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• How does the Amazon Recommendation feature work?

  - by Rachel

  What technology goes in behind the screens of Amazon recommendation technology? I believe that Amazon recommendation is currently the best in the market, but how do they provide us with such relevant recommendations? Recently, we have been involved with similar recommendation kind of project, but would surely like to know about the in and outs of the Amazon recommendation technology from a technical standpoint. Any inputs would be highly appreciated. Update: This patent explains how personalized recommendations are done but it is not very technical, and so it would be really nice if some insights could be provided. From the comments of Dave, Affinity Analysis forms the basis for such kind of Recommendation Engines. Also here are some good reads on the Topic Demystifying Market Basket Analysis Market Basket Analysis Affinity Analysis Suggested Reading: Data Mining: Concepts and Technique

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• How are a session identifiers generated?

  - by Asaf R

  Most web applications depend on some kind of session with the user (for instance, to retain login status). The session id is kept as a cookie in the user's browser and sent with every request. To make it hard to guess the next user's session these session-ids need to be sparse and somewhat random. The also have to be unique. The question is - how to efficiently generate session ids that are sparse and unique? This question has a good answer for unique random numbers, but it seems not scalable for a large range of numbers, simply because the array will end up taking a lot of memory.

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• Testing When Correctness is Poorly Defined?

  - by dsimcha

  I generally try to use unit tests for any code that has easily defined correct behavior given some reasonably small, well-defined set of inputs. This works quite well for catching bugs, and I do it all the time in my personal library of generic functions. However, a lot of the code I write is data mining code that basically looks for significant patterns in large datasets. Correct behavior in this case is often not well defined and depends on a lot of different inputs in ways that are not easy for a human to predict (i.e. the math can't reasonably be done by hand, which is why I'm using a computer to solve the problem in the first place). These inputs can be very complex, to the point where coming up with a reasonable test case is near impossible. Identifying the edge cases that are worth testing is extremely difficult. Sometimes the algorithm isn't even deterministic. Usually, I do the best I can by using asserts for sanity checks and creating a small toy test case with a known pattern and informally seeing if the answer at least "looks reasonable", without it necessarily being objectively correct. Is there any better way to test these kinds of cases?

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• Fast, Vectorizable method of taking floating point number modulus of special primes?

  - by caffiend

  Is there a fast method for taking the modulus of a floating point number? With integers, there are tricks for Mersenne primes, so that its possible to calculate y = x MOD 2^31 without needing division. Can any similar tricks be applied for floating point numbers? Preferably, in a way that can be converted into vector/SIMD operations, or moved into GPGPU code. The primes I'm interested in would be 2^7 and 2^31, although if there are more efficient ones for floating point numbers, those would be welcome.

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• C++ missing feature: variables with mutating names

  - by user345671

  Hello. Can someone please add a feature to C++? I would like to change variable names depending on the context. Example: Class stuff; if(stuff.hasSuperPowers()) { stuff becomes stuffWithSuperPowers; } That because creating a new variable and using an assignment sucks and lets stuff be acessible in that scope anyway. If you do it, please keep the becomes syntax unless it doesn't look good enough for you as a native English speaker. Thanks in advance.

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• Is it advisable to have non-ascii characters in the URL?

  - by Ravi Gummadi

  We are currently working on a I18N project. I was just wondering what are the complications of having the non-ascii characters in the URL. If its not, what are the alternatives to deal with this problem? EDIT (in response to Maxym's answer): The site is going to be local to specific country and I need not worry about the world wide public accessing this site. I understand that from usability point of view, It is really annoying. What are the other technical problem associated with this?

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• Why does C++ mandate that complex only be instantiated for float, double, or long double?

  - by templatetypedef

  According to the C++ ISO spec, §26.2/2: The effect of instantiating the template complex for any type other than float, double or long double is unspecified. Why would the standard authors explicitly add this restriction? This makes it unspecified, for example, what happens if you make complex<int> or a complex<MyCustomFixedPointType> and seems like an artificial restriction. Is there a reason for this limitation? Is there a workaround if you want to instantiate complex with your own custom type? I'm primarily asking this question because of this earlier question, in which the OP was confused as to why abs was giving bizarre outputs for complex<int>. That said, this still doesn't quite make sense given that we also might want to make complex numbers out of fixed-points types, higher-precision real numbers, etc. Thanks!

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• What should I tell kids about how great it is to be a programmer?

  - by Sara Chipps

  I am putting a presentation together. I thought about illustrating with websites like Facebook, and MySpace. Does anyone have children around that age that could tell me what they are into? How to hold their attention? Ways to illustrate what we do? Get them interested? Your ideas are greatly appreciated, I really want to be able to convey how fun this is :). I don't have access to a digital projector... which really stinks. I do have access to an old transparency overhead, though. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/207278/career-day-how-do-i-make-computer-programmer-sound-cool-to-8-year-olds

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• Implementing Transparent Persistence

  - by Jules

  Transparent persistence allows you to use regular objects instead of a database. The objects are automatically read from and written to disk. Examples of such systems are Gemstone and Rucksack (for common lisp). Simplified version of what they do: if you access foo.bar and bar is not in memory, it gets loaded from disk. If you do foo.bar = baz then the foo object gets updated on disk. Most systems also have some form of transactions, and they may have support for sharing objects across programs and even across a network. My question is what are the different techniques for implementing these kind of systems and what are the trade offs between these implementation approaches?

