swillden

That and I'm waiting for the plug-in hybrid model. Actually, what I'd really like is a direct-drive diesel version, like their very first prototype. It got 230 mpg. Still, the hybrid gas-electric prototype supposedly gets 120 mpg starting with an empty battery. The battery in the hybrid will be smaller, holding a 40-mile charge.

So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that.

However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)

IBM currently sells OS/390, OS/400 and AIX while also pushing Linux and only recently stopped selling OS/2. I think it's quite likely that Solaris would have just joined the list.

That is certainly true... but does the player's feeling have anything to do with the actual probability that the ball will go into the hole? According to the Cornell study mentioned by the article, the answer is generally "no".

We're attempting to intervene with medication and professional counseling to help with the depression and injury. We're also attempting to remove the negative peers from her life by removing her from school (homeschooling) and controlling who she's allowed to spend time with.

It's helping, but modern technology has created some challenges. Like most geek homes, mine is filled with technology, and my kids are adept in its use. I've had to block Facebook and all of the free e-mail services on the kids' computers, but short of intensively supervising her computer usage there's effectively no way to cut off that avenue of communication with her negative friends.

I finally resorted to writing a script that notifies me whenever she logs in, and then hacking the GNOME remote desktop tool so that it doesn't display a notification when I remotely connect to her desktop. Oh, we've used the low-tech solution of putting the computer in a public area of the house and paying attention, but that just means she has to pick the right moment. Knowing that I may be virtually looking over her shoulder at any moment, and there's no way she can know when that's happening, seems to have closed off that avenue. Finally. When she's at home.

However, phones have proven much more difficult. We've taken her cellphone away, and the home phone has no long distance service (her problem friends happen to be outside the local calling area; she had to cast a wide net to find a group this bad), but my home office line does, and there are three other cellphones around the house, not to mention that all of her local friends and cousins have cellphones.

Short of keeping all of our phones locked up and not allowing her out of the house, there's effectively no way we can keep her from getting in touch with her friends. And these friends are so important to her that there seems to be no punishment, no bribe, no consequence that will keep her from contacting them.

Without modern communications technology, it's unlikely that she ever would have found this group of negative peers, and it's certain that we as her parents would be able isolate her from them. As it is, as long as she's willing to sneak behind our backs, it is effectively impossible for us to control her access to them. We can limit it significantly, of course, but unless we could watch her every minute of every day, as soon as our backs are turned she'll find a way to contact them.

So far, reducing her communication with them seems to be limiting their effect on her. The anti-depressants are having an effect as well, and the therapy seems also to be helping her to understand herself and her value a little better. However, as you can imagine, the constant close supervision and tight control is also basically destroying our relationship with her, and reducing our ability to directly influence her thinking to zero. She sees us as the enemy.

That saddens us greatly, but we don't see any other option. She was in a downward spiral last year and we intervened aggressively and she pulled out of it. Then she convinced us that she could handle herself if we relaxed the grip. We did, and within three months she attempted suicide (which her peers think is cool).

So, this has been long and rambling, but the point is that my anecdotal experience with my daughter supports this researcher's claims. Our influence over our daughter's behavior and thinking is minimal at best, and I'm questioning whether it was ever as great as we thought it was. Our influence over her environment is substantial and we're working that influence for all it's worth. I guess we'll know in a few years if that approach worked. Well, sort of. We'll only know the results of what we do. There's no way to know what might have happened if we'd acted differently.

That, of course, is the hard part of being a parent. You can only do what you think is best, and there's really no way to know if you're doing the right things, or how much what you're doing even matters. Still, you have to do the best you can.

I play with my wife and kids, and I'd really like to push more roleplaying because that would allow my wife to enjoy the game a lot more (she really only plays because the kids like it), but the kids (ages 7, 11, 13, 15) just don't get it. They get bored with any sort of play that isn't heavy on combat -- a couple of days ago we played through a section of an ancient wizard's keep that was loaded with traps, tricks and puzzles and all but one of them got really bored, though my wife thought it was somewhat interesting.

One of the things any lifesaving class will teach you is to always approach a drowning person from behind, because if they can get their hands on you they try to push you under.

Interesting idea. That would tend to "upvote" reviews that sell the product, pushing the negative (or even positive but ineffectual) reviews off the page. That's a good thing if what you want to do is motivate sales, but a bad thing if what you want is to promote useful reviews.

Not only does it boost the estimate enough that you're likely to hit the target, it also adds a lot of bogus precision to the numbers that the less-than-clueful will interpret as accuracy.

Making more drugs legal doesn't change the dynamics of irresponsibility.

At least, that's how it is in US law. Details at: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

This is also risky because it could leave the file in an inconsistent, partially-modified state. However, in practice it seems to work really well, and Google turns up a striking lack of articles discussing the risks of inconsistency due to use of mmap.

I'd like to learn more about the risks of this approach, since I'm using it to selectively rewrite portions of a very important file in a project of mine. I'm pretty sure that my usage pattern is safe. The writes are small enough that they nearly always affect only one disk block and never touch more than two, and I'm careful to msync() at the right places (actually mmap.mmap.flush(), since I'm using Python), but I'm interested in learning about potential issues. This file is too large to make copying it convenient, but I'll do that if necessary.

What he's missing is that Linus has spent a large part of nearly two decades doing merges using a variety of inadequate tools which no doubt frequently forced him to hand-edit many thousands of patches in order to get successful merges. When Linus sat down to start his two-week project, he brought with him an incredibly rich base of experience with real-world merging of changes in a significant, complex codebase with large numbers of contributors. Also, he's an insightful guy. So while he may not have spent as much time in formal study of the esoteric intricacies, Linus had great insight into the day-to-day issues that merge-heavy development processes create, and how to solve them.