Techcrunch blogspam. Original:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/...

and the letter:

http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/10/27/ba-letter28_gr_...

I think the best part is the response from Ammiano, to whom the comment was directed: "I think it was very creative. They probably think they are even now and it's time to bury the hatchet." A little tit-for-tat and then move on seems appropriate.

For the Canadians here on HN:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddle_duddle

Anyone cares to calculate the odds of this happening by accident?

(1/26)^7 .. without getting too fancy with any sort of linguistic probabilities...

Well, let's get fancy:

  f	%2.228	0.02228
  u	%2.758	0.02758
  c	%2.782	0.02782
  k	%0.772	0.00772
  y	%1.974	0.01974
  o	%7.507	0.07507
  u	%2.758	0.02758

  =

  1/185,399,389,457

This is global letter frequency, I need a table of first letter frequency.

Could not find a good first letter table, so made my own from gutenberg, so:

  f	%3.779	0.0378
  u	%1.487	0.0149
  c	%3.511	0.0351
  k	%0.690	0.0069
  y	%1.620	0.0162
  o	%6.264	0.0626
  u	%1.487	0.0149

  =

  1/487,158,294,227

That's the odds of it happening in 7 specific lines. But what are the odds of it happening by chance at any point in time to any person of Schwarzenegger's importance or higher?

Just multiply those odds by the percentage of people that qualify as important.

And by the number of 7-line sequences produced by each.

One has to factor in that there are thousands of things he could have printed that would have had roughly the same effect (eg. "Piss off", etc).

= about 8,000,000,000 to 1

But capitalization and spacing was correct too.

Capitalization would be correct in almost all cases. You always capitalize first letter and chances are, first word of each line won't be the beginning of a sentence. Ditto for spacing, 3-5 line paragraphs are fairly common.

How do you figure "almost all"? Even if the text could only contain paragraphs of length 3 and 4, the spacing alone would be incorrect in half the cases (assuming that a 3-4 and 4-3 split is equally likely).

(Of course, we are leaving aside the fact that the full body of the message contains an additional one-line paragraph, which could also be considered part of a correctly capitalized and spaced message.)

One would have to analyze all previous relevant correspondence out of the AS's office as to measure vocabulary and other structural elements.

It would be a fun project.

All Things Considered interviewed an expert today, he calculated 5.5/1,000,000,000,000.

Does anyone know what Schwarzenegger's objections to this bill were?

Looks like Arnold has been spending too much time on 4chan.

Seriously, this is kind of sad. He says nothing about the merits (or lack thereof) of the bill [1]. Governing isn't all about high-PR issues, and appropriate districting is an important part of making working cities.

1. http://www.totalcapitol.com/?bill_id=9670

He says that the legislature has more important things to be doing right now. You may not agree, but time is limited and governing is also about making the best use of time. He appears to believe the legislature is using it poorly.

59 points? Color me surprised…

I was surely expecting downvotes because my comment didn't bring much to the table, but I'm still really surprised that this piece is still getting upvotes:

It has no link to anything startup or tech-related and is not intellectually interesting. It's just a "joke" (granted surprising) from a politician/actor.

From HN's guidelines:

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

So, yeah, I'm surprised that it's still on the front page and that I get downvoted for implying it doesn't have its place here. I understand that it's up to the community, but again, that's why I'm surprised: I didn't expect that from this community.

I don't think I'm a "good hacker", but my first instinct was to try and find an algorithm that would generate these kinds of messages.

Language processing is always interesting.

I'm getting a 403 error on the page.

edit: Honestly, can someone the downvote? Clearly, I'm not the only one, as going to Hurl gives the same result: http://hurl.it/hurls/8160ac469b2d5a0b801c8288794badeff8f14b4....

Perhaps because it's not adding much to the conversation? I don't particularly care that you're receiving a 403. Plus there are several other links to the information. Perhaps, "I'm getting a 403, but here's another link to the document." Lastly, while you may not be the only one, perhaps you're one of very few, and people are simply registering their disagreement via vote rather than comment.