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• What is the preferred way to indent cases in a switch?

  - by neutrino

  Hey there, As I was writing another switch in Eclipse, I once again came across a rather weird (to me, at least) default indentation, which is applied to 'switch' statements: switch (i) { case 1: ... case n: ... } I tend to prefer another way: switch (i) { case 1: ... case n: ... } Which way is more readable and eye-pleasing for you? I'm still not hundred percent determined what's best for me, so I'd like to stick to what's best for other people who would read my code. BTW, you're free to close this question if this is too subjective. :)

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• Do similar passwords have similar hashes?

  - by SLC

  Our computer system at work requires users to change their password every few weeks, and you cannot have the same password as you had previously. It remembers something like 20 of your last passwords. I discovered most people simply increment a digit at the end of their password, so "thisismypassword1" becomes "thisismypassword2" then 3, 4, 5 etc. Since all of these passwords are stored somewhere, I wondered if there was any weakness in the hashes themselves, for standard hashing algorithms used to store passwords like MD5. Could a hacker increase their chances of brute-forcing the password if they have a list of hashes of similar passwords?

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• How to implement square root and exponentiation on arbitrary length numbers?

  - by tomp

  I'm working on new data type for arbitrary length numbers (only non-negative integers) and I got stuck at implementing square root and exponentiation functions (only for natural exponents). Please help. I store the arbitrary length number as a string, so all operations are made char by char. Please don't include advices to use different (existing) library or other way to store the number than string. It's meant to be a programming exercise, not a real-world application, so optimization and performance are not so necessary. If you include code in your answer, I would prefer it to be in either pseudo-code or in C++. The important thing is the algorithm, not the implementation itself. Thanks for the help.

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• What do you enjoy about programming?

  - by Earlz

  Some of us here(or is it just me?) enjoy programming. Even if we're not being paid for it, and in some cases, even though the end result will not do anything for us. For example, many people do the Project Euler problems just for fun, and in the end nothing was really "accomplished" materially. What is it that makes us enjoy programming? How is programming different from another job? You don't see an accountant going home to do some accounting on their own time just for the pure joy of it. How are we different? (also, if anyone has some ideas on how to tag this, then please do correct it for me.. )

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• Is there a website to lookup already common code functions?

  - by pinnacler

  I'm sitting here writing a function that I'm positive has been written before, somewhere on earth. It's just too common to have not been attempted, and I'm wondering why I can't just go to a website and search for a function that I can then copy and paste into my project in 2 seconds, instead of wasting my day reinventing the wheel. Sure there are certain libraries you can use, but where do you find these libraries and when they are absent, is there a site like I'm describing?

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• Integration tests - "no exceptions are thrown" approach. Does it make sense?

  - by Andrew Florko

  Sometimes integration tests are rather complex to write or developers have no enough time to check output - does it make sense to write tests that make sure "no exceptions are thrown" only? Such tests provide some input parameters set(s) and doesn't check the result, but only make sure code not failed with exception? May be such tests are not very useful but appropriate in situations when you have no time?

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• Flow Based Programming

  - by Software Monkey

  I have been doing a little reading on Flow Based Programming over the last few days. There is a wiki which provides further detail. And wikipedia has a good overview on it too. My first thought was, "Great another proponent of lego-land pretend programming" - a concept harking back to the late 80's. But, as I read more, I must admit I have become intrigued. Have you used FBP for a real project? What is your opinion of FBP? Does FBP have a future? In some senses, it seems like the holy grail of reuse that our industry has pursued since the advent of procedural languages.

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• Randomly sorting an array

  - by Cam

  Does there exist an algorithm which, given an ordered list of symbols {a1, a2, a3, ..., ak}, produces in O(n) time a new list of the same symbols in a random order without bias? "Without bias" means the probability that any symbol s will end up in some position p in the list is 1/k. Assume it is possible to generate a non-biased integer from 1-k inclusive in O(1) time. Also assume that O(1) element access/mutation is possible, and that it is possible to create a new list of size k in O(k) time. In particular, I would be interested in a 'generative' algorithm. That is, I would be interested in an algorithm that has O(1) initial overhead, and then produces a new element for each slot in the list, taking O(1) time per slot. If no solution exists to the problem as described, I would still like to know about solutions that do not meet my constraints in one or more of the following ways (and/or in other ways if necessary): the time complexity is worse than O(n). the algorithm is biased with regards to the final positions of the symbols. the algorithm is not generative. I should add that this problem appears to be the same as the problem of randomly sorting the integers from 1-k, since we can sort the list of integers from 1-k and then for each integer i in the new list, we can produce the symbol ai.

