sending photos via email? Aren't browsers generally a more pleasant way to view photos than mail clients?

Did anything every come of their push for more energy efficient computers?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/technology/26google.html?e...

If you want email to be looked at and be delivered why would you use HTML?

If you are seeing CPU performance degrade with time it is (likely) a symptom of memory fragmentation. I have not seen any rendering benchmarks where gecko fairs significantly worse than the others.

What about Gnash or Swfdec? A free Flash player seems to be high enough enough priority that one will have feature parity with Adobe "soon".

Can a Mac user clarify what that is a screenshot of? Most people seem to be a capture of CPU instead of memory use (in which case the author clearly has no idea what he is talking about).

I just want to second what what several others have implied about Erlang. It makes the actor model feel right to the point that the fact that your program can run on multiple cores/cpus/computers is seems incidental.

I have ended up watching several Leave it to Beaver episodes lately.

jwz's mixtapes

http://cerebrum.dnalounge.com/mixtapes/