HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

adiM

315 karma · joined May 16, 2011

submissionscomments
adiM··on Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads
How does that help in preventing Google from profiling you?
adiM··on Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design
Wow! There would come a time when kids on hacker news will not recognize jwz!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

adiM··on Probability-generating functions
Don't have a reference on the top of my head, but the main idea is as follows:

The definition of MGF of a random variable with PDF f(x) is

E[e^{sX}] = int_{-inf}^{inf} f(x) e^{sx} dx

The definition of Laplace Transform of a signal f(t) is

F(s) = int _{-inf}^{inf} f(t) e^{-st} dt

Hence MGF is 'flipped' Laplace transform

Now for we know that the MGF of sum independent RVs is the product of their MGFs. So if we take the inverse Laplace transform, the density of the sum is convolution of the individual densities.

Similarly, if we take derivative in frequency domain, that is same as multiplying in time domain: So M'_X(s) is the 'flipped Laplace transform' of x f(x) and its value at s=0 is the 'DC-gain' of the signal.

And so on... the properties are all immediate consequence of the definition of MGF and since the definition is essentially the same as that of a Laplace transform , there is an equivalent property in signals and systems as well.

adiM··on Probability-generating functions
One can also think of probability generating functions as (flipped) Z transforms, moment generating functions as (flipped Laplace transforms), and characteristic functions as Fourier transforms of the respective PMF/PDF. Lot of their properties then follow from simple properties of Signals and Systems.
adiM··on Antifragility in complex dynamical systems
Is this just risk seeking behavior (in contrast to risk sensitive)
adiM··on Server Mono: A Typeface Inspired by Typewriters, Apple's SF Mono, and CLIs
They are significantly different!
adiM··on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet
I found their reviews to be a bit too rosy and not highlighting the weak points of the products properly. But I do not find them to be biased.

The most honest source is Voja's My Deep Guide Channel on YouTube. Very detailed and informative reviews.

adiM··on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet
Some links: https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/ZpVE0dTM98 https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/s/LonNpgGAIF https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/s/YqUXfrZhnm https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/s/xmurkiHGam
adiM··on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet
FYI: goodereader has a bad reputation in the eink world. Their reviews are fair but their shop is borderline scam.
adiM··on Daylight Computer – New 60fps e-paper tablet
Ratta (SuperNote) does not have front light. At least the A6X that I have. I don't think that the new version (Nomad) has a front light either.
adiM··on Show HN: I made a simple daily word puzzle
'A' can be reused!
adiM··on Why is everything based on likelihoods even though likelihoods are so small?
Therefore, likelihood ratios! (Or log likelihood ratios)
adiM··on A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time
It will be fascinating if there were a way for you to record the actual time when you do eat lunch (without the time being revealed to you; say a Rasberry Pi where you press a switch to record current time but it has no display). I am curious how much our body clock synchronizes with real time. I see that in my kids, who don't yet know how to read time. But they are hungry right at noon and 7pm, and will get cranky if they don't get something to eat within 15 min of that. Do adults retain such strong internal body clocks?
adiM··on LaTeX for tabletop
The same way that one would use markdown :-) (you JS libs or TikZ or Metapost packages).
adiM··on LaTeX for tabletop
I use ConTeXt, and it is relatively simple to get each environment to whatever you want (plus you can code everything in Lua).
adiM··on LaTeX for tabletop
I often wonder, if one is going to add such tags anyways, why not directly use LaTeX, ConTeXt, XML, ... for example

\begin{conccurrent}{Hacker News Thread} I'm writing in an HN thread. \end{concurrent}

is not so different from the markdown source. All the benefits you mention are simply from using semantic markup.

adiM··on E-ink is so Retropunk
Is it possible to generate the planner for A6X. The customization options do not seem to mention page size.
adiM··on Emacs is my new window manager
A bit attraction of _tiling_ WMs is ... automatic tiling of windows. Does Gnome do that (haven't used it seriously in about 2 decades)?
adiM··on New zine: How integers and floats work
Curious as to why you thought that this was an ad? Julia Evans has written a bunch of such zines in the past as well and they are quite informative
adiM··on Data-Driven Science and Engineering 2nd Edition [pdf]
Only Wisconsin. Canadian universities usually have .ca rather than .edu
adiM··on Show HN: Sheet Markup – add spreadsheets to a Markdown document
Note that context also support for spreadsheet like calculations in tables, so it could perhaps be translated at markup level.
adiM··on The Nine Billion Names Of God (2021) [video]
But printing them, would take some time and paper.
adiM··on Cosmic DE update: System76's new Linux desktop environment
I am a long time Linux desktop user (20+ years) but am still forced to keep a copy of windows around to use Adobe Acrobat for filling and signing forms. I have tried various Linux pdf applications (including commercial ones), using Adobe Acrobat via wine/crossover but haven't found a solution that works across the board. That is the only holdout from not having to interact with windows/mac.
adiM··on AsciiMath: An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics
Unicode math input works out if the box in Context and (I believe) also in lualatex + unicodmath package.
adiM··on Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages
Julia also has

x |> f

as a syntax sugar for

f(x)

and is useful for the same reason as Mathematica.

adiM··on Wren is a small, fast, class-based concurrent scripting language
Yes, Julia has multi-dispatch, which works really well for this type of overloading
adiM··on New XPS 13 Shows the Price of Going Too Thin
> And a laptop is usually a secondary computer

Definitely not true. For most college students, a laptop is their only computer.

adiM··on You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are
One can always test the hypothesis via an experiment:

https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac

adiM··on Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
The difference with caste is that caste is inherited. If you wear rose-coloured glasses, you can assume that hiring at FAANG is merit based and a non-FAANG can move to FAANG if they want. That’s not possible with caste.
adiM··on Show HN: Newser, utility written in go to generate a pdf with news content
I had a similar setup for creating PDF files from RSS feeds (https://github.com/adityam/rss2kindle). I was simply downloading the webpage, using pandoc to convert HTML to ConTeXt, and typesetting it via ConTeXt (this gave me a lot of control over the formatting and took care of including external images as well). I had a separate script which emailed the PDF to my kindle address.

The script worked reliably for multiple years until I stopped using the kindle. I now have a SuperNote A6X and both pandoc and context have improved significantly in the last decade, so I should give this another shot.

Page 1 of 6Next →