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• Consuming services that consume other services.

  - by phthomas

  What is the best way to confirm that these consumed services are actually up and running before I actually try to invoke its operation contracts? I want to do this so that I can gracefully display some message to the customer to give him/her a more pleasant user experience. Thanks.

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• why is optional chaining required in an if let statement

  - by b-ryan ca

  Why would the Swift compiler expect me to write if let addressNumber = paul.residence?.address?.buildingNumber?.toInt() { } instead of just writing: if let addressNumber = paul.residence.address.buildingNumber.toInt() { } The compiler clearly has the static type information to handle the conditional statement for the first dereference of the optional value and each following value. Why would it not continue to do so for the following statements?

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• What's the purpose of the empty string?

  - by Max Toro

  To me, as a developer and as a user, I find the empty string ("") useless and the cause of much confusion, it's like saying string == char[] Maybe computers need the empty string, so I'd like to learn why.

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• Pre Project Documentation

  - by DeanMc

  I have an issue that I feel many programmers can relate to... I have worked on many small scale projects. After my initial paper brain storm I tend to start coding. What I come up with is usually a rough working model of the actual application. I design in a disconnected fashion so I am talking about underlying code libraries, user interfaces are the last thing as the library usually dictates what is needed in the UI. As my projects get bigger I worry that so should my "spec" or design document. The above paragraph, from my investigations, is echoed all across the internet in one fashion or another. When a UI is concerned there is a bit more information but it is UI specific and does not relate to code libraries. What I am beginning to realise is that maybe code is code is code. It seems from my extensive research that there is no 1:1 mapping between a design document and the code. When I need to research a topic I dump information into OneNote and from there I prioritise features into versions and then into related chunks so that development runs in a fairly linear fashion, my tasks tend to look like so: Implement Binary File Reader Implement Binary File Writer Create Object to encapsulate Data for expression to the caller Now any programmer worth his salt is aware that between those three to do items could be a potential wall of code that could expand out to multiple files. I have tried to map the complete code process for each task but I simply don't think it can be done effectively. By the time one mangles pseudo code it is essentially code anyway so the time investment is negated. So my question is this: Am I right in assuming that the best documentation is the code itself. We are all in agreement that a high level overview is needed. How high should this be? Do you design to statement, class or concept level? What works for you?

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• Why use buffers to read/write Streams

  - by James Hay

  Following reading various questions on reading and writing Streams, all the various answers define something like this as the correct way to do it: private void CopyStream(Stream input, Stream output) { byte[] buffer = new byte[16 * 1024]; int read; while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0) { output.Write(buffer, 0, read); } } Two questions: Why read and write in these smaller chunks? What is the significance of the buffer size used?

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• Determining the order of a list of numbers (possibly without sorting)

  - by Victor Liu

  I have an array of unique integers (e.g. val[i]), in arbitrary order, and I would like to populate another array (ord[i]) with the the sorted indexes of the integers. In other words, val[ord[i]] is in sorted order for increasing i. Right now, I just fill in ord with 0, ..., N, then sort it based on the value array, but I am wondering if we can be more efficient about it since ord is not populated to begin with. This is more of a question out of curiousity; I don't really care about the extra overhead from having to prepopulate a list and then sort it (it's small, I use insertion sort). This may be a silly question with an obvious answer, but I couldn't find anything online.

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• How to learn to program 20 questions?

  - by Pselus

  Anyone have any advice for learning to program a 20 questions game? Something that could learn in the future but doesn't necessarily need to learn right away.

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• Code Golf: Ghost Leg

  - by Anax

  The challenge The shortest code by character count that will output the numeric solution, given a number and a valid string pattern, using the Ghost Leg method. Examples Input: 3, "| | | | | | | | |-| |=| | | | | |-| | |-| |=| | | |-| |-| | |-|" Output: 2 Input: 2, "| | |=| | |-| |-| | | |-| | |" Output: 1 Clarifications Do not bother with input. Consider the values as given somewhere else. Both input values are valid: the column number corresponds to an existing column and the pattern only contains the symbols |, -, = (and [space], [LF]). Also, two adjacent columns cannot both contain dashes (in the same line). The dimensions of the pattern are unknown (min 1x1). Clarifications #2 There are two invalid patterns: |-|-| and |=|=| which create ambiguity. The given input string will never contain those. The input variables are the same for all; a numeric value and a string representing the pattern. Entrants must produce a function. Test case Given pattern: "|-| |=|-|=|LF| |-| | |-|LF|=| |-| | |LF| | |-|=|-|" |-| |=|-|=| | |-| | |-| |=| |-| | | | | |-|=|-| Given value : Expected result 1 : 6 2 : 1 3 : 3 4 : 6 5 : 5 6 : 2

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