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I think this was likely an attempted response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008326

akshaykarthikon Stop Destroying Videogames – EU Citizen's Initiative

Youtube Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI

akshaykarthikon How much does Rust's bounds checking cost?

Interestingly enough, with `-C opt-level=3` both functions yield the same assembly.

I wonder if there's some pass that's missing or not done at the lower opt level.

akshaykarthikon Blood sugar patterns to master as a type 2 diabetic

This is interesting, what tools are available to measure one's blood sugar and chart it throughout the day? I find it's pretty inconvenient to measure and report it accurately enough to get these trend lines with my regular meter.

akshaykarthikon Are tarballs obsolete?

    git clone --depth=1

will get you just $CURRENT_VERSION

akshaykarthikon Show HN: Adopted a dog, had no clue what meds she needed, did some research

Is there an algorithm that would find the minimum subset of these to cover every parasite/bug?

akshaykarthikon Bill Gates Has an Idea for a History Class

Education is a human right. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a26

Of all of the countries that are top performing (as rated by NCEE), which have privatized school systems?

http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-internatio...

akshaykarthikon How do we read code?

One of the things I noticed from the Eye Tracking was that this is very similar to how we were trained to work through programming problems in high school level computer science competitions. Some competition problems involve tracing through code and determining output (of usually recursive functions) but the 'proper' method we were taught is almost exactly how he describes his thought process.

akshaykarthikon Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

I myself am quite interested in ML research. Do you have any resources that you found useful in learning not only ML, but also the associated math?

akshaykarthikon Mountain Lion's new file system

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

Windows has had a "My Documents" folder since win98.

akshaykarthikon Mihai Pătraşcu 1982–2012

If possible, could you post some of these tips? They would be really interesting to read and definitely helpful.

akshaykarthikon Sketchnotes book - visual notes of 100 talks

This visual view of talks reminds me of RSA Animate

http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg

akshaykarthikon Looking At The World Through Twitter Data

Wow... This is awesome. I actually did a project for my high school science fair that focused on analyzing twitter. It was no where near as sophisticated but it really opened my eyes to the massive amount of data and the availability of commodity hardware that can actually handle terabytes of data.

akshaykarthikon Why We Brag

Interestingly enough, there was an AskReddit thread yesterday that consisted of people bragging. Many people in the thread described it as extremely therapeutic.

The link is here : http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/taiqo/can_we_all_...

akshaykarthikon Speed Index: New metric for page performance

How would this metric work for websites that load real-time dynamic content? For example, if a website loads quickly then slowly streams data from the back end, how would this metric account for that?

akshaykarthikon Unix-like operating system for the TI-89 and TI-92+ graphing calculators.

It's really interesting how calculator technology has stagnated over the years. I'm in a BC Calc class now where we are still using 89s. My teacher is aware of the nspire calculators and he frequently uses WolframAlpha but hardware wise, he still teaches off of the 89.

akshaykarthikon Learn about Startups with YC at Carnegie Mellon University today (Apr 5th, 6pm)

Dang, I'm going for a CMU college visit today morning but I have to be out of there in the afternoon. I really wish I could stay...

Will this meeting be recorded/available online?

akshaykarthikon Disqus Research: Pseudonyms Drive Communities

I think this is especially shown in reddit. The idea that you have no idea who a username is but you know that it is the same person each time... I think this may be the factor that brings actual communication.

akshaykarthikon It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs

One thing I've noticed is that education in the US seems to be lax until high school. At high school, the teachers ramp up the work that the students have and, because this increase in work is sudden, the pressure becomes more on getting the work done and turned in rather than actually learning the material. The problem with this is that this attitude of getting the work done vs learning the material hurts each student in college.

I agree that students are lax in college however, in my opinion, it is simply a reaction to being unable to cope with the increased responsibilities and pressures (not only academic but financial and social as well)

Perhaps one solution is to slowly increase the difficulty of elementary and middle schools. The goal would be to improve the work ethic in this country.

Another solution is to make it a necessity to perform well. In many colleges, the final grade is the only one that matters and this leads to students cramming before a final and then promptly forgetting the material. I don't see the work ethic in most American students I see in my Indian peers and my Chinese and Japanese friends.

akshaykarthikon Ask HN: is there a technical reason Siri is not available on the iPhone 4?

I was under the assumption that Siri needed the 4S's DSP capabilities on the new processor.

It seems that it can be put on iPhone 4 as well (http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/15/siri-iphone-apple/)

akshaykarthikon How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever.

My first foray into programming was actually a yearning to figure out someone else's aimbot for Quake.

akshaykarthikon The app that was fixed by a crash

Or Lupus... It is always Lupus first and then everything else!

akshaykarthikon Why My Father Hated India

I am Indian, and have lived in India for most of my life. I have been to nearly every state (all except Kashmir, and Oyra) and everywhere I go, it always seems like the Pakistanis' hatred is the most prevalent one. One thing I can assure you is that, despite the appearance of all of this hatred, all the Indian teens I have met have no hatred for our neighbor but rather wish the fighting would stop.

Since I moved to the United States, I have had several Pakistani friends who voice the same opinions. There is no tension between the youth of the two countries (except during the Cricket World Cup).

The problem is that a government full of conservative, short-sighted politicians in India, and a government, influenced by religion, blinded by hatred in Pakistan can not seem to work out their differences.

Even if the consensus among Indians and Pakistanis' is to stop the fighting, not much can be done until the current regime is changed ( mostly in Pakistan ).

The US's problem is that publicly, they must support Pakistan despite having no real part in the conflict between the two nations ( further increasing tensions on both sides).

akshaykarthikon Ask HN: Why Would I Write Web Apps In Anything Besides PHP?

One major advantage to using Python especially is the availability of many libraries and apis. I think that the main reason for the growth of PHP (at least in the beginning) was the good interface with SQL (LAMP). Now that there are good alternatives (MongoDB, Riak, Redis, etc.), PHP's SQL support isn't a must. I think that the simple nature of the ruby language is a good thing. The code is easy to understand and the libraries aren't a mess cough cough.

All in all, it comes down to personal preference.

Personal Plug for Python: I have used python for some major statistical analysis (over the web) and Django interfaces well with sciPy and numPy. Python also has much better native access so R works well with it.

AFAIK: Node.js was written for webapps. Also javascript is interoperable in most major browsers so you use the same language on client and server side.

Personal Plug for Node.js: I love node. It is really simple to use especially with coffeescript and express. The tools available are constantly growing and there are so many modules available. Also, node.js moves a lot faster with major releases and updates as well as the availability of any existing javascript library available.