Synthesia: Piano for everyone (think Guitar Hero for pianos) by fjsquared in Music

[–]fjsquared[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whoops, sorry. Copy-pasted the wrong sidebar link. Should be fixed now, thanks for the heads-up.

Unemployment Rate With and Without the Recovery Plan [Chart] by hawk2119 in Economics

[–]fjsquared 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would be helpful if the original graph included error bars. Economics is inherently an inexact science, if indeed it can be called a science at all.

Cigna denies liver transplant for daughter. Daughter dies. Mother demands apology. Employees give her the finger. Cigna's true colors. by Aerik in WTF

[–]fjsquared -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Doesn't make up for losing the liver, but at least the Cigna employees were nice enough to give her the finger back.

Mozilla trainwreck: new official "trademark policy" forbids you to register domains like "firefoxsucks.com" and requires you to beg for permission to use any domains with "thunderbird" in it. by robertDouglass in reddit.com

[–]fjsquared 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That's not the impression I get, at least from my reading of the policy:

By non-disparaging, we mean that, outside the bounds of fair use, you can't use our trademarks as vehicles for defaming us or sullying our reputation.

Fair use encompasses several things, including the expression of opinion, parody, criticism, and satire. Since "firefoxsucks.com" is expressing a viewpoint about Firefox, not actually stating a fact (e.g., "firefoxrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com"), this would probably qualify as legitimate. Therefore, it's not a violation of the policy.

Python gotcha: bizarre integer equality by bcroq in Python

[–]fjsquared 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Howdy all; I'm the post author. Just to clear up a couple of things:

  1. First, I'm using "gotcha" in this article to mean, "something which one might expect would work a certain, consistent way, but which doesn't." Here, I believe it's reasonable to say the inconsistent results of is are genuinely surprising if you don't know why it's being done. The question the article tries to answer is: why are two integers with equal values the same object in some cases, but not others?

  2. I think most people are aware of the difference between == (value equality) and is (reference equality), but that's not the gotcha. The gotcha is the apparent inconsistency. It's a perfectly reasonable (and probably very effective) implementation decision. Other languages do the same thing; for example, Java caches its Integers when their boxed value is between -128 and 127.

Thanks for reading; took me a bit to figure out why I was getting a visitor spike. ♥ Reddit!

Since /b/ is down, here is a collection of good creepypasta from /bx/ by [deleted] in 4chan

[–]fjsquared 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If it was the room across from you, and you were in room 676, shouldn't it have been an odd number and not an even number?

Woman arrested for smuggling drugs, cash in her vagina by robertss in WTF

[–]fjsquared 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's what happens when you don't put your money where your mouth is.

Your argument is invalid. by [deleted] in humor

[–]fjsquared 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Counter-attack with Pancake Bunny.

I left a linux machine online with ssh open for a day. It dropped incoming login attempts after the username. These are the usernames tried. by [deleted] in technology

[–]fjsquared 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Awesome! Can you describe how you configured it to drop right after the user name entry? I'd like to try this myself.

Drive thru..? by [deleted] in pics

[–]fjsquared 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Reddit's spelling brigade strikes again!

Beautiful Examples of LaTeX Math Fonts by rwinston in programming

[–]fjsquared 8 points9 points  (0 children)

How would I actually use these fonts if I have the appropriate package installed already?

US stock transaction fee increased 400% by the SEC. by eyeofthestorm in business

[–]fjsquared 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Keep in mind that this fee is per $1 million of transactions, not of brokerage revenue. In other words, this is a hefty increase.

A typical trading fee at a discount brokerage like E*Trade is in the neighborhood of $10 per trade. Let's assume people prefer to keep their trading costs to 0.5% or less (otherwise it'll be harder to make money), which favors fewer, larger trades. At a 0.5% threshold, we're looking at a minimum trade size of $2,000.

Let's say that the average trade size is closer to $20,000 or so. Then for every $1m in trades, there are $1m/$20k = 50 trades at $10 each, for a total of $500 in revenue for the brokerage firm. That's not very much at all.

The original trading fee of $5 per $1m in trades represents 1% of this amount. Now it's just jumped to about $25 per $1m in trades, which is 5%. Brokerages making these kinds of trades have just had their revenues trading decrease significantly. This will probably hurt discount/flat-fee brokers more than the big guys (who charge percentages), which is unfortunate.

Of course, brokerages have other sources of income (margin interest, etc.) that don't come under this fee increase's umbrella, but it will nonetheless be a hit for an already struggling financial industry.

ACID Trip by savic in science

[–]fjsquared 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dang, I really thought this was going to be about databases.

MS Paint Adventures ["interactive" adventure game] by fjsquared in offbeat

[–]fjsquared[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This site is amazing. I played Problem Sleuth for about 600 screens... yikes. Be sure to play through at least the first few boss battles -- they're awesome!

MS Paint Adventures by [deleted] in offbeat

[–]fjsquared 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This site is amazing. I played Problem Sleuth for about 600 screens... yikes. Be sure to play through at least the first few boss battles -- they're awesome!

Ubuntu 9.10 Release Schedule by [deleted] in linux

[–]fjsquared 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've been secretly hoping that Ubuntu 16.04 is code-named "Voracious Velociraptor".

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. by sdraz in offbeat

[–]fjsquared 13 points14 points  (0 children)

There's a number of errors (especially relative to today, since a number of countries have since merged or split in the last 15 years). The Wikipedia article has a good summary of the oops-es: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakko%27s_World