Viewing profile — jaylevitt

Interestingly, this does not seem to be how Google does their spelling correction. Everything I've read implies that Google looks for human corrections in search queries, and then …

Comp sci folks: Is predicting whether a compressed file will produce a finite (or, better, reasonably-sized) output roughly equivalent to the halting problem?

Well, we don't have any A/B tests, and we don't have any statistics, so all we have are anecdotes. That said, my last job was at an angel-funded company, though these were atypical…

Fascinating... I knew * plonk * made a sound, but by 1994 I had always heard it retronymmed to "put loser on newsgroup killfile", which wasn't quite satisfying - Why the awkward ph…

This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out…

By "by hand". I assume you mean using some sort of Intuos tablet with various pen and brush tips and some sort of curve-smoothing software so you can trace over the output of GNUpl…

If this is FUD, please downvote me into grayness, but I remember an article - or maybe even a book - proving that exception-safety in C++ was impossible. I remember nothing else ab…

He's at @mynameisjeff... looks pretty safe and alive to me.

If you haven't already, you should pick up Tom Mabe's CD, where he does some serious improv comedy with the telemarketers.

Go back and check the email confirmation you got for these messages.. did it say "...wrote on your Wall?"

Likewise, consistency's more important in facebook-y scenarios than you'd think. The canonical example I've heard is that "defriend my boss" MUST always be seen before "post 'I'm q…

Is that really allowed in CA? I know that in both NYC and Boston/Cambridge, a hailed cab can't refuse a destination. In fact, after being stranded in uptown Manhattan for an hour, …

No. Moving violations are not necessarily crimes. In Massachusetts, I think that reckless driving is a crime (usually interpreted as 20MPH), but I know that plain ol' speeding is n…

They did, in fact, talk to DC government several times before the first attempt to ban them (this is take 3): http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/14/ubercommissioner/

It's theoretically possible with deconvolution, but I don't know that anyone's had much success there without a bunch of MATLAB coding and a perfect impulse of the room. There's a …

Then you'll be surprised to learn that these were once trademarks: - Aspirin - Escalator - Yo-yo - Zipper

President John Tyler was born in 1790; his grandsons are still alive: http://kottke.org/12/01/president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-...

Web startups can become enterprises. Today's enterprises were car factories, farms, and accountants.

No, a hack would be doing all that while building an abstraction layer around Google Calculator to act as a primitive CPU to do the GIF encode.

I read "raising insects for human consumption" in the same sense as "growing bacteria for consuming oil spills". That'd be an 8 or a 9...

I can verify this - on my Fedora 12 box, I accidentally set up a test MySQL database into /tmp. The test database grew into my blog, and it worked great till I rebooted. Then I lea…

That's easy. I just say to myself, "Think of a random number between 1 and X.", and then I do. I see magicians do this all the time. If it's hot out, I remove the undergarment.

As one of the main contribs noted in a previous HN article, the important part was to get JSON conversion into core, full stop - because extensions (like hstore) can't declare depe…

Yep. It's called "drill-down teams" or "tiger teams", and it works.. use your back channels to discover what's wrong with your front channels. I've seen it work. Hell, I've helped …

I was thinking we could prove this with a blinded quiz: show you a post with no date or author, ask you to rate the quality, aggregate the results. But it'd probably be too difficu…