pavel's comments

pavel | 14 years ago | on: Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches

Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page, now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one else experience a degradation in the quality of results?

pavel | 15 years ago | on: Genetic Algorithm Car Physics

It would be interesting to see how a car designed by a person would perform. Maybe make it a competition where two players design a car and then compete on some randomly generated terrain.

pavel | 16 years ago | on: Doubt, Worry and Fear: New York Faces Dramatic Consequences of Crisis

I've lived in New York City practically my whole life. I currently live in Brooklyn and commute to Manhattan. No matter where I go to hang out, there are always tons of people around, eating, drinking and partying. From my perspective I haven't noticed really any slowdown because if you walk in to almost any store on a weekend or after work, many people are still shopping for clothes, food, electronics and whatever.

In terms of jobs, I knew of a few people who've lost theirs but they were able to find new jobs in a matter of a few months.

So again, I don't notice much slowdown in NYC. In fact places in brooklyn such as Williamsburg, Carroll gardens, park slope are growing in popularity and people are moving to these for slightly cheaper rent than in the city. A few years ago, I remember that these places used to be very crappy and run down. Now they are blossoming.

pavel | 16 years ago | on: New Attack on AES

Remember that the complexity to brute force AES-128 is 2^64 due to the birthday paradox. The complexity to break AES-256 is 2^119 and thus it is still harder to break than AES-128.

pavel | 17 years ago | on: OPEC 2.0: Bandwidth is the New Oil

I don't think that its that easy to actually "legislate" more bandwidth. Bandwidth will be much scarcer in the future as most communication will go over IP. The reason technologies like IPTV are not wide-spread is because there is not enough bandwidth to scale such bandwidth hogging technologies. So the bandwidth issue is a bigger problem which cannot be solved with just legislation. You need legislation combined with infrastructure to expand bandwidth.

pavel | 17 years ago | on: Can't Find a Parking Spot? Check Smartphone

I wonder if this will make parking better or worse. If everyone knows about open parking spaces, then everyone will rush to the nearest space causing more congestion around it. Once they get to the space and realize someone else got lucky, they will all go to the next nearest open space. So are you really solving the parking congestion problem?
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