Interestingly, this does not seem to be how Google does their spelling correction. Everything I've read implies that Google looks for human corrections in search queries, and then extrapolates those into suggestions. in other words, "People who searched for 'speling' often click no results, but search for 'spelling' instead.
Comp sci folks: Is predicting whether a compressed file will produce a finite (or, better, reasonably-sized) output roughly equivalent to the halting problem?
It depends on the decompression algorithm. It's possible for that to be the case, but this can only happen if the compressed binary format is essentially a Turing-complete language, for which your decompresser is the interpreter.
I'm not aware of any data formats for which that is the case, but from a theoretical standpoint, eval(s) is a perfectly cromulent decompression algorithm. This fact is essentially the starting point for Kolmogorov complexity.
"Reasonably-sized" is actually an interesting problem in itself. If your decompresser is sufficiently advanced, you could embed a busy-beaver function, which terminates but grows faster than any computable function. I have no idea whether such functions could be expressed with less-than-Turing-complete data formats.
No, because run-length encoding encodes the - well - run lengths in the file header. You can read those and know how big the resulting file will be without having to actually decompress the file.
Well, we don't have any A/B tests, and we don't have any statistics, so all we have are anecdotes.
That said, my last job was at an angel-funded company, though these were atypical angels - all billionaires, some well-known names. The CEO was not only fat (330 pounds), but old (46), brash, loud, opinionated, and the kind of guy who would say "You know what we need on the landing page? Smokin' hot broads!" In the movie version, he will be played by a taller Danny DeVito.
But he was a good guy and a great salesman, and had no trouble raising multiple multi-million dollar rounds, even while pivoting completely - several times. His investors trusted him to treat their money with respect, and knowing his history, I would too.
Actually, you could run facial recognition on a scrape of images tied to professional profiles, and get some pretty strong inferences on BMI, race and gender. And then re-formulate the question: Are you more likely to see a height/weight disproportionate person vs another minority? like meso-indian, black or female?
Fascinating... I knew * plonk * made a sound, but by 1994 I had always heard it retronymmed to "put loser on newsgroup killfile", which wasn't quite satisfying - Why the awkward phrasing?
This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out of a basic sense of fairness.
By "by hand". I assume you mean using some sort of Intuos tablet with various pen and brush tips and some sort of curve-smoothing software so you can trace over the output of GNUplot, yes?
Unless he's changed his ways, I thought xkcd was still drawn by pencil and paper, then outlined with pen, scanned in, then touched up via a paint program?
If this is FUD, please downvote me into grayness, but I remember an article - or maybe even a book - proving that exception-safety in C++ was impossible. I remember nothing else about this; it was probably around 1999-2000.
Am I completely making that up? Or did we discover ways around the "impossible" part? I haven't coded in C++ since, uh, gcc 2.97 or so.
