Eric Kerr › Comments

False, I would expect, because no number is congruent to itself plus one mod 3.3, and Python modulo is sane with respect to negative numbers. You can't add 1 to a string, and only numbers and strings admit the % operator. Is there a trick? - ⓞnor

I cheated and ran it in the interactive interpreter. Its false for all numeric values of x I tried. Amazingly a string cannot be taken modulo 3.3. (Edit: I mean its a dynamic language after all, a string modulo 3.3 should skip every third letter or something equally clever but useless). - DGentry

Yes, there is a trick. - Paul Buchheit

I'll assume that the trick doesn't involve a user-defined class that defines __mod__, as that would be cheap. - Tudor Bosman

No, the solution is not a trick. This was an actual bug that I had in my code (don't cheat, Tudor). - Paul Buchheit

Is precedence the problem? - Daniel Dulitz

does it involve integer/long overflow? - Eric Kerr

There is no long overflow in Python (longs are arbitrarily large). I'm waiting for the answer to Daniel's question. - Tudor Bosman

It's True for certain values of x. I leave it to you to determine which values :) - Paul Buchheit

Paul, as you said "values of x", I'm assuming that this is not a precedence issue. That is, if I have def foo(x): return x % 3.3 == (x+1) % 3.3, then foo(x) will be True for some values of x. - Tudor Bosman

True for x = 1e+100 (insufficient precision to represent the +1). What do I win? - ⓞnor

True for 1e32 - Joe Beda ()

Ha ha, beat you. :) - ⓞnor

Heh -- by like 6 seconds. Real time, bitch. - Joe Beda ()

okay, now I have to look at the code to see what you were using large floats for :) - Tudor Bosman

Yeah, I'm wondering about the context. (Assuming this was the case you had in mind.) - ⓞnor

Yeah, somewhere around x=2**53 the loss of precision on the int to float conversion causes it to lose the +1 and the expression is True. - Paul Buchheit

Liked for the real time smackdown. Hi Joe! Long time no see. How's the family? We gotta get up to Seattle again soon to see all my friends there. - Robert Scoble

Pie - Chrimmus Tad

x was the hash() of a string, and at some point the values returned by hash() must have gotten a lot larger than when I had originally written the code. - Paul Buchheit

To me, nothing:-) - Francine Hardaway

You're taking hash values modulo 3.3? - ⓞnor

Hey Scoble -- definately -- I'd be happy to show you around the Google Seattle office. - Joe Beda ()

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input. - Meg v. Meg v. 1.0.0.1

Wolfram|Alpha is never sure what to do with _my_ input. - Paul Buchheit

Wolfram|Alpha just hangs for me most of the time. - Joe Beda ()

If I have a counter 'i', then i % 3 == 0 will be True 1/3 of the time, but what if I want it to be True with some other arbitrary probability (such as 1/pi), but non-randomly? (so that the values are distributed as evenly as possible) This was my solution (except with > instead of ==). It's kind of overkill, but I couldn't resist the puzzle. - Paul Buchheit

I think a normal person would have done "hash(i) % 1000 < 318" or the like... but sure, it's cute that you do the modulo directly in floating point space. Cute until the gremlins of floating point *eat your brains*. There's a reason we stay away from that stuff! - ⓞnor

Okay - it gets stranger -- I wrote a binary search to find the inflection point. I didn't get what I expected. x=9007500000000000 -> True, x=9007500000000000+1 -> False, x=9007500000000000+51 -> True. There is something strange going on. Python version 2.5.4 (r254:67916, Apr 1 2009, 17:38:54) \n[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5490)] - Joe Beda ()

Wolfram|Alpha also returns True around 2^53: http://www26.wolframalpha.com/input... - Karim

Dan, that solution would produce unnecessarily long sequences of zeros (or ones). Once I have that, I may as well just use random(). On the other hand, [int((i+1) % f > i % f) for i in range(0, 30)] will not produce any adjacent zeros if f is >= 2. - Paul Buchheit

You could use fixed point if you had a typed language and could select longs to hold the result, e.g if you want 3.3, then (counter * 10 + increment) % 33. Overflow bugs are insidious, these days languages should have support for arbitrary precision promotion. I'm reminded of Joshua Bloch's "Nearly All Binary Searches are Broken" blog post: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006... - Ray Cromwell

Python already has arbitrarily large longs Ray (no integer overflow), so it should not be vulnerable to Joshua's binary search bug. I'm not sure what "counter" and "increment" are in your example though. - Paul Buchheit

Oh, I see, you want evenly interleaved values with the appropriate distribution? Then why were you using hash() at all? - ⓞnor

