I'm renting a flat and it's cold, and it's going to get colder (I'm on a 1 year contract in the alps). Is there anything noninvasive (preferably cheap, but I'm ok to spend if it's really going to work) that I can do to warm the place up? What sort of portable space heaters give the best performance for electricity/gas? Are there any decent renter-based guides to improving insulation? [more inside]
posted by handee on Oct 14, 2009 - 26 answers

Optimisation problem: trying to find the subset of my data that meets a couple of constraints. [more inside]
posted by muhonnin on Jun 14, 2009 - 18 answers

Is there anything meaningful I can do with 10Mbps worth of spare download bandwidth? [more inside]
posted by kureshii on Jun 1, 2008 - 6 answers

How does Facebook handle or simplify the presumably complicated DB queries involved so that me loading my page doesn't bring it to its knees? [more inside]
posted by bonaldi on Feb 4, 2008 - 27 answers

Let's say I buy s socks. Now, these socks feel the very best (have a quality factor of 100) after f wearings, and must be discarded (have a quality factor of zero) after f × 100 wearings. I want to add these socks to a pool from which I draw two daily, and want to maximise the probability of selecting socks with the highest quality over the life of the pool... [more inside]
posted by TheNewWazoo on Jun 14, 2007 - 24 answers

I just started working for an IT company that has been dipping it's toes in the world of web design & development for a while, but not been doing things right. How do I get them to shape up? Or do I ship out? [more inside]
posted by lemonfridge on Sep 21, 2005 - 13 answers