pav3l
Re:Australian software engineer got asked algorithm question when ente...
on Sunday March 05, 2017 @04:38AM (#13795240)
One of my math professor (Canadian) once told us a story (~10 years ago) that the US border control asked him to "state and prove Rolle's theorem" after he had told them he was traveling to a math conference. Apparently he answered "it's something to do with the mean value theorem, right?" and that was good enough.
Re:Probablistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers
on Thursday July 25, 2013 @02:51PM (#6104221)
Thanks for the answer, I deleted my original question shortly after posting because I thought it was abit disrespectful.
For those who are curious, the question was: is "for Hackers" a new way of saying for those who don't feel like actually studying the math, going through the proofs and working through the problem sets?
Re:Climate science: A sensitive matter
on Thursday March 28, 2013 @10:45AM (#5455063)
"Peer-reviewed" does not mean correct, or vice versa. The study they are talking about was done by the Research Council of Norway. I am assuming the goal was to inform the public, not to get published in a scientific journal. It was not an academic exercise. I, for one, am very happy that the Economist included this study in their survey.
Re:HTML5 Snake Game with source code walkthrough
on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @11:16AM (#5331874)
Funny how even after years of Vim-ing, using "hjkl" in a video game still trips me up.
Re:R and pandas and what I've learned about each
on Tuesday March 05, 2013 @12:54PM (#5326094)
I am in the process of migrating all of my analyses from Matlab and R to Python. I have been meaning to do this for quite some time and finally pandas is mature enough to be able to completely replace both Matlab and R for straightforward tasks. If I need something Python doesn't offer, it's still fairly simple to do isolated tasks elsewhere. For me the biggest reasons for change are easy integration with the web and better language features (for Matlab, R language is great, just terribly slow for intensive tasks).
What I miss the most:
- Matlab <--> Excel link (on Windows) - an excel add-on that lets you send back and forth arrays very easily. You need a spreadsheet when you work with datasets, and interchanging data through files just isn't that convenient.
- Matlab's IDE features (debugging, documentation, publishing, variable inspection).
- ggplot2
Re:The best programmers are the quickest to Google
on Monday February 25, 2013 @01:23PM (#5280580)
>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself?
I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems, not googling shit.
Re:Posterous will turn off on April 30
on Friday February 15, 2013 @09:25PM (#5230055)
>Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?
Actually, Flask tutorial uses a blog application as example
Re:Ask HN: What is the most impressive thing "other than this startup"...
on Thursday February 14, 2013 @10:54PM (#5224334)
I have planted over half million trees.
Re:Happy Valentine's Day
on Thursday February 14, 2013 @08:36PM (#5223924)
Re:Zero-Day vulnerability in Adobe Reader
on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @12:34PM (#5214372)
I am pretty happy with SumatraPDF on Windows. Orders of magnitude faster than Reader too.
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
Re:Incredible Secret Money Machine
on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @12:15PM (#5208045)
Exactly, start-up entails growth.
http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Re:Octave for Android
on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @10:07AM (#5207216)
Ask HN: Who uses Octave? If you had access to Matlab, would you use it instead? Why not Python/R/Julia?
Re:Julia, I love you (2012)
on Monday February 11, 2013 @07:29PM (#5204401)
Finally there are downloadable binaries for Windows and OSX! http://code.google.com/p/julialang/downloads/list
Also, previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784349
Re:For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact
on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @11:34AM (#5134839)
Endurance hunting is rarely a straight line race. Here is an example of a route for one of those hunts (it's from my first link):
http://www.jstor.org/literatum/publisher/jstor/journals/cont...
As you can see, even though the overall distance is 25.1 km, the straight line distance between the start and finish is less than a mile.
Re:For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact
on Tuesday January 29, 2013 @10:59AM (#5134641)
Whoever is interested, here are two very good academic articles about persistent hunting (subscription required):
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508695
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248408...
Also, here is a video of a modern persistent hunter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
Re:Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010)
on Thursday December 20, 2012 @09:05AM (#4947726)
>Philosophy of mind is probably the dominant research area in contemporary philosophy, and I think you'd find a lot that doesn't overlap at all with empirical psychology.
It's not really my area of expertise, but maybe the reason that philosophy of mind is such a big research area in contemporary philosophy is because we haven't figured out how to study mind yet. Once we figure out the correct questions about things like consciousness, we should be able to address them scientifically (much like we are doing with perception, learning, etc. through neuroscience), or figure out why it can't be addressed scientifically, or come to some kind of other logical conclusion.
Re:Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010)
on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @04:15PM (#4944882)
I disagree with your comment completely. It's not that philosophy teaches us how to think, and sciences teach us what to think. Philosophy teaches us how to pose questions. As soon as we are able to address those questions the problem becomes science (e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind--> psychology, etc.)
Re:D3, Conceptually - Lesson 2
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @10:03PM (#4874637)
Re:University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @01:50PM (#4872547)
Waterloo is well known in Canada for having an exceptional Mathematics program (if I'm not mistaken you graduate with BMath, not a BA/BSc with a math major).
Re:Save Your Kisses For Me
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @08:16AM (#4870727)
I agree, even if you don't agree with Adam Curtis's politics, his documentaries are very thought provoking and well worth watching. Some of my favourites include "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream", "The Century of self", "Pandora's Box", "All watched over by Machines Loving Grace". If you enjoyed this particular blog post, check out "The Power of Nightmares".
Re:Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @10:12AM (#4861381)
Smart people can waste time too.
Re:HTML5 Datalist
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @09:47AM (#4861321)
http://caniuse.com/datalist
Unfortunately still not supported on safari or IE9. Don't rush to throw away those Javascript widgets quite yet.
Re:Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @08:54AM (#4861165)
Facebook is not going anywhere. These are all smart business moves to make it an almost necessary part of our lives. "Facebook is like chairs" seems to quite literally describe the end goal of their campaign. I would argue they are doing a very good job, perhaps on par with De Beers and Coca Cola in their time.
Re:Ask HN: side projects: quantity vs. quality?
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @08:35PM (#4859726)
For what purposes?
Re:Father builds automated drone to watch son walk to the bus stop
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @08:29PM (#4859714)
In case anyone is interested in tracking their kids, the drone software is open source: http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/
Re:Show HN: FilmBreak is launching a fully integrated virtual film studio
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @08:11PM (#4859672)
Any project challenging RIAA's monopoly is getting my upvote. Looks very well thought through and nicely executed.
Re:A tour of the world in d3.js
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @07:44PM (#4859595)
Thanks for D3, learning it now and it is awesome!
Re:Lindsey Graham wants ability to lock you up forever without trial
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @07:36PM (#4859573)
Everything is evolving, people should be able to amend the Constitution. What you're proposing would make that illegal.
Re:Lindsey Graham wants ability to lock you up forever without trial
on Saturday December 01, 2012 @07:22PM (#4859547)
Inappropriate comment to an inappropriate article (Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon[1]).