The hash() provides a starting position (hash(feed_id) + i). This is used by the crawl, and I don't want all the feeds having the same True/False values at the same time. The hash provides an even distribution across feeds, and the other part provides an even distribution across time. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, counter in your case would be hash(feed_id), and increment would be 'i' I'm guessing, the amount you want to add each time. The idea is, if you want to say, mimic x + 0.1 % 3.3, you instead use x * 10 + 1 % 33. Then, if you have arbitrary precision integers, you'll never overflow (the float mantissa/round-off error) - Ray Cromwell

Ray, the even easier solution was to use hash % 1000000 so that I'm nowhere near the floating point rounding error :). - Paul Buchheit

I laughed out loud haha - Mona Nomura

return LotsMoreMoney; :P - BeeLing

fantastic - you have a fine reservoir of good material Mona - PaulJohnson

Hardware incompatibility error; Driver incompatibility error. if (still_not_crashed) HAHA @Paul: Thank you, for your words. :) - Mona Nomura

HOM C# :O - Hossein Norouzi

C# doesn't use include-directives - they'd be using. That's some pseudo-C :P - Jemm

I'd love to do similar joke about OSX or Linux, but I'd be too afraid of a mob attacking me due to blasphemy ;) - Jemm

hahahaha!! It's supposed to be funny, you guys! - Mona Nomura

ha ha ha *snort* ha ha. Joni, it's Mona#++SE.NET - Kevin L

You couldn't do a "source code leaked" joke for LInux! - Kevin L

Mona: it is ;) klecu: ah :) Now I know how Powershell got its code name.. "Monad" - Jemm

HA! - Mona Nomura

There's a bug in there. Where's the if statement immediately inside the if still_not_Crashed condition that checks "If(bootLog.BootsSinceLastCrash >2), throw new BSOD();". - Kamath (नमः)

funny - but i've never had a problem with Vista - in fact I'm a Mac owner who LOVES vista. take that - andy brudtkuhl

Hahahahahaha - J. Abdul-Qahhar

LOL :) - Merry Xmas FFeeders - AJ

Joni: Nobody makes fun of Unix-like operating systems, or they have me to answer to. :) - Rishabh Mishra (p248)

Mona - Did YOU do this ?? :) - Charlie Anzman

That can't be it. Where's that call to sleep() ? :) - Morton Fox

*giggle* :) - Reuben Thum from twhirl

I'm pretty sure I saw that in the background of an ad in Linux Format a while back, actually. Something extremely similar, anyhow. - i80and

love it! - Geoff K

while(!crashed) { laugh(); } - imabonehead

Why are the Firefox name's here? - 李华顺

lmfao at the commented out "Welcome to Windows 2000" - Eric Kerr

omg, Akiva needs to see this - Josh Haley

LOL :D - Chirantan Rajhans

SearchAndDestroy(FIREFOX|OPENOFFICEORG|ANYTHINH_GOOGLE); = Awesome! - Nicholas James

Octomom's next attempt at monetization. - Mona Nomura

This is a variation of the subset-sum problem.. my follow up question is what about 4 numbers that sum to 0? (I'm the friend who asked) - Adam Derewecki

http://pastebin.com/m27bc1cef ..? - Eric Kerr

Eric: that's kind of the worst case solution but yeah it works. I haven't written any code but I think you can make it faster by separating it into two problems because you know you'll need at least one negative number in each set of triplets (either a negative and 2 positives or 2 negatives and a positive). - Benjamin Golub

with a pencil. - Jim: Dead Like FF

Ben, yeah that would be much better for large sets. it would need a little work because a set of 0s works too. Is the list already sorted? The best case would probably use some sort of interval halving and recursion, but it depends on what you know about the list beforehand.. - Eric Kerr

I assume the list is not sorted. - Benjamin Golub

N integers.....based on just a glance at that post I thought you were being racist! My bad... - Matthew Gottlieb

I came up with this in Python, assuming the list of integers is not unique. http://pastebin.com/madfc9c1 - also Adam you can then easily look for combination of 4 numbers. - Aviv

Mmmmmm... - Anna Haro

om nom nom - imabonehead

Only one thing to do: I'm going to throw one at you. - Eric Kerr

Do you clean up your messes, Eric? - Mona Nomura

iyum! - Zee.

makes me hungry just to see them. Should be mounted on springs so they wiggle! - Bill Thompson from twhirl

Shut your hatches, haters! These cupcakes are awesome. - Mona Nomura

How's the battery life on those cupcakes/ - Michael Markman

yeah - do they jiggle when you press on them? - Zee.

