Hacker News: jaylevitt

New comment by jaylevitt in "How to Write a Spelling Corrector"

jaylevitt — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:11:59 +0000

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 extrapolates those into suggestions. in other words, "People who searched for 'speling' often click no results, but search for 'spelling' instead.

New comment by jaylevitt in "Zip Bomb"

jaylevitt — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:23:47 +0000

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

New comment by jaylevitt in "Ask HN: Fat founder, does it hurt getting funding?"

jaylevitt — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 23:33:39 +0000

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 angels - all billionaires, some well-known names. The CEO was not only fat (330 pounds), but old (46), brash, loud, opinionated, and the kind of guy who would say "You know what we need on the landing page? Smokin' hot broads!" In the movie version, he will be played by a taller Danny DeVito.

But he was a good guy and a great salesman, and had no trouble raising multiple multi-million dollar rounds, even while pivoting completely - several times. His investors trusted him to treat their money with respect, and knowing his history, I would too.

New comment by jaylevitt in ""Plonk""

jaylevitt — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 23:25:25 +0000

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 phrasing?

Now I know the truth. You can't stop the signal.

New comment by jaylevitt in "Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry"

jaylevitt — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 23:17:01 +0000

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 of a basic sense of fairness.

New comment by jaylevitt in "Xkcd style graphs"

jaylevitt — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:10:26 +0000

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 GNUplot, yes?

New comment by jaylevitt in "Error codes vs exceptions: critical code vs typical code"

jaylevitt — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:16:22 +0000

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 about this; it was probably around 1999-2000.

Am I completely making that up? Or did we discover ways around the "impossible" part? I haven't coded in C++ since, uh, gcc 2.97 or so.

New comment by jaylevitt in "Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me"

jaylevitt — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:56:56 +0000

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

New comment by jaylevitt in "Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me"

jaylevitt — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:56:08 +0000

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

New comment by jaylevitt in "Facebook Users Report Seeing Old Private Messages Showing Up On Timelines"

jaylevitt — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:56:10 +0000

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

New comment by jaylevitt in "Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In"

jaylevitt — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:31:41 +0000

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 quitting!'"

New comment by jaylevitt in "DC Taxi Commission Proposes New Rules to Shut Down Uber"

jaylevitt — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 07:13:55 +0000

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, I now make a point of not declaring my destination till I'm in the cab.

New comment by jaylevitt in "'AOL squatter' takes wraps off new startup, Claco"

jaylevitt — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 23:31:10 +0000

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 not. If you contest, you see a magistrate; if you appeal the magistrate's decision, you do get a trial with a judge, but the ticket itself is considered evidence of your speeding.

New comment by jaylevitt in "DC Taxi Commission Proposes New Rules to Shut Down Uber"

jaylevitt — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 23:08:13 +0000

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/

New comment by jaylevitt in "Exotic Transaction Types with Bitcoin"

jaylevitt — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:53:04 +0000

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 newish plugin called Zynaptiq Unveil that claims to do "blind" reverb removal, that is, without having an impulse response. I haven't tried it, but there's a demo version:

http://www.zynaptiq.com/unveil/

Other interesting conversations about de-reverberation:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.music-dsp/775 http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/60299-convolu...

New comment by jaylevitt in "Yahoo Removes Registered Trademark (R) From Logo"

jaylevitt — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:10:02 +0000

Then you'll be surprised to learn that these were once trademarks:

- Aspirin - Escalator - Yo-yo - Zipper

New comment by jaylevitt in "I have a troubling relationship with time"

jaylevitt — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:59:40 +0000

President John Tyler was born in 1790; his grandsons are still alive:

http://kottke.org/12/01/president-john-tylers-grandsons-are-...

New comment by jaylevitt in "PostgreSQL 9.2: Full-throttle Database"

jaylevitt — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:57:23 +0000

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

New comment by jaylevitt in "Realtime Web Messaging over Animated Gifs"

jaylevitt — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:45:02 +0000

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.

New comment by jaylevitt in "Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?"

jaylevitt — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:51:45 +0000

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...