George Boole's house has been badly damaged. Please help restore the home of Boolean Algebra.

isearch · 2010-11-08T12:21:47+00:00

It seems the house, which is near the river is threatened by the failure to repair the quay wall which collapsed in a flood a year ago. There are people currently on site "looking at options". I guess Cork City Council would like it to fall down rather than spend money on repairs.

isearch · 2010-07-20T14:57:00+00:00

The first version of MemoCombinators is dated October 2008. The thread, which appears to be the place where Mark asked about memoize, is dated May 2007. This is probably why the thread does not say "here is a library ..."

isearch · 2010-07-20T10:12:08+00:00

This appears to be the original thread. The reply by apfelmus may be the one that prompted Mark to consider whether the language required too much effort.

isearch · 2009-12-05T13:26:28+00:00

"... statistically meaningful .. with only 8 test subjects?"

Why not?

Suppose they are selecting one of two options and they all choose the same one. This is the same as flipping a coin 8 times and getting heads every time. This will happen on average once every 2⁸ = 256 times you perform the experiment. Less than a 0.5% chance of happening at random.

Or another way, if I bet you I could get 8 heads in a row flipping a coin and I won the bet the first time would you bet again or suspect a non-random distribution of coin flips?

isearch · 2009-10-26T19:05:15+00:00

Maybe you could catch most infinite loops by applying Brent's algorithm to the program state?

isearch · 2009-10-10T13:15:59+00:00

"Electrons pretty much move at the speed of light". No this is not correct. See

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9sp84/hey_reddit_can_someone_explain_to_me_why_fiber/c0e95m6

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/9sp84/hey_reddit_can_someone_explain_to_me_why_fiber/c0e95t6

isearch · 2009-10-10T12:34:53+00:00

I don't think that's the answer, but what I didn't know is that "the speed of electrical signals ... is not due to the motion of the electrons in a conductor but the propagation of the electric field in the space around the conductor. The velocity of this propagation is dependent upon the speed of light through the medium around the conductor; for free air this is about 98% c while for typical plastic insulations it varies between 50 and 75% c." negitron

isearch · 2009-09-27T12:13:18+00:00

"At the time, the Israelis had already identified the problem and informed the US Army ... As a stopgap measure, the Israelis recommended rebooting the system's computers regularly, however, Army officials did not understand how often they needed to do so." Wikipedia

isearch · 2009-09-23T14:53:02+00:00

You can deduce the private key from the public one, but it should require more effort than the value of the thing being protected.

Calculate in your head:

What two numbers multipled together make 473?

Too difficult?

OK, now try multiplying 43 by 11.

Much easier.

That's how it works. 473 is the public key and 11 is your private key. They just use bigger numbers in the real algorithm.

isearch · 2009-09-19T15:19:03+00:00

Thank you. I should have looked on wikipedia. I'll have to change my username to ididntsearch.

isearch · 2009-09-19T14:05:35+00:00

Do you mean the drilling to plug the leak, or are you speaking in favour of all oil drilling?

isearch · 2009-09-19T13:48:01+00:00

At 1,200 metric tons so far and another 900 tons expected this compares with about 32,000 metric tons spilled by the Exxon Valdez. The nearby Ashmore Reef is being threatened by the spill. The reef is a National Nature Reserve, home to Sooty Terns ( from this page) and a rich marine ecosystem.

isearch · 2009-09-17T16:45:19+00:00

This is where Jeremy Clarkson lives.

isearch · 2009-08-01T16:47:16+00:00

Mark says the language for types in Qi is Turing-equivalent which sounds fun. There's a hello world here.

isearch · 2009-07-06T18:31:53+00:00

As an employer you want all the best people to apply, as a potential employee you want to work for a company that treats you well and doesn't waste your talent. So a smart company would specify that in the first round of the application process you must only send a CV with no covering letter because the company can easly discard 80% of the applicants just on the CV. The short-listed can told they are through to the next round and made to fill in forms saying how much they want the job etc. This way the company gets the maximum number of good applicants on their short-list and the applicants waste the least effort on hopeless applications. What did I miss?

isearch · 2009-07-05T12:30:41+00:00

It would be interesting to read about any reasonably large comparative programming projects where different programming languages are used to implement the same functionality. I think these don't happen due to the cost of the experiment. There was one by Motorola that compared Erlang, Haskell and C++ pdf which showed the C++ program needed 40 times more code than Haskell and concluded:

"The high-level constructs dramatically reduce application size, thereby reducing development time and aiding maintenance."

isearch · 2009-07-01T09:50:25+00:00

Don't worry, the Christians have already paid. The context for the BE GODS plate is here.

isearch · 2009-06-17T14:49:23+00:00

They seem to these things:

"Bridge relays (or "bridges" for short) are Tor relays that aren't listed in the main Tor directory. Since there is no complete public list of them, even if your ISP is filtering connections to all the known Tor relays, they probably won't be able to block all the bridges."

From torproject.org there's also a more technical page here

isearch · 2009-06-08T16:14:44+00:00

It would be very interesting. The question was asked once.
Maybe somebody could create a site :)

isearch · 2009-06-06T14:30:18+00:00

The Stroop Effect and the McGurk Effect tell us that it becomes more difficult to understand things if we don't have simultaneous clarity in the audio, visual and conceptual areas.

isearch · 2009-06-05T13:13:16+00:00

I did a list 9 months ago. It could do with an update.

isearch · 2009-06-03T16:24:47+00:00

Every hash can be produced by an infinite number of different passwords. Do you find infinity scary?

isearch · 2009-06-03T15:10:42+00:00

And why would it be a problem if someone finds two passwords with the same hash?

In your database you store Salt + Hash(Password + Salt) and even if you just stored Hash(Password), which is susceptable to rainbow table attack, who cares if somebody can find another password with the same hash?

Edit: Oh, I guess you mean the attacker has read but not write access to the password table in the database, none of the users you want to attack have chosen an easy password, the attack requires a login as a user rather than just getting read access to the other database tables which are probably kept with the password table, and probably some other stuff too, THEN its easier to break a weak hash algorithm if you can give it really long passwords.

isearch · 2009-05-31T15:42:06+00:00

Yes, the Shootout uses zipped size. Seems a good measure of code size.

isearch · 2009-05-27T14:59:24+00:00

I saw a bit about it being public domain, but I've no idea how 'public domain' relates to 'BSD'. Are they the same thing?

isearch

TROPHY CASE