I bet Caryl could make these easy. - Will Higgins™

the iphone is soooo del.icio.us! - (jeff)isageek

Geez, how much do those cost? ;-) - Jordan Hofker

Ingenious. They look delicious too! - sean808080

ummm.. little to far on the iphone thing. Next is the knitted Iphone. - Uncle CW™

Awesome! Do want. - Stellina

I don't own an iPhone but I would like to try to make these. - Melissa

Christopher, I bet the knitted iPhone already exists somewhere. Or crocheted. Check Craft: magazine. - Kamilah Gill

WANT!! - Mona Nomura

*weeps* - Mo Kargas

nom! nom! - Randy

my daughter wanted to know why the cake has crabby patties all over it.... - WorldofHiglet

excellent work! - WorldofHiglet

needs bacon - Kevin Johnson

made me go on a cake fav'ing flickr run -- prepare yourselves - Michael W. May

ICANHAZ?!? - Eric Kerr

CUPCAKE PLZ! o hai Eric - Mona Nomura

Actually, I got very confused by the navigation. I keep clicking in the wrong place, and I'm still not sure which actions cause music to start playing. It seems kind of cool though, and apparently they have FriendFeed integration! - Paul Buchheit

Wow, this is really impressive! It's the best new website I've seen in at least 6 months. - Eric Florenzano

5 minutes in, was still trying to figure out how to get a song to play. and then that thing on the bottom left expanded and I figured it out. A little too much discovery involved for me tastes, but cool idea nonetheless! - Chu Yeow

Impressive!! I like the sound of the bubbles. - Ray Chen

This is pretty sweet - yeah, lil grey box bottom left w/green dot - listening 2 Code Monkey by Jonathancoulton - great find, Paul! - Cheryl Allin from twhirl

Would love it if Songbird could pull tracks from it... - abacab

updates remind me of the iminlikewithyou UX - tagami

Thanks for the feedback. We just added a mouseover tooltip for songs to make the action of playing music more obvious. - Samuel Hsiung

hey raymond, what issue did you have w/ the navigation? if you would be so kind: james at thesixtyone dot com - James Miao

Amazing good UI (or even genius), very nice site and I found a lot of interesting and unknown music there! I somehow never liked last.fm and ilike.com was a bit better for me, but still not the best. I'm not interested in sharing what I'm listening to at the moment (as I often listen to one album for many days or weeks), but I like to discover new music and maybe share recommendations with friends. I'm highly impressed with thesixtyone. - Wojciech Polak

Loving the interface! Any new music service is a blessing these days. - Majento

Somthing to keep an eye on. That, is if the RIAA don't get hopping mad. Anything to keep music going.... - Roberto Bonini

Damn it's a great implementation of JS and UI - Jorge Escobar

Also, a friend developer of mine tried it on a Linux desktop and it didn't work - Jorge Escobar

he probably needs to update flash: http://www.thesixtyone.com/static... - James Miao

awesome work -- great JS magic. well done Sam. yet again. - Puneet Thapliyal

About 2 hours of listening now, the default station, great tunes and perfect connection. - Majento

Thanks James! I am hooked! Great job... - Jorge Escobar

thanks, glad to hear people are enjoying the experience. - James Miao

@ gregory: candidness appreciated. while thesixtyone's positioning is very deliberate, we can always improve on communicating the wide range of benefits for using the site (i.e. you can listen without having to interact with the site). - James Miao

Excellent site and great service, I check out the Hot tunes each week - Kol Tregaskes

I believe this site is a lesson in how not to design a UI. After a couple minutes of registering and trying to figure stuff out...I'm done and I haven't even heard a song yet. Someone's going to have to make it a bit easier to get started. Going to this site for the first time is just like running Emacs. - Todd

agree with greg, todd and whoever else who felt frustrated and left tuneless - viki saigal

OK, after restarting Firefox, I seem to have music playing. Not the best experience...but since I'm into music and always looking for new ways to discover music, I went through the pains. I don't think I can point my non-techie friends to this site, though. - Todd

Hmm, music started playing for me immediately, and it was pretty obvious what to do. But I'm not sure why that thing at the left is closed by default. If I hadn't read about it in this thread, I might not have discovered it. - j1m

I've been using this site for a while. A great place to find new music. - Dennis Jackson

this site is awesome. that is all. - Tim Hoeck

"Linux started as a terminal emulator".. !!!? Or not. - Nick Lothian

Definitely a lot of points that rang true for me, especially the "Chicken and Egg" point. - Adam Thorsen

