PotatoEngineer's comments

If the advertisers can see the MAID for each ad impression, then there's no need to be too specific about who you target - it'll just cost you more. On the other hand, if the advertiser doesn't get to see the MAID-per-impression, then the easy solution is to supply your one target MAID, plus another 999 bogus MAIDs (or, if the platform verifies that MAIDs are accurate before allowing you to use them, then you use 999 MAIDs from Liberia or some other country that your target won't visit).

If you like something, upvote it. If you're only saying the equivalent of "+1", please don't post - it's just (well-meaning) clutter.

Also: check the guidelines link at the very bottom of the site (in tiny, nigh-unreadable type!): don't talk about votes, either up or down.

Outcomes! Right, that's what they were called. Thanks for naming it.

This question of "what skills are students missing?" reminds me of the new teaching methods they were trying out as I started high school. The new teaching program centered around objectives. The idea was that each objective was a skill that the student needed to learn, but the upshot was that you had to score more than 70% on every single quiz to pass the class, and that you could retake every quiz you failed, repeatedly.

The implementation varied between classes - in my World History class, there were a large number of objectives, and each objective was met by a small quiz that tested ~one skill. (There were a lot of retaken quizzes in that class.) In Biology, there were about 10 objectives for the entire semester, so you could still pass while missing a few small skills, as long as those missing skills were spread out among different units.

My high school used that "objectives" system less and less as I moved up the grades -I assume that most teachers got tired of it pretty quickly and just decided to make their usual teaching material "look like objectives" rather than rebuild their curriculum in later years.

The Microsoft campus in Redmond would most likely not be knocked over by the tsunami: a rather hilly Seattle is in the way, then there's the large Lake Washington, and then Redmond is another ~40 feet above the lake on the far side, plus another ~2 miles inland. A fair amount of the energy of the tsunami is going to be expended by the time the Microsoft campus gets salted. (Kirkland is west of Redmond, adjacent to Lake Washington, so it's a similar-but-somewhat-less-optimistic story there. Fremont is adjacent to Seattle and slightly inland, so it will be worse there.)

Of course, the infrastructure of the greater Seattle area is going to be trashed, but chances are good that the Redmond and Kirkland campuses of Microsoft and Google respectively would be intact.

Link to the inundation zone predicted for a magnitude 7.3 earthquake on Seattle: http://wa-dnr.s3.amazonaws.com/Publications/ger_ofr2003-14_t... This isn't even "the big one" as the OP describes, much less "the really big one", but it's a rough description of where the flooding will happen. Downtown Seattle (up and left of the word SEATTLE on the map, with streets in a dense diagonal grid) won't be strongly affected, because downtown Seattle is a hill. With an 8.5 or 9.0 earthquake, of course, Seattle will be much worse off, but there's still some hope that Redmond and Kirkland won't get too damaged.

No; I lost the starmap when I still had some 5 1/4" diskettes that said "Star Control II" on them.

Star Control II uses a starmap as copy protection ("tell me the constellation at these coordinates..."). I lost the starmap at one point, but if you can remember just one of the answers, you can just keep running the game until that answer is the correct one. (The copy protection is at the very beginning, and the game won't bug you during play.)

Using a socket wrench rather than, say, a crescent wrench means there's more nut in contact with the wrench at any given moment. So the wrench doesn't have to be quite as strong, since the torque is distributed over a larger surface area and thus a larger volume of wrench is available to absorb it.

The current knowledge of jellyfish intelligence is "we've figured out they have memories." Jellyfish are extremely simple creatures; the "brighter" ones are known for their ability to avoid obstacles. [1] These are not particularly sentient creatures.

[1] Coates et al. 2006 "The spectral sensitivity of the lens eyes of a box jellyfish" JEB

You convince your loved ones to switch to something else. If they won't, then you must realize that, deep in your heart, you love freedom more than you love your loved ones, and must switch to non-video calls or other methods of communication.

Maybe the market is small enough, and the transactions small enough, that the competent hackers are attacking other systems.

Almost every single non-reply post on this article is criticizing how much the app isn't AirBnB. Maybe the new measure of success on HN is finding the excellent discussions under those criticizing posts? Those criticizing top posts always have a huge amount of discussion under them.

It's not just jacking up prices; it's about keeping competition down to reasonable levels. If you have the world's best restaurant that everyone needs to eat at, then great; but most restaurants are going to be in the middling end of the scale, where they're vulnerable to having "too much" competition. If you serve decent Mexican food, then your revenue will be damaged by every "decent Mexican place" that opens in your vicinity.

Don't get me wrong; there's plenty of room for "decent Mexican places," but if too many of them open, then they might all end up with not enough customers to survive. Limiting the number of restaurants means that there will be enough customers for most of them.

I wouldn't expect most "handshake deals" with a friend/spouse to require that level of formality - unless money is changing hands.

That first one reduces your privacy even further: not only does Group A track you, but now everyone knows that Group A is tracking you, allowing Group B to ask Group A for data on you.

That's the point - it's "kind of" true. But the takeaway from that NYT article is "you'll get stranded," which is much more painful than the truth: "be careful in the cold."

Probably because there's limited wireless bandwidth. It'll work, but it doesn't scale - doubly so for colocation, where other customers might eat your bandwidth. The "short distances" would help, but there might not be enough throughput to make it worthwhile.

A note on how gerrymandering works:

In a perfectly gerrymandered system, the party in power can win using only 25.1% of the vote - and that's if all districts have equal population. You can get by with even less if the districts have imbalanced populations. In that "perfect" system, you draw the districts so that your detractors are 100% of the population in the districts you know that you're going to lose, and your supporters are 50.1% of the population in the ares you want to win.

In real life, of course, it's messier and you can't draw the lines quite so perfectly, but here's a link to the districts near Chicago - look how oddly-shaped they are, especially as you get closer to the city center. (They'll probably change again next election season, doubly so if the other party gets control.) http://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/IL

"Sponsored" implies an advertising relationship, even if it avoids the dread word - sponsors pay you. "Inspired by your browsing history" is accurate, and is Amazon advertising Amazon - you're on a shopping site, seeing more links to shopping shouldn't surprise you. "Promoted Discovery" is a new and unrecognized flavor of newspeak; it's not just avoiding the word "advertising," it's hard to even recognize as advertising.

Can you live on 60%? That is, how hard is it if a large customer decides to ignore that last payment?