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newsdog

Re:Ask HN: What source code is worth studying? on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @08:25PM (#880410)
I've been led to understand that the OpenBSD source code is of amazing quality.
Re:Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books. on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @10:03AM (#879048)
The Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart The Princess Bride by William Goldman

The first is insanely superior. The second just really really good.

Re:A Quest to Read a Book a Day for 365 Days on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @09:36AM (#878996)
Dude, you're gonna hurt yourself. I say this as a lord high master of the reading arts crafts and sciences. Don't do it.
I know the feeling - I try to torrent a book and there's ten 300 mb mp3s of someone READING it but not 3 meg book itself....
Re:Ask HN: What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? on Friday October 09, 2009 @03:29PM (#872267)
Better one.

Guy I knew - awesomely good - hex edited a DOS boot sector on a in house machine to use FUCK.SYS instead of whatever.sys it normally is (I forget). He renamed that file to fuck.sys, rebooted and the machine ran. Cool!

We laughed and reinstalled DOS and two days later the boss come charging in yelling 'I have a client on the phone who says his new machine can't find FUCK.SYS!'

The awesome guy goes 'uh oh'. I laughed.

Re:Ask HN: What was the worst bug you've ever solved ? on Friday October 09, 2009 @03:23PM (#872256)
so it's your fault...
Re:Bacterium that extracts gold from its environment on Monday October 05, 2009 @10:20PM (#863354)
back in the day I ran the numbers on this - there's about a dime of gold in a ton of seawater - the salt is way more valuable....
Re:Vocoding with a piano on Monday October 05, 2009 @08:30PM (#863205)
Awesome. We need a video game with the MASTER COMPUTER's voice done with that.
Re:Does anyone know what happened to newmogul.com? on Monday October 05, 2009 @08:30PM (#863204)
Since it was all about the economy crashing, I figure when it died the other day, it was art imitating life.
Re:Packing heat gets you shot, say profs on Monday October 05, 2009 @01:06PM (#862148)
not true - those guys got shot due to their gansta lifestyle, guns were orthogonal to that
Re:Ask HN: Are any of you into blackjack "hacking"? on Monday October 05, 2009 @12:05AM (#861177)
Also it is very intolerant of error - one mistake an hour negates your advantage.
Re:Rupert to Internet: It's War on Sunday October 04, 2009 @09:49PM (#860939)
Lovely - it'll be nice to see this dick get clobbered.
Re: The Statistical Problem With Soccer on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @01:28PM (#850839)
Correct. But we dumb North Americans need to make the distinction with the weird violent USA game, which almost everyone in Canada cares about, myself included.

Somehow, they convinced us it's important. I really want to know how they did that.

Re: The Statistical Problem With Soccer on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @01:26PM (#850832)
Exactly - also the nba nhl etc with multi game playoffs LESSEN the prob of a lesser team betting a better one - but it never goes away.
Re: The Statistical Problem With Soccer on Tuesday September 29, 2009 @08:45AM (#850244)
All sports are like this - they try and eliminate it with multi game playoffs, but you can't do that with intense games like this.
Re:Why are the Russians so good at chess? on Monday September 28, 2009 @03:26PM (#849038)
O,k I read it. It DID have some mention of the state support system, but said it was for more ideological reasons.

Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why?

In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most.

Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized.

Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer!

Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.

Re:Why are the Russians so good at chess? on Monday September 28, 2009 @03:17PM (#849020)
I think this is politics, not racism. Botvinnik was a stone communist and the party's fair haired boy. That's why the fix was in.

I actually met him in Toronto in 1977.

Re:Why are the Russians so good at chess? on Monday September 28, 2009 @03:10PM (#849000)
I haven't read the article yet, so I'll guess at it's contents then check it to see how well I did.

TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik.

Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job.

Easy, peasy.

Re:DropBox grows like weed. Reaches 2 million users. on Friday September 25, 2009 @09:07AM (#843380)
I agree - it also syncs certain files I don't want synced - like log files.
Re:DropBox grows like weed. Reaches 2 million users. on Thursday September 24, 2009 @07:37PM (#842501)
I'm a customer. it's indispensable.
I'm getting a geek boner just thinking about this one...
Wow - there's no excuse for bad css anymore...
NBA too.
Re:Kasparov, Karpov set for chess clash in Spain on Monday September 21, 2009 @04:17PM (#835458)
Total respect to both these guys, but it's hard to get excited about this match when Crafty could beat either of them....
Re:Lessons Learned in Large Computations with Ruby on Monday September 21, 2009 @04:14PM (#835441)
Listen friend, this isn't what Ruby is good at.

Acquire a C program, a C-Assembler program if possible and drive it from Ruby with an API.

Don't do mad cranking with Ruby.

Re:Scribd sued over copyright on Monday September 21, 2009 @04:11PM (#835427)
Ah but Goggle is a big boy with lots of money. It's much easier to pick on a smaller opponent.
Blank page for me
Re:Geometry of the restricted Boltzmann machine on Sunday September 20, 2009 @10:59AM (#833107)
Wow - so e e cummings and charlie the cockroach are now a professor.

Seriously - nice work.

Another example of the kind of thinking that has made the third world great.
I remember that even when Jordan was making a $ million a week from advertising alone, he'd stay after practice and do that turn around jump shot for two hours, like he was some raggedy-ass kid who was going to wind up bagging groceries if he didn't make the team.

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