I myself have worked on two start-up concepts and a revitalization effort, each of which bombed, but each one taught me something different. I finally threw in the towel on my last start-up and picked up a full-time day-job because I couldn't find anyone willing to share hats. We were already incorporated, so I was the CEO, book keeper, technology evangelist, sales guy, support tech,... more... - Chris Stewart from twhirl

Haven't read the article yet, Nick, but Linux didn't start out as a terminal emulator. Linus Torvalds deliberately started working on implementing a "practice OS" called "Minix" from a book, and it grew from there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Phil G

When it evolves into a super human world spanning robotic military network that turns on its human masters and sends Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to exterminate us, you'll be sorry you wished it was better at offense. - Ranjit Mathoda

haha yeah, its primary strength seems to be not forgetting to go back to defend the goal - bob

its the Deep Blue of air hockey. - Eric Kerr

I could beat it. - Shey, Jamaican of FF

lol, Eric, nice. :) They clearly fed it a database of all that guy's previous air hockey games! It was able to predict his every shot... ;) - felix

This is kind of cool. Maybe this could set up a foundation for individual chips for each extremity in mock human bots - Anthony

Domain parkers are banking on one principle: domains will be used forever. I wouldn't be surprised to see the system start to change in the next couple years, as evident by browsers in asia with no URL bar (albeit for a few different reasons). When the system starts to change, there will be tons of supply and no demand and people hording domain real-estate will be SOL. - Eric Kerr

"...and people hording domain real-estate will be SOL" Really? Given that it's less than a buck a month per domain, if the jerks who squat on domains make just a few pennies per day in folks who click on their ads, they're coming out ahead :-( - Adam Lasnik

Ah confusion :). "Domain squatters" who grab tradmarked names are doing something illegal & no real domainer does that (too expensive if/when caught). The others profit from the ".com"ism that users were taught. When they're looking for something, lots of them type "[thing-I-want].com" into their browsers. If they end up getting a page with "search results" (targeted ads), I think that's ok. - John μller

True, I shouldn't have conflated those two, John. But I think the folks that own stuff like popular-hobby-name.com or sport-type.com or art-form.com are scumbags, too. - Adam Lasnik

Some pages have more value, some pages have less. If you land on a domain that gives you a link to the domain you want, I'd say that particular page has just as much value as an equivalent search page in Google - even if it is a parked domain. Given that there is an unlimited supply of domain names (e.g. one for every, say, videocard for example), and there is an unlimited number of products (e.g. one for everything that mankind can invent), I don't think its bad to create landing pages w/limited value... - Justin Long

I do hate domain parking where the page has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject at hand, tho... - Justin Long

@stefan Unfortunately, eminent domain is often used by local governments to hand property to private developers. In this case, I just have two domains I would really like to own as I plan to launch something shortly. Neither can be generating any revenue at all. But the owners of both have asked for tens of thousands of dollars to part with them. I believe in markets, etc, etc. But, considering the unique nature of names, it just frustrates me. - Christopher Sacca

Hi Sacca, it frustrates me that in order to get a reasonable house for my family here I have to pay >1.5 million. However, people are paying that much for houses here so if I want something like that here, I'll either have to wait for a bargain or pay up. Who knows, maybe the market will collapse and we can get house & domain name for much less ... - John μller

thx edythe - MG Siegler

yes, but in my case it's a best of Scoble - Duncan Riley

mine, at least for today, is definitely a best-of popular bloggers - MG Siegler

Duncan: interesting. I see other stuff on my best of page. I definitely like the same kind of stuff that you do, though. So that probably is why that's what you see. - Robert Scoble

Best of Scoble, Louis Gray, and FriendFeed employees. Something to be said though about what the people i follow find interesting. - Eric Kerr

i'm now included twice in my own top 4 best of the day, something which i'm really proud of. - MG Siegler

@duncan - I'm seeing a good mix of my friends - some Scoble, but he doesn't dominate the list by a long shot. - Frederic

Looking forward to new features next week. Stay safe. - Russellreno

The World is flat - Luca Conti

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp - Mrinal Desai from Alert Thingy

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf - Louis Gray

Herd: How to change mass behavior by harnessing our true nature by Mark Earls. it's good - Eric Kerr

The Second World War by Churchill - Ole Begemann

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Co... - Mick

it's rather short but "The Five People you meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom - Bastard Operator From FF

Music 2.0 by Gerd Leonhard - Florin Grozea

The relay singularity? - Paul Buchheit

hah, was referring more to technological singularity.. either way, that mess of wires is the beginning of the end - Eric Kerr

That takes me back to when computer architecture was much easier to understand. It is beautiful. - Brian Johns